360 records from the year 2000: 215 - 206

215. Ute Lemper: Punishing kiss

German classical chanteuse, who made her name with Weill repertoire, takes a stab at lofty singer-songwriters of the modern age: Costello, Waits, Nick Cave, Scott Walker, Philip Glass, Neil Hannon (he seems a bit out of his depth, no?). We’re in deep water. These people take serious how seriously all these people take themselves. And it’s not without rewards, though halfway through the suspicion creeps up to you that all of them are keeping their A-game for their own records and are sending in substitutes. That is, apart from Hannon who pops up to sing along and lets band members contribute arrangements – clearly more involved than most, and Walker, who offers a customary, perplexing, ‘Is it music?’ piece. It’s the only moment on this record that you can’t just as easily make up in your head on the basis of this review, instead of listening to it.

At its best: The case continues, Split, Scope J
Funny: Lemper tries on her best Tom Waits voice for ‘Purple avenue’ and ends up somewhere near the Cheshire Cat in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland.

214. Kirsty MacColl: Tropical brainstorm

Kirsty’s in the line of British limerick pop. Ian Dury had it, Robbie Williams tried it. It’s no wonder Graham Gouldman co-writes a song here. 10cc had it. And so on.
So a typical verse from this album reads:
I once met a man with a sense of adventure
He was dressed to thrill wherever he went
He said ‘Let’s make love on a mountain top
Under the stars on big hard rock’
I said ‘In these shoes? I don’t think so’
I said ‘Honey, let’s do it here’
(I know it’s not really a limerick.)
I’ve nothing against it. It’s a venerable tradition (at least since the late ‘70s). I don’t mind the cross pollination with Latin pop styles either – it’s a peculiar mix between British understated humor and song craft values and Latin warm-bloodedness.

But lest we forget, 2000 was a highpoint of a specific strain of ‘saucy’ humor aimed at single middle-aged women (‘Sex and the city’, right? If that’s female sexuality, can’t they keep it hid?). And Kirsty’s discovered a new demographic. So this is all about lame scenarios involving internet sex, culinary metaphors for kitchen sex (‘Stuff me with whatever you’ve got handy’), football as metaphor for lying cheaters, releasing your inner slut, ‘Amazonians’ and men having midlife crises.
There’s a brand new car in your driveway
And a blonde new girl in your bed
You’ve everything you’ve ever wished for
Happy little bubblehead
And you can’t fill it up with promises
You can’t fill it up with lies
And you can’t fill it up with business lunches
Oh but you can try

Maybe I’m not the target audience.

At its best: Wrong again, Head

213. Hellacopters: High visibility

Quality MC5-style riff-rockers. Some excellent songs, but just a little variable in quality and I keep wishing they would get a little more adventurous, you know, like the MC5. Still, good stuff.

At its best: Hopeless case of a kid in denial, No song unheard, No one’s gonna do it for you, I wanna touch.

212. Paul Simon: You’re the one

Five reasons why ‘You’re the one’ is the best record of the year:
1. I bet Paul Simon pays those African musicians handsomely not only to play on his own records but also not to play on any other aging rock star’s records. I can’t count the ways this has been beneficial to all of us.
2. Who doesn’t want to hear the humble life lessons of the rich and famous?
3. If you’re looking for brutal self-analysis, nothing beats Simon’s summing up of his whole existence in two lines, ‘I’m tight / Well, that’s me’.
4. If you like fantasy, in that same song he says his name is Frank.
5. This whole record seethes with the singer’s frustration that his youthful work gets all the recognition. Come on, it screams out, all that stuff was done under deadlines, it was all compromised, I was held back by my band mates (well, the one guy), I hadn’t schooled myself in music from every indigenous tradition in the world yet. And don’t forget, I was young and dumb and working on blind intuition.
While now, with all the experience of writing an opera, I let the music come to me. I work without deadlines, inspiration unfolds at its own leisurely pace, in between my family holidays. I buy the best musicians to play it just right. Everything is controlled, everything is exactly as I wrote it down, cause I studied notation too, you know.
And the lyrics, those subtle zingers, the wisdom. When I write that verse in ‘Old’ (‘We celebrate the birth of Jesus on Christmas day / And Buddha found nirvana along the lotus way / about 1500 years ago the messenger Mohammed spoke / And his wisdom flowed’) you better believe I studied the bible, the Koran and a book of fortune cookie quotes cover to cover on audiobooks while I was sleeping on airplanes. Of course I’m better now! All that frustration, think about it, it’s just like ‘Tonight’s the night’. It’s like ‘Blood on the tracks’ about a man divorcing himself.
All that is undoubtedly true (except for the audiobooks of course, I don’t believe Paul Simon listens to anyone but his own records*). This record is way better than I’m describing it, with moments of undeniable beauty. Except, I’m still going back to ‘Parsley, sage…’, and I bet everyone else who got this does too. Tough, but you can take it, Paul, you’re tight.

*Just kidding, I know he’s got tons of African records.

At its best: Quiet, Old, That’s where I belong

211. Marc Ribot: Muy divertido

This literally doesn’t pretend to be anything more than a really diverting slab of guitar heavy Cuban-flavored excursions. Sometimes they sing a bit, but the accent is squarely on the instrumental exchange. It doesn’t sound probing or questing or soul-searching, or any of those. Just a bunch of excellent players digging in and exciting each other in good fun.
Maybe you have to be a bit of a guitar aficionado to get it – I mean, it’s Marc Ribot, you know him. But I tell you, after the whole Buena Vista-trad Afro-Cuban business boom of the late ‘90s, it’s good to hear some folks be so disrespectful towards Cuban rhythms and melodies.
This is really diverting music, and at first listen I was ready to place it quite high. Further spins have seen it drop a bit – I don’t know, maybe you’ll never be more excited by this record than in the first five minutes you hear it. Maybe this is exactly the sort of thing you should experience live rather than on a record (I would, definitely). Anyway, damn good fun, expect nothing less (but maybe nothing more).

At its best: Dame un chachito pa’huele, El divorcio, Se formo el bochinche

210. At the drive-in: Relationship of command

Do you think At the Drive-In named themselves after the great NRBQ song? Guess not.

I wrote this whole lecture after the third time I heard it:
My objective review:
At the drive-in deliver a maximum impact modern rock album that sets new standards for intensity. It’s a claustrophobic post-punk urban style. Very dense, compact, contained. In military terms, it would be closest to a splinter bomb. While not for everyone, At the drive-in should be commended for their undeniable commitment to aurally hitting their listeners in the face harder than any band going.
My subjective review:
I know many music fans rate this highly and I respect that. But it makes me sad a record like this has to exist in this world. Not cause it’s loud, not cause it’s heavy. But because it’s a record so utterly and completely about aggression and frustration. Listening to it (and I did, repeatedly), makes me feel physically and mentally nauseous, literally. And seriously, why would I want that? Why would I want to be stuck in this relentless aggressive frustrated self-contained world that offers no glimpse of salvation? Listen, I don’t have any problem with noise, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of heaviosity, but I can dig it, but at the root, rock’n’roll should set you free, it should be liberatory. That’s my belief. This is the opposite, locking people up in self-directed negativity.
But that’s not what makes me sad – yes, I am reactionary, but that’s not it. This record, or this style of music, would not strike a nerve (and it’s far too omnipresent to pretend it doesn’t), it would not be created at all, if it wasn’t necessary for it to exist. Society gets the music it deserves. This stuff is all around us, and someone was going to put it into music.

At its best: Objectively: Arcarsenal, Invalid litter dept. Subjectively: none.

But guess what, the fourth time it clicked. I no longer felt nauseous or kicked in the face. It felt kinda good.
Now, I still mean what I wrote before. I mean it about the whole context this record exists in, the development of a specific strain of American hardcore rock at the turn of the century. I’ve seen it compared to classic rock, but in truth it has almost no traces of classic rock in its genes. I’ve also heard it described as a genre without roots, which is equally wrong. It goes back at least 20 years (counting from 2000) to hardcore punk in Washington and Los Angeles (well, there’s people that know more about that than me) and of course there’s Rage against the Machine and Public Enemy and all that. But still, I stand by my opinion. It wasn’t a pretty scene. And I’ll stand on Jonathan Davis’s coffee table and say that. But this record makes me wonder if it’s possible that music which fits neatly into the genre, could be good enough to transcend the problems I have with it. It’s a moral dilemma for sure. Until Billy Bragg writes a song to tell me what to do, I guess I’ll just sit back and enjoy it. Fuck, I have moral issues with the whole genre and I place it just outside of the top 100 (Edit: well, that didn’t happen). If you like that sort stuff, feel free to bump this another 80 places or so. It’s good.

And so on:
No, back to square one – it’s well made, but it’s all violence and negativity, and I’m not having any fun.

209. Gopal Shankar Misra: Out of stillness

We all know what Ravi Shankar said in response to his first applause at the concert for Bangladesh: ‘Thank you, if you enjoy the tuning so much, we hope you enjoy the playing even more.’
I’ve never heard anyone tune like this.
This one, to me, is all about sensory experience. I’ve yet to locate a melody, but you need to play it loud so you can feel the strings humming, the impact of every thrum, slur, slide and so on. It’s quite a vibration.
It gets a bit much after about half an hour, I don’t always make it to the end, but for the first 30 minutes of impact, I won’t knock it.

At its best: Jod

208. Monster magnet: God says no

Despite their stoner rock satanist appearance, there’s always been something cute about Monster Magnet. And that’s what I like about them. There’s a cartoonish pop side there that sets them apart. Some of their singles really capture that vibe.
But this must be their off-day. It doesn’t buzz the way it should. Still fun, but not hellish fun.

At its best: Melt, My little friend, Down in the jungle – three awesome slabs of heavy pop, more of that would have been fine

207. Shimmer kids underpop association: Bury my heart at makeout point

I love the sound of Abbey Road in the ‘60s, I love the sound of Fame and American studios, I love the sound of Bradley’s barn and Easley studios, and I love the sound of ‘90s home recorded lo-fi. Where pop nuggets always seem surrounded by backwards tape experiments and found sound instrumentals, where everything sounds more frazzled than it should, where generous fuzz is the best way to cover up any flaws in your backing track. These days it’s getting harder and harder to find such badly recorded records.
The Shimmer kids (and so on) offer a near perfect example of that sound. It isn’t much more than the sound – couple of nice songs that would remain upright in a real studio environment aside – but on a good day the sound is all I need.

At its best: Society of rockets, Full color love affair, Sundowner, Last of the bright young men

206. Richard Buckner: The hill

A haunted creation. Buckner built this 34-minute single track record from snatches of instrumental sounds and poems out of a book called the ‘Spoon River anthology’ which he set to stark, desert Americana music and recorded with members of Calexico / Giant sand. The songs are desolate, literate, reminiscent of Springsteen on ‘The ghost of Tom Joad’. Covered in a maze of wild guitar excursions and lonely churchyard organ reveries, it becomes a fever dream of music.
It’s absorbing, fascinating stuff. Maybe it misses a couple of killer songs to really put it over. Indeed, it has the air of a fascinating experiment, something Buckner put out there in between his ‘official’ records. I should probably check some of those out. Consider me intrigued.

At its best: Fletcher McGee / Julia Miller, Elizabeth Childers