"The Day After Tomorrow" Is The New "Tomorrow"

A day late, eleventy billion dollars short. Don't tread on me.

Paul Simon, "Think Too Much" (a) - I'm honestly not sure if I can remember a time where I followed music on the internet without encountering an ever-rising tide of people touting the superiority of Paul Simon's Hearts and Bones over its ever-so-slightly-more-successful younger brother Graceland. Obviously, on some level this has to be motivated by simple overexposure; Graceland pretty much was to my generation's parents what American Idiot would later be to our newphews and little brothers, and frankly I'd rather fuck two dogs and a sheep than drop the needle on "I Wanna Be A Minority" any time soon. But overexposure isn't strictly the domain of juvenile bullshit, and it always kinda seemed to me that the paralyzing venom characterizing %99 of all discussions of Graceland on the internet never really had a lot to do with the songwriting at work on the record, which, while far from perfect ("Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes", I poop on thee), certainly has its illuminating moments. Consequently, I always kinda figured that all of the love for Hearts and Bones was just a transference of appreciation that would otherwise be going to Graceland if it weren't for history - after all, both albums come from the same period, both deal with similar themes (GO ON, ANYONE WHO'S EVER HEARD A PAUL SIMON SONG, TRY AND GUESS WHAT THOSE THEMES MIGHT BE), both see Simon appropriating "world music" for his own sonic purposes (in the case of Hearts and Bones, Simon went straight for the Caribbean, albeit without quite so much gusto as when he plundered South African mbaqanga on Graceland)...you see where I'm going with this. Suffice it to say, when I finally got around to actually listening to Hearts and Bones, I wasn't disappointed; it was pretty much everything I expected it to be.

What I never expected to discover, however, was just how goddamned likeable a record Hearts and Bones turned out to be. Again, in the house where I grew up, Paul Simon was to be treated as someone with A Musical Piece To Speak - not that my parents put him on the same plane as, like, Beethoven or anyone, but generally speaking, any enjoyment derived from Simon's records was to be regarded as purely beside the point of the experience (it is perhaps an illustrative coincidence that they thought of Robert Altman in pretty much the same terms). But Hearts and Bones, despite featuring some of Simon's most incisive and insightful lyrics, isn't about any of that - to me, it sounds like Simon's just letting his ear for sonics run wild and having a blast the whole time, almost to the point where the album becomes uneven as a result. There's a genuine relish to the way most of the songs on Hearts and Bones simply play out that you'd arguably have to dig back to "Kodachrome" in order to find in Simon's catalogue; in many ways, it's the album the Talking Heads spent the rest of their career after Remain In Light trying (and failing) to make, an album made by a transparently worldly artist which somehow manages to be almost blissfully devoid of showy intellectual preening or vamping (that "almost" exists in that sentence simply because of "Cars", incidentally). I mean, there's subtle levels to Hearts and Bones that I'm only just now coming to appreciate - up until last night, for instance, I never picked up on all the doo-wop elements forming the backbone of "Rene & Georgette Magritte With Their Dogs After The War", and it's not like I've been ducking that song until then.

But the real revelatory moment on Hearts and Bones has to be the second iteration of "Think Too Much", probably the only song Paul Simon ever had a hand in writing that could conceivably still get a few asses shaking at a hipster disco night even these days. True, you do kinda have to give the assist to Nile Rodgers (in pretty much the same way that you have to give Sid Vicious the assist for creating the myth of the Sex Pistols), but the really revelatory aspects of this version of "Think Too Much" don't emerge unless you really try to hone in on the little details of Simon's performance, like the yelping enthusiasm he pumps out on his backing track or the way he hangs on for dear life to the key line in the chorus or all that tangential stuff he tries so hard to cram into the track just cuz (that wheezing synth flutter during the chorus = "Chalk another one up for ESG's 'U.F.O.'"). And really, once you're able to appreciate "Think Too Much" as Something Made By Paul Simon rather than just as fun music for listening to, Hearts and Bones is pretty much cake - not that the rest of the album reaches its highs, of course, but merely that it's all fun just like this. It may be the one thing you can honestly say about Hearts and Bones that you can't say about Graceland, but having found myself captivated by its appeal for a good couple of weeks now I sure can't help but admit that it counts for an awful lot. (Click here to buy Hearts and Bones from Amazon.com)

The Exploding Hearts, "We Don't Have To Worry Anymore" - Anyone who's ever run an MP3 blog will tell you that the most dangerous trap to watch out for is the one of simply posting songs in order to keep the content coming; there may actually not be a more direct path to "forced enthusiasm" in all of Creation. I mean, I'm certainly as guilty of it as anyone else, but posting stuff just because it's out there and you'd rather listen to it than violently overrated emoperettas isn't really in the spirit of the arrangement that keeps my sweet ass out of the pokey for piracy. Fortunately, though, it's not always necessary to fake enthusiasm - sometimes, there's actual news afoot on which MP3 content actually has some relevance. For instance, and I'm going to put this in bigger, bolder letters on a separate line just to make sure you don't miss it,

THERE'S A MOTHERFUCKING COMPILATION OF EXPLODING HEARTS RARITIES AVAILABLE FOR SALE

and frankly I can't think of any way to get people more excited about what unfortunately amounts to the only possible second album from one of the most promising bands to have emerged so far this decade (one hates to throw terms like that around on the basis of one album, but uh Guitar Romantic kinda > *) than to post one of the most ecstatically infectious songs off it. My rip, admittedly, does sound like crap, but then again hacking through all those layers of blown-out EQs has always been a major part of the Hearts' appeal to me, and I see no reason why adding another layer of uncooperative media should get in the way of that particular pleasure. Plus it'll make you that much more likely to lay out the eleven bucks for the album, which you really should be doing. I mean, the amount of time it took me to buy this album from Dirtnap was pretty much only limited by the speed at which I could yank my credit card out of my wallet. (Click here to order Shattered directly from Dirtnap Records, the Hearts' label)

The Legends, "Play It For Today" - In 2004, the Legends came out with what I always assumed a gloriously formulaic Swedish indie-rock affair; I say "assumed" because, having just been burnt bad by the Raveonettes and the Sounds in one calendar year, I brusquely wrote Up Against The Legends off almost for good in favor of something presumably less satisfying by several factors of ten (oh Delgados, how you haunt me). Fortunately for me, however, this had the effect of setting a place for me at the table for Facts + Figures, their most recent release, simply by virtue of its being an almost total aesthetic inversion of its predecessor. That's not to say there aren't guitars or big, sweeping, awkwardly-worded choruses - this is, after all, Sweden - but rather that the guitars are all buried under an almost-insurmountable wall of arctic synths, and that dramatic out-rocking takes a decided back seat to measured, unshakable precision. "Play It For Today" sums it up best, I think - it took maybe fifteen seconds before I found myself doing two things at once: (1) musing over how a band that could come up with something so winsomely synthetic could have ever even dreamed up an album that drew glowing comparisons to the Jesus & Mary Chain within the same Presidential election cycle, and (2) scrambling to make a copy of Facts + Figures arrive on my doorstep as soon as I could get it here. And luckily for me, it turned out to be wholly representative of the album - hell, it's damn near good enough to get me to go back and give Up Against The Legends another shot. Or, to be more precise, a first shot. (Click here to buy Facts + Figures from Amazon.com)

Diddy, "Get Off" - As shocking as it is to say, I'm starting to think that all the anticipation surrounding the release of Diddy's (nee P. Diddy/Puff Daddy.Sean Combs/Gozer, Destroyer of Worlds) upcoming Press Play might not necessarily be all that unwarranted, although to be fair, a lot of that has to do with learning that he wisely handed production duties over to basically every talented boardsman working in the game today. I mean, of course it sucks hippo cock as a rap album, but listening to a Diddy album for the quality of the rapping is like watching a WNBA game to take in all those glorious fundamentals - either way, you're kidding yourself if you think you're taking in any pleasure deeper than watching girls jump around. I, fortunately, have no such hang-up, which is why my favorite song hands-down to emerge from this whole project so far is "Get Off", his valiant attempt at either James Brown-esque proto-funk or Baltimore club music or God only knows what else, simply because it's so upfront about its intentions: give Diddy a forum by which he might exhort you to dance and then hit you straight up with some oboe hotness. As you can probably imagine, it's pretty much the single most un-anticipatable song of the year; it feels exactly like the kind of thing I'd accept at face value from anyone in the world other than Mr. "Don't ask me if I write rhymes/I write checks" (although frankly that song rules a whole lot too). To be terrifyingly honest, I'm not completely sure whether I actually like the song itself or whether I just like the incalculable incongruity of the whole thing, but given the fact that I think I had "Get Off" on repeat for like forty-five minutes straight last night, I'm willing to take the risk and stand up for it in public, damn the torpedoes. Also (and I cannot make this clear enough) THE OBOE. (Click here to buy Press Play from Amazon.com - "Get Off" didn't make the cut, but O DAMN is "Diddy Rock" enough of a burner to warrant buying anyway [and you can hit up Discobelle if you don't believe me]).

Grizzly Bear, "Easier" - And finally, let's wrap this monster post up with an album to which I am, once again, comically late. For this, I blame all the jerks out there who'd slander Grizzly Bear's Yellow House by labeling it as "freak-folk"; I hate to cannibalize stuff I write for other venues, but like I told Liz, Yellow House clearly has as much to do with freak-folk as Arular has to do with dancehall. I mean, yes, if you want to be a righteous cock you could argue that the shoe fits simply by virtue of so many of the genre's signifiers (whoops, another lift) being so obviously present, but c'mon; the great thing about Yellow House is the way it's so breathtakingly easy to listen to, not the ways it comes up with of being creatively obstreporous (that one, I might add, is strictly for my GP folxxx). Once you unlock the album's logic, it's packed with at least as much pure aural candy as Midlake's album, if not even an album so lofty as So This Is Goodbye - it's just a much more open-ended type of beauty, the kind that passes you a note in class instead of jumping on a table and waving its hands in the air. It's probably not a coincidence that my favorite song on the album is probably "Easier", Yellow House's first track, simply because it announces the album itself so flawlessly; you have my word that if they could titrate the way those flutes flutter in and the bells get to tinkling at the start of the song, to say nothing of the way the song gently becomes an all-out pick-stravaganza, into an injectable form, I'd absolutely be out on the street with a dick in my mouth and a new five-dollar bill in my pocket right now. Most people tend to agree that Yellow House only gets better from "Easier" on, and really, it's not that I disagree in spirit - I just think the album only ever revisits this level without ever rewriting it or surpassing it. And I hasten to add that that's hardly a bad thing. (Click here to buy Yellow House from Amazon.com)