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Menomena’s “Mines” (2010) – The Weekend Review

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By Chris Moore:

RATING:  4 / 5 stars

The clean, clear pattern of bass and guitar give way to the atmospheric hum of vague distortion and drum fills.  The singer declares and repeats, “I walked right in through the rabbit’s door / And walked right into a rabbit’s hole / I made myself an open book / I made myself a sitting duck.”  It ends disjointed, harmonies both beautiful and haunting, and it ends with a final tom hit.

This is “Queen Black Acid,” Menomena’s opening track on Mines.  It hints at the blend of trippy and serious qualities that are to come, and it aptly sets up this Carrollian dream image of the rabbit’s hole.  For Mines, though, openness isn’t a celebrated childhood quality.

For Mines, openness is a characteristic of those liable to get hurt.

Across eleven tracks, Menomena assemble a patchwork of riffs, both instrumental and lyrical, and achieve a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.  The manner in which the band composes is a fascinating process of playing out for extended periods of time, examining the results, working in pieces, writing lines and instrumental segments to connect parts into the resulting whole songs and, ultimately, sequencing the whole album.

“Killemall” is a striking example of the outcome of this process, uniting such diverse segments as smoothly as it does.  There are frantic drums, manic piano, haunting background vocals broken up by stops filled with harsh bursts of drums and organ.  Thematically, the concept of truth is explored, and the implications for honesty in the living aren’t promising: “Have you met your ghost? / He says things that you won’t” and, later, “The spirits are ventriloquists / They say the thing that must be said.”  The riffs on piano (and one other instrument I “ain’t quite identified yet”) are the glue that holds this composition together.  To write a whole song based merely on one of the handful of sections would probably not be rewarding.

Taken as a whole, “Killemall” is a compelling song.

Mines (Menomena, 2010)

Mines (Menomena, 2010)

Considering the jam mentality at the front-end and the fragmented nature of the segments sorted out at the back-end, the coalescence apparent in the final product is a remarkable feat of songwriting.

From the lulling sadness of the “Dirty Cartoons” refrain of “I’d like to go home, go home” to the distorted guitar that cracks through the silence in the opening movement of “Tithe,” it is clear that a narrative of sorts is being strung together.  The latter settles on the realization “Nothing seems appealing” and subsequently devolves into a cacophony of riffs and voices battling for attention.

This leads the listener to the “shit storm” and the narrator’s “sinking ship” on “BOTE,” a centerpiece track that presents a crisis expressed in seafaring metaphors and explores the resulting shocks of awakening.  “I thought I was tough / I thought I was strong / Thought I could handle anyone who came along,” comes the first confession.  This is followed quickly by the qualification that, “The worth of a boat’s / In how well it floats / And this old boat won’t float for long with all these holes / So I grab both sides with iron will / It’s fit for war but weighs too much and starts to fill.”  Herein lies the weakness that sunk the ship: what was thought to be strength was actually a heaviness that doomed the ship after it had taken several hard hits, struck with “holes”.

Another instance of a clever device comes on “Oh Pretty Boy, You’re a Big Boy” when the band opens with the lines, “All my life I’ve run away / From those who’ve begged me to stay / All your love is not enough / To fill my half empty cup.”  This nomadic sense is extended at the close of the song, as the onus of the fear is flipped to focus on the narrator’s shortcomings: “All my love was in one place / Til I let it escape / And all my love is not enough / To fill your half empty cup.”

It is on the eerie “Five Little Rooms” that the singer repetitively declares, “All this could be yours someday.”  This is referring directly to the five little rooms and their tenants, but it could also be understood to suggest the landscape and content of the album as a whole, this vulnerability that has been inescapably stumbled upon.

The natural response to this is anticipated in the line: “All this someday could be yours / Cross your heart, click your heels and get the hell away.”

Mines presents a richly dangerous and dysfunctional landscape of love, fear, and loss: loss of control, loss of hope.  Knopf, Harris, and Seim juggle instruments and singing duties, blurring the lines between roles in the band and consequently blurring the lines of what a song is supposed to sound like.  There are loops here and riffs and repetition, but there are also authentic instruments and carefully constructed words and sounds.  Mines lays out a world that one can get lost in, one anticipated in the cry/prayer in “Taos”: “Oh my God bring me peace from this wolf covered in fleece / I can’t shake loose from its teeth / Oh my God set me free for I’ve no ability to cut my leash and walk away, away, away…”

For its composition, imagination, and innovation, Mines is one of the premier albums of the year.  At the risk of overstatement, it is a record that calls for a reassessment of what an album can be.

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.