Miss Piggy Lunchbox

(I swear I’m working on the SP20 recap.  Really.  It’s just taking forever.)

What are you doing reading this when you could be listening to Girl Talk?

Ho.  Lee.  S**t.

Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” gets a lot of crap in critical circles, and sure, the chorus has that cheesy Billy Joel thing and it’s hard to ignore that after several listens, and the verses necessarily date themselves, but here’s the thing…it’s not a bad song by any means, and if you could write a song as good as ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire” that recapped all of the important events in the environment, politics, and entertainment from the first 40 years of your life, you totally would.

It’s been a long time coming, but now that I’ve added Nude With Boots, released only two weeks ago, a mere nanosecond in MPL time, my Melvins collection is as updated as it’s been since before we entered our “poor period” and signed over our firstborn to My Baby’s business school. Of their studio albums, I’m basically just missing the ones with Jello Biafra (so maybe I won’t buy anything they do). In fact, I had a signed copy of this disc a day before it was even available in stores, which left me feeling kind of super-complete.

A quick diversion, though, because this is critical. All albums listened to primarily on sunny days are going to get the shaft around here. You see, when it’s sunny, I sit upstairs by the windows to increase my happiness, and listen on my iPod. When it’s not, I work downstairs in my office, in front of my stereo. Lots of music sounds like crap on my iPod, partially because it doesn’t allow a custom EQ setting. Dear Apple, screw you.

So The Black Keys got rewritten at the last minute, and Jawbox sounded a ton better right before it got posted, but since I’d already re-written one review last week I couldn’t bring myself to do another. Anyway, I’m writing this now because Nude With Boots was mostly listened to on a cloudy morning, but sounds much worse now on a sunny afternoon.

That may just mean Melvins sound better on cloudy days, and that makes sense for a band born in the dreary darkness of Aberdeen, WA. For the last few years, though, they have been sounding more and more like a band from their current home in sunny California. They’ve been playing less slow, sludgy, gloom and instead concentrating on more upbeat, straight, but no less heavy, metal with riffs that most listeners can easily grasp on to.

That trend continues with Nude With Boots, another very accessible album, at least relative to most Melvins material. There’s still sludge (“Dog Island,” “It Tastes Better Than The Truth”) and noisy sound-fests (“Flush,” “It Tastes Better Than The Truth”). For the most part, though, everything sounds a little brighter and more orthodox. For one track they even do a cover of the 13th century Latin hymn “Dies Irae” (“Dies Iraea”), though of course that hardly sounds familiar or comfortable to 21st century ears.

Instead, for their current release, Melvins seem content to screw with your mind with tricky rhythms. You won’t notice it at first, but on closer listen, “Suicide In Progress,” which might be the best song on here, will reveal some very confusing beats. I think part of it might be in 17. And on “The Smiling Cobra,” which gives “Suicide In Progress” a run for the Nude With Boots best song crown, I even have trouble finding beat one in parts, and it might not even be there…they may have discarded the idea of measures altogether, something that they tended to do early in their career as well.

This is a very good, immensely enjoyable album from start to finish, though there’s nothing here that’s quite as arresting as the best songs from A Senile Animal. Additionally, it might just be a bit too straight in parts. “The Stupid Creep” is awfully close to plain vanilla 1990 tough-guy, no-passion metal, as is the pre-vocal part of “Nude With Boots.” There’s some cognitive dissonance that goes along with saying Melvins are too accessible, and, given their track record I can’t believe that label will stick.

Melvins has been around for 24 years now. The world has hardly noticed, but those who have been paying attention stand in awe at one of the most storied careers in musical history. King Buzzo seems to me to be crazy incisive about just about everything, including his musical legacy:

“There are lots of makeshift wonders, seven in the world/Five of them will not be noticed and three will not be heard,” he sings on “Suicide In Progress.” While you’re working out that math, Melvins is touring the world, creating unseen, unheard wonders.

Rating:

Mixers: “The Kicking Machine,” “Suicide In Progress,” “The Smiling Cobra,” “Nude With Boots,” “The Savage Hippy”
Non-keepers: “Flush,” “The Stupid Creep”
Filed Between: The Making Love Demos and Melvins+Lustmord (Pigs Of The Roman Empire)

Coffee makes this album worse. I felt like I wanted a bit of an energy boost heading into Friday night, so got me some Starbucks before giving this album my focused listen, and I enjoyed it far less than I had been before the caffeine infusion. But now I know definitively that this is a sleepy, nighttime album.

Amnesiac was recorded at the same time as Kid A, but wasn’t released until the following year. There isn’t a song on here that wouldn’t sound out of place on Kid A, or vice-versa, and the albums sound similar: they are both extensions of the cold, spacey feel of OK Computer and both travel further from the guitar-based rock of the band’s early days. They both push boundaries and have their share of “sonic experiments,” as opposed to songs.

The main differentiation is that this album is more of what Kid A was. It goes further afield from traditional rock song structure, instrumentation, melodies, and rhythms. “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” wouldn’t sound at all out of place on an Ipecac record. This album also doesn’t cohere as well as Kid A did. In other words, it’s not necessarily a 45-minute work in and of itself, and I don’t find the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts.

Part of that is because I just don’t need all of these songs. Sure most of the album is being kept, and nothing clunks really heavily, but I don’t think I’m that much better off for having heard “Pulk/Pull Revovling Doors,” “Hunting Bears” (another exercise in sound composition), “or Life In A Glasshouse” (which features a New Orleans dirge-y horn part).

With this record, which is definitely not a starting point for Radiohead, the band just might be right on the verge of pushing things too far. “Knives Out” is one of the best songs here (just a tad too repetitive to be mixed), and it also probably the single Amnesiac song that would have fit best on The Bends or OK Computer. According to singer Thom Yorke, via Green Plastic, though, the band was really bothered by the fact that it was so “straight.”

We just lost our nerve. It was so straight-ahead. We couldn’t possibly do anything that straight until we’d gone and been completely arse about face with everything else, in order to feel good about doing something straight like that.

The band’s commitment to advancing the state of popular music is to be commended, and will surely be their legacy, but in 2001 it seems they may have been losing their compass for what was legitimately good, which is further evidenced by the fact that this is easily the best cover- and liner-notes-art of all of their albums thus far, and I’ve simply come to the conclusion that they intend it to be awful.

Rating:

Mixers: “Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box,” Like Spinning Plates”
Non-keepers: “Hunting Bears,” “Life In A Glasshouse”
Filed Between: Kid A and Ramones (Ramones)

This is Jawbox’s last studio effort, and it seems they could never make up their mind about who they wanted to be. Or maybe they made up their mind that they wanted to be a bit of everything. Either way, as the band frequently vacillates between powerful melodies supported by mildly abrasive guitar, completely atonal talk-singing over nearly atonal, rapidly shifting songs, and slow attempts at setting a mood of darkness, the mixed bag that is Jawbox serves as a pretty good summary of the mixed bag that was Jawbox.

So was it intentional or accidental that so little of their catalog approaches “Spoiler” either in terms of style or quality? Did they want to write a bunch of disparate songs that weren’t as good as their hooky, powerful stuff? Or could they just not put it together all that frequently? I’m not even sure the band could answer that question truthfully, but given how great Jawbox members J. Robbins and Bill Barbot did when they went on to Burning Airlines three years after this album, I have to think it was just plain stubbornness. Who knows, though…”Iodine” is fairly low key, sounds pretty, and is easily the best song here, while “Chinese Fork Tie” is one of their least conventional, fitting into the atonal/off-kilter-rhythms category above, and I love it.

This is a borderline three-and-a-half lunchboxes CD. Even though they rarely get greatness from beginning to end on a song, overall the interesting moments outweigh the also significant portion of unnecessary sound. You also have to give it props for having five mix CD candidates, a very good number. It’s not the first time I’ve said this, and it certainly won’t be the last, but this might have even been four-lunchboxes good if they’d just cut four or five songs off, mostly toward the end. As it is, it’s still less than 45 minutes, so I guess I can’t accuse them of being motivated just by all the empty space on a CD, as they’ve left plenty.

Clearly, as the last two paragraphs reveal, I have some mixed and conflicting feelings about this album and the band that made it. In the end, Jawbox is one of the most frustrating band I’ve encountered. When they’re good, they’re so very good and ripe with potential, but when they’re bad they’re as meh as it gets.

Rating:

Mixers: “Mirrorful,” “Iodine,” “His Only Trade,” “Chinese Fork Tie,” “Spoiler”
Keepers: “Livid,” “Chinese Fork Tie,” “Won’t Come Off,” “Desert Sea,” “Capillary Life”
Filed Between: For Your Own Special Sweetheart and Jayhawks (Hollywood Town Hall)

I wrote this damned review two days ago, but now it’s yesterday, and after being persuaded by some unseen force to give it one last spin on my stereo, I’m forced to rewrite the vast bulk of it. At least it’s because I think it’s a lot better than I did before. Anyway, I just can’t bring myself to trash the old stuff completely, so, along with adding some material, I’m just going to do the strikethrough thing, and you can treat it as a window into the process of getting to know this album. Or whatever.  I kept some of the old stuff, too, so if some of the non-strikethrough stuff seems to be a little poorly composed or to lack cohesion, that’s why.

Attack & Release, released earlier this year by The Black Keys, was produced by Danger Mouse. I’m not sure exactly what meaning is supposed to be conveyed by that, but it is apparently the law that it has to be mentioned in every review of this album, so I figured I’d just get it out of the way. If I’m going to be a music critic, I have to just ape the press release, right?

The Black Keys are some prolofos (prolific mofos), putting out an additional four albums since their 2002 debut, The Big Come Up. I have and love 2003’s Thickfreakness, and I think maybe the band should be a little less prolific because a lot of the pow has disappeared in the last five years. Attack & Release is still really good, but with more emphasis on the slow repetitive nature of the blues and less on their formerly driving rock, the shine is off this blues-rock duo from Akron a bit. Attack & Release is named, I believe, for the strong dichotomy on the album of super-charged, hard-driving rockers against slow, repetitive, blues-y numbers.

The last five years have also formed The Black Keys into a more polished-sounding, less lo-fi band. That’s not necessarily unexpected, as more bands clean up their sound over time, but it is surprising considering this was recorded on a homemade console. Maybe the cleaner sound is the result of Danger Mouse’s production and you all understood that in the first sentence of the review. Maybe the code all reviewers write in is really clear to everybody but me. Regardless, it sounds absolutely amazing on my stereo. It still sounds gritty, but now instead of sounding like they’re playing to their cats in their living room, it sounds like they’re captivating Wembley Stadium.

In what has to be a first, The Black Keys put four of the five best songs at the very end of this record. They also put the two very best songs and the single best song on the record at the very end. It sounds even weirder to listen to than it does to hear about. After decisively determining, through extensive examples at SP20 this last weekend, that the best way to construct a 40-minute live set is to build the entire time, with the possible exception of putting in a really strong opening song (the third mixer, “All You Ever Wanted,” is the opener here), I can’t help but wonder if they’re planning to play this album (clocking in at just under 40 minutes…I knew it) straight though live some time, because that set up certainly doesn’t work on disc as well as it does live.

I don’t think this set up is an accident either. To transition from the “meh” first half to the “yeah” second half of this album, they put the two tracks “Remember When (Side A)” and “Remember When (Side B)” right in the middle. The former fits in with those in front of it as a slow, moody, bluesy sleeper, and the latter picks up the pace and the punch on the drums quite a bit to prepare you for the excellent second half. I am newly loving the first single, “Strange Times,” and “Lies,” and newly really-liking everything else.

I don’t know…this is probably a four-lunchbox CD if I hadn’t heard Thickfreakness, but knowing how much better their output was five years ago, I’m tempted to give it three-and-a-half. But that’s not really fair. It is produced by Danger Mouse, after all. I really like this album. It is a no-brainer at four lunchboxes.

Rating:

Mixers: “All You Ever Wanted,” “Oceans And Streams,” “Things Ain’t Like They Used To Be”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Thickfreakeness and Black Sabbath (Black Sabbath)

I believe I only have two CDs with the word “Argentines” in their lyrics. Both of these CDs have been reviewed here this month. The first is Vampire Weekend (“Mansard Roof,” the first track), and now I encounter the word on Billy Joel’s “That’s Not Her Style,” the first track off of 1989’s Storm Front.

There’s a lot here that you’ll recognize, but for the longest time my iPod was only shuffling through crap like “When In Rome” and “Shameless” and so I couldn’t figure out why this would be the only Billy Joel album in J-mez’ collection. Finally, though, I discovered the presence of “We Didn’t Start The Fire” and everything made sense. (Speaking of finally making sense, check out this awesome Wikipedia page on that song.)

What I still can’t make sense of is Billy Joel. The guy is basically music’s biggest enigma. Chuck Klosterman wrote a great profile of him a while ago that reportedly set off Joel something fierce. A good chunk of the profile is about how Joel craves critical approval, and that’s the crux of the enigma. There’s no questioning Joel’s talent, skill, and work ethic, but for some reason there’s this layer of cheese that creates a bit of an emotional distance between the listener and the songs that keeps Joel just out of reach of a “Great” categorization.

All of which is ironic because you can tell this guy feels intensely in a way that most of us can’t understand. His well-publicized battles with his demons seem to be evidence of that, but we also have a number of songs, primarily ballads, where he cuts right through to the core. The best example of that type of song on Storm Front is “And So It Goes,” whose lyrics encapsulate every sentiment about taking risks for love far more poignantly than nearly any other poet and songwriter has been able to do. “Leningrad” isn’t quite as raw emotionally, but its tale of a “cold war kid” making a connection in adulthood with a Soviet man of the same age reveals how powerful the moment was to Joel and how he owns the power of the history of his lifetime.

Joel probably doesn’t get as much credit as he should from the music world, but I can’t quibble too much with him being confined to his “Very Good” status. He kind of brings it on himself, with that layer of silly, bombastic cheese on top of so many of his songs. “Shameless,” with its opening Bryan-Adams-riff, sounds like it was written for Garth Brooks, who did have a hit covering it, and “Storm Front” pushes a metaphor between weather at sea and romantic relationships well past the point of unintentional parody.

Still, Joel is the master at creating songs that you like, even though you think you shouldn’t, and this album is full of them. I can hear what’s wrong with “We Didn’t Start The Fire” and “I Go To Extremes,” for example, but I still like them. And while I’d never think to categorize this album as “Great,” it’s a damned enjoyable piece of musical craftsmanship, and what else really matters? I hope Joel can arrive at that conclusion for himself and find some peace.

Rating:

Mixer: “And So It Goes”
Non-keepers: “Shameless,” “Storm Front,” “When In Rome”
Filed Between: Joel’s The Bridge and Elton John (Greatest Hits 1970-2002)

Just in case you weren’t quite sure that I would buy absolutely anything that Melvins put out, here I am reviewing The Making Love Demos, which are “mastered” versions of four-track demos the band recorded in 1987. Furthermore, these aren’t even mastered from the original four-track tapes, which have been lost, but are instead taken from a cassette the band gave their friend Brian Walsby 20 years ago. Finally, the only way to get this CD is to buy it with Walsby’s book, Manchild 3.

So that’s what I did.

The book is filled with Walsby’s drawings and thoughts on music and his life. The style is that of a comic book, but I get the feeling Walsby would bristle at the term. The biggest section is a journal of Walsby’s trip on a Melvins tour through the South a few years ago. At one point he talks about how each night they would create a single t-shirt with markers, making it as offensive as possible and pricing it really high to see if it sold. It always did, according to Walsby, and I can’t help but think that this shirt that I own (except that mine is white) came out of this process. Honestly, I’m surprised I haven’t bought a Melvins turd yet. (Although I suppose most people would say that any CD by Melvins is a turd.)

Some of these songs came out on 1989’s Ozma, recorded with a different bassist. That album was ostensibly recorded in a studio and all, but it sounds an awful lot like this, which also sounds a lot like 1987’s Gluey Porch Treatments and 1986’s Six Songs. The point being, for anything that Melvins recorded in the 80’s, the sound quality just doesn’t matter. They hadn’t yet figured out how to sound like they sounded like crap by sounding awesome, they kind of just sounded like crap and, noise merchants that they were, a poor recording environment just sounded like it was intentional, and it probably was, for all I know.

And even though this sounds like crap, it’s still awesome in a way only Melvins can be. In the 80’s they were at their bombastic, amelodic worst, but somehow, through the din, it all worked. Melvins have always been the superlatives of unlistenable music, and that alone makes them magnificent. The fact that it’s all really good and, given enough time, listenable, and the fact that they’ve changed so much and yet remained completely on the fringes of the music world in the last 20 years makes them a truly historic movement worthy of being placed in the highest tiers of music’s long and storied history.

Manchild wasn’t an unenjoyable read, but I didn’t need it. Really, guys, you could out-do your forebearers, Kiss, and brand a turd and I’d buy it. At this rate, it does seem they will release Fecal Matter at some point, which I really would rush out and buy.

Rating:

Mixers: How many Melvins demos from a 1987 cassette do you think would work well on a mix? Although, “Creepy Smell,” “My Small % Shows Most,” and “Repulsion” came close.
Non-keepers: “Dime Lined Divide”
Filed Between: A Senile Animal and Melvins+Lustmord (Pigs Of The Roman Empire)

After MPL Laboratories created the equation that describes the relationship between the quality of Radiohead’s cover art and their music, we wondered if it wasn’t, in fact, an inverse relationship. After developing further experiments to try to answer that question, we can now saw conclusively that it is not a relationship that behaves strictly inversely. This was proven by the fact that Kid A’s art is their worst yet, while the music is not their best. Furthermore, their best album from the 20th century (and I’m including this release from 2000 in that list) is OK Computer whose art is actually pretty good.

Kid A is actually pretty similar to OK Computer in style. In fact, if I were to randomly hear one of their combined 22 songs, I’m not sure I could place it on the correct album with much more than 50% accuracy. The U2 influence is completely gone by now, and Radiohead has come into their own as a unique, formidable creative force. Like OK Computer, the straight-ahead, guitar-driven rock is put aside for a synth-y, cold, and detached, while still beautiful feel. Unlike their prior album, though, Kid A is more of a mood machine than a collection of songs in the traditional sense. It is a work of music, in and of itself, an opus, if you will. It does not lend itself to shuffle play, and will only submit to being played from start to finish.

Kid A was the album where the band decided to really challenge their fans, as virtually every song takes on some kind of experiment to mix a new sound into the Radiohead oeuvre. “Everything In Its Right Place” implements an effect where it sounds like Yorke’s vocals are on a cassette tape that is being eaten, “The National Anthem” features a chaotic free-jazz ensemble highlighted by a Morphine-like sax solo, and “Treefingers” is a new age-y piece composed of sustained chords with harmonic movement but no progression. And that’s just in the first half of the album. The second half contains “Idioteque,” that, with its tight drum hits, sounds like it could have come right out of a club, and “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” with bagpipe-like synths and a brilliant harp part. And of course it all works excellently.

Kid A doesn’t cripple me with its detached, powerful emotion the way OK Computer does, but it’s still a masterpiece. There’s hardly a flaw (*cough* “In Limbo”) from start to finish, and what’s there is brilliant, but just shy of transcendental.

Rating:

Mixers: “Everything In Its Right Place,” “The National Anthem,” “Optimistic,” “Idioteque”
Keepers: everything else…”In Limbo” mostly only because it fits with the rest of the album
Filed Between: OK Computer and Ramones (Ramones)