DoubleShot: The Fratellis

In the fall of 2006 I needed some happy. It was a pretty dark time in our lives. But it was also a great time for music. Especially Scottish Rock.
Just when I needed it most, I found the debut import by The Fratellis, a glam/cabaret/britpop trio that were none of them brothers but had adopted the drummer's previously unknown last name as their individual and band moniker.
I don't usually spent upwards of $25 for one cd. But, after hearing some of the tracks through someone on Soulseek, I ran out and got the album asap.
That album was....




The Fratellis - Costello Music - 2006 (iTunes)

With it's backbeat Oompa horns and it's dirty glam pop sound, "Henrietta", the first track off Costello Music, explodes with such a pied piper fury that I can't help but think be reminded of the Violent Femmes debut. No, it doesn't sound ANYTHING like that record but the busker aesthetic is there on both records. Like these songs were hewn on the corners of Scotland and recreated in the studio with wild and excited abandon.
You know the second track, "Flathead" because it was the iPod commercial song for a while. And it popped up in weird commercials like Safeway out here in LA. But that doesn't diminish it's hummability. You WANT to follow the top hat waring, vagrant foppishness of Jon Fratelli with a chorus of "ba da bop bop badadadada"s as we shuffle and skip our way through the streets and into the pubs.
"Cuntry Boys & Girls" could have fallen off a Libertines record if it wasn't so...happy. "Whistle for the Choir" proves that Jon Lawler (Jon Fratelli) has a way with melody as well as a turn of phrase.
The album's biggest hit doesn't come until almost halfway through the CD and it's the big, driving glam beat alley rocker "Chelsea Dagger". It's a worthy hit song. It's got everything: Random shouts. Tricky rhymes. Nonsense (do-do-do-dododo-do-do-doo-doo....) that would make The Beatles proud. It's easily one of my favorite tracks of the decade.
"For the Girl" changes the nonsense to "La la"s and is still a hoot. In fact, it helps cement the fact that Costello Music is a great party album. The first half, up to this point could rev up a rave and keep everyone dancing.
The second half of the album takes a slightly different turn starting with "Doginabag" which is a little darker, less fun for the sake of fun. It's not a failure by any stretch and it comes at the perfect time. An entire album of this might wear patience. But after 20 minutes of La Las and Doo-doos, it's a welcome change.
"Creeping up the Backstairs" owes its chord progression to (of all things) Dead Kennedys' Moral Majority but, don't worry, you're safe. The boys keep that sing-a-long ditty aesthetic alive and well.
The rest of the album is just as good. In fact, it never lets up in it's craft and the stories eaved and characters described.
After 20 or so listens you may think you never want to hear Costello Music again, but that's fine. I can't think of many albums I want to listen to a second time.

Costello Music - The Fratellis

Grade A
A Side: Chelsea Dagger, Henrietta, Flathead
BlindSide: Cuntry Boys & Girls, For the Girl, Whistle for the Choir
Downside: None, really. It's all fun.

So, you can imagine just how excited I was to buy the follow up album. I didn't waste any time. I knew it was coming out that morning and I fired up the iPod Touch, turned on the Wi-Fi and bought it immediately....



The Fratellis - Here We Stand - 2008 (iTunes)

Just about every bit of fun in the foggy streets the band laid out on the previous album was tossed out in favor of trying to emulate, well, Arctic Monkeys. That shouldn't be bad, right? I mean, on the first album they were apeing The Libertines, right? But on that first album Lawler and crew was taking their cue from those turn of the century britpoppers and making it their own. The opening track, "My Friend John" could be mistaken for the Monkeys. And not "Whatever People Say i Am..." Arctic Monkeys. "Favourite Worst Nightmare" Arctic Monkeys.
There seems to be, especially on "A Heady Tale" a concentrated effort to create a bigger sound. A stadium sound. But, it doesn't sound like The Fratellis anymore. It's anonymous. And when they do try to get back to their sound on "Shameless", it sounds tired.
There are good songs on this record, but it doesn't have the explosive fire of the first. It's a sophomore album slumping along. The hits just sound too much like other bands. Look Out Sunshine is really steeped in The Beatles more than ever before and Mistress Mabel....what can be said? It's catchy and fun and toe-tappy but it also calls to mind George Michaels' "Faith" as written by Green Day's side project, Foxboro Hot Tubs. Who, themselves, were ripping on a particular late 60s swinging mod rock sound. To sound like a second rate version of a made up band paying homage to a style...this is not the Fratellis I fell in love with on the first album.
The entire record can be summed up for me by the track, 'Tell me a Lie", which is so distracted by being a mini-britpop rock opera that it never realizes that these guys aren't up to the task. Trying to cram these different styles and tempos into a 3.5 pop song written by street buskers (who seem to also be trying to hard to sound like the White Stripes) the boys only come up short. And unfocused. Which is the sum total of the whole record.
The album really rights it's listing self with the double shots of "Acid Jazz Singer" & "Lupe Brown" which are close as we're gonna get to the Fratellis we fell in love with.
Toward the end of Here We Stand we get possibly the only track that really succeeds in trying to take Lawler's songs to a new place. "Milk & Money" which opens with a melancholy piano which takes it's lead from Kander & Ebb, picks itself up and really rocks out a second half of frenetic instrumentation.
Here We Stand is not a total failure. It's confused. It doesn't reach out and grab the listener the way Costello Music did, but is it worthy attempt at a second record? Sure. Why not. I don't hate it. But I will only cherry pick the songs I like and dump the rest.

Here We Stand - The Fratellis

Grade B-
A Side: Mistress Mabel, Acid Jazz Singer, Lupe Brown
BlindSide: Baby Doll, Look Out Sunshine, Milk & Money
DownSide: Tell Me A Lie

DoubleShot: The Hold Steady

My history with The Hold Steady is sporadic and frustrating.
Mojo magazine ranked "Your Hoodrat Friend" from Separation Sunday as one of the best punk songs of all time. I heard it. I didn't get it.
Back in the Soulseek days EVERYBODY had that album and was talking about how great THS was. I got the entire SS album. I still didn't get it.
In a Lost flashback Hurley was trying to ask out a girl in a convenience store on a date. He mentioned that The Hold Steady was playing.
What was I missing? I loved the name. The band was supposed to be a tossback to Springsteen and the E streeters. It should have been right up my alley.

Then the hype for their next album, Boys and Girls in America, started in earnest. This was 2006. A great year for music. And, I decided to give it a spin.

I am so glad I did.

"There are time when I think that Sal Paradise was right; Boys and girls in America...they have such a sad time together."





The Hold Steady - Boys And Girls in America - 2006 (iTunes - Amazon)

B&GiA opens with cavernous guitars. Harmonic pianos that almost seem to be doing their own thing join them. The whole band comes in. And the epic, stadium Anthem that is "Stuck Between Stations" kicks this fucker off. Craig Finn is one terrific lyricist. He is in the running for new Rock Poet Laureate. But his voice...it's an acquired taste, to be sure. Talk singing with a nasal quality that made me wonder at first if Jello Biafra was moonlighting as an Indie Rocker. But, it doesn't matter, because it works.
And it's odd. The Boardwalk rock continues on "Chips Ahoy" which, unlike anything The Boss ever wrote, is about a guy whose girlfriend is psychic and she doesn't have to work because she always knows which horse is going to win at the racetrack. But, it could be about Saturday night at the roller rink for all we care. It's just grand.
In the mood for some 70s inspired rock? "Hot Soft Light".
Need some edgy boogie rock? "Some Kooks".
How about a reminiscent ballad about the first time you met that girl...."First Night".
One of my personal favorites (heck, they're all terrific) is Party Pit. If you've ever been to a bonfire with beer buckets and stoners in the woods, you know this place. "Just gonna walk around and drink some more." is the perfect sentiment to those aimless late nights. This is not just an album about partying. It's about being at the party. And it's not an Andrew W.K. kind of PARTY!!!. It's a chaperoned, glee-filled, spiked punch party.
"Citrus" calls to mind the acoustic balladeering of Zeppelin. Though, I'm not sure they were singing an ode to alcohol. But with such pinpoint accuracy and deft wordplay...Example:
hey citrus 
hey liquor
I love it when when you touch each other

hey whiskey 
hey ginger
I come to you with rigid fingers.


i see judas in the hard eyes of the boys working the corners.

i feel jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers.
After you've gotten a little too high you might need some time in the "Chillout Tent". Not exactly Boss lyrics, but, as edgy as Bruce was "Pouring salt upon you tongue and hung just out of reach", so, too are the truths in Finn's poetry.
The album closes with the ready-made classic "Southtown Girls". With it's lazy, faux country sensibilities, it's the perfect coda to a grand 40 minutes.
I can't recommend this record higher.

Boys & Girls in America

Grade A+
A Side: Stuck Between Stations, Chips Ahoy, Southtown Girls
BlindSide: Party Pit, Massive Nights, Citrus, Chillout Tent
DownSide: none.

So, two years later.....



The Hold Steady - Stay Positive - 2008 (iTunes - Amazon)

When the band backs up Finn, yelling out, "This Summer!" on the opening track, "Constructive Summer", I can hear Black Flag's "TV Party" and, it makes me happy. They haven't really forgotten their punk roots, The Hold Stead. Name checking Joe Strummer isn't a bad idea, either.
"Constructive Summer" is actually the right progression for the band. It's a bold melding of the Separation Sunday THS and the Boy and Girls one.
In no time they are reminding us of why we loved that last album with the first single, "Sequestered in Memphis". That organ, though. They are bringing out the kitchen sink and feeling their E-streetiness. Saxophones? Okay.....but this time, the lyrics seem a little too precious. "Subpoenaed in Texas, sequestered in Memphis." I can't relate and I feel like Finn the Rhymer is replacing Finn the Poet.
One for the Cutters continues the "local townies" aesthetic that helped rise the previous record to new heights (this time calling to mind the 70s film, Breaking Away), but it's weak and the harpsichord (huh?) battling for space with a grand piano feels crazily out of place. And whatever instrumentation they are forcing upon us on "Navy Sheets" doesn't help this album make a good impression.
"Lord, I'm Discouraged" feels like the sort of sleepy, anthem ballad that the guys can write in their sleep. It works. It's not surprising, it doesn't jolt you, but it works. And the dustbowl, almost Jovi-esque, "Both Crosses" can't quite the mustard. This time, it's because heavy echo won't mask the fact that Craig Finn isn't a singer. And yet, he's trying something more than spoken word. He's trying to wrap his larynx around this idiom. He fails and it's not spectacular.
If the album has any redeeming quality, and anything to offer those of us who came in with B&G, it's the title track. I wish it had opened the record and they had spent more time working on songs like these. If they had, no doubt The Hold Steady would have burst big time in 08. And, once they get their footing, they follow with "Magazine", "Joke about Jamaica" and the excellent epic, "Slapped Actress", which would have made this a great EP.
If Boys and Girls was The Hold Steady's nod to Springsteen and 70s arena rock, Stay Positive harkens back further to Zeppelin, name checkling Zep songs all the way.
But shooting for that moon and missing has just left me cold.

Stay Positive

Grade C
A Side: Constructive Summer, Stay Positive, Slapped Actress
BlindSide: Lord I'm Discouraged, Joke About Jamaica
DownSide: One for the Cutters, Navy Sheets

DoubleShot: Nightmare of You

I am going to try something new with DoubleShot. The idea is to highlight an album that truly resonated with me. A personal classic. Or just a really great entry album. By that I mean, the record that brought me in to a band's fold. And, then, their follow up. The sophomore. Slump? Brilliance? We'll see.

We'll start with Nightmare of You.




Nightmare of You - Nightmare of You - 2005 (iTunes)

A band I'm pretty sure you have never heard of. I was at the gym when a friend of mine stuck my earbuds into his iPod and made me listen. One song in and I was hooked. I picked up the eponymous debut album at Amoeba that day and, I gotta tell ya: this album is 5 years old and has never, ever left my iPod. In some playlist or other I have this record. Why is it so good?
First off, there are tremendous hooks. "The Days Go By So Slow", "Dear Scene, I Wish I Were Deaf", these are two epic, hook-laden, retro-80s, lush emo rock songs, deceptively steeped in 50s songcraft. The way singer Brandon Reilly wraps his throat around wordplay and rhyme schemes of, say, Thumbelina, only add to the catchiness of the songs.
The album is relentless in it's pop-hook assault. The electro-nightclubbing Simple Minds-esque "My Name is Trouble" and quasi-college Indie "Why Am I Always Right?', the brilliant "I Want to Be Buried in Your Backyard", paint vivid pictures of desperation, loss, death, love and all of them make you want to lower the top and sing along on a coast drive.
Does it stop?
Nope.
The skiffle pop of "Ode to Seratonin".
The faux-country of "Marry Me".
The urgent "In the Bathroom is Where I Want You".
The driving "The Studded Cinctures".
It's amazing that every single song on this album is great. It's like a best of record by a band you've never heard of but wish you did so you could collect all the rest of their colection. Except that this is the debut.
Closing on the french cabaret inspired, "Heaven Runs on Oil", well, if you can't tell, I think this album is an unknown classic.

Grade A+
A Side: The Days Go By So Slow, Dear Scene, I Wish I Were Deaf, I Want to Be Buried in Your Backyard
BlindSide: Everything Else.
Downside: Nothing.

Septenary

In between this album and this year there was a brief, forgettable ep called "Bang". I have it. I don't care for it.
But a few weeks ago I got a tweet from NoY that their new album was out. I downloaded it from iTunes immediately.

It's called...



Nightmare of You - Infomaniac - 2009 (iTunes)

Starting off with "Good Morning, Waster" I think we're on an interesting ride but, I got the sense that something was wrong. Now, I often give a cursory listen to a second record and dismiss it as not as good as the first, because I'm an impatient a-hole and I want immediate gratification. But this song sounds like a leftover b-side from the first record. It feels like Reilly is trying to sell the tunes through vocal gymnastics, like they all know nothing is really as good as that first record. It's a mellow place to open things with and bleeds into the simplistic "Eustacia Vye" that feels like, gulp, a Panic at the Disco track. A little too Beatles-y for my taste.
The lazy-versed and catchy-chorused, "I think I'm Getting Older" smells of "first single" but it's really obnoxious. What I hate most is that I am singing along even though I know that this is not a great tune.
The first sign that the band hasn't lost all songwriting prowess comes on "Someday, but not Today", which steals heavily from mellow 70s AM radio top 40. It builds to a nice chorus that I can't help but sing along to. It pairs, weirdly, with the retro-70s stuff My Morning Jacket tried earlier this year.
The 50s songcrafting is back on "Hey, Sweetheart" and that's a welcome sign.
But the more troubling things come just after.
"Experimental Bed" should really read as "Experimental Bed of Music that we are not really up to."
"Amsterdam" is just bad but--
"Gavi". Gavi sucks. I assume they are writing from the perspective of a self-serving, indignant, unctuous swinger but the lyrics are so poor and forced that it's almost as embarrassing as its subject matter. In fact, it's really the worst thing this band has committed to...what do we call it now that vinyl is dead, anyway?
The album rights itself, slightly, with "Tell Me When its Over", a song that would fit well into their calssic, hooky, canon. And "Pair of Blue Eyes" and "Please Don't Answer me" are terrificly classic NoY. But they can't save the record.
The last track, "Goodnight, Devil" bookends the album. It wears its adoration of Pink Floyd's the Wall on its sleeve but, even so, that's light years better than most of this record.

Too bad. I was really hoping that this follow up would be as terrific as the first. It's not. It's not awful, but it falls many stories from the debut's heights.

Grade C-
A Side: Someday but Not Today, Tell Me When It's Over, Goodnight Devil
BlindSide: Eustacia Vye, Please Don't Answer Me, I think I'm getting Older
DownSide: Gavi, Experimental Bed

Listening Post: Ani DiFranco - Red Letter Year

Ani DiFranco - Red Letter Year - 1988 (iTunes - Amazon)

Dammit, Ani. Just as I was ready to completely write you off you go and do something like this.
Red Letter Year is good. It's the best she's done since Little Plastic Castles. It's also the first album in 10 years that SOUNDS like something that was made by someone who made that album and the ones that preceded it.
To those who say that motherhood and happiness have had a negative effect on DiFranco's music, I say, pishaw! She wears overt happiness as well as she wears (or wore) anger.
Ani's music has seemed aimless and meandering the last 10 years. Hooking up with her lifemate, Mike Napolitano, has brought the MUSIC back. There are actual, dare I say it, songs here.
The opening, Red Letter Year, is haunting and mellow but incisive and edgy and the album just gets better.
All This actually rocks with ominous fury. Present/Infant is such a pleasant examination of motherhood from a woman who once pined with longing and jealousy so many years ago at the woman who was coiffing herself for a man.
The N'Orleans Jazz of the Red Letter Year Reprise is such an ode to her new hometown but also shows a zest for life that has been missing for so fucking long.
Ani DiFranco has grown up. She's happy...finally!
And she's allowed, gulp, production. Good, layered production.
The glee in the woman in love (without man, daughter, whomever) who is "smiling underneath" is a welcome visitor after those so many years of depression.
Sure Red Letter Year falls into a miasma of repetition by the end. But, who cares? It's better than so much else out there. And it's just nice to see that Ani hasn't used up all her talent or traded it in for Sunday Brunch Music.


Grade B
A Side: Red Letter Year, Emancipated Minor
BlindSide: Present/Infant, Smiling Underneath, The Atom
DownSide: Star Matter

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Now playing: Ani DiFranco - Emancipated Minor
via FoxyTunes

Listening Posts: Ani DiFranco - Reprieve

Ani DiFranco - Reprieve - 2006 (iTunes - Amazon)

An interesting thing happened while listening to Reprieve. I found myself caught up in the mood and ambiance that had left me so cold on the most recent DiFranco records.
The slow, almost inert opening track, "Hypnotized" actually succeeded in keeping me just that. As the album progresses its obvious DiFranco hasn't abandoned her politics. She's still angry only this time her venom is focused less on bad relationships & the record industry (that stuff still lingers) but she takes aim at Halliburton and others on tracks like "Millenium Theater" and "Shroud". It's just that the music is, as so often displayed over the last 2 decades, boring. Uninspired. Overt in it's self-indulgence.
Reprieve isn't a bad record. Ani DiFranco is simply not the same person who recorded those first 8 records. She's, well, she's boring.

Grade C-
A Side: Hypnotized
BlindSide: No surprises
DownSide: Nothing that great.

Listening Post: Ani DiFranco - Knuckle Down

Ani DiFranco - Knuckle Down - 2005 (iTunes - Amazon)

On first listen, the opening track of Knuckle Down, the title track, filled me with a sense of hope. THIS is the Ani that I remember. It's not the best but it's close to the original sound. Maybe, just maybe, she'll give me and her listeners an album filled with what we fell in love with in the first place.

Yeah.

No fucking way.

Ani's still thinking she's a female Tom Waits hoping to score the next Jim Jarmusch movie. Newsflash, Ani! Those movies suck! Oh, fuck it. Never mind.
God help me, I don't think I'm gonna get through this. I can't recall a Listening Post where the artist has fallen so far from their heights.
Oh, yeah. It's a Listening Post now. It was a Reflecting Pool until I had no relationship with the music. Now it's all discovery.
But not good discovery. Not like when you discover a bag of money in the attic of your old house. More like when you discover shit on your shoe that is stuck there with old gum.

Grade D-

ASide: Knuckle Down
DownSide: Don't get me started.

Listening Post: Ani DiFranco - Educated Guess

Ani DiFranco - Educated Guess - 2004 - (iTunes - Amazon)

If I had to make an educated guess I would say that with the exception of putting a gun to Ms. Difranco's head, she wouldn't remember any of these "songs".
These are meanderings.
When Springsteen holed up with a 4 track he came out with the disturbing and penetrating "Nebraska". 3 years after 9/11 and Ani Difranco is still noodling around with her poetry book. And no real ideas. No real songs.
This album is bad.
I think the people that are buying it and making it Number One on the Billboard Internet albums all did so out of habit. Out of Habit. Remember songs like that, Ani? Remember??

Grade F

Listening Post: Ani DiFranco - Evolve

Ani DiFranco - Evolve - 2003 (iTunes - Amazon)

Ugh.
This album, as I've read, is the swan song for the Ani DiFranco "band" and I couldn't be more ready to kiss that crap goodbye. I think the woman that I fell in love with for her ideas, ideals and attitudes, has been bogged down on the ability to experiment and possible cajoled and seduced by other musicians.
But that's not fair because that statement takes the onus off Ani and strips her of the responsibility for these borefests that she's been proffering.
Songs like O My My are the type of syncopated Jazz influenced stuff that, well, I despise. Maybe it's great but it offers me nothing. I'm just not wired to like this stuff.
I think, at this point, it's obvious that Ani Difranco and I do not own any of the same records in our collection. She's got a lot of Utah Phillips, Miles Davis, and protest stuff and I like Queen. I'm also pretty sure that falling in love, having a child, enjoying life, has stripped AD of everything I liked about her.
I need my Ani angry. Not happy.
Her music has never been of interest to me. It was the music coupled with her worldview that made it all work. Now that she fancies herself a "musician", I'm left cold.

Grade D
A Side: Evolve, Here for Now
BlindSide: -----
DownSide: Shrug, Serpentine

Reflecting Pool: Ani Difranco - Revelling/Reckoning

Ani DiFranco - Revelling/Reckoning - 2001 (iTunes - Amazon)

At this point I'm not really sure why anyone would care about Ani DiFranco and her records. I think, and I'm not sure, so don't quote me, but, I think she HAS to record something because otherwise, well, that's the way the business works. Record, tour, make a living. You have to give your audience something new so they know you're alive otherwise every tour is really just a best of retrospective, yes?
So, Ani goes about her business, recording new music that makes her happy, even though it has almost nothing to offer the listener. She isn't the finger plucker of yore. She's in love with Jazz and seems to have let those influences take over.
This album isn't offensive, nor is it memorable. It's a Sunday morning, coffee and newspaper background CD.
There is one song that struck me, however. It comes towards the end and it's called "Sick of Me". I'm sure it's supposed to be a relationship song. But when she asks:
how sick of me
must you be
by now?
My answer is: A Lot.

Grade: C
Nothing stands out in any way on this record.

Reflecting Pool: Ani Difranco - To The Teeth

Ani DiFranco - To The Teeth - 1999 (iTunes)

Is Ani DiFranco advocating blowing up and destroying media and corporations? On the title track it sure seems so. Thing is, if this was the younger Ani the song would be an onslaught of frenetic fingering and it would have resonance. Now it just sounds like big chord, semi-country, latter day Springsteen insta-epic.
The SECOND record in one year from Ms. DiFranco starts off just as dour as the previous and seems to be a big middle finger not to her enemies (selling out, corporations, mean people) but, instead, to the fans who have been following her for the past decade.
She hasn't as much grown up as she seems to have grown weary. She's found the key in jams and improvs and Jazz and I'm not sure it's helping her.
This album is her, what, 10th in 9 years? It's been quite the decade for her. I don't know of any other group or musician that I know of whose sound has changed so vastly over such a short period of time. Wait, I do. Between 1974 and 1984 Queen went from glam rock to disco to hodgepodge metal. This is sort of the same to me.
It feels like I'm being left behind. Like everyone is being left behind. Whoever thought that Ani was their voice was really wrong. She's not the voice of lesbians, girl power, feminism. She's the voice of Ani DiFranco. She's just following her muse.
If it's possible, if you can believe it, Freakshow, one of the better tracks actually sounds like what would happen if you took Madonna and forced her to record Sheryl Crow songs but told her that they don't have to be that good, so don't hire the best producers, kay?
I'm halfway through and I gotta say; This is a really boring record. She still writing songs. But there's nothing to hang on to in any of them.
Wait. Rap. There's rap on "Swing". Rap does NOT belong on an Ani DiFranco album. And electro-techno programming on "The Arrival's Gate" which loops a banjo sample and pairs it with a fluid bassline. Ani's lyrics, multi-tracked vocals make this track a treat. It's the most lively on the album. I could actually get into more of this, please.
Now playing: Ani DiFranco - The Arrivals Gate
via FoxyTunes

Oh, and Prince, PRINCE(!!!!) adds backing vocals to Providence. How did THAT happen??? The groove and swinging balls on this song almost redeem the album. I wish it was a) shorter and that b) it had opened the record.

This is my second least favorite Ani record. But, given that its the second one in a row, I don't have a lot of hope for the records of the new century.

Grade: D
A Side: Freakshow (but it's really not that good.) The Arrival's Gate
BlindSide: Clloud Blood, Swing(....almost but then....), Providence
DownSide: Swing...there's fucking rap on this. Maceo Parker's brother fucking raps on this. Carry You Around

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