Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Ten Summoner’s Tales is an exemplar of a type of CD that makes me re-evaluate what a CD review means on MPL.  The tradeoff these CDs pose is whether to write from more of an evaluative perspective or a personal one.  Due to the style of the non-CD review content of this blog, I’ve always come down on the personal side, but coming across a well-executed CD that does not grab me always causes a re-assessment.

When I was taking my reviewing class four(!) years ago, my instructor pointed out that you should review something to give others an idea of whether or not they’d like it.  His gig was primarily movies, so his example was, "If you don’t like horror movies, when you review a horror movie you should evaluate it on whether or not somebody who likes horror movies would like it."  I don’t disagree with that approach at all, and use it as one of many guideposts in my reviews, but for a couple of reasons, it’s not really what I do here.

For one, I think it’s a bit of an old media mindset.  I don’t mean that as a pejorative; I just think that in an era when there were fewer sources of information and opinion, this quasi-objectivity made sense.  Now, though, you can get all kinds of opinions on musical artists and their output, and I feel the only reason to be read is to be interesting.

The main reason I tend to give more weight to my reaction, though, is that this blog is about me.  It’s essentially a public journal.  It may seem like I’m writing about a CD or a politician or a baseball game, but I’m really writing about my reaction to that thing.  Offhand I can only think of one regular reader I’ve ever had who didn’t know me personally.  I’m fine with that because, again, what I want to do with MPL is create a record of my life, and a record of how I’ve felt about collections of music serves as a pretty damned good proxy of my life.

So while I could spend time writing about Sting’s intelligently-written music, the proficiency of his supporting musicians, his clever lyrics, or the expertly-engineered sound, none of that captures the fact that these songs just do not grab me.  Where I should hear passion I hear chilliness and distance.  I respect the music, but I can’t love it.

I have always felt this sense of detachment from Sting’s music, and it’s always amazed me how passionate his fans are about his music.  No matter how much I listen, I cannot understand how he affects so many people so deeply.  I imagine that a KEN who loved Sting would be one that would write a review like this for, say, Faith No More’s Angel Dust, praising its execution and brilliance, but left alienated by the overwhelming assault on his ears.

I like plenty of music that might be described as passionless.  In particular, big chunks of the avant-garde music and death metal I praise do not grab me in the same way this doesn’t.  The difference is that those CDs tend to be more cerebral, exciting the puzzle-solving neurons of my brain, which in turn engage me in a sort of passionate way.  Sting’s music is smart, yes, but it’s not quite at that level of stimulation.

So, in the spirit of my reaction to this album, let’s polish this off professionally but dispassionately.  High points are the clever lyrics in "Seven Days," the emotional depth of "Fields Of Gold," and the nearly emotional "It’s Probably Me."  Low points are the ridiculous spoken portion of "St. Augustine In Hell," the ponderous incessance of "Heavy Cloud No Rain," and Sting’s insertion of his opinions of politics, war, and technology into a love song ("If I Ever Lose My Faith In You").

If I were evaluating this album on its terms, for what it intends to be, I would have no problem giving it my highest rating.  For MPL, though, I’ll just shake its hand, thank it for the occasional stimulation, and be on my way.

Rating:
  
Mixers: "Fields Of Gold"
Keepers: “Love Is Stronger Than Justice (The Munificent Seven),” “Seven Days,” “It’s Probably Me," "Shape Of My Heart”
Filed Between: The Steve Miller Band (Greatest Hits 1974-78) and Stinkfish (…Does It Again)

Typical me, I started something and now I’m not so sure…

– “I Started Something I Can’t Finish”

Turns out I really like the Smiths, which is a surprise, especially considering there’s not a single member of this band named Smith, which was a huge f**king disappointment.  Anyway, I think it’s because even though the songs are all about being sad and lonely, lead singer Morrissey doesn’t spend much time being hesitant about it: he’s sad and lonely and wants to feel you up and he’s going to make sure you are aware of that, even if it means he’s going to have to perform the musical equivalent of following you around and breathily whispering his problems into your ear.  Or maybe it’s because the band just writes great songs.

It’s late and this is a greatest hits album, so without further ado….

“Hand In Glove” – this is my second-least favorite song on here, and if there’s a track where Morrissey is all timid about being gay, sad, and lonely, it’s this one.  At points it sounds like he’s forgotten they’re recording a song.

“How Soon Is Now?” – If you know one song by The Smiths, this is it.  “I’m lonely and I need to be loved/Just like everybody else does.”  I always thought this was Depeche Mode or somebody like that.  This song has that signature guitar wail…have any rappers used that?  They should.  More bands should cover this.  Huge and awesome.

“Shakespeare’s Sister” – Whoa whoa whoa.  Stop.  STOP!  This is awful, and an awful lot of awful.  This is like the day the band tried coffee or something.  Easily the worst song here.

“That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” – The narrator of this track is telling his friends that their jokes about people less fortunate than them aren’t funny, which hits close to home because if you ever say something like “grammar nazi” to describe somebody who’s persnickety about grammar or “recycling nazi” to describe somebody who is vigilant about recycling around me I will definitely point out the inappropriateness of using the word “nazi” in that context for the way it diminishes the true horrors of the Nazis.  This is a mediocre track until the “…and now it’s happening in mine” part, at which point the album ratchets it up to 4.5-lunchbox levels right up through the second-to-last track.  If “Hand In Glove,” “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” and “Shakespeare’s Sister” weren’t on here, or maybe even if two of them weren’t, this would probably be a 4.5-lunchbox album.

“Shoplifters Of The World” – I love this guit solo…it’s damned near glam rock.  T. Rex lives!

“Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me” – A perfect example of how Morrisey and The Smiths get their whiny, sad reputation: “Last night I dreamt/That somebody loved me/No hope – no harm/Just another false alarm.”  I can’t argue with the fact that these lyrics are blatantly dark, but let’s not forget that these songs are at least as good as the lyrics are depressing.

“There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” – As a lousy song at the end of this album, this serves to be the thing that that one-night stand said right after the mind-blowing orgasm that served to make her a one-night stand.  Oh this hurts here.

Rating:

Mixers: “William, It Was Really Nothing,” “How Soon Is Now?,” “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” “Panic,” “Girlfriend In A Coma”
Non-keepers: “Hand In Glove,” “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” “Shakespeare’s Sister,” “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”
Filed Between: Elliott Smith (Figure 8) and Sneaker Pimps (cassette single “Tesko Suicide (LP Edit)” b/w “Post-Modern Sleaze”)

We’ll crucify the insincere tonight

– “Tonight, Tonight”

You and me both, Billy.

Can you be a fan of a band if you don’t like what is universally regarded as their best album? ‘Cuz that basically describes the love triangle between me, Smashing Pumpkins, and Siamese Dream. Smashing Pumpkins’ debut album, Gish, had me from the first time I saw one of its videos on 120 Minutes even though I found lead singer Billy Corgan to be an insufferable sufferer of rock star martyr syndrome. (His scolding of the audience when opening up for Red Hot Chili Peppers in St. Paul in November 1991 is seared in my brain.) Then Siamese Dream came out, and I thought, “Huynh, so that’s where he was going with that sound.” All of Gish’s vitality was replaced with slick production and by-the-numbers songwriting, all of the debut album’s energy was replaced with ringing chords designed to leave space for on-stage rock star poses. It sounded great, but was the sonic equivalent of the hot, vapid blonde that catches your eye at first but has nothing else to offer. So much lost potential….

You either rule or suck in my book, especially in those chapters written as high school merged with college, and with every Siamese Dream track played on the radio, which I think was every other song on the radio in the summer of 1994, Smashing Pumpkins further cemented their reputation in my mind as “suck.” That was that: dust off hands and banish their post-Gish output from my ears forever. (The wretched Corgan-produced Hole album Celebrity Skin didn’t help their case at all.)

And, really, the fact that I could write off a band once and be done with them was one of the only damping effects on my CD consumption. Which is why, now that I’m working through the S’s of J-mez’ collection and find myself face to face with another very good Smashing Pumpkins album, the one immediately after Siamese Dream, in fact, it’s still undetermined whether I’ll re-evaluate this evaluation process.

Given their status as rock giants in 1995, I’m surprised I didn’t hear more of this double-disc’s singles on the radio and revise my opinion earlier, but the only song I recollect is the merely decent “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” with its regrettably histrionic lyrics “Despite all my rage/I’m still just a rat in a cage.” (Do you think Trent Reznor and Billy Corgan would be best buds given their similar lyric styles, or would they hate each other because their martyr complexes are realized in such similar ways? They must have met at some point…hard to believe they never toured together.) But I’ve even managed to make some sort of peace with that song. The pity-me-the-rockstar lyrics still roll my eyes every time, but now that the rest of the album reminds me of PinkFloyd’s The Wall, the song takes on its role as this album’s “Comfortably Numb.”

In fact this album is quite reminiscent of that album whose lead singer loved to play the melodramatic martyr card and often drove full-speed over the edge of cliché. Now, this is no The Wall, but I couldn’t help be reminded of it, with its double disc-ness and alternately sweet songs full of fragile neediness; dreary, sorrowful dirges; and raging screamfests. Song order here is crucially important, just like the 1977 musical autobiography of Roger Waters. These discs were not meant to be listened to on shuffle, as the sonic arc is just slightly short of perfect (like almost everything in the CD era it could have greatly improved with a touch of trimming). The album’s opening and closing tracks are entirely mediocre but get kept for their role as mood-setting bookends. Lyrically, it’s got the aforementioned lead-singer-as-melodramatic-martyr, self-hatred, and even pigs (I know, that’s more Animals, but still it ignites a lot of The Wall-associated neurons). And as it turns out, Corgan himself set out to make “The Wall for Generation X.”

Corgan’s still awfully whiny, both in terms of timbral quality and lyrical content, but he’s not nearly as bad as he used to be. Or still could have been for that matter. “Muzzle,” one of the album’s best tracks, starts off oh-so-regrettably with, “I fear that I am ordinary/Just like everyone,” but then Corgan immediately saves it with what are probably his best lyrics on the album: “To lie here and die among the sorrows adrift among the days/For everything I ever said and everything I’ve ever done is gone and dead/…/Great loves will one day have to part.” Ah, now there’s the beautiful style of melodrama that makes me feel like I’ve still got that awful 17-year-old haircut (for the record, with no help from me it turned into a beautiful 18-year-old haircut).

The album takes a drastic turn for the worse during the second half of the second disc, but still, what you’ve got here is the intensity, life, and creativity of Gish, augmented with a daring use of musical styles (not all of which work…see “We Only Come Out At Night” for a huge clunk) and widely varying instrumentation in new and challenging ways (love the outrageously distorted handclaps on “Love”), all with the gorgeous production quality of Siamese Dream, wrapped up as what must add up to the band’s definitive statement. So can I be a fan of this band given my disdain for their biggest hit album? I’ll say I can, and I’ll write off Siamese Dream as a blatant money-and-attention grab, as a way for Corgan to introduce the world to his true musical statement: Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness.

Rating:

Mixers: “Jellybelly,” “Fuck You (An Ode To One),” “Love,” “Galpogos,” “Muzzle,” “Bodies”
Non-keepers: “To Forgive,” “In The Arms Of Sleep,” “We Only Come Out At Night”
Filed Between: Gish and Smile Empty Soul (”Bottom Of A Bottle” b/w “Every Sunday”)

You remember Silverchair. They came along in that 1995 wave of bands like Candlebox and Bush that all sounded exactly like one another, just kind of a condensed amalgam of 1991-1993 into a few hits that were seemingly constantly on the radio.

Silverchair’s contribution was “Tomorrow”. And for some reason I have the single of that awful song. I never liked it, but I seem to remember my girlfriend in college having like seven copies from the radio station, and I’ve never turned down a CD offered to me. I think I listened to it five times 12 or so years ago and never gave it another thought.

Here’s the deal, though…these guys were 15 when this came out. 15! I mean, if you’re submitting this as your freshman year music project in high school, it’s an A+…an incredibly precocious demonstration of songwriting and performance prowess.

In an interview with Faster Louder in 2007, 12 years after this album’s release, Silverchair singer Daniel Johns has a great quote that basically sums up any review of Frogstomp.

Everyone in any band, no matter how good or how cool they’re believed to be, has got some kind of dark, high school band skeleton in their closet [laughs]. I fucking guarantee you! It’s just that ours sold five million records [laughs]. It’s supposed to be a secret – fucking hell!”

Given that there are plenty of moments that make me cringe, I can’t imagine how it sounds to Johns, who, along with the rest of the band, seems to still have a career in their native Australia. They show their age the most in the lyrics, where “growing up is a civil war” (“Cicada”) and they try to encourage a first-time drug offender not to give up (“Findaway”). That track is forgiven, though, since it’s the disc’s best song and foreshadows The Stereo, especially at the beginning.

Musically, there’s a lot of “not bad” on this album and, as a result, a lot of that phrase in my notes. There’s some drop tuning, soft/loud faux-splosions, and crunchy riffs with slowly syncopated rhythms. Really, it’s a template for what record company executives heard in their head when they listened to Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, and Nirvana. If I could have made something this “not bad” when I was 15, I sure as hell would have. That said, while I’m curious about their later output, I don’t need to hear it. Because while this is a lot of “not bad,” it’s also just not good.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keeper: “Findaway”
Filed Between: Sibelius (Symphonies 4-7, Der Schwan von Tuonela, Tapiola) and Silverchair (“Tomorrow”)

Wikipedia says this album sold half as many copies as its predecessor, Blood Sugar Sex Magik. That’s what the band gets for moving towards good, a big smackdown by their fans. Because while this album just barely peeks in on the Land of Good, that glance makes it the best collection of their songs I’ve ever heard, containing a handful of good songs and strewn from start to finish with several almost-good-if-it-just-didn’t-contain-that-one-annoying-part songs.

Those songs break my heart. They’re tragic, really. These sonic butterfaces are endowed with either a fantastic chorus, verse, or bridge, only to be marred by a stomach-churning minute, sometimes less. Almost all of them go on too long. If you took the bridge from “Aeroplane,” put it with the verse of “Falling Into Grace” and add in the chorus of “Shallow Be Thy Game,” you’d have a mix CD candidate for sure. Separated, though, “Shallow Be The Game” barely gets kept and “One Big Mob” is another one I can shag after putting a bag over its face (i.e., the slow part).

This was the album where the band’s guitarist was Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. Wikipedia says more of these songs were written as fully conceived pieces instead of via the band’s usual collaborative jam process. Navarro was replaced by his predecessor, John Frusciante, for the band’s next album. I don’t know if they went back to their old ways or not, and I don’t plan on ever finding out, but this album is either an anomaly or progress away from their prior decade-plus of sucking. For their sake, I hope they didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater when they fired Navarro and his drug habit.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: “Warped,” “Coffee Shop,” “One Big Mob,” “Tearjerker,” “Shallow Be Thy Game” Update: “One Hot Minute”
Filed Between: Red Hot Chili Peppers’ What Hits!? and Redd Kross (a peek into Show World promotional sampler cassette)

The Presidents Of The United States Of America (The Presidents) were always the Seattle band that wasn’t. Breaking through with this album’s “Lump” a few years after the whole Seattle thing broke and faded, bearing a gruesome name, and reeking of novelty, even their drop-tuning didn’t endear them to me. I never listened that closely, but based on radio play of “Lump” and “Peaches,” I knew they weren’t for me, even though those songs had some appeal beneath the silliness.

Of course, the band was always self-aware about their limitations, primary among them their complete lack of virtuosity. Theirs is a sloppy aesthetic, and they approach it in the right way, with loads of kitsch. Nowhere, though, did they display more self-awareness than in “We Are Not Going To Make It,” which only seems half-sarcastic:

We’re not gonna make it/
‘Cause there’s a million better bands/
With a million better songs/
Drummers who can drum/
And singers who can sing

Somewhat ironically, that’s one of their best songs. Maybe that’s part of the sarcasm.

It turns out they’re better than I thought. I used to hate “Peaches,” but if you can get past the inanity of the opening section (“I’m moving to the country, gonna eat a lot of peaches” [x4]), it’s actually a pretty rockin’ song. And when I saw this description of the video on Wikipedia, I knew I had to see it.

During the song’s instrumental break, the band is attacked by a group of ninjas attempting to capture them, who they fight for the remainder of the video and eventually defeat.

And that’s about how it plays out:

The presidents of the united states of america - peaches

It’s a long way from “better than I thought” to “good,” however, and spending a few days with “Peaches,” “Feather Pluckn,” and “Body” going through my head was not a pleasant experience. Despite finding a few tracks here I want to listen to again, and a few others that don’t drive me crazy with either extreme annoyance or extreme boredom, this isn’t a CD I’m going to be reaching for very often.

Rating:

Mixers: “Kick Out The Jams”
Keepers: “Lump,” “Peaches,” “We Are Not Going To Make It,” “Candy,” “Naked And Famous”
Filed Between: Poster Children (Tool Of The Man) and Elvis Presley (30 #1 Hits)

I can’t think of this album without thinking of my 1995 girlfriend, to whom I gave this as a birthday gift if not on the day she broke up with me then like the day before. Not that I can blame her…looking back at the 20-year-old me, it’s amazing I even got laid. Still, the album comes with a lot of unhappy associations.

And this is just a stubby, informal review anyway, since I’ve only got the first of the two discs.

It’s pretty good, though. One of the biggest problems with Phish, in my opinion, is that there compositional style grates and stays in a rut too long, particularly in the sterile studio environment. It’s more fun live, though, with that extra energy, and the grooves are more on the hypnotic side, as opposed to the boring side.

Non-keepers: “Stash,” “Montana”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Phish’s Hoist and Billy Breathes

It’s back in time for Jump, Little Children’s 1995 debut, a collection of demos recorded around the South and compiled for release here. It’s impossible to listen to this and pretend I don’t know what’s coming three years and two releases later on the five-lunchbox Magazine, so I won’t even try.

This release is way more hippie and way less rawk and experimental than their later releases. In the mid-90’s, the band was definitely in a Birkenstock, granola phase as they’re essentially Rusted Root with worse production values. By the late 90’s, their range of emotional expressiveness had increased dramatically…you have to wonder if they were dumped by a chick in the meantime.

Lead vocalist Jay Clifford’s voice, such a distinctive sound on Magazine and Vertigo, here displays features of what it would be, but is still developing as well. It’s weaker here, and lacks a gritty sexiness it has on later releases.

Parts of this are pretty good, but it has gaping holes as well. “Lamplight” is five minutes long and becomes boring in about the first 25 seconds. “My Heart Is On The Ocean” features some awful lyrics: “The ship is sailing as the ships they do sail.” It all adds up to about a three-lunchbox CD, but I can’t quite decide if I would say the same thing if I hadn’t already heard their later work. Like I said, it’s hard to separate what I know will happen.

But then they go ahead and make up my mind for me by tacking on a “bonus” track after the pretty good “Opium,” which is just them talking about dumb s**t with an inanity previously thought to only exist in conversations of college freshmen. And, really, that kind of solipsism can’t go unpunished.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: “Someone’s In The Kitchen,” “Smiling Down,” “Quiet,” “My Heart Is On The Ocean”
Filed Between: Judgment Night Soundtrack and Magazine

With the experimental feel and emphasis on sounds, as opposed to traditional pop song structure, this album of remixes from The Downward Spiral does indeed sound like you’re further down said spiral, as if the descent into madness is taking control, moving past the point of no return, and making what surrounds you more confusing, more disconcerting, and less concrete. This collection sounds better than The Downward Spiral and, because it has less vocals and isn’t trying to appeal to a broader audience, has less of those roll-your-eyes moments Trent Reznor is so good at giving us. On the other hand, The Downward Spiral mixes things up better and still has better cohesion. This CD rarely strays from one of two moods, both fairly acerbic, and, as a collaborative effort, feels a bit pasted together.

In remix circles, I believe this qualifies as star-studded. J.G. Thrilwell contributes a couple of remixes and Aphex Twin delivers a pair of originals. The first of these, “At The Heart Of It All,” may be the highlight of the entire album, as its meditative atmosphere is fantastic background and sleepy-time music in the best sense of those terms. Similarly, “The Downward Spiral (The Bottom),” is another one of my favorites where not much happens, but at least it’s interesting while it happens, like an entire movie of interesting exposition and character development: no plot, but riveting.

This set of remixes probably rates slightly higher than the album that spawned it, though they are coming at things completely differently. If I want more of a rock album listen, I’ll go for the original, but if I’m looking for groan-free interesting sound, I’ll pull this one out. That’s a refreshing conclusion to come to given how horrible the last Nine Inch Nails set of remixes I listened to was. Plus I kept versions of two tracks from the original that didn’t get kept there: “Piggy” and “Eraser.”

Rating:

Mixers: none
Non-keepers: “The Art Of Self Destruction, Part One,” “Self Destruction, Part Two,” “Hurt (Quiet),” “Eraser (Denial; Realization),” “Erased, Over, Out”
Filed Between: A Thousand Pleasures and Nirvana (Bleach)

It’s a shame that this album contains “One Of Us,” and not just because that song blows. Almost as big a crime as inflicting that unrelenting tripe on our 1995 ears is it obscuring what is an excellent album as well as Joan Osborne’s true style. I was reminded of that style myself when I heard this disc open with “St. Teresa,” which I seem to remember as the first single off the album, with “One Of Us” being the second.

The other 55 minutes here, for the most part, decidedly part ways with that atrocity (notably the only song credited solely to guitarist Eric Bazilian). Light up a cigarette on a hot, steamy night (note: offer not available in Seattle), kick back with a cold beer, and let the slow, bluesy rhythms, Osborne’s sultry voice and Bazilian’s perfectly accentuating guitar playing bring your heartbeat and temperature down.

There is some diversity, like the party track “Right Hand Man” with its great sax and piano parts, the tight little groove of “Ladder,” and “Let’s Just Get Naked,” which is appropriate about 10 months into a recession and six beers into the night and is a candidate for mix CDs primarily because of its lyrics. Still, for the most part, just sit back and soak up the deeply penetrating soulfulness of Osborne.

Sadly, in the end this album will be remembered for one thing (aside from its atrocious cover art that makes Radiohead’s look like Van Gogh) and that is “One Of Us.” My Baby came into my office the other day when it was playing and said, “Is this Alanis?” I think that just about sums up the merits of that song.

Rating:

Mixers: “St. Teresa,” “Let’s Just Get Naked,” “Crazy Baby”
Non-keepers: “One Of Us,” “Help Me”
Filed Between: Beth Orton (Comfort Of Strangers) and Ozzy Osbourne (No More Tears – Collector’s Edition cassette single)