Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Finland is one of those countries where they put their famous artists on their money. Despite my respect for the ladies and gentlemen gracing our currency, I wish we put our great artists on our money. It’s hard to think of a more famous Finn than Sibelius, and he graces or graced the 100 mark note in Finland.

After listening to this, it’s hard to imagine there could have been any greater Finn ever, so I guess it’s appropriate that I can’t name any others off the top of my head. This double CD has his last four symphonies, one movement (“The Swan Of Tuonela”) from a larger piece based on Finnish mythology that is possibly his most famous work and contains possibly the most famous English horn solo in the canon, and a 20-minute tone poem written about the Finnish forest (Tapiola).

On first listen, Sibelius doesn’t quite fit into the radical mold of much of the 20th Century classical music I’ve been listening to lately. In fact, I think most ears accustomed primarily to popular music wouldn’t think twice about throwing it in with Beethoven and Mozart. Closer listening, however, reveals that, despite the conventional instrumentation and emphasis on tonality and thematic development, there are halting, unsure vacillations in the rhythm and a brooding angst underlying almost every minute of these pieces.

Sibelius, as the reputation of the Finns would suggest, suffered from severe loneliness, depression, and solitude, and naturally it comes through in his music. The third movement of the Fourth Symphony takes forever to do anything; themes are started, left incomplete, and then subside to the same theme emerging a bit differently or stand aside for a new theme altogether. Finally, at the 7:45 mark we get about 50 seconds of sublime beauty, but it falls back down in its bed to mutter away for several more minutes, making hearty attempts here and there but never quite becoming ambulatory. The final movement feels as if it was written by a man about to take his own life. It’s nine-and-a-half minutes of music falling apart, as if it can barely will itself to go on. Here we have a violin ostinato, there the winds pipe up for a brief moment. Things end in a sea of lukewarm entropy, everything having fallen apart.

Symphonies Five and Six are alternately Sibelius’ greatest symphony, depending on which one I’m listening to. The first movement of the Fifth is a masterpiece. At times it is bold, stately, fast, gripping… everything that the Fourth was not, the manic to the Fourth’s depressive. The Sixth is the controlled middle ground, healthy, and reaching for inspiration and guidance from the Overture to Wagner’s Lohengrin, one of my favorite pieces.

If the thought of a Finnish forest, especially during a long, dark winter, frigthens you, I don’t recommend listening to Tapiola, because your pants will be wet with “fear” before it’s over. From catchy but harmonically tricky thematic development at the start to total Wagner/John Williams-Darth Vader moments midway through to howling and screeching in the violins that would put the most abrasive David Lynch moments to shame, this is one of the darkest and greatest dark pieces in the history of music.

I appreciate honoring their artistic heroes, but there’s no way Finland can have a denomination high enough to warrant Sibelius’ image. They should just name their GDP after him.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: Symphony 4, Movement 1; “The Swan Of Tuonela;” Symphony 5, Movements 1 and 3; Symphony 6; Symphony 7, Movements 1-3; Tapiola
Filed Between: Shudder To Think (50,000 B.C.) and Silverchair (“Tomorrow”)

If you know one thing about Stravinksy’s ballet The Rite Of Spring it’s probably that at its 1913 debut in Paris it set off riots. Here’s a dirty little secret, folks, people loved to fucking riot in Europe at concerts and ballets in the 19th century and the early part of the last century. It happened all the fucking time. If you pick any piece out of the canon that debuted after the French Revolution, there’s probably a 50/50 chance that there was a riot at its premiere. (Aside: I don’t know why I’m swearing.)

But for some reason this story about the riot at The Rite is retold far more than than all the other riots put together. I don’t really know why that is, but I’ll make up shit because I like doing that.

So, I think it’s because when it’s heard today, either for the first time or the hundredth, it still sounds obnoxiously foreign yet innately familiar all at the same time. The Rite is completely different than everything that came before it, and very different from everything you’ve ever heard, and yet everybody immediately gets it.

Its rhythms are all completely unexpected, with syncopated accents appearing in no discernible pattern, yet it cuts right to the rhythm of the human body, mind, and soul. You feel its accents inside you, echoing the strongest emotions of your life as well as the Big Bang. You can’t predict when the next downbeat is coming, yet you can’t help but move to it. It’s thrown off the formalisms of common time and the artificial civility of the ballet that accompanies that and replaced it with something sinister and pagan within all of us. Every instrument is playing in a different meter, simultaneously, conjuring up the most excited, confused moments when our brain is scattered, racing, and torn between competing sets of desires.

Alternately ominous and beautiful, crystal clear in its dominance of your ear canal and bewildering in its presentation of so…much…information, The Rite leaves you gasping for air. Your mind will race, confused, and yet excited at the same time. One moment you’ll hear madness in the composition, and then it will quickly resolve to genius, and just when you think you’ve heard everything, like it can’t get any better, it does. You can’t keep up with this piece as it whisks you along at its own exhilarating pace. A nearly steady build right to the end, this is what a primal, hedonistic, 30-minute orgasm, delivered as only a true dom can, sounds like.

The premiere of The Rite is still talked about because we can still hear its echoes when we listen to it today. It’s still discussed because at that moment music changed…Stravinsky opened the door to a whole world of music that was immediate, obvious, and exciting, but had been unknown to us before that time. In my opinion, it’s the first piece of rock and roll ever written, and owes as much to its current state as native African music and its mutation, the blues (to take absolutely nothing away from those contributions to modern Western music, of course). Not only was it a music-changing, an art-changing, piece, it is a life-changing piece. I don’t care how you feel about classical music in general, you must hear this piece, and Obama is going to require it to be taught in high schools because it is that fucking important.

This album, featuring Stravinsky himself conducting The Columbia Symphony Orchestra, begins with Petrushka, a “burlesque,” kind of a ballet suite like The Rite, as far as I can tell, and it’s awesome as well. It’s got a few more dead spots than The Rite, but it probably stands up there at about four lunchboxes just by itself.

It blurs the line between reality, fantasy, and dream in the tale of a sometimes animate marionette named Petrushka who is treated cruelly, and eventually murdered, by his creator/owner/pupettmaster. More traditionally dancey and less radical than The Rite, Petrushka still features motifs obscuring other motifs in a way that Wagner couldn’t even quite bring himself to pull off and also features a brilliant sonic impersonation of the hustle and bustle of the early 20th century crowds that would hear its 1911 premiere.

Going backwards chronologically from right now, Stravinsky is the first composer you get to where you think, “Yeah, that guy is clearly a giant, one of the greatest composers of all time and head and shoulders above his contemporaries.” He was, and still is somewhat, a modern celebrity, conducting these recordings in 1960 and passing away in 1971. It’s been 95 years since the premier of The Rite, and the world is still reeling, still feeling its aftershocks. Someday composers may be willing to wade into this world and write in this style. For now, though, Stravinsky’s greatness is still too intimidating for anybody else to truly attempt to further his work. That would be a shame if what the maestro had left us weren’t so brilliant on its own.

Rating:

Mixers: The Rite, Part I: “Dance Of The Earth,” Part II: “Summoning Of The Ancients,” “Sacrificial Dance”
Non-keepers: Petrushka, Tableau I: “Russian Dance,” Tableau III: “Beginning,” Tableau IV: “Conclusion (Petrushka’s Death),” The Rite, Part I: “Adoration Of The Earth,” Part II: “Introduction,” “Mystical Circles Of The Young Girls”
Filed Between: Richard Strauss (Der Rosenkavalier perf. Te Kanawa, Rydl, Von Otter, Grundheber, Hendricks, orch. Staatsopernchor Dresden, cond. Haitink) and Sub Pop-200

I can’t think of a better CD to have popped into my CD player on my birthday a few days ago. I still have clear memories of sitting on the floor for something like my eighth birthday and unwrapping a new walkman and my first cassette, Springfield’s Working Class Dog, which I think had been recommended by the older neighbor kid, or maybe Mom knew I liked “Jessie’s Girl” from the radio or something. Regardless, over the next 26 years Rick Springfield has maintained his position at or near the top of my favorite musicians and this year’s Venus In Overdrive is probably his best album since the Holy Trinity of Rick (Working Class Dog, Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet, and Living In Oz).

You roll your eyes and humor me, but Springfield’s songwriting brilliance is one of the best kept secrets in rock. You dismiss him as a pretty boy, one-hit wonder with “Jessie’s Girl” plus some time on General Hospital, but he had two more top 20 hits from Working Class Girl alone, one of which I heard blaring two weeks ago at a UW 5k I ran. He also had three top 40 hits from each of his next two albums (see the Holy Trinity of Rick), including the number two “Don’t Talk To Strangers.” He’d continue charting in the top 25 into the late 80’s on his next three albums, including scoring a number five with “Love Somebody” from the Hard To Hold soundtrack. His critical acclaim never quite matched his popularity, but appearing on the cover of Tiger Beat, or whatever, tends to have that effect. But, yeah, Springfield’s a total stud and it’s no accident he’s still putting out great music.

And I’ll be one of the first to say that one of his first albums after his near-decade hiatus, 1999’s Karma, was acceptable but pretty weak. I didn’t even get his next two albums, but given how incredible Venus In Overdrive is, I’m going to have to go back and check them out.

The album begins with an intentional nod to “Jessie’s Girl,” then spends the next 40 minutes forging another brilliant chapter in this 59-year-old’s(!) history. These are all brand new songs, some of them mixed by Matt Wallace who produced two of the greatest albums in rock’s history, Faith No More’s The Real Thing and Angel Dust, that stand equally with the greats in Springfield’s canon. Unlike too many aging musicians, Springfield stays with what he does so well. These are all new, fresh songs, but God, nobody else is so masterful with some power chords, a catchy melody, and a veneer of keys over a driving, clean guitar sound. For a few days I was eleven years old again, playing air guitar in front of 15,000 screaming fans just behind the mirror.

(Election obsession side note: Also making me feel young again was this adorable birthday card from my 80-something Republican aunt from Iowa whose message inside was brimming with comforting confidence that Obama was going to fix everything soon. Hold me while I suck my thumb and fall asleep.)

It’s not all 1982 all over again, and 2008 Springfield isn’t some caricature of what he once was. His life stage is apparent in his lyrical content and in the liner notes, which feature page after page of pictures of him with his fans. Most of his fans don’t look like me…check it out. He gets political, anxious to throw out the whole system, on “Mr. PC,” and no fewer than four of these songs are about death, in particular that of Sahara Aldridge, a 13-year-old fan who succumbed to a battle with brain cancer last November.

Of course, it’s never been all about unrequited love. Springfield’s been dealing with death, particularly that of his father’s in 1981, in his lyrics prominently ever since Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet. As a survivor of depression and a 30-year veteran of a career in rock-and-roll, though, his explorations of the issue have a more peaceful, faithful, upward-looking feel then they did before.

So yeah, I have a very strong identification with Rick Springfield, and there’s a part of me that feels like I am him in a way. It’s always been a rewarding relationship, and I can’t even tell you how excited I am for his recent success in delivering one of the best albums of the year.

Update: “Time Stand Still” is the best song ever.

Rating:

Mixers: “What’s Victoria’s Secret?,” “I’ll Miss That Someday,” “Venus In Overdrive,” “One Passenger,” “Time Stand Still,” “Mr. PC”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Springfield’s Backtracks and Bruce Springsteen (Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.)

“Fuck this and fuck that/
Fuck it all and fuck the fucking brat”
- “Bodies” by The Sex Pistols

Boy did I need this. Hope, universal health care, and appealing to our greater selves has worked for me for the past 20 odd months, but with less than two weeks to go until the election, it turns out I need youthful anti-authoritarian screeds that condemn everything done by older generations and those in power. Who ever thought anarchy could be so appealing or apathy so empowering?

After a long string of silly experimentation and navel-gazing technical proficiency, it’s about time I got something so exposed and in your face that there’s hardly anything to analyze. This is just pure disaffected youth in a crumbling economy railing against everything they see. “No future!” Johnny Rotten, whose annoying British drawl becomes enjoyable when backed by a brutal guitar assult, screams in “God Save The Queen,” the best song ever, condemning not only those who caused the problems but also those who are trying to fix them. Nobody escapes his bleak schaudenfreude: “No future for you/No future for me.”

This primal, visceral sound puts a sneer on your face, a snarl in your speech, and turns everybody into somebody just asking to get their ass kicked. I think I may just keep this on repeat for the next two weeks.

Rating:

Mixers: “Problems,” “God Save The Queen,” “Seventeen,” “Anarchy In The U.K.,” “EMI”
Non-keeper: “New York”
Filed Between: Sepultura (Roots) and Ravi Shankar (Raga Charukauns)

This album just screams guitar rock from the early 1980’s. (That’s a good thing.) It sounds very inspired by/inspirational for/in the same zeitgeist as Rick Springfield’s work from the same era. (That’s a very good thing.)

Like a word search, let’s see if I can pull out all of the elements of rock crica 1982. “A One Story Town” and “Change Of Heart” feature that lead guitar that stands out from the rest of the song, bringing in a second melody to interact with that of the vocals. The song you know from this album is “You Got Lucky” and those insistently pulsing keyboard sounds would make Foreigner proud if they hadn’t done something very similar on 1977’s “Cold As Ice.” The intro to “Deliver Me” recalls John Cougar’s “Hurt So Good” and the breakdown is very Springfield-esque in its shukka-shukka grooving guitar treading water between the short, pregnant riff played by the whole band. “We Stand A Chance” starts off an awful lot like Foreigner’s “Double Vision,” another sound on loan from the late 1970’s. Petty must have really liked the album Double Vision as he also references “Hot Blooded” at the beginning of “The Same Old You.” Journey Escape was a game for Atari the year this album came out, and Petty pays Journey’s “Escape” credit with the intro to “Between Two Worlds.”

Wow, I did not expect that paragraph to be that long. I’m also forced to revise my thesis, because I had no idea before I started how many Foreigner songs from four and five years earlier he alludes to.

So here’s the new deal. You know how Foreigner and Journey are completely guilty pleasures in that, yeah, big chunks of their songs are really appealing, but, like candy, if you have more than just a little treat every now and then, you feel sick to your stomach? Well Petty takes all the good elements of Journey and Foreigner, removes the crap that makes you feel sick, drops in some organic Rick Springfield, which is all-naturally good, and gives us the delicious and healthy Long After Dark.

Plus there are the lyrics. Remember how in the 1990’s it was a big deal that people were writing Ph.D. theses on Madonna? It really wasn’t all that newsworthy that sociology doctoral candidates were examining current popular music, but the traditional media used it as a story to fill time back when we were sorely lacking complete and total access to movie stars’ lives. Anyway, I think I might write a thesis about Petty’s lyrics. Take “You Got Lucky,” for example. At first listen, it’s about a thankless soon-to-be ex-: “Good love is hard to find/You got lucky when you found me.” However, a closer examination reveals no information at all about this departing lover, and what we really have is a close look at the song’s protagonist, who, for all we know, might not actually be all that fun to date. Or then there’s “Straight Into Darkness,” which begins like a typical Springsteen exploration of love gone stale, but ends with the headstrong determination to find perservere and find “real love.” Leaving his lyrics as vague as he does makes them appropriate to so many different viewpoints, and is a big part of his broad appeal. That’s the thesis of my thesis. I’ll take one fancy piece of paper, please.

I love this album, and I think it’s right up there in his upper echelon of albums, which includes, but is by no means limited to, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Damn The Torpedoes, and Wildflowers.  This will pretty much end my recent Tom Petty flurry. He’s one of my favorite artists, but you might not know how juicy he makes me from the 3.5 and 4 lunchboxes some of his albums have received. I feel the disconnect, too, and I think it’s resolved by the fact that Petty’s strength lies primarily in a lengthy career of a few very, very good songs every year. (Like, when you heard he was playing the Super Bowl this year, didn’t you think that was the most perfect Super Bowl performer on the planet?) I won’t say that his albums have lots of filler, I just think his value is spread out over his career rather than concentrated in a few albums. None of this applies to Highway Companion, though, about which I’m still pretty upset.

Rating:

Mixers: “You Got Lucky,” “Deliver Me,” “Change Of Heart,” “We Stand A Chance,” “Straight Into Darkness,” “Between Two Worlds”
Non-keepers: “A Wasted Life”
Filed Between: Hard Promises and Full Moon Fever

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)

After MPL Laboratories created the equation that describes the relationship between the quality of Radiohead’s cover art and their music, we wondered if it wasn’t, in fact, an inverse relationship. After developing further experiments to try to answer that question, we can now saw conclusively that it is not a relationship that behaves strictly inversely. This was proven by the fact that Kid A’s art is their worst yet, while the music is not their best. Furthermore, their best album from the 20th century (and I’m including this release from 2000 in that list) is OK Computer whose art is actually pretty good.

Kid A is actually pretty similar to OK Computer in style. In fact, if I were to randomly hear one of their combined 22 songs, I’m not sure I could place it on the correct album with much more than 50% accuracy. The U2 influence is completely gone by now, and Radiohead has come into their own as a unique, formidable creative force. Like OK Computer, the straight-ahead, guitar-driven rock is put aside for a synth-y, cold, and detached, while still beautiful feel. Unlike their prior album, though, Kid A is more of a mood machine than a collection of songs in the traditional sense. It is a work of music, in and of itself, an opus, if you will. It does not lend itself to shuffle play, and will only submit to being played from start to finish.

Kid A was the album where the band decided to really challenge their fans, as virtually every song takes on some kind of experiment to mix a new sound into the Radiohead oeuvre. “Everything In Its Right Place” implements an effect where it sounds like Yorke’s vocals are on a cassette tape that is being eaten, “The National Anthem” features a chaotic free-jazz ensemble highlighted by a Morphine-like sax solo, and “Treefingers” is a new age-y piece composed of sustained chords with harmonic movement but no progression. And that’s just in the first half of the album. The second half contains “Idioteque,” that, with its tight drum hits, sounds like it could have come right out of a club, and “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” with bagpipe-like synths and a brilliant harp part. And of course it all works excellently.

Kid A doesn’t cripple me with its detached, powerful emotion the way OK Computer does, but it’s still a masterpiece. There’s hardly a flaw (*cough* “In Limbo”) from start to finish, and what’s there is brilliant, but just shy of transcendental.

Rating:

Mixers: “Everything In Its Right Place,” “The National Anthem,” “Optimistic,” “Idioteque”
Keepers: everything else…”In Limbo” mostly only because it fits with the rest of the album
Filed Between: OK Computer and Ramones (Ramones)

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)

Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky was originally the score for Sergei Eisenstein’s film of the same name, but later, for performance purposes, evolved into the seven-movement cantata contained on this disc.

I haven’t seen the film, but due to Prokofiev’s musical fluency and literacy, I feel like I know exactly what happens. The sonic narrative is clear, propulsive, emotional, and powerful. When people praise modern-day film scorers, it is pragmatically. “They really know what they’re doing,” the praisers will say, which means, “They really know how to manipulate an audience.” It’s sad that today’s film scorers couldn’t have learned more from Prokofiev than just the superficial sonic elements, because if every film’s score was this good I would be way more into film than I am.

Telling the story of a 13th century soldier who led a Russian army against an invasion by a Teutonic army, and debuting with the film in 1938, the music and lyrics here are, naturally, of an intense patriotic fervor. It makes me wish I were a Russian in the 1930’s. In retrospect, that’s a ridiculous time and place to choose, but such is the power of this music that it stirs up pride in the soul that didn’t even exist before.

Bold, beautiful, modern, epic, and grandiose, Alexander Nevsky is what 20th century classical music should be. It introduces all sorts of melodic and harmonic challenges, but is still intuitively musically compelling, especially if you give it a few listens, and oozes modernity…even seventy years later. It’s hard to pick highlights from the nearly 40-minutes of the piece, but “The Crusaders In Pskov” is worthy of mention. Haunted by a recurring, descending motif that would have made Wagner proud, this movement has a mild and not unpleasant dissonance throughout that seeps and flows around a few central tones, all while the chorus pounds out a steady Latin chant. The effect is dark and mesmerizing. The 13-minute epic, “The Battle On Ice” and the final movement, “Alexander’s Entry Into Pskov” are top of the line as well.

This CD is rounded out with an inclusion of Scythian Suite, which is more than 20 years older than Nevsky and is also by Prokofiev. This piece is far more chaotic and challenging than Nevsky, as Prokofiev, still in his 20’s, really pushes the boundaries in full-on rock star style. It also contains thematic moments that would make John Williams, who wrote the Star Wars and Indiana Jones scores, among others, proud. The opening movement of the ballet, “The Adoration of Veless and Ala,” is like Debussy’s Children’s Corner evolved into a full orchestra piece on a bad trip, complete with pink elephants stomping through your room. In short, it’s fantastic.

This is easily one of the most immediately arresting and accessible classical CDs I own. It’s also one of the best, but I won’t pretend that those two things are not related. I’m simultaneously sad it took me this long to get any Prokofiev in my collection and delighted that I have so much more to look forward to.

Rating:

Mixers: “The Crusaders In Pskov,” “Arise, Ye Russian People”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Prince (Musicology) and Prong (Force Fed)

Radiohead has the largest positive difference between quality of music on an album and the quality of that album’s artwork. This has been empirically verified in the MPL laboratory. We arrived at the following equation: Music_awesome – Art_suck = Number_large. If you could judge a CD by its cover, Radiohead would be derided like Britney instead of being the popular, influential giant that they are. I can understand now why they decided to release In Rainbows over the Internet first: no cover art.

I guess if every artist has some amount of suck in them, then cover art is the place you’ve got to put it. And there’s no suck anywhere else on this album, so this may indeed be the formula Radiohead uses when picking their cover art. “Let’s make sure it sucks bad, guys, so that the music is as good as possible.”

The only sonic problem on here is that they’ve got a bit of the same-key, same-tempo problem going on, as the band moves from the more straight-ahead style of Pablo Honey to the clean, crisp, futuristic style of OK Computer. They make a stop in dystopian future for The Bends, a depression-infused opus that Pink Floyd might have made in the 60’s if they wrote shorter songs back then.

The band still exudes a lot of U2 influence, especially in the vocals, but this is more Achtung Baby, whereas Pablo Honey was more The Joshua Tree. In addition to U2, there are a couple of new key elements here. One is dissonant abrasiveness, which they do well enough to prompt significant clockwise turning of the volume knob when they get to the most aggressive parts of “Planet Telex,” “Bones” and “My Iron Lung. They are starting to get their symphonic legs, a la Pink Floyd. “Fake Plastic Trees” is their first real attempt at the long, slow build, and they absolutely nail it. If you weren’t aware of what followed this, you’d say this was a band at the peak of their craft.

Rating:

Mixers: “Planet Telex,” “(Nice Dream),” “Black Star,” “Sulk,” “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Pablo Honey and OK Computer