Praise, Health, and Rock 'n' Roll
Reviewed:
“I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass” by Yo La Tengo (Matador)
“Gulag Orkestar” by Beirut (Ba Da Bing!)
“Return to Cookie Mountain” by TV on the Radio (Touch and Go)
A friend of mine recently pointed out that the purpose of most album reviews is to answer a simple question: should you buy it? Thanks to brutally efficient grading systems, the judgment is usually quick and final, more like an execution than a considered examination of testimony. But as convenient and pervasive as this evaluative habit has become in our ostensibly democratic culture, it smacks of a thoughtless absolutism. What exactly warrants four stars as opposed to three? A C+ instead of a B-? When does folk become folk-rock? Prog-rock become post-punk? And what of individual sensibility as judge? One listener’s whim is almost by definition another’s irritation. Having grown up in the eighties, I remember shrill and bizarrely defensive talking heads on TV responding to the emerging genre of rap, arguing that because rapping was not singing and sampling not creating, rap was lazy thievery, not music. Such criticism, of course, reflected the fear, racism, and confusion of the critic more than anything else, and remains a warning example of how dislike may—at best—be simply misunderstanding, at worst a refusal to accept difference and individuality.
With that in mind, the purpose of negative reviewing mystifies. What one critic censors might be better left alone for a more understanding critic to explain, leaving a natural obscurity to silence whatever no one finds worth explaining. Therefore, this review will look at three recent rock albums that deserve unmitigated praise. Each promotes to an exemplary degree expansive eclecticism, originality, and an admittedly most un-rock ‘n’ roll pair of virtues: health and sanity.
Proverbially encyclopedic in their pop knowledge, Yo La Tengo as usual work in a multitude of styles on their new album, “I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass,” including 1950’s pop, 1960’s psychedelia, shoegazing walls of feedback, barrages of surf and garage rock, punk, funk, atmospheric electronica, and touches of free-jazz. The album opens with “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind,” a ten-minute guitar epic built around a terse bass and drum groove stubbornly repeated for the song’s duration under a loop of washed-out, wave-like guitar drone. On top of this, singer guitarist Ira Kaplan solos, working from slow riffs of long-held notes to increasingly short and spastic knots of noise, which, when at their most constricted, suddenly unravel into layer after expanding layer of looped guitar riffage. Before this turn, Kaplan manages to sing something about microphones and something else about water slides, but his voice soon disappears altogether from the massive soundscape he has created, the many layers of which remain distinct from one another, their complexity bewilderingly clear.
Also clear by this time are the main thematic dynamics of the album, which both yearns for and questions—and creates—music as a space where melancholy might be transformed, isolation faced, and conflicts resolved. While the insistent piano pep of the second track, “Beanbag Chair,” makes the circular futility of lines like “I spent my life trying to understand / Just how my life led to where I am” sound positively chipper, the violin haunted “I Feel Like Going Home” has Georgia Hubley asking for a return to the “ground” from the free-floating drift of a “restless imagination.” In one of two all-out rockers, “I Should Have Known Better,” everyday belligerence is regretted; in the equally humorous “Mr. Tough” the same belligerence is met with generosity and an invitation “to the dance floor,” where pretending “everything can be alright” may be the first step in making it so. The closing track, “The Story of Yo La Tengo,” may be as much about Kaplan’s marriage to Hubley as about the trio or anything else, and it begins with Kaplan singing in bracing defeat, “We lied to ourselves / for awhile / in our usual style. / I wish we could lie / to ourselves again.” But the earnestness, volume, and furor to which the music builds over the course of the song’s ten-minutes (it’s their finest ten-minute guitar epic since “Blue Line Swinger”) suggests that the wish itself has been enough to win back whatever saving illusion had been lost.
Record shop clerks might be forgiven for mistakenly consigning Beirut’s debut, “Gulag Orkestar,” to that sad gulag of chain stores, the world music annex, which alongside the classical bin constitutes our culture’s repository of continents’ and centuries’ worth of narcissistically neglected music traditions. As eMusic puts it on the album’s promotional sticker, “Gulag Orkestar” is the “best indie-rock record of the 19th century” (worth quoting if only for being the first meaningful promotional blurb I have ever seen); and despite being the very recent work of 19-year-old New Mexican high school and college dropout Zach Cordon, the album sounds much more gypsy than indie, a collection of Balkan influenced marching/drinking songs fusing the plaintive and the hopeful, the young and the old, the near and the far.
The classification of Beirut as “gypsy music,” however, exoticizes, oversimplifies, and objectifies a little understood cultural other. Cordon himself appears both too innocent and too sophisticated to fall into this trap, producing what could best be categorized as a kind of “travel music,” comparable to that kind of travel writing that keeps the observer as much as the observed clearly in view. The self-consciously touristic “Postcards from Italy” captures the cinematically archetypal story of an American’s romance with the people and culture of “Europe,” broadly defined, and here conveyed through an idealized vision of Old World innocence: “That day is mine / When she will marry me outside the willow trees / And play the songs we made.” The album reveals more about the experience of travel itself—the intense appreciation it allows of the passing moment, its transitory liberating qualities—than the many places to which Cordon traveled, and it’s the intensity of such an experience that may explain how a 19-year-old’s voice manages to summon up the pathos and nostalgia of a 70-year-old, a feat on par with the 20-year-old Bob Dylan successfully channeling raw blues on his self-titled first album.
But Beirut does more than send a postcard from an imaginatively lived Europe; it also finds—and refines—a fundamental connection between the aesthetics of travel and the aesthetics of music and performance. For instance, in a “Scenic World” (a Magnetic Fields-ish departure from the rest of the album), Cordon attempts to release the liberating potential of a song by recalling the liberating position of the traveler and spectator, singing, “When I feel alive / I try to imagine a careless life / A scenic world where the sunsets are all breathtaking.” The closing track, “After the Curtain,” makes an even more concrete parallel between the space and subject of the performance, asking both western audience and newly democratized eastern bloc states, “What will you do / When the curtain falls?” The answer, for both, is an ambiguous and repeated “left, right,” suggesting a calm walk out the door, a productive dialogue between left and right wing, or a mindless authoritarian march. But as self-conscious as this may all sound, “Gulag Orkestar” remains astonishingly sincere and free of affectation. When listening to a Serbian neighbor’s record collection in Amsterdam, Cordon found not a trove of exotic allusion, but a vocabulary expressive enough to deliver whatever it is that so often stretches out his lyrics into indecipherable wails rich with yearning.
TV on the Radio’s much and deservedly praised “Return to Cookie Mountain,” their second full-length album, sends a simple message with a great deal of force: Wake up, take courage, and go forth. The American life tautly captured in such lines as “So who the hell are you? / Making out so high in the backseat of a car-bomb under carcinogenic sun” is choked by violence, war, fear, self-indulgence, addiction, and political, cultural, and environmental corruption. Industrial-paced beats and urgent blasts of distortion drenched guitar propel the soulful crooning of Kyp Malone through this rotten clutter, providing sturdy support for the uncompromising antiauthoritarianism of tracks like “Hours”: “Refuse these cruel / Unusual fools / Leave them to rule / In hollowpoint hell.” At the end of the same song Tunde Adebimpe affirms the individual in powerfully mythic terms, singing, “Know you are beautiful, aimless and alive / Broken and divine / O walk around know you are / Future youth / Summoned to the sky.” Such affirmations seek to heal the paralyzing violence done to any reasoning mind in a country where those in charge send horse show administrators to manage national disasters and pedophiles to manage child abuse legislation. “Cookie Mountain” begins in fact by acknowledging this close relationship between the political and personal, pointing out that the former can not only invade and demoralize the latter, but also seduce it into complicity. “I was a lover, before this war,” alternate Malone and Adebimpe, “I once joined a priest class, plastic, inert / In a slowdance with commerce / Like a lens up a skirt.” The album is apocalyptic in the sense William Blake used the word: outraged, admonishing, revelatory, and mind-altering, reminding the listener—as do Yo La Tengo and Beirut in their own ways—of the sadly obvious notion that there are better spaces than bar-room brawls and battle-fields to think through our differences and set freedom on the march.
“I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass” by Yo La Tengo (Matador)
“Gulag Orkestar” by Beirut (Ba Da Bing!)
“Return to Cookie Mountain” by TV on the Radio (Touch and Go)
A friend of mine recently pointed out that the purpose of most album reviews is to answer a simple question: should you buy it? Thanks to brutally efficient grading systems, the judgment is usually quick and final, more like an execution than a considered examination of testimony. But as convenient and pervasive as this evaluative habit has become in our ostensibly democratic culture, it smacks of a thoughtless absolutism. What exactly warrants four stars as opposed to three? A C+ instead of a B-? When does folk become folk-rock? Prog-rock become post-punk? And what of individual sensibility as judge? One listener’s whim is almost by definition another’s irritation. Having grown up in the eighties, I remember shrill and bizarrely defensive talking heads on TV responding to the emerging genre of rap, arguing that because rapping was not singing and sampling not creating, rap was lazy thievery, not music. Such criticism, of course, reflected the fear, racism, and confusion of the critic more than anything else, and remains a warning example of how dislike may—at best—be simply misunderstanding, at worst a refusal to accept difference and individuality.
With that in mind, the purpose of negative reviewing mystifies. What one critic censors might be better left alone for a more understanding critic to explain, leaving a natural obscurity to silence whatever no one finds worth explaining. Therefore, this review will look at three recent rock albums that deserve unmitigated praise. Each promotes to an exemplary degree expansive eclecticism, originality, and an admittedly most un-rock ‘n’ roll pair of virtues: health and sanity.
Proverbially encyclopedic in their pop knowledge, Yo La Tengo as usual work in a multitude of styles on their new album, “I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass,” including 1950’s pop, 1960’s psychedelia, shoegazing walls of feedback, barrages of surf and garage rock, punk, funk, atmospheric electronica, and touches of free-jazz. The album opens with “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind,” a ten-minute guitar epic built around a terse bass and drum groove stubbornly repeated for the song’s duration under a loop of washed-out, wave-like guitar drone. On top of this, singer guitarist Ira Kaplan solos, working from slow riffs of long-held notes to increasingly short and spastic knots of noise, which, when at their most constricted, suddenly unravel into layer after expanding layer of looped guitar riffage. Before this turn, Kaplan manages to sing something about microphones and something else about water slides, but his voice soon disappears altogether from the massive soundscape he has created, the many layers of which remain distinct from one another, their complexity bewilderingly clear.
Also clear by this time are the main thematic dynamics of the album, which both yearns for and questions—and creates—music as a space where melancholy might be transformed, isolation faced, and conflicts resolved. While the insistent piano pep of the second track, “Beanbag Chair,” makes the circular futility of lines like “I spent my life trying to understand / Just how my life led to where I am” sound positively chipper, the violin haunted “I Feel Like Going Home” has Georgia Hubley asking for a return to the “ground” from the free-floating drift of a “restless imagination.” In one of two all-out rockers, “I Should Have Known Better,” everyday belligerence is regretted; in the equally humorous “Mr. Tough” the same belligerence is met with generosity and an invitation “to the dance floor,” where pretending “everything can be alright” may be the first step in making it so. The closing track, “The Story of Yo La Tengo,” may be as much about Kaplan’s marriage to Hubley as about the trio or anything else, and it begins with Kaplan singing in bracing defeat, “We lied to ourselves / for awhile / in our usual style. / I wish we could lie / to ourselves again.” But the earnestness, volume, and furor to which the music builds over the course of the song’s ten-minutes (it’s their finest ten-minute guitar epic since “Blue Line Swinger”) suggests that the wish itself has been enough to win back whatever saving illusion had been lost.
Record shop clerks might be forgiven for mistakenly consigning Beirut’s debut, “Gulag Orkestar,” to that sad gulag of chain stores, the world music annex, which alongside the classical bin constitutes our culture’s repository of continents’ and centuries’ worth of narcissistically neglected music traditions. As eMusic puts it on the album’s promotional sticker, “Gulag Orkestar” is the “best indie-rock record of the 19th century” (worth quoting if only for being the first meaningful promotional blurb I have ever seen); and despite being the very recent work of 19-year-old New Mexican high school and college dropout Zach Cordon, the album sounds much more gypsy than indie, a collection of Balkan influenced marching/drinking songs fusing the plaintive and the hopeful, the young and the old, the near and the far.
The classification of Beirut as “gypsy music,” however, exoticizes, oversimplifies, and objectifies a little understood cultural other. Cordon himself appears both too innocent and too sophisticated to fall into this trap, producing what could best be categorized as a kind of “travel music,” comparable to that kind of travel writing that keeps the observer as much as the observed clearly in view. The self-consciously touristic “Postcards from Italy” captures the cinematically archetypal story of an American’s romance with the people and culture of “Europe,” broadly defined, and here conveyed through an idealized vision of Old World innocence: “That day is mine / When she will marry me outside the willow trees / And play the songs we made.” The album reveals more about the experience of travel itself—the intense appreciation it allows of the passing moment, its transitory liberating qualities—than the many places to which Cordon traveled, and it’s the intensity of such an experience that may explain how a 19-year-old’s voice manages to summon up the pathos and nostalgia of a 70-year-old, a feat on par with the 20-year-old Bob Dylan successfully channeling raw blues on his self-titled first album.
But Beirut does more than send a postcard from an imaginatively lived Europe; it also finds—and refines—a fundamental connection between the aesthetics of travel and the aesthetics of music and performance. For instance, in a “Scenic World” (a Magnetic Fields-ish departure from the rest of the album), Cordon attempts to release the liberating potential of a song by recalling the liberating position of the traveler and spectator, singing, “When I feel alive / I try to imagine a careless life / A scenic world where the sunsets are all breathtaking.” The closing track, “After the Curtain,” makes an even more concrete parallel between the space and subject of the performance, asking both western audience and newly democratized eastern bloc states, “What will you do / When the curtain falls?” The answer, for both, is an ambiguous and repeated “left, right,” suggesting a calm walk out the door, a productive dialogue between left and right wing, or a mindless authoritarian march. But as self-conscious as this may all sound, “Gulag Orkestar” remains astonishingly sincere and free of affectation. When listening to a Serbian neighbor’s record collection in Amsterdam, Cordon found not a trove of exotic allusion, but a vocabulary expressive enough to deliver whatever it is that so often stretches out his lyrics into indecipherable wails rich with yearning.
TV on the Radio’s much and deservedly praised “Return to Cookie Mountain,” their second full-length album, sends a simple message with a great deal of force: Wake up, take courage, and go forth. The American life tautly captured in such lines as “So who the hell are you? / Making out so high in the backseat of a car-bomb under carcinogenic sun” is choked by violence, war, fear, self-indulgence, addiction, and political, cultural, and environmental corruption. Industrial-paced beats and urgent blasts of distortion drenched guitar propel the soulful crooning of Kyp Malone through this rotten clutter, providing sturdy support for the uncompromising antiauthoritarianism of tracks like “Hours”: “Refuse these cruel / Unusual fools / Leave them to rule / In hollowpoint hell.” At the end of the same song Tunde Adebimpe affirms the individual in powerfully mythic terms, singing, “Know you are beautiful, aimless and alive / Broken and divine / O walk around know you are / Future youth / Summoned to the sky.” Such affirmations seek to heal the paralyzing violence done to any reasoning mind in a country where those in charge send horse show administrators to manage national disasters and pedophiles to manage child abuse legislation. “Cookie Mountain” begins in fact by acknowledging this close relationship between the political and personal, pointing out that the former can not only invade and demoralize the latter, but also seduce it into complicity. “I was a lover, before this war,” alternate Malone and Adebimpe, “I once joined a priest class, plastic, inert / In a slowdance with commerce / Like a lens up a skirt.” The album is apocalyptic in the sense William Blake used the word: outraged, admonishing, revelatory, and mind-altering, reminding the listener—as do Yo La Tengo and Beirut in their own ways—of the sadly obvious notion that there are better spaces than bar-room brawls and battle-fields to think through our differences and set freedom on the march.
posted by R at 4:38 PM
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