Musings Often in Stereo

There’s three albums that came out this year worthy of a number.

Yeah.  I said it.  Three.

See, this year was dominated by albums that either sucked (the majority), were solid (40%), were great, or were in my top three.  It’s not really a cop out.  It’s that three albums easily were 1-2-3, and the rest of the greats were simply honorable mention.

Here are those honorable mentions, listed in the order that I wrote the review for them:

The Con- Tegan and Sara: Any band can overcome a few bad tracks with one amazing hook.  That seems to be the theory behind The Con, Tegan and Sara’s album with some of their career’s highest and lowest points.  When they went for abject, they certainly got there, making songs that fell victim to experiment.  When they went for accessible, they got there, crafting some of the tightest harmonies of the year.  Even if it’s uneven, it still has too many great songs to deny.  Recommended Tracks: “Back In Your Head,” “Are You Ten Years Ago?,” “Nineteen”

Boxer - The National: It’s really refreshing to hear bands crafting soft pop-rock anthems while skewing every which way within the indie atmosphere without going too far.  The National makes densely layered rock that sounds both laid-back and immediate, anchored by the velvet smooth baritone of Matt Berninger.  Nothing overwhelms, which is a bit of a novelty nowadays.  It’s simply a mix of some of the best styles around in proper proportions under well-crafted, soft-spoken confessionals.  Recommended Tracks: “Squalor Victoria” and “Racing Like A Pro”

Beyond - Dinosaur Jr: When you listen to “Almost Ready,” the lead track on Beyond, you almost get the feeling that you’re wearing flannel.  Dinosaur Jr, the band that epitomized the other way you could go with grunge rock, brought 2007 its coolest reunion with an album that sounds both current and like a throwback.  It’s filled with hooks and the occasional insecure lyric, yet still draws its greatest moments when Lou and Murph blast backbeats as J Mascis cranks the gain and makes his guitar scream like his axe will destroy Communism.  Recommended Tracks: “Almost Ready,” “This is All I Came to Do,” “We’re Not Alone”

Reunion Tour- The Weakerthans: Anyone doubting the lyrical mind of John Samson, who spent the better part of three years (and the lesser part of several others) on this record, may need to light the grill and hunt some crow.  He may have crafted the most human stories of his career, injecting local-color level Canadian references to give his tales of normal schlubs more depth.  It keeps up the trajectory of 2003′s Reconstruction Siteby tempering the punk down to accent level while holding onto their anthemic strengths and forming them into some of the most affecting songs of the year.  Recommended Tracks: “Relative Surplus Value,” “Utilities,” “Virtute The Cat Explains Her Departure”

Graduation- Kanye West: ‘Ye may be the closest thing this generation has to a great composer nowadays, and that distinction comes from listening to the beats on this record.  He went from being the best music nerd on the planet (sampling Curtis Mayfield on “Touch The Sky,” anyone?) to actually sitting down and putting the puzzle pieces together to craft amazing, if not bombastic, songs about how amazing, if not bombastic, he is.  Recommended Track: “Good Life”

American Gangster- Jay-Z: When Hov dropped Kingdom Come in 2006, I really thought that he was trying to destroy any credibility and history he had made by coming back from retirement to show that his golf cart has Sprewells.  I’m glad he came to his senses, making the soul record of the year behind a lyrical explosion.  He mined his childhood and teens for powdered gold on Gangster, and it doesn’t help that both he and lead producer Diddy rediscovered the power of a good horn section.  Recommended Tracks: “Roc Boys (And The Winner Is…),” “No Hook”

 Onto the list.

#3: Never Been’er – The Evening Rig:  When I first saw The Evening Rig in October of 2006, I was stunned that someone was making the music that I was attempting to write (well, that and because both Miller from The Crush and Becky from Cadillac Blindside were in bands again).  It was hook-laden, seemingly romantic, and had a wicked mix of punk and alt-country that didn’t skew too far either way.  Little did I realize that it was one of their first shows as a four-piece.

Never Been’er captures that mix in a way that nearly every single band from Minneapolis has tried to do since 1985 and always came up tantalizingly short.  You have the Westerberg-soaked sly narrative songwriting (and the solo in “Takin’ Mine”), the adoration for alcohol (“All The Stars,” an early standout, and “At The Bar”), rollicking interplay of rhythm and slide lead guitar, and the occasional hint of straight alternative rock (“Try and Turn it Down” and the title track).  Every archetypal thing in MPLS Rock is represented here.

What’s so impressive, however, is that it really doesn’t ever relent.  Yes, you have the two near-country interludes in the first half, but the album never gets bogged down by filler.  Every song has at least one good quality, be it the outdoor bar blast and walking bass of “All The Stars,” the sweet croon of “City Lights,” the acoustic drive of late standout “Those Them Eyes,” or the blatantly anthemic opener “Playing House,” each track just works extremely well.  Nothing misfires.

As Miller said while fronting The Crush, every album needs an acoustic song “to help us get laid,” an issue I doubt he had problems with as the guy behind “3/4″ and “It Fell on Nines.”  “So Many Things,” Never Been’er‘s closer, continues that tradition strongly, but in a different way.  “Things” is a touching note to the fact that his life has been a series of epic screw-ups, but he still hasn’t been able to shake the influence of his father.  It sounds cheesy on paper, but with the slide solo and solid backbeat from Becky Hanten, who rocks a pair of brushes like no one else in the scene today, it becomes one of the most affecting songs of the year and sums the album up perfectly.

#2: New Wave - Against Me!: In light of the scene politics surrounding this record, AM!’s jump to Sire Records after a period where they were sellouts for being on Fat Wreck Chords, one can take the angle in reviewing it that this is the album to kill punk rock.  It’s the record that proves that bands can overcome the three chord sensibilities to make something more tuneful and meaningful than anyone ever thought of in 1977.  It’s the record that proves with its backlash that the punk hierarchy, who finds itself more concerned with stricture to outdated ideals, has lost touch with what is happening and has finally hit the point in their anarchist theories where they can’t handle constant change and instability.  Punk rock is dead; long live Against Me!.

Or one could take the angle that this is actually the most subversive and populist album of the year.  It’s the album that takes the music industry, the culture of punk, and the state of the nation to task.  More notably, it does it from behind enemy lines with Tom Gabel painting the band as the City on the Hill for rock in 2007 (“We can be the bands we want to hear” is the first line of the album, going on to say, “Come on and watch me show the way/I’m looking for the crest/Looking for the crest of a new wave”).

Or one could take the angle of it being Against Me!’s best step in the logical development they showed on 2005′s stellar Searching for a Former Clarity, which I still believe is the best punk record this decade.  It’s a honing of their skills of dance rhythm (“Stop!” and “Up the Cuts” both feel like the minor version of “Don’t Lose Touch”), humanist anthems of people on the edge  (“Thrash Unreal,” possibly the best song I heard this year, feels like the sister to “Problems,” easily the best song I heard in 2005), and the use of studio techniques (“Animal” is a paranoid version of ”Violence” on steroids) to convey a song’s emotion.

But here’s the path I’ll take: it’s just a damn good rock record.  It’s powerfully done, with their sound benefiting greatly from the knob-twiddling of Butch Vig.  It’s powerfully written, with as immediately heartfelt of lyrics as will come out this year, namely on the title track and “White People For Peace.”  It’s powerfully performed, with the guitars played to the ends of their strings, the drums sounding like the skins will pop at any moment, and Tom Gabel’s vocal cords sounding like veins he didn’t know existed were popping out.  There’s no better way to describe it than as the most powerful album of the year.

#1: Magic – Bruce Springsteen: I may have taken the safe road in calling Magic the album of the year, but as Backstreets Magazine editor Chris Phillips says, “The Grammy selection committee must have had a hard time calling it the album of the year when it’s the album of the decade.”

Magicis possibly Springsteen’s realization that reinventing himself to say the same thing doesn’t mean ditching the E Street Band and going solo or hootenanny.  It doesn’t mean shelving the best backup band ever devised to do something different.  He can reinvent his songwriting on his own.  He did that with Magic.

See, Springsteen could never be looked at as a dishonest songwriter.  Every chord, every note, every lyric he ever wrote was intentionally placed to prove a point.  There was no masking a message; if something was sad he wrote it minor, and if it was triumphant he wrote it in B flat.  On Magic, however, he did the opposite, masking rather depressing narratives in some of the most accessible rock of his career.  He wrote barn-burners (“Radio Nowhere,” which continues his streak of excellent opening tracks; and “Last to Die” are prime examples), elegiac pop soundscapes that Spector and Wilson would like to listen to in Heaven (“Girls in Their Summer Clothes”), and bombastic radio-friendly anthems (the album’s early four-shot of “You’ll Be Comin’ Down,” “Livin’ In The Future,” ”Your Own Worst Enemy,” and “Gypsy Biker”).  All of these songs say, in some way, the same thing: We’re screwed, and we’re sitting around.  “Biker” lyrically sounds like “Born in the U.S.A.” with the cast from “Glory Days,” but gets a set of solos worthy of Guitar Hero.  “Enemy” gets a sweeping piano and string intro before launching into a man’s existential nightmare after he understands how bad his life is going.  “Future” is “10th Avenue Freeze-Out” re-imagined into a burning critique of the Bush administration.

But then you realize what he’s doing.  Listening to the title track, you realize that his thesis as to what is wrong with the country is that we’re being tricked.  “Trust none of what you hear/And less of what you see/This is what will be,” he plaintively says.  This masking of the message behind what’s seemingly a fun pop-rock frolic is a Clear Skies Initiative set to music, a video game war’s soundtrack.  He’s using the same technique the PR division of the West Wing has for the past seven years.

I’m not sure if it’s just Bruce coming to his senses or what, but the second half of the album absolutely burns.  Opening with the album’s least consequential song in “I’ll Work For Your Love,” he then delves into the four-song tour-de-force of the title track, the burning indictment of war policy that is “Last to Die,” “Long Walk Home,” a roadmap to returning to fundamentals that takes ”My Hometown” and turns it into a stereotypical Springsteen B flat battle cry (which, in my mind, ranks above ”The Rising” and even “Land of Hope and Dreams” in its sheer depth) and “Devil’s Arcade,” the fitting closer. 

“Devil’s Arcade” is my song of the year for a few reasons.  First, it’s lyrically stunning.  It tells, with as little politics or philosophizing as possible, the story of an American soldier coming home wounded and lost, using the tale as a metaphor for what we’ve traded our ideals for in this decade.  Second, it’s sonically jarring, not following traditional major keying but instead going into (I think) D Mixolydian, providing a dream-like major style chord structure that sounds vaguely like a nightmare.  Third and most importantly, it goes for simple, using Garry W. Tallent and Max Weinberg’s signature steady as anything backbeat to level out acoustic guitar, strings, and some of Danny Federici’s sweetest organ playing ever with only small electric flourishes.  It’s a song about unmasking the bullshit of the Bush administration to reveal the true damage of their reign, and it’s sonic perfection.

But why Magic above all else?  Simply put, it’s Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.  No one can really go toe to toe with Springsteen as a bandleader or a songwriter, nor can anyone beat out Weinberg and Tallent, nor can anyone outplay the key tandem of Federici and Roy Bittan or the guitar duo of Steve Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren.  On their worst days they are at the top of their professions.  Magic, I believe, is them near their best.

Occasionally music gifted us with reasons to have hope in 2007.  Usually, however, it made us pessimistic.  However, a few things may just point to our impending doom.

1. “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” by Soulja Boy: It may be contrived to say that the worst hit of the year is the biggest sign of the apocalypse, but consider the lyrics to the chorus: “Soulja Boy up in it/Watch me crank it, watch me roll/Watch me crank that Soulja Boy/That super man dat.  O,/Now watch me do/Crank that Soulja Boy…”  It sounds alternately like a self-service and a Greek ode.  He continues, “I’m Bouncin On My Toe/Watch Me Super Soak Dat (OH!)/I’ma Pass It To Arab/Then He Gon Pass It To The Low (Low)/Haterz Wanna Be Me/Soulja Boy, I’m The Man/They Be Lookin At My Neck/Sayin Its The Rubberband Man (Man)/Watch Me Do It (Watch Me Do It)/Dance (Dance)/Let Get To It (Let Get To It)/Nope, You Can’t Do It Like Me/Hoe, So Don’t Do It Like Me/Folk, I See You Tryna Do It Like Me/Man That Shit Was Ugly.”  When coupled with steel drums and a BPM the rate of a tortoise’s heartbeat on GHB, all I can do is agree with Nas and, to a different extent, Soulja Boy himself.  “Hip-Hop is dead,” Mr. Jones said.  “Man, that shit was ugly,” Mr. Boy stated.

2. America’s inability to resist Daughtry: When Chris Daughtry lost on American Idol, I thought it was a bit of the want for novelty with the coronation of Taylor Hicks.  Little did I realize that America would realize that trading subpar talent with a prodigious amount of vocal nodes for subpar talent with gray hair would be considered a mistake in need of over-rectification.  If, say, the Twins were to trade Nick Punto for the Royals’ Ross Gload, the Twins would retaliate by continuing a steady decline.  America, it seems, cannot just stop at slowly sucking.  They vaulted Daughtry’s debut record, one with a few decent but overdone hooks and a remainder of proto-grunge B-sides to the top-selling album of the year and two of its singles to the top 25.  It would be like the Twins paying Ross Gload $28 million a year.  America cannot make proportional responses when it comes to music, but they continue to have no problem purchasing bombs.

3. “Before He Cheats” by Carrie Underwood: In another example of an estimated 30 million Americans being deaf three or so hours a week, Carrie Underwood had the sixth highest charting single in the country with “Before He Cheats,” a slow-burning piece of spitfire about losing her man to a slut and returning the favor by beating the crap out of his truck.  Not only is it a slap in the face to any progressive movements that have run through female country (The only thing that can elicit passion like that is a cheating man? Not even the constant male-centrism of conservative society?) since the birth of the Dixie Chicks, but she, throughout her debut album, perpetuates the same clichés that have plagued an otherwise passable genre over the past 25 years: Drunk guys, guys who drive large trucks, and Jesus.

4. The Great Publicity Stunt of In Rainbows: I’ve said before and will continue to say it: the record industry, when they moved into the digital age, didn’t realize until it was four years too late how screwed they were.  They trusted people to pay for generally subpar music at rates drastically higher than they were worth.  In essence, they told people to pay for things that, in a digital world, are worthless.  Enter Radiohead, the band for the million or so audiophiles who still buy vinyl, who came up with the answer: Allow the consumer to decide whether or not their new album, In Rainbows, is worth anything.  Let their free-will (and conscience) determine their wanted price.  We all thought it was a revolution in the way music would be purchased and distributed.  We then were confused as to why the album was posted in a pretty bad compression ratio considering the fanbase’s skew to the sonically nerdy.  We wondered whether or not we should buy an actual copy at a normal price for something in better quality that we had gotten for what we said it was worth.  Then we were crushed by hearing that some guy in marketing came up with our industry’s salvation as a buzz-creator for an album downloaded and bought by the same million people that would have gotten it anyway.

5. Music has become a video game: As a guitarist, I can safely say that guitar skills help very little at Guitar Hero.  There’s not really the artistic integrity there.  There’s not a place to add twinges of soul, save for when you use the whammy bar out of place.  It’s five (not even six, like, gee, guitar strings) buttons you press to make something seem like you’ve made sound.  Regardless of the technology behind a game like Rock Band or the possible exposure to good music (albeit limited when Slash, not Clapton, is the key legend of rock in Guitar Hero III), the marketing of music as a video game is a saddening moment.  Seeing people think of themselves as musicians when all they need to do is press two colored buttons at a time or contort their voices to kind of sound like their heroes removes the artistic ingenuity of rock music, an artform designed to remove the binary straps of classical music and theory.

C

There are a few ways to look at the music world in 2007.  Some are more positive than others (and, arguably, the truth) while some are even pessimistic for my standards.

The first way to analyze it is by going off of this thesis: 2007 may well prove to be the apocalypse of music.  Artists were returning to the tired idea of creating novelty hits that bank on simplicity over actual cleverness, and it worked.  “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” is a sad but prime example of riding an unimaginative slice of a substandard portion of a genre (one that led Nas to declare that “Hip-Hop is dead”) to unimaginable infamy.  At the same time, bands were creating genius work that couldn’t seem to find its way out of an insular underground community without a lot of help and, again, novelty.  The new Radiohead album would have likely been bought by the nation’s million or so hipsters, but only gained real attention after it was posted for free on the internet for a marketing gimmick.  Even the music community began eating its own, vaulting lesser known standards like Hancock and Gill over seminal influences like Springsteen at the Grammys or the Ventures and Mellencamp over the Beastie Boys at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Art, sales, and critical integrity all took a sharp cutting over the past year.

But yet, there was some good music floating every which way.  Jigga came back to his street poetry with American Gangster.  K-West finished his University Trilogy strongly with Graduation, which saw him branch out more as a composer instead of the world’s best sample producer.  The Arcade Fire eschewed the sophomore slump with Neon Bible, a more accomplished if more safe outing than their fantastic Funeral.  Against Me! finally got around to selling out completely from punk rock with New Wave, which ironically may bring down more establishments than when Tom Gabel sang about molotov cocktails and Dom Perignon.  And lest we forget the Boss, who made an about face on the increasingly brilliant Magic. 

My preferred way to view it is as the nadir of popular culture.  In spite of all of the positives the true artists of music created in 2007, the masses became content with a disingenuine “reality” where people could regain fleeting fame by going on a game show, script truth into stereotypes of excess and isolation, and not really mind when the thought disappears and the advertising begins.  There may be a lot of pessimism in that, but keep this in mind: If it’s a nadir, it means that there’s nowhere but up.

God help us.