Jeff Buckley - Eternal Life (live)
Fifteen years ago today, Jeff Buckley disappeared into Memphis’ Wolf River while taking a break from the recording of what would have been his second album, My Sweetheart The Drunk. His body would wash up a week later; it’s still unclear what happened, or why.
I picked up Buckley’s first (and only true) full length, Grace, after seeing the video for “Last Goodbye” on MTV. It quickly became a favorite of mine, and of my dad too, one we would listen to in the car together, a soundtrack we could both agree on. It’s on the short list of albums that changed my life, and it still holds that same power today; there’s absolutely nothing that sounds quite like it.
I remember watching the coverage of his disappearance on MTV, hoping against hope that he had popped out of the water somewhere downriver and run off, that he was hiding, or lost, or had just decided he needed a break from the pressure of recording and was pulling a disappearing act.
Jeff came up on shuffle on my iPod a couple weeks back, while I was in the car with my brother, and I remarked that in the intervening years, there’s a very particular side of Buckley that’s become his legacy. The hyper-sensitive, angelic soul of Hallelujah, not meant for this world; the mysterious, tragic Dream Brother.
But Buckley was nothing if not diverse, well-rounded, expansive. Jeff Buckley, as Whitman once put it, contained multitudes.
Life Eternal is full of piss and vinegar and righteous indignation, Buckley channeling Robert Plant and Kurt Cobain in equal measure. It seethes with fury, it hisses and sputters and steams like a soup pot reaching its boiling point. No angel here, Jeff is fully earthbound, corporeal, and so very very alive. It’s a side of him that’s been largely lost from public memory, but it was as important a component to Jeff Buckley The Complete Human Being as anything else he did, maybe even more so than the rest.
Magic Hour
Lately, the grandest, goopiest, most deliciously unembarrassable impulses of seventies and eighties pop have been in resurgence. Disco glitter, big-haired bluster, Broadway theatrics—these things have become pop symbols of bravery and brashness, open-hearted vitality and emotional fearlessness. (How could they not, coming after years of kids’ using the word gay as an all-purpose insult, with these same qualities in mind?) And if they still sound tacky to you, well, that’s exactly the issue: Lately, calling anything tacky seems a bit old-fashioned and parochial.
From the Department of Hard-to-Pin-Down ideas: I wrote something for New York about the new Scissor Sisters album, and the newish Adam Lambert album, and Lady Gaga, and the way pop stars can use sounds once considered over-the-top to telegraph … liberty and fearlessness, or something very much like them.
A really great article (from Nitsuh Abebe, who has a habit of writing really great articles) on not just those new albums, but also the direction in which mainstream pop seems to be tacking more generally. From an earlier paragraph, against which this new focus is contrasted:
For years, the party line seemed to be that the seventies and eighties were eras of goopy, glitzy dreck and lumbering, pompous rock, all in dire need of rescuing by punks with battered guitars.
As someone who spends most of his time in the pop-punk (/hardcore/emo/indie pop/etc) world, I think it’s really interesting to note the ways in which punk seems to have responded to this cultural zig with a zag of its own. As uber-serious indie rock became more mainstream in the latter part of the decade, the punk scene responded, darting away from ‘serious’ emo and headlong into in the neon explosion of 2007-2009 and its hypersweet, Disney-fueled melodic power-pop, an open embrace of dance beats and autotune, amplified blown-out swoop-cuts and raccoon tails, bright rubber wristbands and shoestring headbands and white hoodies.
But as pop culture has lurched towards the open embrace of big excess, punk seems to have responded in kind. Pete Wentz himself declared the Death Of Neon (via his Clandestine clothing line) in the winter of 2010, and it was so. Look at high fashion runways over the last year, or just check out what most mainstream-dressing people are wearing this summer, you’re going to see a LOT of bright colors, but go to any scene show and the fashion will overwhelmingly be grunge-inspired plaids, earth tones, scruffy anti-haircuts and beards, shirts covered in fonts inspired by 80s hardcore. Meanwhile, bands like The Wonder Years and The Story So Far and Transit, dudes who take shit seriously, bands who would trade ‘fun’ for ‘meaningfulness’ eight days a week, have all but pushed the Mayday Parades and Cash Cashes to the margins; adapt (generally by refocusing as a more ‘serious’ rock n roll band like The Maine or The Summer Set) or die (too many to count).
I’m really not sure whether there’s causation here or just correlation, but I do think it’s awful interesting to observe regardless.
(ps please note the use of scare quotes for ‘serious’ and ‘meaningfulness’; I’m not sure any of these things are actually what they claim to be, but it’s the claim itself that’s important for the analysis here)
I haven’t had a lot of time to write over here lately; I’ve been pinch-hitting in the editorial department for a bit over at PropertyOfZack, as well as writing a bunch of reviews myself, and that’s kept me pretty busy. (As always the Reviews page has my latest work linked, and there will another ten pieces or so coming in the next few weeks as we clear out some backlog.) But I thought this was interesting enough to bring over from my other blog, and if nothing else any chance to promote Nitsuh Abebe’s work is a good one.
Austin Gibbs - Creepshow (Live)
As I did last year, I took part in this year’s Music Diary Project (you can thank Nick Southall for both the great idea and the putting-it-into-action).
One of the primary goals of the exercise is to examine the ways in which we consume and interact with music over the course of a week, both actively and passively, and at least from an active listening standpoint this was, in many ways, a rather unusual week for me. Generally I’m giving a lot of play to one or two albums I’m reviewing, but this week caught me at the tail end of one review with nothing pressing for a bit. And this weekend was hardly a typical weekend, what with the travel and the family time, and the getting sick. (Which evolved into bronchitis that had me knocked on my ass until today, keeping me out of work and leaving my brain far too muddled to write anything coherent until just about now).
One way it WAS typical is that I did a great deal of my music listening at live shows. If anything, last week was a light one for me in terms of shows; a “normal” week will find me at maybe 3, with as many as 6 shows some weeks. A big part of the fun of taking part in the project is seeing how other people take in music (go search #musicdiaryproject or #musicdiary2012 here on tumblr or twitter and dive in, its fun and enlightening and a great way to find people who enjoy talking about music on a more-than-surface level), and for the second year in a row I’ve noted that it seems very few people taking part in the project are going to live shows on a regular basis. I’m not sure if there’s any grand conclusion to be drawn from that, but follow the trail as you will.
My music diary entries:
[This cut from Austin Gibbs’ Live 2011 EP might be the best thing I heard over the course of the week, it goes to all kinds of weird and wild and wonderful places.]
Against Me! - The Ocean
If I could have chosen, I would have been a woman
My mother once told me she would have named me Laura
I would grow up to be strong and beautiful like her
The Tea Party - Fire In The Head
I mentioned in the last post that, of all the other Canadian bands I discovered via Our Lady Peace, The Tea Party had the biggest impact on me. In particular, their 1995 album The Edges Of Twilight (which, unlike my $30 copy of Naveed, I found in the cutout bin for a buck) knocked my socks off back then, and still does. Jeff Martin’s super-deep hypnotic baritone, that ridiculously awesome chime-y guitar tone, the incredibly muscular rhythm section, the way the band flips the switch between loud and quiet so casually, everything about the album just levels me. I’ve never been much a fan of the “Eastern instruments in Western rock” thing, but The Tea Party meld it so seamlessly, and singularly, that it never feels like a gimmick.
If that one doesn’t convince you, then this one should.
One of the reasons I’ve always wanted to spend some time in Canada. Suspicions that there’s something in the water there…
Our Lady Peace - Find Our Way
In 1994, I was a member of an internet mailing list for the band Live (who I will someday write about at proper length), and one of the hot topics of discussion between a couple of the list regulars that spring was a young band from Canada who were making some waves up there. Our Lady Peace didn’t have any kind of footprint in the US yet, but the chatter was such that I was convinced to go to my local record shop (RIP Toones, home of weekly super-discount sales and a dollar bin i would spent hours trawling through, incredibly rude employees who never remembered me despite my buying multiple CDs virtually every weekend for years, and also apparently home of some tax cheat scheme that eventually got the place shut down) and shell out $30 for an import copy of their debut album Naveed, which wouldn’t be released stateside for another year.
It was easily the best $30 bucks I’ve ever spent on a piece of music. From the first electric notes of “The Birdman,” with that incredible Mike Turner tone full of weird overtones and harmonics, I was head over heels for the band, and of everything I was listening to at the time (the aforementioned Live, The Shamen, Nirvana, Primus, Suede, Smashing Pumpkins, etc.) they’re the band I still go back to the most. I can listen to Naveed now, and enjoy it not just as nostalgia but as a record that still sounds fantastic, full of incredible songs. It might be my all time favorite debut album.
Maybe the biggest upshot of finding Our Lady Peace was that it send me on a tear through the early internet to find what else was going on in Canada that I was missing out on, and there were a ton of great Canadian Bands in the 90s who never made their way down here. The two biggest for me were The Tea Party (whose The Edges Of Twilight ranks right up there with Naveed as far as great albums from that time goes) and Moxy Fruvous, but there was a solid chunk of the mid-90s where I was listening to a whole lot of Sloan (who I’d already been a fan of), I Mother Earth, Moist, The Odds, Great Big Sea, the Tragically Hip, 54-40, Treble Charger, Rainbow Butt Monkeys (who later morphed into these actual butt monkeys) and lots lots more that I’m sure I’m forgetting now.
I’m not going to give a whole OLP history lesson here (that’s why Wikipedia exists), but the band have been through a lot of twists and turns and incredible albums (and a couple duds) over the last 18 years, and I’ve been a fan through it all.
Curve is, to my mind, the best thing OLP have done maybe since Spiritual Machines*. It finds them ranging into all sorts of new territory, from the thick, square synths that open the album at the beginning of “Allowance” (as big as the electro revival has been, I don’t think I’ve heard a synth sound quite like that since early OMD, which is reason enough for me to love it) to the heavy bass groove of “Fire In the Henhouse” (which sounds like it could be a cut originally intended for one of Raine’s solo albums) to “Find Our Way” which shares the spare atmosphere of late-period Thrice and blooms into a fat, fuzzed-out guitar solo straight out of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android”. “Heavyweight” takes the classic OLP single formula and adds a new rigidity to it, a stiffened backbone that grooves differently than anything they’ve really done before. (It reminds me a lot of what Jimmy Eat World did with “My Best Theory”). The fact that I keep referencing my favorite bands/songs probably has more than a little to do with how much I love this album. Curve might be OLP’s most bass-forward album since Naveed; the bright, major-key bridge of “Allowance” and the sunny “ooh-ooh” background vocals of “As Fast As You Can” are like nothing else in their catalog.It drags a little bit on the tail end, but it’s ultimately a thrilling ride, the thrill of great songs amplified by the joy in witnessing an old, beloved dog mastering new tricks.
I had the pleasure of seeing the band once more two Thursdays past, and they were as great as they’ve ever been. They played half of the new album and it all translated really well in the live setting; the rest of the set was pretty well divided between the hits (new and old) and some old favorites from their early albums. I’m at a point where most of the bands I grew up with are either no longer together or coasting on the nostalgia circuit; I’m thankful that at least one of them is still pushing themselves creatively, and thrilled at the results that are coming from it.
*though, as much as it hurts to admit it, Gravity has grown on me a lot over the last few years. It was easy to get caught up in my bad feelings surrounding the ickily-calculated move to OLP 2.0 (+ Bob Rock, - Mike Turner), so much so that I think I kind of missed how solid the songs therein were; “Innocent” has long been one of my favorite songs (period), but in addition to that and big hit single “Somewhere Out There”, tracks like “All For You” and “Not Enough” and the b-sides “Whatever” and “Our Time Is Fading” are pretty fantastic.
How do you think your fans that have followed you since your Hüsker Dü days would react to that?
Maybe it’s time to let them know that, “Hey, I love you, but I want to be free to do what I want to do.” Really, it’s been the last three years. But, I hope Bob knows what he’s getting into with this Sugar reunion. The amount of nostalgia, this midlife crisis. Our older brothers bought Corvettes when they reached 40. Now, people go see a reunited band and yell out the names of 25- to 30-year-old songs, whether that artist is performing them again or not.
Grant Hart has a lot to say about a lot of things, particularly his former bandmates in Husker Du. (via sotc-nyc)
Grant sums up a lot of what I have to say about reunion-mania. Not that I’m not being kind of hypocritical about it; I’ll be seeing Refused, and I’ll see ATDI whenever they get around to scheduling a NYC date, and I’ll damn sure be there whenever Bob brings Copper Blue up here (I was bummed to miss it during SXSW, but that’s the nature of the beast down there). I went to Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity*10 tour and had a blast. I suppose to me those are about getting to experience songs I never get the chance to hear live anymore rather than actually reliving the original moment. But I dunno.
I saw Grant down at SXSW, and as he’s wont to be, he was acerbic, irascible, playful and honest all at once. I actually enjoyed the newer stuff he played better than the “hits”; the Hot Wax material, in particular, translates much better live than it does on record. I’ll probably see him tomorrow night, if I don’t go to Enter Shikari / letlive, or Marianas Trench instead.
This is a great interview, btw.
(via jrichmanesq)
I’m never quite sure what I should reblog over here from my other blog. When they started out they were two very different places; this was for sort of longer-form music-related writing, and the other blog was for all kinds of other stuff, the usual tumblr photo posts and reblog-convos and stuff, but over time it’s drifted to where I’m talking primarily about music there as well (albeit in shorter, more respond-y ways).
I think I’m going to try and find some way in my redesign over here to make the connection between the two clearer, if that makes sense?
Either way, this felt like it belonged over here as much as it did over there.
The internet is a weird place.
(via jrichmanesq)
The Isotopes - The Ballad of Rey Ordonez
Opening Day is here again…kinda.*
In honor, watch as the Isotopes pay tribute to one of the great shortstops for that other New York team. The Cuban Missile may never have figured it out at the plate, but as you can see in the video, he was a joy to behold in the field, at least for a few short years.
Thanks to the fine folks at both the Baseball Prospectus Podcast and Productive Outs (who have just launched their own PRODcast, which is somehow exactly like their twitter feed but in audio form) for turning me on to this one!
* Yes, they played a couple games in Japan last week, but I’ll be damned if sending two basically-AAA franchises to play untelevised games at 5AM on another continent a week before anyone else even finishes Spring Training counts as Opening Day. Then again, I’m not sure if today’s single evening game before the floodgates open tomorrow really counts either. This whole staggered opening really sucks; half the joy of opening day is the feeling of overwhelming immersion, of suddenly being surrounded by baseball like the season just dropped down on top of you in midstream, of drowning in a river of freshly manicured infields and crisp white lines, bat-cracks and umpire strike-“KEAAUGH!!”s, feeling powerless to do anything but just sink into it, letting it rush over you.
As usual, well done Bud.
