Blog

Artist: Mike Keneally (with Andy Partridge)

Album: Wing Beat Fantastic

First, I got two careers to quickly summarize here. Mike Keneally — former “stunt guitarist” for Frank Zappa’s touring band — comes across as a friendly, goofy man who simply happens, by dint of hours a day of practice, to be a jaw-droppingly brilliant guitarist. His playing has gotten more understated and subtle over his solo career. This matches the trend in his songwriting, which has developed steadily more pop/jazz sophistication (which to some extent is a shame; his Potato and Live in Japan, from 1998 and 2000 when his albums were by “Mike Keneally and Beer for Dolphins“, are two of the most gloriously catchy hair-metal songs I’ve ever heard).

Andy Partridge was the primary singer, songwriter, and arranger for XTC, a band I sometimes think of as what the Beatles would have become if they’d started out in 1978, forced to react — not only to punk and New Wave and Peter Gabriel’s musicology tours — but to the awesome challenge of being a pop band trying to out-innovate the Beatles. Partridge has claimed, plausibly (judging by their first couple of albums), that the origin of XTC’s distinct melodic style was an accident: that he and Colin Moulding simply learned the “wrong” set of three basic chords. Be this as it may, they developed this non-standard base into increasingly lavish tunes that, however unorthodox, nonetheless inspired genuine hit songs: Senses Working Overtime, Dead God, Mayor of Simpleton, the Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead. Then they vanished in 1993, on strike against their label; returned with two indie albums in 1999/2000; and vanished again.

Until now, with Mike Keneally’s Wing Beat Fantastic, where the cover and Amazon listing both announce “Songs written by Mike Keneally & Andy Partridge”. I hadn’t noticed that Keneally’s and Partridge’s melodic styles were converging, but the resulting album feels natural for both of them, part Keneally’s acoustic Wooden Smoke (with its emphasis on elaborate vocal arrangements and headphone-listening sonic detail), part XTC’s fussily orchestrated Nonsuch. Or to bring in outside comparisons: I’m Raining Here, Inside is a fluid single fusing Billy Joel’s rock strut with the lovely elusiveness of Radiohead’s In Rainbows. Wing Beat Fantastic is like half-a-dozen late-Beatles stripped-down ballads transposed and stitched together into one complex creation. You Kill Me blends several styles of guitar-driven classic rock — some Thin Lizzy, some Who, some Yes, some Dire Straits, some Sesame Street — not all in 4/4 time.

The guitar — except on You Kill Me — is de-emphasized. The quiet That’s Why I Have No Name is build on ghostly voices, low rumbling piano, and oscillating synthesizer. Your House is mostly a piano ballad, qualified to be covered by lounge singers for the next century. Miracle Woman and Man has one strikingly agile and expressive acoustic guitar solo at the end, but otherwise its forceful strums are notable mainly for the unusual chord progressions and halting-then-fluid-then-halting rhythms, and there’s a Chick Corea-like jazz fusion keyboard solo. Bobeau‘s really acrobatic feature is Keneally’s singing.

The lyrics are very good, and while I make no attributions — Keneally’s a very good lyricist — the co-written words feel more Andy Partridge to me.

* Some are happily romantic: “Wing beat fantastic: I want you in my backyard, tucking twigs and twine. Rising here and diving there, we’ll vanish, make ’em wonder where. Both evading cast and snare, we’ll emigrate to regions rare”.

* Some are self-conscious: “What if you should see me here? I’d whirl blue and disappear”.

* Some are lonely, emotions protected only by the search for the perfect metaphor: “My blue umbrella is no use: I’m raining here inside. Salt water flowing endlessly, just adding to the tide. Since you’ve gone, no light has shone; I’m drowning in my pride”.

* Some are socially aware and indignant: “You kill me, with your cheap AK and your ‘Let us spray’. You kill me, with your oily games and your gift of flames. You kill me, with your ‘Praise the Lord!’ and your waterboard… I don’t mean to vote for you, but your machine will fix it so I do”.

It adds up to a writing style I’ve recognized and largely admired for half my life. In whatever format, and with whatever help, I’m happy to have it back.

– Brian Block

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

Artist: Yakuza

Album: Beyul

Yakuza, from Chicago, are a heavy metal band, and Beyul is a heavy metal album. Encyclopedia Metallum, normally a definitive web source, disagrees, which I’m told was an active, debated decision. I’m not quite sure what *else* they make, then, of Oil and Water, which barrels along at a quadruple-speed attack of distorted bass, drums, and squalling clarinet, before a commanding Rob Halford (Judas Priest)-like singer (= tuneful wailer) enters. The fierce trebly guitar solo is metal; the frantic background vocal screeches are metal. The Last Day is part tempo-shifting speed-metal, part more like Metallica’s dark atmospheric trudges, with reflective lead guitar and near-crooning and smooth-jazz sax over the bass that ominously tolls (for whom?). Man is Machine sets off Iron Maiden riffing — and later a more assertive Rage Against the Machine-ish barking rhythm — with long, loud reverberating chords and (tuned) howls and big echoing drums, plus the usual anti-humanity pro-apocalypse lyrics.

And free-jazz sax.  Bruce Lamont, when not being a classic heavy metal singer, plays saxophone and clarinet, and as far as I can tell this makes Yakuza’s Beyul“avant-garde”. Which I gather is metalhead for “These guys are too interesting WAAH”.

Someone is wrong on the Internet. Yakuza deliver much of what I want from heavy metal: the heaviness and power (duh). The bursts of insane energy. The mysterious pleasure of partly detuned bass chords (Korn’s grand innovation), or occasional Middle Eastern tunings. The grandeur. The stumbling into elementally right-on melodies, played several times rapidly with force and then abandoned. The atmosphere: aside from Oil and Water and the 1:26 grindcore-for-fun outburst Species, most of this album rings out with plenty of long-held notes and chords, even when there’s furious drum rolls. Beyul is an album to which I can lie down, put my headphones on, and let the music pummel me as my mind drifts.

Saxophone and clarinet? They fill the same frequency range as the human voice. They’re also a break from literal communication, instead sliding over the notes faster, more smoothly, and perhaps more intuitively than we can sing. Metal fans aren’t always into notes; perhaps that’s the objection. I overrule.

– Brian Block

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

Artist: Rudi Zygadlo

Album: Tragicomedies

Scotland’s Rudi Zygadlo was introduced to me, for his 2010 debut the Great Western Layman, as a maker of something electronic called “dubstep”. He does do clever things with electro-sonic manipulation, about which more shortly, but that label slowed my recognition of what on Tragicomedies is at least as important: he writes excellent, distinctive vocal melodies. They’re graceful, and modest in scope, but full of odd intervals, sharps or flats where none would be expected. They have a composery feel, and at first the only comparisons I thought of — once my brain had caught up — were hopelessly obscure: Liam Singer, Chris Letcher, Stars in Battledress, William D. Drake. But no, by Russian Dolls I’d realized his tunes might pass as slowed-down fragments from Broadway’s Stephen Sondheim (Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd, Assassins). By Tragicomedies itself, aided by the arrangement, I’d recognized Zygadlo‘s sometime kinship as a tunesmith with Steely Dan (or Francis and the Lights). By the Domino Quivers I’d picked up on the resemblance to some of XTC’s slower, more pastoral songs. Sometimes even Crowded House recorded songs that were a little evasive in their prettiness. There, now you have starting points.

So about that electronic tomfoolery. First of all, Zygadlo‘s voice seems mild and pleasant – like Roddy Frame of Aztec Camera, or Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout – but we don’t hear it untampered. There’s often several of him, pitch-corrected in harmony, or sent through a vocoder (a la Laurie Anderson on O Superman), or chipmunked, or deepened into a robotic Big Bopper (especially on the doo-wop Waltz for Daphnis), or sent through a dozen other forms of distortion. Instrumentally, many songs are based in classically-trained piano, but electronics will wobble the pitch, fade the notes artificially in and out, slow down or briefly warp-speed the playing. Some shiny keyboard lines are purely artificial, such as Catharine‘s synthesizer insisting a grin while it tries to  distract you from its machine indigestion; I guess that’s dubstep, though without Skrillex’s abrasiveness. Some sound like ’70s Wurlitzer organs; Tragicomedy sounds, specifically, like Steely Dan mixed on a computer while my 4-year-old jabbed at the keys and tried to swipe the mouse. The Deaf School could even play in goth or ’80s dance clubs, though not without inspiring questions.

By final tracks On and Variously Made Men, it feels entirely natural that people have electronic filters attached to their vocal cords; that notes sound louder half-a-second *after* they’re played; that instruments rebuild themselves from scratch from one measure to another. Tragicomedies creates its own world of pop elegance.

– Brian Block

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