What Are You Listening to Lately (Part 13)?

Kayne West – 808s and Heartbreak
This album just gets more and more interesting for me. It's spare and minimal, yes, but it's got hook value - West's too pop-savvy to not have it - and for as little as it's got going on audibly (though more than the title lets on), it's proven to be quite durable, not wearing thin even with just voice and 808 on many tracks. I'm not a big fan of "RoboCop," lyrics are just too silly, but he's basically opening up as much as he can while staying within a pop format. Crafting songs of love and heartbreak is a pop given, there's no reason he shouldn't be doing it too; and there's no reason someone as talented as he is shouldn't do it well, which he does. It's such a break from his norm - though there's nothing in the electro-heavy sound he hadn't tried before - that it's causing some waves. In short, it's an experiment - an experiment within pop form, which doesn't permit you to go too far after all - and only time will tell if it will be considered a grand flop or a new direction, a brave experiment. It's personal, it's catchy, and whether it proves to be a detour or not I like the tunes, the words, and the experiment enough that I expect to dig it for a while.

Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru
Let's forget that word "psychedelic" shall we? Too much baggage associated with it, and most people's interpretations of the word are very personal. I mean, if you want a parallel to this music, this is more Nuggets or 13th Floor Elevators - styled garage band stuff, not heavily processed, acid-drenched shit like Parable of Arable Land or Electric Ladyland. It's raw, rocking, influenced by the "now" (meaning of course "then") sound that breathed life into a million bands about the world, each working their regional variation on the music that was in the air. So from '68 to '78, these Peruvian bands made songs for dancing, devoid of the intellectual or class-conscious aims (or pretensions) of, say, the San Francisco scene or the Brazilian Tropicalistas - closer in spirit to Malaysian Yeh-Yeh or, well, the we-just-wanna-have-some-fun Nuggets stuff. Songs don't catch as well as the best of Nuggets though - partly a function of my mono-lingual limits, partly a function of so many of them taking off from roughly the same rhythmic base and building a Latin dance tune flavored with rock and roll on top of that. I do enjoy listening to this and periodically sounds do jump out - a curious Moog moment, a nice Farfisa riff, a vocal flourish - that make me take a momentary notice, but it all ultimately fades back into the flow. Any tune here would liven up your party, your mixtape, your playlist, but taken 17 in a row for an hour and change, it gets tough to distinguish one from the next, even if you can live in the moment and dig them there. Oh yeah, except for the time when one of the groups adapts "Fur Elise" to Chicha form. Maybe not the best song here, but it sure does stick out.

Kimya Dawson – I’m Sorry that Sometimes I’m Mean
It kind of bums me out that Kimya's music being all over Juno is going to encourage those cynics who don't like the film to create a backlash against her when they really don't even understand what the fuck she does, tying in Kimya with some kind of saccharin-sickly-sweet bit of cutesy-pie idea that's not really her metier. I know it's happening because I've heard it here at the record store and it fucking sucks, because to me she's a totally uncompromised musician, making things her way and making her own slow and steady advances. What the haters key in on - and I'll admit here that I'm cynical enough myself to not even have the remotest interest in seeing Juno - is the sense of whimsy, something that's all over this album. Talking Ernest and Talking Pee-Wee dolls, cartoons and cereal - the subject matter is enough to make you think she needs to grow up already. But what she's doing is brilliant - childlike, not childish, and if you don't get the difference, it's something you ought to think about. Childlike to me means approaching a subject with the openness of a child, experiencing things with some kind of wonder and not the sort of jaded hipster-dom that indie music is so rife with. Childish, on the other hand, is regressive, infantile, taking your ball and going home, crying over spilt milk, always raging at a world that might hurt you and not trusting anybody. She's always the former, never the latter. She sees bad shit that goes on but doesn't let it kill her spirit. She sings about it instead. She reaches out to other people who might feel the same. And when she's using Talking Ernest or cartoon references, it's nothing so heady as a metaphor, it's just a way of talking about adult subjects with language kids will understand, or on the flip side, talking to other adults while keying in on touchstones of a youthful idealism that she hasn't lost contact with. If I don't love every song the way I do on other recordings of hers, I love enough of them, and I love the ideas and ideals behind all of them. I hope her success via Juno doesn't spoil her. It would be a tragedy. Based on what I know of her from a couple conversations and from her music, I can't imagine it happening. And if she emerges bigger and stronger (and hopefully wealthier too), it's gonna be the best sign I've seen in the music industry in more than a decade.

What Are You Listening To Lately (Part 10)?

Roxy Music - Roxy Music
Not quite seminal for me, but damn close. The album consists of weirdo artsy stuff that still retains enough pop/rock sense to seem sorta normal, though not so much once you delve into the soundscapes on side B. So yeah- wherever they take it, there's still a sense of melody, of structure, and for this I guess we ought to thank Mr. Ferry for dominating the proceedings enough that he deserved (or so he felt) sole songwriting credits no matter how clearly you can hear the audible input of his confreres. But the 'A' is downright classic art-rock, the 'B' never tests my patience unduly or anything, but I've noticed myself tuning out from time to time when they're not hitting it perfectly right, as they are in the fractured rhythms of "Sea Breeze" or the totality of "Bitters End." But it - and by this I mean the whole album, A- & B- sides alike - sounds fantastic. The enterprise of warped pop/rock songs makes a nice audio complement to Ferry's Romantic longings and letdowns and brings the whole thing up a notch. The record really opened some possibilities for my listening - it let me realize that you don't have to wear your strangeness on your sleeve to prove you're smart like too many avant-gardists think. You can be plenty subversive via more a broadly accepted means of expression.


Kimya Dawson - Alphabutt
It should be no surprise that someone like Kimya who's always sung about adult subject matter with the whimsy of a child and in terms a kid can understand should, on the event of her having her own child, make an actual kids' album complete with songs that indulge her mildly scatalogical humor ("Pee Pee in the Potty" and whatnot). I had hoped she'd take her gift for condensing adult ideas into child-friendly music, but given her penchant for being utterly goofy (not to mention the fact that her kid (named Panda) is still only an infant), songs about tigers in your bedroom and an alphabetical lesson that makes sure to use variants of "fart" at least six times out of twenty-six are probably exactly what I should've expected. So I may not listen to it much, but if I had a kid I just might, and should I choose to throw it on anyway, I'll get some laffs out of it for sure. And then at the end she throws down "Sunbeams and Some Beans" the politically charged kid song I had hoped the whole album might be. Killer. It fits totally within her ethos, but it's a unique item` for sure. Buyer beware. Juno fans, beware.


Various Artists - The Only Doo-Wop Album You'll Ever Need
It's great, sure, and only if you take the title literally will you have a problem with the selections that don't dive too deep. If you want a great intro to the music, 2+ solid hours of great doo-wop you'll be very pleased to have this, as I am. It's a bunch of no-brainer selections, by which I don't mean an insult, it's just that there's no way for things to go wrong if you program stuff like "In the Still of the Nite," "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" "I Only Have Eyes for You" and the like, the only potential problem being overexposure of some tracks. And that's what you get here, two discs worth of surefire greats, nothing controversial, every one of them very good or great. Again, if you take issue, it'll be with the false advertising of the title which is certainly misleading - there's plenty more great material out there if you want to look of course - but if you really only need two discs worth, if you look at the title and believe it, this probably will do you just fine. I personally take issue with the title, yes, but moreso with the skimpy book, which could tell you something about the personalities surrounding this great music and instead gives you nothing but a couple paragraphs by Billy Vera telling you why you should enjoy doo-wop. I mean, if you're reading it, you already know why it's worth your listening time, right? Anyway, take it how you will - a fantastic collection of music, or a misleading package that only scratches the surface; either way, it's a lot of great shit.