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.

Regardless of your feelings on Bono’s recent Messianic complex, you have to respect the fact that U2′s The Joshua Tree is the best album released in the 1980s.

Period.

After The Unforgettable Fire, which saw the band moving away from its protest-punk roots, they realized they were lost in space.  They had no real influences, no sound they were copying, yet they came to a grand realization about the power of America as an idea.  Bono became obsessed with America as he toured it incessantly, namely the Statue of Liberty as a metaphor for what our country stood for and had turned into.  You can hear that through songs like “Pride” and “MLK” that decry the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

This existential crisis, however, hit the music in a different way.  As they changed their identity to one rooted in Americana, their befriending of giants like Dylan and Keith Richards turned their eyes to soul, blues, and American folk.  That, mixed with the Edge’s trademark guitar parts copped from Irish music, set the tone for one of rock’s great sonic masterpieces.

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The Joshua Tree is a testament to the importance of sequencing.  Legend has it that Kirsty MacCool, an Irish songstress who had befriended Bono, picked her favorite songs in order, birthing a track list that explodes with “Where The Streets Have No Name.”  “Streets,” like Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” is what God had in mind when He came up with the beginning.  It’s a romantic (almost to a fault) anthem about the promise of America.  Bono paints this country as Zion, the promised land, the morning sun after an eternal night, and pleads to be allowed in.

As the album progresses, Bono continues this argument about what America is, from the inflicter of destruction in “Bullet The Blue Sky” to the continued beacon of “One Tree Hill.”  All the time, however, he adds this second thread, one of argument with God.  “With or Without You” typifies this.  On the surface, it seems like a backhanded love song; he essentially says that whomever he can’t live without is the one that torments him.  Then you realize, “Bono is a Catholic.  Isn’t this a song about Catholic guilt running wild?”  “With or Without You” then becomes the most powerful song ever written about Christian living.  “You give it all/Yet I want more/And I wait for you/…I can’t live/With or without you,” Bono cries.  “My hands are tied/My body bruised/She got me with nothing to win/And nothing left to lose.”  He’s left with nothing but the ability to come back to his savior and tormentor.  This nadir point and eventual salvation typifies the Christian experience, and Bono was able to meld it into one of the catchiest love songs ever written.

When you meld the ideas of the American ideal and the Christian struggle together, you get an even cooler metaphor: America is both the angel and devil on the shoulder.  Think about it: the two sides of America, the lighthouse of “Streets” and the black hole of “Bullet,” the romantic pessimism of “Red Hill Mining Town,” and the messed up deliverance of “Mothers of the Disappeared,” and you see this scary picture of everything America is and ought to be.

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What moves me the most, however, is the interplay between this message and the music.  Bono submits one of the most stirring vocal performances of the 20th century throughout the album, using a soaring tenor and falsetto inflected with pain, joy, and soul befitting James Brown to truly convey the album’s lyrical heart.  The Edge’s signature delay ring melds the best of American rock with Irish folk, taking the low drones and making them bass notes for some of the best melodic rhythm soloing anyone’s ever heard.  Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen provide pounding, sensitive, and explosive back-beats on every track.  The production team of Eno and Lanois arrange every song to the edge of sanity, never crossing too far either way.  No note sounds out of place; every accidental is intentional, every minor plays a major storytelling role, and every song is brilliantly pieced together.

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Simply calling it a triumph of the 1980s, however, is worthless.  The Joshua Tree is no album about Reaganism, nor is it a song cycle on the fall of Communism.  It’s neither flashy nor understated.  It doesn’t sing of individual problems that plagued the decade, but systemic ones that haunt us today.  The only way it is a triumph of the 1980s is that it, in some sense, follows the personal battle that the world went through.  Its greatness, however, is outside of that.

The Joshua Tree is a work of philosophy, of existential nightmare, and of great beauty.  It’s one man attempting to understand what he and his world means, realizing that there is no true answer.  In the end, Bono, in the closing track, “Mothers of the Disappeared,” finds a near solace in this two-faced view of what perfection is.  He decides that there is an ability to turn the sadness of loss into a major key, not admitting either way whether good or evil prevails in America.  That is the message of the album: Nothing can overshadow the ideal of a beacon of freedom like America, but nothing can overshadow what that beacon occasionally does to hurt.  God and America giveth.  God and America taketh away.

It’s a long-standing fact that Canada cannot put out good music.  Canadian music either falls into a category inhabited by artists like Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Avril Lavigne, Anne Murray, and Nickelback; or into one exemplified by Neil Young, John Samson of the Weakerthans, et al.  Canadian music, essentially, is either is a synonym for terrible or for perfection.

Enter Tegan and Sara Quin, a pair of Toronto twins schooled on the better school of Canadian rock laced with a healthy dose of Bruce Springsteen (see their tender rendition of “Dancing In The Dark” for an example).  Add the fact that they’re both lesbians and you create a stew of passionate, beautiful, and occasionally subversive anger.  Their 2007 effort, The Con, may be the best exposition of their style, as well as their myriad of quirks.

One quirk is their seemingly disparate sounds.  Twins are said to have near ESP from their DNA being nearly identical (particularly identical ones like the Quins), yet Tegan and Sara both write vastly different songs.  Tegan’s are usually more straight-forward pop anthems typified by “Nineteen,” possibly the best song about the chemistry between love and sexual frustration released this year.  Sara, on the other hand, writes more obtuse and dissonant song-scapes that mess with the harmonic quirks between their mainly similar voices.  “Floorplan” is the prime example of this phenomena, with lush layers of acoustic guitar mixed with offbeat rhythms and constant minor keying.

However, the ESP aspect creates an intriguing thread throughout the album, tying a sort of angst and emotion from their shared experiences through musically different songs.  The themes usually center around problems with relationships, including infidelity (“Back in Your Head” and, to a non-superficial extent, the title track) and the eventual breakup (the oddly touching “Call It Off”).  Possibly due to their shared sexuality or simply through the ability to identify with family best, each song seems like each girl felt the exact same as her counterpart.  It’s equal parts beautiful and unsettling.

The girls banked on this ability to make beauty out of pain and, in the process, have made a set of songs that rank up there as some of the catchiest of the year.  “Nineteen,” “The Con,” and “Back in Your Head” will end up scoring your life for an eternity simply because you will be unable to think of any other songs.  The problem, however, is the sequencing.  Because of the sonic disparity between Tegan and Sara, you find yourself jumping from jarring, arrhythmic minor masterpieces to soaring pop anthems without breaks or interludes.  As a set of EPs with Tegan on one and Sara on the other, The Con would be a genuine masterpiece.  As a disjoint LP, it suffers.