Pieces Of The Puzzle
The High Llamas
Years Of Operation 1990-present
Fits Between The Beach Boys and Steely Dan
"The Old Spring Town" by The High Llamas
Personal Correspondence Speaking of Glorious Crackpots, The High Llamas' frontman Sean O'Hagan may not be as eccentric as Harry Nilsson, but he's certainly followed his own muse, even when it's undercut his commercial prospects. I first discovered The High Llamas thanks to a happy weekend spent flipping through The Trouser Press Guide To '90s Rock. The entry on Stereolab featured a handy "see also" tag at the end, and I was intrigued by the description of The High Llamas' Gideon Gaye, which promised a Stereolab-affiliated sound cut with The Beach Boys and Steely Dan. Despite its abundance of failed sonic experiments, I liked Gideon Gaye enough I picked up Hawaii when it was released domestically, and again found some truly terrific material, undercut by repetition, an exhausting album length, and O'Hagan's predilection for putting the same damn banjo and gurgling synthesizer on nearly every song. It was as though O'Hagan were stubbornly refusing to simply entertain, even though he clearly had the ability. In the decade since, O'Hagan has stuck to his guns, returning every couple of years with another set of similar-sounding songs derivative of Bacharach, Tropicalia, Brian Wilson and Donald Fagen. But over time, The High Llamas' rip-jobs have become identifiably O'Hagan's own, and fans of the band—of which I am one—have come to enjoy spending time in his world whenever he opens the door. All of O'Hagan's experiments have led him to a placid place, and musically speaking, he seems to have learned what he can do without, while still delivering heart-stoppingly lovely songs about idyllic locales and seasonal memories.
Enduring presence? Unlike a lot of acts with a spotty output, I'm not sure it's possible to put together a High Llamas compilation that would represent them any better than their albums do. Even stripped down to their peak 40 minutes, The High Llamas would probably exhaust most people. The band's past two albums—Can Cladders and Beet, Maize & Corn—are arguably their best, but I don't know that I can unequivocally recommend them over Gideon Gaye or Hawaii. Either you're willing to meet O'Hagan on his own plane, or you're not. I can't decide that for you.
The Hives
Years Of Operation 1993-present
Fits Between The Stooges and Trio
"A Little More For Little You" by The Hives
Personal Correspondence In theory, The Hives might be the best rock 'n' roll band on the planet right now. (All together now: "In theory, communism works. In theory.") Everything about The Hives' presentation, from their snazzy suits to Howlin' Pelle Almqvist's charged-up pitchman persona, is pure rock—the old stuff, calculated to get fans moving. But the band has yet to close the deal with me. The Hives' best songs—"Hate To Say I Told You So," "Tick Tick Boom," "Two-Timing Touch And Broken Bones," "A Little More For Little You"—are duly ass-kicking, and yet the rest of their albums can't quite reach the heights of their singles. They often sound like raw frenzy, unchanneled and therefore—oddly enough—uninteresting. Almost as much as The White Stripes, The Hives seemed like they were going to be the flagship band of neo-garage, pushing the genre beyond retro by distilling its essence and carrying it into the modern day. The White Stripes have done marvelously with that mission, and The Hives have tried, by nodding to technopop and R&B. But so far, they keep coming a cropper.
Enduring presence? Last year's The Black And White Album was a particular disappointment, coming after the focused and forward-looking Tyrannosaurus Hives. I'm really pulling for The Hives, because when they're on, they really do leave every other band of this era eating their dust. On the whole, though, they've been locked from the start into a speed-to-the-finish bash, with each instrument in each song holding to a single melodic pattern for the two minute average playing time. Though a guitar or two may drop out momentarily for the sake of dynamism, the compositions contain too few surprises.
The Hold Steady
Years Of Operation 2004-present
Fits Between Bruce Springsteen and Thin Lizzy
"Stevie Nix" by The Hold Steady
Personal Correspondence You know how sometimes you read a book and get an idea in your head about a character's physical appearance, and then the movie version comes out and it looks all wrong? Yeah, that was my original experience with The Hold Steady. I was totally unaware of Lifter Puller before I heard The Hold Steady's 2004 debut album Almost Killed Me, so listening to Craig Finn growl out rant-y, repetitive lines like, "We got wars going down in the middle west / We got wars going down in the middle western states" had me picturing him as a wild-eyed, long-haired dude, slightly unhinged but wickedly witty. It wasn't until Separation Sunday came out a year later that I finally saw a picture of the band, and found out that Finn was yet another doughy, bespectacled, balding indie-rock type, largely indistinguishable from a Ben Gibbard or a Colin Meloy. (I suddenly understood why Gerard Cosloy had dismissed The Hold Steady as "late-period Soul Asylum fronted by Charles Nelson Reilly.") But it didn't rattle me much. About Separation Sunday I wrote, "Finn bellows like an overcranked art student, reading lyrics from some barroom poet's police statement. On the first Hold Steady record, Finn worked the room at a rowdy Saturday night kegger, overhearing improbable stories and telling a few lies of his own. Separation Sunday could be taking the place the next day, as the partygoers with nowhere to go hang out in a skate park and talk about God." Then about 2006's Boys And Girls In America, I wrote, "Finn may be a smart-ass and a poseur, but he genuinely understands how it feels to want to get wasted, both as a way of fitting in with the crowd, and a way of forgetting that he can't. Always muscular, The Hold Steady is now wiry to boot, capable of cabaret ballads like 'First Night' as well as Thin-Lizzy-meets-Black-Flag anthems like 'Massive Nights.' Both those songs are about moments that linger, 'when every song was right,' and the triumph of Boys And Girls is that it's full of the kind of songs that Finn's protagonists would crank up, relishing every power chord." My one lingering hang-up with The Hold Steady is that I feel like Finn repeats himself too much with all his lyrics about party-addled teenagers. I'd like to see him widen his focus a little. At the same time though, I think he writes some of the most vivid—and funniest—story-songs in modern rock, and guitarist Tad Kubler and pianist Franz Nicolay steal from classic rock as well as anyone. Boys And Girls In America capped a three-year run that showed a clear progression in songcraft and understanding of rock dynamics. Every year, one or two albums come along that make me look forward to waking up to a new day, because I know I'll get to listen to them again. Boys And Girls In America was one of those albums.
Enduring presence? When I interviewed Finn two years ago, I asked him why so many critics and rock fans hate him so much, and he was refreshingly honest about it, saying, "I think my vocals are hard for some people to take. I also think that people of a certain age in the indie-rock scene experience music as a part of their identity. If you're into, like, I don't know, Saddle Creek or whatever, and you're younger, you want people to know that's what you're into. I think us being kind of classic-rock-based might be threatening to those people's sense of identity. I can understand that. I love The Grateful Dead and I also love hardcore, but when I was 20, I couldn't see how I could love both. At 35, it makes tons of sense to me." It makes sense to me too, though I still get a little hurt by how much some music buffs—including friends of mine—actively hate The Hold Steady. It's like they resent the whole idea of midwestern schlubs moving to the hipster neighborhoods of New York to sing faux-badass songs about where they used to live, set to crushing riffs borrowed mostly unironically from corporate rock. Whereas me, I sometimes feel like The Hold Steady have taken all my favorite threads of rock history and woven them together, making the kind of music I might make if I were in a rock band (only with different lyrics). I understand there's a new Hold Steady album due in July. You guys wouldn't mind if I ended this project early, would you?
The Housemartins
Years Of Operation 1983-88
Fits Between The Jam and Cliff Richard
"Get Up Off Our Knees" by The Housemartins
Personal Correspondence There aren't too many bands in pop history that said hello and goodbye—with only two albums no less—as gracefully and entertainingly as The Housemartins. Even though bandleader Paul Heaton went on to offer a similar—albeit more slow and soulful—version of The Housemartins' sound with The Beautiful South, the snappy, concise approach of London 0 Hull 4 and The People Who Grinned Themselves To Death is tough to top. Approximating both "Up With People" and early Motown, The Housemartins sang happy-sounding songs about how we're all slaves to consumerism, religion and authoritarian fear-mongering, and how our best option is to leave our churches and maybe pick up a gun. (And that just covers one song, "Get Up Off Our Knees.") People feels maybe a hair more strained than Hull, as the band started to take their status as social commentators a smidgen too seriously, but on the whole it's every bit as bright, jumpy and hooky a record as the first one. The band's posthumous singles collection Now That's What I Call Quite Good captures some essential non-LP tracks and Peel sessions (similar to The Smiths' Hatful Of Hollow), and holds together well as an album all on its own, but it doesn't have the same upstart sting of the first two albums, both of which are jaunty pop records that even my punk friends found acceptable.
Enduring presence? I don't know of any modern bands who cite The Housemartins as a direct influence, but their bustling and overtly poppy sound definitely echoes through Belle & Sebastian—as well as all the current Swede-pop bands that worship Belle & Sebastian. I just wish some of the new breed were as engaged politically as they are musically.
Hüsker Dü
Years Of Operation 1979-87
Fits Between Volcano Suns and Naked Raygun
"Celebrated Summer" by Hüsker Dü
Personal Correspondence In the spring of '85, a little less than a year after I became a regular reader of Rolling Stone, the magazine published an article that would be one of the two most important Rolling Stone articles I'd ever read*. It was a Michael Goldberg report on the state of American punk rock—what's now referred to by some as "post-hardcore"—using The Replacements, Meat Puppets, Black Flag, Minutemen and Hüsker Dü as the anchor bands. I cut out the pictures from that article and taped them to my 3-ring binder, and I referred back to the text of that article often as I went exploring in used record stores. It took a while before I could track down Zen Arcade, the key Hüsker Dü album in the piece—which even the author admitted was hard to find—but I came across Flip Your Wig for $4.99 and made it my first Hüsker Dü album. Then, out of the blue, my brother—never a punk guy in any way—brought home New Day Rising from college, and I fell in love with "Celebrated Summer," Bob Mould's half-nostalgic, half-desperate pro-vacation anthem. (I even started working on a novel called Celebrated Summer, heavily influenced by Stephen King's novella The Body, but I never got past the first chapter.) That summer I went to The Governor's School For The Humanities in Martin, TN, and met a good group of alterna-kids with eclectic tastes. I remember we all went to the local record store together and each special-ordered one album that we really wanted. I got Echo & The Bunnymen's Songs To Learn And Sing, another friend got The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead, and an especially hip girl in our clique got Hüsker Dü's Candy Apple Grey—which is why for years I had a cassette tape with The Queen Is Dead on one side and Candy Apple Grey on the other. When I returned from Governor's School, I started my junior year at a new, bigger high school that had an actual punk crowd, something my smaller high school—which had been closed in accordance with Tennessee's desegregation laws—did not have. But I was disappointed to find out that the punks at the bigger school weren't as broad-minded as my friends from Governor's School. One day one of my new punk friends said, "Raise your hand if you think Hüsker Dü has sold out," and when everybody but me raised their hands, I realized that the gap between what I was looking for in music and what the scenesters expected was probably going to be unbridgeable. I still hung out with them anyway. I just didn't let them see what I was buying at the record store.
Enduring presence? Can I confess something? Although I loved loved loved Hüsker Dü back in the '80s, and I still think that they were a phenomenal band, they're probably the band that once meant the most to me that I almost never listen to now. (Close second: Sonic Youth.) Something about Hüsker Dü now strikes me as ungainly, even a little adolescent—and not in a "what a golden age that was" way, but in an acne/body-odor way. The unassailable Zen Arcade aside, I find I get a purer rush from Mould's first two solo albums and Sugar. Hüsker Dü is almost more impressive as an influence on post-hardcore than as a band in and of themselves.
*The other RS article that changed my life, by the way, was Mikal Gilmore's "Daredevil Authors: Today's Real Superheroes," which led me back into comic books after about a six-year layoff. But that's a subject for a different feature: "Capeless," coming 2009.
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