Titus Andronicus - The Monitor

Titus Andronicus - The Monitor - 2010

Okay, this album is a couple years old, but they've got a new one coming out and I thought, given that I just blasted through the Japandroids latest and, well, my ears don't hurt yet, I thought it would be a good time to back to TA.

Not since The Gaslight Anthem (Or Arcade Fire. Or John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band) has there been a band that has been as explicit of its love of Springsteen as Titus Andronicus. But, if that means you are expecting heartland music about the downtrodden or deserving, you won't get that here.

Part Civil War reflection piece, part Americana, part punk, part rock operas, The Monitor is impossible to pigeon hole. The opening track, A More Perfect Union, is a kitchen sink of chaos. But it's really the next track that Titus Andronicus show their true colors.

They are an anthem band for the 21st Century. Bookending the anthem with quotes (most notably, Lincoln's "most miserable man living" at the end) they aren't writing anthems for stadiums. These are intimate, difficult, small venue anthems. Titus Andronicus want you to hurt the way we all do when we are wronged. they want you to feel the blood on the battlefield on the mid-1800s.

Or that's just what I am putting on them. But, deep in the chaos and dischord are some beefy and powerful hooks. I imagine a sea of Jersey kids jumping up and down, fists in the air, chanting, "you will always be a loser" at the end of "No Future Part 3: Escape from No Future, which, on the album, uses that momentum to take us into a marching band, parade snare gigantor of a track, Richard II or Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Responsible Hate Anthem). If this 2/4 Irish jig on steroids doesn't get the crowd going, I dont want to know what would.

The album seems to reach its nadir of despair on "Four Score and Twenty", a song of hopelessness and desperation as I've ever heard. But the band knows well enough that there's no currency in pure hopelessness. So, the second half of this 8 minute centerpiece roils up like The Pogues challenged to a fistfight and declares itself "Born to die just like a man". It's ultimately a heroic piece, if even for the ultimate conclusion of much of the civil war, these men were NOTHING if not brave in the face of certain death.

Whew.

Fortunately that's only followed by the most Replacement-like paen to blind stinking drunkenness, "Theme from 'Cheers'" which has nothing to do with the actual theme from "Cheers" and more from the "Theme" of what happens in a bar. I.e. getting vomit inducing drunk.

The capstone to the record is the 14 minute (yes, you read that right) "The Battle of Hampton Roads" which is elliptically set against the epic battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack but is really a confessional for the singer who is rebelling against....well...everything. And finally pleas with his "darling" to never leave him, for he'd be nothing without...her? Or is it the war? Or is it the society he needs to rebel against?

I don't know. I don't think Patrick Stickles, the singer, does either. It doesn't matter. It SHOULD be unresolved as the famous battle wasn't decidedly won by either side.

The Monitor isn't an easy album. It's demanding. If you give yourself over to it, it's like discovering Neutral Milk Hotel for the first time. Only edgier and angrier with a LOT more feedback. This band could be called Feedback. Or Funeral. Or Funny Funereal Feedback.

But, when you do give yourself to Titus Andronicus, be prepare to rock out like you've never done before.

Grade: A

ASide: A More Perfect Union, No Future Part 3: Escape from No Future
BlindSide: Richard II or Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Responsible Hate Anthem), Theme From "Cheers", The Battle of Hampton Roads

Japandroids - Celebration Rock

Japandroids - Celebration Rock - 2012

"We yell like Hell to the Heavens!"

Who says rock is dead?

Okay. Maybe rock is dead. Maybe no one wants to play it on the radio anymore. Maybe.

But, there's something about bashing barre chords and hitting drums as hard as you can and rousing teenage boys and girls to jump around in front of a stage.

Too many bands are more interested in being effete and musical or hypnotizing their fans into a subdued trance state.

And then there are Japandroids. A couple guys out of Vancouver (By the way, BC rocks. Black Mountain, anyone? AC/DC recorded their last one there. Something about that city of glass) who rock harder than The Gaslight Anthem or The Darkness or, hell, just about anyone.

They aren't slaves to old tropes and yet they use classic metal tropes to make their points. Case in point, the accentuating cymbal crashes of "Evil's Sway", who's chorus will have you adding Tom Petty's "American Girl" to your playlist (Trust me, just listen to it).

The sounds that Guitarist Brian King and Drummer David Prowse make could tear down any stadium roof. They are Monsters of Rock in an era when so few want to blow the doors down.

At 35 minutes, Celebration Rock is just that. A celebration of rock. Of music. It's joyful and chaotic and messy and explosive. Everything Rock is supposed to be. Honestly, if it lasted any longer it would be bloated with filler. Because this is the perfect amount of time to spend with this music.
Celebration Rock closes as it opens: with the sounds of actual fireworks. Which aren't as epic as the movies make them out to sound but that's the realness of fireworks. They aren't explosions of a Star Wars-ian scale. They are dry and hollow and there's real beauty in them because they are jarring and so very very ephemeral.

That's Celebration Rock.

Its a party record by way of assault. But it's not dumb. No, not dumb at all. Imagine if Titus Andronicus could find a way to trim 5 minutes off some of their epics.

So, Rock isn't dead.
The Hold Steady may have gotten exhausted being the only band of its kind in a Bieber/Perry pop world, but they just kicked down the door for Japandroids. And The Gaslight Anthem. And Titus Andronicus.

Grade: A
ASide: Days of Wine and Roses, Fire's Highway, The House that Heaven Built
BlindSide: Evil's Sway, Adrenaline Nightshift

Blind FlashBack: Lynyrd Skynrd - Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd

Hey, here's another one I've never heard. Allmusic gave it 5 stars. It MUST be great. Right?



 Lynyrd Skynrd - Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd - 1973

Skynrd's debut record fires on all cylinders from jump. Sounding like a bunch of vets with a long discography behind them, it's actually surprising to know that this is their first album.
The dynamite opener of "I Ain't the One" acts like an overture. Followed by the epic mid-tempo "Tuesday's Gone", which could have fallen off the best of songs by The Band that you never heard, "Pronounced" is unrelenting. No sooner have they finished a SEVEN minute dirge-ballad then we get picked right up with a beer-swilling boogie of "Gimme Three Steps" and they close the first side with a classic 70s epic. "Simple Man" really only hints at the greatness to come, but if this was all we'd get that would be enough. Dayanu.
Flip the record over and it's whiskey drinking, monster truck rally time. "Things Goin' On", with it's honky-tonk piana acts more like an intermission. It plays like a jam that, for all intents, could take up the entire second side and no one would be disappointed. Thank goodness it doesn't, because then we wouldn't get the treat of the stripped down, do-bro, harmonica goodness of "Mississippi Kid", or the dingy, drunk, dirty, "Poison Whiskey", which could have (and probably should have and, fuck, may have) served as the soundtrack for the Walking Tall movies. Or, at least, laid the groundwork for a decade's worth of porn soundtracks.
And then, the granddaddy of them all. The FM radio brother to Zeppelin's Stairway.
Free Bird is every bit as great and grandiose now as it has been the 900 times you've heard it on WPLJ or WDHA (The Parkway to Rock!) or whatever your classic rock station was.
My two minds of Free Bird are that I hate the fact that it fades out at the end, because I am a sucker for a good ending. And, after 9 minutes, I feel like I deserve it. On the other hand, if a bird flies away...well...it fades from view, right?
I can't believe I just made that analogy.

One of the best debuts ever.

Grade: A+
ASide: Tuesday's Gone, Gimme Three Steps
BlindSide: Simple Man, Poison Whiskey

Queen for a Day - Play the Game

"No synthesizers!" was the cry on every Queen album in the 70s. All the sounds that were produced came from non synthetic instrumentation.

And then the opening descending noise-waterfall of the album The Game happened and we knew that was over.

But, it wasn't like they went crazy. In fact, more than anything, the album was a back-to-basics affair. And this song opened the festivities. The calliopal bridge bled into a trad-guitar solo and it didn't really sound all that different from anything that could have been on News of the World.
The big harmonies are there, the bombast.

The song itself is pablum and piffle. "This is your life, all you have to do is fall in love. Play the game."But it's no worse than, say, "Jealousy".

A fine, neat, somewhat dull, by the numbers Queen song.

Grade: B+

Blind FlashBack: The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms

Blind Flashback is a new feature. It might go in depth, it very well might not. It may cease to exist in a heartbeat. But for the time being, it's here and we should enjoy it. 

;)

This is where I take a classic album that I SHOULD have heard, that I SHOULD know about, but, completely missed my attention. 

Thanks to Spotify, I've been able to rectify that.




The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms 1980

The title actually says it all. This is all herky jerky rhythms and jangle. The roots for everything R.E.M., Aztec Camera and a host of 80s bands can be found, sort of, in here. This is also ground zero for alternative music.

At once impenetrable and accessible, the first thing I noticed was how difficult it was for me to give over to the album. It took time for me to realize that these are as much mood pieces as they are post-punk songs. Is it Penguin Cafe Orchestra? Or is it Talking Heads?
Is it Jangle Pop? or is it No-Wave?

Yes.

The album cover screams "NEW WAVE" but the music is something entirely different. Something that I've never heard before and never since. And yet, it's all familiar.

The percussion is as important to the music in a way that percussion almost wasn't to many New Wave bands. And yet, it was VITAL to Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow. But, in that case, it was a fad, aping African beats. Anton Fier IS tribal beats. And...crazy rhythms.

If Kraftwerk was a guitar band, they might have made an album like this. But they weren't. And they weren't from Suburban New Jersey.

if Jonathan Richman had a full band to play off of HE might have come up with this.  But he didn't.

I could go on and on. I had an album called "Red Snerts", which you can search the web for if you're interested in more about it. It was cheap at some record store in NY when I was 15. It featured New Wave bands of Indianapolis. Many of them sounded like they wanted to be The Feelies. But none of them got it quite right because The Feelies were also, weirdly, a party band. If your party was filled with pogo-ing nerds.

This is a spectacular piece but also one of those records I'm sort of glad I didn't hear in 1980. Because I wouldn't be able to discover it now.

Grade: A+

Queen for a Day - More of that Jazz

I absolutely do not understand this song. First off, it sounds like a desperate John Lennon grab. But it's empty and soulless. Filler of the ultimate type. It does, however, hold fast to the Roger Taylor " bored and a rock star and I've got wayyyy too much time in my hands" aesthetic that he mined in "Drowse".
The riffing is pretty great then---
Suddenly the song lifts pieces of a majority of the other tracks and strings them together in a montage before heading back to its own chorus. Which is, "give us no more of that jazz". So...is he saying that the rest of the album is shite?
I don't know. I know that this song is a bad coda to the last "Me decade" album by Queen.

Grade: C-

Queen for a Day - Don't Stop Me Now

Ah!





So, finally getting back, the timing couldn't have been better.
I mean, better to stop before one of my favorite songs of all time, right?

"I wanna make a supersonic man outta you!"

A rollercoaster of a track, DSMN is basically the first real foray into dance music for the band. It's a rollicking neo-disco track that, just when you think it can't get any more kitschy, breaks out of the bridge with a killer guitar solo. Welcome to the party, Mr. May.

But, this is all Freddie's party, man.

You're all invited, but it's his show.

Grade: A+

Listening Post: Gary Numan - Dead Son Rising

Gary Numan - Dead Son Rising - 2011

Gary's like an old friend that you never want to invite over. He's difficult and he thinks he's better than everyone else, or that HE came up with the ideas first and, therefore....and you just can't shut him up.
But, he's a good friend and when he has something to say, you give him a chance. Right?

In transferring my reviews from the other blog I've lost the one for Jagged, but, I've heard it, reviewed it and I'm not going there again.

Employing more pops and clicks and glitches in all the right places, Gary settles in to a nice grandfatherly place for a style of music that has sort of seen better days. It's not the 90s anymore, and I'm not sure everything needs to sound like a soundtrack to a David Fincher movie anymore.

There are no surprises here. Gary's still scoring apocalyptic sci-fi movies that don't exist. But he's employing acoustic guitars instead of just all synths. He's broadening his palette and that, for the most part, works. He gets downright danceable on "The Fall" and his beats, while they aren't groundbreaking, they don't completely suck.

I like Dead Son Rising. The songs may have come from demos for other albums but I can't recognize the eras for each, save for the slavish devotion to Trent Reznor, it's not that the songs were written in the 90s (they might have been), it's that Gary's stuck in that era. Although, I swear he's also been listening to OK Computer and KID A a LOT while working on this record. If he could have come up with "Fitter/Happier", I'm sure he would be happy.

But then again, I'm not sure Gary's ever been happy.

Grade: B
ASide: Big Noise Transmission, The Fall
BlindSide: Resurrection, We Are The Lost
DownSide: For the Rest of My Life (reprise), Into Battle

Almost forgot!

It's been over a year but I WILL finish the Queen for a Day.

Note to self: Finish Queen for a Day

There.

Hi there!

It's been awhile, no?
I've been crazy busy. And just haven't had the time.
Well, that's not true. The fact is, this blog basically got replaced by Facebook. And Spotify.
Since those two are linked, anyone can read and see what I'm listening to. So, that conversation got more personal and takes less work from me.
But, that doesn't mean I haven't been listening.
And, holy balls, there's some great stuff out there.

So, here's what I need to get to, and I will, I promise:

AWOLNation review
Fun. LP (With The Format & Steel Train!)
Japandroids review
Fang Island (review)
Foxy Shazam Doubleshot
Chickenfoot Doubleshot
You, Me & everyone We know (one off)
Whitesnake (Last record in the LP)
Adele Doubleshot
Weezer (That last piece of garbage)
The Gaslight Anthem (An LP)
"Dead Son Rising" by Gary Numan. to finish off that LP
The Dictators (Not sure exactly what to do here)
Redd Kross (a quartershot)
Britney Spears (a full LP!)
Crocodiles (a triple shot)
And a big Bruce Springsteen Reflecting Pool. (That one unnerves me. Can I be objective?)
And everything else I got in '11 and never got to.

But...when and how? Time is not my own lately.
I promise.