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Bright Eyes: I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
Bright Eyes
I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
(Saddle Creek, 2005)
A few years back, Conor Oberst dropped two albums in the same week under his Bright Eyes moniker: I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash for a Digital Urn. The former was an alt-country, singer-songwriter album and the latter was an electronic pop experiment. I’m Wide Awake reigned in the glowing reviews while the critics threw a mixed bag at Digital Ash. And then there was Stephen Thomas Erlewine (esteemed editor of All Music Guide) who lashed out with a shitstorm of vitriol, condemning Oberst for being lauded by critics as the next Dylan. Erlewine called Oberst a poseur, a hack, and something along the lines of a perpetual adolescent. We shouldn’t be so quick to fellate nor condemn anyone for making a solid album, but in the thick of the critical weather patterns worked up by the media it sometimes gets hard to see things as they really are. So Erlewine and salivating critics, we forgive you for your outbursts.
Admittedly, at the time, I, too, was a little fed up with all of the Bright Eyes hype, but as I drove across the United States during that summer of 2005 with I’m Wide Awake on my stereo, the collection of songs revealed itself as a standup little alt-country record. It wasn’t anything too spectacular but certainly not crappy: It was just a cool record to spin as the hills of Indiana bled into the backdrop of Ohio.
Burn the Neon Bible
Arcade Fire
Neon Bible
(Merge, 2007)
First off, I don’t hate Arcade Fire. They seem like good people, they believe in their music, and they pour considerable energy into live performances. All of that’s just fine by me. The problem is, they didn’t make a very compelling second album. What I do hate is what Neon Bible represents about us as listeners, how easily we’ve championed something so innocuous, full of pre-meditated emotion rather than the real thing. Among this album’s failures are the relentless sloganeering and the band’s need to turn every chord progression into the most important moment in my life. Like a night at the Phantom of the Opera or Les Miserables, everything here is overwrought. The heavy-handed delivery of songs like “Neon Bible” and “Black Mirror”: I’ll go as far as to call it cheesy. And that church organ! It’s used all over this record to suggest notions of grandiosity. Get that fuckin’ organ out of my ear. This isn’t Christmas mass at the Vatican; lay off that thing, go get a Farfisa Fast Five, and run it through a Fender Reverb.
Funeral (2004), by all accounts, was also a bit overwrought, but it sounds more authentic because it’s a bit rougher around the edges. Sure, Arcade Fire put countless hours into crafting that gem of a debut, but there’s honesty in the instrumentation and execution that is lacking on Neon Bible. Listen to the garage stomp of “Neighborhood #2 (Laika)” with those jangly guitars and overdriven backing vocals, or the loose, funky groove of “Haiti”, with its sexy, restrained vocals. So, whom should we shoot first, the producer or the band? Actually, the band produced this themselves so I guess we can only blame them for the over-the-top flourishes. Where quartets were once used to flesh out arrangements, it sounds as if they’re bringing in the whole orchestra.
David Bowie: Young Americans
David Bowie
Young Americans
(RCA, 1975)
Middling late-career box sets aside, please folks: let’s not take David Bowie for granted. We get so caught up in the hooks of the famous singles from “Space Oddity” and “Ziggy Stardust” through “Golden Years” and “‘Heroes’” that it’s easy to forget the artistic depth this man achieved with his thick catalog of ‘70s albums. Let this be a reminder: 10 original studio albums in 10 years, several of them groundbreaking. Most collectors have copies of Ziggy Stardust (1972) and Low (1977) in their libraries, but how often do they listen to them all the way through, let alone the other stuff like Station to Station (1976) and Young Americans (1975)? While the watershed records mark Bowie’s transformations from spaced-out hippie (The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory) to rock ’n’ roll alien (Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane) to just plain alienated (the Berlin trilogy: Low, “Heroes”, Lodger), there are fascinating transitional moments tucked into his second-tier ‘70s records and it’s an album like Young Americans that reminds us of Bowie’s creative wingspan.
I won’t even attempt to reconsider Young Americans as one of Bowie’s best works: it just isn’t and never will be. I will posit it, however, as an essential collection of songs, something to eagerly pore over on headphones, to grasp how many radical ideas this man once possessed. Whereas his British rock predecessors in the ‘60s—Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin—have had their wrists routinely slapped for criminal appropriations of black music, there’s nothing suspect about the alien’s invasion of the ‘70s soul sound. This album doesn’t disguise its sources: it fucking devours them. The Thin I-Wanna-Be-Black Duke grazes on a historical buffet of soul singles—a little Motown here, a little Philly there—running it through his quirky psychedelic filters.
Interpol’s Antics
Interpol
Antics
(Matador; 2004)
In 2004, I was totally “in the wrong” with some of my friends. They wanted to go out and dance to “Slow Hands” or “Narc” and I was like, “Fuck that: who needs ‘NARC’ when I’ve already got ‘PDA’?” It’s tough to be the guy who simply isn’t feeling a band’s second album while everyone else is in love with it. Your friends just laugh and call you a stuck-up, too-cool-for-school, hipster critic. There are some constants in life, however, and one of them is that Interpol’s Antics is not as good as Turn on the Bright Lights (2002). I think most of us can agree with that. But here’s where I differ from most: when Antics came out I believed it wasn’t only inferior to the band’s debut but that, in the grand scheme of cultural worth, it was average at best. While folks were at the clubs dancing amidst the hipster herd and posting critical praise on well-respected music websites, I was quietly sitting in my apartment revisiting Interpol’s old songs.
Returning to this second Interpol album after reluctantly digesting this year’s Our Love to Admire has definitely solidified some thoughts I’ve had about the band all along. My most prominent criticism is that they are locked in a holding pattern in which they play the same kind of music without making any improvements on previous, now distant, accomplishments. I mean, if you’re not going to change up your style much, at least write better songs within your confines. The Strokes, after all, were able to craft a handful of classics—“12:51” and “Automatic Stop”—with their sophomore effort, Room on Fire (2003), an album that followed the musical patterns of Is This It? (2001). Sure, everything on Antics is played with the competence of a well-toured band, but none of its songs are as startling as their counterparts on Turn on the Bright Lights.
The Walkmen: A Hundred Miles Off
The Walkmen
A Hundred Miles Off
(Record Collection; 2006)
People must have been encrusted in deep, deep slumbers or running around with their headphones turned up too loudly. It’s tough to imagine how they missed this, the Walkmen’s third and most sonically vicious album. While their debut, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone (2002) dealt an atmospheric hand and its follow-up, Bows & Arrows (2004) was a concise collection of rockers and subtle ballads, 2006’s A Hundred Miles Off blends the Walkmen’s penchant for the crooning melodies of ‘60s New York singer-songwriters with an aggressive energy that recalls the hardcore roots of their hometown of Washington, D.C.
Lyrically speaking, this is the album where the Walkmen really began screaming at us with middle-class desperation, with absolute disgust aimed at the world that surrounds them. They’d been heading in this direction for years, getting more and more aggressive in their delivery. In the beginning, back in 2002, they simply asked for us to “Wake up” or denounced that “[We’d] been had.” A couple of years later they were barking at us for having the nerrrrve to stop by and say hello. But on this album there’s only a blank and caustic nihilism, a sense that nothing matters, that we should burn in hell for being such sheep in this fucked-up world. On one of the album’s standouts, “Emma Get Me a Lemon”, singer Hamilton Leithauser opens with a contemptuous acknowledgment of a relationship he doesn’t really want to be in:
Fruit Bats’ Spelled In Bones
Fruit Bats
Spelled In Bones
(Sub Pop, 2005)
I’m getting older, but the magic of discovering new, life-changing music still happens every now and then. On this particular occasion, I was sitting in Pianos, a bar on the Lower East Side, enjoying a solitary happy hour drink. I was keeping to myself, reading a book, when the bartender put a new album on the stereo. It was the Fruit Bats’ Spelled In Bones. The music was so immediately enthralling I had to stop reading. When I walked over to the bartender, he had a knowing smile on his face—like the one John Cusack wears in High Fidelity when he spins the Beta Band for his unsuspecting record store patrons—because he knew what I was going to ask him (“Who is this band?”) and that, ultimately, he had made a new Fruit Bats convert.
Spelled In Bones (the band’s third record and second on Sub Pop) enjoyed some positive reviews upon its release and a couple of swipes from the likes of Pitchfork and Stylus. But for an album that received a good deal of indie-press ink, I couldn’t find anybody who had heard of the band. Maybe I was swimming in the wrong circles, but it’s rare that all of my friends and music nerd colleagues miss an album this strong. The point being, Spelled In Bones is one of the best indie rock records of 2005, and somehow some of us either forgot about it or never even knew it was there in the first place. It not only deserves re-evaluation, it demands to be heard, by many, for the first time.
Modest Mouse Are Killing Me
Modest Mouse
Good News For People Who Love Bad News
(Epic, 2004)
When I first discovered Modest Mouse in 2000 they had been around for quite a while so I certainly can’t claim to have been down since day one. But once I found them I fell into their music rather quickly. The impressively cohesive rarities collection, Building Nothing Out Of Something (1999), became a personal favorite and Lonesome Crowded West (1997) tore me up proper. I even found joy in marginal releases like the bare bones The Fruit That Ate Itself and the electronic leaning Everywhere And His Nasty Parlor Tricks EP (2001).
Their live show also became an important experience for me: the first time I saw them was at the Warfield in San Francisco on September 10, 2001. It was a vicious night. The band seemed a little upset and people were actually fighting in the balcony seating area. Projections of buildings being demolished towered behind the band. It was an eerie prophecy of the following morning’s shocking news. But even that rough show had enough compelling moments to pull me out on their return visits to the Bay Area. For four years I kept keen tabs on this unique band.
Daytrotter: Midwest Mecca of Indie Rock
How’s it going down here, Sean?
Well, when we pulled up I think everyone was kind of worried. I mean, we’re in the middle of a junkyard. Like they told us: when they came here to build this place there was a pile of dead animals and baby diapers. I don’t know if it was a storage area for that or whatever, but they cleaned it out and made this place. I think it still retains some of those nice qualities… it’s weird thinking that Spoon recorded in here. The brand new Trail of the Dead record was done in here. It’s cool to know those people have been here.
The White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan
The White Stripes
Get Behind Me Satan
(Sony, 2005)
Feature stories and reviews surrounding the White Stripes’ Get Behind Me Satan (2005) focused heavily on the introduction of marimba to the instrumental line-up and the increased use of piano. Perhaps this was only natural, as any non-guitar/drum instruments in the White Stripes’ repertoire will inevitably turn some heads. Nevertheless, such coverage also seemed hard-pressed to suggest that this band had made a significant departure from their sound, effectively shedding the history of their previous four albums. It’s more complex than that. The White Stripes certainly went in some progressive directions, as they always do, on Get Behind Me Satan, but they also balanced those sonic departures, in subtle ways, with the formula they’ve been establishing all along.
In an episodic way, it has always been the “White Stripes Show” with various genre twists and instrumental surprises that emerge on each album. It’s their way of keeping things fresh without entirely redefining the band’s signature style. That White Stripes sound—rooted in instrumental minimalism, blues-driven rock, killer riffs, and a touch of Americana traditions—took on blues revivalism on De Stijl (2000) and flexed its ‘70s hard rock muscles on Elephant (2003). But style only goes so far… even with this band. The worth of any White Stripes album depends more on the actual songwriting than anything else. Although some fans might turn up their noses at the marimba tracks (at the end of the day there are only two of them) and demand guitars where there are pianos, there’s more than enough here to prove that the White Stripes have an impressive talent for consistency.
Hanging Up Guitars: The Story of the Natural History
by: Andre Perry
When I listened to it at the time, I knew the Natural History’s Beat Beat Heartbeat (2003) was a really good record, but amidst the noise of bigger New York bands, I kind of just let it fade into the background. Built around brothers Julian (bass) and Max (guitar, vocals) Tepper and Derek Vockins (drums), the Natural History designed brief, minimal, and catchy rock songs. They flexed Strokes-like pop hooks but left that band’s hipster affectations behind. The Natural History was raw and honest: Nothing about them seemed manufactured. Max Tepper’s voice was a sturdy mid-range croon, capable of crunching out lines with intensity or floating along melodies with cool reserve. The songs jerked back and forth around jagged guitar lines and abrasive drums, erupting into energetic bursts and irresistible refrains. The arrangements were straight-ahead: No abundance of effects or overdubs or layered vocals. Beat Beat Heartbeat clocked in just under 28 minutes.
The Natural History toured around their debut, often playing with labelmates French Kicks and the Walkmen. I somehow never caught them live. I just figured, like with all of the bands at that time, that I’d get another chance to see them soon enough. I’d periodically check in on their website to see what they were up to. Time passed and the Strokes and Interpol, became relatively huge, riding out the dividends of the creative peaks they’d hit with their debut records, each subsequent album producing diminishing returns. The French Kicks never quite broke through in a major way, but settled into the cult status they’ve enjoyed (or endured) for several years. The Walkmen didn’t skyrocket into public consciousness like the Strokes or Interpol but steadily amassed critical acclaim and fan adoration with each release, becoming one of most loved bands in indie rock. As for the Natural History? They just kind of disappeared. There was a moment, in 2003, I think, when I went to their website and found a new song they had posted. It was called “Princeton Junction”, and it would be featured on a forthcoming album. The song was amazing, a possible nod to a failed romance along New Jersey Transit’s Northeast Corridor line. The production was thicker: There were guitar overdubs and maybe even a hint of keyboard! I readied myself for their comeback record. I waited and waited and eventually returned to their website, one day, to find it no longer existed, and like that, the Natural History was gone. Another dead rock band.
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by: Andre Perry
published: March 27, 2009
in column: Feature Story
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