Flaming Lips and Yo La Tengo Year End Reviews

I was asked to write year end reviews for two of favorite records of last year, The Flaming Lips Embryonic and Yo La Tengo's Popular Songs. You can find them here, as well as below.

Flaming Lips- Embryonic

Embryonic resets the clock for the Flaming Lips. After a decade of functioning as a studio three-piece and turning out highly orchestrated albums with Wayne’s voice and lyrics firmly in the foreground, the band has gone back to being a band again. It would be easy to imagine that a back-to-basics approach would result in an album that sounded like it could be the follow-up to 1993’sTransmissions From The Satellite Heart, but this is the Flaming Lips. They’re anything but predictable, although they probably needed to remind themselves of that after the relatively tame At War With The Mystics.

Constructing songs primarily upon a tapestry of drum and bass patterns, Embryonic is also their first so-called double album, even though it fits on a single disc and doesn’t run much longer than some of their previous records. Like the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street, the record goes for a sustained mood over individual songs. Which is not to say there aren’t some gems on here. Embryonic takes you on an organic journey through a range of styles including free jazz and psychedelia, and because the vocals are pushed to the back, the themes of power and astrology only emerge over time. But on a sprawling record like this, uncovering the rewards is what it’s all about. –Todd Norem

Yo La Tengo- Popular Songs

There’s something to the title of Yo La Tengo’s 2009 album that really rings true. Popular Songs – it sounds like another joke from the same band that brought us 2005’s I’m Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass. Sure, we’ve never seen Yo La Tengo in the top 10 and probably never will. But Popular Songs is Yo La Tengo’s most accessible album in years. Longtime fans enjoyed their Condo Fucks detour into garage rock covers from earlier this year, but by genre-hopping from R&B to psychedelia to guitar-drenched epics, they’re created a better record here. “Periodically Double Or Triple,” “If It’s True,” and “Avalon Or Something Similar” may not have the catchiest titles, but the music is some of the most infectious the band has created. And just when you think they really have created a batch of single-ready material, they reward you with three epic songs to close the disc. But what really matters is that Yo La Tengo have recorded another record which lives up to the promise of I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One and And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out. By referencing their past while creating an adventurous new musical landscape, the record rewards longtime fans while providing a great entry point for wannabe converts as well. –Todd Norem

Tom Waits- Glitter And Doom Live

Check out my review of the new Tom Waits live album at onethirtybpm.com.

Sensitive singer songwriter. Jazzy nightclub hipster. Found instrument auteur. Growly bluesman. Circus sideshow act. You never know what you’re going to get with Tom Waits. For four decades now Tom Waits has been defying easy categorization and doing what he does best – producing music that is as big of a hodgepodge of styles as America once was. You’d think live albums would be a safe way for those new to his music to dive in. Usually second only to greatest hits albums in predictability, the live album often features little more than a disc or two of an artist’s biggest hits framed by crowd noise. But this is Tom Waits we’re talking about, and there’s nothing business-as-usual about Glitter and Doom.

A document of the 2008 tour of the same name, the Glitter and Doom Tour played only scattered U.S. and European dates and came two years after his last release. Orphans was a three-volume compilation of songs that didn’t find their place on previous records, along with a handful of new material, and his last studio album of all new material, Real Gone, was back in 2004. With nothing new to promote, the Glitter and Doom Tour promised nothing but the opportunity to see Tom Waits live, and although he performed songs from both releases, the resulting live album has more in common with his pair of theatrical releases from 2002, Alice andBlood Money.

Glitter and Doom isn’t about a live show as much as it is about a live performance. There’s nothing natural about the brute voice that Tom projects so well during the opening “Lucinda/Down To The Well,” a brilliant combination of two Orphans tracks that far surpasses what the two originals had. The album is worth checking out for this song alone, but it’s unsettling the first time you hear it. Tom Waits has used the grittier aspects of his voice quite effectively for the past 25 years, but this pushes things to the extreme and into the realm of theater. “Goin’ Out West” is a nice romp, sounding like a stripped down blues song done to the tune of T. Rex’s “Bang A Gong.” There’s a foreboding that’s absent from the Orphans version on “Fannin’ Street,” and his excellent band gets a chance to stretch out as Waits barks lyrics on “Get Behind The Mule.”

Waits sticks mostly to songs from the last decade or so, but even then his choice of material sometimes seems random and plays more like an alternative detour through the past 20 years than any sort of greatest hits live collection. “Falling Down” is a nice nod to his previous live album, 1988’s Big Time, as the song was featured on that record as the album’s lone studio song. And “Singapore” reaches back a little further to the time when he made a major break from largely acoustic guitar and piano-driven songs to a potpourri of sounds you couldn’t easily slap a label on.

The theatrical nature of the performance starts to wear a little thin by end of the first disc on songs like Real Gone’s “Circus.” And there’s plenty of this on the second disc, such as “Tom Tails,” which consists of nothing but between-song banter and jokes. It’s entertaining when you’re in the right mood, but sometimes you wish a guy with these immense talents and songs this good would play things just a little bit more straight. Of course, part of being a Waits fan is learning to enjoy the ride. Glitter and Doom rewards, even if, much like the randomness of the cities the tour played in, it comes across more like a backwoods road trip than a full-blown drive.

R.E.M. Live At The Olympia

R.E.M. embrace their early albums, test out new songs, and capture it all on a new live album. Read my review at 130bpm.com.

R.E.M. released five full-length records, an EP and a b-sides collection for IRS records in the 1980’s. And even though they built their reputation as a touring band, playing small towns and major markets and just about any venue they could get a gig in, they never released an official live record for the label. Peter Buck often spoke out against it, saying that a live record should be more than just greatest hits with crowd noise and referenced The Who’s Live At Leeds as a live album that was done right. After commercial success and a major label contract, they would eventually cave somewhat and release live videos after successful tours, but it wasn’t until 2007 that they released a proper live album, 25 years into their career. But R.E.M. Live was exactly the kind of live record the band had always been against. In retrospect, it seems like an attempt to save the material from 2004’s sterile Around the Sun and prove to the world that they still mattered, at least in a live setting. But the proof wouldn’t come until the following studio album and a back-to-basics approach that began with five shows in Dublin.

In 2007, R.E.M. were at a crossroads. They had released three albums since Bill Berry left, and while some, like 1998’s Up were artistic highs, they were increasingly spending more time in the studio and getting weaker results. With the follow up to Around the Sun looming they wanted to break the mold so they booked 5 nights at the Olympia Theater in Dublin to test material in front of a live audience as recognition to the way they used to work up new songs by trying them out on tours. In order to prepare for the shows they went back to their earliest albums and looked for material that might fit in with their new direction. Most of the new material played at these concerts ended up on 2008’s Accelerate, and the double-disc Live at The Olympia contains all 39 songs played during the 5 nights, including two new songs that didn’t make the cut for Accelerate. But unlike R.E.M. Live, the only thing bloated here is the length.

Live at The Olympia is over two and a half hours long and avoids the big hits of the 90’s, as well as most of their minor hits of the 80’s and almost all of their recent work, in favor of truly a back-to-basics approach. R.E.M. mine their IRS years, playing almost the entirety of their 1982 debut EP Chronic Town along with half ofReckoning and several lesser-known songs from Fables of the Reconstruction, Lifes Rich Pageant andDocument, and a few scattered songs from the Warner Brothers years. Besides the emphasis on more rock-oriented material, the most surprising thing about Live at The Olympia is just how well this older material works with the new. It’s testament to how far they had come with the pre-Accelerate material that the one dud out of all the 39 songs is a song from Around the Sun, the very album that they were fighting against making.

Live at The Olympia might just be that rare live album that Peter Buck had always talked about. It captures a legendary band that never found a reason to quit, even after they finally succumbed to recording a truly bad album, and finds them reinventing themselves by returning to what they do best. For those only familiar with the band’s 90’s material, the plethora of great early songs like “Kohoutek,” “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” and “Letter Never Sent” will provide a killer introduction to their past while also bringing you up to date with the where they are now. And for those of us that got on board early on, it’s the closest we’re likely to get to going back. But for the band, it marks a new start and a rewinding of the clock. To borrow one of their lyrics, they have begun again. And it’s great the tape was rolling this time.

Built To Spill- There Is No Enemy

Review is up at onethirtybpm.com for Built To Spill's new one.

The best artists are often haunted by their past. Stick around long enough to see bands that grew up on your sound start to imitate it, or meet fans that treat your albums as gospel, able to recite every lyric and conjure up every note, and it can leave you in an impossible position. Some bands drastically change their sound, looking to grow artistically while separating themselves from an identity forged by their early material. But an even larger number of them simply break up. After 2001’s disappointing Ancient Melodies of the Future, Built to Spill took a long break.

“Make up your mind, make up your own mythology,” Doug Marsh sings on There Is No Enemy’s “Planting Seeds.” He could easily be talking about the singular vision that shaped the two albums that largely defined the band and helped shape the sound of indie rock in the previous decade, 1997’s Perfect From Now On and 1999’s Keep it Like a Secret. While 2006’s You in Reverse sounded tentative, only occasionally hinting at the brilliance that so many fans of guitar-based rock fell in love with, There Is No Enemy sounds confident. They’ve created an album that sounds less like a patchwork and works as a whole, and more importantly, they sound like a real band again.

“Hindsight” could easily fit on Keep it Like a Secret, with textbook indie-rock hooks and a concise structure, and “Pat” is Built to Spill at their most economical and aggressive, but many of the highlights of the album are the mellower moments. “Life’s A Dream” features some unexpected harmonies that provide a welcome relief from the serious nature of the lyrics, and “Things Fall Apart” could easily sit alongside the very best of the band’s songs.

There is No Enemy is far from perfect. There are some prodding moments, most noticeably during the middle section of the record, especially on “Oh Yeah,” but as a whole this is the strongest record they’ve put out in a decade and a welcome return to form. Like Dinosaur Jr, Built to Spill seem to be able to reconcile the mythology of their past with their artistic pursuits of the future. It can’t be an easy task, but it’s awfully nice to be able to go along for the ride.

Mason Jennings- Blood Of Man

Review is up at onethirtybpm.com for the new Mason Jennings album.

For much of his career, Mason Jennings’s body of work has been the type that would often feature a handful of great songs alongside a lot of filler. His albums invariably contained one absolutely killer song, a role “The Field” fills on Blood of Man, but too often Jennings fell short in fulfilling the promise of his early work. From the opening notes of Blood of Man, it’s apparent that this is not business as usual. There’s a new sense of primal urgency and yes, electric guitars, most noticeably on “Ain’t No Friend of Mine,” which recalls the Black Keys’ Hendrix-indebted blues rock. The album’s production is more lo-fi than any of his recent releases, but more than anything there’s a sense of rebirth in the subject matter as well as the delivery. Mason’s been releasing records for well over a decade now, and if there was ever a record that served to remind us why we started listening in the first place, Blood of Man is it.

Jennings’ lyrics speak of “blood on the door” and “blood on the wall” and from the sound of this record, there’s blood on the line as well. The singer-songwriter takes full control on Blood of Man, playing all of the instruments and recording everything himself much like he did on his 1997 debut EP, but the music here is much darker, recalling Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska both in approach and in subject matter. But where that record featured acoustic guitars and stories of closed factories and dead end small town America, Blood Of Man is plugged in and addresses war, suicide, murder and drugs. Like Springsteen, Jennings knows that with a heavy dose of doom and gloom you have to sprinkle in a little optimism, and it’s here in songs like “Tourist” and the first-childhood-kiss recollection of “Sunlight,” where “Minutes freeze like popsicles and drip their seconds down our shirts.”

This return to his roots shouldn’t be surprising to longtime fans. Jennings has always put his art first, not releasing his first EP until he was truly satisfied with it, painstakingly recording each part by himself in a run down apartment, and reportedly turning down major label recording contracts early on in favor of doing things his way without compromise. Blood of Man signifies a new direction for Jennings, whether he’ll continue down this path remains to be seen, but it’s clearly a career reset from a guy who could have been perfectly content making records like his last couple. Then again, great artists are never really content are they?

PW & The Ghost Gloves Cat Wing Joy Boys

I have a review up at One Thirty BPM of Paul Westerberg's new EP.

Check it out.

In 1997, between labels and growing increasingly frustrated with recording as a major label solo recording artist, Paul Westerberg took a sharp detour and released a five-song EP under the pseudonym GrandpaBoy. The songs were uncharacteristically direct, avoiding many of pitfalls of his previous recordings. The EP signaled a new direction for Westerberg, that he hadn’t forgotten that music could be fun and that sometimes a song gained power through a stripped down arrangement. But fans would have to wait until 2002’s Stereo/Mono double whammy of home recordings to see the potential truly blossom. It was on that release that a line in the sand was drawn, and with rare exception, Westerberg would release albums his way– home recorded, and in recent years, without the help of a label or a presence in CD racks.

PW & The Ghost Gloves Cat Wing Joy Boys continues in the vein of his MP3-only records, but doesn’t reach the highs of the song collage that launched those releases, last year’s 49. Paul seems to sense that’s he’s in a rut. “Finally found a pair of cowboy boots that fit/now I hang around and stare at the shine I spit.” He’s looking to someone for inspiration in “Gimme Little Joy” and threatens to blow the roof off the place if he finds it.

There’s an argument to be made that the first take is often the best, but too often the songs sound like they were being written as they were recorded. “Dangerous Boys” sounds the most inspired and rehearsed. It could easily fit on some of his more produced albums, and it’s hard not to imagine this being played live on some future tour. “Drop Them Gloves,” the most rocking song on the EP, would also sound great live, probably far better than the version featured here. Often he’s trying to re-create the sound of a band hammering it out in the basement, and sometimes it works to great effect, but on a song like this it becomes apparent that most bands are, well, bands.

When Westerberg gets melancholy the one-man band is less of an issue. “Love On The Wing,” with its plaintive piano introduction sounds like an outtake from 1999’s Suicaine Gratifaction. “Ghost On The Canvas” features acoustic guitars and pseudo-religious themes. “We dream in color/others they color their dreams.” It’s an intriguing song, certainly better than “Good As The Cat,” but maybe the feeling that he’s not being treated as well as the family feline is what drives him to the basement in the first place. And with this EP, warts and all, we are lucky for that.

It’s important to point out that this is a record. For the first time since 2004 you can purchase an honest to goodness CD of new non-soundtrack Paul Westerberg music. And it’s hard not to look at this as a sign of things to come. Its independent release on Westerberg’s Dry Wood label could easily be a test for something more substantial. Maybe he’ll find a sympathetic producer and take the lessons of the basement recordings and apply them to something better crafted and professional sounding. Or maybe not. Either way it’s nice to get a unexpected dose of rock and roll like this. A little grit in the Pro Tools.

Wilco (An Album)

Wilco are a band you love to love. They've released some of the best music of the last twenty years. And they tour constantly, winning over fans as they visit major markets and small ones, much like the punk/alternative scene in the early 80's which inspired them. They also seem like regular people. Jeff Tweedy's a modern day Huck Finn, born not that far from Twain and singing songs that are uniquely American. And he's finally found a band that he truly enjoys playing with.

This new incarnation of Wilco only has two studio albums under their belt. 2007's Sky Blue Sky and this year's Wilco (The Album), a record that has yet to be officially released but is streaming from the band's website and available as a download if you employ a little Google action. The band is excellent on the road, as documented by 2005's Kicking Television and by anyone who has been lucky enough to buy a ticket to one of their shows. But getting it right in the studio and delivering it live are two different animals.

One could argue that Wilco spends too much time on the road, leaving Jeff Tweedy too little time to write. It's not that the songs on Wilco (The Album) are bad. Some of them just feel a little undercooked and slight compared to the rest of the material, especially "I'll Fight" and "Everlasting," two songs that come towards the end of the record. "I'll Fight" uses cliche religious imagery and "Everlasting" is slight enough that no amount of strings and studio trickery are going to save it.

It might have to do with the absence of a sparring partner. Jay Bennett is long gone. And Jim O'Rourke isn't anywhere to be found on this record.

But let's not be too picky. This is Wilco. And like a lot of their albums, you need to listen to it quite a bit before fully digesting it. Originally aired on an episode of the Colbert Show, the album opener "Wilco (The Song)" seems drastically improved. Sure, it's a simple song, and much like the album cover, seems designed to lower expectations. While it originally sounds exactly like the sort of song the band would want to play once on a comedy show and then discard to the rarities, once you let the hooks in and listen to it in the context of the rest of the record, it really works. It's Wilco having fun. And on a larger philosophical level, it speaks to the kind of salvation people seek at rock shows.

The highlight of the album is "Bull Black Nova." It's a song that builds off of the subject matter of "Via Chicago" and the sound of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)," but is unique enough to stand on its own, and also as the album's best song. The narrator has done something terrible. Likely murder. He sings of blood in his hair and blood in the sing before repeatedly screaming "wake up." Wilco songs, and thought provoking rock and roll songs in general, don't get much better than this.

There are some great songs of introspection. "Solitude" could easily be a solo Tweedy song. "Deeper Down" uses boxing imagery to describe somebody being knocked out before delivering the unexpected line "he felt the insult of a kiss" and then, as the verses built, "he felt the comfort of a kiss." "You and I" is a duet with Feist that never quite catches fire. And "One Wing" seems designed to grow in live venues.

George Harrison is an obvious reference – some would say a little too obvious – in "You Never Know." To these ears it's a pleasant song. If you're going to rip somebody off, you could do a lot worse than this, both is who you borrow from and how you deliver it.

Jeff Tweedy called the album a "Whitman's Sampler" recently. It's hard to argue with that. The album doesn't have a distinct feel like their best records, but instead takes elements of those records and builds a really good collection of songs that will only grow in appreciation with repeat listens. A better title might have been Wilco (An Album). But it's nice to hear the band have fun and maybe lower expectations a bit. And with a band that tours as much as they do, the songs will only grow on the road.

Looking Back: Bob Dylan's Empire Burlesque

I think I'm missing two Bob Dylan studio albums. Saved, his ultra religious born again album of the early 80's and Down In The Groove from 1986, which by most accounts is among his very worst. The news of a brand new Dylan record on the heals of a career renaissance consisting of two excellent studio albums (1997's Time Out Of Mind and 2001's Love and Theft), a recent above average album (2006's Modern Times) and an amazing collection of unreleased recordings from the last 20 years (last year's Tell Tale Signs) is incredibly exciting. And it's prompted me to look back at a Dylan album I may have overlooked.

1985's Empire Burlesque gets some occasional high marks from some Dylan fanatics who frequent message boards. The album is the follow up to 1983's Infidels, which along with 1989's Oh Mercy seem to get all the high praise for being worthwhile Dylan albums of the 1980's. But Allmusic gives Empire Burlesque a 4 star review, and the original Rolling Stone review by Kurt Loder is quite positive. I have a copy of it on vinyl that I only listened to once all the way through, if that, and at least ten years have passed. I thought about digging for it, but it's just as easy to download a copy as it is to weed through the vinyl buried somewhere in the deep recesses of my closet.

The production is hard to get past. This is 1980's modern production techniques at its worst. Female background singers in the foreground. Synth drums. Processed guitars and vocals. It seems like everything that is vital about the recordings are pushed to the background, with all of the inorganic touches and flourishes brought to the forefront. "When The Night Comes Falling From the Sky" sounds like it could have been recorded for Miami Vice.

The album feels upbeat by Dylan standards, and he's singing in his high register, which is something he's rarely done on his three comeback albums. There isn't much weight to the lyrics. He seems concerned with vague personal issues, which is a far cry from the politics of the previous record. But his voice works well within the disco beats and snappy trumpets on songs like "Seeing The Real You At Last." The opening song, "Tight Connection To My Heart" is catchy and memorable, but ultimately empty. The background vocals seem to devour the song and strip it off any power it might have. "Clean Cut Kid" hints at some lyrical brilliance and provides a solid rock song that might have had some real staying power had the recording not been so cluttered. But it's nice to hear Dylan cutting loose.

The slower songs work better here. "I'll Remember You" and "Emotionally Yours" are straight forward songs, and it's hard to not to read too much into Dylan's lyrics and think about the biographical object of his affections. Still, there's something so pedestrian about the songs. Like Dylan owed his record label an album went to work to write songs the way any mortal would, and it's a far cry from any of his classic albums, or even Infidels, the album that preceded it. The rhymes are predictable. The lyrics are simplistic. And a sound that is so unlike Dylan. Yet there is something quite likable about it.

Apparently these tracks were originally produced by Dylan. It's hard to fathom him adding all of the studio glitz, and if some of the demo tracks that surfaced on The Bootleg Series are any indication, the blame can be put solely on the producer, Arthur Baker. Ron Wood played on a couple tracks and has said that Dylan seemed removed from the recording process. What makes the record so fascinating is what makes any Dylan album fascinating. That it came from the same guy who brought us all of those amazing records. This time it's as if the producer thought he could get Bob Dylan on top 40 radio. As for Bob, Ron Wood seems to say that he walked away after recording the basic tracks. It sure sounds like it.

There is one song on here that really does Dylan justice. Featuring little effects, just Dylan, his guitar and harmonica, with his voice dead center, "Dark Eyes" is the clear standout on the record, and makes the album worth discovering.

The very last song on the album, it instantly reminds me of other Dylan classics that close out his albums. "Highlands" comes to mind because that song strips away the Daniel Lanios' production (although way less intrusive) of Time Out Of Mind the same way this one strips away Arthur Baker's and leaves us with unadorned Dylan at his best. The fact that it comes at the end of such an overproduced record makes it stand out even more.



It works as a nice fan-created (but abridged) tribute to George Harrison too.

Judge this one by the cover: Bruce Springsteen's Working On A Dream

This is Bruce Springsteen, so a little respect is in order. And maybe some repeated listens. But first we have to downplay our expectations, which isn't easy to do. Long the perfectionist, Springsteen is known for taking years between albums, obsessively pouring over track listings and details, and leaving entire albums worth of material for the archives. The quick turn around of this album, which follows Magic by just over year, was surprising. Not since 1992's Human Touch and Lucky Town have we had such a burst of activity.

Unfortunately Working On A Dream sounds as creatively stagnant as Human Touch, with only a handful of songs reaching the quality of the slightly better Lucky Town. But that's where the comparisons to those two records should end. The problem with Working On A Dream lies more in its ambitions. Following the larger than life tour for Born In The USA, Springsteen put the E Street Band on hold and spent the next decade plus trying to reinvent himself. Stumbling on records like Human Touch, but succeeding on Tunnel of Love and 1995's misunderstood The Ghost Of Tom Joad, which seemed to give him a new identity that he could use for years to come. But as Springsteen began to look back with 1998's Tracks, rumors of an E Street Reunion were inevitable, and it happened the following year. For a while it seemed like Springsteen was balancing out the occasional E Street Band record with interesting detours like 2005's Devils And Dust or 2006's The Seeger Sessions, but now we have two back to back records that seem to be aiming for the music for the masses pop domination of Born In The USA. While the bombastic nature of Born In The USA obscured many of the songs messages, that record at least had several very good songs. Which is a lot more than can be said for Working On A Dream.

Springsteen has always been a little over the top, but the pedestrian lyrics of so many of these songs are quite surprising, and you don't have to look any further than "Queen Of the Supermarket" for a good example. "I'm in love with the queen of the supermarket/as the evening sky turns blue/a dream awaits in aisle number two." And that's about as good as it gets. "Outlaw Pete" is one of the better songs on the album, but even it begins with "At six months old he'd done three months in jail/
he robbed a bank in his diapers and his little bare baby feet/all he said was folks my name is Outlaw Pete." This is not "A Boy Named Sue," and these are not novelty songs. They're serious ones, which makes the lazy and sometimes downright embarrassing lyrics all the more puzzling.

Musically the album goes straight for the center of the road, and Brendan O'Brien's production is partly to blame, but so is Springsteen's recording style. Gone are the days of the E Street Band banging out endless tracks in a studio with the hope that some of them will see the light of day. Instead this record and its predecessor were largely recorded with a smaller band within the E Street Band and used the full band as overdubs. The result is a sterile flat sounding record that lacks any urgency. Bruce is in good voice, and the record sounds good as background music, but we expect more from him.

There are some highlights. "Lucky Day" is an uplifting pop song that you'd be hard pressed to get out of your head, and "The Last Carnival" seems like a good way to wind down the record, but so much of the album is almost immediately forgettable, even after several listens. "Working on a Dream" is an okay pop song, but it seems to lack any substance. If a fluff piece, which should resonate with a large percentage of his audience. Namely the folks that still don't know what "Born in the USA" is about.

Tacked on to the end of the record as a bonus cut is one of Springsteen's strongest songs in recent memory. "The Wrestler" was key to making the Mickey Rourke movie work, especially in the preview, and it's also the record's highlight. After listening to the album it's hard not to listen to the song from Springsteen's point of view. "Have you ever seen a one-legged man trying to dance his way free/if you've ever seen a one-legged man then you've seen me."

Hopefully he doesn't see himself that trapped, and the next detour from blandland is just around the corner.

The Hold Steady- Boys And Girls In America

Enough with this bar band shit. Seriously. This band sounds nothing like the type of band you’re likely to encounter if you hit just about any bar in any city. If bar bands sounded like this Top 40 radio would be a beautiful thing, American Idol wouldn’t exist, and we may have even spared ourselves from W (sorry I can’t even type his name anymore without feeling sick).

Can you imagine what it would look like? Every small town would be a ripe scene waiting to explode. It’d be like having a 1959 Liverpool, 1967 San Francisco, 1977 London and 1989 Seattle everyday in every small town. “Good to see you’re back in a bar band, baby.” Yeah, maybe at the type of joint you’d find in Minneapolis in 1984.

The Replacements, Husker Du, and the Minneapolis scene of the early 1980’s feature prominently in the Hold Steady’s approach. Like Westerberg, Craig Finn wouldn’t be in a band if he had nothing to say. Fortunately for us, he’s got plenty to say, but he’s abandoned the unfocused jazz approach the got him so many comparisons to early pre-Born To Run Springsteen albums.

Boys And Girls In America is all about economy. Lead Singer/Lecturer Craig Finn sounds like he’s part of the band instead of competing with them. Gone are the long narratives found on 2004’s Almost Killed Me and especially last years concept heavy Separation Sunday, and in their place are concise rock songs. Most feature pronounced piano and restrained guitar. Some of which Craig Finn even manages to sing on.

The album kicks off with “Stuck Between Stations” and tells an interesting story about the poet John Berryman, Minneapolis and drinking. “He was drunk and exhausted but he was critically acclaimed and respected/He loved the golden gophers but he hated all the drawn out winters”. Alcohol gets the best of him (“he likes the warm feeling but he’s tired of all the dehydration”) before he leaps to his death and drowns in the Mississippi river. Hard lesson. You have to wonder if there isn’t a little band commentary in there.

The album’s other highlights include “Chips Ahoy”, “Massive Nights” and the very Cheap Trickish “Southtown Girls”. Boys And Girls In America’s greatest strengths come with its biggest detours. “Citrus” is a lovely ode to romance and inebriation, and oftentimes the romance of inebriation. Religion creeps its way in as well “I feel Jesus in the tenderness of honest nervous lovers/I feel Judas in the pistols and the pagers that come with all the powders.”

The real highlight is “First Night”. The song is where Craig Finn’s storytelling comes full circle as he resurrects Holly from Separation Sunday. Piano driven with layers of strings and guitars underneath, this song is The Hold Steady as probably nobody could have imagined them just a few years earlier. Indeed, if bar bands sounded like this, it would only be a matter of time before this song would penetrate a prom or two somewhere along the way.

Boys And Girls In America does have a few missteps, most notably “Same Kooks”. Guitarist Tad Kubler is wonderfully restrained on most of the album, but when he lets loose here the song can’t really support it. Elsewhere “You Can Make Him Like You” seems a little pedestrian, and “Chillout Tent” suffers a bit from the guest appearances even if the subject matter and song itself are pretty strong.

But none of that really matters. What really counts here is how brilliant the storytelling and lyrics are on the bulk of the record. Nobody comes close to Craig Finn at his most focused. And there’s plenty of focus here, lyrically and musically. Oh, and it rocks. If only all bar bands were this way.

1994- CROOKED RAIN, CROOKED RAIN

Pavement could have been huge. They made mistakes. They were either too eclectic (Wowee Zowee) or they went too soft and got a little boring (Brighten The Corners). But on 1994's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, they made about as perfect of a rock and roll album as you could find.

I always meant to pick up Slanted and Enchanted. The Spins and Rolling Stones were calling it one of the best indie albums, but I never got around to picking it up. I don't even know if I heard a note. But the buzz had been created. My ears were wide open when their second record started to get some airplay.

Not that I can remember hearing it on the radio, although Rev 105 was around then, so it was a distinct possibility. I do remember seeing "Cut Your Hair" on MTV and thinking it was about the coolest song I'd ever heard.

What I wasn't prepared for was what a cohesive whole the album was. From "Silence Kit" to "Filmore Jive', this was a complete album. Full of weird interludes and detours, the album featured some of the best pop songs you'd ever want to hear. But unlike Slanted and Enchanted, this wasn't four track first take kind of stuff. This album sounded good. Like they meant it. "Gold Sounds" and "Range Life", with the Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots jabs were perfect slices of pop nirvana.

And of course we couldn't forget Nirvana. It was sort of an all consuming thing in 1994. Kurt Cobain was dead. A lot of us identified with him. He seemed to have everything any of us would ever want (except Courtney Love), and now he was dead. Yeah, those were some heavy times.

But Pavement had none of that heaviness, and I think that's what made them so attractive. Malkmus was the ultimate slacker. He didn't give a shit about talking about childhood abandonment issues or eating fish because they don't have any feelings. No, he sang silly little songs about range rovin' with the cinema stars and hoping that his girl wouldn't go and get her hair chopped off.

But those silly songs were so fucking great. It becomes even more apparent how great the album is when you listen to early takes of the songs. As essential as Slanted and Enchanted- Luxe and Reduxe was to any serious Pavement fan for its inclusion of tracks previously found only on hard to find eps and singles, the 2004 reissue of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain isn't quite as rewarding. Once you hear the early versions of the songs that ended up on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain you realize that these guys aren't just a bunch of slackers who got lucky in the studio. This album took a great deal of craft. And they captured it on these 12 tracks. The reissue is interesting, but we don't need 37 additional tracks to remind us how great Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is.

Wowee Zowee took care of that.

Ok, I can't end there. Wowee Zowee isn't a bad album. It's just not a Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Then again, few albums are.

Bob Dylan's Modern Times

Bob Dylan has a new album and it's quite good. Much more in the vein of "Love and Theft" than Time Out Of Mind, this seems, as Dylan explained to Jonathan Lethem in his recent Rolling Stone interview, more like the 2nd part of a trilogy that started with "Love and Theft" than the final installment. The only thing the Modern Times really seems to share with Time Out Of Mind is the quality of the material.

Modern Times arrives at a time when Dylan's public and critical esteem is at a high not seen since the mid-seventies, and if the album suffers at all, it is because of this. We've come to expect a masterpiece instead of being pleasantly surprised when he delivers a listenable album. The 80's were not so kind to Dylan. For every Infidels and Oh Mercy, there was a Knocked Out Loaded or Down In The Groove. Inconsistency became the rule. A career renaissance began in the early 90's with his back to back folk albums, but he wasn't fully thrust back into the public limelight when his near-fatal heart problem became public. His recovery came in every sense of the word later that year with Time Out Of Mind.

With five or six years between albums, Dylan's not the most prolific artist these days. Although it's not because he hasn't been busy. Between "Love and Theft" and Modern Times he wrote a book, starred in Masked And Anonymous and contributed interviews to No Direction Home, and hosted a weekly radio show. His never-ending tour is still going.

Modern Times has a gently easy going vibe to it. Some of these songs wouldn't sound out of place on early 70's albums like New Morning or Planet Waves, or maybe even Street Legal. Modern Times has some of the longest songs Dylan has ever put out. With just 10 songs, the album clocks in at over 62 minutes. Brevity is not one of his common traits, and while the songs may initially seem to drag on for a bit, repeated listens warrant the extra verses. Lyrics jump out. Guitar parts leap from the speaker. Carefully produced by the bard himself, Modern Times sounds sublime.

His voice is rough in spots and drops off in others. "Thunder On The Mountain" contains several lyrics where Dylan's voice sounds like an engine being reved up at the end of the lines. "Spirit On The Water" almost requires a volume adjustment to catch what he's saying at certain points. Beyond this, his voice is quite good. Smoother than it's been in ages, and stripped of the production that dominated Time Out Of Mind, Dylan sounds like he's in the room with us, the audience. The band is playing quietly. The drummer uses brushes. Dylan's voice is front and center.

Like most classic Bob Dylan records, the more you listen to them the more the lyrics come out. Dylan seems to have a lot on his mind even if he is sometimes characteristic's vague. "Some lazy slut has charmed away my brains", he sings on "Rollin' And Tumblin' and he wants some woman to do just what he says in "Thunder On The Mountain", yet "When The Deal Goes Down", "Spirit On The Water" and "Beyond The Horizon" rank up there with Dylan's most sincere love songs.

Dark times are on his mind as well. Dylan takes on social issues in "Workingman Blues #2", and there's more than a hint of Katrina in "The Levee's Gonna Break", but his most profound statements come with the album's closing song, "Ain't Talkin".

In the human heart an evil spirit can dwell/ I am tryin' to love my neighbor and do good unto others/ But oh, mother, things ain't going well

His "heart is burning. He's "still yearning" as he walks "through the cities of the plague." The song echoes "Desolation Row" from Highway 61 Revisited. Just comparing a song from the 65 year old's new album to one of his classics would be plenty of praise. But this album stands on its own. Like "Love and Theft" and Time Out Of Mind, Modern Times ranks up there with his some of his finest recordings. And even though the album often sounds like it's from 1945 or 1952, Dylan brings it all home to the 21st century, a new album for modern times.

Songs in the key of life: Neil Young's Living With War

Neil Young has the touch again. For a while there was this theory that at the end of every decade he had a creative rebirth. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere in 1969, Rust Never Sleeps in 1979 and Freedom in 1989. I'm not sure whether or not Silver and Gold from 2000 counts or not. It was a year late, and six years later it's really not that memorable.

The other theory around Neil Young is that his best work follows periods of intense personal conflict. The "doomsday" or "ditch" trilogy of Time Fades Away/On The Beach/Tonight's The Night, followed the deaths of his guitar player and roadie. And now following a near-fatal health scare and a corrupt US administration, we have 2005's Prairie Wind and this year's Living With War.

If Prairie Wind sounds like the redheaded stepchild of Harvest Moon's bastard son of Harvest, it's understandable. At least initially. It seems slightly hokey with odes to his guitar, Elvis Presley and of course the wind which blows across his prairie childhood home in Canada. But once you marry the songs with moving pictures, you'll never hear the album the same way again. Heart Of Gold, the Jonathan Demme concert film of Neil's performance of Prairie Wind and other acoustic-Neil classics, does that job, and it's a masterpiece. Watch the film and you really understand how important Neil is, and how close we came to losing him. Prairie Wind was written and recorded in a brief period of time after Neil was diagnosed with a brain tumor and told he had to have surgery. The album is reflective and conceptual, and it's the sound of old friends coming together to record new music under what could be dire circumstances.

Now, with Heart Of Gold still generating plenty of press and not even out on DVD yet, and a mere 7 months after Prairie Wind was released, Neil Young has a new album out. Living With War was written and recorded in late March and early April, it is truly amazing that this album is already on record store shelves. Credit should be given to Warner/Reprise for rush releasing this album instead of riding out the Heart Of Gold marketing plan and setting a release date for Living With War six months from now. But what's even more amazing is how good this record is.

It's easy for people to attack Neil for this record. It's anti-Bush. It has a song called "Let's Impeach The President". It has over the top lyrics and song titles like "Shock and Awe" and "Looking for a Leader" And Neil's from Canada, in case you didn't know. Never mind that he's lived in California for decades and raised his kids here. But what is truly amazing about this record isn't the press surrounding it.

Easily his best since Sleeps With Angels or Mirrorball, this album is the sound of Neil fired up and pissed off, as well as passionate and hopeful, despite the current political situation. While many artists have released political songs in the past five years, most of them are buried under metaphors and preach to the choir. Living With War is in your face, and doesn't know what subtlety means.

Recorded with a spare backing band, a trumpet player and a 100 piece choir, Neil confronts the Bush administration head on. He's living with war in his heart every day and damnit, he's going to say something about it. He's not going to rock out like Crazy Horse either. There are no extended solos here or any sort of jams. The songs are short and build off of each other. It's the sound of an artist writing a batch of related songs. There aren't any hanger on's from previous sessions. Everything is fresh and timely in a way few records are capable of today. It's simple dirty rock and roll. The type of music that would fit in well in the "ditch" trilogy. Or maybe "doomsday" was the better word after all.

Neil is back though. And whether it's his own mortality or that of a soldier's fighting a questionable war, Neil's found the perfect vehicles for delivery.

A Blessing And A Curse

Some things take a while to reveal themselves. When I heard "Feb 14" back in January I thought it sounded okay, but it was a fairly average rock song, and it seemed to lack the storytelling aspect that's at the core of the best Drive By Truckers songs. It sounds like the Replacements, sure, but I don't necessarily want the Truckers to sound like the 'Mats.

This album doesn't really sound like the same band that made Decoration Day or The Dirty South either. Of course, that's kind of a foolish thing to say. If any band has a unique identity these days that they can really call their own, it's the Drive By Truckers. But the storytelling/conceptual edge of the last three records is missing from A Blessing and A Curse, and it can be a little unsettling.

This is Patterson Hood's album. The last couple records best moments often belonged to Jason Isbell, but on this record the DBT founder seems re-energized. "Remember it ain't too late to take a deep breath and throw yourself into everything you got" he sings on "A World of Hurt" and it's as if he's done just that. It must be a hell of an inspiration to have Isbell and Cooley to compete with for song inclusion, and with this record Patterson proves he's up for the challenge. He even managed to write the best Stones song in years with "Aftermath USA".

It's Mike Cooley who has the finest moment on the disc though. "Gravity Gone" is the lyrical high of the album, and may be the best song Cooley has had on a Truckers album. He sees the trappings of fame and phrases it in only a way a Trucker could. "Between the champagne, hand jobs and the kissing ass by everyone involved/Cocaine comes quick and that's why the small dicks have it all."

So the sound is there. And the stories are there too, even if they aren't as unified as previous records. The Drive By Truckers know how to give the whole package too. It's pretty easy to download songs these days and make a snap judgment and move on to the next thing. In a beautiful gatefold cd which recalls the 70's double vinyl days, the Drive By Truckers invite you to sit down and absorb the whole experience. Look at Wes Freed's artwork. Read the lyrics. Get the stories. Then slap it on your ipod and make it part of your life.