Filled with the yuletide spirit, our entertainment critic finds many wonderful albums and one great movie to keep the season bright.
Never liked the term "critic." I much prefer seeking out what I like and expounding on what makes it so great. With that in mind, consider this list a holiday assortment of many great-to-pretty-great music I’m enjoying currently. (Plus, there’s a movie down at the bottom – it’s great, too.) Maybe it’s because I’m getting my end-of-the-year list together and therefore pigging out on the best CDs that sneaked past me during 2006. Maybe I’m just in a giddy mood. Whatever it is, I’m happy happy happy and I hope the feeling stays with me a long time.
The Shins, "Phantom Limb" (from the forthcoming Wincing the Night Away, Sub Pop)
At a once-in-a-career moment when they can do no wrong – their fans love ‘em love ‘em love ‘em, and those who blame ‘em for the death of indie rock can drink a bottle of Pledge – the Shins hedge no bets and deliver another standout track. But it’s not another "New Slang." And it’s not quite another Chutes Too Narrow – the guitars show the slightly stronger muscle they brandished on the last tour. The lyrics? The usual James Mercer obliquity, which doesn’t make it gibberish. Just a puzzle you want to spend all evening unraveling as you play the track again and again. At the 14-times-in-a-row stage, I’m reporting that the most meaningful lines are the "Ooooohs" and "Waaaaoooooohs" that send the melody into the heavens. I don’t think I can love this band any more than I do already. But I’m willing to try.
The Coup, Pick a Bigger Weapon (Epitaph)
The album’s too long. And that concludes my short list of problems with perhaps the finest record by rap’s current heavyweight champions. Boots Riley still wants revolution just as much today as he did back in 2001 when his Party Music album cover imagined the destruction of the World Trade Center mere months before the fateful event occurred. But where the Coup’s earlier records trafficked in sloganeering and hard funk, Pick a Bigger Weapon is all about stories seasoned with a litany of R&B styles even more diverse and supple than the Dreamgirls soundtrack. Riley has discussed sex before, but never with this much detail – it’s the album’s listener-friendly entryway into his tirades about bad jobs, corrupt governments, and (that old reliable) Da Man. Prince himself has never quite understood so strongly that our romantic lives are indelibly connected to our careers and financial well-being – sex isn’t an escape from the 9-to-5, it’s a reaction to it. Where white emo artists mouth their meager frustrations in the female department, Riley sees his world in its entirety; unemployment and racism and the pressures to start a family feel monumentally more urgent than some twee college boy’s arch folk-tale rewrites. Even the slow jams, flawless musically, have a political agenda to them. He and his cohort Pam the Funkstress have discovered horns, OutKast, Tom Morello’s guitar, and a terrific sense of humor. He makes you wonder what could have become of Public Enemy if they hadn’t burned out. And, like PE’s Chuck D, he’s that rare hip-hop artist to bother including a lyric sheet because he damn well wants you to memorize every word he’s saying.
Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped (Geffen)
If I had to choose a favorite Sonic Youth record, I’d waffle a bit and finally go with 1992’s Dirty. Streamlined but still angry, tuneful but loud, Dirty is as accessible as they’ve ever allowed themselves to be – never mind that the songs are about sexual harassment, murder, and a warmongering president. (Bush Sr., remember?) Rather Ripped isn’t as political, but it’s equally revved-up and stripped-down – it’s "ripped" like a buff-dude’s chest. The spaced-out jams of A Thousand Leaves are here tied to tight, elegant packages like the Velvet Underground-cum-Doors mystery of "Or" or the bulldozing slumber of "Pink Steam." The Kim Gordon songs are her strongest in several discs. The guitars continue to delight, astound, and shred. Topics include cheating on your partner (it sounds like it’s going to end badly), groupies (ditto), and several versions of the apocalypse (way ditto). All Sonic Youth albums fall into the good-to-stellar category. This one is on the high end of that scale. You ask how it compares to Sonic Nurse and Murray Street. I say let’s put them on one after another and have a great afternoon comparing and contrasting.
The Streets, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living (Vice/Atlantic)
First album was the cocky coming-out party of a talented British lout with a unique perspective on a subculture that the hip-hop universe knew nothing about. Second album was the too-ambitious follow-up, a concept album whose story wasn’t interesting enough and whose music had to play second fiddle to the story. Third album is the second album’s ambitions married to the first album’s musical ingenuity. Mike Skinner has sold three million records, and even if you haven’t heard of him, he has bigger problems: the dead dad, the women he lies to, the indifferent American audience whose psychology he scrutinizes with a fairness I wouldn’t have guessed. He’s funny, he’s touching, and his album runs less than 38 minutes and barely breaks a sweat. You don’t have to worry about his problems with fame if they keep spawning such terrific tracks that he produces with the hunger of a man who made the great first record.
Sparklehorse, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (Astralwerks)
In the five years since It’s a Wonderful Life, Mark Linkous has only climbed deeper into the aural kudzu, stuffing his mouth fuller with effects, falling into a midtempo groove that suggests an alternate reality, a dream state, a stoned no-man’s-land. But if nothing tops Wonderful, everything remains immaculately beautiful and melodic. Like sometimes-collaborator Tom Waits, he evokes the grizzled and the fragile as if they’re actually the same thing. Even at his weakest, he writes decent soundtrack material for weirdo art films. But the love song is a new peak – "Some Sweet Day" fixates on his cutie’s knobby knees, and let’s not concern ourselves with what Poe-ish fate befell his daisy. And the long closing instrumental is genuinely unnerving and dreamy; don’t listen to it while driving at night – or do, if that’s the sort of musical accompaniment you’re into.
Built to Spill, You in Reverse (Warner Bros. Records)
As per norm with this band, as sure as you’ve decided that their new album is strong but unremarkable, an extra listen reveals a new detail and you find yourself reevaluating and loving the record more. Most of the time, that new detail comes from something buried within Doug Martsch’s guitar work – the enormity of the arena-rock riff that propels "Mess With Time," the simple strum of "The Wait," the reverb-drenched solo that lights a fire in "Gone." Martsch is probably one of the few thin, sensitive, white indie rockers you’d want to know in real life – he preaches compassion and perspective, and he doesn’t write songs because he has something to whine about. But if this is the group’s most collaborative record, it’s a little indecisive, the sound of a band trying to learn to work as a homogenous unit. Every one of You in Reverse’s 10 tracks has something in it worth enjoying. But the old dynamism has given way to a high-level of jamming that’s rarely extraordinary. It’s enough to make you wish that Martsch was more of a control freak and musical dictator.
Sean Lennon, Friendly Fire (Capitol)
Prolonged exposure will make you grouse about the obvious: his trendy friends, the L.A. sound that bites Elliott Smith, the vocal similarities to his famous father, the rampant McCartney-isms. But if he’s a limited musician – the strongest track here wasn’t even written by him – then Friendly Fire is a best-case scenario of what he can offer: one sweet three-minute earful after another until you’ve had your fill. The sad songs are pretty, the happy songs are pretty – the emotions underlying any track aren’t nearly as important as its ability to conjure a lush sound which can simulate emotional upheaval. In the battle of famous kids, he’s more consistent but less captivating than Rufus Wainwright. Now I’d like to see someone push him out of his comfort zone to find out what happens.
Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Live at the Fillmore East (Reprise)
Another Neil Young live album. But like all of them, Live at the Fillmore East contains at least one memorable version of a song you already love but will want to hear in this different way. The concert covers the Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere period, not necessarily my favorite of his – After the Gold Rush was just around the corner – but the freshness of what are now overplayed radio staples like "Down By the River" and "Cowgirl in The Sand" is a reminder that, once, they were exciting new songs from a young talent. And then there’s "Winterlong," a hidden gem you could previously only find on the Decade compilation, and Tonight’s the Night’s "Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown" with a Danny Whitten who was still very much alive. I wouldn’t advise spending your own money on it – it’s a live album, after all. But as a gift for the holidays, it’ll be fun for the four or five spins you give it.
It’s not for all tastes. The Puffy Chair is a twentysomething romantic comedy about a dysfunctional couple and the guy’s tagalong brother traveling to visit the young men’s dad for his birthday. And they have to pick up a chair along the way. The American indie scene this year has been littered with well-loved road movies and off-the-cuff character pieces that hope to create a generational portrait – Little Miss Sunshine, Old Joy, Mutual Appreciation – but none of them are as effortless, hilarious, true, and ultimately poignant as The Puffy Chair. The trick might be the Duplass brothers’ pretensions and ambitions – they don’t have any. Whether directing, writing or acting, they positively vibrate with the same dizzy exuberance any teenager with his first video camera possesses. That Mark and Jay’s charming debut doesn’t fall into the same dustbin of self-indulgence as so many Sundance rejects is because of all the old clichés. They care about their characters and understand them inside and out. They have a knack for the telling detail. They’re really funny in unexpected ways. But most importantly, they get you to see how romantically naïve, cruelly shallow, and blissfully unaware their young protagonists are without ever letting you forget that you used to be just like them. The Puffy Chair might not be for all tastes. But if it’s yours, the movie might just hit you right between the eyes.
Consumables is a biweekly overview of popular culture.
