Northampton, MA Indie/Folk/Pop band Winterpills’ second (and finest) album unfolds its melodic charms with each repeated listen, until it feels as indispensable as any recent pop record. It’s a work of seductive wintry melancholy as the cover suggests.
Acoustic guitar is usually central in the mix, with electric guitar and keyboards texturing the simple yet sophisticated arrangements. But the sound most prominently defined by songwriter Philip Price’s lead vocals and Flora Reed’s complimentary harmonies–a magical male-female vocal mix. A work of gentle sophistication, this is a gem of a record.
I reckon that the way I was turned on to Guster is typically how it happens among their fans. A friend handed me their Ganging Up On The Sun CD and said pretty casually, “Every song on this album is good”. I laughed. Said friend’s taste is usually but not always a reliable barometer for me, and this was the most bodacious claim she’d ever made for a band. I scoffed at the thought that there could be an artist out there virtually unfamiliar to me (I’d heard them do “Donde Esta Santa Claus” on a holiday compilation) who could fill a whole CD with musical goodness. But it only took me about three listens to come to the same conclusion: there was no filler on Ganging Up On The Sun. What a fluke.
Shortly after the record reached heavy rotation status in my world I learned Guster was about to release Easy Wonderful. I was filled with the dread of knowing the Guster high I was on was about to crash to earth. No way would the next album be nearly as good. I’d become a fan, you see, but not yet a true believer. Easy Wonderful is probably better than Ganging Up On The Sun.
So I sent some Guster to a friend in Massachusetts. It sat on his pile of music–every hapless music fanatic has at least a stack or two of stuff that’s waiting to be heard; I have about 30–until I reminded him I wanted to know how he liked it. What I didn’t tell him was how secretly smug I was in the certainty that he’d love Guster. Or that I was looking forward to that magical moment…you know, the moment when you get to bask in the reflected glory of a band just because you were the one who handed them off, conveniently forgetting for the moment that friend who was hipper than you and turned you onto the same band. But enough about her…
My friend’s email began: “Ed: Okay, Guster’s great.”
YESSSSS!
Similar stories must happen all the time for this band. They’re one of the archetypical “word of mouth bands”. Their fans aren’t casual fans. “Gusterrhoids” are among the most fanatical followers of any band. I get the reason. Simply put, no current band or artist comes to mind who puts more appealing melodies on an album. If you like somewhat quirky, melodic pop performed by three somewhat quirky, charismatic guys–this is your band. What I don’t get is why they arent’t bigger. Perhaps it’s because their music is simultaneously accessible and outside the realm of mainstream pop. Whatever. I only know of two types of music fans: those who love Guster, and those who don’t know Guster. Easy Wonderful is your invitation to cross to the other side.
The Moog Cookbook: Ye Olde Space Bande: Plays The Classic Rock Hits (1997)
Classic rock is awesome. So awesome I can’t stand to listen to most of it anymore.
I was raised on the rock that’s now called “Classic” but it was never the only kind of music I loved. I followed the trail of melody that snaked its way through classic rock and Pop in the 70’s, meandered across Country for part of the 80’s, hid out in the badlands of alt country in the 90’s, and sometimes stays at the youth hostel of indie pop today. I’ll always love melody and harmony, but have an undying appetite for new music, so the classic rock songs I loved in my youth, while still magical, have been faded by radio’s heavy rotation. I’m numb from their overexposure.
I remember the visceral thrill of hearing ambitious, iconoclastic songs like “Hotel California”, “Sultans of Swing” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” for the first time. In some cases I actually remember where I was when I first heard them, they were that impactful and format-bending. And even today I love when any band shows a willingness to “take it to the limit” and try to write that Big One–the concert encore, their own “Stairway to Heaven”.
The flip side is, there’s a slippery boundary between the portentous and the pretentious, and I’ve found I’m capable of simultaneously feeling that a song is undeniably great and “a bit up itself”. So sometimes a “great” rock song needs somebody to take the piss out of it.
Enter The Moog Cookbook, a “band” made up Brian Kehew and Roger Joseph Manning, Jr. who perform rock’s sacred canon on cheesy analog synthesizers (mostly Moogs), the musical equivalent of drawing caricatures of Jesus in the margins of a Bible.
Having enjoyed its heyday in the Disco and New Wave eras, the synthesizer was eschewed by pop acts of the late 80’s and early 90’s. Brian and Roger, who shared a love for synth sounds, bought up unwanted keyboards at bottom dollar and got the idea to make a modern version of the type of album popular in the 60’s, when cheesy synthesizer instrumental tributes to the Beatles and others were popular. Their self-titled 1996 LP sent up contemporaries like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Weezer and Green Day. “Ye Olde Space Band: Plays The Classic Rock hits” was another brilliant combination of parody and homage, with 70’s icons from Nugent to Skynyrd as its subject (or target, depending on your point of view).
“Hotel California” is a highlight. The original version being famous for one of the longest instrumental codas of any hit single (maybe second only to “Layla”) that coda is here used to pay tribute to a couple Moog riffs from the past (Hot Butter’s “Popcorn” and Del Shannon’s “Runaway”). On “25 Or 6 To 4” they raise the ante, throwing in pieces of Led Zeppelin’s “All My Love”, the Ventures’ “Walk, Don’t Run”, The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and War’s “Spill the Wine”, also demonstrating the chord progression the songs all share.
This album is like a music fan’s Easter egg hunt. It’s also really funny, if you’re inclined to get the musical joke. And the bonus: it pisses on Don Henley a little bit. And he kind of needed it.
About two minutes’ listen should be long enough for you to decide for yourself if it’s genius or rubbish. I know what I think.
In keeping with the trend of extolling mostly albums with either black or beige-ish covers, I present Los Angeles band Dawes’ 2009 debut, North Hills.
When I think of the various types of musical talent, the visual in my head is a triangle–but let’s call it a pyramid, ’cause nobody talks about the Food Triangle or the Inverted Triangle Of Global Liquidity. Pyramids are clearly cooler than simple triangles.
At the base of my Pyramid Of Musical Talent are competent vocalists. As the glut of singing-competition TV shows suggests, there are a lot of people out there who’ve been blessed with the ability to carry a tune (although I think these shows are the death bell for subtlety and nuanced song interpretation, but that’s another rant).
Above good singers in the pyramid are proficient instrumentalists. Seems like every third kid you meet can plug in and shred to one degree or another (although he has a sister and a girlfriend who can sing).
Above the people who can play, in the more rarified third tier of the triangle pyramid, are those who can compose an original, hummable melody. The writers of credible pop tunes are less common than the musicians who can play them, and much less so than those who can sing them. That’s why in, say, the 60′s there were far fewer Burt Bacharachs than Dionne Warwicks–as great a singer as she was, she was luckier to get to sing his songs than he was to have her sing them. Burt wrote timeless pop standards sung by Dusty Springfield, Jackie DeShannon, B.J. Thomas and many others. Warwick arguably never sang a classic song unless Bacharach (and David) wrote it. Without the melody the singer is irrelevant.
And because I believe gifted lyricists are an even rarer phenomenon than good composers, the topmost penthouse of my Pyramid Of Musical Talent is reserved for people who can write words like these:
So I am taking off my wristwatch/To let the time move how I please/To let my day be guided by the sunlight/Through morning’s bell and twilight’s soft release//So if you want to get to know me/Follow my smile down into its curves/All these lines are born in sorrows and pleasures/And every man ends up with the face that he deserves
…and…
So find me when you welcome back your roots/And I will be where all of your ends meet/I want the feeling waking next to you/I want to find my children at your feet
…and…
I will move somewhere the ocean’s never seen/Somewhere weeds just make their claims/Where my best friends exist only on screen/Where my love all fits in frames
Comparatively speaking, a new artist or band will frequently catch my attention with a distinctive sound or sticky melody. But seldom do lyrics penetrate to the forefront as they do here. And Dawes seem to construct their songs with this in mind–the arrangements are clean and restrained, with every instrument and voice put in service of the song. This is not a band interested in showing off by stepping out for the flashy solo or the over-the-top vocal performance. Think of Creedence Clearwater Revival who, with the rare exception, eschewed lead solos in favor of forming a good, solid pocket for the lyric. Jackson Browne will come to mind, too. Dawes seems to have borrowed his lyric-focused style and vocal sound, while happily avoiding the melodrama quotient that can make large doses of Browne’s stuff a bit tedious.
The band has a knack for an appealing turn of melody too. The album was recorded “live to tape” to achieve an organic, relaxed California Rock sound that should appeal to fans of the Eagles or Neil Young’s gentler tunes. Above all, I’d call it authentic. In a world of ear-candy, Dawes is making ear-nutrition that goes down real easy.
If you combine the piano pounding sounds of Ben Folds, melodies reminiscent of Bacharach and Nilsson, and the wacked-out sensibilities of post-Pet Sounds Brian Wilson you begin to close in on the coordinates of Philadelphia-based songwriter Brian Christinzio, a.k.a. BC Camplight.
Hide, Run Away is lyrically dark at times, but wrapped in appealing melodies of the stick-in-your-head variety. On a few tracks the Wilson admirer Christinzio determinedly emulates the sonics and instrumentation of Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys.
Leadoff track “Couldn’t You Tell” is a Bacharach-flavored lounge-y bossa nova (in a good way) that pretty much sets the lyrical tone on the album’s first line:
And if you offer me a second chance/then I would quickly need another
“Emily’s Dead To Me” finds the singer reassuring the object of his affection that another girl is no longer her rival–the phrase and song given a dark twist once it’s revealed he’s talking to that other girl’s mom.
BC Camplight’s follow-up featured the same cheerful melodies, twisted sentiments–and another bizarre album cover.
Austin, Texas-based Alternative Country band the Gourds have been making lively, kooky shit-kicking southern roots rock since the mid-1990’s. So it’s kind of a shame that when you type in the band’s name on Amazon.com the first song title that comes up is “Gin and Juice”. Yeah, their top download is still a novelty bluegrass cover of Snoop Dogg. Maybe that’s why they haven’t found greater acceptance, in fact. If that’s your first exposure–even if you like the Snoop cover–it doesn’t exactly help you to take the band seriously. (This should be called “Stacy’s Mom Syndrome”.)
But seriously taken be should they by you, as Yoda would say (or whatever, I’m more of a Star Trek guy) because the combination of skilled songcraft and whiff of authenticity in their music is rarely matched in the genre in the post-Skynyrd era. (Please don’t tell the surviving, still-touring members of Lynyrd Skynyrd I said this is the “post-Skynyrd era”.) Only Steve Earle comes to mind for comparison, and he’s a different cat. These guys seem to be mainly out to have fun. A solid guitar-and-keyboard sound is supplemented with mandolin, bouncy accordion, and occasional horns to make it sound a little like a danceable version of The Band. With better vocals. And a couple ballads here are simply gorgeous, especially “Promenade”. This album ought to appeal to at least three types of people:
1) Skynyrd fans with triple-digit IQs (hmm, what’s that? yes there are)
2) Fans of The Band who can’t find bands today with a remotely similar sound, and
3) Anyone who likes to listen to Rock bands who don’t sound like every other Rock band.
Every Moment Has A Song 