Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Sometimes in my continuing quest to listen to everything, I run through a stretch much like the current one where everything is swimming in mediocrity. When that happens, I give serious consideration to giving up, to just hunkering down with the music I know I love for the rest of my life. Invariably, though, if I keep fighting through it, I come across something that makes it all worthwhile, like the new album from Minneapolis avant-garde jazz trio The Bad Plus.

This is everything I love about discovering new music. It’s appealing at first, and on repeated listens opens itself up to your ears as they get to know each song’s individuality, finding and loving every hidden nook and cranny that you can only appreciate after experiencing it several times.

This album is 12 tracks of 11 cover songs. The original artists run from Yes to Milton Babbit, from Pink Floyd to Stravinsky, from The Flaming Lips to Ligeti. It’s as amazing as it sounds and even better than the similarly-themed album by Brad Mehldau Trio I reviewed three years ago.

These covers aren’t just curiosities. This group of musicians, now joined by the wonderful, smokey-voiced Wendy Lewis, adds a completely new spin on all of them. They haven’t just replaced the electric bass with stand-up and drum sticks with brushes: these songs have been ripped down to their foundations to be rebuilt in the image of The Bad Plus. Instead of soft-to-loud, the chorus of Nirvana’s “Lithium” is set off from the rest of the song by emphasizing piano. Heart’s “Barracuda,” which I hate, is fantastic here, with a slow-down-speed-up rhythm at the end that is so awesome it has me “down down down down on my knees.” I don’t quite get the scream on “Comfortably Numb” being transformed into silence, but the cascading waterfall of the piano perfectly illustrates the song’s dreamlike quality and the immaculately-controlled chaos at the end reveals the protagonist’s illness and situation better than even Floyd did.

I’m not familiar with “How Deep Is Your Love” by The Bee Gees, but the version here is the Best Song Ever. Heck, these guys even make me love “Radio Cure,” originally from Wilco’s forgettable Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Literally forgettable: I had no idea I’d ever heard the song before until I looked it up and realized I own it in its original form. The only track I’m not getting into is Roger Miller’s “Lock, Stock and Teardrops,” which, like a lot of these tracks, starts off very languid, but never really pulls itself together save for a few seconds of Lewis drawing me in by nailing the high notes with nearly enough feeling in them to carry the entire tune.

Thanks, Bad Plus, for pulling me out of my most recent musical funk. You’ve been the bright spot in a gloomy week.

Rating:

Mixers: “Lithium,” “Long Distance Runaround,” “How Deep Is Your Love,” “Barracuda,” “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate”
Non-keeper: “Lock, Stock and Teardrops”
Filed Between: The Bad Plus’ Give and Badlands – A Tribute To Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska

Tags: 2009, 4.5 lunchboxes, Best Song Ever, CD reviews, jazz, Minneapolis, Minnesota, music

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 10:11 pm and is filed under CD reviews, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.