Miss Piggy Lunchbox

It’s been 17 years since Type O Negative burst into our consciousness with Slow, Deep And Hard’s opening track, “Unsuccessfully Coping With The Natural Beauty Of Infidelity,” featuring the call-and-response “I know you’re f**king someone else/He knows you’re f**king someone else.” It’s kind of hard to believe it’s been that long, considering that they continue to pound out the exact same flavor of the gothic-doom-sludge-metal genre they basically invented in 1991. That was a compliment all the way through their fifth album, 1999’s World Coming Down (I skipped their sixth album in 2003), but it’s not anymore.

More impressive than their longevity and consistency, was the knowledge that with Type O you not only knew what you were going to get, but it was going to be heavy, catchy, funny, dark, and damned good, all at the same time. It’s damned near impossible to write from the same basic template for a decade and keep it interesting, but Type O did it for the 90’s. Unfortunatley, given that back catalog, there’s not a lot to recommend 2007’s Dead Again, as a full half of the album’s ten tracks will fall off of my DMP after posting this review.

The best stuff is actually when they get away from the proto-typical Type O style here. They’ve always incorporated tons of different styles in their music; it just happens to be the most compelling stuff on this album. The faster, thrash-influenced tracks like “Tripping A Blind Man” and “Some Stupid Tomorrow” increase your heart rate by several bpm, and the groove-y, bluesy tracks like “An Ode To Locksmiths” will loosen up your hips. The highlight, with a kickin’ backbeat and a wry take on the afterlife of dead-too-young rock stars is “Halloween In Heaven.”

Taken by themselves, the keepers and mixer here make a damned good 25 minutes. Unfortunately, their propensity for epic-ness, usually done so well, does them in in the remaining 52(!) minutes. The 14-and-a-half minute “These Three Things” is nearly an ode to Melvins for the first three minutes, with sustained, ringing guitar chords held together by spooky, echo-y drums, but it plods and drags and condemns (cheekily or sincerely, I can’t tell) practitioners of abortion to hell before bizarrely talking about how the “alien” Zion “shuns the son.” There are stretches that have me turning up the volume, but the band was not at all able to make every minute of this album as gripping as their past work. The good-stretches-but-too-long category applies to most of the non-keepers from Dead Again, including “September Sun,” notable for beginning almost identically to Mötley Crüe’s Home Sweet Home.

The production values are stellar, as always. When the band swings its heavy hammer down after a slow section, it’s an assault that I can’t believe I didn’t think of in my review of ISIS. “Tripping A Blind Man” adds beeps and bloops that sound like my phone is ringing but also integrate perfectly with the song. So the band is not completely relying on the same template, but they do so enough, and poorly enough, that you’re better off with their output from ten years ago.

Rating:

Mixers: “Halloween In Heaven”
Keepers: “Dead Again,” “Tripping A Blind Man,” “Some Stupid Tomorrow,” “An Ode To Locksmiths”
Filed Between: Type O’s “Everything Dies” single and U2 (October)

Here’s something pretty awesome about the City of Seattle. From the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs comes this collection of nine songs recorded at the Office’s series of noontime concerts at City Hall every Thursday. First of all, we have an Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. That alone is pretty awesome, but then that office puts on a weekly series of concerts from a wide range of local artists. Finally, they round out their awesomeness by putting some of those performances on CDs and then giving them away. (I got mine at the Capitol Hill Block Party in July 2007, but the website says Volume Two is available only at upcoming concerts.)

Not only do these efforts exist, they’re also well done. The Office is paying attention to its enviro-conscious constituency by printing the packaging on recycled paper, and the musicians herein represent a broad swath of that consitutency as well, performaing a variety of styles from classical to jazz to avant-garde to reggae music from East Asian and the Native American vocal tradition. You could say it’s not the best representation of “Seattle music” with no indie- or alt-rock or any representative from our growing and innovative hip-hop scene, but I think the Office has made the right choice here to focus on artists who don’t have the same avenues artists from those genres do. In that vein, I’d quibble with their inclusion of Ravel’s “Piece En Forme De Habanera” by two members of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. It’s a great piece performed well, but why they devoted three of these fifty-two minutes to such a well-known ensemble is a bit perplexing…as is why they only put 52 minutes of music on a format that can hold well over 70.

Just about everything on here is very good, and you can listen to samples yourself from the CD’s website. The only two tracks I’m tempted to skip are “Cherry Blossoms” by Native American group Eagle’s Jump and Clinton Fearon’s reggae song “Bless Your Heart.” I dig the Native American elements of “Cherry Blossoms,” but there’s this cheesy smooth jazz fusion running through the track that is a complete turn-off. As for Fearon, well, reggae’s not really my thing, and while this performance and song is fine, he really doesn’t break out of the standard reggae mold. In the end it gets kept due to its sweet lyrics about mothers, ‘cuz that’s nice.

On the other side of things, Byron Schenkman’s performance of a Haydn piano sonata is spot on, and the jazz tunes “Dear Pop” and “Stone’s Throw” by Jay Thomas & The East/West Double Trio and Victor Noriega, respectively, hearken back to ensemble jazz of the 60’s with fresh new compositions (especially Noriega’s) and, in both cases, great piano performances. Duo En brings some flavor from the Far East with instrumentation consisting of the 13-stringed Japanese koto and a bamboo flute. I really get excited, though, by pianist Amy Rubin and Brooklyn-based violinist Tom Swafford doing their Latin-influenced avant-garde composition, “Tango Izquierda,” which is like when you go to an Asian fusion restaurant and are blown away by somebody finally putting those great tastes together in just the perfect way.

When Joe Biden said it’s patriotic to pay taxes, this is part of what he meant. Well, that and paying to take care of the older generation, maintain beautiful national parks and forests, and, you know, supporting the troops. (Seriously, I cannot believe how little that concept resonates with folks.) Anyway, I’m thrilled to see my tax dollars going toward this concert series and CD. Keep it up, Seattle.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Non-keepers: “Cherry Blossoms” (Eagle’s Jump)
Filed Between: Season To Risk (In A Perfect World) and Seaweed (Weak)

On our way home from a weekend of golf and sorbet in Moscow, ID last summer, we stopped for breakfast at the One World Café, where a pile of free Julie Payne CDs was sitting by the cash register. The rules say you pick those up and put them into the collection, and so here I am 14 months later reviewing these three folk songs advertising Payne’s then-upcoming performance at said venue.

If you google around for Julie Payne you’ll find a lot of stuff about the actress and, further down, some things about this songwriter/guitarist/singer that say basically that she’s not limited to or defined by the folk genre. That’s stupid; this is folk music: solo acoustic guitar sometimes increasing to two guitars, sparse percussion, a solo vocalist who sometimes harmonizes with herself on the recording, and lyrics about the working class and her offspring. Is “folk” the new “liberal” where people have to hide from it? I don’t get it, there’s nothing wrong with being folk, and when an anti-genre-ist like me so readily classifies something, just embrace it.

Besides, it’s pretty good. So good that I even like the song about her kid(s), “Baby Bird.” The guitar is mic’d too closely and the vocals are too distant, but the music is soothing and well-performed.

The lyrics are evocative, but, well, there’s a reason Joni Mitchell is such a special artist: only she can do what she does. Complaining about a middle class family’s consumption (“The Good Life”) turns me into a free market Republican, and “Internet” is never a good lyric (“Baby Bird”). I don’t even understand most of the lyrics to “The Good Life.” “If this is the good life/Tell me when will it begin.” Huh? Did somebody tell you that working at a gas station was the good life? Are you referencing some politician’s statement that we’re all living the good life? Why would “this” be the good life but not a begun one? When you ask, “Did it pass me by on the way here?” are you implying that the good life used to be working at a gas station? Did these lyrics come out of an automated folk lyric generator?

Still, this is good, and had I spent last August 11th in Moscow, you probably could have found me at One World Café at 8:30 PM to get a little bit more. Lord knows there wouldn’t have been anything else going on.

Rating:

Mixers: None
Non-keeper: “The Good Life”
Filed Between: Mike Patton (Pranzo Oltranzista) and Pearl Jam (Ten)

This collection of live performances, mostly recorded at KEXP’s Seattle studio and all recorded to be broadcast exclusively by KEXP, will naturally be attributed to Various Artists, and seventeen tracks by seventeen performers does make it a compilation album. However, this is a Kevin Suggs and Tom Hall album, and that’s all there is to it. Suggs recorded all but three of these tracks and Hall mixed them all, to incredible sounding results

When Suggs is absent from a track, it’s obvious, as his tracks sound more present, more immediate…more here and now, in other words. As with any compilation album, mediocrity is present, and the occasional complete clunker, like The English Beat’s “Hands Off She’s Mine,” but there’s not a track here I didn’t give serious consideration to keeping just because it all sounds so glorious.

What’s most notable about Suggs’ recordings is that they are all so well tailored for each artist’s performance. This CD covers a wide array of bands and solo artists playing a wider variety of songs and showing up at the studio with instrumentation that may be right out of the studio recording or their live show or some setup that is completely different. Whether it’s the heavy electronic dosage of Ghostland Observatory or Cloud Cult, the stripped-down vocal-heavy-with-guitar-as-bass setup of Grizzly Bear, or Frank Black’s more traditional guitar and mic, Suggs spontaneously records it perfectly, putting his own stamp on every performance.

The discerning reader who is listening along will note that two of the three tracks Suggs didn’t record (“Yr Mangled Heart” by The Gossip and “And I Was A Boy From School” by Hot Chip) are two of the album’s three mix CD candidates and the third one he didn’t record (“Australia” by The Shins) is kept. I have to admit that this might be evidence that Suggs’ levels-high and customized approach is actually harming the output, but still, I’d like to have heard those tracks done by Suggs…I happen to think they’d be even better.

You get a longer intro than most compilation albums, due to the cohesion provided by Suggs, but I still do have a few track-by-track notes.

The Long Winters’ “Pushover” has that strident British vocals thing that hipsters have loved so much for the past thirty years going on, and it usually drives me nuts. This actually has a pretty good song underlying it, though, and as mentioned above, it sounds delicious, so it gets kept.

“Australia” by The Shins is the first non-Suggs track, and his absence is a bit painful here. This sounds a lot like The Cure and might be a very good song with better sound.

When “Move With Your Lover” by Ghostland Observatory starts, it sounds like somebody spent hours in the studio getting just the perfect dynamic mix out of their electronics or as if they’re about to light up a giant, full arena. Then they do their Ghostland Observatory thing where they don’t quite finish writing the song and rely on the early-hook crutch, but it’s still pretty damn good. It would have been a mixer if they could have kept up the momentum up.

Lady Sovereign’s “Public Warning” does that strident British vocal thing, but despite her best efforts, that doesn’t obscure that this rap song rocks it hard. Very reminiscent of M.I.A.

“Hands Off She’s Mine” by The English Beat is that strident British vocal thing over a horrible reggae/ska thing.

Grizzly Bear brings things down a bit for “Knife,” which starts off great, just like “Move With Your Lover,” only in a completely different way evoking pathos instead of triumph, and just like that track it sits in stasis for its remainder.

It’s not as good as Dylan’s version, and “Mr. Tambourine Man” isn’t my fave Dylan track anyway, but I do like to see Cloud Cult doing it here, keeping the Minnesota musician torch burning in the Minnesota family.

So few international acts sing in their native language, and it’s even crazier that the Danish Under Byen does it in theirs since Denmark is one of those countries where everybody aged 10-70 speaks crazy good English anyway. In addition, they reach farther afield from their neighbors Sweden’s and Norway’s traditional sugary pop hooks to Iceland, instead, for this very Björk-like track, “Den Har Sang Handler Om At Få Det Bedste Ud Af Det,” which Google Translate says means “This song is about getting the best out of it.” More interesting than good, it’s still damn good.

The Black Angels do a fine but non-keepable “The Prodigal Son,” due largely to them staying in their single riff for just about the entire song.

“Yr Mangled Heart” by The Gossip is the best track on here. It will move you to spontaneous ridiculous dancing, the best kind.

The Shackletons and Billy Bragg round out the strident British vocal thing. I usually really like Bragg, and this song isn’t terrible, but his banter here is absolutely cringe-inducing and sophomoric. You’re not a comedian, Billy, stick to the sincere.

The sugar-hook pop of “Young Folks” by Sweden’s Peter Bjorn and John gets mixed, but I bet it wouldn’t if I had the original (which I’m predicting would), which features a bit more punchiness from the studio and whose iconic opening whistle is a bit more in tune. It’s just such a good tune that it has to be considered for mixes.

Same goes for Hot Chip’s “And I Was A Boy From School”…it’s a great tune but could stand to be a bit punchier here. It’s very techno/electronica/dancey, but when you get bands like that that still know how to craft a song and include things like blue notes and other soulful elements, it’s so much more meaningful than the all-ecstasy-all-the-time syndrome that plagues most of the genre.

Rating:

Mixers: “Yr Mangled Heart” (The Gossip), “Young Folks” (Peter Bjorn And John), “And I Was A Boy From School” (Hot Chip)
Non-keepers: “Hands Off She’s Mine” (The English Beat), “Elephant Gun” (Beirut), “The Prodigal Son” (The Black Angels), “Your Movement” (The Shackletons), “Collarbone” (Fujiya & Miyagi), “Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards” (Billy Bragg)
Filed Between: Live (Secret Samadhi) and Live At Moe 1

With vocal harmonies and repeated lyrics like Fleet Foxes and a jammy percussive style that alternates between rich, dense electronic layers and sparse-but-looped instrumentation á la new hippie bands like Vampire Hands, Yeasayer lies both firmly in 2008’s zeitgeist while also sounding unique.

The band’s debut, All Hour Cymbals, is quite chill, and its diverse, repetitive sound and hypnotic rhythms sound specifically tailored to a late-night smoke session. It’s perfect for letting it flow over you and alternately letting it taking control of your thoughts and letting your thoughts run off to subsconsciously alter your perception of the music.

Predictably, I am most enchanted when the band gets a little more aggressive, picks up the tempo and volume, and introduces a touch of dissonance to complement the hypnotic and go-down-easy harmonies that comprise most of the record. They hit this point on the apex of All Hour Cymbals, “Wait For The Wintertime.”

The disc fades off pretty quickly after that point, nearly enough to lose a half-lunchbox from its given rating. But it’s an unquestionably good record and I’m going to assume that chemically-enhanced listening raises its quality by at least a full lunchbox, and that’s got to count for something.

Rating:

Mixers: “Sunrise,” “Forgiveness,” “Wait For The Wintertime”
Non-keepers: “No Need To Worry,” “Worms/Waves,” “Red Cave”
Filed Between: Xenakis (Electronic Music) and Yoshimi and Yuka (Flower With No Color)

In Rainbows will be forever known as the album for whose mp3 files Radiohead let you pay what you wanted, but it’s a shame because they really outdid themselves this time. This is one for the ages. Given their exceptional past, I didn’t think they would be able to push things even further, but somehow they pulled it off. Just take a look at that cover art…that is almost certainly the ugliest CD of all time.

Musically I could probably put my review of Hail To The Thief here. Aside from the peaks of the end of “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” and all of ““All I Need,” this album is pretty much start-to-finish mood setters, with little actually in the way of songs that end in a different place than where they started.

It’s like the band used up all their emotional bandwidth shortly after the turn of the century but still had some songwriting chops left, so decided to keep working on that output. Who knows…maybe everything sounds more novel when you don’t try to inhale a band’s 15-year discography in only a few months.

This is about as good as Hail To The Thief, and probably even breaks less new ground that that one did. There isn’t a second on here you’d be surprised to hear from Radiohead. I can’t really explain, then, why this gets four lunchboxes to Hail’s three-and-a-half beyond just entertaining the possibility that I was simply too hard on that one, which is probably the case.

Rating:

Mixer: “All I Need”
Non-keeper: “Bodysnatchers”
Filed Between: Hail To The Thief and Ramones (Ramones)

One my favorite musical experiences, and one I continually seek out, is where what originally sounds completely unmusical due to unconventional rhythms, melodies, or harmonies becomes, after several listens, musically beautiful. This phenomenon is why I listen to all of my albums so many times, no matter what my initial impressions are. It’s also why I’m hesitant to have a strong opinion (and I love having strong opinions) on anything I haven’t given a close listen. I experience it less and less as I age, which may be a consequence of me having heard so many unconventional forms of music, or there may be a maturational component that makes this experience more difficult to achieve. Circus Devils’ Sgt. Disco seems to suggest that the latter choice is an invalid hypothesis, though, as they provide 32 tracks over 65 minutes with varying, but generally high, levels of this phenomenon.

It’s like when you listen to a certain sample of speech enough times, it begins to sound familiar and enjoyable in the way tonal music does. You perceive the changes in pitch as a melody, the quality of voice as the harmony, and the diction as rhythm. This is why poetry read aloud is a completely different (and superior, I believe) art form from poetry read silently. It’s why those tracks by The Doors where Jim Morrison reads his poetry over weird sounds eventually sound like music. Sgt. Disco is all about this. It takes several listens for it to sink in, but I wouldn’t describe it as challenging. Circus Devils has found a way to make their music so speech-like that it feels like an innate acquisition to comprehend this disc.

This isn’t a spoken-word disc, however. Though I can’t go back in time to remember exactly which parts were less musical to me several listens ago than they are now, this is something you will unquestionably immediately recognize as music. Roger Waters has explored similar territory to those songs here that are nearly tuneless vocal melodies supported by sparse instrumentation, like “Nicky Highpockets” and “Pattern Girl.” “Love Hate Relationship With The Human Race,” which must be the band’s ode to me, features a clichéd cock rock riff with all sorts of swagger. “New Boy,” with its toy instrument timbres recalls Debussy’s work, particularly Children’s Corner. And after over an hour of bizarre, surrealist lyrical imagery of plastic surgery and alien life forms, the band sums things up with the brilliant protypical rock opera closer “Summer Is Set,” recalling Rush’s work of 30 years ago.

Most CDs that reach five-lunchbox candidacy appeal to my heart and loins. They get me excitable and animate me, causing me to jump around and scream. Sgt. Disco is just as good as any of those CDs, but it appeals to my intellect, hitting my cerebral neurons just right, causing me to stroke my beard and smoke a pipe.

Rating:

Mixers: “In Madonna’s Gazebo,” “Pattern Girl,” “Outlasting Girafalo,” “The Assassins’ Ballroom (Get Your Ass In),” “The Constable’s Headscape,” “New Boy,” “Swing Shift,” “Do This,” “French Horn Litigation,” “Summer Is Set”
Non-keepers: “Puke It Up,” “Happy Zones,” Hot Lettuce,” “Safer Than Hooking,” “Caravan,” “Lance The Boiling Son”
Filed Between: Chopin (19 Waltzes perf. Cyprien Katsaris on Teldec) and Eric Clapton (Timepieces – The Best Of Eric Clapton)

Just in case you weren’t quite sure that I would buy absolutely anything that Melvins put out, here I am reviewing The Making Love Demos, which are “mastered” versions of four-track demos the band recorded in 1987. Furthermore, these aren’t even mastered from the original four-track tapes, which have been lost, but are instead taken from a cassette the band gave their friend Brian Walsby 20 years ago. Finally, the only way to get this CD is to buy it with Walsby’s book, Manchild 3.

So that’s what I did.

The book is filled with Walsby’s drawings and thoughts on music and his life. The style is that of a comic book, but I get the feeling Walsby would bristle at the term. The biggest section is a journal of Walsby’s trip on a Melvins tour through the South a few years ago. At one point he talks about how each night they would create a single t-shirt with markers, making it as offensive as possible and pricing it really high to see if it sold. It always did, according to Walsby, and I can’t help but think that this shirt that I own (except that mine is white) came out of this process. Honestly, I’m surprised I haven’t bought a Melvins turd yet. (Although I suppose most people would say that any CD by Melvins is a turd.)

Some of these songs came out on 1989’s Ozma, recorded with a different bassist. That album was ostensibly recorded in a studio and all, but it sounds an awful lot like this, which also sounds a lot like 1987’s Gluey Porch Treatments and 1986’s Six Songs. The point being, for anything that Melvins recorded in the 80’s, the sound quality just doesn’t matter. They hadn’t yet figured out how to sound like they sounded like crap by sounding awesome, they kind of just sounded like crap and, noise merchants that they were, a poor recording environment just sounded like it was intentional, and it probably was, for all I know.

And even though this sounds like crap, it’s still awesome in a way only Melvins can be. In the 80’s they were at their bombastic, amelodic worst, but somehow, through the din, it all worked. Melvins have always been the superlatives of unlistenable music, and that alone makes them magnificent. The fact that it’s all really good and, given enough time, listenable, and the fact that they’ve changed so much and yet remained completely on the fringes of the music world in the last 20 years makes them a truly historic movement worthy of being placed in the highest tiers of music’s long and storied history.

Manchild wasn’t an unenjoyable read, but I didn’t need it. Really, guys, you could out-do your forebearers, Kiss, and brand a turd and I’d buy it. At this rate, it does seem they will release Fecal Matter at some point, which I really would rush out and buy.

Rating:

Mixers: How many Melvins demos from a 1987 cassette do you think would work well on a mix? Although, “Creepy Smell,” “My Small % Shows Most,” and “Repulsion” came close.
Non-keepers: “Dime Lined Divide”
Filed Between: A Senile Animal and Melvins+Lustmord (Pigs Of The Roman Empire)

As has been extensively documented here on MPL, Springsteen is clearly in the decline phase of his career, to use terminology normally reserved for aging baseball players. With baseball players, just being past your peak doesn’t mean you don’t have any great games or even seasons left in you, it just means your numbers are trending downward. This is especially true for the greats, who can continue to be very valuable well past their prime. To really work this analogy, Springsteen’s running out the end of an expensive, multi-year contract, and is nowhere near worth the value he’s being paid anymore, but can still pop one out of the park in a crucial situation from time to time. He can’t put together an entirely awesome season (album) anymore, but from game-to-game (song-to-song), it can be nice to see (hear) him at the plate (mic).

Springsteen first became grossly overvalued with 2002’s The Rising, and I didn’t at all take to Devils and Dust, where I laid much of the blame at the feet of producer Brendan O’Brien, who joined forces with The Boss with The Rising, and continues to stay on board. In great moments in MPL history, last fall, I received an e-mail in response to that review from CT who said “Accurate assessment of DD. … BTW: Yours is still the only website that google returns under the search phrase ‘Brendan O’Brien sucks’—aside from some message board stuff. That is hard to believe.”

Anyway, CT said that he felt the same way about Magic, which he received as a gift. I also received this as a gift, but I actually think this is a step up from Springsteen’s other recent material. It’s still not all that good (five stars from Rolling Stone? The emperor has no clothes, dammit), but as Springsteen heads back to more of a straightforward rock album for the first time in a half-decade, that drawly, affected vocal style that has been driving me so nuts, while still there, is less prominent, and he’s mostly ditched that insultingly obvious screech of a violin. By reducing those elements, the songs are allowed to shine through. Now, there’s still a buttload of awful songs on here that couldn’t shine with even the best of treatments, but there are enough good tunes that I can actually give this CD the lowest possible rating for a CD that I like. I mean, “Last To Die” and “You’ll Be Comin’ Down” are legitimately good songs The Boss can be proud to add to his canon, not just songs that are tolerable and you’ll listen to because they’re new Springsteen.

The worst part of this album, besides the fact that there are a handful of tunes that make me nauseous, is that Springsteen is borrowing from his old material a little too liberally here. The music of “Livin’ In The Future” would have fit perfectly on The Rising, “Your Own Worst Enemy” is basically just “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” the piano intro to the execrable “I’ll Work For Your Love” (and the lyrics are just as bad as that title) is an awful lot like that of “Thunder Road,” and “Long Walk Home” is yet another missive on the collapse of small towns. Hey, we get it buddy, small towns are in decline and it sucks to be one of those left behind.

I’m tentatively giving this three lunchboxes because I’m feeling generous today, I guess. It’s almost worse giving a rating that high, though, because now I fear that I have unwarranted hope in Springsteen’s future. I may be setting myself up for disappointment. With a runner on and two outs late in a tie game, I may send him up to the plate hoping for a miracle that would really be more likely delivered by a younger player with a better recent track record.

Rating:

Mixers: “You’ll Be Comin’ Down”
Keepers: “Radio Nowhere,” “Gypsy Biker,” “Girls In Their Summer Clothes,” “Last To Die”
Filed Between: We Shall Overcome – The Pete Seeger Sessions and Stanley, Son of Theodore: Yet Another Alternative Music Sampler

Gamma classmate Bree left a comment last summer that’s stuck with me. In reference to Bob Dylan’s Desire, she wrote:

It happens to be one of my Dylan favorites as it is clearly the voice of a man in his 30’s accepting the fact that he is in his 30’s. It is a great picture of an artist exactly where he is at, not where he (or anyone else for that matter) thinks he ought to be.

It’s fitting here because Tom Petty has always exuded confidence in who and where he is. He turned 56 in 2006 when this album came out and continues to project a level of comfort in aging that is virtually unprecedented in rock stars. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that the guy always seemed like he was 15 years or so older than he really was, as if his whole career was just pretext to him being an old rocker.

On Highway Companion, however, Petty may be a little too comfortable with his age. On some songs it’s kind of like he’s the guy just a few years from retirement, coming in to punch the clock, send a few e-mails while vigilantly guarding the turf that gives his job just enough relevance to keep him employed, and checking out every day with minimal effort. “Damaged By Love,” which is like two chords and three words (guess which ones) is the best example of that guy. On other songs, “Night Driver” in particular, you get the feeling like you’ve interrupted Petty’s naptime, except he’s not going to let your unexpected presence stop him from getting on with his appointment in dreamland.

Before this album, my only experience with Petty’s late-career oeuvre was Wildflowers, which I adored, and the song “The Last DJ,” which was pretty awesome, too. Wildflowers came out in 1994, though, and that’s not so recent anymore, so maybe we’re pushing into his late-late-career now.

He certainly is treating the market as his personal piggy bank, as late-era musicians are all too prone to do. With a greatest hits album in 1993, another in 2000, and a box set in between, Petty and MCA assured that the record stores were filled with new product even with no new content. That maneuvering is tolerable, though, as most fans can ignore it. With Highway Companion, though, he’s moved to intolerable. One year after this album was released, the special edition (the edition I’ve got) was released with fancier packaging and four bonus tracks, including two brand new songs. As opposed to releasing both the regular and special editions at the same time, this is kind of a big slap in the face to your biggest fans, who will want this version in addition to the regular version they surely bought in the first year of its release.

And it’s for that reason, as I waver between awarding three and three-and-a-half lunchboxes, that I’ll settle on the lower number. Despite its tendency to go back to the same well a few too many times, and its occasional somnambulant tendencies, this is a pretty good listen from start to finish (all of the non-keepers are bonus tracks, with the exception of “Damaged By Love,” which should have been replaced by bonus track “Home”) with a few peaks of excellence (see the mixers). Even the subtly powerful instrumentation, expertly crafted by some of the finest session musicians in the US and the UK, is grabbing enough so that the weaker songs grow on you with repeated listenings. Treat your customers like crap, though, even in these ambiguous times for the industry, and you hit a sore spot with me.

Rating:

Mixers: “Down South,” “Jack”
Non-keepers: “Damaged By Love,” “Around The Roses,” “Big Weekend (Demo Version),” “This Old Town (Demo Version)”
Filed Between: Playback by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Prince (Crystal Ball) in the oversize section