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Ben’s Brother
Ben’s Brother
Beta Male Fairytales
(Virgin, 2007)
Ben’s Brother is a five-piece out of the UK, specializing in piano-based melancholic pop. To be very clear at the start here: I love a good sad song. Give me something glum, something that presses on all those aches, and I will run with that for days. I will revel in it. Ask me sometime what my play count is on, say, Mt. Eerie’s “Great Ghosts” or the Temptations “I Wish It Would Rain”, and it’s embarrassing, it really is. Ben’s Brother aims to create these kinds of sad songs, songs that uplift by bringing low. Because really, a sad song doesn’t make you feel sad, exactly. Or it does, but it does it in a way where there’s a feeling of kinship, of connection—yes, life brings raw pain, but the music creates the feeling that others have felt it too. But Ben’s Brother doesn’t do that. Ben’s Brother just makes me feel terrible.
This is music where it’s always time for strings to swell up sweetly, and everything has been produced within an inch of its life. Lead singer Jamie Hartman has a pleasant scrape that’s highly reminiscent of Rod Stewart, but the problem is, he’s not making kick-ass songs like “Stay With Me”, he’s making the utterly emasculated “I Can’t Deny It”-era Rod Stewart tunes. These are big floppy ballads that sound like the sonic equivalent of a participation prize from the Science Fair, sensible slacks from L.L. Bean, or a firm handshake at the end of a date—which is all to say it inspires a kind of existential funk in me that I normally associate with psychiatrist waiting rooms and traffic jams.
Partly this is because it’s the type of music I find embarrassing, and I’m realizing that the reason I find it embarrassing is not so much the music itself, but who I imagine listens to and really enjoys Ben’s Brother. It’s a nasty assemblage of unfair stereotypes and prejudices, and the fact that so many people enjoy this album (the album reached number 14 in the UK charts) and that I can’t add an extra fold of dejection in there. Still, I was listening to this album on the bus, and I suddenly realized that my over-the-ear headphones let a fair amount of sound out, and that everyone around me could hear me listening to this stuff, and a deep, deep shame came over me as I scrambled to dial the volume down.
But not all of the blame is on me. If the music is bland cheese, the lyrics are borderline offensive in their efforts to always go exactly where you think they’ll go. Take the chorus from the album opener, “Rise.” Against the sound of organ and harmonica, sounding like a rejected Wallflowers cut, Hartman rasps, “Rise / Don’t just stand there, open your eyes / Shame, shame, shame on you / You’ve got to / Try.” And while nearly all song lyrics seem trite when taken in without music, trust me, the music adds nothing here. The album is full of these almost condescending lines, exhorting you to get out there and really live life and don’t give up, champ; you’ll be a winner yet.
To be fair, there are two songs on here that didn’t bother me as much. The second song, “Beauty Queen”, is even something I would maybe, maybe stick on a mix tape, and at least the lyrics in the chorus don’t try to put a positive spin on things, with Hartman sighing, “The truth I have found / Is we all fall down / Yes, we all fall down.” And the penultimate song, “Harmonica in F (Interlude)” is full of energy the rest of the sludgy mass dearly needs. Also, “Harmonica in F (Interlude)” has no vocals, which helps.
While thinking about this over the weekend, I caught a snatch of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and yeah, that’s me. Lots of people like this stuff—the album closer “Stuttering” is on a Dentyne Ice commercial, mid-tempo ballad “Let Me Out” was on a recent episode of Grey’s Anatomy—and I’m the fucking Grinch, up on Mount Crumpit, hating on the Whos down in Whoville. But I don’t think there’s going to be a third-act reversal here; my heart is going stay two sizes too small. Because if expanding my heart three sizes means I have to listen to shit like this, it’s not worth it.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Cult With No Name
Cult With No Name
Paper Wraps Rock
(Trakwerx, 2007)
Comprised of East London keyboard duo Erik Stein and Jon Boux, Cult With No Name puts out sparse piano pop that can’t help but recall the ‘80s—the kind of thing that’ll have you reaching for the eyeliner and black blouse. A collection of 15 songs, coming in at nearly 50 minutes, the self-styled “post-punk electronic balladeers” take time getting to where they’re going.
The album opens with “The Morning After the Night Before Last”, a meandering piano number that shows of Boux’s classical musical training, but it’s the second song, “Blame It On Oil”, that displays the band’s bread and butter: Boux rolls out piano arpeggios while Stein’s echoing cabaret-style vocals float above it all. Stein is willing to get pretty emotive in his vocals, yanking his voice up into yawps for the chorus. The third song, “More of the Same”, introduces the last part of the group’s instrumentation: good ol’ drum machines. It also showcases some of the things that irk: Stein’s vocals can come off as a bit nasally, and lyrics like “I’m ready to shoot / But need a moment to choose / And the bit between my teeth / Will be deployed sometime next week” read more like random phrases stuck together with a rhyming dictionary.
It’s hard to tell how much of this drum machine ‘n’ synth aesthetic is deliberate, and how much is a byproduct of Stein and Boux recording in a home studio. There are certainly times where a full drum-kit would sound, to my ears, better and less like an odd throwback. When it works, it can sound like Brian Eno in his quieter, more introspective moments. At the worst, the drum machines and the synthesizers end up sounding like the Vietnamese karaoke I catch at my local pho restaurant.
But there are moments when sparseness works to their benefit. There’s a great mid-album track in “Maslow’s Dog”—a kind of wry pseudo-samba that takes the best part of Stein’s nightclub croon and Boux’s snyths. “Product Of” is also a nicely downtempo lounge thumper, with a soft four-on-the-floor beat laid against washes of synth. The album itself improves as it goes along, becoming more sardonic and the sound becoming more and more like if the Rat Pack had been abducted by the New Romantics. When Stein ends “The Power of Television” with a tightly whispered “For good” it’s hard to not take this for anything but a bit of a joke, but it’s an increasingly fun one.
Like the Pipettes or Wolfmother, bands that are quite clearly drawing their inspiration from what has come before, I’m not quite sure what to think about Cult With No Name. Stein and Boux are both in their early to mid-30s, and there’s obviously some love for the music of their early childhood, though they would have been way too young to ever get into Blitz Club. If you really like Roxy Music, there’s going to be some songs on here that will catch your ear. But if you really like Roxy Music, wouldn’t you want to maybe take the time to work through their back catalogue instead?
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Soulsavers, Damo Suzuki, Jonathan Richman and more
Los Campesinos!
November 28 at Great American Music Hall
Los Campesinos! put out an EP this year, Sticking Fingers Into Sockets, that was perfect for early summer—bouncing, bubbly party tunes from a bunch of fresh-faced Welsh kids, with a cover of an old-school Pavement B-side (“Frontwards”) thrown in for good measure. But it was also the type of thing that showed up on my desk, I listened to it a few times, enjoyed it, and then moved on. Seeing Los Campesinos! five or six months after I first heard them, I wasn’t feeling it as much. Don’t get me wrong, these kids are still cute (and twee) as fuck, and they all exude a kind of beaming joy on stage that could power a small city, but the new material they played didn’t do much for me, and overall I found myself feeling a bit indifferent to the whole thing. But judging from the ecstatic bouncing from the kids around me with cardigans, keffiyehs, and carefully unkempt air, I was in the minority. Much more compelling for me was their tour mates and opener, the Most Serene Republic, who pull off the cathartic anthems á la Broken Social Scene to warm my wussy heart, while mixing it up with some math-rockish start-stop stuff to warm my June of ’44-loving music nerd heart (I have two hearts, apparently). And if I walk away from a show digging even one new band, it’s a success. — Jake Swearingen
Listen: Various tracks [at myspace.com]
Damo Suzuki Network
November 30 at Hemlock Tavern
Annuals
Annuals
Frelen Mas EP
(Self Released, 2007)
In 2006, North Carolina six-piece Annuals had the lucky misfortune to get touted as maybe the Next Big Thing. Pitchfork gave their debut LP, Be He Me, recommended cred, a bevy of blogs threw up mp3s at a feverish pace, and the band quickly found itself thrust into the ever quickening cycle of hype followed by backlash. (For a more in-depth look at what happened to the band, and the larger issue of exhaustion with hype, I cannot recommend enough the article “Hype Machine” from last month’s Oxford American.)
Listening to that album, as well as the digitally released EP the group just put out, Frelen Mas, it’s easy to see why they gained so much ground so quickly with tastemakers: it’s a surefooted distillation of the last seven or eight years of left-of-center rock. There are the swelling washes of sound, the jangling atmospherics, the keening and slightly psychedelic vocal chants, all chopped up and given a ProTools post-millennium stutter and gasp.
For all that, the group’s efforts, led by Adam Baker, doesn’t come off as cloying or sycophantic—if anything, there’s a lack of guile, real or imagined, that keeps the music feeling fresher than it has any right to. Frelen Mas, a collection of B-sides from Be He Me, keeps this streak alive for the most part, with a series of songs that should fall apart in theory, but largely work in practice.
The opener, “Nah Keseyi” begins gently with nonsense vocals and an ambling steel guitar, but already there’s a clatter of excess instrumentation around the edges. The song suddenly explodes, drums kicking in a martial beat and horns doing pulsating stings on top, building vocal shrieks and drums together, ending a song epically that started pastorally. “River Run” is even more of a lurch-swerve baffler: it opens with a player-piano saloon riff, almost immediately shifts into a vaudeville vamp, and then builds up a crashing percussion that sounds like Looney Tunes explosions mixed with a door slamming.
The third song is easily the ballsiest on the album, and the one that, reading the track listing, I was sorta dreading: a cover of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Like most Annuals songs, it begins simply and ends chaotically, and it should be a disaster, but their take on it serves both them and the source material surprisingly well: the electronic rattle complements the song, while the melody itself proves strong enough to bear the weight of all the added production.
The following three songs put all that production on display, with each of them pulling it off in successively less successful turns. “Misty Coy” glides along on strings and guitars with brief crashing, screaming interludes, and if not for the swirling production and the startling yawps around it, could almost be shoehorned into the drive-time playlist at an adult contemporary station. “Sewn to Kites”, with lyrics about getting drunk with Bigfoot at Old Man Miller’s house and its digital doldrums, sounds like it could have been a B-side to a lost Grandaddy record. But “Such a Mess” fails to stand on its own as a song, serving as not much more than a showcase for atmosphere and just how dense the instrumentation can get.
However, the following song “Ease My Mind” is the strongest argument for all this production. Opening with a sleek acoustic guitar line that could’ve been on a Joan of Arc record, guitarist Kenny Florence croons “I like everyone to float around me / To be my halo,” and the song moves through its first verse and chorus sounding, after everything that’s come before, shockingly analog. When the second verse kicks in, digital beats start to chatter, but it ups the energy of the song, and by the time the chorus comes back around, with a propulsive backbeat laid on top, the acoustic and digital are working together to create something better than the sum of their parts. The EP closes with the title track of “Frelen Mas”, a relatively straightforward ballad, opening with the sound of children playing before building into a floating, lush murmur, a dreamy coda to all the restlessness that’s come before.
Annuals are working on a second LP, but for now, Frelen Mas works to show Adam Baker and company as one of the brighter lights within the world of experimental rock, creating tumbling-down soundscapes that invite with pop hooks but bewilder with sudden left-turns, knowing that you don’t have much a choice but to follow along.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Clipd Beaks
Clipd Beaks
Hoarse Lords
(Lovepump United, 2007)
Clipd Beaks is a noise rock-ish group out of Oakland, and like Oakland, they aren’t so pretty, but they do bring miles of style to the table. Sounding like an even more fuzzed-out Liars with dashes of pop groove to entice, they make music that’s enjoyably ugly, like a hangover right on the edge of going away.
Hoarse Lords, their debut LP, offers up its sweetest bits right away. Opening with “Melter” may even classify as bait-n-switch—after the obligatory feedback squawks the song falls into an affable bop of a bassline, and upbeat, almost Beck-like mumble rap vocals. The drones of feedback do an almost call and response along the sides of the music. The track slowly devolves from there; the static and feedback grow while a slinking bassline keeps it all from falling into skronking chaos. The next song, “Wrathscapes”, starts off less cohesive, with a fluttering, lurching tempo and inchoate howls mixed with blurred keyboards, but then the sound all falls away and relatively clean guitar comes in. This is more a matter of taste, but my favorite moments on the album are when the static clears and allows the music space to breathe.
For instance, “Manipulator”, which is easily my favorite from the album, is a post-punk workout on bass and drums, with reverberating vocal shouts and kiddy keyboard shrieks along for the ride, before the song exhausts itself with the sound of bass string slackening into a rumble. While the electro squall is still there, it’s the instrumentation that’s at the forefront. And the following song, “High on Charms”, after a moaning and clattering intro, breaks into something damn near catchy—thick bass, an earworm of a keyboard line, and mega-hot drumming, while keeping the band’s eccentricity. I wouldn’t want them to strip away all the fuzz, but it works best when there’s a give and take between the two.
The album’s mid-point and title track, “Hoarse Lords”, is the first song that begins to lose my interest. It’s a droney, almost free-jazz type excursion that never develops into anything. Clipd Beaks’ songs live and die by Scott Ecklein’s bass work and Ray Benjamin’s drums—when they’re on, the songs carry the weight of the feedback and vocal yowling, but when they’re off, everything just comes off as turgid and a little pretentious.
The album’s sequencing is also sorta weak. The first four songs are all strong, but everything after slowly descends into much less interesting territory. The one exception is the penultimate “Black Glass”, which uses buzzing keyboards and a bass guitar ramp-up to create something that recalls the weirder moments of the Butthole Surfers: angry, weird, and compelling.
Music is for a lot of things, and for a lot of moods. Clipd Beaks isn’t something you put on to wash the dishes, or for a sunny afternoon drive, or any of that happy crap. It’s tense, at times aimless music, for those tense, at times aimless moments in your life.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Už Jsme Doma
Už Jsme Doma
Rybí tuk
(Škoda, 2007)
Už Jsme Doma (pronounced “oozh smeh dough-ma”) is a Czech outfit that puts out staggeringly spastic prog-funk operas that can swerve between folk to punk to completely unclassifiable noise within a few seconds. The band has been around since 1985, and has the kind of history that most underground acts have got to covet: forget getting stiffed on payment by club owners or a van breaking down in the middle of nowhere, this group was no-shit illegal—banned by the then-Communist government of Czechoslovakia, they were forced to play secret gigs around the country. Following the Velvet Revolution, the group has toured the world pretty relentlessly, including numerous US tours.
And it’s the type of music I wish I’d first heard in a club somewhere, not knowing what to expect. I think if I had experienced it like that, my opinion would be a bit more positive, because for all its admirable willingness to go weird, the group’s album doesn’t do much for me. Partly, to get all college boy about it, this is because I’m way outside the cultural context of what they’re putting out. Like the Yugoslavian industrial group Laibach, it’s music that could be deadly earnest, but the only way I take some aesthetic pleasure out of it is through the raised eyebrow and half-smile smirk of irony (which I know makes me a tremendous asshole), and because I have no idea what the lyrics mean, it makes me uncertain whether the band is in on the joke or not.
The songs are, for the most part, the type of gearhead Zappa nerd stuff that music store clerks love, while baffling me. Constantly shifting time signatures tend to annoy me, not impress, and the vocals are over-the-top operatics that remind me of Rammstein (another group where I’m unsure if I’m supposed to be laughing or not). So, unsurprisingly, the songs on the album that I enjoyed the most are the ones that are played the straightest. “Chvíle” starts as a wandering guitar plucker, before martial drums kick in and some furious riffing begins, and the mid-track tempo shift feels natural, not the yanking lurches of other cuts, before the song falls back into its opening riff. “Hodiny” is an up-tempo rocker with strings and tints of reggae thrown into the mix, and the intricate bass work complements the song, as opposed to the prog wanking found elsewhere in the album. And the album closer, the instrumental “Proud” is what I do like about prog: listening to the music fold in and out of various shapes as the central spine of the song remains pleasingly present.
Most of the rest of the album, I vary from indifference to annoyance (especially annoying is the descending vocal line of “Lavina”, which inspires a kind of shoulder-tightening, nails-on-chalkboard irritation in me). I freely admit that there’s a lot to this band that I’m not getting. This is their eighth LP, from a group that’s lived through a lot of history, and I’m completely the ugly American, oblivious and vaguely aggravated that I have to, like, learn about some foreign junk. For all my shit talking, this is a group I wouldn’t hesitate to see live, if only because it would promise to be stupendously strange. But I’ll probably wait until that next US tour before I listen to Už Jsme Doma again.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Roky Erickson, Do Make Say Think, Mason Jennings and more
Roky Erickson
October 31 at Great American Music Hall
Glimpsing Roky Erickson onstage is a special thing. Looking somber on this night, jowly (chicken fried steak?), and wearing black as opposed to his traditional huge grin and Hawaiian shirt, he took command. Tonight was Halloween and it was different. Roky would be backed up by a costumed band, Evil Hook Wildlife E.T. (his last appearance in the Bay Area was with the Explosives). The downside was their “look at me” guitarist. Heavy-handed, effects prone, and off the mark except for when he hit the mark and then the dude was jumping around all joyous. What band are you playing in, sir? Why not learn how to play “The Interpreter” correctly? Don’t wank indiscriminately, wank with a purpose. It was great to hear a different band backing Roky up though. The pedal steel was a good counterpoint to the guitar. Roky rode their careless wave and it worked. His voice sounded miles above the music, holding a hypnotic control over the crowd that came out in a collective pan-rhythmic bobbing. His set was identical to the last time. Next time, please play “I Have Always Been Here Before”, as it seems appropriate. Oh Roky, with your voice you could be backed by worms and it would sound just right! You could sing the same songs to me forever. The next morning when I woke up this show seemed as a dream, fleeting. – Brian Brown
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Bear in Heaven
Bear in Heaven
The Red Bloom of Boom
(Hometapes, 2007)
When it comes to psychedelic music, there’s always this push and pull between the atmospheric texture and just pure music. If we place what you’d hear hanging out on a street corner as pure atmospheric texture, that is to say sound with no organization, on one end of the axis, and something that’s nothing but music, say maybe “Louie Louie” on the other end, psychedelic music makes its bones by swerving in between those two poles.
The title of Bear in Heaven’s first LP, 2004’s Tunes Nextdoor to Songs, pretty much declared where they tend to head. While everything they create is recognizably a song—there’s melodies and vocals and such—there’s also a lot of synth-drone, wandering drum breaks, and electronic squiggles thrown into the mix. How much this does for you depends on how much you value atmosphere over song.
It’s not like they’re trying to soft-sell anything. “Bag of Bags”, the opening song of their newest album, the Red Bloom of Boom, opens with 20 seconds of minor-chord synthesizer buzz, before dropping off into a clattering cymbal ride and jazz bass bop. The synths come back, joined by jumbled drums, before dropping off again into acoustic guitar strumming and hushed vocals. The track continues in this way, falling through an intriguing series of costume changes, for seven minutes.
The second track, “Slow Gold” finds the group falling into a bit more traditional structure—starting with an alternating two-note shuffle, the song’s parts circle back around themselves, and vocals find a stronger footing, while still being way spaced out electro buzz. Compared to the aggressively shifting weirdness of the first track, “Slow Gold” could even be called sort of poppy.
The third track, “Werewolf”, is my favorite off the album. I don’t know if this is because of or despite the fact that it’s essentially one theme slowly developed over seven minutes. As snyths slowly layer up upon themselves, drums begin to build before retreating back. It’s a pretty classic build-and-release song, but the fake-outs are the best part. At the five minute mark, the drums thump in, and it seems certain the song is about to break open, but instead it falls back into a cushion of fuzz.
Coming in at a relatively short 4:55, “Arm’s Length” is the closest thing the album has to a pop song. With an opening like a darker Múm track, with static scrapes, imposing reverberations, and the sounds of chimes, it falls into a quick-stepped tribal thump, with pulses of keyboards set on “marimba,” while percussion tumbles down in the background. The following track, “Fraternal Noon”, is the album’s only serious miss for me—big fuzzed out synthesizers and wailing vocals that repeat themselves for far too long, without much else going on. It tries for forbidding and comes off as grating.
The Owls
The Owls
Daughters and Suns
(Magic Marker, 2007)
First off, a confession: I’m a fucking idiot. I opted to review the Owls’ new record, Daughters and Suns, because I thought it was by Owls (no “the”), a band featuring most of the original members of the awesome mid-‘90s art-punk outfit Cap’n Jazz. So, while I’m trying to not bring my own disappointment into this, it’s hard not to—I was hoping for rasping, weirdly angled rock songs, and instead got a fairly straightforward collection of gentle indie pop tunes. That’s not the band’s fault, and I’ve attempted to bring a clear head to the game, to really evaluate the Owls based on not what I was hoping for, but what they actually are. But goddamn if these songs don’t bore the piss out of me.
This isn’t straight-up bad music—far from it. The music is well-produced, sounding spacious and open, and lead vocalists Maria May and Allison LaBonne both have lovely voices that are very reminiscent of Stereolab. The Stereolab comparison holds true in other ways as well: like the French group, I find the Owls perfectly agreeable, pleasant, and tasteful; however, I also find it extremely hard to actually focus on their music. It sounds like background music, stuff meant to be listened to while doing something else, and lacking even Stereolab’s propulsive beats to keep things interesting.
Daughters and Suns opens with “The Way On”, a wispy minor-chord strummer that features female vocals describing how “When you’re happy / I feel the sun through a cloud” while male vocals provide counterpoint harmony. The song isn’t actively annoying, but it invoked the feelings I get in hospital waiting rooms where I’m desperately looking around for anything else to pay attention to. Maybe I need to get on those ADD pills or something, but trying to concentrate on the Owls’ music is like trying to snatch a very dull trout out of a river; it’s always slipping out of my grasp.
“Bury Your Mind” is a sign of what the band could be. Opening with a sparse guitar and the lyrics, “You can go go / You can go slow / Leave that ship behind / If it’s so so slow / And you can’t bury your mind,” this is a sad and affecting song about the things we can’t forget, and sounds like an Aimee Mann b-side. But more indicative of the album is the follow-up, “The Lucky Ones”, which annoys me with doggedly simple lyrics and musical phrasing, and does the same thing over and over again for four minutes. The next song, “Apocalypse”, is full of trite couplets like “Can you read the paper without crying? / The ocean floors are dying,” and the distorted guitar solo at the end is bland and kinda embarrassing.
The best song on the album is “Peppermint Patty”, a fun and sly track about the comic strip character who “Lives outside / She knows where the ladies ride / Also how they come undone.” But a little pop-culture irony goes a long way, and by the time the late-album track “Isaac Bashevis Singer” rolls around, describing the Yiddish novelist as an old-school guy who’s “A ladies man / But he’s easy on your broken heart,” it starts feeling a bit cloying. It also doesn’t help that it’s another song that essentially repeats itself three times in three minutes.
I’m sure there’s an audience for this album, but I find myself not a part of it. It reminds me of the completely adequate bands that populate every college town—music that provides a pretext for drinking too much and ill-considered hookups, and not much else. For those that enjoy the idea of a softer, more sedate Rainer Maria, the Owls could hold some appeal, but for me too much of the album aims for a kind of wry languor and instead ends up feeling listless.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Carl Wilson: Tastes Are Composed of a Thousand Misunderstandings
by: Jake Swearingen
33 1/3 is a series of books that each take one album, and examine it in exhaustive detail. The series to date tends to split the difference between older rock albums universally recognized for their brilliance—MC5’s Kick Out the Jams, the Band’s Music From Big Pink, Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited—and albums that any self-respecting college radio DJ has on vinyl—Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand, DJ Shadow’s Entroducing…, the Replacements’ Let It
Be. So it came as a surprise that their latest offering was a look at Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love. Even more surprising was that the book, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, completely knocked me on my ass. Written by Carl Wilson, an editor and critic at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, the book uses the Canadian diva as a jumping off point to examine the idea of taste itself, shot through the prism of class and social belonging. Why do we like what we like? When we say we don’t like an artist (and nearly every self-respecting music nerd would say they don’t like Dion) what are we really saying? How much of what we like and dislike is bound up in our social class? The book is smart, moving, funny, and will have you questioning every aesthetic judgment you’ve ever made. You may even find yourself giving Celine Dion a listen. Wilson was kind enough to answer a few of my questions over email.
Crawdaddy!: Were there other artists besides Celine Dion that you considered for this project? Could you have examined, for instance, Kenny G, or is there something unique about her?
Carl Wilson: I considered some other artists—Kenny G is a good example, and I thought about the Eagles, for example, who have the best-selling album ever; while I was working on the book I came to think that the current most-reviled act, the equivalent of Celine’s stature earlier in the decade, is probably Nickelback, who are also Canadian and therefore a band that I take somewhat personally. I have to confess that I’m happy I didn’t have to spend a lot of time listening to Nickelback. But Celine presents some special qualities: everyone agrees that what she does is at a high level of musical accomplishment, for instance, no matter how much they dislike her, so that combination was striking to me; it raises a particular puzzle. (How can music be at once good and no good? What does the word “good” really mean?) As well, she is kind of in a genre of her own. Obviously there’s a whole adult-contemporary realm, but her version is especially intense and operatic, at the same time it’s in soft focus. Plus she brings this European pop influence that makes her extra confusing to a lot of North American rock listeners. Nickelback doesn’t do anything quite so exotic. In my friend Ann Powers’ phrase, they’re “bread and butter music,” and while Celine falls into that category, too, she brings a lot of other baggage that seemed worth springing open.
read more
by: Jake Swearingen
published: February 6, 2009
in column: Feature Story
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