Miss Piggy Lunchbox

I think everybody who went to college in the mid-90’s has exactly one Phish album. My Baby had Rift. J-mez had this one, its successor. I had two: Junta and Billy Breathes, but then I’m kind of an exception when it comes to CDs.

If I were to speculate on why this happens, and screw it, let’s speculate, it’s because everybody picks one to try based on the buzz…maybe they see it on sale in the new releases section…and then decides they’re not all that. Of course, Phish fans don’t have any Phish in their collection, at least not studio-produced stuff like this. They all know that Phish is about the live show, so if they do own any it’s, like, Phish’s Halloween show where they did the Beatles’ White album or whatever.

But anyway, if you were to only have one Phish album, you could do a lot worse than Hoist. It’s good, though it falls quite a ways short of great. Only three of the 11 tracks piss me off, which is a pretty good ratio considering that the ratio of the world at large that pisses me off is much higher. There’s one undeniable mixer and a couple others that came close. “Down With Disease” gets me bopping, but it’s a little too obvious in Phish’s way, and “Axilla [Part II]” would have been a mix candidate if it weren’t for the slowed-down talking at the end.

Speaking of noises, I don’t know what the band is going for on “Riker’s Mailbox” or “Demand.” The former is only a few seconds of sound effects, while the latter has its moments, like when the jam ends with a crash and a beautiful, ethereal chorus appears, but the song is almost 11 minutes long, the jam is pretty dull, and there’s a dumb sound-effects part smack in the middle of it. Still, neither has me grabbing for the remote as fast as “Lifeboy,” which finds that magic combination of amazingly dull and super long, or “Scent Of A Mule,” whose echoes of Dueling Banjos make my hair stand on end.

Everything else is pretty good, though, and, since the best part of reviewing a Phish album is poking Phish fans, I’m going to give credit to the performers on here who aren’t the band. The Tower of Power horns add a new flavor to “Julius” and “Wolfman’s Brother” that camouflages that hesitant Phish sound that makes my skin crawl and my stomach queasy, and Alison Krauss is gorgeous, as always, on “If I Could,” which doesn’t get mixed just because it spends too long on repeat at the end.

Still, I want to make this absolutely clear: I like this album. I can listen to it from start to finish and enjoy myself most of the way through. And, really, I don’t actually paint Phish fans with this broad of a brush. It’s just the one that has stuck in my memory. All broad-brushing is just for entertainment purposes. Plus, Phish is one of the biggest proponents of FLAC, which is awesome.

Rating:

Mixer: “Wolfman’s Brother”
Non-keepers: “Riker’s Mailbox,” “Lifeboy,” “Scent Of A Mule,” “Demand”
Filed Between: Phish’s Junta and Billy Breathes

Barber was an American composer who lived from 1910 to 1981. He’s most famous for his “Adagio for Strings,” which you may not know by name but you probably know by sound. It’s one of those nearly ubiquitous classical pieces that, in recent times, has appeared in the movies Platoon, The Elephant Man, and Amélie. It is the sound of violins crying. I swear the piece itself weeps, as it nearly imperceptibly builds for over six minutes until it climaxes in a howl of anguish, leaving the silence that follows to scream and roar in your ears and images of tragedy to flash before your eyes.

The Adagio has always been one of my favorite piece and is the reason I bought this CD. But it’s less than nine minutes long, so the rest of the CD served as an introduction to more of Barber’s works for me. If you read any encyclopedia-length bio of Barber, you’re bound to read some form of two words: lyrical and bold. And with good reason: his bold statements are lousy with beautiful lyricism, so it really is a fitting cocktail-party level of knowledge to have about him.

Barber had more abilities than just that, though. “Overture To The ‘School For Scandal’,” inspired by a play by Richard Sheridan, is full of life and energy and spends a good portion of its early minutes bubbling and percolating that energy into you. “Music For A Scene From Shelley,” inspired by “Prometheus Unbound,” features a Wagnerian simmering of strings reminiscent of the shimmering Rhinemaidens scene in Das Rheingold. His first symphony revels in the dissonance and 12-tone harmonic textures from the Second Viennese School. On the downside, he can get off course at times and lose me, as he does here in the non-keepers. For the most part, though, this is a great listen.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Non-keeper: “Second Essay For Orchestra,” Symphony 1, Movement 1
Filed Between: Bang Tango (Dancin’ On Coals) and Barenaked Ladies (Maybe You Should Drive)

[Mystery solved.  J-mez was the one who decided to thank me for my output by sending me this CD. - Ed.]

A lot of times the 2.5-to-3 lunchbox boundary has to do with whether I decide an album breaks the likable boundary or not. Other times, though, a CD doesn’t fall into the fuzzy middle ground as much as it’s just a collection of good stuff and bad stuff, and breaking the three-lunchbox mark then becomes about whether the good stuff outweighs the bad stuff. That usually happens on compilation albums, but sometimes one band can’t seem to decide whether to suck or rule for even a single hour. This is one of those times.

The album’s ten tracks have seven keepers among them. By themselves, they’re an easy four lunchboxes, and if you took out their noodly parts, which keep at least half of them from being mixers, we could be talking about five lunchboxes. Even “Drunkship of Lanterns” has its moments. But I’m not reviewing a collection of parts of songs.

The bad parts…oy, this is the kind of stuff that gives progressive metal a bad name. Lyrics that make no sense (“Exoskeletal junction at the railroad delayed” is one of the more cohesive lines in a song that begins with “Transient jet lag ecto mimed bison”), sounds and noises just for their own sake, a story so opaque that understanding it requires reading a .pdf linked to from the album’s Wikipedia page, and abrupt, loud starts of phrases that spend too much time in the strident mid-high ranges and thus force you to quickly lower the volume which then obscures the quieter parts…it’s more than just not good, it’s a frustrating, angering experience.

However, as angry as it makes me, and it makes me pretty freaking angry, there’s a lot of good stuff and it is really good good stuff, with complex, driving rhythms, awesome guitar riffs, and gripping (if a bit too whiny) vocal melodies. Even though I started writing this review fifteen minutes ago with a lead paragraph aimed at giving this disc 3 lunchboxes, these are the CDs I went to half-lunchboxes for.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Non-keepers: “Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of),” “Tira Me A Las Arañas,” “Drunkship Of Lanterns”
Filed Between: Bob Marley And The Wailers (Legend, The Best Of) and a double-opera CD with Cavalleria rusticana by Mascagni and Pagliacci by Leoncavallo

This is the Ozzy Osbourne record where he really broke away from the metal genre and asserted himself as a star with some crossover appeal who could age well. Not physically, of course. No, I saw him on this tour (because it was going to be his last…ha ha ha), and he was already unable to stand erect, weighed down by his man boobs. No, by “age well” I mean that he established himself as a star who had put the drugs behind him and was able to act like a professional and write music and perform concerts in a workmanlike manner. While that professionalism enabled him to turn his notoriety into a fiscal empire, it doesn’t sound all that rawk. Maybe that’s why two of these 11 songs are meta-rockers about how awesome and crazy (Ozzy’s fave word) it is to rock like he has and is and how he just can’t stop, whoa yeah.

This album’s core strengths are in the guitar and bass performances of Zakk Wylde and Bob Daisley, respectively. Osbourne deserves credit for surrounding himself with these guys, of course, but they really are carrying the load.

This was Wylde’s second studio album with Osbourne, and he picks up where he left off on No Rest For The Wicked, putting his signature melodicism everywhere. Wylde’s technique is phenomenal, as is that of all the guitar deities of the era, but what sets him apart from the crowd is his ability to affect every aspect of a song. Along with rock-horn-inducing solos, he always sets just the right mood at the beginning of a song and fills in the space between vocal phrases so well you can’t help but sing along with those parts as well, Beavis and Butthead style.

There aren’t any great songs on here (though all four keepers come close), but there’s really only one awful song (“Zombie Stomp”). When grunge came along to banish metal to the butts of jokes for several years in the early 90’s, this was one of the albums that managed to rise above it, despite not really being considered a masterpiece. Along with Osbourne’s die-hard fans, this gained enough crossover radio airplay to keep it chugging along, in that unspectacular workmanlike manner that I mentioned above.

The singles from this disc cover me like an old, comfortable blanket, transporting me back to high school. There’s a lot to like here beyond just nostalgia, too. However, when I listen with my critical ear, with its lack of sentiment, it picks up a lot of terrible lyrics, and a lot of lazy melody writing. Add in the clunky moments that pepper “I Don’t Want To Change The World” and “A.V.H,” to name a couple, and you’ve got a mediocre album. Still, almost every song has a bridge, which keeps the disc on the listenable side of the spectrum, and if I ignored the comfortable, nostalgic blanket aspect of things, I’d be betraying my soul, so this barely gets its third full lunchbox.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” “No More Tears,” “S.I.N.,” “Road To Nowhere”
Filed Between: Joan Osborne (Relish) and Ozzy’s “No More Tears” Collector’s Edition cassette single

They take their open mics seriously in Boise.

This switch is definitely in the right position.

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

Okay guys, this is your chance.  I need you.  I need you to want something.

Here’s the deal: I need more project coding experience as I apply for internships and full-time jobs.  The competition is fierce and jobs are few and far between, and I need more non-school coding experience, especially on webby technologies.

So, what do you want to see?  What would make MPL better for you?

How about an online database of my CD collection?  That would give me experience in mySQL, and I would probably code it up in Ruby to get experience in that, too.  Or, here’s an API for a Computational Linguistically-focused Seattle company; what could I do with that?

Anything, guys, I just need some ideas of what to work on.  I broke up with my job this morning.  Long story, but it’s all on good terms, or at least as good as it can be given the loss of income.

So let me know in the comments.

Guapo is an instrumental trio that finds its way from London to my CD player via Ipecac recordings, who really should just have money taken out of my paycheck. According to Wikipedia, Black Oni is their sixth of eight albums. Also according to Wikipedia, “Guapo’s music explores the outer-most regions of psychedelic composition.” Um, no. At least not on this album.

I like this album, but its primary characteristic is that it spends minute after minute, about 60-70% of them interesting and enjoyable, chugging along to build up to a climax that never arrives. If I listen for five minutes, I think it’s awesome. Ten minutes, and I’m starting to get bored. Fifteen minutes and I realize they never delivered on the promise of that first five minutes, but at least now they’re sweet talking me with another long, slow build (that won’t arrive).

According to the band themselves, though, they’re the second coming. Here’s how the bio on their website starts out:

“Blaze the Light of Ten Thousand Suns!”

So cries Elizabeth Clare Prophet, spirit channel and avatar of the Church Universal and Triumphant….

Ho boy, well that explains a lot. Somebody put instruments in the hands of Tolkien fans and now they’re trying to turn legends of elvish rings into abstract sounds. And, really, an excellent mood-setting that causes your attention to drift and never delivers on its promise is basically how I would describe the Lord of the Rings trilogy, so well done, boys.

The last sentence of that bio begins:

How long is a climax? “How long have you got?”, replies Guapo

Unfortunately, you apparently need longer than 43 minutes, which is the length of this CD, because this never really reaches a climax.

So it goes nowhere, but for the most part it sounds great in the meantime, so I unhesitatingly give it three lunchboxes. If you need to escape to a land of warlocks and trolls, light up, put this disc on, and let your mind go. You could do a lot worse.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Non-keepers: “II,” “IV”
Filed Between: Great Phone Calls featuring Neil Hamburger and The Gumdrops (Tight Pants)

It’s urgent.  (Emphasis mine.)

There are fewer than 60 [Javan Rhinos] left in the wild — almost all in a single Indonesian national park — and numbers appear to be declining for the first time in decades because of low birthrates.

…

Conservation groups say it is the world’s most endangered mammal.

About 50 live in Ujung Kulon National Park, but it appears that only three of the females are breeding continuously.

As a result, an average of one calf is born every year — near to the number of animals dying, and four times fewer than would be needed to sustain a healthy, growing rhino population, [Christy Willams, the WWF's Asian Rhino Specialist,] and others say.

Williams said the park may have reached the maximum number of rhinos it can support and the animals may also be struggling to compete for scare resources with growing populations of wild cattle.

The government is working with conservation groups to find a suitable second site for the Java rhinos, which would help protect them from catastrophic events like disease or natural disasters, Williams said.

Researchers say a smaller population of Javan rhinos in Vietnam does not appear to be breeding anymore.

So let’s try this: MPL’s first save-the-rhinos fundraising drive.

I know times are tough, but if you have the means, please consider donating to the International Rhino Foundation here.

For every $25 you donate, I’ll give you one post at MPL.  Heck, I’ll even write it if you want, just ask me to riff on a theme or something.  I will reserve the right at a final edit, so you can’t mention my birth name or put hate speech up, but I’ll let pretty much all reasonable content go up untouched.