Better as a Single

Better as a Single: "Songs in the Key of Life" by Stevie Wonder

2012-01-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

Well, this is it. Having already spoken about Blonde on Blonde, The White Album and London Calling, there was really only one stone-cold classic double album left for me to take on. And it's not as if I've ignored it: I actually drew up a tentative tracklist fully two years ago but have left it sitting there, to age, I suppose. I've been waiting for 'the right moment' to tackle it, I suppose. But I think that moment's arrived.

What's particularly daunting about discussing Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life is not merely its massive size, both as a huge critical and commercial success and also as a 100+ minute epic flowing across two full-length records and even a third 7" 'ep'. It's not even the hugeness of the project, two years in the making and allegedly featuring a cast of hundreds, released to enormous expectation after a string of four classic albums that presented Stevie Wonder as perhaps the single most gifted musician of his generation. The challenge, in fact, is the huge scale of the accomplishment of the album. Not all of the 21 songs on this album are classics, and it's certainly as worthy of a good trim as any other double out there. But as it's effectively five sides' worth of music, concentrating Songs in the Key of Life to an efficient 45 minutes requires binning fully 60% of one of popular music's greatest achievements. Loving Stevie Wonder as much as I do, that's a tall order, and one that threatens to derail my entire project: what I'm about to cut off this album, collated and presented as its own entity, would still kick the ass of 95% of popular music.

Yes, Songs in the Key of Life is that good, make no mistake about it. I'm not given to hyperbole, but in this particular case there's no real avoiding it. I would probably say that I consider 19 of the 21 songs on this album to be 'good': there's only two that I tend to skip over. The two main criticisms that can be gently placed on the shoulders of this album are, however, a useful start for the process of shrinking this colossal work down to a more manageable size, so it's useful to take a minute to consider them:

First is the quality of the lyrics. You simply can't love Stevie Wonder if your cynicism is so inbuilt that mawkish sentimentality or misty-eyed utopianism, no matter how masterfully presented, makes you gag: for someone lacking the sense of sight, he has a wide-eyed optimism and a wide-eyed sense of wonder about the world around him (I was never going to make it through that sentence without some kind of pun). The ability to tap proudly into this particular emotional resource is much of what makes Wonder unique, but when unchecked it can become cloying, and at times his exuberance does embarrass. In effect, Stevie Wonder lyrics come in three varieties: insightful and memorable, rather weak but carried with a disarming vocal sincerity or else buried beneath brilliant music, and lastly too tacky or embarrassing to be redeemed. Songs in the third group provide me with an obvious starting point.

The second is the length of the tracks. Now, Stevie can cook up an amazing groove, both alone in a studio overdubbing all the instruments or leading a crack band of session players and celebrity 'special guests'. To this end, then, certain songs are given the opportunity to stretch out a little bit. But a good number of these songs drag on for no discernible reason, and it frankly is to the detriment of the album as a whole. While a good number of these songs do exist as truncated 'radio edits', I've avoided the temptation to resort to those, meaning that a track will go on my single-length intact or not at all. This has allowed me to make some exclusions here and there that might strike some as sacrilege. But let's be honest: that was bound to happen no matter what I did.

Lacking sight but possessing vision few can rival, Stevie Wonder's journey is one of popular music's most amazing. From 'Fingerprints' to 'I Just Called to Say I Love You' (to say nothing of the almost thirty years since) is a pretty remarkable tale, from youthful exuberance to middle-aged smarminess. One horrid song does not negate all his greatness, though, and not even a million 'I Just Called To Say I Love You's can dent the impact of this musical milestone. Years before that horror, Wonder discovered as Dylan had before him that critical response to a double album can range from the absolute heights of praise to the bitter depths of panning - in Stevie's case back to back as he followed up this critical-darling with the almost-universally-panned Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. The day may come when I attempt to tackle that particular beast. But at the moment, let's take a rest for a while at the absolute summit of Stevie Wonder's artistry, and enjoy the view from this lofty vantage, a view so beautiful only someone without the capacity for sight could have conceived of it.

Songs in the Key of Life

Side one

Sir Duke (3:54)
Pastime Paradise (3:28)
Knocks Me Off My Feet (3:36)
Summer Soft (4:14)
Isn't She Lovely (6:34)

Side two

I Wish (4:12)
Have a Talk with God (2:42)
Ebony Eyes (4:09)
Ngiculela - Es Una Historia - I am Singing (3:49)
As (7:08)

Love's in Need of Love Today: lose

First track on the album, first 'length' issue. This is a beautiful piece, with a smooth, swaying vibe, a gospel feel, and a sturdy melody designed for lighters held above heads at stadiums. The lyrics are mawkish, but the song's overall mood sells them all the same. So what's the problem? It's just that damned song length. Everything Stevie really needs to say he's already said by the three-minute point of the song, and yet the song carries on in excess of seven minutes, with no real 'Hey Jude'-style buildup either: it merely repeats its chorus innumerable times while Stevie vocally improvises on top. It's trying, and that's too bad, since it's a beautiful piece.

Have a Talk With God: keep (side two, track two)

And no sooner have I said that then we get into the shorted piece on the album, a beguiling little effort that is almost charming in its scope. The religious sentiments are delivered via a dependable but not overly 'catchy' melody, something that seeps into the subconscious only after a few listens. For me, though, what stops traffic here is the amazing musical accompaniment, an almost random juxtaposition of harmonica licks, aquatic synth burbles, bell-like tones and other disparate fragments, arranged over a beat in a way that we in the post-sampling era are able to compute but which must have been amazingly forward-looking for 1976. Hell, 36 years later it still sounds like the future.

This isn't the first track on the double, but it's close enough to still be 'introductory' in an important way. I like the idea of using it early in the album, but I just couldn't make it happen. Instead, it wound up on my side two, as track two.

Village Ghetto Land: lose

These synths, however, sound resolutely mid-seventies. And they're all you get on this track, sheets of new-age chords and elaborate instrumental breaks. I suspect that Stevie was going for a baroque sense of 'drama', juxtaposing bleak scenes from the ghetto with elaborate neo-classical synthesiser accompaniment. But the effect does not fail to be ostentatious, and the main way to get through this dated piece is to ignore the synths completely and focus instead on Wonder's amazingly authoritative and touching vocal performance. Pity that's not enough.

Contusion: lose

In a juxtaposition so extreme that it must have been deliberate, we go from a solo performance of new-age synths redeemed by amazing vocals to dirty improvisational funk played by a full band with no vocals at all. Well, no lead vocals, at least - this os one of the album's two instrumentals, and while I'm tempted to leave my commentary at "instrumental: gone", I should point out that the showy melody line, doubled throughout on guitar and on synth, is technically impressive but not especially loveable. Everyone knows Stevie Wonder has chops to put the entire Chinese food industry on the streets, but that's never been enough: Wonder's best music is always about how he uses that amazing musical prowess as a mainline to human emotional response mechanisms. He can make us cry in sadness, cry in joy, or feel both feelings equally deeply at the same time. This showiness, however, leaves me emotionally cold.

Sir Duke: keep (side one, track one)

And compare it to this. If someone were ever to challenge me to prove to them in four minutes why the advent of recorded sound was one of the greatest advancements in human culture, I'd merely play this song. I'm not sure how a song could be more 'perfect' than this particular one is: the horn 'riff' is catchy and compelling, Wonder's obvious excitement and simple joy is evident every time air passes through his vocal chords, and the breakdowns in the song are enough to reduce even the most emotionless zombie to a giddy little child, caught up in the excitement and simple glee at the power of music, the same feeling that clearly caught up the poor little blind, black kid from Detroit whose childlike love of Duke Ellington (and others) is still vivid all these years later in this touching tribute. That someone can take such joy from music is remarkable, but that he's also able to impart that feeling and expressly give others that same joy is a talent almost unique in the musical world. It's probably Stevie Wonder's single greatest gift.

What is a musical 'statement of purpose'? Well, I'd say it's a single song that, in the scope of an album, sets out the main themes that will be further explored as the album progresses - be those themes musical or lyrical. If you're very lucky, it can do both - and I would argue that this tribute to, and case study in, the joy music can impart is indeed a 'statement of purpose'. And plus it was a number one single. I think it's an obvious opening track. That brass fanfare is exactly what you need to knock the listener off his feet and keep him in one place for an amazing 40 minute ride.

I Wish: keep (side two, track one)

On vinyl, these two monsters were split across different sides of the first disc; it's only in the CD era, and the post-CD download era, that we're able to hear 'Sir Duke' and 'I Wish', two of Wonders' most amazing expressions of joy and two number-one singles, back to back. This particular piece, pop-funk at its finest, is a bit of a different beast to 'Sir Duke', being a reflection on childhood, in particular the various innocuous ways that a poor blind kid managed to get into trouble. Considering how actively Stevie Wonder has always been able to maintain an emotional connection to his pre-fame childhood (something he has always had in common with fellow Motown child star Michael Jackson), this is obviously a subject that hits close to home, and you can tell his conviction when listening. But the voice of innocence is, happily, not couched in a sappy heartstring-pulling midtempo arrangement but sits atop a truly raucous, fun yet 'mature' pop-funk background. A lot of 1970s kids' programming sounded a lot like this, but there is no age at which a person can't feel genuine pleasure listening to this song. If Stevie Wonder had recorded nothing in his entire life except this song and 'Sir Duke', we'd still be writing about him 36 years after the fact.

If you buy this on CD, you'll find 'I Wish' to be one of an amazing five-song stretch of songs that made it to my single-length; fully half the final album. But while four of those are on side one, this is the outlier: my side-opener for side two. Why? Well, 'I Wish' and 'Sir Duke' really are cousins, and they both serve to start each side with a foot on the gas pedal.

Knocks Me Off My Feet: keep (side one, track three)

After three mighty band-led funk tracks in a row, this downtempo piece, recorded entirely solo as a one-man overdub band, is certainly a change of pace. And yet while slow-dance Stevie is often the riskiest, with many songs spilling over the boundary between 'touching' and 'tacky', there's no such thing happening here. This is a touching lyric set to a gorgeous melody, given a gripping vocal performance, and entirely over in three and a half minutes. Again, not to disparage longer pieces, but there's not a single unneeded note here, not a single extraneous second - which is part of what's so amazing about this beautiful track. It could have been an 'American songbook' standard had it been composed a generation or two earlier. And take a minute to marvel at the fact that Wonder performed every note of every instrument here, accompanied only by headphones and a clearly vivid musical imagination.

This is my track three. I explain why in detail below, but I'd like to add that a big ballad like this shouldn't come too early in a set. Track three is about as early as it could realistically come.

Pastime Paradise: keep (side one, track two)

Well, this song belongs to Coolio now, I suppose. Coolio's rap interpolation, called 'Gangsta's Paradise', is every bit the work of genius it's widely considered. And yet the genius of that track is as much as 50% Wonder's, as you can hear by listening to the original, which works a truly suspenseful vibe, a midtempo collision of ringing percussion and icy synth-strings over which, in a stroke of genius, a Christian gospel choir and a Hare Krishna temple sing simultaneously. This song is all tension and no release as it merely builds and build for the duration. All these years later, it's easy to miss Coolio's dramatic inner-city-life recitation, but with Stevie Wonder's stark vocals reading a meaningful list of '-ation' words, a performance somehow simultaneously bleak and optimistic, it's not like there's anything 'lacking' in the original.

Call me a revisionist cheat... I had this as track three, after 'Knocks Me Off My Feet', but the honest truth is that this song's subsequent celebrity made me want to put it back-to-back with 'Sir Duke' in a kind of one-two punch of hit tunes. So it's my track two, a bit of real-life seriousness immediately after the escapism of the opener, 'Sir Duke'.

Summer Soft: keep (side one, track four)

And yes, I'm aware that I've now taken five songs in a row, fully half of my album. They're not quite 'in a row' due to the vinyl split, but I do take four of the five songs on the original's side two. This one is, by far, the least well-known of them, and yet, like 'Have a Talk with God', the song's under-appreciated nature actually endears me to it. As Wonder was spending the 1970s progressing by leaps and bounds year by year (when not almost-dying, another thing he did just a year or two before starting work on this album), there was obviously little chance to step back and reconsider what's come before. And yet that's largely what I love about this song, its free, easy jazzy groove and rise-and-fall dynamics, to say nothing of the sense that the Stevie's keyboard performance is a direct side-product of his beautiful vocals, most reminiscent of his early-1970s formal breakthroughs. Those albums, Music of My Mind and Innervisions, were so magnificent that saying this track sounds like an outtake from those albums is no insult at all but a high compliment indeed. This is wonderful music indeed, a song that ought to be just as famous as any of this album's many highlights.

It's a bit strange that my side one is constructed largely out of Motown's side two, with three consecutive tracks remaining consecutive here. At least my decision to push 'Pastime Paradise' forward means the exact order is not the same, but this is my track four, just like it is on the double - though side one for me and side two for Motown.

Ordinary Pain: lose

This is a strange one. It clocks in at six and a half minutes - long, yes, but not too long for two songs, which is what this effectively is. Somewhere shy of three minutes in, the song comes to a natural conclusion, only to be reborn as a slightly faster 'part two' sung by Shirley Brewer instead of Stevie Wonder. While the shorter 'part one' is a lovely enough mid-tempo composition, the longer 'part two' is far too repetitive, musically, to have much merit. It's the sole disappointment on an otherwise flawless side two.

Isn't She Lovely: keep (side one, track five)

The one moment that most readily divides Songs in the Key of Life fans, and Stevie Wonder fans as a whole: simply put, this song is almost as mushy and schmaltzy as 'I Just Called to Say I Love You' (a horrid blight on a wonderful discography). The joy of becoming a father is clearly one of life's greatest joys, and the desire to commemorate it in song is evident, especially for one who communicates with the world via song. But that does not necessitate that the rest of us should hear what is in fact a private moment, an ego-stroke of rather massive proportions, especially as the minutes tick by and we start to listen to the sounds of Stevie bathing his infant, of all things. And yet, God-damn it, inevitably I succumb. As much as I'd like to hate this song's sentimentality, I merely can't, and it's all to do with the expressive melody, the happy-go-lucky instrumentation, and Stevie's best-ever performance on one of the several instruments of which he is an undisputed master: the harmonica. In most people's hands, the harmonica is either a bluesy drone or a mere annoyance, but Wonder plays the instrument like no other, a clarion call of simple happiness and exuberance. He sounds like no one else, and you can listen to him carry on for minutes, as you do here, without getting tired of it.

My final tracklist takes only two extended tunes and puts them alongside eight radio-length tracks. That being the case, I don't care for the original album's tendency to crowd the longer songs together on the second LP. If you have two long ones and eight short ones, it makes sense to divide them down the middle - one and four per side. So as the other long one is my album closer, this one got relegated to side one. It's bright-morning exuberance might seem better suited for a side-opener, but its lengthy conclusion also makes it an ideal predecessor to needle silence. At the end of side one.

Joy Inside My Tears: lose

Though the first disc features two lengthy pieces and the second disc two briefer ones, by and large Songs in the Key of Love is programmed in such a fashion as to spotlight briefer moments on the first disc and then longer vamps on the second. So as there's not necessarily any wavering in the quality of the compositions themselves across the two discs, ultimately one's preference for one disc or another will have much to do with one's opinion of songs that last longer than a 45 rpm 7" could accommodate. My prejudices on this topic are laid quite clear, I suppose - but it's not quite as cut and dry as merely excising any track that exceeds five minutes. For me, a lengthy track has to justify its length, and I'm not sure many do on Songs in the Key of Life. This, for example, is a truly gorgeous song, like 'Love's in Need of Love Today' a slow-burning stadium-filling crowd-pleaser. But, pardon my insolence, why is it six and a half minutes long? There's nothing in this song that hasn't been said by the three-minute point, and yet the song is less than half over by that point. It's tough not to find yourself rolling your eyes as Stevie goes into the one-hundredth iteration of the same two lines of lyrics that make up the majority of this song. Pity, because it's a thing of beauty.

Black Man: lose

I said earlier that there were only two songs on this entire behemoth I found it challenging to listen to from start to finish. In one case, it's largely the sickly-sweet instrumentation, but in the other case - this one - the elementary-school-funk background is quite enjoyable indeed. But this is what it is: a dated eight-and-a-half-minute public service announcement, a well-meaning 'educational' reminder of the ethnic diversity of American 'heroes' and pioneers. The flag-waving fervour is apparently in honour of the USA's bicentennial in 1977, but it clearly comes from a genuine source of patriotism buried within a man who was apparently thinking of leaving the USA and moving to Ghana at around this time. And yet jingoism is no more attractive when 'genuine', and this whole exercise is unpleasant, as well-meaning as it might be. By the final two minutes, a mock 'classroom' featuring 'teachers' and children shouting out people's names, it's become an embarrassment to listen to.

Ngiculela - Es Una Historia - I am Singing: keep (side two, track four)

After the well-meaning browbeating of the previous song, we get yet another well-meaning celebration of diversity, in this case via a song that renders its chorus in three different languages - Zulu, Spanish and a clearly relieved English. I can't say much about how authentic Wonder's Zulu and Spanish are, but this kind of po-faced 'inclusiveness' has lost much of its lustre in the intervening thirty-six years. If all it had going for it was the novelty of hearing Wonder sing foreign languages, this track would probably not make my final tracklist. As it is, though, it also happens to feature a wonderful melody line, beautifully sung (the third iteration, in English, features perhaps Wonder's best singing on the album) and atop another one-man-band performance of real character (minus the percussion, apparently played by nine people, though I don't hear it).

Like it or not, in may cases albums' original tracklists have effects on my tracklists. The first four tracks on my album come from disc one of the double, and the final three tracks all come from the end of the package - including this one, which I raise to the position of 'penultimate track': side two, track four.

If It's Magic: lose

Probably the most experimental moment on this album is this particular track, arranged for solo voice and two overdubbed harmonicas with concert harp accompaniment. And nothing else. The harp is not the most versatile of instruments, and I must confess not one of my personal favourites. It makes the recording more than a little boring in my opinion, not helped by a bit of a ho-hum composition that fails to stick in the memory. The brief little snatches of harmonica are the highlights, but it's nowhere near enough.

As: keep (side two, track five)

Let's review, then, the main criticisms of this album: pat lyrics that cross the boundary of good taste, and songs that continue on and on for no good reason. Consider, then, the wonder of 'As', one of the album's four singles, in a version greatly condensed from these seven minutes. The overall groove of the track is a kind of easy-listening funk, a flowing and swaying groove of a jazzy thing played by a full band (as opposed to a one-man show) over which Herbie Hancock adds layers and layers of delightful Hammond paint. A chorus of background vocalists add a gospel feel to the proceedings, and the lyrics go on for pages and pages (in the original booklet) filled with various poetic and metaphysical ways to say 'I'll be loving you always'. Stevie Wonder the lyricist excels here, and nothing is trite, even the most unguarded lines. And he sets it to music that shows Stevie Wonder the composer (and arranger) at his very finest. Not a single moment is wasted, and though the song goes on for a whole seven minutes, it could have gone on even longer.

As this song gracefully fades away, it seems preposterous to follow it with anything else. Alas, by that definition Stevie Wonder is preposterous, because he does. But I don't. It's my final track: side two, track five.

Another Star: lose

Unless you're Emerson, Lake and Palmer, or Pink Floyd, how much hubris does it take to follow up a seven-minute epic with an eight-and-a-half-minute one? Plenty... but there are quite a few epic songs here, and as I've already said, most of them don't really merit their length. Does this one? Well, the feel of the song is quite attractive: it's a harder piece than 'As', with a more insistent forward motion and more hyperactive rolls of drums, over which any number of instruments percolate and a brass section competes with some rather repetitive 'la la la' vocals for primacy. Stevie Wonder's epic pieces tend to follow a structure of 'composition plus vamp', and when the composition merits it, the listener is more than pleased to listen to a bit of a vamp. The listener should want to; he or she should be loathe to let the song go. But in this case, the composition is three and a half minutes and the vamp is an indulgent five, tiresome even for the jammiest of us. By the bitter end, the song's very real charms have long since dissipated.

Saturn: lose

The seven-inch 'ep' that served as the third disc of Songs int he Key of Life, that runs at 33 rpm, lasts about fifteen minutes and contains four songs, is titled 'A Something's Extra', a name that implies it's a bit of an 'addendum' to the album proper, like bonus tracks on reissued CDs. None of the four songs are particularly show-stopping, and their relative anonymity suggests that most of the album's fans play the third disc much less than the first two. Yet no edition of the album exists that omits these four songs, so they're 'core' to the whole package. And they're quite decent, at times wonderful. Not this time, though, as the head-in-the-stars sci-fi of the lyrics and the swooping would-be 'grandeur' of the synths manage to evoke the most self-indulgent moments of both new-age music and prog-rock. At the same time. This track sits alongside 'Black Man' as only one of two songs on the whole project I find difficult to listen to.

Ebony Eyes: keep (side two, track three)

From the pomp of the stratosphere, we come crashing down with perhaps the most down-to-earth track on the whole collection: an earthy strut of a song built around staccato piano chords, with perhaps the most enjoyable talk-box performance not made by Roger Troutman. The song is incredibly charming, not in any misty-eyed or sickly way but just in the simple charms of a down-home vibe. It's a delightful song, all the more so for how unsung it is: tucked away on the seven-inch that no-one plays or even talks about, a tiny little piece of wonder. No surprise that Songs in the Key of Life is so highly rated: even its darkest corners are filled with delights.

Poor Stevie didn't know quite what to do with this song, and neither do I. My side two is a bit all-over-the-place, and I've put this one smack-dab in the centre of that: side two, track three.

All Day Sucker: lose

No mere ditty at five minutes, 'All Day Sucker' still feels quite compact for the funk workout it is. Though there's a bizarre mix of instrumentation, including a marimba here and there and a rhythm that somehow sounds like a malfunctioning drum machine, the piece is 'hard' by Wonder's standards: the guitar is quite 'dirty' and the bass is quite aggressive. All in all, though, the song does too little to stand out. It feels like an outtake: while clearly an enjoyable listening experience, it's not distinctive enough to rank with the very best, though still too good to dispose of entirely. It's a good listening, but on this epic album 'good' just isn't good enough.

Easy Goin' Evening (My Mama's Call): lose

Is this the album's final track? Or was that 'Another Star'? If it's that one, then the album goes out on an epic, with a four-song encore. If it's this one, then the track ends not with a bang but with a whimper, a lazy little instrumental shuffle so non-descript that at first you barely even notice it. But its charms sink in with time: it has an evocative harmonica melody and a nonchalant feel, mood music for a relaxed time at home. With your mama, I suppose. It's quite decent stuff, but ultimately it's 'throwaway', and there's too much here that's essential.

Better as a Single: "DrukQs" by Aphex Twin

2011-12-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

So remember Aphex Twin? He was a big deal at one point, that particular point being the late 90s. It was right around then that this shockingly prolific artist went from being a sensation in modest underground dance circles to being something much bigger than that - the weirdly-grinning face of the new post-rock world that the turn of the milennium was supposed to bring. More than any of the other shining lights of 1990s electronic music, it was Richard D. James (the only one of this man's many names that was given to him by his parents) who seemed to embody the spirit of the times, name-dropped as a formative influence and reviewed in all the right places.

And it's odd. Aphex Twin never made that big breakthrough into the mainstream, but it's tough to imagine any other person whose music is so extreme coming that close to the 'big time'. I mean, Aphex Twin's music is messed up. It's dance music you can't dance to, headphone music at times you can barely listen to.

DrukQs was Aphex Twin's first album under that name of the 21st century. And amazingly, a full decade later it remains his most recent. It's tough to know what Aphex Twin wanted to accomplish with this baffling album, but the critical drubbing and subsequent semi-retirement suggest either that he failed at it, or that he succeeded spectacularly at engineering a Dylanesque exit-stage-right act of self-sabotage. Could DrukQs be Aphex Twin's Self Portrait? Only James himself could possibly know for sure, and there's every chance that he doesn't either. Interesting, though, that it was the preceding album, I Care Because You Do, that had a very similar-looking self-portrait on the cover, and that this was the first release in a while not to prominently feature his grinning face.

What does this album feature? Well, it's thirty tracks over two CDs, but they're not stuffed full: they average only fifty minutes each, and the high track number is due to the number of shorter, fragmentary pieces that outnumber the longer beat-freak workouts. Almost half of these pieces aren't exactly electronic music at all but are two-minute pieces for piano, standard or prepared. A good number are brief random snippets or half-songs too, mixed in alongside the percussive blasts of what, for old time's sake, we might as well call 'Aphex acid': incredibly hyperactive abrasive sonic attacks that somehow still manage to compel.

Reviewers weren't kind. The disparate nature of the album - masterpieces mixed rather randomly alongside throwaways, flow constantly interrupted by regular mood shifts - reminded reviewers of contract-finishing vault-clearances. 'He's raided his hard disc for unfinished bits and pieces', they surmised. I don't quite agree - I see too much accomplishment on these two discs to believe that it was thrown-together. James very clearly is, however, working the shuffle-mode mood-juxtaposition concept for all it's worth, to the degree that an uncertainty what will happen at any given time is a part of the listener's experience of this record. If it's not Self-Portrait, then, call it James's White Album. And like that album, it's especially rife for a fan-made single-disc compilation.

Am I a fan? I think so. I found this music confounding, but I ultimately found it rewarding. You do have to be in the mood for it, and at times I found myself frustrated with the indulgences on display even on the twelve songs I selected. But one thing this album does do is reward repeated play. The ludicrous song titles, repeated left-turns into strange territory and lack of commercial consideration inspire the listener to disregard the project at first - something I think contemporary reviewers did - but given time the listener grows attached to any number of songs, which suddenly feel remarkably distinct from each other, despite their names. Had the reviewers played DrukQs a few more times than they likely did, I'm sure they'd have been kinder to it.

After all, perhaps it did meet the purpose James had set out for it. A good number of these ditties have ended up accompanying all sorts of televisual projects or sampled on other artists' work. So it has had a cultural effect, refreshingly devoid of the breathless 'future visionary' doggerel that had started to follow its creator, everywhere he went.

DrukQs

Side one

Avril 14th (1:55)

Jynweythek (2:14)
Cock/Ver10 (5:17)
Vordhosbn (4:42)
54 Cymru Beats (5:59)
Btoum-Roumada (1:56)

Side two

Afx237 v.7 (4:15)

Ziggomatic 17 (8:28)
Meltphace 6 (6:14)
Orban Eq Trx4 (1:27)
Hy A Scullyas Lyf A Dhagrow (2:09)
Kesson Dalef (1:18)

Jynweythek: keep (side one, track two)

This is the first of six prepared-piano pieces on the disc, which essentially means a normal piano that has had objects attached to its strings in order to alter the timbre of the piano. As an electronic composer whose genre tends to worry more about sound than melody, it's no surprise that James might find a piano's limited timbral range confining. Yet prepared piano projects tend in my opinion to upset the balance too much, to the extent that we wind up listening to the noises and missing the music.

As critics complained, the original DrukQs was programmed largely as if the product of an MP3 player on shuffle mode. That being the case, then, no specific arrangement that relied on juxtaposition could be any better or worse than the original. Perhaps, then, to be contrary, I took the opposite approach and programmed my single-disc quite deliberately: the main idea was to programme all of the electronic tracks back-to-back in more-or-less descending order by BPM (fast to slow), putting one 'clean' piano piece and one treated piano piece each at the beginning of the program and at its end. So this particular piece, one of two prepared piano pieces to make the cut, comes at the beginning, a curtain-raising intro before the percussive onslaught. But unlike the double, not the very beginning but track two.

Vordhosbn: keep (side one, track four)

The first electronica piece is a skittish D&B piece, cut-up drums flying all over the place and lathered in a thick slab over top of what is otherwise a mellow midtempo piece. D&B to me has always been about that juxtaposition between the mellow and the sonic onslaught - a chill-out room next door to a construction jackhammer. This piece is remarkably easy to listen to, challenging and compelling without ever becoming grating. D&B might be mere ancient history by now, but that doesn't stop us from musing that they don't make 'em like this anymore.

A hyperkinetic D&B piece, by rights this should go on side one, with its other superfast brethren. And so it does, as track four, sandwiched between two longer pieces.

Kladfvgbung Micshk: lose

Another prepared piano piece, the individual notes being almost as percussive as melodic and the song title as redolent of someone randomly hitting typewriter keys as the music itself. This attempts an unsettling cinematic feel, but it ultimately feels too gimmicky to really register. The prepared piano pieces, despite the noise they reliably bring, wind up succeeding or failing on the strength of their melodic content. And 'Jynweythek' winds up being more melodic.

Omgyjya-Switch7: lose

A 'switch', in addition to being a kind of button for turning things on or off, is a kind of whip. An this particular piece is filled with ugly sounds that seem whip-like to me. Ugliness is throughout this rather extreme electronic piece, and while at times it intrigues, by and large getting through the piece as a listener requires too much effort and offers too little reward.

Strotha Tynhe: lose

Without he 'preparations' to enhance the weirdness levels, Aphex Twin's 'traditional' piano pieces on this album are quite shockingly conventional. It seems as if Richard D. James is very determinedly writing himself a post-Aphex future in the 'classical' world with these pieces, and while he's perhaps not 'there' yet, he displays a talent for it that is quite impressive, given how far removed it is from Aphex Twin's already eclectic range of genres. There's not much, though, to distinguish one piece from another, as by and large they are competent but uneventful. This one is sparse, with moments of pure silence, and ends quite unresolved. But that's all I can report. Pretty, sure, but just pretty.

Gwely Mernans: lose

The collision on this album of breakbeat electronica and gentle piano pieces largely overlooks Aphex Twin's first real claim to fame: post-Eno ambient electronica, of which he has several albums' worth of examples. This particular piece is as close as DrukQs gets to that genre, and it is indeed 'ambient', an atmospheric collection of barely-there background sounds. It might be an attractive piece if it weren't for James's decision to drown the whole piece under an unrelenting nausea-inducing sub-bass rumble. Like a clever joke gone terribly wrong, this piece is all but impossible to listen straight through, from beginning to end - without, I suppose, succumbing to some unfortunate form of hysteria.

Bbydhyonchord: lose

The album gets deeply weird hereabouts, as the five-minute rumble is followed by a giggle-inducing two-and-a-half piece built around only the tackiest of synthesised congos and handclaps. It sounds like something straight out of 1985, and if that was the intent, then bravo. But remind me why I'd want to listen to it more than once?

Cock/Ver10: keep (side one, track three)

Unlike its two face-covered predecessors DrukQs was not promoted in a traditional way. There were certainly no user-friendly remix-laden CD singles featuring album 'highlights' baited with clever MTV-favourite videos. The closest Aphex Twin came to a 'single' was the pairing of this track with '54 Cymru Beats' on a 12-inch. Presumably, then, Aphex Twin and Warp Records figured that if anything would fill a dancefloor, this would. I would have to agree. DrukQs might be history's least danceable 'dance album', but this piece staggers along in a compelling beatwise fashion, attractive and enjoyable without ever getting especially grating. The best electronica contender this album offers for inclusion on the inevitable Aphex Twin's Greatest Hits disc, this obscenely-titled piece is an easy contender here as well.

It's perhaps not the fastest piece on the disc, but seeing as it's the 'hit', I front-load it all the same, as track three on side one, or the first 'proper' track after two warm-up intros.

Avril 14th: keep (side one, track one)

By leaps and bounds the best-known piano piece here, the gorgeous 'Avril 14' probably earned its fame in perpetuity when Kanye West chose to build a song from his My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy disc around it, an event that probably thickened Aphex Twin's pocketbook a fair amount. The song, which in my arbitrary classification is 'clean' piano even though there are two distinctly different timbres on display, is worth its celebrity, being a melodic and moving piece, well-structured and (amazingly for this album) hummable.

I love this track, and it was largely my desire to put it at the very beginning that inspired my entire programming logic. So there it is: side one, track one. My first 'taste' of what's to come, even if it doesn't resemble 'what's to come' very much.

Mt Saint Michel + Saint Michaels Mount: lose

The second-longest piece on the whole double-album is an almost comically hyperkinetic display of drum-programming wizardry. Its beat-mania explains why it was chosen to feature in one of two short films made by Chris Cunningham with music from this album, 'Monkey Drummer'. Unfortunately, that clip, like this song, seems more fascinated by intricate drum patterns than by anything else. While over the course of eight minutes, this piece does develop into something a bit more musical than mere rattling percussion, it's too little too late. It's like listening to someone play with a drum machine.

Gwarek2: lose

This confounding piece is almost seven minutes of random sound effects - not an ambient song at all or even a series of sound textures, it sounds like someone had accidentally left a tape recording in the corner of the scariest room in the universe. God knows what's going on at any given time, but as the minutes pass by the genuinely unsettling ambiance starts to grate on the nerves, especially after lengthy passages of what sounds merely like someone dragging something along a metal banister, or else complete silence. Nothing you'll need to hear twice.

Orban Eq Trx4: keep (side two, track four)

After six and a half minutes of noises, suddenly a return to music. Of sorts - like 'Mt. Saint Michel' before it, this brief 90-second snippet is more interested in the beat than in music, but at least it's a profound enough beat, a deep, rattling midtempo thing more suited to trip-hop than typical Aphex clattering noises. I find it quite enjoyable, even if it's hardly revelatory and indeed gives off the vibe of being a half-finished thing thrown onto the album to fill it up.

So why am I including it? Well, I genuinely like the feeling it invokes, and it adds a bit of variety - even if, as a slower piece, it winds up near the end of the album, where things are already getting more eclectic. It's actually how I end the 'album proper', with nothing but piano pieces to follow it - the final electronic tune, the last drumbeat. Side two, track four.

Aussois: lose

A few seconds of two or more voices talking. It's distorted, but I could probably make out what they were saying. If I cared enough to try.

Hy A Scullyas Lyf A Dhagrow: keep (side two, track five)

I listened to all of the piano songs on these two discs with an open mind, trying to avoid the impulse of decrying them as 'all the same'. And I certainly did give all of them a chance. So I can't explain why all four of the piano pieces I selected wound up coming from the first disc and none from the second. This particular piece has a beguiling melody and a sturdy song structure to it - so much so that the preparations cease to be especially noteworthy. They're not that radical anyway, merely giving each note a bit of a percussive tone. So instead it's the melody we tune in on. And a fine one it is, too.

Except for the few seconds of whispering, Aphex ends his first disc almost exactly how I end my only one, with the same three pieces. Fancy that. Anyway, this is side two, track five.

Kesson Dalef: keep (side two, track six)

At barely longer than a minute, this (unprepared) piano piece is brief, almost snippet-like. But it feels fully developed. It's a truly impressive piece, feeling every bit the equal of classical greats. It's an étude, I suppose, but I can't be sure of that because I don't know the first hing about classical music. If I did, I could probably put into words just what about the melody line here is so fraught with emotion, so compelling. I can't though, so we're left to just be moved by it, without knowing why.

All in all, I don't think the piano pieces do that much to add to the overall quality of DrukQs. Mostly they merely break up the flow of what could be a pretty interesting electronic album. But the two unprepared piano pieces I chose, 'Avril 14th' and this, truly are special, beautiful pieces perfectly worthy of opening and closing the album. This, and not some electronic click-and-whir, is what I choose to end the album with - as track six on side two.

54 Cymru Beats: keep (side one, track five)

The first track on the second disc and the other track on the album's 'single', this rather hysterical piece got rather good reviews while critics were panning the album as a whole. I can see why - it is truly a journey, a piece that can't stand still as it samples all manner of speaking toys and moves from mood to mood. And you could almost dance to it if you tried - like its 12" partner "Cock/ver10", it's a relatively user-friendly piece, enjoyable without getting too extreme. Well, for the first four and a half minutes, anyway. The last minute and a half is a rather painfully extreme attempt at eardrum-bending, with high-pitched feedback-like noises all over the place.

I was tempted not to include the track for that very reason. Then, however, I thought I would include it, but let it conclude side one, so that you could lift up the needle earlier, if you wanted to. And I didn't even wind up doing that either, though I came close. Instead, it's second-to-last, side one track five.

Btoum-Roumada: keep (side two, track five)

And a little Christmas cheer for all of us... this is a rather formless two minutes of what sounds like a sampling keyboard's take on church bells, chiming out what might be a Christmas carol. It would be nice if it actually cohered into something hummable, but it's still an intriguing thing.

Probably not intriguing enough to include, but I think the varied texture made me want to toss it in the mix. Closing side one (as track six) with it, letting it follow '64 Cymru Beats' just as it does on the double, requires me to entirely break my 'plan' for the sequencing of my album. It's a long and boring story, but it's here for reasons more to do with track lengths than anything else. So after three tracks of manic beats on side one, suddenly there's two minutes of church bells. Then you turn the record over to experience another electronic sonic onslaught. And that's just the way it is.

Lornaderek: lose

Our little Richie's mum and dad sing happy birthday into his answerphone, and somehow here I am a decade later in another country listening to it. Aw. It's so sweet I just might vomit.

QKThr: lose

This track is also called 'Penty Harmonium', which gets the instrument right anyway. It's a harmonium, and an old and squeaky one, evidently. But James has forgotten to actually write anything that we'd want to hear played on a harmonium. Instead, he just plays around with it for a bit, the third track of WTF in a row.

Btoum-Roumada: keep (side two, track five)

Drum and bass music tends to clock in at 160 bpm or so - which is spasmodically fast for a dance song, but it also double-time for 80 bpm, a slowish tempo with a sensuous and soulful feel. This dichotomy between gabba-gabba fast and heartbeat-slow lies at the heart of all of the best D&B pieces. This perhaps isn't even a D&B piece, since they tend to be fast-with-slow-elements, whereas I would categorise this as slow-with-fast-elements. It's a pretty sophisticated groove which, over six and a half minutes that feel much shorter, feels a lot more sleepy than the thudding beats on top would indicate.

That's certainly why I put it on side two, as part of the gradual 'wind-down'. It is indeed music that I can picture you not dancing but sitting to. Chill-out music, despite the tempo. The third track of side two and the final lengthy piece.

Bit 4: lose

A little bit of noise carries on for 20 seconds. For no good reason.

Prep Gwarlek 3b: lose

If the name is anything to go on (and it probably isn't), this is a kind of kin to the similarly-named 'noise' piece on disc one, but with that 'prep' in the name perhaps suggesting 'prepared piano'. Truth be told, I have no idea what this is. It sounds to me like all of the preparations, none of the piano. It sounds, in fact, like the mechanisms of a piano, thumping and squeaking as they move, with none of the sounds of the piano themselves. If that is indeed what we're hearing here, then while that makes for an interesting sonic experiment, it doesn't make for anything more than that.

Father: lose

And then the piano itself, with none of the preparations. Here it's a piece made out of a series of unusual chords played in blocks, no melody anywhere to be heard. It's pretty, I guess, but it's not overly enjoyable. And it's not even a minute long.

Taking Control: lose

While not quite as outré as Bbydhyonchord on disc one, this seven-minute electro workout still seems rather surprisingly retro. or is that 'generic'? Surely not: there's a decent amount of invention here, but there's also a fair amount of repetition here, as if a robot had taken control of the drum machine after all. In, say, 1994. The minutes pass but there's not really all that much to show for it. Even if poor old Lorna and Derek show up again.

Petiatil Cx Htdui: lose

Back to the piano, for a bit of a muddy piece that has attractive fragments of melody but not enough definition really to cohere. I'll grand that its directionless moodmaking is 'dreamy', perhaps a bit wistful or even nostalgic. But while it's not bad, it doesn't really stand out either. Not on an album that has a dozen piano interludes.

Ruglen Holon: lose

The piano bits are coming hard and heavy as we enter the long shadows of this double-disc. Another prepared piece, and this time out it's all about the preparations. There is not a single percussion instrument here and yet 'percussive' is the end result. You get the sense that the piece was composed entirely around the odd noises generated by whatever it was James stuck on the piano strings. This particular track is rather like trying to make music on a typewriter: intriguing, but not melodic enough to actually be interesting.

Afx237 v.7: keep (side two, track one)

The other of two short films by Chris Cunningham soundtracked to material from this album was the incredibly disturbing 'Rubber Johnny', a six-minute experimental piece that uses this song to accompany what I can only presume is the flight of fancy of a deformed, handicapped shut-in. It's to the not-always-pleasant grooves of this particular bit of weirdness that the titular Johnny frantically contorts his limbs and, later, bashes his head against the camera in rather horrifically graphic detail. As a song, it's a bit lacking, though it has its moments. Like much of DrukQs, I find I have to be in the mood to truly 'get' it; when I'm not, it seems rather sadly routine.

Still, when I'm 'feeling' it, I get enough value from the sonic onslaught that is this song to have included it. On side two, no less, which makes little sense when you consider how thumping this track is. But I use it to begin side two, by which point in our gradual slow-down, we evidently haven't progressed very far.

Ziggomatic 17: keep (side two, track two)

At eight and a half minutes long, the longest track on the disc is this manic head-rush of a song. It's a pretty 'epic' journey from one sonic soundscape to another, an intricate combination of music elements buried beneath the relentless beats. Somehow, the whole thing - even those spasmodic drumbeats and the oddly Kraftwerk-like ending - seems curiously warm and comforting. It never gets especially 'dark', and as a result, it winds up with a curiously optimistic glow, that you'd almost call 'celestial' as it fades out to a sincere computerised voice saying, 'that you for your attention, bye'.

All of which conspires in its own way to make this a good album closer. James didn't put it there exactly, but since it's the last electronic composition before two piano pieces (hey! he stole my idea!), effectively it is a closer. It's not for me, though; in fact, far from it. It's my track two on side two.

Beskhu3epnm: lose

The last prepared piano piece here is one of the least interesting. The preparations are percussive, and to that end something approaching a beat is conjured from the notes being played. Interesting, I suppose, but not very exciting. Then, at around the half-way point, even that goes away, and the song becomes even less exciting.

Nanou2: lose

The title of this piece implies it's a sequel to 'Nannou' from the 'Windowlicker' single. Yet it is in fact one final 'pure' piano piece, a moment of serenity with which to close out the album. It's by some distance the longest of the piano pieces on DrukQs. It's atmospheric, and a pleasant way to conclude this hundred-minute embarrassment of riches, but ultimately a bit too repetitive to merit inclusion on my slightly more disciplined single-length.

Better as a Single: "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook" by Ella Fitzgerald

2011-11-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

I had read that one of either Blonde on Blonde or Freak Out! was the first double-album of the rock era, and somehow I convinced myself that meant 'the first double-album ever', at least twelve inches in size and 33 rpm in speed.

Of course, that turns out not to be the case at all - there are several outside of rock that precede it. This current two-hour double-record set is only the first of a lengthy series of releases, some of which were as much as four-disc boxed sets. It's the fact that this particular Cole Porter volume is the first, from 1956, that made me want to take it on.

So what is it? Well, it's Norman Granz, owner of Verve Records, trying to make a 'statement'. And a great one it was too - that the USA had produced a handful of songwriters, working primarily in the medium of stage musicals, every bit the equal of the revered composers of the European classical tradition. Working together with the amazing vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, he set out to enshrine these composers in a series of 'songbook' releases, that with varying degrees of comprehensiveness, tried to 'catalogue' their works.

So this is a 'cover album', really - tribute album, in modern parlance. But it was a major statement at the time, both in that it was the first time a project of this magnitude was attempted and also in that Fitzgerald and conductor/arranger Buddy Bregman put a hell of a lot of fine detail work into these performances. At 32 tracks and almost two hours, this is epic in side, but there's never a workaday feel. You can tell sincere effort was put into every one of these recordings, and the result is frequently stunning.

But the nature of the project causes me to reconsider the entire thing I do here: to what extent is my job to critique Cole Porter's compositions and to what extent Ella Fitzgerald's performances? Should a lacklustre take on a genius song be included above a gripping recording of a run-of-the-mill tune? And furthermore, while the 32-track double gains a certain amount of gravitas and authority from its sheer bulk (while no means a comprehensive take on the prolific Porter's work, it's certainly more than a mere overview), how can I make my truncated single-disc be anything more than merely 'a dozen Porter songs assembled more or less randomly', or even worse 'the most ubiquitous dozen of Porter's stand-bys assembled for the millionth time'?

I don't claim to have successfully answered those questions. I would say that I attempted to evaluate Fitzgerald and Bregman, after all the authors of this particular aural document, more than Porter himself, but ultimately I was looking for a cohesive and memorable listening experience, and that quite obviously involves both. Regarding my ultimate tracklist, I think my single-disc plays well, moving through moods much like his stage musicals themselves must have. It's certainly not half of the Verve original - it's a good deal shorter than that. The original is long, not merely eight songs per side but eight frequently extended recordings. Each side is nearly thirty minutes, a rather amazing feat for 1956 unless the discs were either incredibly tinny or incredibly prone to scratching. Me, however, I have an almost superstitious attraction to the 12-track album, and anything more than that would stretch credibility, I think.

The Songbook series continued, but I don't think I will. I've been stepping out of my comfort zone a lot recently, and it's been an enjoyable experience. I enjoyed this album greatly, developing a real respect for Fitzgerald. Porter I was not a stranger to, but I'll freely admit my knowledge of him comes largely from two sources: (a) the 1990s AIDS-benefit project Red Hot + Blue, which offered up at times radical interpretations of Porter classics but which I ate up at the time, and (b) a stretch of time when I listened to a lot of Capitol- and Reprise-era Frank Sinatra. On some level, these two sources constantly informed my understanding and appreciation of what Norman Granz, Buddy Bregman and Ella Fitzgerald put on vinyl an amazing 55 years ago.

Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook

Side one

Anything Goes (3:23)

It's Alright with Me (3:09)
Always True to You in My Fashion (2:50)
I Get a Kick Out of You (4:02)
Miss Otis Regrets (3:02)
Love for Sale (5:55)

Side two

You're the Top (3:35)

Too Darn Hot (3:50)
Night and Day (3:06)
So in Love (3:52)
I Love Paris (4:59)
Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye (3:34)

All Through the Night: lose

Fitzgerald, Bregman and Granz get the two-hour epic started with this one, positioning the experience of listening to the album as a 'nighttime' event. I suppose Porter would approve - I don't think he would envision much of his oeuvre as Sunday morning music. This particular piece is no exception, with a sighing sadness built entirely from chromatic descending scales. It's pretty enough, but it doesn't weigh very heavily on the imagination, and having little to say about it is not really a recommendation for its inclusion in my single-length.

Anything Goes: keep (side one, track one)

As is often the case on the Songbook, Fitzgerald includes the 'verse', the introduction to the song which is often removed when sung. It's a bit bizarre, mentioning Plymouth Rock three times in eight lines, but introduces the much-better main part of the song, which makes the point that customs and standards have worsened in the USA. It's hilarious to hear someone grumbling about that in 1934, when the song was written, or in 1956, when Fitzgerald performed it, more evidence that 'the world is going to hell in a handbasket' is a timeless gripe. What makes the song great, and one of the songs most closely associated with Porter, is the ambiguity: Porter's words imply derision, but there's every sense that Porter is not overly upset by the perceived moral degradation. Neither does Fitzgerald, who seems to be having a ball with the song's casual swing, and so do the brass who replace much of the song's lyrics with an exciting instrumental central section. A triumph, all told.

This was maybe the entry I was most ambivalent about, and I'm using it to start off my whole collection (side one, track one). Crazy? Well, mostly it's to start things off playful. Both sides move from playful to serious, which I thought was a good way to progress with this collection. And I'm not saying 'Anything Goes' is exactly a statement of purpose, but it does make an arresting open statement. Even if I don't like the beginning.

Miss Otis Regrets: keep (side one, track five)

Is Cole Porter truly one of the American greats? Well, of course he is - but let's ask it differently; is he one of the greats in the establishment of a musical idiom and mode of expression that could be described as in some core way 'American'? Well, I believe he's that too, and I think this jaw-dropping composition is an excellent example: as cinematic in scope as anything Hollywood spends dozens of millions of dollars making, this ballad tells the story of a young socialite apologetically unable to fulfil her social duties, due to having murdered an ex-lover and having been lynched for it the night before. Dark as tar, then, but possessing a gentle fragility that stands as total odds with the subject matter. Bregman needs nothing more than a piano and a smoky single-spotlight ambiance to wrap around Fitzgerald's hauntingly poetic performance. This is a truly amazing piece of work.

I'm not sure why exactly, but I really wanted this on side one. I think maybe because I knew which song i wanted to end the collection with, which was also slow and haunting but not, well, grisly. I thought these deserved to be removed from each other. I didn't wind up finishing the side with it, and I kind of was thinking that I would, but instead it's next-to-last, track five, on side one.

Too Darn Hot: keep (side two, track two)

What is this song about? Well, it's a quick-stepping piece with a bouncing bassline and strutting brass. And the song is about the effect temperature has on libido? Really? Surprisingly enough, yes, and it's carried off with aplomb. Porter's lyrics are genuinely funny, even as the decades have rolled on. The song is a lot of fun, and Fitzgerald is having a lot of fun singing it, barely even able at times to control herself. Hot indeed.

Both of my sides start light-hearted; seeing how close this comes on the double to 'Anything Goes', perhaps I should have put it on side one as well. But I didn't - for me, it's side two track two, the last whimsical piece before the lights dim.

In the Still of the Night: lose

This Porter composition is the reason why the doo-wop standard you probably start singing in your mind the moment you see this title is spelt 'nite'. That beautiful song is the better of this one, and yet this present recording's intriguing fast-and-slow-at-the-same-time arrangement sits on top of a sturdy melody. There's nothing really bad at all to say about this song or this recording: it's all perfectly good stuff. It doesn't make the cut, but it sits most sadly on the cutting room floor.

I Get a Kick Out of You: keep (side one, track four)

The 'introduction', which lasts forty-five seconds, presents the rather intriguing sound of Fitzgerald accompanied solely by an electric guitar. It's quite pretty, which is good, because the introduction is the low-point of this rather amazing song, which compares the excitement of spending time with an unrequited love interest to other lauded thrills such as champagne, air travel and, rather surprisingly, cocaine. Porter's walking melody is memorable and expressive, and Fitzgerald carries it very well. The arrangement is a touch too lounge, relaxed where it could have had a bit more, ahem, kick. And yet it's all so professionally and expertly done that it seems silly to complain.

I use this song on side one to bridge 'fast and playful' to 'slow and contemplative' - in other words, side one, track four. It's still playful, but in service of genuine romantic love, and the tempo is somewhere between chipper and morose.

Do I Love You?: lose

This song, a series of rhetorical questions built around the titular question, is not overly compelling a melody, the arrangement more or less just sticks to the script, and Fitzgerald embellishes the melody very little indeed. And yet where in most cases such ingredients would imply a sadly run-of-the-mill space-filler, in this case the ingredients are so strong, and Fitzgerald's vocal performance so compelling, that 'sticking to the plot' is more than enough. This is an understated and yet wistfully romantic song, recorded in a version so quintessential that nobody, post-Fitzgerald, has really had anything more to say about it. I don't include it, but that doesn't mean I don't like it.

Always True to You in My Fashion: keep (side one, track three)

For the most part, songs that I knew before listening to this collection have had distinct advantages. It's a prejudice, I suppose, or laziness, unless it's merely that it's Cole Porter's best songs which have been his most famous. In any case, the risk is that I'll excise this collection entirely of its lesser-known numbers, leaving us merely with 'Ella Fitzgerald sings only those most ubiquitous of Cole Porter's songs, which you've no doubt heard sung by a dozen people already'. So let me puff my chest out a bit when I announce that I've fallen head over heels with this charming little obscurity: it's only the best of fun, uptempo and upbeat with cute lyrics, musical quotations from differing sources and an amazing piano line that underpins the titular chorus. Really, it's all about that piano. Whatever it is, though, I love it.

I put this third on side one, third of a three-song set that's kind of coyly 'oh my!' shocking. Both this and 'It's Alright With Me' play around with devotion and cheating, from opposite sides. And they're similar tempos too.

Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love): lose

'It', of course, isn't really 'falling in love', but something more base in nature that also involves two people. Porter giggles like a naughty schoolgirl at his tiny little double-entendres, but what apparently shocked when this song was composed barely rises above Disney level today. This coyness is genuinely charming, but to be honest that's all that really charms in what is otherwise a self-conscious attempt on Porter's part to be too-clever-by-half, listing nationalities and species of animals which copulate, including such eye-rolling examples as 'educated fleas' and 'Lithuanians and Letts'. To her credit, I suppose, Fitzgerald finds the song's exact tone, which is somewhere too far on the spectrum from playful to smarmy.

Just One of Those Things: lose

I don't really know enough about musical theory to pin it down precisely, but I can tell you that what upsets me here in this performance is the rhythm. It's a sturdy composition, expertly performed, but the arrangement has a kind of 'swing' to it that I find rather removes the song's power. I can't quite get into it, which is a pity, as it's a great song. It's a hell of a song, in fact, that ought to roll in its own confident fashion toward the conclusion, but here rather fares like a car with a bent axle. Unfortunately.

Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye: keep (side two, track six)

One of Porter's most gorgeous ballads, and Fitzgerald owns it, with a performance of such performance and grace that it must have changed the minds of dozens of singers who were thinking of taking it on. She doesn't experiment at all with the song, performing it merely as it was written, but performing it with absolute assurance and mastery. 'There's no love song finer', the lyrics go. They might just be right. It's an absolute heart-breaker.

'Goodbye', right? So last song on the album - side two, track six, then, right? Might seem a bit of a cheesy joke, but really - it leaves the album with a sense of termination, but not quite resolution. Keep 'em wanting more, they always say. Oh wait... I'm getting rid of tonnes. Oh well.

All of You: lose

A mere hundred-and-five seconds, short by the standards of the Songbook. And yet, it's mostly just a 'ditty' anyway, fine by any reasonable standards, but not especially memorable. It's a simple game lyrically about how much of a person to love. And yet simplicity is no advantage here, as it's in service of a song with no real depth.

Begin the Beguine: lose

One of Porter's absolute classics down the years, but the one of his classics I'm least attracted to. I get very little out of this composition; it's probably just too closely tied to its era. The 'beguine' is a Caribbean dance style not well evoked, in this arrangement at least. It's tough to walk away from this humming a melody, which ought to be one of the defining qualities of a 'classic'. Fitzgerald and Bregman do just fine for themselves, but in service of what?

Get Out of Town: lose

An attractive torch song, one with a sense of foreboding floating in the air. One is often tempted while listening to these two discs to forget that Porter wrote musicals, and that all of these songs are in service, one way or another, of a plotline. That doesn't always matter, but this time out it does seem to. I feel I'm only getting half the story here, and the result is that this undoubtedly beautiful song remains little more than a mere curio.

I am in Love: lose

Fitzgerald follows this song's gradual upward escalator ride as ably as she can, but apart from the surprising appearance of the word 'cyanide' in a popular song, Porter's composition offers only exactly as much inspiration as its sadly generic title would suggest. It goes on longer than four minutes, which is a long time indeed for a song that fades so readily into the woodwork.

From This Moment On: lose

This could be a showstopping dramatic ballad, all swelling strings and crescendos. But it's played completely differently: light-hearted and strutting. Or 'swinging', of course, as they used to call it back then. A mid-song instrumental break brings Fitzgerald's performance up a step as she spontaneously rewrites the composition and seems constantly an inch removed from breaking out into scat. It's really quite exciting indeed.

I Love Paris: keep (side two, track five)

To my ears, 'I Love Paris' has always seemed to be one of the more minor of Porter's classics, a tourist-board jingle that gets the job done but isn't really worth more than 90 seconds of our time. So what on earth compelled Fitzgerald and Bregman to transform it, of all the possibilities, into a five-minute epic, luxuriously taking its time through a lengthy instrumental middle section and two complete vocal run-throughs? Whatever the underlying logic, the result is amazing, wide-screen cinematic (more so than most of the Songbook) in a way that allows you to just close your eyes and picture the two young émigrés that are the inevitable protagonists of a romantic comedy, falling in love on the romantic streets of Gay Paree.

Content-wise, this song has no right whatsoever to be the 'climax', side two track five, and yet there is is anyway. Why? Well, as much as I've attempted to consider lyrical content while programming my single-disc, ultimately it's mood that matters. This is the other lengthy cinematic showstopper on my disc, near the end of a side. And it fits well between the moody pieces that precede it and the gorgeous goodbye that follows it.

You Do Something to Me: lose

This is one of Porter's sexier songs of seduction, in Bregman's hands a light bounce driven on a prominent upright-bass line with muted horns in the background. The result is coy and flirtatious, a respectful take on a standard so well-known it's difficult to comment on. Good, but not good enough.

Ridin' High: lose

This song was apparently first sung by Ethel Merman, and its brassy swagger is probably better suited to Merman than it is to Fitzgerald. It's not a bad performance, but it fails to convince, at least until two minutes in, when Fitzgerald introduces her own personality to the performance, lightening her touch and playing games with the melody. It becomes a much more attractive effort at this point, but it's too late to save the song.

You'd be So Easy to Love: lose

I suppose I'm just naturally attracted to the ballads. Porter can write a great uptempo song, but it seems that when the mood is taken down a notch or two that he really shines. Take this particular song for example: there isn't even much I can say about it, it's neither better nor worse than a dozen others here, and it's not immediately attention-grabbing. Yet it weaves its own spell, gradually but assuredly, and after hearing it a few times you find yourself quite captivated by the song's beauty and its downcast barroom atmosphere. It truly is lovely, though.

It's Alright with Me: keep (side one, track two)

I first heard this song when I was so young that its moral ambiguities flew entirely over my head and I was left merely confused by the song: is she interested in this guy, or isn't she? Now of course, all these years later it's the bravery of those moral ambiguities that intrigue. Well, that and the fabulous show-stopping arrangement Bregman trots out here, with brass instruments ringing out and exploding all over the place. Fitzgerald seems to appreciate the backdrop and carries her performance off with a very particular panache that suggests she's aware of the problems that potentially result from picking someone up on the 'rebound', the scenario the song describes - aware, but not really all that concerned. She seems merely caught up in the magic of the moment, with the end result that we are as well.

This shares with 'Anything Goes' a certain libertine approach to moral and convention, and also a light-footed uptempo 'good time' feel. I think it works well back-to-back with it, so it's my track two.

Why Can't You Behave?: lose

A pretty ballad with a stately, autumnal mood and with Fitzgerald's curious yawning vocals in a fine performance. It's really quite good stuff, but for one reason or another, it never quite clicks, and five minutes is a long time to devote to a lack of clicking.

What is This Thing Called Love?: lose

An incredibly prominent bassline moves this song along, accompanied primarily by muted brass, which are highlighted on a central instrumental break. The composition isn't up to all that much, though, and the song fades from the memory as soon as it finished.

You're the Top: keep (side two, track one)

This is another list-song, built entirely out of items that Porter would compare a romantic interest to. No Shakespearean 'summer's day', though, as Porter's frequently bizarre (though very much of-their-time) comparisons include Mickey Mouse, Mahatma Gandhi, Jimmy Durante's nose, camembert, cellophane, turkey dinner, and indeed a Shakespearean sonnet. How successful 'you're cellophane' ever was as a pick-up line we'll perhaps never know, but what makes this song charm where 'Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)' fails is in its sincerity, and that's probably to Fitzgerald's credit, as she sounds like she's having a ball here with the silly, playful lyrics and the light touch of the orchestration. Porter wrote for many moods, and Fitzgerald nailed them all, so it's nice to see 'sweet and playful' carried out so well.

My single-disc record is a true record, and to play it as a continuous twelve-song programme is to face the horrid shock when the epic, emotionally rich 'Love for Sale' fades out and this cheery ditty comes on. But there's a gap there - side one ends, and side two begins, and with it (we can think of them as different 'acts') a fresh start. We're back to light-hearted and cheery. Plus, it's 'the top', right?

Love for Sale: keep (side one, track six)

Like 'I Love Paris', Fitzgerald and Bregman are clearly aiming for a cinematic feel here. Obviously this is from a musical - but close your eyes, and that smoky sax and deliberately walking bassline evoke everything you need. A hymn to prostitution? Absolutely - a risqué proposition for 2011, to say nothing of the better part of a century that has elapsed since Porter wrote it. But Fitzgerald puts every conflicting emotion into her vocal performance, and the result is enchanting. Six minutes might seem more than strictly required for a pre-rock song, but you don't find that it drags on at all. It's a bit of a grower, but in the end it's truly a great track.

My emotions for this song really changed as I progressed with this project, to the point that by the end I'd given it pride of place as a dramatic finale for the end of act one.

It's De-Lovely: lose

This odd ditty is based entirely around words (both real and imagined) that begin with the letters 'del-', a bizarre conceit to be sure, but one topped by the clunky introduction that has Fitzgerald singing 'while I crucify the verse'. Not much of it makes sense, and it doesn't leave the most pleasant of tastes in the mouth, as well as Fitzgerald sings it.

Night and Day: keep (side two, track three)

One of Porter's best-ever songs in one of the best-ever interpretations. So monotonous that most people have historically had no idea what to do with it, the jungle-music introduction in Fitzgerald's capable hands becomes the steamy heart of the song, tympani and pizzicato strings building an amazing tension that only breaks as the song crashes into its singable main chorus. When it comes, the jungle's overbearing leaves part to make way for a 1950s ballroom of an enchanting sophistication. The whole thing is quite gorgeous, really.

Like 'I Get a Kick Out of You', this is a 'bridge song', moving from uptempo dance tunes to moodier fare. Of course, this song inverts it, starting out heavily atmospheric before picking up a danceable beat. But it never really cuts a rug - it's a midtempo piece, and so as track three on side two it straddles the lightness of the first two tracks with the darkness of the final three. Night and day, in other words, or more exactingly day and then night.

Ace in the Hole: lose

This recording clocks in at less than two minutes, which on the Songbook is a decent indication of how seriously it was taken. Porter's melody is sturdy if unoriginal, and the lyrics are pretty much a one-trick pony. Filler, ultimately. Even with the reference to Satan.

So in Love: keep (side two, track four)

If I knew music terminology better than I do outside of a rock context, I could probably identify the style this song is performed in - merengue or something, who knows. I can tell you that it's wonderful - brooding and intense and yet still delicate. It's an evocative and slightly unsettling experience, and while Porter deserves credit for that, Bregman and Fitzgerald are certainly more responsible for it. Shadows lengthen here, and were this truly a musical, it'd be an edge-of-the-seat scene.

One of my favourite parts of my single-disc is the home stretch on side two where it gets all evocative. That's where this one belongs, side two track four, which on many albums is the Bermuda's Triangle.

I've Got You Under My Skin: lose

It shouldn't really be relevant to judge the quality of a performance based on a subsequent reinterpretation, and given the 'alternate-history' nature of this blog, it's anachronistic as well. Yet Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle's absolute demolition of this song - surely a masterpiece in the art of reinterpretation - turns this version into a sadly tentative 'stroll' through the song. It's still a great song, but this performance fails to catch fire.

I Concentrate on You: lose

To keep on about Sinatra, in his hands this became a sensuous, pulsating bossa nova. Now that's reinterpretation, too, and maybe just as radical. But since it takes it in another direction, it doesn't complete with Fitzgerald's more traditional take on the song, which brings out its natural beauty in an unshowy way.

Don't Fence Me In: lose

I've heard it said that this Songbook was so artistically successful because it bridged a divide - that Fitzgerald and Porter inhabited different worlds but were able to find common ground here. I disagree that they were so different, and that strikes me as a racial interpretation that fails to hold water. After all, for cultural disconnect, look to this track, an ersatz 'cowboy' song that Porter actually gets more or less right despite having probably never even set foot outside a city. Fitzgerald seems lost in it, though, evoking none of the wide open fields and thirst for freedom that the song praises.

Better as a Single: "The River" by Bruce Springsteen

2011-10-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

So the story of The River is this: Springsteen had been intending to release a normal-length release. He'd even written and recorded it, plus given it a cover and a title: The Ties that Bind. An eleventh-hour change-of-heart had him deciding the material wasn't varied enough, so he pulled it and went back to the studio to record some more material. In the end, the story goes, he recorded fully a second album's worth and decided to mix the whole mess together into the dog's breakfast that is The River.

The clever trick of the album is that that's exactly what it sounds like: like two entirely different albums forced to share elbow-room. And to that end, my job would seem to be clear: extricate one from the other. I've seen the tracklist of The Ties that Bind, though, and it seems that the two albums that seem to exist across these four sides are mostly a trick of the light: historically, no such beasts existed.

Fine, then. Who needs history? This rather frustrating album veers between fist-pumping stadium-bar rabble-rousers that for the most part utterly fail to impress and more emotional mid-tempo tracks that range from adequate to truly exceptional. I can recognise the value of a good ol' foot-stomper from time to time, but as far as material of quality, as far as stuff I'd actually want to listen to (a) sober and (b) more than once, there's really no competition here. Much of my work here will consist of removing the frat-rock and preserving the kitchen-drama stuff. Not entirely, I should mention, as a few of the rockier songs rank among the album's, and in fact Springsteen's, very best. But my album has a much slower average BPM than the double.

The slower tracks are not perfect either. Springsteen has a way with a melody that could kindly be described as 'respectful of tradition': his compositions are not groundbreaking musically, and in several cases it's a wonder he avoided plagiarism suits. The most affecting lyrics are ultimately as inelegant and ham-fisted as the repetitive rockers, but somehow the tongue-tied nature of the best of them is actually something that appeals. Cliché as it is, this is really popular music about and for the 'common man', and Springsteen's failure to couch his tales of working-class pride and working-class defeat in flowery or overdone language works in their favour: it's a more direct pipeline to the emotions he's trying to tap into, even if on paper the words can at times be embarrassingly clunky. Sung though, they are at times enormously moving. At times. I think if any double album has ever been perfectly suited to the 'Better as a Single' treatment, it is probably this particular one. It's not a great album by any means, but if you sift through it, there is a great album hidden within it: here is that album.

The River

Side one

Out on the Street (4:18)

The River (5:01)
The Ties That Bind (3:34)
I Wanna Marry You (3:30)
Point Blank (6:06)

Side two

Hungry Heart (3:19)

Fade Away (4:46)
Stolen Car (3:54)
Wreck on the Highway (3:54)
Independence Day (4:50)

The Ties That Bind: keep (side one, track three)

This would have been the title track to the single-record Springsteen was considering releasing. It's a fists-in-the-air stadium-filler, not quite an 'anthem' but a crowd-pleaser anyway. It's filled with a lot of Springsteen's most lunkheaded tendencies - turning the word 'bind' into a thirteen-syllable word at one point and a pained grunt at another point. The chiming guitars remind me of the Byrds, and are a highlight. It's not a wonderful song, certainly the inferior of what eventually became the title track, but it's good enough. It doesn't offend, it has something to say about family, which is a major theme of this album, and it's less empty than most of the uptempo songs here.

This is my third track, sandwiched between two songs explicitly about marriage on a side that's programmed as a series of mood contrasts. After up and down, uptempo again, though not for long.

Sherry Darling: lose

A truism: if you have to dub the sounds of people having fun onto your song, it's probably because the song can't do it by itself. It's like a laugh track, and while it probably plays into Springsteen's fantasy of remaining some great undiscovered bar band, the fact is that most bar bands remain undiscovered because they suck. This song doesn't suck, but it comes pretty close, and it's sad to hear Springsteen refusing to grow up by singing stuff like this when there was so much more that he was capable of.

Jackson Cage: lose

You get the sense he's trying to say something here - there's lots of words and ideas. The name of the song sounds like it means something - moreso than, say, 'I'm a Rocker'. But the Dylan harmonica aside, there's not really anything exciting enough in this song to make you really want to dig in and figure it out.

Two Hearts: lose

Fourth in a row now. Side one's almost finished, and the overall feel has been party-band. This is starting to seem like a rather inconsequential album - or that is to say that knowing what else is on this album, what's to come very soon, makes the first four tracks flatly monotonous. This one chugs along through its predictable paces in a pleasant enough fashion. It's all just fine, really, for the two minutes and forty-five seconds it takes to listen to it. Immediately after, though, you've completely forgotten every not of it.

Independence Day: keep (side two, track five)

Daddy issues transmuted into art. A major accomplishment by any standard, and one that should have been heard more widely - even if it borrows more from a single source, Van Morrison, than it really should have. The tale is that our narrator is leaving home, after the millionth argument with his father, not slamming doors in anger but pushing them closed with a weary resignation. The lyrics are intelligent, emotionally direct and confused - as they would be. Springsteen doesn't attempt to make his narrator perfectly righteous. What he has to say isn't even entirely fair to the stoic and emotionally-stunted father he's addressing, but it's all very honest. It feels autobiographical, especially since he sings about men who have mixed relationships with their fathers on several occasions, and more importantly that organ and the sax cut to the heart, mining emotions even Springsteen's beautiful composition can't access.

Might be first on Bruce's album, but on mine, this is my third wide-screen family-misery epic. Each deserves prominent placement somewhere, and I decided to use this one as my finishing touch. Why? Well, if nothing else, 'goodbye' is one of the main words in the lyric. Just another broken family, just another case where blood is so much thicker than water it starts to clot. Take a baby Aspirin, maybe?

Hungry Heart: keep (side two, track one)

A sentimental favourite for me: my mother absolutely adored this song when it came out. In retrospect, it should unnerve me that one of my parents was so enamoured with a song about a spouse escaping a marital union, but I'm quite sure it wasn't the words but that simple drum stomp, those background vocals and that roller-rink organ solo. 'Anthemic', right? Gorgeous and visceral, either way. Springsteen claims he wrote this for the Ramones, which probably confirms he didn't really listen to the Ramones much. Their version would probably have sucked, but this is glorious. I should also mention that toward the end, he manages a quintuple-negative, which must surely be in the Guinness Book of World Records, isn't it?

I really wanted to start the album with this, and did right up until the last minute. But there's a more obvious candidate, so what I wound up doing was the same thing Springsteen himself did: starting side two with it. So long as I start something with it, right?

Out on the Street: keep (side one, track one)

And then Springsteen follows it up with this, the album's best 'Born to Run' move. In the midst of the artistic confusion Springsteen is clearly feeling on this album, tapped as he remains into his muse, it's odd how little he chooses to exploit his obvious gift for setting to music the moments of ecstasy of the inarticulate working class. Because god-damn is he good at it; it may be the one thing he's absolutely best at. A secret he knows: you can't put that particular hoi polloi jubilation into erudite words; the truest expression of that feeling does happen to be 'Woah-oh-oh-oh-oh'. Which is not an insult at all: it's been true ever since 'A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop'. This song doesn't pander in even the slightest, and if we find its simplistic lyrics cheesy, it's because we've conditioned ourselves to feel embarrassment at our least 'refined' joys. Phenomenal, in any case, and heads-and-shoulders above the vast majority of the up-tempo stuff on this album. Interesting to note, also, that Elvis Costello's 'Oliver's Army' came out as a single a mere month before recording started on The River.

Yes, my album's much more mid-tempo that Bruce's. But if I'm going to have a rocker or two, I might as well give them a prominent place. I had to completely restructure this album at the last minute (just like Springsteen himself!) to accommodate a sudden desire to have this be the opening track, but given its lyrical conceit, I can't really see where else I could put it. It just has to be the album opener.

Crush on You: lose

And then... from the sublime to the ridiculous. Shrieking meaningless one-liners in a highly unpleasant voice, Springsteen attempts to bring some energy to an intentionally meaningless song. After two brilliant fast-songs, one might start to wonder where I get off saying it's the uptempo pieces that drag this album down. And yet...

You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch): lose

On an album filled with touching insights into dignity and human character, Springsteen wastes some more time on this crass song talking about almost breaking a lamp in a shop and feeling 'mean' enough after watching an attractive girl on TV to telephone a 'dirty' girl for an evening of 'parking'. If you can tune out the song's message, it does pump along with a more genuine energy than many of this album's weak points, but all told it's just too unpleasant to bear repeated listening.

I Wanna Marry You: keep (side one, track four)

If this album truly is a schizophrenic melding of uptempo songs about hope and slower pieces about despair, this track is the outlier. Or perhaps it's the bridge between two discrete halves. It's slow but optimistic, lyrically simple but with a weight pushing down the slightly hazy instrumental performance. And here's the thing: it's gorgeous. There's not a drop of cynicism here, and it's really disarming to the cynic, who wants to sneer but finds he can't quite. This is not a 'major piece' by any standard, but it really does stick out as a minor highlight. Cruel to put a song about the simple pleasures of getting married right before a bitter song about the disappointment of it.

Me, however, I stick a song between them. And I invert the order, too. So this is a nice pat-on-the-back, then, as track four on side one. Though did I mention what I'm putting after it? I'm just as cruel as Springsteen, I suppose.

The River: keep (side one, track two)

If you told me I could only ever listen to one Springsteen song again, that every song he wrote bar one would be wiped from my consciousness, it might well be this one I keep. I've held onto this song for years and years now. Not because I relate but because I hope never to. It's a really dismal song, a life of promise slowly extinguished through the decisions we make, that seem like the right thing at that moment but accumulate. Misery, sure, but there's plenty of misery out there. No, for me what makes this song, and Tracy Chapman's markedly similar 'Fast Car', one of the greats is what happens about three minutes into the song, when a reminiscence of those glorious and long-lost early days serves two contradictory purposes: on the one hand, to further progress him down a spiral of despair (the memories haunt him like a ghost, he confesses in his best-sung line on the album) but rather amazingly somehow also gives him a jolt of energy, something to hang on to get him through another day. Stupidly and beautifully contradictory, it's a truly beautiful message for those of us stuck in our lives, and it's a message not even made with words but with the feeling in his voice as he says them.

Springsteen concludes side two with the title track, sticking it in roughly the midpoint. But I'd say it's more than merely the title track, it's also a kind of overview of the themes of the album. After the good-times celebration of Out on the Street, it's a rapid end to funtime to stick this track after it, as side one track two. But among other things, I think the songs sound good together.

Point Blank: keep (side one, track five)

No matter what the medium - vinyl, cassette, CD - there is a pause between the preceding track and this one. Just as well, too - two emotionally-wracked epics side by side would be a bit too much. 'Epic' applies to this one more than to the title track, of course: at six minutes, it's the longest track here that doesn't suck. They're both equally cinematic, though this one is a black-and-white mood piece, with maybe a European director. It's all atop a very well-built chassis, and though I feel embarrassed for it, I find that my attention wavers from the plot line and I'm focusing on details: a clever turn of a phrase, a well-sung word or two here, a great piano line, bass throb, organ swell or guitar lick. But as Springsteen veers between slow-burn verses and more dramatic choruses, you can sense that plot-line perfectly clear even if you're not paying attention. This is amazingly compelling music, and it's strange to me that it's as obscure a track as it is. Why isn't it on every greatest-hits collection Springsteen's ever released?

Springsteen brings the first half of his album to a close with 'I Wanna Marry You' and one kitchen drama, 'The River'. I decided to be radically different though, and bring the first half to a close with 'I Wanna Marry You' and a different kitchen drama. Maybe even bleaker, really, especially now that I have both this song and the title track on the same slab of vinyl (this one is track five). In fact, it's just as well the first half comes to a close with this track. You need a break afterwards.

Cadillac Ranch: lose

Bruce Springsteen likes cars. He once said that he didn't write songs about cars but about people in those cars. While that may be true from time to time, it's not here. This song is devoid of any meaning at all above and beyond 'I like Cadillacs'. Bruce Springsteen likes cars. I don't. Pity it's me whittling this album down, then.

I'm a Rocker: lose

In light of all the content-free uptempo wastes of space, you'd figure upon learning that one has the title 'I'm a Rocker' that it would be the worst offender. And yet it has a kind of carefree energy and, dear Lord, genuine excitement sadly missing from so many of these bar-band generics. Not enough to make me want to include this song or anything, but still... you take it where you can get it.

Fade Away: keep (side two, track two)

Choosing singles for radio play has got to be a difficult science. I can't really say I know how they decide what to put out, except that for some reason it always seems incredibly obvious only in retrospect. Like the fact that this double's first single remains one of Springsteen's most celebrated rockers and the second single is all but unknown, a track whose very title seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's a nice slowish track, quite well-sung for Springsteen with a nice melody. But it struggles to maintain the listener's interest, even a listener desperately trying to concentrate on it. Given how many songs here stick in the mind as 'god-awful', this track's anonymity isn't entirely an insult - in fact, I'm including it on my single-disc. But it's the ultimate example of the 'album track', an ingredient that enriches the sauce rather than stands as a meal centrepiece. So why was it a single?

Obviously this song deserves to get slotted somewhere in the middle of side two. But it serves a purposes as side two, track two: it gets you from the fist-pumping roar of "Hungry Heart" onto the deeper-and-deeper well of misery that is my side two.

Stolen Car: keep (side two, track three)

Let's use the word 'skeletal' to describe this delicate little wisp of a song. It builds as it progresses, but at its heart it's deliberately minimalist: carried out with the minimum of instrumentation, the minimum of melody and the minimum of emotional depth in Springsteen's vocal performance: that's very much the point; this desperately sad tale of a man driven to wanton acts of crime merely because he has ceased to care about much of anything in his loveless life. The single moment he feels saddest in the entire performance is when he admits that despite his crimes, he never gets caught. It's an impressive thing for Springsteen to attempt, even if it's yet another car-thing. The song ends by merely fading out, entirely without resolution. Resolution would have been too Hollywood, wouldn't it?

On my disc, this becomes the first of two emotionally distant tracks involving cars in a row. Concept! Call it side two, track three. The middle of the second half.

Ramrod: lose

A by-the-numbers twelve-bar so blandly generic that there's not a single note within it you don't see coming a mile away. It's joyless too, like the product of some horrible afterlife where a bar band is forced to play this kind of music continuously for all of eternity.

The Price You Pay: lose

I've seen this track listed as an album highlight in some places out there, but I don't see it. It's at that tempo that on this album signifies 'portentous' as opposed to 'throwaway', and that gravelly voice squeezes out a Ford-tough durable melody line. But I guess there's a bit of a been-there-done-that feel to it. Or maybe the problem is that, sandwiched between two duds, it'd have to be a classic not to be carried down by its bedfellows.

Drive All Night: lose

Second-to-last position on a double is 'climax' territory, typical place for an eight-and-a-half-minute 'epic' to appear. And so it would seem Springsteen decided the album needed one. Content? Irrelevant. Let's press record and go at it for a little while. We're a good band; it'll be enough. Or perhaps not: the song is boring and clearly meaningless (the chorus line about driving all night to buy shoes is widely, and justly, ridiculed). or rather, the last minute or two might be the most amazing music Springsteen's ever committed to vinyl. I have no idea, though, as try as I might I've never made it all the way to the end. It's about the time he starts caterwauling, 'You've got my love, heart and soul' about a hundred times over and over that I tune out. Gruntshrieking? But of course... that's what an eight-and-a-half-minute album 'climax' needs, right? That's what it says in the manual.

Wreck on the Highway: keep (side two, track four)

A pretty little midtempo slice of melancholy, this is a tale of a man who views the titular accident and find it haunts him, though the rather dispassionate vocal performance gives no taste of that. The main inspiration I here on this track is the melodically similar 'Green, Green Grass of Home', but Springsteen apparently modelled this on the country standard of the same name (which I've critiqued elsewhere). That song is expressly religious, though, with a moral about a society that has lost sight of prayer. Springsteen offers little in the way of a greater society-at-large picture, though; even when sleepless about the disaster he witnessed he seeks no comfort from up above. Stark, perhaps, like the subsequent 'Reason to Believe' (which also swipes its title from an old classic) - but the absence of religion is noticeable only by contrasting it with the other song. Beautiful, anyway, though it's an odd choice to conclude the album.

So I don't. Not quite. It's penultimate for me, track four of side two. And the unresolved unease that concludes this track doesn't serve as the last note the album strikes. Instead, that honour goes to another song that ends with unresolved unease.

Better as a Single: "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor

2011-09-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

Godspeed You! Black Emperor are one of those bands that just seems to stand out, as something distinct, separate, from other bands. Well... 'band'. They're a nonet, a 'collective', with two each of the rock trinity of guitar, bass and drums plus a violinist and a brass section. They make wholly instrumental music based around lengthy drone-type repetitive phrases, music that has little to do with anything you might hear on a radio. Seems strange to call them a 'band' or to call their output 'rock music' - well, it most certainly is not rock, though I'm not really sure where else you'd categorise them in a record store.

Ah, record store. Another one of those things that set them apart: for GYBE, vinyl is an important part of the experience: not because they didn't release material on CD, they did, but because the material tended to be really different on vinyl and on CD, and the packaging was more ornate in the former than in the latter (famously, vinyl copies of their début all came with a penny that had been crushed on a train track). The present album is an exception, in that the 2-record set and the two-CD set both came with identical musical contents, but the package is still very much set up as a vinyl listening experience.

To start with, it's made up of four discrete 'sides'. GYBE doesn't create individual 'songs' so much as lengthy suites composed of smaller parts. Technically, Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven is a double-album consisting of four twenty-minute pieces. As we go trough my thought processes here, you'll see that I consider the conceit to be more than a little pretentious and at times rather artificially enforced, but still, they're the band and I respect their vision for their music.

To an extent. I've had to treat this release different to every other release I've done so far. To just say, for example, 'yes to side one, yes to side two, no to side three, no to side four' would have been pretty pointless (though if I forced myself to follow that format, that's exactly how I would have), so I'm actually cutting the suites up into their constituent movements and making my decision based on that. That's not quite as disrespectful as it seems: when GYBE perform live, they sometimes make 'new' suites by cobbling together different movements from different earlier pieces. Recombination appears to be part of the GYBE listening experience. The packaging of this album titles and illustrates the movements in a rather abstract way, but the 'official' GYBE website actually times them, and it's that that I've followed, chopping the pieces up. I've still tried to respect their ideas for flow, following their segues as much as possible. In the end, I took the first suite in toto, skipped the third one completely, and cobbled together my own 'side two' from parts of the remaining two suites. This unorthodox approach means I approach the write-up differently too, writing up each suite, not movement, in extended multi-paragraph descriptions.

So who are these professed anarchists from Montréal, who shun all conventional press and cultivate a highly arty, countercultural image while playing massive sheets of music in small venues in between a thousand side-projects? It could be said that what sets GYBE apart from most other musical acts is this: seeing as it's the main focus of most popular music lyrics, most musical acts could be said to treat the range of human emotions as their main subject matter. But in most cases, songs are 'about' feelings such as love, loneliness or wonder only to the extent that that's what they sing about. In other words, they use human incantation to invoke emotions. GYBE, on the other hand, have no need for vocals or lyrics: their stock-in-trade is to use their not-insubstantial array of musical instruments to evoke emotions, to churn those very feelings up from the deep pot they stir and leave them to wrap around, or at worst merely linger in front of, the listener. The advantage GYBE have is that this allows them a wider range of emotional responses; as they can tap into emotions that we don't quite have names for, feelings vividly felt but rarely verbalised. And throughout these ninety minutes, GYBE do this with regularity.

The experience is highly subjective. Not only is it true that some people will hear this as the most inspiring, beautiful music of their lives while some hear it as pretentious noodling, but it is also true that most individuals will experience both extremes, depending on their mood. Personally, this album drives me crazy from time to time. They have a sense of dynamics far, far richer than most popular musicians, but frustratingly revert time and time again to a GYBE cliché of starting quiet and building to a roaring climax, ten minute crescendos that occur with such regularity that the dramatic effect is rather dulled. Still, this is the kind of listening experience that really alters your perceptions of what music can be and even what it should be. The world would be a richer place if everyone let this into their lives at least once.

All of this, however, has conspired to make this one of the most difficult of my own 'Better as a Single' projects. I pine for albums where I pick and choose among sixteen discrete rock songs. But luckily, not all music is like that.

Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven

Side one

lift yr. skinny fists, like antennas to heaven... (6:14)
gathering storm (11:09)
"welcome to barco am/pm..." [l.a.x.; 5/14/00] (1:14)
cancer towers on holy road hi-way (3:52)

Side two

atomic clock (1:08)
chart #3 (2:39)
world police and friendly fire (9:47)
she dreamt she was a bulldozer, she dreamt she was alone in an empty field (9:43)

Storm (details below)

lift yr. skinny fists, like antennas to heaven...: keep (side one, track one)
gathering storm (side one, track two)
"welcome to barco am/pm..." [l.a.x.; 5/14/00]: keep (side one, track three)
cancer towers on holy road hi-way: keep (side one, track four)

'Storm' starts out with guitars and brass, sounding for all the world like Spiritualized meets 1960s Miles Davis for a minute. The basic theme is played over and over, building in intensity and adding a violin, slow and compelling, for three minutes until the halfway point of the title-track opening movement, where the song crashes into screaming loudness with drums and it becomes clear that this album is beginning with an overture, a dramatic curtain-raiser. It builds in intensity all the way to the end, a simple crescendo like so much that will follow, but with a different feeling. As the piece builds, that brass starts to sound redolent of a fanfare, perhaps heralding the entrance of, well, an emperor. This is inspiring music, if not fists exactly then at least most certainly arms lifted to heaven.

It crashes into nothing as the second movement, which will last eleven minutes, begins. Never has a GYBE piece been more descriptively named than 'gathering storm', but it's pretty clear skies as the piece begins, slow and haunting. The 'storm' starts to begin about four minutes in, again when the percussion occurs, when the piece gets louder if not faster - the instruments start to scream, and the effect is unnerving and calming at the same time. GYBE instruments scream a lot, but it's not always as psychedelica-influenced at this particular 'storm' is. Until, that is, about the six minute point at which the clouds turn decidedly black and the piece becomes a noise-piece, the sort of freeform stuff I might have excised had it been a track all by itself. Here it's just some 'gathering', though, until about seven and a half minutes in when it's drums again that signal a shift, as the pounding simulates the rainfall beginning, I guess. The guitars are like monotonous drones here - not peals of thunder but sheets of rolling thunder I suppose, and it's time to hunch over and make it through till it subsides without getting too drenched.

And subside it does - to complete silence, giving a lie to the structure of this disc as four integrated pieces of music. A minute of found sounds from a supermarket introduces the highly evocative and nightmare-soundtracking 'cancer roads'. Like 'Providence' from Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, this is piano, noise and distorted speech. The whole thing feels like a post-meltdown stroll through a destroyed nuclear power station without a protective suit on. It's scary as hell, but possessed of an eerie beauty. 'Haunting' is what they call stuff like this. Hell, it's enough to make me believe in ghosts.

I'm not sure the extent to which 'Storm' succeeds as a single twenty-minute piece. But each of the three main parts of it is beautiful in its own way and entirely worth of inclusion. And seeing as how I want to include all twenty minutes of this (well, I could skip the shop announcement), I think it makes sense to refer to the band's own vision for how the movements are stitched together. So the real side one of this album is, note-for-note, my own side one too. Radical? No. But I guess it means noise-music art collectives front-load their doubles as much as anyone.

Static (details below)

terrible canyons of static: lose
atomic clock: keep (side two, track one)
chart #3: keep (side two, track two)
world police and friendly fire: keep (side two, track three)
[...+the buildings they are sleeping now]: lose

The second suite, and second side of the album, starts off with 'terrible canyons of static', which is a lie: this particular soundscape has plenty of noises, including feedback and the chopping sound of a helicopter, which rise and fall like, I suppose, a journey from one canyon to the next. But there's no static: this is clean as a brand-new kitchen. Evocative, yeah, but not really worth more than one listen.

The static comes next, during a track pointlessly given over to an electronic clock which leads to the reliably creepy sound of a radio preacher, whose queerly taunting voice is laid across a truly beautiful, quiet and (by these standards) remarkably brief piece for guitar and violin. Beautiful, but so terrifyingly chilling that you know no single member of GYBE could be a believer themselves.

It leads into 'world police and friendly fire', at ten minutes the heart of the 'Static' suite. As the music starts quietly but starts to build in intensity, repeated lines buried below roaring sustained notes, you start to know what to expect. But at two and a half minutes it surprises, leading into haunting lines for violin and then glockenspiel that shift sideways instead of merely rising or falling. The mood is tension, though, because you know the boom is still coming, and at four minutes it comes, sounding much like any other GYBE roar but perhaps more melodic than normal. At just shy of six minutes, the song changes shape, still roaring but sounding as much like a 'conventional' rock band as they'll sound these ninety minutes. If it weren't for that persistent violin that won't go away, I should add. By the final minute of the track, the band are rocking hard, earning that 'heaviest album' accolade, and it's terribly exciting, even as the track concludes with half a minute of screaming feedback. What's great about this piece is how it builds in intensity not merely by pumping up the volume but by introducing more an more intense emotions.

Until they're spent. The last five and a half minutes are entitled '(the buildings they are sleeping now)', and while this soundscape does indeed sound like buildings, it doesn't much sound like sleep. The metallic sheets of noise that arrive, scream and leave are beautiful, but they don't sound very much like music, and they're ultimately disposable at half the length. Side two begins and ends with a combined nine minutes of noise, featuring little in the way of 'static' but too much atmosphere and too little content.

What I've done here is, to be honest, shaved off the droning noise bits at the beginning and the end and kept the more musical bits in the centre. Which might not seem all that enlightened, I suppose. And yet my job is to distill doubles into more concentrated, and hopefully more enjoyable, listening experiences, and the drone pieces aren't exactly GYBE's peak of overall listening enjoyment. So the second, third and fourth movements become the first, second and third parts of my side two.

Sleep (details below)

murray ostril: "...they don't sleep anymore on the beach...": lose
monheim: lose
broken windows, locks of love pt. III / 3rd part: lose

GYBE might well be insomniacs, because whatever the title 'Sleep' connotes to you, I doubt it can be heard much on the highly distracting twenty-three minutes of side three. An old man reminiscing about Coney Island is far more moving than it has any right to be, and it's the briefest of introductions to the first of the two lengthy pieces that make up the entirety of 'Sleep'.

'Monheim' starts out gorgeous, slow and stately, evocative and calming. Indeed, music for 'sleep'. The music slowly becomes more sinister, but there's nothing wrong with that - quiet and calming can turn sinister at any given time. Doesn't make the music any less wonderful to listen to. It's at about five and a half minutes in, though, that things start to go a bit wrong, as you realise that once again GYBE is going to go quiet-to-loud, and indeed by six and a half minutes in the neighbours are starting to wake up and bang on your walls. It's not that it becomes ugly, not yet anyway, it's just that there's a pointlessness to the spell-shattering crescendo this time out, as if they get loud not because they want to but because they feel that, as GYBE, they're obliged to, on any movement that exceeds five minutes in length. Still, there's a left-turn into a galloping rhythm at eight-odd minutes that intrigues and wills you to give the piece the benefit of the doubt. But as the minutes go by, it doesn't really go anywhere. It's merely committed itself to being as loud and screaming as possible, and as the moment concludes in mere feedback and detuned guitars, whatever spell it had woven all those minutes ago has long since dissipated.

And so it is for the ten-minute other movement on side three. It does take its time, quietly plodding on for a while, so that the first big whoosh, just shy of three minutes in, is welcome. This is loud but dramatic, with a decent rhythmic groove, though the absolute stand-still of the instrumentation does make you selfishly wish for just one tiny strand of melody... ah, but this is GYBE, and melodies are for capitalists. Still, that groove gets better and better, the drums being the only thing keeping this from being an overlong and uneventful waste of time. But at seven and a half minutes in comes the whooshes of noise, embarrassingly predictable by now. It's not that I have anything against music being loud, or getting loud through gradual crescendo. It's just that on side three the first crescendo bulldozes whatever emotions had been built, constructing none in their place, and the second crescendo comes along with a complete absence of any emotion whatsoever, a group bored, screaming into the dry ice, because they feel that that's what people pay them to do. Sad.

It is my disappointment with how the two movements on this side ultimately pan out that has me skipping both of them.

Antennas to Heaven (details below)

moya sings "baby-o"...: lose
edgyswingsetacid: lose
[glockenspiel duet recorded on a campsite in rhinebeck, n.y.]: lose
"attention...mon ami...fa-lala-lala-la-la..." [55-St.Laurent]: lose
she dreamt she was a bulldozer, she dreamt she was alone in an empty field: keep (side two, track four)
deathkamp drone: lose
[antennas to heaven...]: lose

Shorter than the first three pieces but consisting of more movements than any of them, 'Antennas to Heaven' is a schizophrenic piece that frankly feels like an outtake reel stitched together to fill up a fourth side. Even the one movement of substance feels like little bits hobbled together, as lovely as it is to behold.

The piece begins with what the tracklisting categorises as four separate movements lasting a minute apiece, but are really little bits of nonsense: an improvised nonsense on guitar-and-vocals, a little chunk of moody noise, some improvised glockenspiel, kids chanting on a playground. Found sounds, but nothing to write home about, and nothing coherent that can be called a 'piece'.

The rather lovely 'she dreamt she was a bulldozer...' starts with a few waves of feedback. A minute and a half in, out of nowhere comes some screaming loudness. I should be banging my head in despair now, but I'm willing to go with it. Oddly enough, after less than a minute, it stops as suddenly as it began, going back into calming stillness. Weird? Certainly. It's more atmospherics until about six minutes in, when suddenly it starts to feel something like a jam band, of all things, the Grateful Dead strolling into the middle of an empty farmer's field, or maybe a deadhead sitting in a vacant flied suddenly experiencing a flashback. It gets louder, because it does... but it doesn't bother me, because it's evoked something. Not sure what, but something. Flashback ends eight minutes in, and after soft and loud and soft and loud, it's back to soft. And spacey, and humming. I guess she dreams that she's a bulldozer repeatedly, little spurts of eye-moving dream-state in the midst of a good night's sleep.

So how do you follow the two minutes of evocative, quiet noise that concludes 'bulldozer'? Why with three minutes of noise followed by a further two minutes of noise to end the entire double record. Judging by their names, 'deathkamp drone' should be stark and depressing while '(antennas to heaven...)' should be uplifting and celestial. But I'm afraid I don't really get that from them. After ninety minutes of contrasting moods or at least contrasting volumes, I'm in no mood to consider what a noise piece 'evokes'. I'm merely looking for my keys and hoping to beat the crowds.

This final movement frustrates me more than the others because it feels so thrown-together, though I suppose ultimately the other three sides aren't really much more cohesive than this side. At least they pretend, though. Still, the main 'centrepiece' of side four, 'she dreamt she was a bulldozer...' is quite lovely and worthy of inclusion. So I remove it from all the little-bits before and after and let it conclude my side two, and my listening experience as a whole. With two minutes of quiet noise. Why, that's barely any time at all, by GYBE standards.

Better as a Single: "Hell" by James Brown

2011-08-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

I originally wanted to do The Payback, James Brown's mid-seventies double would-be soundtrack. I balked at a double-album that featured only eight tracks of lengthy, dragging funk epics (two a side) and decided instead to go for Hell, the much more varied but also much more inconsistent follow-up. I'm not really sure I made the right choice, to tell the truth.

Retrospect changes things. We look back on James Brown's incredibly prolific decades-long career as largely the story of a gifted auteur who made one single lasting contribution to popular music: his development and refinement, if not the very creation, of funk music into an art form.

I think this is the right way to view him, really - his funk songs are his best songs, and many of the best funk songs out there are James Brown songs. A single-disc 'introduction to James Brown' compilation would be very heavy on funk numbers. It might exclusively consist of funk numbers.

But this is not how James Brown himself ever saw his career. Sure, he was the Godfather. But he was also 'the hardest working man in show business', one who prided himself on stage shows that were well-rounded performances, not just 90 minutes of funk. His actual recording career, which as the sixties became the seventies became so ridiculously prolific that he averaged a new album every eight weeks, is much, much more varied than that: there's plenty of soul, but also a lot of jazz and a lot of 'pops' standards stuff and even blues too. Pretty much the entire range of 'black American music'.

I don't know much about it, but I suspect that Hell was compiled as a double-length studio replication of his then-current live performances. While there are plenty of funk workouts, there is also a distinct emphasis on diversity, with a good number of slicker ballads and a curiously forward-looking pseudo disco sound before the disco era had even begun (though it didn't stick, 'the Original Disco Man' was another self-applied Brown sobriquet) - all programmed with a distinctly concert-like sense of flow. More than half of the tracks on this double-disc are either covers or remakes of his own songs, which might suggest a dearth of inspiration but could also be part of the 'concert experience replication' I speculate Brown might have had in mind. Alternately, it could be an attempt to go back, like jazz musicians frequently would, to previous glories to see what the passing of years has brought to them. Some are finer in their remade versions, almost none are embarrassments.

For no good reason that I can think of, all of the tracks on any given side of this four-sided album are linked together with the same five-second recording of a Chinese-style gong. So as one track fades out, you hear that metallic crash again and again before the following track starts. On the CD, the sample is programmed at the beginning of each song in question, meaning ten of these fourteen tracks start exactly the same way. It's a bit annoying, and obviously my single-length programming of this will thus have gong smashes in the oddest of places. Ignore them, or imagine that my single-disc version edits them out.

I will admit, though, that all told Hell stands out less as a crucial statement than as a competent water-treading exercise, released perhaps because he had an available stockpile of material sitting on the shelf. Released perhaps because he needed the money. It's not a major statement - it's a schizophrenic and at times bland piece of work. But, whittled down appropriately, it becomes a much worthier piece of work. And - hey! - that's exactly what I do here.

Hell

Side one

My Thang (4:20)
Sayin' it and Doin' it (3:05)
I Can't Stand It '76 (8:10)
These Foolish Things Remind Me of You (3:05)

Side two

Coldblooded (4:45)
Papa Don't Take No Mess (13:51)

The box below contains the entire contents of my single-disc version of this album, hosted by YouTube. Click on the box itself to reveal the scrollbars, and click on any of the scrollbars to hear the music.

» Hell, Single-Disc Version «

Coldblooded: keep (side two, track one)

An odd choice of opening track, this little ditty consists of a handful of different grooves crudely welded together. There's a lot of brass going on here, some lovely guitar lines, and all kinds of strangely creaking percussion. It's all quite nice, if the end result is a bit confusing. It doesn't really have anything that you can walk away humming. It's a 'showpiece', and as such it's more for appreciating and admiring than for truly grooving to. No wonder such an oddball piece wasn't a single, and why it's on no-one's James Brown shortlist. But it's quite enjoyable nonetheless.

Though this is worthy of inclusion, I don't think it's a great album-starter. Instead, I've let it start off side two instead of side one.

Hell: lose

Hell is a pretty cool name for an album, I suppose. So I suspect that it was the fortune of having such an attention-grabbing name available, rather than any particular virtues in its content, that led to this particular song taking the mantle of 'title track'. I've heard this song described as 'kitschy', and unfortunately it really is, over-busy and messy, with over-the-top female vocalists and with a capella grunting - an acquired taste to be sure. He doesn't have as much to say as he might think he does, and the truth is that this track is a disappointment as a title track.

My Thang: keep (side one, track one)

The most valid criticism you could throw at James Brown-style funk is that it far too frequently builds a decent groove and them merely rides it for a few minutes before fading out. People who like tension and release, or who like coherent verses and choruses, can find funk music horribly boring. But funk music is music to be felt, not to be analysed. In the particular case of this song, it's not merely a 'decent' groove but an amazing monster of a groove, a thing worthy of awe. After that, Brown's vocals and the background vocalists are merely more percussion, really. Everything here is in service of the groove, and the groove is in service of nothing except itself. It's a dynamic that is really pretty alien by popular music standards, which is probably why funk has crossed over as rarely as it has. But make no mistake: this is fabulous, fabulous stuff, music for the soul, cleansing and cathartic. This is why James Brown was one of music's greats, and why the R&B charts loved this song enough to take it all the way to number one.

It's not just because it's cool to start and end an album with number-one singles... I mean, this was a number-one single because it's a great song, filled with self-confidence and an uptempo 'statement of purpose'. Look at its name, and look at its opening claim of 'a brand new funk'. It's a hell of a way to open an album. Why didn't James?

Sayin' It and Doin' It: keep (side one, track two)

This is less a cover version of sidekick Bobby Byrd's recent single with the same title than a new composition built out of the same base materials. Seeing a James Brown funk song as propulsive as this one clock in at barely three minutes is pretty radical by 1976, but this is really a very successful take on pop-funk, a fun-as-hell sermon with Lyn Collins as an effective foil singing a single sentence in response to James's constant dress-length requests. It's strange, but it's pretty brilliant stuff nonetheless.

Keeping the back-to-back... two shorter uptempo funk tracks in a row, the two 'commercial highlights' of the album in all probability. I love them both to bits. Track two here.

Please, Please, Please: lose

God knows how many times James had sung this song by 1974 (by which time it was amazingly already almost 20 years old). Here the excuse is that he gives it a Latin gloss evocative of Cuba - or at least evocative of American attempts to evoke Cuba. He struts his stuff quite well, really - seeming quite at home in the idiom of his 'brown brothers' (in his own words), but outside of being a semi-intriguing museum curio, it's tough to know what exactly the point is, except showing off.

When the Saints Go Marchin' In: lose

Yes, this is James Brown taking on the New Orleans brass-band classic. It's not a funk take on the hoary old standby but something even odder: a kind of sleek proto-disco take on it as sing by James Brown. Side two of the disc was produced by a different producer and presents an oddly slick and funkless side of James Brown. It's intriguing but not entirely successful - which is exactly what you can say about the side's opening track. While it's interesting as a novelty, ultimately a disco-esque take on "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" has precisely as much staying power as you'd figure it would.

These Foolish Things Remind Me of You: keep (side one, track four)

The emphasis on the funk side of James's musical legacy means one particular fact of James Brown is slowly being airbrushed out of the picture: the man had a hell of a voice. He wraps his warm, personable and oddly feminine voice around this pre-rock standby so definitively that for a few minutes you can convince yourself that it's not a cover at all but a pure James Brown song - and you can also, if you try harder, convince yourself that this genre had anything to do with his musical legacy. It doesn't, of course, as much as he peppered his dense album catalogue with genre experiments. But in this particular case, he's chosen a composition that merits the slick studio-crafted sound of this album's second side, with the result that those strings and that female vocal chorus don't stick out; they fit in smoothly, as if they always belonged here. All told, a remarkable accomplishment on an old classic, even if it has nothing to do with how we remember James Brown today.

I should confess that I was undecided between this and 'Crossroads', or between these two and not including any non-funk tracks whatsoever. But I think it's worth having one soul track, and this is the best one, in my opinion, even if it sits a bit strangely next to its funky kin. I know where I usually put downtempo songs here, but side one track four is a mere practical consideration - not to break the flow of a single album side, I stick it at the end of one of the sides. What else can I do?

Stormy Monday: lose

Caked in fat wah-wah guitar lines and floating on a bed of the finest 1970s strings, even with a flute straight out of Van McCoy's 'The Hustle', this is proto-disco as its most prescient. All it really needs to fit like a glove on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack is that insistent 'disco beat' beneath it. Oddly enough, as it turns out, under all the skillful era-specific accoutrements lies a rather weak beat, supporting a not-overly-interesting take on a days-of-the-week old standard.

A Man Has to Go Back to the Crossroad Before He Finds Himself: lose

Another of his old standards, a showstopping weeper done up in the style of side two - it's a naturally earthy song buried under the studio gloss of the rest of this side. It's Atlantic as recorded by Motown, and while it's quite pretty, the essential dichotomy never really gets resolved. Best just to sit back and reflect on the beauty without thinking too much on it.

Sometime: lose

'Sometime' brings side two to a finish in a relatively nondescript fashion. I don't know if this is a remake too or if it's a rare new song - tough to tell either way because it's pretty generic and unimpressive. It's not an embarrassment, but it does nothing that hasn't already been done several times on this side, barring a rather pretty instrumental figure about two minutes in. Not much to hang a hat on, though.

I Can't Stand It '76: keep (side one, track three)

Technically, this is a remake of Brown's late-sixties hit 'I Can't Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)'. But while that earlier recording was very much a proper song designed for AM, unusually percussive but otherwise very much in the 'Papa's Got a Brand New Bag' mould, this later rerecording shows the signs of years of precision roadwork behind it. By now Brown could care less about verse and chorus and merely wants to lead the band through an eight-minute jam based on the song. It's compelling as hell, because the groove is as hard as this album gets and the band are almost supernaturally empathetic. The bass is the lead instrument, and the drums kick out the groove unrelentingly for over eight minutes. You might question the need to get this down on vinyl in the studio, but perhaps it's better to view Brown as something like a jazz performer at this point, constantly revisiting older works to present them in newer contexts. This has zero commercial appeal, but it's still pretty great.

In other circumstances, I'd have let this end side one, letting both sides finish with epics. But it doesn't make sense, so with 'These Foolish Things' ending this side, these eight minutes wind up as the third track in four on side one.

Lost Someone (Remake): lose

And suddenly we're back to midtempo, feeling a little like side two though a little more down-to-earth. But it seems like a strange programming decision to step back across that soul/funk divide just one song after crossing it. This song bears the subtitle '(Remake)', which is strange seeing as how the majority of this album is one kind of remake or another - in this particular case the original is from 1961, not as old as 'Please, Please, Please' but still pretty ancient. The song cooks up a pretty decent groove, and it's got another impressively animated bassline. But it doesn't really move the soul.

Don't Tell a Lie About Me and I Won't Tell the Truth on You: lose

If a great title made a great song, this would be one of history's best. The one-liner isn't James Brown's invention but it certainly does make for an attention-grabbing title. Unfortunately, that's all the composition that went into the song, as the vocal performance he and his backup singers makes here consists of little more than that title riffed on over and over again. The groove is pretty down-to-earth, laid-back and down-home though overdubbed with some trebly synth and some odd percussion. But it's too knocked-off, all told. And it sounds markedly similar to the superior song that follows it immediately (on CD).

Papa Don't Take No Mess: keep (side two, track two)

This was written for, and rejected from, the same movie as 'The Payback', indicating that the producer of that movie had a tin ear of monumental proportions. It also indicates that this, Hell's centrepiece, was a leftover outtake. How could something like this have been left on the shelves? Especially considering it was to be a number one hit as a seven-inch single, Brown's last-ever number one. In this light, it's perhaps a culmination of his late-sixties and early-seventies body of work. What it is, undoubtedly, is a massive accomplishment, a fourteen-minute epic that is completely compelling throughout, as Brown deftly guides his band through rises and falls, verses, solos and moments to step back, breathe and bask in the groove they've created. This is improvisational music at its finest, but it's also one of the more complete 'songs' on this album, taking five and a half minutes before the solos break out, starting with a lengthy one from the master himself on piano. Lyrically, it's a testament to his father's unsentimental approach to discipline that at times seems tasteless by modern standards ('When we did wrong, Papa beat the hell out of us'?). Still, it brings out genuine feeling in Brown, who screams and grunts his way throughout. This works the same sluggish tempo and profound groove as its sister 'The Payback', but is a little less dark (musically, if not lyrically). Overwrought? Perhaps. Perhaps it doesn't quite need to be fourteen minutes long. But at the same time, it could have been twenty-five minutes, too. It doesn't really need to end, especially since as it comes to a close, so does James Brown's position as a cutting-edge taste-maker.

Where else but the very end would I put this epic mother of a track?

Better as a Single: "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

2011-07-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

I keep telling myself I need to expand my range. Well... here it is, then. Given the choice between country music and qawalli, in my life so far I've listened to more qawalli. And I always told myself I'd prefer it to country. I have the same stereotypes a lot of urban non-Americans have about this most uniquely American genre, so I hope the country fan reading this will see it for what it is: a person coming to terms with a lifelong aversion to the genre and trying very hard to listen with open ears and an open mind. It's been hard but it's been satisfying.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken has the band name 'The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band' on the cover, but that tells very little of the story. This record is really the result of said band inviting a crew of old-timers into the studio and letting them run the show. On most of these tracks, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band provide little more than an unobtrusive backdrop to the old-timers doing a one-more-time through their greatest hits. The 'band' are in whole or in part absent on quite a few tracks.

Surprisingly, this works. It's a 'various artists' album, really, and one that takes in a wide array of styles and moods. Yet the hodgepodge approach works, tied together as it is with studio banter that is actually a joy to hear since it presents these historical greats as charming, gentlemanly old men. The album as a whole does play as a cross-generational meeting of minds, a diverse group of people who like and respect each other very much spending time in the studio and renewing those 'chops' from decades past.

What the album doesn't do anymore, however, is give the image of a stylistic meeting of old-time country/bluegrass and modern rock music. Country since then has adopted so much of the rock idiom that nothing here sounds like it has anything to do with Elvis Presley and what came after him. This isn't a problem, but I won't lie and say I instinctively 'feel' this music the way I do things closer to my heart. I've put together a twelve-track single disc, one that I'm proud of, but I do so as an outsider, and much of my discussion is going to ring false for true connoisseurs of the genre(s). Also, since this is a massive triple-disc with thirty-eight tracks, my commentary will have to be superficial. So let me present my modus operandi and then get right down to it.

Thirty-eight tracks is a huge amount. I worried that with time the songs would all sound the same, so one thing I did was while familiarising myself with these three discs' contents, I never once listened in the correct order. In fact, I hid the album's correct order from my eyes, uploading the tracks to my MP3 player merely in alphabetical order. I slowly put together a 12-track shortlist, listened a few times more to confirm it, and then got to work here. It's only in actually writing this entry that I've listened to the album in the order intended.

In the body of this entry we'll learn why I chose this strategy. We'll learn much in the body, actually, since most of my commentary on the album as a whole is hidden amid these 38 comments. So let's get started, shall we?

Will the Circle Be Unbroken

Side one

Honky Tonk Blues (2:23)
Down Yonder (3:46)
I am a Pilgrim (3:55)
Dark as a Dungeon (2:46)
Nashville Blues (3:15)
Keep on the Sunny Side (4:26)

Side two

Lonesome Fiddle Blues (2:43)
Lost Highway (3:48)
Wildwood Flower (3:34)
Losin' You (Might Be the Best Thing Yet) (2:49)
Both Sides Now (2:24)
Will the Circle Be Unbroken (4:50)

The Grand Ole Opry Song: lose

This actually is the theme song to The Grand Ole Opry, apparently - and both as an introductory celebration of country's hoedown spirit and as a shout-out filled reminder of the music's communal nature, it's a perfectly fitting down-home introduction to the album. But it's more than a bit corny and doesn't really hold up to repeated listening, in my opinion anyway.

Keep on the Sunny Side: keep (side one, track six)

Starting out with some of the between-songs studio patter that permeates this album, this track features Maybelle Carter, at sixty-one when this was recorded still possessing of a beautiful, warm, rich voice. The song fits it like a glove, a sweet, optimistic song that seems to have been transmitted not only from a different century but from an alternate reality of simple, down-home peace and comfort. Carter's songs are perhaps the most well-developed of this set, and with the wisdom of centuries of folk tradition weighing behind them, they're all highlights. I was tempted to include all of them.

Both this and the album's title track are epic singalongs led by Ma Carter; it made sense to keep them far apart, but there's something 'concluding' about both. So I let each side finish with one of them, and this one finishes up my side one.

Nashville Blues: keep (side one, track five)

This album is peppered with instrumentals, most of them representative of the 'bluegrass' genre (something I know nothing about) and in many cases featuring technically astute fingerpicking but perhaps not so much in the way of melody. This one, however, has a pleasant warmth to is an a rather fetching melody. It's very pretty stuff.

I took four instrumentals, and thought it made sense to disperse them about relatively evenly. So thus two to a side. I put this on side one as track five, not realising that it and the Ma Carter song were side-by-side on the original as well.

You are My Flower: lose

A sweet and subtle romantic sing-along with long instrumental passages between the vocal bits. Nothing especially wrong with it, but as I had to scupper two-thirds of the material, a lot of my cuts are not that far off arbitrary, really.

The Precious Jewel: lose

A fascinating talk on studio recording introduces a decent enough fiddle-led track that for some reason doesn't quite cohere for me. It's almost as if it was a first take that could have been, well, improved upon by a second or third take...

Dark as a Dungeon: keep (side one, track three)

One reason why country music is so distant from my northern, urban daily life is that is documents a lifestyle just as alien to me as a Native American rain dance. Merle Travis here sings his mournful ode to coal mining - one of many Travis sang to this job/lifestyle. Realistically since I cannot relate, I'm required to listen to this as exotica and take his word for it. It's easy, though - his timeworn voice and expressive melody tell me all I need to know. Looking this track up, I can see that when the 78 rpm album it was first released on came out, it charted on Billboard's 'folk albums' chart, for that's what Billboard called country music at the time. And folk it is indeed, with a direct connection to centuries of cross-Atlantic tradition. It makes much more sense to view Country music as white America's folk music, and when you dig through the layers of gloss, rhinestones and conservative politics that have surrounded Country music over the decades, this is the pure mineral core you'll still find inside. And it arguably never got any better than this. World-weary and perfect.

Most of my selections are mid-tempo, despite the range of tempos on the three discs. This is one of a few 'slow ones', and I tried to disperse them evenly, so this winds up on side one, at track four in the approximate 'slow track zone' of the side.

Tennessee Stud: lose

This epic piece of cowboy storytelling does have its charms even as the verses roll endlessly by. It's cinematic and cute. But ultimately it's a song about a horse, and what's charming at first becomes merely hokey with time.

Black Mountain Rag: lose

There are so many fingerpicking 'rags' on these six sides (one of which is given over in toto to them) that ultimately I was forced into a place where I needed, clearly, to select a few but bin the majority of them. Ultimately this was never going to be much more than an arbitrary decision, and there's no reason why this couldn't have appeared except that too many bluegrass rags ultimately made them all start to sound the same. What this doesn't have is a compelling melody. What it does have, though, is compelling playing: these old timers are as technically proficient as the best of the jazz greats, really.

The Wreck on the Highway: lose

Roy Acuff sings the old-time moralising on this track, a lament on the lack of religion following a senseless traffic accident. Heady stuff sung in an old-time twang that is a bit hard for the uninitiated to take. It's something to listen to the first time, but on repeated listening the subject material starts to sound a bit like hectoring.

The End of the World: lose

A bit of a breather, this simple little piece sits between two old-timey gospel hosannas and is kind of lost between them. It's sweet, but it doesn't really linger on the mind and the microtonal steel guitar starts to annoy, to be frank.

I Saw the Light: lose

A lot of bridges are mended over these three discs, but once the group vocals on this religious Hank Williams ditty start, Country music suddenly feels as divisive as it can get. You either love this stuff of you hate it, really, and your reaction is immediate. I don't hate this stuff, but I've spent a month training myself. Still, the word 'hokey' was invented to disparage stuff like this. I admire the proficiency of the musicians (there's a great bass solo here), but it's in service of music that I can cannot feel naturally. I've fought the impulse to just turn it off immediately, and I think that's progress. But I couldn't actually play a song like this for someone else without suffering a heart attack from embarrassment. Sorry. It's only while wiring this now that I can see that the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band programmed the first disc as in many ways a stand-alone before programming the next two discs in a bit more of an archival fashion. So something finishes here in the original playlist. But the truth is we've barely begun yet.

Sunny Side of the Mountain: lose

Vocals about as 'keening' as they get, this track is another challenge to non-country fans, and another challenge I suppose I fail. Not bad, all told, but just a bit too cheesy for me to stand, really. I'm probably not the right person to be doing this.

Nine Pound Hammer: lose

Back to Merle Travis, whose music and vocals I just find greatly preferable. It's a nice enough stroll through a tune, but it's far too similar to 'I am a Pilgrim', which we'll hear soon and which I prefer. Good front-porch music, all told. And they're ecstatic to have completed the take. Their enthusiasm is contagious.

Losin' You (Might be the Best Thing Yet): keep (side two, track four)

But after all those 'keening' (read: whiny) vocals are a central part of country music. I could go through the entire album immediately excising songs whose singers have a bit of a twang in their voices. But then I'd miss out on tracks like this, an elegant little country waltz that feels very old to me. Again, I'm an outsider: this kind of music means much less to me than it does to others, but to them this stuff is the soundtrack to first loves, to seminal summer vacations, to best friends, to families reunited for holidays and birthdays. I may not be very able to feel this music in my soul, but I can feel those people in this track, somewhere behind the yodels, and it's less eerie than it is comforting. Plus it's a great melody.

One of three songs on side two to start with the letters 'L-O'. I've put it as side two, track four - the last vocal song before the big closer. But that's really a kind of 'I had nowhere else to put it' placement.

Honky Tonkin': lose

I tried my darndest to like this song, but I couldn't carry it off. It's just too hokey.

You Don't Know My Mind: lose

This isn't all that bad, though with those vocals and the hoedown fiddle, it does sound a bit like much of the rest of the package - and this side in particular, which seems to be the 'country vocals side' of the project. It's all well and good, evoking grandpa dancing around after a bit too much whiskey, but it's not good enough to make the cut.

My Walkin' Shoes: lose

Side C, and CD one, finish with this group-vocal singalong representing the halfway point of this epic slog. It's a real square-dance number, chugging along at a high tempo and filled with all kinds of instrumental breaks. Cute, I guess, but a bit tiresome by the end.

Lonesome Fiddle Blues: keep (side two, track one)

'Lonesome Fiddle Blues' is the first track on side D, an eight-song stretch of pure instrumental bluegrass. I don't really think that's the best way to programme the album, actually - the bluegrass tunes were better on my MP3 player interspersed among the vocal tracks, while here the effect is diminished with the songs in close succession. It's sheer coincidence that the first track is the only one I chose, though: that decision had more to do with the infectious fiddle and the good-timey bassline. Go ahead and scream 'Yee-haw' a few times. Get it out of your system.

This one was convoluted. I had actually wanted to start side two with 'Lost Highway', but doing so would have led to me probably putting the side's two instrumental tracks side-by-side or separated by only one song. I wasn't sure how to proceed until the idea popped into my head of starting the side with this instrumental. I was sceptical, but it plays well.

Avalanche: lose

Since I had these songs on my MP3 player in alphabetical order, I got used to thinking of this as the 'opening' track. It's another barnstorming workout, distinguishable mostly for being longer than the rest. Each instrument takes a solo in turn. It's good, I guess, with an especially percussive drum line.

Flint Hill Special: lose

More fingerpicking, neither better nor worse than what precedes it or follows it. The banjo and harmonica are more prominent, that's all. Back-to-back is not the best way to present this material.

Togary Mountain: lose

It's getting hard to even tell these songs apart.

Earl's Breakdown: lose

If the name is anything to go by, this track features an improvisation by Earl Scruggs, on banjo. I'll take their word for it, though, as the approximate ratio of recognisable melody to improvisatory doodling seems more or less the same on this track and on any other. It's fine, you know. It's all fine. Now when does it end?

Orange Blossom Special: lose

This one is a bit of a disappointment for me, as it was one of a small handful of songs on these three discs I'd actually heard before. I know it as a good-time harmonica-based twelve-bar sung by Johnny Cash, even though I realise it's not 'his' song. Here it's a vehicle for some solo fiddlin', which could have been lovely, but Vassar Clements' work here just strikes me as not-overly-inspired and at times grating.

Wabash Cannonball: lose

The second of two songs on this side to have the word 'cannonball' in the title, and the last song on the side as a whole, it's slower and more soulful than the bluster that's preceded it, and as such it's more interesting, though after eight long tracks the net effect has been to make me actually long for the twangy vocals of side three.

Lost Highway: keep (side two, track two)

I know this old standard from Bob Dylan's Don't Look Back, where I was taken by its expressive melody and fatalistic sense of weary regret. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band do it quite decently (and what a relief to hear vocals again!), yet I suppose that were someone else compiling this, they might discard this track as 'workmanlike and uninspired'. Yet it's me compiling it, and I play favourites.

As I wrote above, I had this pencilled in as the first track on side two. Instead, it became the first vocal track on side two, which is almost the same thing.

Doc Watson & Merle Travis First Meeting: lose

This is as listenable as two minutes of spontaneous conversation could possibly be. Both principals come off as deeply interesting, charming southern gentlemen. Their discussion is peppered with what sounds exactly like rocking chairs squeaking, and it's nice that this particular moment was caught on tape. But I prefer my albums to feature, you know, music.

Way Downtown: lose

Don't be deceived by the name - this is just as small-town as anything else here, perhaps more. It's a sprightly little tune, designed for town-hall dances. Good fun in its own way, though it fails to rock my world, to say the least.

Down Yonder: keep (side one, track two)

It might seem particularly perverse after rejecting a long series of instrumental pieces to include this one. Yet, while reminding you of my M.O. here, wherein I didn't consider the original track listing at all, I maintain that this song both summarises and transcends the songs on side D. This is most definitely hoedown music, yet it's deeply melodic and extremely likeable stuff.

Odd to put an instrumental as track two, but with four of them, and with one show-stopping vocal track per side, options are in fact limited. And it sounds good there, too.

Pins and Needles (in my Heart): lose

Possibly, melodic distinctiveness is less of a virtue in country than in other genres. I suppose there's comfort in old melodies. I mean, there's nothing really wrong with this track, except for the feeling that it beats down a particularly well-trodden path.

Honky Tonk Blues: keep (side one, track one)

This exercise was always going to be subjective, but in the particular case of this album, featuring almost forty tracks of a consistent quality, it starts to feel almost random. This particular track is just about as down-home as it gets: not a drop of irony or pretence to be heard. And someone who has, well, problems with country music (to put it mildly) shouldn't care for this track, and yet I do - perhaps in part because of the energy and commitment of the lead vocals. It is indeed alien, and yet it touches some nerve buried deep within me.

Having rejected the Grand Ole Opry song, I was stuck trying to find something to fill its place. I like this because it pulls no punches as a real dyed-in-the-wool country song, and while it has chummy guests on it and all, it's the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band themselves on vocals, an all-too-rare reminder of whose name it is on the package.

Sailin' on to Hawaii: lose

It's a peculiar curiosity that at some point the sun-soaked lazy lullabies of Hawaiian folk music got absorbed into country music, and yet that's exactly what happened. This is as authentically Hawaiian as anything by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, but it's a token here, a single track given over to the subgenre in order to say 'we included Hawaiian steel guitar, too'. And as such it's superfluous to our needs.

I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes: lose

The exemplary side six, strongest of the album. features Maybelle Carter on three of its six songs - and this after five sides that feature her exactly once. This particular entry is not about her own blue eyes (which would have been a bit vain) but about the ones that belong to her long-lost suitor, overseas at war or something. So it's certainly a throwback to a different era, but it's a nice enough song anyway. I might have included it, but if I had I'd have put all four Carter songs on my 12-track disc, skewing the overall track listing in her favour. As it is, I took three.

I Am a Pilgrim: keep (side one, track three)

This is the third song to be taken from the same 1947 Merle Travis album, one that obviously the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band were fond of. It's a spiritual, but it's a most attractive one, a folksy shuffle taken at a casual walking pace. The lightness of touch here is the thing that's enchanting, an entirely relaxed journey that takes three minutes (the fourth is studio banter) but could have gone on for ten.

I had no idea that by putting this immediately before 'Dark as a Dungeon' that I was putting two Merle Travis warhorses, the only two I included, back to back. When I realised what I'd done, I was tempted to do some shuffling around, but by then I had decided I liked the effect, so there you have it.

Wildwood Flower: keep (side two, track three)

As far as I knew, the autoharp was the exclusive reserve of not-very-musically-inclined elementary school teachers, but it gives this old standard an appealing new coat of paint in the capable hands of Maybelle Carter, who explains on side one why she's playing it. It's a beautiful song, and though by then Carter had probably sung it every single day for more than half of her sixty-one years of life, she still offers it a touching, heartfelt rendition here.

Maybelle Carter finishes both sides, leaving just five places between her two epics to include a third track by her. Mathematics, tell me where it should be?

Soldier's Joy: lose

I didn't much care for this banjo piece when I first heard it, considering it mere showboating. I've warmed up to it since, though, having been able to find the melody in there among the technique. Not enough to include it, mind you, but enough to feel a little bad about not including it.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken: keep (side one, track six)

A mournful lament about the writer's mother's death and the events following it is a highly strange song to turn into a group singalong and album climax, but 'Will the Circle Be Unbroken' is up to the task, with its timeless melody and simple changes. Each person does a verse in celebrity-singalong fashion, with countless solos spread across five minutes, and ultimately the song's focus on family and the passing of generations not only rings true to Country music's raison d'être but also fits the main 'theme' of this triple-disc quite well. It's all very good-natured, homey stuff, and the overall feeling is one of warmth, of a family reunion on a holiday turning into a singalong. It is hokey, damn it, but it's possible to suspend cynicism for five minutes and just get swept away in the rush of sentimental goop.

My closer, if not theirs.

Both Sides Now: keep (side two, track five)

Why put a coda after your epic curtain-call finale? Well, this is Randy Scruggs (Earl's son) performing a then-newish Joni Mitchell tune on acoustic guitar. So it's an homage to the next generation, a look forward to indicate that, yes, there will be songwriters and musicians to keep this music alive, it will carry on into future generations just as it has been carried on this far. And the circle will be unbroken. By and by, mainstream country became eye-gougingly horrid, but it's the thought that counts. Or rather it's Joni Mitchell's timeless melody that counts, raising this simple guitar exercise into the realm of the incandescent. It's an afterthought, but it's a winning one.

In light of that, then, why do I switch the two tracks around, putting this as track eleven before the title track as track twelve? Well, I think that with the smaller scale of my single-disc, a 'coda' seems a bit too much. It doesn't seem like an afterthought when there are only eleven other tracks on the disc. I wanted the title track to be the curtain-call it was clearly designed to be. But I still wanted to include this track, so I wound up flipping the two around instead.

Better as a Single: "Wu-Tang Forever" by the Wu-Tang Clan

2011-06-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

The Wu-Tang Clan were absolutely incredible. In the 1990s, there was no-one in the hip-hop world who could match them. It may be a decade and a half since their heyday, but what a heyday it was.

As much as anything else, the Wu-Tang were a great idea, a marketing and artistic strategy whose genius fell in recognising the opportunity that existed in the music business at the time, an opportunity that has since passed.

In brief, the Wu-Tang Clan were a crew of nine highly talented MCs led by the highly intelligent RZA. In addition to being a first-class MC and a revolutionary producer whose beats formed an instantly recognisable sub-genre, the RZA was also a clever business impresario who used the Wu-Tang Clan's excellent début Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) to establish the MCs`personalities before spinning them all off on a series of solo careers on different record labels, each launched with CDs helmed at the production desk by the RZA and featuring the majority of Wu Tang MCs as 'guest artists'. This led to a rush of classic albums: one in 1994, three in 1995 and one in 1996 - a burst of productivity with few parallels in contemporary music. While no single record label would ever agree to saturate the market like this, having the MCs signed to competing labels meant that each label was pleased to assertively promote their individual piece of the Wu-Tang phenomenon, to each other's detriment perhaps but to the benefit of the clan themselves and hip-hop fans as well.

The problem with this strategy, perhaps the only problem in an otherwise faultlessly clever idea, is that it would inevitably build up expectations for the group-centred follow-up. Indeed, the wait between the début and the follow-up was four long years - and had they let the band simmer a little longer, they might have found it all but impossible to deliver a follow-up not doomed to disappoint.

As it was, it was already difficult, not only because of the expectations the sequence of solo albums had raised but because within the rap game the vogue was double-albums, a trend begun a year and a half previously by 2Pac and his epic All Eyez on Me. With nine talented MCs to fill the discs, the Wu-Tang Clan would probably have sounded uninspired with a mere 75-minute sophomore album.

What we got, then, was simultaneously more and less than the other hip-hop doubles. At 110 minutes and 3 vinyl discs, it was no slouch, but it was not really a double-CD. The rather genius move of adding an 'enhanced' CD-ROM element that all these years later seems embarrassing allowed them to present the album as having a multimedia 'bonus' while actually pawning off one-and-a-half CDs of music as a double-with-extras. And while there is more than enough in the way of trademark RZA beats and ensemble rapping to keep the hardcore plenty satisfied, the album also farms out eight tracks to assistant producers and presents four solo tracks and two tracks featuring no Wu MCs whatsoever. Considering that the intervening 'solo albums' were all produced in toto by the RZA and featured 'guest' Wu MCs on almost every track, they could actually stake a claim to be more legitimately 'Wu-Tang' projects than the current album.

But time has been kind to this album. Looking back on it, it's a very strong package, with consistently good RZA beats (even the ones helmed by others), heavy on the sloppy drama and the cinematic sense of mystery, and a jaw-dropping amount of 'science' delivered by some of hip-hop's best MCs at the peak of their abilities. It captures its audience on its own terms and shows very little interest in courting 'crossover' success: it's low on hooks, chart-friendly choruses, recycled R&B hits and gimmicky 'special guests'. it proves something that should be obvious: hip-hop can stand on its own merits just fine when the standard of quality is as high as it is here.

The main problem with Wu-Tang Forever is the very problem that this site consistently explores: how songs can get lost in the shuffle when presented in an overlong package. With nine MCs and an endless list of 'killa beez' associates, the Wu-Tang Clan would never have a problem with volume - this could have been a five-CD set if they'd wanted - but the net result of bloat is that focus is lost and albums tend to become mere mixtapes: a lesson RZA and his crew seem to have learnt, since they never again attempted a double-CD.

Wu-Tang Forever

Side one

Reunited (5:21)
Hellz Wind Staff (4:52)
Visionz (3:09)
As High as Wu-Tang Get (2:37)
Severe Punishment (4:49)
Bells of War (5:11)

Side two

Triumph (5:37)
Impossible (4:28)
For Heaven's Sake (4:13)
Black Shampoo (3:49)
The City (4:05)
A Better Tomorrow (4:55)

» Wu-Tang Forever, Single-Disc Version «

Wu-Revolution: lose

This just isn't a very good idea - the members of the Wu-Tang Clan are all adherents of the Five Percent Nation religion, and as such have a kind of 'wise man' teacher among them, someone called Popa Wu. Popa Wu is not a rapper, merely someone who can expound on Five Percenter teachings with a preacher's cadence. No matter how alluring the RZA's backdrop happens to be, the point remains that giving over five minutes of your album - the first five minutes no less - to a preacher is a phenomentally bad idea, and I don't know why anyone would listen to this more than once.

Reunited: keep (side one, track one)

This is much more like it. If you were to write a book on the topic of 'why the RZA is a genius', this brilliant beat, robotic with a clanging sound like an acoustic guitar and with a pretty incredible violin line over top, is just jaw-dropping. Before anybody even says a word (excepting the female vocalist swearing over and over again), the RZA's cast a spell. Then he opens his mouth, rapping a verse alongside the GZA, the Ol' Dirty Bastard (in maybe his best performance on the whole disc) and Method Man: four MCs at their peaks on the album's real introduction. And a damn fine one it is.

As I say, this is the real introduction. Attention-grabbing and purpose-stating, an obvious shoulda-been track one actually takes that position on my shortened version.

For Heaven's Sake: keep (side two, track three)

Within a few years sped-up R&B vocal samples would be de rigueur, but here the warbled track title is merely one of many unsettling elements in a RZA stew thick with details. The MCs chant the clan's name between verses provided by the less famous Inspectah Deck and Masta Killa, and the semi-member Cappadonna. Placing this track so early in the lineup is a rather obvious attempt to raise the profile of these lesser members, which is a remarkably generous thing for the RZA and the other 'stars' to do.

It might have made sense to keep this on side one as it is on disc one of the original. But timing issues put it on the b-side, where it fits in smoothly as my track three.

Cash Still Rules / Scary Hours: lose

It's tough to pin down exactly why, but this ostensible 'C.R.E.A.M.' sequel, the first non-RZA track on a Wu-Tang album, is quite underwhelming. Method Man is good as usual, Ghostface Killah keeps rapping even after the beats have ended and he's being faded out, but it's all quite charmless. Just filler, really, and sad to see filler so early on the album.

Visionz: keep (side one, track three)

This brief track is an Inspectah Deck production - showing that the RZA wasn't the only WU-Tang member with musical skills. It sounds a lot like the RZA, frankly - which, of course, is a very good thing. The track is barely three minutes, and the brevity helps it out, giving it.focus. It's quite successful, all told.

My side one starts and ends with two longer epics, leaving two shorter 'pop' pieces in the middle. This, then, is track three.

As High as Wu-Tang Get: keep (side one, track four)

A messy, grimy little vignette with a 'sung' chorus by ODB, it's all over in two and a half minutes. Impressionistic gibberish, really, regardless of that the GZA and Method Man are saying. I'm not so sure why I included this - it wouldn't have made much difference if I'd dropped it. But I think it brought something to the mix that would otherwise be absent. The Clan points out a few times here that they don't bait their tracks with smooth R&B choruses. True enough - and to add insult to injury, instead you get the Ol' Dirty Bastard growling out a sad parody of an R&B hook. Classic.

As I said above, it's the two shortest tracks on my single-length that I include in the middle of side one, side by side. This is track four, following 'Visionz' just as it does in the double.

Severe Punishment: keep (side one, track five)

Another old-school hip-hop joint, punctuated not with a singer but with a blackly humorous kung-fu sample and underpinned not by a warm R&B sample from years gone by but from a starkly simple beat, merely drums and noises. This would be boring as sin if it weren't for the MCs, compelling and on top form. On this album, songs really do live and die by their MCs: the RZA and his protégés work hard keeping the beats fresh throughout, but when the rappers are on form, the end result is compelling. And when they're not, it's not. Here, thankfully, they are.

Track five on side one means this is the third of a three-song segment lifted from the double intact. Since the whole double is a suite of songs woven together as opposed to fading out and fading in again, a ten-minute chunk of the original gives a sense of the flow as the RA originally programmed it.

Older Gods: lose

A Ghost/Rae joint with an additional GA verse, produced by 4th Disciple and probably a solo track requisitioned for the double - it's filler, mostly. 4th Disciple's beats don't inspire and the MCs have the requisite energy but it's not in service of anything overly exciting.

Maria: lose

The Wu-Tang Clan don't seem to like 'bitches', i.e. the other half of the human race, very much. This is a lot of sex talk, but it's vulgar and childish as hell - not surprising, I guess, since much of this is Ol' Dirty. But it's not appealing. Not in any way. I doubt I would have liked this even when I was 12 years old.

A Better Tomorrow: keep (side two, track six)

So why exactly did the notoriously control-freakish RZA farm out the beat on eight different tracks on this album? An obvious answer was merely that he couldn't keep up, burnt out from too many projects and probably working to a tough deadline. But another answer might be that, presented with tracks like this, he realised he had no choice. The quality of this track is stunning: without a single R&B star trilling a throwaway melody, 4th Disciple and the five MCs on this track (mostly the lesser stars shining in combination) put together a rap track that is in every respect a 'song', with verses, a chorus and a dramatic tension the equal of any great classical piece. The philosophical discussion the MCs hold regarding the effects of a wasted ghetto life are illustrated perfectly by the simple piano-led beats behind them. Magnificent.

This so clearly deserves to be the final track that on the double I have no idea what it's doing on disc one. An overarching meditation on the future and on the themes of the album, it's a great enough song to conclude the entire package.

It's Yourz: lose

'Boomin', I guess. A macho thumper with a shouted chorus and with plenty of crowd samples. I guess it's meant to be fan-friendly, but it seems overly agressive to no real end. It's ultimately a bit boring, and it's a rather bizarre final track for side one, ending the first disc on an underwhelming note.

Intro: lose

As a start to the second CD, the RZA and the GZA babble for two minutes about themselves and about the state of hip-hop. Unlistenable.

Triumph: keep (side two, track one)

Whatever criticism you want to level at the Wu-Tang Clan, you can't say they lack in marketing acumen. Coming back after a lengthy spell away with an OTT double CD is all well and good, but you still need to hit radio with a bold announcement of your return. And that's 'Triumph', five and a half minutes and not a second wasted. Every MC in the entire clan (plus Cappadonna and, effectively, minus ODB who merely plays a trickster role here) bites into their thirty-odd seconds as if their lives and future careers depend on it. A brief showcase for every individual MC, but forming like Voltron as they do, the end result is a mass project - a barrage of voices dropping science. Masta Killa says, 'the dumb are mostly intrigued by the drum' - a diss that is levelled at me as much as anyone else out there; I'm quite able to tune out words on a hip-hop track and just nod my head to the beat. No chance this time out though - 'Triumph' gives you nothing to hang your hat on. Not a chorus, not a hook, not a sample... nothing, which is why it was bold as hell to release it as the opening single from the album. But it makes its point clear as day: this is a defiantly old-school celebration of verbal skills. Take it or leave it.

After the 'intro', this is the first track of the second CD. It's a lapel-grabbing call to arms, and it makes sense as a side-starter. So it's side two, track one here.

Impossible: keep (side two, track two)

This intense four and a half minute epic, produced by 4th Disciple, is a moody Beethoven-sampling monotone peppered with an improvised sung chorus of 'you can never defeat the Gods'. It's good, but the success of this track has little to do with its beats: it's all about three MCs at their absolute peak. Freed from production duties, the RZA puts together a remarkably dense verse to remind listeners that there are two things he's very good at. The underutilised U-God follows, with an equally dense breathless rush of words. On any other track, these twoverses would be highlights, but they're merely a warm-up for Ghostface Killah's verse, a devastating example of 'method rapping' where he playes the role of a person whose friend has been shot and is breathing his last. Ghostface's verse is considered by some to be one of the very best in hip-hop, and it's absolutely stunning, visceral and real in a way rap rarely gets. It's amazing.

'Triumph' doesn't even end: it just lurches into this song. And separating them would give Triumph the most brutal of an edit. Luckily I don't have to: I keep these Siamese twins together by putting this track as side two, track two.

Little Ghetto Boys: lose

Excepting its 'skit' intro, this track features only Raekwon and Cappadonna - well, and Donny Hathaway, via extensive samples from his 1970s hit of the same name. This is the one track on the whole album most reliant on its R&B sample - to the extent that the sample really carries the track. Yes, it has that creey, unsettling feeling that makes it trademark RZA, but it's more showy than compelling. It's good, but it's not a highlight.

Deadly Melody: lose

It's tough to say anything bad about this - it's intense as hell, four minutes without even a pause for breath, unrelenting verse after verse, with almost every member of the Wu-Tang chipping in and a few Killa Beez too. The beats are good... why am I not including a track I can't find anything bad to say about? Mostly just because there are so many of these already on this disc. That's not quite a criticism of the disc, except to say that en masse these kinds of 'posse' cuts get a sense of sameyness about them. Which is why we trim them, right?

The City: keep (side two, track five)

A solo Inspectah Deck track with an outside producer, this was probably never intended for the double but was probably requisitioned from another project at the last minute to flesh it out. Doesn't matter - it's still pretty great, a woozy, creepy crawl of a backdrop based on Stevie Wonder's 'Living for the City' behind Inspectah Deck, emanating charisma and discipline. Wasting disc space on solo tracks for established solo stars would be regrettable disc-padding, but in this case it's a useful showcase, giving much-needed mic time to the Wu-Tang Clan's most underrated member. With bleak keyboards groaning and squealing across the range of hearing, its unsettling mood is a highlight of the disc.

I give this track the crucial role of 'lead-in to the final track' as disc two track five. By sheer coincidence it puts two solo joints, U-God's and Inspectah Deck's, back to back.

The Projects: lose

Another creepy piano-based beat here, grumpy and erratic. It's quite listenable, really - and for a few minutes the MCs on top are listenable too - Method Man in particular is great. At a certain point while compiling my single-disc version I found myself choosing between this track and 'Impossible', difficult as it is to imagine that. Since it's Ghostface Killah's verse, third and final, that wins inclusion for that track, it's fitting that it's Ghostface's verse, third and final, that loses it for this one: ugly, charmless sex talk, it's like 'Maria' but worse. Ghostface's verse is all but unlistenable and destroys an otherwise fine song. Lest you think I suffer from some king of prudish sex phobia, let me assure you that I have no problems listening to people rap about sex. So long as they do it well.

Bells of War: keep (side one, track six)

A lazy stroll of a song. U-God, Method Man, the Rza and Ghostface Killah lay down verses that are perhaps not their best but are in each case great introductions to their styles as rappers. Since this song is so committed to taking its own sweet time, its gets two breaks where the beat merely continues over random dialogue - first time out about boxing, second time out bravado about the CD in question. Filler, yeah, but in service of beats that have created a mood and in between MCs who are successfully able to expand on that mood. It's pretty good, all told.

This mellow piece is a great way to finish off a side, and here it finishes off side one as track six.

The M.G.M.: lose

True Master produces this brief song in RZA style, but the flow is what catches the attention: making like Run-DMC, Raekwon and Ghostface Killah 'tag team' the lyrics in 'double trouble' fashion, finishing each other's lines. The 'tag team' metaphor makes more sense talking wrestling than talking boxing, but it's the latter that is the subject matter. It's nice to hear the two MCs working so closely together, but otherwise the song has little to recommend it. It's mostly just a quick little filler, perhaps also requisitioned from another project to fill out the disc.

Dog Shit: lose

Let's not speak ill of the dead: Ol' Dirty Bastard was the best out there at what he did. It's just that I'm not quite sure what it is exactly that he did, except perhaps performance art of the highest quality. But let's be honest: he's an acquired taste. His sense for an earworm is impressive, and some of his greatests solo joints are amazing. But overall he's the odd man out in the Wu-Tang Clan, a crew of MCs at their best when freestyling a jaw-dropping ornate flow over complex cinematic beats. ODB was arguably less capable an MC than the others, and overcompensated with his OTT goofball routine. But like Flavor Flav, it wears thin without a straight man to play off - so while a little ODB goes a long way, a solo number is less enchanting. This is tiresome filler.

Duck Seazon: lose

This song just goes on forever. Not that its shy-of-six-minute running time is all that unprecedented (it's shorter in fact, since it includes a kung fu sample at the end), but its chorus-free intensity makes it seem that much longer. Which is not a bad thing - no MC bores here, and their uptempo agression contrasts nicely with the lazy two-note guitar line behind them. It's, granted, more than a little repetitive. And ultimately it's a bit samey, sounding like too many other sings on this disc and so not finding any way to stand out. And on a less-than-half distillation, its running time really is a strike against is.

Hellz Wind Staff: keep (side one, track two)

A kung-fu epic, this track samples some martial arts fighting (at the end of a longer sample illogically sequenced at the end of 'Duck Seazon') but then rather ingeniously takes its metallic scrapes and rattles and turns them into the song's main beats, with the result that the entire piece has a messy cinematic quality to it - those being the two adjectives most often used to describe the RZA's early-years productions, though rarely in combination. The lyrics are pretty great stuff, even if it's so steeped in mythology that I have no idea what anyone is talking about. It's mostly just a tribute to the Wu-Tang mystique. Though what's wrong with that, when the MCs are this good?

I put this as track two of side one because I think it really encapsulates what the Wu-Tang Clan are, and after the strong opening statement of 'Reunited', it makes sense to look at who exactly this group are - and have been, since its kung-fu obsessions and deliberately sloppy feel hearken back to the début. Obviously I'd prefer for the actual Wu Tang vs. Shaolin sample to appear before this track.

Heaterz: lose

They're all running together by now. Another one, same level of quality. What to say about it? It's good, but 'good' sometimes isn't good enough. It doesn't resonate enough for me, and the ridiculous little 'skit' at the end of it (even if it's probably designed to lead into 'Black Shampoo') is just silly.

Black Shampoo: keep (side two, track four)

I might just be contrary, really. I reject songs throughout for sex content and then include this track, much maligned as limp. And sure, this U-God solo track is much 'softer' than the rest of the CD, from U-God's soft-spoken flow to the spongy cushions behind him (with odd string samples and even the wackest of 808 percussion sounds every now and then). But the thing is that it's entirely suitable. Subjecting your sex-talk to the same strident nihilism and dischord as your tales of life on the streets presents a sadly aggressive and unpleasant form of sexuality. This, on the other hand, is a refreshing change of pace, compelling in the way it stands out from everything else. It gives U-God an individual persona (the band's Lothario) and, I contend, draws a sharp contrast with the exploitative vulgarity the other MCs deliver elsewhere. Just my opinion, mind you.

Placing this sore-thumb amid the bravado was a tough choice. I knew I wanted it towards the end, but it would have been a disappointing final track, and penultimate position tended to isolate the actual final track. So I wound up third from last, with two songs after it to recast the urban-drama spell.

Second Coming: lose

More than probably any other track on this collection, 'Second Coming' proves the the RZA was a seriously talented 'proper' musician, capable of creating lush instrumentation the equal of any other producer out there - no mere loop sampled from another source, the musical backdrop here is highly impressive. But it's put in service of a remake of 'Macarthur Park', rewritten with silly self-mythologising lyrics and sung by Tekitha. And therein lies the problem: it's not a Wu-Tang Clan song. Or at least if precedence on this album demonstrates that tracks featuring Wu-Tang MCs produced by outsiders can still be legit 'Wu-Tang clan' songs than this one can't. All told, pretty as it is, it does little more than break up the feel of the disc.

The Closing: lose

This time it's Raekwon babbling into a mic. The only thing I can say about this track is that it actually makes the first track on disc two listenable. A horrid way to end your two-cd epic.

Better as a Single: "Chicago II" by Chicago

2011-05-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

Like most people my age, I suppose, I first encountered Chicago (the band) in George Orwell's 1984, when Peter Cetera's adult-contemporary songs and vocals met David Foster's shiny MOR arrangements to create a globe-conquering 1980s monster, a particularly treacly, sticky-sweet monster.

Having met Chicago in this fashion, and having subsequently learned about their earlier days as a Blood, Sweat and Tears-style 'fusion' band, I must admit I was more than a little reluctant to explore their earlier albums, imagining them as 1980s mainstream ballads with an improvising brass section on top - an unholy concoction that you surely must agree would be absolutely unbearable.

Yet early Chicago is not that at all, really. This album is much more listenable than I expected. Enjoyable, in fact, and I never saw that coming.

First things first: Chicago are that unstoppable institution who spent decades periodically releasing intentionally samey-looking albums: albums that were given consecutive numbers as opposed to names and endless variations on the iconic Chicago logo for a cover. It makes them stand out in a CD rack in a record store, but it inspires the shopper to merely look at the covers before putting them back unpurchased. It's tough to imagine anyone, even the most devout Chicago fans, arguing the relative merits of, say, XIV versus VII. This extensive back catalogue all seems interchangeable, really.

Especially given their propensity for doubles. This particular album, their second, was a double (which is why I'm talking about it). But so was their début. And their third album. Their fourth album, by comparison, was a four-record set. And, yes, for those keeping count, that's ten records in two and a half years. Not that that's so strange: the band featured several songwriters, and none of these megaliths feature any kind of thematic unity: they're just 'another ninety minutes of stuff we've recently recorded' (except for IV, which is live). The current album is not really any different from the others, but it was the 'breakthrough', with three top-ten singles and with its shiny chrome cover more iconic than any of the others.

The début featured twelve songs over four sides, three apiece. While this one appears to almost double that, with 23 tracks on the label, it's mostly just a matter of how you look at it. This album features three ten-minute multipart 'suites' (which at times have no discernible difference between 'parts' really), and if one counts them as one song each, then this album actually has only eleven distinct 'pieces'. And as such, they come to their extended lengths in the two main ways 'rock' music artists manage to increase their track lengths: through improvisation or through fragmentation. It's my particular belief that Chicago benefits from the fragmentary approach more than they do from the improvisatory approach, but I will concede that that's largely my own particular bias: I'm admittedly no friend of the jam-session.

Chicago II

Side one

Wake Up Sunshine (2:29)
The Road (3:10)
Ballad for a Girl in Buchannon (12:55)

Make Me Smile (4:40)
So Much to Say, So Much to Give (1:12)
Anxiety's Moment (1:01)
West Virginia Fantasies (1:34)
Colour My World (3:01)
To be Free (1:15)
Now More than Ever (1:26)

Side two

25 or 6 to 4 (4:50)
Poem for the People (5:31)
Movin' In (4:06)
Where Do We Go From Here (2:49)

» Chicago II, Single-Disc Version «

Movin' In: keep (side two, track three)

Brass on top of 'rock' instruments, this would appear to be the basic Chicago template, and what better way to start the album than with a statement-of-purpose, right? But it's not actually especially representative, being more eager-to-please than much of the rest of the album. 'Swinging' in a finger-popping way you rarely hear from the Chicago of this era, it almost has a vibe to it that I'd describe as 'Las Vegas' were that not a bit of an anachronism at this point. A skronky sax solo shows up midway through once the song was at risk of being just too damn likable, but as skronky sax solos go, it's more tolerable than many, and doesn't really damage the song overall. It's not a jaw-dropping composition by any means, but it's just a competent vehicle for the arrangement, really. And that arrangement wins me over. It's easy to see how this might have seemed revolutionary in 1969.

I don't think it makes sense as the opening track, though. In fact, I see it more as an end-of-album thing, and so I put it in penultimate position, as the album's last horn-piece. After all, it's late into your career that you start playing Vegas, isn't it?

The Road: keep (side one, track two)

And here we are. This is exactly what Chicago was back then, and it's pretty great: this is a more-or-less traditional rock song with traditional rock instrumentation and harmonies... with a complex horn chart placed over top. I say 'over top', but that implies a synthetic addition, and the brass at no point seems superfluous. It seems like the most natural thing in the world, actually, and it's odd to consider how little effect Chicago ultimately did have on modern music, despite their shed-loads of sales in the 1970s. Because music doesn't sound like this after all. And it never really did. Music's loss. This is exciting, dynamic music - even if you don't walk away with much in the way of a memory to hum. No surprise Chicago themselves shucked this particular skin in time.

I'll be honest with you: though I'm fine with where I ended up putting this song, it's more to do with timing than mood; really, with the two shortest songs having specific places on the album, this was merely 'the shortest song I could fit into the original's side two, which became my side one with the addition of this track in slot number two'.

Poem For the People: keep (side two, track two)

The horns show up thirty seconds in. And with time, those 1960s post-Beatles harmonies kick in too. So there's maybe not anything 'special' about this song, but it comes together with a particular grace, starting with a lonely piano plunking a heartstring-pulling chord pattern. I don't think the lyrics, vague life-is-hell stuff that keeps talking about 'the people', are up to much. But they rarely are on this album, are they? Once the majority of them are over, the tempo picks up and the horns are all over the place. The particular spell cast at the beginning of the track is probably gone by then, but what remains is still decent enough.

The third song in three to make the cut. I put this as the second track of side two, a 'major statement' following another one.

In the Country: lose

The longest song on side one is, perhaps not surprisingly, the most boring, A genial rolling-thunder big-band vibe permeates this song, as if it was designed to be a stadium crowd-pleaser, but it's equal parts Blood Sweat and Tears-style catchiness and Joe Cocker-style emotiveness - which in principle has potential but here merely brings out the worst aspects of both. It isn't easy to listen to this song all the way through to the end. It feels as if minutes and minutes are tacked onto this song just for the hell of it. And in addition, have you ever noticed how any song that tells you to have a good time is that much less likely to actually cause people to have a good time? Some things are evidently better left unsaid.

Wake Up Sunshine: keep (side one, track one)

There's an unwritten rule in popular music that says that songs with the word 'sunshine' in their title have to sound pretty much exactly like this: optimistic, breezy and perhaps more than a little naive. This song is a valuable addition to the genre: short and sweet, with Beach Boys harmonies and a strange ending tacked on - that ending is certainly 'experimental' enough, but on an album stuffed with complexity and improvisation, this particular little 'ditty' certainly sticks out. Its to-the-point efficiency makes it feel like it belongs on a different album (horns notwithstanding), but it's here instead, and it lifts the spirits amidst a not-small amount of self-indulgence. Charming, and I don't mean that as an insult.

Could there be a more obvious opening track than this? I have no idea why Chicago didn't open the album with this particular sunrise. So I did.

Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon: Make Me Smile: keep (side one, track three)
Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon: So Much to Say, So Much to Give: keep (side one, track four)
Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon: Anxiety's Moment: keep (side one, track five)
Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon: West Virginia Fantasies: keep (side one, track six)
Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon: Colour My World: keep (side one, track seven)
Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon: To Be Free: keep (side one, track eight)
Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon: Now More Than Ever: keep (side one, track nine)

The first of three 'suites' on the album, this is admittedly made up of seven discrete parts. Yet they are all joined together and flow seamlessly from one to another (with the exception of 'Colour My World', which sits in the middle of the piece as a separate entity). The reference point here is side two of Abbey Road, where tiny half-songs that would have been ridiculous on their own somehow cohere to a larger whole when integrated in a suite-like fashion. I have no idea why this is called a 'ballet', but it works in entirely the same fashion. Only 'Make Me Smile' and 'Colour My World' (not coincidentally the two singles) really stand out on their own, while much of the rest is rather disposable when looked at bit-by-bit. As a coherent thirteen-minute whole, though, I think it works quite well indeed, with a certain grace and beauty. 'Make Me Smile' (together with its coda 'Now More Than Ever') serves as the main 'theme', and it's a very sixties 'rock' song, hummable and filled with a certain love of life that does indeed, if you'll forgive the triteness, make one smile. 'Colour My World', the centrepiece, is an evergreen classic, and deservedly so: the piano-and-drum arpeggiating triplets sets the song up for a beautiful single verse before the sweetest of flute melodies comes in. The whole thing is calming, elegant and terribly beautiful. I'm too young to remember it as a slow-dance standby, and maybe that's for the better: I can hear it without being overcome by mawkish memories of adolescence.

The remainder of the suite, after these two, are less essential, but the whole piece deserves to be considered as an all-or-nothing gambit. And since I can listen to these thirteen minutes much easier than most thirteen-minute pieces, I give this whole package the green light, putting it last on side one (it is of course the majority of side one). I don't love the piece's rather arbitrary division into seven. Chicago put out a box set in the 1990s that divided this piece into three parts: everything before Colour My World, Colour My World, everything after it. I actually like that far more than the seven-part division. But most of all I think I'd like it to be a single thirteen-minute track.

Fancy Colours: lose

This track serves a kind of public service stuck here right in the middle of the album: it's a bit like those fish you buy to control algae in a pond. And swimming in the deep idea pool that Chicago no doubt generated, being a large group of composers flush with creativity and the excitement of youth, this particular track trawls about, skimming up the very worst of this at-times-bombastic group's ideas, collating them all together on a single track so that they don't contaminate neighbouring songs instead. This track is, let's not mince words, god-awful. But like an appendix storing toxins in the body, it's not that difficult to extricate. Consider this an appendectomy, then.

25 or 6 to 4: keep (side two, track one)

This is a shoo-in for inclusion, really. There's no doubt about why this particular track has become an FM radio staple down the years: it's a confident strut of a song that rocks much harder and more convincingly than brass instruments have any right to. Arranged with different instruments, this could have almost fit comfortably on any of Black Sabbath's early-seventies albums, and just how bizarre is that? Regarding the song's lyrics, I'm willing to come out in favour of meaningless babble as lyrics in a song where the vocals really just serve as one more instrument in the overall groove, the one the listener gets to play along with. Why let meaning mess with that? The wah-wah solo is perhaps overdone. But perhaps it really has to be - anything else would probably have been a disappointment.

This song deserves not to be stuck somewhere in the middle of a side. I let it open side two, roaring to life after the "Ballet", and after the intermission that a ballet ought to have. My side two is all songs, no concept. So this is the best way to break it in.

Memories of Love: Prelude: lose
Memories of Love: A.M. Mourning: lose
Memories of Love: P.M. Mourning: lose
Memories of Love: Memories of Love: lose

This was probably the most difficult decision of the album for me. For the very different nature of this particular 'piece', I wanted to include it. It's woodwinds and strings, not supplementing a generic rock song but by themselves, on a rather pretty little delicacy, for the most part quite calm and minimalist. It's a really decent attempt at something different. But at the same time, it's a bit too precious, and it's sadly bloodless. The vocal part, when it comes along (minutes later) is a letdown: the slow melody is hesitant and goes nowhere. Ultimately I said no not only because nine minutes is a lot to devote to an experiment. I said no because the pastoral and vaguely cinematic sound of the track unfortunately is wrapped around a composition too inconsequential to merit nine minutes.

It Better End Soon: 1st Movement: lose
It Better End Soon: 2nd Movement: lose
It Better End Soon: 3rd Movement: lose
It Better End Soon: 4th Movement: lose

It takes a certain amount of moxie to title your ten-minutes-plus 'epic' 'It Better End Soon' - God knows about five minutes in, that's precisely what I was thinking. I put the word 'epic' in quotation marks because unlike the other multipart 'suites' on Chicago II, this is really just one extra-long song, divided rather arbitrarily into four for no clear reason. It's very much a late-sixties rock song, extended much the way as songs tended to be extended back then. There is a lengthy solo (on flute), there's a slower middle part with more grunting than usual, and there's a brief 'coda' of the first part of the song at the end. It's just in this particular case those are presented as four distinct 'movements', which they really aren't. It sounds like Joe Cocker sounded at around the same time. I don't find it very interesting at all, but at least it serves one worthy purpose: reminding the listening audience was the album as a whole could have sounded like, if Chicago were less talented.

Where Do We Go From Here: keep (side two, track seven)

This is Peter Cetera's only composition on the album, and it rather ironically answers its own titular question by in substance pointing the way forward. No brass here, no jazz. This is a song, recorded with a singer-songwriter acoustic sheen and those would-be Beach Boys harmonies. It doesn't fit on the album at all really, but from the fifth album on, this would suddenly become 'what Chicago sound like'. Prescient, sure, but worthy? Well, yes. And that's all to do with something that is hard to admit: that Cetera really does have a way with a melody. Its brevity is a kind of breath of fresh air by itself.

There are several good reasons to use this song to end off the album. Not only does it have a title that indicates 'last track', but the piece as a whole is a self-fulfilling prophecy, as I said above, and ending an album with a 'taste' of what lies ahead is a famous album-sequencing gambit. None of this would be apparent if the song were somewhere in the middle.

Better as a Single: "The Beatles" by The Beatles

2011-04-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

God, my knees are trembling. This is 'the big one'. This is history's most iconic double album. While it's self-titled, its empty white cover has guaranteed that everyone knows The Beatles by the Beatles as 'The White Album'.

The White Album is more than just a mere double album. The White Album is really the starting point for the double album as a concept. Sure, it wasn't the first double album, or the first double in rock, or the first commercially-successful one. But it was the first major double album that envisioned itself as anything more than a 'slightly longer normal album'. The White Album is epic, it's eclectic, it's indulgent, it's unforgettable. Ninety-five minutes and thirty songs, it's way more than a person can digest in a single sitting. It's sprawling, and minutes upon minutes of needle-time are given over to the most fatuous of experiments and inside jokes. It revels in its lack of discipline, and as a result somehow manages a greatness that makes no sense in individual consideration of the thirty tracks it comprises. The ridiculous and the sublime are programmed next to each other over and over again, and the result is a portrait of a band at the height of their creative faculties, even if they were at the depth of their relationships with each other.

The White Album is not merely the mould for the embarrassment-of-riches double album; it's also the template for this particular website I keep here - after all, while I have never before heard speculation of how best to trim Don Juan's Reckless Daughter or Welcome to the Pleasuredome into a normal-length album, the 'better as a single' White Album is a parlour game of forty years and counting. I personally have compiled as many as a dozen such 'albums' down the years, each one different to the one before. In fact, this is my third crack at it since starting this blog, and it features a tracklisting that I've never done before.

The difference is this: while some Beatles albums are very strongly Lennon productions and some have McCartney in the driver's seat, this is the single album where each track is most obviously an individual creation. Anyone can take the tracklisting to hand and identify each song it turn as a McCartney song or a Lennon song (excepting, of course, the four Harrisons and one Starkey). This fact, and a kind of resistance to the knee-jerk posthumous deification of John Lennon, has caused me again and again to attempt a rough equality of 'John songs' and 'Paul songs'. But the fact is that Paul is way too given to empty genre experiments on this album, whereas John, who still has his share of dross, has more of a direct line to the on-again-off-again creative energies that fuel him at his peaks of genius. This is not 'a John album', but a streamlined fourteen-track of it pretty much has to be.

The White Album is wise enough to realise that a monochromatic ninety minutes would be a painful experience. But the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach is the first to go when you cut this album in two. The result is an extremely disciplined album, one that showcases a simple, fragile, murmuring beauty and a quiet contemplation. The heart of the White Album is a clutch of songs written on acoustic guitars while meditating in India with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Returned to London, the Beatles took to genre experiments and space-filler. Much of this material may be interesting (much isn't even that), but it's not overly inspired.

The core that remains when you strip all that away is a markedly coherent forty minutes, an understated album of simple beauty. My single-length still has rock, loud guitars and fast tempos - but it's in service of an overall mood. Somehow the album is transformed from a hopelessly centreless sprawling mess to an album that 'makes sense'. And one which has twice as many Paul songs as George songs, and twice as many John songs as Paul songs.

In the particular case of this album, I really ought to thank the late Ian MacDonald, whose Revolution in the Head has served as a real textbook for me. I purchased it a good dozen years ago and have thumbed through it to the point that the spine has broken and it's now a pile of loose sheets of paper. I have purposefully avoided consulting it in the writing of this particular entry, yet so many of MacDonald's insights are tattooed into my brain so deeply that they inevitably colour my appreciation of the Beatles, whether or not they are close to hand.

The Beatles

Side one

Dear Prudence (3:56)
Mother Nature's Son (2:48)
Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey (2:24)
Sexy Sadie (3:15)
I Will (1:46)
While My Guitar Gently Weeps (4:45)
Happiness is a Warm Gun (2:43)

Side two

Revolution 1 (4:15)
Martha My Dear (2:28)
I'm So Tired (2:03)
Cry Baby Cry (3:11)
Blackbird (2:18)
Julia (2:54)
Long, Long, Long (3:04)

Back in the U.S.S.R.: lose

This is a pastiche, a tongue-in-cheek riff on Chuck Berry rock-and-roll and Beach Boys sunny harmonies. Paul McCartney, on record repeatedly as a fan, subverts the all-American vibe of that California family band by transplanting 'California Girls' to the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. It's strange to start this album off with a joke, but it is a genuinely funny joke, and there aren't many of those on this album. Ultimately, I do like this song, and waffled about whether or not to include it, but there is indeed the rub: my single-disc scuttles the extreme eclecticism of this catch-all album to such a degree that stylistic deviations suddenly feel out of place. So no, then.

Dear Prudence: keep (side one, track one)

Down the years, I've had a hard time pinning down what's so remarkable about this four-minute-long nursery rhyme. The facts behind its origin, involving Mia Farrow's sister, are charming. But it's the song that matters, and I've recently realised why it's so magnificent: walking out of the dark into a lazy sunny day is an experience that can put you in a vague ecstatic daze. It's a mood that has much in common with childlike innocence and with mantric, repetitive Hindu meditation. Somehow this beautiful song (with stunning drumming by Paul McCartney) evokes that perfectly. It's a messy crescendo of a song, yet it evokes that childlike wonder, that euphoria of revelation, perfectly.

'Won't you come out to play?' God knows why the Beatles opened with the jokey rock-and-roll 'Back in the USSR'. Being deliberately obtuse, I suppose. But this little epic is the obvious starting point, and it's a beautiful opening track. Provided, of course, you edit out that little snatch of jet-engine crossfaded from the preceding track.

Glass Onion: lose

This is a weird little thing, a thoroughly 'meta' take on the Beatles' own history, scattering song titles and lyrics all over the place. It comes up dry because it means nothing, ultimately, being merely a kind of catch-the-reference game that fails to charm since it's drowning in its own self-regard. The music is fine enough, rock in feel but with an unexpected string arrangement. But so what? It's still unpleasant, and the beginning of the least likeable stretch of the whole album.

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da: lose

I don't know if it's this one or 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' that best illustrates why Paul McCartney, in many ways the most creatively talented Beatle, will never be deified like his partner is. This cynical yo-ho-ho tries to have a good time but winds up being the ugly antithesis of what a 'good time' ought to be. Offensive in its plastic cheeriness, it shows a decent understanding of the artifice of music but not a whiff at all of its soul. This is what music would sound like if it were created by robots. Its mere existence should serve as a cautionary tale to all.

Wild Honey Pie: lose

A meaningless minute of nothing-at-all; fine as an interlude, but completely disposable. Even though the Pixies found something in it worth covering.

The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill: lose

When I say this is 'John's album', I certainly don't want to give the impression that Lennon is responsible for all the genius and none of the dross. Lennon was as capable as McCartney of churning out embarrassing tripe; he just did it less often (Lennon's worst trait as a Beatle was songs that were less embarrassing than merely forgettable hackwork). Here we have this ludicrous singalong, a diss at a hunter whose animal-killing urges seemed out of place amid the meditating hippies in the Maharishi's company. But while it may not inspire the rage that 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da' is capable of inspiring, it still remains an unfunny embarrassment, and as third in a row for horrid songs perhaps represents the overall low-point of the 95 minutes here.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps: keep (side one, track six)

There's a very real difficulty any 'reviewer' faces (and I know I'm no reviewer, but that's ultimately what I do here on this site): how to maintain stylistic objectivity while engaging in what is a purely subjective activity. How to review Slayer, for example, if you don't like heavy metal? There's no value in dismissing their entire output, especially since others praise it, but it's tough to point out strengths and weaknesses if, viscerally, you don't like any of it. So here we come to a kind of white-blues 'hard rock', screaming guitars, ponderous melodies and inordinate length. Long-time readers will note that I'm naturally inclined not to like this genre, and certainly it's the touching acoustic version on Anthology 3 that presents this as one of Harrison's most beautiful compositions. Yet the version we have to work with is this overwrought one, the longest 'song' on the album. It's out of deference to its fans, really, that I include it. It's not to my taste (I don't mind it, at best), but I have to begrudgingly admit that its soup has some good elements in it. And it's 'classic Harrison', so let's give him a chance, right?

Penultimate track on side one for both versions of this album. Its 'epic' nature means it can't be smack-dab in the middle, but I have other ways to close my album sides. So, runner-up then.

Happiness is a Warm Gun: keep (side one, track seven)

The very heart of the White Album, its best composition and most remarkable performance. Down the years, the Beatles will always offer music lovers two conflicting (and yet complementary) visions of the creation of art. For someone studying the art of composition, 'Happiness is a Warm Gun' makes no sense, really: it's a bunch of tiny bits stuck together, flopping between time signatures all but randomly and offering nothing in terms of verses or choruses. The melody is lazy and passes no 'whistle test'. Lyrically, not much of it makes conventional sense, either, being on the printed page little more than half-thoughts and repeated catch-phrases. In short, it's no skilfully crafted evergreen, and could not have come from the more orderly mind of Paul McCartney. But 'Happiness is a Warm Gun' is art at its very finest, a stunning evocation of emotions we perhaps didn't even know existed. The main image is violent, much of the rest of it is sexual, the music plays with rock-and-roll clichés... and the whole thing is nevertheless thoroughly imbued with the feeling of wistful regret that the rest of the album's best moments are similarly soaked in. Apparently the four Beatles really pulled together as a unit to nail this song's overwhelming complexity (you have to pay attention to catch it; at first listen it doesn't feel complex). So this song is testament both to the Beatles' talent as a quartet and also to Lennon's genius as a very individual songwriter.

'Gently Weeps' and this makes a good one-two. This track deserves to close an album side, and it works well coming after Harrison's epic. The only thing that can follow this is the needle running over and over again in the inner groove.

Martha My Dear: keep (side two, track two)

How is this wonderful where 'Ob-La-Di' is horrid? I'm not actually sure I can explain why. In a sense, it's also 'empty', devoid of any really deep feelings. Yet its breezy lightness, excellent piano and delicious falsetto somehow conspire to create a tiny little piece of work that, gasp!, that charms. This song is highly charming. Is that such a crime?

With only four Paul songs, I elected to put two on each side. Side two is not going to be very bouncy, so I put this early on - as the second track. Before we all get too depressed for it.

I'm So Tired: keep (side two, track three)

If you ever wanted to offer a course on how to evoke a feeling musically, this'd be a great place to start. Lethargy just drips off this song, even if it's louder and more emotional than you might expect. No lullaby this, it's a song for insomniacs, tired but frustrated at their inexplicable energy levels. The whole thing is wonderful, so short it feels only half-done (though that's perhaps the point). In constructing the single-length, this song often gets the squeeze. But it's a great piece, quite unique in the Beatles' whole genre (superior to 'I'm Only Sleeping') and well worth hearing.

I didn't actually realise that the original double puts this after 'Martha' until I had done the same. So that must mean it's the perfect place for it.

Blackbird: keep (side two, track five)

And here is why Paul McCartney is every bit the genius that John Lennon is, just in an entirely different way. This song is absolutely incredible, a hauntingly beautiful melody over a gorgeous acoustic guitar line that others have spent years trying to master. This is one of those compositions that seems to have been constructed absolutely perfectly. It's not even 140 seconds long and yet it needn't be a second longer. It's the tiniest little bit of perfection, evoking the simplest of Sunday-morning pleasures, which in no way makes it the lesser of any of the more wallowing creepy moments to be found elsewhere. Paul was the only Beatle capable of a song like this; it's to his ultimate detriment that he didn't do it more often.

I wanted to have side two come to a close with three little murmuring wisps from each of the songwriters, but while all four of Paul's songs here are small and quiet, none are exactly prayer-like. So this happy little ditty cruelly represents the last time on this album you'll smile, as track five in seven.

Piggies: lose

Yes, this album is all about conflicting emotions. So here we have invective over a happy-go-lucky melody. But its insults, mixed in with oinking noises and deliberately farcical backup vocals, meet the harmonium-feel of the instrumentation (with nice strings) and fall entirely flat. This is an ugly little ditty, a holier-than-thou sneer that is impossible to love.

Rocky Raccoon: lose

So Paul McCartney loves old wild-west mythology, and he likes good old-fashioned yarn-spinning. And so Paul McCartney was talented enough that he could just sit in front of a mic and improvise something like this (the song very clearly is improvised, at least in part). He was surely a riot at parties. But I'm not really sure why such an off-the-cuff piece of silliness deserves to be listened to over and over again forty years later. We'd love it if it showed up on a hissy bootleg. Here? It's funny the first time you hear it, an annoyance by the fourth.

Don't Pass Me By: lose

This is, of course, Ringo's first compositional effort (and his second-to-last as a Beatle). It's all sleigh bells, piano and (pretty awesome) fiddle with silly lyrics sung with the typical Ringo self-effacement. It attempts to be charming and it succeeds about 80% of the way. Which is not that bad, really. But the song gets tedious long before its conclusion. A for effort, Ringo, but effort isn't everything.

Why Don't We Do it in the Road?: lose

In almost every previous incarnation of this single-length White Album, I've included this silly little McCartney stomper. I do like it, mostly as I chuckle at its silliness. But ultimately, it's just the title repeated over and over again over a twelve-bar which might be more inventive than 'Birthday'... but that's not saying much. I'm glad to be rid of it this time out.

I Will: keep (side one, track five)

This is a tough call; it's this kind of genteel MOR material that gets most McCartney detractors angry, horse-clopping percussion and dum-dum-dum bass singing and all. And yes, there might not be much soul or passion here. But as a lovingly-crafted Fabergé egg, it is still a work of art with value. It is a beautiful song, a murmuring little piece of ingenuity. Yes, it's a 'ditty', but it's a charming one. And ultimately, charm is an under-appreciated virtue.

I originally had this where I now have 'Blackbird', and the original double agrees - but it's not the right mood at all to precede 'Julia'. It's clever and cunning... and very hard to place. So I put it, in its quiet brevity, right before the epic Harrison number.

Julia: keep (side two, track six)

Julia is his mother, of course. Ocean Child is his (soon-to-be) wife. John Lennon was a complex man, but he felt love the way an infant does. And for him, love - be it for a dead mother or for society as a whole or whatever - was always tinted a wistful, regretful blue. In the technicolour Sgt. Pepper era, you didn't notice it, but here it's exactly that regret that makes this touching and nakedly personal acoustic composition so wonderful. Lennon is trying an uncomplicated lovesong, a work of simple beauty (and he's perhaps trying to best 'Blackbird'), but perhaps even against his will the sadness creeps in. He couldn't escape it, and we're all the richer for it. And who knew he was such an adept guitarist?

I'd like this to close the entire album with this, whispering into silence, but it's too personal. So another song closes it, but this is runner-up.

Birthday: lose

Very clever to compose a 'birthday song', a rival for Patty and Mildred Hill's old still-in-copyright standby. And it's perhaps one of the Beatles' best-known songs, but it's also one of the least worthy. A highly cheesy piece of emptiness, the song has the same problem 'Ob-La-Di' does, in that it thinks it's fun, whereas it is in fact no fun whatsoever.

Yer Blues: lose

The biggest problem with this four-minute take on the blues: deciding whether it's sincere or tongue-in-cheek. If it's the latter, then the shopworn clichés are excusable. If it's the former, then the clearly impassioned vocal performance makes sense. Ultimately, I have no idea, and I strongly suspect Lennon didn't either. He seems to have liked the song, though, which is where he and I disagree. I can't put my finger on it, exactly, but there's too much artifice and pretence here for the soul-baring the song wants to display. And it proves its point several minutes before it ends.

Mother Nature's Son: keep (side one, track two)

This is very obviously one of the acoustic India songs, and yet it's perhaps the one where that low-tech inspiration and the urban sophistication of their recording milieu complimented each other best. It's that beguiling brass arrangement, unsettling where the composition itself attempts to be comforting that makes the song a most peculiar form of gorgeous. This is McCartney songcraft at its finest, a rival to 'For No One', and a disconcertingly bittersweet experience that evokes the spirit of the White Album, disquiet and serenity hand in hand, most perfectly.

There might only be four McCartney songs here, but he's still one of the main 'partners', so not including him in the first two tracks of the album would just be unfair. And it's odd that this is the showiest of the four McCartney songs I included, but there you go... plus, like 'Dear Prudence', it's a proper India song, so it gets the story told right.

Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey: keep (side one, track three)

'And Your Bird Can Sing' is one of my favourite-ever Beatles songs, a great riff and a headlong rush from start to finish. This particular song is a kind of 'part two', quite meaningless but with a great energy and a great drive from start to finish. It has nothing to do with meditation-induced acoustic-guitar navel-gazing, and so perhaps doesn't really fit on this album, but it's a great piece of work, a genuine moment of sincere excitement on an album where most of the laughter is canned.

This is a very tough track to place. For some reason, I kept wanting to put it on side two. Turns out it's a more natural fit on side one, early enough that the album hasn't really found its voice yet.

Sexy Sadie: keep (side one, track four)

I've always been on the fence about this song. With its dreamy wow-wow vocals and phenomenally wobbly piano, it's a beautiful-sounding piece. But it feels more than a little like a minor 'Dear Prudence'. So in all the times I've compiled a single-length White Album, this has always fallen in the middle, between the 'must-haves' and the 'must-excludes'. This time out, I'm going for it. Ultimately, what I find so enjoyable about the song is its melody: for all his virtues, Lennon is not a great writer of melodies, but this one, sensitively song with great excursions into falsetto, is well-managed, through verse, chorus and middle eight. It lingers on in the imagination, which is why it's no mere also-ran. The invective (toward the Maharishi, who was not very sexy at all) that informs this songs lingers a bit, but mixed into the swooning beauty - which makes this another White Album song to evoke conflicting emotions simultaneously.

Also a tough one to place... so the dead middle of side one. And a three-song set swiped intact from the double. Why does this keep happening?

Helter Skelter: lose

I have no love at all for this pointlessly noisy skronk of a song. Whatever mood they were looking for by bashing their instruments unmusically, it fails. And all we're left with is Paul screaming for no good reason about a playground slide. Charles Manson stole it, U2 stole it back... really it should have just remained on the cutting-room floor.

Long, Long, Long: keep (side two, track seven)

Preferring this gorgeous whispering haiku of a song to the noisy mess that precedes it is, I concede, merely a matter of individual choice. It's easy to condemn this song as boring wallpaper. After all, it's so unassuming that you're tempted not to even notice it's there. Even if you're well acquainted with the White Album, you'll have a hard time singing this from memory. But if you give it a chance and actually let it weave its very particular spindly little spell over you, you will succumb to its virtues. It's a haunting piece of work, and perhaps the most personal and heartfelt piece George Harrison ever recorded for the Beatles. That its virtues are often overlooked, then, is highly appropriate.

So I use this song to say goodbye, a final murmur on an album that slowly winds down to a halt instead of going out with a bang. And in so doing, I do something the Beatles themselves never did: end an album with a George Harrison composition (Beatles For Sale ends with him singing a cover). This song is worth it.

Revolution 1: keep (side two, track one)

The album's 'major statement' is a more laid-back 'bluesy' version of the b-side to 'Hey Jude'. The music is more or less incidental, really; there's a decent brass arrangement and some screaming guitars, but it's all about the lyrics. It's well-written and it's a well-intended effort to actually 'say something'. i think you could argue that that means it belongs on a different album, a more stridently political album that never got made but perhaps should have. Most of the White Album's finest moments have nothing to do with preaching or with universalism; they're very much about the headspaces the four individuals who created them inhabit. So this song really does stick out, but it still fits. It's the sermon that 'Within You Without You' was on Sgt. Pepper. A very different kind of sermon? Sure, but this is a very different kind of album.

It's got to open a side, right? So side two it is. Just like 'Within You Without You'.

Honey Pie: lose

Songs like this make me wonder what it is that motivates Paul McCartney to compose - the challenge, I guess, of trying new things. Flapper-era music is not by itself bad - perhaps not my cup of tea, but whatever. And McCartney fakes it decently enough, but this style of music requires a kind of insouciance that I don't think they pull off. It's a not-half-bad facsimilie, but a facsimilie it reamins. And more importantly, it's a smarmy piece of soulless nonsense that has nothing to do with the rest of the album. It's not aggressively offensive like 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da', but no enjoyment went into its creation, and no enjoyment comes from its consumption either.

Savoy Truffle: lose

We're just a few ways away from the breakup of the Beatles, where George Harrison will explode onto the scene with a triple-album, talking about how his musical expressions were always suppressed in the Beatles, keeping him to the strictest of quotas. If this is the case, why waste a rare one-song-per-side look-in on this particular song? Sure, the horns and the organ are great. In a way this is as 'funky' as the Beatles ever got. But it's entirely empty, a pointless listing of chocolates and nothing else. George Harrison is guilty of the crime most often pinned on McCartney: confusing style with substance, letting form replace feeling. And since Harrison doesn't share McCartney's way with a tune, the results are arguably even more dire.

Cry Baby Cry: keep (side two, track four)

Why are the best nursery rhymes so creepy? I mean, they are: they all exist in a particular headspace where a child's wide vistas of imagination spread open just enough to hint at the darkness in the corners. This song is fully cognisant of this, and while it sounds a but like 'Dear Prudence', its overall chaotic vibe is entirely different. This is a song that's proud to be creepy, and that is aware that the best way to truly creep people out is to play with the theme of childlike innocence. This is a great piece of art, and Paul McCartney's little tacked-on acoustic segue complements it beautifully. It's the highlight of a difficult-to-love side four.

I experimented with putting this on side one, but as the evil cousin of 'Dear Prudence', it needed to be far away from it. Toward the end of the album, but before the trilogy that ends it, so track four. Putting 'Can You Take Me Back?' next to 'Blackbird' is a bit underwhelming, but what else could I do?

Revolution 9: lose

No, I don't include 'Revolution 9'. But I'd like a minute to explain why: where a million other commentators find unlistenable experimentation and navel-gazing, I find an evocative soundscape and an exceptionally listenable piece of art. I like "Revolution 9" and have listened to it on many an occasion - yes, all the way through to the end. So for me, it's not a personal distaste for the track so much as (a) its inordinate length, which becomes a much bigger issue when we cut the album in half and which would eliminate perhaps four different songs were I to include it, and (b) the stylistic gulf that exists between it and the other songs - more manageable, perhaps, in the purposefully-eclectic double but more of an issue in the more reigned-in single-length I've produced. It's not just that it would stick out like a sore thumb, so to speak: it would also lethally slaughter the momentum of the album. But of the tracks I've put on the chopping block, it's one of the most listenable.

Good Night: lose

The harp, the swooning strings, the trilling female voices... this ought to be easy to detest, but I don't detest it at all. Putting poor little Ringo at the centre of the chaos is a bit cruel, but he does what Ringo does best here - disarm the sceptic. It's a great testament to what could be done with an amazing producer and almost unlimited budget from your record contract. And it's a joke, too, even as it's sincere: a final head-trip after eight and a half minutes of the biggest head trip on the album. But it doesn't sound like anything else on the album, it doesn't fit, and it's a boring composition ultimately (as perhaps a lullaby should be).

Better as a Single: "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter" by Joni Mitchell

2011-03-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, first off, let's approach, in point-form, just what this particular beast is. Joni Mitchell's particular corner in the story of 20th century music is so discrete and particular that it's quite rare indeed to just 'stumble across' her post-Court and Spark material. Unless you've made a conscious decision to immerse yourself in it, you can be well-versed in 1970s music and be completely unaware of this album, and of Hejira and Mingus, the albums which preceded and followed this one, and are very much of a piece with it. So what is it?

Sonically, it's remarkably consistent: this is Joni Mitchell sacrificing hummable vocal melodies for long-winded poetry delivered with a jazzy vocal feel, accompanied by acoustic guitars and an always-prominent fretless bass. Seriously, this is like a textbook for the bass student.
It's barely even a double at all: ten songs, less than sixty minutes. It's only seven minutes longer than Hejira, released the year before as a single-length. If you remove a single song, "Paprika Plains", you walk away with a perfectly manageable 43-minute, 9-track album. I'm tempted to do exactly that, but I think that would be a bit cheeky.
This album is of limited value to people who don't listen to lyrics. Lyrics are the centre of this album: everything revolves around them. If you prefer music for the music (which I admit most of the time I tend to), you might find this rough going. Also it takes effort: personally, I felt like I needed to be reading the lyrics to listen to this or else I was missing out. Not music for that morning ride to work, then.
Even with that significant caveat, this is still music you need to be in the mood for. It's a 60-minute invitation into a very interesting person's mind, and if you're up for that, it's a hell of a journey. But if you're not up for it, you'll find this pretentious and maddeningly low on 'tunes'.

Critical acclaim for this album was 'mixed'. It wasn't quite panned, but there wasn't much love for it either. I find it difficult to ultimately say the degree to which I like this album, because there's this nagging voice in the back of my head telling me I ought to like it. But I find it easier going than a lot of doubles I've considered. It's no masterpiece, but it ain't half bad either: I guess the critics were right all along.

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter

Side one

Overture / Cotton Avenue (6:41)
Otis and Marlena (4:09)
Dreamland (4:38)
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (6:36)

Side two

Paprika Plains (16:21)
Off Night Backstreet (3:20)

Overture / Cotton Avenue: keep (side one, track one)

This is two entirely different entities fused together: it starts with three minutes of overdubbed acoustic guitars, disembodied wailing and navel-gazing fretless bass. If that sounds horrifying, it really isn't. It's quite pretty and evocative - and it's certainly a mysterious beginning to a rather inscrutable album. The spell is shattered a bit when it breaks into a rather more conventional pop song, but really that's just a new spell being woven, for "Cotton Avenue" is also beguiling in its own way: fun, swinging and exciting. It's about how music can be a release: dancing to 'shiny music' during a 'summer storm', which is perhaps what the first three minutes of this track are meant to be.

I probably respect artists' opening track choices too often. In the vast majority of my distillations, I keep them intact. Here's another. But what else to do with the 'overture' part? Don Juan's Reckless Daughter is overinflated as a double, but I respect Mitchell's use of space here. Opening with such a sparse piece is brave. And I like bravery.

Talk to Me: lose

That lead bass grounds her, but otherwise the hyperactive strum and breathy gibber of a vocal performance would have taken Joni Mitchell completely airborne here. She's great fun to listen to, drunkenly trying to chat up a 'silent type' and imitating a chicken at one point. But it's not as flirty and cute as it needs to be, and so ultimately it's a failure as a seduction.

Jericho: lose

The reason why double albums tend to be more sonically diverse than singles is easy: a limited palette becomes excessively repetitive over four sides of vinyl. Joni Mitchell does shake things up, but on a limited scale, and by and large this song represents her raison d'être this time out all too exactingly. The languid tempo and sonic feel is all quite familiar, and the vocals again sound like a poem sung out loud: lines spread across bars with the most minimal of melodies. It's not an embarrassment at all; after all, being entirely an example of the particular genre she created and then worked almost exclusively in from 1975 to 1980 or so, how could it be? But neither does it stand out.

Paprika Plains: keep (side two, track one)

Ah, the bane of my existence at the moment. 'Paprika Plains' is sixteen minutes and twenty-one seconds. It stands out by featuring Mitchell on piano, not guitar: a pretty decent piano performance, I think. The different texture, especially once the excellent orchestration kicks in, makes this an attractive prospect. As does the initial segment of the song, an evocative picture-in-words of the Native American experience - viewed by an outsider. This part of the song last 5:15, and were it to end right there would be a cinch for inclusion in my single-length version. 'I'm floating into my dreams', she says - and then she does exactly that, stumbling into an entirely instrumental piano-and-orchestra midsection that lasts six minutes and forty-one seconds. It's pretty enough: Mitchell performs well, and the score is vaguely cinematic in feel. It's all deeply evocative stuff. But almost seven minutes of it? In the middle of a song? It's tough to define that as anything but indulgent. In any case, the vocals return for the briefest of segues as we enter 'part three' of the song twelve minutes in. Out of nowhere come drums and a saxophone, and the 'journey' is complete. But the saxophone coda goes on too long too, and a second overlong instrumental section in the same song is a bit trying, since so much of the song is truly beautiful and evocative. This song is the bane of my existence because the decision to include it or not affects everything else: it's a whole side... If I ditch it, the album that remains is pretty much good to go as is. If I include it, I have to throw large parts of the remainder of the album out to accommodate it. Where needle time is precious, can I afford seven minutes of piano tinkering?

Okay, so I chose it ultimately. Perhaps it's more than a little overdone, but it's worthy of inclusion, and its instrumentation makes all the difference. I don't quite devote a whole side to it, though: I allow it to dominate side two while giving it a brief dénouement (and palate-cleanser). I think the result is much more user-friendly.

Otis and Marlena: keep (side one, track two)

An electric guitar floats in from nowhere in this song, and it feels like a revelation. Drums occasionally appear, but they're superfluous: Joni Mitchell's violent acoustic guitar strokes are percussion enough. She's quite confident on this one, painting the picture of a couple arriving on holiday in Miami, 'while Muslims hold up Washington'. That political/religious image, a chorus of sorts, recurs several times in the song, a non-sequitur so extreme that that must be the point. Apparently this is a lampoon of the kind of people who travel to Miami for vacation. I don't really know what that means, but that seems a bit unhappily élitist to me. I choose not to listen to the lyrics. Side three is actually the same in structure as side two, except the three component parts are given different names this time out. So the song doesn't exactly end so much as gradually become the next song.

Having chosen to include 'Paprika Plains', I'm now forced to programme my album entirely around its side-one inclusions. Sadly, they follow the album's actual 'flow', though this way, with this as track two, the whole side gradually builds in tempo. Which is nice.

The Tenth World: lose

When you listen to this album for the first time, the entrance of some South American and otherwise 'international' percussion makes you perk your ears up with excitement. The idea of Joni fronting a battery of exotic drums is far more interesting than, say, Paul Simon. Yet we never quite get that... at first you find yourself wondering when the song will begin, you marvel at the length of that 'intro', you start to bemoan the pretence of such an extended beginning to a song... and then you sadly realise that this is the song. That for seven minutes, it's going to be nothing more than percussion with some guy sounding like one of the Gipsy Kings (anachronism, I know) singing on top. And Joni Mitchell nowhere to be found... and how silly is that? It's her album: why give seven-minute stretches to other people? Ultimately, it starts to sound like a documentary, and forced eclecticism.

Dreamland: keep (side one, track three)

And then finally we get what we've been waiting for: Joni extemporising over that Latin percussion. It's as good as it should be, Joni at her gypsy best with the drums less 'wild' but more purposeful. She plays around with racial stereotypes - a lost little Canadian wandering around during Carnaval, perhaps, confused but enjoying the reverie. Again, shut off the lyrics and just enjoy the mood: it's been eight minutes coming, after all. It's a lot of fun, even though you get this sense that it's not supposed to be all that much fun.

Yes, I get rid of the Latin percussion 'interlude'. But I still let this follow 'Otis and Marlena' as side one, track three. Joni was going somewhere with her side three, after all. Let's let her.

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter: keep (side one, track four)

This is pretty unrelenting stuff, six an a half minutes of ferociously strummed guitar and breathless vocals, singing pages and pages of lyrics that merge side two's Native American introspection with side three's Latin American release. And with the USA American national anthem interspersed to boot (the second time she's put an anthem into one of her songs, after 'A Case of You'). You might reach for the lyrics sheet, but this time you can survive on the half-heard phrases and put them together as you see fit, really - since the end result is in some way 'psychedelic', a word that makes less than no sense in talking about a late-seventies folkie/jazz fusion concept. But it's true - altered consciousness brought about by sleep or alcohol or whatever constitutes a large part of this album, and here it's brought about by music, by the chant-like repetition and swimming sound of this particular track. it's pretty great, and on the double it brings the album to a kind of climax before two more 'retro' songs bring it back to earth.

It's always a good question where to put the title track. First or last seem obvious, but the title track isn't always the album's 'main idea' - for example here I don't think it is, though it's still a compact epic. I like letting it conclude side one. As I've said above, it allows side one to constantly increase in tempo, toward a climax.

Off Night Backstreet: keep (side two, track two)

This is probably the single track on this album most accessible to Court and Spark fans, and oddly enough it gets lost in the shuffle here. The fretless bass carries the melody again, though there are subtle little flavours here and there, including a shimmering electric guitar and an occasional orchestral entry. Tempo is relaxed yet focused, Joni is on top form vocally working her way through a structure that could actually conceivably be covered by someone else (most of this album is too idiosyncratic to). She provides her own background vocals once the song's title appears, and it is sublime; a simple beauty of a song that does not outwear its welcome.

Joni Mitchell closes her album with two more 'traditional Joni songs' - this can't have been a coincidence. I'm only keeping one of those, but I'm still using it to close. And after sixteen and a half minutes of piano-and-orchestra flight, a safe landing is what the doctor ordered.

The Silky Veils of Ardor: lose

And suddenly, Joni gives us the folkie. This is the only acoustic-guitar-and-voice song on the album. Elements of her vocalisation are still jazzy like the rest of this album, but the 'feel' of the words she sings and certain words and phrases are taken directly from the folk oeuvre: tongue, perhaps, in cheek, but it closes the album on a very 'retro' note. Nostalgia, perhaps, for the artist Joni Mitchell no longer was by this point.

Better as a Single: "Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me" by the Cure

2011-02-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me is a strange album. The Cure had, until that point, stumbled blindly through their career, swerving from tinny post-punk to doomy goth to cheesy pop and then to a rather mature form of 'alternative rock', as American radio stations had it at the time. Having just subjected themselves to a 'greatest hits' retrospective with a new verion of early track 'Boys Don't Cry' as a single, it must have been difficult for Robert Smith & co. to decide where to go next.

Which is clearly why they decided to have their cake and eat it too. Artists are rarely allowed double albums unless they're commercially viable, and in this case the Cure uses the extended running time to attempt a leapfrog obstacle-course around "The Many Moods of The Cure". Gloomy minor-chord epics rub shoulders with the snappiest of radio jingles, would-be sitars and funk bass lines wander in, and the whole thing attempts to summarise everything the Cure is capable of.

It is an adept summary, largely because disc two shows another thing the Cure are capable of: unmemorable hackwork. I had this album on cassette at the time, and that required a lot of rewinding, since almost nothing on side two really captures the attention. None of it's horrible (the worst moments are, in fact, probably on side one), but it just seems to go on and on, 74 minutes for no reason whatsoever. They pulled four songs as singles, songs which, when considered as a whole, give a highly misleading impression of this album. But they're all worthy songs, good if not great (in one case, about as great as music gets). What bothers about this album is not its diversity (a/k/a messy lack of focus) so much as its overriding blandness, standout singles notwithstanding. Robert Smith has to be aware that, for much of this album, he was merely churning them out, composing and recording songs merely to fill out the playing time. That being the case, then, why was this a double-length album? Why not release a single-length and leave some of these songs for further development at a later time? The only thing I can think of is that Smith felt he had something to prove by releasing a double. But what was he trying to prove?

A further question is why this album is sequenced the way it is: obviously it's a common enough strategy to 'front-load' one's albums by putting the most memorable tracks near the beginning. But Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me craps out in a quite spectacular fashion, with side four in particular being perhaps the most uninteresting side of vinyl the Cure have ever released.

Incidentally, there is an alternate way to trim this down to single-album status, one that I would be remiss not to mention: the Cure has a tendency to take its time 'introducing' songs, waiting about a minute and a half on average before the first vocal entry arrives. In the cases of 'The Kiss', 'If Only Tonight We Could Sleep', 'Hey You!', 'One More Time' and 'Shiver and Shake', the first half of the songs are instrumental. If you clipped the instrumental intros off of all 18 of these songs, you'd lose an amazing twenty-six minutes of this album, bringing it down to a more manageable 48-minute running time.

Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me

Side one

The Kiss (6:17)
Just Like Heaven (3:30)
How Beautiful You Are... (5:10)
Why Can't I Be You? (3:11)

Side two

Hot Hot Hot!!! (3:32)
Catch (2:42)
One More Time (4:29)
A Thousand Hours (3:21)
If Only Tonight We Could Sleep (4:50)

The Kiss: keep (side one, track one)

As 'surprising ways to open your album' go, this one ranks pretty high. Close-miced walloping drums and screaming wah-wah-soaked guitars suggest an altogether different British idiom - but in truth this has very little to do with 'metal', even if it's as 'heavy' as the Cure have ever been. The arrangement is certainly different, but much isn't: it's mid-tempo and angsty, and it blurs the line between 'vocal song with instrumental intro' and 'instrumental song with vocal coda' - in this case, it's almost four minutes of wah-wah orgy before Robert Smith opens his mouth, to wail the album title and to (gasp!) say a dirty word. I hated this song when it first came out, but now I like it. And not only because it's ballsy but because it creates an intriguing particular mood. And creating moods... at least as much as 'performing songs', that's really what the Cure is best at.

Gotta admire the perversity that is starting the album with the longest and most extreme song. Sure, it's the 'title track', but it's hardly the song that's going to break them out onto MTV, is it? Anyway, I like the effect it creates as a 'starting track', so I'm keeping it there.

Catch: keep (side two, track two)

This is a clever follow-up to "The Kiss", a very obvious 'back to earth' stylistic contrast with that wah-wah epic. This is a brief little string-enhanced 'ditty', impossible not to like. Sweet without being syrupy, it doesn't say much and it doesn't force itself into your head like the other singles from this album, being altogether a subtler entity, as such initially easier to overlook. Ultimately, however, it shines bright as day, leaving the listener with a lighter heart and a lighter step in his shoes. Which is very nice of Robert.

This is well-placed on the double. I've replicated the effect with a different song, leaving this a bit homeless. Ultimately, my side two is two fast songs and three slower ones, in that order, so I use this to 'bridge' the two, as the second track of the side.

Torture: lose

I suppose this is an attempt at being 'anthemic' - big 1980s stadium drums, a rah-rah chorus. It actually sounds very much like U2, if Bono was whiney instead of groany. And if U2 put glacial synths and artificial brass in their songs. This song isn't actually torture (it's asking it titling a song that, right?) but it's nothing to write home about, either. We don't look to the Cure for our stadium anthems, do we?

If Only Tonight We Could Sleep: keep (side two, track five)

When I was a kid listening to this album, I guess I thought this was 'psychedelic'. It is, I suppose, in its own thoroughly 1980s way. I also thought in some way it evoked the Middle East or South Asia, places that I knew nothing about but that intrigued me. Snake-charmer music. And I probably thought it was a real sitar, as opposed to whatever studio-processed thing it is. Anyway, real or not, the song creates an atmosphere that is quite beguiling, taking its own damn time to go nowhere special. It's not much of a song, but it's an interesting mood. And those are hard to come by.

I really didn't know where to put this song until I stumbled across the idea of ending the disc with it, and then it made perfect sense. They say an album-closer should either 'sum up' what you as an artist to or point a bold way forward. "Fight" does neither, but this does the latter. Doesn't it?

Why Can't I Be You?: keep (side one, track four)

The main thing that allowed post-goth moper Robert Smith to become something approaching a pop star was, more than a pop sense or a pop ethic and certainly more than an ability to be joyful or cathartic, an ability to be playful. It's the sense of a middle-class shut-in putting on goofy clothes and dancing in front of a mirror that gives songs like "The Lovecats", "Lovesong" or this one their value. You might want to smack Robert Smith here, but at the same time you have to suppress a sympathetic smile in the process. This is silly, infantile nonsense - yet it's great fun, and it's no surprise that it's become a concert mainstay: while Robert Smith lacks the empathy and universality to create true collective-consciousness pop experiences, he can project his ultimately asocial image onto each and every individual concertgoer, transforming a stadium full of smeared-lipstick and dyed-hair disaffected teenagers into geeks spaz-dancing in front of mirrors. And that's an impressive trick that few people can pull off.

Not much can follow this song, really. I thought it made the most sense to finish off a side with it, so it's the end of side one.

How Beautiful You Are...: keep (side one, track three)

This one is a strange one. Musically, it's right there in the idiom of 'classic Cure', a beautiful melody atop a thick, lush carpet of a backdrop. The words attempt to tell a story, or at least to recount an emotional recollection of a particular situation. The song is quite good, good enough to merit inclusion. It's a good listen, but it aims for greatness and falls short. Something about the song is unlovable, really. It leaves a taste in my mouth that, while not quite bitter, sure falls short of the feast it could have been. Call it karma, I suppose, but it's tough to love a song that talks about hating.

The specific sonics of this track reminded me of "Just Like Heaven". So initially it didn't make much sense to track them side-by-side, but the fact is that they very simply sound good in rapid succession like that, so there you have it: side one, track three.

The Snakepit: lose

This is seven minutes long, but it feels positively interminable. If it slithered like a snake, at least that'd be something. But as it is, it merely lumbers like a tortoise: like an old, drugged tortoise. There's no development at all here: Verses? Chorus? None to be heard. A few 'exotic' sounds are tossed into the guitar-heavy mix, but it signifies nothing. Certainly nothing worth seven minutes of your time.

Hey You!: lose

For some reason, without the technology seemingly changing at all, as the 1980s became the 1990s, the length of a CD expanded a little bit from a rigid 74 minutes to about 80 or so. A few albums fell into the gap between 74 and 80 and, where today they merrily fit on a single CD, at their time of release they couldn't. This was one (by only a few seconds, in fact), and given the choice between releasing it as two CDs or trimming it down to size, the Cure's record companies chose the latter, axing this particular little ditty. And it's no surprise they chose this one, really: it's barely even a song, just an excuse to use brass instruments in an embarrassing attempt as party-down 'fun'. And what does it mean to 'look like Christmas' anyway?

Just Like Heaven: keep (side one, track two)

If there is a God, and if God composes songs, they probably sound like this. I'm at a loss right now because there aren't really any words to describe how absolutely fabulous this song is, the best one Robert Smith ever wrote and ever will and one of the very best anyone has ever written. The instruments that come in one at a time, the strummed hemidemisemiquavers, the noodling lead guitar line, those glacial keyboard chords, and that whining little voice... they're all familiar elements, but it comes together with a unity and a completeness that... well that would almost make a believer out of me.

The double follows up "The Kiss" with "Catch" as a palate-cleanser. I like that idea, but why not put your best foot forward? Clearly on the double this has been held off to start the second record in order to give that second piece of vinyl a bit of weight. Not needing that here, let's put it first of all, barring that six-minute 'intro'. So side one, track two it is, then.

All I Want: lose

Pretty nondescript by-the-numbers stuff here, neither horrid nor embarrassing, but just seemingly knocked-off filler. I mean, did Robert Smith write this and say, 'Yeah! This'll be the big one!' or did he say, 'Well, there's another one done and dusted'? Also, disappointingly, all Mr Smith wants is to hold you like a doll. I always thought it was 'hold you like a dog', which is at least interesting.

Hot Hot Hot!!!: keep (side two, track one)

This is the song that indicates probably the end-point of how far away from their core sound the Cure are willing to go and how far most Cure fans are willing to accommodate that. I say 'most' because for some Cure fans this is simply a bridge too far, and there is a segment of Robert Smith's audience that deplores this song. For my part, I acknowledge that it's a hell of a risk, but overall I give Mr. Smith a passing grade, and not just for effort. This is a pretty well-constructed attempt at funk, driven entirely by its bassline. In all likelihood, this song would have floundered if it weren't for that bassline, actually, but it brings a confident self-assurance to Smith's efforts to get throaty-groovy. The composition itself is decent too, a bouncy take on, well, seemingly on the topic of lightning. At the end of the day, though, what matters is the sound. It was a hell of a risk, and congratulations to Smith et al not only for giving it a try but for pulling it off.

The way this song sticks out, it's tough to sequence it in the middle of other Cure songs. And so I've gone with the logic of letting it really stick out by having it introduce side two. It's an attention-grabbing way to get the second half up and running. Or, alternately, if you listen without interruption, it's the second of two brash pop songs in a 'brash pop song' suite. It fits either way.

One More Time: keep (side two, track three)

Progress through the album gets extremely sluggish from this point on, as the collection is so very front-loaded that the final third of the whole thing drags by with nary a single attention-grabber in the bunch. I suspect that since the first half is so very disparate, and at times stretching the limits of what 'the Cure' are, that a little homogeneity was introduced in the second half to appease the diehards. But at tempos like this, you can't even tread water; you'll just sink. This particular song, though, is pretty enough, provided you keep the volume down low enough that those 'chiming' midrange guitars don't scrape holes in your eardrums. It aims for 'majestic' but really only manages 'dreamy' - but that's still good enough, really. It's slow and deliberate, a Sunday morning song. Robert starts to shout a little, but really only because no-one's paying him any attention.

While I attempted to sequence my single-length preserving the sense of hop-and-jump stylistic diversity of the double, through no fault of my own it didn't turn out that way at all. So my single-length kind of works on 'blocks' of mood-related songs. And this starts of the 'austere' segment of three songs that closes the record on I guess a sombre tone. Side two track three is the weakest point of a record, but here it's like the beginning of a closing 'suite'.

Like Cockatoos: lose

Why the avian title but the aquatic mood? Anyway, mood is really all this is - an intriguing acoustic percussive groove. It does intrigue, but it goes nowhere. And Robert forgot to write a song to go with the riff.

Icing Sugar: lose

Rolling drums and unpleasant saxophone. This would be undemanding even as a b-side. Hell, it wouldn't impress as the 'bonus track' that they used to put on the 12" to get fans to buy both single formats. That's how essential this song is. Oh, and by 2:13 into the song, by which point people have stopped paying attention, it occurs to Robert to start singing.

The Perfect Girl: lose

If someone offered you a handsome sum of money to produce a dozen songs that sounded like the Cure and gave you only 48 hours to accomplish it, you'd wind up producing a lot of stuff exactly like this. Objectively, there's nothing I can point to as being bad in this song, and it even tries its hand at a catchy riff. But there's nothing to make it stand out, either. This is the façade of a nice building, not the building itself. It's an empty shell. And that's precisely what makes the second disc of this album such slow-going: it's ultimately a ghost town, a Hollywood set after the shooting's finished. It's little more than mere appearances.

A Thousand Hours: keep (side two, track four)

I wonder if this was an outtake from an earlier era of the Cure or if it was just a deliberate look back at that era. Either way, this is a Faith-style ice castle: detuned drums thudding beneath a noodling guitar-and-synth duet. Just as rote as any of its immediate neighbours, but ultimately there's a little depth to it, or at least the appearance of depth.

Makes sense to keep this late in the sequence. It's a 'late in the sequence' kind of song. Of the final three songs, two have stark instrumentation and one is really saturated. Since stark-saturated-stark didn't make any sense whatsoever, I went with saturated-stark-stark, leaving this to be the middle track of the suite, side two track four.

Shiver and Shake: lose

Apparently this song is dedicated to band member Lol Tolhurst, who might have an awesome internet acronym for a name (his brother's name is Wtf) but spent the 80s regressing from contributing band member to drug-addicted waste of space. While some people might look at a fellow band member struggling with addiction and see an opportunity to help, Robert appears to see it as an opportunity to write a petty screed of a song, shouting all manner of abuse at a guy who technically was still in the band at the time. Lovely. Oh, incidentally, it's a horrible song.

Fight: lose

This is the way the album ends, not with a bang. Not with a whimper, which would have been all right, but with a repetitive riff-and-cheesy-drums non-entity. What's most noteworthy about this song is how entirely unnoteworthy it is, bringing this meandering album to a conclusion on the unmistakeable sense that it realyl should have finished some fifteen minutes ago. Fight, fight, fight, Robert squeaks, entirely unconvincingly. Was this meant to be inspiring? It isn't. It isn't anything at all.

Better as a Single: "Electric Ladyland" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience

2011-01-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

Jimi Hendrix's music legacy is confusing as hell. Part of the problem is that he released only three studio albums during his life but appears to have recorded an almost unlimited wealth of material, kept in vaults and gradually released after his death in an endless flow of 'posthumous albums', ranging in quality from quite good to absolutely horrid. His barrel appears to have no bottom whatsoever, but by now only a small portion of 'what's out there' is material Hendrix actually intended to have 'out there'. Hendrix's own role in the shaping of his legacy has long become a mere footnote. Which is a tragedy - the glut of material that's out there should be sifted through, but only after consuming the three studio albums he actually sanctioned release of.

This issue is part-and-parcel of the greater confusion regarding Jimi Hendrix. On the one hand, there's the acid-head hippie child, live on stage playing his guitar with his teeth or else setting it on fire, smack-dab in the middle of endless jamming, an orgiastic celebration of instrumental virtuosity and stagecraft as opposed to a celebration of the simplest, purest joys of musical creation. But on the other hand there's Jimi Hendrix the composer, the man capable of beautiful and entertaining songs, well-constructed and well-sung (it goes without saying well-played as well) and Jimi Hendrix the interpreter, who could bring such new visions to cover material that he was practically engaged in the art of 'recomposition' anyway. Jimi Hendrix the flamboyant masturbatory king of guitar-noodle and Jimi Hendrix the incredibly talented guitarist player: those two are not the same beast. It's the first one that gets the press, but it's the second one radio is more likely to play. It's the second one that deserves to be heard.

Predictably, any double-album released by Jimi Hendrix is going to contain both 'faces' of the man - and just as predictably the ratio is going to be tipped in favour of the guitar-noodler. Just as predictably, my single-disc remedy is going to consist largely (but not entirely) of me stripping away the noodling and retaining the songs.

I grew to like this album after listening to it. I started it with trepidation, fearing seventy minutes of "The Star-Spangled Banner". Knowing Hendrix mostly for those FM radio staples he has about a dozen of, and knowing that this album contained a handful of them, I was expecting to love the staples and hate the noodles. That's not quite what happened. But it's close enough.

Electric Ladyland

Side one

Crosstown Traffic (2:25)
Gypsy Eyes (3:43)
Long Hot Summer Night (3:27)
House Burning Down (4:33)
All Along the Watchtower (4:01)

Side two

Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland) (2:11)
1983... (A Mermaid I Should Turn to Be) (13:39)
Voodoo Child (Slight Return) (5:12)

» Electric Ladyland, Single-Disc Version «

...And the Gods Made Love: lose

Apparently, we're meant to believe that a minute of whooshing noise and studio dickery knocked 'em dead back in 1968. Those were simpler times, evidently.

Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland): keep (side two, track one)

This is pretty conventional, actually. a piece of R&B balladry that could have fit on a Motown album (maybe not a 7" though) of the era, except for a falling-apart sloppiness that is actually kind of endearing and of course except for that Hendrix-sounding guitar. Hendrix is meant to have been really pleased with how the vocals turned out on this one, and his multitracked harmonies are indeed well done. I like that this album's 'title track' sounds nothing like the album's raison d'être, standing apart as musically conservative more than convention-breaking. A real grower, though, this one: overlooked on an album filled with rock-radio 'classics'.

It's already strange for an eight-song album not to have four songs on each side. But with the length of the other two songs on the b-side, it would have been even more balanced, time-wise, to put six songs on side one and two on side two. But that would have looked silly. I'm putting the shortest of my eight songs on the b-side, as side two track one, which is an odd place for a title track, but it fits sonically.

Crosstown Traffic: keep (side one, track one)

For such a sprawling album, it's amazing that Electric Ladyland starts off with three tiny little tracks back-to-back. It is a well-programmed album, and after the intro and the soul-man bit, this is the 'pop song' - not 'pop' as in 'candyfloss', but something most eminently playable on AM radio. Catchy, if you will. 'Crosstown Traffic' really is a remarkable achievement, a swaggering funk-rock groove condensed into a mere 145 seconds. Verse-chorus-verse, distilled to the essence and exciting as hell. The main riff is performed on kazoo, which is silly, but it really does work. Hendrix really did know how to craft a song, and for someone whose main legacy is the extended running-time of 'rock' in the 70s and onward, it's interesting how many of his most memorable tracks fail to crack the three-minute barrier.

This is an obvious lapel-grabbing album-opener. It's not the title-track, but I think it's a great way to get the single-length off the ground. Side one, track one.

Voodoo Chile: lose

...And then the brevity goes out the window. This isn't teeth-on-strings Hendrix exactly, because it's a jam with Steve Winwood on organ. So it's got more organ than Hendrix jams tend to. But it is a huge fifteen-minute jam. And a jam on a song that appears elsewhere on this album in a briefer form. So no surprises for guessing whether I keep it or bin it. But it really doesn't deserve inclusion. It has an authentic blues feel for the first few minutes, but then it becomes "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida". There might be value to performances like this (a) done live, on the night and/or (b) if you're stoned. But it is this very endless jamming that, I think, obscures what Hendrix's legacy could otherwise be. His actual albums don't have as much of it as all the stuff that's come out posthumously, but there's still more than there needs to be. It's not that I have anything against fifteen-minute songs. Just I have something against five-minute songs pointlessly stretched out to fifteen.

Little Miss Strange: lose

Noel Redding's time in the sun, and a shocking reminder that this album really was released in 1968. After all, this and not the remainder of this album is what radio sounded like in 1968, and hearing this song in this context really does underline how out-of-time Hendrix was, since this particular track seems hopelessly retro and twee while much of the rest of this album is still quite playable on radio today. This song isn't an embarrassment, and it's not the worst track on this album, but it does stick out like a sore thumb. Plus, for all intents and purposes it's a song written and performed by an outsider, like Hendrix's own "Star Spangled Banner" stuck on a U2 album.

Long Hot Summer Night: keep (side one, track three)

That title is not what he actually sings in the song, but oh well. It makes more sense anyway. This is an impressive enough song, too much lead guitar and ridiculous stereo separation, but it's a kind of blues-based slow-burner, unassuming and mildly attractive. It doesn't grab you by the lapels as does much of this album, and as such leaves a better impression that some of more excessive moments here.

I like this song, and I'm glad to include it, but it doesn't really stand out, so smack-dab in the middle of side one, track three, is a good place for it. It follows and is followed by 'harder' bluesy songs. So it's a slight pause for breath.

Come On (Let the Good Times Roll): lose

A pretty boring cover song. Thirty years of bar bands sounding exactly like this has dulled whatever impact this might have had back in the day, as does the knowledge that Hendrix likely knocked out stuff like this in his sleep. I can certainly relate: sleep is exactly where hearing it puts me.

Gypsy Eyes: keep (side one, track two)

This is a strange one. It's barely a song at all really - mostly it's an appropriately voodoo-like guitar riff played over a train-track drumbeat. That's really all it is, but somehow it manages to be fabulous. The lyrics are meant to discuss Hendrix's mother, not that that's the impression you'd get from a casual listen. Like the five minute version of 'Voodoo Child' that ends this album, this is a guitar-lesson. But that song uses the guitar to fill all the air. This one is a lot sparser, a lot looser. While it's not really a funk song, it is composed mostly of the same ingredients as a funk song. It has the same brute loose-limbed physicality to it. All in all, it's quite compelling: not blues but blues-like, not funk but funky.

This song is buried rather deep in the double. I think it deserves a more prominent place, so I put it directly after 'Crosstown Traffic' as the second song in the collection. My side one is pretty much entirely 'commercial' stuff, and this song is plenty commercial, despite sounding nothing at all like anything on the radio, be it 1968 or today.

Burning of the Midnight Lamp: lose

This track is beguiling in its own way, a summer-of-love evocation of time and space, a bit silly (featuring a harpsichord and featuring a description of loneliness as 'such a drag') but well-meaning, and with a taking-flight vibe to it that is quite attractive. The thing is, though, that Electric Ladyland is not a summer-of-love album, not in chronology and not in temperament. The old strategy of beefing up your double-length by sticking ancient non-album tracks on it is never an attractive one, for what the album gains in 'starpower' it loses in thematic unity and reason to exist. After all, if an album's worth was measured by how many singles it featured, history's best albums would all be 'greatest hits' compilations.

Rainy Day, Dream Away: lose

Nothing at all to do with the Experience, this is Hendrix 'jamming' with a sax player and an organist. And with Buddy Miles. I guess it was a jam that Hendrix himself was impressed with, enough to break it in two and start both side three and side four with it. An obviously knocked-off song-cum-excuse-for-jamming, it's meant to evoke, I think, a careless, uneventful 'rainy day' - passing the time while prevented from anything of substance. And though the guitar (predictably enough) gets around to working up a fury soon enough, by and large he suceeds at evoking that. But why would we want to listen to that? It's not offensive, unless you find such pointlessly empty jamming offensive.

1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be): keep (side two, track three)

You could be excused for thinking, in 1968, that by 1983 all music would sound like this. We have Michael Jackson and Duran Duran to thank for proving that prediction wrong, but really, as fourteen-minute songs go, this one is pretty harmless. The song itself, unsurprisingly, stops about five minutes in, but what for me gives this the edge is that for the remaining nine minutes Hendrix is less interested in using his guitar ability for inspiring awe and more interested in establishing a mood. He succeeds: a mood that is more astral than aquatic. That doesn't matter, since the merman stuff is nonsense anyway and not the point. The point is the 'trippiness', and let's face it, 'trippiness' is in no small part why people buy Hendrix albums. So this makes the cut for me, much to my own surprise. After all, if I strip off all the jamming, I don't really have a Jimi Hendrix album, do I?

This is obviously a side-two thing, and I let it take up the whole of the middle of side two: the second of three songs.

Moon, Turn the Tides... Gently Gently Away: lose

At this point, I have no idea what's going on. I was ready to compare this to the first track, a minute-long chunk of noise with a dreadful title. It would appear, though, that there's nothing here but chaos: excluding the 'rainy' jam session, this whole side is a bit of a single piece that you can break into three: the song bit, the jammy bit, and the minute of noise. Some versions of this album call just the song bit '1983' and the remainder (ten minutes) 'Moon'. The version I have joins the song bit and the jammy bit and leaves the chunk-of-noise at the end. By now I don't care, though: I'm happy to lop off the noise and bin it, but for the sake of completeness, if you want to include it, go ahead. It's just a minute; it changes nothing either way.

Still Raining, Still Dreaming: lose

Like this wasn't boring enough the first time out.

House Burning Down: keep (side one, track four)

This is probably the single track on the whole album that it's toughest to have an opinion on. It's Hendrix at his most Hendrix-esque, with guitars-a-plenty but in service of a proper composition. The lyrics, about the riots then happening in the USA, are a bit more explicitly political than the rest of the album. I include it, more because it doesn't suck than because it's great. It really does defy analysis though, because it's competent but unexceptional work. Good guitar, but so what? This is Hendrix for Christ's sake.

I had a hard time deciding whether this should come before or after 'All Along the Watchtower'. In the end, I followed Hendrix's lead and put it first, as track four of side one, largely because it creates a three-song 'bluesy' suite in the middle of side one.

All Along the Watchtower: keep (side one, track five)

Hendrix was a good songwriter when he wanted to be, but not so great that Dylan can't show him up on his own album. Hendrix flubs the lyrics but nails the spirit, bringing the song a smoky voodoo feel it had lacked on Dylan's sparse original, but one that Dylan liked so much that he adopted it and thereafter took to covering a cover of his own song in concert. This is a quartet performance, with Dylan's four-chord chassis hammered out with a martial feel and Hendrix spraying out 'licks' whenever he's not singing. It might have been formulaic, but it retains a freshness here, maybe because it's performed with an unblinking authority. You could argue that Hendrix lacks subtlety, screaming through a bullhorn what Dylan, a master of musical restraint, merely implies. It's ultimately futile, though, to worry about whether this or Dylan's is the 'ultimate' take on this composition: both are great, in completely different ways.

So I let this song finish side one, as track five. It gives a pretty prominent position to what is, after all, a cover song, and to talk about the legacy of this song down the years is, to a certain extent, to be committing an anachronism. But it kind of gives 'House Burning Down' a context, or rather it widens the scope of that song to address society as a whole, in a more cryptic way. Plus it asks a lot to ask almost any song to follow up this one. So this one gets followed up by needle-silence.

Voodoo Child (Slight Return): keep (side two, track three)

There are two ways to listen to this song. You can listen to the composition in its entirety, a swaggering take on blues tradition with a strong vocal performance by Jimi Hendrix and an impressively big rhythm section. Alternately, as most people do, you can strip away everything else and merely listen tho this as a five-minute guitar lesson. And yes, the guitar performance is filled with technical prowess and conveys a range of emotions. But therein lies the rub of Jimi Hendrix: if you listen to music for its emotional response (and hopefully you do), do you find that emotional response in instrumental performance, of do you find it in other places, like for example in the composition of the song itself? This is what either makes you love Hendrix or leaves you cold: to what extent does 'he plays the guitar really well' suffice in the service of good music? In this particular case, I think it succeeds, largely because it's in service of an attractive blues song. But down this avenue lies not only the worst of Hendrix's live macho posturing and endless noodling but a million garish horrors in 'rock music' history. Heavy metal is born in the playing time of this song, and that's a crime for which Hendrix might perhaps have served jail time, but to condemn what came after this song isn't to condemn this song itself, which is much more intelligent and emotionally resonant than most heavy metal.

Where can you go from here? Nowhere, really, which is why Hendrix finished his album on this high note and why I do too. A wake-up call and a return to earth after 13 minutes of spaciness, and a clear 'high note' to bring the album to a conclusion.

Better as a Single: "Here, My Dear" by Marvin Gaye

2010-12-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

Here My Dear is on of those albums that inspires more discussion about the circumstances of its making than the content itself. That makes sense, seeing as its circumstances are fascinating and its content is often not, but that hardly bodes well for the album as a listening experience.

Famously, Marvin Gaye was getting a divorce from his wife, Anna (complicatedly, sister of Gaye's Motown-impresario boss Berry Gordy). The terms of the settlement included a proviso that, as alimony, Gaye turn over the proceeds from his next album to Anna. While I've spent years wondering what kind of boneheaded wannabe-Solomon would come up with such a ruling, it turns out that the idea came from Gaye and Gordy themselves, and the judge merely confirmed it after both sides privately agreed to it. The story goes that Gaye set out to make a terrible album in spite but eventually his artistry caught up with him and he came up with a genuine statement instead of just merely product.

That might be true, and if so, being a double, perhaps the album gives us both stages in equal parts. Critics have warmed to this album down the years after giving it initially a cool reception, but if ever there was a double album crying out to be a single, this is it. Large stretches of this album follow a similar pattern: a smooth and very attractive R&B backdrop is established, over which Gaye waxes philosophical for minutes at a time, singing stream-of-consciousness musings over amorphous melodies that never gel into anything hummable. The musings, beautifully sung with great overdubs, often have the cadence of a great Baptist preacher in full flight and are in turn petty, profound, boring, angry, knocked-off, thought-through, bittersweet, bitter and sweet. Yet they very rarely connect with the listener, being ultimately self-involved mumbling as opposed to enjoyable music. Choruses are few and far between on this album as tunes arrive, repeat unchanged for an average of about six minutes, and then go away. Any variation whatsoever to this template inevitably sticks out and seizes the imagination of the listener. And by and large it is those deviations that remain on my eight-track single disc. Perhaps that means I've removed the heart of this musical-exorcism. But perhaps it's that so-called 'heart' that makes this album difficult to enjoy, and with it gone, suddenly it's a much better, leaner project.

One last 'pity' here: the only real time you ever hear mention of Here, My Dear is on lists of albums about divorce, some similar discussion. Considering that it touches probably more people than it doesn't (children of broken homes included), divorce is a huge topic that is barely mentioned in popular music (outside of country & western, of course). A double-album concept album about divorce is actually a great idea, but this is not that album: it's a concept album about Marvin Gaye and Anna Gordy's divorce, and that's not the same thing at all. This album is too specific, too self-involved, to have any of the universality that great art needs. Someone going through a divorce and looking for art to reflect, give shape to or reassure the emotions he or she feels will find little or use here. This is 'reality TV' on vinyl, the Gaye family disintegrating for our entertainment value. In consideration of what this album might have been, that's a profound disappointment.

Here, My Dear

Side one

I Met a Little Girl (5:03)
Anna's Song (5:56)
You Can Leave, but It's Going to Cost You (5:32)
When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You (6:17)

Side two

Sparrow (6:12)
A Funky Space Reincarnation (8:18)
Falling in Love Again (4:39)
When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You (Reprise) (0:47)

» Here, My Dear, Single-Disc Version «

Here, My Dear: lose

Less a song than a Greek-chorus-style introduction to the album that follows, this is great if you enjoy living theatre, honest as it gets and very much about the real-life circumstances surrounding this album. But shorn of context, it's just three minutes of aimless noodling, ultimately ugly in its self-pitying cry of victimisation.

I Met a Little Girl: keep (side one, track one)

A masterful take on classic doo-wop R&B, smooth as silk. There isn't a note in this whole song that you can't hear coming a mile away, but that nostalgic comfort in classic form is exactly the point. A regret-filled look backward at the early days of his and Anna's relationship (with the early-sixties chord progression thus setting the era), it's gorgeous and entirely successful album material. It couldn't have been a single (I mean a seven-inch), but what here could have?

The title track being a mere intro, Motown actually put this as the album's first song. I have to concur: the retro feel and languid tempo are red herrings, but it's an arresting opening.

When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You?: keep (side one, track four)

This wasn't the single, but it's very obviously the album's main attraction, not just obvious because the song appears three times over these four sides. If someone wanted you to introduce them to this album, this is where you'd start. It really is an amazing groove, one that just leaps off the turntable. It's bright, imaginative, crisp and well-recorded. It holds the attention - which is great, because for six minutes you keep expecting a chorus to break out somewhere along the line. It constantly seems to be building toward one. And yet one never comes, well not until the very end of the song. It's frustrating, but that's what this album is like. Gaye is in fine voice, filled with emotion and mostly quite compelling. All in all, this approaches 'classic Gaye', yet it's not quite there, even if he liked the song enough to include it three times, lasting over 13 minutes. I like it too, bit maybe not quite that much.

I'll be honest here: I thought of bookending the album with versions of this lapel-grabber. But then I put "I Met a Little Girl" first. Then I thought "Anna's Song" should follow it. Then I thought track three buried this song, so I decided instead to conclude side one, as opposed to opening it. A quick spin on the iPod confirmed it still flowed this way, so there it is. It still complements its reprise, with the same song closing both sides.

Anger: lose

Why do songs fade in? Usually because they're salvaged from jam sessions. Tough to tell in this case what this song's genesis might have been. It's a bit tougher (funkier) than normal musically, and a bit tougher (strident) lyrically. No chorus, obviously. Not better or worse than the vast majority of this album. It's actually tough to find anything at all to say about this song.

Is That Enough?: lose

A confident midtempo R&B groove, enjoyable enough even though too little goes on musically to maintain interest. Risking sub judice, the lyrics are a rant by Gaye about the goings-on of the court case, about how he doesn't like the idea of alimony. Even more self-pitying, then, than the rest of the record, it's ultimately unlikeable, and a superfluous solo at the end does little more than increase the running time towards eight minutes.

Everybody Needs Love: lose

A good example of the main problem with this album. The groove is decent enough: smooth and sweet. But it's not a song. It's merely Marvin spending minutes enumerating who and what needs love. Then it fades away. Satisfying? Not even remotely, however pleasant the musical backdrop might be,

Time to Get it Together: lose

A bit of a flashback to the sound of Gaye's 60s glory-days productions, and pretty much exactly the length a song should be, this song still fails. It's an attractive groove, but one in service of very little: Gaye spends the first half merely saying 'time' over and over again, and the second half randomly 'testifying' about his failings in life. it brings the sadly weak side two to a close, seventeen and a half minutes of chorus-free ranting.

Sparrow: keep (side two, track one)

A smooth jazz number, lyrically only tangentially related to the album's otherwise unrelenting theme. It serves as a great breather, a welcome change of tone, both musically and lyrically. It was probably stuck on as filler, perhaps taken down from the outtakes shelf or intended for a different project, but its delicate jazz beauty makes it an album highlight. Marvin Gaye apparently always wanted to be a jazz singer, his early attempts at Motown to record in that genre constantly thwarted by their commercial failure. While his R&B work is obviously what he'll eternally be remembered for, this foray makes one wish he'd attempted a parallel career too.

My side one has a definite purpose, whereas my side two meanders a bit. So why not start with that most meandering of genres? This is side two, track one as an intentional 'reboot', or an intermission if you will.

Anna's Song: keep (side one, track two)

The album attempts to show the Gayes' marriage and its disintegration stage by stage, and the saddest part of the album is not actually the break-up, its the obvious love in Gaye's voice when documenting the happier days. This beautiful and uncomfortably personal song is practically the very definition of the word 'bittersweet'. Moving, gorgeous and sexy as hell - it must have made millions of women question Anna Gordy's sanity.

The double flits about throughout the marriage: one song addresses the dissolution, the next one the initial courtship. I felt weird about opening this album with two slow tunes, but putting 'Anna's Song' later on in the album both breaks narrative flow and also kind of buries this song a bit. It deserves better, so track two it is for me.

When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You? (Instrumental): lose

Starting out this time with that elusive chorus, this six-more-minutes has way more of Gaye's voice than the parentheses in the title would suggest. More than strictly an 'instrumental version', this is closer to a 'part two', the extended vamps that James Brown liked to include on the b-sides of his singles. But the 'part one' is already six minutes, and while this is an enjoyable enough groove, you'd have a hard time making a case for this as anything but cynical filler. And let's be honest here: court settlement or no, if you have to resort to instrumental versions of songs to bring your double-disc to full running time, release a single-length disc.

A Funky Space Reincarnation: keep (side two, track two)

Martin really did have funk chops, content though he might have been to stick to R&B. This is eight minutes of spectacularly silly sci-fi nonsense, like George Clinton's P-Funk as viewed through the filter of Berry Gordy's Motown. Truth be told, this is much the same as the rest of the album: meandering groove, stream-of-consciousness words, no chorus whatsoever. But it fits the genre better, and the increase in tempo is appreciated on what is after all a rather sleepy album.

My side one gave me a lot of consternation, but my side two fell together much more quickly, primarily being 'just follow the original's side four'. They start the side with this epic. I get the logic of that, but 'Sparrow' doesn't make much sense except as a side starter, so in deference to that, this follows it as track two on the flipside.

You Can Leave, But It's Going to Cost You: keep (side one, track three)

An album is 'top-heavy' if it frontloads all the most accessible material at its beginning. Here, My Dear, then, is 'bottom-heavy', really picking up the pace on the almost-faultless side four, by which time many casual listeners must surely have given up. This is the muddy of the divorce case, back to lyrics that are maddeningly particular and embarrassingly specific. But the music is much more engaging this time - rare on this album, you can walk away singing (or at least humming) this one. It passes that infamous 'whistle test', which doesn't by itself make it a good song any more than naked emotional honesty does. What does make it a good song is perhaps more intangible, but like its neighbours on side four, a good song it is.

I don't get why this is on side four. It makes more sense as a musical decision than a thematic one, but I like it better on side one. It's track three because on my album it moves the story from 'the good old days' to 'the divorce'. It introduces the downfall of the marriage (which I'm just realising now I really don't dwell on much), and also hikes the tempo up after two midtempo tracks.

Falling in Love Again: keep (side two, track three)

The soap-opera on this is that this particular track is about Janis Hunter, the woman Gaye had already married by the time of the release of this album had been released. As it happens, they already had two kids together before Anna even filed for divorce - lest you think Marvin is the victim here. In any case, whatever the unpleasant real-world associations (should I mention she was 17 and seventeen years his junior when they began their relationship?), this song is still brilliant as a finale to this album (which it is, barring forty-seven seconds), ending it on a cautious note of optimism. Not only is the lyrical content lighter but so is the music and Gaye's delivery. This just floats in the air in front of you, after a full hour-plus of weight pushing you down. Refreshing.

Motown gets this one right: it has to be the climax of this album if the album is to have any thematic unity, and if this song is to be anything more than a sore thumb on the album. There's a tiny coda to come, but otherwise this should really be the final track here: side two, track three.

When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You? (Reprise): keep (side two, track four)

Thematic unity? Or fourteen songs on a double looking better than thirteen? Well, either way it works. A tiny little bite of the album's main 'theme', just as the credits roll. Cute.

Obviously this can't be anything but the last track now, can it?

Better as a Single: "All Eyez on Me" by 2Pac

2010-11-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

All Eyez on Me, 2Pac's final release during his lifetime, marks a lamentable shift in topic and theme. While 2Pac's early, and superior, albums find him decrying a variety of societal ills as a 'message' rapper, All Eyez on Me is filled with remorseless 'thug life' tales. Truth be told, little more than a small series of incremental steps exists between decrying gang violence, illustrating its horrors, objectively recounting gangland tales, and glorifying street crime. Since to many a listener the intent of 'message rap' was often lost in the vicarious thrill of hard-life tales, perhaps it's to be expected that the artists would blur that line as well until it was barely even perceptible. Circumstances conspired to feed Shakur's voluminous martyr-complex, with the result that he got out of jail determined to show how hard he was, a thug fighting against a system designed to keep him down. In any case, he was walking free due to Suge Knight's posting of a bond, in exchange for Shakur recording for Knight's Death Row label, an imprint with a reputation for bloodiness and bloody-mindedness.

Never mind that Shakur was in prison for sexual assault, less a hard-man-being-beaten-down crime than a defenseless-woman-being-beaten-and-gang-raped crime. Tales of being a sex criminal sell rather less than ghetto thug odysseys (and on this particular album any track discussing women tends to be misogynist swill), so former-ballet-dancer 2Pac threw himself into the role with all the concentration of a method actor. Within months he was dead, a victim of the very gang violence he had tried to hard to be a part of. Be careful what you wish for, they say.

2Pac apparently had a backlog of material written from his days behind prison bars. He also apparently wanted to get his contract with Suge Knight over with as soon as possible. Whether or not it's strictly true, All Eyez on Me is hailed as rap's first double album, and more importantly, reflecting its 1996 release era, it's a double-CD, a 132-minute monster.

When, in the wake of this album's phenomenal 9x-platinum success, it became de rigeur for hip-hop artists to release double-CDs, they became a new and very particular form of torture. Already the expanded running time offered by the CD had caused hip-hop artists to give into bloat, with CDs padded to 70-minute running times with skits, intros, outros, remixes and 'special guests'. Within the context of what I do here at "Better as a Single", almost any mainstream CD released in the 1990s was a 'double album', and most of them were guilty of the same quality-control-lapses that plagues 'doubles' in the 60s, 70s and 80s. But 140 minutes is far more than anybody properly needs (double CDs are effectively quadruple albums), and All Eyez on Me is no exception, especially since it's front-loaded to the point that 80% of what you want to hear is contained on the first CD. It plays almost like a 'deluxe edition' package, with the album on one disc accompanied by outtakes on a second disc. My reduction, then, doesn't go so far as to minimise a 132-minute project into a 40-minute format. Instead, I've cut it down to twelve overlong songs, to come up with one CD that's about sixty minutes in length. Still more than common sense would dictate, but much more tolerable than 27 overlong songs that all start to sound pretty much exactly the same.

All Eyez on Me

Side one

Ambitionz az a Rider (4:38)
California Love (Remix) (6:25)
How Do U Want It (4:47)
2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted (4:06)
Picture Me Rollin' (5:14)
Run tha Streetz (5:16)

Side two

Only God Can Judge Me (4:56)
Heartz of Men (4:43)
Shorty Wanna Be a Thug (3:51)
No More Pain (6:14)
I Ain't Mad at Cha (4:53)
Life Goes On (5:01)

Ambitionz az a Ridah: keep (side one, track one)

This is a really great opening track. Musically, it's pretty simple, with little more than a creepy/funky piano line and a beat behind it. On an album crammed with guest performances, this is quite understated, to the point that 2Pac himself actually sings the chorus (and sung it is). Over top, 2Pac raps as he intends to for the next two hours: ghetto fantasy, 'thug life' both as a metaphor for street life and for the rather more pampered life of a rap star. But his flow is a force to be reckoned with: self-assured and commanding. He's every bit the 'great rapper' he's frequently lauded as on this song.

Not only was this the first song recorded for the album (a historical note at best) but it's also a kind of 'statement of purpose'. I frontload this album perhaps too heavily with hits and with special-guests, so at least this, track one on the original and track one on my single-disc, serves as an 'intro' before getting down to the top 40.

All Bout U: lose

A smooth R&B sound and a well-sung chorus does nothing to hide the fact that this is misogynistic garbage. Most of 2Pac's verses are just women-hating sex talk. The chorus, and Snoop Dogg's speech, berate a woman for, as far as I can tell, having a successful career in music videos (and attending the Million Man March). For this sin, the woman is called a 'ho' literally dozens of times, without even the slightest remorse.

Skandalouz: lose

This is a tough one. I think this properly belongs on a different album. I know 2Pac envisioned this as largely a 'party album', but rarely is is as explicitly 'party-oriented' as it is here. As usual on this album, 2Pac has nothing intelligent to say on the topic of women, and some of his lines are quite bad, really. But his flow is great, Nate Dogg's vocals warm and memorable, and the bed of music beneath it rich and welcoming. This is just too great sounding a song to be entirely dismissed, but it's ultimately an empty experience.

Got My Mind Made Up: lose

After the previous two tracks, this is a welcome return to the business at hand. The simplest of beats, accented with tiny little scratches and a simple keyboard line, lies underneath a series of guest-stars. This album is overloaded with guest-stars, but the ones on Disc 1, like the Siamese Twins Method Man and Redman here, are big names you want to hear, not anonymous space-fillers. And frankly what's worthwhile - all that's worthwhile - about this song is Method Man and Redman. Otherwise, there's nothing of note going on here.

How Do U Want It: keep (side one, track three)

'Commercial' rap at its most blatant, this Jodeci-sung track even features an unusually radio-oriented 'bouncy' flow from 2Pac himself. The whole thing sounds great, though, and even if Jodeci are required to drop way more n-bombs than they probably otherwise would have, surely this pop confection was responsible for more than a few of the multi million units this collection shifted.

I had originally buried this song a bit deeper, but on playback it kept bubbling forward. Tracks two and three are a one-two of legitimate party jams before the album cools down a bit. The two number one hits come back-to-back, and this is the second one, track three.

2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted: keep (side one, track four)

Obviously this song does nothing more than what it says on the label: takes two of Death Row's biggest stars, 2Pac and Snoop Doggy Dogg, and sticks them on the same song, sparring back-and-forth on a friendly, superficial tune that makes no real attempt at 'depth' in any way, shape or form. Luckily, that's quite enough: this track works merely because the pair seem to be having a good time, they're two greats at the peak of their game, effortlessly knocking off what feels like a simple, fresh freestyle. Most of the 'special guests' on this album feel like marketing ploys: no-names riding 2Pac's coattails in the hopes of greater success to come (while 2Pac tends to phone in his own contribution). Here, though, it's a meeting of equals, and 2Pac rises to the occasion. It does get a bit repetitive, though.

To a certain extent the track placement of the original was a kind of template for my version. On the original, this song brings us back to the mission at hand after "How Do U Want It", and it serves the same purpose here, as track four keeping the special-guest parade alive on my single-length.

No More Pain: keep (side two, track four)

This six-minute-plus epic revolves around a highly creepy, dissonant beat reminiscent of the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA (though in fact created by DeVanté Swing, someone I've otherwise never even heard of). The whole mood, in fact, recalls that Staten Island crew - interesting for a disc that forms a major part of the 'coastal feud' of the era. 2Pac is perhaps a bit unrelenting here, but the whole thing is a welcome change of pace and an intense masterpiece, even if ultimately it outwears its welcome by the time it's faded out.

I wanted to have side two slow down a little. This being slow but also long and experimental, it screams out 'put me on side two', and so I do, in the middle of a long segment of songs without guest rappers. With two weepers following this, this is in a way the album's climax. It's track four of side two.

Heartz of Men: keep (side two, track two)

A thank-you to benefactor Suge Knight, this is a great-sounding song, funky and with a rich mosaic of samples (including great use of Prince and Richard Pryor), this song is hugely enjoyable as an example of pure escapist ghetto fantasy. It's only when you consider the hollowness of 2Pac's materialist hard-man braggadocio that the song loses a little bit of its lustre.

It wasn't immediately apparent to me where to put this. Since side two starts off uptempo before cooling off halfway through, I included it here. It comes after the funky side opener and keeps the tempo high.

Life Goes On: keep (side two, track six)

This song sticks out on the album for being far more sentimental than the rest of the collection and, frankly, not being entirely devoid of cheese. It flirts with the boundaries of good taste, but a bit of suspension of disbelief (and of cynicism) later, and you're listing to a good an memorable song. This is one of many of 2Pac's meditations on death that gained a certain level of infamy as 'prophetic' in the wake of his own premature passing.

It's a eulogy. Putting it in the middle of a CD strikes me as strange and ultimately detrimental to the CD's flow and to this song's impact. It's, again, an oddly sentimental way to end the album, but it works for me, and it's a hell of a lot better closing track than "Heaven Ain't Hard 2 Find".

Only God Can Judge Me: keep (side two, track one)

The only reason one ever says the phrase that forms this song's title is in response to having been judged, and found wanting, by humans. Since that judgement was by and large fair, this song is mostly martyr-complex stuff. Yet 2Pac is entirely compelling here, dramatic and messianic and exhibiting a flow here as masterful as on any other tracks recorded during his lifetime. The G-Funk backing track, an outside production by people I've never heard of, is funky and memorable enough to make the song a success.

It is a bit of a statement of purpose, isn't it? Not enough to displace "Ambitionz az a Ridah" as the opener, but starting off side two is like a 'second opener', isn't it? Well, at least I like to pretend it is.

Tradin' War Stories: lose

That tightrope between reviling and revelling in 'the life': perhaps it's the very tension between these two divergent goals that creates the excitement that exists in so much 'gangsta rap'; I don't know. I do know that the temptation to draw some kind of moral or message from experience, however remorseless you might like to seem for the vicarious benefit of suburban teenagers who buy your stuff, seems almost irresistible, and here we get a sense of that: another mass of rappers sitting around, 'trading war stories' as the apt title would have it. But it cuts a bit deeper here, as in each case there's an attempt to dig a bit deeper than mere thug-boasts. Most of the time on these two discs, I find myself tuning out the words and listening to the music below. But here I find it hard to do that. It's decent, but it's overlong, and in the end it's just filler.

California Love (Remix): keep (side one, track one)

I'm having a hard time with this. In particular, I'm having a hard time putting my finger on exactly what is so undeniably fabulous about the single version of this song and what precisely gets lost in this sadly toothless remix. It's still great, mind you: effortless, exciting, fun and funky as hell. It's a true party song on a disc that has fewer of them than one might think. What it is, in fact, is a shadow of a masterpiece. Obviously, as the whole planet agrees by now, the disc should have had the single mix. Roger Troutman's fabulous talkboxed coda is a worthwhile addition, but otherwise even he (singing one of hip-hop's best-ever original choruses) loses a little with this remix. Still, can't complain: this still blows 95% of the rest of these two CDs clean out of the water. 2Pac would eventually have plenty of unflattering things to say about Dr. Dre, but did he ever attempt to calculate exactly how much Dre contributed to his career with this masterpiece? This is a very rare thing: a song that nobody seems to dislike. It's just brilliant from start to finish.

Remix or no, this is the jewel in the crown. There's really no reason it should be placed deep in the middle of the first CD. I really think the sooner the better for this, so it's track two here, first up after the 'intro'. It might be true that I front-load this album too much, but I like the idea of putting the 'party tunes' first. Contemplation comes later, in fits and spurts.

I Ain't Mad at Cha: keep (side two, track five)

My personal pick for 'best tune on the album' and maybe even 'best tune in 2Pac's career', this is a rare return to the themes and emotional weight of 2Pac's previous albums. An absolutely gorgeous rumination on past friends escaping 'the life' (and, again, of his time in prison), this is sensitively and congenially written and performed by 2Pac (within hours of his release from prison, allegedly), with a beautiful chorus sung by Danny Boy and a piano line, taken from a DeBarge song, that BlackStreet also used. 2Pac did it better.

The focus of this is different to "Life Goes On", I know. But the two are contemplative and considerate, and they bring the album to a calm, reflective conclusion. So it's the second-to-last track.

What'z Ya Phone #: lose

The first CD ends in a really dreadful fashion. Building a song around Prince's erratic funk masterpiece "777-9311" is no bad idea, and marrying it to a rushed sex rap not a crime by itself. But the second half of this track is entirely an unpleasant re-enactment of a telephone conversation between 2Pac and some woman he was 'intimate' with. Horrible stuff that no one in their right mind would want to listen to more than once. As obscene phone calls go, I'd even take the Jerky Boys.

Can't C Me: lose

Dr. Dre was working at the peak of his talent in this era, and actually getting George Clinton himself on board instead of merely sampling P-Funk is a genius move. The track has all kinds of Parliament-style curlicues throughout, but somehow it falls flat. I think it might be 2Pac himself, who seems like he's boxed in by the activity around him and is screaming to be heard in this track. As the opening track of disc two, a 'party tune' is a good choice, but this particular track seems to be trying too hard, and it gets no party started. So I guess that makes it perfect as an introduction to the unfortunately flat disc two.

Shorty Wanna Be a Thug: keep (side two, track three)

Shorty Wanna be a Thug: A scratchy vinyl sample and an occasional sax break conspire to create a backdrop that is a bit unusual over which 2Pac (sans guests, strangely for disc two) tells the take of a youth being inaugurated into the 'life'. Ultimately, it's quite a gripping track, perhaps not overly memorable but not merely filler either. Even though this is faint praise, this track is a highlight of the second disc.

Side two, track three is the single most anonymous place on a twelve-track album, and I wanted to give this song a bit more prominence, but the only prominence I could give it (not inconsequential) was as 'bridge between uptempo and slower segments'.

Holla at Me: lose

This is taken at a quicker tempo than most of the midtempo G-Funk on display here, yet the increased tempo does little to ramp up the energy and excitement level. Guest vocalist Jewell, whoever she is, dominates this track, but it's mostly just messy and forgettable.

Wonda Why They Call U Bitch: lose

More misogynistic garbage. At one time 2Pac might have defended a woman against slurs, now he revels in them. In this particular case, the woman - who 2Pac says he loved 'like a sister - is apparently guilty of the crime of promiscuity. In any case, the musical backing, with female voices amusically singing the title track, is weak, leaving nothing worthwhile about this song.

When We Ride: lose

An anonymous 'group track': in an obvious cross-marketing move, the Outlawz dominate; 2Pac is barely even present. Electro squeaks and beeps in the background, a decent backing track, but absolutely nothing you'd need to hear a second time.

Thug Passion: lose

This track has on it all the elements of the very best of Death Row G-Funk. It really is a decent sounding song, but again it's largely a special-guest showcase, and when 2Pac does show up, he clearly has nothing to say, rapping about drinks and knocking off another filler that is all style, no substance.

Picture Me Rollin': keep (side one, track five)

'Rolling' is exactly what this smooth, musical backing track is doing. It's mostly run-of-the-mill gangsta taunts and boasts on top, another litanly of guest rappers lining up to add a verse or two, another sung chorus, another four minutes done and dusted. But it sounds great, and ultimately when it comes to disc two of this collection, that has to be enough.

I'll be frank here: one of the main reasons I included this song was because CD2 was woefully under-represented on my single-disc. But I wound up putting it on side one, the last of a long series of head-bobbing songs with prominent beats, second to last on the side.

Check-Out Time: lose

Probably the most cynical filler track on disc two, and maybe the worst track on the whole disc. A parade of guest performers talk boring nonsense about being drunk and picking up women, with the phrase "we gotta go" repeated incessantly. Horrid.

Rather Be Ya Nigga: lose

This is a pretty generic 'slow jam', another embarrassing take on relationships. The music is a bit too saccharine, and nothing either 2Pac or Richie Rich has much compelling to say. It's actually all rather poorly done. As the topic of sex goes, it's one of the better performances on this disc, actually, yet it still falls flat. This is what passes for 'romance' at Death Row, I guess.

All Eyez on Me: lose

What does it mean if you take your magnum opus's title track and bury it as track ten of the second disc? It could mean that Death Row started with the title for the CD, and then decided that one of the anonymous tracks on disc two could be spruced up by adding a half-sung 'chorus' featuring the album title. I don't know, but ultimately this song is really representative of the second disc, being perfectly mediocre. Not embarrassing, but something that might have stayed on the shelf had this album been better edited. Big Syke pulls off his verse with aplomb, though. How odd that a title track doesn't make the cut.

Run tha Streetz: keep (side one, track six)

In the middle of the doldrums of the second half of CD two, we get this track. This track is not that highly rated, and it's back to gender relations, which on this album means 2Pac talking a load of bollocks. The main reason I rate this, though, is because it's written mostly from a woman's perspective, Michel'le gets in a great verse, and after countless tracks where women are either cussed and treated as sex objects or else (on the 'thug' stuff) ignored entirely, it's nice to have a slightly more varied approach to the other half of the planet. The song features the R&B-staple high-pitched keyboard line and is hardly revolutionary musically, but at least it's no embarrassment.

Of the twelve songs I chose, I'm well aware that this is the one most likely to raise eyebrows. Its sound is most similar to "Life Goes On", so I give them complementary positions: the final track on each side. That might frustrate this song's detractors that I give it so prominent a placement, but I like the idea of cooling down side one by dropping the tempo as it concludes.

Ain't Hard 2 Find: lose

A series of anonymous guest rappers, so anonymous they're actually identified by letters of the alphabet (honestly: except for Richie Rich and 2Pac himself, the performers here are named "B-Legit", "C-Bo", "D-Shot" and "E-40"), over a totally typical G-Funk beat. Death Row could have whipped off a 60 minute CD of material exactly like this ever week or so. There's nothing wrong with this; in the context of the second half of disc two, it's almost a highlight. But it's just bog-standard, run-of-the-mill stuff.

Heaven Ain't Hard 2 Find: lose

A sex rap, but shockingly limp. A truly dreadful ending to the album, this could be the Fresh Prince.

Better as a Single: "Self Portrait" by Bob Dylan

2010-10-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

I've said before that there's something polarising about the double album: most of them inspire either awe or ire in the minds of critics. There is rarely a space in between. How extreme can this get? Well, Bob Dylan has only released two 'double albums' in his career (with the caveat that he has released double lives, double compilations and CD-era albums that were released on vinyl as doubles): one is regularly touted not only as Bob Dylan's best album but one of the very best albums in popular music history. And the other one, released a scant few years after that one, is not only panned with few exceptions as Bob Dylan's worst album but also regularly features highly on lists of worst albums after.

How extreme is that difference then? From the very top to the very bottom. Double albums can do that to you. Except it's my opinion that Blonde on Blonde is vastly overrated and Self Portrait vastly underrated. I'm not going to pretend the latter is a better album than the former: it's not. But both of them mix moments of rare beauty with indulgent knock-offs, albeit in a different ratio. The main difference, apart from genre, is reach. On Blonde on Blonde Dylan is grasping heights he frequently can't quite touch, but the effort is fascinating to hear. On Self Portrait, Dylan is determined to 'signify' as little as possible and has made a conscious effort to strip his music of ambition. And in this case, he frequently can't stop his natural greatness from shining through, but the effort is frustrating to hear. What makes Self Portrait a failure is not the large amount of terrible music it features so much as the moments of greatness whose shine is dulled by the company they keep. Perfect, then, for some pruning.

Dylan recorded Self Portrait at a time of extreme dissatisfaction with his public persona. I think he was bothered by the unquestioning adoration he appeared to receive whatever he did. The period between the two doubles is characterised by a constant simplification and a constant re-evaluation of his art: it's a huge fall from "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" to "Country Pie", but I would bet that Dylan found he didn't really like his word-fest electric songs that much (though he's constantly returned to them in live performance) and found himself envying the songwriters who were appreciated for simpler values like hummable melodies and catchy turns of phrase. I have no doubt that the songs he chose to cover here were not only the kinds of songs he was playing on his own record player in Woodstock but also the songs he wished he could be celebrated for composing. Dylan being Dylan, I think he came to appreciate, and return to, his strengths, but it was a long time coming, and I think to the extent that this album really is a 'self-portrait', it speaks volumes about how he saw his career at the time.

Is it an act of self-sabotage, as he himself has claimed? It can't be: there is laziness, bad singing, thoughtless castoffs and robotic lack of feeling here. But that's all mixed in with genuinely strong, considered material. At best, this is an attempt at a good album that was sabotaged in the end when he couldn't pull it off. That, or a famously weak self-critical ability, might explain some of the frustratingly poor moments on the album. The critical drubbing this album has received is deserved inasmuch as releasing unlistenable material alongside better stuff is insulting to the audience and allows critics to review the worst while overlooking the best. But worst album ever? Not even close.

The extent to which I think the critical views of Dylan's two doubles are exaggerated can be summed up like this: I don't claim that Self Portrait is a better album or even an especially good album. But if you put together a single disc of the worst of Blonde on Blonde and put together a single disc of the best of Self Portrait, I contend that the Self Portrait album would be better. This is that album.

Self Portrait

Side one

All the Tired Horses (Dylan) (3:12)
Days of '49 (Alan Lomax, John Lomax, Frank Warner) (5:27)
Let It Be Me (Gilbert Bécaud, Mann Curtis, Pierre Delanoë) (3:00)
Take Me as I Am (Or Let Me Go) (Boudleaux Bryant) (3:03)
Take a Message to Mary (Felice Bryant, Boudleaux Bryant) (2:46)
I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know (Cecil A. Null) (2:23)

Side two

Copper Kettle (The Pale Moonlight) (Alfred Frank Beddoe) (3:34)
Living the Blues (Dylan) (2:42)
It Hurts Me Too (Traditional, arranged by Dylan) (3:15)
Blue Moon (Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers) (2:29)
Gotta Travel On (Paul Clayton, Larry Ehrlich, David Lazar, Tom Six) (3:08)
Wigwam (Dylan) (3:09)

All the Tired Horses: keep (side one, track one)

'Moxie' is just one word to describe what it took for Bob Dylan to start his album off with this song. Reviled down the years, this is admittedly a genuinely shocking start to the album. What I hear when I listen to this song is an 'anti-Bob Dylan' track: to date, Bob Dylan songs have lived and died by his words and his voice: this one has the voices of other people singing a single sentence, as artless as possible, over and over. Yet what Bob Dylan songs have been criticised as lacking - a commitment to detail, to arrangement and instrumentation, this has in droves. This is a composition built around the very things Bob Dylan compositions tend to overlook, and whatever Dylan's motives for attempting such a project, I can call it an unqualified success: after all, the song is gorgeous, in a non-ironic way. There is much beauty in this song, a beauty of a different but equally legitimate nature to the beauty of, say, "Mr. Tambourine Man".

Whatever Dylan's motives in the creation of this song, its placement at the beginning of the album is no accident: it is designed to be provocative and challenging. And ergo, brilliant. No punches are pulled, and you can't realistically make it past this track unaware that this is not your father's Dylan album. So opening position for me too.

Alberta #1: lose

A slow tempo can make a song mysterious, fragile, passionate, sensual, haunting, peaceful, brooding or calming. Or alternately it can just make it boring. I don't think this album contains as much 'breathing softly' as Greil Marcus once famously claimed it did, but it does here and on the carbon-copy "#2" as well.

I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know: keep (side one, track six)

A fully competent, flawless take on the Countrypolitan genre. It may have nothing at all to do with what makes Dylan Dylan, but if you can set aside thoughts of who it is doing the singing, is it any good? Emphatically, yes it is. It's well-sing and well-performed, tapping into the currents of a musical tradition Dylan fans may not connect with but Dylan himself clearly does. If this is the kind of music that moved Dylan at the time, and if in recording it he was hoping to give his listeners a taste of what he felt listening to this song, then not only is it a success but it's also a brave and generous public service.

For some reason, you walk away from this album saying, 'boy, there's a lot of Nashville here' - on further inspection, there's not, but that's the impression it leaves. So much so that even though there's not that much slick-country on my single, it still threatens to drown out the rest of the album. It was a calculated decision to devote most of the second half of side one to steel guitars, and a risky one, but it was the only way I could give the album a respectable flow. Never in a million years, though, would I have anticipated closing my act one with this particular ditty.

Days of '49: keep (side one, track two)

At five and a half minutes, this is "Like a Rolling Stone" length and a good deal more ambitious than the rest of this album. As a contribution to the social-history subgenre of the folk tradition, it's more palatable to Dylan fans than syrupy love songs - ultimately, this is exactly the performer many (most?) of his fans want him to be. Yet this is not merely a public service: Dylan clearly loves this song and inhabits it totally, giving a performance so commanding that even he is knocked out by the authority of his delivery. "Whoa," he proclaims as the end, and so do we. A finger in the light-switch on an album otherwise powered by double A batteries.

Since there's so much country on side one and so much more 'trad' on side two, this song might be misplaced. But it deserves a prominent placement, and the one-two of this after "All the Tired Horses" sets listeners up to expect a much better album than they actually get. How cruel am I?

Early Morning Rain: lose

I'm not really sure what Gordon Lightfoot has to do with Bob Dylan, really: one is known for convention-demolishing thought-dreams that sweated ambition, the other for small-scale ditties, sturdy and hummable but largely empty. To that end, then, Dylan covering Lightfoot on the present album makes more sense than Dylan covering Lightfoot at any other phase of his career, and he covers him appropriately here: pleasant but signifying nothing.

In Search of Little Sadie: lose

Tough as the competition surely is, the most baffling aspect of this entire project might just be the two contrasting versions of this song separated on CD by merely one track. Both of them are horrid but for entirely different reasons: the present version is filled to the brim with creativity, dynamics and mood but is technically so horrible as to be unlistenable; the later version is faster and technically precise but so robotic and lacking in feeling that it is ultimately equally unlistenable for different reasons. Form versus feeling, the pairing serves as a great jumping-off point for a discussion about what makes music enjoyable - you could tell much about a person by asking which one he or she preferred. But ultimately all of that is academic, as neither stand up to repeated listening.

Let It Be Me: keep (side one, track three)

When it comes to this particular track, I think I get a vague sense of why the split exists between this album's vehement haters and its timid supporters. Inasmuch as talent and craft are different gifts (and I think it's undeniable that they are), in the expression-is-all world of contemporary music, a world where the importance given to unrestrained creative expression is something largely of Dylan's own creation, craft is given scant consideration: seen as a lesser art, something perhaps belonging to the world of pop music. Certainly not the kinds of music Dylan fans cleave to. In other words, Self Portrait is barely even comparable to his other works, being a different form of expression built from a different skill set - and by no means entirely of Dylan's own creation. This particular song is a perfect example: a French chanson with a gorgeous melody, expertly navigated by Team Dylan with especially lovely guitar throughout. It's very skillfully crafted music, and there's the rub. Dylan fans want talent, not craft, and there's scant evidence of talent here. If you can deal with that, though, the results are beautiful. This is an expert landscape hung in a gallery that normally displays abstract expressionist works.

I didn't intentionally put so much from disc one on my side one and disc two on my side two. I didn't even realise I'd done it at all until now. But this is very carefully places to bridge between the down-to-earth "Days of '49" and the Nashville stuff. Couldn't have found a better song to do it.

Little Sadie: lose

Most of my discussion for this track is above, but I have to wonder if the hopped-up speed and bouncy vocals on this album are intentionally a tongue-in-cheek parody of the murder ballad's words.

Woogie Boogie: lose

A god-awful throwaway instrumental 12-bar jam, the kind of go-nowhere stuff musicians pass the time with while waiting for the singer to take the stage. Could go on for twenty minutes, two long even at two. And it's horribly recorded, with tinny guitars and an ugly squawking saxophone. And no melody whatsoever.

Belle Isle: lose

Pretty orchestration on this Irish ditty, which may or may not have a beautiful melody - I can't tell because Dylan seems to barely know the song and spends his time wandering around aimlessly. What might have been a nice inclusion and a curious change of pace instead trots by without distinction.

Living the Blues: keep (side two, track two)

As the album's only vocal studio original, this song carries a lot of weight: people will it to carry the torch of 'what Dylan represents', and of course it's horribly unsuited to the task, being a throwaway rock-and-roll pastiche of no more consequence than anything else here. But to dislike this song is to misunderstand its intent: as empty fun, it works. And why shouldn't Dylan be allowed some empty fun every now and then?

There's a strange math that I used here: my 12-track single is a cycle, repeated four times, of slow-fast-slow. So there are only four fast songs here, and they're kept far from each other. I showcase this by putting it directly after what most would consider the album highlight. I'm such a nice guy.

Like a Rolling Stone (live): lose

Just a few weeks after Woodstock , the epochal festival that Dylan chose not to participate in despite it being held in practically his backyard, he played a brief set at the Isle of Wight in south England, his first on-stage appearance since his legendary 1966 accident. Using his country-and-western crooning voice and putting the Band through some rather easy-listening motions led to a showering of criticism at the time, and the decision to include four songs from that concert, and by no means four of the best performances, is the main evidence for the 'official bootleg' and 'intentional sabotage' theories regarding this album. I'm inclined to the latter, or perhaps the 'filler' theory. In this particular case, though, if this mumbling, flat, lifeless and scandalously flubbed performance of Dylan's most iconic moment of greatness is not an act of sabotage or demystification (and I really can't see how it can't be), then Dylan must have the worst sense in artistic history of his own relevance. It's fine that this album doesn't aim to replicate his glory days, but recasting his moments of glory in the mould of this frustrating project is every bit the slap in the face of Dylan lovers that many claim this entire project to be. Even if this track had any quality to it, mind you, I wouldn't include it - haphazardly mixing in live tracks is one of the greatest symptoms of double-album-syndrome, and one that needs to be cut at the root. My single-length "Self Portrait" is strictly a studio creation, I assure you.

Copper Kettle (The Pale Moonlight): keep (side two, track one)

Absolutely none of the critical hammering usually applied to this album is applied to the current, unanimously praised, track. So it's worth considering what makes this recording, superficially similar in (syrupy) instrumentation, so much more praiseworthy than the others. And personally I think it has to do with two overlapping things: one, the genre, which as a historically-considered 'plight of the common man' modern folk tune is very much the genre that brought Dylan to fame and 'greatness'; and two, the emotion in the performance, wonderfully sung with all of the grace and passion Dylan's blunt instrument of a voice can muster. And despite Dylan's obvious love of, and attraction to, the critically-maligned genres on display elsewhere on this album, it's tough to avoid the conclusion that number two here is a direct result of number one. Whatever it is, though, that moves him so about this song is ultimately what moves us too. And the fact that the strings and female voices do so much here to enhance the end-product proves how ridiculous it is to criticise this album merely for having them in the arrangements.

Like every other aspect of this maddening double, the original album's sequencing shows brilliance and lunkheadedness in equal parts. Surrounding "Let it Be Me" with different versions of the same song? Lunkheaded. Starting act two with this gem? Brilliant. Who am I to dissent?

Gotta Travel On: keep (side two, track five)

That spark. You know what it is, that indescribable 'something' that makes good music good. We buy Dylan music to witness the spark of the creator, whereas on display here is the spark of the interpreter - but that's no reason to dismiss this album. The better reason to dismiss this album is that all too frequently it's something like starting a fire with wet straw: most of the sparks just fizzle out ineffectually. Presenting the wet squibs alongside the brushfires is brave, but ultimately diminishes what is worthwhile about this album. The present song is obviously designed as a vacuous show-stopper, a foot-stomping singalong, but Dylan starts it through half-opened eyes - seemingly adrift, another example of 'breathing softly'. Somehow, though, mid-song, that spark manages to catch fire and burn up the remainder of the song. Too little too late? Perhaps, but at least by the song's end we're reminded that Dylan still knows how to have a good time. When he feels like it.

I put this as the, ahem, 'climax' because it seems like a hokey old-timey curtain-call. The album finishes with a much better song, but before that, you get this. Good night, ladies and gentlemen, and drive home safely.

Blue Moon: keep (side two, track four)

People hate this track mostly, I think, because it strays outside the stylistic bounds of what people perceive a Bob Dylan song ought to be. Yet Rodgers and Hart's evergreen is so timeless precisely because it can be adapted to pretty much any genre you want. Dylan's take on it is, in my opinion, well-considered, well-sung and effective. The fiddle throughout the track brings it from pops territory partially into hoedown territory, and the genre-mixing is artful.

Perhaps my most controversial inclusion, and I found it hard to place. Side two is more 'organic' than side one, and even though this is a standard, the fiddle makes it hoedown stuff. So in between the blues and the Gene Autry-style tip-of-the-hat? Home at last.

The Boxer: lose

One of the funniest tracks on the disc for sure, this is Bob taking on Paul Simon, the 1960s most successful Dylan-wannabe, by recording a song widely believed to be 'about' Dylan. Almost sardonic in intent, really, and his double-tracked Bob-on-Bob vocals are hilarious yet oddly effective. Amongst the country and folk ditties, Simon's ambition sticks out like a sore thumb, but the rudimentary accompaniment brings it sadly down to earth. It would have been a funnier joke if he'd just done it completely a capella, perhaps with an entire chorus of overdubbed Bobs.

Quinn the Eskimo (the Mighty Quinn) (live): lose

This is by far the most well-known Self Portrait track, and my fatwa on live recordings ensures its exclusion. For the sake of a unified listening experience, I stand by that decision, but I have to concede that ultimately it deprives the album of one of its few great moments. For great this is, not because the song is up to much but because the performance is delivered with such chaotic, devil-may-care abandon that it's impossible not to be caught up in the obvious delight Dylan is taking in being on stage with friends engaged in an act of epic silliness. Dylan's singing is absolutely horrible, but it's tough to see that as anything but a strength on this song.

Take Me as I Am (or Let Me Go): keep (side one, track four)

This is about as straight a Nashville track as it gets. I think we expect Dylan to gravitate towards that kind of country and western music that is closest to folk: that Appalachian ballad tradition. In truth, then, the tinkling piano and cooing vocalists represent 'selling out' every bit as much as Richard Manuel's organ and the streams of feedback did at Newport. In each case, merely rejecting the results out of hand based on how they sound is reactionary - the exact adjective many of this album's detractors use to describe it. I would describe this, instead, as well-performed and effective. Obviously it's not as impressive a great-leap-forward or as aesthetically rewarding an accomplishment as 'going electric' was, but this is bad only if you judge it by what it is not. Judged by what it is, it's quite good.

How I outpace the original for bizarreness? By having an actual set of three songs associated with the Everly Brothers and their writer Boudleaux Bryant. An Everlys song, a Bryant song, an Everly/Bryant song. Ha! It's awkward, but there you go. This is the big muddy of Countrypolitan, so it's side one, track four for you, mister.

Take a Message to Mary: keep (side one, track five)

More than any other track here, this represents why I feel the critics get this album all wrong. They're offended by the fact that it is an Everly Brothers song, and by the admittedly cheesy 'opening' eleven seconds, sung by the backup singers. Yet as the song progresses, Dylan nails it completely, capturing the song's mood and intent perfectly. The song drives along with determined purpose and a great sense of momentum, and sends its heartfelt and moving message home with no small sense of purpose.

Columbia put the two Bryant songs together, and so do I. In any case, as an uptempo number it could only take position two or five. So number five it is, side one. Not too country, but surrounded by country.

It Hurts Me Too: keep (side two, track three)

The 12-bar acoustic blues tradition that this song represents exists in a place where standards of 'authorship' and 'copyright' are defined differently, where performances are cobbled together from the collective unconscious. Of course this isn't a Dylan composition but a spontaneous reinterpretation. It's good - solid, musical, enjoyable - but not great. Higher than the standards of many a performer, sure, but not high enough to compel me to listen to it, or rather to actually think about it as I'm listening. Adequate aural wallpaper. Is that a compliment?

This was one of my final choices for inclusion. I think it belongs, but I was quite on the fence about it. "Living the Blues" is lightweight boogie, but the trio that starts off side two feels 'organic' to me, so it's another 'set', so to speak. First you live the blues, then you hear the blues. I guess.

Minstrel Boy (live): lose

Some people rate this song highly. It stands out as one of only two Dylan original lyrics on this album. But all I hear is the Band struggling through a half-written song they appear to barely know. It wouldn't make the cut even if it was a studio recording. or then again, maybe it would. Slim pickin's, right?

She Belongs to Me (live): lose

I must confess that I don't like the studio original of this song very much. It's a pat little 12-bar with knock-off lyrics of the sort that fans pore over but I imagine Dylan knocked off with little thought regarding meaning. Joan Baez, blah blah, who cares. The result is a charmless creation that inexplicably overshadows the gorgeous "Love Minus Zero / No Limit" it shares a side of vinyl with. Here, it's done a bit countryish. But it's still just a banal 12-bar. Plus it's live, so bye bye love.

Wigwam: keep (side two, track six)

One of the most snickered-at songs here, "Wigwam" is an excellent track in my opinion: an evocative, cinematic piece with a gorgeous atmosphere and an expressive melody. The 'la-la-la' vocals Dylan provides here as an accompaniment to the brass on this otherwise instrumental recording is what gets eyes a-rolling as a presumed lapse in taste, but it's my guess that the vocals served as a guide for brass to be dubbed over at a later date - making the end-result as much Bob Johnston's song as Bob Dylan's. But if the melody really is an improvised doddle sketched out in the studio, that says an awful lot about Dylan's natural gift as a melodist.

It's only Dylan's perversity that keeps this from being his closer. And it really should have been, since "Alberta #2" has no need to exist. It's kin to "All the Tired Horses", and in the movie that this album could soundtrack, that's the opening credits, and this is the closing credits - and the slow stroll into the sunset. I wonder if anyone would pay to watch that particular movie?

Alberta #2: lose

Starting and ending your album with contrasting different versions of the same song is a gambit that has served many a musician well. Making the two versions all but indistinguishable from each other is, however, not, and doing so ends the album on a note just as bizarre as any of a dozen or so other notes here.

Better as a Single: "The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld" by The Orb

2010-09-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

"Intelligent Dance Music", the rather pathetic term coined to describe 90s dance genres that weren't especially danceable and that were created by undersexed English men, is a bit of a misnomer. Little of it was as properly intelligent as, say, Donna Summer at her peak. What it was, frequently, was evocative. Capable of generating more mental synaptic energy in the listener than it did in the creator. A little bit of chemicals helped, too. As did mood.

Which is still the case all these years later. Put "The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Underworld", the two-hour début by English DJ Alex Paterson and cronies on your turntable when you're in the wrong mood and it's god-awful boring, repetitive, indulgent synth-noodling with sci-fi samples on top. But catch yourself in the right mood and it's still an evocative and occasionally moving journey, even if it plays like nostalgia by now. I saw The Orb live a year or two after the release of this album, and found it a near-mystical experience. What I was on at the time is only, well, half of that, let's say.

They called this music 'ambient house', back when it might have seemed that house was something other than a kind of silly flash-in-the-pan. By now, all that really means to us is 'ambient with a beat'. Most of the songs on this album have a beat, at times quite a heavy one. Still, though, even when this music is designed for the dance floor, it's more properly meant for 'calming down' than getting pulses racing. What was revolutionary about this music back in the day was its purpose. The Orb, and concurrent album Chill Out, were a kind of unholy union between former roadie Paterson and professional pranksters the KLF. The thing is, though, that it's not really a prank. This frequently amusical dithering-cum-sound collage was intened for 'chillout' rooms at raves, places where ecstacy-addled revellers could let their heart rate approach normal again.

It seems like nothing special now, and this music evolved more directly into new-age quackery than into any 'ambient' followers. Yet even though it seems more dancey than other 'ambient' stuff looking back at it now, it does in fact take a good deal of inspiration from thoroughly 'uncool' predecessors, not just the obvious Brian Eno but even Pink Floyd and prog rock. Having said that, then, the point of 'trimming' this album is suspect, since the songs' excessive length is kind of the point. Two hours long but only ten tracks, this is an album that revels in a kind of mannered excess. Cutting it down kind of destroys it. To that end, then, my resulting album, length-wise even less than half the vinyl-stretching original, plays a little bit differently. My side one is beatwise and my side two rather beatless. Or perhaps it's not an 'ambient house' album at all, but one side of 'ambient' (side b) and one side of 'house' (side a) - though no house that Steve 'Silk' Hurley would recognise.

Note: there actually is a single-disc version of this, an American release that shaves some 35 minutes off the running time to make a single full-length CD. However, it does so not only by dropping two tracks but by condensing several others, often to the extent that they remain mere 'sampler' versions of the proper album tracks. The American version is quite different to mine, but it's not really comparable. To start with it's still a 'double' (and comically you can buy in on vinyl too, a double just like the UK version, just 35 minutes shorter than it), and the shortened tracks make it much more of a 'pop' album - kind of like subsequent Orb releases. Mine is better.

The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld
Side one

Little Fluffy Clouds (4:27)
Perpetual Dawn (9:31)
Outlands (8:23)

Side two

Earth (Gaia) (9:48)
Spanish Castles in Space (15:05)

Little Fluffy Clouds: keep (side one, track one)

This Steve Reich-meets-Ennio Morricone 'jam' is a great deal more pop-wise than the rest of the album, a verse-chorus-verse dancefloor-filler that, as the Orb's second single after the entirely unprecedented "Huge Ever-Growing Pulsating Brain", should have signalled Paterson's selling-out in pursuit of Top 40 dreams. In retrospect going so poppy so soon might well have been a risk indeed if it weren't for the undeniably awesome nature of this track. All these years and reissues later, this still holds up remarkably well as a bliss- and wonder-filled 'feel-good' dance track. To the extent that naïveté was an important characteristic of early 90s dance music, Rickie Lee Jones was crazy to object to the inclusion of her bizarre rambling observations, because they fit this track like a glove.

The opening track actually gave me lots of pause, with the countdown that starts "Perpetual Dawn" initially feeling much better-suited. The thing is, though, that the immediacy of this song is such that it forces itself into pole position, really. It sticks out anywhere else on this album. So first it is.

Earth (Gaia): keep (side two, track one)

The space-travel theme of this album, and of its conjoined twin Space (by the KLF), is never fully explored. But in this amazing mid-tempo track, the 'transportative' qualities of good IDM are emphasised, and the whole thing does indeed feel like a strangely-spiritual journey into deep space. This is truly beautiful music for dancing or for listening in equal parts. It ends with a few minutes of poinless sci-fi bloops and bleeps, but oh well. You can't win 'em all.

"Earth" does do a good job on the original as track two, but my single-disc version wound up startng beatwise and then slowly slowing down. So for me "Earth" is the first half of the second section, the last time we hear a drumbeat. Since it's mid-tempo, its the 'let's take things down a notch' track. Side two, track one.

Supernova at the End of the Universe: lose

While this song has a truly enjoyable early-90s dance beat, for much if not most of its twelve-minute running time, it has little more going for it than that beat. And that's obviously going to get tiring pretty quick. Obviously in the chillout room epics, striking the balance between thinking and feeling is the goal. But this goal, sadly, isn't always reached. And in any case we're more likely to be listening to this in our bedrooms or on the subway. In that case, this song has little to offer.

Back Side of the Moon: lose

More of a sound collage than a composition, this beatless epic is atmospheric, moody stuff. "Ambient" rather than "ambient house", it fulfills Brian Eno's original conception of aural wallpaper: music, if that's even what this is, that you can tune into or out of at will. It establishes a mood, but with needle time being precious for our purposes here, fourteen minutes is a pretty extravagant length of time to do precious little more than establishing a mood.

Spanish Castles in Space: keep (side two, track two)

On a thoroughly 'futuristic' record, this is defiantly retro: all ambient, no house, so organic it even has what actually sounds like guitars and humans playing instruments live. This is glacially slow music, an ever-mutating line played over and over again until it's become something entirely other. Sands shifting on the desert floor, or the gradual tectonic shift of a continent across the face of the planet. It doesn't pack more of a punch into its fifteen minutes than any other track on the album, but the mood it establishes is a valuable one, one of a sterile twilight calm, and ultimately it's a fulfilling journey. To where? Well, I have no idea. I guess that's what you find when the song reaches its inevitable conclusion and you return, squinting, once again into the sunlight.

I like this track enough to include it, but only on a 120-minute epic could this not be the final track. In fact, it is the final track, inasmuch as the double really plays like two distinct albums. So this finishes the first one. In this case, it's how my entire album ends: not with a bang but with a whisper.

Perpetual Dawn: keep (side one, track two)

This track might wear its Jamaican influence more proudly on its sleeve than any other track, but it's not quite the sore-thumb it appears to be. The harder and deeper beats seem like an interruption in the flow on the album, but in fact as the first track of the second disc, its opening countdown represents a kind of 'fresh start'. Silly and profound in equal measure, this assured, confident track might perhaps be lacking some of the mystery and the emotional connection of the other two singles, and you might say that it's a bit overlong (even as it's one of the album's shorter pieces), but it's an insight into how versatile Paterson really is. The Orb's musical genre is almost always said to be influenced by Jamaican dub, but in reality there's very little except a sense of atmospherics and the value of repetition that carries over from dub to IDM. This, on the other hand, is a respectful and spot-on tribute to dub music, and inasmuch as 'ambient dub' exists as a genre, this is a highlight of it.

The countdown at the beginning of this track just screams 'album opener' to me, and I would have loved for it to be the album opener. But it's problematic: really, conceptually, this just fits better after the more traditional dance track "Little Fluffy Clouds". So track two it is, and if "Little Fluffy Clouds" is a bit of an 'intro', then the countdown still represents the beginning of the 'journey' part of the album. Plus, where else was I going to put it?

Into the Fourth Dimension: lose

This is a hyperkinetic beat on top of (not under) a series of disparate musical elements. Many of these 'elements' are quite beautiful or evocative, but they never quite cohere into a united whole. As a result, the track never really becomes a 'piece' and is most definitely less than the sum of its parts. And it represents wasted potential, too: with a little more thought, this could have been an album highlight. As it is, though, it's nine forgettable minutes.

Outlands: keep (side one, track three)

This overlooked track is, if anything, even 'deeper' than "Perpetual Dawn". It's a real floor-shaker, and even if precious little goes on, it's still compositionally a song, exciting to listen to and never outwearing its welcome.

On an album that, to a large extent, works a rather narrow sonic range as far as possible, once you've looked at the obvious standouts, deciding which songs to include and which not to becomes difficult. In addition to length, one reason why "Outlands", which quality-wise doesn't let the side down, makes the cut is its very danceability. Having twenty-odd minutes of beatwise music and twenty calmer minutes at least gives my single-album a thematic unity. So this track finishes off the beatwise side, as track three of side one.

Star 6 & 7 8 9: lose

'Brief' at only eight minutes, this keyboard-improv session is pleasantly pastoral, but ultimately little more than filler to flesh out side four. And filler that sounds much more like the past than the future, and more like the countryside than deep space.

A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld (Live Mix Mk 10): lose

I know, I know. This is a career-defining, genre-defining epic début, one that regularly shows up on 'best ever' lists, and not including it on my trimmed single seems almost willfully perverse. The simple fact, though, is that there really isn't nineteen minutes of musical incident here. Some bits are intriguing, and as a time- and space-altering 'headtrip', it's a live performance that must have been enchanting to witness. But after Minnie Riperton goes away, you find yourself wondering, 'what now?' The Orb's iconic chess-playing 'perfomance' of this on Top of the Pops was appropriate in more ways than one. And here on the album, after an amazing but indulgent and occasionally tedious 110 minutes, you find yourself craving some Ramones well before the song even comes to an end.

Better as a Single: "Daydream Nation" by Sonic Youth

2010-06-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am actually old enough to remember when "Daydream Nation" came out, when it just seemed to float in on this massive wave of goodwill from the entire 'alternative' music industry: there was this real vested interest from everyone not signed to a major label in this album just doing really well and beating the mainstream at its own game. It was a pipe dream, of course: it was never gonna happen. But it's interesting how Sonic Youth, arch purveyors of amusical noise and fully musical attitude, became 1988's 'most likely to', since musically it doesn't seem like they had much in common with the rest of the underground at the time. In fact, with five seven-minute improvisational epics and with songs built more around mood than melody, the double-album pretense, mixed with the runes for each band member and the pseudo-gothic font used throughout the packaging made the album largely indistinguishable, save for the intent and varying levels of skronking atonality, from the most mainstream of 'hard rock' bands - I get that that was the intent, to make a hipster 'parody' of hard-rock and MOR grandiosity. But the problem with exacting parody is that it's lost on anyone not in on the joke: fine for Sonic Youth and their commitment to staying resolutely 'underground', but less fine for the alternative masses busy 'wishing' this album up the charts and for the kids in the suburbs trying to figure out who or what Sonic Youth is, the kids that you absolutely need to get on your side if you're looking for that breakthrough. I get that Sonic Youth didn't care that much - not yet anyway. But plenty of people did on their behalf. And after all it was just after this album that they signed to corporate-monster DGC. And no surprise that their first DGC album suddenly found itself sans seven-minute guitarwank sessions.

Ultimately, that's why I'll never fall in love with Sonic Youth: they distrust the pop instinct far too much, sadly as they have a half-decent one. I have no problems with noise, or with experiment: just today I made it a full twelve minutes into "The Diamond Sea". But I think that the tribulations Sonic Youth are keen to subject their listeners to aren't always met with reward enough to justify the effort. And that's a pity, too, because when they're great, they're great. They just have no idea what makes them great, and as such are all too infrequently great. Here is "Daydream Nation", then, where their ambition gets the better of them. They're making real songs, something they've shied away from doing so far, but are embarrassed to find themselves doing so, so they reflexively sabotage almost every pop moment they write by showering it in unfriendly sheets of noise or unfriendly singing. Still, it's the most consistent double-length they've ever put out and, shorn of its less pleasant moments, becomes a downright enjoyable experience. Who'd have thought?

Daydream Nation

Side one

Teen Age Riot (6:57)
Kissability (3:08)
Hey Joni (4:23)
Candle (4:58)

Side two

The Sprawl (7:42)
Eric's Trip (3:48)
Providence (2:41)
Hyperstation (7:13)

» Daydream Nation, Single-Disc Version «

Teen Age Riot: keep (side one, track one)

Now here's the thing: the dedication that Sonic Youth has to noise for noise's sake is all well and good, but knowing that they're capable of something as flat-out fabulous as this but just generally choose not to do it is much of what's frustrating about the band. Because look at this: this is just amazingly good, with a great melody and a self-assured sense of momentum. It's a seven-minute punk song, both a fanboy's love song to J Mascis and a fanboy-inspiring example of rock and roll at its finest. It's noisy and abrasive as Sonic Youth feel they need to be, but it uses the noise to cushion the pop song riding on it, not just noise for its own sake. If they'd kept making songs like this, sooner or later they would have beaten the mainstream into submission. But they got too bored too quickly.

This is an obvious album opener. For all that Sonic Youth implies they could knock off a pop gem as easily as an avant-garde workout, they know the difference when they see it. It's no coincidence that this is track one, and I'm happy to keep it in that position.

Silver Rocket: lose

Oh, those imps, releasing this as a single... it might be only 3:47, but it's actually a typical Sonic Youth freak-out in miniature: the song part lasts only one and a half minutes, the wake-me-up-when-it's-over noise bit about a minute an a half, back to the song bit for 45 seconds or so. Oddly enough, this didn't get all that much airplay alongside Whitney Houston on Top 40. Could it be the tuneless noise bit in the centre? Because frankly, I want to dance with somebody who loves me enough not to sabotage my pure pop experiences with boring noise.

The Sprawl: keep (side two, track one)

Allegedly, the title "The Sprawl" refers to science fiction or urban life or something, but obviously it also refers to this track's almost eight-minute duration. Kim gives a good performance, talk-singing her way through the first three minutes in a medium-tempo, medium-volume song performance. It's then almost five minutes of carrying on and on, as if Sonic Youth set an egg timer and said, 'we'll keep playing this till this timer runs out'. It completely breaks down, then builds up again, and the whole thing reminds me more of the Grateful Dead than anything in alternative. Which is no insult: it's evocative and kinda-dreamy.

On the double, this is a side-closer, and it really does seem to be one. Putting it as track one on side two, as I have, is a bit counter-intuitive: its lengthy conclusion seems better designed to seque into a needle lifting off a record than into some other song. But what the hell: who listens to vinly anymore, right? I think what I've come up with is, more or less, a song-based side one and an experimental-based side two. So to that end, this is the bridge between the two: first a song, then the experiment. Welcome to side two.

Cross the Breeze: lose

This starts off pretty enough. But it's all downhill from there, as we get the single most migraine-inducing vocals on the album. Ugly is as ugly does, and it's all well and good to be ugly, especially if its in service of a mood or emotion. But Kim's vocals here just make me want to lunge for the record player in an attempt to get my sanity back. The guitars chug along pleasantly enough, and I could listen to an instrumental version of this, I suppose. Is there one available?

Eric's Trip: keep (side two, track two)

It took me a while to come around to this song, the first and most famous of three pretty similar Lee Ranaldo tracks. It's a story-song, putting the rather inscrutable lyrics front-and-centre. But somewhere in the squall of moaning guitars and brilliantly spastic drums, I actually found myself excited: something that I don't find happens all that much with Sonic Youth.

I'll be frank: I'm putting two Lee songs on the album, so I ought to put one on each side. It could have gone either way. I could have put this on side one. But ultimately it didn't make much difference to 'flow' either way, and I just went with song length. This is the shorter of the two, and side two has two extended tracks, so side two it is.

Total Trash: lose

I'm not sure that front-loading the album with this many seven-minute guitar epics was the best idea, because by the time the first record ends with this decent enough Thurston ditty, the tedium of the noise but completely drowns out the genuine enjoyment value of the pop-song bit. Even (the) Pink Floyd, on "Piper at the Gates of Dawn", had the good sense to limit space-rock guitar freakouts to one per side.

Hey Joni: keep (side one, track three)

It's a good thing the guitars chime musically, because Lee clearly has no interest at all in writing vocal melodies. More than "Eric's Trip", this song calls out for something hummable. But that wouldn't have been underground enough, I guess. I have no idea what he's on about, but it's compelling enough, once again driven by the lyrics and, I guess, the urgency of his voice. I don't think the song has anything to do with Joni Mitchell.

Sonic Youth's got three lead singers. Well, that's a lie: Sonic Youth's got no singers whatsoever. But they've got three people who perform lead vocals. I thought it would be nice to start off the album by showcasing them: a Thurston song, a Kim song, a Lee song. By complete coincidence I did it twice, so that the whole album's order goes: Thurston, Kim, Lee, Thurston, Kim, Lee, instrumental, Thurston. So the first Lee track had to be side one, track three. And, well, I've already talked about why that's not "Eric's Trip".

Providence: keep (side two, track three)

This moody little instrumental for piano, malfunctioning amp and answering machine proves that Sonic Youth can indeed go experimental and come up with things other than endless variations on the basic guitar-armageddon template. I find this quite beautiful. It was actually a single, with a video and all, and since it's by no means a 'song', that's actually kind of funny. But typically Sonic Youth, I guess.

This feels like a 'penultimate' track to me - and more importantly on a four-song side, it seems like it just has to be track three. The compilers of the double disagree, putting it as track two on a four-song side. But the compilers are wrong.

Candle: keep (side one, track four)

You get the sense sometimes that Sonic Youth spent the whole of the eighties burrowing underground toward the pop playground just so that they could arrive at the eventuality of actually playing tunes without anyone accusing them of hopping the fence. I have to wonder why they bothered: it took their protégés Nirvana all of one album in the wilderness before accepting studio gloss on their music. Having songs like "Candle" up their sleeves all those years must have been tough. Because this is very much a pop song, and a very good one, too. Like "Silver Rocket", it's pop song plus noise break plus pop song again, but the pop song is better and the noise break is better too.

"Candle" and "Teen Age Riot" aren't all that similar as songs. But they're both Thurston songs, and they're both strongly commercial. It felt right to end a side with this song, in particular to keep it removed from "Teen Age Riot". So there it is: track four.

Rain King: lose

Not being part of the marital union that 67% of Sonic Youth's lead singers are in sometimes pushes Lee Ranaldo to the sidelines, but he's some kind of hero on this album, with three songs that all sound pretty much the same but are somehow compelling. This one appeals to me least of the three, in that by now it's a bit been-there-done-that, but still to its credit it's got those ridiculous drums. Evocative of a rainstorm? Er... sure. Lee's atonal hollering doesn't seem to hide any real poetry. Just nonsense, really, but it finishes off side three, the side that I think is best suited to my tastes, quite well.

Kissability: keep (side one, track two)

This tightly-wound little deconstructed sixties pop song somehow manages the trick of turning Kim Gordon's singing voice into an advantage. Jangly guitars, hyper drums, a nervously sexual energy that feels like it's about to explode, but just never does. And what might be bells at points, but could alternately just be another weird guitar noise from these masters of weird guitar noise. And - my God! - it's the exact length of a pop song.

Taking this track all the way from side four to side one is my most radical reorganisation. But it's 'poppy' in a similar way to "Teen Age Riot", so back-to-back 'pop' hits made sense to me. And also makes my single-length disorientingly deceptive, since the pop sense dries up soon enough.

The Wonder: lose

In apparently an attempt to 'parody' some of the more overblown aspects of double-album pretense, Sonic Youth decided to bundle together three different tunes with little in common except their tunings (remember that liking Sonic Youth means talking more than is healthy about 'guitar tunings'), and call the result 'Trilogy'. When they reissued "Daydream Nation" a few years back as a two-disc set with obligatory 'bonuses', they also went ahead and split these three songs back into distinct entities. Which makes sense, and is what I'm doing too. So if you're programming your 'BAAS' "Daydream Nation" using an older CD, you'll be in trouble here. In any case, this is not bad as such; fairly 'rocking', with more than anyone in Sonic Youth might be willing to admit in common with heavy metal, suitably enough then for part of the so-called 'trilogy'.

Hyperstation: keep (side two, track four)

Slow but not exactly sluggish, this has a feel to it that somehow suggests lengthy guitar improvisation, so when it (perhaps inevitably) arrives, it doesn't annoy. It's actually all quite pretty: Thurston's title-track lyrics and vocal melody, that tambourine and - yes - the guitarwanking too. Quite a trick they've managed to pull off, wouldn't you say?

It feels like a closing song. It just feels like one. It should have been the final track on the double, so I'm making it the final track on the single.

Eliminator, Jr.: lose

I had such high hopes for this track, as it's got pretty much the best title ever. But alas it's not up to much: just another atonal Kim shout-fest. At last it's mercifully brief, particularly by the standards of this album. Coming after natural album-closer "Hyperstation", it's kind of "Daydream Nation's" "Her Majesty".