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.
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| *Shudder* |
Thankfully, however, if one digs beneath the surface of Waite's pop career, there are more than a couple laudable compositions, and the second part of his set on this night featured some of this more gratifying material. In his lost late '90s/early '00s years, Waite released some truly affecting pieces of singer/songwriter pop, examinations of New York City life, introspections, possibly autobiographical, on a self-medicating former rock star, and narratives about young musicians dreaming of stardom. And it is songs like these that are the most moving and revelatory in terms of the artist John Waite has become. "Downtown," the tale of the downtrodden former star whose hit song is now more recognizably sung by another, is a window seldom seen into the consciousness of an artist whose more famous days are past him. And, even more impressively, when Waite launches into early career peaks, such as 1982's rocking "Mr. Wonderful" and such '70s Babys material as the "Midnight Rendezvous," or the show closer "Head First," it's like the years have melted away. Here, the man is untethered by his former fame or the weight of past hits, such like that which led the protagonist of "Downtown" to the street corner for his high 15 years ago. It's a man reborn. And for me, it is some small reassurance that maybe you can in fact go home again.... I believe him. And I don't wish any ill on John Waite, whose music I wouldn't recognize if I heard it. Health and prosperity to him, says I. But dear sweet Lord, if there's anything I would like to remain in blissful ignorance of, it's 80's ballad stables like "Missing You" and "How Did I Get By Without You." I heard enough of those between the ages of 3 and 13 to last a lifetime.
Back down here on planet Earth, we'd like to caution RCHP against going with this title because, well, it's retarded.
Here are another 10 cautionary points (which means don't do it) the band should keep in mind when eventually officially naming their upcoming album:
10) P.M. Dawn — The Bliss Album…? (Vibrations Of Love And Anger And The Ponderance Of Life And Existence)
9) Alanis Morissette Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie
8) No album title should ever be a symbol.
7) Extreme — Extreme III Sides To Every Story
6) George Clinton — Hey Man, Smell My Finger
5) No album should ever be self-titled.
4) Fiona Apple — When The Pawn Hits The Conflicts He Thinks Like A King What He Knows Throws The Blows When He Goes To The Fight And He'll Win The Whole Thing 'Fore He Enters The Ring There's No Body To Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand And Remember That Depth Is The Greatest Of Heights And If You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where To Land And If You Fall It Won't Matter, Cause You'll Know That You're Right
3) No album shoULD EvEr ABUSe capitALIZation like THIS.
2) Limp Bizkit — Chocolate Starfish & The Hotdog Flavored Water
1) Butthole Surfers — Hairway To Steven
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| Old and Busted (for now). |
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| New Hotness (for now) |
It’s a story that has repeated itself far too often, and for every Arcade Fire or Bon Iver that translated blog momentum into near unanimous acclaim, there was a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Midlake, Voxtrot, Sound Team, Cold War Kids, or Tapes ‘n Tapes that received a strong push from the blogosphere and found that by the time their second album was released, a lot of people had jumped off the merry-go-round. Without the opportunity to develop a fanbase that would invest time and money in them, those bands found that the same listeners and writers who had championed them had either moved on or weren’t interested in watching a band go through growing pains.The internet expands, but human memory does not. There's only so much room for so many bands in our hearts or our wallets. I haven't listened to any of those bands, because my music tastes are a lagging indicator. It's very rare for me to get into a band on their first disc; I usually wait until they've been around and have learned to grow. That way, I don't have to sit around waiting for the next record to drop.
If blogs were the gatekeepers for the indie rock kingdom, Pitchfork were and are the undeniable kingmakers, having essentially launched the careers of Broken Social Scene, Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, and others with one glowing review. The blogs might discover a band, but if that band is going to move beyond the blogs into the larger bloodstream, Pitchfork needs to officially confirm it with a “Best New Music” review.They do? They are? Why Pitchfork particularly? Why not Spin or Magnet or CHARTattack or that plucky little Under the Radar? Is Pitchfork the hit-king?
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| Cletus ain't amused by yer shenanigans. |
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| Dude? The Upturned Phallic Guitar? Could you BE more Rockist? |
27. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion -- Orange |
| This totally changes my mind about irony. |
According to Germany's Der Spiegel newspaper, little Walter Eikrem was walking home from school in his hometown of Rakkestad when all of a sudden he found himself on the same path as a pack of wolves.
Instead of crying wolf and running away, Walter did what seemed to be the only logical thing to him: he pulled out his cell phone, took the ear buds out of it and turned Creed's "Overcome" up full blast while screaming and waving his arms.
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| So much for Irony being dead... |
This idea of knowingness, though-- our relationship with it can get complicated. Right now, one of the internet's most successful bastions of knowingness is a blog called Hipster Runoff, a performance that's almost nothing but knowing: It shrugs, it takes an arch, pseudo-scientific tone, it puts every other word in scare quotes. Here you go, it seems to say: Here is your weird market of hipness and cool. The end. You can take it as withering satire, if you want to, because its skewers are dead on target. Of course, if its pseudonymous author really thought the market of cool were that pointless and vacuous, why spend so much time thinking about it-- why know it well enough to be savvy? It's not so much a satire as a whole performance of knowingness. And even if I don't often have the stomach for it, I can't pretend the performance isn't an immaculate one: it's knowingness raised to the level of poetry, free of the burden of "intent" or sincerity or any point beyond what the reader reflects out of it. It goes beyond "the author is dead" and turns the author into some kind of zombie.When I was in college, REM had a rather large hit song with the line "You said that irony was the shackle of youth." At the time, I disagreed, saying that irony was the weapon of youth. We were both right, I suppose, but I don't care to examine the matter much further than that, because Irony, capital "I", is not that interesting. It's not really a thing, it's an act, a choice. That's why an analysis or discussion of Irony will always feel overblown. And it's why Family Guy will always be less than its competitors.
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| Dude... |
Their fantastic lives begot fantastic albums. MBDTF was a delirium of influence, a recombination of musical DNA as varied as gothic East Coast rap classicism, '70s prog rock, and winsome '90s electronic music. In doing so, West paid maximalist homage to his own best work: the sped-up soul sampling of his early productions, the glossy thump of Graduation, the ornate orchestration of Late Registration, the sad robot pulse of 808s and Heartbreak. And he rapped better, too—a necessity on an album that featured historically grand competition, from a bloodthirsty Nicki Minaj to Raekwon to Jay-Z himself (twice!), a hip-hop fantasy camp basically unparalleled, in part because any other artist would've been afraid to try. Murphy, for his part, boiled down a decade of sarcasm and ironic dance-floor excess into a plainspoken kiss-off to the career that had cost him everything external to the band he found himself trapped in.So I guess that means...we like them? We don't like them? They're douchebags? What the hell does that even mean anymore? Did we ever know? The word "douche" suggests feminine hygiene, or other matter gynecological, and George Carlin testified to its use to insult women only, at least among NY Italians of the 1950's to 1970's. But by some kind of post-modern inversion, it's come to be applied as an all-purpose insult against hyper-masculine bro-types. Joel McHale can't get through a bit about Tool Academy without using it.
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| Their fingers smell delightful. Delightful. |
“Douchebag” is perhaps the most overused slang in the parlance of the under-50 set. It’s so damn effective, and I love nothing more than to latch onto slang that’s either showing its expiration date or recently expired altogether.That was in 2008. So now that it's ubiquity is secure, and it has passed from meaning whatever it meant to "something not desirable," I'm going to quietly retire "douchebag," and it's little bro, "d-bag" from my parlance. You may consider this official:
26. Jet -- Get BornUnlike the The Strokes' rich-boy bum ensembles, the Hives' neo-mod uniforms and the White Stripes' peppermint chic, The Vines were the only band of the origonal "new rock" quadrifecta that didn't have a ready-made look (which may be why they've slipped off the radar screens). Australian boys play rock n' roll, unapologetically, and they know it ain't their job to look pretty. That's for the wankers from Pommey-land and pretentious Yanks.Blissfully ignorant of my misspelling of "original," I go on to say that Jet rocks satisfactorily, but also brings the moody piano balladry, and that this was a good thing.
I’m not talking about these chest-pain-causing bass-frequency fanatics, but the subtle melody-enhancing, rhythm-keeping, ass-caressing bass-guitar sounds. Put on any Marvin Gaye and turn up the low frequencies on your home or car stereos or your mp9 player (or whatever) just a tad, and I promise it’s a little bit better. And kiss your local bass player. He works a lot harder than you think.
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| Kung Fu! |
Ignoring, for the moment, the gee-golly-goshers aspect of being told that musicians do other things when not in the studio or on tour, why in the name of all things holy am I supposed to give a snowball in hell about who James Hince has been fornicating with? Are they really trying to coat this trivia with some kind of lovers-reunited meme?In the time since the Kills released their 2008 album Midnight Boom, the oozing blues duo have been busy with other things. Alison Mosshart has been kicking it with Jack White in the Dead Weather, and Jamie Hince has been racking up low-grade tabloid fame as Kate Moss' boyfriend.
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| Title shortened from "Gimme Some Plastic Surgery, For the Love of God." |
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| Irony and fatuousness mix in one complete package. |
23. The Good, The Bad & the Queeen -- The Good, The Bad & the Queen
22. The Flamin' Groovies -- Teenage Head“You listened to Starship?” the photographer said.I always wondered who on earth ever liked "We Built This City". It surprises me not at all to discover they work at Disney.
My wife said she had. The photog looked at me. “You a Starship fan?”
“No sir,” I said.
“Really? Aw dude, c’mon, We Built This City!”
“They didn’t build anything,” I said. “The idea of Grace Slick singing ‘they’re always changing corporation names’ when the band had three names is just the start of my problems, and ‘Marconi does the Mambo’ is the other.”
“Yeah, you’re right, it was Jefferson Airplane, then Jefferson Starship, then just Starship.”
“I hated them all,” I said. “‘White Rabbit’ is the Bolero of rock.”
“Okay well I can see you got opinions!”
Family by now is cringing. Yes, Daddy has opinions.
21. The Fiery Furnaces -- I'm Going AwayHalfway through the album is also the point where you realize Come Around Sundown is simply too long. Right when you're thinking it's going to end, it just keeps going, becoming as worn out as the elastic on a really, really stretched pair of sweat pants. This makes it a curious contradiction; one would think it would be impossible to make an album that sounded completely thin, but looks dense in terms of its length. But Kings Of Leon have seemingly done the impossible here.Ouch.
20. Elvis Presley -- Elvis 75Interpol's best work sounds enormous, making any room or car in which it's played instantly feel incapable of holding it. Interpol boasts "Barricades," an awe-inspiring song full of sweeping grandeur. It has palpable weight and size. Album closer "The Undoing" gives a sense of panorama, and both "Summer Well" and "Safe Without" succeed to a lesser extent, but Interpol doesn't threaten to blow the roof off....then Interpol is all but done. The eponymous reboot is oftentimes a band's last shot at a sustained career; if you hose it, or don't immediately build on it, then you're toast. So Andrew Earles may have been right, again:
The size has always worked off the razor-sharp edges of the music, with Daniel Kessler's guitar leading the way. Interpol restores some of the shine, but the music still feels softer somehow, the cuts not as precise.
Interpol updated ’90s indie rock by brilliantly revisiting first-wave post-punk and the Church. 2003 was a heady time for the New York City foursome, when the world stayed oblivious to the fact that this was a one-and-a-half-album band. That reality slapped Capitol across the face four years later when Interpol delivered major-label debut Our Love To Admire, a small-scale Waterworld for modern rock circa now.But if some of the songs are as enjoyable, they may yet have a new lease. Don't make us wait, boys, sling that post-punk out fast!
Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.One doesn't need to spend a lot of time with adolescents to see this. Technology has empowered the self-absorption/self protection cycle of adolescence to the point of mindlessness. We will one day reach the point when people will wonder why dining tables and fireplaces even exist; when families will be nothing more than genetic flash mobs. The machine is in the ghost.
For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over…I can only say, "did she miss the 1980's?" That sounds like every act my elementary-school psyche came to grips with on MTV: jaded, soulless hawkers of plastic decadence. I cannot understand why she believes that GaGa differs from Def Leppard differs from 2 Live Crew differs from Madonna. And when she says:
There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.I have to say "Woman, please." As though Madonna was an indie act, bursting forth armed from the head of Avant-Garde, rather than a relentless self-promoter who cannily released her disco-pop from Sire Records, who by 1982 had, like everyone else in the music industry, ran not walked away from everything risky. Madonna's entire shtick has been an epater les bourgeois riff punctuated by exploding dollar signs from the beginning. It's actually kind of sad watching Paglia continue to play defense for a woman who has become as big an institution as Elvis ever was:
However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir.That laughing sound you hear is me trying to figure out whatever it was the young Madonna did that could ever be considered "fiery." Was it the Go-Gos Lite of "Lucky Star"? The syrupy tedium of "Papa Don't Preach"? The lipstick-smeared, second-rate Vivienne Westwood fashion sense? Whatever the hell was going on in "Express Yourself" (truly a sentiment America had never encountered before)? What?
Let's say you bought an entire album just because you liked one song. After listening to that one song on repeat for days, you ventured into the rest of the album. After listening to the entire album, you ran across the best song of your life. Well, that would never have happened if you hadn't bought the album, now would it? If you just bought the single, you would not have learned about any other tracks on the album. Forced consumption in the magazine format is the same. It leads you through a maze of possible favorites; whereas, online only leads you through what you already know.He's not wrong. But the mags need a better tag line than "Forced Consumption: Because We Know Better, Sheeple!" Maybe ConsumptionPlus?
the Milwaukee quartet takes on a musical time warp to beachy ‘60s garage pop, with twangy guitar riffs, psychedelic organs and vocal harmonies.In other words, they sound like the Beach Boys. Which is good, as its been several minutes since I reflected on how the Beach Boys are easily the least interesting Important Band from the 60's.
You see what I mean. The poem doesn't so much enhance my understanding as flatter it, with the wink that of course I know who Paul Cezanne is, and if I can't quite place his art, I remember him as an Important Artist that Educated People know about, so I assume that he painted apples. Damned witty, Wilde!Apple
Since Time began, such alphabets begin
With Apple, source of Knowledge and of Sin
My child, take heart: the fruit that undid Man
Brought out as well the best in Paul Cezanne
The record is a shambling mess, devoid of the bangers that characterized Arular and Kala, two of the stronger pop albums of the past decade. It aims to capture a technological and cultural zeitgeist in its over-stimulated, digitally degraded sound, but the songs are too flimsy to carry her bold conceit. Without compelling tunes, the obnoxious public antics, dubious political messages, and thin voice that had grated on her naysayers have become impossible for even dedicated fans to ignore. It's as if everything that was great about M.I.A. has been stripped from this music, leaving behind only the most alienating aspects of her art and public persona.I should probably stop wailing on the girl. That "Born Free" video really got under my skin somehow.
Negative space, purposeful hesitation, simplicity and raw awkward understated talent are what make this album brilliant. Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim and Jamie Smith have birthed a masterful and original debut.I suppose that's true. To me it sounds like a band sitting in it's bathtub and farting. But I haven't been in the most creative mood of late.
