Month: September 2015

It starts with a clean, bright guitar, playing a simple pattern. Then in come the drums. HUGE drums, drums that sound like mountains look. Then a rhythm guitar and a high, sweet wail, leading into thick vocal harmonies that take you for a ride through the rest of the song. Sometimes the bottom drops out, as tones get stripped away, only to have them come surging back stronger than before. Dynamics play a big role here — the reliable trick of jumping into a cue with both feet to give the tune a jolt. A single voice with low tones and a quiet guitar suddenly slams into power chords and those dense harmonies. Throw in a catchy chorus and you’ve got “Say It Isn’t So,” the lead track from the 1985 album Play Deep, by The Outfield.

This band had the perfect sound for their time and place, and it paid off in triple platinum sales. They even caught the mood of the times with their name and album title, fitting in perfectly with other all-American pastime themes like John Fogerty’s Centerfield and Huey Lewis’s Sports, not to mention movies like The Natural and Vision Quest. They also came along at the perfect time for me — I was 15 years old, and just beginning to really embrace music as a core piece of my identity. There was no denying the pleasure in these tracks, awesome for blasting in the car or buoying the mood at high school parties. Everybody liked this music (well, almost everybody), and when we listened to it together, I belonged to that. I bought the LP, taped it, and played them both constantly.

Listening to it now, there’s still a huge amount of fun in that sugary pop/rock sound. But I can’t help notice that lyrically, this album is kind of a mess. Its most popular and iconic song, “Your Love”, depicts a despicable person without a trace of self-awareness or irony. See, Josie’s on a vacation, far away, and you’re a little bit younger than I normally like my girls, so I’m just gonna use your love tonight, if you know what I mean. Stay the night, but keep it undercover, and on your way out, please, would you close the door? Following immediately on the heels of “Say It Isn’t So,” in which the singer is freaking out about his girlfriend’s fidelity, bemoaning the fact that “when you’re out of my sight / I’m out of your mind,” it can’t help but feel more than a little hypocritical. Then comes “I Don’t Need Her,” in which the singer is so relieved to finally detach from his girlfriend emotionally, but still won’t be leaving her tonight. Kind of makes it hard to believe that he’s going to be sending his girl all the love in the world and then turning out the light to sleep all alone.

That’s another thing. Moral judgments aside, boy are there some trite rhymes in these songs. “All the love in the world / I’ll be sending you, girl.” “I cry just a little bit, die just a little bit.” “Since we first met, you were the only one / Sometimes I forget – I’m still the lonely one.” They also had the album formula down pat — a bright and peppy single, followed by their strongest track, then an anthem, and then a slow dance ballad with gooey lyrics for the teenage girls. I’ve written before about what I call “Raymond Chandler syndrome”, in which something original (like Raymond Chandler) sounds like a cliché, because you’re reading it after having heard a million and one pastiches of it. My experience with Play Deep was kind of the opposite — I heard it before I’d listened to very much music at all, so all its clichés sounded original to me.

But still, those drums! That voice! Those harmonies! I cannot help but sing along, joyfully, because this is one of those cases where the words don’t matter anywhere near as much as the sound, and the feeling it brings to me. No doubt that feeling is wrapped up with 15-year-old me, with his odd flat cap and his jacket full of Ghostbusters and SNL pins. For every time he thrilled, I thrill just a little bit more.

Quoth Robby, last Monday:

Your new assignment for the week is…….
Elvis Costello’s brilliant album from 1977, “My Aim Is True.” I try not to editorialize when I introduce the albums so as not to bias anything, but I can’t help myself with this one. I love this album!

And he’s right, this is a brilliant album. For one thing, it’s just bursting with clever lyrics, starting from the very beginning: “Now that your picture’s in the paper being rhythmically admired…” has to be the best masturbation euphemism in rock. (A more crowded field than you might think — just ask Peter Green or Pete Townshend or Cyndi Lauper.) There’s plenty more, too. How about “I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’m still mystified / I can’t do it anymore and I’m not satisfied” from “Mystery Dance”, or for that matter the entire song’s frustrated evocation of teenage naivete about sex? From “Alison”, “I don’t know if you’ve been loving some body / I only know it isn’t mine” is totally unforgettable. And of course, “I used to be disgusted / but now I try to be amused” is one of the greatest and most quotable lyrics ever.

There’s a Costello-shaped hole in my musical knowledge, due to a quirk of my history. I had a pretty negative experience (in certain ways) my freshman year of college, including a dismal roommate situation with a guy who LOOOOVED Elvis Costello and Squeeze. So for years I unfairly associated those two artists with misery and depression. Even now, they remain only greatest hits bands for me, and I’m very grateful to Robby for specifically prompting me to pay a little closer attention to this phenomenal debut. I was struck by how much it reminds me of one of my all-time favorite debuts, an album I’ve played hundreds of times: Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp!. Not only do these two albums have a point of view and musical attack in common, the artists are at least spiritual cousins, restless and prodigious composers who’ve had long careers of hopping from one style to another, mastering them all and frequently pairing them all with biting and/or poignant lyrics.

Jackson and Costello were labeled “angry young men”, to their mutual disgust, but there’s something to the label, at least for these early albums. So what is Costello angry about? Well, women, for one thing. In song after song, he spits venomous words about some girl or another. In “No Dancing”, “she has made a fool of him / like girls have done so many nights before / time and time again.” In “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes”, he says “I’m so happy I could die,” to which she replies, “Drop dead.” In “Miracle Man”, he sneers, “Everybody loves you so much girl / I just don’t know how you stand the strain.” His anger is most obvious, ironically, on the song “I’m Not Angry.” This is a classic emotion-denial song, right in line with 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love” and John Waite’s “Missing You” — the word “angry”, in a sinister whisper close to the mic, makes it obvious just how angry he really is, despite all protestations to the contrary.

In fact, denying what he really feels (while at the same time completely revealing it) is the primary hallmark of this album. He seems to be angry at women, but look a little closer and it becomes pretty clear that what’s at stake here is injured male pride, vulnerable and badly hidden. Being made a fool of, being rejected, being a loser among competing suitors — every tenderhearted boy’s fear is right here, along with their blustering defenses. If you are or have ever been a boy who struggles with your own ego, emotions, and desires, this is the album for you, because it understands not only the pain, but how you cover it up. Costello has a tough-guy front going on in his punky singing style, and in his claims to be waiting for the end of the world. Everything means less than zero, he tells us, but the evidence is everywhere that everything means quite a bit more to him. He shows us noir femmes fatales in “Watching The Detectives”, their icy indifference highlighted in a shot-by-shot description of a tragic ending for some poor doomed sucker in love: “She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake.” Those detectives, he says, can’t be wounded because they’ve got no hearts, but he knows the truth: they, and he, and everybody this album speaks to, are nothing but heart underneath.

It’s all there in “Sneaky Feelings”, where he nobly suppresses his desires for fear of “breakin’ up somebody else’s home.” It comes out more poetically in the album’s masterpiece, “Alison.” “I’m not gonna get too sentimental,” he claims, but moments later is achingly declaring, “I know this world is killing you.” She has a husband, but he sees her suffer, and can’t stand it. Calling up echoes of Etta James’ “I’d Rather Go Blind”, he wishes that somebody would “put out the big light / cause I can’t stand to see you this way.”

What he really wants her to know, though, what he says over and over so much that it sums up the whole album is: my aim is true. What does that mean? It’s an emotional authenticity, surely: “I speak the truth.” But look at all the cover-ups, all the misdirections, all the denials. I think Costello shows us an irony within that earnest declaration. “My aim is true,” claims the narrator of “Alison”, even as he contradicts himself, even has he teeters on the precipice of letting all those sneaky feelings show. “My aim is true” might mean, “I’m better for you than anyone else”, but that’s just male pride again, lining up once more to get shot down. I think what it really means, at bottom, is something pretty simple: my emotions are intense, I crave connection, I’m vulnerable, and I’m scared. In other words, the human condition in general, and the teens/twenties sensitive male condition in particular. Usually the best we can do is try to be amused.

My assignment this week was the album Brothers, by The Black Keys. So: the first thing I notice about Brothers is the blaring, harsh production on the vocals and some instruments. I know next to nothing about audio engineering and mastering, but to me it sounds like they deliberately spiked the input levels on those things so that the waveforms got clipped. Either that or they had a dial labeled “BLARE” on the console, and they turned that one all the way up. Either way, I found it an offputting sound, especially at first. I kept feeling like I was on the edge of the stage, for a band whose speakers had just blown out, but who couldn’t afford to get new ones.

It has to be intentional. There’s no way a sound like that happens by accident, not for the length of an entire album. So I got to thinking, what effect are they after? The distorted, fuzzed-out vocals have a sinister, eerie feel, keeping us at arm’s length while the deformed guitars howl with intensity. And it turns out this casts a peculiar shadow on the songs. Because I wasn’t allowed to hear a naturalistic tone, I couldn’t conflate the song with the singer. The sound created a kind of split consciousness, with the character narrating some feeling or story, and the wall of distortion either calling that story into question or shrouding it in heavy atmosphere.

That works for these songs, because these are songs of desperation and dread. Take a song like “The Go Getter” — the lyrics alone are a dark portrait of an L.A. loser, very reminiscent of something that might have appeared on David & David’s Boomtown. But where David & David would have sung it without a filter, The Black Keys make its voice and bass sound broken. Under that layer, its darkness deepens.

Then, on the other side, listen to “Everlasting Light.” Lyrically, it is a straightfoward declaration of devotion. But the distortion is so heavy, the falsetto driven to such a frantic extreme, that I can’t hear it as a “silly love song.” It has a quality of intense neediness instead, an almost stalker-ish sense of wrong.

With that frame in mind, and once I’d gotten past my crotchety irritation at being denied anything that sounded like a pure voice, I came to really enjoy this album. Some favorites:

• “Next Girl” – This was probably my favorite track on the album. It has such a satisfying, rocky stomp, and I love the lyrics too. Though I couldn’t help being reminded of something Lindsey Buckingham once said about his song “Never Going Back Again”: “That’s a very naive song. Never going back again? Sure. [laughs]”. Oh, your next girl will be nothing at all like your ex-girl? You’ll never make those mistakes again? Sure.
• “I’m Not The One” – A more direct, less merciful update of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe”
• “These Days” – One of the least distorted vocals on the album, which makes me think it’s one of the most sincere songs. I love the sense of yearning, and the lyric “These blood red eyes / Don’t see so good / But what’s worse is if they could.”
• “Tighten Up” – I can see why this one was the single. Many of the best songs on this album have either a great riff or a great groove, and this song has both.
• “Too Afraid To Love You” – That harpsichord! What an unexpected sound, but somehow it works perfectly in this fear-drenched song.

So thanks for this assignment, Robby! Getting to know this album made me a fan of it.