360 records from the year 2000: 225 - 216

225. Aimee Mann: Bachelor No 2 (last remains of the dodo)

For someone so accomplished Aimee Mann doesn’t allow much variation in her work. Are there really 13 different songs on this album? Melodically it seems like one long humming melody. I bet there’s no song here on which she doesn’t use that familiar step by step descending bass note chord progression. I love it too, but everything in moderation. Lyrically it’s the same thing: don’t all these lines fit in all of these songs? It’s all about the disillusionment of love, and she doesn’t have much compassion for the other person’s faults. Right?

I find myself halfway swayed by the accomplished melody, but halfway annoyed by these songs. It’s all very clever but at some point you have to ask yourself the question. Lyrics like these:
As we were speaking of the devil
You walked right in
Wearing hubris like a medal
You revel in
But it’s me at whom you’ll level
Your javelin

Or these:
Hey, kids – look at this
It’s the fall of the world’s own optimist
I could get back up if you insist
But you’ll have to ask politely
Cause the eggshells I’ve been treading
Couldn’t spare me a beheading
And I’ll know I had it coming
From a Caesar who was only slumming
(A Costello co-write, of course)

Are you sure Cole Porter done it this way? It gives me the creeps.

At its best: How am I different, Red vines, Just like anyone

224. Kingsbury manx: The Kingsbury Manx

With their circular, folksy patterns and canon-like call and response vocals, Kingsbury Manx float in and out of time in a pastoral, benignly psychedelic haze. To say it’s evocative is an understatement, but on this debut it’s often evocative of walking around the backrooms of some ancient natural history museum, rows and rows of animals in formaldehyde. You can hardly see them from the sun spots from insufficient lighting. Only in ‘New old friend blues’ there’s real feeling.
The band would break through their peculiar great divide on their great 2005 record ‘The fast rise and fall of the south’. I know I’m alone who thinks that, even among fans of the band who generally prefer this earlier period. But that’s how it is for me…

Edit: I’m a fan of a good museum anyway…

At its best: Pageant square, New old friend blues

223. Joe Jackson: Night and day II

It’s a rare combination between mid-life business as usual-ennui (‘Is he still making records?’) and ridiculously ill-advised experiments (‘Why is anyone making records like this?’), but ‘career explorer’ Joe Jackson walks the fine line. But that’s not the contradiction that sours this record most for me. The album varies wildly in quality. It’s often best when it sticks closest to home like love song ‘Stranger than you’ (with its very familiar opening melody – from an earlier Joe Jackson song?), or family dysfunction miniature ‘Dear mom’. On the other hand there’s ‘Love got lost’, an excuse for Marianne Faithfull to do her ‘I overindulged until I suffered just to bring you this great art’ routine. There’s the aptly titled ‘Why’, that Gregorian Arabic electronica you’ve always wanted never to hear, and ‘Just because’ with its mix of chamber music, drum’n’bass and self-loathing (‘Just because you’re paranoid / Don’t mean they’re not after you’) – a song in which I can find no redeeming features at all.

But, it can work or fail, at heart there’s something to admire in these experiments. The problem is, and that’s the contradiction I can’t work out, how Jackson can sound so cosmopolitan (and by extension open minded and stuff) and at the same time be so flip to the point where I wonder if he hates humans. I mean, I have a hard time getting past stuff like ‘Everything gives you cancer’, it’s so flip, there’s no charity or empathy to anyone. He’s at it again on this album: ‘Happyland’, a song out of the newspapers about a fire in a nightclub – is he going for it? Yes, he is, it’s ‘the hottest club in town’. Soon he’s off into some parodic ‘Bailare / Esta noche…’ ad libs. ‘Dear mom’ is the most uncharitable song about runaway kids you’ll ever hear. When he breaks down in ’Glamour and pain’ to sing a chorus of ‘But no one sees me fly / No one feels my pain / No one hears me cry / No one knows my name / Is glamour and pain’ it’s like you’re stuck with that unpleasant colleague who always puts everyone down, now crying: ‘But what about me?’

At its best: Stranger than you, Dear mom
At its worst: Just because

222. Delta: Slippin’ out

Something’s wrong with this picture. Everything to make this record a classic 60s throwback pop classic is here: the strings, the horns, the right keyboard sounds, the sincere, positive vibe… But it’s not working – the record is easy on the ears alright, but nothing (bar maybe the two highlights) sticks. I guess it wasn’t to be for these guys.

At its best: Everybody, It’s alright

221. Belle & Sebastian: Fold your hands child, you walk like a peasant

I don’t know much about Belle & Sebastian, but from what I’ve heard they seem the kind of band that would invert the normal ratio quality songs/fluff songs on a record deliberately. That’s exactly what’s wrong here. Things start of excellent - every time I play this I get sucked into thinking ‘How can a record beginning with ‘I fought in a war’ possibly turn into anything but a classic?’ But it doesn’t. Just about everything that follows is fluff (with the possible exception of ‘Chalet lines’, the jury’s still out). Not bad fluff, they could easily spread it out over their next four albums – if they only wrote quality songs from here on in of course – but all together it’s like an album length version of ‘Ob-la-di Ob-la-da’. But not as awesome as that would undoubtedly be. It’s all so fruity and marshmallow-y. Which is a shame, cause the sound world of the record is wonderful – those strings, those acoustics, the pianos, the percussion. ‘I fought in a war’ though, excellent song, excellent arrangement, excellent performance. That’s the keeper. The record is not. But I’m sure they know what they’re doing. They sound really smart.

At its best: I fought in a war, The chalet lines

220. Buffalo Tom: Asides from… (1988-1999)

Buffalo Tom have over the course of their career amassed a number of songs I like to hum along to. Nice, melodic guitar songs. I thought a compilation might be the ideal way to go with them. And I think most of their memorable songs are indeed here, it’s a fine bunch, not innovative, not subversive, but nice, poppy guitar stuff. Reviewers like those on AllMusic like to describe them as having ‘compassionate intelligence’. Normally that’s the death knell, but Buffalo Tom on occasion make it work for me. ‘Summer’ which just sounds like wasted time and regret. ‘Larry’ which sounds like… wasted time and regret as well. However, there’s far too much other songs here, that are just the same as the ones that work, but they don’t. And so there’s no hiding from the realization that even on a compilation Buffalo Tom strike the image of a pretty workaday band. Dull, really. It’s a shame.

At its best: Summer, Sodajerk, Taillights fade, Kitchen door, Treehouse, Larry, I’m allowed, Birdbrain, Late at night

219. Carla Bley: 4x4 Jazz Ost-West

I already knew ‘Baseball’ is the closest composition you’ll find in jazz to the real NRBQ spirit. More than Terry Adams’s jazz album, ‘Terrible’, that’s for sure. Now I can hear that a Carla Bley show is also the closest jazz will get to the spirit of an NRBQ show. And that’s not bad. Not bad at all. Fun.
But… this recording is just too short. Four songs, a good 20 minutes. Opener ‘Chitchen’ is good, but you can hear them getting into it. It’s just as outrageous as the rest, it just doesn’t come naturally. But it comes. ‘Baseball’ is wacky and great. ‘Betul ship’ with its quotes from the great songbook (‘The last post’ etc) ain’t far behind. And ‘Baby baby’ evokes some real feeling (well, besides fun, which is also a nice feeling). It’s not cloying, but touching. And that’s it. More of a teaser than an album, really. Hmm, I like it, but it doesn’t really deliver. I need…something more. And that’s a feeling I hardly ever get with NRBQ shows.

At its best: Baseball

218. Tim O’Brien & Darrell Scott: Real time

Oh craft, I am not your enemy. I dig you, to tell you the truth. I mean, whoever is waiting for the next great imaginative statement from your average pop musician, has picked the wrong crowd for his expectations. Buckling down and learning the hard way how the artists before you (there are generations of ’em after all) made things sound meaningful, transcendental even, is really the better career option for most. Who knows, maybe one of the few greats will hire you at some point and you can support him to great expression.
I’m actually serious. And in the meantime the craftsmen make records like this: two country musicians with bluegrass leanings, recording live in a living room, no overdubs (hence the title), just acoustic guitars, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, harmony singing, couple of originals, couple of traditionals and covers (Hank Williams, who else?). I have real sympathy for the enterprise, and it veers into something inspired more often than you’d expect (someone should cover ‘I’m not gonna forget you’), but in the end, up against the best of any year, sorry, not enough. And I have to deduct points for ‘The second mouse’, an almost instrumental on which you can hear the two musicians switch between all their instruments in real time! It’s not on.

At its best: More love, There ain’t no easy way, I’m not gonna forget you

217. Eels: Daisies of the galaxy

1. E is a talented songwriter and arranger
2. I can very much enjoy this record while it’s playing.
3. There’s always been something less than there should be about Eels. Part of it is that his songs are very similar, they’re really like variations on one perfect ideal song in E’s mind. And many of the individual manifestations of this ideal aren’t all that well developed (on this record: ‘Packing blankets’, ‘Something sacred’, ‘A daisy through concrete’, ‘I like birds’, and that’s just for starters). Part of it is that E allows some damnable lapses of taste. Goddamn all that ‘Novocaine for the soul’ shit – one of the worst in a string of woeful mid ‘90s alternative blockbusters. And he’s at it again with that damn ‘It’s a motherf #&l@r’ song. Mark Everett was 37 years old in 2000 and he still thought it was a cool idea to have a swearword in a fragile ballad. Edgy…
Bottom line, enjoyable ear candy while it lasts, nothing less but nothing more.

At its best: Grace Kelly blues, It’s a motherf#&l@r, Jeannie’s diary, Wooden nickels, Mr E’s beautiful blues

216. Coldplay: Parachutes

Competence is its own reward. There’s nothing wrong with any of the songs on this album, but there’s the rub.
If anything you have to salute these guys for their constancy. Recording of this record took almost a year apparently (summer ‘99 - may ‘00), and yet they never waver from that singular emotion they can express: some lethargic, self-involved, ‘I’m never getting up from this couch again’ state, which is remarkably similar to what listeners feel when playing the record.
All seriousness aside, there really is nothing wrong with any of these songs. You can’t fault it for what it is. But after a while you wish it was something else, anything else.

High points: Don’t panic, Yellow