'Cause I Been In The Lab With A Pen And A Pad

YOUR MUSICAL JESUS RIDES AGAIN

And now that I've finally managed to kill off my entire readership due to chronic inactivity, let's get back to the program.

The Shivvers, "No Reaction" - Well, okay, I suppose I owe the three of you who still check this blog intermittantly some sort of explanation as to where. After all, in the time since I've been gone, Paris Hilton's come and gone (and come, and gone back) to jail, Chris Benoit's sent the term "asphyxiation" skyrocketing up the list of Googled terms (presumably because the vast preponderance of his fans are unfamiliar with words exceeding three syllables, with the possible exception of "jujigatame"), Voxtrot's star seems to have fallen most ingloriously to earth despite their self-titled debut actually being pretty good SERIOUSLY PEOPLE DON'T MAKE ME GET THE HOSE, and so on. I do try not to utterly abandon my readership during boring times.

However, when one writes a mp3 blog, abandoning one's readership really is the only thing to do when one can't for the life of them find decent singles to write up. Part of this, to be fair, is institutionally motivated; as I may have said once or twice or forty thousand times, I started writing for Stylus last year, and as such my focus has been forcibly shifted onto albums rather than singles. Also, and this really needs to be said, whoever's in charge of the musical Illuminati has been doing a really shitty job of putting crucial-sounding singles out; I yield to nobody when it comes to loving the Young & Lost Club label, but they seem to be following the rest of British Indiedom down a dark, unpromising road of singer-songwriterdom thanks to the example set earlier this year by Jack Penate's apocalyptically unsatisfying "Second, Minute, Hour" (THANKS BROSEPH). (I should, however, point out that Rough Trade has yet to get me the Sigma's record, which is allegedly the diametric opposite of some stupid sub-Decembrists coffee-klatch poetry bullroar. Hope springs eternal.)

Luckily for you kids, however, I do belong to a messageboard which, apropos of nothing, decided to initiate a loosely-organized musical taste competition, wherein entrants, after being paired up, upload a song and everyone else listens and votes for which song they like better, with the winner advancing. I place a special emphasis on the "loosely-organized" part of that characterization; we keep adding entrants and playoff formats and losers' brackets and side contests and so on to the point where we're still not even done with the first round, although it would probably be foolish to expect more organization and dedication from a messageboard organized around the impugning of the sexuality of internet douchebags in various stages of butthurtedness. Still, I guess it did the trick; for the first time since like March, I'm in a singles-thinkin' mindset, and here we are.

It helps, of course, that the tournament - and boy, I can't imagine a less interesting subject for you to read about, but we're in far too deep to quit now - has been of unimpeachable quality so far. QED: the best song of the tournament - the Shivvers' "No Reaction" - might not even make it out of the first round due to the bad luck of being matched up against the admittedly indomitable combination of Rakim and Primo of "When I B On Tha Mic". It's very rare these days that someone can bill something to me as "one of the greatest pop songs ever", mostly because the only people who ever even employ the term "pop songs" are just looking to use the opinion of the masses to ratify their own navel-gazing tastes rather than to actually illuminate any previously-unexplored facet of popularity, and yes, I unyieldingly agree that this description implicates me to a profoundly sad extent. "No Reaction", however, is not one of those songs; within five seconds of playing it for the first time, I immediately knew that (1) this was one of the great musical things ever assembled by a group of musicians for any sort of an audience, and (2) I was going to need to kickstart ye olde blog to yell about it properly, which I believe brings us more or less up to date.

Part of me, admittedly, is a little nervous about fulminating overly much about this track since, for all I know, it's one of the dozens and dozens of cornerstones of modern power-pop to which I've just been obliteratingly oblivious. Despite owning multiple out-of-print compilations and demonstrating a facility for picking up on the aesthetic thread linking the Raspberries to Voxtrot (SERIOUSLY, GIVE THAT ALBUM ANOTHER CHANCE, AND THEN POSSIBLY ANOTHER ONE), power-pop still feels like a genre where I'm just kinda feeling my way around in the dark; there are so many touchstones, and people love each of them like their own children, and so many of the genre's most critical tracks were released without any real backing and faded away into unwarranted obscurity that it's hard not to throw up one's hands and rededicate ones' critical impulses to the easily-masterable catalogues of producers and such. Knowing what little I now know about "No Reaction", a song whose existence had passed me by entirely before last weekend, it certainly seems to be a candidate for that kind of status; the Shivvers' catalogue, after all, had been long out of print pretty much since the instant it was first released nearly thirty years ago due mostly to the Shivvers' incomparably bad luck of being based out of Milwaukee, which has roughly as much to do with the music industry as New York has to do with the Vague Stench Of Urine Removal industry. It wouldn't surprise me a bit to learn that, upon the release of Lost Hits from Milwaukee's First Family of Power Pop, the career-spanning Shivvers retrospective released last year, "No Reaction" sent shockwaves through the power-pop community - after all, there's nothing music dorks love to promote more than something which lets them monopolize the spotlight with a good story, and the Shivvers' tale of hard luck certainly qualifies. Hell, I wouldn't even be too surprised to learn that there's been a steady - and steadily-expanding - movement in support of "No Reaction" as being some perfectly-formed nugget of pop music ever since it came out. I mean, hipsters by their nature aren't creative enough to start liking good stuff on their own; someone had to like it since way back in the day.

All I know, however, is that "No Reaction" sounds like the song Jesus and the Holy Choir of Angels would play if they somehow found themselves booked for an after-school show at the Peach Pit. To call this bubblegum-pop par excellance would almost feel like short-changing it; its length belies a more studied approach to the elements that make it up, the kind of approach where everyone gets a turn in the spotlight, even if it's just for a drum-fill's worth of time. That's not to say it sounds professional, of course - if anything, its most triumphant moments are the ones where it actually attains the professionalism necessary for "No Reaction" to have escaped the cheesy confines of Wisconsin - but rather that there's simply no room for throwaway anything in this song - everything, every element, gets used. The drummer's not exactly a living metronome? No problem - we'll just let the keyboard set the pace. The keyboard sounds like a cheap piece of shit? No problem - we'll just let Jill Kossoris hurl herself against the outer boundaries of her vocal range. And so on. It just keeps going, until all of a sudden the miracle happens - the drummer syncs up with the band, or the chintziness of the keyboard sounds momentarily transfixing, or - BIG FUCKING OR - Kossoris stumbles into a sliver of the song which she can unequivocally nail with her voice, as is the case whenever she lets the titular lyric slip. It's simply an invigorating thing to hear.

More importantly, it's what I'd apparently been missing up until that point. I still love the album format - I may find %90 of the albums that cross my path foul and detestable, and I may consider nine percent out of the remaining ten to be merely unworthy of further exploration, but I mean c'mon; dissing the album format is like dissing the novel - but it had simply been too long since I'd run into anything that functioned flawlessly without exhibiting a shred of dependence on anything else on the planet. I mean, I love "All My Friends" as much as, er, all my friends do, but I only really appreciate it when I make a point of listening to Sound of Silver in its entirity; it's a telling fact that Franz Ferdinand's cover lapped the original's playcount in iTunes weeks ago (and if nothing else, it's telling you that Franz Ferdinand pulled off one hell of a cover). "No Reaction", on the other hand, sounded pristine and perfect and unimpeachable as a song literally pulled from the ether as an example of what good music should sound like, which, I guess, is more or less the guiding principle of this blog's format. And that brings us more or less up to date. Again. (Click here to buy Lost Hits from Milwaukee's First Family of Power Pop from Amazon.com)

Evie Sands, "But You Know I Love You" - Evie Sands is, of course, not new to this space, or really even to the earth in general; as best as I can tell, she is merely new to everyone who isn't me or a longtime reader of mine, which, as it turns out, is even more of a paralyzingly unfortunate shame than previously assumed. Before a few months ago, I'd only heard Sands' sophomore album Any Way That You Want Me, a better-than-average early-seventies blue-eyed-soul album apparently only heard in real time by like Barbara Streisand and Bette Middler (and wow is that ever some terrifying company for a steak-eatin' gun-shootin' McLaughlin Group-deridin' heterosexual like yr boy). It wasn't, however, good enough to lead me to Sands' debut album Any Way That You Want Me until a few weeks ago, a turn of events which could drive a sane man to choke his wife and profoundly retarded son to death before hanging himself in his weight room. Because uh I mean WAH-AOW, people - Any Way That You Want Me is one of the absolute unqualified best albums of its kind that I've ever heard, and its eminance among late-sixties weirdo post-Brill Building singer-songwriters deserves recognition (or at least deserves to be encountered) by anyone who's ever held a record by Harry Nilsson or Randy Newman up for praise. And if anything, I'm underselling it.

"But You Know I Love You" is, in some ways, kind of a shitty loss leader, mainly because if your ears are anything like mine you'll happily listen to it nearly to the point of excluding the rest of Any Way That You Want Me from practical recognition. It's certainly the album's brightest moment of all the elements of one of its songs coming together; Any Way That You Want Me may be deserve to be praised as a legitimate classic, but none of its other songs keep piling on the elements as productively as "But You Know I Love You" (listen, for instance, for all the bits and pieces that make up the chorus which the song retains after the chorus' first iteration - I believe they call that "arrangement") or take such a sharp turn into a wholly different formula of emotive resonance (q.v. the way Evie shamelessly abandons the rest of the song's sultry pining in order to practically spit out the "But if only I could find my way back to the times" couplets). But it's really almost a shame how much it overshadows the album that contains it; reducing Any Way That You Want Me to this one song seems about as productive as reducing Exile on Main Street to "Shine A Light (and not just because the two songs share a gang of rollicking gospel sensibilities, although that fact certainly doesn't hurt). True, if you're the type to actually buy music, you're setting yourself up for a bonanza down the road when you eventually exhaust the one song you can't help but love publicly; after all, that's when the other gems' pleasures start revealing themselves to you. But given how low a profile Any Way That You Want Me has kept since its release, it just seems tragic that the whole album can't be raised to its deserving status all at once. As you can probably guess, I urge you to buy the album and prove me wrong. (Click here to buy Any Way That You Want Me from Amazon.com)

get cape. wear cape. fly, "I-Spy" (Metronomy remix) - Just to wrap up this apologia in consistent fashion, I'd like to point out that I'm hoping that, in the future of this blog, I'm going to attempt to do a better job of representing the stuff to which I actually listen rather than the stuff I happen to be uniquely privileged to introduce to the Hype Machine. As my opening gambit, I choose Metronomy's remix of the atrociously-named get cape. wear cape. fly's "I-Spy", a track I picked up over the last few days from the v. excellent These Rocks Pop and have been using to obliterate the memory of pretty much every Metronomy remix since "Atlantis to Interzone". Not that they've been bad, of course - at the very least I actively like his take on Charlie Alex March's "Piano Song" - but they just haven't been exploring the same aesthetic of rushed, broken-soundedness that characterizes all the best Metronomy remixes. Generally speaking, there's always something a little "off" about top-shelf Metronomy stuff - be it the thinness of the drums on the Temposhark remix, the lack of sophistication in handling the vocals' newly-imposed swirl on the Dead Disco remix or, in the case of "I-Spy", the fleeting moments when the various doubled-up bits that comprise it find themselves at odds with each other - it may be most palpably evident on the, er, "synth trumpet", but listen carefully and you'll hear the same dissonant tension in practically every element of the song. And it's not just for effect, either - little quirks like that keep Metronomy tracks feeling substantial where lesser artists' remixes would have you either fast-forwarding to The Part With The Brutally Effective Chord Change or skipping over it alltogether. Of course, it also deserves to be posted simply for rocking so motherfucking hard; by the time that bawling LAWLALALAWLALALIDDLELIDDLELAW part shows up, a veritable feast of options to which one might hurl themselves around in a most conspicuously elated fashion has already been laid out for your consumption. This is seriously good shit; let's hope it's a harbinger of great things on the horizon from one of the most promising young producers today. (Click here to buy the "I-Spy" single from HMV)

ELSEWHERE

- Obviously lots of blogs have been killing it in my extended absence, but I've been able to stay afloat largely thanks to three particular favorites - Discobelle (which needs no introduction), Good Weather For Airstrikes (ditto - fuck, given the ridiculous traffic his little site draws these days, D. Wreck oughtta be introducing me), and American Athlete, a blog chock full of longform cosmic disco jams which somehow seems to have gone shockingly unpimped around these parts despite effectively serving as my homepage ever since the Great Arthur Russell Bonanza of Oh Seven. Heads should note that he's currently hosting a rather world-annihilating remix of Double Exposure's unimpeachable "Everyman"; you really owe it to yourself to go and get it NOW.

- Also, in the interest of not burning my bridges with the people who hook me up with free shit that I actually want, I should probably say something about Superbad seeing as how my homeboy Mike over at Cornerstone got me into a screening last night ostensibly so's I could go drum up support for it. Truth be told, I was just looking for a night away from my apartment, so naturally I was delighted to find myself taking in what has to be considered the best movie to come from the Judd Apatow camp yet. A lot of people are going to be touting Knocked Up as better, but while it's quite the fine little movie, let's be serious here: people are going to get all dewy-vadged over it since it came out right as summer dating kicked into high swing, meaning it may well have been the first instance you got to sit next to the Onliest Girl/Guy Who'd Never Be So Horrible As To Stand You Up On Your Birthday You Hear Me Michelle Fuck No I'm Not Bitter Wait Come Back *Cut*Cut*Cut* and as such your memory might not be the most trustworthy source. I, on the other hand, will undoubtedly be dying young and alone, and therefore have no external factors influencing my opinion that, as a film, Superbad is worlds tighter than Knocked Up, let alone everything else Apatow's ever done on the big screen; since the timeframe in which it takes place is so much shorter, there's simply less room for the screenwriters to get fed up and go AW FUGGIT, LET'S WRAP THIS UP the way they did with Katherine Heigl's sturm und drang pertaining to her position at E! News. That's not to say it's predictable or suffocatingly tight or anything, of course - it's an unapologetic popcorn movie through and through. It's just that this doesn't disqualify it from being an atrociously well-constructed unapologetic popcorn movie, and as someone whose copy of Come & Get It couldn't make its way across the Atlantic quickly enough, I find that to be more than praiseworthy enough. I mean, it's certainly a better-constructed movie than Sicko, or at the very least it's put together smartly enough to avoid the necessity of the popcorn-movie equivalent of directly (and literally!) posing the question "What happened to our country?" to the audience. I mean eugh.

- I cannot stop looking at that picture at the top of this post and hoping feverishly that Google Image Search hasn't accidentally directed me to hilariously apt white supremacist imagery. Once more, for the record: I AM ONLY FROM NORTH CAROLINA, I AM NOT OF IT.

- Finally, all kidding aside, I do want to say thanks to my three or four readers who actually stuck around, not to mention the people who actually took the time to email me botheratin' me to get off my ass and restart the site. It gave me a Feeling, yes it did.