Category: Reviews

Artist: Jonny Polonsky

Album: Intergalactic Messenger of Divine Light and Love

Can you imagine a halfway point between the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream? If so, you have a good musical imagination: well done! Also, you may have imagined something close to Jonny Polonsky’s Intergalactic Messenger of Divine Light and Love. I mean the guitar tones (weighted a bit towards the Pumpkins’ thick-textured grandiosity, especially the fierce solos), the song structures (leaning nearer the Beatles’ compactness), the melodies (pretty equal). To some extent I mean Polonsky’s singing versus Lennon’s and Corgan’s, though he’s throatier than either, and only on See Your Lies does he master Corgan’s piercing whine. Perhaps my “halfway” remark even refers to quality, though that’s endlessly subjective: personally I’d rate Siamese Dream as “good”, Intergalactic Messenger of Divine Light and Love as “very good”, and Rubber Soul as “very, very good”. Also, here’s a more precise comparison for Polonsky’s album that should benefit, if  no one else, my mom: imagine Adam Schmitt’s World So Bright, with a heavier emphasis on the rock aspects. You’re welcome.

Some of the rock songs build tension through sparse, tense verses. Bearclaw‘s precise drumming plays hide and seek with a limber bass line, a whistling off-key synth line, and harsh squiggles of distorted guitar. Coming into Slaughter looks in outline like Live’s slow-burning but ultimately loud hits Lightning Crashes or White, Discussion, although Polonsky’s voice is higher, tighter, and more articulate than Ed Kowalczyk’s, and his guitar here takes on the richness (and chorus pedal) of Queen’s Brian May. All the Evil Things is punctuated with a huge, rousing synth/guitar riff, and its chorus (introduced with a firework display of drum fills) is big too, but otherwise it’s sung in a harsh whisper and an even lower harmony vocal over soft tip-tapping.

Then again, See Your Lies is an all-out rant and swaggering rocker Muse would approve of — as might John Lennon have, even if he never had the technology to make his tantrums sound that way. Ugly People Living in the Hole, fast and intense, replaces the swagger with extra drum bursts and sinister cooing. On the quieter end, Something to Believe in is an electrified folk-rock anthem (with a big flock of electric birds joining for the final minute), and Be My Brain has the hazy, punch-drunk country inflections of Mazzy Star or Giant Sand.

Album title aside, Jonny Polonsky‘s lyrics are vague but reasonable enough. Our corporations and political leaders teach us to want a world that isn’t what we need; we need to “bridge across the chasms of chaos, death, and fear … to get out of here, to rebuild our stately home, and deliver the promise from the night”. Billy Corgan would just scream “Let me out!”; John Lennon would imagine “the world will live as one”; Polonsky’s a bit more prone to asserting “All the world’s an aardvark/ sifting through the sand/ searching for the lost spark/ inside our pineal glands”. But they’d all agree that “Ugly people have more to prove than the rest of the world”. They’d all be talking about themselves, but they’d all be comfortable including me, and probably you. Polonsky proves himself with guitar solos; fair enough. What do you got?

– Brian Block

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

Artist: Jukebox the Ghost

Album: Safe Travels

Jukebox the Ghost are a power-pop band. By this I mean they’re energetic; they sing about normal pop topics (loneliness, awkward crushes, relationships); their male singer sounds young and basically ordinary but carries tunes well; they play guitar and bass and keyboards and drums; they use clean production; and they rise and fall based on the strength of their melodies. They’re “pop” in the sense that this was an excellent way to become popular in the 1960s and ’70s, and many of us (including some like me who weren’t even around for that) still vaguely assume it should be.

Jukebox the Ghost’s Safe Travels, in high-energy mode, reminds me of early Elton John: there’s confident piano, or keyboard sounds that often fit the ’70s, strutting through these songs, and singer Ben Thornewill can pull off a Crocodile Rock-like falsetto. But of course Elton’s records also had all those ballads, even from the start. Safe Travels‘s slow songs feel different from his. Dead and All for Love are dramatic buildups that end up massive, and Devils on Our Side is a mostly understated solo piano performance until the cello arrives, circling around waiting for a tip; if you didn’t like them, it would more likely be that they felt too emo — raw drama arranged and digitized for easy replay — than too schmaltzy. Man in the Moon is mostly voice and sketchy acoustic guitar. The Spiritual, white gospel singing over piano, that could be Elton.

But I’m mostly here for the rock songs. And honestly, Elton John didn’t always write verses this strong, soaring into new keys for the chorus and leaving room for a distinctive, tuneful bridge; sometimes, but not this reliably. Also Jukebox the Ghost have some good lyrics (who knows what Elton’s partner Bernie Taupin was writing about?). At Last — my choice for a single, switching between stylish percussive verses and over-the-top chorus with strings, plus a nifty guitar solo — sets up a romance-to-be. “He was a songwriter writing songs about a girl/ She was a ghostwriter lying to the world/ in deep anticipation of a day that she had written/ and by her own admission, she’d be picked up, kissed, and twirled”. It gets a detailed eager-but-anxious middle, and a happy (nay, jubilant) ending that feels earned. Say When (excellent piano-synthesizer interaction) is a detailed song about hating parties, that doubles as a pick-up line that also deserves to work.

Dead is, one hopes, not autobiographical yet, but it’s vivid: “Maybe it was just the sleeping pills when I went to bed last night/ Maybe I just never made it home; and what if there’s always been/ a tiny, tiny hole inside my heart leaking very very very very slowly? And if you’re dead, how do you know if you are really dead/ or stuck in a dull dream about nothing that never ends?” I admire the modesty of its urgent plea: “We all, at minimum, deserve a unique exit from this world/ So if you’re there, God, see to it”. Until which, the potentially depressing Adulthood — “In my lungs I still feel young, but my body won’t play along … Each one’s waiting for the chance/ to be lifted off the ground, but then/ to discover that we’ll all be dust again” — is sung and played to make “I dare you to survive/ being grown for the rest of your life” sound like an honest challenge worth some energy. Which it is. Especially with some nice peppy music around to perk us up.

– Brian Block

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

Artist: Squonk Opera

Album: Go!

I discovered Squonk Opera via their 1994 debut Howandever, when I lived in Boston and went to things called “used record stores”. The band was called “Squonk Opera“, so that caught my eye. Its instrumental lineup was vocals; piano/ keyboards; wind synthesizer/ celtic flute/ whistles/ sax; contraption kit/ rototoms; electric bass; tabla/ electric tabla. The players were additionally titled “prima donna”, “kapellmeister”, “impresario”, “glocksonic”, “basso buffo”, and “percussionisto”. First six song titles: Inside Height, Jole Du Frommage, hT cT, Drop The Words, the Unusual Mrs. Spitz, Dance Of The 7 Vowels. What the package suggested to me, aside from a mildly prog-rock lineup with a strong rhythm section, was a bunch of talented, imaginative people who hadn’t decided whether they were *really* this godawfully pretentious, or just playing. I was right exactly, and Howandever delights me.Thus I became a fan, despite, for years, being unable to learn anything else about them on the web.

Eventually, come the 2000s, they released more records and made their info more available. Based in Pittsburgh, and led by keyboardist/composer Jackie Dempsey, they’re a traveling, story-enacting multimedia roadshow. They scour grants (as theatre companies must and Laurie Anderson and David Byrne also sometimes must) from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Heinz Endowment, and government arts programs. The YouTube segments of their shows that they’ve put up seem ambitious and, though not subtle, often spectacular, in the literal sense. The music, meanwhile, continued to combine a strong background in pretty 19th-century classical music with rhythmic pulses from around the world, airy synthesizer dramatics, Autumn Ayers’s pure and sometimes operatic vocals, some jazz saxophone now and then, and occasional goofiness. You are Here, from 2006, I’ve probably heard two hundred times, it being one of the albums I drafted to put my babies/toddlers to nap with over the following four years; its pulses and grace-notes are inscribed in my brain by now, and for me it’s a masterpiece both beautiful and intricate enough to have never worn out its welcome. Follow-ups Astro-rama and Mayhem and Majesty — for new stage shows — kept them, stylistically, in either a groove or a rut. I enjoy both pretty well, so I’ll say “groove”.

Go!, then, is Squonk Opera‘s change of pace. Like the title, it is simplified and excitable. Shimmy and Shake leads the record with, of all things, a 3-minute 3-chord rock song: sinewy bass and assertive accordion, with Ayers’s voice showing a new and potent soul-singer aspect. Truckstop Wardance builds on ominous, rumbling drums, Deep Purple organ, and fuzzy, distorted near-metal bass playing; it’s a Modern Rock song, energetic sax solo or not. Maintain the Speed’s drum-and-synth groove is fierce, and while it would ridiculous for me to suggest that Ayers sounds like Aretha Franklin or Janis Joplin on this track — she doesn’t; she clearly doesn’t ingest the kind of addictive fatal substances that would let her — she sounds a heckuva lot closer than we had any reason to expect.

The rest of the album sounds pretty much like Astro-Rama or Mayhem and Majesty, which should make Go! a strong and useful introduction for Squonk Opera newbies: I especially like Flip the Switch, Unwind, and Pulse. I might have ranked the album *very* high on my list if they’d fully followed through their makeover; I certainly enjoyed the experiment. But I can’t fault a band with this many strengths for still, on the whole, playing to them.

– Brian Block

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