Overhaul

A reformatting of the review system here is in order. Seems to me the idea of a review system is more helpful if I stick to some capsule reviews. I can cover more records, and you don't waste your time reading some long-ass essay that'll waste your time. I can give 'yall some invective whenever I feel like it.

In the mean time, I just want to let you know that I pre-ordered RADIOHEAD'S NEW ALBUM, KING OF LIMBS. It's pricey, comes with a download key, a CD, two 10" records extensive artwork, and vague statements about it being "a newspaper album." The album is terrific. It's relatively brief, but every track is a standout. I've listened to it five times in a row, and plan to play it non-stop for the rest of the night. Below is the review.

Radiohead - King Of Limbs

Band: Radiohead
Album: The King Of Limbs
Label: Self-released
Year: 2011

If 2007's In Rainbows was marked by the relative dominance of guitarists Johnny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien, King Of Limbs is definitely Thom Yorke's album. There are no straight ahead rockers or guitar freakouts to be found here. It mirrors his Eraser solo album far more closely the digitally-enhanced space rock of past records. "Bloom" flutters along on synths that wouldn't sound out of place on a Flying Lotus track. It turns into the kind of glitchy tripout meditation that Radiohead has has excelled at since "Idioteque," only now the band sounds far more confident in its melding of digital and analogue instruments. The unit moves as a coherent whole, shifting gears from electronic breakbeats to analogue symphonic swells. Also present is the ghost of drum & bass Radiohead enthusiast Spor amid the disjointed Yorke harmonies on "Give Up The Ghost". "Little By Little" and "Seperator" contain ethereal vocal textures and spacious layered guitars, panning gorgeously like twin comets. As usual, Nigel Godrich's production is impeccable. A typically visually arresting video has been produced for "Lotus Flower", although I would name the stately piano march "Codex" as the record's emotional centerpiece. Each new listen reveals greater sonic detail and complexity, but this isn't really a difficult album to get into. A fine latter-day effort from an experimental rock group that experiments far more than it rocks. Hardcore Radiohead fans (are there any other kind?) will find much to love here.

Bovine

One of my favourite sub-genres of rock music is cowbell rock. This is not a real type of music, it just loosely refers to songs that rock a cowbell. Many bands try their hand at the cowbell at some point or another, probably because it is awesome. Most of them succeed, because it is hard to be disappointed with anything after someone beats a cowbell in your face.

Here is a playlist that will get you banging the bell like Will Farrell.

1. The Beatles - Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey.
2. The Rolling Stones - Honky Tonk Woman
3. Deep Purple - And The Address
4. Led Zeppelin - Good Times, Bad Times
5. Black Sabbath - The Wizard
6. Mountain - Mississippi Queen
7. Free - Alright Now
8. The James Gang - Funk #49
9. Leaf Hound - Freelance Fiend
10. The Groundhogs - Cherry Red
11. Humble Pie - Stone Cold Fever
12. Sir Lord Baltimore - Loe and Behold
13. Captain Beyond - Raging River Of Fear
14. Dust - All In All
15. Queen - Liar
16. Grand Funk Railroad - We're An American Band
17. Montrose - Rock The Nation
18. KISS - Nothin' To Lose
19. Nazereth - Hair Of The Dog
20. The Dictators - The Next Big Thing
21. Aerosmith - Last Child
22. Blue Öyster Cult - Don't Fear The Reaper
23. Scorpions - Pictured Life
24. Pink Floyd - Pigs (Three Different Ones)
25. Van Halen - Dance The Night Away
26. Bad Brains - Pay To Cum
27. Warlord - Lucifer's Hammer
28. Def Leppard - Rock Of Ages
29. Twisted Sister - We're Not Gonna Take It
30. Guns 'n' Roses - Night Train
31. The Beastie Boys - Hey Ladies
32. Guided By Voices - Rhine Jive Chick
33. The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Monkey Puzzle
34. Spiritual Beggars - Magic Spell
35. Cathedral - Heavy Load
36. Radiohead - Electioneering
37. Pantera - Drag The Waters
38. Clutch - Wishbone
39. Fu Manchu - Blue Tile Fever
40. The Queens Of The Stone Age - Little Sister
41. Priestess - Run Home
42. Sloan - Live On
43. Dungen - Mon Amour
44. Snail - Cleanliness
45. Boris - Statement

Enjoy. Don't blow this for us, Gene.

*I've revised this note somewhat, and may continue to do so in the future. My lust for cowbell knows no bounds. May plan is for this playlist to be definitive, with a limit of one song per band. Once you've used the cowbell once, its basically assumed that the instrument becomes a mainstay of your sound anyways. It's just as important when its not playing as when it is, except less awesome.*

**I've discovered this list of songs that feature the cowbell. It's far more definitive than mine, but there is a lot that is irrelevant to the kind of cowbell rock I'm talking about here. I guess the Beastie Boys song on my list is hard to fit in with the context of the rest of the list, but it's my blog and that song fucking rules.**

*** I added GBV's "Rhine Jive Click" for my buddy J.P. A classic cowbell rocker. Mr. Pollard knows what he's doing.***

Eulogy

Sadly, the White Stripes have decided to call it a career. Although this doesn't come as much of a surprise as they've been on hiatus for the last three years, it's still disappointing to see a truly great rock band hang 'em up. Beginning with a mutated hybrid of Mississippi delta mud and Motor city muscle on their eponymous debut and morphing into proto-Zeppelin super rock behemoths on their classic main sequence of De Stijl, White Blood Cells and Elephant before indulging Jack White's restless id and taste for country and folk arrangements on the schizophrenic and unfocused Get Behind Me Satan and finishing strong with 2007's gloriously eclectic and endearingly weird Icky Thump, the White Stripes have fashioned a body of work which artistically rivals anything put to tape this decade. Moreover, the band's skillful handling of its image combined with Jack White's unadulterated musical genius fashioned a media profile just as intimidating as their music. While I feel that given White's restless spirit it makes sense to retire the Stripes brand, it is a little bit upsetting to see one of the world's only superstar rock and roll groups ride off into the sunset. The White Stripes fill a need in the public consciousness for the transcendent mass cultural euphoric experience that can only be gained by blowing apart a stadium full of screaming fans with pure rock fury. With the Stripes gone, where can we turn to get stadium-filling, rock radio-ruling, car stereo-blasting rock and roll that you can get behind? Not Coldplay, that's for sure.

Unfortunately, I never was able to experience the Stripes in all of their live shit-kicking glory, although it wasn't for lack of opportunities. I'm pissed at myself now. Guess I'll have to be content with last year's blistering live career retrospective, Under Great White Northern Lights.

Here's a little something to remember them by. I first saw this video on Much Music's The Wedge when I was in about Grade 8. How time flies. Still a great track, awesome video.

Animosity

"Who hates the Stooges?"
*loud cheers from the crowd*
"We don't hate you. We don't even care."

-Iggy Pop with the Stooges, live at the Michigan Palace, February 9, 1974, Metallic KO

Definition

Musical historiography has spent at least the last four decades warping our view of rock. Over the last couple of years I’ve come to view the history of rock music as a continuum, rather than by the far more common discourse on genre ghettoization. Revisionist history written by orthodox rock critics has attempted to obscure this essential truth in service to advertising concerns. To clarify, I am not opposed to the use of musical definitions. Terms like thrash, grunge, punk, sludge and so on have their uses as sonic descriptors. When someone says a band thrashes, you generally take that to mean that they play fast, heavily distorted chugging rhythm guitars with lots of complex, winding instrumental breaks, jackhammer drum beats and shredding guitar solos featuring lots of hammer-ons. The problem arises when artificial barriers are erected between styles that are only superficially different. Music is fluid, and the best bands, as they themselves have been saying all along, cannot be pigeonholed.

Rock is a specific term, not an umbrella one. When I say rock, I’m talking about small band music that is dominated by the electric guitar, bass and drums and built mainly on amplified and usually distorted guitar riffs. For a band to be a rock band it must rock, and if you’ve been listening long enough now, you know what that means. Rock is a non-dance music that provokes a physical response. The physical impact of rock music when amplified generally is the force that compels acolytes to bang their heads or play air guitar. Despite their stylistic differences, the Rolling Stones, Stooges, Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Replacements, Soundgarden, Kyuss, High On Fire and White Stripes are all working within the same idiom. These bands and thousands more are all quintessentially rock. The instrumentation is the same, as is the small band format. A drummer, a bass player and a guitarist or two are the central voices in their sound. Vocals may be handled by a dedicated singer or one of the players. It serves the interest of the media (whose goal is to sell advertising, not music) to subdivide rock bands into categories because they can be more easily marketed or ignored, as the case may be. Guns ‘n’ Roses and Jane’s Addiction crawled out of the same Los Angeles club scene and parlayed the same set of arena-ready, classic rock approved influences and a similar glammed up media profile into short-lived but brilliant parallel careers as avatars for diametrically opposed scenes, MTV hair metal for G’n’R and SPIN’s Alternative Rock Nation for Jane’s. Why? It’s not as though Pearl Jam and Bad Company were all that different musically to begin with, but for the majors to present the Pearl Jam in 1991 as the Next Big Thing, an artificial break with the dinosaurs of the past had to be created to produce a groundswell of hype and move units. Failing to hide from the crucial twenty-something Generation X demographic the fact that their new sounds were highly influenced by their parents’ boomer rock would have been commercial poison, hence the need for a new name – grunge. Being an arena rock band to the core, Pearl Jam and the far more metal-influenced Alice In Chains and Soundgarden were lumped in with the ragged pop-punk of Nirvana. Sonically they all were extremely different, but still essentially rock. So basically we have this ridiculous paradigm constructed by which these bands do not share their historical antecedents but instead lept fully formed into the public's consciousness as a homogeneous "new wave" of music. I'm not buying it. Again, it was not the bands themselves who were saying this, but their major label handlers' marketing departments doing their best to obscure the music and wrap it in fashion conceits to move units. Pearl Jam themselves realized this once they were left in the dust by contemporary trends and at least had the integrity to own up to their influences and play on record with Neil Young.

Revisionist rock history has come along for the ride. Typically, a survey of early 90's rock makes some point about the symbolic gesture of Nevermind knocking Michael Jackson's Dangerous off of the top spot on the charts, but this is hardly surprising given that album charts always reflect more accurately (although not all that accurately) the serious record-buying public's perception than the fickle pop audience and insular broadcast industry. These outlets are better represented by the singles charts, which are based on airplay. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" only ever hit number 6 on the Billboard charts, and did so after a slow and steady climb rather than an explosive debut. Conclusion? The song that gets picked again and again and again as the greatest song of the '90s was never as ubiquitous as we are taught to remember. And as for the idea of Nirvana and their alt-rock ilk ending the reign of MTV hair metal well... MTV might have jumped off the bandwagon some time around 1992, but Quiet Riot's Metal Health still sold two million copies during the 90's, and Mötley Crüe's Dr. Feelgood sold twice that. People were still listening to and even buying this music. These sorts of sea changes don't actually happen and take place only in the minds of broadcasters and music writers.

Music criticism as it stands has contributed to the problem for decades. The vast majority of music criticism is not about music at all, but instead catering to the core audience demographics’ self image as being tuned in to what is cool. The advertisers which supply the revenue want to be able to sell their products to these people. If you’ve read as much music media as I have and have at least a modicum of critical thinking ability in your brain, you should have noticed how little time is actually spent talking about music itself. Where they are from, what they wear on stage, who in the industry they are associated with, what their videos look like and so on do not tell us anything about what a band actually sounds like. The idea is to build an image for the band and the publication itself and by implication the advertisers. Sometimes you will see albums advertised in the same publications that are reviewing them! How can we expect an impartial critical review if the advertiser is paying the writer’s salary?

Fashion and production trends have obscured the relative stability of rock as a style (ignoring its fluctuating commercial prospects) to a large degree, and their primary influence on the music itself was to date it. This doesn’t have to be the case, and the bands that have always remained committed to finding their musical voices have discovered this time and time again. If they are good enough and work hard, they might with luck even be able to make a go of it for a little while, touring and recording. Really, playing in a rock band is not a commercially rewarding enterprise, and aside from a few obvious exceptions it never has been. Again though, commercial concerns are irrelevant to the quality of music. As long as the sound of a rock band is built on solid musical bedrock, timeless and relevant music can be made whether or not the musicians themselves are aware of their own musical DNA. For this reason, bands that are superficially different due to whatever production tricks happen to be in vogue (giant, arena-ready gated reverb snare drums in the ‘80s, pseudo-electronic industrial textures in the ‘90s, digital distortion and auto-tuned vocals in the ‘00s etc) can be appropriately grouped together based on the musical traits they all share. The Who and Mountain and the Clash and Black Flag and Kyuss and the Smashing Pumpkins and the Black Lips might sound different, because the techniques used to record them differed and because each band’s particular voice was unique, but their instruments and techniques and song structures are all based on similar antecedents -- they all speak the language of rock.

Musical differences between bands and styles are a different factor, and by this I mean techniques. Morbid Angel use blast beats and guttural vocals, the Jimi Hendrix Experience did not. Earthless play guitar solos, the Ramones did not. These are not arbitrary or qualitative judgments, but simply statements of fact. The presence or absence of identifiable musical qualities such as these allows us to accurately refer to Morbid Angel as a death metal band and the Ramones as a punk band. Rock has sprouted its fair sure of offshoots, punk and metal being the most important and each of these encompassing their own sub styles. It is important to remember that these all fall under the dominion of rock however. There can be, and except for the most extreme cases (Napalm Death, Deicide, Mayhem, Extreme Noise Terror, Fear, Crucifucks, Hirax, Cryptic Slaughter) almost always is crossover between the styles in the work of all bands that do not fit squarely into the rock mold. Just as Led Zeppelin and Cream could easily be thought of as super loud blues bands, Motörhead and Metallica could easily be thought of as amped up, ultra-heavy rock bands (something Lemmy himself has always claimed), and Minor Threat and Sick Of It All as rock bands in a (sometimes permanent) state of pupation.
Certainly the bands themselves were aware of this, if not consciously, then at least musically. They were all listening to each others’ records anyways. Malcolm McLaren’s manipulation of the media and Johnny Rotten’s mouth got a lot more attention for the Sex Pistols than Steve Jones’ conventional pub rock approach to the guitar ever did, but it was the boys in the band who knew how to give Budgie and Black Sabbath licks a steel-toed boot to the ass and play them more primitively than even those artisans had. The media fell for it and went along for the ride because they love shit like the idea of the front man for a rock band talking about destroying roll. Yeah right. I’m sure there was no rock whatsoever that went into peeling off the riffs and solos (!) that make up “Anarchy in the U.K.”At the end of the day it was still the same power-trio racket that had defined rock ‘n’ roll since the ‘50s. Never mind the Bollocks indeed.

Don’t be fooled by Madison Avenue and its cronies. It’s about the music, and always has been. Ignore the extraneous bullshit and listen without distraction. Maximum volume yields maximum results.

Reptilian

This is why people love the Jesus Lizard. Huge riff, and David Yow is a maniac. Music starts up again at 3:30.