Miss Piggy Lunchbox

You know that counting-the-days thing I do every winter and spring until the start of the baseball season, and how I fixate on the upcoming season at least once every hour? Well that’s nothing compared to what I’m currently going through with the election.

15 days.

I can’t have normal conversations with people because all I want to do is talk about the election, and it’s not like that helps at all, because I’m nearly completely powerless in the whole thing and I can’t wait for it to be over and resolved in the right way.

And I thought 2004 was bad. Ugh.  Just put me in a coma and wake me up in 16 days.

Here’s something pretty awesome about the City of Seattle. From the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs comes this collection of nine songs recorded at the Office’s series of noontime concerts at City Hall every Thursday. First of all, we have an Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. That alone is pretty awesome, but then that office puts on a weekly series of concerts from a wide range of local artists. Finally, they round out their awesomeness by putting some of those performances on CDs and then giving them away. (I got mine at the Capitol Hill Block Party in July 2007, but the website says Volume Two is available only at upcoming concerts.)

Not only do these efforts exist, they’re also well done. The Office is paying attention to its enviro-conscious constituency by printing the packaging on recycled paper, and the musicians herein represent a broad swath of that consitutency as well, performaing a variety of styles from classical to jazz to avant-garde to reggae music from East Asian and the Native American vocal tradition. You could say it’s not the best representation of “Seattle music” with no indie- or alt-rock or any representative from our growing and innovative hip-hop scene, but I think the Office has made the right choice here to focus on artists who don’t have the same avenues artists from those genres do. In that vein, I’d quibble with their inclusion of Ravel’s “Piece En Forme De Habanera” by two members of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. It’s a great piece performed well, but why they devoted three of these fifty-two minutes to such a well-known ensemble is a bit perplexing…as is why they only put 52 minutes of music on a format that can hold well over 70.

Just about everything on here is very good, and you can listen to samples yourself from the CD’s website. The only two tracks I’m tempted to skip are “Cherry Blossoms” by Native American group Eagle’s Jump and Clinton Fearon’s reggae song “Bless Your Heart.” I dig the Native American elements of “Cherry Blossoms,” but there’s this cheesy smooth jazz fusion running through the track that is a complete turn-off. As for Fearon, well, reggae’s not really my thing, and while this performance and song is fine, he really doesn’t break out of the standard reggae mold. In the end it gets kept due to its sweet lyrics about mothers, ‘cuz that’s nice.

On the other side of things, Byron Schenkman’s performance of a Haydn piano sonata is spot on, and the jazz tunes “Dear Pop” and “Stone’s Throw” by Jay Thomas & The East/West Double Trio and Victor Noriega, respectively, hearken back to ensemble jazz of the 60’s with fresh new compositions (especially Noriega’s) and, in both cases, great piano performances. Duo En brings some flavor from the Far East with instrumentation consisting of the 13-stringed Japanese koto and a bamboo flute. I really get excited, though, by pianist Amy Rubin and Brooklyn-based violinist Tom Swafford doing their Latin-influenced avant-garde composition, “Tango Izquierda,” which is like when you go to an Asian fusion restaurant and are blown away by somebody finally putting those great tastes together in just the perfect way.

When Joe Biden said it’s patriotic to pay taxes, this is part of what he meant. Well, that and paying to take care of the older generation, maintain beautiful national parks and forests, and, you know, supporting the troops. (Seriously, I cannot believe how little that concept resonates with folks.) Anyway, I’m thrilled to see my tax dollars going toward this concert series and CD. Keep it up, Seattle.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Non-keepers: “Cherry Blossoms” (Eagle’s Jump)
Filed Between: Season To Risk (In A Perfect World) and Seaweed (Weak)

Seems like Friday’s becoming News-Goes-Onion day on MPL, as here’s another actual news article that I swear could have been taken straight from The Onion.

China manufacturers lace children’s toys with liquid ecstasy

A recent discovery reveals that toys called “Aqua Dots” are coated with a chemical similar to liquid ectasy. When children eat the Aqua Dots (which they’re not supposed to do, but they’re children, after all), they go into an ectasy-induced coma.

I know this is actually a terrible, terrible thing, but in the abstract, where no children are actually being hurt, this is f’ing hilarious.

But wait, we’ve read this book before….

All this follows the recent, astonishing announcement by Nancy Nord of the U.S. government’s Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) that there’s really no need to enhance the safety monitoring of consumer products in the United States. Under orders from the White House, Nord insisted that the CPSC didn’t need any increase in funding, and that businesses should essentially remain unregulated. Nancy Nord, who is now widely regarded as a pro-business Bush puppet, jetted around the world on trips paid for by some of the very same wealthy corporations who don’t want consumer product safety regulations.

And now I feel like an idiot for getting this far into this post…I should have known from the author’s bizarre pic and the jarring anti-China rhetoric up front, but near the bottom this article fully reveals itself to be written by a cult member.

There’s only one person in the running for the next presidential election who even has a shot at reversing this, and that’s Ron Paul.

Followed by this contradictory and unsubstantiated remark….

It’s not clear what a Ron Paul presidency would do for consumer protection against Chinese-made imports, but it’s crystal clear that U.S. consumers would be freer, wealthier and healthier under Ron Paul’s policies than those of any other potential presidential candidate.

Yeah, crystal clear.  So now I’m back to thinking the whole thing is completely f’ing hilarious.  In fact, I think Obama and McCain both support heavy Chinese ecstasy use by babies.  What do we want?  Babies doing ecstasy!  When do we want it?  At tonight’s rave!

Somewhat unbelievably, this is the first review of anything Pearl Jam I’ve done that hasn’t been of their 2003 tour. It’s been 15 months since I finished that puppy off, and I’ve been staring at this album, dreading it, ever since. As of this posting, my to-be-listened-to pile will be devoid of Pearl Jam for the first time in over five years.

Released in 2006, this album doesn’t contain anything I heard on that seemingly interminable tour, and so it was refreshing to hear the band pounding out some new songs. This might be the band’s worst record, though, and so the breath of fresh air didn’t last long and I’m back to literally feeling nauseous while I write this. Pearl Jam is this decade’s Vs., which is the album competing with this one for the worst in the band’s history. Here the band goes back strongly to the raw, fast punky stuff they were doing on that album, Vitalogy, and, to a lesser extent, Binaural. However, there’s nothing on here as fantastic as Vitalogy’s “Last Exit” or “Corduroy,” or even “Go” from Vs.

I’ve counted Pearl Jam out before, but they bounced back to release a great string of albums that is now their mid-career stretch (No Code, Yield, and Binaural). However, I can’t help but feel that they’ve just reached their end here. The performances are strong but uninspired, and the songwriting, while containing novel approaches here and there, is a hodge-podge of things that they’ve done in the past: screamy punk here, a plodding half-ballad there. While most songs have some progression or odd time signature that catches my ear, it’s rare that one wraps me up inside of it for its entirety, with the album’s high point, “Marker In The Sand” being the exception.

The disc is on a roughly three-and-a-half lunchbox trajectory through the first eight tracks or so, with the inventiveness outweighing the banality by a decent enough margin. Starting with the third single, “Gone,” though, things take a pretty severe nosedive. “Gone” itself might as well just be Binaural’s “Nothing As It Seems” or Riot Act’s “I Am Mine,” and by the time we get to the album’s requisite epic seven-and-a-half minute closer, “Inside Job,” I’m able to predict all but about thirty seconds of it.

Still, there are a decent amount of songs worth listening to here, and even more that contain at least one or two riffs that are notably creative for such an aged band (“Comatose” and “Unemployable,” for example). So it’s not write-off-able, but it’s going to take more than this to ease my stomach’s reaction when thinking of this band after it hung around through 72 concerts from the same tour.

Rating:

Mixers: “Marker In The Sand”
Keepers: “World Wide Suicide,” “Life Wasted,” “Parachutes,” “Big Wave,” “Wasted Reprieve”
Filed Between: Pearl Jam’s Lost Dogs and Peeping Tom (Peeping Tom)

This CD is summed up in its inside picture. It’s similar to the one on the outside (above), but has Flowers lounging more horizontally making his fat rolls visible through his too-tight leisure suit. “Fun idea, poor execution,” the picture screams, and the sound matches the visuals. Taking popular songs and making them lounge seems cute at first, but it grows tiresome when presented so meekly here.

Mike Flowers is clearly a talented musician. He does all of the arrangements, plays many of the instruments, and does most of the electronic programming for these songs, even adding a few originals to the mix. Look at him, though. What you see is basically what you get in terms of personality, too. He just doesn’t have the requisite charismatic personality to pull this off, so you end up with lounge at its worst: inoffensive noise for covering up background silence, but music so dull that when you pay attention to it it drives you mad.

I guess The Mike Flowers Pops is most famous for their lounge cover of Oasis’ “Wonderwall” on this disc, but it blows, as does their cover of “Light My Fire” by The Doors and “Venus As A Boy” by Björk. Much preferred are “The Velvet Underground Medley” and Prince’s “1999,” where the lyric “Ooops out of time” takes on a new meaning when it’s enunciated and relaxed. Rounding out the covers are Dobie Gray’s “The ‘In’ Crowd,” which works well enough, and “Please Release Me,” famously done by both Elvis and Engelbert Humperdinck, which I think was already lounge enough that, in its very faithful rendition here, it stands out like a sore thumb in this collection.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: “A Groovy Place,” “The ‘In’ Crowd,” “The Velvet Underground Medley,” “1999”
Filed Between: Metallica (Garage Inc.) and Milk Cult (Project M-13)

A couple of months ago when I was putting the finishing touches on my love letter to Jump, Little Children’s Magazine, I briefly had the “new favorite band” tag on the post. I hesitated, though, not quite willing to bestow that title I’m so slutty with to a band with eight albums based on only one of those. The band’s 2001 release, Vertigo, a step in the wrong direction for them, justifies that hesitation.

Vertigo is still a damn good album. Jay Clifford’s voice still moistens my crotch, the melodies still suck the stiff out of my spine, collapsing me into an emotionally twitching heap, and the band still mixes elements of straight-ahead rock with creative, novel songwriting. What’s missing here, is the big go-for-the-jugular, arm-raising, visceral, primal builds that led to such thrilling elation from a few years prior.

It’s understandable that the band would want to go in a new direction. When you’re really good at a songwriting skill, you can become hesitant to rely on it as a crutch, and try to go in new directions to broaden your palette. Too often, though, songwriters let a little too much self doubt into the equation, and you can feel the band hedging, exercising restraint here because they think they should, even though they kind of want to. On “The House Our Father Knew,” for example, they kind of go for the kill in the chorus, but they still hold back a little, and my hands only get up to about neck level, not even close to the fully extended Rocky triumphant pose Magazine got out of me. The music has a bit of a feel of bubbling stasis, which matches the lyrics, which deal a lot with activities like floating, resting, sleeping, and the like.

And so those songs most similar to Magazine, while good, end up in a somewhat indistinguishable muddle in my brain. Individually, I love them all, and they’re all at least keepers. But I couldn’t tell you after five listens, without cheating, which were my favorites or hum more than a couple.

The songs that do stand out are those where JLC went with a more experimental approach beyond just holding back on the explosive releases. I really dig the choral harmonizations that constitute the dirge that is “Pigeon.” “Mother’s Eyes” is their take on epic, and they pull it off as you hardly notice the song’s seven-and-a-half minutes going by. It’s a smooth, natural progression from the very slow, sparse beginning through to the end. It’s also a remarkable blend of their soulful, melodic rock with the anesthetic aesthetic of Radiohead while Clifford also sounds remarkably like Thom Yorke. Other times, the experiments don’t work as well. Most notably “Singer,” with its breathily spoken vocals over drums and bass, strays far from the band’s usual formula, with disappointing results.

The album, as a whole, is a bit of a disappointment as well, but that says more about how great Magazine was and how much it raised my expectations than it does about how enjoyable a listen Vertigo is.

Update: “Made It Fine” would make an excellent going away/moving/road trip mix CD candidate.

Rating:

Mixers: “Angeldust (Please Come Down),” “Too High,” “Lover’s Greed,” “Come Around,” “The House Our Father Knew,” “Made It Fine”
Non-keepers: “Made It Fine,” “Singer”
Filed Between: Magazine and Kaada (Thank You For Giving Me Your Valuable Time)

Of course, this is where and how the real election takes place these days: in courtrooms, decided by lawyers and judges.

Report: Voter purges in 6 states may violate law

The New York Times reports that tens of thousands of eligible voters have been removed from rolls or blocked from registering in at least six swing states and the voters’ exclusion appears to violate federal law.

…

[The newspaper] says some states are improperly using Social Security data to verify new voters’ registration applications, and others may have broken rules that govern removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election.

And of course the Republican motto is Democracy Is Bad.  The more people vote, the worse it is for them.

People on all sides don’t trust the system.  And you can’t really have a democracy with no trust in the system.

Between this kind of s**t and the inflamed mobs we’ve been seeing at Palin/McCain rallies, I am very, very nervous.

It’s learning time at MPL. Let’s talk about the term “classical music.” That term probably has some meaning to you that covers most Christian and art music from the earliest chants of monks up through that of the present day, or at least the early part of the 20th century, excluding modern Christian folk and rock. You’ve probably got composers Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and maybe even Bartók, performers like Pavarotti and conductors like Bernstein all lumped into that grouping. Well, that’s one, and probably the most frequently-used, meaning of the term.

But let me tell you about music history or appreciation classes (concerned, of course, with “classical music”), most of which proceed as follows. They start off with some hand waving about Gregorian chants and the Middle Ages by way of introduction, then basically really start in on the meat of the class with the Renaissance, at whose beginning we had the Baroque period. This is represented by Bach and Handel and typified by extravagant ornamentation and complex structure, just like Baroque architecture. Then we get the Classical period, which is where things really start to get confusing, because now we’re referring to the music composed during this period, a subset of “classical music,” as “Classical music.” Mozart and Haydn are the archetypes of this period, and it is characterized by clean lines and balance, just like Classical architecture. Then we get the Romantic period. Beethoven bridges us from Classical into Romantic, where we get florid, dramatic works, as in Romantic literature, by composers like Chopin, Grieg, Liszt, Brahms, Puccini, Wagner, Debussy, and so on. These classes typically finish their survey of these three main periods (Baroque, Classical, and Romantic) with Mahler, who is kind of like Beethoven in that he kind of bridges us to the next period, where the classes typically end with some hand waving over the poorly defined period from 1910-2008, usually referred to as the 20th Century period, or Modern period, which is, of course, a horribly suited name that lumps way too much disparate music under one ill-fitting umbrella.

All of which is a long way of introducing what will be a series of reviews to come of “20th Century music.” I didn’t have to put that in quotes, because I will be most definitely listening to music composed in the 20th century, but that’s 98% of what I review on here anyway. Now, though, I’m reading Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening To The 20th Century (out in paperback this month), and so I’m listening to this “20th Century” subcategory of “classical music.” Clear as mud, I’m sure, so if you care and I haven’t been clear, ask a question in the comments and I’ll do my best to clarify.

Anyway, I’m starting my journey through this varied, ignored landscape with the canonical recording of one of my favorite composers, Hungary’s Béla Bartók. Summaries of Bartók’s career must mention that he visisted Hungarian and Bulgarian villages, notated and recorded the folk music there, and incorporated elements from it, such as shifting time signatures and non-Western (another crazy-confusing term) modalities (kind of like keys, if you’re familiar with that musical term) along with traditional Western elements into his composistions.

This CD begins with his Concerto For Orchestra, written near the end of his life in New York, where he emigrated to from Hungary in World War II, and debuted in 1944 in Boston. Concerti typically involve a solo instrument such as flute, piano, or violin playing the bulk of the melodic development while an orchestra helps out with harmony and the bold statements of the main themes, so this is a bit of an oddly-named duck. Once you listen, though, you realize there’s no other name that would work, as he spends five movements creating a near-symphonic work that gives extensive solos to a wide variety of different instruments throughout.

The Concerto is a marvelous piece, easily one of my new favorite “classical” works. In the space of 37 minutes, Bartók lays the foundation for the music of film for the last 50 years with quivering strings, a bevy of slowly emerging and retreating motifs, and an emphasis on tuned percussion, presents some of the most lusciously gorgeous melodies this side of Barber’s Adagio For Strings, pays tribute to Gershwin with a few near quotes of Rhapsody In Blue, interrupts his own work in an ”interrupted intermezzo” with a light-hearted quote of the contemporaneous Leningrad Symphony by Shostakovich, and closes by working the orchestra into a fit of virtuosically brilliant pyrotechnics. This piece is probably the best synthesis of Bartók’s career into a single piece.

Three years after recording the Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Reiner did the same for what was originally a separate release with two more pieces of Bartók’s: Music For Strings, Percussion, And Celesta (written in 1937) and Hungarian Sketches (1931).

I had to look up what a celesta was:

The celesta…is a struck idiophone operated by a keyboard. Its appearance is similar to that of an upright piano… or of a large wooden music box…. The keys are connected to hammers which strike a graduated set of metal (usually steel) plates suspended over wooden resonators. …. One of the most well-known works that makes use of the celesta is Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” from The Nutcracker.

And what is an idiophone?

An idiophone is any musical instrument which creates sound primarily by way of the instrument vibrating itself, without the use of strings or membranes.

This piece is quite highbrow, with its time signatures shifting rapidly and even more in the way of themes emerging out of and quickly fading back into the ether. The second movement is particularly enjoyable and, along with the fourth, a bit more accessible than the first and third movements, which have little in the way of themes you can easily grab on to to guide you through the piece’s 28 minutes. It’s quite good, but it’s far less readily emotionally available, and thus much harder to connect to.

Speaking of “harder,” I should mention that this is all somewhat challenging music, as you would expect, but in a much different way than that of Bach, which I’ve reviewed often here. I rarely write about Bach without somehow working in some mention of how his work is cognitive and a mental exercise. This music of Bartók’s is challenging in the sense that it won’t serve you as background music, however all that’s required to feel what it offers is to pay attention. Once you focus your attention on what’s being “said,” everything will be clear and you can enjoy the music without smelling the smoke from your brain’s gears crunching hard like they do on tough math problems.

The CD flows well from the folk-influenced fourth movement of Music For Strings, Percussion, And Celesta to the lighter Hungarian Sketches, a collection of five songs that, as the title suggests, are inspired from Bartók’s work with Hungarian folk music. About one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half minutes each, with colorful names like “Bear Dance,” “Slightly Tipsy,” and “Swineherd’s Dance,” and with a folk style and evocation of nature similar to Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, they give a concentrated view on the music from that time and place that, in this world of massively distributed media, is a refreshing bit of time travel.

It’s a wonderful way to wrap up this introduction to Bartók, and emphasizes why this is so often the starting point to exploring his work. I should have more Bartók, given how much I’ve enjoyed what I’ve heard and played on the piano, but I’m at least very happy I finally took the time to get this disc. Finally, I have to give props to BMG Classics for pricing this SACD/CD hybrid at the reasonable price of $12.99. It seems some record companies are slowly coming around to more closely understanding the value of their product.

Rating:

Mixers: Hungarian Sketches: “An Evening In The Village,” “Bear Dance,” “Swineherd’s Dance”
Non-keepers: Music For Strings, Percussion, And Celesta: “Movement 1 – Andante Tranquillo,” “Movement 4 – Allergro Molto,” Hungarian Sketches: “Slightly Tipsy”
Filed Between: Bartók’s Mikrokosmos and Bauhaus (1979-1983, Volume One)

I swear to God this could have come straight from The Onion.

Palin pre-empts state report, clears self in probe

Trying to head off a potentially embarrassing state ethics report on GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, campaign officials released their own report Thursday that clears her of any wrongdoing.

In other news, Richard Nixon is not a crook.

We’re back to Sarah McLachlan. Three years ago I reviewed her three albums in My Baby’s collection pretty extensively. Predating all three of those discs is Solace, presumably so titled because most songs are about some kind of past love still creating pain and attempt to provide some sort of comfort, much like she did on Surfacing, though it’s less effective here.

Not surprisingly, McLachlan’s songwriting chops aren’t quite as developed as they were a few years later on Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, and she’s doing a lot of that stagnant, stationary thing she did so much of on that album. However, there are elements here that contributed to the appreciation I gained for her on The Freedom Sessions in that she’s setting a mellow, reflective mood perfect for unwinding from an emotionally full weekend.

There aren’t many songs on I here I like without reservation, even the mixer “I Will Not Forget You” is a borderline mixer and only appropriate for a mellow, sissy mix. “Into The Fire” is very similar to the Dokken song of the same name, though she gives no songwriting credits, and it doesn’t work with her style at all.

However, most of these songs have moments that are enjoyable in my unguarded moments. “Back Door Man” seems to be about the privileged class using networks to get what they want out of the system through creating and then exploiting loopholes, and it’s one of the more passionate songs on the album; it might be the best song on here, but I’m somewhat disappointed it’s not about anal sex.

As she did on Surfacing, she takes instrumentation risks here, to good effect. “Black” is nearly avant-garde with its use of mandolin, accordion reeds, and pizzicato strings emerging out of silence to begin. Something called a billatron is featured on “Drawn To The Rhythm,” which may be the best example here of a song that draws me in with a compelling melody one minute and then turns me away with a cheesy turn of musical phrase the next.

Solace is a mixed bag of bright spots and bland stagnation. Like the rest of McLachlan’s oeuvre, though, it can be quite an engaging, fulfilling listen if you’re in the right spent, exhausted mood, which is not the default mood of MPL, so the best I can do here is acknowledge that.

Rating:

Mixers: “I Will Not Forget You”
Non-keepers: “Into The Fire,” “Shelter,” “Mercy”
Filed Between: Paul McCartney (Chaos And Creation In The Backyard) and Megadeth (Killing Is My Business…And Business Is Good!)