Soul Coughing, “Ruby Vroom”

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ruby-vroom

(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #46 – released September 27, 1994)

Track listing: Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago / Sugar Free Jazz / Casiotone Nation / Blue-Eyed Devil / Bus To Beelzebub / True Dreams of Wichita / Screenwriter’s Blues / Moon Sammy / Supra Genius / City of Motors / Uh, Zoom Zip / Down To This / Mr. Bitterness / Janine

I first heard Soul Coughing when they opened for They Might Be Giants at the Barrymore Theatre in Madison about six months after their debut album Ruby Vroom came out. Going in without any expectations, it ended up the best live performance I’d seen to date (granted, my first concert was only two years before). I was so entranced that I thought I was seeing nothing less than my generation’s equivalent of the Talking Heads in terms of originality and impact as a live outfit. Naturally, I purchased a copy of Ruby Vroom not long after; nearly a decade later, I noted that it didn’t sound dated at all, that it was still unclassifiable and daringly weird: “Forget Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots, or Smashing Pumpkins–this was alternative rock,” I enthusiastically wrote.

While it’s aged far better than those more popular mid-90s artists, Ruby Vroom doesn’t exactly sound timeless today. You certainly couldn’t get away with the album’s opening lyric (“A man flew a plane into the Chrysler building”) post 9/11 and the “ironic” cover art screams 1994 more than any other album from that year I’ve covered here. Furthermore, Soul Coughing’s ultra-specific sound and aesthetic is just something you don’t hear anymore, anywhere: it feels completely relegated to that brief period of time in the early-mid ‘90s when Modern Rock was newly trendy as a commercial option, allowing for quirkier-than-usual bands to get a foot in the door. After all, Soul Coughing were on a major record label—an unthinkable prospect now.

One can neatly summarize that ultra-specific sound by breaking down its core components. First, you have the rhythm section, which consists of the usual drummer (Yuval Gabay) but also an upright bassist (Sebastian Steinberg); together, they provide an overtly jazzy foundation. Then, there’s vocalist/lyricist M. (Mike) Doughty, whom alternately sings, raps, sputters and recites spoken-word poetry in a personality-rich but musically untrained voice, somewhere between a more adroit, nasally Tom Waits and a slacker Fred Schneider. Doughty also plays rhythm guitar—the band’s most formidable connection to it even being considered alternative rock. Still, although Soul Coughing would be immeasurably different without Doughty’s contributions, its fourth member, Mark de Gli Antoni, is their true wild card. Credited with playing “keyboard sampler”, which amounted to about 10% keyboard, and 90% manipulating samples, his input is a major part of what renders so much of Soul Coughing’s output as unclassifiable.

It’s arguably the samples one notices most when first hearing Ruby Vroom because they’re so playful, creative and deftly woven into each song. “Bus to Beelzebub” is built upon an extended section of Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse”, a tune most will recognize by sound if not by name (think of theme music for a cartoon assembly line). The sample’s repetitive, humorously anxious melody is all one hears for the song’s first few seconds; then, the rest of the band kicks in, and the melding of the two is both giddy and strangely grounded, as Doughty raps nonsense lyrics more valuable for their cadence than content (“Yellow number five, yellow number five, five, five.”) “Sugar Free Jazz”, which could almost be an unintended facsimile of trip-hop, finds Antoni’s undeniably jazzy horn interjections negating Doughty’s gutturally delivered accusations of this being a watered-down version of the real thing. Later, on “Down To This”, Doughty’s repeated chorus (“You get the ankles and I’ll get the wrists”) is juxtaposed with the album’s most familiar sample, from The Andrew Sisters’ 1940s chestnut “Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree”: “Anybody else but me, no, no, no!” they warble. Coming right after the chorus, their cautionary pleas take on a wary, almost frightened tint, but the music’s so catchy and upbeat that it’s more fun than sinister.

In fact, “fun” is an ideal word to describe the bulk of Ruby Vroom, especially on the massive “Casiotone Nation”, an out-and-out manifesto to sampling where Antoni practically seems to exhaust every last snippet and found sound from his arsenal. However, the song’s underlying structure is rock solid: Steinberg and Gabay lay down a twisty, swinging rhythm track while Doughty ad-libs/rattles off a series of descriptive phrases that contain no deeper meaning than the randomness of their pop culture references. They all begin with the words “The Five-Percent Nation of,” which are followed by such effluvia as “corduroy”, “Milton Bradley” and “nipple clamps” before arriving at the beloved, “The five percent nation of Casiotone” (the last word emphasized and exaggerated) at the chorus. In the second verse, the repeated phrase switches to “The People’s Republic of” stuff like “Lake Edna”, “chocolaty delicious” and, exclaimed in a mocking, singsong tone, “lumps in my oat-meal!” The whole thing roars to a spazzy, furious finale, hitting upon some sort of frenzied bliss as Antoni repeatedly loops the first three words of the old Mighty Mouse theme song lyric, “Here I Come! (to save the day).”

Nothing else on the album is quite so clever, experimental and in-your-face as those aforementioned songs, but that’s a bit of a relief and a credit to the band that they’re not a one-trick pony. What Doughty ultimately brings to Soul Coughing is an unanticipated singer/songwriter vibe. It’s first heard on “True Dreams of Wichita”, a gentle, loping, nearly elegiac lament with an engaging, straightforward melody and minimalist accompaniment. Both lend heft to such hazy imagery as “Brooklyn like a sea in the asphalt stalks / push out dead air from a parking garage”, which he alternates with more lucid, emotionally effective phrases like, “I’ve seen the rains of the real world come forward on the plain / I’ve seen the Kansas of your sweet little myth.” “City of Motors” reprises a similar amount of feeling only in a more noir setting where he seems to be telling someone else’s story until switching to first-person on the plaintive chorus. On closer “Janine”, he even goes full-ballad mode: it’s a sincere, acoustic strummer easy enough for any busker to fully replicate, except for the sample of a woman singing a different song into an answering machine that simply exists throughout the track’s background—the quirky addition that fully renders “Janine” a Soul Coughing song.

These two seemingly disparate strands of edgy art outfit and story-song band join together most formidably on “Screenwriter’s Blues” at the album’s near-exact midpoint. As with “Bus To Beelzebub”, a sole, looped sample kicks things off, but it’s more for texture and momentum than any overriding recognition. After Doughty begins sprouting off spoken-word prose (“Exits to freeways / twisted like knots / on the fingers”), the rhythm section soon comes in, building up a groove in tandem with the two-note sample. Doughty then moves into a colorful yet content-rich, Bukowski-like exploration of the song’s titular profession, gleefully yet measuredly extolling both the gleaming attraction and seedy underbelly of L.A. Like an on-the-air DJ/preacher, he announces, “It is 5 A.M. / and you are listening / to / LOS ANGELES.” He goes on to tell imagined tales both commonplace and sordid (“You are going to Reseda / to make love to a model / from Ohio whose name you don’t even know”) and offer learned observations (the city has “Gone savage for teenagers who are aesthetically pleasing / in other words FLY”, that last word stretched out almost beyond the limits of sarcasm). Meanwhile, the groove just keeps on building; along with Doughty’s prose leading the charge, the song forever reaches toward that sweet spot combining total mental and physical stimulation, until, like all songs, it must eventually end—in this case, like a radio transmission fading, abruptly petering out.

Ruby Vroom itself didn’t receive any significant radio airplay (apart from independent college stations), but the band’s two subsequent records (Irresistible Bliss (1996) and El Oso (1998)) did, actually taking advantage of the opportunity bubble alt-rock briefly afforded, even scoring minor hits with “Super Bon Bon” and “Circles”. Of course, while still distinctive and notably consistent, each album sounded increasingly more conventional and predictable than the last, to the point where it wasn’t much of a surprise when Soul Coughing ran out of gas and split in 2000. Doughty eventually settled into a pleasant, if unremarkable solo career best summed up by his being on Dave Matthews’ label for a sizable chunk of it. He later revealed he didn’t get along with the rest of the band; in hindsight, that very tension between Doughty’s outsize personality and songwriter pretensions and the other band members’ “serious” jazz backgrounds (they all met when Doughty worked the front door at The Blue Note) is what made Soul Coughing interesting—a confluence of disparate influences clashing against each other, creating something entirely new. Aging cynics might claim it could’ve only happened in the mid-90s, but the optimist in me still continuously seeks out its modern day equivalent.

Up next: Borrowing from the best of all worlds and making it your own.

“Screenwriter’s Blues”:

“Casiotone Nation”:

Portishead, “Dummy”

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dummy

(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #45 – released August 22, 1994)

Track listing: Mysterons / Sour Times / Strangers / It Could Be Sweet / Wandering Star / It’s A Fire / Numb / Roads / Pedestal / Biscuit / Glory Box

Late 1994, a dreary Saturday afternoon, driving up Packard Avenue in Cudahy, the radio in my parents’ borrowed Grand Am tuned to New Rock 102.1 FM, Milwaukee’s first commercial “Alternative”, or Modern Rock station (having switched over from Top 40 that September). Upon hearing the opening to Portishead’s “Sour Times” for the first time, I nearly pulled the car over—of course, I didn’t actually do so (although it’d make for a greater story if I had). Still, rarely before or since has hearing something new on the radio instantly startled me. The cinematic strings, the shuffling beat, the sly, spy-music guitar riff, the impossibly mournful female singer and most of all, that odd, unidentifiable, repeated, trembling, almost clanging noise utilized as a hook—all of it so unexpected, intriguing and eerie.

“Sour Times”, with its indelible chorus of “Nobody loves me, it’s true (pause) / not like you do,” would become a top five Modern Rock hit in the new year. Although Portishead would remain a one-hit wonder where that format was concerned, once something that strange and innovative received the amount of radio airplay it did, it felt like there was no going back to a time when the radio couldn’t be this interesting. Of course, it did just that, repeatedly, as Modern Rock as a format devolved first into a rather corporate version of “edgy” music that ended up little more than a playground for trend-jumpers and what I like to call “one-hit grungsters” (we won’t speak further of its second, later, downward slide into testosterone-heavy nu-metal). However, for one brief period, the possibilities of Modern Rock felt limitless. While Dummy was born out of circumstances and a scene that had precious little to do with this format, for me it exemplified a few optimistic months of my radio-listening youth before things turned, well, sour.

Two decades on, Dummy is more regularly remembered as one of the quintessential trip-hop albums rather than for anything it contributed to Modern Rock. Trip-hop was a moniker assigned to mostly British music inspired by the drum-machine, bass and sample-heavy rhythm tracks of rap songs. The difference was that it had virtually no rapping and none of the cultural signifiers rap as a genre contained. The first real trip-hop record, Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, did feature rap on a few tracks, but it was entirely shorn of braggadocio or hardness, instead adhering closer to soft-spoken word and beat-derived jazz. The title track and lead single on Massive Attack’s second album, Protection, went to so far to feature Everything But The Girl’s vocalist Tracey Thorn, thus cementing an easy-to-follow template for the subgenre: a woman singing, often sorrowfully, occasionally playfully over a hip-hop beat, with samples coloring the spaces in between.

Although Dummy is undeniably trip-hop and a genre-defining record at that, it almost feels reductive to say so, in the same way that it became go-to “sexy bedroom” music for many listeners in subsequent years. In actuality, Dummy is often cold, dark, challenging and abrasive; intermittently, it’s also beguiling, melodic, and seductive and even radiates a little warmth and solace. Although noticeably influenced by the orchestral sweep of John Barry and the langour of Isaac Hayes (whom it samples), the album had few other precedents; also, much (but not all) of the trip-hop that followed palely imitated it without carrying a fraction of its depth, ingenuity and weirdness. It’s an easily comprehendable record on first listen that seems to reveal previously hidden facets and complexities as one becomes more familiar with and pays closer attention to all its darkened, emerging corridors.

For those not enclined to spend too much time on Dummy, “Mysterons” could tell you all you needed to know about the entire album on a superficial level: the opening, echoey Fender Rhodes electric piano repeating four notes and two chords, the record-scratching sample and loping, drum machine beat that both could’ve come off any Dr. Dre production, reverb-heavy guitar lurking in the background, the spooky, horror-flick vibe of the Theremin (in this case, a simulation of such and not the actual instrument) and most of all, Beth Gibbons’ deliberately artificial-sounding femme-fatale vocal, suffused with stressed syllables in an assortment of affectations (“all / or NOTH-innng”, “did you REAL-LY WAA-aaannt”). The basic elements of Dummy’s palette, they each appear in nearly all of its songs, but repeat in permutations varied and creative to a degree that little tends to run together or bleed into another. Each track seems to sustain a similar mood or sound until, often quite subtly, a new wrinkle or nuance emerges and alters it.

“Strangers”, for instance, seamlessly vacillates between jazzy, almost gentle-sounding samples (the brief, opening saxophone fanfare; the isolated, far-away, lone guitar lick in the first verse; the mysterious, almost Middle Eastern bell-like chime filigree later in the song) and the track’s heavy, thick, loud beat (when it first drops out, then suddenly returns at 1:15, it’s like breaking through the surface after brief submersion under ice-cold water.) “It Could Be Sweet” could almost be Everything But The Girl, with Gibbons emphasizing the title’s last word over a velvety-soft bed of Rhodes and syndrums; however, those rapid, angular orchestral stab samples keep entering the milieu, keeping us on edge. Both “Wandering Star” and “Numb” wed hummable melodies to deliberately alien backdrops while the band’s chief architect/producer Geoff Barrows manipulates various samples, playfully scratching them into the songs’ rhythms to break up the tension and dread, if just a bit.

Between those last two songs, “It’s A Fire” neatly divides the album into two halves (as RJ Wheaton suggests in his 33 1/3 series book on Dummy). It wasn’t originally included here, first issued as the B-side to “Sour Times” and then only added to the album’s US release and understandably so—it’s an obvious outlier, arguably more welcoming, soulful, and optimistic than anything else Portishead ever did (also far more accessible). Fear not, for the band’s patented misery returns with the aptly-titled “Numb” and sustains itself all the way through Dummy’s final note. While “Numb” and the slinkly, vaguely sinister “Pedestal” merely repeat motifs abundant in the album’s first half, the three remaining songs mark where Dummy shifts from a good record into a great one.

It’s still hard to believe “Roads” was never a single—even more than “It’s A Fire”, it’s the album’s beating, wounded heart. It slowly builds, piece by piece: first, another lone, reverb-heavy Rhodes (but of course!); then, the beat and Gibbons’ clearest, most emphatic vocal on the record, each verse ending with the searching, enigmatic lyric, “How can it feel this wrong?”. A wah-wah guitar echo and subtle but swooning strings straight out of Histoire de Melody Nelson come in on the second verse, the latter gradually growing in power and volume until everything else drops out at 3:19 and they take over the song in full force for a few seconds. This orchestration transforms “Roads” dramatically, like something you’d hold your lighter out in the air and sway along to if only that didn’t sound like a cliché and, in this setting, feel so gauche. And just as magically as the strings swell up, they drop out for the song’s final verse, as does all else until we’re left with just Rhodes and vocal. “Roads” musically ends as it begins, but emotionally it travels a great distance.

“Biscuit”, on the other hand, doesn’t move too far in any direction—it begins and ends on an all-encompassing sense of dread. The massive beat trudges along like a Mack truck that does not dare travel faster than ten miles an hour, and yet, somehow, there co-exists a teeny, tiny spring in its step, particularly in those three vaguely funky notes at the end of every revolution of the repeated hook, like it’s moving one step forward, two steps back. The song’s real coup de grace, however, is the vocal sample of Johnnie Ray’s 1959 recording, “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again”. Rather perversely, Portishead takes Ray’s originally peppy tune and deliriously sloooows down his vocal (like The Chipmunks in reverse!) to the point where it resembles a corpse wailing from beyond the grave—a somewhat macabre intent since Ray had died just four years before. Equally unnerving and morbidly funny, it only further ramps up the desperation and terror in Gibbons’ voice.

However, to say she just plays the victim in Dummy’s often bleak, miserable universe is inaccurate. Had the album ended on “Biscuit” that might’ve applied; instead, actual finale “Glory Box” is where all of its themes and moods alchemize and then take a left turn. The song ever-so-slowly fades in, but is fully formed from the barely-audible first seconds of a four-chord progression blessed with a string sample from an old Isaac Hayes tune. At first, Gibbon’s vocals are her most cartoonish on record: “I’m so tired / of playin’ / playin’ with a broken arrow / gonna give my heart away / leave it to the other girls to / play,” all of it sung like Betty Boop slowed down from 45 to 33 RPM. But then, the next line (“A thousand flowers bloom”) suddenly pierces and aches in its much higher, more emphatic register. “Move over / and give us some room, yeah,” she then practically coos. Still, it’s all just a warmup for the massive chorus, where, backed by a heavily distorted but melodic guitar riff, she sings, “Give me a reason to love you / Give me a reason to be / a woman.” Suddenly, she’s anticipating the Spice Girls (in sentiment, not in sound) by two years, with any fragility in her voice overruled by empowerment and determination.

After the third chorus, at 4:08, she abruptly wails, “THIS is the BEGINNING / of FOREVER / and EVER!” as if boldly facing and staring down death itself. She triumphs over the steamroller beat, explaining, “It’s time to move on, / so long for me” but you realize she doesn’t mean death as in mortality but the conclusion of something more temporary, fluid, undefined: A relationship? An attitude? A thing to overcome that, if one fails to do so will bring loss but not entire physical destruction? It’s unclear, but such ambiguity and power are potent enough to leave one both reeling and utterly changed long after the first verse of “Glory Box” begins again and the track slowly fades out. On subsequent listens, one might view all of Dummy through a slightly altered lens, knowing that no matter how much sorrow it emits, it will ultimately end in, well, not exactly joy, but in startled discovery—the rare album with a somewhat limited musical palette that still manages to feel limitless.

Up next: Another alternative from Modern Rock’s commercial and creative peak.

“Glory Box”:

“Roads”:

Everything But The Girl, “Amplified Heart”

Chris KriofskeLeave a comment

amplified heart

(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #44 – released June 13, 1994)

Track listing: Rollercoaster / Troubled Mind / I Don’t Understand Anything / Walking To You / Get Me / Missing / Two Star / We Walk The Same Line / 25th December / Disenchanted

Following Idlewild, Everything But The Girl went to America to record their next album with Tommy LiPuma after he had expressed an interest in working with them. Producer of such eminent artists as Miles Davis, George Benson and Randy Newman, LiPuma seemed an unlikely choice for this understated British duo. While The Language of Life actually broke the band in the U.S. at last thanks to the VH-1 hit “Driving”, LiPuma’s slick, contemporary lite-jazz production left band and life partners Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt sounding a bit too middle-of-the-road for their own good. The next year, they returned to England and made the uninspired Worldwide, an album even smoother and blander than its predecessor.

A year later, Watt was diagnosed with an extremely rare autoimmune illness, spent nine weeks in a hospital, and nearly died. I mention this upfront because it is the key to understanding the album he and Thorn recorded after he recovered. Amplified Heart is, on the surface, full of songs about relationships in various states of disrepair and, in the case of its best-known track, obsession over a lost love. One doesn’t necessarily need to know the personal history behind these laments in order for them to resonate—Thorn and Watt remain exceptionally relatable pop stars, and the mostly acoustic, stripped-down arrangements allow for far more intimacy than those last two records were capable of. Still, once you know about the near-death experience its creators endured prior to making it, it’s impossible not to see how deeply it courses through it.

“Rollercoaster” right away establishes that Amplified Heart is a break from its recent predecessors. A lithe, somber bossa-nova, it’s mostly folkish/acoustic (the rhythm section consists of Fairport Convention drummer Dave Mattacks and legendary double-bassist Danny Thompson) with the exception of a synth that plays the part a sax or a flute would normally take—it’s surprisingly effective, blending right in with the bass, not subtracting any of the song’s warmth but instilling a sense of otherness. Even more striking are the lyrics—the opening lines, “I still haven’t got over it even now / I want to spend huge amounts of time on my own,” could refer to a faltering love when coming out of Thorn’s mouth, but it’s Watt who wrote them. The song later references “the road to my redemption” (read: recovery) and its hook goes, “I’m not really in your head,” a phrase that can cut both ways, perhaps alluding to how this illness altered each partner’s perception of the other as it occurred.

While Amplified Heart is predominantly (and somewhat ironically, given the title) acoustic and thus sounds timeless, like Idlewild, it contains a few modern elements. Both “Troubled Mind” and “Get Me” have electronic flourishes (looped drum-and-guitar samples, some subtle keyboard shading on top) that are far less stiff and integrated more organically into the arrangements than Idlewild’s drum machines. However, they seem to support rather than dominate the overall pastoral and bright flavor of the songs, which are still guitar heavy. Lyrically, the tunes also seem to mirror each other. Thorn’s “Troubled Mind” addresses a partner whom she increasingly finds hard to communicate with (“I’m trying to keep up with you / It’s hard enough when you speak clearly”), while Watt’s “Get Me” (which Thorn sings) offers a response of sorts: “I’ll tell you things ten thousand times / but do you ever get me?”

This symbiosis becomes further pronounced on the two songs enhanced by Harry Robinson’s sumptuous (but not overbearing) string arrangements. Thorn’s “I Don’t Understand Anything” may appear to be about a fractured affair (“Do you want what I want?,” she pleads in the first verse), but it also succinctly expresses that feeling of helplessness one gets from observing and being unable to fully get through to their partner. “You reach for me from miles away,” Thorn concludes, and the distance implied is not entirely physical. Four tracks later, Watt’s “Two Star” almost bluntly answers, “Stop listening to me / and don’t ask me how I feel,” but there’s more going on than just an argument or infidelity. For one thing, Thorn also sings “Two Star” (she’s really the primary vocalist of the duo). Although Watt hints at his own recent experiences (the remarkably descriptive lyric, “And I watch Saturday kids TV / yeah, with the sound turned down,” appears nearly verbatim in his illness memoir Patient, published a few years later), phrases such as “To judge a life this way / when my own’s in disarray” are universal enough that they could easily apply to either partner/band member.

If much of the album fixates on distances (physical, emotional, psychological) between two lovers, Thorn’s “We Walk The Same Line” reaffirms the strength such a long-term bond can hold (“If you lose your faith babe, you can have mine,” she sings in the chorus). The song’s cheery demeanor is a welcome respite from the subdued gloom surrounding it, not sounding too far off from “Driving”. However, as with Idlewild’s “These Early Days”, the sentiment reaches deeper than you’d expect, for Thorn also acknowledges how easily this bond can be tested. “When we meet what we’re afraid of / we find out what we’re made of” is one of the most honest, insightful lyrics ever about what it’s like for a love to be threatened by something beyond one’s control; sitting right there in the middle of a seemingly anodyne pop song only sharpens its impact.

Watt himself sings two songs on Amplified Heart. While his merely pleasant voice will never match Thorn’s distinct, deep, elegant low tone, he does sound like a changed man (and looks it, too—compare the cherubic, floppy-haired figure on Idlewild’s cover with the far more gaunt, emaciated man not facing the camera here); in Patient, he writes, post-illness, “I find my voice has a new-found strength to it, a greater projection, more meaning.” When you hear him sing on the album for the first time, on “Walking To You”, you can comprehend such strength, especially as he’s placed upfront in the mix with only a bed of strummed, ringing guitars behind him. It’s a seemingly simple tune about former lovers who have stayed in touch as friends, but continue to question what could have been. Thorn takes over on the second verse, making it a duet, but when both their voices blend together so beautifully on the song’s remainder, it reinforces the value of this bond they’ve built together, both professionally and personally.

However, Watt’s other vocal song, the penultimate “25th December” is the album’s true centerpiece. Again, the music’s sparse—mostly gently chiming guitars (including an guest solo from Richard Thompson, another Fairport Convention member) backing Watt’s introspective, vulnerable, undeniably personal lyrics. The first verse reflects on how “my old man plays the piano for Christmas,” being surrounded once again by family for this most celebrated and often melancholy of holidays. “And I never, no I never, ever realized,” is the plaintive chorus; it acquires more weight after the second verse, where he muses on being thirty years old (which places this as the first Christmas after his illness). He asks, “Have I enough time, have I just some time / to revisit, to go back, to return, to open my mouth again?” For someone who has just gone through an extraordinary trauma, it’s a profound question. How exactly does one go on after courting, then cheating death? In the final verse, Watt’s lyrics turn metaphorical, as he tries to “unlock a door / with a key that’s too big for my hands.” He drops the key at (presumably) his partner’s feet, and the final lyric, “Come on, come on, it’s there at your feet” almost magically joins up with and complements the chorus, the two lines repeating as the song fades out.

Then, the album ends on the brief, devastating “Disenchanted”, where Thorn (with some help from alto saxophonist Peter King) mournfully concludes, “I wonder, can you try again? Are you that strong?” Its placement shrewdly calls back to that notion, “When we meet what we’re afraid of, we find out what were made of.” However, it’s not quite the final word. On later versions of the album, it’s followed by the Todd Terry remix of “Missing”, whose original version kicks off the album’s second side. I’ve ignored it thus far because it is sort of the big elephant in Amplified Heart’s candlelit room.

The album version of “Missing” actually fits in pretty well among its peers. Although built around a drum loop inspired by Raze’s 1988 club hit “Break 4 Love”, it doesn’t sound much like something you’d hear in a club. Still, it’s tough denying how transparently it stands out as the catchiest thing on the album. “And I miss you / like the deserts miss the rain,” goes its indelible chorus, as acoustic guitar triplets and atmospheric synths score a melody that gently glides along like a locomotive, with Thorn effectively guiding all in the right direction even as her narrator flails about in despair, seeking remnants of a life once shared with another, admitting, “You’re long gone, but I can’t move on.”

Initially one of Amplified Heart’s failed singles, “Missing” had a belated, rare second life thanks to Terry’s remix, which radically strips down the song to Thorn’s isolated vocal and places a minimalist but prominent rhythm track behind it. This new version slowly became a big dance hit that unexpectedly crossed over to the pop charts, even going all the way to #2 in the US more than eighteen months after it was first released. At the time, I lazily dismissed it as a sellout move because I had first heard the album and fallen for it after borrowing it from the library the summer before. Fortunately, within a few years, I grew to appreciate how Terry’s remix utterly transformed the song, keeping the melody intact while letting the beat heighten the palpable fear and longing in Thorn’s words and vocals.

The song’s massive success broadened the band’s audience considerably, but it also somewhat obscured the album’s accomplishment by sounding like nothing else on it. Thorn and Watt ended up reinforcing this by delving full-on into electronic dance music on their next two albums, Walking Wounded and Temperamental. It’s difficult to begrudge them for doing so—they were obviously ready to move on from such a rough period of their lives. Still, Amplified Heart aligns with the notion that the best art is often born out of immense pain. The crown jewel in EBTG’s catalog, it is an about-face where Thorn and Watt reaffirmed and utilized all of their musical strengths—it’s conceivable they could have made just as good of a record had they not gone through such hell, but it surely would not have been the same record.

Up next: Music startling enough to make you want to stop driving and pull the car over.

“Rollercoaster”:

“25th December”:

Blur, “Parklife”

Chris Kriofske3 Comments

parklife-cover

(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #43 – released April 25, 1994)

Track listing: Girls & Boys / Tracy Jacks / End Of A Century / Parklife / Bank Holiday / Badhead / The Debt Collector / Far Out / To The End / London Loves / Trouble In The Message Centre / Clover Over Dover / Magic America / Jubilee / This Is A Low / Lot 105

Labeling by genre is a helpful but potentially misleading way to write about music. Naturally, describing an artist as rock or jazz or classical or Scandinavian black metal (if you want to get really specific) gives most readers a common signifier to latch on to regardless of their personal familiarity with said genre. For example, take Britpop—even if you’ve never heard “Wonderwall” or “Common People”, you know from the word alone that it describes a type of popular music that’s inherently and emphatically British in sound and subject matter. Still, just because a band makes British pop, does that automatically make them Britpop?

For many, London quartet Blur are Britpop personified, partially due to them being one of the best-selling acts in the UK at the genre’s peak, but also because their music was emphatically and, probably to most American ears, excessively British in nature. They peppered their songs with such specific cultural references as “colour supplements” and the Westway and had titles like “Advert” and “Mr. Robinson’s Quango”; lead singer Damon Albarn also did absolutely nothing to mask or smooth out any hint of Limey tang in his voice. Parklife, their third album, often plays like a time machine buzzing through snapshots of the last thirty years of British rock and roll, enthusiastically bouncing between Beatles-esque splendor (“End of a Century”), XTC-like social commentary (“London Loves”), Kinks-ian chamber pop (“Clover Over Dover”), new wave (“Trouble In The Message Centre”), glam (“Jubilee”), psychedelia (“Far Out”), exotica (“To The End”), etc., etc.

Parklife is undeniably, quintessentially Britpop, but what’s tricky about Blur is that they were always so much more than that. Look back to their 1991 debut, Leisure and you’ll find a decidedly less poppy (and frankly, less inspired) outfit riding the then-trendy shoegaze/Madchester bandwagon; look ahead to their self-titled fifth album in 1997 and you’ll hear them trying to shake off their more overly British aspects in favor of scrappier, less polished sounds gleaned from American indie rock (and it worked, giving them their sole American hit). Even shifting the focus back to Parklife, you see a group crafty enough to borrow from genres past and present but also inspired enough to fully transcend pastiche—you can label “Bank Holiday” as their “punk” song and “Girls & Boys” as their “synth-pop” song, but Albarn’s songwriting and the band’s musicianship is such that, in the end, you simply remember them as Blur songs.

Speaking of which, “Girls & Boys” opens Parklife on a deliriously cheeky note with its repetitive two-note synth hook, blatant disco rhythms and provocative and daft wordplay in the chorus (all together now: “Girls who are boys / who like boys to be girls / who do boys like they’re girls / who do girls like they’re boys”). Without Graham Coxon’s abrasive (yet still melodic) guitar riffs, this critique of “love in the ‘90s” could nearly be peak Pet Shop Boys at their satirical best (PSB even later remixed it), except, despite Albarn’s slightly mocking tone, it seems just a little more heartfelt than that—after all, the chorus quoted above ends with the line, “Always should be someone you really love.”

Similarly, “Tracy Jacks” details a middle-aged, middle-class everyman whom gradually cracks under the pressure of the societal expectations his age and class implies, going so far as to impulsively shed his clothes in public and eventually “bulldoze down the house he lived in.” His rationale in one generalized but irresistibly succinct couplet? “I’d love to stay here and be normal / but it’s just so overrated.” And yet, while Albarn acknowledges the situation’s absurdity and extremity, he never condescends to or fails to sympathize with his subject, his tone in the chorus turning uncommonly tender, plaintively noting of our doomed Mr. Jacks, “He knew in his heart it was over.”

Such is the humaneness that emanates throughout Parklife. While Albarn is certainly capable of a scathing critique (showing absolutely no mercy to Bill Barrett, the opportunistic dreamer of “Magic America”; even the wonky synth solo seems to be mocking the dope), far more often, he adopts the voice of the people, forging a persona that very well knows he could’ve ended up like Tracy Jacks had his own career as a pop star not panned out. On “End of a Century”, in addition to immediately deflating its significance by following the title with the phrase, “It’s nothing special.”), he muses, “The mind gets dirty / as you get closer to Thirty,” a clever lyric that’s also evocative for its candor and disclosure.

Later, on “This is a Low”, the album’s miserablist masterpiece, he again misdirects us, this time following the title with the phrase, “But it won’t hurt you,” which crucially transforms the song from a lament to a reassurance. Even when he lets Quadrophenia actor Phil Daniels serve as his overtly cockney-accented mouthpiece on the title track’s verses, you can discern an overriding affection for middle-class London—after grousing about “getting rudely awakened by the dustmen” and “all the joggers who go round and round (and round),” Albarn via Daniels concludes he’s happy, “safe in the knowledge that there will always be a bit of my heart devoted to it.”

If that sounds a tad sentimental, rest assured that the song’s enthusiastic verve undercuts any hint of sap. Much of Parklife simply would not work (nor have had as significant an impact or nearly the staying power) if not for its confident, clever, fully realized music. The breadth of different styles alluded to above makes even the band’s previous record, Modern Life is Rubbish (which encouragingly plants the seeds for Parklife’s breakthrough) seem relatively monochromatic; that the band pulls off nearly every one with aplomb is a criteria they have in common with their storied predecessors-cum-influences. And even then, you start to wonder if XTC or The Kinks could turn out something as soothing and eerie as “To The End”, a cavernous soundscape of vibes, tom-toms and Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier intoning sweet nothings in French, and follow it two tracks later with “Trouble In The Message Centre”, a dark, drivingly catchy electro-rocker overflowing with hooks, made indelible by Albarn’s dramatic, deadpan, slightly tart spoken vocals.

I suppose one could dismiss this sort of agility as a means of showing off; others could even go so far as to deem Parklife an imperfect album, pointing to a handful of throwaway tracks that it really doesn’t need (“Far Out” screams “B-side that somehow made it onto the LP”, while the skippable “Lot 105” does little else but lighten the mood after “This is a Low” mightily growls to a close). For many Brits, I assume Parklife may even seem dated now given its immense popularity over there. However, as an American college student at the time, for me it was a lifeline, vindication that the numerous British bands I adored since falling for Abbey Road were viable alternatives to all of the then-massive domestic grunge rockers that did nothing for me. I won’t claim that Parklife necessarily sounds timeless, but it endures due to its sustained quality and musicianship. Blur itself built a long-term career on those exact tenets, but also by forever confounding expectations. Nothing else they did ever reached Parklife’s heights, but with the exception of the Coxon-less Think Tank (2003), none of it was ever less than interesting, and that includes last year’s not-bad reunion effort, The Magic Whip.

Up next: “When we meet what we’re afraid of, we find out what we’re made of.”

“This is a Low”:

 

“Trouble In The Message Centre”:

Favorite Albums of 2015

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My Top Ten (click on titles for more commentary):

1. Róisín Murphy, Hairless Toys
2. Marina and The Diamonds, Froot
3. FFS, FFS
4. Calexico, Edge Of The Sun
5. Florence + The Machine, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful
6. Belle and Sebastian, Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance
7. Laura Marling, Short Movie
8. Robert Forster, Songs To Play
9. Sufjan Stevens, Carrie and Lowell
10. Courtney Barnett, Sometime I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit

Honorable Mentions

My Spotify playlist, containing selections from my top ten albums and fifteen others.

1. Róisín Murphy, “Hairless Toys”

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hairless toys

Róisín Murphy found fame and notoriety (in Europe, at least) as one half of ‘90s trip-hop duo Moloko. Solo, she released two albums in the mid-2000’s: a song from the first appeared on an episode of So You Think You Can Dance, while the second provided a visual template Lady Gaga would later sneakily take to the bank. Over the past eight years, she’s put out a number of singles and EPs, including one entirely of Italian-language songs. And, all of this is a long way of saying that none of it quite prepared me for her third album, an art-pop song cycle about identity, persuasion, desire, behavior and love (among other things).

Whereas her last album, Overpowered, was the straightest (for her), most immediate pop she ever recorded (it bombed commercially anyway), Hairless Toys makes little effort to appear radio-friendly. Its eight tracks clock in at an average of six minutes each, with the trancelike “Exploitation” extending to over nine. Opener “Gone Fishing” meditates on the classic drag/vogue documentary Paris Is Burning, while woozy, warped electro-country lament “Exile” should definitely be considered as soundtrack fodder for the Twin Peaks revival. Heady, dense, quiet, contained, enigmatic—it’s no wonder this album has mostly fallen under the radar.

Still, by not confining herself to usual three-minute pop song structures, Murphy gives these tunes some much-needed room to breathe. Sublime passages emerge all over the place, like the extended, lush breakdown where the percussion drops out of “Uninvited Guest”, or the jazzy guitar runs that color and lend shape to “House of Glass”, or the neat, beguiling way the music seems to unpredictably contract and expand throughout the title track. The closest she comes to a straightforward love song is closer “Unputdownable”, which wraps a clever reading metaphor around a gently skittering mass of minimalist piano and beats only to all suddenly drop out twice for lone Spanish guitar chords that startle like a breathtaking mountain range or cityscape suddenly emerging out of the darkness. Although often challenging and occasionally inscrutable, Hairless Toys is packed with unexpected moments like these that are more compelling and original than anything else I heard this year.

Favorite tracks: “Gone Fishing”, “Evil Eyes”, “Uninvited Guest”, “Exile”, “Unputdownable”

“Unputdownable”:

 

“Gone Fishing”:

2. Marina and The Diamonds, “Froot”

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One of my favorite things about being a music obsessive is occasionally stumbling upon either a great album that I had no expectations for or something initially unassuming that only reveals its greatness over time. I first came to this Welsh artist via my friend Howard, who posted about her third album early on (it’s his #1 of this year); I was familiar with the name but not the music. My initial impression was that of an agreeable listen and nothing much more. Still, the bubbly title track soon became an irresistible earworm and before long, “I’m A Ruin”, with its dynamic shift from verse to chorus and rather Kate Bush-like wordless vocals on the latter part broke me down. The rest of Froot gradually fell into place, beginning with its stripped-down opener, “Happy”, where Marina Diamandis lovingly sings, “I found what I’d been looking for in myself,” with the force of a sheet of ice rapidly melting, revealing a warmth so open and powerful that it hurts. Checking out her previous records, I was startled to discover how much of a departure this one is from them. Eschewing up-to-the-minute (over)production for a more nuanced, timeless sound, Froot continues to resonate more with each passing month: it’s now almost my favorite album of the year.

Favorite tracks: “Happy”, “Froot”, “I’m A Ruin”, “Blue”, “Savages”

“I’m A Ruin”:

 

“Savages”:

3. FFS, “FFS”

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FFS_self-titled_album_cover_art

I certainly never expected contemporary Scottish post-punk revivalists Franz Ferdinand and venerable LA-bred/Anglophile cult duo Sparks to record an album together; nor did I ever imagine it would turn out this great. Easily FF’s best since their 2004 self-titled debut and S’s most spirited since 2002’s career-redefining Lil’ Beethoven, this exuberant mash-up’s less seamless than last year’s Aimee Mann/Ted Leo collaboration The Both, and perhaps more interesting for that very reason. The opening operatic piano chords of “Johnny Delusional” suggest the Mael Brothers are clearly in the driver’s seat here, but Alex Kapranos and co. are noticeably thrilled to be along for the ride. Both bands bring their A-games to every damn last song, whether they aim to be cheeky (glorious last call “Piss Off”; adoring girls with “Hello Kitty Uzis” on the manic “So Desu Ne”), seductive (“Call Girl”), elegiac (“Little Guy From The Suburbs”) or winningly bratty (“Police Encounters”). Naturally, their penultimate song is an epic titled “Collaborations Don’t Work”; these six pranksters only get away with it by repeatedly disproving such a theory.

Favorite tracks: “Call Girl”, “Little Guy From The Suburbs”, “Police Encounters”, “Piss Off”

“Piss Off”:

4. Calexico, “Edge Of The Sun”

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calexico

A few longtime fans have dismissed this as too much of a pop move from a band who really didn’t need one; as a longtime fan myself, I think it’s easily their best since Feast of Wire because it emphasizes their considerable melodic strengths while still remaining true to the uniquely regional sound they’ve always cultivated. When those beloved mariachi horns kick in on the chorus of opener “Falling From The Sky”, it’s recognizably Calexico, just as the elegant Crowded House-isms of “Miles From The Sea”, the quirky, electro-rock en Español of “Cumbia de Donde” and the slow-building Middle Eastern strings of “World Undone” are all Calexico. Neko Case also contributes to the magnetic, spare “Tapping On The Line” and “Follow The River” is as effective and profound a conclusion as “Find The River” was on Automatic For The People—not that this is anywhere near the level of R.E.M.’s classic LP, but I’d love to think it could have a similar impact on some unsuspecting 17-year-old out there.

Favorite tracks: “Falling From The Sky”, “Tapping On The Line”, “Miles From The Sea”, “Follow The River”

“Miles From The Sea”:

5. Florence + The Machine, “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful”

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florence-the-machine-how-big-how-blue-how-beautiful

If sophomore slump Ceremonials was cause for alarm that Florence Welch might never match her brilliant debut, Lungs, rest assured it turned out an aberration; nor does LP number three play like a sequel to either record (for one thing, there’s barely any harp on it). Instead, she takes advantage of that old trope that the most inspiring and affecting art often comes from turmoil rather than happiness and thank god, ‘cause her commanding, fiery presence is ideal for such a song cycle. She’s never sounded more alive or direct—cranking up the guitars certainly helps, but so do the stunning orchestral arrangements, especially on “Queen of Peace”, making what was a great tune to begin with (killer chorus, unexpected Motown rhythm) even better. Impeccably sequenced and masterfully performed, it firmly places Welch back on track—I’m now a little more confident she has a Hounds of Love in her.

Favorite tracks: “Ship To Wreck”, “What Kind of Man”, “Queen of Peace”, “Delilah”

“Queen Of Peace/Long and Lost”: