Music That Matters, Pt 28

274) Garbage, Garbage (1995): From the rough coupling of a nascent Pro Tools and a blossoming remix culture came this beautiful bastard, Garbage. If you were alive in the 90s, you might remember a culture besotted and remade with software tech – music, graphics, video, design, etc. – and Garbage was one of the more visible parts of that steaming heap. The band’s scaffolding would form from a meeting of a sound engineer and two musicians who’d migrated into producing. Based in Madison WI, these three nerds appealed to a singer a world away (Scottland) after they’d seen her on MTV’s 120 Minutes ca. 1994. At the time, Shirley Manson was showcasing with the local band Angelfish. To this stateside squad of knob-twirlers and mouse-jockeys, she represented a fresh departure from the grunge that was both the trend and their bread and butter as producers. She had the darker quality they were seeking – not Riot Grrl nor Lilith Fair – and had none of the “chirpy or light” vocal sound they wanted very much to avoid. What they got was a tone as cold and gray as the fall North Atlantic sky.

In among all of the classic rock retreads of grunge that was raging at the time, Garbage seemed like a breath of brisk air and they hit immediately. It helped they debuted with a trove of radio-friendly ware. And despite the overly unctuous hunger for the slicing and dicing of ProTools, these production veterans – unlike many of their studio tanned peers – discovered more of its potential: Note the guitar break on Only Happy When It Rains. 

Also interesting to note that Manson had never written a song before joining up. Clearly, she was a natural.







275) XTC, Travels in Nihilon (1980): Harder and longer than just about anything else in their extensive catalog, this song nearly strays into jam band territory. Composer and singer Andy Partridge often reveals himself as a passion advocate in the singing of his songs, but here he’s shown in rare power. The guitars worm in and out of power chords, funky riffing and the droning provides muscle to the tension. Nihilon adds another facet to the already well cut and polished jewel that was XTC.

276) The Decemberists, The Wanting Comes in Waves (Repaid) (2009): The Decemberists had already proven themselves able modern advocates for the legacy of murder ballads. Songwriter Colin Meloy’s blend of gothic folk, Grand Guignol pathos, and crunchy guitars is given a rocket burst with the muscly guest vocal of My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Nova. Altogether, the mix enforces this Repaid like a loan shark’s debt. Nova’s final breath of repaid at the close pushes the song into an entirely other dimension. This song demands to played on a loop.



277) Thin White Rope, On the Floe (1990): Rootsy faux Nashville riffs and a hard trucker groove matched with a gravelly voice that’s worn like an 80-year-old long shoreman’s tattoo. It all begins with filigreed delicacy and transitions into a full bats-on-oil-drums  groove when the chorus kicks it up. The final out-chorus organ sweeps add a deathly ethereality as the song disappears into a cold horizon. 

If you don't know, a floe is a sheet of floating ice. In this, broken-hearted losers left to wither on a floe like elderly Inuits of legend going to meet their gods. (And it’s not entirely legend.) In the barfly version, the ice floats in a double bourbon with a Budweiser back.

There is a song so hard to steer

I thought it would capsize in bitterness and fear

I look to the sky when I'm tired of the sea

Constellations are moving, they're useless to me

And it seems we've been stranded on the floe

Watching distant shorelines as we go

278) Peeping Tom (featuring Mike Patton & Massive Attack), Kill the DJ (2006): It’s the opinion of the team at Jelly Roll that Mike Patton has collaborated on more vitally interesting work than just about anybody over the last 35 years. His deep résumé combines both the avant garde (Mr. Bungle, John Zorn, Fred Frith) and the more mainstream-ish (Faith No More, Björk, Fantômas) and Peeping Tom fits somewhere to the right of middle. The album was a one-time project taking six years to create and Wiki says this about it: [...Peeping Tom]...is a tribute to Michael Powell's 1960 film Peeping Tom. The album was created by swapping song files through the mail with collaborators such as Norah Jones, Kool Keith, and Massive Attack, among others.

This joint’s got more than enough mood for the darkest game soundtrack, dynamics enough for serious head bang on a movie chase scene, and spunk enough to shake dance floor bound asses —a total package.

279) Pointer Sisters, Going Down Slowly (1975): For those not alive at the time, The Pointer Sisters would become mega-sellers in the 80s (13 Top 20 sellers). By that time they’d mostly wiped clean most of their early soul-shouting edge to improve their market prospects, though stains of the church remained. Some of their early vocal rave ups – Yes We Can Can, How Long (Betcha’ Got a Chick on the Side) – are now classic including this Allen Toussaint roundalay. 

In this singing family slugfest, they brought the brass knuckles. I can’t think of another vocal group, family or otherwise, that ever went this hard and long.

280) Bulgarian State Television Female Choir, Kalimankou Denkou (The Evening Gathering) (1990): Sometimes, cultures across seas and continents can discover joy in similar sounds. Strains of Middle Eastern, East Asian, and some Celtic sounds seem to have been birthed from a similar umbilical cord, united across time and space. I find the strains here remind me of  North American indigenous chants. There’s also a soul-scraping quality that communicates beyond language, it’s more like the code of experience—not a word but a sound in a voice, an emotional salt. Language may be superfluous to the ancient vibe they’re elevating here. Just under three minutes in you can even hear some Westside Story dance choruses. 

And yet it’s also completely it’s own thing, which the best music, not matter where or when, always is.



281) Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Bat Chain Puller (1978): This is a sound found nowhere else on the planet: Nightmare rhythms of lurching mummies and the anthraxed footfalls of death-spiraling animals mixed with nursery rhyme bursts of melody, the blues, the anxious vibe of horror movies, souls leaping from bodies, and all capped with the voice of Howling Wolf intermittantly having psychotic episodes and an announcer reading ad copy. Not a bad way to spend 5 minutes and 27 seconds on a sleepless pre-dawn Saturday morning.

From the French Chorus television show ca. 1980:

282) Tanya Tagaq, Aorta (2016): To distill the pain and trauma of a people in song, you can do no better than Tagaq. Her voice is a bleeding flag to be planted into the center of our skull.

 

283) The Fall, Theme from Sparta F.C. (2003): Screams that siphon the flames of every trauma you’ve endured, words twisted to become brilliant effigies of every revulsion and rage that was visited upon you – those would both be wonderful ways of squeezing raw emotion into the kinetic earspace and many of the songs I’ve enthused about here in Music That Matters over the years. But there’s something extraordinary about Mark E. Smith’s utter disdain for melody and the acid-drenched spew of his upper-class insolence (whether he was ever upper class, I don’t know, but he’s got the arrogant disdain down like a pedophile princeling) delivered whenever that voice is paired with whatever version of The Fall is behind him. The revolving door of Fall bandmembers must be like the staff of a fast food franchise. (The working conditions must be insufferable.) Too bad for those itinerant kids. For us, Sparta FC is the dividend of their pain and discomfort.

Bonus! George Clinton, Bullet Proof (1985): Here, Clinton captures some of the jagged juice missing from P-Funk in the late 70s-80s. Forget about the sound’s datedness, the passé synths, the MIDI beat. When it’s alloyed with such an impervious melody, vocal interplay, and hard energy riveted to gated drum thunder like this, it’s a joint as sharp and timeless as anything on this list. 

Music That Matters, Pt 26

With my previous 25 installments of Music That Matters, I’ve tried to make the case for the way music acts on us like a stream of emotional triggers —through my own well-chosen examples—while it arouses the pineal gland. (More on that in a moment.) A song, or more often, a piece of a piece, offers the listener some seductive lingerie to draw you into the boudoir, backseat, against a tree, etc. of a song. Sex first, then love: as you’re increasingly smitten, you learn to love everything else about it along the way. And often the reasons why don’t even make rational sense: It’s something that happens beyond both consciousness and free will. It’s not unlike the way we find ourselves attracted to other humans—it’s not something we choose. What it does is excite a whole suite of things that may trigger you – experience, chemistry, proclivities, memories, colors – but in the end it doesn’t even matter: It’s magic.

Like Crazy, quite possibly one of the best pop songs composed in the last 20 years: When CeeLo was on Live from Daryl’s House, Daryl Hall said something similar.



Why is that song so good? Is it the skipping vocal melody, the hooky choruses, the atmosphere, the church backgrounders, the traditional ballad strings, that major and minor chord sound shift? Maybe, but whatever it does, it binds you in a multitude of ways like Lilliputians capturing Gulliver. And yet, the song is a slight confection. It’s no Bohemian Rhapsody or A Day in the Life. Crazy’s whole is so much greater than the sum of its simple parts: That’s the magic that pop music does like nothing else on Earth.

(A shame CeeLo poisoned the song by revealing himself as a rapey asshole. Ah, well...)

All of which many believe excites the pineal gland, the contact point between mind and body according to Descartes. It's said that when excited, the gland channels health, longevity, harmony, and spirituality. Search pineal gland and music and find all kinds magical thinking about how it may be activated with music — or a tuning fork and crystals: kits are for sale! Actual research tells us its primary function is the nightly release of melatonin which affects sleep-wake cycles and not much else.

Music can, however, create a bevy of intense emotional effects and, for some of us, it can transform us with a religious-like passion. But let’s forget the pineal gland — listen up (below) and go to church (or temple, ashram, synagogue, mosque, or whatever) and worship. Like the slogan of old Stiff Records, “F*ck art. Let's dance.”

263) Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters, (1973) Chameleon: While electronic keyboards in various forms had begun in the late 40’s with Fender pianos, Wurlitzers coming in the mid 50’s, and Moog synthesizers and Clavinets in 1964, it wouldn’t be until the early 70’s that they’d storm pop music. And this had much to do with who was playing them: I’m going to guess a young Herbie Hancock’s hearing Ray Charles’ banging What’d I Say (1959) was probably a turning point. Though, probably no record did more for electronica in pop music than Headhunters. The sounds were otherworldly, ethereal, and transcendent and Hancock was just the captain to take us there. By the time of the 80’s and digital sounds came along, electronics would become trendier and more ephemeral. But even now, it’s the analog sounds of the vintage ’boards that still drive deep into our dreams. Some manufacturers even regained their licenses and started making those analog ’boards again more recently, but there probably won’t be anyone creating such a worthy spaceship for going into the heart of the sun as Headhunters again.




264) XTC, All Along the Watchtower, Are You Receiving Me?, The Rhythm (1978): This first album by the band was also while the first wave of Thatcher era punk was still raging. By the time the album White Music was in the stores, there was already a growing legion of players out there that appreciated punk’s energy but found the crude structures too limiting. By then, XTC and many others were being tagged with the post-punk label which suited them less as time went on. In the case of early XTC, their chords were Chuck Berry, if chunkier, but the keyboards lent them a more sophisticated Music Hall cum sci-fi bent. Keyboardist Barry Andrews’ work remains some of the most innovative in rock history, in my mind. A journey he’d quickly abandon for his dancier and immediately more successful enterprise Shriekback. XTC’s leader Andy Partridge gives a vocal workout that may make this cover of Watchtower even harder than Hendrix’s.



Crappy audio on the next two but images are worth it:





265) The Birthday Party, Cry (1981): Why this was left off of their Hits collection is a mystery. If there’s any truth to that pineal gland business, this ditty would be would kick the wind out of it. The more formalistic version of psychedelia on the lyric sheet may’ve been entered into a word spinner app and set to abstract-o-vize. And then all was propelled into hyperspace on the afterburners of that scream: Cry! F--kin’ bingo! The words are kooky and obtuse – and the drums are right there with them – and among them are a few profoundly nestled sugar cubes to blow up your face: “...I’ll dig myself a hole and fill up that space with I’ll fill it up with flesh and I’ll fill it up with no flesh...and I’ll fill it with tears...” Truer words have never been written.



266) Bob Dylan, Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) (1974): Another installment in Dylan’s gallery of voices. This one as heated and insolent as any in his career and could’ve easily served as the model for Johnny Rotten who’d start his own band a year after this album’s release. The Band’s playing is ferocious and Garth Hudson’s purgatory string-like organ sound is an ominous counterpunch to the Hammond sound the many Highway 61 Revisited imitators used to pollute the air in the world after. Whatever Dylan’s original intentions of Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way, this rendition adds far more lemon juice and jalapeño.


Bob Dylan & The Band - Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine) from Not Dark Yet on Vimeo.

267) The Sound, The Fire (1981): More post-punk: This would be their most brilliant moment. Sadly, history tells us their commercial prospects were only brief and dim as proven here, From the Lion’s Mouth, that’d ultimately cash out at 100K units. By the late 80’s, leader, singer, guitarist, and songwriter Adrian Borland would be displaying symptoms of clinical depression. By 1999, he’d take his own life. I bring this up because this ultimate expression of existential pain does offer the work much more poignancy, as the singer laments his youthful emotions jacked of their free will for desire, as is often the case with the young and, if you’re very lucky, old. The Fire is a banging’ little number the dashes right out of the gate with simplistic brilliance and a relentless punctuation of bass and guitar that pump turbo into every cylinder. A powerhouse to decorate your time.



268) Billie Holiday, I'm a Fool to Want You (1958); Your Mother’s Son-in-Law (1933): Billie also had her vocal transformations. Hers may’ve been less a choice than hard and desperate living. (And as we now know, she was targeted for destruction by the government.) The sweet exuberance of her early sides were overrun by a freight train of livin’ by the time of her Lady in Satin album era – it’d be like the difference between Greta Thunberg pigtails and a pre-surgical shaved head. Every terror and soul-freezing moment of her adult life is rendered in her singular take on I’m a Fool to Want You. Frank Sinatra took a ponce’s swing at this too but his was a Disney remake next to her Hitchcock-like original. This is adult music that throws a full spotlight on the scar tissue. It’s not for the squeamish.





269) Prince, Loose! (1994): For my money, Prince got better in the 90’s. The songs were less programmed, the sounds more analog, and nothing in his very deep catalog matches this track for sheer power. According to Wiki, Prince had little love for the album at the time. He called it “old material.” The songs were dirtier even than the adolescent porn of Dirty Mind (check Come), which is saying something, and the sheer muscle of them kicks the shit out of any of his 80’s output by far.



270) Procol Harum, Simple Sister (1971): Unless you’re some kind of Anglophiliac, you probably didn’t care much about Procol Harum beyond Whiter Shade of Pale, which swam in a larder of accolade excess, and maybe the orchestral balloon of the live Conquistador. While stars in Britain, their sound didn’t seem to translate well to American tastes. You probably also don’t care that this was Robin Trower’s last pitch on guitar for the band. Like Whiter Shade of Pale, Sister paired a great melody with a sneering and uniquely Keith Reid lyric, one that bends toward the surreal:

Simple sister 
Got whooping cough 
Lock her in a cell 
Throw the key 
Into the sea 
Hope she never gets well

I’m not sure why this vid is a paen to groupies. But, there it is:



271) The League of Gentlemen, Inductive Resonance, Dislocated (1981): On this record Robert Fripp would begin developing the style he’d utilize for the rest of his musical life including future versions of King Crimson. (A style I’ve written about before.) It’s mathy and meticulous and influenced by avantists like Steven Reich but Fripp takes it somewhere more melodic and kinetic than anything the avantists would’ve imagined. And yet, it’s a sound completely controlled and restrained in a way to give it a kind of white knuckle tension.

Also: Barry Andrews (post XTC) is the one beating out tantrums on the organ.





272) The Isley Brothers, Livin’ in the Life (1977): The era may’ve been disco but the Isleys decided to return to some of the sweaty vein-thumping rage of Fight the Power. The sound is vintage, the tempos and grooves more subdued, and the subject matter more mature and toned down—still cynical and mystified but changed: Go for Your Guns was the long contemplative email after the angry drunk texts of The Heat Is On. I wish they had of worked this angle more.