[review 2006: the odds and ends]

Jenny Lewis lost me the first time I saw the video for “Rise Up With Fists!!”

If you’ve never seen the video, take a look. If you have, let me explain. For whatever reason, I can’t track down the third version of this video, but they’re all essentially the same except for the opening line—it’s Sarah Silverman saying either “With a twist of lemon,” “Lemonade!” or “Semen!” (guess which version I couldn’t find). In any case, it’s followed up with an asinine laugh track and all the band members pretending to laugh hysterically. The whole video is essentially a play on Hee Haw (fun fact: Hee Haw was on the air until 1992!). You can tell by the costumes, the set and the random spurts of canned laughter. Oh, and about halfway through the piece, all of the band give the camera the good ol’ knowing wink, but it’s an especially knowing wink that says, “yeah, we know even this knowing wink is cliche, and we’re letting you know that we know!” Yes, we’re being Ironic! Hur-fucking-ray. But why wink to the camera at all? It all seems completely out of place.

No one was ever going to mistake Jenny Lewis for a genuine country singer, as if that really means a whole lot these days. After all, mainstream country has only recently abandoned the abhorrence that was New Country (and arguably vestiges still remain), and one of the leading lights of the alt-country scene is none other than Neko Case, whose career bears many similarities to Lewis’s. They both began in bands playing music in a different genre (Case with Vancouver punk band Maow, Lewis with Rilo Kiley), they both started singing solo while with said band, and they both had trouble initially gaining acceptance as a legitimate country artist. Case went on to perform on the stage of the Grand Ol’ Opry, though in typical Neko Case fashion she got kicked out for stripping down to her bra (Case claims it was heatstroke, a far less exciting version than the apocryphal tale). But kicked out or no, Case doesn’t have to worry very much about not being taken seriously as a country artist or a singer-songwriter. So legitimacy shouldn’t be a problem; if a punk drummer can make it, so can Jenny Lewis.

And she’s off to a decent start; the one-two opening punch of “The Big Guns” and “Rise Up With Fists!!” is promising, even if the video for “Rise Up With Fists!!” isn’t. And while the remainder of the album begins to settle into a slight malaise, it’s mainly because the songs aren’t quite up to snuff and the sound isn’t varied enough to compensate. The gospel stylings of the Watson Twins are fantastic, but over the course of a whole album the impact dulls a bit. Same with the spitshine polish on all the tracks—very pretty, but very consistently pretty, consistent to a fault. It’s an easy album to listen to, but not enough of it sticks. Lewis has better luck with the slower songs like “Melt Your Heart” and “Rabbit Fur Coat,” but the upbeat tracks aren’t all that memorable.

In the end, the problem is not that Jenny Lewis is having a hard time getting others to accept her as a country singer; she does a good enough job of that, though no one is going to accord her the same credentials as a Loretta Lynn or a Dolly Parton. The problem is she seems reluctant to embrace the label herself. You can hear it best in “Handle With Care,” which is not only the closest the album comes to sounding like Rilo Kiley, but is also the track where Lewis is joined by her other indie-rock friends like Ben Gibbard and Conor Oberst. And there’s something slightly odd about pairing up with the Watson Twins for your first solo album; for a woman whose voice is near-universally praised, was it absolutely necessary to have two more angelic voices behind her? Not that it was a bad choice—clearly it wasn’t—but it’s like the golden-era New York Yankees paying off the other team to lose the World Series.

Granted, these are all small signs, and I may be reading too much into it. But then there’s the video for “Rise Up With Fists!!” At first it seemed just a bit offensive to me, though I easily take offense at imagined wrongdoings. It seemed like she was laughing at the very country tradition she set out to join, like she was somehow above it all. Now I’m not so sure about that interpretation; after all, she seems fairly invested in her material throughout the album, and the song itself is bereft of the knowing winks the video provides. In fact, the video is an odd choice for what is actually quite a beautiful song. It’s almost as if Lewis was trying to tell you not to take any of it seriously—the laugh track, the knowing winks, Sarah Silverman—almost as if Lewis didn’t quite trust her material to stand on its own merits.

[review 2006: the disappointments]

Let’s get this out of the way real quickly: this list is not intended to be some sort of absolute truth, handed down from the heavens like the word of God. I am just a man without a plan. Please feel free to like albums I dislike, or vice-versa; certainly everyone thought I was bonkers when I dissed the Ladytron album last year, and all I could say then was I just didn’t like it very much. But that’s me; you might feel differently. I do these lists mostly as a masturbatory exercise, but also because people like reading what I have to say even if they don’t agree.

Why am I writing all this preamble? Because I don’t think this will be a popular choice. To say I hated The Greatest is unfair; the intensity of feeling I have for this album isn’t anywhere near the strength of hate. And for Chan Marshall herself, it seems like 2006 was a mixed but ultimately productive year; she seems to be in a better place in the struggle against her own demons, and certainly she’s put together entire strings of live performances where she didn’t once break down, retreat backstage or fall apart at the mic. It’s just too bad that The Greatest turns out to be about as appealing as gruel.

Everything starts out very promisingly with the title track. “The Greatest” is a far cry from earlier material, possessing a grace and beauty we don’t usually see in a Cat Power song. Which is not to say her music isn’t beautiful; it’s just that on songs like “American Flag” and “Names,” that beauty seemed like a by-product of some mental anguish or emotional trauma. Not so on “The Greatest,” the surest sign yet that the “difficult” Chan Marshall had perhaps transformed into a happier, less encumbered Chan Marshall, free at last to perform to her fullest potential.

Of course, to some extent that’s an illusion; in reality Marshall was at her lowest ebb when Matador asked her what it would take to finish another album, and when she asked for her backing band of legendary blues musicians she expected to be told off. But if there’s an upside to The Greatest, it’s that the album really does sound like the product of a cleaned up and less miserable Chan Marshall. The problem, as is sometimes the case of artists who make a name for themselves by mining their own personal dramas, is that the new Marshall doesn’t seem all that compelling.

It’s here that I will admit this may be my fault; I’m not a student of the southern blues, and so perhaps I’m not equipped to appreciate the subtleties at work. There could be entire undercurrents I’m simply not aware of that make The Greatest worthy of its name. But all I hear is an album a bit too refined, a bit too complacent, a bit too pretty to leave any lasting marks. I can’t actually listen to older songs like “Names” very often because they essentially consist of Marshall reciting a litany of childhood devastations directly into your ears—it’s like a horror movie you can’t bear to watch, a quality that’s undeniably powerful but hard to actually listen to regularly. But The Greatest goes too far in the other direction; hidden inside the sax of “Could We” and the tasteful slide guitar of “Islands” might be some nasty lyrical punches, but they never seem to land. Perhaps Marshall will strike a balance with her next album, if she’s up for it; I’ll be waiting.

Despite running this site, having my fingers in several music-related forums and generally being well-read when it comes to music, I have never really seen a whole lot of rare releases. Pre-releases, yes; but then these days it’s not hard to find leaked versions of upcoming albums, just keep an eye on your local friendly torrent site. But stuff that’s hard to find anywhere else? That requires actual work, lots of connections or both. The closest I get to that sort of material is generally stuff in fairly wide release anyways, like Liz Phair’s early “girlysound” tapes. Though I honestly couldn’t tell you where to find it if you asked.

Anyways, they say fortune favors the bold. Sometimes fortune favors me, as once upon a time I stumbled across a pack of MP3s someone had ripped from a CD-R from a friend of a friend back in Boston. The CD-R contained the b-sides from Helium’s Superball+ EP—and a bunch of demos, acoustic versions and unreleased songs. “Julia” never saw the light of day, it seems, but the demo is fairly polished. With Helium’s sound evolving a great deal around the time of The Dirt Of Luck and beyond, it’s entirely possible that “Julia” didn’t fit into Helium’s new world order. As a one-off, though, it’s a nice track to have. And for anyone enamoured with Mary Timony but not her later treks into neo-medieval dirges, “Julia” is a glimpse into an alternate universe where Mary Lou Lord ends up fronting Helium permanently while Timony goes back to busking in the subway and singing sweet little acoustic numbers in coffee shops.

There Is No Home marks the end of the road for Dear Nora, an underappreciated San Francisco band whose sound has finally evolved far enough that keeping the old name makes no sense. It’s the end of an era for the band’s only permanent member, Katy Davidson, who will move on to other projects more in line with her current musical direction.

I skipped over Mountain Rock based largely on the sound of the one song I heard off the album, “Here We Come Around.” after the burnished, autumnal sound of The New Year EP “Here We Come Around” seemed to retreat a bit into simple, lightweight folk—no rock, just a whole lot of… mountain? The slight psychedelic flourishes on The New Year EP seemed to have disappeared. In retrospect, perhaps it was unfair to judge an entire album on one song, if Dear Nora’s later work has been any indication. “Sarah, You’re Not For Me,” from the recent Magic Marker compilation A House Full Of Friends, picked up where earlier songs like “A Polar Bear” left off. And now there’s “Emily,” the dark wilderness to “Here We Come Around”’s campfire.

So what’s next for Davidson and company? The most immediate sign of things to come is this MySpace page for Katy and Marianna, aka Katy Davidson and Dear Nora alum Marianna Ritchey. Despite the apparent goofiness of the whole venture (unless they’re serious about “WE SOUND EXACTLY LIKE SIMON AND GARFUNKLE”), it’s unlikely Davidson’s ever again going to sing the early-career teenage lyrics like “I am such a bore, I can’t take it anymore / but school’s out forever and I’m never gonna let it go.” But then, that hasn’t been the case for years now and I still stick by her. I look forward to her next move.

According to the All Music Guide, if you’re an American, you’ll know “Bellissimo” as the soundtrack to a Revlon ad. Having never seen the ad, I can’t say if it was a magnificent piece of cinematic magic or just like all the other cosmetics ads, but I’m going to guess the latter. This is a bit of a shame, because “Bellissimo” has a wonderful video of its own that probably never got played in the States.

Ilya themselves, known as San Ilya in the U.S., so as not to be mistaken for the San Diego band of the same name, are a trio from Bristol whose sound sits somewhere between Goldfrapp, Brazilian Girls and old jazz standards. They Died For Beauty is the title of their first album, and pretty much sums up the sentiment behind songs like “Bellissimo.” Interestingly, after their major-label splash, Ilya’s next album would be released via Universal Digital—in other words, a download-only release via iTunes and Napster. Whether Somerset will be able to reach audiences as well as They Died For Beauty did remains to be seen.

When they were still around, Saloon seemed to lead a double life of sorts. To me, they were quite obviously part of the same fey indie pop movement as bands like Belle and Sebastian and Camera Obscura—hushed vocals, unhurried pacing, sweet melodies. Saloon seemed like the perfect accompaniment to a lazy Saturday afternoon in the park. To everyone else, they were apparently acolytes of Stereolab and Broadcast. To this day, I have not quite been able to reconcile these two seemingly at-odds interpretations of the British quintet’s body of work. This is partially because I haven’t heard a whole lot of Saloon, and most of it is from their debut album, (This Is) What We Call Progress. Though “debut” is perhaps not quite the right term; by the time that album came out Saloon had been making music for three years.

Their earlier work is apparently more overtly bleepy and bloopy, which would better explain the myriad Stereolab references. And I suppose songs like “Le Weekend” bear the vaguest of similarities to Dots and Loops-era Stereolab. But it seems obvious to me that the two bands are attempting to do different things; Stereolab’s brand of farfisa coolness seems a bit too fashionable and hip, whereas (This Is) What We Call Progress feels less overtly cosmopolitan, more pastoral.

For whatever reason, Saloon never managed to perfect their particular formula; they split up after two albums. But at some point I aim to track down their debut CD; ’tis the season for breezy walks in the park and bicycling through quiet tree-lined city streets.

Calm, quiet, peaceful. These aren’t exactly terms you’d associate with Erase Errata, who’s always been nothing but edges and chaos and blissful guitar noise. But singer and trumpeter Jenny Hoyston’s solo project, Paradise Island, is a lateral leap into another world—still unpredictable and offbeat, but in the realm of the folk singer-songwriter. In a sense, she’s following a somewhat similar path to Tara Jane O’Neil, whose formative punk years in the early 90s and her current folk output are worlds apart, and yet share a certain unconventional wisdom. And so it is with Paradise Island, where Hoyston has painted a number of experimental soundscapes that share with Erase Errata’s work a break with convention, but with an otherwise wholly different sound. “Step Away,” off a Troubleman Unlimited limited-edition seven-inch, is the song that sounds most like, well, a song. In its own unassuming way, “Step Away” grows on you. Hoyston’s ability to sound completely unlike her strident Erase Errata persona is, at first glance, quite a shock. Only after considered listening do you realize it is, in fact, the same woman behind both projects, and it only makes the shy, sweet sound of “Step Away” that much more compelling.

Speaking of transatlantic telephone calls.

Though Lois Maffeo’s first official album with Brendan Canty was 2000’s The Union Themes, 1995’s Bet The Sky served as the prototype. Recording much of the album with Canty on guitar and Tiger Trap’s Heather Dunn on drums, Lois hit upon her quintessential bedroom-pop sound with Bet The Sky. Of the album’s 10 tracks, it’s “Transatlantic Telephone Call” that comes closest to predicting the fuller, more accomplished sound of The Union Themes, though it still retains a certain lo-fi wildness that marks a lot of the music that came out of Olympia at the time. And then there are the lyrics, which sound as though they were ripped out of the diary of a too-literate undergrad’s diary: playful and passionate, with a mile-a-minute pace that only the boundless energy of adolescence could maintain. Of course, by the time of Bet The Sky, Maffeo was in her thirties, which makes that boundless energy all the more surprising.

If you hated the lounge revival of the 1990s, Combustible Edison is probably Public Enemy #1. They’re responsible for “Vertigogo,” one of the most memorable lounge revival tracks of the era (or, at least, anything not including Mike Flowers’ cover of “Wonderwall”). And it all started with the end of Christmas.

Back in the late 80s, Michael Cudahy and Liz Cox were two-thirds of an eclectic rock band called Christmas. Another semi-famous alum of Christmas is James McNew, who went on to join Yo La Tengo. In any case, Christmas put out two records and slowly built up steam. But upon the recording of their third album, Vortex, Christmas ran into some trouble; the album was recorded in 1990 and rejected by their label at the time, IRS. While the band struggled to secure a release for the album, Cudahy and Cox tried their hand at other pursuits. At some point near the beginning of the 90s, the remnants of Christmas and other like-minded musicians mounted the Tiki Wonder Hour, a cocktail night dedicated to the days of the Rat Pack and Nancy Sinatra. The 14-piece band, decked out in white polyester tuxedoes, played only three shows—two in their hometown of Providence, RI and one at Boston’s Paradise Club. But the nights were enough of a success that Cudahy and Cox saw an opportunity. By the time Vortex finally saw a release on Matador in 1993, Christmas was no more. Its members abandoned ship, changed identities (Cudahy became The Millionaire and Cox became Miss Lily Banquette) and created a slimmed-down version of the Tiki Wonder Hour house band. Combustible Edison would release its first album, I, Swinger, a year after Christmas’s last release.

“Vertigogo” was undoubtedly the band’s critical peak and the only reason why people haven’t completely forgotten about Combustible Edison. Really, it’s the track that anchors them to the 1990s; as the theme song to the cool directors’ revue Four Rooms, “Vertigogo” was a perfect fit for the quirky exercise in mid-90s hipster slapstick. Combustible Edison, as the provider of all but two of the songs on the soundtrack, suddenly found themselves in the company of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, and it was on their rising stars and the success of the movie itself that the band found its ticket to success. “Vertigogo” itself is bubbly and insanely catchy, and was submitted for consideration as Best Original Song at the Oscars—except that the Academy declared the song ineligible because the lyrics were unintelligible.

The band and their label, Sub Pop, were slightly miffed, so they posted a response. Sadly, it did nothing to sway the Academy, who gave the award to Vanessa Williams for “Colours Of The Wind.” Surely, whatever you might think of lounge or Combustible Edison, we can all agree that they were robbed.

From a message board I’m on: Post an mp3 of a song that gives you very strong memories of a specific time in your life, no matter how mundane the memory may seem.

I stuck around for the summer in Kingston, Ontario after wrapping up my sophomore year in college. I had one night class on Media and Society, where we watched horror films from the 80s and related it all back to family dynamics and the changing role of the child as a threat to the American family (Carrie, The Exorcist) or as something to be protected (Poltergeist, Parents). Afterwards a couple of us would drive over to a friend’s place and watch the Leafs game; it’s the only time I’ve ever come close to following hockey during the regular season.

Aside from that, though, there was dick all to do and plenty of time to kill, and on top of all that I was an insomniac. So every so often, after midnight, I’d hop on the bike and ride down to the shore of Lake Ontario, towards the hospital, through all the neighbourhoods with the empty student houses, and back to my tiny little third-storey room with a giant old oak tree by the window. All the while, this album was the soundtrack.

I’ve never had a more peaceful time in my life before or since. I really miss it.