RECORD REVIEWS

Will repeated listening to the Flaming Lips‘ dark, depressing and intense new album drive you insane? MAGNET’s Matthew Fritch aims to find out. Welcome to the Terrordome.

If I were Wayne Coyne—and I am definitely not Wayne Coyne, because he would use a better pseudonym—I would begin this post with 40 seconds of synthesizer drone. That’s a joke for those of you who have heard The Terror, the 13th album by the Flaming Lips. The Terror is the subject of about as much controversy as can be stirred up by a rock album these days, which is to say that it is a stylistic left turn by a known artistic quantity, and some people don’t like it one bit.

Here’s the situation: A well-liked, seemingly well-adjusted band that had lately become known for its lysergic sense of joy and outright gimmickry (the bunny suits, the plastic bubbles, the movie about Christmas on Mars) releases an endless bummer of an album—it is dark, and somewhat experimental, and we’ll have plenty of time to dissect it in the coming weeks. Upon first listen to the album last week, it is my opinion that it’s the greatest thing the Flaming Lips have done in years; possibly better than 1999′s The Soft Bulletin and far removed from the band’s shiny-happy pop of the 2000s. I immediately knew I’d become obsessed with The Terror, similar to the way I knew I’d be spending a lot of time with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Sister Lovers or Alligator the first time those albums graced the CD player or iPod or whatever.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did not hear The Terror for the first time in its entirety. Who does that? I typed “flaming lips the terror full album” into the YouTube search box and said a little prayer. It wasn’t successful (believe me, plenty of other old and new albums are there for the free listening), but it did turn up two album tracks, “Turning Violent” and “Try To Explain.” Here is the former:

I listened to each song three times to make sure I didn’t repeat what I now refer to as The Foxygen Incident. That occurred a couple months ago when I made an impulse iTunes purchase of the entire Foxygen album after hearing “San Francisco.” Aside from that song, fucking Foxygen fucking sucks. Anyway, I looked at the deluxe iTunes version of The Terror for $2 more, felt cheap and decided I didn’t need the pair of bonus tracks. I’m down $9.99, and I’m going to get my money’s worth.

I don’t know what this series of weekly posts is going to be like, or how long it will take. I hope I don’t kill the thing that I (currently) love. We’re going to do some deep listening. We’re going to talk about the Jim DeRogatis review. We’re going to find out why Jonathan Valania didn’t write more about the album in the MAGNET cover story on the Flaming Lips, and why he was kind of evasive when Coyne asked his opinion of it. There will be a hastily conceived infographic. This exercise is self-indulgent and indulgent in other ways, too. Let’s see what happens when you review an album for a few months.

Tom Petty has said of Wildflowers, the 1994 solo album he cut with Rick Rubin that is arguably the high water mark of his 34 years of record making, that he spent two years trying to make it sound like the album was done in a weekend. No such shell game with Mojo, Petty’s latest album with the Heartbreakers and first since 2002′s The Last DJ. Each of the album’s 15 tracks was recorded in a day (liner notes tell you exactly what day), with the band playing together live and Petty singing along, all straight to tape. A couple of minor overdubs aside, you’re hearing it pretty much how it went down in their tricked-out rehearsal space. (This from a band that very likely spent an entire day dicking around with producer Jimmy Iovine and engineer Shelly Yakus to achieve that fat snare-drum sound on Damn The Torpedoes.) Of course, the pace at which an album’s songs are recorded isn’t a mark of quality. But the urgency and manner with which Petty and the Heartbreakers laid down these tunes goes a long way toward defining what Mojo is—just as much as the album’s blues/R&B/roots-steeped tenor.

Mojo is certainly not the jangling Heartbreakers that put their songs over with harmonies and pop sensibilities learned from the Beatles and Byrds. There’s nary a harmony vocal or anything resembling a classic Petty hook on the record. This is something different. It’s extremely skilled spontaneity. Something Petty has surely been trying to bring out of the Heartbreakers on record for a long time, perhaps as far back as when they were walking a tightrope nightly behind Bob Dylan in the ’80s. And now, grizzled vets of almost 60, unencumbered by commercial concerns, completely able to write their own ticket knowing they’ll never play to a half-empty house, Petty and his crew have gone and made that record.

Throughout Mojo, Petty frequently channels the laid-back, low-maintenance vibe of Mudcrutch, his swampy early-’70s band with original Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench that he reformed for a great album and short tour in 2008. He does it best in a mellow gem of a road song called “The Trip To Pirate’s Cove,” which drifts along on Tench’s “Riders On The Storm”-like electric-piano part and Petty’s succinct character distillations (“She was a part of my heart/Now she’s just a line in my face”). If “Runnin’ Down A Dream” was a highway jam meant for the interstate, “Pirate’s Cove” is built for a lazy nighttime cruise on the Pacific Coast Highway. Even when they’re playing slow, lurching Chicago blues, like on “Takin’ My Time,” the Heartbreakers’ role on Mojo comes across as anything but laid-back. Last year’s Live Anthology boxed set showcased them as a versatile and accomplished combo. True players that bring the best out of Petty’s songs, especially live. And in Mojo’s basically live setting, they shine. They’re applying what they learned playing four sets a night 40 years ago, working out all the knowledge gleaned from those Mike Bloomfield, Yardbirds and J.J. Cale records.

And did I mention Mojo is an electrifying showcase for Campbell’s lead guitar, quite possibly the most under-appreciated commodity in the history of rock ‘n’ roll? There’s a precision and depth to his playing that you might not expect to find on a record made in such a hit-it-and-quit-it fashion. One of Mojo‘s standout tracks, “Running Man’s Bible,” smolders on the strength of Campbell’s responses to Petty’s declarations of survival (“I took on my father and I’m still walking/Took on all comers in some shape or form”). Sometimes his responses take the form of rapid-fire licks, other times muted bursts of quarter-notes. It never feels like too much or that it’s not enough. It’s the perfect compliment to a great song. The same can be said of Campbell’s playing on swirling, seven-minute jam “First Flash Of Freedom.” Over Steve Ferrone’s steady swing, Campbell wraps curly arpeggios and trippy runs around Petty’s woozy melody in a song that serves as a reminder that the band grew up just a few hours south of the Allman Brothers’ home turf in Macon, Ga.

These aforementioned tracks, along with loosey-goosey R&B numbers “Let Yourself Go” and “Candy,” account for Mojo’s best moments. That’s six songs. Four, maybe five, more tracks that come close to reaching those heights (the swirling blues of “Good Enough” and the delicate “Something Good Coming” would make my short list) would have amounted to an excellent album. Petty, though, felt compelled to make Mojo a 15-song album. So the record loses some of its, ahem, mojo in spots, bogged down by tracks that are more vibe than song (“I Should Have Known It,” “Lover’s Touch”) and fairly throwaway (“No Reason To Cry”). These slow spots aren’t enough to totally derail things; they’re just lulls. Because by reaching way back to their roots, by doing what they do best—playing as a band—and by making a record that sounds like no record they’ve made before, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers have come up with their most vital record in years.

—Patrick Berkery

As a career retrospective and unreleased/rarities compilation, you couldn’t do much better than Keep An Eye On The Sky, Rhino Records’ long-anticipated Big Star boxed set. The band’s canonical albums are few—two polished releases and a post-mortem assemblage that never made it to a final draft—but what Big Star lacked in released product, it more than made up for in depth and scope, and that long historical reach provides the context for this packed four-disc set. Keep An Eye opens with pre-Big Star recordings from Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, tracking the folksy/psychedelic origins of the band’s earliest recordings, including a rudimentary version of Bell’s exquisite “Try Again” under the Rock City sobriquet. The first three discs follow a sensible division, grouping demos, alternate takes and mixes and album versions of songs from the #1 Record, Radio City and Third/Sister Lovers sessions. Though there’s nothing here in the way of a holy grail—Big Star burned hot, but too quickly to leave a lot of material behind—the unreleased music is always interesting and frequently revelatory. The demo material from Third/Sister Lovers, in particular, is a treasure trove of early drafts and alternate performances that reveal the melodic roots of what later became notoriously shambolic sessions; to listen to the demo of “Downs” beside the album version is to hear how astonishingly prescient and fearless a band Big Star had become by 1973. The fourth disc offers a pristine live recording, taped at Lafayette’s Music Room in Memphis, from the period between the release of #1 Record and Radio City. It’s a passionate performance, and yet this final disc is as poignant as it is energetic. In the pauses between songs, the audience’s indifference to the music they’re hearing is palpable. Listless applause and polite silence hang in the gaps, and the criminal lack of success Big Star faced in its own lifetime becomes a part of the official transcript. We knew that already, of course, and yet to hear it so plainly on the final disc still hurts, a bit. Lush photographs and detailed liner notes, most notably a deep critical assessment by Memphis-based journalist Bob Mehr, complement the music and render Keep An Eye On The Sky a fully satisfying archival project. The albums are still the place for novices to begin, but anyone with a desire to dig deeper will find this box a worthwhile purchase indeed. [Rhino]

—Eric Waggoner

Although it might be difficult to comprehend now, the Jesus And Mary Chain was a total revelation when it appeared amid the ocean of dull-yet-worthy indie pop that made up so much of the mid-’80s British music scene. Initially greeted with hate and bile, 1985 debut Psychocandy wasn’t so much a breath of fresh air as it was a speed- and booze-addled belch of intent.

Looking back, brothers Jim and William Reid had it all: great name, great look, a truckload of attitude and, most important, a sound that’s been ripped off and assimilated by a thousand other less-talented bands. But what a sound: the Velvet Underground, Suicide, the Stooges, ’60s girl groups, Phil Spector and the Beach Boys, all mixed up and seemingly recorded in a tin can on a budget of $3.50 by a studio engineer under the influence of wine and animal tranquilizers, then swamped by white noise and migraine-inducing shards of feedback. It wasn’t especially clever, it certainly wasn’t pretty, but by God, it was effective.

Read More »

Mascott is the art project of Manhattanite Kendall Jane Meade, a seraph-voiced singer and sometime Off-Broadway songwriter. Conversely, Art Project could rightly be read as her mascot: Its nine songs (many less than three minutes long) are both short and endlessly sweet, and its vibe is simultaneously downtown-sleek and small-town-simple. Over jingling bells and plinking synths, Meade sings of hours floating and of something growing, of how sleeping dogs lie and wanting to make it all right. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but there’s an airy charm in her childlike delivery and a blessed practicality to her untangled arrangements, most notably in the easy cadence of early highlight “4th Of July.” The exceptions to this rule on Mascott’s third album are also interesting, even if they feel somewhat forced. Her spoken-word vocals on “Like Letting Go Of The Sun” creepily straddle a Beatlesque, “Because”-borrowed arpeggio, while painstaking ballad “Red Flowers” lacks the conviction of, say, Jennifer O’Connor, who provides backup vocals on two Art Project tracks. But all of that is forgotten on honey-dripping closer “Wildwood Flower,” a strummy number that T-Bone Burnett ought to be eyeing for his next O Brother, Where Art Thou? hoedown. It’s Meade’s most affecting tune on Mascott’s most affectionate and tuneful collection. [www.redpandarecords.com]

—Noah Bonaparte Pais

FREDRIK Na Na Ni [The Kora]
The debut by this Malmö, Sweden, six-piece comes on like typical Scandinavian folk pop. It’s cashmere-soft, endlessly lilting and more polite than a game of backgammon between Kings Of Convenience and Jens Lekman. A side project from first-name-only songwriters Fredrik and Lindefelt of pop duo the LK, Na Na Ni has its autumnal charms. Tenderly played acoustic guitars, glockenspiel and cello frame the melodic, wallflower vocals. Things get interesting, however, during Japanese-tinged, koto-music interlude “Hei Hei” and the nearly all-instrumental second half of the album. Soon enough, Na Na Ni descends into a rabbit hole with the kind of mystical, pastoral tunes last heard on records by Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Fairport Convention. It’s a pleasantly weird turn of events for such an otherwise well-adjusted indie-pop album. [www.thekorarecords.com]

Read More »

Ask for Englishman Roy Harper’s references and you’ll get pages of popular and semi-popular names that span decades. Led Zeppelin sang a song about him, and Pink Floyd had him sing one of theirs; Kate Bush, Pete Townshend and Jim O’Rourke have given him a public thumbs-up. Even so, after a 43-year career, the man is a cult figure, partly because his authenticity is the sort that makes people uncomfortable. Harper is an uncompromising social critic, quite willing to follow his muse to places people really don’t want to go; for a taste, visit the May 2006 entry in his online diary and read his thoughts on organized religion. His unswerving devotion to driving his point home manifests in songs such as “I Hate The White Man” (from Flat Baroque And Berserk), which holds England accountable for the racism that was the flip side of what was then a still much-missed empire, and “Twentieth Century Man” (from Jugula), which is an explicitly detailed chronicle of carnality vanquishing civility.

Read More »

The Velvet Underground’s first album ranks among the most plagiarized of all time: Its strident melodies, dark subject matter and cloaks of reverb have crept into songs by Patti Smith, Television and Sonic Youth. The fact that those three called New York home is also no coincidence since Gotham continues to inspire crisp, anxious, lo-fi rock ensembles, each unabashedly paying homage to the Velvets. Brooklyn’s Vivian Girls are most conspicuously the product of their claimed influences: the Wipers, Nirvana and the Shangri-Las. More appropriate, though, the jangling guitars and charmingly off-key vocals traipsing through the female trio’s self-titled debut would’ve fit perfectly between post-punk titans like the Raincoats and Delta 5 on a Rough Trade compilation. And like their English ancestors, the Girls deal almost exclusively in exuberance and wonderment, making found squalls and rattles sound like their own. But that might have more to do with the copious amounts of reverb echoing through the album’s best songs (the ponderous “Where Do You Run To,” the punky “Never See Me Again”). They would noisily fall apart were it not for a steady beat. Read More »

For every Eagles Of Death Metal devotee letting loose the devil horns, there’s usually a dumbfounded friend using those same digits to scratch his head. What’s so polarizing about a pair of sex-obsessed, former high-school pals getting their teenage garage-rocks off, anyway? Perhaps it has something to do with the notion that one of said pals, drummer Josh Homme, saves his “real” art for Queens Of The Stone Age. Or maybe it’s the sheer audacity of singer/guitarist Jesse Hughes’ porn-star mustache. Nevertheless, the duo’s third LP won’t reconcile the two camps; in fact, Heart On may be the first EODM album to really make the detractors’ case. Chugging riffs and falsetto vocals abound on these 12 tracks, but instead of indulging whatever black magic that kept 2004’s Peace Love Death Metal and 2006’s Death By Sexy from devolving into jokey karaoke, Hughes and Homme decide to play it mostly straight. The one stab at reclaimed cock rock, “High Voltage,” can’t get it up, while “Now I’m A Fool,” with its ooh-la-la-la harmonies and salient solos, verges on the balladic. It’s obvious that these Eagles don’t care to be thought of as a mere novelty act. Less obvious is whether they should aim to be anything more. [www.downtownrecordings.com]

—Noah Bonaparte Pais

You thought Woody Allen’s coital exploits were icky? Welcome to Skeletal Lamping, which could’ve been titled Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Kevin Barnes’ Sex Life (And Should Be Afraid To Find Out). Barnes’ Of Montreal albums have fast become elaborately constructed confessional booths, to the point where it will be no great surprise if the lyrics on his next platter reveal PIN numbers or medical records. His last, and best, offering, 2007’s Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, disclosed intimate details about everything from Barnes’ stormy domestic life (“dodging lamps and vegetables”) to his stalled neurotransmitters (“come on, chemicals!”). Skeletal Lamping zeroes in on his bedroom—in spirit, anyway. Recounted love acts also occur in his kitchen (“ass against the sink”), and be forewarned: Once you learn certain things about Barnes’ pleasure palace, you won’t be able to un-learn them. Yet, between musings about black condoms and black shemales, he manages to keep the mood light. The album’s sound is a more intricate remix of Fauna’s futurama, another hyperbaric disco chamber filled with technoodling beats backing pop operettas, while the lyrics sometimes do that magnum opus one better. “I’m so sick of suckin’ the dick of this cruel, cruel city,” he begins “St. Exquisite’s Confessions.” Saintly it ain’t, but a more exquisite confession you’re not likely to find. [www.polyvinylrecords.com]

—Noah Bonaparte Pais

Kurt Wagner has finally admitted what’s been true all along: No matter how many dozens of Nashville musicians play on his records, Lambchop is a solo project, one growing more intimate by the moment. He’s now winnowed the tootling, banging and strumming masses down to a septet, a move that’s brought new focus and coherence to Wagner’s increasingly soft songwriting and dry, unmistakable sing-speak. “I’m such a bad enunciator/ Understanding me is hard,” he sings on “A Hold Of You,” but the emotional tenor on Lambchop’s 10th LP is hard to miss. Not that there’s anything wrong with being touchy and tender, but the calm, spare arrangements on OH (ohio) can only be described as pretty. The temperature rises on the midtempo “National Talk Like A Pirate Day” and near rocker “Sharing A Gibson With Martin Luther King, Jr.”; elsewhere, tasteful horns (often a Lambchop strength) return. On 2006’s aptly titled Damaged, Wagner had just survived a health scare and was elegiac and emotionally fragile. That mood continues here on the quiet, bossa-nova-tinged “Ohio,” whose chorus lyric is “Green doesn’t matter when you’re blue.” OH is like listening to one long, quiet conversation where Wagner tells us his secrets. [www.mergerecords.com]

—Robert Baird

God, this is depressing. And no, we’re not talking depressing as in mood or tone, but that a band such as Mercury Rev could release something as wretchedly insipid as Snowflake Midnight. (Even the title causes involuntary nausea.) Forever destined to be looked down upon as the Flaming Lips’ wayward cosmic cousins from the Catskills, this is a band that gave the world the frazzled brilliance of 1991’s Yerself Is Steam, the freewheeling, boundary-breaking psych-pop thrills of 1995’s See You On The Other Side, not to mention the Jack Nitzsche-conducts-choirs-of-angels wonderment of 1998’s Deserter’s Songs. So what happened? Mercury Rev has talked about reinvention and veering away from its comfort zone, which is only to be commended, but the band has really fallen flat on its face here. It’s all just too polite. Guitars have been largely abandoned for interminable washes of insipid synths and vapid, ’90s-style techno-lite beats. It’s as if some third-rate Ibiza-based chillout DJ (or, god forbid, Moby) has been handed the reins and decided to bland them out of existence. There are moments of brilliance and wide-eyed lysergic madness, and frontman Jonathan Donahue remains a Charles Adams character made real, but ultimately, Snowflake Midnight is one long, disheartening comedown. [www.yeproc.com]

—Neil Ferguson

Chances are, you’ve heard something similar to Tracy Shedd before. Surrounded by guitar tones that vary from stark to stratospheric (depending on the mood), Shedd sings in a unprepossessing, hushed voice that recalls everyone from Mazzy Star and Lush to just about half of early-’90s Britain. But for all the comforting pangs of nostalgia bubbling to the surface, the energy and craft found in her road-ready songs keep Cigarettes & Smoke Machines firmly grounded in the present. There’s simply no resisting the Missouri River-wide hook of opener “Never Too Late,” where an initially grim atmosphere melts away with Shedd’s double-tracked voice in a sunnily anthemic chorus. Elsewhere, the Tucson, Ariz., transplant shows her new home’s influence with “Not Giving Up,” a dry acoustic shuffle with big-sky guitar that hints at Calexico (whose frontman, Joey Burns, appears as a guest musician). Cigarettes & Smoke Machines falters when Shedd drifts into monochromatic balladry, as with the pretty-yet-meandering “Paris” and the brief, nondescript “Valentine,” but such lapses are quickly forgotten in the face of its brightest moments, particularly “Won Past Ten.” Powered by a bubbling guitar figure and a gleam of youthful innocence, Shedd indirectly answers any possible criticism with the question, “When was the last time that you felt like you were 17?” Point taken. [www.teenbeat.net]

—Chris Barton

Along with ruining the harmonica for every modern-day rocker, Bob Dylan’s influence on other people’s music often comes across as subtle as a sledgehammer. The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser seems stuck in a never-ending audition for I’m Still Not There, and Blitzen Trapper singer/guitarist Eric Earley does the pinched-nose, protracted-vowel routine as well as anyone not named Cate Blanchett. Witness the title track from the Portland, Ore., band’s fourth full-length, which hums along on a six-string’s plaintive strum, a tambourine’s gentle jangle and, true to form, a harmonica’s whistling wheeze. It’s not the only quality song on Furr to suffer from such a comparison—and not only to Dylan, either. “Black River Killer” is a fantastically detailed, first-person murder ballad that takes a few too many cues from Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” while two other tracks reanimate the Allman Brothers’ Southern-rockin’ guitar solos. Enjoying Furr, then, depends entirely on your ability (or willingness) to ignore the heavy footprints of familiar musicians. Try to appreciate the highly infectious boogie-woogie of “Saturday Nite” without hearing Jerry Garcia or the hellfire screeching of “Love U” without having to block out Jet. Do that, and the craftsmanship on Furr has a good shot at overshadowing its undeniable derivation. [www.subpop.com]

—Noah Bonaparte Pais