internationalpopoverthrow

[internationalpopoverthrow]

29/366: The Like’s “Release Me”

The key to being derivative and succeeding is to derive from something people already basically like. I don’t think that’s any sort of trade secret – I don’t mean to show you the man behind the curtain, here, this is just logic. The Like is a very straightforward retro girl group, and because I’m me and let terrible songs by The Bangles and The Go-Gos slide right into my music library – because, see, I love girl groups, even when they’re bad – I can get onboard with The Like, with more or less no trepidation.

They are derivative, though. Release Me doesn’t break any ground, innovate any tried-and-true trope of the genre, subvert any expectation. It’s a fun, poppy record that hits all the major beats you’d expect out of a retro girl group: background ooh-ing, songs about boys being predictable jerks, color-blocked sheath dresses, and half the band not actually playing on the album. Frontwoman Z Berg and drummer Tennessee Thomas make significant contribution - honestly the drums are the biggest draw for me on the record besides the overall aesthetic. Tennessee Thomas is Pete Thomas’s, the drummer for The Attractions, daughter, and it sorta warms my heart in a way that it shouldn’t have to that she followed in her father’s footsteps. I remember this video of Carl Palmer in the 80s saying he was glad he had a daughter because he “wouldn’t have to teach her the drums” which, you know, is a gross loaded assumption to make. Good for Tennessee for taking the torch, good for Pete for supporting it, more girl drummers 2k16. 

So what’s actually good on here? A while back I [legally acquired] this girl group compilation from Rhino, and Release Me follows a similar template. The songs are short, they work best with a good hook and a harmony vocal. The production choices here are in keeping with the band’s aesthetic, Hammond-esque organs and all. 

Highlights: The title track, “Release Me”, is the most straightforwardly catchy and it pays off. This is what we’re hoping for when somebody mines an expired sound world for undiscovered shelf life. “Catch Me If You Can” is another little gem, just snarky enough not to have teeth under its impeccably painted lips. The hidden last track, a cover of “Why When Love is Gone” by Ivory Joe Hunter, is well-worth sticking around for. 

Duds: It pains me to say it, but as much as I love a good morning after song, “Walk of Shame” is obnoxiously sing-songy in a way that belies its hesitance to commit to the idea of doing a walk of shame. The lyrics skirt around, conversational:

Hello stranger, what is your name? And can you tell me where we are Oh god oh no. Tell me we didn’t… Oh Thank god ok well now I’ve gotta go I’ve gotta get home

It’s not what I’d call progressive feminism, I’m just saying. “He’s Not a Boy” is, disappointingly, not the lesbian anthem I was hoping for, as much as a list of all of the different kinds of boys that he purportedly isn’t. It’s a bit of a yawn. 

For all that, though, it’s an album that lends itself well to a complete and repeat listening. The same way those Girl Group Sounds CDs can be put on one after the other. It’s a fun album, it’s smartly made with a particular mood in mind that it delivers on with every track. It’s not versatile, but it’s not supposed to be. I’m told I should check out Phases/JJAMZ for more ambitious Z Berg material. We’ll see about that. 

(Also, as an aside: there’s a reason posts have been sparse here lately, but hopefully it’ll make sense soon. Thanks for keeping with me!)

[internationalpopoverthrow]

what a fantastic essay from a friend of mine about the nature of genre (and so much more!)

Why You (Don’t) Like Country Music

So here’s the thing: you don’t like country music. This was originally “you don’t like country or rap,” but then, people started liking rap music. Maybe it’s because of Kendrick Lamar, or Nicki Minaj, or the fact that most popular music is a weird mix of pop, electronica, and hip hop currently, but for whatever reason, most of that bizarre stigma around listening to hip hop is gone. But you still can’t listen to country music. You don’t like country music. So I’m not going to play any country music today. The first song I’m going to play, a song that is not country, is “Jesus, Etc.” by Wilco.

Wilco is an indie rock band, and perhaps also an alternative country band, perhaps also an alternative rock band. They’re also perhaps the only country band you’re allowed to like. And I know, most of the time, I’d probably say, you should like all country music! It’s all good! But not today. Today, if you think the country elements of Wilco is the only good country music ever written, that’s fine.

Because even more than country music, today I want to talk about the general subject of: how to like a genre of music you don’t really like. There’s a lot of ways to do this, sometimes it involves learning about history, sometimes you need a friend to explain the passion of the music. 

For me, the best way is to think of all genres through the lense of Sturgeon’s Law. This law, created by author Theodore Sturgeon, is usually presented as this: “Ninety percent of everything, is crap.” This was originally used to describe science fiction novels, like the ones that Sturgeon himself wrote. Traditionally, most science fiction novels aren’t as acclaimed as novels of other genres. And Sturgeon agrees, most science fiction novels are terrible. But most of EVERYTHING is terrible. Most movies are terrible, most TV shows are terrible, 90% of EVERYTHING, is crap. You don’t watch most movies or TV shows, if you turn on the television you’re more likely to find something you’ll hate than one of your favorite movies. It’s not that science fiction is bad, it’s that most things are bad. Statically speaking, there are few things that are really going to catch your attention.

And with music, it’s the same thing. 90% of jazz is crap. 90% of electronica is crap. But Sturgeon’s law usually comes with an added rule: 90% of everything is crap, but the 10% is worth dying for. It’s why the question “what kind of music do you listen to?” is such a bad question. Most people are just going to respond, “oh I listen to all kinds of music.” You have friends that are big metalheads, or only listen to jazz, but most people are just going to take their cream of the crop of a lot of different genres. That, for me, is how you really get into a genre, you have to have your foot in the door somehow. Maybe you’ll explore electronica, well, you probably know Daft Punk a bit. You don’t listen to show tunes, but you like Hamilton. And of course, Sturgeon’s law is extremely pessimistic. Of course more than 10% of music is good. But if you want to get into a musical genre that you really just don’t like, sometimes 10% is all you can compromise to. You don’t like country music, a lot of it just about hillbillies and shotguns and trucks and grandmas, but 10% of it is good. And sometimes it’s just about finding that 10%. This next song Here’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, by Bob Dylan.

I could go into all the ways that Don’t Think Twice is a great country song, it has great storytelling, clever lyrics, a sense of regret and self-reflection, but the most important thing is that, you probably like this song. Sure, maybe it’s a folk song, or a singer-songwriter song, but let’s just congratulate ourselves here. We like one country song! And yes, You’ve probably heard this song a lot. But if you’re getting a genre you don’t like, starting with The Greats is often a good place to start.  And this can come with hearing some things you’ve probably heard a million times before. It’s like, if you’re taking a class on comedy films, you’ll probably have to watch Annie Hall. You’ve probably seen Annie Hall. You’ve probably read articles about Annie Hall. But that doesn’t stop Annie Hall from being a good movie. We know what Bob Dylan sounds like. But now let’s hear a song like “Don’t Think Twice” as see it as a country song. How is it different from Don’t Think Twice the singer songwriter song?

There’s one problem with looking at the greats, however. Sometimes, the biggest, most respected, most highly praised artists, maybe are a little old now. In high school, I started getting into hip hop, and one of the first bands I checked out was Public Enemy. I really mostly bought It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, their magnum opus, because it was the highest ranked hip hop album on Rolling Stone’s 500 best albums of all time, at number 48. The issue is, Nation of Millions was released in 1988. Hip Hop was really just getting started. And sure, it’s a great album, and extremely influential, but it sounded dated. Chuck D was rapping about the Black Panthers and the crack epidemic. Current rappers, like Kendrick Lamar, have songs about Ferguson and Black Lives Matter. Those issues are so much more relevant to my daily life, they exist in a world that I exist in. Most of the time, I’ll advise against listening to the radio to get into a genre, but “mainstream music” is more diverse than what we give it credit for. You have to ease yourself into genres. Find elements of that genre in the music you hear, and that will help you understand and appreciate the genres these songs take influence from. This next band, while not strictly country, takes elements from roots rock, folk, bluegrass, and other genres.

I hope I can say that we now like a few country songs. And that’s a surprisingly good thing to just say out loud. Seriously, if you don’t like country music, but have at least some appreciation for the last few songs, try just saying the sentence, “oh, I like a few country songs.” “well, there’s a few country songs I like.” Saying something like “ I don’t listen to metal” or “I can’t stand k-pop” will limit you a lot more than you probably realize.

Of course, we weren’t actually listening to country music. We were just skirting around the edges, really. If you turn on country radio, you probably will hear songs that sound much different than this. So let’s dive into the real world of county! Except, let’s stick to the shallow end for a bit. The problem with getting into any new world, but especially a new musical world, is that there’s so much in it. There’s so much slang to learn, so many new heroes to revere, so many new places you can go, and it’s magical, but it can be overwhelming. And the truth is, you’re never going to explore every world to its fullest. The proof of that, is that there are people who will only listen to country music, who will only listen to classical music, who will only listen to indie rock, and they will keep delving deeper and deeper into these worlds and never get bored. People will spend decades of their life just in one genre, and that’s beautiful. That shows how much music can give us. But if we’re going to just dip our toes in, we’ll have to start with the easy stuff. The stuff we know we can like. And in music, that means pop.

The nice thing about pop is that there’s a pop version of every genre. If you want to get into punk, you can go with Blink 182. If you want to get into hip hop, you can go with the Black Eyed Peas. And for country, I shouldn’t even have to name her. One of the biggest stars in all music, Taylor Swift. Taylor swift’s career is basically pure pop now, but the farther back you go, the more country her sound was. Almost all of the hits from Fearless or Speak Now would fit perfectly into an introduction to country music, but I’m going to play a song from her first, and most country album. 

We’ve made it! We are officially in the world of country. But before I talk about how to further explore this kind of music, I want to briefly touch on the idea of GENRE. Genre really gets a bad rap. We heard about people arguing over if something is truly one genre or another, and I’ll admit, those discussions can get pretty silly. A song is a song, and how we categorize it will not change what it sounds like. But genre can help with understanding of a musical world. Let’s take a band like Deafheaven. I played a Deafheaven track a few weeks ago during the Metal show, mostly as an example of a metal song that I liked, but that band was also important for gaining a lot of media attention very quickly, and popularizing a sound that many people hadn’t heard before. This sound is often called blackgaze, a combination of black metal and shoegaze music. And really, you could just call them metal. But if you define them as something like blackgaze, you can say “these elements of this song you like come from these different worlds.” Maybe you like a Deafheaven song for the heavy, pounding, guitars. Then you might like black metal. Maybe you prefer the swirling, atmospheric, post rock sounding textures, then you might want to listen to some shoegaze. Genres can seem like meaningless labels, but can also serve as a mission statement or list of influences, telling us where they came from and what they seek to achieve.

But back to country. Let’s allow ourselves to like Taylor Swift. We’re now in the world of country music. And of course, Taylor Swift is a household name. But now we can start looking at artists that the country world is excited about. Sometimes this can be a dangerous road to go down. Country fans recommending country music are going to have a lot of assumptions. They’ll assume you know the canon of country music, and know what you like and don’t like. But, sometimes it just gets us some good music. 

Going into a new genre like this can open up a lot of new worlds, but it can also let us revisit songs we’ve heard before. This next song was a huge hit when it came out, but I wasn’t able to really appreciate it until I learned to appreciate country as a whole. Sometimes, we can find it easier to get into the interesting stuff, the more experimental tracks, the tracks influenced by other genres. But to really appreciate a genre, I always think it’s good to hear the mainstream tracks as well. Embrace some more of the stereotypes and cliches of country music, because even if they sound overly nostalgic or introspective, they can be some pretty nice songs. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NJqUN9TClM

So we found this world of country music, though of course we’re not going to stay here forever. But when we return to our worlds of rock or indie, it can be fun to see what elements we found in country in other genres. Country seems to be this isolated world, but so-called Alternative Country elements can be found in many different genres.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js2wh9saLZk

Once you get into a genre, you can really appreciate the things that culture appreciates. One of the most fun things about music is hype. There are the greats, there are classic songs and albums, but being around when a new star comes around, that can be the best feeling. The next song I’ll play is from Kacey Musgraves who is kind of an up and coming star in the country world. In fact, I like to think there are some parallels between Kacey Musgraves and Kendrick Lamar. They’re both young artists, started their careers in the 2010s, come from often marginalized genres, are deeply respected in their own worlds but have crossover appeal, and were born and raised in the heart of their respective genres. Musgraves may not have a To Pimp A Butterfly yet, but her songwriting suggests they someday, she might.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZfj2Ir3GgQ

I know I didn’t really talk about country music today, so if you want reasons to listen to country music, here’s what I have: country is the genre most focused on songwriting. No other genre is more based on a making a cohesive song experience, a story, a cliche, a thought, expanded into 3 minutes of lyrics and guitar. It’s witty, it��s nostalgia, it’s bittersweet. But I chose to talk today about listening to genres you might not like, and I hope those ideas could convince someone to reach out to a kind of music you might not really like. And often that’s about admitting that there will be up to 90% of that genre you don’t like. Or listening to bands that are hardly that genre at all. But once you find that one song you like, that one album you can play over and over, that one favorite artist, you can say: I am a fan. 90% of country music is crap, but I like Kacey Musgraves. 90% of rap is terrible, but I like Mos Def. So if you liked any of these songs, you can say: I am a fan of country music. And you should say it, it’s fun.

[internationalpopoverthrow]

28/366: The Academy Is...’s “Almost There”

I’m going to level with you. I wrote off The Academy Is... as a teen because I thought the album art for this record was lame, and only pretended to know anything about them because Bill Beckett was really cute in the “Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)” video. So I’m repenting for a decade of falsified knowledge and I feel suitably punished, but vindicated, too, because this record isn’t very good. 

Or, it’s not that it’s not good. I would probably have actually liked it when it came out (I was 12, and I listened to plenty of garbage, like, for example, I was really into Evanescence). But in terms of the Warped Tour set that was blooming around then, there’s not much to elevate TAI above the pack. For the most part these songs are generic pseudo-sensitive pop punk, alternating between taking shots at themselves and being angry about something, in a vague, underdeveloped sort of way. 

I’m kind of disappointed - not in them, so much as in myself. I’m usually really good at putting my tween ears on and finding the best in juvenile music, and am maybe unduly proud of myself for being able to set biases and a degree in music theory aside to enjoy the sort of catharsis this music is supposed to give you. Maybe it’s because I skipped over these guys back in the day. Maybe they are just genuinely bad. I hope not, though - for the record I still think Bill Beckett has very pretty hair. 

Highlights: There are a surprising handful of good hooks! Even the songs that had me really rolling my eyes still usually managed to grab me for a chorus. “Season” is exciting because in pop punk it’s so hard to find a song with a good guitar riff. The chorus is real catchy too if you can get through the verses, which are a little dull, despite the riff. (The chorus, incidentally, contains the line “I’ll sing you something you won’t forget,” which if I’m being honest seems unlikely.) “Skeptics and True Believers” does the best job of selling the record’s “fuck the haters” attitude, and its energy is infectious. “Checkmarks” is sort of a banger - there’s a lot of good guitar on this record if you can get past the rest of it. 

Duds: “Attention” isn’t good. There was a period where everybody was opening their albums with songs to specifically address the audience, break the fourth wall or whatever, and it works with varying degrees of success, but not here. The chorus is first-draft sloppy, none of it suits Beckett’s voice terribly well, it’s under three minutes and it still feels too long. “The Phrase That Pays” makes me snort, I can’t get past the lyrics. I’m sorry, I tried. 

I might give one of their later albums a chance but in the meantime we can all agree about the real highlight, right: 

[internationalpopoverthrow]

27/366: Lorde’s “Pure Heroine”

I don’t even have a good excuse for not having done this one yet. I think it came out while I was still in college - or, upon fact-checking it looks like I had recently graduated when Pure Heroine dropped, so I was trying to get my shit together in a pretty serious way and also working the aforementioned manual labor job 70+ hours per week. And it had a pretty extended moment in the sun but by the time I came up for air there were more immediately important new things to listen to and it got put aside until now. But Pure Heroine was always high on my to-do list, because it checks a lot of boxes: smart, independent young woman making art her way; vaguely gothy vibe; a pun. 

It’s hard not to know “Royals,” the big single. I don’t encounter radios much in my current walk of life but I’ve heard it in cabs, in stores, being butchered by my ex’s ex, drunk, at a Halloween karaoke party (no joke). I hadn’t heard any of the other singles, and I find them variously striking and not. Pure Heroine is an almost formulaically strong debut record, not to knock it. Marketing an act from New Zealand, especially a young woman who will run into barriers gaining crossover appeal, is lamentably still a risk-taking move, and keeping the album straightforward and crisply produced was smart. 

I wasn’t disappointed, not really. I enjoyed the record a lot: it’s ten good songs in a row, and I don’t want to throw in all these expectations for overarching themes and being album-oriented versus singles-oriented when it’s only her first record. I’m going to have obnoxiously high standards for her sophomore effort when it comes out, I’m going to expect to see artistic growth and ambition. This album made me want to get invested in Lorde now so that when she changes the face of music I can feel vindicated. If she doesn’t, boy howdy will it be a letdown. 

Highlights: “Buzzcut Season” is unexpectedly and genuinely one of the most emotionally affecting songs I’ve heard in a long time! I don’t even know how to go into it in depth because listening through it again made me feel weird and raw and vulnerable, but like, 10/10 would use as the soundtrack to an existential crisis. “Tennis Court” is a really good album opener and definitely worth a repeat listen. In terms of giving the album thematic structure, “Tennis Court” parallels “Royals” in a way that manages to stay just on the right side of overbearing (but barely). 

Duds: “Glory and Gore” isn’t great. It gives you the same surreal alternate universe of high aspirations feeling that “Royals” spins, but in a cheaper, hastier way, like a half-baked Gossip Girl story arc or a Chuck Palahniuk novel. 

tl;dr Reserving judgment on Lorde until her next album, but I really want her to be my favorite person. There’s a lot of potential here and I’ve got the faith she knows what she wants to do with it. 

[internationalpopoverthrow]

26/366: Gym Class Heroes’ “As Cruel as School Children”

Apple Music has me down to a science. I mean, a sort of one-dimensional science, but if they’re gonna keep suggesting Fueled by Ramen stuff I skipped over in its heyday I’ll probably keep listening to it. It doesn’t surprise me that Gym Class Heroes passed me by in 2006 despite being on the radars of my close guy friends; it doesn’t surprise me that As Cruel as School Children got a pass on being labeled pop despite coming out on Decaydance. This music alienates a lot of the selves I’ve been. It’s cocky and masculine in a way that doesn’t try to impress or win favors. Travie McCoy is a charismatic narrator in a way that makes me feel like he’s taking me under his wing, not like he’s trying to get in my pants. He’s a perpetual upperclassmen to an audience in its sophomore slump. 

So this is an alternative hip hop album loosely sequenced to mirror a school day. (Somebody’s school day, not mine though.) The liner notes refer to the various tracks as periods of the school day, occasionally punctuated by a “Sloppy Love Jingle” featuring more off-the-cuff sounding verses from McCoy and minimal production magic. It’s a mercy the school days aesthetic is mostly theoretical - songs explicitly about the condition of teenagerhood rarely age well, but As Cruel as School Children actually holds up. For all that I explicitly lack rhythm or flow, I can tell that Travie’s got it. The production also shimmers, it really goes a long way to give the record the crossover potential that it’s got, so props to Stump for that one. 

Highlights: “7 Weeks” is an easy track to love because it’s poppy and it has William Beckett singing on the chorus. I think Beckett is used to better effect as a guest vocalist than either of Patrick Stump’s vocal contributions, actually. They aren’t bad by a long shot but “7 Weeks” does a better job of integrating that vocal hook. “The Queen & I” and “Shoot Down the Stars” are both standout tracks and smart choices as singles and to open the album. 

Duds: Not super keen on “New Friend Request,” largely because it’s the moment that feels the most dated. I’m allergic to this sort of topical pop culture reference in music, I never stomach it well. “Scandalous Scholastics” is actually sort of a jam, and it’d rank high on my list if student/teacher relationships as a concept didn’t make my skin crawl. The chorus is such a hook. A skeevy, gross hook. 

Does anybody know what Travie McCoy’s solo album is like? If his band at a median age of 25 can still convince me to feign the wide-eyed naivete of a freshman boy, I’m curious to know what the aged up Travie expects of his audience. Just a thought. 

[internationalpopoverthrow]

25/366: Vampire Weekend’s “Contra”

This project isn’t the first time I’ve tried to drag myself, kicking and screaming, into pop relevance. A couple years back I got a long list of albums from a few friends to get me started, and Vampire Weekend’s self-titled was one of them. It got a lot of play. It’s a horrendously fun way to kill a half hour at a manual labor job like I was working at the time. Plus the anti-elitist grammar slob in me latched onto the line “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?” with gusto.

That was a pretty long time ago, though, and even though that album has had permanent residence on my phone since then and still sees pretty frequent play, I never took the next step. Until I forced myself to write an album review every day and got behind after catching the cold from hell, and anyway, here we are.

Some first impressions: Contra is more meditative than its predecessor, and while we see a lot of what I think of as the Classic VW Idioms back in action - Afrobeat percussion, really bright sort of hi-life guitars, lyrics about New England - there’s also room to breathe. Most songs on the first record barely if at all clear the three-minute mark. Contra plays with increasing amounts of space given over to atmosphere and mood over the course of the record: “Horchata” and “Holiday,” both singles (although when 60% of the tracks on the album have been released as singles that means less), are especially reminiscent of previous VW stuff. They’re a good base to build upon, and that does seem to be the function they serve: it really feels like you’ve taken a journey by the time you get to the end of the record. The last three tracks allow the most room for growth and for quiet moments - it’s a testament to how well-sequenced this album is that they can start with “Horchata,” end with “I Think Ur a Contra,” and still feel like they’re making one continuous statement.

Highlights: “Taxi Cab” was the first track to immediately grab me, and it’s the first track on the album to depart from the singles-oriented VW sound. I’m gonna say upfront that the songs I like best are the ones with the most contribution from Rostam Batmanglij, who also produced the album (and the previous one, and he just left VW in the past couple of weeks and I’m sort of retroactively freaking out about it now that I’ve explored their discography a little further). The soundiness he brings in with keyboards lends a good weight to the songs on which he has the most input. I was hesitant to commit to liking “I Think Ur a Contra” largely because I have an aversion to chatspeak on lasting documents, despite the fact that I, like, use chatspeak constantly. It just looks weird and immediately dated on a book or an album. Still, it’s probably my favorite track - it has this weird, uncomfortable intimacy that I find really compelling, and like I mentioned, it wraps the whole album up really nicely. It feels like a good landing.

Duds: I’m not super into “California English” although I’m ready to admit it probably has a lot to do with my being allergic to processed vocals. I find the delay on Ezra Koenig’s vocals really distracting, especially when he’s singing so quickly, it blurs together in a way that doesn’t appeal at all to me. I also get a little bored with “Giving Up the Gun” even though it contains a lot of stuff I laud “I Think Ur a Contra” and “The Diplomat’s Son” for. I want a little bit more purpose out of it, I suppose.

So basically, I have to listen to Modern Vampires to decide once and for all how scared I am of the prospect of a VW without Rostam. In spite of my inability to thoroughly explore their catalog up to now, their fourth album has been on my most anticipated albums of 2016 list since it was announced. Look forward to that review when it happens!

[internationalpopoverthrow]

24/366: I Am the Avalanche’s “Wolverines”

I want to knock a couple of these out while I’m conscious, which hasn’t been often lately. I have the sickness from hell. I also have a ticket to see I Am the Avalanche tomorrow, and any of you are welcome to it, I guess, because the Corporate Medical Overlord I work for shafted me for hours last minute and I’m righteously peeved about it, to tell you the truth. Especially since, in prep for this show, I listened to their most recent album and kind of adored it.

For those of you not in the know, I Am the Avalanche is the current melodic hardcore punk project from Vinnie Caruana, who (if you’re at all like me) you’ll know from The Movielife. For all I spit on here about how I’m still learning to listen to melodic hardcore - and for all that spit is viscous with truth - I don’t have any trouble enjoying Wolverines. At its core, these songs have good bones. There’s a sort of working-man Bruce Springsteen-y sensibility to a lot of them, and I say that as a huge compliment regardless of my feelings on “The Boss.” The biggest thing about the album as a whole was how versatile these lyrics and chords could be. Not in a, wouldn’t it be cool if a white dude with an acoustic guitar covered “Hey Ya” way, but in a way where I could see almost any track on Wolverines being done in almost any style, and I’d still predict success. That’s no small feat, and is a huge compliment coming from me, since I was lukewarm at best on The Movielife. There are no loyalties here.

Highlights: The single, “Shape I’m In,” is a fantastic piece of songwriting even if it owes a bit of a debt to the Band song of the same name for doing some of the legwork, lyrically. It has great energy. What I’m calling the Tom Petty tracks, “Two Runaways” and “Young Kerouacs,” have such a great sort of Jersey americana vibe to them while staying just on the right side of headbanging punk. “Where Were You?” is an unlikely candidate, what seems to be a post-end of the world track that isn’t terribly concerned with the end of the world as much as it is with being infectiously snotty. I’m so into it. “Anna Lee” deserves an honorable mention for being hooky as hell and the track that I immediately went back to after my first full listen through the album.

Duds: Present though they be, the duds are brief. The title track, weirdly, doesn’t register very high with me. I actively sort of dislike “177” if only because I don’t get it, and feel like it sounds copy/pasted from the less appealing parts of other tracks. I want to hate “My Lion Heart” because it’s kind of as cheesy as the title suggests but, if I’m going to level with you - and I’m all about honesty - it’s sort of a jam if you let out your inner melodramatic punk teenager. (We all have one of those, right? Just me? Oh well.)

I’ve heard these guys put on a killer live show. Here’s hoping I am liberated from the shackles of corporate America by the next time they come through. Lucky for me, they’re hometown boys.

[internationalpopoverthrow]

23/366: Tally Hall’s “Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum”

Tally Hall seemingly exists - or existed, sorry guys - to be the missing link between the comedy-quirk indie of They Might Be Giants and Fountains of Wayne to the twee sincerity of Belle and Sebastian, Death Cab for Cutie, and the rest of the regulars on The O.C.’s soundtrack. They’ve been on my radar for nearly a decade always as something I’ll “get to eventually” - when One Week One Band featured them earlier this year I wrote “tally” on a post-it and stuck it in the back of my locker at work to remind myself to get to it. They do have a sort of fascinating history, all full of groundbreaking but ultimately unsuccessful multimedia projects and being burned by deals with big record labels, and I really recommend checking out their OWOB tag if that sort of thing holds your interest (like it does mine). It boils down to them only putting out two albums during nearly a decade of being a band, and Marvin’s is their first. 

It’s another one of those records that’s hard to pigeonhole. Tally Hall (during the recording of this record) shared management with OK Go and They Might Be Giants, which helps codify their aesthetic somewhat, but they’re a diverse group of songwriters and it shows on the record. A host of genres are represented from folk to pop to an arena-rock power ballad and a self-effacing instance of several white dudes rapping. Marvin’s is a really well-rounded album that lives up to its name, always making its points from odd angles, backlit and lovely for maximum wonderment. 

Highlights: The lead single, “Good Day,” was the best song written in 2004, if the BMI John Lennon Scholarship is to be taken seriously. It’s a multifaceted little piece of songcraft from the brain of keyboardist Andrew Horowitz and it’s a clever draw for the record, but it’s the one I find myself skipping the most, if only because I want to get to: “Greener,” the second track, which is one of those pure, perfect pop songs you can’t believe you didn’t know before the moment you first heard it. I listened to this album four or five times in prep to write about it, but I listened to “Greener” maybe 35 times, I just couldn’t help myself. “Be Born” is hard to describe, it plays with the neofolk aesthetics that were just coming into prevalence in the early 2000s and builds a beautiful, sentimental track around it. Both “Greener” and “Be Born” are contributions from guitarist Rob Cantor, now having superseded his Tally Hall fame by penning the classic viral track, “Actual Cannibal Shia LaBoeuf.”

The epicenter of the album is “Spring and a Storm,” brought in by guitarist Joe Hawley, which - intentional or not - manages to beautifully meld the clever cerebral songwriting coming from the Horowitz corner with Cantor’s more wistful romanticism. Hawley brings to the table a certain amount of whimsy, as well, which lends the album as a whole a much-needed lightness. “Spring and a Storm” blends rain sounds into the instrumentals, breaks down in the middle for a conversation between a group of children and the comically-voiced moon before building itself back up into the punchiest, poppiest heights. 

Duds: Most of what I didn’t like on the album had to do with its inability to age gracefully. “Two Wuv” is a love song about Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson, which may have been quirky and topical in 2005 but is bizarre to conceptualize in 2016. “Banana Man” is a straight-up comedy track which, while its percussion is worth a listen, smacks forcibly of Newgrounds/Homestar Runner type humor. It’s naively and vaguely racist, with (the very white) Hawley singing in an exaggerated Jamaican accent. Yikes. “Haiku” is fine but throwaway, and I for one am sort of tired of western voices painting the haiku as “the easiest kind of poetry” because of its structure. I couldn’t give less of a fuck about poetry (ask anyone) but I’m pretty sure there’s more to it than a syllable count, and a bunch of white people have been misusing the form for their own quirky bullshit for god knows how long. That sort of thing grinds my gears. 

My issue with “Welcome to Tally Hall” actually isn’t anything to do with the song itself - it’s charmingly silly, it’s a song about the band that wrote it, which is a thing for which I have a pointed weakness - but rather with the sequencing of the album. Having two introductory songs - “Good Day” and “Welcome to Tally Hall” - is odd, separating them with “Greener,” the most obviously hooky song on the record, is odder. It doesn’t scan well to me but what can ya do, I suppose? 

Qualms aside, I’m eager to get to their second album. There was so much more about Marvin’s that I enjoyed, and so much promise and energy in their still-fledgling songwriting. Absolutely worth a listen, especially if pop with purpose is up your alley. At least give this one a shot: 

[internationalpopoverthrow]

22/366: Better Off’s “Milk”

If an alien diplomat visited our planet and demanded to know what pop punk was, I would be called in as the world’s foremost pop punk scholar (on the condition that Andy Greenwald wasn’t available). And if this extraterrestrial only had an hour to learn the major points, I might just have them listen to Better Off��s debut record, released last year on Equal Vision Records. Milk might not be the best or most innovative or groundbreaking pop punk record ever released but it’s a both remarkably good road map to the major beats pop punk has hit so far and an excellent synthesis of the state of the genre today, such as it is.  

Plus, it’s fun. 

Milk cuts a wide swath through established pop punk song forms, providing tearful end-of-summer sepia-toned nostalgia via tracks like “Dresser Drawer” and the wistful ballad “Lesson in Loving,” or melodramatic angst on “Bella Disorder” and aptly titled “Unhappy.” It wouldn’t be pop punk without a few songs you can jump up and down in your Chuck Taylors to. Better Off offers “Suicide Island” to plug that slot, as well as a handful of others. It’s a well-rounded album that stays entirely in-genre. There’s even a brief homage to hardcore punk at the album’s middle point. 

Highlights: The most interesting song on the album is the closer, “Myself as a Pill.” It has a an almost-jangly guitar line that morphs and expands into a deeply satisfying solo, the only one of its kind on the record. The chorus is bleeding teenage heart anthemic, the kind you’ll come away humming. The opener, “Empty Handed,” grabs you immediately as well. The history and influences are so present on the record that if you remember early 2000s alternative radio at all you will probably feel like you know all these songs already. There’s not a huge demand for listener participation - you’ve grown up with the blueprints for the album, more likely than not.

Duds: Unfortunately, that same golden quality is also the record’s biggest detriment. There’s no one moment I can point to as a colossal failure but I’m just as hard-pressed to find an original thought in any of these songs. Part of the reason it functions so well as a map is because Better Off leaves no personal stamp on any of these thirteen extremely digestible tracks. Unfortunately its value as an artifact might stop there. It’s so much the platonic ideal of a pop punk record that it surrenders any sense of identity. Hell, it kinda sounds like Saves the Day. 

Here’s my recommendation: if you are a committed pop punk listener, you will get down to this record and you should put it on your phone and take a walk with it. It won’t let you down. If not, don’t bother. It’s their first album, and it shows such a clear and complete understanding of what it wants to be that I can’t give up on Better Off just yet. They have the toolkit, they obviously know the history. Their sophomore effort will likely be their make-or-break moment: they will find a voice and wow us with it or they’ll precipitate another batch of Frankensteined Neck Deep knock-offs to pad out our workout playlists. AltPress listed them as an important band to watch in 2016 and they might be right, if not for the reasons they think. They’re not proven yet, but Better Off are getting the opportunity to try. Fingers crossed for ‘em. 

[internationalpopoverthrow]

Girl Politics in The Brobecks' "Violent Things"

Here’s a fun game I like to play: love an artist; run out of new material from their catalog; find every recording tangentially related to the artist and learn it to satisfy your weird, completist brain. It’s the reason I’ve listened to so many Rick Wakeman solo albums (because it is possible to run out of Yes if you’re listening to Yes every day), and it’s the reason I’ve heard all the demos from Robert Sledge’s short-lived group, International Orange. The list goes on, but at its core this is just me killing time until the next big project presents itself.

Today’s selection comes out of this game: having finished the Panic! at the Disco discography earlier this year and already worn out the new album but not totally content to give up on them – and because I’m still waiting for Ryan Ross to do something with those five songs on his Soundcloud – we turn to touring bassist Dallon Weekes and his pre-Panic! group, The Brobecks, for new material. Here are the things I know about Dallon: he’s tall; he’s a practicing Mormon. That’s literally it. His only credited writing contributions to Panic! come from my least favorite record of theirs, 2014’s Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die! but I’m going into this with an open mind. I’ve always really enjoyed his bass work on the post-Ross records, and if there’s one priority I’ll always elevate, it’s good bass.

The record is called Violent Things and it’s something of a misnomer. As an artifact it ranges from twee to retro, many tracks better mirroring the Ryan Ross project The Young Veins than any other Panic!, before or since. Obvious influences on first listen are mid-2000s alternative radio: The Killers, The Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, or Hot Hot Heat could have written most of these songs. Almost every track sparkles, and that’s as much a demerit as it is a compliment: there’s not much room for nuance or dynamic. Lyrically we’re mostly looking at standard issue young white guy misogyny, sorry to say. I’m always rooting for these guys, I always want to come away from a record without my first impression being “Wow, why do you hate women so much?” And especially, because Dallon is a Mormon and my extended family are practicing Mormons, I wanted to be able to point to something coming out of LDS that didn’t make me feel as lousy as listening to my uncles bash women every Christmas does. It sucks, I’m disappointed, I’m mad about it because by and large this music is so fun. I’ve been exhausted by songs like “Small Cuts,” - which demonizes a woman for self-injuring, claiming “she just wants attention, we all want attention, she just wants it more than she’d have you believe” – since Ryan Ross penned “I for one can’t see any blood from the hearts and the wrists you allegedly slit” for A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out in 2005.

Ugh! I’m so mad about it! There’s so much potential on this record! Let’s take a look at the handful of songs I can enjoy without feeling gross.

Highlights:  Musically, most of these songs are highlights! “I Will, Tonight” is a post-apocalyptic party song that pays pointed homage to the handful of cabaret-inspired Queen tracks, most obviously “Seaside Rendezvous,” complete with a Brian May-esque guitar solo. It’s followed, speaking of Queen, by a pair of back-to-back songs about bicycles, neither of which is particularly Queen-y but which are both loads of fun. “Visitation of the Ghost” is the most ambitious track on the record and it demands active listening – if you’re turned off by religious imagery you can skip it, but there’s nothing preachy about it and the instrumentals are really cool. You can see how Dallon could influence a Panic! track like “Hurricane” off Vices and Virtues in this one. “Better Than Me” is a lot of fun, too – every song where Dallon takes a shot at himself works better than the ones that just drag women through the dirt, although there’s certainly an element of self-pitying nice guy misogyny at play here, and one “man in a dress” joke that offends me not just on the grounds that it’s gross but also because it scans like a filler line to complete a rhyme, like something you stick in and sing until you can replace it with something better.

Duds: Everything about “All of the Drugs” is deeply embarrassing and ill-advised, from the bizarre Christmas jingle instrumentals to the weirdly positioned and pointless moments of studio feedback, not to mention the serious employment of the word “slut,” only the tip of the ugly lyrical content iceberg. I’m embarrassed for Dallon for having written it, and I’m embarrassed for myself for having listened to it more than once in order to give this album a proper critique. It’s a bad song. “Second Boys Will Be First Choice” is not as terrible but it’s really boring, despite having been chosen as the radio single. It’s an entirely unnecessary song, given that everything it’s trying to say was already adequately covered in 1993 on the Spin Doctors’ track “Two Princes,” which was catchier, to boot.

I ended up talking a lot about Dallon Weekes here but the Brobecks are a band, his friends, not just studio guys backing him up. There’s not a lot of information about them, or the writing of this record, available to me though. Apparently Weekes was offered a Sony contract on the condition that he drop the rest of the band, which he declined. That kind of loyalty is something to admire. But you could just listen to this album to know he’s got a “bros before hoes” attitude, and there’s a definite ugly side to that coin. Guess it’s time to see what Jon Walker is up to.

[internationalpopoverthrow]

20/366: At the Drive-In’s “In/Casino/Out”

So At the Drive-In are reuniting and putting out new music; they announced it a couple days ago and people (myself included, although obviously lowkey) are psyched. I’m coming at this from a weird angle - my proggy heart beats in 13/8 time and loves The Mars Volta, but the only AtDI I’ve ever explored before is their last and sleekest record, Relationship of Command. Still, if I’m going to see them this year - and, god willing, I’m gonna - I should see what all the fuss is about, right? 

This is the record people point to as their transitional album, between the lo-fi grit of Acrobatic Tenement and the polished musicianship and production you find on Relationship of Command. Obviously I don’t know the first album, but a listen through gives a view of the trend. Tracks like “Alpha Centauri” and “Pickpocket” are decidedly rougher around the edges than anything off Command, but “Napoleon Solo” and would fit right in on a playlist with “One-Armed Scissor.” Ultimately most tracks do strike a balance between the extremes. If I’m going to be really honest with you, I could mistake a lot of these songs for the golden era of AFI. (I’m talking Black Sails in the Sunset, I don’t know if Cedric Bixler-Zavala has the Davey Havok pop sensibilities to produce anything as mainstream as Sing the Sorrow.)

I’m still learning to listen to (post-)hardcore but it’s easier with proggier, weirder stuff than it is with a band like Lifetime. It’s crazy - I dug all this sorta stuff in high school before I had trained ears or the ability to vocalize what I liked about it, which makes going back and trying to analyze it sort of a tough nut to crack. There’s enough variety here on In/Casino/Out that I can definitively make some judgment calls, though, and they are as follows: 

Highlights: “Napoleon Solo” is definitely the most AFI song on there and I mean that in a good way. “Chanbara” also has really good pop sensibilities while maintaining something off-putting and intriguing. I can imagine it fitting on a makeout mix CD i had in tenth grade like, disturbingly well. “For Now..We Toast” is sort of up to you - it’s the most straightforward track on the album and there’s a dissonance with the way Cedric sings it: Cedric’s voice has always been anything but straightforward. I think it works really well but I can 100% see why somebody would hate it. 

Duds: I’m not super into “Hourglass” and a lot of it has to do with Jim Ward’s vocals. The song itself has tons of potential but his voice wavers, there’s no support or confidence behind it, and that really takes me out of the track. I want to tell him to breathe with his diaphragm, or something. The weird, vaguely discordant piano, on the other hand, is one of my favorite musical moments on the album. Also not super keen on “A Devil Among the Tailors” - it’s sort of one-note and that note isn’t one I find particularly interesting. Again, I’m here for the weird, not so much for purely shouty stuff. 

Following the sound of this album through to Relationship of Command and then looking at the projects Omar Rodríguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala have collaborated on post-AtDI (i.e., The Mars Volta and Antemasque) it’s hard to visualize what an At the Drive-In record in 2016 will sound like. So much ground has been covered, and with so little time spent truly apart, I can’t imagine it’s easy for them to find that old At the Drive-In sound, as if there’s one unifying sound for the group at all. I’m looking forward to digging into more of the back catalogue in preparation for the new album, and looking forward to seeing what At the Drive-In means 15+ years out. 

[internationalpopoverthrow]

19/366: Taylor Swift’s “1989″

Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat: people really like to hate Taylor Swift, and I have never been one of those people. I’m frustrated by her watered-down white feminism, a lot of the casual misogyny in her early songwriting, her continued association with my nemesis Lena Dunham. I’m not interested in tearing her down over writing sad or mean songs about her ex-boyfriends, or for being a purported serial monogamist, or for having a cutesy web presence where she shares cookie recipes with her fans. Also, at the end of the day, she’s a relatively coddled rich white girl who’s not that much older than me, and the girl-hating in her music has gone way down over the course of her career, and maybe her brand of feminism isn’t great or particularly progressive but it’s extant, so there’s room for hope here. People seem to have all basically forgiven Justin Beiber, a day will have to come when we stop getting a kick out of shitting on Tay. 

Okay! Disclaimer over! I don’t know what took me so long to get to this album - I was pretty up on Taylor’s career up through Red. Some of the singles sort of put me off, I guess. “Blank Space” is great, is one of the songs I look forward to hearing on the PA at the gym, but was the exception there. Her catalog does have a significant trend from pop-country to straight-ahead pop, and 1989 just about expunges all trace of a twang from her sound. The closest there is to a country track is “This Love,” and believe me, I’m reaching by pointing to it. Taylor is a full-grown pop artist. We can stop calling her country. 

Highlights: “Out of the Woods” is really nice. I heard it was about Harry Styles, but I heard that about most of the songs on 1989 so take it with a grain of salt. The percussion and the backing vocals have a very lowkey Peter Gabriel in the late 80s vibe to me. “Wildest Dreams” is fun, too. Honestly hearing a song like this, or “How You Get the Girl,” from a woman is so refreshing to me. I hate how liberating it feels just to hear a woman want to dictate the way the end of her relationship goes: in “Wildest Dreams,” where on a previous album she might’ve cried, lamented what could have been or how the guy she was with turned out to be different than she thought, here she just wants to be remembered as significant, and for the good aspects of their relationship. That’s so admirable! Hell! “How You Get the Girl” is a little more shallow, maybe, but a fantasy about someone who broke your heart showing up and saying all the things you want to hear from them is as harmless as it is cathartic. 

Duds: I might be the only person who was unimpressed by 2014 summer jam “Shake It Off.” And I feel the same way about “Bad Blood!” They both feel like they’re the lowest common denominator on the album, single material purely for the purpose of having single material. I was also - and I’m sure this is colored partly by personal bias - annoyed by “Welcome to New York.” It’s entirely possible that while listening to this album sitting in my shitty apartment in Crown Heights, during an all-day snowstorm that has finally given me the first day off I’ve had in 2016 at all and simultaneously wondering if the weird noise I was hearing was the antiquated radiator finally coughing itself to life or the on-again-off-again relationship we have with mice in the walls, I was not as susceptible to the wonderment of the greatest city in the world. Taylor has a Tim Burton themed loft in TriBeCa so she probably does not run into that problem. 

Here’s the thing, though! Taylor doesn’t really make music for people like me. A lot of what I like and respect about her is that she makes music to relate to young girls with big dreams. As a teenager getting ready to move to New York and simultaneously breaking up with my hometown boyfriend I was hard pressed to find a song more relatable than 2008′s “White Horse” from the record Fearless. And “Welcome to New York” is this sort of cheesy wide-eyed romanticism of going somewhere you’ve only ever heard about and realizing how much the world has to offer you, and that’s a really wonderful and inspiring thing to hear when you’re a kid, especially when you’re a young girl. It’s rare to be enchanted by the world without having to keep in mind the ways it can and will harm you. Taylor may be a disappointing feminist but I probably wouldn’t have developed to be a (marginally) better one if she hadn’t gotten me started.

[internationalpopoverthrow]

This album’s on heavy rotation this weekend.

[internationalpopoverthrow]

Uncle Tupelo’s “No Depression,” or, You Probably Like Country Music

Pretend I’m putting my hand on your shoulder. It’s warm, and kind of sweaty, and I’m looking into your eyes with the sort of sincere intensity of a thirteen-year-old at a middle school dance. This is the sort of intimacy I need to cultivate before I confess to you this thing: every single song I already knew on No Depression, somehow, over the last twenty-four years of my life on this planet, I have unconsciously attributed to Pearl Jam. Not for any particular reason, and with no sense of real certainty, but if you’d hummed a few lines of “Graveyard Shift” to me I would without a doubt have said, “Oh, yeah, I remember that song. Pearl Jam, right?” It’s undoubtedly a function of having grown up with young parents in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s, when the alt radio station was on in the car and there was probably a 50/50 shot whatever was playing was PJ or something adjacent. And it’s not beyond reason to say Jay Farrar’s voice has a Vedderian timbre, I guess. I’m just embarrassed. It was mortifying enough to know this record was out there, influencing tons of people I admired, from Elliott Smith to Jason Isbell, and to never have sought it out. To find out that I already knew - and loved - a handful of songs and had mistakenly attributed them to a group I’m lukewarm on at best... A disgrace. 

So now that I’ve confessed my sins and said my Hail Tweedys we can get down to brass tacks. I’ve been doing a lot - a lot - of emo music on here, and Uncle Tupelo is a palate cleanser for me and hopefully for you. It’s brassy and exhilarating, it’s extroverted, there are some really fast riffs that are exciting not to mention at least one incidence of mandolin. It’s notable that this is the album that gave everyone the blueprint for alt country - previous dabblers like True West and Green on Red out of the LA 80s neo-psych scene never quite committed to the tonal aesthetic, couldn’t rough up their sound enough. When No Depression came out it blew the doors off a whole sound world, inspired a roots music magazine, and arguably laid some groundwork for movements as remote as the folk/bluegrass revival of the mid-2000s. 

It’s also notable that Uncle Tupelo is one of those groups that birthed two incredible bands in its wake, with Jay Farrar forming Son Volt and Jeff Tweedy going on to massive success with Wilco. (Wilco, whom I routinely and somewhat controversially categorize as emo-adjacent... Time is a flat circle, everything is nothing, emo is all of us.) They’re both staggering songwriting talents although their joint approach here doesn’t bely much of what they go on to do later. For one thing, Uncle Tupelo is definitely a band about the music. No Depression contains poignant lyrics but always as a sidekick to the music, the careful arrangement, the mandolins. It’s good for me: I’m a notorious defender of country music, an occasional but vocal scorner of music as a vehicle for somebody’s crappy sentimental poem, and a sucker for a tasty riff. 

Highlights: the singles on this record are remarkably well-chosen. “Graveyard Shift” and “Factory Belt” are without a doubt the strongest tracks on the album, they blister with unrestrained energy. “Life Worth Living” is the track with mandolin on it (to save you the trouble of searching) and while it’s not used much, it’s used to great effect. The song is reflective without being navel-gazing, subdued without being boring, really well done. “Whiskey Bottle” is another absolute jam falsely attributed by me to Vedder & Co. I can’t believe myself sometimes. 

Duds: “Before I Break” is not exactly a dud on its own, only that it doesn’t cover any new ground that better songs on the album don’t already tread, and the chorus could use a punch-up. “Train” is a little monochromatic to me, even if train songs are necessary staples of every country artist’s canon, right up there with war songs and shitty manual labor job songs. Honestly I think the reason it bugs me is because it namechecks Roger McGuinn, and every time I hear his name it takes me a minute to remember who he is, or that there are other members of The Byrds you’re supposed to know besides David Crosby. 

Am I going to maybe brush up on my Pearl Jam lexicon? I guess. I don’t know if I have the stamina for repeat listenings of “Better Man” but now that the gap has been revealed to me I have to patch it up somehow. And I feel better knowing No Depression, partly because it’s a satisfying record to listen to when it’s cold out and you’re taking a long train home from a job you hate, partly because if I’m going to defend country music I should do it right. Part of doing it right - and I’ve definitely developed a system for this with other maligned stuff I love like emo and prog rock - is figuring out the best ways to convert the uninitiated. If you tell me you hate prog, I give you some tamer Pink Floyd and a couple of Genesis tracks. If you hate emo, I have some late-period MCR to ease you in. 

If you’re a snob who hates country, you can still probably get into Uncle Tupelo. And if that fails, you’ll probably still like this Elliott Smith tune. I’ve got it all worked out, my friend.

[internationalpopoverthrow]

2/50: Big Eyes

Jan 21 / Cake Shop

Somebody’s guitarist is late. I’m nursing this five dollar pint of Bud, freezing in the 53-person capacity Cake Shop basement with maybe four other people in the room, and I just heard the door guy reassuring the sheepish opening act Simpler Times that it’s “not a big deal, the later the better.” I download an audiobook on the club’s wifi and wonder if I’m going to get out in time to stop by Vanessa’s before it closes for a quart of hot soup to keep me warm on the way home. (Spoiler alert: I don’t get out in time.)

When Simpler Times does get onstage, after their guitarist has fought through the traffic on the FDR and claimed his complimentary beer from the bored-looking bartender, they do an unathletic soundcheck and kick into the first song. They sound like the platonic ideal of your old buddy’s band, aggressively average, loud, with a frontman in Rivers Cuomo glasses yelping against the mic. Their bassist is restless - he can’t stop noodling between songs, only pausing to point out his extremely pregnant wife in the audience and say becoming a father is “definitely the coolest thing that’s ever happened in [his] life.” Their second song is better, using all that frenetic bass player energy for a more active bass line and taking advantage of the second microphone for some vocal harmonies, shouting a third apart (or close enough for rock and roll). They cover a Nick Lowe song, “Heart of the City,” and afterwards remark that it’s “deceptively proggy,” dragging it out to twice the length of the original. After a half hour they wander down from the barely raised stage and to the bar, crowding around the pregnant wife, all smiles. It’s easy to root for them even when they’re not very good. They’re having fun. 

Most of Nuclear Santa Claust’s set-up seems to be about the drums, handled capably by a guy who bears an uncanny resemblance to Garth Elgar. He tweaks the hi hat clutch, mounts a tom atop a bass drum sloppily painted with their initials in white acrylic. They do a similar soundcheck, some yelling and a few noisy chords and playing with the feedback before launching into their set with zero preamble. They’re obviously tight, well-rehearsed, and every song charges forward on the heels of the last. I have trouble distinguishing them from each other, the same three chords and unintelligible words less interesting to me than the way the bassist keeps stumbling offstage into the crowd, then back, lanky, too big for the basement. Nobody in the crowd is moving, and you get the impression they’d be more impressive against the ranks of anyone but the jaded LES hipster army. Energy pours off them and evaporates. They get off the stage with as little ceremony as they got onto it, not even a goodnight. They join the Simpler Times guys at the bar but they’re drinking liquor instead of beer. It probably keeps them warmer - the basement is still frigid. 

Big Eyes actually soundchecks like it matters. Kait, their guitarist and frontwoman, is tiny in Docs, adjusting the mic and checking her pedal board. They balance the mics, play snatches of a couple different songs, communicate with the tech about monitor levels. They’re used to this, they’re playing a show for their brand new 7″ and kicking off a lowkey Eastern US tour. They’re tight and rehearsed and comfortable, not relying on audience interaction between songs or ignoring it wholesale. Kait Eldridge’s lead guitar lines are full and expressive under her vocals. For a three-piece they manage to really fill the room. What’s more they seem to actually be having fun together - keeping eyes on each other, connected to the music, making asides to one another. It’s an infectious camaraderie - it’ll go miles to win them new fans on their tour. They even get some of the snotty kids in the audience to dance - one drunk guy with a sweaty, drooping handlebar mustache bangs his head until he looks like he might puke. There’s more widespread swaying in place - the de facto dance of the young white kid in a club. Their set is short - not short enough to get me to Vanessa’s in time for dumplings, but certainly less than an hour - and when they leave the stage, tired as I am, I want to wait around for an encore. They’re already at the bar, though. Good to know they’re rounding this tour off at Union Pool on the 20th of February, hopefully with some more inspiring openers. At any rate, I’ll see you there. 

[internationalpopoverthrow]

17/366: Cobra Starship’s “While the City Sleeps, We Rule the Streets”

I read an article on AltPress about albums turning ten this year, and to my shock the first Cobra Starship record was on there. On the one hand, it feels like a lifetime ago that “Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)” was everywhere. On the other, ten years? Really? Aren’t all those guys, like, barely thirty years old? Anyway, for whatever reason I was never hard into Cobra even though I had all their friends on my first generation iPod nano. So when this article said, “While the City Sleeps… is what we really mourn when we say RIP Cobra… Although Cobra’s witty, abrasive lyricism and classically long song titles were a natural fit for the power-pop landscape of 2005, the group brought something fresh with dark, synth-heavy electro-pop that was borderline revolutionary in 2006 and arguably ushered in the scene’s now-prominent EDM influence.” I was kind of thrown for a loop, because I never thought of them as an albums band, or a band at all in any kind of traditional sense.

It seems like they are, though! Who’d have thought! I did some research, and it turns out I’m missing a big chunk of mid-2000s music history not knowing their complete albums. So I’m diving in, with the one we mean when we say RIP Cobra, apparently.

Pinning While the City Sleeps… to any specific genre is a problem. My (recently acquired) Apple Music sorts the entire record into punk, which must be an arbitrary decision because there’s an indie/acoustic/folk track, a lot of dance-y pop, some straight-ahead pop punk, and a few moments of shockingly good songwriting. Somehow it all seems to basically hang together, though, which is the weirdest part of all. It was purportedly inspired by some peyote-induced vision quests on the part of bandleader Gabe Saporta (who recorded the album as a solo project before recruiting the other Cobra musicians), take from that what you will.

Highlights: Most of the tracks! It’s a really fun album and there aren’t any songs I truly feel like I have to skip when I listen through. Notably, the opener, an acoustic track called “Being from Jersey Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry” is an interesting gesture, totally unlike the rest of the album but somehow called for, lending a bit of gravitas for a second. My favorite dance tracks are “It’s Warmer in the Basement” and “Keep It Simple” (co-written by alt stalwart Ted Leo!) although predictably I have a weakness for “Pop-Punk is Sooooo 2005” which belies its genre in the title. The closer, “You Can’t Be Missed If You Never Go Away,” is actually a pretty stunning display of nuanced songwriting after the espresso-bitter caffeine high of the rest of the record. Every track has something I like, though, without my having to look too hard.

Duds: “The Church of Hot Addiction” is a little corny for my taste, and I’m pretty sure referring to yourself by spelling your own name out in the chorus has never been cool, Gabe. I’ve got similar issues, kitsch-wise, with “The Ballad of Big Poppa and Diamond Girl.” It gets in my head because it’s catchy as hell but boy do I never want anyone to refer to themselves as “big poppa” in my presence ever. Never ever ever.

The rest of their discography yields similar fruit, and that’s a good thing. I’m terminally here for bitter dance-pop, I want to frown and be sardonic and ironic under strobe lights, I think it’s great. I was really surprised by just how much When the City Sleeps… feels like an album, rather than a collection of songs. And all those discoveries made, I gotta say: RIP Cobra.

[internationalpopoverthrow]

16/366: Motion City Soundtrack’s “Panic Stations”

Motion City Soundtrack is an adrenaline rush of a pop punk band. They were the first concert I saw after I moved to New York, at the front end of the Dino Initiative tour at Webster Hall, and for all my new city jitters and bone-deep reticence about, well, everything, I danced my ass off and had a great time. It was what I needed when I was eighteen.

It’s hard, I think, to be in a band that’s so For Teenagers and to grow up trying to sustain that fanbase while making art that appeals to yourself. After MCR broke up Gerard Way said about Hesitant Alien, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I wanted to make an album people my age would listen to.” Sit with that for a second - people their own age absolutely ridiculed MCR, couldn’t relate and said so with gusto. Fall Out Boy had to go on a four year hiatus and come back and stop writing songs about stalking ex-girlfriends, and a huge part of their post-hiatus success comes from the fact that they took themselves out of the scene to grow and do other things. Joe Trohman talks about getting into the van at age 17 and getting out eight years later, an adult with no coping skills or experience other than being on the road. It’s crazy to visualize bands like Simple Plan and Good Charlotte attempting a similar private maturation, and yet, they both have albums coming out this year after long hiatuses. Is this the new template for pop punk? Wear yourself thin, take yourself out, come back when you’ve learned to do your own taxes?

It isn’t universal and it isn’t the case for Motion City Soundtrack, who have been fairly consistent in recording, touring, working together. They also never wrote songs about murdering their high school sweethearts. That sounds like a one-liner but it’s notable: MCS has a sense of humor and even seminal pop punk records like 2005’s Commit This to Memory (produced by Mark Hoppus) carry some weight of maturity. The female subjects of the songs, while not exactly handed agency in the lyrics, do have points of view, and are less totems devoted to Being Sad About Girls than they are memories of relationships that come across as real, as genuine.

That said, breakup songs may pay the bills but they’re not a limitless goldmine. There are fewer on 2015’s Panic Stations than previous albums, and the overall tone of the record is interior, exploring the relationship one has with oneself, with the past versions of oneself. There is a lot of dwelling on waiting for the world to end on this album. Musically, it’s very straightforward. A lot of the fun and pep and Moog-ness of the MCS I grew up with is notably absent, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It sounds more grownup, it has less room for error. It also doesn’t take a lot of risks, which, when you’re coming up on twenty years as a band, smells like trouble to me.

The first track starts with an assertion from frontman Justin Pierre: “Let’s do this.” In the moment I do need that assurance. It’s scary to explore the untouched parts of a thing you love as a complete object. Unfortunately the first two songs don’t do much to convince me: they’re mellow, they build up to climaxes they don’t deliver on, there’s never enough Moog happening to satisfy me. It picks up, though, and finishes strong. It’s not so intentionally concept-y as to grow over the course of the album, but it’s well-sequenced, despite the weak opener. There is a sense of growth, of forward momentum, and that’s a relief in itself.

Highlights: my personal favorite hyper-specific genre of pop punk song is the we’re-both-fucked-up-but-it’s-okay song, and “It’s a Pleasure to Meet You” is one of the best ones I’ve heard. It’s upbeat, it feels like it confides in you the way a protective older sibling might, and it manages lines like “We’ve all had our battles / with darkness and shadows” without being too preachy or overly sentimental, which is where I usually find fault with this type of song. “Heavy Boots” is the first track on the album where signs of life are truly stirring. It feels like a Motion City Soundtrack song. It also vaguely parallels “I Can Feel You” - they’re the two explicit statements about “waiting for the world to end” - but while “I Can Feel You” is more sedate, “Heavy Boots” is an absolute banger. It’s lead single material, and the fact that “TKO” and “Lose Control” are the first two singles off the record is confusing to me.

The last two tracks kill, both hanging on the idea that you can be nostalgic for the future, can be paralyzed by it. “The Samurai Code” expresses this paralysis best in its chorus: “You hope for the best but the best always leaves you behind / I’d like to anchor someday, I’d like to anchor and stay.” Album closer “Days Will Run Away” turns inward, isolating acoustic guitar and vocals for well over a full minute before a spacey, echoing electric guitar comes in to play off the melody for a moment. It feels like a living room song, not expansive, something private. The chorus queries, “If you could live a million years in just a moment, would it hit you even harder?” And we are hit, distorted electric guitars crash in and open the song to the outside. It’s a striking moment. It feels a little bit like stepping out of the van you’ve been in since you were seventeen, blinking in the sunlight, to find yourself fully grown. It dissolves into a synth wash, wallows, and crashes in again the same way. There’s desperation, “The days will run away before you know it.” It’s not regret as much as the distillation of the ache of asking yourself what if. It’s the riskiest track on the album and it pays off in spades.

Duds: “Lose Control” is not great. I would have happily put my endorsement behind a Motion City Soundtrack song imploring its listeners to let loose, but there is no energy in this song, no conviction. Drawling “It’s time to lose control” in a bored monotone doesn’t read as ironic or funny, it reads as lazy. “TKO” and “Broken Arrow” are both take-or-leave tracks. “Anything at All” is a fine song but it doesn’t make enough of a statement to open the album, or at least, it doesn’t inspire me to listen further.

At the end of the day, it’s good to see this growth happening. It’s a delayed puberty, to be sure, and they’ve elected to do it publicly, so it’s going to have acne sometimes, to be a little ugly. I’m okay with that. If they’re going to keep putting stuff out and keep trying to further themselves, I’m going to keep listening. (Jury’s still out on the new GC and Simple Plan - look forward to those reviews later this year.)