Top Ten CDs I Pulled Off My Parents' Shelf (Part One)

By Emmett Booth

This piece will come in installments. Hooray for installments!


I'm a college student, and a devoted music fan, and an older brother.

So, logically, I should be deluging my little bro with more sound than any reasonable, non-obsessive brain could hope to handle, taking part in the grand tradition of the cool older sibling warping and expanding the younger from a distance. But I'm not doing that, and I've rarely felt the impetus to.

This is partially out of respect for his own, independently burgeoning musical preferences, and partially because I know I would take it personally if he was uninterested in any of my most sacred touchstones--Husker Du, XTRMNTR, "Ignition (Remix)." But mostly, I refrain out of quiet reverence for the particular method by which I wormed my blind, curious, intimidated way into music obsession. That would be the way of the white wooden shelves, the one sturdy constant in a living room my family has never been fully satisfied with. What they hold is a lodestone of contemporary American suburban culture, as much so as every new television and increasingly globe-conscious car: the dusty, sprawling CD collection of two fortysomething parents.

Due to your favorite death-of-the-music-industry manifesto, my parents have largely stopped buying CDs. But the monument is still there, and quite a monument it is. My parents have defineable musical tastes, but fads, flavors, phases, and fickle red-herring debuts all have as much a place in that well-ordered mess as do the prominently displayed rows of Grateful Dead and Donna the Buffalo cases. There's history, variety, and strangness there. And the most wonderful thing about cluelessly approaching a new medium is that everything is equally strange, non-standard, and potentially delightful.

"Clueless" certainly sums up my relationship to music in my early adolescence. My 13-year-old self was a fair distance from spinning "House of Jealous Lovers" over Liquid Liquid beats, and I wasn't terribly interested in sharing what my friends had to offer--not because they had bad taste (they could have, I understandably don't remember), but because I took up my time with books and my PlayStation, and didn't see music as playing a large factor in my life.

Six years later, that has changed, and I owe it to those shelves and their monolithic burden. Once I caught the bug, I caught it bad, and have since recommended music to my parents far more often than the reverse. But it started with my parents' collection, timidly nosing into the pile for essentially random splinters of sound, trying to understand the one connection I had to a massive, complicated world. I found some of my favorites in that collection, but that's not what prompted me to list these particular ten CDs that I found there. These ones changed how I thought about music, how I could relate to it and how it could change, with time, with perspective, with the endless listening sessions that accompanied my rise into high school and beyond. These ones really mattered to me, a lot, and one of my deepest wishes is that my younger (no longer so 'little') brother can one day make a similar list, composed of treasures that are entirely his own.



R.E.M--In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003

(Warning: This entry contains footnotes. Footnotes remind me of R.E.M. Lots of incidental, unconnected things remind me of R.E.M. for reasons I can never explain, but still comprehend in their entirety, which strikes me as the perfect metaphor for R.E.M.)

Like I said, I wasn't especially cool. Other than Around the Sun, I cannot imagine a less hip first exposure to R.E.M. than this, a best-of collection (1) of their major label years (2) that focuses almost exclusively on singles (3). But hey, this was the one R.E.M. CD in my parent's collection, and if it oughtn't to have been the perfect introduction, it became so.

I'd vaguely heard of "Everybody Hurts," mentioned as one of the great nineties standards, and so the day after my first high school romance exploded, I impulsively pulled down In Time. I stared for a second at the blurry moon cover (4) and hit fast forward in a measured pace, unknowingly skipping past songs I would come to know better than my heartbeat, until I hit track 16. And with that, that was it. I was an R.E.M. fan, even though it took me an absurdly long time to get around to the original source albums for In Time's 18 tracks, and even longer to reach the indie stuff. It didn't matter--R.E.M. got into my blood, and would amiably refuse to leave now if I ever had reason to ask (5). The songs on In Time related to me differently than anything I'd ever listened to before, and that subject-object setup is key: these songs seemed alive, in the literal sense. They were living beings, in and of themselves, elements of their common creators but utterly separate from each other. And they were eager to talk to me.

"Man on the Moon" jumped out for its perfect, rutting chorus, but stuck around for the utterly unabashed "hey ya! hey ya! heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyy......" and for the strangely affectionate reading of the encyclopedia-spewed facts of the verses. "Losing My Religion", flawless and gutsy and as lyrically rich as any other rock song ever, Stipe spooling out a dozen different beautiful, barely-in-control vocal melodies before we (or he) can draw breath. "Daysleeper", the reason Radiohead seemed so strangely familiar upon their own introduction into my life, the perfect balance between the absurdly (wonderfully) specific and the utterly, gut-crunching universal, something R.E.M. does so well. "E-Bow the Letter", so strange and ancient-sounding and deeply, deeply adult; I had never heard of its parent album New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which would become my favorite of the band's major-label LPs, but even that song seemed to me to hide the longest and loveliest road out from behind it. And at the bottom of the pile, the glistening gem of "Nightswimming", which struck me with such complete, emotional images, one after another, that I had to cry and run to talk about it with my father, who as it turned out, had held that song close to his heart for years.

Music, previously, had been something that came and went, and I had let it go. This wasn't the critical cliche of music taking me over, seizing me, owning me so that I couldn't turn away. This was music, for the first time, becoming someone I could call friend.

(1) Strike one, in most-but-not-all cases.
(2) Strike two, for while they've still had quite a run on Warner Brothers, R.E.M. has always suffered from a commercial and cultural scorched-earth career division that leaves millions of well-meaning fans stranded, unaware of their career pre-"Losing My Religion" and Automatic for the People. This almost inevitable syndrome has hit bands from the Flaming Lips to Modest Mouse, but it's most tragic in the case of R.E.M., and the most frustrating, because I don't care how biased or indie-kid-blind I am to pop culture, I am convinced that Reckoning could go platinum if marketed correctly. Come on! If the Shins can change lives, we can get "Talk About the Passion" beyond college radio. Band together! Form a human wall! Get Michael Stipe to come by and scatter flower petals made of baked tofu!
(3) For most bands, I honestly wouldn't find this problematic. Singles are singled out for a reason, after all. But for a band with such deep, endlessly rewarding album tracks as R.E.M., strike motherfucking three.
(4) Which reached for the classic R.E.M. knack of turning the seemingly meaningless into the serenely beautiful, but just turned out kind of unmemorable.
(5) I don't, not even after Bill Berry left, not even after "Leaving New York". I don't.


Jeff Buckley--Grace

Lists like these inevitably bring out the most shameful and squirm-inducing admissions of adolescent biases and failures. So, here's mine: around the age of 15, I was terrified of music. Most of my little library sprang from enthusiastic recommendations or direct, sit-down-and-listen-to-this exposure; rarely did I make the independent leap to an "Everybody Hurts", and even when I approved of what I was given, I almost never pursued it further. I didn't go out and buy their earlier stuff, didn't seek out artists who influenced or were influenced by them, didn't even listen to the other songs on the album. It wasn't out of apathy; my musical awareness and palette was miniscule, but my adoration of, amazement with, and faith in songs had already begun to flourish. Looking back, the problem was self-doubt. For movies and paintings and even long books, I could dismiss with equinanimity that which didn't strike my fancy as boring, flawed, overly confusing, or simply not meant for me. I could not face music with the same confidence. If I grew lax enough to let an unfamiliar song slip into my ears, and I didn't like it, I was shaken. I was convinced that there was something crucial I was missing, that I had screwed up somehow and lacked the talent that one clearly needed to succeed as a music fan. I wasn't afraid that new music would fail me. I was certain that I would fail it. And so I tucked away my skimpy treasure trove of songs, greeting each newcomer suspiciously, as if songs were eggs I was juggling and one more could bring the whole precarious affair crashing down.

But if the songs came slowly and with difficulty, they still came. Jeff Buckley's cover of Leonard Cohen's deathless "Hallelujah" came because I had seen Shrek, and when my parents obligingly bought the soundtrack, I spent quite a bit of time with the song that had struck me so in the theater: not Buckley's version, but Rufus Wainwright's. When my parents learned how much I liked it (how they coaxed that confession out of my reluctant little self, I cannot recall), they eagerly informed me that there was a more definitive version and that they, in fact, possessed it. One of them dashed to the shelf and brought back a cracked CD case. It bore a cover I am still trying to understand: a singer, that much is clear, whose passionately closed eyes and somehow unmistakeable 90s-ness put me at first in mind of Billy Corgan and Kurt Cobain, but whose aura is leagues away from theirs, expressable only in the album's title.

So I took it up to my room and stuck it in my starving CD player and skipped (frantically fast but hyper aware, lest I accidentally hear a fraction of a wrong song) to track 6. In the six minutes that followed that first inviting, frightening intake of breath, I could recognize the skeleton ghost of the Wainwright version--same chords, same allusive, unflinching, stupendous lyrics. But this was something entirely different from Shrek, and from anything else I'd ever heard. It was Romantic; these days, I can tie that term to an artistic and historical movement to which Buckley unquestionably belonged, but then, the capital R was simply my best attempt at describing a voice that transcended every love song I had ever heard, by imparting every one of Cohen's perfect words with throbbing sorrow and painful, almost helpless sensuality, by showing, rather than telling, love. He repeats the song's title endlessly at the close, but I never felt it was indulgent: why would I ever get tired of hearing him? He could have gone on for half an hour and my attention would never have wandered.

So I loved it, and put it back on the downstairs shelf (I almost never kept one of my parents' CDs in my room, for reasons which had nothing to do with deference to the disc's owners), and came back and took it back upstairs again right after school, in the morning right after my shower, in the post-dinner peace, every day for months. As with all truly great music, repeated listening hasn't destroyed "Hallelujah"; the only imprint my past obsession has made is ancient ripples of emotion, sliding down the years back to me every time I return to that song.

And so in retrospect, it is not at all surprising that Grace was the first album on which I didn't firmly hit the stop button after The Song was over. One day, that last crystalline syllable faded, and I sat and waited.

Then: a faint whirring noise, suddenly overlaid by beautiful woodwinds, chord-waves of contentment and quiet age. It was lovely and it was new, and for a few disorienting seconds, I was without gravity.

Then the acoustic guitar struck, short notes but unmistakeable, like drops of sudden rain in the puddle you've been staring at. And I felt the song, its shape and range, and for the first time, felt musically comfortable without a drop of familiarity. After I had ridden the ecstatic pushes and pulls of that first song ("Lover, You Should've Come Over"), I perhaps went on to explore the rest of the album from the beginning. Or perhaps I let it ride out to the end from there, or perhaps I stopped the album dead and soaked in the unbeatable silence that follows the last song of the day. I don't remember, which is of course precisely the point--from then on, I loosened up, I let my music spread horizontally instead of observing strict vertical practice. I explored, not with trepidation, but with eagerness, and found that there was way more music out there than I had ever imagined, and more importantly, that I liked an absurdly high percentage of it after all.

And some examples were "Mojo Pin", whose intimidating, unknowable name no longer mattered when set against that aching chorus and that murderous, bone-shaking stomp. And the flawless "Grace", which like R.E.M. taught me the invaluable lesson that a voice can say far more than the words it's saying (even when those words are impressionistic and utterly beautiful). And "Lilac Wine", all character and mood and steady images of dusky, elegant objects half hidden in Buckley's crooning shadow. It took me so long to reach Grace's closers, but they quickly became my favorites: "Eternal Life" stomps, howls, and tears, entire universes beyond the usual sensitive singer-songwriter attempts at hard rock, and then "Dream Brother", refusing to come down to Earth as so many closing tracks assume they have to, the only track that reminds me, every time, that Buckley only outlived his debut record by three years.

My newfound desire to explore music has taken me to some awesome and divergent places since, but Grace has rarely left my side. Of course, this constancy is an element of what many people scorn in the album, dismissing it as MOR mediocrity, a keystone of the slew of yuppified dinner-party musicians that commercially took over from 90s altrock. I can't fault their objective history, but my relationship with Grace is inevitably more isolated and personal. To me, it never sounds boring, edgeless, or limiting. To me, it sounds like my freedom.


PJ Harvey--Rid Of Me

I was astonished to find this, rooting through my parent's least-used CDs to see if I could find anything salvageable before they made a donation run to the local library. My parents have excellent, enthusiastic taste in female musicians, but everything I had always read about this record (usually, the word "feral" was involved) made it sound like one of the last things to ever end up on their shelves. And I had read a lot about Rid Of Me, much of it from SPIN (who gave it a 10 out of 10, one of the very few things they got perfect post-Nirvana), but also from nearly every corner of the critical network I knew about then. At that age (17), I was still heavily dependent on such established critical sources to guide me through the various fluid, intersecting canon-interpretations of what was good (or rather, important) music. Given Rid Of Me's exalted status, I had always felt odd for not owning it. But my initial fanboy-focus on the early 90s punk-crossover icons had faded rather sharply by the time I was 17, and Rid Of Me had happened to miss that boat, as has happened to a few touchstones of every section of music I've crested and descended (see also: Archers of Loaf, the Rolling Stones). So it had existed in a strange little limbo-world of my musical mind--I respected it and could have cogently argued on its behalf, without having ever heard a note of it. I was glad of the opportunity to change that, and so Rid Of Me stayed behind while its equally neglected fellows were driven off to the quiet, earnest life of a library CD. And that, of course, fits Rid Of Me perfectly--it would rather stay on, as yet unloved, to needle and cut at a stranger, than accept graceful retirement.

And yeah, when I first spun Rid Of Me, it needled, and it cut, and it was utterly, unambiguously ungrateful that I had saved it from a dignified scrap heap. I don't remember the sensation of listening to it for the first time, but I do recall the lingering aura of metallic distaste, and the rarely-felt sensation that my critical godfathers had ripped me off. Polly Jean's work was one-dimensional, wrong-sounding, and ugly beyond the shielding powers of artistic integrity. I read Steve Albini's name in the liner notes and felt distinct irritation with a man I'd previously revered. This wasn't an opening up, a road to musical possibilities that I could explore. This was a dead end, and a dead end I'd passed without slowing on my way up the hill. And I'd evidently been right to do so after all.

So I buried it, like my parents had before me, and moved on. Some weeks later, I bought Fugazi's Repeater and had a similar initial reaction, but seduced by the band's ethics and backstory, I stubbornly gave it time. And in time, it revealed itself to me, not as just a kickass punk record (although it is perhaps the reigning kickass punk record), but as a work that grew as I listened to it, as I noticed both the virtuosity and humility of the instrumental arrangements, as if musical skill was nothing other than the most diverse and powerful method of communicating a simple but urgent message. And that message wasn't over-the-top, exclusive rage: "You are not what you own" is actually as different as can be from, say, "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me." Fugazi yelled a lot and was absolutely uncompromising in their polemics, but far from castigating us or tossing us a vague-but-anthemic way out, the band was actively exhorting listeners to invest in their own, equally subtle and tiered message: if you're not what you own, then you have to go find out what you are.

I could talk about Repeater and Fugazi all day, but the most immediate impact that record had on me was an instant desire to revisit Rid Of Me. Some ghostly, evanescent similarities between the albums led me to think that I had erred in my impatience.

And I had. If Rid Of Me is about any one thing to me, it's not dismemberment or brutal sex (although those are very key), it's that a seemingly monochrome, aggressive front can be the freshest and most effective way of exploring emotional depth and songwriting range. Rid Of Me has angry songs and contemplative songs and despairing songs and devious, enjoying-my-own-hatred songs, and songs that are all of those at once, too. But it doesn't have Angry Songs or Despairing Songs, and despite its surface reputation, it's not an Angry Album. It doesn't plot out the song types for the listener, which will throw off anybody who can't hear past the sharpness of the guitars and the weight of her voice (and on first listen, that's pretty much everybody). Every song on this album gets loud and sounds harsh, yes. Hell yes. But that's the language of the record, and what it's actually trying to get across with that unifying tongue sounds more like fraught, instant, emotional in-between spaces than the obvious peaks and pits. The moment between sex and murder--"Legs". The moment between regret and independence--"Missed" (and also, remember "I Will Survive "). The moment between breezy momentum and stopping off for some commentary--"50 ft Queenie". The moment between hero worship and scorched earth--"Highway 61 Revisited", of course, of course. These aren't contradictions to be resolved. These are real-life shots, and if you're uncomfortable, it's because you're familiar with them.

And musically? Look beyond the (excellent) Dylan cover, and you'll still find plenty of gnarled folk roots. Making these songs noisy and punk isn't some "juxtaposition", it's a natural outgrowth of the emotional heart of those old folk songs, which are always way harsher then you recall them being. The most common genre-term for Rid Of Me is art-punk, and it definitely has those qualities that makes one compulsively stick "art-" in front of the base tag. What are those qualities? After the first born-again listen, I went back to the backstory. Harvey was in retreat from the success of her own debut, Dry, and was facing some serious major-label pressure while recording the follow-up. So she made an album so seemingly about the obvious and sensational but became revered for the details, the timing, and the edge-of-art nature of some seriously strange songs. "Missed" is dominated by a circling, draining riff, absolutely unwilling to release its tension; I knew Slint when I heard them for the first time, not long after. "Legs" ends on a whisper, and not a stage whisper but a completely human, exhausted ending where a more climactic one might be expected. The string-laden "Man-Sized Sextet" ought to stick out like a sore thumb as the obvious weird song, but after a few listens, it sounds like a complete coup--strings, the most obvious and bemoaned sign of big-money acclimation, are used like saws to further enhance the spareness and oddity of Harvey's jabbing descriptions. It sounds organic, a natural part of the album, somehow. "Somehow" is a good word for this record--reflecting both a struggle against steep odds and a triumph that defies easy explanation.

This album has made me (made me) turn down the volume during the quiet sections to a near-nonexistent hush, and then give it a terrifying jolt upward just as the band does the same--as on the opening title track, again and again. Rid Of Me achieves dynamics that explain, enhance, and are the weight and memorability of the song, rather than act as a cheap sonic crutch that was all too common by 1993.

As I delved into Rid Of Me, I was afraid of music again, but for all the right reasons. I've had to abruptly stop this record more times than I can count to give myself a moment of contemplation or rest, to slowly re-enter its deep, complex viscerality.

It is visceral, and powerful, and heavy, and if one part of my relationship to his album has stayed the same since I first heard it, it's the sense that Rid Of Me is out to destroy me. But Rid Of Me isn't out to murder you while howling (like In Utero) or hack you to bits while grinning (like Surfer Rosa). It exists to do for you what it did for its creator: to grind away at a simplified, falsified outer shell, destroying not you but your layers of bullshit, until you can step out and forward, unencumbered, driven by emotions and sounds as fascinating as they are furious.

On Enjoyment/On the Subject of Lists/My iPod is My iSoul

(Originally published in Spring 2009)

On Enjoyment

How do I enjoy something? Can I ever enjoy my favorite albums again? How do I even know what having something as a favorite album means? In this age of blah blah blah can I still hope to find something pleasurable about the things I'm already supposed to know how to take pleasure in?

On The Subject of Lists

Sometimes, in the midst of a crisis, I turn to making lists. I do this to rank the intensity of my personal feelings about albums I've heard many times and enjoyed in the past. Why I would choose to do this instead of trying to discover new music to feel excited about, who knows. It seems I'd rather continue to talk about the music I've heard a billion times without bothering to listen to it again or anything else.

I'm trying to imagine my mindset when I approach making a list. I'm probably doing it at the spur of the moment in a fit of compulsion. Maybe a sort of a desperate frenzy. It's as if I'm trapped in a haze after experiencing severe brain damage and am desperately grasping at anything that will help me re-experience happier moments of my life. This re-experiencing could seem like it's in some way interesting, but no, I'm drawn to doing it in the most droll, mundane way possible. Are there any genuine inspired parts left in this music for me to squeeze any more life out of? Will I finally hear something I never could before that will suddenly unearth a revelation? I don't know. But I still have a strong desire for this rediscovery, as if re-cataloging all of these things will be a channel to something essential about this music and myself that I somehow missed before.

There is only one kind of list that should mean anything to anyone - ten favorite albums, ten favorite films, ten favorite books, etc. That's the kind of list that you only dare to approach the possibility of assembling maybe a handful of times. It's heavy shit, and you carefully consider every option and the possible disastrous consequences of choosing one option over another. This is a list you show to people, after all, as a definitive representation of you. You don't want to give off a wrong impression. Should you go with the album that understood you better than everyone else when you were in highschool, but is embarrassing to even bring up now (unless you're trying to be ironic post-modern sort of person and follow the fad where you embrace only the most incredibly stupid things you liked at one time (but did you even like them then or were you just doing it to be part of the crowd?) in an attempt to suggest that the only real experiences of enjoyment are ones you had of something that didn't require much thinking, and that it's not possible to really enjoy something of more substance because it involves some sort of work, work which is antithetical to enjoyment, in which case fuck you) or the one that validates your personal aesthetic and/or worldview now (whatever that means, you fucking loser)? Hey, but what about the one that got you through a deep fit of depression when you were at school and everyone seemed fake and hollow and unfriendly and it just seemed like the world thought you were shit and didn't want you to have any happiness but you can't listen to it anymore because it just reminds of that time and you don't exactly need to relive it to remember how shitty it was (or maybe you do purposefully relive it to hold it against people, you fucking one-dimensional JD Salinger character)? And what about that one that you really haven't heard that many times, but you know it's good and you want to give off the impression of being a cultured, intelligent person with cultured, intelligent tastes to other people (in which case, you'd be a boringly predictable fraud, which you already know that you are anyway)? Important stuff.

Endless rearrangement of long-gone thoughts and memories, brain-damaged regurgitation, comatose reimagination. I don't enjoy it, so why am I doing this?

My iPod Is My iSoul

I'm listening to some music on my computer right now through headphones (the album Under The Bushes Under the Stars by Guided By Voices). The music consists of mp3 files that I have saved on my hard drive. Mp3's are a collection of compressed (so that a given file doesn't take up too much space) digital audio data gathered from the also compressed audio of a compact disc, itself a collection of 1's and 0's gathered either by a CD burning machine using a laser to write in these 1's and 0's to the surface of the disc to approximate the original analog recording or a computer's own approximation of a live audio performance physically fed into it (or music programmed into the computer with software from an already digital source of sounds).

The sequence of these mp3 files is determined by a playlist on my computer. A playlist is a linear progression of different tracks that moves from one track to the next, approximating the linear progression of a CD or vinyl record or tape. Each track is a collection of audio data (usually a song) that runs a defined duration of time. I can skip to any track (or any part of a track) at any time, almost instantly. And unlike tape/vinyl/CD's I can change the order of tracks almost instantly (not to mention that if I have an audio editing program, I can edit the all of the content of the track itself).

I don't think that I'm experiencing this music through thought. I can recognize the motifs and the chord progressions used, and probably come to a conclusion that the same few chords and melodies are getting recycled. But I don't feel that way about it. I hear each track as a separate entity. So then, can this music be a list?

No, it must not. Nor must it be a mathematical formula, or a machine, even if it is made with machines. Nor does it seem to be an argument, where every element contained within exists for a articulated purpose, and its strengths and weaknesses are carefully considered before one ultimately comes to a conclusion on its usefulness or validity. This music is too arbitrary and strange for that. There is a structure, but the structure is only partial, it doesn't make logical sense. Does that make it bad?

Maybe it is bad, but maybe it doesn't deserve to be endlessly broken into parts and analyzed like a puzzle. Is there really any puzzle here? Maybe it is less of a puzzle of thoughts and more of a soup of ideas, a progression of feelings spilled off from the minds of other human beings. Maybe I've just been conditioned to think about music in the other way. Maybe I can't really judge beyond personal preference whether or not I find it to be good, but it is deeply felt, and needs to be experienced without judgment. Maybe music needs to be heard.

Because of this, it is a strong possibility that our newfound power to endlessly customize our music should not be taken lightly. Art is supposed to be about submission. Maybe we need to submit ourselves to the world of a work of art so we can have any chance of appreciation or enjoyment of something it for what it is, and it doesn't matter what we think it should be. Maybe having the power to modify something does not give us the right to do it. Maybe we run the risk of moving from interesting new ideas into endless amalgamations of references. And maybe we don't need to relive the past any goddamn more, maybe we need a present that people are interested in living in.

Perhaps it's time to slow down the constant noise of music criticism so that we can let the music itself catch up to us, so that we aren't endlessly vomiting out the same meaningless terms, anticipating trends that don't exist, thinking that we can create an idea of the ideal based on what we think other people want. Perhaps we need to wake up from the daydream where we constantly venerate the past because we're too scared of not knowing the present and instead remove ourselves from these excessive and meaningless labels of genre, scene, lifestyle, whatever, that have long ago ceased to have any real meaning.

Perhaps now more than ever is a time to finally be sincere about something. Maybe it's time to become excited about music again.

-Jack Ryerson

Talk Talk

(Originally published in Spring 2009)

I wouldn’t call myself a fan of post-rock. I don’t even really understand what the genre is about. Post-rock. What a term! To imply that rock is something linear, and that it has an end, and that that end has passed, that there has come a time to move beyond, post it, if you will. Ridiculous. The music which tends to merit the label evolved in the early 90s, mainly as a result of two albums that you’ve probably never heard of: Spiderland by Slint, and Laughing Stock by Talk Talk, both released in 1991. I can’t say I’m that familiar with Spiderland, though I’ve heard enough of it to be able to tell you that it sounds very little like Laughing Stock, which I do know something about. More bizarrely, I swear that Laughing Stock knows something about me.

I have been slowly retreating through Talk Talk’s discography. It’s probably the wrong way to do it, or at least the more perverse of the two directions one might take. There are several reasons for this. First of all, there’s the fact that, when it comes to discernable album-by-album evolution, few bands can compete with Talk Talk. To listen to a cut from their debut, 1982’s The Party’s Over, and then to hear something off of Laughing Stock, their masterful swan song, or even from Spirit of Eden, which came out only six years into their existence, one can hardly detect that these are works of the same band, though if anything gives it away it would have to be Mark Hollis’ mournfully idiosyncratic vocals.

What was their progression? I think a short list of the artists with whom Talk Talk have been associated will suffice: Roxy Music, Duran Duran, Steve Winwood, Miles Davis, Sigur Rós. Roxy Music inspired them; they drew endless comparisons to Duran Duran in their early days; Steve Winwood played on their third album, The Colour of Spring; Laughing Stock has been said to share a kinship with In a Silent Way, Miles Davis’ atmospheric masterpiece; Sigur Rós is one of their many “post-rock” disciples.

And yet, if you listen to any one album of theirs next to the one released immediately before or after it, there’s no question it’s the same band. Their progression is so elegant, unconscious even, like a sleeper slowly inching out of his sleeping bag, first just an arm, then a leg, until he awakens in the dark of night entirely uncovered. They’re the most organic, natural band I’ve ever encountered in my life.

I mean natural in as many senses as you could conceivably apply the word to music. One example: album art. They’re the sort of band whose album art effortlessly implies, even entails the sounds inside. The covers of their two masterpieces, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, feature surreally beautiful trees surrounded by white borders with the band and album names written in simple font. Spirit of Eden, which still retains much of song-structuring convention, has a willow-like tree with thin leaves and strong branches on which rest shells, sea creatures, and birds. It’s a bizarre, dreamlike image, but it’s still more ordinary than the artwork of Laughing Stock. In this case, the tree’s branches are bare and form a perfect circle. Here, the tree is filled only with birds, exotic and colorful, and the positions of the birds resemble the continents of the world. Thus, the tree is an organic globe, something like a natural, accidental incarnation of the earth itself.

But of course, there’s nothing at all natural about birds who happen to imitate the shape of the world’s land masses, let alone with a perfectly round tree. It seems to have intent; it is art. It is exactly the sort of thing that Laughing Stock itself is: art made of nature, or nature made of art. Listening to that album, I get the sense that I am hearing something that, like the tree on its cover, could have existed without human beings, just by chance, however unlikely. Somehow, this music could just be sifting through a forest, lilting over a desert, filling the voids of outer space. Certainly it would be an incredible thing to experience. Certainly I would be incredulous. And yet, I would not doubt my perception, I would not question the world because of this experience. I would merely count myself incredibly lucky to have heard nature at its most coherent, its most articulate, to have been at the right place at the right time.

That Talk Talk manage to harness this, to create this feeling, is almost as incredible as the music itself. But as unbelievable as it seems that humans could make an album this organically profound, it too remains plausible. Part of the reason for this is the fact that they clearly did not start out that way. As I implied before, listening to their first album, The Party’s Over, one would never believe that the same band could create music like the sort I’ve just described. I need only remind you of the comparison to Duran Duran to demonstrate my point. Their approach to Laughing Stock was gradual. Slowly Mark Hollis, Talk Talk’s frontman, was inhabited by this spirit of nature, or of nature with intent to be more precise.

Suddenly their fourth album’s title makes so much sense: Spirit of Eden. Eden—nature with intent. A garden created as paradise, something that potentially could have happened on its own yet seems to be watertight proof of the existence of some greater design. This “Spirit of Eden” is the lifeblood of Talk Talk. Listening to their last two albums, I can feel it coursing through the music just as surely as the speakers are emitting sound. It’s a powerful affirmation of the capabilities of humanity, as well as a powerful spiritual statement about the world in which we live. I am forced to ask myself, “Must there be something more to the world in order for this sort of harmony to exist seemingly on its own? Or is it possible for the world to really contain this beauty on its own, to every now and then pattern itself in just such a way as to overwhelm me so much that I question the very nature and origin of the universe?” Its fucking intense I can tell you.

Talk Talk’s lyrics reinforce their spiritual side. Mysticism is all over Spirit of Eden: the insistent, almost pleading declaration in “Eden” that, “Everyone needs someone to live by,” the cathartic then hushed mantra of “Wealth”: “Take my freedom for giving me a sacred love.” With their final album, the references only become more obvious, though the lyrics themselves grow more cryptic. The heart-wrenchingly beautiful “New Grass” includes the lines, “Seven sacraments to song/versed in Christ/should strength desert me/they’ll come/they come.”

I cannot deny that these lyrics come off stilted when I put them down here. Actually, I feel shame at having removed them from their music, their habitat if you will. Reading them here, naked on the page, is akin to going to the zoo. Sure you get a look at the animals, you get to see a giraffe or a tiger, but it doesn’t feel right, and you can’t say you’ve spent the day with nature by any stretch. It’s a mockery, a pale imitation of the true state of the world. These lyrics have no power on this paper, but when you hear Mark Hollis aching with them, delivering them like it’s the only thing he knows how to do, they are perfect.
To be honest, the words are inconsequential, and Hollis’ delivery only emphasizes this. Like I said, he aches with them. They drip out of him like sap out of a tree. His delivery is slow, but it’s proud. He quavers, but he is content to do so. All this emotion coupled with the uniqueness of his voice to begin with often renders the lyrics barely intelligible. The vocals, then, become more of an instrument in the conventional sense rather than a vehicle for the band’s “message.” The only other group I can think of that have a similar effect are My Bloody Valentine. Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that when I first heard Talk Talk, they sounded to me like My Bloody Valentine on valium. My Bloody Valium.

The funny thing is that, in theory, I don’t really like Mark Hollis’ voice. In their early stuff, he just sounds kind of croony. It took me a little while to get past it, but slowly, as Laughing Stock fully unveiled its genius to me, I came to understand that there is no other vocal that could work there, if only because no one else could feel that music as personally, as genuinely as the man whose vision created it.

Talk Talk broke up after they made Laughing Stock. Some of the other band members went and did other things, but Mark Hollis pretty much disappeared, with the exception of one solo album he released a few years later. I think I heard somewhere that he became a monk. If this is true, it’s even more appropriate than it is funny, and again it emphasizes the natural qualities of the band. They started at near tripe, pop in the most absurd 1980s sense of the word. From there they grew more sophisticated and ambient, more natural. By their third album, 1986’s The Colour of Spring, they were still very rooted in traditional pop and rock forms, but they had developed a unique aesthetic, and organic subtlety was saturating their music like sugar stirred slowly into tea. The Colour of Spring is 80s pop perfection. They were standing on the verge of tradition, of what music tended to sound like. With Spirit of Eden, they finally slipped off, and by Laughing Stock, they’d sunk to the bottom of the ocean, immersed themselves in their naturalistic beauty as much as possible. Where could they have gone from there? It was done.

Most music is like a painting, a beautiful but unmistakably artificial creation. Talk Talk is a photograph, a snapshot of the world as it is, as it was, as it always will be.

-John Russell

The Stooges - Fun House (1970)

(Originally published in Spring 2009)

A proper synopsis of this one should probably read something like “This is a fucking awesome record”. To attempt to elaborate on Fun House is almost to insult the sheer force it has. After listening to the album your first reaction probably isn’t that you want to discuss its merits with anyone, but more likely to take the nearest blunt object you can find and smash everything in sight. This is not an album that can be described as beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, ugliness and aggression seeps out of every one of its pores.

The cover of Fun House tells you everything you need to know about the album before you even put it on. Here you see Iggy Pop’s head and his leather-gloved hands reaching into the air. No more of Pop is shown, however, because the rest of him has been engulfed in fire. But is he resisting? Of course not, he knows that there’s only one way for a rock star as manic as him to go down, and that’s in flames.

In order to understand how an album like this could exist in 1970 amid the hippie counterculture movement and the whole flower power aesthetic in youth culture one has to know a little about the members of Ann Arbor based Stooges. First and foremost is the band’s frontman. Iggy Pop is one of the most dynamic performers of all time. In addition to his refusal to ever wear a shirt (seriously, if you can find a picture of him anywhere with a top on I’ll be shocked), he pioneered the now cliché stage dive and would often smear peanut butter and raw meat all over himself onstage. He even went so far as to cut himself and bleed while performing occasionally. Having said all that about Iggy, it is important to remember that the rest of the band weren’t exactly in their right minds either. Bass player Dave Alexander was a heavy drinker who often would be so intoxicated that he couldn’t stand up during shows. He died tragically of liver disease related to his excessive drinking in 1975, when he was just 27. In addition to Alexander’s drinking problem three members of the band, Iggy, Dave, and drummer Scott Asheton were pretty big into heroin around the time Fun House was recorded, only guitarist Ron Asheton wasn’t. These weren’t a bunch of happy go lucky flower children, but a group of guys teetering on the edge of self-destruction, and this is clearly evident in the music on Fun House.

The recording of Fun House also presents an opposition to the standard practices of the era. 1966 and 1967 saw the dawning of what can be called modern studio techniques. Gone were the days of getting an entire band into a single room and recording live with few, if any, additional parts overdubbed afterwards. This all changed when The Beatles and Beach Boys decided it was not enough to put out records that sounded like live performances. These groups managed to use multiple recording devices to dramatically increase the number of different tracks that could be added to a single song. The result, most evident on Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was that albums could suddenly have a very lush feel by incorporating new instruments (like the sitar or the Beach Boys’ famed theremin) in addition to standard rock instrumentation. The Stooges, however, were having none of this. The band enlisted Don Gallucci, already a legend for the famous keyboard part on The Kingsmen’s hit “Louie, Louie” to produce their 1970 album. Instead of loading up the final track mixes with overdubs the producer told Iggy and crew to go into the studio and do what they did best: plug in and rock out. The result is an album that captures the incendiary sound of the bands live shows. And while the playing may not be particularly precise Fun House’s ferocity is a direct result of the band’s approach to recording.

The sheer force of the album is evident in its opening moments. The ragged riff that opens “Down On The Street” lets you know immediately that this is isn’t the sort of record to take acid and put flowers in your hair to. Still, there is a sense of restraint in volume on guitarist Ron Asheton’s part that allows the listener to hear Iggy’s lyrics that paint a picture of paranoia and desperation, particularly evident in Pop’s insistence that he’s a real low mind and later when Asheton kicks it up to eleven for the chorus over repeated shouts of “I’m Lost!” As odd as it may sound this track was the label’s pick for the album’s first single. Then again, hearing the remainder of the songs on Fun House makes it seem like as good a choice as any.

Following the opener is “Loose”. Here Iggy sings that he’s taken a record of pretty music. But he clearly doesn’t put any stock in this sort of music, declaring soon afterward “Now I’m putting it to you straight from hell”, which is the only place Asheton’s guitar part could have come from. The primal fury of the song ceases for a moment while Pop states “I’ll stick it deep inside” (interpret this line however perversely you see fit) before the chaos starts up again with shouts of “’Cause I’m loose” (again, take this to mean whatever you think is appropriate).

“T.V. Eye” is track three on Fun House, and this one doesn’t need any sort of lyrical analysis. After Pop’s invocation of “Lord!” at the start of the track it’s all Asheton’s showcase. While Asheton is one of rock’s all time riff masters this one stands out in his body of work. The driving guitar part that runs throughout “T.V. Eye” is enough to incite a riot while the solo in the middle is sheer sonic insanity. It’s ultimately irrelevant exactly what a T.V eye is because the way Iggy shouts it makes it instantly seem like the most important thing in the world.

The Stooges slow it down a bit on “Dirt”, though the music doesn’t loose any of its intensity. Here we’re treated to a little insight into Iggy’s mental state, and it sure isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. “I’ve been dirt/ and I don’t care” is what we get first, not exactly an uplifting statement. Following this is a sort of justification. Iggy’s been dirt because he’s burning inside. After listening to his impassioned vocal performance thus far on the album it’s hard to deny this statement. Later when Pop asks if you feel a fire when you touch him, it’s impossible to imagine that you couldn’t.

Next is the track “1970”, a song that has become an iconic Stooges recording. The opening line “Out of my mind on Saturday night” is as good a way as any to sum up the band’s mindset during the album’s recording. In addition to this lyric are Iggy’s repeated screams of “I feel alright!” Despite the current state of the band members that would speak to the contrary Pop’s fervor is enough to convince the listener that he does indeed feel all right. This track is also notable because it is the first appearance of Steve MacKay’s saxophone, a theme that continues throughout side two of the album. Just when you’d think that the record couldn’t get any more out of control MacKay’s molten lava sax adds another layer of insanity to an already crazy record.

The title track opens with MacKay’s blazing sax and Iggy’s shouts of “I feel alright”, just in case you didn’t know it from the previous track. This one is also notable for its improvised feel with Pop yelling directions to his band mates, constantly telling them to take it down and let him in. When his band does, after some time, let him in Iggy speaks of his true intentions, namely that he’s come to play and he means to play around. And, like most of his exclamations, there’s no reason to doubt him here.

Finally, there’s “L.A. Blues”. This track is so full of chaos it makes the rest of the record seem almost tame by comparison. Pop morphs from human to wild animal, screaming unintelligibly while his band, sax included, flails around with no attempt to create a structured song. The result is stunning, a piece of brash noise that could tear paint off of a wall. It’s the only way this album could end without making a compromise to the sheer madness that precedes it. It makes the Velvet Undergound’s “Sister Ray” sound like easy listening. By choosing to end the album on such a wild note The Stooges appear to be saying that any sort of structured rock and roll song wouldn’t do justice the fury they have inside of them.

In addition to Pop’s vocals, Asheton’s guitar, and Mackay’s sax the rhythm section is also crucial to the album’s impact. Drummer Scott Asheton plays just what he needs to in order to keep the songs driving. His simple, ferocious playing gives the chaos behind him an anchor without detracting from the performers that are more in the foreground. Similarly, Dave Alexander’s bass playing emphasizes simplicity over showmanship. Whether he is taking Ron Asheton’s lead on tracks like" T.V. Eye" and "1970" or setting the tempo on “Dirt” and “Fun House” his playing gives the tracks a sinister edge while allowing Asheton to work his wild magic in the lead with his guitar.

This record understandably did not sell well upon release. After all, who but mental asylum inhabitants would listen to this sort of racket willingly? This is an album that is raucous even by today’s standards. However, this record would later find favor with punk rockers. The simplistic riffs and bleak subject matter would go on to provide the template for the Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Clash, and numerous other first wave punk acts and continue to trickle down to musicians identified with Alternative Rock. It’s easy to hear a bit of the Stooges in everything from the Pistols to the White Stripes, and Jack White himself has called Fun House America’s definitive rock album. In addition to this praise it both Henry Rollins’ and Steve Albini’s favorite album of all time, and these guys aren’t exactly lightweights in the music business. It is not just the music on Fun House, but also the band’s attitude that has influenced many artists. If Iggy Pop’s penchant for cutting himself onstage sounds familiar it’s because Sid Vicious would later emulate it, paying homage to one of the great showmen in rock’s history.

Fun House has stood the test of time as one of rock’s great records because of the sheer audacity of The Stooges. By refusing to adhere to the current trends of using the studio as an instrument and the idea that virtuosity is a requirement for making good music the band created the template for punk rock and beyond while simultaneously playing more ferociously than any band that attempted to follow in their footsteps. While a detailed look at this album may shed light on just why it has the impact it does on a listener all anyone needs to know it is in the first sentence of this piece; and that it is that it’s fucking awesome.

-Eric Gibbs

Black Sabbath [UK] (1970)

(Originally published in Spring 2009)

"A shuck—despite the murky songtitles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés."
-Lester Bangs

Take yourself back to the year 1970. Okay, maybe you weren’t alive in 1970, neither was I, but do your best to imagine the state of popular music in ’70. If the words “heavy metal” had any significance to you it would have been in the form of some vague concept of heavy blues-rock that centered around the likes of Cream and Led Zeppelin (who’s first album had come out only a year before). The heaviest thing on record to date would have been Blue Cheer’s Vincebus Eruptum. This is a classic album and a milestone in the evolution of heavy music but the guys were still covering blues and rockabilly standards, they were from San Francisco, and their band was named after a brand of LSD. That’s just not very metal.

So take yourself back to this time, a time before Cannibal Corpse covered their albums with gruesome images of… well cannibalistic corpses, when Jim Morrison was still one of the darkest and most threatening rock icons. You walk into a record store on Friday the 13th of February look on the shelf. You see something strange before you… a new record, the cover is an eerily hand colored photograph of a dilapidated English millhouse (let me remind you that this would have been a 12” vinyl record, not some puny cd). In the foreground, framed by a shattered tree trunk and dying foliage is a hauntingly incongruous figure. A man with long black hair stands waiting, erect and still, clothed entirely in black with a cloak that hangs to the ground, his skin has a sickening pallor that seems almost yellow in contrast to the deep reds of his autumnal surroundings. The cover reads simply “Black Sabbath”. Many questions spring to mind: who is this strange figure in black? Why is he hovering so ominously over this pastoral scene? What eldritch horrors await me should I choose to proceed? Spurred on by that same dark force lurking in the depths of human consciousness that tempts us to sin and perversity you decide to proceed. You buy the record. Let the Sabbath begin.

Rain on cobblestones. A church bell. Distant peals of thunder, coming ominously closer… Then at about 40 seconds into the first track, a riff… heavy, slow, ominous, forebodeing… a tritone perhaps… the devil in music. Then eventually, a voice. Not a pleasant or melodic voice, but harsh and menacing, slowly chanting something that sounds like a demonic invocation. This is the man called Ozzy.
What is this that stands before me?
Figure in black which points at me
Turn around quick, and start to run
Find out I'm the chosen one
Oh nooo!
Big black shape with eyes of fire
Telling people their desire
Satan's sitting there, he's smiling
Watches those flames get higher and higher
Oh no, no, please God help me!
(The song increases to a pace that seems frantic compared its lumbering first five minutes, as Ozzy runs terrified from the figure in black. You know you’ve come to far to turn back now)
Is it the end, my friend?
Satan's coming 'round the bend
People running 'cause they're scared
The people better go and beware!
No, no, please, no!
They’ve built it up, and now they hit you in the fact with it. The next track opens with the heavyset use of harmonica in existence soon followed by thunderous guitar riffs whose rhythmic simplicity only lends power to the pounding force of their driving assault. The song, entitled simply “The Wizard” has been supposed by many to be about a drug dealer, but no! What’s way more metal than drugs? Gandalf! Before Zep ever came out with “The Battle of Evermore” Sabbath had already written a song about Lord of The Rings (although if you want to get picky, “Ramble On” predates “The Wizard” and contains a reference to Gollum).

Though not quite as compelling as the classic first two tracks “Behind The Wall of Sleep” is a solid romp in classic Sabbath territory with plenty of heavy riffs and a title inspired by the works of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft.

The sweet bass solo simply entitled “Bassically” on some releases of the album leads immediately into the song N.I.B. A heartfelt love song sung from the point of view of… you guessed it… Satan!
Now I have you with me under my power/our love grows stronger with every hour/look into my eyes, you’ll see who I am/my name is Lucifer please take my hand
The central riff is the song’s main driving force, as if often the case with Sabbath songs. In fact, you may be noticing at this point that my praise of each song is something along the lines of “it has a really badass riff”. This logic is one of the strongest arguments both for and against Sabbath. It’s all about the riffs, sure the other parts of the band are great and very important to their sound, but on a certain level they’re just icing on the cake.

(At this point in my ramblings I choose to stop talking about the album, you can go listen to side two by yourself and for your own damn opinion. I will continue to ramble about Sabbath in general however.)

Maybe if I knew enough about music theory I could explain what makes Sabbath riffs so sweet, but what it essentially what it really comes down to is whether you get it or not. If you don’t get it you’re just not a Sabbath fan. Someone once told me that you couldn’t write riffs anymore because Sabbath wrote them all already, this may be an somewhat of an exaggeration but they sure as hell already wrote most of the really fucking sweet ones. This is a scene that has doubtless taken place thousands of times all across the planet: were sitting around jamming or just fucking around with a guitar and someone says to their friend “hey that’s a really sweet riff” the friend says “yeah I just made it up”, he takes a little extra time to figure it out and plays it a couple times, another friend looks up and says “dude that’s just a Sabbath song”.

So, for those of us who bow before the black altar of RIFF, N.I.B. is pure heaven, or maybe hell is more appropriate. When I say some people don’t get it, I don’t mean to say that those people are missing something. I suppose it would be more appropriate to say that those people don’t “dig” it. Those people are just on a completely different wavelength than Sabbath fans, one can’t really call them wrong without making some sort of claim about being able to objectively judge something that’s clearly subjective. Of course everyone has slightly different musical taste, but there is a great dichotomy among music lovers over the appreciation of heavy music. By somehow inserting themselves into the “indie” (pardon my language) consciousness some heavy metal bands like them Melvins have brought people in contact with heavy music who would probably not have encountered it otherwise, or at least never given it a serious listen. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that Black Sabbath isn’t for everyone, but if it is for you and you just haven’t given it a careful (or maybe just loud) listen yet; you’re in for one hell of a treat.

In a sense the best way to sum up Black Sabbath is that they fucking rock. Many other band’s music is not conducive to this type of logic. For example if I were trying to impart you with a love of the Velvet Underground or Neu! I might have to use a more complex line of reasoning, as though I was describing a remarkable work of art, but Sabbath is more akin to world shattering behemoth of cosmic might lumbering through the void with towards earth with colossal reality shaking steps. I am your hierophant to this unholy god of metal, this titan of iron and steel. I am the herald of the Black Sabbath…

-Adrian Oei

Alamaailman Vasarat

(Originally published in Spring 2009)

Sometimes music becomes so obscured by the genre it inhabits that its original identity is lost. Everyone knows that “Kind of Blue” is an important, brilliant jazz album, but most people can’t identify the musicians on the record or even what instrument Miles Davis plays. “Classical” music has become linked to the cut-and-try music theory that pervaded most of its early works, and so many people assume that all classical consists of soft string quartets and cadential six-fours, ignoring the wild atonality of John Cage and the demented grooves of Stravinsky. With so many sub-genres of music – hard-bop jazz, post-punk, math-rock, alternative fusion, etc… the title seems to encapsulate the music more than its content.

Alamaailman Vasarat, or “Hammers of the Underworld,” as they are known in their native Finland, defy the label of genre by embracing several of them. They describe their style as “kebab-kosher-jazz-film-traffic-punk-music.” To better illustrate their music’s sound, they write “A poor Chinese immigrant moved to Calcutta for a better life, but finds all the rumours he heard about the graceland to be something else than true. Now he's stuck in a traffic jam in between a million rickshas.”

AV consists of six-members, each playing various instruments. Jarno Sarkula plays saxes and clarinets, Erno Haukkala plays trombone and tuba, Miikka Huttanen plays pump organ and other keyboards, Tuukka Helminen and Marko Manninen play cellos, and Teemu Hanninen plays drums and other percussion. With the exception of the cellos, AV’s instrumentation seems to most closely resemble a modern jazz combo, but the roles of the instruments are more closely linked to klezmer music. Sarkula utilizes the shrieking quality of reeds to slicing effect, and Haukkala (the only conservatory trained member of the group) harnesses the power of brass instruments in wails reminiscent of Shostakovitch symphonies. The basslines are usually carried by Huttanen’s keyboards and Helminen and Manninen’s cellos, the latter adding harsh, heavy jabs to the figures. Hanninen supports the five separate elements with a solid sense of time and a sensitivity that can range from screaming heavy metal to warm jazz ballad.

Although AV certainly borrows from and hints at many different styles of music, they truly have created their own sound. Ostinatos (repeating basslines) and odd meters are their specialty. Songs may start with a throbbing prog-rock riff in electronically amplified cellos before transitioning to an intricate Balkan-tinged melody from the sax and bone, or they may begin with a tender piano solo that gradually builds into a rising and eventually abrasive wall of sound. The music is intense, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Songs switch from slow to fast, happy to angry, rhythmic to ambient, like channels switching on a TV. The most impressive thing about these abrupt switches is that they do not sound like interruptions. The compositions flow in dramatic rises and falls, and are careful to tell stories – with characters and motifs reappearing in unexpected permutations throughout the course of the songs. Improvisation is hinted at but never fully expressed.

On top of the emotional intensity and catchy quality of AV’s songs, the parts are pretty damn difficult. Dissonant harmonies, insanely technical melodic figures, and unusual bar forms dominate the compositions. In almost every song that AV plays, the time signature will change subtly at some point. As well as more obvious sections in 11/4, 5/4, or 7/4 (drawing influence from Balkan music once again) songs may start out on 4 and every so often skip or add a beat at unexpected times, creating a suspenseful delay or abrupt leap forward in the melodies. It’s as if AV is tricking the listener by switching the emphasis of the groove, a predominant technique in prog-rock.

This is certainly not a band for everyone, but they amass such a wide range of styles and present such a unique musical sound-scape that they seem to have attracted a significant fan-base outside of Finland, stretching to the US. Metalheads will love the grungy power chord cellos, jazz fans will dig on the swinging melodies, and just about anyone will appreciate the cinematic quality of AV’s music. Perhaps one of the best things about AV is that it is so evocative, and the way people appreciate it varies in so many ways. I have a friend who will always ask me to play “that creepy circus clown music,” and another who loves “that weird polka shit.” Alamaailman Vasarat is certainly not a conventional band, but in defying conventions it rises above them and creates a category all for itself that can be enjoyed purely for what it is – very strange, very catchy, and very, very tightly-performed.

-Josiah Reibstein

Radiohead - Kid A (2000)

Lemon of the Gods:  Radiohead and Kid A

(Originally published in Spring 2009)

That there, that’s not me.

It’s deeply uncomfortable, as a Radiohead fan, to recall the fivesome’s original moniker:  On a Friday.  Not because it’s an embarrassingly bad name, although it certainly is that.  It’s uncomfortable because it’s specific, tied down to a particular corner of the Earth and to five people we’ve all been better off not thinking of as human:  five British blokes naming themselves after the only day they could practice.  The only day the rest of a decentralized, messy planet massive beyond the expressive powers of anyone besides rock bands would let them get together and play.  Humans like any other:  ignorant of most things, thinking in shades and vague images, full of mistakes and bad jokes and memories of that time, that place.  As Radiohead fans, we don’t like thinking about the band as merely one shade of a paralyzingly huge world.  We put them above it all, watching like gods with voices but not faces, scornful but unifying, not taking sides among us.  Orderly, well-maintained, adult, belonging to nothing yet encircling it all.  The name Radiohead: no angles to play off of, no hint of a given time or location.  Cool, elevated, everything in its right place. 

Cut the kids in half.

The band that would become Radiohead came out of the Britpop movement of the early and mid-1990s, one of the earthiest movements in pop music history.  Not “earthy” in the American sense, with its dirt and five o’clock stubble.  These were British bands, full of breathy accents, rhythm sections more indebted to disco than to the blues, and lines like “We don’t look the same as you, we don’t do the things you do, but we live around here too.”  You weren’t even supposed to get Pulp or Suede unless you were like them, let alone revere them as gods and play them for your kids.  There was nary a hint of the universal appeal and stadium-sized grandeur increasingly common in American rock—for all the comparisons Oasis earned to the Beatles and the Stones, the brothers Gallagher and their cohorts don’t play like the greatest band in the universe.  They play like the most accessible one, like potential best mates you could easily see puking on you amiably after a long night of lager.  “Earthy”, in the sense that they came from Earth, rather than sent as the Hammer of the Gods. 

We’ve got heads on sticks.

Around the time of Radiohead’s first album, Pablo Honey, the band released a poster featuring singer Thom Yorke flipping us the bird.  Ironically, it’s powerful only because it seems so inauthentic in retrospect for Yorke to be angrily taking a side rather than wallowing in millennial dread.  It’s deeply uncool, and far from what one generally associates with Radiohead.  Perhaps this is why the Radiohead story tends to neatly snip Honey out as an inconvenient outlier, a messy protrusion to be corrected.  Then the story gets to begin with The Bends, whose flawless guitar lines and undeniable songwriting cast the band as a product of the ether.  By comparison, their Britpop contemporaries look like squabbling mortals, each only a corner of the whole Radiohead encompassed so easily.

I introduced someone to Radiohead through The Bends.  The first few times they listened to it, Thom Yorke’s voice made their throat close up painfully.  I was flabbergasted, not just because it was weird, but because I had gotten so used to the traditional talk on Radiohead:  the colossal grandeur, the nonspecific, relatable dread and paranoia, the sheer irresistibility of the vocals and guitars.  How could there be such an outlying, individual, mortal reaction?

Eventually, their throat stopped closing, and they got around to liking the band.  They didn’t realize Radiohead was British until I told them.  

Ice age coming, ice age coming.

On the same day Radiohead released OK Computer, the Verve released their single “Bittersweet Symphony.”   The wall of strings, the ascending melody, the absolutely neutral classic-rock drumbeat, all add up to a song without gravity, in either sense.  It hovers in the clouds, where everyone can marvel at it but never touch it.  It’s absurdly appropriate that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote the lyrics:  “Symphony” is edge-less enough to float pristinely beside its fellow giants on watered-down classic rock radio.  Why shouldn’t it be there?  Nothing about it would keep it here with us. 

This was 1997, and British pop music was rapidly changing.  Pulp had gotten, if possible, more difficult to market.  Blur had released an unstoppable single with the least specific title ever and a riff ripped straight off the Pixies, Nirvana, and Weezer.  Oasis’ suckiness had become officially impossible to ignore.  There was a hole to fill, and dear God did it get filled.  The big-beat spazzes and the Spice Girls divided audiences between fervent acolytes and the haters that grew louder every day.  The latter were Boomers and the ever-ready imitation Boomers, dismissive of singles, techno, and the flighty, sensational pleasures of pop.  There will always be a market for those who disdain pop music culture post-London Calling, even if they were born in 1982.  These people bought the Verve’s Urban Hymns in droves, but it was OK Computer that made them sing to the heavens.

I’m on your side, nowhere to hide.

OK Computer is arguably the single most adored LP since Kurt Cobain died and evidently ended the great revival of rockist Boomer values (those guys are way into symbolism, you see.)  It was a big, guitar-driven, highly conceptual Work that betrayed grim ambition and classical virtuosity.  It was everything to get behind and more, if you hated everything about big-beat and teenybopper and emo—in other words, if you hated populism and music from Earth.  It didn’t take sides with a particular generation or side of the Atlantic—even its supposed anti-technology dread was vague enough to fit any general sense of alienation.  OK Computer, then, was the last great message from the gods, the final gasp of whatever random drunk spirit last inhabited ambitious, world-conquering rock and roll. 

Because arguably the most revered and brand-creating of 21st century rock bands consists of a drummer who can barely play and a singer who can barely sing—for all that the White Stripes nick riffs from Physical Graffiti and Exile on Main Street, their music is largely ambition-free, and their Elephant’s platinum status was widely viewed as an incredible fluke.  The Internet has decentralized it, the ease of self-made laptop music has trumped it, and the refreshing minimalism and accessibility of modern guitar music has humanized it—rock and roll, more than 30 years after punk predicted, has completely dropped out of the domain of the gods.

I think you’re crazy…maybe.

In the first year of the new millennium, as these events began to lock into place, Radiohead allowed Napster to stream their follow-up to OK Computer.  The criticisms began to roll in, and what was interesting was that they came from those at the vanguard of the file-sharing revolution as well as from those who had seen OK Computer as the endgame of good music.  Obviously, an album that largely abandoned the Floyd/Bowie guitars and classic-golden throated vocals of their earlier work was going to piss off the rockists, who had seen Radiohead as their last hope.  This was an album with dominant synthesizers and openly fucked-with vocals.  But many of the techno kids seemed just as underwhelmed.  They had spent hours in front of their monitors, wrestling with agonizingly slow dial-up downloads, for the sake of a motionless ambient instrumental named “Treefingers” and a deconstructed, barely-there ballad aptly titled “How to Disappear Completely.”  They had put together the new Radiohead together piece by piece, and it didn’t feel like a revolution.  Anyone who had ever listened to Brian Eno or Aphex Twin already knew this kind of sound, and outside of “Idioteque,” none of the songs were remotely danceable.  The album’s catchiest, most conventional track—“Optimistic”—was not released as a single. 

So it was too electronic and non-anthemic for some, and not progressive or digestible enough for others.  So what was it, then?

Yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon.

Almost everyone missed the point with Kid A.  It was not a massive evolutionary step for modern music.  Nor was it a mediocre, half-baked hybrid crossover attempt.  It was not consistently steeped in electronic music.  It was not more challenging than OK Computer—after all, deified rock albums are not necessarily easy listening. 

It was not robotic or distant or emotion-free.  And while, like OK Computer, it didn’t take sides, it didn’t do so by towering above it all as a pristine monolith.  It was among us, part of our ears, brains, hearts, and inboxes. 

It was emblematic of its era, something those who had bestowed OK Computer with the double-edged sword of “timelessness” failed to understand as a plus.  90s pop music post-Nevermind was an explosive culture war, as waves of hype-backlash sprang up for grunge, g-funk, pop-punk, trip-hop, East Coast hip hop, big-beat, alt-country, and Ricky Martin. There was more music than ever, and some rarities earned consensus (OK Computer chief among them), but the battle lines were largely rigid.  Indie kids took pride in not dancing.  Old Deadheads worshipped Eddie Vedder and bemoaned rap.  Beck’s Odelay was viewed as the triumph of exclusive slacker “irony” rather than the ahead-of-its-time genre-buster it was.  Weezer’s Pinkerton simultaneously earned the most rabid haters and most devoted fanbase of the decade.

Now, we still have our niches, but they’re incestuous, constantly evolving, and absurdly numerous.  Everything is decentralized, and we’re somehow more relaxed even as we grow more obsessive.  Hipsters learned how to dance and then promptly forgot, and pretty much everyone amiably agrees that Is This It was a damn good record. 

Kid A predicted all that, which is why it’s culturally, rather than sonically, progressive. It’s a record that sprawls horizontally, rather than following the great upward peaks of the genres it absorbs without reverence.  Sonically, it pulls together disparate strands of Warp Records fuzz, jazzy dissonance, and its own dense, gorgeous discography into a whole that carries weight without ever seeming aloof or manipulative.  It means something, but it refutes every classic-rock ideal of full-band virtuosity and portentous lyrics.  It came at the beginning of the greatest DIY period in music history, and every inch of it was made by humans, with in-jokes and fragmented passions and a deep desire to tear into and remake the canon.  For a record endlessly criticized as inscrutable, made by a band so often misinterpreted as pretentious, it’s the greatest coup in pop music history.  On a Friday’s material may have sounded closer to Pablo Honey, but the spirit of that band is most clearly preserved in Kid A, the great humanist record of the new millennium.

-Emmett Booth