On Harps and Angels, Randy Newman takes on the Supreme Court and America's economic disparity. Elsewhere, Keane return with a typically uncharacteristic new single, and the Hold Steady get their dork on in concert.
Randy Newman is arguably one of the 10 or so greatest songwriters America has ever produced. That doesn't mean he can't make a so-so album on occasion.
Randy Newman, Harps and Angels (Nonesuch)
As much as I love his early-‘70s output (12 Songs, Sail Away, Good Old Boys), my favorite Randy Newman album is still probably Bad Love. Released in 1999 after he essentially retired from the singer-songwriter profession – film scores were his beat by then – the album caught a glimpse of a 55-year-old westside L.A. millionaire incorporating his varied musical approaches for songs about the rot inside the soul of affluent America, starring Newman as the prosecution’s star witness. In between lacerating himself for being rich and happy, he wrote some of the most beautiful love tunes this eternal cynic had ever dared – and a heartbreaker about a family slowly ruined by its daily intake of television. (I haven’t even mentioned the two about politics, which are brilliant.) Harps and Angels catches a glimpse of the 64-year-old westside L.A. millionaire, but while I wouldn’t want to accuse the satirist of not having his heart in it, very few of these unsurprisingly tuneful, eloquent songs connect as potently or cut as deeply. He still recognizes that a well-off white man in America has to be careful pointing fingers, but his usual trick of turning himself into the comedic target doesn’t work as well when as a protagonist he isn’t nearly as complicated as he used to be. The “Randy Newman” of Harps and Angels discovers that death is coming, his memory is going, and the economy is in the dumps. His remedy is easy jokes and Dixieland arrangements that lack the fluidity that made Bad Love not just astute and moving but powerfully listenable. He can tease Johnny Cougar for his car commercial, but the truth is that Mellencamp at least seems to grasp the American moment. Newman’s love songs are still touching and wistful, but we’ve heard them from him. Only one moment on Harps and Angels is worthy of his best: “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country.” It combines anger, humor and sorrow – and the joke about Clarence Thomas and Pluto is hysterical. But Newman’s fans have been aware of it since January 2007, and he doesn’t seem to have written anything as great since.
Keane, “Spiralling” (from the forthcoming Perfect Symmetry, Island)
Their second album was a conscious move away from the first, and this advance single from their third keeps them on their wandering path. Hopes and Fears was respectable wuss-rock, Under the Iron Sea an attempt at modest grandiosity. “Spiralling” is … well, what? The Killers, Vulture says. INXS, votes my wife, and she doesn’t mean that as an insult. Me, I can enjoy its disco-beat rhythms and appreciate the fact that they’re mixing it up again – one of the things I like about these critical pariahs is that they don’t let the brickbats get to them. (Since they have no reputation to uphold, they can travel sonically where they want.) Unless things have changed, Tim Rice-Oxley writes the words and Tom Chaplin sings them – with feeling, although he doesn’t have the charisma to save a goofy line. Which is why that unspeakably stupid “Did you wanna be?” bridge sits there like a dead possum in the middle of the road – best to focus on the neon keyboards and Keane’s unfailingly reliable knack for melodies, hooks and wussy sentiments.
The Hold Steady, live at the Avalon, July 30
Craig Finn, the leader of the Hold Steady, writes two types of songs: the absolutely awesome and the terminally so-so. The absolutely awesome ones you spin over and over again on his records; the so-so ones you skip past and never quite feel bad that you ignore them, although when they sneak back into your life, you do enjoy them. Seeing the band in concert, you get a string of the absolutely awesome – and if a track or two isn’t your favorite, it’s probable someone else’s. The Hold Steady are a fan’s utopia: You can love them to death without having to worry about losing them to the larger mainstream audience. (Preteens don’t care about references to John Berryman.) Leaning very hard on their newest, Stay Positive, the band never stopped rocking as Finn dorked around the stage, white man’s overbite and arrhythmic snapping for all to see. The dude exists to rub it in the rest of our faces that if we had just tried a little harder, we all could have turned our Springsteen fantasies into a real career. I remain convinced that “Stuck Between Stations” is the greatest thing he’ll ever write – a very loud, yearning song about the limits of ambition, pretensions, the quest for glory and transcendence. And as I realized at the show, there’s no beautiful-loser vibe to it: The song, like the band, are about those who survive, not those who drown in the Mississippi River.
I guess I understand why people hate this documentary. Its production values are atrocious, the talking heads aren’t necessarily A-list, and in tone it feels like a high school educational film. But director Dorothy Fadiman provides the required element that any alarmist film needs to work over its audience: sinking dread. Focusing on the voting irregularities and disenfranchisement of the last 12 years of American elections, Fadiman has a relatively calm tone – narrator Peter Coyote’s relaxed gravitas goes a long way in this regard – as she lets reporters and election officials tell their eyewitness accounts. By no means hysterical, it stirs up a little patriotic fervor while hitting the right cautionary notes – who in their right mind will watch this film and not think its points about electronic voting machines are exactly right? Hardly revelatory, never preachy, Stealing America could just as well fit on PBS. And it would play fine there, too.
Consumables is a biweekly overview of popular culture.
