Miss Piggy Lunchbox

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)

Coffee makes this album worse. I felt like I wanted a bit of an energy boost heading into Friday night, so got me some Starbucks before giving this album my focused listen, and I enjoyed it far less than I had been before the caffeine infusion. But now I know definitively that this is a sleepy, nighttime album.

Amnesiac was recorded at the same time as Kid A, but wasn’t released until the following year. There isn’t a song on here that wouldn’t sound out of place on Kid A, or vice-versa, and the albums sound similar: they are both extensions of the cold, spacey feel of OK Computer and both travel further from the guitar-based rock of the band’s early days. They both push boundaries and have their share of “sonic experiments,” as opposed to songs.

The main differentiation is that this album is more of what Kid A was. It goes further afield from traditional rock song structure, instrumentation, melodies, and rhythms. “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” wouldn’t sound at all out of place on an Ipecac record. This album also doesn’t cohere as well as Kid A did. In other words, it’s not necessarily a 45-minute work in and of itself, and I don’t find the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts.

Part of that is because I just don’t need all of these songs. Sure most of the album is being kept, and nothing clunks really heavily, but I don’t think I’m that much better off for having heard “Pulk/Pull Revovling Doors,” “Hunting Bears” (another exercise in sound composition), “or Life In A Glasshouse” (which features a New Orleans dirge-y horn part).

With this record, which is definitely not a starting point for Radiohead, the band just might be right on the verge of pushing things too far. “Knives Out” is one of the best songs here (just a tad too repetitive to be mixed), and it also probably the single Amnesiac song that would have fit best on The Bends or OK Computer. According to singer Thom Yorke, via Green Plastic, though, the band was really bothered by the fact that it was so “straight.”

We just lost our nerve. It was so straight-ahead. We couldn’t possibly do anything that straight until we’d gone and been completely arse about face with everything else, in order to feel good about doing something straight like that.

The band’s commitment to advancing the state of popular music is to be commended, and will surely be their legacy, but in 2001 it seems they may have been losing their compass for what was legitimately good, which is further evidenced by the fact that this is easily the best cover- and liner-notes-art of all of their albums thus far, and I’ve simply come to the conclusion that they intend it to be awful.

Rating:

Mixers: “Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box,” Like Spinning Plates”
Non-keepers: “Hunting Bears,” “Life In A Glasshouse”
Filed Between: Kid A and Ramones (Ramones)

I delayed reviewing this album for a couple of days because I was stumped. For the life of me I could not pull out the name of the band that “Wish” sounds a lot like. Was it Queensrÿche? There are a lot of similarities to Queensrÿche on this album, with the tinges of progressive metal in accessible songs, soaring vocals mixed way up front, and introspective, sometimes cheesy, lyrics. But it’s not quite them that I’m looking for. Dream Theater references lie in the same vein, but I’m getting further away here, as Masquerade is not at that level of technical-flourish progressive. Stepping back to less intricate music and adding in the vocal harmonies brings me to Galactic Cowboys. Well, there is some GC influence here, but that’s not who I’m looking for. Really, the quality I’m feeling is most prominent when the female backup vocalist comes through most strongly. Is it Mercy Me? Late Pink Floyd?

Ah-choo! It’s Eleven. I can’t even tell you the sense of pain I feel when there’s this kind of an itch I can’t scratch. The prospect of reviewing my entire collection and still not being able to come up with it is incredibly disheartening. The sense of relief I now feel at being able to conjure up that trio whose awesome releases in the 90’s were unlike anything by any band I’ve ever heard until now is matched only by the warmth that floods my heart anticipating listening to their first two albums again.

Well, lookie there. I’ve basically reviewed this album already. This Swedish quartet’s 2001 release on Metal Blade sounds a lot like those bands I mentioned above for the reasons I did. There aren’t many great songs, but virtually everything is very good.

My biggest complaint isn’t even musical, it’s lyrical. With song titles like “A Me And An I” and “Infinite Am I,” your guess at how cheesy the lyrics are is probably pretty accurate. Thankfully, I can ignore those, especially since the lyrics to “Wish” are perhaps the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard: “One more ordinary day/…/Guess I’ve learned to live this way/…/Everything I wish I was/I guess I’ll never be.” And it just goes on like that, wallowing in unachieved dreams, untaken risks, and missed opportunities.

I guess that can easily be a mind’s focus in a long, dark, Swedish winter. I can relate. The cover of this album depicts a solid sheet of dark gray and black clouds, and I’m thinking that maybe listening to this album during our recent gray-out (rumor is we added an hour on to the end of the day recently, but I haven’t been able to tell) wasn’t the wisest choice.

Rating:

Mixer: “Back On Earth”
Non-keepers: “Freedom,” “Connection,” “In A Day”
Filed Between: a double-opera CD with Cavalleria rusticana by Mascagni and Pagliacci by Leoncavallo and Masters of Reality (Sunrise on the Sufferbus)

I consider myself a fan of Green Day, and I kind of half-heartedly followed their career through, roughly, 1997’s Nimrod. I say half-heartedly because I had the sense the band was in decline, but never really spent a lot of time with Insomniac or Nimrod to really solidify that nagging opinion. International Superhits, the band’s greatest hits collection released in 2001, is a nice, 60-minute confirmation of my loose hypothesis. Come with me as we journey downwards.

Like any greatest hits album, this one starts off with two kind-of-new tracks so that the longtime fans who already have all the albums have to buy it. “Maria” was originally the b-side to “Warning,” and “Poprocks & Coke” was previously unreleased. Both are counter examples to my band-in-decline hypothesis as they’re both pretty good. “Poprocks & Coke” could fit on a mix and “Maria” might even be eligible for that status if it didn’t start off with a faux interview between a radio show host and a five-year-old Billie Joe Armstrong, the band’s lead singer.

When this compilation came out, Green Day’s peak had been on their second album on Lookout Records, Kerplunk! There’s nothing on here from Lookout, so it continues with their first release on Reprise, 1994’s breakthrough Dookie. Since Dookie was a letdown from Kerplunk! and since the song that broke the band, “Longview,” isn’t even all that great, I always kind of had a neggie view of Dookie in the back of my head. This is a nice reminder, though, that it really was a damn fine album, with three of that album’s representatives here being mixers and the other two being keepers. “Basket Case” is a perfect example of what Green Day does best, the way that little hi-hat ping starts off the first chorus and continues to build anticipation throughout it before the band explodes like no other band can at the end of the chorus. There’s also the way that, between the chorus and the second verse, the guitar is so tight that you feel the backbeat in every muscle in your body even without the benefit of percussion. And when there is percussion, well, no band’s drumming is tighter or more integral to their awesomeness than Green Day’s.

Still near the top of their game, the album continues with “J.A.R. (Jason Andrew Relva),” a song that, according to Wikipedia, is about the death of bassist Mike Dirnt’s childhood friend at the age of 19. We’re a little more than a third of the way through the album, and we’ve reached its second-to-last mixer

There are no mixers from the next album, Insomniac, but it’s still quite good in that all but the thrashy “Jaded” maintain a spot on my DMP, as the band gets much more frenetic and, in the process, loses a bit of their catchiness and accessibility. There is a return to saner tempos on Nimrod, whose tracks that are on this disc are all keepers. Nimrod is notable in Green Day’s development because it marks what I think is a very successful transition from their original, successful lyrical recipe of apathetic drug use, surly laziness, and masturbation to more mature themes. This is evident in what might be their most well know song, “Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life),” where the other side of the band’s carpe diem approach to life is seen as “Time takes you by the hand/Directs you where to go.” It’s a fantastic song and is not eligible for a mix CD only because the emotional content is a little too calculated. Including it on a mix would be like admitting that Charlotte’s Web makes me bawl my head off (it does).

And then the band’s decline is complete when we get to Warning:, which is the only full album on here that I don’t otherwise own and is also the only album on here that wasn’t produced by Rob Cavallo. Seems my intuition for when the band would fall off a cliff was right, though the fact that it’s not in my collection probably also has a lot to do with the fact that it was their least successful one and, as a result, I’m not even sure I knew it existed until now. But, as I was saying, I feel justified in not owning this since three of its four songs on here aren’t even keepers, though the one that is is the disc’s last mixer. “Minority” and “Macy’s Day Parade” aren’t terrible…they’re just not quite good enough to warrant the hard drive space. “Warning,” on the other hand, is noxiously bad. One of the things I really appreciate about Green Day is that they don’t mess around: they get in, lay out the riffs, explode, and get out. Why they avoid this formula on “Warning” and make its 3:40 seem eternal is beyond me.

That brings us to a cliffhanger ending for this review. Three years later the band would reunite with Cavallo and release the popular and acclaimed American Idiot. I can’t wait to see if it lives up to the hype or if, as so often happens, the entire world is wrong and I’m the only sane living person.

Rating:

Mixers: “Poprocks & Coke,” “Welcome To Paradise,” “Basket Case,” “She,” “J.A.R. (Jason Andrew Relva),” “Waiting”
Non-keepers: “Jaded,” “Minority,” “Warning,” “Macy’s Day Parade”
Filed Between: Nimrod and Green River (Come On Down)