Each song is its own piece of soulful groove. Hurling forward at full-throttle, this is The Black Keys' most direct and consistent album yet. With the new audience the two have garnered from 2010's Brothers, expect to hear these songs on everything from car commercials to the nearly extinct rock radio. There isn't a bad song in the bunch, nor a moment to relax until you've ingested El Camino in full.That sounds perfect, and indeed, exactly like what the album was promised: a full-on, rocked out stack of Clash-meets-Cramps stew. Only problem, and this is minor, is the album cover:
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| NOM NOM NOM |
So, So you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell
Blue Skies from pain
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail
A smile from a veil
Do you think you can tell?
And did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk-on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?
How I wish
How I wish you were here
We're just two lost souls swimmin'in a fishbowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
The same old fears
Wish you were here
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| U mad, bro? |
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| In Space, No One Can Hear You Suck. |
Plangent. Stand-by rock-critic used to lend a magical aura to any nonaggressive guitar-based music (even though the word's primary meaning is "loud and resonating"). Stipes' muffled vocals and Buck's charming, plangent guitar made R.E.M.'s Murmur one of the most auspicious debuts of the 80's.Aren't you glad I don't write like that? I sure am.
Tutti Frutti -- Good BootyThat's according to Jim Miller, author of Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock n' Roll 1947-1977 (see link below), a pretty good cultural history of the classic rock n' roll era. Apparently Richard Penniman had no plan of recording "Tutti Frutti" until a producer convinced him that it would be a hit if he just excised all the naughty lyrics. He did and it was, and the result was one of the great nonsense phrases of Rock. The recorded "Tutti Frutti" isn't about anything but a Whole Lot of Shakin' Goin' On. Little Richard just howls and shrieks and hits that ecstatic thrill that Rock'n'Roll so often promises but fails to really deliver.
If it fits, don't force it
You can grease it, make it easy
A Wop-Bop A-Loo-Bop, a Good Goddamn
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| Halloween, 2008. Her arms are more toned now (She is looking over my shoulder as I type). |
When the first Ramones records were released, high school friends and I would sit in one of our rooms, huddled around the stereo. (Parents would yell if we turned it up.) We tried to parse the lyrics, the sounds, the meanings. We didn't know much about pop history, but we could sense the sendups -- "You're Gonna Kill That Girl," the title a slap at the Beatles's "You're Gonna Lose That Girl"; the indolent drawl with which Johnny sang the thing a slap at the indolent Mick Jagger.When I first read that, I knew exactly what he meant, even though I knew it to be a less-than-just description of Zeppelin's catalogue. But when it comes to Physical Graffiti, the word "flatulent" becomes almost apt.
Once we figured out the Zen of it, the world looked different. Bands like the Eagles and the Who sounded weak, Pink Floyd sounded mannered, Zeppelin almost flatulent.
The Yardbirds, as I said, were incredible. They came stampeding in and just blew everybody clean off the tracks. They were so fucking good, in fact, that people were still imitating 'em as much as a decade later, and getting rich doing it I might add, because the original band of geniuses didn't last that long. Of course, none of their stepchildren were half as good, and got increasingly pretentious and overblown as time went on until about 1973 a bunch of emaciated fops called Led Zeppelin played their final concert when the lead guitarist was assassinated by an irate strychnine freak in the audience with a zip gun just fifty-eight minutes two-and-a-half-hour virtuoso solo on one bass note.
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| You thought I was going to make a Bonham joke, didn't you? |
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| Somehow, I'll manage |
Give the album a chance and you’ll be converted. By the time Let Them Talk has played out in its full glory, you’ll have forgotten this is a blues album by an actor. It’ll be more “where’s this guy been all these years?”
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| Actually, I think the whole song is pretty funny... |
the revealingly titled Raven in the Grave is rife with the somber, gossamer 4AD mannerisms of yore. The dreamy longings of “Forget That You’re Young” decisively call up the specter of Cocteau Twins, while “Apparitions,” with menacing gallop and funereal atmospherics, has Clan of Xymox’s mournful markings all over it.
Looking at their arc from a purely musical perspective, you could divide their career in half at the midpoint of that decade-- at some point between 1994's Ill Communication and 1998's Hello Nasty. Their first four full-lengths came in less than eight years, and during this stretch, they were hungry and on the move, restlessly searching for new avenues of music expression. They're just now getting to their third proper album (fourth, if you want to count 2007's instrumental LP The Mix Up) in the 17 years since.
There is an exchange -- sometimes more than one -- between artist and audience, and exchanges need to operate according to some of the rules of trade, and also some kind of basic respect. It doesn't really matter the genre; one of the most professional bands of the last thirty-five years was the Ramones. They survived for twenty years without strong album sales because they ruthlessly toured and professionally performed. Johnny Ramone gets a lot of the credit for that: he gave a damn about what the band looked like, how they walked across the stage, how long the set was taking to perform.
For all the bohemian mythos about performers as artists pouring out the innermost secrets of their souls, it’s really just show business. And professionalism is about respect for one’s audience, providing them with the maximum enjoyment by maintaining the illusion that the performer is somehow set apart from the common run of mankind, so that what is seen on stage is really something special.
The half-buried vocals sound more compressed than usual in places, and Casablancas' vapid, self-loathing lyrics tread familiar ground. But the songs themselves are as catchy as ever, sinking their hooks into you with guilty-pleasure guitar and vocal melodies underscored by the band's signature tight, fat rhythms.So more or less what Pitchfork said, except they make it sound like a good thing.
At its best New Wave/punk represents a fundamental and age-old Utopian dream: that if you give people the license to be as outrageous as they want in absolutely any fashion they can dream up, they'll be creative about it, and do something good besides.
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| It's so miserable being a bad art student's shitty crayon drawing |
Throughout, the album is hobbled by disconnections-- between verse and chorus, lyrics and music, intent and execution. Casablancas' ambivalence about his own actions crops up often.Whatevs. They like Battles, which sounds like crap spun through a cotton-candy machine.
So how'd you like to read that five times on a web site's main page? Which is what happens every time they let people guest-edit the mag: the same by-line advertisment appears over and over again (because Heaven Forbid we have to click on an anchor link to discover who in Hades Buffalo Tom is, if we happen to give a moldy crap).Nothing if not a model of consistency, Buffalo Tom has been making the same decent-to-great music since 1992’s Let Me Come Over. Actually the Massachusetts trio’s third album, Let Me Come Over feels more like a debut, as it zeroed in brilliantly on the group’s strengths, namely the earnest, imagery-laden, acoustic-gone-electric songwriting of guitarist Bill Janovitz and bassist Chris Colbourn and the propulsive punk undercurrents supplied by drummer Tom Maginnis. Judging by the band’s latest, Skins (Scrawny), it’s a formula that still has legs. Skins is the group’s eighth album and second since reuniting after a 10-year (sort-of) break, and its world-weary lilt and been-there/done-that themes make it the perfect grown-up companion piece to Let Me Come Over’s reluctant coming-of-age angst. It may be the best thing the band has done since that LP. Buffalo Tom will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.
