Miss Piggy Lunchbox

This is the sweet spot…right where you want to be.  This is the perfect balance between dance hall rhythms and sounds, kickin’ melodies, and experimental glitch work.

Mouse On Mars, a duo from Dusseldorf, has been at it since 1993, so it’s no surprise that their 2006 release puts them leagues ahead of anybody else trying to do this kind of experimental dance-inspired music.  Hell, this album is so good it puts them leagues ahead of just about anybody doing either experimental or dance music, much less just those doing a combination of the two.

Somebody, it might have been Beckers, told me about some study once that revealed that most people like the music they do based on the timbre of it more than any other quality.  I don’t have a problem believing that, given my anecdotal observations of the world and their inferior (to mine, natch), illogical, and, quite frankly, wrong musical tastes.  But it must be a tendency and not an absolute because if it were an absolute, Mouse On Mars, with their scrumptious, sensual sound, would be the biggest band on Earth.  Still, it’s not hard to tell where these guys aren’t the most accessible band.  This album was released on Ipecac, after all, and that pretty much entails chaos and sour sounds.

Otto Von Schirach kept his grooves going longer than Fantômas did before exploding them into blips, and Mouse On Mars keeps theirs going even longer, fully engaging your butt and your heart before pulling your head in the game, taking you from rump shaking to beard scratching and back again throughout the course of a song and the disc.  And, yeah, like most electronic dance music, there are times when things get a bit repetitive, but, again, the sound is so warm and erotic that you just sink into the trance like a nap in the park on that first really warm spring day.

The real standouts are at the start of the disc.  “Chartnok,” “I Go Ego Why Go We Go,” and “Düül” are all amazing.  “Inocular – B” is like a lonesome didgeridoo in the outback played against a thumping, crowded club beat, which sounds like the most cheesy thing ever, but, as I’ve said, the sound is so gorgeous it somehow works.  “Skik”  could have been a great 8-bit video game song, which is a brilliant reaction to the Nintendo generation turning their favorite game music into guitar-driven rock.  Even “One Day, Not Today,” which is almost without structure, is incredibly listenable, with its muted glitches strangely comforting you the way the distance of the world does during the Sunday stupids when recovering from a Saturday night done to the fullest.

Honestly, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect combination of dance rhythms, catchy melodies, and experimentation than this.  You’ve got the perfect mix of immediate accessibility with the relistenability of all of the twists and turns of those crazy blips and bloops.  Both of me love this.

Rating:

Mixers: “Chartnok,” “Inocular – B,” “Bertney,” “Retphase – A,” “Retphase – B,” “Retphase – C,” “Retphase – D,” “Retphase – E,” “Retphase – F,” “Retphase – G,” “Retphase – H,” “Retphase – K”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Bob Mould (The Last Dog And Pony Show) and Mozart (Le Nozze Di Figaro, London Philharmonic Orchestra, cond. Georg Solti)

I’m pretty pumped right now because Emerald Queen Casino is promoting an upcoming Rick Springfield concert with a song other than “Jessie’s Girl.”

I can’t even remember if we were lovers
Or if I just wanted to
But I held her in my arms, I held her in my arms
I held her in my arms
But it wasn’t you
- “I Held Her In My Arms”

I’m not really sure what to make of Violent Femmes, which is partly due to not being sure what to make of this album, which is partly due to not being sure what this album is intended to be.  Add It Up (1981-1993) seems like it’s supposed to be a chronological greatest hits album covering the band’s first five albums, and it kind of is, but there are also a slew of odds and ends added in, like unreleased demos, live tracks, and an answering machine message.  Add that kind of diversity to an already diverse set of genres (they handle everything from country to free jazz, including a performance with John Zorn), and you’ve got a scattershot record.

Of course there are the hits.  There’s obviously “Blister In The Sun” from their 1983 self-titled debut, along with “Gone Daddy Gone” (with what’s likely to be the best xylophone solo in all of rock) and live versions of “Kiss Off” (with performances constructed to sound sloppy but that actually exhibit expert musicianship) and “Add It Up” from that disc that brashly exploded onto college radio.

That album was, and continues to be, the high water mark of the band’s career, though their remaining years weren’t a total loss.  1986’s The Blind Leading The Naked contained the Best Song Ever, “I Held Her In My Arms,” whose music perfectly matches it’s lyrics of unrequited longing by sustaining a long, held note on keys while the rest of the band reaches up to a higher register for the emotional chorus.  A b-side from the same year, “Dance, Motherfucker, Dance!” is another highlight, consisting of little more than the two words in its title and the exultant affirmation of the titular exclamation mark.

But those moments of fabulousness are ruined by so much unlistenable material.  I never knew the Femmes did “American Music” (“Do you like American music?”), but I also never noticed just how whiny it was.  A quick count comes up with no fewer than nine (of 23) songs that are abrasive in all the wrong ways, veering from Jonathan Richman-esque faux-naiveté to “America Is”,” a, frankly, quite disgusting, reactionary, and unpatriotic criticism of the United States that makes even me cringe and wonder where the band might be happier (honestly, what country doesn’t have hypocrites?).

So it’s not a total waste, but due to the haphazard flow of the album and the wide variance in quality, this gives a very hazy view of the 13 years covered by this disc.  But I have a feeling that is exactly what the band, seemingly a bit scattershot themselves, was going for.

Rating:

Best Song Ever: “I Held Her In My Arms”
Mixers: “Gone Daddy Gone,” “Dance, Motherfucker, Dance!”
Keepers: “Blister In The Sun,” “Gimme The Car,” “Country Death Song,” “36-24-36,” “I Hate The TV,” “Out The Window,” “Kiss Off (Live),” “Add It Up (Live)”
Filed Between: Vincent & Mr. Green (Vincent & Mr. Green) and Voivod (War And Pain)

Intelligent Dance Music, or IDM for short, may be the most pretentious musical genre name ever.  The Wikipedia entry on it, however, describes it in a way that perfectly encapsulates the varied music of IDM practitioner Otto Von Schirach:  “Stylistically, IDM tends to rely upon individualistic experimentation rather than on a particular set of musical characteristics.”

According to Von Schirach’s bio on Ipecac’s website, this album originated as a mix of 38 songs he sent to Ipecac co-founder Mike Patton, who then hand-selected the tracks that make up Maxipad Detention.  Patton’s influence is here, with an emphasis on fuzzy, distorted sounds patched together in musical ways, stuttery vocal samples, and, well, let’s just say that if I had had that original mix and been asked to guess which 18 Patton would have picked, I guarantee I would have known “Submarine Mammal Milk,” which features the incredibly unsettling mix of pornographic loops over babies crying, dogs barking, and cows mooing, would have made the cut.

While this has elements of Patton influence, this is also quite distinct from a Patton project.  Von Schirach tends to keep things moving along a bit more than Patton, there’s less dwelling in deep, meditative non-grooves, and, once your ears get used to the sounds and sound combinations, things almost seem kind of song-like.

In fact, I have the perfect “composer” to compare this music to, but it will mean nothing to any of you and simultaneously seem pretentious.  From time to time I’ll get a bug up my ass that I’m going to start composing again, taking full advantage of synthesizers, sound libraries, and loop technology, because what I hear in my head can’t really be notated, at least not the way it comes to me, and it certainly can’t be played on my piano.  This album contains several songs that sound like the music in my head when I get on one of these kicks.  When I first heard “Rumbling Cork Screw,” I was sure I’d heard it before, but I couldn’t place the artist.  It took me a few minutes to realize that the style therein was first heard by me in my head.

No single track is exemplary of the entire album, especially given its compilation process, but “Alligator Waltz” is the best track and so receives the exemplar treatment.  It begins with a heavy riff that is pretty quickly contrasted by a high-range, melodic, pasted track of female vocal samples, which will eventually become the track’s chorus, for lack of a better word.  The vocals will anchor you when you get disoriented by the rapidly changing rhythms and sound combinations of car horns and muted jackhammers and dentist drills.  It’s a fantastic seduction of the brain, always keeping you on the edge by getting you just comfortable with a riff before taking you in a new direction that’s even better; it’s what Fantomas’ Suspended Animation could have been if they hadn’t just screwed the whole thing up so badly.

The biggest drawback of the album is that it was put together not necessarily as an album but as a collection of styles that Von Schirach could execute on.  As such, there’s no arc here. Furthermore, while some of the tracks are exercises that make for intellectually stimulating material but not necessarily entertaining listening, and while everything is well-executed, there are a few tracks whose aims are flat-out ill-conceived.  As a collection, though, it’s great, from the long-burp vocals of “Frog Gingivitis” to the ominous intro to “Tea Bagging The Dead,” the best-named song of all time, to the Ummagumma trip of “The Seventh Juggler” to the sci-fi soundtrack of “Translator Kuthumi,” there’s something here for everyone.  Well, maybe not everyone, but it sure does provide a lot of descriptive phrases I couldn’t end the review without getting in.

Rating:

Mixers: “Alligator Waltz,” “Frog Gingivitis”
Non-keepers: “Toma Liquido De Ballena,” “Maxipad Vegetation,” “Three Billion Electron Volts,” “Submarine Mammal Milk,” “Translator Kuthumi,” “Swollen Whale Abdomen”
Filed Between: Voivod (Negatron) and Wagner (Der Fliegende Hollander cond. Ferenc Fricsay, orch. RIAS Symphony Orchestra)

I lost my innocence today
When I learned how to write this
- “Celebrate You”

It may be crazy to say about an album that only went gold and made very little impact outside of the hit song “Seether,” but this may be the album that wraps up 1994 better than any other.  Take the drop tunings of Seattle, the catchy chug of The Breeders, the breathy, sweet vocals of Juliana Hatfield and the disturbing lyrics of L7, throw in some Billy Corgan Chicago fuzz, put the Best Song ever (“Seether”) on top, and you’ve got this album.  There really may not be an album more representative of 1994’s zeitgeist than this.

What I take away from it more than anything else is how great the guitar solos are, which is surprising given how little emphasis the production puts on them, burying them down in the mix with the rhythm section.  Of course, it’s never really been cool for indie bands to be good at their instruments, but Nina Gordon and/or Louise Post can really play in a way that supports the songs and fall just short enough of virtuosic to maintain indie cred.  In “Forsythia” for example, the solo starts off with a simple scale that evolves into a headstrong argument with the harmony, a pattern carried even further into an all out screaming match in “25.”

One of the downsides of the band being so good at rawk is that the slow songs, even though well-executed, end up being an exercise in impatience.  “Fly” is gorgeous, but it’s really just something that makes me wait for “Number One Blind” and “Victrola.”  “Sleeping Where I Want” is good enough to have a place somewhere, just not on this album and certainly not at the end where it leaves an aftertaste of ennui not reflective of the enjoyment of the rest of the album.

1994 may have seen the cancellation of the World Series, but thankfully Veruca Salt’s reminded me of how good it sounded with its 50-minute summary, American Thighs.

Rating:

Best Song Ever: “Seether”
Mixers: “All Hail Me,” “Victrola”
Non-keepers: “Sleeping Where I Want”
Filed Between: Verdi (Otello) and Vincent & Mr. Green (Vincent & Mr. Green)

What is the meaning of this?
What are you trying to do?
- “The Stars Look Down”

A review criticizing this album might first focus on the fact that all of the songs are too long.  Even when they’re well-written, like the classic Rush goodness at the beginning of “Ceiling Unlimited” or the hard rocking of “Earthshine,” all of the material tends to have been prsesented by about the 60% mark, leaving the last 40% to drone on into boredom.  This is a band that used to write songs that filled an entire LP side and were fantastic from start to finish.  A review could take that line of criticism, but the too long songs are only the album’s, like, fourth biggest problem.

I could critique this album on lead singer Geddy Lee’s inability to write a vocal melody with any kind of hook in it.  But that would only be about half true, since many of the melodies on the verses of these songs are pretty good.  And it’s really only the third biggest problem with this CD.

A better critique would be that of Neil Peart’s lyrics, which, while refreshing devoidly of the Ayn Rand nonsense permeating them in the 70’s and 80’s, are execrable.  They’re half-thoughts, cliches clumsily pasted together like a young child’s art work.  At one point I was going to collect their awfulness for you, but I would probably get sued for copyright infringement since I would basically be posting the lyric sheet.  So let me just leave you with the two prototypes of nauseating pablum here.  First there’s the I’m-deep-by-calling-things-opposites half-hearted poetry of “Secret Touch” (“The way out is the way in”), and then you have the cliche that even fifth-graders know is overdone, as in “Nocturne” (“A voice in the wilderness.”)  But, again, the lyrics are really only the second biggest problem of this album.

What really makes this disc so bad that it even makes the band’s prior studio release, Test For Echo, seem like a glorious achievement, is its sound quality.  This album sounds so bad, Wikipedia has a section on it.

The production of Vapor Trails has been criticized due to the album’s “loud” sound quality. Albums such as this have been mastered so loud that additional digital distortion is generated during the production of the CD. The trend, known as the Loudness war, has become very common on modern rock CDs.

…Rush has admitted that there was digital distortion during recording, which also contributed to the damage. Remastering the album would not correct the damage from digital distortion that was introduced during recording, but it could correct the other, more destructive damage that is the result of overly-compressing the audio during mastering.

[Guitarist Alex] Lifeson…stated: “It was a contest, and it was mastered too high, and it crackles, and it spits, and it just crushes everything. All the dynamics get lost, especially anything that had an acoustic guitar in it.”

Yep, that’s exactly what it sounds like.  There is no nuance due to the near-total compression into mud, and there is also clipping distortion due to that.  You can tell where there were intended to be color changes as they switch from verse to bridge or chorus, but you can’t actually hear that color change, making the album a 67-minute exercise in failure.

This really is unconscionable.  We knew how to make good sounding CDs in the 1980’s.  In 2002 there was no excuse for a product sounding this bad, much less from an already rich, successful band with a history of high quality production.  So they made a mistake, but why couldn’t they re-record or re-mix the record?  I wouldn’t want to put my name on something this awful.  Why wouldn’t a mega band like Rush pull out all the stops not to leave this black stain on their legacy?

A lesser band wouldn’t be allowed to release something that sounded this bad because they wouldn’t have hooked in the loyal fan base yet.  There’s no excuse for this kind of blatant cost-cutting money grab, and everybody involved with the making of this CD should be ashamed.  It overshadows the lack of melodies, the too-long songs, and the awful lyrics combined.  “Freeze” gets kept because it’s the best song and has a cool 5/4 meter (though it still sounds awful).  It’s trash like this  morality problem masquerading it as a CD , making it not just qualitatively bad but essentially bad, for which I reserve the rarest and lowest of my ratings.  Congratulations, Rush, you have just made it even harder to earn the rare single lunchbox.

Rating:

Mixers: None
Keeper: “Freeze – Part IV Of ‘Fear’”
Filed Between: Rush’s The Spirit Of Radio and Rusted Root (When I Woke)

Well you heard about love givin’ sight to the blind
My baby’s lovin’ cause the sun to shine
- “Pride And Joy”

The blues have always been a bit of an enigma to me.  Give me a blues tune in isolation and I’m loving it.  But put a few blues songs back to back and I’m very quickly bored.  An entire genre built around the same three-chord, 12-bar progression?  It’s astounding the genre has so many performers and devotees.  Hasn’t it all been done?  What are they hearing that I’m not?  Is it like dog whistle music or something?

All of which becomes tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughan that I like this album as much as I do.  Much like with the blues, I’d never understood the passion surrounding Vaughan, all of which seemed to spontaneously arise when he died in a helicopter crash following a show in Wisconsin when I was in high school.  I’d never heard of him before, and yeah, his technical prowess was amazing, but it kind of felt like the eulogizing exceeded the oeuvre.  As you can tell, I was all ready to write a review along these lines until I gave this album a few listens.

As a music reviewer, I consider it my job to find descriptions for enjoyment (or not) of music. Sometimes, though, I just can’t do it.  Much like with the Janis Joplin review I punted on, I’m tempted to regurgitate the same platitudes everybody gives: filled with soul and feeling, master of his craft, etc.  All of it’s true, but you’ve got better things to do than read that about a 27-year-old album.  Suffice it to say that this is one of those rare works of art that manages to be a pinnacle of the genre’s achievement as well as an excellent introduction to the genre, accessible to the neophyte and appreciated by the connoisseur.  It is to guitar-oriented blues what Kind Of Blue is to mid-century jazz and what Appetite For Destruction is to heavy metal.

So why only four lunchboxes?  Specifically, because I think the shuffle in “Tell Me” is played, “Rude Mood” is too much (too fast and dizzying) and not enough (derivative, uninspiring melody) all at the same time, and “Pride And Joy” is a little too easy.  Generally, well, maybe it’s just because I just have some trouble with the genre’s limits.  But that’s on the genre (and me), not on SRV, who kills this, far exceeding my expectations of what was possible.

Rating:

Mixer: “Love Struck Baby”
Non-keeper: “Rude Mood”
Filed Between: The Vaselines (The Way Of The Vaselines—A Complete History) and Velocity Girl (¡Simpatico!)

Even if I try to understand
It won’t ever be the same
Is there any left for me?
- “Nickel Wound”

Texas Is The Reason, their name a reference to JFK assassination conspiracy theories, a theme that continues through the song titles on the album, is the last band in J-mez’ collection that was new to me, and it was a good one.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this is why I slog through so much bad music, because you never know when you’ll find some unknown band you love.

The only full length ever released by the band, Do You Know Who You Are? was produced by J. Robbins of Jawbox and Burning Airlines fame, which explains its awesomeness but leaves as puzzling its worst quality: its anemic sound quality.  “Anemic” is the exact right word, as there’s no depth, no low end, no warmth.

The sonic style may have been a choice, as it fits the rough and straining voice of singer Garrett Klahn, whose vocal style is charming in the same way as that of a favorite high school band might be (I’m reminded of the fantastic early 90’s Mankato band My Friend Stu).  So the style may have been a choice, but as with A Man About A Horse (in fact, the bands and albums are very similar), it holds the product back.

The songs are amazing compositions expertly piecing together catchy and powerful riffs reminiscent of Sunny Day Real Estate’s Seven, but the sound just leaves me with the feeling of a once-loved project left to molder as the changes the band members went through after graduation made it impossible to keep in touch more than superficially.  In some ways it adds to the appeal, like I’m some omniscient being able to vicariously enjoy some fantastic teenage friendship through the art it left behind, making them my new favorite band.  But in another way it keeps it from attaining an extra half lunchbox.

Rating:

Mixers: “Johnny On The Spot,” “Back And To The Left”
Non-keeper: “Do you know who you are?”
Filed Between: Testament (The Ritual) and Therapy? (“Misery” cassette single)

Well something’s lost but something’s gained
In living ev’ry day
- “Both Sides, Now”

Joni Mitchell’s second album, Clouds, isn’t for sissies: this is serious business.  I know you think it’s all simple acoustic guitar strums and tales of sunlight, but this is an intense collection of unconventional guitar tunings and chord progressions, augmented fourths, varied tempi, and a varied, vivid, and dense tapestry of characters and emotions.

The price of admission is high.  Mitchell could have started this album off with the catchy, sunny “Chelsea Morning,” sucking you in with poppy sweetness, but she delays.  Instead you have to start off with “Tin Angel,” a melancholy ebbing and flowing, both musically and lyrically, tale of settling for settling for love [sic].  The palpable weight of the song and exhaustion of its narrator is not for the faint of heart and fits in better with the other dark, minor-key compositions later in the album, but Mitchell uses it as a weeder-out song: you can’t get the rest of the album unless you get this.

This is an album best appreciated as the sum of its parts.  Other than its sparse instrumentation, naked vocals, languid, fluid rhythms, and depth of emotion (actually that’s a lot, isn’t it?), there’s not so much in the way of coherence here.  It doesn’t feel like an album so much as one amazing composition after another.

It doesn’t come on to you, it just sits back there being brilliant.  You can approach it, admire it, try to engage it, but that doesn’t change what it is or does.  It’s not even that it’s there for you to see, it makes you work to get in it, though it won’t fight you if you try.  Beware that quiet confidence and apathy towards you, though, because after some point curiosity will become infatuation and you’ll be unable to escape its charms.  Everything about it seems completely different, so much richer, than it did initially.  You kind of remember thinking that it was a little off at first, like maybe her nose or cheekbones were too angular or her hair was dirty, or that “Both Sides, Now” wasn’t a mixer, but that’s just faint memory that was maybe just a dream or something you saw in a movie because now she’s flawless, the utter definition of beauty, more beautiful and just as relevant (see the protest of America’s militant foreign policy, “The Fiddle And The Drum”) with each passing year and there’s no other way she could be, even if you can’t quite articulate why.

Rating:

Mixers: “Chelsea Morning,” “That Song About The Midway,” “Both Sides, Now”
Keepers: the rest
Filed Between: A Language Records sampler titled Miscellaneous and Mocean Worker (Mixed Emotional Features)

You’ll wanna see the band playing bish bash bosh tonight
- “Tonight”

Supergrass is one in a long line of over-hyped bands from England that pretty much flopped in the United States.  Stone Roses, Oasis, Arctic Monkeys…help me out…there’s so many.  “Flopped” might be too strong a word, especially in the case of Oasis, but these bands never live up to their hype: they’re always supposed to be “the next Beatles,” and not only do they not live up to that impossible standard; their eventual impact hardly ever makes them next Rick Astley.

In It For The Money, the band’s second album (so they’d already been vetted and discarded in the States by this point), starts off with a real good groove on the title track and I begin to think the Yanks may have had this one wrong.  But they immediately ruin the whole thing by going with the chorus too many times at the end and then screw up, I can only guess intentionally since making it awesome should have required next to no effort, the transition to the next song, “Richard III,” one of the best on the record.

And that’s kind of how it goes through the whole album: unrealized promise.  The first three tracks kick it hard, then there’s a couple of mediocre tracks, then another great one, then the worst song on the album (“Going Out”), and so on.  There’s enough quality on this that it’s hard for me to grant it three lunchboxes, my lowest rating for a CD I like, but given that it never seems to achieve greatness for more than a couple minutes at a time, the inanity of the non-keepers, and the lack of easy enjoyability (it’s just hard to sink into), three lunchboxes is what it deserves.

Listen, I’m not saying Brits have bad musical taste.  They probably do, but that’s not what I’m saying right now.  What I am saying is that two places separated by an ocean, no matter how similar their cultures or how easy technology has made media distribution, will develop different tastes.  Furthermore, those tastes will diverge as younger generations grow up hearing different songs in their youth, creating different and divergent aesthetic sensibilities.  And so STOP FUCKING TELLING ME I’M GOING TO LIKE WHATEVER SHIT ALL THE WANKERS IN ENGLAND THINK IS THEIR NEXT FUCKING GIFT TO AMERICAN RADIO AND THEN WRITING CONDESCENDING ARTICLES ABOUT HOW AMERICANS DON’T LIKE WHAT SOUNDS SO OBVIOUSLY FUCKING FANTASTIC TO YOU!

I’ve been holding that in for over a decade.  F**kin’ music critics.

Rating:

Mixers: “You Can See Me,” “Sometimes I Make You Sad”
Non-keepers: “Late In The Day,” “Going Out,” “Hollow Little Reign”
Filed Between: Sunny Day Real Estate (The Rising Tide [Japanese Import]) and Matthew Sweet (100% Fun)