Miss Piggy Lunchbox

This CD turns me into those comedy/tragedy theater masks. It makes me so happy because it’s good, fast, guitar-drenched pop music with great lyrics, but it also makes me sad because it’s a travesty that bands this good can go their whole existence without being noticed. It was a while before I was even able to find them on the Internet. They’re not these guys. Nor these guys. Here they are. Or maybe the bright side is that there are still undiscovered gems like this out there, just waiting to brighten up my life when I stumble upon them, content to play awesome music to people around their hometown and never try to make it more than a hobby

Poppy guitar hooks are clearly becoming my weakness, as almost all of the CDs I adore now fit that mold. I’m not sure why more bands don’t go for this aesthetic, because when it is done well it’s quite clearly the most perfect way to manipulate air molecules…and blood molecules, as I can distinctly feel them rush into my penis when I hear music this good.

Maybe it’s not done often because it’s really hard to do well. Or maybe because the bands that do it well, like The Cutters, Vampire Weekend, and Airborne Toxic Event, do it so damned well that it’s not even worth trying to add to the conversation unless you can be at that level. I mean, the hooks are so perfect, so timeless, that if you set out to write music like The Cutters, you’d just come off as a sorry imitation because with hooks like this, that sound like they must have been competing with The Beach Boys for their place at the top of the charts. They sound so perfect that it’s impossible to escape them, and if you tried to write tunes while hopped on these, you’d just end up writing the same thing because why mess with perfection. I’m coming to the conclusion that true musical brilliance is finding those remaining pop hooks that haven’t been written yet. Hearing some band still do it, though, gives me hope that Schoenberg was right that there really is so much great music left to be written in C major.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was, to read in the liner notes that Danny Heifetz of Mr. Bungle played percussion on this album and co-produced it. Brilliance attracts brilliance. (Note: It actually might be a different guy since his name is spelled “Heifitz” in two places in the liner notes, but I find that too strong a coincidence.)

Do yourself a favor and buy both of the band’s CDs for sixteen dollars. I will be shortly. You can also download some mp3s. Start with the powerful “Counting Cars,” which is about a few seconds shy of being the Best Song Ever and go from there to the vindictive “Get It Wrong.” Celebrating some asshole’s death has never sounded so good. Then move to a couple more adventurous tracks, like “Out Tonight,” which features what sounds like a bomb as an instrument at the beginning, and their tribute to what I’m guessing was a major influence, Buddy Holly’s “Everyday,” which they imbue with a spooky, uncomfortable vibe with some low-frequency sounds in the background.

This is my new favorite album and new favorite band. I’m not sure whether to be happy about that or to be sad that I’ll almost certainly never see them play live.

Rating:

Mixers: “Out Tonight,” “Sunday Sunday Sunday,” “Counting Cars,” “Li Li,” “Get It Wrong”
Non-keepers: “Veruca Salt,” “Where In The World”
Filed Between: Curse Of The Golden Vampire (Mass Destruction) and Cutting Through – Columbia Hard Music sampler

Instructions:
1) Stop whatever you are doing.
2) Buy, borrow, or steal Jump, Little Children’s 1998 album, Magazine.
3) Listen to it.
4) Experience elation.

I’ve listened to some fantastic albums this year, but it’s hard to think of one that has a leg up on Magazine for MPL’s Album of the Year. There is not one note out of place on this entire, perfect disc. It’s accessible (I liked every song the first time I heard it), but also has depth (I’ve listened to it probably over 10 times now and it just keeps getting better.) It has just the right combination of ballads and rockers and every perfectly assembled song could easily be the next one stuck in your head. Emphatic vocals soar over driving guitars and some of the tightest drumming you’ve ever heard while strings round out the emotional palette that isn’t filled by the brilliant lyrics. And just when you think the song’s topped out, in comes a bridge carefully crafted to fit in seamlessly but also give the tune a welcome bit of spice. It’s a little bit pop, a little bit punk, and all rawk

I want to make out with this band. Magazine is my new favorite album, and “Say Goodnight” is the best song ever. You know it’s a good album when I hardly have anything to say about it.

Meanwhile, I have my own set of instructions to follow now:
1) Find friends who don’t let a decade go by before introducing me to music this good.

If I were king, withholding information like this would be a felony.

Rating:

Mixers: “Violent Dreams,” “Come Out Clean,” “Cathedrals,” “My Guitar,” “B-13,” ““Say Goodnight”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Judgment Night Soundtrack and Kaada (Thank You For Giving Me Your Valuable Time)

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)

This is a perfect (or very nearly so) pop album. With unbelievably catchy melodies, the perfection of that slightly distorted sound all the kids are trying to get right these days, world music influences, and songs that move naturally from one awesome riff to the next, methodically building to a jumping-up-and-down-in-ecstasy climax, this is the album that The Beatles would make in 2008.

At least half of these 11 songs feature melodies that are so damned catchy you can’t believe nobody’s written them yet. Hearing new songs like that is probably the best musical experience you can have at age 33, because it reaffirms the power of music and how much untapped potential is still out there. I’m sure I’ll listen to twelve mediocre albums in a row at some point in the future and lose all faith in humankind’s ability to write a hook again, but for now the possibilities are endless and I can’t even see the horizon.

Wikipedia says the band is influenced by African popular music, and that’s there in the drums, but it doesn’t get in the way of perfectly accessible Western pop songs. I also hear some Jamaican reggae and Latino influences, too. It’s all so easy, though, with absolutely no pretension. So even if world music scares you, you’ll be able to dig on this, and you get the burnishing of your world music cred for free. And remember, it’s basically a modern The Beatles, so what’s to be afraid of?

Vampire Weekend wouldn’t really be a band attending Columbia if there weren’t some pretension, though, and they chose to insert it in the lyrics. Words and phrases like Dharamsala, Madras, Jackson Crowther, kefir, and keffiyah (sic), dowdy, and rickshaw appear every other verse. They fit, though. They’re not forced in there, and you almost get the feeling that they really do talk like this. Who knows, maybe I’m just swept up in the dreamy pop tunes.

“The Kids Don’t Stand A Chance” ends the album and, while okay, is entirely unnecessary, and weakens the album to a notch below perfect. Update: Screw it, this is a five lunchbox CD.  Criticizing this album for its last track is like criticizing Scarlett Johansson for her original nose.  Sure, it’s not what, taken alone, is traditionally regarded as what it should look/sound like, but it makes it even more appealing that there’s some humanity amid the outrageous perfection.  Johansson’s a perfect ten and this is a perfect five.  </Update> “Walcott” is the best song ever, but on a weaker album “Oxford Comma,” “Campus,” and “I Stand Corrected” all could have won the same title. So start with those, but for the love of God start now.

Rating:

Mixers: “Oxford Comma,” “A-Punk,” “Campus,” “I Stand Corrected,” “Walcott”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Steve Vai (Passion And Warfare) and Van Halen (1984)

Iron and Wine has all the elements to be the next big hip band. It’s basically one guy (Sam Bream, though he does get a lot of help on this album), going by the moniker of a group, and he sings in a whispery, breathy way that feels very unsure at first listen. If that’s not a recipe for hipster adoration in 2008, I don’t know what is.

Just because the hipsters should like him, though, doesn’t mean he’s not awesome, because he is. It takes a few listens, but after a while you get beyond the maddening lack of confidence in the vocal style and hear its aesthetic effect as one of many instruments in his heavily layered, dense, and chilled-out but powerful songs.

Those layers also make this album more challenging than most you’ll encounter. “House By The Sea,” in particular, seems to obscure the main song with another one with an odd rhythm and heavily-plucked guitar on top of it. Like the vocals, though, the listener’s patience is rewarded by these well-composed and -orchestrated tracks, and soon you’ll hear how each layer contributes what now seems like an essential part of the sonic sea in which you’re happily drowning.

Elliott Smith has to be one of Bream’s main influences, as his vocals often veer toward falsetto, and the instrumentation, despite its layers, has an airy but claustrophobic emotional feel to it. The melancholy “Carousel” and “Resurrection Fern” makes me weak in the knees, makes my heart skip a beat, and makes me feel like crying, but the crying where you don’t know why you’re crying.

Bream’s lyrics are evocatively imagistic (that’s a word? I thought I was making it up) like Smith’s, but instead of the intensely personal, these are more like vignettes. Each song tells some kind of non-linear story made up of still shots from the characters’ interactions and thoughts. The best way to describe his lyrics is just to tell you that Bream is a film professor, and then let you imagine what kind of lyrics he would write. You’ll be close.

Given this album’s hippie roots and its hipster appeal, it really is phenomenal that it’s earned the title of my new favorite album.

Rating:

Mixers: “White Tooth Man,” “Carousel,” “Resurrection Fern,” “Boy With A Coin”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: International Pop Underground Convention and Iron Maiden (Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son)

You work so hard to get it done
And then you get it done and what’s the point in that?
Cause when you work so hard you have no fun
And then you have no fun and what’s the point in that?
- “Good Distance”

And so my new fave band shows they have more insight into my life than even I do.

This is awesome. Can I Keep This Pen? leads off with these three women from Long Island rapping about their skills on the mic, gets you to fall in line behind their charge to the top of Mount Awesome, and doesn’t give you a chance to catch your f’ing breath until they reach the top. With every track, you think, “Oh, this is the best one on the record,” and then, while you’re still soaking in its awesomeness just a second after its finished, bam!, they’re back with something even more awesome.

This is so awesome it is killing me to stop rocking my ass off in order to write this post. So I’m just going to knock this s**t out so I can get back to bopping, k? Yeah, you understand.

So, yeah, it’s all here. Killer rhymes, rocking beats, hooks that just…don’t…stop, heroic guitar riffs, and samples integrated right into the damn song, unlike so much rap that finds a sweet bit and plays it 50 times over the course of three minutes to disguise a weak ass song. The sounds are swim-around-in lush. “Iluvitwhenya,” the best song ever about sex with your boyfriend, has two of the album’s best sounds in it: the furriness you can reach out and pet at the climax as well as the ringing guitar power chord early on whose power would make Glenn Danzig blush. This is simultaneously the smartest and most fun rap, and possibly music, I have ever heard. And if you were trying to maximize fun, smart, and rocking all at the same time, your first and last stop is Northern State.

I dare you to go watch their video for “Better Already” and then tell me you don’t love them to death. Also don’t miss the free mp3 for “Away Away,” which is my favorite song by them because it’s the one I’m listening to right now. Also, it’s awesome.

Every rap group should be three women from Long Island. Or maybe every rap group should be Northern State. ‘Tevs…I’m going to get back to listening to these girls sing about my social life.

Everybody’s talking bout getting married
Everybody’s talking bout having babies
Everybody’s talking bout making money
Everybody’s talking bout going to work
- “Cold War”

Rating:

Mixers: “Better Already,” “Away Away,” “Good Distance,” “Iluvitwhenya,” “Sucka Mofo,” “Cold War,” “Things I’ll Do”
Non-keepers: “The Three Amigas”
Filed Between: No Alternative and O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack