Miss Piggy Lunchbox

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)

Matchbox 20…For those who feel like Hootie And The Blowfish didn’t water down Counting Crows enough.

Confession: I have a ton of guilt related t this album because at my first post-college job in 1998 a colleague my age planned an outing for his team where they went to a Matchbox 20 concert, and I mocked him for it. I really just mocked Matchbox 20, but he was like 23 and just trying to do something fun for his team, so I guess that makes me a colossal jerk. I mean, add it to the list, you know? What’s worse is that I can’t tell Matchbox 20 from 3 Doors Down or Third Eye Blind, so when you throw in Bush’s album Sixteen Stone they’re all the same crappy band, so I really carry around this guilt for several bands. That’s my punishment I guess.

For my penance, then, I’ll just leave that initial line as my only criticism here of the band. Suffice it to say, I’m not a fan of these anguished vocals over strummy-guitars-leading-to-Southern-fried-mid-90’s-rock. But if you are, you know, that’s cool, especially if your last name has five consecutive consonants in it.

Okay, one more thing, because I can’t resist. Wikipedia reports that “3 A.M.” (you know it, it goes “It’s 3 AM I must be lonely-huh”) is “considered a defining song of post-grunge.” I’ll leave that without comment, because it really sums it all up better than I ever could. Still, if it floats your boat, whatever, you know?

Rating:

Mixers: None
Keeper: “Long Day”
Filed Between: Mastodon (Blood Mountain) and a promotional cassette for Material Issue titled Chatter – An Audio Profile

Here’s the deal with Now I Got Worry: just…stop. Please. It’s too much, and I can barely force myself through this any more. It begins with a acerbic howl by Spencer and then it’s 16 songs of more-explosion-than-blues riffs delivered through a punk filter of loud, distorted, loud, loud guitars played loudly at the same intense tempo for 45 loud minutes.

Apparently Jon Spencer does this raw sexuality, animal magnetism, Elvis impersonation shtick that is completely sultry-except-it’s-not. Because I don’t think that it would be all that erotic to have sex with a savage beast, but maybe Spencer’s into bestiality. In fact, if an artist’s music is an expression of his or her sexuality, then I think it would be best to keep your sex far away from Spencer, because if he pounds your pussy or asshole with the same insistent intensity devoid of nuance with which he pounds your earholes on this album, it will be far from an enjoyable experience. Like the album, I have to imagine it’s all about Spencer himself, and far from the partnership you want it to be.

The motto for this album should be “Keeper at best,” because that’s the note I’ve left for myself on over half of these tracks. I’m hesitant to write off songs initially, but it’s quite clear that very little here would work well on a mix due to the sheer sonic brutality of almost every track. This is, quite simply, a very hard listen, whose proper listening context I’m having trouble finding.

My opinion of most of these songs vacillates from listen to listen, and a lot of that has to do with tolerance for intensity and my programming. This album, to its credit, is in exactly the right order, at least for the first 75% or so. The order they appear in on the album is the only order they could possibly be enjoyable in, as every permutation shuffle has found over the past week has been unlistenable. As a result, I frequently like these songs more or less than I did the last time based on what came before them. Additionally, I like almost all of these significantly more in isolation than I do in the context of the rest of the album, even the correctly-ordered context. It’s fun to rock out this obnoxiously for three to five minutes…but not so much for 20, much less 45.

And that’s why the number of songs that gets kept doesn’t really match the number of lunchboxes. Most of these songs are enjoyable and interesting as one-offs, but the album as a whole is, while interesting, an aesthetic failure because it operates in only one gear. Some of my favorite tracks are the sound experiments of “Fuck Shit Up” and “Sticky” where the band briefly steps back from the edge, or “Can’t Stop,” where the piano does a great job of leading the rest of the band through the harmonic progression. But just when things start to get enjoyable with a little bit of a rockin’ groove that feels comfortable, Spencer goes and screws things up by letting out some primal scream coming from a dark alley that only makes you pick up your pace.

A little bit of subtlety can go a long way, but JSBX’s approach to picking up ladies must be walking into the bar screaming with his dick hanging out. As I can attest, this is a memorable, but not effective, approach. So while I’ll always remember that pounding I took, and while I’ll appreciate the fact that my life’s more interesting because of that memory, this isn’t an experience I want to re-visit.

Rating:

Mixers: “2Kindsa Love,” “Rocketship”
Non-keepers: “Identify,” “Wail,” “Love All Of Me,” “Chicken Dog,” “Eyeballin’,” “R.L. Got Soul”
Filed Between: Freedy Johnston (This Perfect World) and Scott Joplin (Piano Works 1899-1904 (perf. Dick Hyman (no really)))

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)

No, no, no. These guys suck. Just about everything I wrote about House of GVSB can be written about this single/EP, as “Disco Six Six Six” was taken right from that album and three of the remaining four tracks sound like ones that were meant for that album but weren’t quite good enough to make the cut.

Worthless. Even the pretty good “Distracted (Revs #7),” with its cool keys sound, can hardly salvage any value from these 17 minutes of wasted time.

Rating:

Keepers: “Distracted (Revs #7)”
Filed Between: House of GVSB and God Damn Liars (God Damn Liars)

I’ve already spent too much time on this album, so there’s no need to waste much more, or many kilobytes, on it. Thank god it’s only 40 minutes…which is about 35 more minutes than they needed to get across the boring, no-idea sound on here.

Girls Against Boys is a hardcore punk band from Washington, DC that sounds like a hardcore punk band from Washington, DC that is either too stoned to bother to get up off of their couch or on way too much Prozac.

Hardcore punk bands forget the hooks all the time, but that’s kind of par for the course. GVSB, as the kids call them, have also forgotten the energy. Just about everything here, with the notable exception of “Wilmington,” feels workmanlike and passionless, like they can’t even bring themselves to care about what they’re singing about. Even when they get to the thrash-y point of their songs, it’s like they’re keeping one eye on the clock, just waiting to punch out. There’s this perfect moment in “Vera Cruz” that sums up the album perfectly. At about 2:45, the lead singer opens up with a scream, except it’s so half-hearted that “opens up” and “scream” are bold exaggerations.

House of GVSB asks the philosophical question: Can hardcore punk and Gen-X, Slacker-esque apathy co-exist? Turns out they can, but you don’t want to listen to it. On this album, the hardcore/industrial genre has swallowed itself. Instead of sounding like an ironworks, they sound like they’re working at a musicworks, pumping out standard hardcore rhythms with free-from-charisma vocals and sprinkling in some dissonance here and there…but not too much, we’re cutting back to compete with those cheap imports.

Rating:

Mixers: “Wilmington”
Keepers: “Super-Fire,” “Crash 17 (X-Rated Car),” “TheKindaMzkYouLike”
Filed Between: Jimmie Dale Gilmore (One Endless Night) and God Damn Liars (God Damn Liars)

It’s really hard to review an album with Jeremy Enigk singing on it because to do so feels like treating a delicate object with blunt tools.  Enigk’s vocal style, with its dissonant wails, laryngitis moans, and falsetto peaks, feels fragile and implores you to treat it with great care lest you shatter it.  Veering unpredictably from introspective, despondent lows to lashing out with rage, Enigk’s work doesn’t play well with most ears (My Baby just walked in to criticize its whininess and described it as “one big pity party”), and calls to be placed up on a shelf away from other CDs so that it doesn’t hurt them, either.

If you couldn’t stand Enigk’s style with Sunny Day Real Estate, you won’t be able to stand this, either.  A lot is made of how the loud, roaring guitars of SDRE have been replaced with a 21-piece orchestra on this, his first solo album, from 1996.  I, however, am taken with how similar it sounds to Sunny Day Real Estate.  Sure, the instrumentation is different, but the song structures, melodic patterns, harmonic arpeggiations, and overall mood are very similar to Sunny Day’s LP2, which directly preceded Return of the Frog Queen.

I can’t really blame you if you’re one of those whose hair stands up when listening to Enigk.  However, if you’re able to give it a chance, the lashing out and whininess first starts to reveal itself as that fragility described above, and with further listens you will start to appreciate the unique and special gift the music is.  It will never be fit for general public consumption, but it can be a private joy.  You won’t be able to take it to a party…you’ll have to go visit it in its padded room so that the harm it can do is kept under control.  But it really is the most cathartic and joyful emotional experience you’ll ever have in a padded room.

Speaking of padded rooms, if you dig beneath the dense power of the music to the lyrics, you’ll be greeted by even more Syd Barrett-like madness.  “Words” like “dallow” and “tomic” pop up amid frequent mentions of paradise.  Narrative is completely absent, as are connecting words in these imagistic lyrics consisting mostly of verbs, nouns, and a few adjectives.  “Lewis Hollow” begins, “Gaze glow and rowing under silver moon/Collide argue tether and fall down again.”  To try to make more than dreamlike sense of this album is folly: they conjure emotions and images through lexical properties only.

I’ve listened to this album several times now, and it’s still growing on me.  Or maybe it’s not.  Maybe I’ll eventually decide it’s not that good.  It’s hard to tell with Enigk.  I used to hate the aforementioned LP2, but after several listens and several more, it eventually became my favorite Sunny Day album.  It’s out of respect for Enigk’s other work and the knowledge that his songs take a lot of time and patience that I’m keeping all nine of these tracks that, together, clock in under 30 minutes, despite the monster difficulty of “Lizard,” and, to a lesser extent, “Call Me Steam.” And it’s because that respect, as well as its unique, interesting aspects, that I’m going ot give future credit and award it three-and-a-half, as opposed to a mere three, lunchboxes

Rating:

Mixers: “Explain”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: End (The Sounds Of Disaster) and Entombed (Wolverine Blues)