Saturday Songs - March 31

1. “The Long Road Ahead” – Shooter Jennings

The son of country legend Waylon Jennings comes into his own on his 5^th album, which marks a return to his country roots after his pseudo-experimental concept album Black Ribbons with his band Hierophant. A weird country/hard-rock excursion, Jennings himself has compared the album to the work of Nine Inch Nails—an odd influence for a country rocker. Certain tracks on Jennings’s new album Family Man bear witness to those influences in less obvious ways.

“The Long Road Ahead,” for example, features a curious bridge/break overlaid with a Tom Morello guitar solo—and not any meandering country at that, but a Rage Against The Machine-flavored diatribe against traditional forms…which jumps right back into the lilting, country chorus. Where Jennings will travel next with his gunnysack of influences is yet to be seen, but I can only promise that it will be interesting.

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2. “The Skin You’re Living In” – Grand Drive

Besides currently fronting the band Danny & the Champions of the World (a band name I like more and more for its saccharine appeal every time I see it), Australian-born English singer-songwriter Danny Wilson was once in the folk-rock band Grand Drive with his brother Julian. This wistful folk song sounds derived directly out of the American South; Danny, in more recent releases, has been even more forthcoming with his American influences on recent work. Several critics have pointed to the obvious Springsteen influences on Hearts & Bones, the latest album from Danny & the Champions of the Word.

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3. “Jesse With The Long Hair” – Robert Earl Keen

[Apologies for the bad video...you're best finding the studio version of the song somewhere.]


This is one of those story-songs that you either love or hate. If you don’t follow the narrative that Keen stretches across three and a half minutes, then you most likely won’t care for the tune. That said, Keen sprinkles his story of the love triangle between outlaw Jesse, Jesse’s girlfriend Luann, and the banker Mr. Brown. The smirk of the story rests in a simple understatement; Keen doesn’t tell us exactly what happens in the penultimate verse, but we still know what happened to Mr. Brown.

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4. “White Freightliner Blues” – Lyle Lovett

“White Freightliner Blues” is one of those Townes Van Zandt songs that doesn’t exactly sparkle with wit or glimmer with sadness. In fact, there’s nothing all that lyrically or melodically interesting about the tune. To top it off, there’s that one high, lonesome note in the chorus that Townes could never quite hit. (Not to say that anyone who sings on Lovett’s cover of the song can quite hit that note either.)

However, there’s still this inexplicable energy about the song; I’ve written previously about the fantasticLyle Lovett show I saw earlier this year. The last song I heard (before a less than totally enthusiastic and tired family dragged me out the door) was “White Freightliner Blues,” which bristles with a live energy not quite like anything Lovett played that night. Hell, most of the people in the audience didn’t know that song—or at least not quite like the way they knew “If I Had A Boat”—but they were still rocking out.

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5. “Long Love Letter” – Tony Lucca

Currently on a contestant on the The Voice, Tony Lucca has been bouncing around the singer-songwriter scene for years. Although in recent years he’s been toiling in near obscurity, he was once on the world’s stage as a member of Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club alongside pop luminaries Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Christina Aguilera. His appearances on the The Voice are, sadly, about as close as he’s come to that level of exposure ever since.

Lucca, in what I will always applaud as a smart move in expanding a fan base, has put his 2010 album Rendezvous With The Angels on Noistrade for free! I’m going to go ahead and assume, as I did with the recent appearance of fun.’s Aim & Ignite, that this free album will be a very limited offer. So do yourself a favor and download the album below! (I offer “Long Love Letter” as one of several great songs on the album.)

20th Century Treasure (And Dan Brown...)

In reading John Buchan’s 1910 novel Prester John, I was struck by its treatment of treasure hunting. The appearance of native treasure in an imperialist is hardly noteworthy; it’s been a regular feature in the literature that I’ve read this semester for my course in British ‘stories for boys.’ Treasure also appears memorably in Treasure Island and, rather improbably, in H. Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines. Arguably, turn-of-the-century (20th century), Western attitudes to treasure are stripped bare in Prester John, when the narrator Davey Crawfurd explains:

‘I believe that every man has deep in his soul a passion for treasure-hunting, which will often drive a coward into prodigies of valour. I lusted for that treasure of jewels and gold. Once I had been high-minded, and thought of my duty to my country, but in that night ride I fear that what I thought of was my duty to enrich David Crawfurd.’ (from Prester John)

Crawfurd’s self-indulgence with regard to treasure is almost startlingly open. But what struck me in thinking about this moment in the novel is the assumption that the treasure is out there something. The treasure is consciously associated with empire; one must go out and find the treasure in these foreign countries and native lands.

I won’t pretend that I have made a formal overview of 19th-century literature and concocted that thesis; one might well argue with the claim that 19th-century notions of treasure were rooted in the empire, in the lands of the ‘other.’ In fact, it seems an obvious point that these attitudes towards treasure within narrative storytelling lasted long into the 20th-century. It’s as easy as pointing to Indiana Jones and his treasure-hunting pretenses of scholarly archaeology.

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That said, I think it’s worth noting that there seems—in my mind—to have been a slight shift in attitudes treasure over the past few decades. I’m thinking specifically of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code; I’m harping on the novel not simply for the sake of my argument, but because it is one of the best-selling novels of this (still-young) century and has occupied a large part of the public imagination for some time. Dan Brown’s novel notably doesn’t send its ‘symbologist’ protagonist Robert Langdon to the far reaches of the earth; it sends him to Paris, London, and Edinburgh (technically, the village of Roslin, but who are we kidding? Let’s say Edinburgh!). I think it would be a stretch to cite any of these places as possessing any real kind of confrontation with the ‘other’ in same way as Davey Crawfurd’s adventures.

The final ‘treasure’ (if you feel tempted to cite the Holy Grail in that manner) isn’t buried off in the Sahara or in some stretch of South American jungle…it’s in the Louvre…in the center of Paris. The treasure is no longer outside of Western society; it has become embedded within. The same goes for the embattled, Nicholas Cage-vehicle National Treasure franchise, especially the first film, in which Benjamin Gates et al discover treasure in the middle of freakin’ Manhattan as the subway system rattles the walls around them. 


Of course, the plot resides entirely in historical fantasyland, but it’s worth noting the otherworldly unlikelihood of the premise; does anyone believe—besides film-marketing-gurus Jon Turteltaub and Jerry Bruckheimer and small children—that this treasure den beneath Trinity Church could remain undisturbed for nigh-200 years, what with all the fun tunneling New Yorkers have done over the years?

Anyways, believability aside, National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code herald what might be a new turn in ‘treasure storytelling’; the closer to home the treasure is—the better. It’s no longer about confronting the ‘other’ and retrieving the treasure from some hellish jungle; now it seems to be about confronting ‘us’ and lording the rich find over the innocent souls who ride the No. 5 to work every morning, unaware that several yards away (twice a day!) sits the treasure of a lifetime…

Saturday Songs - March 24

And here we are! Against all odds, here is the promised fourth post of the week! I can’t promise similar output next week, but I will again warn you about the impending gulf of posts that will occur beginning April 6—the first day of my spring break. For now, here’s Saturday Songs…which I sound really get around to retitling… Enjoy!

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1. “Bird Song” – The Wailin’ Jennys

Canadian folk trio The Wailin’ Jennys deliver a consistent product: pretty acoustic tunes with some jaw-dropping harmonies. The twist thrown into this song is the three-part a cappella section that closes out the song; it’s about as close to Brian Wilson pop perfection as I’ve heard country music come in quite some time. Listening to an established female folkie group like The Wailin’ Jennys (or, alternately, Madison Violet), I can’t help but hope that Larkin Poe is traveling on the same road. Hopefully, the next Larkin Poe record will sport some vocal parts like this one.

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2. “Shake, Shake, Shake” – Bronze Radio Return

There’s something a little too gimmicky about a group of kids from a music school getting together to form a rock band founded on old-time values. That’s a nutshell description of Bronze Radio Return—a group from Hartford, CT, two of whom went to the Hartt School of Music. Once in possession of that knowledge, it’s hard to think of their music as anything but vested with something of a poser-ish stance—a kind of diggin’ through mom and dad’s record collection attitude. But while Bronze Radio Return might be rooting around record sleeves for musical ideas, they deliver a consistently modern, grooving sound.

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3. “Waiting Around To Die” – The Be Good Tanyas

Every couple months or so, I will hunt for Townes Van Zandt covers. His influence—obviously not as monumental as someone like Dylan—still seems to pop up everywhere. Covers of his songs are scattered willy-nilly across folkie albums, such as Robby Hecht’s cover of “If I Needed You,” which I featured a few weeks ago. My latest find is this wonderful cover of “Waiting Around To Die”—the first song that Townes wrote—by The Be Good Tanyas, a female folk trio hailing from Vancouver, British Columbia. (Is anyone noticing similarities between #1 and #3?!)

The Be Good Tanyas provide the song with the delicate, dark care that it was always looking for. Van Zandt, despite his wide acclaim as a songwriter, was never that skilled of a singer or guitarist, and covers of his songs often reveal those weaknesses. Steve Earle’s album of Van Zandt covers (2011’s Townes) was a step in the right direction; I think there’s another covers album out there somewhere…maybe The Be Good Tanyas are up for it?

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4. “You Can Have It All” – Yo La Tengo

One of my favorite songs, this delicate number from Yo La Tengo is a cover of a somewhat forgotten George McCrae song, but you’d never know that from hearing it. The disco flavor has been lovingly peeled back, as if veneer on a coffee table, to reveal the beautiful song underneath. The guttural guitar pulse, Georgia Hubley’s frantic drum patter, and the ghostly buh-bump-buh-bump a capella ornamentation turn this song into a fragile wonder.

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5. “Song For You” – Jenny & Tyler

You all know how I feel about Christian rock. I’ve just about beaten that horse to death…although I’m tempted to explore some of its oddities again after listening to Jenny & Tyler’s album Faint Not. Unlike Josh Garrells, this husband-wife duo doesn’t skirt around their religiosity. Praising God and eternal love are themes that beat at the heart of this album and they make sure that we don’t miss any of the lyrics. That said, I couldn’t help but fall in love with this album. Imagine the unlikely marriage of The Civil Wars and A Rush Of Blood To The Head-era Coldplay: soaring male-female harmonies tied to stadium size production. And the best part? It’s free!

Owen Youngs Doesn't Waver On 'Unwavering Light'

There are some artists out there who I root for. They’re not my friends or close acquaintances, but I would probably still defend their (artistic) legacy tooth and nail if that’s what it came to. These artists are usually lower on the totem pole—occasionally I find myself a cheerleader for a big league artist such as Wilco, but mostly I keep to the minors—especially those who live (or seem to in my mind) under the unpleasant, looming shadow of reality: Should I give up the dream and be a normal person? Should I get a full-time job and play only on the weekends? Should I stop being an artist?!

I’m projecting, of course, but the whole relationship I have with these people consists entirely of projection. It’s truly a one-way street—me, alone in my room, putting a hand in the air and saying, “High five, Nate [Ruess]! That last fun. record is epic!” (This happened last week.) Anyways, one of those artists is Jenny Owen Youngs, a singer-songwriter from New Jersey. Youngs sports Amber Rubarth’s sensitive humor, but with a darker, more aggressive flavor. With the release of her recent album An Unwavering Band Of Light, Youngs takes a big step away from the coffeehouse stage. Indeed, this record makes her sound like she belongs less on the Brooklyn folk scene and more fronting a sporty Rilo Kiley-inspired indie band.

Her record, coming off the heels of last year’s random single “Great Big Plans,” goes for an even better and bigger sound. Although “Great Big Plans” made strides towards a larger sound, Greg Laswell’s production left the song trapped in a kind of feeble middle ground; Youngs didn’t sound comfortable in the more rocky territory. But on An Unwavering Band Of Light, Owens has fully blossomed into what I’ll vaguely term ‘Jenny-Lewis-territory.’

Pausing before the praise I’m about to drop about this album, I’ll look back to my first listen through it and my extraordinary anxiety—being a Youngs-cheerleader. I’ll admit that I was worried halfway through the album. By the time I got to “Why You Fall”—roughly the half-point of the album—I breathed a sigh of relief. Prior to that point, I was playing very much the part of the anxious parent on the sidelines of a child’s soccer game, but after that track, I settled in for the rest of the album; her team was ahead by a few goals and would win. They might let in a goal or two…but they would win at the end.

Ever cheerleading, I silently gave her a nod of respect as I sat at my desk. And thankfully, unlike so many lesser-known singer-songwriters, Owens doesn’t frontload the album with the best tunes. Not that there are any tunes on here really worth ignoring; the only weak spots on the album are “Sleep Machine” and “Two By Two,” which, frankly, are still in rotation as I play through album. That said, I could not help but think that the darkness at the core of “Two By Two” has a genuine chance of expanding into something as darkly frightening and pulsating as something off The National’s album Boxer. Not that Owens has crafted a Boxer here—but hopefully she is on her way to that kind of payoff. 

Character Development In Arrested Development

My latest, late foray into the world of television—hot on the heels of my crash course on methamphetamines in Breaking Bad in February—was the three seasons of Arrested Development, the 2003-2006 Fox comedy series based on the exploits of the wealthy and problematic Bluth family. Despite widespread critical acclaim, including several Emmy awards and one Golden Globe, the show never made an impact in the ratings and was cancelled after its third season in 2006. But that wasn’t the end for the show, which has received a surge of interest over the past few years, achieving such a cult following that plans for a fourth mini-season and a feature film are in the works for premiere/release dates in 2013.

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So what’s all the excitement about exactly? On the face of it, the premise of the show isn’t exactly promising: in the wake of corruption, treason, and embezzlement charges, George, Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor), the patriarch of the Bluth family and the CEO of the Bluth Company, ends up in prison, leaving his son Michael (Jason Bateman) in charge of the company…and his deluded family. And, yes, this is very much a comedy—and a very funny one at that.

Other than Michael, his son George Michael (Michael Cera), and his cousin Maeby Fünke (Alia Shawkat), each member of the family is a trainwreck. The matriach Lucille (Jessica Walter) is a self-absorbed, sarcastic alcoholic; Michael’s twin sister Lindsay (Portia de Rossi) is a lazy narcissist; Lindsay’s husband Tobias (David Cross) is a moronic former psychiatrist with a shameless lack of social tact…you get the point—the description of Michael’s family is a litany of negative traits: greed, self-obsession, idiocy, laziness, and the general talent of being highly dislikable.

Despite the insistence of my girlfriend Kayla that I would come to accept these characters on their own terms (apologies, Kayla, I’m paraphrasing here…), I never came to accept some of them. In particular, the character of GOB (Will Arnett), the eldest son of the Bluth family, is so ruthlessly self-interested and unaware of those around him that, at moments, it moves out of comedy into cruel farce. There are episodes of such cruel weirdness that I had a hard time forgiving him easily.

I won’t get bogged down in details here, but recall even the simple scene in the third season episode “Fakin’ It,” in which GOB overturns Michael’s desk just in order to practice his witness testimony behind the mock ‘stand’ created by the desk. Meanwhile, Michael’s papers, pens, and desktop computer lie scattered on the floor. Sure, it’s comedy and GOB’s character is ridiculous, but I didn’t feel like I could reconcile even that weird slight—knocking over all the stuff on the desk to practice witness testimony with a hand puppet—with any kind of character save one suffering from very real mental illness. (Which, I admit, is possible in GOB's case.)

But my uneasiness about the characters isn’t limited to GOB—I have felt similarly about almost all the characters at one point or another throughout the series.

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Is that close-minded of me? It is comedy after all—nothing I’ve seen in the past months screams ‘over-the-top’ quite the way that Arrested Development does. Nothing in recent memory (besides maybe Conrad’s ridiculously drawn out ‘delayed decoding’ in Lord Jim—the Lit majors will have fun recognizing that one…) has had so much fun with conversations in which two people think they’re talking about the same thing only to discover later that they’ve had two entirely different interactions. The situations are rarely realistic; they always verge on farce. Think back to Michael’s on-and-off relationship with ‘blind’ attorney Maggie Lizer. The writers (and actors) come up with some extraordinarily funny and awkward misunderstandings. 

But, at the end of the day, these characters aren’t likable. My friend Andrew told me that whenever someone comments how The Office is the funniest show they’ve ever seen, he scoffs and tells them to go watch Arrested Development. (I’m loosely paraphrasing again… […not that Andrew reads this blog…].) If we’re talking funny, then I would argue that Andrew is accurate. Arrested Development has garnered more laughs from me in three seasons than The Office has in seven (or are they on the eighth season now?!).

But people don’t like The Office just because it’s funny. Of course, it is a comedy, but it also tends to push into drama thanks to the extended character development that it ventures into. I haven’t met an Office enthusiast who did not nearly shed some tears (or shed some like me) at Michael’s departure at the end of last season. We felt for him. That kind of feeling is crucial to the success of the show. (And it is equally crucial, I would argue, at its slow decline; Jim and Pam can’t hold up the show’s emotional arc all on their own.)

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Contrast your feelings for the characters on The Office with those in Arrested Development. Personally, I suppose that I have a demented ‘affection’ for most, if not all, of the characters on the show. But do I love any of them? I suppose I love George Michael’s bumbling adolescent awkwardness and Michael’s endless insistence on the importance of family. I suppose I love Tobias’s absurd enthusiasm for ‘theatre’ and GOB’s penchant for ill-timed magic tricks. But I don’t love any of the characters. For the most part, they are too self-interested for me to be deeply interested in them; they look inwards and inwards and inwards again.

Why did we love Michael on The Office so much? I think we loved him because he was exactly their opposite: outwards, outwards, and outwards. He was always looking to people outside himself, concealing his loneliness and self-embarrassment on the inside. That’s by no means a recipe for a lovable character, but it’s sure more lovable than Lucille’s greedy corruption, which, when you peel back the several face-lifts, doesn’t seem to have much heart behind it. 

The Twisted Genius Of Mike Cooley

The ‘lesser’ of the Drive-By Truckers main songwriters only in terms of output, Mike Cooley takes home the trophy for consistency. Patterson Hood’s work can often feel scattershot; sometimes there even seems to be a template for the songs (not that I can work that template out, because if I could I’d be out there on the country-rock circuit myself). But Cooley—other than Jason Isbell, who managed some pretty fantastic material during his stint with the band—tends to carry the emotional center of Truckers’ records.

Take, for instance, the laid-back beauty of a song like “Loaded Gun In The Closet,” the closing track of the band’s 2003 album Decoration Day. In an album riddled with problems of incest, divorce, and family feud, this song comes across as by far the saddest. (Although Isbell’s “Outfit” makes a strong case for the most ‘emotional’ song on the record.) Like so many of Cooley’s tunes, “Loaded Gun…” is primarily a character study; he takes a close look at the lonely life of a woman whose husband works while she stays at home. There is additional desperation in the fact that the possibility of children is never mentioned; as much as I fear the wrath of the feminists and the general bad feeling I get wandering carelessly into gender-stereotype-land, children seem like exactly the kind of detail that would solve the problem of how “by two o’clock or so every afternoon / the quiet [of the house] would start getting to her.”

But that’s pointing out just one detail that Cooley buries in the woodwork. On the surface, the song is obvious until Cooley arrives at the final line. We learn, with a kind of sickening twist, that the husband has put the loaded gun in the closet not—as we were lead to think—because of break-ins, but because it provides his depressed wife with a way out. The loaded gun is her sad, simple ticket out of a lonely life.

…she’s got a loaded gun in the closet

and it’s there anytime she wants it,

and her one and only man knows it and

that’s why he put it there in the first place.

[Apologies for the live version, but you can find clean studio versions on Grooveshark, Spotify, iTunes, etc. You can also read the full lyrics here.)

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The real power of the song emerges once we start considering how she treats the gun earlier in the song. The last verse toys with the idea that she might use the gun to kill herself, but, as far as the listener is aware, she never actually acknowledges that possibility. The only person who acknowledges that idea is the husband and Cooley’s wily narrator. Metaphorically, the loaded gun in the closet aligns itself with the truth of this woman’s life. It seems as if she won’t use the gun to kill herself because she still has not come to terms with her life. The only person who recognizes the suicidal utility of the gun is her husband, a fact which then forces us to question the entire basis of this marriage.

Our vision of the marriage, as provided by Cooley’s narrator, is filtered through the life of the woman—not the man. We don’t see where he works or what he looks like or even hear any of his daily complaints when he goes home. The emotional connection between the couple, in fact, works like a one-way street for most of the song: the woman would “hug his neck and tell him how much she loved him” every morning and “[understand] just what he needed.” She’s about as emotionally present as it gets, while the man evinces no outward connection to his wife—he never tells her that he loves her and, in fact, isn’t seen to acknowledge her a single time over the course of the song.

That lack of emotional attention throughout the song causes me to be troubled about that single action directed towards his wife at the end—that is, putting the gun in the closet. Because we’re not talking about straight poetry—we’re also dealing with melody, the timbre of Cooley’s voice, and the general expressive power of the music—it’s hard to say whether or not Cooley’s narrator reads that act on the part of the man as sympathetic. My first impression from the song is that the husband is, indeed, providing an obligatory service to his wife; I perceived a sense of bastardized chivalry in his recognition that she was utterly bored by her life.

But is she?

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As awful as her existence might seem to most of us—I, for one, can’t imagine sitting around the house not only with nothing to do but actually doing nothing for hours on end (although I love hogging a pot of coffee to myself)—who are we (or the husband) to say that this isn’t the life she wants? My initial 'reading' ('hearing'?) of the song’s ending was that she hasn't yet realize she wants to kill herself . I’ve italicized that bit, because it now seems to me such a self-centered reading—emblematic of some bad literary criticism.

Consider the verse that deals with the “other people”—the women who “would say she was a disgrace” and the men who “would say she wasn’t much to look at.” These people are projecting their own values onto this woman’s life. The tone of the narrator isn’t exactly disparaging towards these judgmental characters, but it certainly doesn’t seem to buy into their vision of the world. What the introduction of these characters does for us as listeners (or at least me), however, is that it hints at how we are projecting our own values onto her life. As I noted above, I would be upset if I lived her life…but can I really offer the thought that (I’ll italicize again) she doesn’t realize she wants to kill herself?

Effectively, in putting the gun in the closet, the husband is trying to provide an easy way to commit suicide. The song’s ending is sad only because we have denied her the agency to think for herself. We don’t think she knows that her life is depressing, so we bemoan the gap between reality and fiction. But should we?

Saturday Songs - March 17

Records, some say, are made to be broken. Only a few months ago I abandoned the blog for a mere six days before the stings of shame brought me back. Of course, I knew that six days was small change compared to the time I might be gone while traveling over spring break, so six was only a temporary record anyway. But, much to my own disapprobation, I have gone on an 11-day streak of absence.

That said, I’ll make it up to all you readers out there (all…what? four of you?) by going for four posts this week—despite my looming workload from the university—thereby returning to the heights that Pueblo Waltz witnessed the likes of last September. (Granted, there were more posts per week way back then…but there was also the fortunate accident of Jorge Luis Borges’s birthday, which triggered 150+ hits on the website. (That may be a record that will stand forever.)

Anyways, let’s head on into *Saturday Songs land once more!

*I know…it’s Sunday. Hate me.

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1. “He Went To Paris” – Jimmy Buffett

A few years before Buffett’s 1978 album Changes In Latitude, Changes In Attitude came out—with its massive hit “Margaritaville,” which I’m sure you’ve never heard of—Buffett had not yet quite devolved into the archetypal, rich beach-bum character that he inhabited ever since he “blew out [a] flip-flip.” In fact, Buffett’s discography pre-“Margaritaville” (and even on that album) is a rich catalogue of lovable losers and dead-end lives. Albums like 1973’s A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean and 1974’s Living & Dying in ¾ Time are full of quirky character sketches, not all of which are based on booze binges. (Some are… See: “Why Don’t We Get Drunk.”)

“He Went To Paris,” for example, is one of the saddest songs in the Buffett catalogue. The story is told straight, without any pretension. The story, typically, is about finding transcendental peace in life living alongside the ocean. But merely relating that bit doesn’t explore the emotional impact of the song. This is a song I recommend listening to while reading the lyrics.

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2. “Our Hell” – Emily Haines & the Soft Skeletons

Another vestige of my music listening failures, Emily Haines served as a bold reminder that I have left the Canadian music scene largely unexplored (despite my ongoing love affair with The Weakerthans). Haines is not only in charge of this solo venture, but she is also the lead singer and keyboardist of indie band Metric as well as a member of the Canadian collective Broken Social Scene. Embarrassingly, I have not made it around to any of Metric’s work and have only dipped a toe in the discography of Broken Social Scene.

This song off Haines’s solo effort, however, caught my ear with its simple piano balladry, which manages to weirdly come off as verging on electronica. There are moments in the song with a dark, dynamic energy I would never expect from a singer-songwriter sitting at a piano. Granted, there is some superb drum work and some breath-based percussion as well. I hesitate to call it ‘beat-boxing,’ because it’s more like the sound of someone catching their breath. It’s sort of an unnerving sound in that way.

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3. “Cape Town” – The Young Veins

I have never listened to Panic[!] At The Disco (I put the exclamation point in brackets because they had it, then lost it, then had it again…I might as well cover my bases), but I have a hard time imagining that those standard bearers of ‘emo-pop’ would record anything like this. That said, The Young Veins is only two former members of Panic[!] At The Disco—Ryan Ross and Jon Walker—so it’s not as if Panic[!] went through an entire facelift to get to The Young Veins.

Whereas Panic[!] At The Disco (as I understand from the various writings of other critics [thank you Stephen Erlewine!]) plumbed the depths of orchestral rock and chamber pop for inspiration, Ross and Walker were individually seeking out the influences of the 1960s, including garage rock and British Invasion. Those sounds couldn’t be any clearer on their debut album Take A Vacation!, which sounds—both musically and thematically—as if it might be a lost record circa 1967.

While it’s hard to say that any one track sticks its head above the others on the album, “Cape Town” might be the most memorable, partly because of its more ‘mature’ theme…relative, at least, to the other tracks on here. The chorus—“Woke me in the morning / asked me if I meant it / I didn’t”—is heartbreaking in a very peculiar poppy, 1960s way… You’d have a hard time not loving it.

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4. “48 To Go” – The Fray

Clawing helplessly at the towering heights of arena rock favorite Coldplay, this Denver quartet soldiers on into their album Scars & Stories with some resolve to stay in the game. Their second album, while not quite a sophomore slump, had nowhere near the same impact as their debut album, which boasted the radio hits “Over My Head (Cable Car)” and “How To Save A Life.” As good as those songs are, the rest of the album isn’t half bad either and it is still an occasional guilty pleasure. Unfortuantely, the third album finds them in the same dire straits, stuck in the same tired radio rock as their British counterparts soar into uncharted territories.

There are moments of promise, though, when it seems as if they might have the strength to broach the gap between their boring, schlocky sensibility and real mainstream respectability. They’ve got the tunes and the muscle behind them. It’s the arrangements that are stale; every song on this album, with the exceptions of “I Can Barely Say” and closer “Be Still,” go for a giant, bloated sound. Even Coldplay, with even greater production values at their disposal, goes for a grittier, less swelling sound on occasion—listen to the first half of “Major Minus” or “Up In Flames.” Maybe the giant, arena-rock frenzy is the best way to get on the airwaves, but it’s sure as hell not the best way to get into my heart.

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5. “Concrete Heart” – Great Lake Swimmers

Great Lake Swimmers is a band whose sound is best realized live. They probably understood at least that much, given that their eponymous debut was recorded in an abandoned silo in Ontario. (You can hear the crickets in the background!) However, some success has brought better production values to the band’s studio albums (mostly better microphones…they recorded their newest album—due for release in April—in the Toronto subway system). Anyways, the live setting allows more colors to blossom around Tony Dekker’s delicate lyrics; the studio version of “Concerte Heart” comes off as a little pale and muted. It’s probably better to listen to the free live version! You can download it via Noisetrade below:

fun. Has, Well...Fun On 'Some Nights'

As hard as Nate Ruess tried to be Freddie Mercury on fun.’s 2010 debut album Aim and Ignite, the imitation (however good it was at times) remained an imperfect project. Some songs—“All The Pretty Girls” and “Benson Hedges”—came close to Queen’s bombastic spirit, but they only touched the majestic absurdity of Queen’s work and Ruess’s voice only ever managed to flirt with the playful heights of Mercury.

In a lot of ways, fun.’s new album Some Nights finds Ruess and company looking beyond Queen for inspiration. The only track that obviously touches on their prior Queen obsession is “Some Nights – Intro,” whose background vocals come closer to the crazed, operatic puzzle that is “Bohemian Rhapsody” that any song I’ve heard in some time. “Some Nights,” however, makes it clear that this album is not dealing with Queen at all. The song, and the rest of the album, is a cultural amalgam, combining the past and present of popular music to fine results.

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“Some Nights” incorporates details from the world of current top 40 radio, including playful Auto-Tune and even the occasional 80s drum machine à la Kanye West’s album 808s & Heartbreak, and layers them over a nigh-tribal drum pattern and anthemic background vocals. “We Are Young” has a similar formula, dropping in every pop song’s favorite combo of big drums and heavy synth before then building to another anthemic climax, buoyed up by Janelle Monáe’s wordless backing vocals.

fun. makes it into almost something of a game; these songs are spring-loaded with cultural allusions, sometimes so direct as to make you start when listening to the album for the first time. For instance, “Carry On” is a common enough song title—i.e. not quite enough to lead us directly back to Kansas’s prog-rock epic “Carry On My Wayward Son”—but it does melodically lead us back to Styx’s classic prog epic “Come Sail Away” in a few moments.

“Why Am I The One” could not be any more open about its love affair with Elton John. If you’re one for comparing tunes, listen to the “…hold you like I used to” in Ruess’s song alongside “there’s a calm surrender” at the beginning of “Can You Feel The Love Tonight?”. And later on, while I can’t yet point to direct melodic argument, it would take a long time to convince me that the chorus of “Why Am I The One” doesn’t draw ideas straight out of Elton’s work, in particular “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.”

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We could play this game all day long—from the pop-punk influences of “It Gets Better” to the achingly open Kanye influence of “All Alright.” But as much fun (!) as the game might be, it gets old. I don’t rate albums on a scale—stars or ten points or whatnot—and this album is a perfect example for why I avoid that practice. For although parts of this album are absolutely fantastic, there are parts of it that feel awkward. “One Foot,” for example, with its horn-led backbone and hip-hop sensibility, just doesn’t work. It’s a cumbersome experiment (and maybe a brave one), but it ultimately fails. I feel more or less the same way about “All Alone” and “Stars”—another Kanye imitation, which, with its synth/Auto-Tune at the end only makes me pine for “Runaway.”

But what remains true from one song to the next in this album is that Ruess proves himself as one of the smartest songwriters working in pop music today. From his characteristically inventive melodies (which he’s been churning out since a member of ‘desert-pop’ group The Format) to his aching, personal lyrics, Ruess doesn’t falter from one song to the next.

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You all know that lyrics are important to me and fun.’s lyrics are no exception. Although Ruess could easily get away with penning lyrics composed of largely unimportant phrases (See: most pop songs today.), he goes the extra mile. “Some Nights” sounds, on first listen, as a kind of innocent party song, but its layers reveal itself listen after listen. It’s a song that deals with frustration: frustration with love, frustration with family, and frustration with music.

…five minutes in and I'm bored again,

Ten years of this, I'm not sure if anybody understands.

This is not one for the folks back home; I'm sorry to leave, mom, I had to go.

Who the f—k wants to die alone all dried up in the desert sun?

There is a darkness at the heart of the song that the melody and arrangement don’t do a whole lot to acknowledge. In that way, it’s not unlike the sunny pop of Wilco’s album Summerteeth, which buries lyrics about domestic violence and drug abuse under seemingly warm melodies.

But even as Ruess explores the darker areas of his life, he acknowledges the silver linings; when looking at his sister’s failed relationship (“the con that she called love”), he can’t help but look at his nephew and admit, “the most amazing things…come from some terrible lies.”

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The question lingers at the end of the album: Where can they go next? fun. has opened so many doors of inquiry that they could go almost anywhere from here. I can only pray that they don’t fully embrace hip-hop; although I can imagine someone rapping a verse to a fun. tune, the truth is that I would rather not. They’re too good at the whole prog-rock business to leave its fertile territory so soon.

Saturday Songs - March 3

As has been recently de rigueur of this weekly post, I again put up my ‘Saturday Songs’ on Sunday. This seeming lapse in focus is again the product of Scottish adventures (up in the Highlands as with last weekend). Fortunately, I can offer at least one musical picking from my Highlands travels. In fact, this set of songs might be the most diverse in the history of Pueblo Waltz! Scottish, Danish, Irish! Be excited…

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1. “O Caledonia” – Dougie MacLean

I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help but think about Dougie MacLean’s song “O Caledonia” as analogous to Don MacLean’s “American Pie,” one emblematically American and the other emblematically Scottish. But while Don’s song is a clear product of the beatnik generation with its obtuse lyrics and somewhat extraordinary length (at over eight minutes, it’s still the longest single to sit atop the Billboard 100 chart), Dougie’s song is a simple celebration of pride and love for Caledonia—the Roman name for Scotland.

Driven by some beautiful finger-picking—played in an open C tuning—MacLean manages to toe the line between hokey-ness and wide-eyed wonder. Even as he sings openly of his love for Scotland, he reels back the sheer patriotism by incorporating a string of personal admissions, having “lost the friends that I needed losing,” “kissed the ladies and left them crying” and “stolen dreams.” The song is not just a national celebration; it is an account of self-discovery and struggle.

Of course, MacLean was not yet 30 years old when he wrote and recorded this song. But despite his youth, the song distinctly sounds like it was written by an old soul. In that way, listening to the more recent studio recording of the song above makes more sense; MacLean’s wizened look and slightly grittier voice finally provides the appropriate narratorial presence.

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2. “The Balcony” – The Rumour Said Fire

Discovered by my friend Leah in the course of her Danish adventures, The Rumour Said Fire are a pop quartet based in Copenhagen, Denmark. The immediately apparent thing, of course, is that despite their Danishness, they sing in English. Like other many other bands and singers from non-English speaking countries, The Rumour Said Fire must have been quick to recognize the musical dead-end of their own language and the open-door opportunity of English. There is something somewhat dark and hegemonic about the universality of the English language in the pop world. From Phoenix to The Tallest Man On Earth, there is a strange sadness in the way that English is lingua franca in the music world. I can’t help but respect more and more the staying power of Icelandic artist Sigur Rós, who mostly stick to their native language.

However, all that said about native languages and English, The Rumour Said Fire remain as equally capable a pop band as any indie-pop outfit Los Angeles could spit out onto the scene. “The Balcony” displays a warm vulnerability that recalls the Shins and strives for the easy, sunny harmonies of a pseudo-Americana group like Fleet Foxes.

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3. “Velcro” – Bell X1

Described as Ireland’s biggest rock act right after U2, Bell X1 cannot be easily described. They are a curious amalgam of sounds, but “Velcro” finds them mixing electro-pop with arena rock. Imagine LCD Soundsystem cross-pollinated with Snow Patrol. And then take away Gary Lightbody’s voice and replace it with a better one. Of course, Bell X1 has none of the charm of either act; the melody and lyrics sometimes seem a little too mechanical for their own good—all the pieces are there, but it’s as if someone forgot to tell them they needed to play with a little spirit too.

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4. “Why” – Josh Ritter

The single off Josh Ritter’s recent 6-song EP Bringing In The Darlings, “Why” is a sweet, acoustic tune that presses its addressee with variations on its eponymous question. Part of a collection that Ritter has termed his “lullabies,” “Why” and the other five songs on the EP are a result of a recent writing session. You wonder that someone can be so productive; this EP comes somewhat on the heels of the 2011 release of Ritter’s novel Bright’s Passage, which also received rave reviews from not a few publications. What can the man not do?

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5. “Highs And Lows” – Mindy Smith

The song that immediately jumped to mind when I stumbled across this second track on Mindy Smith’s 2009 album Stupid Love was my Jill Andrew’s “Another Man”—one of my favorite tracks from last year. (I have a thing for quirky country rock with female vocals.) Smith doesn’t have quite the flair that Andrews exhibits, but her voice is supported by fantastic production and a shipshape arrangement. In particular, the light percussion that rattles its way through the track—including the calm flicker of a conga drum—helps ease the song in a positive direction.