EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL, “IDLEWILD”

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Idlewild

(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #25 – released February 1988. Originally posted on Kriofske Mix, 3/1/2015)

Track listing*: Love Is Here Where I Live / These Early Days / I Always Was Your Girl / Oxford Street / The Night I Heard Caruso Sing / Goodbye Sunday / Shadow On A Harvest Moon / Blue Moon Rose / Tears All Over Town / Lonesome For A Place I Know / Apron Strings

(*Many copies begin with a cover of Danny Whitten’s “I Don’t Want To Talk About It”, which was tacked on after it became a big UK hit four months after the album’s release. Since the band reverted to the original track listing on the 2012 Edsel reissue, I’ve done the same here.)

The band name of longtime musical and life partners Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, Everything But The Girl defies simple categorization if you scan through its discography. Jazzy and primarily acoustic, Eden (1984) neatly fits into the UK sophisti-pop movement of that period, but the jangly, guitar-heavy Love Not Money (1985) is far more driven by love for The Smiths than Stan Getz. Baby, The Stars Shine Bright (1986) mostly eschews six-strings for a full orchestra in an attempt to replicate classic Dionne Warwick as produced by Burt Bacharach. The only constant among these first three albums is Thorn’s low, somewhat reticent tone (along with Watt’s pleasant, if less distinctive occasional vocals)—and she came from a DIY/punk-influenced background as a member of The Marine Girls (he was the one who loved jazz).

Album number four, Idlewild deliberately backs away from the previous record’s opulence—it’s as stripped-down as Eden, but definitely more contemporary pop than jazz, and decidedly more mature (unusually so given that its creators were only in their mid-20’s). Thorn and Watt claimed they set out to make a “folk-soul” album, but were also influenced by contemporary R&B, particularly Janet Jackson producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Not that anyone would ever mistake Idlewild for Control, but one can easily detect a hybrid of textures in the former: crisply strummed acoustics and tasty guitar licks are as vital to the album’s soundscape as keyboards and drum machines (which account for all percussion). Still, the arrangements are generally understated, exercising more restraint than you’d expect from the late ‘80s, a period when up-to-the-minute recording techniques left a heavy imprint on most pop.

That’s not to say parts of Idlewild aren’t exceedingly dated. With its electro-hum opening and gently clanging hi-hat drum pattern, “Goodbye Sunday” is nearly Jam/Lewis—admittedly catchy in its mid-tempo strut, but overwhelmingly one of EBTG’s more blatant stabs at radio airplay. “Tears All Over Town” also lays on the synthetics a bit too thick and ends up resembling an exceptionally lush bedroom demo more than a band-in-studio recording. Fortunately, other tracks make inspired use of such modern touches. “Love Is Here Where I Live” may open the album with an isolated mechanical drum track, but from there the song feels more organic, agreeably resembling musicians playing together in a room. “These Early Days” and “Blue Moon Rose” achieve a similar balance: keyboards and programmed rhythms provide up-tempo brightness and oomph, while such timeless elements as soulful organ and chiming guitars retain a human touch imperative in enabling these songs to fully connect and resonate. That’s certainly the case with “I Always Was Your Girl”, a delicate, melancholy tune made even lovelier (and more layered) by its unorthodox, insistently tapping drum pattern and cowbell that subtly appears on the later choruses, adding tension to both Thorn’s yearning vocal and all the dreamy, elongated guitar and keyboard lines on top.

Still, Idlewild is never better than when it distills things to the barest essentials (arguably, the same goes for EBTG’s output in general). “Shadow On A Harvest Moon” is primarily acoustic guitar-electric bass-drum machine, plus a few muted trumpet filigrees, but it’s as robust as any great Simon and Garfunkel song (it also most closely anticipates a rewarding direction EBTG will take a few albums later). “Apron Strings” leaves the drum machine behind, opting for a simple acoustic guitar and lone keyboard duet that effectively supports Thorn’s almost unbearably intimate vocal without ever distracting from it. The album’s most striking arrangement, however, is on “The Night I Heard Caruso Sing”, where Watt sings over nothing but an acoustic piano and possibly the least cheesy sax solo of the ‘80s. Such starkness draws extra attention to the lyric, where Watt assumes a character, a man in some undisclosed, war-torn country who is hesitant to bring a child into such a world. Then, the event relayed by the song’s title occurs; it thrills him like only the discovery of art can, offering him solace. Still, he concludes ominously, “But even as we speak / they’re loading bombs onto a white train / how can we afford to ever sleep / so sound again?” When wedded to such simplicity in the music, the pensive yet frank lyric gains in power.

And yet, I’ve spent nearly seven hundred words on Idlewild’s sound while only barely touching on its themes. It’s not uncommon for me to approach an album this way—I tend to respond to melodies, rhythms and arrangements over lyrics for their universal appeal. It follows that when I do notice and respond to the lyrics, their impact on me is naturally far greater, and they often recontextualize the music itself. If you were to isolate this album’s instrumental tracks, you’d end up with something that wouldn’t be too out of place on smooth jazz radio. You could say the same of later Steely Dan, although Thorn/Watt’s words are rarely as acidic or ironic as Fagen/Becker’s. Still, Idlewild’s lyrics contain more depth and vulnerability than its “everything’s fine” demeanor would suggest; it’s full of deceptively tranquil surfaces that act as conduits to far more complicated, occasionally darker places.

Most of the songs reference themes of domesticity: of childhood from one’s own perspective (“Oxford Street”) or that of a parent’s (“These Early Days”) or someone who longs to be a parent (“Apron Strings”) or is not sure he even wants to be one (“The Night I Heard Caruso Sing”). Each scenario is careful not to solely slip into nostalgia or mere contentment; “These Early Days” may begin with the gentle observation, “You’re only two / the whole wide world revolves around you,” but follows it with the line, “And nothing’s happened yet that you may wish to ever forget.” Then comes the harsh truth: “It doesn’t stay that way / if I could, I’d make it stay that way.” Suddenly, what initially seems like a cheery song sung to a toddler takes on the weight of a mother wanting to always protect her child but very well knowing how impossible such a promise is.

Thorn also sings of relationships in various states: the faint but discernible malaise following a honeymoon (“Shadow On A Harvest Moon”), the fear of hitting a rough patch or retaining the stamina to make it through one (“Love Is Here Where I Live”) or a bittersweet assessment of a long-term union and how the outside world perceives it (“I Always Was Your Girl”). That last song tempers a potential (if heartfelt) cliché like “It will always be you and me against the world” with richer, more specific phrases such as “You put your friends through hell and that’s why we get along so well.” Elsewhere, among songs with a palpable longing for homes both past (“Oxford Street”) and present (“Lonesome For A Place I Know”), there’s “Blue Moon Rose”, an ode to friendship and platonic affection between two women. It’s a subject you’d expect to find more in pop songs and generally don’t, but any novelty is diminished by such applicable, thoughtful observations as, “I have a friend and she taught me daring / threw back the windows and let the air in.”

As much as Thorn and Watt sing of specifics, Idlewild’s greatest strength is in how relatable they appear. We’ve covered confessional songwriters all the way back to Joni Mitchell in this project, but with EBTG, there’s a directness that’s quite powerful when the music and the lyrics are as symbiotically effective as they are here. We’ll return to them a few years later on an album that nearly pushes that symbiosis to its breaking point, although as we will see, Tracey and Ben had to endure both musical and personal hells in order to get there.

Up next: an alternate-universe 1980s.

“I Always Was Your Girl”:

 

“The Night I Heard Caruso Sing”:

XTC, “SKYLARKING”

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Skylarking

(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #24 – released October 27, 1986. Originally posted on Kriofske Mix, 2/15/2015.)

Track listing: Summer’s Cauldron / Grass / The Meeting Place / That’s Really Super, Supergirl / Ballet For A Rainy Day / 1,000 Umbrellas / Season Cycle / Earn Enough For Us / Big Day / Another Satellite / Mermaid Smiled / The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul / Dear God / Dying / Sacrificial Bonfire

In the four years between English Settlement and this record, XTC lost a bit of their mojo. Some blamed Andy Partridge’s refusal to tour anymore, rendering the band entirely studio-bound; others cited drummer Terry Chambers’ sudden departure (not unrelated to no longer touring). Mummer (1983) and The Big Express (1984) have their moments but neither album is as consistent or convincing as the three preceding them. Partridge’s settling for the studio cuts both ways, suitably buffing his newfound pastoral nature into a fine folk-pop sheen (“Love On A Farmboy’s Wages”) while using this retreat as an excuse to spew bitter venom about the music business (“Funk Pop A Roll”, “I Bought Myself A Liarbird”). In either case, the public didn’t buy it—25 O’Clock, an EP of late ’60s pastiches the band released in 1985 under pseudonym The Dukes of Stratosphear sold more than The Big Express in the UK!

Thus, their label Virgin insisted the band hire an outside producer for their next record and gave them a list of names; they picked Todd Rundgren, a pop polymath best known for his ‘70s singer/songwriter hits “Hello It’s Me” and “I Saw The Light” but also a seasoned studio wiz, having produced the likes of the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Meat Loaf, etc.; Not that XTC hadn’t employed producers on their previous albums, but Rundgren took charge to a far greater degree than any of them—supposedly, after the band sent him their demos, he shaped and sequenced the whole album before any of them set foot in his recording studio in Woodstock, New York. Naturally, Rundgren and Partridge (who was used to having more control) clashed throughout the making of Skylarking and never worked together again, but even Partridge now admits the final result is one of their better albums.

I’d go as far to say that most days I think Skylarking is the band’s best album, partially thanks to Rundgren’s overseeing. What immediately sets it apart (and above) the previous two records is a unified structure, its songs passing through two recognizable, interrelated cycles: The Seasons (Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter) and Life itself (birth, death, rebirth). Granted, not every single moment fully adheres to these trajectories (for complex reasons we’ll address later), but the songs more or less superficially fit together in this way, making for arguably the first XTC album as obsessed with the whole enchilada as each individual trinket. In addition to following a tighter structure, Partridge and Colin Moulding also each contribute a strong set of tunes, as if they’ve crossed that threshold from touring to studio band, at last mastering the type of composition best suited to the latter arena.

Skylarking’s unification is further heightened by how some songs are deliberately crafted to either thematically complement each other or literally flow into one another. “Summer’s Cauldron” opens the album in a gauzy, blissful haze of humid but sparkling light psychedelia. As its chorus builds for the final time, gaining momentum, instead of a pause, a new chord and melody immediately announces the next track, “Grass”. With an almost East Asian-like fanfare, the song sustains the previous track’s tone, only wedding it to a lyric about making love out in the open. Concluding “Grass” with a musical callback to the beginning of “Summer’s Cauldron” nourishes the connection between the two tracks even further. Similarly, a few songs later, when the relatively laid-back “Ballet For A Rainy Day” reaches the last word of its final chorus, it ends on a slightly different chord than the previous choruses, instantly going right in to the swirling, string-laden “1,000 Umbrellas”, which sounds not too far off from the quirky psych-orchestral pop Prince was dabbling in on Parade at the time.

“The Meeting Place”, with its playful, faux-mechanical arrangement and crystalline chorus continues the cheerfully idyllic mood of the first two tracks. Some might argue “That’s Really Super, Supergirl” pushes it further, maybe even too far into self-parody. Fortunately, Partridge is a master of imbuing precious and coy subject matter with enough care and ingenuity that it becomes digestible through the sheer force of its melodicism and musicality—just listen to those intricate backing vocal overdubs or how easily and unexpectedly the band arrives at that chord change before the chorus. “Season Cycle” does a similar thing only with the chorus feeling more like a natural extension of each verse. Coming just about right in the middle of Skylarking, it blatantly reiterates the album’s overarching themes; it’s also significant for being the first XTC song with a heavy Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys influence, which will surface repeatedly throughout much of the band’s subsequent work.

The general air of optimism and breeziness gives way to weightier themes and somewhat darker (and more varied) moods on Skylarking’s second half. However, the song that kicks it off is one of XTC’s most triumphant: “Earn Enough For Us” is a socio-economical sketch both musically and lyrically worthy of the Kinks, driven by a classic guitar riff and an impassioned sense of both defiance and pride (“Just because we’re on the bottom of the ladder / we shouldn’t be sadder / than others like us / who have goals for the betterment of life”). It’s certainly one of the catchiest, most urgent working class anthems of the ‘80s (why in the world wasn’t it picked as a single outside Canada and Australia?). Moulding’s “Big Day” takes a few steps back from the previous song’s family-struggling-to-make-a-living to where it all began, pondering getting hitched with equal anticipation and dread as autumnal, chiming 12-string guitars signal colder weather ahead.

At this point, the album’s concept wavers a bit. In contrast to everything preceding it, “Another Satellite” feels like an outlier, a remnant from the band’s prog-rock recent past, although the sweet harmonies rub up nicely against the flanged synth-guitar hook and the song’s spacious, echo-y arrangement. Then, things get a little complicated. Initial pressings of Skylarking included “Mermaid Smiled” a brief, nautical-themed, showtune-ready sigh of a song, followed by “The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul”, a jazzy spy music pastiche that, like “Season Cycle”, introduced another new path the band would develop further on later albums. However, after “Dear God” (the B-side of the “Grass” single) actually started to get radio and MTV airplay, it was added to the album (placed after “The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul”) and “Mermaid Smiled” was deleted—“something had to go and so I took off the shortest song,” said Partridge. While not especially profound, “Mermaid Smiled” is charming, buoyant and a good lead-in to “The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul”. It really should’ve remained on Skylarking (with it, the album still clocks in at under 50 minutes), which is why I’ve kept it in the tracking listing here. (If your copy doesn’t have it, you can find it on the band’s 1990 rarities comp Rag and Bone Buffet.)

Although “Dear God” was the album’s biggest hit, it doesn’t fit too comfortably on Skylarking. Despite encouragement from his bandmates and Rundgren to include it, Partridge was never at ease trying to write about his atheism: “such a big subject… in three-and-a-half-minutes,” he lamented. Still, what three-and-a-half minutes! With an eight-year-old girl (played by a boy in the iconic music video) singing the entire first verse, “Dear God” grabs hold of the listener right at the start; then the drums kick in and the minor-key acoustic arrangement turns electric as Partridge sings the second verse. A string quartet slowly creeps in, at times sinister enough to peel paint off the walls (think of the strings in Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode To Billie Joe”). The whole track builds to a ferocious final minute where Partridge lays out his blasphemy with eloquent but intense, blunt force. Arguably the catchiest and most original single in the band’s catalogue since “Senses Working Overtime”, the song repositioned them as both modern rock stars and controversial figures in America, even inspiring a firebomb threat to a Florida radio station and moving one college student to hold his principal hostage at knifepoint, demanding that the song be played over the school’s PA system. To this day, it’s still one of XTC’s best-known songs in the US; although aesthetically Skylarking doesn’t need it, without it, the album might’ve fallen into obscurity.

Thankfully, the band chose to keep the closing sequence intact and not tack “Dear God” on at the end, even if the overlapping transition between it and the penultimate track “Dying” jars a little. But these two final songs, both written by Moulding are essential to Skylarking’s allure. “Dying”, like nearly every other XTC song of this period contains a healthy dose of Beatles-isms: it could be a track off The “White” Album or side two of Abbey Road. However, it’s more of a link to “Sacrificial Bonfire”, one of Moulding’s very best songs and the latest in a long line of spectacular XTC album closers. Over tumbling percussion, an almost classical-sounding guitar riff provides the hook, while deftly employed orchestration carefully draws us further in, the strings eventually mirroring that initial riff. Moulding sings, “Burnt up the old / ring in the new,” and later, “Reign over good / burnish the bad.” Rebirth may be an obvious theme to end on here, but it’s an effective, compelling one for the sense of majesty and sincere awe the melody and arrangement together conjure up. Skylarking is nearly a perfect circle of an album—as “Sacrificial Bonfire” fades out, I recommend utilizing the “repeat all” function on whatever listening format you prefer, for that opening instrumental haze of “Summer’s Cauldron” becomes more enticing and resonant with each passing cycle.

Up next: Lonesome for a place I know.

“Summer’s Cauldron/Grass”:

 

“Earn Enough For Us”:

THE SMITHS, “THE QUEEN IS DEAD”

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the-smiths-queen-is-dead

(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #23 – released June 16, 1986. Originally posted on Kriofske Mix, 1/23/2015.)

Track listing: The Queen Is Dead (Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty) / Frankly Mr. Shankly / I Know It’s Over / Never Had No One Ever / Cemetry Gates / Bigmouth Strikes Again / The Boy With The Thorn In His Side / Vicar In A Tutu / There Is A Light That Never Goes Out / Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others

In Tony Fletcher’s exhaustive, entertaining biography of The Smiths, singer Steven Patrick Morrissey and guitarist Johnny Marr don’t even meet each other for the first time until page 191, or roughly one-third of the way through the chronologically ordered book. This would seem to go against a common perception that the band (which also included Andy Rourke on bass and Mike Joyce on drums) arrived fully formed, seemingly from out of nowhere in 1983. Although they never hit the Billboard Hot 100 (or reached higher than #8 on the UK singles chart), their cultural influence was massive, arguably defining British guitar pop for an entire generation. That they achieved this in so little time (breaking up in 1987) still astonishes.

Describing The Smiths to the uninitiated is potentially dicey, for they were both accessible and unique—one’s gut reaction to them may swing wildly in either direction. Chalk up their familiarity to guitar prodigy/hero Marr, who distilled his love of rockabilly, glam and girl group pop into a clean, melodic sound that felt timeless rather than overtly retro or of-the-moment. Morrissey provided their otherworldliness—mopey and shy, unrepentantly fey and with a theatrical voice wavering in and out of tune like a foghorn, he certainly had few precedents as a rock and roll frontman. You could call them a textbook yin/yang combination, but then you’d be overlooking Marr’s occasional experiments with form and texture (one of the band’s most beloved songs is the seven-minute tremolo-heavy epic ‘How Soon Is Now”) and Morrissey’s unconventional charisma and selective appeal—rarely has any other artist inspired one to either instantly retch at the sound of his voice or want to mimic his every word and cadence (and Morrissey songs are nothing if not fun to sing along with.)

Despite their brief lifespan, it’s tough to pinpoint a definitive Smiths album—their relatively small discography carries a high concentration of great songs, but rarely do they all appear on the same record together. A decade ago, I would’ve stumped for Best… 1, a 14-track compilation released five years after they broke up simply because it was my introduction to the band and everything on it was aces. However, it leaves off at least a half-dozen of their very best tunes (a few appear on the sequel, …Best 2). You could opt for Singles, which came out a couple of years later, but many Smiths album tracks are as good as their singles (some are actually better)—heck, there’s even a few classic B-sides scattered throughout. One of them, “Half A Person”, features a crystalline melody that could break hearts as effectively as it could sell coffee, with Morrissey checking himself into the YWCA, dutifully asking if they “have a vacancy for a back-scrubber.” It’s easily in my top five Smiths songs.

That leaves four studio albums: 1983’s self-titled debut suffers from blah production, much of Meat is Murder (1984) is Morrissey at his most offputtingly didactic (if the title didn’t already tip you off) and Strangeways Here We Come (1987) is tentative and time-biding with Marr already halfway checked out (he left the band right before its release, sealing their demise). All three records have a few great songs, but not as many as the band’s third album. An about-face coming off the heels of Meat Is Murder, The Queen is Dead crucially turns a corner: while Morrissey hasn’t entirely cheered up, his anger here is newly, refreshingly tart, and even the faint suggestion that he’s now comfortable making fun of himself casts these songs in a far different light. The music’s also much more crisp, not only showcasing the rhythm section’s growing proficiency (Rourke’s bass dominates nearly as much as Marr’s guitar) but how tightly the band were functioning as a unit at this time.

Perhaps taking a cue from the underground success of “How Soon Is Now” (originally a B-side that was eventually re-released as an A-side, albeit too late for it to become a real hit), the album opens with its title track, a six-minute jam that arrives guns ablaze (but not before beginning with a Morrissey-chosen snippet of the World War I-era “Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty” from the 1962 film The L-Shaped Room). Of course, this is a daring, loaded title for an album and a song, so one would hope for nothing less than this total rave-up careening with pounding drums, furious wah-wah guitar and one of Morrissey’s acidic, first-person narratives where he rhymes “apron” with “castration”, among other clever turns-of-phrase. “Frankly Mr. Shankly” is just as much a manifesto, but with a tighter structure and lighter spirit. The song’s very English music-hall beat is a perfect match for Morrissey’s ironic (or not?) yearning to “go down in musical history” and his rather affecting disaffected sneer about “making Christmas cards for the mentally ILLLL.” Oh, and it’s actually a swipe at their indie record label, somewhat explaining the certainly ironic “give us yer money” ad-libbed at the end.

“I Know It’s Over” is the album’s requisite big melodramatic ballad. With a heavier hand, it could’ve ended up a warped take on your average 1950s/60s heartbroken lament, but the understated, gently layered arrangement avoids any hint of dirge or detachment, the music continually building, retaining all urgency even with Morrissey excessively moaning at the outro. “Never Had No One Ever” suffers a little from sounding like the previous song’s coda—whether it works in sequence or would’ve benefited from isolation depends on how much misery one can withstand in a single listen. Fortunately, “Cemetry Gates” follows with its pleasant, pastoral strum, practically inventing The Sundays. “A dreaded sunny day,” Morrissey sings as if he were a character in a Hitchcock film full of deceptive blue skies, cheerfully name-dropping literary heroes (Keats, Yeats and of course Wilde) in a potentially sullen setting, gently satirizing and celebrating goths and literary geeks alike.

Most of The Queen Is Dead’s best-known songs are on its second half. Along with its mocking title and sped-up backing chipmunk vocals on the chorus, “Bigmouth Strikes Again” has Morrissey’s boldest, funniest and most self-deprecating lyrics to date, referencing Joan of Arc, a Walkman and a hearing aid (the latter a typically daft onstage Morrissey prop). It’s all over a relentlessly-paced minor key strum teeming with rapid bursts of guitar and an exhilarating drum break—if they were so inclined, the band could’ve easily remixed it into a New Order-like dance hit. Released as a stand-alone single the previous year, “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side” fits in effortlessly here. Despite the song’s brilliant title, innate lushness and Marr’s beguiling highlife-style guitar lines, the best thing about it may be Morrissey’s wordless vocals throughout the final minute or so, proof of his actual range and improvisational prowess. “Vicar In A Tutu” is not quite as sublime. More or less a rockabilly retread of “Frankly Mr. Shankly”, it feels like a case of “the title begat the song”, but what a title, and what fun that Morrissey actually defends the fancily frocked man of God rather than fully mock or belittle him.

But then, after “Vicar In A Tutu” abruptly ends, that sudden, thrilling chord comes crashing in, announcing the most beautiful and affecting song in the band’s catalog. I once said that I could write a whole book about “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” and I’m only exaggerating slightly. Each time I listen to it, I hear more in it, although it’s not so much due to a dense arrangement (it’s actually pretty straightforward) or any hidden subtext. Apart from setting exceptionally morbid lyrics (“If a double-decker bus crashes into us / to die by your side, such a heavenly way to die”) against a wistful yet ebullient melody, the song doesn’t do anything radically different from any other beloved pop standard. And yet, each time I can discern a little more sweetness, serenity and profundity in it. Consider the way Morrissey sings the key line, “Take me out… tonight,” and all the possible intentions his tone and that significant pause suggest: he’s pleading and yearning, but also resolute and almost melancholy, as if he knows both how ridiculous and vital it is to hope for something, perhaps to be loved or adored or even considered. Near the song’s end, he repeats a variation on its title (“There is a light / and it never goes out”) in almost a singsong cadence to the point where it becomes a mantra, gradually fading away into the sumptuous accompaniment of purposely florid fake strings that are nonetheless tinged with sadness and wonder.

It’s an impossible song to top, so rather than even try, The Smiths conclude the album with a joke, albeit a droll one. Musically, “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” is nearly as striking as the preceding track with its robust swirl of Rickenbacker guitars circling over a danceable rhythm that all unexpectedly fades out, then back in again. The lyrics are another matter, consisting of not much more than the title, which Morrissey intones as if the thought just came into his head, albeit with a slight roll of the eye more than a Zen koan’s gravitas. Leave it to these guys to leave us on such a sublime, catchy yet purposely silly note. Like the rest of the best of The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead endures due to this alchemy, spinning gold out of so many disparate parts no one previously thought to assemble this way.

Up next: more mid-80s British guitar pop.

“The Queen Is Dead” (a short film by Derek Jarman, including “The Queen Is Dead”, “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” and non-album single “Panic”):

 

“Bigmouth Strikes Again”:

KATE BUSH, “HOUNDS OF LOVE”

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Hounds_of_love

(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #22 – released September 16, 1985. Originally posted on Kriofske Mix, 1/16/2015.)

Track listing: Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) / Hounds of Love / The Big Sky / Mother Stands For Comfort / Cloudbusting / And Dream of Sheep / Under Ice / Waking The Witch / Watching You Without Me / Jig Of Life / Hello Earth / The Morning Fog

If The Dreaming established Kate Bush as a major visionary in pop music, Hounds of Love managed the neat trick of expanding her reach both artistically and commercially. It outsold the earlier album, topped the UK album charts and even scored her a top 40 single in the States (her only one to date). Simultaneously, while to the casual observer less angry and bonkers than the earlier album, sections of it are still out there and, on the whole, it’s a considerable undertaking for anyone diving into her catalog for the first time. Although I’ve often cited The Dreaming as my favorite Kate Bush album, I’ve come to cherish this follow-up just as much, even though there is far from an expected progression between the two records.

For all of its complexities, Hounds of Love is neatly divided into two halves (or “sides” in the pre-digital days). Side One contains five songs that frequently showcase Bush at her most approachable (all but one were singles), although none of them would move anyone to accuse her of selling out or calculatingly courting a mainstream audience. Opener “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” was that sole US Top 40 single; that it even peaked at #30 (and #3 in the U.K.) is still a little mind-blowing. It begins with an almost ambient wash of noise before drums and the song’s signature wonky synth riff emerge. The lyrics are at once easily comprehensible and stubbornly enigmatic: what exactly is this “deal with God” she’s making and what does she hope to accomplish by getting “Him to swap our places”? We can ponder this over and over while automatically singing along to the catchy (if also strangely dissonant) melody. You can give it a dozen spins and still not entirely wrap your head around its meaning and purpose, or even pick up on all the bizarre processed backing vocals in the margins. And yet, enough people listened, and listened again to make this Bush’s signature hit—a remixed version even cracked the top ten again in 2012 when the song was included in the ceremonies for the London Summer Olympics.

The title track follows with a bang (“It’s in the trees! It’s coming!!”), announcing a brisk uptempo number capturing that elusive, exhilarating rush of falling madly, head-over-heels in love, losing control and giving yourself over completely to it, not even caring how daft it sounds to replace your “do, do, do’s” with canine-mimicking “arf, arf, arf’s”. The regal, glorious chorus (“Take your shoes off / and throooooww them in the lake”) plays over fervent synth violins that only enhance the song’s overriding ecstasy. Bush retains that gleeful rush on the next song, “The Big Sky”. Sounding unexpectedly dainty on the opening triplets, she lets go of any demureness by the time she hits the first chorus, at which the song becomes an extended two-chord vamp that builds, and builds, and builds. All furiously strummed guitars, “diddley-da, diddley-da” nonsense backing vox, and an army of percussive handclaps, it goes out on a two minute plus, sped-up “Hey Jude”-like coda that is one of the most blissful, jubilant things you’ll ever hear—if you listen closely enough, you might even detect Madonna’s similarly elated “Ray of Light” thirteen years off in the future.

After all this joy, Bush takes a breather with the downcast “Mother Stands For Comfort” (the one non-single on Side One). It’s the track here that could most easily fit on The Dreaming, particularly on that album’s ballad-heavy second half. Like “Night of the Swallow” and “Houdini”, it’s essentially piano-and-voice, but that’s only one layer. Sudden crashing noises make up the percussion, another wonky synth riff mirrors the melodic vocal hook, and again, the margins are stuffed with all these odd little sounds, like Bush caterwauling along with an “Ah-oooo!”. Perhaps, not one her best-loved songs, but in the album’s sequence, it gives us time to cool down before Side One’s final track, “Cloudbusting”. A staccato string arrangement kicks it off, with Bush delivering lyrics about philosopher William Reich and his young son as the two attempt the rainmaking process that lends the song its title. A martial beat joins the strings on the first chorus and much like “The Big Sky”, the song just builds from there, adding on countermelodies, wordless chorales and subtle loud/soft dynamics—complex for pop song, but it’s all in service of a hook so indelible (“Ooooh, I just know that something good is going to happen!”) that it was sampled to great effect by Utah Saints seven years later for their rave hit “Something Good”.

If Hounds of Love’s first half is the closest Bush ever came to pop perfection, Side Two reveals how vast her ambitions were at this point. The album’s final seven tracks form a twenty-six minute suite called “The Ninth Wave”, the title of an 1850 work by Russian Armenian painter Ivan Aivazovsky which depicts people hanging on to a shipwreck at sea. Bush herself has described the suite as being “About a person who is alone in the water for the night. It’s about their past, present and future coming to keep them awake, to stop them drowning, to stop them going to sleep until the morning comes.” While the drowning aspect of the narrative is easily discernible, the whole thing nearly plays like a mini-opera, one oblique enough that most might require a lyric sheet to follow along.

A more effective way of approaching “The Ninth Wave” may be to consider its trajectory of emotions and sudden, significant tonal shifts. The suite begins rather sweetly with “And Dream Of Sheep”, a gentle lullaby harkening back to the relative simplicity of Bush’s earlier girl-and-a-piano tunes. It doesn’t last, for “Under Ice” is turn-on-a-dime sinister, snaking and accelerating just like the Jaws theme as its heroine descends into sleep/underwater. The next song, “Waking The Witch”, starts with an extensive, disorienting collage of pensive, echoing piano chords and various sampled voices speaking variations of the phrase, “Wake up!” (similar to the “Goodbyes” in the outro of The Dreaming’s “All The Love”). Then, everything goes haywire all at once: layers of Bush’s vocal seemingly cut up into a thousand million pieces as she sings nonsensical childlike verse underneath (“red, red roses / pinks and posies”), samples of cathedral bells and a courtroom of men crying “GUILTY!”, and what sounds like the Satanic Demon Creature of Your Worst Nightmares, among many other noises. Possibly the single most challenging track in Bush’s catalog, it defies categorization, unnerving and overwhelming the listener with its full-on attack and total dismissal of traditional pop song structure.

After a whirring helicopter and a male voice shouting, “Get out of the water!”, the song fades out and a markedly calmer soundscape surfaces. Gently bobbing like a buoy on the waves, “Watching You Without Me” comes as a sigh of relief with its seesawing beat, playful synths and basic, two chord progression—then, you notice the unintelligible backing vocals, and also the backward vocals. Just when the last track’s insanity has all but faded, Bush throws in a dash of that weird-as-fuck sliced-and-diced vocal from it, perhaps as a little reminder that this song is simply a segue. The fiddle that introduces and drives the next track is an unexpected shock to the senses (unlike the title track’s proclamation, you don’t at all see it coming). In a possible nod to her Irish mum’s heritage, “Jig of Life” reprises the traditional instruments last heard on The Dreaming’s “Night of the Swallow” at an equally joyous and menacing tempo. Midway through, there’s an actual minute-plus long jig breakdown as intense as anything the Pogues ever came up with, followed by a poetic reverie spoken by her older brother, John Carder Bush.

After “Jig of Life” hits its final resounding chord, Bush announces the expansive yet intimate “Hello Earth”, belting out its title and immediately sobering us up. This is the type of grand, epic orchestral ballad Bush had been writing since “Wuthering Heights”; as much as I adore that singular debut single, “Hello Earth” shows how far she had come in just seven years. If you listen closely enough, a few of the suite’s various threads reappear, such as the Irish instruments and the phrase “Get out of the water”. Still, the song resonates on an emotional level above all—as Bush sings of drowning and/or dying (“Go to sleep, little earth” is the song’s last spoken line), the arrangement both suitably haunts (that low, slow, moaning chorale taking over when the music suddenly drops out twice) and chills (those icy, lingering orchestral crescendos straight out of a horror film).

And then, just as “Hello Earth” dribbles to a close, “The Morning Fog” materializes at full volume via a loudly plucked harp. Blissful and uplifting, it is a song of rebirth with a fresh, vibrant pastoral arrangement. The preceding drama having ceased, Bush sounds wonderfully happy—she’s made it through a rough night and has emerged unscathed and renewed, reveling in the pleasure of just being alive. While “The Ninth Wave” bears the influence of side two of Abbey Road and any number of prog-rock suites that followed throughout the 1970s, it stands apart in one significant way: instead of placing great emphasis on recurring musical motifs and reprisals to tie all the disparate sections together, Bush seems to have crafted this as a journey of the mind, heart and soul. It may take ten or twenty listens (perhaps even more) to comprehend every last bit of her dense text, but the array of feelings it evokes is immediately apparent—you may not literally be there with her in the water, but if you give yourself over completely to her serenity, her madness, her melancholy and her jubilance, well, it’s enough to make you wish you could take your own shoes off and dive right in beside her.

Up next: A heavenly way to die.

“Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)”:

 

“Hello Earth”:

PREFAB SPROUT, “STEVE MCQUEEN”

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prefab

(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #21 – released June 1985. Originally posted on Kriofske Mix, 1/9/2015)

Title originally changed in the U.S. to Two Wheels Good due to objections from McQueen’s estate.

Track listing: Faron Young / Bonny / Appetite / When Love Breaks Down / Goodbye Lucille #1 / Hallelujah / Moving The River / Horsin’ Around / Desire As / Blueberry Pies / When The Angels

Like any art form, pop music is full of artists whom never became household names, yet have retained a cult of enough fervent admirers to be remembered decades after they left their mark, no matter how small. A vehicle for English songwriter Paddy McAloon, Prefab Sprout are best known for a series of albums released between 1984 and 1990. They’ve recorded sporadically since then (most recently 2013’s Crimson/Red), but my guess is that most think of them as an ‘80s band for two reasons: they were semi-popular at that time (in the U.K., anyway) and those albums sound overwhelmingly of that time. Nearly every synth and drum machine on their second full-length, Steve McQueen practically screams 1985, instantly dating it. However, much like the rest of McAloon’s oeuvre, it’s also oddly out of time—other music from the mid-80s might sound similar, but little else from that era or beyond feels much like it.

Despite the band’s cover motorcycle poses and the album title-referencing actor (the epitome of anti-hero cool), no one would ever accuse McAloon of being a rocker. An ‘80s equivalent of Steely Dan’s irony-drenched jazz-pop is a good jumping-off point for describing Prefab Sprout’s sound—what, if anything, are the album cover and title meant to be if not ironic—but McAloon also liberally incorporates Tin Pan Alley-derived craft and Brian Wilson-like experimental song suites into his overall aesthetic. On one level, Steve McQueen is ostensibly pure pop music, driven by traditional melodic hooks, verse-chorus-verse structures and McAloon’s boyish, clear-as-a-bell croon. Still, look beyond those obvious, accessible surface pleasures and stranger, more idiosyncratic qualities emerge, such as extended instrumental intros and outros, shifting time signatures (“Horsin’ Around”, for instance, carefully vacillates between bossa nova and swing tempos) and, in a most explicit nod to Steely Dan, no shortage of delectably acidic lyrics.

McAloon chose Thomas Dolby (of “She Blinded Me With Science!” fame) to produce Steve McQueen, which accounts for its overtly synthetic sound; he also asked Dolby to pick the track listing from a vast catalog of tunes he’d composed on his Spanish guitar and had been storing up for years. Interestingly, all of Dolby’s selections were written in 1979 or earlier. Had these songs been professionally recorded then, they would not have sounded like anything on Steve McQueen. It’s tempting to claim that the finished album is as much Dolby’s as McAloon’s, for Dolby’s preference for a deliberate artifice in his production—in other words, making music that could only come from a studio and is near-impossible to reproduce live—effectively heightens the irony in McAloon’s songs while also highlighting the subtleties apparent in them. One can listen to the album wondering what in the heck McAloon’s singing about, then not caring because it all sounds so great only to have some sort of epiphany on the tenth or twelfth listen (or perhaps minutes, hours, or days after the song is over).

Steve McQueen’s first track may be its most atypical one: “Faron Young” begins with a twangy four-note guitar riff, followed by a purposely stiff, quick, almost new wave-paced beat and a sample of a gunshot. McAloon sings of listening to the titular country star on the radio, his lyrics rife with wordplay, alternating “You give me Faron Young” with “Forgive me, Faron Young”; meanwhile, harmonica and banjo weave in and out of Dolby’s production and a jarring electronic noise appears in the extended, deconstructive outro. It’s a catchy opener, but the next song is more representative: The first thing heard on “Bonny” is a mysterious blowing wind, which remains as a ticking hi-hat and a jazzy guitar riff kick off the song proper, a lush palette of diminished chords and multi-tracked textures gradually building until it reaches full force in an exultant, impassioned chorus.

The next three songs follow nearly the same template: “Appetite” and “When Love Breaks Down” both have now-cheesy seeming synth intros that nonetheless soon blossom into glorious, sparkling walls of sound equal parts fellow ‘80s sophisti-pop group The Style Council and 10cc’s classic gauzy ‘70s hit “I’m Not In Love”. “Goodbye Lucille #1” more of less achieves the same thing, only with an intricate, impossibly beautiful web of acoustic and electric guitars that surges into what may be McAloon’s most urgent chorus, his gentle “Johnny, Johnny, Johnny’s” giving way to this about-face: “Life’s not complete till your heart’s missed a beat / and you’ll never make it up or turn back the clock.” It’s followed by a startling, sinus-clearing repeated howl of “No you won’t!” as everything behind him clicks into place. All three songs, along with “Faron Young” were released as singles (only “When Love Breaks Down” hit the UK top 40); together with “Bonny”, they make a compelling argument for McAloon as a misunderstood, unjustly obscure pop genius.

The album’s second half is not so much obscure or inaccessible as it is varied. “Hallelujah” is jazzier than anything preceding it, with upbeat wordless melodies sugarcoating more pointed sentiments such as, “I believe that sweet talk, like candy, rots teeth,” or, even more bluntly, “No Hallelujahs,” which at this date seems like a rebuke to anyone who has ever covered the Leonard Cohen standard of the same name. Not even the wide-eyed grin “Moving The River” musically beams forth can obscure a wicked barb like, “I hear you’ve got a new girlfriend / how’s the wife taking it?” or erase the weirdness of a WTF hook that goes, “I’m turkey hungry / I’m chicken free!” “Horsin’ Around” and “Blueberry Pies” must have been meant as throwaways (or, in a more positive light, palette cleansers)—the apostrophe in the former’s title even gives it away. “When The Angels” closes Steven McQueen with reverence tempered by a healthy dose of cynicism (a church organ intro, obviously fake horns, a proto autotune hook enhancing the words “Heart-faced little bastards”).

But then there’s “Desire As”, the album’s real centerpiece, right in the middle of side two. As a series of lone synth chords hesitantly hang in the air, McAloon tenderly sighs, “I’ve got six things on my mind / you’re no longer one of them,” (kind of prefiguring Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” by nearly two decades). Eventually accompanied by a barely-there rhythm section and a sax player (regulation for ‘80s pop), he returns to this line again and again along with another providing the countermelody (“Desire as a sylph figured creature who changes her mind?”). For over five minutes, this Mobius strip of a song really does play as if on an endless loop, albeit one containing variations that smooth out any notion of repetition, replaced by an irresistible seductive ennui. I could listen to “Desire As” on an actual endless loop and probably not tire of it—one of those songs that reaches some sort of perfect stasis for me, but damn if I can fully explain how or why. That might be one reason for Steve McQueen’s perseverance through the decades: it entertains and even soothes like a good piece of popular art should, yet it remains singular and at times, a little mysterious.

Up next: Drowning, not waving.

“Goodbye Lucille #1”:

 

“Desire As”:

VINCE GUARALDI TRIO, “A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS”

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charliebrownx-mas

(My 100 favorite albums, mostly in chronological order (but not this one): #20 – released December 1965. Originally posted on Kriofske Mix, 12/24/2014.)

Track listing: O Tannenbaum / What Child Is This / My Little Drum / Linus and Lucy / Christmas Time Is Here (Instrumental) / Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal) / Skating / Hark, The Herald Angels Sing / Christmas Is Coming / Für Elise / The Christmas Song / Greensleeves

I cannot emphasize enough the profound impact Peanuts has had on my life. Charles Schulz’s comic strip is as important to me as any of the albums or films I’ve written about on this blog. His sense of humor and highly singular yet relatable way of observing the world has resonated with me for as long as I can remember. In childhood, instead of playing with Star Wars figurines or watching Transformers after school, I dutifully collected Peanuts reprint books and watched every half-hour animated television special whenever it aired. Those shows, always preceded by that CBS Special Presentation logo with the startling percussive roll and orchestral fanfare, must have been my introduction to Schulz’s work. From an early age, I can recall sitting with my mom right in front of our TV set, watching the charmingly low-budget animation, hearing the identifiable soundtrack of children’s voices (a rarity at a time when adults providing cartoon character voices was the norm), the muted trumpet standing in for all parents/teachers, and of course, Vince Guaraldi’s jazz score.

In recent years, “Charlie Brown Music” has become one of my favorite phrases to utilize in music criticism because it is so obviously made-up and hyper-specific: if you’ve seen one of the fifteen or so Peanuts specials that Guaraldi scored or have even heard “Linus and Lucy” in isolation, you know exactly what that three-word term implies—mid-century instrumental piano jazz exuding equal amounts childlike whimsy and grown-up melancholy, performed with gentleness but also agility. Although Guaraldi had been recording for nearly a decade and had an actual crossover top 40 hit with “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” three years before, his soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965 exposed him to a considerably larger audience. From then on, until his death from a heart attack at age 47 in 1976, he was known less for his status as one of his era’s most idiosyncratic and talented West coast jazz pianists and more as the man who created “Charlie Brown Music”—a role he obviously relished, as he spent those final ten years working primarily with Peanuts.

A Charlie Brown Christmas received instant critical and public acclaim on its first airing and quickly became a perennial, rerunning on prime time network TV at least once every year since. Nearly a half-century on, the soundtrack album is just as iconic, although this wasn’t always the case. Released a week before the special first aired, it initially missed the Billboard Album chart (not uncommon for a jazz record). Over the next twenty-five years, it’s hard to say how well it sold as it was not certified Platinum or Gold during that time. However, after a CD reissue in 1988, it began popping up in more store displays every December. Since 1991, when Billboard started using Soundscan (which relies on computer data to track record sales), the album has sold over three million copies—the tenth best-selling Christmas/holiday album in the U.S. during that time period. In 1992, I bought the album on CD and it immediately became a seasonal listening staple in both my parents’ home and practically everywhere I’ve lived since.

As a soundtrack album, A Charlie Brown Christmas is somewhat peculiar. Whereas the special begins with that beautiful, evocative scene of the kids ice skating to the vocal take of “Christmas Time Is Here”, the album kicks off with “O Tannenbaum”, which doesn’t appear until the special’s second half. Not only does the entire album fail to follow the special’s chronology (“Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” which concludes the special, seems randomly dropped in as track # 8), it includes a few selections not heard in the special at all (“My Little Drum”, “The Christmas Song”) and misses some of the stuff actually in it—most notably the lounge-y, upbeat incidental music playing when Charlie Brown frets over Snoopy’s participation in a “lights and display contest” for the latter’s doghouse. Of course, only obsessives and completists worry about such things, but after having heard this album about one hundred times in the last 22 years, I can’t help but notice its imperfections.

Fortunately, very little else about A Charlie Brown Christmas is less than perfect. I’d like to think one major reason why it has endured for so long and arguably grown in popularity is that it doesn’t sound like much holiday music that preceded it. Guaraldi was far from the first artist to make a Christmas jazz record—everybody from Louis Prima (the swinging “Shake Hands With Santa Claus”) to Duke Ellington (“Sugar Rum Cherry”, a sly takeoff of a song from The Nutcracker) beat him to it—but his melodic, accessible version of cool jazz proved ideal for capturing a very specific hue of the holiday season. These mostly instrumental songs, with their simple, piano-bass-drums arrangements emanate as much comfort and joy as they do wistfulness and poignancy. Depending on your own present state of mind, they have the tendency to shift heavily towards either end of this emotional spectrum. However, Guaraldi has no use for grandiose melodrama: nearly every song here bespeaks understatement and intimacy and collectively, the album provides a balm of sorts to what is for many the most stressful time of year.

A Charlie Brown Christmas has its share of covers of holiday standards, roughly split between swing-trio versions of “O Tannenbaum” and “What Child Is This” and more liberal readings like “My Little Drum”, which modifies the melody of “The Little Drummer Boy”, sets it to a shuffling bossa-nova, and adds in some kiddie onomatopoeic vocals. Guaraldi’s original songs, however, have become the album’s real standards over time. Presented in both instrumental and vocal versions, “Christmas Time Is Here” is nearly as well-known as any carol you can name and possibly the epitome of the album’s equation of the season with a kind of sweet sadness. “Skating” is a lovely little tune where Guaraldi’s descending piano trills mimic gently falling snowflakes, only to follow them with ascending chords before they return and the natural cycle repeats itself. “Christmas Is Coming” has an irresistible, up-tempo momentum to it, right from Guaraldi’s opening rhythmic piano licks to its swing interlude mid-way through.

And then, there’s “Linus and Lucy”, as recognizable from its era as “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” or “Strangers in the Night” and the closest thing Peanuts ever had to a theme song. It’s not a Christmas tune, and it wasn’t even written for this special, but for a documentary about Schulz made two years before that never aired. It appears in the special during the rehearsal scenes where most of the cast would rather get down to Guaraldi’s catchy number than prepare for the Charlie Brown-directed Christmas pageant. The song’s instrumental primary melody is an instant earworm while the rumble of the bass melody adds complexity without distracting from the main hook. It alternately rocks, swings and sighs (those elongated chords Guaraldi occasionally throws in) and has no precedent as strictly jazz or pop—it’s a true hybrid, much like the rest of Guaraldi’s “Charlie Brown Music”.

Those interested in exploring more of his work should head directly to The Definitive Vince Guaraldi, a comprehensive two-disc career overview, and Vince Guaraldi and the Lost Cues, two volumes of music mostly from the early-mid ‘70s specials, revelatory for being unexpectedly funky, and proof that Guaraldi kept pushing himself creatively to the end. Still, A Charlie Brown Christmas remains his most culturally significant achievement—as each Christmas passes, it feels more timeless, ensuring that it will be heard for many Decembers to come.

Up next: back to the 1980s (with a vengeance).

“Skating”:

 

“Linus and Lucy”:

Favorite Albums: 2010-2014

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Having recently posted my top 25 movies of the first half of the 2010’s, here’s the same for favorite albums of that period.

I came up with the top three right away, although I debated the order. Gryner ends up at # 1 because it’s the flawless ten-song pop album I always hoped she’d deliver (you likely haven’t heard of it—despite a nearly 20-year career, this Canadian singer/songwriter has remained obscure due to releasing all of her music (save one early major-label album) independently.) Kaputt is still a singular listen (yacht rock equal parts Steely Dan and Pet Shop Boys), taking me to an unlikely happy place every time, while Random Access Memories is the rare zeitgeist release that aptly sums up the past, defines the present and looks ahead to the future.

Based on year-end best-of lists, I’m not surprised I Know What Love Isn’t, Dottie’s Charms and Heartthrob all ended up in the top ten, since each originally placed at # 1 or 2 in their respective years (and, despite being only my fifth-favorite Saint Etienne album, Words and Music… is admittedly pretty good). With hindsight, 2010 had a few shifts: One Life Stand (#3 in 2010) and I Speak Because I Can (#4) now rate higher than Love and Its Opposite (#1) and IRM (#2)—let’s just say that the Thorn and Gainsbourg albums were fervently anticipated at the time, while I initially had no expectations for the others. The one record that has grown on me the most is Pickin’ Up The Pieces: #5 in 2011, it’s nearly as perfect a ten-song pop album as Northern Gospel.

As with the 2000’s (and as I get older), it’s a challenge trying to recognize any trends here. I find myself increasingly relying on new releases by artists familiar to me, so when a Haim or Janelle Monae emerges, it’s a big deal—especially as some longtime favorites take increasingly longer breaks between releases (I’m looking at you, Apple, Lekman, Saadiq, Thorn and Robyn). Fortunately, 2015 is shaping up to be an exceptional year for new music; I’ve already heard at least four albums that would easily place on this list.

1. Emm Gryner, Northern Gospel
2. Destroyer, Kaputt
3. Daft Punk, Random Access Memories
4. Jens Lekman, I Know What Love Isn’t
5. Fitz and the Tantrums, Pickin’ Up The Pieces
6. Laura Marling, I Speak Because I Can
7. Hot Chip, One Life Stand
8. Tegan and Sara, Heartthrob
9. Saint Etienne, Words and Music By Saint Etienne
10. Jill Sobule, Dottie’s Charms
11. Tracey Thorn, Love and Its Opposite
12. Fiona Apple, The Idler Wheel…
13. Future Islands, Singles
14. Raphael Saadiq, Stone Rollin’
15. Janelle Monae, The ArchAndroid
16. The New Pornographers, Brill Bruisers
17. Haim, Days Are Gone
18. Hot Chip, In Our Heads
19. Sam Phillips, Push Any Button
20. Laura Marling, Once I Was An Eagle
21. Robyn, Body Talk
22. Charlotte Gainsbourg, IRM
23. Alison Moyet, The Minutes
24. Rufus Wainwright, Out Of The Game
25. Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues

KATE BUSH, “THE DREAMING”

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dreaming

(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #19 – released September 13, 1982. Originally posted on Kriofske Mix, 12/7/2014)

Track listing: Sat In Your Lap / There Goes A Tenner / Pull Out The Pin / Suspended In Gaffa / Leave It Open / The Dreaming / Night Of The Swallow / All The Love / Houdini / Get Out Of My House

A year after I fell in love with Abbey Road, Kate Bush released “The Rubberband Girl”, the playful lead single from her seventh album, The Red Shoes. One of her few songs to get any radio airplay at home, it moved me to check out of the library The Whole Story, her greatest hits album which documented her career through 1986. Like Abbey Road, it was another leading portal into an aesthetic I never knew existed: here was this eccentric, high-voiced British woman with cool, strange, imaginatively arranged songs about everything from an Emily Brontë novel (“Wuthering Heights”) to nuclear apocalypse (“Breathing”). Furthermore, most of these were huge hits in the UK (with “Running Up That Hill” her only top 40 in the US) and she recorded all of them before turning thirty.

The Whole Story thoroughly intrigued me by suggesting what brave new worlds pop music could contain: An account of a father and daughter dabbling in rainmaking (“Cloudbusting”)? A wife who cunningly plays with gender roles by seducing her husband incognito (“Babooshka”)? Well, why not? Bush was a true original, not to mention a true weirdo. Perhaps the song that I found most fascinating was “Sat In Your Lap”: After a barrage of pounding, possibly synthetic drums leading the charge, Bush chirps brief, herky-jerky observational lyrics before shifting to full-on cray-cray mode for the operatic, nearly shrieked chorus: “Some say that KNOWLEDGE IS something sat in your lap! / Some say that KNOWLEDGE IS something that you never have!” She goes on to declare, “I must admit, juuuust when I think I’m king,” in a voice so immense and overly theatrical you begin to wonder whether she’s serious; what sets Bush apart from any of her peers is that you never doubt her sincerity, even when she makes WTF statements such as, “I want to be a lawyer / I want to be a scholar / but I really can’t be bothered.” In alternate contexts, “Sat In Your Lap” is either a palette-cleanser or a room-clearer. It reached #11 on the UK singles chart in 1981 and its music video (below) has to be seen to be believed.

I did not check out its parent album, The Dreaming, until five years later, mostly because I was a bit intimidated at the prospect of an entire record of this stuff. Its title track also appears on The Whole Story, and it makes “Sat In Your Lap” seem like “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” in comparison: over a droning, clanging, sound-collage backdrop liberally laced with didgeridoo and sinister animal noises, Bush sings in a heavy Aussie accent about the plight of the Aborigines. So effective is the world she conjures up in “The Dreaming” that it would give even Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett nightmares (by the way, this was also a single, and it flopped). The Dreaming was Bush’s fourth album (at age 24!), and the first she produced herself. Later, she referred to it as her “I’ve gone mad album” and indeed, it seems noticeably more unhinged and excitable than her previous work, which was often fairly eccentric to begin with. However, by taking hold of the reins, Bush makes that Great Leap Forward with The Dreaming: confident, fearless, inventive and often insane, it negates any perceptions that Bush is a novelty or a precocious prodigy, correctly establishing her as an artist, an innovator and a force to be reckoned with.

“Sat In Your Lap” effectively opens The Dreaming but still barely hints at what is to come. “There Goes A Tenner” (another single that flopped) is somewhat more accessible, slightly mischievous fun. Inspired by classic film noirs (mentioning Humphrey Bogart and George Raft by name), it alternates Bush singing in a cockney accent over a daft, distinctly British oom-pah beat with dreamy interludes of her cooing in a lower voice, “Re-al-lit-eeee.” Dinky but catchy, odd but ending on a wistful note, it is, like practically everything else on The Dreaming, unclassifiable. That’s certainly an apt description for “Pull Out The Pin”, where Bush assumes the part of a Vietnam soldier. As with a majority of her compositions, her piano lays the foundation but up top and at the margins are a menagerie of sampled sounds: crickets, a whirring helicopter, even a guitar solo near the end that’s chewed up and spat out like a cubist painting. It a retains a pop song structure but gives Bush carte blanche to freak the fuck out, her repeated, exhaustive screams of “I LOVE LIFE!!!” providing the most immediate hook.

“Suspended In Gaffa” might be a novice’s best entry point into The Dreaming: over a bright and cheery waltz tempo that comes this close to resembling a merry-go-round on the verge of spinning out of control, Bush reiterates one of the album’s primary themes: she shouts a boisterous “I want it all!” in the bridge to the chorus, only to immediately, more softly concur, “We can’t have it all.” Shrouded in mystery (is “Gaffa” even a place or state of mind or is it a kind of constricting, tactile substance?) but disarmingly catchy, “Suspended In Gaffa” is the album’s best case for Bush as a Delightful Nutjob (to borrow a friend’s term). “Leave It Open”, however, is where things start to get really weird: it kicks off with a boom-clap stomp that could be an alternate universe version of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” before Bush’s heavily-treated vocal comes in and all bets are off. Featuring a call-and-response duet between high-pitched, possibly sped-up Kate and low, wobbly Kate, she also lets out a sinus-clearing wail before the full band kicks in and her subsequent warrior cries suggest she’s leading an army into battle. It’s as unclassifiable as “There Goes A Tenner” and it could not be more tonally different.

Here, the aforementioned title track is slightly longer than the single edit on The Whole Story, concluding with a fanfare of traditional Irish instruments (bagpipes, penny whistle and the like) that serves as a bridge to the remarkable “Night Of The Swallow”. A slow, stripped down piano ballad in its verses (certainly the album’s most introspective moments so far), it revs up the tempo in the choruses, which reprise the Irish fanfare, with Bush almost magically building up momentum and intensity until she exclaims, “Let me go!” as only she can. “All The Love”, the piano ballad that follows, is far more somber and possibly the album’s most normal and accessible song, although “normal” is a relative term when referencing a track with a minute-long outro full of sampled snippets of folks saying “goodbye”, “cheerio”, “take care”,etc; Still, it’s a direct but dreamy lament suffused with longing and resolve, anticipating Bush’s more mature later work. “Houdini” is a quintessential Bush composition about a famous figure and his tragic death; like the preceding two songs, it is also a slow piano ballad, but it keeps listeners on their toes as Bush’s vocal suddenly shifts to a thunderous, all-encompassing roar on the chorus, followed by a string quartet interlude and, at the end, an operatic chorale.

The Dreaming concludes with its angriest, most audacious track. On “Get Out of My House”, Bush distills the album’s various themes into a loud, swirling manifesto where she passionately defends herself against all threats to her well-being (they could be physical, mental or emotional, she’s not entirely specific). She exclaims, “This house is full of madness!”, which, given all that came before, is an understatement. But she triumphs, screaming the song’s title repeatedly until it becomes a mantra; Bush being Bush, she also inexplicably sings the bridge to the chorus in a funny voice that rather resembles a Frenchman catering to the Borscht Belt circuit and brays “HEE-HAW!” a few times towards the end as if she suddenly turned into a donkey. Like The Dreaming as a whole, “Get Out Of My House” is at once both gloriously empowering and an extreme, bat-shit-insane declaration of independence. It likely lost Bush some fans at the time, but I’m guessing it ended up endearing her to many more new and existing ones. I admired Bush before I ever heard The Dreaming, but once I did in full, she became (and unquestionably remains) one of my all-time favorite musical artists. We’ll be hearing from her again and soon.

Up next: we temporarily break with chronology to feature the oldest album I’ll be writing about in this project.

“Sat In Your Lap”:

 

“Suspended In Gaffa”:

ROXY MUSIC, “AVALON”

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avalon

(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #18 – released May 1982. Originally posted on Kriofske Mix, 12/1/2014.)

Track listing: More Than This / The Space Between / Avalon / India / While My Heart Is Still Beating / The Main Thing / Take A Chance With Me / To Turn You On / True To Life / Tara

Ah, Avalon: music for Friday afternoons where the promise of a weekend’s clean slate beckons; for flawless first dates with all chemical synapses of both participants firing away; for driving the streets your hometown, everything cast in an absurdly nostalgic, comforting glow; for walking through thickly-settled woods only to suddenly arrive at a scenic, dramatic coast; for high rise balconies with a view of millions of twinkling lights below and beyond; for middle-of-the-night epiphanies; for Saturday nights that you never want to end; for languorous, cozy Sunday mornings at home; for moments stuck halfway between despair and desire; for all that is beautiful, majestic, romantic, exquisite.

We last encountered Roxy Music on their fourth album, Country Life, where vocalist/songwriter Bryan Ferry balanced transcending the ordinary and the mundane with a sense of longing for an unattainable ideal. Eight years later, he arguably came closest to obtaining the latter on this, the band’s eighth album. However, the road from Country Life to Avalon was hardly straightforward. After the band’s fifth album, Siren (1975) gave them their only top 40 hit in the US (“Love Is The Drug”), they took a four-year hiatus. The records that followed, Manifesto (1979) and Flesh + Blood (1980) downplayed Roxy’s experimental side for an evidently more smoothed-out sound, which might’ve angered some fans at the time but seems logical and inevitable now—for all their greatness, the first five Roxy Music albums are all of their time, and to continue that exact approach at the dawn of the 1980s would’ve turned the band into an anachronism. While not as excitable as, say, “The Thrill of It All” or “Prairie Rose”, songs such as “Dance Away” and “Same Old Scene” were no less passionate; they also bespoke a newfound maturity that suited Ferry’s ennui very well.

What makes Avalon endure and cohere more than the previous two albums is Ferry’s willingness to push that suaveness and warmth as far as he can (before it would peter out into mood music) and sustain it. The edgy, hyperactive nature of earlier Roxy has entirely vanished; the guitars and saxes remain vital to the band’s soundscapes, but here they’re buoyed by such contemporary instruments as period synths and the occasional drum machine. The arrangements are at once simple, but distinctly layered—on headphones, one gets a keener sense of such flourishes as the sleigh bells on “India” or the juicy synthesized bass on “The Main Thing”. Avalon is lush but not busy, sumptuous but not opulent, delicate but not fragile, tranquil but not boring.

You could say the band lays all its cards on the table with the album’s opener and biggest hit, “More Than This”: a two-note clarion call memorably kicks off this anthem of sorts, which succinctly sums up Ferry’s philosophy. In response to the song’s title, he concludes, “There is nothing.” He doesn’t let on as to what “this” is, only that it’s unsurpassable. Whatever it is, it allows him to be “as free as the wind” and he concludes, “who can say where we’re going?” After years of searching and scrutinizing, Ferry’s found something profound. Is it love, peace, wisdom, happiness? Well, who can say? The lengthy instrumental outro suggests there are no more words, only feelings—a key to understanding Avalon as a whole, for it gets by on sensations and abstractions rather than specifics. Ferry will never tell us exactly what “The Main Thing” is, but that’s okay, because all one needs to hear is how important it is to him.

The album’s other best known song is its title track, a slow, enigmatic meditation on making contact with that ideal, the sublime, or whatever you want to call it. A prime example of Ferry communicating meaning through sound more than the actual words, “Avalon” gets by mostly on Ferry singing the song’s title, his croon sweetened by some prominent female backing vocals. It’s a pleasant tune and an undeniable standard for sure, but it lacks an urgency present in much of the rest of the album. “Avalon” was an easy hit—you can imagine thousands of listeners appreciatively utilizing it as a seduction tool. “While My Heart Is Still Beating”, on the other hand, doesn’t lend itself so neatly to such a task, and for that is infinitely more interesting. Paced at a slow crawl and enhanced by sax triplets, piano trills and a suitably pulsating bass, the song finds Ferry deliriously heartbroken, pleading, “Where’s it all leading?” like a man who knows the clock is ticking. In other words, Ferry at his best.

Elsewhere on Avalon, both “The Space Between” and “The Main Thing” are spacious, immaculate and somewhat funky, repeating their melodies on endless loops, featuring call-and-response choruses between Ferry’s vocals and Andy Mackay’s sax riffs (providing a template INXS would take to the bank as the decade wore on). “Take A Chance With Me” is more musically adventurous, beginning with over a minute of seemingly free form improvisation before locking into its accessible groove, complete with crystalline, ringing guitar hook. “To Turn You On” tempers a well-sculpted wall of sound with Ferry’s most direct and euphoric chorus. However, in the album’s context, it’s merely buildup to “True To Life”: singing of an undisclosed “Diamond Lady”, Ferry muses on, well, everything, I suppose. He distills any number of thoughts or queries to a few phrases that scan poorly when isolated (“Dancing city / now you’re talking / but where’s your soul?”) but sound terrific as verses that all lead to the same conclusion: Ferry sighing the song’s title and evoking so much with those three little words.

Closing track “Tara” is more of a grace note than an actual song: a brief, lovely instrumental with Mackay’s soprano sax playing over a mélange of orchestral synths and the sound of crashing waves. Like Avalon as a whole, it feels like a conclusion and for Roxy Music, it was. Although the band reunited to tour in 2001 with rumors of working on new material, they never released another album. Ferry focused on his solo career, although nothing he did ever matched Avalon’s popularity or achievement. And yet, as much as Avalon plays like the culmination of a decade-long quest, there’s enough optimism and renewal in it to suggest that it’s also an album about beginnings. Just because Ferry has presumably found what he’s looking for doesn’t mean the quest itself is over—life goes on and Avalon is really a forward-looking album, which may explain why, despite having reached only #53 on the charts, it remains Roxy Music’s sole Platinum-certified album in the US and arguably its most iconic one.

Up next: Madness (not the band).

“More Than This”:

 

“While My Heart Is Still Beating”:

XTC, “ENGLISH SETTLEMENT”

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XTC ES

(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #17 – released February 12, 1982. Originally posted on Kriofske Mix, 11/24/2014.)

Track listing: Runaways / Ball and Chain / Senses Working Overtime / Jason and the Argonauts / No Thugs In Our House / Yacht Dance / All Of A Sudden (It’s Too Late) / Melt The Guns / Leisure / It’s Nearly Africa / Knuckle Down / Fly On the Wall / Down In the Cockpit / English Roundabout / Snowman

“This is one more double album that would make a nifty single” is what Robert Christgau wrote about Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (a record I briefly considered including in this project); I don’t fully agree, but I understand his reasoning. Depending on who you ask, the double album is either one of popular music’s greatest innovations, allowing for extended output from an artist at his or her peak, or the worst thing to ever happen to the format itself, encouraging excess and self indulgence from bands who could barely produce enough solid material for two sides of vinyl, let alone four. Of course, a double album’s effectiveness all comes down to the individual artist, their talent, and whether they’re in a place where they can pull it off—after all, just three years on from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, John released another, decidedly less successful double album, Blue Moves, of which Christgau said in his review, “As my wife commented in all innocence of who was on, ‘What is this tripe?’”

Like all terrific single albums, the best double albums are often a snapshot of an artist at a creative high (Bob Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde, The Clash’s London Calling) or a commercial one (Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Stevie Wonder’s Songs In The Key Of Life). Such factors aside, it really depends on their ability to hold a listener’s interest for well over an hour instead of the usual 30-45 minute duration. This is easier said than done, as we’ll only encounter a handful of double albums in this project. The first is the fifth album from XTC, a British post-punk group who formed in 1977 and remained active up until 2000. Too revered and well-known to be considered a cult band, but not enough to ever become a household name or score a US top 40 hit, they’re an act whom, at their most accessible moments engages one to question why the heck they were never half as big as The Police, U2 or any of their more recognized contemporaries. Listen to any of their albums and the answer’s immediately apparent: stubbornly foraging their own path through the music industry, XTC rarely shielded their quirks and singularities. They arguably made great pop music, but didn’t particularly worry about making it appeal to everyone. The few “hits” scattered throughout their catalog are those rare, serendipitous instances when their notion of pop nearly aligned with the rest of the world’s.

By 1982, XTC barely resembled the band they were five years before, despite having had only one personnel change in the interim. On their early recordings, which the band’s primarily vocalist/songwriter Andy Partridge has all but disavowed, they spat out herky-jerky, jagged-edged pop punk, their sound deeply colored by Barry Andrews’ cheapo keyboards. Andrews left the band after second album Go2 (1978); his replacement, Dave Gregory, was more of a lead guitarist although he also could play keyboards as well. As a result, six-strings more heavily dominated the band’s sound on Drums and Wires (1979); with Black Sea (1980), Partridge and bassist Colin Moulding (the McCartney to his Lennon) began to loosen up a little, letting such previously downplayed influences as The Kinks, The Beach Boys and yes, The Beatles overtly surface in their songs. “Towers of London”, for instance, is as catchy, solid and affecting as nearly anything by those ‘60s stalwarts, getting a lot out of a clanging hook, a heavy (but not derivative) period flavor, a heart-stopping, key-changing bridge, and, to keep it distinctively XTC, Partridge’s love-it-or-hate-it wail (it should go without saying that I love it.)

Although it was the band’s highest charting album in the UK, English Settlement is less the definitive XTC release and more a transitional one. The first two tracks, both written and sung by Moulding, are departures in sound and subject matter that each reoccur during the album’s remainder and indeed, throughout the rest of the band’s career. “Runaways” slowly fades into focus like a Monet landscape, a mass of shimmering guitars and impressionistic synths, eventually propelled by booming, insistent drums. Partridge aptly described it as “like walking through a forest, getting bigger and bigger until suddenly you’re in it and fighting your way through.” It emanates a sense of awe and wonder unlike anything else the band previously recorded, setting the stage for a more pastoral and mature XTC. Subsequent tracks like “Yacht Dance” and “All of a Sudden (It’s Too Late)” are similarly drenched in acoustic guitars and Gregory’s newly purchased electric 12-string Rickenbacker (the guitar The Byrd’s Roger McGuinn often used). Other songs, such as “Jason And The Argonauts” and “Snowman” favor walls of sound formed by circular, droning arpeggios instead of the alternately angular and melodic riffs the band was previously known for.

As “Runaways” fades out, “Ball and Chain” takes over with its instantly identifiable clipped guitar chords and bouncing martial beat, a sound that, like much of Black Sea, would provide the template for 1990s Britpop. Moulding’s lyrics, however, now hit much closer to home. A screed against devastation and demolition in the band’s industrial hometown of Swindon, “Ball and Chain” is far from XTC’s first political song (see “Generals and Majors” or “Complicated Game”), but it places new emphasis on protecting and holding on to past values much like The Kinks once did on Village Green Preservation Society, but with far less nostalgia. For Moulding and Partridge, holding on to their heritage is as much of a concern as ensuring there will still be a future to do so in. Such themes resurface throughout English Settlement: the purposely abrasive “Melt The Guns” is as insistently blunt as the title suggests, while “Knuckle Down” advocates for nonviolence on an individual level in hope for a collective world peace. If XTC once cloaked any commentary with a healthy dose of satire (“Respectable Street”, “Making Plans For Nigel”), they’re now more sincere in their approach.

What elevates English Settlement and arguably keeps it from falling off a cliff is that Partridge and Moulding aren’t willing to um, settle for being merely pastoral and/or political. This album covers considerable ground or at least as much as one could hope for in a 72-minute opus. With its triumphant count-to-five chorus, “Senses Working Overtime” is at once among the most accessible songs Partridge ever wrote (indeed, XTC’s only top ten UK hit), but also one of his more idiosyncratic tunes as well: the unconventional, barely-there opening measures give no hint that it will build to such majestic heights, and each twist and turn it takes carries a thrill that is effective as but far more complex than the average pop song hook. “No Thugs In Our House” also manages to feel both familiar (the stomping Motown beat, the indelible bridge to the chorus that’s as catchy as a chewing gum commercial) and wildly distinctive (the massive roar Partridge lets out right after the intro, the hyper-specific lyrics about a teen engaging in criminal activity, “dreaming of a world where he can do just what he wanted to” (lucky for him his father’s a judge)). “It’s Nearly Africa” filters world beat motifs through a Partridge-shaped lens, nailing down the expected polyrhythms and vocal cadences while stirring the pot with an out-of-nowhere, multi-tracked and cut-up saxophone solo (nearly making up for the (deliberately?) terrible one in previous track “Leisure”.) “Fly On The Wall” has all the ingredients for a radio hit, then obscures and smothers them in Moulding’s distorted vocals and a buzzing synth that skitters and suitably flies all over the song.

If this diversity gives English Settlement an intriguing shape, the band’s tightness and level of proficiency here make for XTC’s best-sounding album to date. “Down In The Cockpit” is both structurally giddy and light-as-air, combining a ska beat with a lounge-like melodic aura, each one perpetually keeping the other in check. “English Roundabout” retains that beat but quickens the tempo (with a tricky time signature, no less), its five or six hooks circling each other, threatening to collapse into bedlam but thankfully never doing so. “Jason and the Argonauts” is a prog-rock epic you’ll have no trouble staying awake for, as it always seems to keep moving forward and does not suffer from any lack of detail. And closing song “Snowman” cleverly makes a neglected lover metaphor out of the title figure’s wintry disposition and tendency to melt away; it also serves as a bookend to “Runaways” by reimagining that song’s dense, twinkly impressionist glow as a force to be reckoned with and walloped at, as personified by Partridge’s repeated exclamations of “AH!” (not too radically different from that of David Byrne’s.)

Following English Settlement, Partridge retreated, refusing to tour anymore, turning XTC into solely a studio band. Commercially this did little for them in the UK but eventually, they cultivated a new audience in the US and built up an unlikely but rewarding catalog. They will return throughout this tale, both via more of their albums and as influences on other artists.

Up next: an ending, or perhaps a beginning?

“No Thugs In Our House”:

 

“English Roundabout”: