360 records from the year 2000: 270 - 226 round-up

Thanks for hanging in there. I’m sure you’ve noticed – these are the records I can’t muster much interest in either way. Can’t hate ‘em, certainly can’t love ’em. With a lot of these records – the big ones, the ones you couldn’t miss, you were supposed to like as a music fan – it’s not that they’re worthless. I couldn’t honestly place them any lower. I see there’s something there. Something that consensus picked up on. But it’s just not enough. And you develop this grudge from continually being told this is as good as it gets, and you’re thinking ‘no, that can’t be. If this is as good as it gets these days, I just don’t want to hear it’. Then the hate starts…
But be forewarned, the change comes at 199. See you there!

Third week’s roundup (270-226): 7 songs that stick out of the mud, 7 songs I proudly proclaim my picks of the week.

1. Pat Metheny: Travels

A folk / gospel chord progression which sounds as old as the hills, an evocative melody. That’s all Metheny needs on this equally sad and uplifting track. Just some subtle drums and bass, and his acoustic guitar. He’s not so much soloing, as examining the different links in the melody line one by one. Tells you a lot of what you really need to know about life.

2. The Hives: Main offender

Funny to think, two (the two?) of the most snarling and plain entertaining slabs of garage rock in the garage rock revival which started from about 2001, had to be reissued from a Hives record released the year earlier. There wasn’t any scene to welcome these nuggets in 2000. In the grand garage rock tradition, the band had nothing further to add, but that didn’t stop them from milking it for all it was worth. In case you’re wondering, the cartoon quality adds to its appeal.

3. Mark Knopfler: One more matinee

See, this is what craft can do. You need to know a whole lot about chords to write a song like this. And it’s worth it. On a record mired in boredom, Knopfler takes time out to reflect on aging cabaret singers still hoping there’s a silver lining coming. The heart is that wonderful moment when the melody opens up into that ‘Something’s going to happen to make your whole life better’ part.

4. Cristina Branco: Ausente

Gaze into this abyss of human sorrow and you can be forgiven for jumping in. I know I’m picking a lot of these slow and sad songs as highlights – don’t know if it’s coincidence or if it says something about me. This has beautiful, florid piano playing supporting a defining diva (in the good sense) performance from Branco. The twists and turns give me shivers.

5. Slumber Party: Sooner or later

Wonderfully groovy and insouciant VU-pop. It certainly makes the most of those strummed chords, but with a winning chorus melody (I sing along!) and some deft Sterling Morrison soloing, I’d forgive them most things (releasing a sorry record on the back of this single for instance). It’s not given to anyone to build something so coolly naïve and straightforwardly rocking.

6. The Hives: Hate to say I told you so

See 2.

7. Keith Caputo: Just Be

If even white men can get the blues, then Life of Agony-singers can get the melody. All the things I wrote about the record this comes from are true, but I can’t deny the carefree frolicking piano, the heavenly banks of strings (so syrupy) and backing vocals, and the singing (that falsetto in the bridge!). Maybe this is what guilty pleasures are made of. A twee delight.

---

Cue Lou Reed:
Well hey(man), that's just a lie,
It's a lie she tells her friends.
'cause the real song, the real song
Where she won't even admit to herself

OK, OK, that’s not the whole story. I also made myself a Whitney Houston Sings Her Greatest Ballads – compilation:
1. Saving all my love for you
2. Greatest love of all
3. One moment in time
4. I have nothing
5. I will always love you
6. Run to you
7. All at once
8. Where do broken hearts go
9. Didn’t we almost have it all
10. My love is your love

It’s just to pass those lonely winter nights.

360 records from the year 2000: 270 - 261

270. Cristina Branco: Post-scriptum

Blues is the fado of America.
Well, that’s as far as this review’s likely to get. I hit the wall of my own perception. Yes, I do like the first and last songs on this album, they sound to me like they have something different, something that approaches my own field of experience. The rest is a wall of what could be great music, that I have no feeling for, no map to even start appreciating it. It exists, but outside of my personal field of aesthetics. Oh, I’ll sit reverently still as it’s playing, hoping to get thrown a bone, thankful for every occurrence of a little guitar motif that I can place. It’s like that sometimes. My loss, quite certainly.

At its best: Ai vida, Ausente

269. Keith Caputo: Died laughing

For a short time, I figured this was a Ween-esque parody on tortured rockers. Sadly it’s not. The music is very accomplished in a corporate post-grunge heavy ballad rock style, produced with some panache. I quite like it in a Perry Farrell way. But the lyrics are so bad it’s just impossible to tune them out. Granted you’re bound to come out of a vocalist slot for Life of Agony somewhat traumatized, but this takes psychiatrist couch rock (such a 90s genre) to previously unexpected depths of awfulness. The first few songs manage to be at least a little subtle about it, just a couple of stray terrible lines: ‘it’s warm inside a crucifix’ (‘Razzberry mockery’) or the chorus of ‘Selfish’, ‘I’m selfish with myself’. In the second third of the record there’s no escaping. ‘Home’ has a repeated chorus line ‘I recommend a psychotherapist to clean up your brain’ sung in a dramatic way as banks of violin rise from the depths. What to think of the faux-jazzy lounge groove of ‘Cobain (Rainbow deadhead)’ with its incessant refrain ‘Cobain was murdered by you’. Is this some elaborate code that I’m not in on? Maybe the chorus of the next ballad (‘Neurotic’) takes the biscuit though:
Syringe me
Syringe me
Syringe me with addiction

The final third loses all sense. Meaningless doggerel starts flying from all directions: ‘Standing naked in front of me / Won’t you sex my soul’ (‘Dew drop magic’), ‘If you don’t believe in heaven / It won’t believe in you (chorus from the same song), ‘Do you have to cry / Were you pulling Christ?’ (‘Upsy daisy’), ‘Your life is a crime / Frogman I’m dying / Arrogant hard-on borrow your own goat / Your life is a crime’ (also ‘Upsy daisy’), ‘I died last year of a heroin overdose / In memory to my sweet mom, she was strawberry blonde (‘Brandy Duval’), ‘Sometimes light behaves like a monkey / Sometimes light behaves like a torch / Fashion faith is entirely striking / Ode to Kate Moss’ (‘Brandy Duval’ again).

And somewhere in there, ‘Home’ again, is the worst lyric I’ve ever encountered in a love song. This guy wouldn’t recognize poetry if it hit him in the face with a brick. Ladies and gentlemen:
‘I’m swallowing stars and shitting out love’
Shame, cause some of the tunes are pretty good.

At its best: Razzberry mockery, Just be
At its worst: Cobain (Rainbow deadhead) is inexcusable, but token ballad to addiction ‘Neurotic’ hits me on an even deeper level of gut awfulness

268. Dwight Yoakam: Tomorrow’s sounds today

It just doesn’t add up to me. Reading about this record, I see a lot about how it’s everything Real Country (the obviously not-real country Nashville patriotic rock of the ‘90s and ‘00s) is not. And everything about it, from the title to the Buck Owens duets, to the vocal harmonies, to the fiddle playing and the pedal steel, the stomping country beat, seems to show Real Country what they’re doing wrong. Well, okay… but there’s more to life than showing Real Country what they’re doing wrong. 

So what’s giving it me? Is it giving me a feel for the classic country themes (heartbreak and honkytonks to name but two)? Not really – it touches those themes, but none of it hits home hard, none of it seems really more than a written-to-order theme tune. Is it giving me a feel for something new, some theme that hasn’t been expanded on in country yet? Definitely not. I get this sense that it’s too much of nothing, a really slick record trying to position itself as raw, simply because the competition is even more slick? And on a side note: what the fuck is that cover of Cheap Trick’s ‘I want you to want me’ doing here instead of ending up on the cutting room floor? Either be raw, or be slick unapologetically, but somewhere stuck in the middle with only denial for a friend… It doesn’t work for me, but I get the feeling Dwight might just write a song about it. And I’ll probably feel that one’s just a little too superficial as well.

At its best: Time spent missing you, A world of blue
At its worst: I want you to want me

267. Common: Like water for chocolate

No matter how many seriously great collaborators he manages to snare (?uestlove, d’Angelo, J Dilla…), fact is Common is a really dull artist – his subject matter is often annoying, his rapping without hooks. And the ‘Pimp’ skit – woman praises Common for his feminist stance, while Common keeps his ho’s in check – is really unforgivable – it’s just not funny. Shame about the collaborators who can’t raise this up above average but boring.

At its best: The light

266. Primal scream: XTRMNTR

Listening to Bobby Gillespie sing is like making love to a beautiful woman marinated in wild honey and exotic spices. Well, if you don’t buy that, here’s another one:
Some believe that making a painful mockery of yourself is at the heart of rock ’n’ roll, but that doesn’t mean every painful mockery is rock ’n’ roll. Primal Scream aim for an insurrectionist noise. MC5 meets Sun Ra meets Suicide. It’s not. It doesn’t even make me get up and protest horrible music. I just turn it down when asked by my girlfriend (who is a beautiful woman though not marinated, so I do whatever she says, even when she’s got a point like now).

At its best: Keep your dreams, IF you can get past opening line ‘I believe that syphilis can burn itself away’. Heart-breaking stuff.
Passable: Kill all hippies, Exterminator (damn those lyrics again though, all this talk about civil disobedience makes me want to wait for the green light before I cross the street), Blood money (finally, an instrumental)
Bad: Accelerator, Swastika eyes (both versions), Insect royalty, Mbv arkestra (layers of sound can’t hide that nothing happens in these 7 minutes), Shoot speed/Kill light
At its worst: Pills – I have to applaud such total lameness. Absolutely one of the worst songs I’ve heard from 2000, and I’ve heard a bunch. Objectively bad.

Edit: It’s been a few months since I wrote this, and on subsequent listens, while the overall awfulness hasn’t lifted, I’ve developed a strange, ‘Plan 9 from outer space’ like fascination for ‘Pills’.

265. Tom McRae: Tom McRae

Definitely not without rewards for attentive listeners. Nevertheless this singer songwriter may have released his debut a little prematurely. It’s all a bit underdeveloped and adolescent. And well, just his luck that I got a thing about adolescent singer songwriters. They make my skin crawl.

At its best: Second law, Draw from the stars, Untitled
At its worst: Bloodless

264. John Scofield: Bump

Jazz guitar, a little bit of soul/r&b in there, a little bit of stunt guitar. But…no, it doesn’t register.

At its best: Fez

263. Uri Caine: Goldberg variations

If there’s one record (or a double) that escapes classification, it’s this one. A bewildering set of variations (72 in total) based on Bach’s work. It ranges from straight (beautiful) renditions to the weirdest sounds. The premise seems to be to introduce Bach to all of the music that has come into being since he worked. So you get the Rachmaninov variation, the Verdi piano duet variation, but also New Orleans jazz, gospel, soul (anyone for the ‘Dig it variation’ ?– basically Caine singing ‘dig it’ to the tune of the variation), bossa nova, klezmer, minimalist variations, drum&bass variations… And then there are the really nutty ones: ‘The Dr Jekyll and mr Hyde variation’, ‘the stuttering variation’… Some really bad ideas.
There are certainly 30 minutes of outstanding beauty in there, but I just can’t get a handle on it. The whole thing sinks under its own weight. Of course it deals in caricatures, but the overacted singing on nearly all of the sung tracks (the gospel singing particularly excruciating) is a dealbreaker. It’s a no.

Edit: Let me try it with an abridged track list, like the one underneath. Better, but…no.

At its best: Disc one – 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 11, 14, 16, 18, 22, 28, 35, 39. Disc two – 3, 8, 10, 14, 15, 19, 21, 24, 30, 32, 33.
262. De la soul: Art official intelligence: Mosaic thump

Those De la soul guys are back. But it’s a disappointing return. You get the feeling it was time for another record, ‘How many have we made?’ you hear them think, and so they headed for the studio and stuck it out, had some friends over, got on with it and without too much hassle, here’s the new record. It’s not all bad, the first half is quite entertaining, but that real De La Soul touch doesn’t appear all that often. These are just some entertaining, could be anyone jams, and a bunch of skits of course. Occasionally it lifts itself out of the mire (see the high points below) but that happens all too rarely. And in between you have to sit through some boring tough guy workouts like ‘I.C.Y’all’, which fits De La Soul like a boxing glove fits a ballet dancer. In the second half of the record it gets pretty boring, the last third (which is still 6 songs – not having much to say doesn’t stop them from saying it a lot) is downright embarrassing: ‘Squat!’ is one of the worst Beastie Boys-tracks I’ve heard, and the Beastie Boys were never good at quality control. ‘With me’ is a lame slow jam. ‘Copa (Cabanga)’ is uninspired club/tropical junk. But worst of all is the last track ‘U don’t wanna B.D.S.’ which is quite literally a mess of people shouting over one another – one of the worst of the year. It could have been so much more.

At its best: Oooh, Thru ya city
At its worst: IC Y’all, Declaration, Squat!, U don’t wanna B.D.S.

261. Wyman, Bill – Rhythm kings: Groovin’

Where’s Jools?

At its best: Tomorrow night, Rhythm kings, Yesterdays