Beck's Morning Phase

CALIFORNIA STYLE

Beck mines a different sort of mellow gold on Morning Phase

by Matt Ashare |  

Published February 26, 2014 http://www.newsadvance.com/the_burg/music/pop_rocks/

In his latest mutation, Beck embraces a kind of grand moodiness

The new Beck album — his twelfth overall, and first for Capitol — is not an illustrated book of sheet music. It’s not a delivery device for the three buoyant, stand-alone singles — “Defriended,” “I Won’t Be Long,” and “Gimme” — that the mercurial singer-songwriter released last year, after his nearly twenty-year contract with Interscope-affiliated DGC label had run its course. And, it actually doesn’t quite open with a wistful Beck reflecting on the scattered remains of days past, waking up from “a long night in the storm,” eyeing “roses full of thorns,” wondering aloud, as the plaintive refrain of the quietly unsettled “Morning” plainly asks, “Can we start all over again?” 

         No, the meticulously laid-back, bittersweetly romantic, organically rendered Morning Phase begins, in concept-album fashion, with a brief orchestral overture, a rising swell of a string section (violins, violas, cellos) touching on some of the more dominant, minor-key musical motifs of the album in the 41 seconds of “Cycle.” Only then do we catch a glimpse of Beck’s acoustic guitar, leisurely strummed, as the first song settles into a languid, deliberate groove, with restrained drums and atmospheric keyboard touches that, along with orchestral embellishments, help conjure the peaceful, uneasy feeling that pervades Morning Phase.

         It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that we’ve washed up once again on the lovelorn shores of Sea Change, the quietly introspective 2002 album a wounded Beck recorded in the wake of a jarring break-up of a nine-year relationship. And, while that’s not entirely inaccurate, it does miss some of the finer points — some of the nuance in an album that’s driven by subtle shifts of mood — of Morning Phase.

The Beck that surfaced on Sea Change, raw and freshly wounded, was an artist in search of a different kind of mellow gold. It was a Beck who seemed out of step with the slacker savant who, with hip-hopped hits like “Loser” and “Where It’s At,” had made cut-and-past eclecticism his calling card, and, in a delightfully postmodern twist, turned novelty songwriting into an incisive commentary on the art of the novelty number. Through crafty juxtaposition and freely associated wordplay, he proved a master at creating the illusion of depth, or, more accurately, at using allusion as a meaning unto itself to craft hearty party anthems that, upon closer inspection, deconstructed the whole notion of the anthemic party.

Even when he set the sampler aside on 1998’s Mutations, he proved to be a genre omnivore, artfully sampling, in a larger sense, from Brazilian tropicalia, psychedelic folk-rock, and countrified comforts without fully committing to any one musical or tonal framework. So, for all its lovely shadings, Sea Change couldn’t help but seem a bit heavy handed in its adherence to a one theme, one mood, and a whole lotta tangled feelings. It was, ultimately, an album with emotional baggage. And that was just the sort of thing that the freewheeling Beck hadn’t packed on his previous excursions into the pan-cultural pastiche of hip-poppery, or into the the lo-fi, neo-Dylan realm of the acoustic anti-folk that preceded his “Loser”-fueled 1994 breakthrough album Mellow Gold.

Beck has been through a number of, well, might as well call them mutations over his two-decade career, essentially splitting time between electro-charged hip-hop and r&b on the one hand, and more organic, folk-oriented soundscapes on the other. But, he’s tended to remain refreshingly restless even when working within a particular genre — his Princely, soul-stacked, and masterfully funked-up 1999 album Midnite Vultures is a testament to that particular aspect of his artistry. That’s also why many of Beck’s detractors have tended to view his more extreme stylistic swings as elaborate hipster in-jokes, and his penchant for merry eclecticism as an unwillingness to commit.  Morning Phase may not dispel those notions, but it goes a long way toward demonstrating a level of maturity and follow-through that haven’t been high on Beck’s list of musical priorities in the past. And yet, it does so without settling into the monochrome blue mood of Sea Change, by finding beauty, comfort, and disarmingly charming melodies in free-floating sadness.

Those are qualities that casual fans aren’t likely to associate with Beck, but Sea Change is an album that embraces modest, and perhaps even hard-won grandeur, that frankly isn’t afraid to be lovely in a downcast sort of way. It’s intimate, without being cloying. And, while it does stick to a certain subdued palette — slow- to middling tempos, acoustic guitars, ethereal reverb, lush but not quite ornate strings — it moves freely through a range of folk-rock idioms, touching on the light-pshychedelia of the Beatles and the Byrds, deploying heavenly vocal harmonies reminiscent of vintage Simon & Garfunkel, stumbling down a few of Americana’s “lost highways” (as Beck alludes to in the fingerpicked “Heart Is a Drum”), and landing squarely on the hazier side of the California-style of folky rock. There’s even a little bluesy swagger in “Say Goodbye,” a slow-thumping rumination on mortality that, like much of Morning Phase, is less confessional than meditative.

Morning Phase may not have been six years in the making, but it is Beck’s first album since 2008’s more characteristically diverse Modern Guilt. Not that Beck’s been idle over that time — along with unrecorded sheet-music album in the form of 2012’s Songbook and last year’s singles, he’s been producing other artists (Charlotte Gainsbourg, as well as fellow alt-rock travelers Thurston Moore and Stephen Malkmus), and writing material for soundtracks and video games. Along the way, he’d also been hinting that he had a couple of very different albums in the works. Morning Phase, with its casual intensity and insinuating melodies, is one of those albums. If the past is any indication, the next one will almost certainly be something totally different. That’s just how Beck rolls.

Angel Olsen interview

SONIC BLOOM

The casual intensity of indie songstress Angel Olsen

by Matt Ashare |    

Published February 12, 2014 http://www.newsadvance.com/the_burg/music/front_row/

Angel Olsen finds a voice of her own on Burn Your Fire For No Wintess

When singer-songwriter Angel Olsen first emerged in 2010, with a cassette-only EP titled Strange Catcti, it was fairly easy to typecast her as one of the new breed of aspiring Americana artists. She’d in the midst of what might best be characterized as a indie-rock internship with Will Oldham, a mercurial underground icon who’s been navigating a skewed path between rootsy folk and countrified punk since the early ’90s under various guises — initially as Palace Brothers, then as Palace Music, and, for the last 15 years, as Bonnie “Prince” Billy. But the songs on Strange Cacti, released by the tiny Asheville label Bathetic Records, suggested a fairly straightforward, homespun approach to confessional, heart-on-the-sleeve, strum-and-twang songwriting. And, her full-length debut, 2012’s Half Way Home, recorded with help from Oldham collaborator and guitarist Emmett Kelly, largely confirmed that impression, drawing comparisons both to Patsy Cline and Joni Mitchell.

         But, with her forthcoming sophomore disc, the somewhat cryptically titled Burn Your Fire For No Witness, Olsen changes things up just a bit. With the help of a modest yet agile backing band (drummer Josh Jaeger and bassist Stewart Bronaugh, who also adds guitar), Olsen broadens her gritty sonic vistas, steering her disarmingly raw, introspective close-ups of unsettled emotions onto rockier terrain, without abandoning the casual intimacy she’s been cultivating all along.

         “I quit my dreaming the moment that I found you,” she intones dreamily, over spare, undulating guitar chords on the album’s brief, pensive opening track, a song that aptly comes across as the haunted whisper before the scream. “I started dancing just to be around you/Here’s to thinking that it all meant so much more/I kept my mouth shut and opened up the door.”

Churning guitars and a muscular backbeat rise to the fore as the album shifts gears, moving beyond reflection on the more volatile “Forgiven/Forgotten,” a short shot of rock therapy anchored in Olsen’s candid cries of “I don’t know anything.” And, then she’s on to tearing a page, and a phrase, out of the Hank Williams songbook, admitting “I feel so lonesome I could cry” in the opening verse of the slow swinging “Hi-Five,” a relatively cheerful lament in which the singer finds solace in the company, if not the arms, of a fellow lost soul. “Now we don’t have to take it to extremes,” she croons, “We’ll keep our legs and arms and lips apart/But I’m giving you my heart. . . Are you giving me your heart?”

Olsen, who marks the release of “Burn Your Fire” this Tuesday by kicking off a national tour with her band at the Southern in Charlottesville, grew up in St. Louis, but it was in Chicago that she discovered her voice as a singer-songwriter. “Chicago is kind of where I found my own personality,” Olsen explains, over the phone from her new home base in Asheville, NC. “I mean, everyone in the scene there kind of works on projects together, like jazz musicians often sit in with indie rockers, and that kind of thing.”

It was in that collaborative atmosphere that Olsen found her way into the orbit of Will Oldham and one of his more elaborate Bonnie “Prince” Billy projects. Along with recording a new album of original material that would feature Olsen — 2010’s The Wonder Show of the World — Oldham was putting together a backing band with Emmett Kelly to explore his fascination with the avant-rock of the 1979 album Babble, a cult classic produced by British-born art provocateur Kevin Coyne, featuring the German singer Dagmar Krause.

“I was working at a café where I’d play house shows all the time,” Olsen recounts. “A friend introduced me to Emmett Kelly, and I ended up keeping in touch with him and sending him some of my music. A few months, or maybe even a year went by and he got back in got in touch with me about singing the part of Dagmar Krause in this cover band idea that he and Will had. They were looking for female singer to do the Krause parts. I hadn’t done anything that was super loud or theatrical in a long time, but I said yes. I have no idea how they heard Dagmar Krause or anything that would convince them that I could do that kind of screaming vocal from the songs I sent them. But I took it as a complement. It was a good challenge for me.”

Being, as she puts it, “23 among all these grown-up men,” and having the opportunity to perform Oldham’s songs in the studio and on stage for several years, turned out to be a valuable tutorial for Olsen. “I learned a lot about my voice by doing Will’s songs,” she explains. “I was singing his words loud and strong, and I was taking chances. I started to think, ‘why can’t I do this with my own music?’”

Olsen’s willingness to experiment — to gently push at the boundaries of expectation — is reflected in the mix of styles that coalesces on Burn Your Fire, from the hushed and moody monochrome of the skeletal “White Fire,” to the more raucous psychedelic shadings of “High & Wild,” to the wounded, full-throated country-rock of “Lights Out.” At the same time, it’s an album that makes it a little harder to neatly or reflexively peg Olsen as a particular kind of indie songstress, even if it is tempting to cast a wide net over an entire subset of neo-folk performers who have also been associated with Oldham. Like, for example, the harpist Joanna Newsom.

“I think when you work with Will and with that group, it’s kind of unavoidable that you’re going to be compared with people who are part of that group of musicians,” Olsen reflects. “And, because I’m female, it’s easy to compare me to other women who are writing their own songs. So, I just accept that that’s what people do.

But, I don’t play the harp,” a bumused Olsen points out. “And, I don’t really feel that I’m doing the same thing as, say, Joni Mitchell, even if I do have a dynamic voice that I sometimes choose to use in uncontrolled, weird ways. People just find it easier to put artists in a category, and I totally see the use of it. I do it all the time myself. I remember playing a show a long time ago in Florida, and some girl came up to me afterwards and said that I sounded like Gwen Stefani. I’m not sure what she was talking about, but I took it as a complement. I guess she was just drawing on a small sample group of music that she’d heard.”

Lucinda Williams

SWEET RE-RELEASE

Lucinda Williams brings back her 1988 Americana classic, with a little help from her fans

by Matt Ashare |  
Published January 15, 2014 http://www.newsadvance.com/the_burg/music/pop_rocks/

The 1988 "Rough Trade Album"

In early 1989, I was convinced by a couple of friends to come along with them to a now long-gone small club in Cambridge, MA to see an artist I’d never heard of, not that it’s all that likely I had much else to do that evening, or that it would have been particularly unusual for me to check out an obscure performer. I don’t recall whether there was much buzz about Lucinda Williams. She was 36 years old at the time, and in the midst of relaunching a career that had gotten off to rocky start a full decade earlier, when the Louisiana native failed to get much traction with a gritty collection of trad acoustic blues reworkings — Robert Johnson covers; Hank Williams’ “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)”; the new Orleans flavored “Me and My Chauffer,” credited to Clifton Chennier and Memphis Minnie — on the Smithsonian Folkways label. In that respect, her timing had been less than optimal: the blues-steeped folk revival of the ’60s was just a distant memory, and it would be a good decade before widespread interest in Americana would be reawakened by, among other things, the reappearance of the Smithsonian Folkways’ Anthology of American Folk Music (a/k/a, “The Harry Smith Box”).

      Without access to now readily searchable online discographies, I would have had no way of knowing about Williams’ past, save for word-of-mouth. And, all I remember being aware of is that Williams had just released, in 1988, a self-titled album on Rough Trade, a London-based, punk-oriented indie label. That, along with the urging of friends, was good enough for me.

     At this point, whatever details of that show I do remember — the alluringly waifish, bleached blond Williams fronting a foursome of laidback Nashville looking dudes with bolo ties; the darkly churning blues rocker “Changed the Locks” (later covered by Tom Petty); the melodic chime of “Passionate Kisses” — have likely been distorted by the tendency of memory to romanticize such things. But Williams, who emerged on 1988’s Lucinda Williams as a gifted songwriter in the country-rock vein, definitely left an impression that resonated well beyond the walls of the club.

     Over the next few years, it wasn’t uncommon to see punk/alternative bands like the Lemonheads tear into one of Williams’ songs during an impromptu encore. And, both Patty Loveless and Mary Chapin Carpenter would go on to have country hits with their own version of tunes from Lucinda Williams — Loveless reached #20 on the charts with the aching “The Night’s Too Long” in 1990, and Carpenter’s recording of “Passionate Kisses” earned Williams a Grammy for “Best Country Song” in 1994. Indeed, just ten years after its initial release, when Williams scored the closest thing she’s had to a mainstream breakthrough with her 1998, Grammy-winning, big-label debut Car Wheels On a Gravel Road (on Mercury), Lucinda Williams was well on its way to being embraced as a modern Americana classic, part of a canon that includes seminal albums by Steve Earle, Uncle Tupelo, and Ryan Adams’ Whiskeytown, not to mention legacy artists like Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, and Bob Dylan.      An expanded version of the “Rough Trade Album,” as some now refer to it, was reissued by another international indie, KOCH, in the wake of Car Wheels in 1998.  But, apparently, nobody actually bothered to keep the disc in print after that. I found that out the hard way back in November when I went online intending to buy a copy for one of my nieces: the cheapest of the few copies of the KOCH reissue I did find was going for $60, and several were priced well above that. The original Rough Trade vinyl — I’ve still got mine, though it’s suffered through repeated spins and a couple of cross-country moves — is now a bona fide collector’s item.

Perhaps it’s just a sign of our digital times, of the increasingly diffuse and fleeting nature of music in the virtual cloud, but the Lucinda Williams CD, a fairly easily reproducible product that there clearly was some demand for, had been sitting in a kind of commercial purgatory for some period of time. As Williams reflects, somewhat hyperbolically, on her PledgeMusic.com homepage, “For decades, people have wondered why they couldn’t buy this album in stores. . .”

Okay, so maybe it’s only really been a decade and change. But, just in time for its 25^th anniversary, and for Williams’ 61^st birthday, is that the “Rough Trade Album” is back in print. And, as yet another sign of our digital times, it’s largely thanks to Williams herself, who procured the rights to the recordings, and to all of the fans who chipped in through PledgeMusic, a crowd-funding site that’s currently hosting projects by modern-rockers Sevendust, singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones, and Brit-punk stalwarts the Buzzcocks (who, coincidentally, also got their start on Rough Trade). There are several packages available: a pledge of $18 get you a digital download; a newly reconfigured, expanded format two-CD digipack, featuring a live set from the Netherlands in ’89, is $25; and, for true audiophiles, there’s the 180-gram, translucent red vinyl LP, for $35. If you happen to be looking for an heirloom, there are also autographed copies of the CD and LP for sale, along with posters and t-shirts.

I’m all for crowd-funding, particularly to the extent that it cuts out the record label as middle man and allows for a more unencumbered kind of artist freedom. And, yet, it’s worth at least pausing for a moment to consider how Williams might have faired in 1988 if, as a largely unknown entity, she been left to her own devices — if, for example, she’d had to raise money from a then mostly non-existent fan base in order to record and release Lucinda Williams. In some ways it’s fitting that the disc is now referred to as the “Rough Trade Album,” and even more so that former Rough Trade A&R scout Robin Hurley, who was instrumental in signing Williams to the label, penned liner notes to the new edition. If it weren’t for Rough Trade taking a chance on Williams and, in a commercial sense, coming up short, then we very well might not have Lucinda Williams.

Hypothetical scenarios aside, Hurley and Rough Trade were smart, prescient, and/or canny enough to see and hear something special in Williams. The album that resulted, with its mix of New Orleans-flavored country comforts, blues attitude, and pop smarts, may not have sold very well, but it got the proverbial ball rolling for Williams, who’s now regarded as one of the best songwriters of her generation. It’s certainly something Williams appreciates. “I can’t even begin to explain what this album means to me,” she admits in her post on PledgeMusic. “It was the first record where I truly found myself. . . Or, at least, figured out what it is I do. And it has shaped me as an artist from that year forward.”

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks

TRIVIAL PURSUITS

Stephen Malkmus and his Jicks skew whimsical on the new Wig Out At Jagbags

by Matt Ashare |  
Published January 8, 2014 http://www.newsadvance.com/the_burg/music/pop_rocks/

Steven Malkmus has settled in, not down, with the Jicks

There was a time when Stephen Malkmus, in his unfashionably fashionable second-hand slacks and rumpled button-down shirts, seemed to stand at the center of something big, something crucial, something that felt important in the way that music sometimes does, but that more often applies to figures in the insular realms of literature and the visual arts. As the dominant voice and de-facto frontman of Pavement, an oddly configured product of suburban California, college life at UVA, and a post-grad stint working as a security guard at NYC’s Whitney Museum of American Art, he embodied an anti aesthetic, a warped alternative to mainstream alternative-rock that had its roots not in anger or alienation, but in a kind of bemused irony. If Nirvana marked the resurgence of punk-rock fury, then Pavement signaled something messier and more elusive — a clever continuation of the post-punk penchant for a subtler kind of subversion, or something like that.

            The window for Pavement opened in 1992, with the critically heralded arrival of Slanted and Enchanted, and just two years later they landed on the Lollapalooza main stage, which in retrospect seems more than a little absurd. Then again, that was the same year — 1994 — that Pavement scored a minor alt-rock hit with “Range Life,” a playfully laid-back, rootsy tune that kinda, sorta poked fun at Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots, two pillars of alt-rock radio. But, fittingly enough, Pavement’s moment in the commercial sun pretty much came and went with ’94’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the second of just five albums the band released before collapsing under the weight of their own mystique in 1999.

            Since then, Malkmus, who relocated to the hipster haven of Portland, Oregon, has settled down — he’s married to artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins and they have two daughters — without really settling in. With a loose band of enablers called the Jicks, he’s been steadily recording and releasing solo albums at a rate of one every two to three years. And, if what once seemed like a cabalistic calling now comes across more as an odd job description, it probably has as much, if not more to do with the degree to which the slanted enchantments of twenty years ago have been normalized and, indeed, ensconce as part of the accepted rock canon. (I checked and, sure enough, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is ranked at #10 in the Rolling Stone 100 best albums of the ’90s.) Not to mention the fact that, rather than striving to reinvent himself post-Pavement, Stephen Malkmus has simply gotten really good at being Stephen Malkmus, even if it’s still not particularly easy to pin down exactly what that entails beyond a few basic precepts like guitar, bass, and drums; sardonic wordplay; artfully unpolished production; skewed melodicism; and, oh, just a general and genuine appreciation for the weirder side of rock.  

            “Planetary motion/Circle ’round the sun/United devotion/To the chosen one,” he sings cryptically in clipped syllables at the start of “Planetary Motion,” the jauntily dark psychedelic guitar jam that kicks off Wig Out at Jagbags, the new missive from Malkmus and his Jicks. You could read those lines as a sarcastic swipe at new-age silliness, or maybe even as Malkmus musing straightforwardly metaphysical. But it’s every bit as likely that he copped the notion from an Ancient Astronauts rerun on the History Channel, or that he was just looking for something to rhyme with the line “I’ve run out of lotion,” because Malkmus fascination with the arcane is at least equaled, if not surpassed, by his fondness for the way words sound. So, for example, the title of the new album is both an accumulation of meaningless syllables and an oblique allusion to a long forgotten 1987 album by the DC hardcore band Dag Nasty — Wig Out at Denko’s — an obscure artifact that Malkmus would certainly have come across as a DJ WTJU during his years at UVA. Either way, Wig Out at Jagbags is apropos of nothing in particular, other than Malkmus’ penchant for free association, and the same can probably be said of the “chosen one” in the opening lines of “Planetary Motion.”

            So, what’s the point? That can be a tough question to answer in the context of Malkmus. Either you get it or you don’t. His milieu as a wordsmith isn’t really an acquired taste so much as something that either sits well or doesn’t. In “Lauriat,” a slack acoustic rocker that echoes the mellow countrified feel of “Range Life,” Malkmus punctuates the first chorus with an offhand question: “People look great when they shave, don’t they?” And then, amidst percolating guitar riffery that brings to mind Jerry Garcia, Malkmus shows his hand, as he waxes nostalgic and, of course, absurd with this mouthful: “We lived on Tennyson and venison and the Grateful Dead/It was my honey summer torture mystic stubble bummer.” Fair enough. But, when it seems like there really isn’t any destination on the horizon — that we’re all just along for the ride — Malkmus throws in a line that’s both funny and fitting: “We grew up listening to the music from the best decade ever/Talking ’bout the Ay-dee-dees.”

             The Jicks recorded Wig Out in Berlin, where Malkmus lived for a couple of years after a brief Pavement reunion in 2010, and retained former Pavement soundman Remko Shouten to produce it. And, it has some of the same tossed about, off-the-cuff, everything-is-permitted charm that Pavement conjured at their best moments. Guitars waver on the edge of discord, beats stumble over one another from time to time, and Malkmus isn’t shy about reaching beyond his vocal range here and there, affects that are both annoying and endearing. And, “Houston Hades,” a song that rests on one of the album’s more muscular guitar riffs, opens by collapsing in on itself before settling into a comfortable groove. Whether that’s because Malkmus feels the need to undermine his own penchant for pop, or it has more to do with the way he’s innately attuned to hearing music is pretty much beside the point. 

            There are some serious moments on Wig Out, and plenty of serious guitar playing. But, it’s the more whimsical aspects of the album that resonate best, and it’s his pursuit of the trivial that Malkmus finds his real depth. With a horn section on board, and a few jazz chords up his sleeve, Malkmus, the outsider artist with insider cred, plays at preaching to the unconverted in “Chartjunk,” an uptempo number that opens with the lines “I’ve been you/And I’ve been every where you’re going,” before heading in the general direction of a Steely Dan-ish hook that reminds me of “Reelin’ In the Years.” And then, as it heads into a searingly funny guitar-hero solo, Malkmus reveals what we’ve pretty much known all along: “Actually, I’m not contractually obliged to care.” 

MY 2013 YEAR END LIST

AROUND THE TRENDS

Ten things in music I liked about 2013

by Matt Ashare |  
Published December 31, 2013 http://www.newsadvance.com/the_burg/music/pop_rocks/

THE HOT SEAT: Lady Gaga delivered spectacle in 2013

Another year, another amorphous chorus of mixed messages about the so-called “state” of music, as if were actually possible to capture something so elusive in anything resembling its natural state. Back in March, David Lowery turned up on NPR’s “On the Media” to discuss some of the issues he addresses as part of “The Trichordist,” a website dedicated to “Artists for An Ethical and Sustainable Internet.” The erstwhile Virginia-based producer, longtime frontman of the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, and current a lecturer at the University of Georgia, suggested that the old business paradigm, dominated by monolithic major labels, really wasn’t all that bad, which is interesting coming from a guy who had his share of dust ups with the powers- that-be back in the day.

More recently, David Byrne, whose Luaka Bop label was once a part of Warner Bros., published “How Music Works,” a collection of essays in which he waxes somewhat nostalgic for the days when a corporate entity like Sire Records (which was also part of the Warner Group) would invest its resources in a left-of-center CBGB’s band like his own Talking Heads. In other words, now that these once-insurgent artists have gotten a look at the future of music, the past doesn’t look half bad.

         On the other hand, 2013 was also the year that Amanda Palmer celebrated her crowdfunding coup by delivering a TED Talk on the many virtues of tweeting, blogging, and otherwise interfacing directly with fans on the Internet. In 2012, she’d set a new record by raising over a million dollars in individual contributions on Kickstarter to record her second album, “Theatre Is Evil.” So, she’s understandably less concerned about the state of music than some of her peers.

Of course, when conversation turns to the state of music, what’s usually at issue is the state of the music industry, which has always been governed by rather arbitrary rules — copyright law, for example — that benefit some at the expense of others. There’s no doubt that technology — particularly in the digital realm — has been a game changer for the entertainment industry over the past decade, not to mention the last year. Whether or not it’s been a force for good or for evil remains up for debate. But, while the medium can be the message, more often than not technology, even in the face of cultural skirmishes, is essentially neutral: it’s really more a matter of how we choose to make use of evolving modes of consumption and communication that makes the biggest difference. By that measure, 2013 belongs to the comic Norwegian brother act Ylvis, whose surreal “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)” went mega-viral on YouTube and turned out to be this year’s “Gangnum Style.” I guess that means we should be on the lookout for a big ad featuring Vergard and Bård Ylvisåker shilling pistachios when Superbowl XVLIII takes to the air on February 2.

In the meantime, the proverbial beat goes on as artists continue to make music that weaves itself into the fabric of daily life in a manner that can be at once surprising and familiar; comforting and disruptive; ridiculous and sublime. It’s all good, even if not really all good. And, since there were far too many albums than I could justify paring down to a simple top ten, I’ve opted this year for a list of ten categories that feel like they capture something essential about the state of music in 2013. 

POP ART OR ARTPOP?: Arcade Fire can do both.  

1) ARTPOPPERY:  Arcade Fire “Reflektor” + Atoms for Peace “AMOK” —Lady Gaga, in her infinite ambition, may have twisted the Warholian idea of “Pop Art” into a multi-media marketing campaign that fuses the virtues of art with the baser nature of accessibility, but she’s not the first to play at that game (see David Bowie, below). And, while it may be more apt to place Arcade Fire’s expansive, retro-futuristic double concept album “Reflektor,” as well as Radiohead head Thom Yorke’s new Atoms for Peace missive “AMOK” in the category of what older folks once called prog- or art-rock, artpop seems a fair enough designation. Both bands flexed their considerable creative muscle and challenged loyal fans to accept a modicum of experimentation, while offering just enough in the way of infectious grooves and melodies to make the trip worth the effort. 

        

REBEL BELLE: Kacey Musgraves 

2) AMERICANA WITH ATTITUDE: Kacey Musgraves “Same Trailer, Different Park” + Natalie Maines “Mother” — Nashville’s Music Row has long been one of the most conservative corners of the mainstream music industry, which has admittedly bred quite a bit of vapid, predictable, middle-of-the-road product over the years. But it’s also fostered plenty of rebels and outlaws because, well, you gotta have rules before you can break them. Kacey Musgraves, a 25-year-old Texas-bred singer-songwriter who self-released three albums and appeared on the USA Network’s “Nashville Star” competition before signing to Mercury Records, may have rewritten the script for what’s acceptable on Music Row with “Same Trailer, Different Park,” a homespun yet crisply produced album of rather-trad tunes with more than a touch of twangy bluegrass that, among other transgressions, exclaims, “Make lots of noise/Kiss lots of boys/Or kiss lots of girls if that’s something you’re into,” and offers this vision of small-town life: “Mama’s hooked on Mary Kay/Brother’s hooked on Mary Jane/And Daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down.” And Dixie Chick Natalie Maines moved away from straight country toward something more along the lines of Sheryl Crow’s rootsier side on “Mother,” an album of covers that delivers a devastating version of its Pink Floyd title cut that was originally recorded to raise money for the falsely imprisoned West Memphis Three.

RELATIVE COOL: The formidable sisters of Haim

3) GRRRL GROUPINGS: Haim “Days Are Gone” + Savages “Silence Yourself” — Trending retro in ways that were fashionably unfashionable in 2013, the California sister act Haim and the London-based grrrl group Savages drew on very different aspects of the ’80s on two of the year’s more promising debuts. With formidable musical chops, Haim fashioned their sly hooks around the funked-up rock of Prince’s Revolution and the kind smooth r&b grooves that Quincy Jones used to catapult Michael Jackson into the stratosphere, all without a trace of tongue-in-cheek irony. The aptly named Savages zeroed in on the post-punk nihilism of John Lydon’s Public Image Limited, the raw scrape of Joy Division, and the primal wail of Siouxsie and the Banshee, with a surplus of attitude and stark androgynous look to complete the package.

POP ART: David Bowie appropriates himself on The Next Day

4) HAPPY RETURNS: David Bowie “The Next Day” + Elvis Costello and the Roots “Wise Up Ghost” — One of the original purveyors of “artpop” and a major influence on Lady Gaga’s latest vocal affectations, David Bowie was apparently in a self-reflective state of mind when he set out to record his first solo album in a decade, and his 24^th overall. With cover art copped from his own art-rock classic, 1977’s “Heroes,” and a single (“Where Are We Now?”) that sifts through images from his years in Berlin, “The Next Day” goes a long way toward recapturing past glories without necessarily repeating them. Bowie’s almost always interesting, but it’s been quite some time since he’s sounded this immersed in a musical project. And, what frankly seemed like something of a novelty collaboration between Elvis Costello and the Roots turned out to be a surprisingly solid collection of songs that deploy the hip-hop science of loops and sampling in a way that’s oddly reminiscent of Costello’s ambitiously orchestrated 1982 masterpiece “Imperial Bedroom.”

OLD SCHOOL RULES: Pearl Jam kicked out the analog jams

5) GUARDIANS OF GRUNGE: Dave Grohl’s “Sound City” + Pearl Jam “Lightning Bolt” —  An homage to the famed and now defunct studio where Nirvana recorded “Nevermind,” “Sound City” was both a loving documentary directed by Foo Fighter frontman/former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl and a soundtrack featuring the Sound City Players, a remarkably diverse group of artists with various connections to the Northridge, CA studio. You get everyone from Stevie Nicks and Rick Springfield, to Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, to Sir Paul McCartney backed by the three surviving members of Nirvana, all on an album of new material that serves as a visceral reminder that, on some level, they all share a certain common creative ground. As for Pearl Jam’s “Lightning Bolt” — their tenth studio album since 1991’s chartbusting “Ten” — it’s simply a straightforwardly stripped-down reminder that there’s still plenty of room for an unabashedly analog band in our brave new digital world.  

MOODY BLUES: The National embrace the darkness

6) INDIE ROCKS: The National “Trouble Will Find Me” + Superchunk “I Hate Music” — Nobody does nonchalantly dark, world-wearily romantic, or elegantly debauched quite as well as the Cincinnati-by-way-of-Brooklyn band the National. “Trouble Will Find Me,” an apt description of the persona Matt Berninger projects as the deep-voiced singer of the National, isn’t so much a departure for the band as it is a further distillation of the moody blues they revel in. There’s also some wistful romanticism on “I Hate Music,” the searingly melodic tenth album from North Carolina indie stalwarts Superchunk. You can’t blame singer/guitarist Mac McCaughan for screaming “I hate music” on the album’s title cut — as the founder of the longstanding indie label Merge Records, with bandmate and bassist Laura Balance, he’s probably been subjected to more than his fair share of noise. But, “I Hate Music” is, in its own peculiar way, a love letter to a DIY ethos that Superchunk helped create in the early ’90s.  

KANYE'S YEEZUS: No title required

7) DYSTOPIAN HIP-HOP: Kanye West “Yeezus” + Pusha T “My Name Is My Name” — Rappers aren’t just measured by their flow, their beats, or the number of units they’re able to move. It’s also about empire building, creating a brand bigger than one’s self, and moving the form forward in some notable way. Kanye (do we even need the West anymore?) has done all of the above. His “Yeezus” is one of the strangest hip-hop blockbusters in recent memory, with its maximal minimalist soundscapes, its fractured beats, and its often impenetrably dark sensibility. But that wasn’t all Kanye had cooking in 2013: having helped boost former Clipse member Pusha T’s status as a solo rapper through a guest spot on 2010’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” West stepped in as executive producer for T’s debut, “My Name Is My Name,” which along with “Yeezus” ranks as one of the more compelling and intriguing commercial hip-hop albums of the year.

THE REAL DEAL: 17-year-old Lorde 

8) THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS: Lorde “Pure Heroine” + Earl Sweatshirt “Doris” — As difficult as it may or may not be for new artists to find firm footing these days (as opposed to the good old days of major-label hegemony), there’s still plenty of evidence to suggest that just being really really crazy talented, inspired, and/or unique does have its advantages. Lorde is a wickedly precocious 17-year-old singer-songwriter from New Zealand, born Ella Marie Lani Yelich-O’Connor (thus the stage name), who has a remarkable gift for finding rough-hewn beauty in the mundane realities of daily life, and a strikingly confident voice that’s rarely accompanied by more than a sleek beat and a few backing racks on “Pure Heroine.” There are lots of singers sweating it out in an effort to capture the ’tweenage experience — I won’t mention names — but Lorde does it effortlessly, and with quite a bit more depth. An even odder oddball, 18-year-old Earl Sweatshirt emerged as a part of an LA indie hip-hop collective known as Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, released a mixtape filled with horrorcore fantasies in 2010, and then disappeared for a year, during which “Free Earl” t-shirts starting showing up in LA. His debut is a schizoid affair that, while reminiscent of the fantasy scenarios and just plain out-there soundscapes of the early Wu-Tang Clan, stands on its own as the next strangest thing to “Yeezus.”   

CROTCH SHOT: Miley Cyrus skews sexy

9) POP SPECTACLE: Miley Cyrus “Bangerz” + Lady Gaga “Artpop” — Not going to waste too much time here on the actual music, since both Miley and Gaga are more about making a scene or a splash than crafting a tune. And, Miley may have one-upped Gaga in 2013, with her white-girl twerks and that hilarious VMA stunt making nasty with a big Styrofoam finger (not to mention Robin Thicke). But Haus of Gaga has almost surely been hard at work, dreaming up something even bigger than the ArtRave extravaganza she staged to celebrate the arrival of “Artpop.” So there should be plenty more spectacle to feed on from both Miley and Gaga as we move on in to 2014.

10) BLASTS FROM THE PAST: Bob Dylan “Another Self Portrait” + The Clash “Sound System” — Yet another mysterious period of Dylan’s mysterious career has at least been partially unshrouded with the repackaged, remastered, and almost completely reconfigured “Another Self Portrait,” a two-disc set that draws on a pair of albums from 1970: “Self Portrait” and “New Morning.” If nothing else, it serves as a timely reminder that Dylan has always lived inside the Great American Songbook, that he’s always been an enigma, and that some of us will never tire of probing into the heart of Dylan’s darkness.  And then there are those of us who will forever wish that the Clash had stuck around for more than just the five albums they released from 1977-1982. The late great Joe Strummer’s main partner in crime, guitarist Mick Jones, has remastered all five discs for a ginormous set that also includes three discs of bonus rarities, a DVD or archival footage, reprints of a fanzine the band published, stickers, pins, buttons, and a set of Clash dogtags, all wrapped up in a package that looks like an old-school boombox. It’s one of the year’s best arguments in favor of the CD — streaming the audio just ain’t the same as owning the damn thing.     

BRITNEY SPEARS + MARIA TAYLOR

WORLDS APART

Britney Spears and Maria Taylor deal with two very different realities on Britney Jean and Something About Knowing

by Matt Ashare |  
Published December 11, 2013

“I wait for you to call, and I try to act natural,” Britney Spears sings with mock bravado, smiling through the proverbial pain on the romantically frayed, made-for-radio power-ballad “Perfume.” It’s the second single from her new “Britney Jean,” a comeback album by an artist who always seems to be coming back from one thing or another — career missteps, personal misadventures, public humiliations, you name it. And, it also serves as a sly bit of advertising for “Island Fantasy,” the newest in a line of women’s fragrances from Elizabeth Arden that bear Britney’s royal seal. 

         As spare, sympathetic piano notes give way to the looming banks of synths that dominate “Perfume” and most of the rest of “Britney Jean,” Spears does her best to step out from behind the gilded fortress of fame and, if only for a moment, take stock of her own self-doubts. “I hate myself and I feel crazy, such a classic tale,” she admits in the first verse, before wondering aloud, “Am I paranoid?/Am I seeing things?/Am I just insecure?”

         That’s what passes for an unguarded moment in the land of Spears. But Britney’s bittersweet symphony quickly takes a turn toward silly yet sinister desperation, as she contemplates surreptitiously spraying her scent on a cheating boyfriend — marking her territory to ward off potential rivals in romance. If nothing else, that oughta give her competition a whiff of the kind of romantic warrior they’re up against. And, given Spears’ rocky dating history, not to mention her easy access to copious amounts of her very own eau de toilette, it’s probably not such a bad strategy. I’m just not sure it really humanizes her to the extent that she might be hoping.

         Humanizing details, unguarded moments, and just acting naturally aren’t nearly as big a challenge for Maria Taylor, an Alabama-based singer-songwriter who, admittedly, has had a very different career trajectory than the Louisiana-bred Spears. At 37, Taylor is five years older than Spears. But they both emerged somewhat precociously in the late-’90s. Spears, an erstwhile Mouseketeer who’d honed her skills at NYC’s Professional Performing Arts School, found herself at the forefront of a new teen-pop explosion when her blockbuster debut “…Baby One More Time” arrived in 1998. Meanwhile, Taylor had gravitated to the softer, poppier side of alternative-rock: while still a student at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, she and fellow songstress formed the band Little Red Rocket, released two albums on Geffen in 1997 and 2000, and then moved on to become the harmonizing indie duo Azure Ray. While she didn’t release her first solo album until after Azure Ray went on semi-permanent hiatus in ’04, Taylor was also an adjunct member of Conor Obert’s Bright Eyes bands for five years, beginning in 2002.

         Taylor and Spears clearly weren’t cut from the same cloth. While Spears was being dressed up in Swedish hitmaker Max Martin’s platinum studio production, and dressed down in skimpy, belly button-baring stage attire, Taylor busily stitched together a down-to-earth aesthetic that emphasized the subtle beauty of her voice and the sublime allure of everyday emotions. The former, a mainstream sensation and tabloid queen, now appears to be trying to reclaim some semblance of her true self as a performer. The latter, afforded a somewhat more modest degree of underground success, became a self-possessed artist who, on her new “Something About Knowing,” seems just as comfortable in her own skin as anyone who’s temperamentally inclined to think too much about too many things.

         “There’s grace in how you choose, which memories you lose,” Taylor sings softly, buoyed by little more than fingerpicked acoustic guitar figures and a muted beat in “Folk Song Melody,” the ruminative opening track on “Something About Knowing.” Actually, she’s nearly whispering, even as she draws out the last syllable of “lose,” holding onto to the word as if it might have the power to conjure whatever has been forgotten. And then, as her voice grows stronger, she waxes philosophical in homespun fashion, gently but proudly reflecting, ”I got lucky alright/It was never going to be my life/You can’t be free until you’re ready. . .”

         “Something About Knowing” isn’t a comeback album, but it does mark Taylor’s return after the birth of her first child. And, while Taylor’s always been inclined toward the wistful and contemplative, motherhood has crystalized her instinct for wresting beauty from regret, and finding a kind of reserved joy in the vicissitudes of life. “Remember that day we got the news, I was scared as hell and so were you,” she admits at the start of the rockabilly-inflected “Up All Night,” a reservedly upbeat swinger that hinges on the declaration, “I’ve been up all night, but these are the best days of my life.”

         Taylor doesn’t stick to any one script. “Tunnel Vision” employs darker-hued minor chords, a propulsive beat, and plenty of echo to create a grounded dreamscape in which Taylor concedes to a friend or lover, “You were giving it all you got, giving up your whole life, and I was betting on the other side.” A programmed beat anchors the airy guitar arpeggios of “Sum of Our Lives,” a languid reverie about “names carved in the pavement, and all the marks we haven’t made yet.” Pedal steel adds a little country flavor to the lightly galloping “Saturday In June,” and vintage organ tones lend a classic feel to the peaceful, easy groove of the disc’s title track, a ode to appreciating the little things in life, like “A long leaf pine tree,” “a dog named Buddy,” and “A ‘Revolver’ LP.”

         It’s probably not entirely fair to compare a Maria Taylor list of treasures with a catalogue of Britney Spears valuables, but it’s just too hard to resist. In the frantic club workout “Work B**tch,” a rubbery electro bouncer, Spears affects a Lady Gaga-ish Euro accent of unclear origin, as she rhymes Bugatti with Maserati (but, sadly, not vanilla latte), and Lamborghini with sipping martinis and looking hot in a bikini (but, again, sadly, not zucchini linguini), until she sounds practically worn out.

And, when Spears doesn’t sound tired, she just seems lost in the mix, as is too often the case on “Britney Jean.” Tracks like “Perfume,” which was co-written with Australian singer Sia, and the guitar-driven “Passenger,” a strident yet hook-laden rocker written with Katy Perry’s help, are right in Britney’s wheelhouse, but they’re both fairly boilerplate-empowered pop anthems. And Spears just seems absent next to Will.i.am (who produced much of the album) in “It Should Be Easy,” an ode to easy loving that features this sophomoric zinger: “If there was a scale from one to ten, then my love for you is a million billion.” (I’m pretty sure that’s a fairly big number.) And, are we really ready for a fresh look at Britney in “Tik Tik Boom,” a over-produced, sexxxed-up bit of innuendo that’s mostly an excuse to drop in a rapid-fire rap from T.I.

It’s all just a little sad, in part because “Britney Jean” does get off to a promising start with the William Orbit-produced “Alien,” a more restrained, dreamier brand of electronica that finds a full-voiced Spears doing a little soul searching as she drifts through the percolating groove. “There was a time/I was one of a kind,” she recalls, “Lost in the world/Out of me, myself, and I.” And then, she admits, “I tried, but I never figured it out/Why I always felt like a stranger in a crowd.” You can almost hear a real woman in there, a human being who, by almost any standards, has lived quite a life, and has plenty of raw, even painful, experience to draw on, if only she could find the courage to go there. Maybe it would lead to something more rewarding than the cheap thrill of a “Tik Tik Boom.” Or, perhaps not. It’s never really that simple. As Maria Taylor puts it in “Sum of Our Lives,” “I could just let it be/Or I could set us free/But it’s never that easy.”