Rantings, reviews and lists from a person who structures half his life around obsessing over music.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Beck - Mellow Gold (1994)

2.5 ★/5.0 - 5.9

Listening to Mellow Gold should remind you of this news story:

A Georgia man is accused of holding his wife and children captive in a trash-filled mobile home for three years, police said Wednesday. Raymond Daniel Thurmond, 36, was arrested after police got a call from a woman at a local shelter August 4. "She told me they had a mother and four kids and apparently they'd been kept at home and there was some abuse allegations and the dad wouldn't let them leave," Lavonia Police Lt. Missy Collins said. Thurmond, who has no criminal record, was charged with one count of rape, four counts of cruelty to children in the first degree and five counts of false imprisonment. Alma Medina, the property manager for the Beaver Creek mobile home park, had lived three doors away from the family for the past 2½ years. Medina said she put a note on Thurmond's door to pay the late rent by August 5. On August 6, after no rent was received, she sent her maintenance man to the 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom trailer. He opened the door and came straight back, she said. "I want you to see this with your own eyes," she recalled the maintenance worker saying to her. "You better wear some shoes and gloves or something." Medina went in the trailer and found piles of trash everywhere: 4, 5 or 6 feet high, she said. Medina shot a video of the trash inside the trailer, including Diet Mountain Dew bottles, board games, cigarette boxes, frozen pizza boxes and piles of human hair on the kitchen floor. "You cannot describe the smell," she said. "It was so strong it would knock you out." After Thurmond's arrest, the trailer was cleaned out, but yellow jackets swarmed around a Dumpster full of trash -- including a stroller, car seat and toys -- from the trailer. A horrible stench still lingers. Before the park's maintenance staff began cleaning, anthills were under a mattress in the master bedroom, maggots crept around the trailer and roaches roamed inside the fridge.
~ from update on cnn.com/crime, August 13'th, 2008.

Not enough people seem to point out how outright disturbing a lot of Beck's music is, but Mellow Gold is probably where it was most obvious. Unique and fascinating, yet undoubtedly repulsive. Read more...

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Beck - Modern Guilt (2008)

3.5 ★/7.0 - 7.9

Beck's albums have always, for the most part, been scattershot collages; stream-of-consciousness constructs of messy finger-painting in which the artist chooses to completely ignore any boundaries between genres. But with Danger Doom by his side, his wild attitude is quieted down, and while the result is a more homogenic demeanor, it also has led to his most focused album in years. On Modern Guilt, Beck's style is more akin to hard-edged abstract art. If albums like Odelay, Midnite Vultures, Guero and The Information were wildly flailing expressionist pieces, his latest is geometric, controlled, clean and cut at the edges, with an ultimately sharper bite. The condensed rocket-pop song, "Gamma Ray" is proof enough, but there's also the mechanical funk of "Youthless," the metallic boiler-room grind of "Soul of a Man", the glitchy "Replica" and "Walls", which is all woozy strings and post-modern swagger. Only tracks like "Profanity Prayers" and "Orphans" feature a bit of Beck's old, more loose style of genre hopping with acoustic guitar features, but they're handled with such sterility and so many electronic textures, that the songs feel unlike anything else in Beck's discography (except maybe the more spaced out tendencies of Mutations, which to many, will be a good thing). Admittedly, by adopting these new sounds, Beck has certainly began to sound more 'normal' and some of these tracks just don't have enough character (especially "Volcano"). But then again, a track as amazing as "Chemtrails" suggests that maybe this change was for the best. The ghostly piano-led ballad, blown up by rigid careening drums, is the early centerpiece of the album and the main argument for a more subtle, stripped down Beck. A year or two ago, these songs would be the same-old loosely held together extensions of his "anything goes" personality, something that has almost become more of a gimmick than a vehicle for good songwriting. With Danger Doom's help though, they're tightly constructed for maximum effect, and so even though Modern Guilt will probably be looked back on as a transitional album, it's high points have opened the door and paved the path of growth for Beck's future. Read more...

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Wire - Object 47 (2008)

3.5 ★/7.0 - 7.9

Wire's career is a microcasm. From the stripped down beginnings on Pink Flag to the avant-influenced oddball experiments on Chairs Missing and finally the full fledged leap into the unknown with 154, their first three albums provide a point-by-point rundown of how punk developed into post-punk before the latter even really had a name. Even after their hiatus, their return in the late 80's epitomized the sound that post-punk had turned into, embracing pop and dance music to create "New Wave." This is why you couldn't be surprised by their second reformation in the 00's. Post Punk had indeed entered another stage in it's timeline (the "revival" stage, popularized by bands like Franz Ferdinand and The Futureheads), and it's creators, who seemingly have been documenting it's evolution ever since, had to have their say. And so, 5 years after capturing the post-punk revival movement in it's aggressively youthful abandon with Send, they've returned with the much more melodious Object 47, defining how most of the post-punk revivalists have now embraced higher production values and tamed down their approach (Bloc Party, British Sea Power and even Interpol don't sound nearly as energetic and frantic as they once were). The difference is, much like how the soft-spoken A Bell is A Cup... distinguished itself between its peers, Object 47 does it right.

The album's electrifying contradictions are the stars of the show. When you pick apart Wire's music, there's nothing but menacing tenseness and industrialism. "All Fours" rolls in on a single-chord bash, that gets exceptionally assaulted by a vicious bridge of noise and feedback. "Circumspect" is drugged up and strung out to dry, decadence and distance embodied in the form of listless guitar figures. But looking at Wire's latest offering from a distance reveals nothing but a bunch of condensed pop tunes. The tightly-wound guitars may be focused on forming walls of dissonance and repetition, but unlike their last album, the band uses these ear-piercing textures in order to pen some infectious hooks. "Perspex Icon" couldn't be more memorable, contrasting a vocal that borders on whimpering with layers of brisk and fervent post punk guitars. And tracks like "Mekon Headman" or "One of Us" have choruses that will lodge themselves in your brain for weeks. On modern electro-buzzing tracks like "Hard Currency" it becomes especially easy to guess that the producer in question is Flood (Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails), a craftsman who has been known in the past to dwell in that spot between abrasive squalor and catchiness. There are moments that Flood's mainstream flirtations are made far too apparent (the dark highway driving anthem, "Four Long Years" is a little too close to Depeche Mode for comfort and "Are You Ready" desperately needs to get away from its sterile production), but Wire is a band that has proven to hold up to change remarkably well, and with Object 47 they continue to triumphantly hold the torch up for post punk. Read more...
"How many times must a man look up
before he can see the sky?"