Miss Piggy Lunchbox

I went with this meme just a few posts ago, but what the hell, if it works I’m going to use it. The last time I reviewed something by Norwegian electronic- and film-composer Kaada, it was his collaboration with Mike Patton. Therein, I said:

[T]his CD holds its own for what it is. This is great early morning listening, particularly a lazy Sunday morning when memories of your prior night are still coming back to you in waves. It goes down easy and yet has a lot of nuance to delve into when you want to forget….

The same goes here, with this slow, dreamy set of “film music” that wasn’t composed for any film in particular. You won’t find any catchy tunes per se, but you will be willfully hypnotized by the rich-but-not-dense layers of artfully arranged and composed pieces. There isn’t a lot that will fit on a mix, but it’s perfectly self-contained. Its low points (the lowest of which is “Birds Of Prey”) aren’t as low as those of his debut Thank You For Giving Me Your Valuable Time or Romances, but there’s also nothing as good as Romances’ “Seule” or even the best moments of Thank You. In the end, none of that matters because this album absolutely nails what it intends to do.

And that is actually kind of special, because Kaada’s gone out and formalized the genrefication on a non-genre that had been genrefied. I mean, on the surface, “film music” is music used in a film. And a healthy percentage of film composers will still insist that’s what it is. And they have a point…film composers shouldn’t feel constrained to write in a certain style that is a style of film…they should write what fits the film. (This ignores the gesamtkunstwerk ideal that the relationship be more symbiotic, but whatever.)

But honestly, when I say “film music,” you get an idea of what that sounds like. So despite some composers’ most strident theoretical insistence, film music has become a genre. And what Kaada’s done here is gone and thrown away any presumption that it’s not a genre, accepted the most obvious sonic parameters given the non-genre’s history, and turned it into a film-less, enjoyable listening experience.

As such, this album represents evolution. Evolution from the first generation of film composers in the “golden age” of film who were the pioneers, through the second generation of film composers, like John Williams, who defined it and made themselves stars of film in their own right while struggling to define it by not defining it, and onto the third generation, of which Kaada, born in 1975, is directly a part. This kind of evolution can only happen generationally, when what previous generations created is accepted as a given, only then can it be redefined.

Or something like that. Just be glad this review didn’t take the “what’s a ‘moviebiker’?” angle.

Rating:

Mixers: “Mainstreaming”
Keepers: “Smiger,” “Julia Pastrana,” “No Man’s Land,” “Daily Living,” “The Small Stuff,” “Celibate,” “Retirement Community”
Filed Between: Thank You For Giving Me Your Valuable Time and Kaada/Patton (Romances)

I don’t know what the saloon is a reference to, but the tango in the band’s name is not rhetorical: this is definitely tango. For the most part, this project of Julian Curwin is traditional tango, including a couple covers of Astor Piazzola tunes, but there are aspects of modernity and experimentation thrown in, like synthesized timbres and complex start-stop song structures.

The biggest problem is that there are too many areas where the music gets bogged down in itself with no passion to pull it up. And tango without passion…well…it’s not really tango. It’s the novel composition that causes the most problems. The worst parts are when the songs either hit some jam-band rut or become too interesting for their own good.

But even when it’s not all that great, you’ve still got that interesting to fall back on, and when the focus is on sound instead of structure, the disc shines. The 70’s sci-fi sounds that pepper “Man With The Bongos” and the last 25% of “Intermission” are reminiscent of Messer Chups, and the mixers are must-hears. Even some of the non-keepers have grown on me in the last few days as our recent heavy cloud cover (honestly, a recent eastern- to western-border drive confirms that clouds in Seattle are simply darker and more depressing than clouds elsewhere) has mellowed me to the point of being more in tune with the pleasant but passionless non-keepers. It’s still not tango without the passion, but whatever it is, those tracks are not a bad accompaniment to a chill mood.

Rating:

Mixers: “Upon A Time,” “La Calle 92”
Non-keepers: “Overture,” “March Of The Big Shoe,” “Carol,” “Intermission,” “The Little Plane That Could”
Filed Between: Talking Heads (Popular Favorites: 1976-1992) and Art Tatum (Piano Starts Here)

What a difference a year makes: this CD is a vast improvement over Mugison’s Ipecac debut.

Little Trip is a film score to a movie called Little Trip To Heaven, which I’m guessing is named after the Tom Waits song of the same name that is covered on this album. The cover features rusted out cars in front of broken down homes and barren trees against a cloudy, purple sky, and it basically sounds like the score to a film heavy on those elements.

It’s dark, melancholy, and brooding. It’s heavily instrumental, featuring sparse piano, saxes, Lovage-esque shimmering synthesized strings, and some steel guit, all moving with a slow, smoky groove As a film score, it doesn’t always make sense without the programmatic aspect of the visuals, like when it suddenly shifts from soft to loud for seemingly no reason. So it’s more of an interesting thing than a relaxing, enjoyable sort of thing, but I can dig that.

If I were to judge it on pure enjoyability, it’s a 3.5-lunchbox CD. That’s the criteria I use to decide what gets kept on my DMP. But if I’m to judge it on its merits as a film score and its function as art music, it’s definitely four lunchboxes.

Rating:

Mixers: “Go Blind,” “Watchdog”
Keepers: “Little Trip To Heaven,” “Mugicone,” “Piano For Tombstones,” “Mugicone Part 2,” “Sammi & Kjartan,” “Murr Murr v 2”
Filed Between: Mugison’s Mugimama! Is This Monkeymusic? and Murphy’s Law (Dedicated)

10 nights over the course of five-and-a-half years. 13 sets. 2 audio CDs and one MP3 disc. 127 tracks. 10 hours, 12 minutes, and 32 seconds of audio. 7.5 pages of notes. There were times I considered just throwing up my hands and walking away from my collection. I must be masochistic, given my willingness to jump into this after Pearl Jam’s 2003 tour.

I came away from this much happier with Melvins than I came away from that tour with Pearl Jam. There are a number of reasons I’ll attribute this to. First of all, I just had a higher level of affection for Melvins going in. Second, 13 sets over 10 nights is not even close to 73 sets over 72 nights, nor do the length of any Melvins sets approach the length of the single shortest Pearl Jam concert. Finally, this represents five-and-a-half years of changing set lists, not five-and-a-half months of the same. Plus it’s Melvins vs. Minneapolis, for crying out loud. How can you go wrong with that combination? Boner-ness commence!

I’ll be honest with you, though. This sounds like ass. I’d love to tell you these were lovingly recorded, mastered, and compiled concerts—and they very may well have been done out of love: the non-Walker shows, which is also exactly the set of Grumpy’s shows, were “recorded from the audience by Jeff Sebastianelli” and sometimes with Geoffrey Nicholson and the box set is dedicated to Sebastianelli’s memory—but no amount of love is going to burnish a non-soundboard recording in a tiny bar.

Still, I enjoyed this immensely. As opposed to the Pearl Jam debacle, which emphasized how much I hate several songs of theirs and how even the ones I like can’t quite stand up to that amount of heavy rotation, this experience reinforced to me just how much I love the Melvins catalog. Be assured, this is for fans only. Newcomers who don’t already have a robust Melvins collection will be confounded and perturbed. But if you love Melvins, you’ll love the passionate performances and live energy that cut through the terrible sound quality.

Even I got something new out of it. They hearken back to their very early Pacific Northwest days by covering Malfunkshun’s “With Yo’ Heart (Not Yo’ Hands)” from the legendary Deep Six compilation, which also featured four Melvins songs, and then they go right from that song into “Leeech,” a song that was given to them by or stolen from Green River, depending on who you ask. (This brings us all the way around because those were the two bands that merged to form Mother Love Bone, the predecessor of Temple Of The Dog and Pearl Jam.) Their covers of Alice Cooper’s “Halo Of Flies” are amazing; Melvins meets 1970’s glam-prog-rock? That’s such a fantastic combination I can’t believe it’s not a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. In fact, the performance of that track on 9/18/2000 might be the highlight of the collection if it’s not the Walker sessions where they do “Hung Bunny” and “Roman Dog Bird,” the first two songs on Lysol.

Still, my god, I’m not sure what’s better: Having this collection and listening to it intently several times, or finally allowing myself to move on through the rest of my unlistened-to collection.

Rating:

Mixers: None
Keepers: 3/20/04, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “Night Goat,” “With Teeth,” “Black Stooges/It’s Shoved”; 3/24/06, Soo Visual Arts Center: “Intro by David Scott Stone”; 2/8/03, The Walker: “Hung Bunny/Roman Dog Bird”; 9/18/00, Grumpy’s Minneapolis (Set 1): “Missing,” “Tipping The Lion,” “With Yo’ Heart (Not Yo’ Hands)/Leeech,” “Halo Of Flies”; 9/18/00, Grumpy’s Minneapolis (Set 2): “Revolve,” “AMAZON,” “Cherub,” “Youth Of America”; 9/19/00, Grumpy’s Minneapolis (Set 2): “Youth Of America”; 10/15/01, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “The Ballad Of Dwight Fry/Halo Of Flies,” “At The Stake”‘; 10/16/06, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “Intro/Oven,” “It’s Shoved”; 2/9/03, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “Black Stooges (first half),” “Black Stooges (second half)”; 3/25/06, Grumpy’s Minneapolis: “Pigs Of The Roman Empire,” “Hooch,” “Happy Birthday/Black Stooges”
Filed Between: Melvins’ Nude With Boots and Melvins+Lustmord (Pigs Of The Roman Empire)

I am a rock star. The most amazing thing to come out of watching this DVD is that one of my freaky attributes is shared by Fantômas lead singer Mike Patton. Apparently he has a “weird throat” and gets food stuck in it a lot. I get food stuck in my esophagus all the time, and have been required to take several trips to the ER to get it unstuck and have had several surgeries on it. The GI doc once described my esophagus as “very interesting,” a compliment I feature prominently at the top of my résumé.

That bit of info regarding Patton came out of this DVD’s audio commentary, featuring the Big Band’s booking agent, Dale and Buzzo from Melvins (and the Big Band), and Danny DeVito. Yes, that Danny DeVito…he never seems to be too far away from any given Ipecac project.

The Fantômas Melvins Big Band is, as you would guess, a combination of the two bands into one. Since Melvins was only a trio at the time (they may have even been a duo in between bassists) and King Buzzo serves duty in both bands, it really works out to be Fantômas (Mike Patton on vocals, Trevor Dunn from Mr. Bungle on bass, Buzzo on guitar, and Dave Lombardo from Slayer on drums) plus Melvins drummer Dale Crover plus a second guitarist, David Scott Stone, who has done some touring with Melvins in the past. The band has also released a CD of their New Year’s Eve 2000 show.

If 80 minutes of the combined bands performing each other’s songs sounds like 80 minutes of sheer awesomeness, you’re about 85-90% right. Unfortunately the band sabotages their own show right in the middle. The cool-down section most bands insist on putting in the middle of their shows rarely works as well as they think it does, and this is just tragic insanity as it’s almost 17 minutes comprised of Fantômas’ “Page 14” and “Pigs of the Roman Empire,” which Melvins did with Lustmord. “Page 14” contains several minutes of only very sparse hi-hat hits, and while “Pigs of the Roman Empire” picks up eventually, it starts off not much better than “Page 14.” “Page 14” is an interesting sonic experiment and fits fairly well on the band’s debut album, but why they thought these eight minutes were appropriate in a live setting is a mystery. I’ve got a deal for you, rock bands: how about if you insist on putting in these bathroom-break sections you announce when they start so that we can get headed off to the john right away? And if the lead singer feels the need to sit for three or four minutes, cut it.

After that, however, they pick it up and rock straight on through to the end in an 11-song sequence consisting of some of the bands’ best material (“The Omen,” “Hooch,” “Mombius Hibachi,” “Page 23,” “04/02/05 Saturday”) that I literally have difficulty turning off once it gets started.

One of the great mysteries of this concert is how Mike Patton knows the lyrics to the Melvins songs. Melvins’ lyrics are infamously obscure. They’re never printed in their CDs (the liner notes to Colossus of Destiny consisted of six panels but featured only alternating pictures of artichokes and rubber duckies), they’re difficult to decipher, and often don’t make sense when you can make them out.

For example, here’s “Hooch” from the Melvins wiki:

Cuz I can ford a red eed only street a wide a ree land.
Die-mond make a mid-evil bike a sake a like a ree caste.

I’m pretty sure those aren’t right, but I can’t do much better. But there Patton is, singing along on “Hooch,” so either he’s making s**t up like the rest of us or Buzzo has deigned to let him in on one of the great secrets of the universe.

Most of the footage is standard concert footage, sometimes intentionally grainy for effect, but when you’re least expecting it there are overlays of smoking cartoon animals, pieces of fire raining down, blood cells floating over everything, or a muppet making rock horms from the rafters. It doesn’t add a ton, but it’s a nice touch that keeps you on your toes and probably throws you for a pretty wild loop for a while if you’re watching stoned.

This video concert doesn’t blow me away the same way a Mike Patton concert in London, You Fat B**tards by Faith No More, did 20 years ago, but it’s still about 85% awesome and aptly highlights the involved bands’ careers.

Rating:

Filed Between: Faith No More (You Fat B**tards and Who Cares A Lot, Greatest Videos) and High Fidelity, The KEN Story in the DVD section.

Kids, they grow up so fast. On 2004’s Hot Fuss, The Killers sounded like kids: aggressive emo-ish songs, simple but powerful riffs repeated just long enough to be called a “song.” Two years later, on Sam’s Town, they’re so much more mature with their more laid-back tempi and varied song structures.

For the most part they wear their added experience well, but there are stretches, like the non-keepers and the bridge of “When You Were Young,” where it seem lost, like they need more good ideas, some way to string together them together, or both.

On my first few listens, I thought I heard a Springsteen influence in several places. After visiting Wikipedia and learning that it was in fact influenced by Springsteen I started hearing him everywhere. The guy’s career is all over this album, and I’m happy to hear Born To Run, the best album ever, take the lead on the inspiration front. “When You Were Young” is Lucky Town-era Boss with some glockenspiel and a key build á la “Born To Run” at the end for good measure, “Bones” features “10th Avenue Freeze Out”-horns, and “This River Is Wild” ends as a merging of “Mary Queen Of Arkansas” and “Jungleland,” the best song ever. It’s not just sonically, either, as Springsteenian metaphors and images abound. “Read My Mind” strongly recalls “Thunder Road,” the best song ever: “It’s funny how you just break down/Waitin’ on some sign/I pull up to the front of your driveway/With magic soakin’ my spine.”

This album is far from perfect, and while it’s good to see the band stretching so far so soon to develop their craft, some things would be better left unexplored. Take the weird attempt at making the album cohere with the second track “Enterlude” and the final one “Exitlude.” Silly names aside, “Enterlude” is unnecessary and completely forgettable. “Exitlude,” on the other hand, isn’t necessary, but it could have stood on its own at the end of the disc, recalling The Wall-era Pink Floyd.

So I think I like this better than Hot Fuss. Probably because they took my implied advice two-and-a-half years ago to heart:

Oftentimes these songs end up being one or two minutes too long as repetitive riffs are played over plodding rhythms with little or no development. The problem bands run into when they go for that blissful, ear-grabbing, 10-second hook is that there’s nowhere left to go after that. The immediate adrenaline shot is nice, but it wears off and I want a little more coyness and teasing in the form of tempo, dynamic, and/or harmonic changes.

A better album, for sure, but some wrinkles need to be ironed out yet before the band gets its fourth full lunchbox.

Rating:

Mixers: [Update: “For Reasons Unknown,"] “Read My Mind,” “This River Is Wild”
Keepers: “Sam’s Town,” “When You Were Young,” “Bones,” “Why Do I Keep Counting?,” “Exitlude”
Filed Between: The Killers’ Hot Fuss [Limited Edition] and King Can (Maximum Power Super Loud)

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 came into my my collection via My Baby, as a gift. How she picked it up, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it was some kind of promotional thing, which didn’t bode well for its rating. What doesn’t bode well for its review is that this New York-via-Venezuela band spends 18 songs here covering Venezuelan pop music from the 60’s through the 90’s, a decades-and-country combo whose music I am woefully ignorant of.

But while I can’t review the album on its merits as a collection of covers, I can say that it’s still a solid, entertaining listen. Think recent Latino pop with a more modern funk bent, wrap it up into a discoteque feel and give it a through-composed performance feel for almost 74 minutes and you’ve got Super Pop Venezuela.

That mixture is the best part of this album. Most of this could work as is in a nightclub, as well as just one tool in a DJ’s toolkit for the night. There are plenty of mood-setting, hypnotic, danceable beats, but Los Amigos Invisibles add layers of complexity seemingly effortlessly with a gamut of traditional Latin instruments performing in a complex, syncopated rhythmic interplay.

Don’t let the lack of mix CD candidates fool you: I don’t hesitate to recommend listening to this at all, especially in social, fun contexts. When I think of this album abstractly and think of all the great songs on it, I myself have trouble thinking of it only containing two mixers. In fact, if I tended to think of my mixes as nighttime large-group accompaniments, it almost certainly would have had more. Most of these tracks, though, don’t have both a great start and end and some killer compositional element mid-song as my usual mixers do. This album is an easy four lunchboxes, particularly after it really picks up at about track eight or so, and you should definitely consider popping it in for your next fast-paced night out on the town.

Rating:

Mixers: “Miss Venezuela,” “Media Luna”
Non-keepers: “Intro,” “All Day Today,” “Curda Y Pan,” “Rosario,” “Dun Dun”
Filed Between: Loin Groove (Ain’t No Dance Floor Wide Enough) and Los Lobos (How Will The Wolf Survive?)

Between their greatest hits, live, collaborative, and 25-year-old-demo releases, it’s sometimes hard to remember that Melvins do hit the studio every few years to release new music as a band. They do, though. They’ve got a new album due out next week, and this one, from 2006, is their first since 2002’s excellent Hostile Ambient Takeover.

For a long time I didn’t consider Melvins one of my favorite bands, my opinion probably overly-colored by my young experience with “Cow” from 1991’s Bullhead, which starts with one slow drum beat for what feels like several minutes. Over the years I’ve grown to appreciate their “one long note” and noisy output, but it’s still not the type of thing you think of as being enjoyable leisurely listening. F**k that, though. There’s way too much awesome, accessible music in their catalog to ignore it any longer. Melvins is my favorite band.

Oh, that feels so good to say. For about 13 years I’ve been describing Mr. Bungle as my favorite band, and they haven’t put out an album for nine years. “You know Faith No More?” my explanation would begin. No longer. I’ll still have to explain to everybody who Melvins is (which is a tragedy in at least two ways), but now I can at least point to a band who is continuing to add to their legacy, and awesomely so. Unless I found out lead singer King Buzzo is some kind of horrible criminal before the birth of my first son, that son will be named after him to honor his contribution to music and the human condition.

You can put A Senile Animal right up near the top of the list as one of Melvins’ best in their extensive discography. It’s a good intro to the band, too, as it’s mostly straight-forward aggressive, thrashy stuff. They’ve put aside the molasses-paced sludge for at least one album in favor of a tight, clean, but still absolutely huge sound. They even implement hand claps on “A History Of Drunks.” Melvins are special because of all of what they are, but when they release an album this accessible and fantastic, to go along with other classics like Houdini, Stoner Witch, and Hostile Ambient Takeover, you can’t help but wondering if I’d have to introduce them to fewer people if they had decided just to be a metal band.

Things get a bit repetitively mundane near the end, starting at about “The Mechanical Bride.” Up until that point, though, this was on a five-lunchbox trajectory. “The Hawk” is the Best Song Ever, and I encourage you to check it out if you’ve ever been curious about Melvins or wonder what all the fuss was about.

Rating:

Mixers: “The Talking Horse,” “Rat-Faced Granny,” “The Hawk,” “You’ve Never Been Right”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Houdini Live—A Live History of Gluttony and Lust and Melvins + Lustmord (Pigs Of The Roman Empire)

Bruce Springsteen is only 58 years old. And yet, after his fantastically energetic tour with the E Street Band in 2001, with his face growing increasingly wrinkled and funny-lookin’, he has decided, I believe prematurely, that he needed to wrangle himself a new image as a crazy old coot. He is most certainly not The Boss anymore. Instead, he’s more like the old guy at the bar who, when you stop in at three in the afternoon to ask for directions, starts telling you some rambling story that seems to start in the middle and is peppered with a hankering for the good ol’ days, and, despite your non-committal grunts while you wait for the bartender’s attention, just keeps right on going trying to engage you with personal questions.

Don’t think it’s dementia settling in…this is all calculated. We know from first-hand accounts that Springsteen’s blue-collar, working-class image and his raw, rough sound are both meticulously crafted specifically to feel spontaneous and natural. I’m not a fan of this new turn, though, because it’s just not as believable as the old image was. Springsteen’s no actor, and I think his old image aligned more naturally with his values and experiences so that he could pull it off, while this mumbly old man thing is a bit of a reach for him.

But the new character needs a stage on which to spout about things he doesn’t really know to the level he wants you to think he does, and so we get We Shall Overcome: The Pete Seeger Sessions, a collection of traditional songs re-done by Springsteen and a large group of musicians in three one-day sessions between 1997 and 2006 (reportedly without rehearsal, though I find that hard to believe, or at least a very strict definition of “rehearsal”). I’m reminded of the taxi driver who, in 1999, positively insisted to me that a few years prior there was a Super Bowl in Chicago that was severely blurred by a blizzard when, on this disc’s accompanying DVD, I hear Springsteen talking about how acoustic instruments were meant to be more integrated into daily life than their electric brethren or how there’s some unquantifiable kind of energy in music or performances like those on this disc that, supposedly, isn’t in music that isn’t. It’s not that I necessarily disagree with him on any of these points (unlike the cabbie, who was on another planet), it just comes across as insincere and fake from this baby boomer baron of the electric guitar. What’s more, I’m frustrated that he and Patty are the hamming-it-up stars of the DVD and the brilliant musicians that shared the house-cum-recording-studio with Springsteen are ignored at best and dismissed at worst.

The songs on here are absolutely fantastic. There really is a bit of magic captured with several different feels weaving in and out of the program. The album begins with an upbeat, jug band, hoe-down feel of “Old Dan Tucker,” moves to the superbly anti-war lyrics on top of an Irish jig-ish tune of “Mrs. McGrath,” and then hits the gospel-y “O Mary Don’t You Weep,” all in the first four tracks. “Jacob’s Ladder” has a thrilling communal, gospel feel and “Pay Me My Money Down” will not fail to get you singing along while placing you, sloshed, in a bar a few hours after a hard day on the docks. Every single song has some kind of redeeming quality: even those that didn’t get kept at least made me think about it. For example, “Shenandoah” is hella annoying, but the lush instrumentation of horns, strings, and choir are brilliantly elevating.

So what makes the bad songs bad? Unfortunately, it’s the same thing that bugged me about the DVD: Springsteen himself, with his vocal style and his occlusion of the rest of the band. Springsteeen’s clearly settled on this back/top of the mouth, nasal cavity rattling, yarly singing thing, and I can’t stand it. Again, there’s an insincerity to it that makes it even worse. It’s so over the top that even the folks Springsteen is trying to emulate don’t sound like this. I’ve hated this style since it first showed up on The Rising, and if it continues much longer, I may just be done with Springsteen, a claim I can’t believe I would have made even seven years ago. I also never would have believed even a few years ago that I would feel so done with Springsteen the man. But the talent and performance of his band members, along with the crystal-clear yet wonderfully dense sound produced by Recorder Toby Scott and Mixer Bob Clearmountain, are clearly the strength of the record, yet with his stubborn insistence on mumbling in a faux-twang and on portraying himself as the leader and arranger who imbues the musicians with talent get in the way. It’s not even clear what Seeger has to do with this album, as almost all of these songs are traditional. If Seeger popularized many of them in his day, he’s not given credit for it, and so Springsteen just comes across as petty in this rude dismissal of a legend.

I wrote in my review of Devils & Dust that I was blaming Brendan O’Brien for that album and for The Rising. Springsteen himself is listed as this album’s producer, and O’Brien’s name is nowhere to be found, so the O’Brien as Brutus theory may need to be revisisted.. This is a good album, but I’m so hard on Springsteen here because after more than 25 years of continually raising the bar of what rock and roll could be while only occasionally and briefly lapsing into the suck that strikes all musicians able to go that long (primarily Human Touch), I hold him to a higher standard. 1995’s The Ghost Of Tom Joad was Springsteen’s last good studio album, so by this disc’s release in 2006 we were due. I had held out a lot of hope for this one, but the results are mixed.

Rating:

Mixers: “Mrs. McGrath,” “Jacob’s Ladder,” “Pay Me My Money Down”
Keepers: “Jesse James,” “O Mary Don’t You Weep,” “John Henry,” “Erie Canal”
Filed Between: Devils and Dust and Stanley, Son of Theodore: Yet Another Alternative Music Sampler