Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Here we have three piano pieces, two concertos (which are backed by an orchestra) and one solo piece, from the first third of the 20th century by two of that century’s most respected composers. Each piece has lengthy, incredibly technically demanding sections, and so Argerich is the real star here.

Prokofiev is quickly becoming one of my favorite composers. I loved Alexander Nevsky last spring and, as with that piece, I find his Third Piano Concerto (1921) to be the perfect blend of Romantic and 20th Century music. It has enough of the 19th century to be easily understood and emotionally gripping while including enough 20th century experimentation to be interesting and exciting.

Since Ravel was a French “impressionist” composer, I’ve always just assumed he was Debussy, Part Deux. I may eventually determine that to be the case, but his compositions here distinguish him from his countryman in my mind. The Piano Concerto in G, from 1932, could have been written by Gershwin, with its seamless blending of classical and jazz idioms. One recurring theme is, in fact, a direct quote from Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue from eight years prior, if im not mistaken. Horns wail out themes plaintively only to be swept away by the orchestra and piano. It’s so obvious when you hear it, but so few composers have done it. It is an absolute triumph and, in the present, an almost sad statement of what was missed from the general lack of combination of these schools of music.

Ravel’s other piece here, Gaspard de la Nuit, a setting for a poem by Aloysius Bertrand, is more like Debussy in that each movement paints an impression of some noun: water fairy, gallows, and goblin. There is less harmonic lushness and, as a result, an ultimately unsatisfying aspect to this piece. “Ondine,” the first movement, sounds like riplling reflections of water, but never seems to go far below the surface. I think its most unsoundly blemish, though, is in Argerich’s muddled interpretation: often times the melody seems to get lost in the blur of glissandi and rapid runs on the page.

Conductor Claudio Abbado is to blame for this as well in the piano concerti. I often find his tempi to be far too fast. The third movement of the Prokofiev is marked “Allegro ma non troppo” (quickly, but not too quickly). Abbado’s tempo is, however, definitely “troppo.”

Those flaws are not enough to take away from the technical brilliance displayed by Argerich, nor the compositional beauty of these pieces. On both of those counts, this is an excellent disc.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Non-keepers: Piano Concerto in G Major, Movement Three; Gaspard De La Nuit, “Scarbo”
Filed Between: Prince (Musicology) and Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky/Scythian Suite (perf. Linda Finnie, Scottish National Orchestra, cond. Neeme Järvi)

May the good Lord shine a light on you/
Make every song your favorite tune
- “Shine A Light”

Let’s get right down to brass tacks here. The Rolling Stones’ 1972 double album Exile On Main St. is widely regarded as their best album. Acclaimed Music (god that site gives me a hard-on) has it listed as number seven on its all-time top albums list.

But come on, that’s played. I don’t know whether it is or isn’t the band’s best, and it’s not an opinion I’m going to come to in the space of this review. What I’m really interested in getting at right here and now is which is the best of the four sides of this album. I mean, this has been debated by the world’s top music critics for, literally, like a minute now. The earliest reference to this debate I was able to find was late 2008.

Everybody seems to agree that the two five-song sides, sides one and three, are immediately out of the conversation, as that’s where the band put the songs where Jagger can’t quite stay on the mic, confusing anybody trying to follow that line in the music, as well as the harshest-sounding songs whose guitars are just too loud and abrasive to allow aural exploration of what seem like interesting keys parts beneath.

I have to agree with all of those critics on that point. “Rocks Off” and “Rip This Joint” are killer rockers and “Tumbling Dice” is one of the four contenders for best song on the album, but “Shake Your Hips” and “Casino Boogie” are roots experiments gone wrong. Side three is even worse, with only “Happy” and “I Just Want To See His Face” (a space-jam experiment gone right) getting kept and the other three tracks coming in at fine, but not worthy of the space they consume on my DMP.

So that leaves us with the two four-song sides, sides two and four, and for paragraphs and paragraphs, music critics have just not been able to determine the superior side. Since both sides have four songs, it allows us to compare song-by-song. “All Down The Line” is better than “Sweet Virgina,” so that’s a point for side four. Side two comes right back, though, with “Torn And Frayed” beating “Stop Breaking Down.” The third contest isn’t even close as “Shine A Light” crushes “Sweet Black Angel” to move side four back into the lead, but it’s short-lived as side two’s strongest entry, “Loving Cup,” is next and handily beats album closer “Soul Survivor.” So a 2-2 tie and serious methodology issues anyway isn’t helping. Moving on….

Now, on the one hand, side four seems to have the higher peaks, as it has two of the album’s four contenders for the album’s best song: “All Down The Line” and “Shine A Light.” However, side two is more evenly awesome from start to finish. It has an album’s-best-song contender in “Loving Cup,” as well as “Torn And Frayed,” the excellent, steel-guitared ode to a road-weary guitar-slinger performing night after night in some of the furthest corners of America imaginable, and the just-missed-mixer “Sweet Virginia.” “Sweet Black Angel,” about Black Panther Angela Davis is the weakest of the bunch.

And the fact that I can’t even pick a weakest song on side four (though it almost certainly comes down to two just-missed-mixers, Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down” and “Soul Survivor”) is a big part of why this critic is settling the debate once and for all: Exile On Main St. closes with its strongest side, side four.

Suck on that, rock critics. In just a few minutes I’ve solved the debate you’ve been having for a few more minutes.

Rating:

Mixers: “Rocks Off,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Torn And Frayed,” “Loving Cup,” “All Down The Line,” “Shine A Light”
Non-keepers: “Shake Your Hips,” “Casino Boogie,” “Turd On The Run,” “Let It Loose”
Filed Between: Rocket From The Crypt (Scream, Dracula, Scream!) and The Stones’ Some Girls

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)

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)

It’s learning time at MPL. Let’s talk about the term “classical music.” That term probably has some meaning to you that covers most Christian and art music from the earliest chants of monks up through that of the present day, or at least the early part of the 20th century, excluding modern Christian folk and rock. You’ve probably got composers Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and maybe even Bartók, performers like Pavarotti and conductors like Bernstein all lumped into that grouping. Well, that’s one, and probably the most frequently-used, meaning of the term.

But let me tell you about music history or appreciation classes (concerned, of course, with “classical music”), most of which proceed as follows. They start off with some hand waving about Gregorian chants and the Middle Ages by way of introduction, then basically really start in on the meat of the class with the Renaissance, at whose beginning we had the Baroque period. This is represented by Bach and Handel and typified by extravagant ornamentation and complex structure, just like Baroque architecture. Then we get the Classical period, which is where things really start to get confusing, because now we’re referring to the music composed during this period, a subset of “classical music,” as “Classical music.” Mozart and Haydn are the archetypes of this period, and it is characterized by clean lines and balance, just like Classical architecture. Then we get the Romantic period. Beethoven bridges us from Classical into Romantic, where we get florid, dramatic works, as in Romantic literature, by composers like Chopin, Grieg, Liszt, Brahms, Puccini, Wagner, Debussy, and so on. These classes typically finish their survey of these three main periods (Baroque, Classical, and Romantic) with Mahler, who is kind of like Beethoven in that he kind of bridges us to the next period, where the classes typically end with some hand waving over the poorly defined period from 1910-2008, usually referred to as the 20th Century period, or Modern period, which is, of course, a horribly suited name that lumps way too much disparate music under one ill-fitting umbrella.

All of which is a long way of introducing what will be a series of reviews to come of “20th Century music.” I didn’t have to put that in quotes, because I will be most definitely listening to music composed in the 20th century, but that’s 98% of what I review on here anyway. Now, though, I’m reading Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening To The 20th Century (out in paperback this month), and so I’m listening to this “20th Century” subcategory of “classical music.” Clear as mud, I’m sure, so if you care and I haven’t been clear, ask a question in the comments and I’ll do my best to clarify.

Anyway, I’m starting my journey through this varied, ignored landscape with the canonical recording of one of my favorite composers, Hungary’s Béla Bartók. Summaries of Bartók’s career must mention that he visisted Hungarian and Bulgarian villages, notated and recorded the folk music there, and incorporated elements from it, such as shifting time signatures and non-Western (another crazy-confusing term) modalities (kind of like keys, if you’re familiar with that musical term) along with traditional Western elements into his composistions.

This CD begins with his Concerto For Orchestra, written near the end of his life in New York, where he emigrated to from Hungary in World War II, and debuted in 1944 in Boston. Concerti typically involve a solo instrument such as flute, piano, or violin playing the bulk of the melodic development while an orchestra helps out with harmony and the bold statements of the main themes, so this is a bit of an oddly-named duck. Once you listen, though, you realize there’s no other name that would work, as he spends five movements creating a near-symphonic work that gives extensive solos to a wide variety of different instruments throughout.

The Concerto is a marvelous piece, easily one of my new favorite “classical” works. In the space of 37 minutes, Bartók lays the foundation for the music of film for the last 50 years with quivering strings, a bevy of slowly emerging and retreating motifs, and an emphasis on tuned percussion, presents some of the most lusciously gorgeous melodies this side of Barber’s Adagio For Strings, pays tribute to Gershwin with a few near quotes of Rhapsody In Blue, interrupts his own work in an ”interrupted intermezzo” with a light-hearted quote of the contemporaneous Leningrad Symphony by Shostakovich, and closes by working the orchestra into a fit of virtuosically brilliant pyrotechnics. This piece is probably the best synthesis of Bartók’s career into a single piece.

Three years after recording the Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Reiner did the same for what was originally a separate release with two more pieces of Bartók’s: Music For Strings, Percussion, And Celesta (written in 1937) and Hungarian Sketches (1931).

I had to look up what a celesta was:

The celesta…is a struck idiophone operated by a keyboard. Its appearance is similar to that of an upright piano… or of a large wooden music box…. The keys are connected to hammers which strike a graduated set of metal (usually steel) plates suspended over wooden resonators. …. One of the most well-known works that makes use of the celesta is Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” from The Nutcracker.

And what is an idiophone?

An idiophone is any musical instrument which creates sound primarily by way of the instrument vibrating itself, without the use of strings or membranes.

This piece is quite highbrow, with its time signatures shifting rapidly and even more in the way of themes emerging out of and quickly fading back into the ether. The second movement is particularly enjoyable and, along with the fourth, a bit more accessible than the first and third movements, which have little in the way of themes you can easily grab on to to guide you through the piece’s 28 minutes. It’s quite good, but it’s far less readily emotionally available, and thus much harder to connect to.

Speaking of “harder,” I should mention that this is all somewhat challenging music, as you would expect, but in a much different way than that of Bach, which I’ve reviewed often here. I rarely write about Bach without somehow working in some mention of how his work is cognitive and a mental exercise. This music of Bartók’s is challenging in the sense that it won’t serve you as background music, however all that’s required to feel what it offers is to pay attention. Once you focus your attention on what’s being “said,” everything will be clear and you can enjoy the music without smelling the smoke from your brain’s gears crunching hard like they do on tough math problems.

The CD flows well from the folk-influenced fourth movement of Music For Strings, Percussion, And Celesta to the lighter Hungarian Sketches, a collection of five songs that, as the title suggests, are inspired from Bartók’s work with Hungarian folk music. About one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half minutes each, with colorful names like “Bear Dance,” “Slightly Tipsy,” and “Swineherd’s Dance,” and with a folk style and evocation of nature similar to Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, they give a concentrated view on the music from that time and place that, in this world of massively distributed media, is a refreshing bit of time travel.

It’s a wonderful way to wrap up this introduction to Bartók, and emphasizes why this is so often the starting point to exploring his work. I should have more Bartók, given how much I’ve enjoyed what I’ve heard and played on the piano, but I’m at least very happy I finally took the time to get this disc. Finally, I have to give props to BMG Classics for pricing this SACD/CD hybrid at the reasonable price of $12.99. It seems some record companies are slowly coming around to more closely understanding the value of their product.

Rating:

Mixers: Hungarian Sketches: “An Evening In The Village,” “Bear Dance,” “Swineherd’s Dance”
Non-keepers: Music For Strings, Percussion, And Celesta: “Movement 1 – Andante Tranquillo,” “Movement 4 – Allergro Molto,” Hungarian Sketches: “Slightly Tipsy”
Filed Between: Bartók’s Mikrokosmos and Bauhaus (1979-1983, Volume One)

With cohesive songs, consistent, rock-standard instrumentation, slick grooves, and downright catchy, accessible melodies, you would have no idea that this was the same band that released Pony Express Record three years prior. For their last album, though, Shudder To Think went with a slick, kinky-sex vibe that is completely at odds with the overt brashness of their previous release.

In fact, these tunes are so good, with the repressed sexuality of the simmering grooves clashing with the blatant perversion in the lyrics, and the song’s sections are connected to each other seamlessly enough, that they don’t really need to obfuscate things with off-kilter time signatures and abrupt shifts. For the most part, they don’t, and let the songs work on their own, but they still get in the way a few times, most notably by adding an extra beat here and there in “Call Of The Playground.”

And in fact, these songs are so good that it’s bordering on 4.5 lunchboxes. My main complaint is that almost all of these are catchy in parts, and with the pressure-building restraint the band exercises, it feels like threr should be some kind of satisfying explosion in most of them. That never happens, though, and the listener’s desire is left unrequited. I like wanting more, but this could use at least a little gratification.

Rating:

Mixers: “Call Of The Playground,” “Beauty Strike,” “Survival,” “Hop On One Foot”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Pony Express Record and Silverchair (”Tomorrow”)

I have just about completed my collection of the second tier of Led Zeppelin albums. Seriously, I have almost the exact inverse of the Zep CDs you’re supposed to have. I don’t have I, II, Houses of the Holy, or Physical Grafitti, but I do own III, Presence, and now Coda. All I need to completely my collection of tepidly-received Zeppelin output is In Through The Out Door, and even that sold six million copies. Heck, the only reason I have IV is because J-mez gave it to me.

Of course, it’s not at all a coincidence that the ones I own are also the ones that get “The Nice Price” sticker on them. Some people listen to an artist chronologically. Others start with their most highly-rated stuff and work their way down until they don’t like it anymore. Me? Well, there’s still a part of me that thinks I’m eventually going to own every CD I desire, so I often take the ridiculous strategy of buying the cheapest stuff when it’s on sale because, you know, I’ll own it all eventually so I should take advantage of price breaks.

Anyway….

The aptly-named Coda is a collection of odds and ends that was released in 1982, after drummer John Bonham had died and the band had broken up. And it feels like it, with Page adding lots of early-80s studio magic on top of everything in order to make it releaseable and a scarce cohesion only provided by the strong blues influence threading its way through these eight tracks.

While it feels patched together, the individual songs are all so good that the sum of its parts is still a pretty sizeable sum. “Poor Tom” starts off as a slow, standard blues-structured track and develops sonically and lyrically as it advances. Apparently Zep felt like they needed to usurp one more stylistic element from early-20th-century blues songwriters and so craft their own tale of murder inflicted upon an unfaithful woman. Enlightened, I know. “We’re Gonna Groove” and “Ozone Baby” are up to par, Page’s guitar work on “I Can’t Quit You Baby” is for the ages, and “Walter’s Walk” is a very good but unexceptional romp on Zep’s more-rocky, less-bluesy side. The highglihts are “Darlene” (I don’t care what anybody says, Plant is singing “Double E,” not “Darlene”) and “Wearing And Tearing.” The former features a great three-note ascending riff repeated right before the chorus to ramp things up and a marvelous piano solo that makes this a unique number in the band’s catalog. “Wearing And Tearing” closes things out and it’s so good and so Zep that you can’t believe it didn’t see the light of day until this album.

The Led Zeppelin section of my CD library may confound scholars of the rock and roll canon, but I love III and BBC Sessions and I can’t say I’m at all unhappy to have added Coda to the regarded-as-middling mix. In fact, given my propensity to completely disagree with conventional wisdom about a band’s strongest material and my lower-than-expected rating of IV, I’m almost hesitatnt to get “the good stuff.”

Rating:

Mixers: “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” “Darlene,” “Wearing And Tearing”
Non-keepers: “Bonzo’s Montreux”
Filed Between: Presence and BBC Sessions

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?)

Some theories of knowledge assert that things we know about get stored in things akin to slots in our brain and that we also put properties that we associate with that object into those slots. It’s hella scientific, I know, but my “knowledge” of Shudder To Think is evidence of this theory. First of all, I never could tell apart Shudder To Think and Built To Spill. Now that I have a CD by one of the bands, though, I have some very clear thoughts on Shudder To Think. Now, though, when I examine my “knowledge” of Built To Spill, I realize that I associate the same properties with Built To Spill that I do with Shudder To Think, suggesting that they still are both stored in the same brain slot, but now share the knowledge I’ve based on my dozen or so listens to the Shudder To Think’s 1994 major label debut, Pony Express Record.

It’s actually probably been closer to 15 or maybe even 20 listens. You see, this might be the most difficult, challenging rock record ever released, and I kind of got obsessed with why it’s such a cult classic. Combine that with a trip spent driving all over Florida where it was the only CD I brought and I forgot the cord for my DMP and you’ve got a recipe for focused listen after listen.

I’ve read a lot about this record, too, and I can tell you that “challenging” and “inaccessible” appear in almost every single write-up of the album. (So does “opera,” but that’s ridiculous…held, warbly vocal notes do not equate to an opera influence. I might let you get by with “operatic,” but there is no opera on this album.) So when my initial reaction to this album was, “What?,” I wanted to spend more time with it to see if, as happened with the similaraly challenging LP2 by Sunny Day Real Estate, repeated listens would wear ruts in my ear drums straight through to the pleasure centers of my brain.

The results bode well for the album, but it’s not good enough to warrant any further comparisons to SDRE’s masterpiece from the year following this disc’s release. The rapid switching between riffs, odd time signatures, and keys now seem expected and planned to me, instead of cacophonous, as they did on the first few listens. The seemingly-meandering vocal lines and accompanying abstruse lyrics (“Boys you’ve got a great house but it’s got major-holes-a-heart-shaped”) now come as expectations that feel right, not surprises or mistakes. And besides the last two tracks, I can find something to like in every song on here. I even found two mixers, the grooving rawk of “9 Fingers On You” and the halting-but-evident build of “So Into You” (originally by Atlanta Rhythm Section), whose intense riff is the album’s best moment by far. In fact, the only other track that was even close to not getting kept was the slow-to-start “Sweet Year Old.”

I didn’t even get sick of it until the last couple of listens, where I had to switch to whatever radio was available on Florida’s Turnpike, which is basically classic rock, a couple of Latino stations, and Jesus-and-9/11 talk radio, so you can imagine how sick of it I was by that point. But this is a very good album. Attributions like “classic” and “masterpiece” are a stretch, but Shudder To Think definitely deserves their due for releasing such an inspired, difficult-to-access album on a major label.

Rating:

Mixers: “9 Fingers On You,” “So Into You”
Non-keepers: “Trackstar,” “Full Body Anchor”
Filed Between: Shostakovich (Ballet Suites 1 & 3, Suites 1 & 2 for Jazz Orchestra, cond. Kitaenko, orch. Radio-Sinfonie-Orchester Frankfurt) and Silverchair (“Tomorrow”)

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)