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Guster’s “Easy Wonderful” (2010) – YES, NO, MAYBE SO?

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Guster’s Easy Wonderful (2010) – MAYBE

Easy Wonderful (Guster, 2010)

Easy Wonderful (Guster, 2010)

(October 5, 2010)

Review:

The Easy Wonderful CD design is telling: the disc is a vibrant, organic hand-drawn color wheel (see the cover) with a massive “FBI Anti-Piracy Warning” stamped over it; this design — whether the band approved the warning or not — finds Guster, as always, an engaging band with a knack for beautiful songwriting but with too much feeling forced or underwhelming this time around to truly impress alongside their back catalog (i.e. Keep It Together, anyone?).

Top Two Tracks:

“Jesus & Mary” & “Architects & Engineers”

Bad Books’ “Bad Books” (2010) – The Weekend Review

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By Chris Moore:

RATING:  4.5 / 5 stars

Some of my favorite bands kicked off their careers with mediocre debuts (think: Bob Dylan) — some overrated at that (like August and Everything After & Horehound) — and others with terrible and/or terribly ho-hum debuts that betrayed little of the excellent work that was to follow (cough, nudge… The Wallflowers).

While some have accomplished it (the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Pearl Jam, and Barenaked Ladies come to mind), it is not often that a new band hits a home run on their first attempt.

The time has come to add another to that brief, auspicious list: namely, Bad Books.

As with the Thorns’ excellent debut, Bad Books has experience and range working in its favor.  The band is comprised of solo artist Kevin Devine and (what is essentially all of) the band Manchester Orchestra.  The resulting album tempers the band’s all-out indie/alternative rock sound with Devine’s folk-influenced style.

With any such collaboration, the danger is that the whole will either sound too similar to the work that the members have produced previously or that it will come across as a forced attempt to cover new ground.

Bad Books manages to avoid both extremes.

Bad Books feels cozy, simple even.  Nothing here that will challenge your previously held opinions about what good music should sound like.  Yet, simultaneously, Bad Books is expansive, spanning from the spacey ambiance of “How This All Ends” to the stripped down acoustic “The Easy Mark & The Old Maid” to the crunchy guitar-driven rocker “Baby Shoes.”

And that’s only the first three tracks.

Bad Books (Bad Books, 2010)

Bad Books (Bad Books, 2010)

The pinnacle of the album is indisputably at the beginning of “Side B,” or track six for all you downloaders and the handful of you CD buyers out there.  “You Wouldn’t Have to Ask” clocks in at under two minutes, but, in its short span, it accomplishes much.  There is no intro: the song kick-starts with lush harmonies, clean, subtle guitar work, and a steady drumbeat.  This builds up to a more driving beat with excellent drum fills, crunchier electric guitars at the front of the mix, and what amounts to a duet between Devine and Manchester Orchestra’s Andy Hull.  (The music video, based on the Everly Brothers’ 1964 Shindig! performance of “Gone, Gone, Gone,” aptly sets the band’s contemporary indie sound against a black and white backdrop of a bygone era.)

This partnership is what seems to propel the album, each contributing half of the songs to this joint effort.  There is the nearly unhinged emotion of “Please Move,” transitioned to smoothly from the broken-down vulnerability of “I Begged You Everything.”  Extremes are placed back-to-back, and yet it works.  The arrangement is brilliant, not only on the song level but also on the level of the album as a whole.

And to be certain, lyrically, Devine and Hall have composed some of the strongest songs of the year, seemingly simple songs like “You’re a Mirror I Cannot Avoid” and “Mesa, AZ” that reject the concept of background music.  These songs, as it often is with the good ones, require multiple listens to comfortably ascribe meaning.  The allusions, when made, are not always readily apparent, the most notable probably being a reference to Shakespeare’s Henry V.  This is original, fluid writing.  I dare say this is poetry.

It is thus shocking — and unforgivable — that the packaging is less than minimalist.  A lackluster cover (my apologies to the band members who created these sketches, images that would have made for fascinating insets within the packaging) is about all there is.  A dismal one-fold covering for this CD with no booklet and no lyrics and no more than these ten brief songs: this is all there is.

Bad Books is one of the premier albums of the year — top three material — and yet the packaging is non-existent.  The lyrics are unacknowledged.  This I will never understand, because — I’m sorry — if a band like Jukebox the Ghost can mass-produce a colorful, three-fold digipack with a thoughtful design and complete lyrics, then seasoned folks like these either deserve more options from the higher-ups or we deserve more effort from them.

If we as listeners don’t “deserve” it, then certainly this beautiful music deserves more.

Elliott Smith’s “Figure 8” (2000) – The Weekend Review

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** This is the second in a five part series of music reviews, counting down from the #5 to the #1 albums of the decade, 2000-2009.  On January 2nd, 2010, the #1 album will be revealed, along with the complete Weekend Review picks for the Top Thirty Albums of the Decade. **

By Chris Moore:

RATING: 5/5 stars

Elliott Smith’s Figure 8 is undeniably one of the most hauntingly beautiful studio albums ever recorded.

This album — his fifth and final before his death — came at the peak of his career, blending his early acoustic fingerpicking styles with the orchestration that characterized his later work.  When it was first released, some reviewers criticized it as lacking the “subtlety” of his previous work.

Excrement.

Figure 8 has all the subtle brushstrokes of his tremendous early work — Roman Candle, Either/Or — with a much better grasp of the big picture.  Even XO, released two years previously as his major label debut, never quite attained the cohesion of Figure 8.  The concept of the album title alone is compelling, possibly taken from a Schoolhouse Rock! song (which he recorded during the sessions).  In a Boston Herald interview, Smith explained the concept by saying, “I liked the idea of a self-contained, endless pursuit of perfection.  But I have a problem with perfection…”  Conjuring the image of a skater, he continued, “So the object is not to stop or arrive anywhere; it’s just to make this thing as beautiful as they can.”

If this doesn’t encapsulate Smith’s worldview, then what does?

For better or worse, Figure 8 — not to mention all of his previous work — is often, perhaps unavoidably viewed through the lens of his death in 2003, generally considered to have been a suicide even though homicide could not be ruled out.  Knowing the circumstances of his death, it is difficult not to bestow additional layers of meaning on tracks like “Everything Means Nothing to Me” and “L.A.”

Whatever your take on his life and death may be, the music on Figure 8 speaks for itself.  Ranging from stripped down acoustic crooning to full-band electric romping, not to mention some honky tonk piano thrown in for good measure, the instrumental and vocal textures are well-layered, somehow achieving complexity without distracting from the songs themselves.

Elliott Smith's "Figure 8" (2000)

Elliott Smith's "Figure 8" (2000)

“Son of Sam” is, of course, the perfect album opener.  As my girlfriend has pointed out, you really have to remind yourself of the topic of this track to avoid being taken in by how catchy and pretty it is.  And how many songs about serial killers are simply this good?

Not many, I would hope.

Smith immediately takes it down a notch for track two, declaring his emotional distance in “Somebody That I Used To Know,” which is all acoustic and double-tracked vocals.  Classic Elliott Smith.

No sooner does that song fade then “Junk Bond Trader” kicks up on piano, spewing out disdain in a manner that only Smith ever could.  The next two tracks — “Everything Reminds Me Of Her” and “Everything Means Nothing to Me” — continue along the same theme, but in a more openly vulnerable voice.  The latter sounds every bit as stripped down as the former until about a minute in, when the characteristically double-tracked vocals are joined by heavily reverbed drums, building up to a spine-tingling crescendo.

The album continues in this manner, spare instrumentation at times and all-out rock n’ roll at others.  While Smith is an excellent piano player, guitar is clearly his instrument.  His use of timing with guitar riffs, electric solos, clean and distorted sounds at various times, and even palm mutes is unsurpassed.

Somehow, Figure 8 achieves an eclectic, indie sound that is both very modern and very nostalgic, particularly of mid to late Beatles work.  It seems no coincidence that Smith purchased authentic Beatles recording equipment throughout his career and even recorded several tracks for this release at the famed Abbey Road Studios in London.

It is difficult to imagine any other singers being more emotive, any other songwriters being so diverse in their styles and interests, or any other performers being so talented, much less all at the same time.  For these reasons, Figure 8 is one of the absolute essential albums of the decade, 2000-2009. It may have barely cracked the upper half of the Billboard Hot 200, but anyone who rejects the radio and the Grammys as the best source for new music knows that this is an unreliable judge of musical character.  Rolling Stone‘s panel of judges came a bit closer by voting this album as the #42 album of the decade, but this is drastically underselling it.  After all, I love Love & Theft, I think Magic is rocking, and White Blood Cells is great, but how these albums can place higher than a true masterpiece like Figure 8, I’ll never know.

And don’t even get me started on U2, Coldplay, Radiohead, and Green Day…

Truly, if you have ever felt rejected, needed to distance yourself from a negative influence, tried to mentally process the pressures of society, or simply been human, Figure 8 is an essential album.

Son Volt’s “Trace” (1995) – The Weekend Review

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By Chris Moore

RATING:  2 / 5  stars

Although Wilco has since gained more critical acclaim, let us not forget that Son Volt was, at least initially, the more successful of the post-Uncle Tupelo groups.  When I fell hard for Wilco a year and a half ago, I went hungrily about, devouring any relevant music I could find:  Jeff Tweedy’s solo work, Golden Smog, the Minus Five, Wilco demos, and back to the source of it all, Uncle Tupelo.  I had an interest in Trace, but I never could find it in physical form on the shelves anywhere.

It took a devoted member of the Jay Farrar message board community to come across my Deep Racks Report on Wilco’s A.M. (1995) and point out my not-so-subtle dismissal of Son Volt for me to realize I had better get serious and find this album.

A year and several spins of their mediocre 2009 record American Central Dust later, I finally stumbled across their debut release in downtown New Haven, CT.

It’s a striking record, a heartfelt, gritty grind through eleven serious songs, Farrar’s characteristic vocal chords creaking at every turn.  The first word that comes to mind is authenticity.  I can see more clearly than ever that Farrar certainly brought that component to Tupelo.  Still, I could have guessed that from A.M.; I love its lyrical bluntness and boneheaded beauty, but Tweedy seemed to be simply passing through town on the way to more experimental music.

Certainly, Uncle Tupelo pioneered the alternative country genre, Tweedy’s interests clearly moving progressively farther to the alternative and, as Trace confirms, Farrar’s predilections being for more pure country – often distortion-soaked, but country all the same.

At best, Trace is a collection of compelling words and instrumentation that gel around what has become a distinctive Son Volt sound.  Still, with the exception of “Drown,” I can’t shake the impression that listening to a Son Volt song is like examining a heartbeat: within the first several seconds, you can predict exactly what is to come for the duration.

Son Volt's "Trace" (1995)

Son Volt's "Trace" (1995)

“Windfall” is a fairly straightforward number, the harmonies and acoustic work kicking off the album on a calm but serious note.  It was most certainly unintentional, but I find the reference here to AM radio representing a “truer sound” quite interesting, considering the title of Wilco’s debut release six months earlier.

The band takes it up a notch on “Live Free,” introducing electric guitar to the mix.  Even here, though, there is nothing groundbreaking.  It is catchy, to be sure, and there is some strumming that verges on being a riff.

Track three retracts that aforementioned notch, but “Tear Stained Eye” is perhaps the most beautiful song on the album.

“Route” has more raw energy than anything that came before, and the band begins to show a bit of disregard for note-for-note perfection — a welcome change.  Still, there is nothing outstanding about “Route” when taken out of context.

If depression is your game, then “Ten Second News” is your song.  As much as I want to skip it, I do acknowledge that, the reference to cancer notwithstanding, it sounds like it could have come directly out of a traditional ballad written who knows how long ago in the who knows where.

Then comes the flagship of this album.  “Drown” has everything that a great rock song should: raw energy, a catchy riff, cool electric soloing, great vocals with hints of harmonies in all the right places.  If there were more songs like this, Trace would have received an altogether different rating from me.

Even after multiple listens, the songs on the remainder of the album begin to blend together for me.  “Loose String” and “Too Early” aren’t bad songs…  They’re just not memorable ones. “Out of the Picture” and “Catching On” have more substance to them, but I can’t avoid noticing the echoes of A.M. in them.  (Why reviewers extolled Trace‘s virtues while so blatantly disregarding the merits of Wilco’s debut, I may never understand.)

Son Volt could not have chosen a more poignant number than their cover of Ron Woods’ “Mystifies Me,” and their version verges on the quintessential.

All in all, I don’t dislike Trace, but I am nonplussed by the attention it has received.  At best, it is a middle of the road release with a handful of fantastic songs.  At worst, it is yet another reason Wilco fans have to be excited about the Uncle Tupelo split.