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#31 album of 2013 – Pop Full Stop by Statuesque

Artist: Statuesque

Album: Pop Full Stop

Statuesque is the name under which Stephen Manning has played (all but the drums) and recorded his intensely literate, feyly melodic Brit-pop songs since the late 1990s. Their older albums — peaking for me with 2004’s superb Choir Above, Fire Below — often gave a striking imitation of full-band performance and professional production. I imagine that’s expensive and time-consuming for a hobby, though, so by 2013’s Pop Full Stop he’s settled into releasing large gobs of songs (25 on Pop Full Stop itself, plus he released two other albums that year) that sound much more like one guy plus a part-time drummer. It’s completely understandable but disappointing. Not because the resulting album isn’t a pleasure; it is one, hummable and lonely/ funny and playing with complicated rhymes and over-extended metaphors (about which more in the third paragraph). It’s disappointing only because it’s the outlines of a masterpiece that no one had time to fill in.

Some of the arrangements are winners, mind you. Out Crowd stomps along on big fuzzy bass riffs and echoing, syncopated drums, with pinging guitar decorations near the top of the treble range. Jigsaw Island hides a Proclaimers-like jangle behind Smiths-style dreaminess and another big fuzzy riff, this one sinister. Over Being Over You gets mileage from clip-clop drums, agile leaps of guitar melody, wordless harmony vocals, and the extreme intensity of Manning’s yelp; Augmental from creepy chord changes strummed out with Ani DiFranco-like disregard for the health of the skin on his fingers, plus woozily psychedelic production drones on the chorus guitar and vocals. Micronationals rings out like mid-’80s R.E.M. God, Alcohol, and the Moon and My Life is One Long Cartwheel are loud and bleary yet pleasantly twee, sounding like a Sarah Records band, or Guided By Voices. But the majority of songs here are just voice-and-simple-guitar or voice-and-ukelele, simple-or-no drums — which, while fine, puts all the pressure on words and melodies. At which point one can start to notice that as strong and distinctive as Statuesque‘s melodies are, they re-use some of their most interesting, sidewise progressions from song to song.

Luckily, the English language (and his voice is *very* English, of some modest-income regional variant from the island’s south) has more words than the music alphabet has notes, so the words provide novelty where needed. Pop Full Stop is rooted in defeat and fatalism, but cleverly so, set in a world of “Limits set down early/ Playground conquistador/ Whose dad will vanquish yours./ Don’t judge him too sternly: /He lacks the Myers-Briggs/ To find the Boson Higgs”. “Some are born fighting/ others, alighting, apologize their way into the world”, he sings elsewhere, and we know he’s the latter. Many pop songs seek romance; few of them admit what a much larger number think, phrased here by Manning as “I want a girl with a flipchart heart/ who’ll declare my moods are a work of art/ who’ll delete my history as each day starts”. Micronationals isn’t the first love song to propose a You-and-Me-Against-the-World arrangement, but there’s a clarity to “Give away your dignity/ and celebrate what’s left with me/ we’ll be like micronationals/ pinning medals on passing gulls”.

It’s probably too stark to be a winning message; I’ve rated Pop Full Stop slightly ahead of Yeezus in my countdown of 2013, but it’s hardly a surprise when the groupies vote against me. A few times Manning’s romantic frustration lashes out (albeit cleverly: I’d rather be attacked by him than Phil Collins, if forced to either fate), but mostly he keeps his lashes inward. Given that rock criticism is predominantly male, it is a little bit off that Statuesque has no standing with the critics’ polls. Kanye West lashes out too, far more than Stephen Manning does, and as unproductive as both of their complaints may be, Stephen’s are, for most of us, a better fit to our style and our memories of youth. It’s possible he should focus, as Dr. Nerdlove would suggest, on better dress and posture and a warmer conversational style more full of active listening and well-timed touching; but look, while he wasn’t doing that, he recorded 25 new songs. I don’t live in London; his actual choice, then, was far more useful to me.

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2013 page!

The Amazon link is for my favorite Statuesque album. Pop Full Stop is my 2nd-favorite Statuesque album and is available for £5 from their bandcamp page.

May 21, 2014
#32 album of 2013 – All My Friends by Jack o’ the Clock

Artist: Jack o’ the Clock

Album: All My Friends

Two years ago, I chose Jack o’ the Clock‘s How are We Doing, and Who Will Tell Us? as my #1 album of 2011. In retrospect I’d put it at #2 — behind They Might Be Giants’s Join Us — but it’s an extraordinary record, blending pretty folk/Americana and nicely-sung storytelling with avant-garde influences and surrealism, so I’ll tell you about five of its highlights before I continue.

Back to the Swamp is a bluegrass/ jugband number with pretty male/female harmonies, rousing banjo and fiddle; it also sings a series of journeys punctuated by short debates about time, work, religion, and the purpose of human existence. (Not to mention manners: “She said ‘I have been watching, and by now you ought to know/ your shadow’s going to walk with you wherever you go./ Eventually you’ll stop a while and talk to it./ And it tells you it’s a window and without it you’d be blind/ though the only scenes it shows you are the streets you left behind./ Do you take it at its word, or throw a rock through it?’/ I said ‘I still don’t know, do you know?/ Don’t ask me rhetorical questions if you don’t know, it’s mean-spirited”.) Last of the Blue Bloods is folky and languid and thoroughly pleasant, building through lovely piano, bassoon, and violin solos — even if the percussion is clattering, variable, and odd, and the narrator, an old man haunting his old university workplace, is combative and distracted by flickering memories. Schlitzie, Last of the Aztecs, Lodges an Objection in the Order of Things puts Jordan Glenn’s junkyard percussion upfront and distorts Damon Waitkus’s gentle verse singing through faulty old equipment, arranges flutes and bassoons with Flight of the Bumblebee busyness, and bombards everything with odd noises; but it’s a song of empathy and encouragement to a circus freak, and resolves into a folky chorus. Novaya Zemyla is a lovely, weird, increasingly spooky soundscape over which the narrator speaks, in a chatty, amusing, matter-of-fact voice, a narration of a flatly impossible journey. Shrinking, on the other hand, is a gorgeous song almost imaginable as a hit, no more out of left field than the Dave Matthews Band’s Crash into You was: close harmonies, acoustic guitar, violin, tuned percussion, framing its sung observations as a fond, anxious song to a lover.

The songs on How are We Doing, and Who Will Tell Us? all fit together, but the mix of influences (from folk to bluegrass to chamber music to Harry Partsch’s home-made microtonal instruments) kept shifting proportions to make a remarkable range of songs. Jack o’ the Clock‘s 2013 All My Friends uses similar ingredients to make an album that seems to me quieter, cooler, less welcoming. 8-minute first track All My Friends are Dead is a good example. It begins slow and quiet, with old recording equipment and the sort of skittering, weird-melody chimes and imperfectly-tuned high piano that indicate “spooky dream sequence” in movies. Kate McLoughlin starts to play a nice, perky bassoon melody, but it’s driven out by echoes of thunder, droning wind, and public address voices echoing in canyons. It fits the accompanying lyrics, certainly (“All my friends are dead. What can you say to that, my friend? Cancer dropped a blockbuster: the formula works. The car crash was a sleeper hit”), but rejects standard notions of how to make a first impression. Not until the 3:28 mark is the revived bassoon melody joined by a band and a beat.

From that point All My Friends are Dead is a jaunty song that I like very much indeed, but it’s still carved evasively into segments — led by bassoon here, guitar there, busy drums for awhile, then a complex cascade of woodwinds; now in waltz time, now in 5/4 — and ends without warning. A short instrumental is played on old precursors of the guitar, while orders we can’t understand are muttered into distant megaphones. Only then, nine-and-a-half minutes into the album, does a loud fanfare of xylophones introduce a forcefully catchy song, a Lot of People are Dead Wrong Most of the Time, hooky with bassoon and violin. “Whip me, teacher, you should know that’s all I ever needed from you. Don’t impress me with your signet, don’t give me any books to leaf through. I only want your love, I will even take it lying down”. The melody is like an especially ambitious Sesame Street tune, not at all like Van Halen, but there’s a plenty spectacular solo — distorted electric violin, maybe? Still, it leads into a spacious, buzzy homemade-percussion song in 11/8 time (the Pilot), then into a drifting Eno-esque instrumental; Jack o’ the Clock are not about rousing you with anthems.

I’m happy to guide you to the most accessible tracks, if you prefer. Besides the aforementioned a Lot of People…, there’s the sparkling, delicate folk song Half Searching, Half There, with impressively agile acoustic guitar and gently surging choruses; if you like Half Searching you should check out Disaster. There’s also the rousing instrumental Saturday Afternoon at the Median, with electric guitar, fast thumping drums, and interlocking bassoon lines that should resolve any doubts you might have that the bassoon is a great rock’n’roll instrument. What to Do in Our Neighborhood 1 is catchy and perky.

Buying the MP3’s of a few songs like that would be a decision to enjoy Jack o’ the Clock‘s tunes, and the purity of Damon Waitkus’s gently gliding, keening, articulate voice, and lyrics like “Won’t you take me upstairs to your room when you’re starting your day/ to the place where you find all the words that you say/ to your pantry of pills that keep the demons away?” Or “I am not afraid of you; are you afraid of me?/ Don’t go! Step into my house. We’ll fry a little fish, we’ll brew a little tea./ We’ll walk around the town, we’ll go down to the river, we’ll stare across the river/ animal to animal, like we were kind of dumb. And we *are* kind of dumb”. All My Friends has a friendly side: philosophical and peculiar in its intimacies, but friendly. It’s entirely fair to enjoy that side only.

If you get curious, after all, to hear the rest of the album — the echoing drums and tuned percussion solos and detuned pianos and retreats into soft noise — it should still be there. The old, weird America never went away with the coming of 24-hour celebrity news channels and information superhighways; if anything, it’s still there and has cell phone cameras now to document itself. Jack o’ the Clock are an idiosyncratic folk band. At our best, we’re an idiosyncratic country; who better, then, to document us?

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2013 page!

May 15, 2014
#33 album of 2013 – Yeezus by Kanye West

Artist: Kanye West

Album: Yeezus

Reviewing Kanye West‘s Yeezus is a double challenge for me. On the one hand, Yeezus was chosen by music critics as a whole, in the giant Village Voice Pazz & Jop Poll, as the #1 best album of 2013 (so my rating it as #33, though intended as a compliment, opens the question “Why are you dissing it?”). On the other, I’m pretty sure a majority of *my* readers don’t like Kanye West at all. Since he’s had many hit singles, including Black Skinhead, New Slaves, and Bound 2 from Yeezus, I’m stuck trying to convince readers they’ve made an oversight that isn’t about — as when I’m reviewing Kobo Town or the Burning Hell — “Yo! Look over here! This album exists!”

Yeezus isn’t the record I’d’ve chosen to make my case for Kanye with. Previously, a large part of the case for West is that he’s a brilliant magpie, tossing together genres (and often samples) in ways that make no sense until you hear the results — results which also tended to be highly melodic. I don’t like his earliest albums as albums, but he was recording individual songs I loved as far back as 2004’s Jesus Walks: sad/goofy military doo-wop, joined by aggressive sound effects, by female choral vocals, by snake-charmer woodwinds, by gospel-singing melisma, and his own intense rapping. (That’s also the year he wrote and produced Twista’s hit Slow Jamz, a gorgeously seductive soul song with self-satirizing rhymes like “I’m gonna play some Vandross/ You’re gonna take your pants off.”)

By 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — a Pazz & Jop poll winner that’s in my own top ten for its year — he was juggling more elements than ever. Dark Fantasy led the album with white and black church choral traditions together, lean minor-key hip-hop beats, chamber strings backing cyborg vocals, and a piano hook my 7-year-old would find easy to play that is nonetheless a majestic and lovely way to tie things together. All of the Lights put symphonic synthesizer fanfare (a la John Williams or Vangelis, c. 1980) together with soul singing and the ultra-busy drum machine of techno/jungle music. Hell of a Life turned a synthesized copy of the Black Sabbath Iron Man riff into something even hookier, strafed by fast swirling synth-piano and backing-up garbage trucks; Kanye West himself stole Ozzy’s vocal melody (with permission), sang it in smoother and lower voice, and put more notes in it, proving himself correct to do so. Blame Game had a catchy light cocktail-jazz piano hook, simple drum machine, orchestral drum rolls, saxophone, cello, and vividly weird bits of vocal processing. Lost in the World started with a-cappella close harmony R & B vocals run alienatedly through pitch-correction, then joined them to stomping ’80s rock percussion (an army of stormtrooping Phil Collinses), Michael Jackson tributes, cavernous synthesizer drones, slam poetry, and, for a bit, the rhythmic warping of the entire sound envelope. Good tunes abounded everywhere, new ingredients popped up every few measures, the song-to-song transitions were carefully managed, and the result was a panoramic album that sounded un-self-consciously of a piece. 2011’s Watch the Throne, a joint recording with Jay-Z, encompassed just as much territory, and is in my top ten for its own year.

Yeezus, like-but-unlike 2008’s 808s and Heartbreaks, deliberately sacrifices some of that for the sake of mood. 808s was a sad, guilty-but-unkind-but-analytical album focused on a romantic breakup, and borrowed most of its tropes from synth-pop, which it combined with the most varied, artfully alien, emotionally effective use of pitch-correction I’ve ever heard. Yeezus, on the other hand, finds him relatively happy with his personal life, mostly using his voice un-disguised — and part of his success is that Kanye West may be the most communicative rapper out there, focused and intense and articulate, sly with his occasional punch-lines, building rhythm around the rhetorical demands of his words. But personally happy or not, Yeezus is bristling, paranoid, strutting and fierce in his approach to the world, and its songs are leaner, built on synthesizers as aggressively artificial as I’ve ever heard. Album opener On Sight sounds like a malfunction at first, or would if it wasn’t sneakily/ weirdly tuneful, but even when the harsh rhythm kicks in, it still feels like the music equivalent of the Outer Limits urging you “There is nothing wrong with your television set…. We are controlling transmission… We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image; make it flutter”. Black Skinhead is sparse, percussive, somewhere between “stereotyped primitive tribe” and “psychotic cheerleaders”, with a simple, ominous bass-synth tune and some low wobbly resonances to give you something to hum. I am a God cuts up samples of a lovely vocal-classical piece by Indian composer Rahul Dev Berman over low harsh drones, and twists Kanye’s voice so that we’re clear which kind of God he’s claiming to be: the scary-ass Old Testament kind who destroys cities and drowns continents if you don’t “hurry up with my damn croissant”. (It contains some of my favorite punchlines of the year, which doesn’t make the nearby digitized screams any less jarring.) New Slaves is, behind its urgent rap, pure melody, fit for a music box that in turn is fit for vengeful ghost children who are laughing nastily at your inability to see them. I’ve heard people complain that this sort of soundscape has done before in hip-hop — by El-P, by Cities Aviv, by Death Grips. Those examples aren’t wrong, but they’re anti-melodic. Not only does Kanye sing capably when he so chooses, but his every instrumental riff is for us to sing nonsense words to.

One flaw in this is that I’m not accounting for the blatancy of West’s sampling this time out, where his songs shift genres for a minute at a time by reproducing sizable chunks of pre-existing records, a little bit altered and supplemented but entirely recognizable and taking dominant roles. I hated that crap when Vanilla Ice stole Under Pressure for a boring rap, or Puff Daddy stole Every Breath You Take for a boring rap of his own. My justifications for Kanye doing it are (1) that he gets permission and pays royalties, and more importantly (2) that he’s completely open about his sources, and indeed willingly publicizes them, leading to useful pages where you can watch videos of the original songs. Plus, in almost all cases, I like the results and the juxtapositions, and I rarely knew the originals. Tellingly, the one I have a problem with is his use of Nina Simone’s performance of the anti-slavery song Strange Fruit, which I own in original form, and which sure as hell doesn’t belong in a song (Blood on the Leaves) complaining about Kanye’s alimony payments.

Which leads to the second flaw in this account: Kanye West has always presented himself as an arrogant asshole who loves hetero sex in vast quantities but resents women and defines himself by expensive purchases. That used to be balanced against a provocative political intelligence: Jesus Walks‘s self-aware attack on the pro-hedonistic biases of commercial radio; Who Will Survive in America‘s critique of a capitalist America that lulls us away from protesting by making us dream of lovely things we might someday, in theory, afford; Murder to Excellence‘s argument that we need a million more black men as exorbitantly rich as he is in order to get black poverty taken seriously; No Church in the Wild‘s circle-of-insignificance “Human beings in a mob: what’s a mob to a king? What’s a king to a God? What’s a God to a non-believer?”, and its endorsement of polyamory for his wife as well as himself. But on Yeezus we have exactly one intelligent point about the world: New Slaves‘s reminder that the Corrections Corporation of America is legally entitled by the 13th Amendment to use prisoners as slaves, and is therefore profit-motivated to lobby for many, many arrests. It’s drowned by periodic sloganeering (no, Kanye’s mistreatment by record company execs is *not* tantamount to working 18-hour days picking cotton and being flogged if his back pains make him too slow) and a whole lot of discussion of his cars and his penis and how no woman should charge him money for the pleasure of serving his penis. It’s gross.

Like Eminem on his Marshall Mathers LP, Kanye balances this with self-awareness and self-mockery (even the one romantic song on the album, Bound 2, asks “Hey, do you remember where we first met?/ Okay, I don’t remember where we first met”). Plus occasional vows to improve; it has a mild voyeuristic intrigue. It’s still gross. Tris McCall makes the following defense: Kanye West‘s albums are great, in part, because he makes great use of collaborators. His stable of collaborators keeps growing larger, because he *never loses one*. In other words, he can’t possibly be a narcissistic jackass in person, because he’d drive people away — not everyone, but enough so you’d notice. The level of intense detail on his albums suggests that Kanye is above all a nerdy sound engineer and control freak — a good-natured one who’s welcoming of new ideas as long as he’s allowed to shape their final result — who has adopted the persona of a ridiculously cocky person in order to scare away people who would interfere with his vision. Surely he’s a hedonist, but by itself that’s not all bad. It makes sense. I suspect McCall is right.

Does it matter? Eh, I think it helps a little. Kanye West is an extremely talented man who probably could, if he so chose, make some of my favorite albums of all time. But if he was focusing on me, he’d probably have smaller budgets and fewer people to call on, and then what we hear wouldn’t match what’s in his head. Yeezus is the product of a man who’s extremely successful in a culture that produces and rewards successful jackasses. It doesn’t sound quite like anything else, and it sounds excellent, and now and then it makes me laugh. Even when it makes me cringe, it’s basically aiming to. I’ll take it.

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2013 page!

May 12, 2014