Miscellany

Instead of one reasonable blog entry about an album, you're going to get some brief thoughts on a few things I've been listening to as I rebuild the music stash on my hard drive. I checked out five albums from the library this week, so there are my thoughts on all of them.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Abbatoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus. I'm certain I already wrote an entry about this (double) album, but I had to get it again b/c my hard drive died. It's amazing, piano-pounding music, the kind of stuff that would make Billy Joel wet his pants if it ever got played on mainstream radio. Two discs full of good songs, maybe one track that I'm not overly partial to. Maybe I haven't written about this album, but it probably deserves its own entry.

Bad Brains - Build A Nation. This album is off-beat and I like it. I could talk about the greatness of Bad Brains, about how hardcore and punk bands in the early 80's dreaded playing shows with them, because Bad Brains was such a musically and intellectually proficient unit that they would generally blow the other bands off the stage. This album jumps between punk and almost-reggae with ease; the lack of transition makes it seem like a joint album between two bands sometimes, but nothing lame is found here. This album made it onto my mp3 player for gym use, hopefully I don't get too many of the slow songs in the rotation.

The Fratellis - Costello Music. This album is fairly awful. I didn't even make it all the way through! It's not so much that the musicianship is lacking, or that the lyrics are simple, or even that almost every song seems to have a 'la la la' or 'do do do' section, though these are all very valid criticisms of the album. It's mostly that the musical structure is so simple that I think a musically aware 10 year old wrote most of it. Every song seems to be built off two-or-three measure phrasing; it just isn't complex enough to hold my interest at all. I'd say that this is what would happen if Tom Petty wrote music for the Ramones, and then decided to dumb it down as much as possible. Really, unless The Fratellis get their act together, they'll be lucky to open for the Wiggles next year. Of course, there are probably legions of 14 year olds who listen to this stuff every day on the way to high school. You poor bastards.

Guster - Keep It Together. This album has some good songs on it, but I can't say it's Guster's best - that distinction probably should go to Lost and Gone Forever. This album is a little too sensitive for me sometimes, and that comes from someone who has no shame in talking about his Cat Power albums. Still, when the songs work, they really work, like "Red Oyster Cult", or "Homecoming King" - Guster is best when its songs are both sweet and upbeat, while maintaining their nihilistic undertones. This album also has "Amsterdam", a good archetypal Guster song that brought them to radio listeners everywhere a few years ago. A pretty good album if not ambitious enough for my taste.

Radiohead - I Might Be Wrong/Live Recordings. I can't really critique this as a regular album, but it's still fun to listen to. It's got a couple of my more beloved Radiohead songs ("Everything in its Right Place", "The National Anthem") and one of my favorites ("Idioteque"). While this album is no Live From Folsom Prison, I appreciate a band that makes a live album now and then. It's just a nice way to let people know they're not a studio wonder, and that they don't completely blow in concert.

George Harrison - All Things Must Pass. Well, I saved the best for last, and that's no small feat considering that in almost any other group of six albums, Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus would give the other contenders a serious, American History X-style curb-stomping. This is a double album, chock full of great songs. There are ballads here, straight-up blues rock tunes, all driven by Harrison's wonderful voice and guitars: sometimes electric, sometimes acoustic, always controlled and leading. It's not often I listen to an album and decide that I will have it before I finish the first playthrough, but this one earned it.

It's no secret that Harrison was unhappy towards the end of the Beatles, in particular because the McCartney/Lennon songs dominated the albums and his material was given stepchild status at best. This album came out in 1970, the year the Beatles broke up. Harrison famously said that making his own albums was like "being allowed to go after being constipated for a long time". Well, sir, if only our refuse could all be so fine, the world would be a much better place.

In other news:
This week hasn't been much fun. But I think things turned around yesterday sometime, maybe? I guess on a scale of 1 to 10, I'm probably a C- right now, but still much improved from a couple days ago.