GREEN DAY

BILLIE JOE ANYTHING

Green Day have an infectious good time on Dos!

By: MATT ASHARE |  
Published: November 21, 2012 http://www.newsadvance.com/the_burg/music/pop_rocks

With Dos! (Reprise), Green Day deliver the second of three new albums

If you'd asked just about anyone — even singer/guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt, and drummer Tré Cool — whether a volatile, angst-ridden, neo-punk trio like Green Day might turn out to be a viable vehicle for anything, much less a five-time Grammy-winning powerhouse of a band with a Broadway musical to their credit, back when they were just getting started over two decades ago, the answer very likely would have been a simple "no," followed by a chuckle or two. Even after they had their first breakthrough with the multi-platinum major-label debut Dookie in 1994, Green Day still didn't seem to have the depth or focus to endure for more than a couple more albums before burning out. Because, if nothing else, that's just what punk-oriented bands tend to do. They run hot, flame out, and, if they're lucky, leave a good-looking corpse behind.

       But there's been nothing particularly textbook about Green Day's trajectory. They had the good fortune of emerging from Northern California's East Bay punk scene at just the right time to capitalize on the slacker alienation of the alternative nation with fast and furious songs that channeled the DIY spirit and oblique frustration of a generation that had embraced the restive malaise of Nirvana. Sure, there were plenty of self-appointed gatekeepers who questioned the "integrity" of a platinum punk band who, for all their anarchic teen spirit, seemed all too willing to play the game, which is really nothing more than old-school code for "selling out" — something, as I was fond of pointing out, that the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and even Nirvana had all been accused of at various times. And then, Green Day somehow managed to survive a slow decline, as they began to deviate from punk's loud, fast, and snotty rules, limping into the new millennium with 2000's tepid Warning.

       But, after a four-year hiatus from the studio that found them deigning to co-headline a tour with Blink-182, Green Day reemerged in 2004 with another fairly astounding, career-defining statement, the timely punk rock opera American Idiot, an album that once again captured the zeitgeist by tapping into the existential anxiety of suburban teen life. Along with reviving Green Day as plausible standard bearers for yet another generation of disaffected youth, American Idiot was cohesive enough to suggest that Armstrong, the voice of the band, had matured as a songwriter and might just be capable of anything. Indeed, American Idiot: The Musical did go on to make its Broadway debut in 2010, and there are now plans for a film version.

       That Green Day didn't fall apart in the wake of American Idiot, with Armstrong surging ahead as a solo artist and the rest of the band moving on to star in their own reality television series, is something of a minor miracle. I mean, isn't that what rock stars are supposed to do these days? But, apparently, Armstrong and his cohort, which now includes long time touring guitarist Jason White, are fueled by something more than just a lust for commercial success — something that might just be somewhere in the general vicinity of "integrity," or at least a deep, genuine, shared love of music.

       If that sounds like an antiquated notion, it might be worth remembering that the band were so fond of covering the Who's classic youth anthem "My Generation" early on that they included their version of it on their second album, 1992's Kerplunk. Because, as they now enter their forties, Armstrong, Dirnt, and Tré Cool are still very much a unified force. In fact, they started this year with a plan to release not just one but three new studio albums. And, at this point, they're on track to do just that. Uno!, a blast of raw powered punk from Green Day's past that alludes directly to the Clash and the Who, hit the streets running back on September 21. And, the second salvo in the trilogy, Dos!, has just arrived, leaving plenty of time for the third to drop in December.

       If Uno! was a no-holds-barred return to their raucous punk-pop roots, then Dos! is more of an anything-goes proposition. Armstrong appears to have rid his system of the nihilistic gravitas that elevated American Idiot and began to feel a bit heavy handed on its semi-sequel, 2009's neurotic 21st Century Breakdown. But, even at his most playful, he’s got a churlish dark side that rears its roaring head and brings a little edginess to what might otherwise be throwaway party tunes. And that’s essentially what Dos! is — a high-octane collection of garage-rocking tunes about girls and stuff, but mostly girls.

       The disc opens on a knowingly sappy note, with the short and bittersweet “See You Tonight,” a countrified downer buoyed by little more than Armstrong’s simply strummed unplugged electric guitar and some nice Everly Brothers-style harmonies by Dirnt. It’s really just a brief, if well rendered, set-up for Tré Cool’s pounding drums, which ignite the next track, a sinister love song that might have been called “Fun Time” if Armstrong weren’t so fond of dropping f-bombs. “I wanna choke you ‘til you’re blue in the face/Got dirty thoughts and a dirty mind/Take a look into my eyes/I wanna hold you ‘til you’re paralyzed,” Armstrong sneers with menacing glee to the object of his disaffection, as the rest of the band settle into an amped-up r&b groove and head for a Chuck Berry-by-way-of-Angus Young guitar solo.

       That’s more or less the basic blueprint for Dos!, which hangs Armstrong’s dirty thoughts and mixed emotions on well-honed hooks and finds its way to more than a few arena-ready melodies that are as artfully crafted as they are rough around the edges. There are variations on that theme: “Wild One” slows things down a bit for some tortured goth-grrrl romancing; “Stray Heart” takes its cues, rhythmic and melodic, from the Motown playbook, as Armstrong offers an apology of sorts for bad behavior; and, with its skewed guitars and Beatlesque structure, “Wow! That’s Loud” trips into a little Revolver-style psychedelia.

       Armstrong finds his strongest footing on “Lazy Bones,” a clever, over-caffeinated ode to boredom and confusion that would have sounded right at home on Dookie. “I don’t want your sympathy,” Armstrong howls against a stack of growling guitars, “I don’t want your honesty/II just want some piece of mind.” And, on the briskly searing “Ashley,” Armstrong gets the balance of tenderness and disgust just right as he confronts an ex who’s become a mess and tells her, “I can taste the cigarettes and liquor on your breath/We used to call it speed, but now it’s called crystal meth. . .”

       There are a couple of outliers on Dos!, including the creepy slow-roller “Nightlife,” a reggae-tinged rocker that features some guest rapping by Lady Cobra from California’s Mystic Nights of the Cobra. It’s an awkward fit on an album full of rockers, but, even if it proves that hip-hop isn’t Green Day’s thing, it still sorta works. And then there’s “Amy,” an earnestly wistful, somewhat jazzy remembrance of Amy Winehouse that reveals a more sophisticated side of Armstrong and proves that, at this point in his career, he’s pretty much capable of doing just about anything and maybe even pulling it off.

LAETITIA SADIER AND SOLEY STEFANSDOTTIR

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

The alluring avant-pop of Iceland's Sóley Stefánsdóttir and French songstress Laetitia Sadier

By: MATT ASHARE |  
Published: November 14, 2012 http://www.newsadvance.com/the_burg/music/pop_rocks

Laetitia Sadier sticks to the Sterolab script on her new Silencio (Drag City)

For nearly twenty years, Laetitia Sadier was the French-accented voice and co-pilot in Stereolab, an enigmatic British post-rock band who combined bits and pieces of ’60s lounge pop, minimalist composition techniques, retro space-age synths, chime-and-churn guitars, affectless vocals, and strong hints of Situationist political philosophy to create oddly compelling music that defied easy categorization. Sóley Stefánsdóttir, who kindly dropped her last name when she emerged as a solo artist two years ago, got her start as a multi-instrumentalist in the eclectic Icelandic folk-pop collective Seabear, an avant garde-leaning group who nonetheless got one of their songs, "Cat Piano," included in an episode of the teen drama Gossip Girl back in 2008. Both have recently released intriguing new solo albums that toy, alluringly, with pop convention and find that sweet spot somewhere between organic beauty and stylized drama.

       Sadier's never been one to write about affairs of the heart. At least, not directly. Romantic woes just aren't her thing. Her preferred purviews are the postmodern conflict between art and commerce and tension between high and low culture. That may sound a little dryly academic, and it might come off that way if it weren't for her slyly sultry delivery. Sadier may not indulge in the sort of soul-rending, self-reflective confessionals that tends to be the stock and trade of Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and, well, most Lilith faeries, but she's no less enchanting. Sadier's distinctively stoic vocal approach may seem coldly calculated, but the distance she projects has a coolly seductive quality that echoes the Francophone pop of the ’60s, as well as the arch minimalism of ‘70s Krautrockers like Can, Neu!, and other obscurities. Let's just say that it takes a certain je ne sais quoi to open a song with the line, "Rating agencies, financial markets, and the G20s/But who are these people?," breezily, as Sadier does Silencio, in the context of the bubbly, upbeat, guitar-driven "Auscultation of the Nation," a politicized salvo that's downright danceable and remarkably accessible.

       "Auscultation of the Nation" is just one of several tunes on Silencio that serve as a timely reminder that we're not the only Western country dealing with serious economic problems, particularly in the wake of what was a rather anticlimactic end to an all-consuming, fairly contentious election that didn't quite deliver the well defined vision for an American recovery that it promised. Sadier's leftist leanings are no secret, particularly on the album's airy, atmospheric opener, "The Rule of the Game," a dreamy soundscape of strummed guitar, strings, ethereal background vocals, and textured keyboards that find her proclaiming, with utter nonchalance, "The ruling class/Neglects again/Responsibility/Over-indulged children/Drawn to/Cruel games/Pointless pleasures. . . paving the way to fascism."

       Stereolab fans won't find any of that particularly surprising: This isn't exactly new terrain for Sadier. Indeed, Silencio pretty much sticks to the Stereolab script, with Sadier offering almost random observations, in French as well as English, about everything from trigonometry and consumerism, to what might best be described as existential anxiety ("We are lost in the century/No spark in the dustbin now/Our eyelids empty," she intones in the discofied "Fragment pour le future de l'homme"). And she does so in songs that flutter and hum with deceptively simple sing-along melodies. On her own, she's a little less prone to the kind of indulgent sonic excursions Stereolab favored, as the title of their second album, Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements, suggests. Instead, she's generous with hooks and catchy choruses up until the final track, "Invitation au silence," a spoken-word piece in English and French set to little more than quiet ambience, a clever ode to the preciousness of silence in our noisy world that includes nearly two minutes of nothing.

Sóley paints surrealistic portraits on We Sink (Morr Music)

Sóley knows a thing or two about the virtues of quietude. A classically trained pianist with a pleasantly pixie-ish voice and playful sense of the absurd, she favors sparse arrangements that only occasionally incorporate anything resembling a full band. A clipity-clop rhythm that sounds a bit like someone gently tapping two wooden clogs together is all the support she needs to open the first track of We Sink, an eerie reverie called “I’ll Drown” that relies on little more than a few piano chords and paints a surrealist picture of a mysterious someone who “sleeps with his eyes open” in a house that’s “far, far away.” The song builds to an emotional chorus of “I drown when I see you” before stopping for a good five seconds of total silence. When it returns for a brief refrain, everything, including Sóley’s full-throated voice, is immersed in echoing reverb, as if to suggest she’s actually drowning.

       Small, artful touches like that are one of the elements that create a gulf between Sóley and your basic, confessional singer-songwriter, even when she’s accompanying herself on simply strummed acoustic guitar on a track like “Smashed Birds.” Another romantic song of sorts, it finds Sóley talking to trees as she finds her way to a former lover’s house, making a dress out of his notes, and eating his words, as organ drones and a subtle backbeat help her along. “Bad Dream,” a skeletal acoustic guitar track with a long pause midway through, is, as the title suggests, a strange and haunting tale about a rabbit that she fears “will jump on me and take my heart out.” And, “Dance,” which does open with a strong backbeat that comes and goes, is yet another dreamscape from beyond the looking glass, with lines like, “My soul will dance over your house.”

       Sóley’s skewed lyrics and art-damaged approach to folk place her somewhere in the range of mercurial singer-songwriters in the vein of Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom. And that playfully waifish voice and the simple fact that she’s from Iceland are sure to bring up Björk comparisons. Neither is a bad thing. But “We Sink,” with all its charming eccentricities, suggests that Sóley has the will and the vision to thrive in her own captivating world of fanciful imagery and sprightly melodies, just as Sadier seems to be doing just fine on her own.

NEIL YOUNG AND BOB DYLAN

LONG PLAYERS

Neil Young and Bob Dylan stay true to their inscrutable muses

By: MATT ASHARE |  
Published: November 7, 2012 http://www.newsadvance.com/the_burg/music/pop_rocks

BACK TRACKING: Young recaptures the churning fury of classic Crazy Horse

"The first time I heard 'Like a Rolling Stone,’ I felt that magic and took it home," a stoically nostalgic Neil Young recalls at the start of "Twisted Road," an homage not just to Bob Dylan, but also to his own formative years as a rocker. "Gave it a twist and made it mine," he continues, bolstered by barbed guitars and the incessant drive of his longtime compadres in Crazy Horse, "But nothing was as good as the very first time." The song is the opening track on disc two of Psychedelic Pill, an epic new album by Young and Crazy Horse that aims to recapture the overdriven sound and churning fury the band first harnessed in the mid to late ‘70s, on classics like Zuma and Rust Never Sleeps, and largely succeeds.

       Young's nod to Dylan, who, at 71, also has a fairly epic new disc out titled Tempest, is one of just nine tracks on the 66 year-old singer, songwriter, guitarist, and bandleader's 35th studio album. Spanning 87 minutes, it's also his longest to date. And, it arrives at the end of what's been a remarkably busy year for Young, who released Americana, a collection of freewheeling reworkings of tradition folk tunes amped up by Crazy Horse, a little less than six months ago, and who published the memoir Waging Heavy Peace just a couple weeks ago.

       As that title suggests, Young's never shied from controversy or been afraid to be topical. In the ‘70s, he addressed the plight of Native Americans in two of his more stirring, Crazy Horse-powered tunes, "Cortez the Killer" and "Powderfinger." He ended the ‘80s with "Rockin' In the Free World," an angry salvo targeting the Reagan/Bush years. And he was anything but subtle on 2006's Living With War, a disc that found him raging against the policies of another chief executive on tracks like "Let's Impeach the President" and "Lookin' for a Leader." But, like Dylan, he's too mercurial to be pinned down as single-minded protest singer, just as he was wound a bit too tightly to stick to folksy acoustic guitar picking when he first emerged from the ruins of Buffalo Springfield as a solo artist.

       Young has a bit of fun with his own twisted legacy at the start of "Driftin' Back," the nearly thirty minute-long opening track on Psychedelic Pill. Referencing one of his own Rust Never Sleeps-era classics, "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)," he mellowly strums an acoustic guitar and, with earnest fragility, intones "Hey, now now/Hey, now now/I'm drifting' back/Dreamin' about the way things sound now/Write about them in my book/Worry that you can't hear me now/Or feel the time I took/To make you feel this feeling/And let you ride along." But, as he's heading into the next refrain, a stormy surge of distorted guitars and pounding drums washes away any trace of a folk singalong and, suddenly, he's plugging in with Crazy Horse and alighting on one of the expansive tune's many reverb-drenched guitar solos.

       Psychedelic Pill evolved out of the sessions for Americana, a disc that marked Young's first collaboration with Crazy Horse in nearly ten years, and you get the sense that it was all a happy accident of sorts. Having spent the months leading up to Americana finishing Waging Heavy Peace, Young was clearly in a reflective mood, and happy to be back in the company of guitarist Frank Sampedro, bassist Billy Talbot, and drummer Ralph Molina. It's certainly as raw and untethered as anything Young's ever recorded, with quite a few long and roiling solo guitar excursions buffering scattershot bits of verse that, in "Driftin' Back," touch on everything from hating MP3s and wanting a "hip-hop haircut," to "big tech" turning Picasso into "wallpaper."

       Young sticks to more straightforward narratives on the disc's two other long-runners, both of which clock in at just over 16 minutes. "Ramada Inn" wistfully follows a couple through the vagaries —"good times" and "ups and downs" — of a couple’s life, from bringing up kids and having drinks with old friends, to simply "holding on to what they've done." And the more obviously autobiographical "Walk Like a Giant" is a minor-key meditation on the hopes and dreams of the Woodstock generation. "Me and some of my friends were going to change the world," Young sings plainly. "But then the weather changed, and the white got stained, and it fell apart, and it breaks my heart, to think about how close we came."

       Elsewhere, Young taps into echoes from his Crazy Horse past, carving out a monster “Cinnamon Girl”-style riff on the disc’s title track, which comes in two forms: a oddly phase-shifted version, and a more bristling and metallic alternate mix that features a searing one-note guitar solo. And the romantic sway of “She Loves to Dance” brings to mind the fevered dreaminess of “When You Dance I Can Really Love.” Both tunes, like the bulk of Psychedelic Pill, ultimately reflect Young’s unshaken belief in the liberating power of rock and roll, even if it still breaks his heart that he and some friends weren’t quite able to change the world some forty years ago.

FACT AND FICTION: Dylan conflates the two on Tempest's title track.

Dylan is one of those friends, but he gave up on the idealism of the ’60s quite some time ago and has been going off on unpredictable tangents ever since. Tempest surely counts as one of them. Another long player that clocks in at an hour and change, it’s an eclectic collection of quiescent, darkly hued tunes that reveal, like so many of his recent albums, Dylan’s own uniquely skewed vision of Americana. It does open on a relatively bright note, with the pre-rock ragtime swing of “Duquesne Whistle,” an old-timey train ride with some typically quizzical lines like “I can hear a sweet voice steadily calling/Must be the mother of our lore.”

       Dylan, his weathered voice sounding dry as the dustbowl wind, hasn’t lost his penchant for inscrutable verse. “Two timing slim/Who’s every heard of him?,” he asks nonchalantly in the countrified “Soon After Midnight,” before threatening “I’ll drag his corpse through the mud” — that, in a song that hangs its main hook on the line, “It’s soon after midnight/And I’ve got a date with the fairy queen.” And, in the bluesy “Long and Wasted Years,” he’s all over the place, relenting “I ain’t seen my family in twenty years. . . they may be dead by now,” warning “Don’t you know, the sun can burn your brains right out,” and explaining, in nice rhyme,  “I wear dark glasses to cover my eyes/There are secrets in ’em I can’t disguise.”

      Stranger, yet, are two of the album’s more transparent tunes. The title track, “Tempest,” is a 45-verse retelling of the Titanic voyage that conflates historical fact and contemporary fiction by including an odd reference to Leonardo DiCaprio and his sketchbook. And, although it’s admittedly a moving and seemingly heartfelt John Lennon elegy, “Roll On John” seems somewhat randomly tacked onto the end of the disc, particularly when you consider that Lennon was shot 22 years ago. The song does fit the general tenor of Tempest, which is full of death, murder, violence, and tragedy. But, it leaves one to wonder why Dylan waited over two decades to write it. I’m sure he’s got his reasons. And, it’s a good bet he’s not telling.

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HALLOWEEN PLAYLIST

DRESSED TO THRILL

Getting into character for Halloween

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: October 31, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment

Lux Interior and Poison Ivy of the Carmps

Maybe I'm just suffering from zombie fatigue. Or, perhaps, I've just been starting to feel that the overload of supernatural slasher films that crowd cable movie channels in the weeks leading up to All Hallows Eve has reached a tipping point — one in which Freddy Krueger's nightmares on Elm Street have become as annoyingly, even cloyingly routine as the pre-Christmas television blitz of Jimmy Stewart's "It's A Wonderful Life," an otherworldly allegory of quite a different sort. Or, it could just be that among the folks I'm connected with on Facebook, there seem to be quite a few more folks dressing up as women in binders than ghoully grrrrls this election year.

       In any case, while I'm happy to concede that there have been plenty of scary monsters and super creeps over the years – from the lipsticked glam dudes of the ‘70s, to arch goths like Bauhaus, to monsters of metal mayhem like the traveling freak show that is GWAR – rock and roll has really always been about playing dress-up in one form or another, going all the way back to Elvis' rockabilly quaff. After all, John Fogerty wasn't really born on the bayou (he was a Berkeley boy, as in Northern California): He just did his best to look and sound like he was. And, when Pearl Jam's manager suggested that they were a band with "no image" in the early days of grunge, he was rightly reminded that no image is indeed an image.

       With all of that in mind, I've done my best to opt out of the usual monster mashes for this year's Halloween. Instead, I went looking for more playfully eclectic playlist of bands and artists who, at various points in their careers, found unique ways to complement their music with the sort of stylized attire that continues to tweak my appreciation for the tricks and treats of rock-and-roll pageantry. As is so often the case, this is just the tip an iceberg that arguably encompasses anyone who's ever taken the stage, as John and Paul surely knew even in their pre-Sgt Pepper incarnation as the suit-and-tied Fab Four. And, ultimately, that's really sort of the point.

1) Rasputina, "Transylvanian Concubine"

       In 1996, this trio of female cellists dolled up in Victorian-era corsets and lace made a minor splash with "Thanks for the Ether," a strangely alluring debut that incorporated spoken-word reveries and classically-tinged songs encompassed everything from Shakespeare ("Dig Ophelia") to Howard Hughes. This track, the disc's de-facto single, set distorted cellos and some poetic versifying that could have come straight outta an Anne Rice novel to an incessant beat. It actually caught the ear of Kurt Cobain, who had them open for Nirvana, and Marilyn Manson, who did a darker remix of the song for the 1997 EP "Transylvanian Regurgitations." Still, I mostly remember Rasputina for the clothes.

Dresden Dolls' Brian Viglione and Amanda Palmer

2) The Dresden Dolls, "Coin-Operated Boy"

       Moving out of the 19th-century and into the early-20th, the Dresden Dolls came on in whiteface and formal, color-coordinated, thrift-shop garb with their remarkable 2003 debut to offer up something singer/pianist Amanda Palmer termed "Brechtian punk cabaret," a cleverly nostalgic twist on the pre-war scene in Weimar Germany. With little more than drummer Brian Viglione bringing some punch to the performative party, Palmer delivers a deeply creepy tale of mechanical romance in this standout track from the self-titled album that launched her unlikely career as something of an international underground sensation.

3) The Cramps, "Strychnine"

       The self-proclaimed "hottest thing from the north to come out of the south," the Cramps pretty much held the patent on punkabilly from 1976 until frontman Lux Interior's death in 2009. This cover of a fairly deviant ode to the pleasures of poison by the ‘60s garage band the Sonics is one of the more straightforwardly sinister rave-ups, replete with plenty of reverb-drenched powerchords courtesy of guitarist Poison Ivy, from their amusingly titled 1980 album "Songs the Lord Taught Us."

The Damned's frontman Dave Vanian

4) The Damned, "Wait For the Blackout"

       Although they do have the distinction of being bona-fide members of the original, class of ‘76 British punks, the Damned never really quite reached the heights of the Clash or the Pistols. They did have their moments early on, particularly with the fast and furious outburst "New Rose," a semi-classic that gets covered from time to time. But it was with 1980's "The Black Album" (pre-dating Spinal Tap by four years) that singer Dave Vanian embraced his inner (and outer) vampire, and adopted a deep croon that lends this apocalyptic mini-epic its ominous overtones.

5) Kiss, "Rock and Roll All Nite"

       Sure, Kiss, in full make-up, are an obvious Halloween pick. But one of my favorite, if brief, periods in Kisstory is "Dressed to Kill," the 1976 album with the wry black-and-white cover shot of the band in full face paint, but wearing natty Fab Four-style suits rather than their full costumes. It's definitely a look, although, sadly, not one they stuck with for very long. And, the disc does end with one of their all-time greats, a peon to partying every day and then switching over to rock and roll once the sun has set.

6) New York Dolls, "Personality Crisis"

       It wouldn't be fair to bring up Kiss without giving these trashy New York City proto-punks their due because Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley got their idea for playing dress-up from the tongue-in-cheek, dime-store drag queen look the Dolls sported when they first emerged in the early ’70s with a twisted take on Rolling Stones androgyny. I'm sticking with "Personality Crisis," the song that best describes what the Dolls once embodied, when they released their self-titled debut in 1973.

7) The Rolling Stones, "Child of the Moon"

       And, now that we've mentioned the Stones, it's not always worth remembering that they took a somewhat misguided trip into Sgt. Peppery psychedelia in 1967, with "Their Satanic Majesties Request." But a few good things did come out of the era that had Mick dressing up like a wizard, pointy black hat and all, including the single "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and it's luminesque b-side, an all too often forgotten tune call "Child of the Moon."

8) Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Dear Prudence"

       As a sideways nod to the Fab Four, who changed costumes more than a few times in their short time together, here's an alluringly eerie rendition of one of their late-career "White Album" cuts by the post-punk queen of goth Siouxsie Sioux and her Banshees. Released in 1983, it became one of their bigger UK hits, and helped popularize her dark diva stylings here in the States.

9) Devo, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"

       While we're at the crossroads of post-punk/new-wave covers and Beatles/Stones tunes, it kinda doesn't get much better and/or weirder than Devo, in their matching futuristic spacesuits, doing a number on this Jagger/Richards classic. It’s hard to imagine what anybody made of this when the Akron-bred band came out of nowhere with "Q: Are We Not Men A: We Are Devo!" in 1978. And, it remains a truly strange, yet oddly accessible transmission from the punk-rock era.

David Bowie as Aladdin Sane

10) David Bowie, "Cracked Actor"

       Ziggy Stardust is admittedly one of the benchmarks for rock-and-roll costumery. But the quick wardrobe change the Thin White Duke, as he'd later be known, made directly after his tenure with the Spiders From Mars, into the more elusive and introspective Aladdin Sane (as in, "a lad insane"), is too often underrated. With a multi-colored lightening slash painted across his face, he brought on what he's called an Americanized version of his glam sham with r&b-tinged rockers like "The Jean Genie" and the suitably schizophrenic "Cracked Actor," a somewhat deeper "Aladdin Sane" cut.  

JOE STRUMMER

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AFTER CLASH

Joe Strummer’s Resurgent Hellcat Years

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: October 22, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment

PAN-CULTURAL POPULIST: Strummer style.

One of my favorite Joe Strummer stories – and there are more than just a few – goes all the way back to the formative days of the Clash, when he and guitarist Mick Jones were working on the incendiary material that would become the band's groundbreaking 1977 self-titled debut. According to Jones, who played Paul McCartney to Strummer's John Lennon in their songwriting partnership, he’d come up with the makings of a tune called "I'm So Bored With You," a perfectly solid foundation for angry punk cannon fodder. But Strummer had a more provocative salvo in mind: he changed the title to "I'm So Bored With the U.S.A.," and quickly turned it into a searingly prescient, politically-charged indictment of some of the less savory aspects of the same country that had given the world the r&b music he'd cut his rock-and-roll teeth on.

       Conflict, contradiction, and controversy are just a few of the volatile elements that fueled Strummer, who died of an undiagnosed congenital heart defect at the age of 52 on December 22, 2002, and helped make the Clash the first truly mainstream punk band. It's also equally fair to credit his penchant for provocation with the premature demise of the Clash: After releasing five albums in five years, the band imploded when Strummer famously "fired" Jones in 1983. In a misguided move he'd come to regret, Strummer kept a back-to-basics version of the Clash sputtering along for a few more years. And then he more or less dropped out of the game for nearly a decade and a half, showing up from time to time on film soundtracks, dropping the mediocre solo album Earthquake Weather in 1989, and filling in as the frontman for the Irish band the Pogues on a couple of tours in the early-’90s.

       It took the punk-rock resurgence of the ‘90s, spearheaded by the Clash-revering California bands Green Day and Rancid to lure Strummer back to the fold. Indeed, it was Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong, a singer with a Strummeresque snarl and a very Clash-like affinity for marrying the raw roar of punk guitars with the rock-steady rhythms of reggae and ska, who helped facilitate Strummer's late-career return. In 1999, Armstrong signed Joe Strummer and his newly christened band the Mescaleros to his Epitaph imprint Hellcat Records and released their debut, a remarkably inspired return to form titled Rock Art and the X-Ray Style. Strummer followed up with the equally impressive Global A Go-Go two years later. And, in 2003, Streetcore, a disc Strummer had been recording at the time of his death, came out posthumously on Hellcat. All three discs have been remastered and reissued with bonus tracks by Armstrong's label. And all of that material, along with an additional 16 live tracks recorded at London's Acton Town Hall at a benefit the Mescaleros played in support of striking firemen on November 15, 2002, are part of The Hellcat Years, a downloadable, comprehensive "digital box set." 

       Although he never recaptured the commercial ground he reached with 1982's platinum-selling Clash classic Combat Rock during his Hellcat years, Strummer regained his artistic footing as a scowling yet soulful punk prophet, a pan-cultural populist who expanded the very notion of rebel rock to include everything from growling guitars to supple dub grooves – from simple folk-rock and r&b, to reggae, funk, hip-hop, and beyond. The static that begins the broadcast that is "Tony Adams," the first track from Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, signals that Strummer's plugging right back into the same sonic frequencies he explored back in ‘81 on the "This Is Radio Clash" single, a furious fusion of rap and rock that was rather well ahead of its time. As insistent guitars settle into a syncopated groove, the white noise clears and Strummer begins his broadcast: "Late breaking news, this just in. . . Tonight there was a power cut in the city of madness/And all the conversations died in the burst of a solar flare. . . And all the neon blew down funky Broadway/And shorted out the Eastern shore."

       The reggae-inflected drum fills and saxophone squalls that color the apocalyptic visions of "Tony Adams" may be a long way from the strident simplicity of the early Clash, but they're right in tune with the kind of subtle atmospherics Strummer and Jones were exploring on a deep Combat Rock track like "Straight to Hell." Freed from the basic guitar/bass/drum structure of a trad band, Strummer went further with the Mescaleros, appropriating sounds from Spain, Africa, and the Middle East without losing his rockist center on tracks like the relatively upbeat and laid-back "Sandpaper Blues" and the eerily unsettling reverie "Yalla Yalla," a funky, techno-tinged track that opens with an undeterred Strummer crooning, "Well, so long liberty/Let's forget you didn't show/Not in my time/But in our sons' and daughters' time/When you get the feeling/Call and you've got a room."    

       Not everything here is a multicultural mash-up. The largely acoustic "X-Ray Style" is, at heart, a campfire folk tune that finds Strummer counting stars and giving a sly shout-out to one of his heroes, rockabilly legend Eddie Cochran. And, "The Road to Rock 'n' Roll" is a straightforwardly soulful if somewhat sorrow-filled reflective track Strummer wrote for Johnny Cash. But, over the course of the 33 studio tracks from The Hellcat Years, which include a starkly solemn cover of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song," you get the sense that Strummer, vindicated and revitalized by ‘90s neo-punks like Rancid, was more determined than ever to push the stylistic envelop of a brand of music he helped to conceive. As for the two-dozen live tracks tacked on at the end, three of which feature Mick Jones sitting in on some Clash tunes, they're a somewhat wistful reminder that the fun Strummer had a special way of making songs as disparate as the Ramones' "Blitzkreig Bop," Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder They Come," and the trad blues tune "Junco Partner," feel like they all belonged together in a place I'll call Strummerville.

AIMEE MANN

REALITY BITES: 

Aimee Mann keeps her cool on the revealing new Charmer

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: October 15, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment

INTIMACY ISSUES: Mann bares romantic wounds with wit and reserve

Last week, enigmatic songstress Tori Amos released Gold Dust, a classically styled collaboration with the Metropole Orchestra that takes 14 epic songs spanning her two decades as a solo artist and reworks them as baroque, cabaret-pop tunes. Just a couple of weeks earlier, dance-pop diva Pink delivered her version of a "grown-up" album, a playfully all-over-the-map collection of rockist power ballads, introspective acoustic folk, and, of course, dance-party anthems. Each, in its own gaudy, confessional way, fits nicely into a living-out-loud cultural milieu that values the vicarious thrill of the tell-all memoir and reality television. And both are more than likely to overshadow a very different kind of personal statement: the cooly reserved, artfully crafted retro-pop of Charmer, the eighth studio album by the LA-based singer/songwriter Aimee Mann.
    Mann knows a thing or two about being a charmer, or, at least, about fleeting nature of the charmed life. In 1985, she was a young, spiky haired, new-wave blond beauty fronting and playing bass in the Boston-based synth-rock band ’Til Tuesday when the very first single from their debut album became a hit on radio and, more importantly, MTV. Playing the part of a sheepishly stoic yet rebellious, leather jacketed lover caught in an oppressively buttoned-down relationship, Mann became a ubiquitous presence on MTV, as she acted out the drama of raging against the upper-middle class machine in her own coy manner. The song, "Voices Carry," catapulted ‘Til Tuesday into the emerging alternative mainstream. The video, with its cheesy narrative and clumsy overdubbed dialogue, won MTV's then coveted award for "Best New Artist." And the iconic image of Mann casting off the trappings of the good life to pursue her rock-and-roll dreams somewhat ironically left her trapped, for a time, in something akin to an ‘80s one-hit-wonder time capsule, as ‘Til Tuesday quickly faded from view.
    It would be the better part of a decade before Mann resurfaced as a solo artist in LA with 1993's critically lauded Whatever, an album that recast her as a whipsmart and sassy, seasoned songwriter with a keen talent for channeling wryly cynical observations into classic Beatlesque hooks and melodies. In her new guise, Mann's garnered praise from Elvis Costello and novelist Nick Hornby, to name just two prominent "critics." And her considerable contributions to the soundtrack for the Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia (1999), earned both an Oscar and Grammy nomination. She hasn't, however, come anywhere close to recapturing the commercial success she experienced with ‘Til Tuesday. And you get the sense that she's just fine with that.
    Indeed, until now, Mann's work has rather assiduously avoided touching on anything that might carry even the slightest echo of "Voices Carry." But it's been almost thirty years since "Voices Carry," bands as disparate as LCD Soundsystem, the Killers, and the Faint have cast the sound of ‘80s new wave in a more positive light, and, over the course of seven solo albums, Mann's unerringly established her bona-fides as a serious artist — so much so that she's finally willing to if not embrace, at least have a little fun with her ‘Til Tuesday past.
    To that end, she enlisted Tom Scharpling, a comic radio show host who served as a writer/executive producer for the show Monk, to direct a shot-for-shot satirical remake of the "Voices Carry" video, replete with dramatic overdubs, for "Labrador," a ruminative, mid-tempo rocker from Charmer that's also the disc de facto first single.  With characteristic understatement that clashes with and underscores the high drama of video's narrative, Mann recounts the dynamics of a dysfunctional friendship. "You lie so well, I could never even tell, what were facts in your artful rearranging" she intones against the easy strum of a guitar." And then, as the drums pick up and ringing piano chords enter the mix, she looks inward and admits, "I came back for more/And you laughed in my face and you rubbed it in/Cuz I'm a labrador/And I run when the gun drops the dove again."
    The contrast between the bright, hummable flow of the melody and the darker implications of the lyric are something of a Mann trademark. Paradoxically, the histrionics acted out in the video have never been her style. Although Mann's not afraid to mine her life for material, her delivery relies on sly subtleties, shifting perspectives, and delicately incisive jabs. On the disc's opening tune, the title track "Charmer," she takes aim at charismatic cad, leaning on a nostalgic analog synth hook as she observes, "When you're a charmer the world applauds/They don't know that secretly charmers feel like they're frauds." You get the sense that she's got someone specific targeted when she lands precisely polite punches like that. But she may also be speaking from personal experience.
    With only one of its eleven tracks clocking in over the four-minute mark, Charmer is a concise album, with few wasted words or notes. Mann approaches her art like a craft, carefully fashioning tight arrangements that suit her subjects, from the doomed lovers in the sprightly "Crazytown" to the resigned romantics in the more plaintive "Living a Lie," a beautifully sad duet with Shins frontman James Mercer. She does save the best line – "For every open arm there's a cold shoulder" – for herself, but she doesn't overplay it. For all the heated emotions that underpin the songwriting here, Mann's preferred mode is more smolder than burn, her voice more a whisper than a scream. Unlike Pink or Tori, who are more than happy to bare their wounds loudly, Mann creates allure by holding back just a bit, creating a kind of knowing intimacy that invites the listener in on the often devastating jokes. In the break-up ballad "Soon Enough," she's almost matter-of-fact as she nonchalantly concedes, "Soon enough you can say we made it up/Just for fun I guess/To make a mess/‘cause what's more fun than other people's hell." She got a point there. And she's also got what might be the best album of her career.

BAND OF HORSES

BREAKING SAD

Band of Horses take another resonant ride on the melancholy side

By: MATT ASHARE |  

Published: October 3, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/list/music-burg/

Band of Horses, Mirage Rock (Columbia)

BRINDELL'S BOYS: Band of Horses in their latest incarnation

Reliably sturdy, emotionally earnest, often nearly meditative mid-tempo Americana in the vein of Neil Young and Crazy Horse are some of the qualities that have characterized Band of Horses since 2004, when Ben Bridwell emerged from behind the drums of Seattle slo-core specialists Clarissa's Weird to front the group. But, while it wouldn't be quite right to suggest that Bridwell's overly sober, by reputation the thick-bearded singer-songwriter is certainly more somber than, say, playful.

       So it feels like it must be a sign of something – perhaps a loaded, coded message to his many minions — that Bridwell settled on a cleverly puckish title for Band of Horses' fourth album, their second since moving to the big leagues of Columbia Records and earning a Grammy nomination with 2010's Infinite Arms. Say it real fast three or four times in a row, and Mirage Rock begins to sound an awful lot like "garage rock," a style/genre that, like indie-rock, Bridwell has largely relinquished as Band of Horses have found footing somewhere in the general vicinity of what used to be called the mainstream.

       Swapping saddles isn't exactly new to Bridwell. The South Carolina native quickly became the only remaining founder of the original Band of Horses foursome. And, at this point, former members outnumber the current five-piece — Bridwell, keyboardist Ryan Monroe, guitarist Tyler Ramsey, bassist Bill Reynolds, and drummer Creighton Barrett — by a full two-to-one ratio.

       That said, Band of Horses have embodied a bedrock of consistency, even as various players have come and gone, in large part because Bridwell's distinctively haunting yet hearty falsetto, whether drenched in reverb or supported by spot-on harmonies, has remained so glaringly bare of artifice. And, even as his songwriting has evolved to incorporate more rootsy arrangements, churn-and-burn Crazy Horse guitars are still very much an elemental part of Bridwell's Band of Horses vision.

Band of Horses, Mirage Rock (Columbia)

      If "Infinite Arms" marked Bridwell's return to his native south (it was mostly recorded in North Carolina), then Mirage Rock signals a shift toward a rather eclectic vision of classic rock, as well as a determined attempt to leave the limitations of the garage behind without losing the illusion of grassroots intimacy. Rather than taking over the reigns of production, as the band did on Infinite Arms, they brought on a legend, Glyn Johns, whose considerable resume includes classics by the Who, the Stones, and Clapton, although it's probably more relevant that he also helped the Eagles find their country-rock footing in the early-‘70s, and did something similar for Ryan Adams just last year on Ashes & Fire.

       Johns has a well-tested talent for honing hooks, clarifying choruses, and subtly sharpening melodies that lends a kind of refined rawness to a recording. His deft touch is apparent from the first guitar-bursts on Mirage Rock. With drums pounding and powerchords roaring, Bridwell begins on a high note, crooning wordlessly "Awoo, woo" in an almost celebratory falsetto. The song's title, "Knock Knock," suggests there's a punchline coming, but it's not of the comic variety. "So, say it to me/Say it to my face/There's no time to be deserved or safe," Bridwell sings, as if for the first time in a long time he really is in a hurry to get somewhere. That place is a rock-solid chorus that finds him "knocking" over and over again on some unspecified door, an image that suggests he's pushing hard toward a creative breakthrough of some kind.

       After a chaotic intro, the next track, "How To Live," settles into a more measured groove, as big, ringing guitars create an anthemic atmosphere for a little world-weary introspection. "I really don't have to suffer/I still do it anyway/I'm a diamond in the rough/Or a dirt clod in the clay," Bridwell reflects in what might be the disc's most telling line: he may be a major player on a major label with a major producer, but Bridwell's comfort zone, as song titles like "Everything's Gonna Be Undone" and "Heartbreak on the 101" suggest, is still minor-key melancholy, unraveling relationships, and a kind of looming quotidian sadness. He revels in everyday details of decay: "There's no street lamps/Only three buildings/And one of them's vacant," he intones on the largely acoustic "Slow Cruel Hands of Time," an airy reverie that find him, "Back in my yard, where everything's just dull."

       With its jangly guitars, each chord drawn out into pretty arpeggios, and enigmatic imagery ("Sky is in the yard/Street cotton candy in the fall"), "Slow Cruel Hands of Time" is just one of several tracks here that owe a debt to R.E.M's reinvention of "Southern" rock. In that sense, Band of Horses are in the right hands with Johns at the board. He's not just familiar with the three-part Crosby, Stills and Nash harmonies that color the undulating, fingerpicked "Shut-in Tourist," the mellow "Horse With No Name" tones of "Dumpster World," and the bluegrass-inflections of the rather Dylanesque "Everything's Gonna Be Undone," he's basically on a first-name basis with all of them.

       Mirage Rock does its best to split the difference between grungy hard-rockers, like the softly searing "Feud," with its "I need you to fail" refrain, and the straight-up Bakersfield country discomfort of "Long Vows," a Gram Parsons-style ballad that begins with a "Hello Darlin'," and ends on a meaner note: "No one's gonna show you the way/When it gets cold/You can find yourself baby/Back in the hole from which you came/And everything will fall into place." If, at times, that makes for an album that's more an amalgam of styles than a coherent artistic statement, at least Mirage Rock has one thing holding it all together: an alluringly pensive moodiness bordering on both beauty and despair. As Bridwell, at his most unadorned, put it in "Heartbreak on the 101," "You leave me more damaged every day/You took my entire world and threw it all away."