Author: brian

Artist: BidiniBand

Album: In the Rock Hall

BidiniBand are a skilled heartland folk-rock band a la Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s Freedom/ Ragged Glory mode. Not the vocals, mind; almost 50 years old, novelist/ journalist Dave Bidini sings with a boyish clarity and enthusiasm Neil Young didn’t have even at 20 (let’s face it, Neil’s last name always seemed ironic). But BidiniBand aren’t trying to sell originality in their power-chords, their acoustic picking, or their 4/4 time, although they’re fluid and sometimes imaginative players with an excellent sense of dynamics. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers have made albums not far from here, as have Jason & the Scorchers, as have John Mellencamp & the Unmentioned Sidekicks. In the Rock Hall fits a sing-along tradition that I grew up with; what that will mean to you is yours to guess. I do think it’s an outstanding example of its form.

There’s depth here, but most of the songs have a for-fun vibe. The Best Thing about the ’80s was You, two minutes of guitar-pop with cheesy drum-machine and robotic voice processing, is entirely goofy, but “Meet me on the corner at a park after school/ We’ll synthesize minds” still sounds good to me at my own advanced age. Hey Paul and Donna is as casual and harmonized and pretty as Peter, Paul, and Mary’s children’s album, goofily rhyming its title with “Glad you took the train to Torontuh” and “Let’s get high and smoke marijuana”. You’d almost miss its sympathetic summary of parenthood: “First they got married, then they had a kid/ then they had another, they don’t know what they did/ a toy-bomb exploded in their bed/ raccoon eyes and a weary head” — or the song being written to express “You picked me up when we were down/ Now I’m happy that you’re around”. Popcorn has elegant guitar filigrees from the very start, but Bidini’s singing trawls along with lazy good cheer and nostalgia: “Ever since I was a young boy, I played the silver ball/ from Soho down to Brighton, yeah, I must’ve played them all…/ I’m a juvenile product of the working class/ my best friend lives at the bottom of a glass/ of popcorn!/ Give me some popcorn”. When an angelic female chorus takes over the song – and then Bidini takes over their words for his own committed take on them — it evolves into a paean to love and belated responsibility. Which has more power, I think, emerging from the jolly half-assedness it began with.

Needle Beach/ Outboard Motors goes from easy strums to punk-folk aggression, while Big Men Go Fast on the Water evolves in stages from ominous guitar pointillism to rousing folk-rock triumph to urgent fury — each features an excellent guitar solo from Paul Linklater. Each holds onto adolescent refusal to accept wrongness: “Reality’s out of reach/ all the things they preach, you don’t believe”. “I keep fighting, fighting for more/ and mourn for the waters before./ On Sundays, they close the store/ you can’t go swimming cuz there’s swimming no more”. “Captain smiles as he swallows his last/ It’s midnight for the graduating class/ impressions won’t last, it’ll be about money”. “I’ll take the wound, stay out of reach/ the poison water laps at your feet”.

BidiniBand are proud of that refusal. Last of the Dead Wrong Things is the dark-sounding track here, with Linklater’s most adventurous playing, and one of the best: starting “I drove all night, from dark to light, to bury you”, it envisions Canada’s full emergence into
fascism, with rebels from teens to striking fisherman being shot dead to shut them up. BidiniBand don’t imagine they could stop such a thing: “We’re just a two-bit rip-off Neil Young attack/ We stole this song, now we’re stealing it back/ doesn’t matter how good or bad you can sing”. But if a nation is overrun by men who view both people and the earth itself as nothing but short-term resources, “What kind of love do you bring?” is a necessary challenge to make.

I’ve gotten this far into my In the Rock Hall review without explaining that Dave Bidini used to be one of the three songwriters of possibly my all-time favorite band, the Rheostatics. Any Rheostatics fan can guess at In the Rock Hall‘s sound from the more straightforward of his tracks with his old band: Queer, Legal Age Life at Variety Store, Beerbash, My First Rock Show, Mumbletypeg, Here to There to You, Polar Bears and Trees. BidiniBand are, nonetheless, different, which is nowhere clearer than on Earth (Revisited). Under the original title Earth/ Monstrous Hummingbirds, the Rheostatics’ version was an art-rock monstrosity, its dynamic swoops and warps as melodramatic as any camera shot on Citizen Kane. I love it dearly. Whether the music had anything to do with the song’s essence, though — starting from its brilliant eulogy for our species “The earth was born from a giant box/ You ripped the lid right off the top/ You couldn’t wait to collect your prize” — is another question. Here, it’s a hard-charging *rock* song driven by Don Kerr’s drums. It’s full of musical ideas at its edges — sound effects, abrupt echoes, interesting harmonies — but it’s carried through on passion, percussion, and energy. It’s welcoming.

The last two new songs on In the Rock Hall total 18 minutes and wander a lot of territory. Folk songs, not progressive rock; just many ideas loosely organized. If I fully warm up to them, I’ll have no excuse for leaving this album out of the top ten. Until then, they’re a pleasant enough reminder of how woolly Dave Bidini and chums are choosing not to be.

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!

Artist: Passion Pit

Album: Gossamer

So far, when I’ve praised pop songwriters (e.g. Jon Lindsay) on this countdown, I’ve centered the praise on artists who, like the Beatles or XTC or Elvis Costello, produce unexpected melodies: songs that recombine the basic 12 notes in ways that feel catchy but are somehow new. Passion Pit don’t really do that. I’ll grant them I’ll Be Alright and Carried Away, and parts of Love is Greed and Where We Belong, but most of the tunes on Gossamer move your basic step-by-step, except in the transitional leap from verse to chorus. If, as I claim, it’s a special album, it comes down to arrangements: instrumental and vocal. The instrumentation (mainly the synthesizer sound envelopes) is inventive and intriguing. The vocals on the verses, by Michael Angelakos, are strong and clear-voiced but ordinary (and enhanced quite a bit, I think, by doubling and multiple takes). The chorus vocals, often en-masse, are as shameless as any jingle-writer ever conceived. In context, I am claiming, that’s a very *good* thing.

The instrumentation is crucial to that context. The hook on I’ll Be Alright is as creative, obtrusive, and in-your-face as anything by Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad, but as adoring as a puppy, and it leads to a firm disco beat that, like the very best of original disco, races us past dozens of shiny sound effects, with just enough time to goggle at each before being swept along. Take a Walk, Carried Away, and others are the sort of danceable mainstream ’80s synth-rock celebrated in John Hughes movie soundtracks, with multiple hooks, sighing counterpoint, and a playing-up of the artifice of the sounds their keyboards make possible. Constant Conversations is moody modern R&B, unsettling in how none of the instruments’ attack/decay patterns sound at all natural (until string pizzicato near the end), and with brief, cleverly alien-sounding uses of pitch-correction. Cry Like a Ghost is spooky and spare on its verses, the abandoned remains of a Giorgio Moroder Eurodisco hit, but makes good use of a hook/sample that sounds at once like gangsta mice and Middle Eastern prayer music. Hideaway acquires an illusion of subtlety by having the first minute seem to filter in from a cathedral over a bad phone connection. Love is Greed mostly sounds like Christmas music with a redeemingly peppy beat, but is introduced by 33 seconds of odd yet lovely a-capella vocoder duet. Where We Belong flutters along on almost holy-sounding oscillations and hidden, scuffling drum machine.

Lyrics are probably crucial to the context. Gossamer is largely messages from the inside of a failing romance, marked by verbal fights, earnest and no-more-pleasant attempts at reconciliation, bouts of self-loathing, and frequent inquires into why the other person doesn’t just give up. If closing track Where We Belong is the closet thing to a love song, and the final lyric is “All I’ve ever wanted was to be happy and make you proud”, even it still gets there by way of “Who says you ought to stay? How’s this the easier way? It’s far from giving up. Cowards never say ‘Enough is enough’”. It matters because *real* Christmas jingles at the mall don’t say “Someday we’ll all agree, it’s not worth making/ another person that is yours for the taking … Love is just greed, it’s selfish and mean/ It follows all you lead/ if we really love ourselves, how do you love somebody else?”. (Although you wouldn’t think commercials would be able to use Take a Walk, the outward-focused lyric here, a six-verse three-generation tale of the disappointments of the American Dream. Taco Bell’s marketers still decided “This is perfect!”)

The choruses of Take a Walk and Love is Greed and I’ll Be Alright have gone through my head this past year as much as those of any other three songs; the context allows me to be glad of it. Passion Pit muster the full force of group vocals, assertive production, easy but not-too-easy melody, and repetition short of the point of unbearability to drive them home: they have no mercy. Their songs are selfish little memes.

Susan Blackmore wrote a fascinating non-fiction book called the Meme Machine, based on Richard Dawkins’s tossed-off concept of the “meme”, which he meant as metaphor and analogy to genes: ideas as evolutionary devices. Memes might be moral principles or jokes; poems or just half-remembered lines; logos or concepts like “flying saucers of little green men who abducted me”; cooking techniques or fragments of song. Blackmore’s case is that memes *literally* evolve — anything that makes imperfect copies of itself, some copies of which are better-suited to survive and reproduce than others, literally evolves, and human brains are an environment. She further argues — and outlines several experiments to test the notion with — that human brains have evolved to be better and better meme-spreaders. The result is that while The Ability To Sell Other People On Memes helps an individual mate and raise healthy offspring (and so our species gets smarter and cannier and wordier), the memes themselves — which produce everything from laughter to religious awe to sex discrimination to suicide — don’t need to serve anything but their own ability to spread, as they evolve at the speed of viruses. There may, for example, be no genetic explanation for music at all: once human brains got capable of producing the first eight notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, they were simply an available environment for those ruthless eight notes to breed in.

Passion Pit‘s Gossamer is a small masterpiece of viral melody. I rate it highly because I enjoy the symptoms. I recommend it to you because, it turns out, my brain makes a handy transmitter to hijack.

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!