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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