After 17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking the year off from all new music, and instead revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider whether he still needs it all.
"Oh Lonesome Me" by Don Gibson
As I was watching The Oscars last night, I was thinking about how much "awards season" encourages us to compartmentalize—and thereby misapprehend—collaborative art. Because the Academy gives awards in varied technical and creative categories, it seems to support the notion that we need a lot of cooks to prepare a full-course dinner. But within those categories, typically only one or two people get to take home statuettes: One editor (unless it's "Roderick Jaynes"), one cinematographer, one actor or writer. Never mind the assistant cutters, focus pullers, dialogue coaches or punch-up specialists. We're a top-down society here in the States, and we like to pin the wins and losses on a head coach.
Even in music, we prefer to celebrate The Album, as created by The Artist. When I sparred with my friend Nathan Rabin over hip-hop last year, I mentioned that one of my problems with the genre is that it's often unsatisfying for those of us who like to think of one person alone in a studio, obsessively laying down tracks to bring a singular vision to bear. Even though hip-hop is frequently a producer-driven medium, many of the monolithic rap and soul albums of the past decade have featured work by multiple producers, and tracks teeming with guest rhymers… and at a certain point, it becomes impossible to identify who's in charge.
But in singling out the muddle that is mainstream hip-hop, I fell into a trap that I've warned others away from in the past. I've argued for years that it's unfair to judge rock acts solely on the quality of whole albums, because a lot of bands are better defined by their collections of singles. And the same could be said of rappers, producers, and all kinds of a-one session men.
Like Chet Atkins, for example.
Atkins—a bona fide legend and visionary—recorded a staggering number of LPs as a solo artist, and performed on or produced countless more. As an executive at RCA, he signed country legends Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, and as a gracious, generous mentor, he helped a healthy number of Nashville pickers get better. (Including my father—more on that later.) But Atkins' individual albums are often little more than sketchbooks, containing one modest hit single and nine or ten variations on that song's theme. Atkins sometimes recorded up to four or five LPs a year, using each one to show off some new recording technique or picking style, or some unusual genre he'd just discovered. In their day, Atkins' albums were essential. Today, they sound kind of dryly explanatory: a series of demonstrations in song form.
Listen to a good Atkins anthology though, and the breadth of what Atkins attempted becomes more impressive. The Essential Chet Atkins includes songs Atkins merely soloed on (including classic singles like Don Gibson's "Oh Lonesome Me") alongside songs that are all his, and it puts his career in a context that makes a lot more sense than if someone were to pass on a copy of Chester & Lester or The First Nashville Guitar Quartet and say, "Listen to this guy play…he's a genius."
Atkins' gifts just aren't reducible to one classic LP, or even one indelible single. His gifts are in the recordings he helped facilitate, the guitarists he inspired, and the trails he blazed. Atkins is, without a doubt, a Man In Charge. But it's what he's in charge of that's sometimes hard to define.
*****************
Pieces Of The Puzzle
Caetano Veloso
Years Of Operation 1967-present
Fits Between João Gilberto and Burt Bacharach
Personal Correspondence Pedro Almodovar's Talk To Her is a good movie, but one of its best moments doesn't really belong to the director. About halfway through the film, Caetano Veloso performs a sweet acoustic ballad, and steals the movie for about four minutes. Almodovar pushes his characters to the margins, and lets us luxuriate in the performance of old master, holding a patio full of people spellbound on a pleasant Spanish night. For decades now, the appeal of Veloso has been the way he allows listeners to imagine that we're on that patio. When critics account for virtuosity in popular music, we often avoid talking about vocals, because we've been conditioned by decades of "the rawer the better" mission statements to think of good singers as show-offs and sell-outs… the kind of pop pablum that fills out American Idol, and thus not worthy of serious consideration. But a large part of what Veloso does is sing—beautifully, delicately, with phenomenal nuance.
Enduring presence? Once upon a time, Veloso's music was considered so radical that he was thrown in jail. Those days are gone, but you can still hear traces of what shook up Brazil in "Enquanto O Lobo Nao Vem," from the late '60s Tropicalia era. The song modernizes traditional South American musical forms, adding influences from the avant-garde, psychedelic rock, and even socialist folk art. Veloso sings about clandestine romantic meetings in the wilderness, where "mister wolf doesn't come." It doesn't take too much close reading to find that subversive on all kinds of levels.
"Enquanto O Lobo Nao Vem" by Caetano Veloso
And just because this is the Internet and why not, here's the Talk To Her clip:
Caitlin Cary
Years Of Operation 2000-present (solo)
Fits Between Kelly Willis and Emmylou Harris
Personal Correspondence If the untimely dissolution of Whiskeytown accomplished anything—besides setting Ryan Adams free to dick around with a new genre every week—it gave the band's violinist/vocalist Caitlin Cary the chance to forge her own respectable career as a soft-country-rock troubadour. Cary's solo debut, 2002's While You Weren't Looking, showcased her expressive voice and some elegant restraint, but the songs weren't as effortlessly tuneful as Whiskeytown's. It wasn't until 2003's I'm Staying Out that Cary and her producing partner Chris Stamey cooked up and/or borrowed material better suited to their tasteful version of roots music. At the time I wrote: "Through all the discreet shuffling of styles, the ace in the deck remains Cary's deep, full vocals. Again and again on I'm Staying Out, she guides the songs through verses, over bridges, and into choruses, pitching hard and pitching soft, telling stories of romantic adventure that are plainly understood through her harmonic tone of confidence and ache." To be honest, I have some resistance to music that smacks of "rockin' country:" a non-genre that tends to fail at both halves of its description. But Cary sings with such ease that the pleasure of listening to her croon overwhelms any qualms.
Enduring presence? Cary hasn't made a true solo album in a few years, though she's been involved in a few decent collaborative projects. Still, it would wonderful to hear another record of the classy caliber of I'm Staying Out.
"You Don't Have To Hide" by Caitlin Cary
Camper Van Beethoven
Years Of Operation 1983-1990; 2000-present
Fits Between New Riders Of The Purple Sage and R.E.M.
Personal Correspondence I'm still holding back on my "drugs and music" mini-essay for another couple of weeks, but Camper Van Beethoven would've been a good band to peg it to, because a cloud of marijuana smoke envelops all five of the band's '80s LPs—for good and for ill. Camper Van Beethoven were always a band with too many ideas, and too many strong voices fighting to be heard, but the result was an impressive number of songs where David Lowery's quirky-but-heartfelt singer-songwriter persona met his mates' groovy worldbeat and down-home hootenanny leanings head-on, generating something richer and more surprising than standard-issue low-stakes college-rock. Of course it also produced some abject wankery. Not a lot, but enough to keep the band's albums from crossing over from "cool" to "essential." I love all of CvB's '80s records, but I don't know that I'd be able to recommend any of them whole-heartedly. Still, it kills me that Camper Van Beethoven aren't as well-known now as they once were, because it means that a lot of people are missing out on clever, surprisingly poignant American morality tales like "The History Of Utah," "Jack Ruby" and "Tania"—the latter the sweetest, saddest song ever written about Patty Hearst and the cult of fame. If I had to make a case for one CvB album as a stone classic, it'd be the not-so-well-received-at-the-time Key Lime Pie, which is the band's most focused explication of how life can be at once grand and impossible. Key Lime Pie's key track, "When I Win The Lottery," is a tricky song that comes on like a grotesque white trash lampoon, but quickly changes tone to become a stirring reinterpretation of what it means to be a patriot.
Enduring presence? The band's comeback album a couple of years ago was admirably ambitious but creatively shaky; still, it gave CvB an excuse to get back out on the road again, and introduce themselves to a new potential audience of jam band devotees. When I interviewed Lowery around that time, I suggested that if CvB had stuck it out a couple more years, they could've been a less-noodly Phish. He didn't disagree.
"When I Win The Lottery" by Camper Van Beethoven
Can
Years Of Operation 1968-79 (essentially)
Fits Between Pink Floyd and Neu!
Personal Correspondence I can't pretend to be a Can fanatic, but the "Pieces Of The Puzzle" section is set aside not just for the acts that I've spent a lot of time with, but for the ones whose very existence and ethos intrigue me—either because they're an essential part of the development of the music I love or because they stand for something I believe in. As pioneers of the avant-garde pop movement known as "krautrock," Can's adherence to the philosophy of "do it now, fix it later" meant that their songs were sometimes little more than overextended, sketchy nothings, verging into dissonance whenever they threatened to flatten out. But Can typically didn't switch on the tape machine unless they'd started on something interesting, and while I know some Can-freaks like the probing immediacy of the early albums, I prefer Can from Ege Bamyasi on, after they'd gotten a better sense of what they could do well, and what "interesting" means.
Enduring presence? Wilco's nods to krautrock on A Ghost Is Born didn't spark a genre revival, but Can and their fellow travelers still represent a detour that nearly every serious rock fan has to take eventually. During my own excursions, I've always been surprised by how lush and verdant krautrock can be. The prospect of brainy Europeans exploring repetitive minimalism on long, resolutely amelodic songs doesn't seem like the kind of thing that people would listen to for fun, but as the Can track below should prove, "rigid" doesn't have to mean "flat."
"One More Night" by Can
The Cardigans
Years Of Operation 1992-present
Fits Between Nancy Sinatra and Everything But The Girl
Personal Correspondence The first time I heard The Cardigans was when First Band On The Moon's "Never Recover" popped up on the radio in Charlottesville, VA, where I was living at the time. I bought that record shortly before "Lovefool" became a hit (thanks, Baz Luhrmann!) because the frenetic pep-pop of "Never Recover" was right where my head was at in the mid-'90s. On closer inspection, I discovered that much of the shiny happy face of First Band On The Moon (and its predecessor, Life) was intended ironically—a point clarified when I picked up The Cardigans' decidedly moodier debut album Emmerdale, and their icy follow-up to First Band, Gran Turismo. The band took a long break after Gran Turismo and returned with the country-rock-tinged Long Gone After Daylight, a stylistic switch-up that seemed initially jarring, until I noticed that the sophisticated pop arrangements, bleakly ironic lyrics and elegantly semi-detached vocals were all pretty much intact. I was less thrilled by the similarly rootsy Super Extra Gravity, but The Cardigans are still a far more interesting band than their one-hit-wonder status would suggest. (Actually, the same could be said of most one-hit-wonders.)
Enduring presence? Despite all the jumping around The Cardigans have done—and I haven't even mentioned their under-documented stint as a death-metal band back in the early '90s—their best songs fit seamlessly together when gathered in the same place. The Cardigans have a Greatest Hits album that came out in Europe earlier this year; and surely it'll make its way here at some point. In the meantime, I'd stump hard for Life, one of the brightest, most beautiful pop records of the '90s—one that turns "twee" on its ear with fully realized song constructions and a drape of wistful maturity. I was torn between whether to put "Never Recover" or a song from Life as my sample track, but I decided to go in a different direction and put up "Over The Water," which is off Emmerdale originally, but is included on the U.S. version of Life. It's emblematic of what Life is all about.
"Over The Water" by The Cardigans
Cardinal
Years Of Operation 1994
Fits Between Robert Wyatt and Brian Wilson
Personal Correspondence Last week I mentioned the March Madness weekend that Scott Tobias and I spent browsing The Trouser Press Guide To '90s Rock. Well, Cardinal and its primary songwriter Richard Davies were one of the happy discoveries we made by paging through that book. I was already a fan of Cardinal's other half, Eric Matthews, because my wife had heard one of his songs on our local college radio station, and had convinced me to spring for a cheap used copy of his second solo album, The Lateness Of The Hour. Matthews' story—enfant terrible pop genius who goes AWOL before realizing his potential—will have to wait a couple of months, but it all starts with Cardinal anyway, so it's helpful that the alphabet is organized the way it is. My understanding of the Cardinal story is that Davies—an Australian singer-songwriter who'd left his alt-pop band behind in order to become more folk-rock-oriented—was introduced by a friend to Matthews' supernatural gifts for pop-orchestral arrangements. Davies asked Matthews to help fill in the gaps in some of the ballads he was writing, Matthews agreed, and the twosome produced the album Cardinal, a record of jarring shifts from music-hall ditties to breathy neo-psychedelia, heard by few but loved by those who did. Matthews reportedly wasn't keen on being a supplementary player to Davies, and the two parted not-exactly-amicably, leaving behind one interesting—if not exactly as brilliant as it often promises to be—LP. Cardinal is by no means an essential purchase, but it's one of those under-heard curios that sits around waiting for bored rock fans to find it years later, and get reinvigorated by the discovery.
Enduring presence? Matthews made a belated re-entry into the underground pop world a couple of years back, and seemed apologetic about his role in busting up Cardinal. (He even wrote a moving song about it, "Cardinal Is More.") Davies, sadly, has been off the screen for a while—though his existing solo work was frequently terrific. Cardinal's lone album was reissued not too long ago, and found at least a few new fans. (I know my friend Vadim Rizov is one.) A Cardinal reunion, complete with new material, would be a good way of closing the books on what this duo barely started.
- Comments