All posts by Andre Salles

Turns Out, It Is the Size of Your Boat
Getting Huge with The Fiery Furnaces and the Polyphonic Spree

I read an article in Spin Magazine this week…

And here I need to stop and clarify, in case anyone gets the hilariously mistaken idea that I am a regular reader of Spin Magazine. Despite often hysterical contributions from Dave Eggers, Spin remains a pretty excremental rag, full of trend-hopping and style-over-substance “journalism.” In the very issue I read, in fact, they call the Hives the “best live band ON THE PLANET.” I have decided that calling anything the “best (blank) ON THE PLANET” will now be my favorite hyperbole – “Damn, Dr. Scholl’s makes the best foot odor removers ON THE PLANET,” or, “John Paul II is just the best Pope ON THE PLANET!”

Hyperbole is fine once in a while (see my Black Crowes articles for my own “best (blank) in the world” statements), but every other issue these guys seem to crown something else the best whatever. In this month’s issue they also counted down the 50 best frontmen OF ALL TIME, and wasn’t the guy from the Hives (Howlin’ Spinnin’ Fuckin’ Almquist, or something like that) on the list? Why yes, I think he was. In 10 years, when no one remembers who these pukes are, and Spin is still (shudder) doing these lists, I wonder if we’ll see Almquist’s name? I doubt it.

So anyway.

I read an article in Spin Magazine this week about the sad dearth of long, multi-part songs these days, and I actually couldn’t agree more. My favorite song of the year so far is 18 minutes long, and my second-favorite is 12. (“Ocean Cloud” and “Neverland,” both by Marillion, in case you were wondering.) Long-form composition seems to be a lost art. In decades past, the biggest bands in the world (the Beatles, Led Zeppelin) took their status as an opportunity to stretch musically, crafting songs far longer than the established radio system of the day would dictate (“Hey Jude” and “A Day in the Life,” “Dazed and Confused” and “Kashmir”).

These days the biggest bands in the world are so terrified of losing their spot at the top that they timidly churn out same-sounding stuff year after year. There’s no sense of adventure, no danger, no heart-stopping, floor-dropping-out-beneath-you feeling of unpredictability. The last extremely popular band to try vertigo as a modus operandi was Radiohead, and we all saw what happened to them. It’s a shame that their post-OK Computer output has been all but artistically bankrupt, because the rise and fall of what was once the best band ON THE PLANET certainly gives those looking to stay uber-rich and famous pause.

That’s why the flavors of the moment are going to keep giving the people what they want. You will never see a Franz Ferdinand song that doesn’t sound exactly like what they’re doing now. Ambition, however, is just like anything else – it’s there, you just have to look for it. The problem with our pals at Spin is that when they say there aren’t any ambitious epics being made anymore, what they mean is that there aren’t any being made by the “cool” bands the trends have dictated they embrace.

There’s actually a very good example to be found in the pages of that very magazine – in the reviews page, you’ll see the latest by the Fiery Furnaces, Blueberry Boat, slated for being “a joyless slog through mossy folk tedium.” It’s mystifying – I can understand a mag like Spin not reviewing the polished likes of Marillion and Neal Morse, but the Furnaces have scrappy indie cred to sloppy up their ambition. And despite (for me it’s a despite) a four-track mentality and a garage-band aesthetic, the Furnaces have made the most giddily eccentric tower of musical surprises you’re likely to hear this year.

The Fiery Furnaces are Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, a sibling combo from Illinois. Their debut, Gallowsbirds Bark, is an oddly unimpressive chunk of lo-fi blues drivel, but there are some nifty moments. There’s nothing, though, that even hints at the expansive reach of Blueberry Boat. Imagine if Yes had leapt forward to Close to the Edge immediately following their blues-rock debut, without the intermediate steps of The Yes Album and Fragile, and you get an idea of how disorienting and surprising this album is.

Apologies for the prog-rock analogy, but it’s apt. Blueberry Boat is stuffed to the gills with lengthy suites, synthesizer lines and tricky time changes – it’s only a few flute solos and some lyrics about wizards away from classic prog. The record’s 13 tracks clock in at more than 76 minutes, nearly twice the length of Gallowsbirds, and there are four songs that snuggle up to the 10-minute mark. It’s a time-consuming journey, but it’s never boring thanks to the Friedbergers’ everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-and-what-the-hell-throw-in-the-whole-kitchen-too approach.

On first listen, Blueberry Boat sounds, to put it kindly, chaotic. The Furnaces burn through ideas so quickly here that it seems like they’re trying to squeeze three albums’ worth into 76 minutes. Opener “Quay Cur” includes four or five distinct movements in a very quick 10 and a half minutes, and makes use of drum computers, pianos, static, tape manipulation, all manner of guitars and a bizarre, staccato vocal melody from Eleanor Friedberger. It’s one of the craziest, most fascinating songs of the year, and it’s just the opening act.

One could be forgiven for expecting the loopy, expansive vision to falter now and then over Blueberry Boat’s running time, but it doesn’t. Even Gallowsbirds-style songs like “Straight Street” and “My Dog Was Lost But Now He’s Found” fit in well, providing simple bridges between the more experimental moments. The album retains its off-kilter, slightly off-key tone throughout, but the Furnaces manage moments of beauty amidst the insanity, particularly at the end of “1917” and on the title track. The arrangements are all over the map – instruments will appear for four measures, then disappear, and the percussion is constantly shifting.

The lyrics are similarly restless, and often sound made up on the spot. Some are elliptical, but most are stream-of-consciousness, as in the strange romantic conversation at the end of “Chief Inspector Blancheflower.” The title track is a pirate story, and “Spaniolated” is the nonsensical tale of an 18-year-old research engineer who is kidnapped and drugged while walking home from TCBY. (It concludes with the repeated line, “The pain in Spain falls mainly on me.”) While much of the wordplay is fun, it’s obvious that the Furnaces have much more to say musically than they do lyrically.

Despite all the exciting ideas and skillful arrangements, the Furnaces seem to have thrown this record together in the studio, perhaps in their haste to get all these thoughts down before new ones took their places in their brains. They miss the beat a few times too often for my taste, and I can’t help thinking what these manic geniuses could do with some real money and production technique. Of course, that way lies professionalism and polish, two things anathema to the indie rock ethos – I can imagine this band’s fans crying sellout should they ever create anything with the edges smoothed off.

Even though this album is too disjointed to consider it completely successful, the Furnaces have defiantly established themselves as a band unlike any other. Reportedly the group’s live shows are just as restless as the records, with songs appended to other songs and arrangements completely reinvented, Frank Zappa style. Blueberry Boat is the kind of crossroads that bands usually come to after five or six increasingly expansive albums – their choices seem to be to either re-focus and create something concise, or go all-out and make three-hour collections that few will buy.

Or, knowing them, they’ll do something else entirely, something unexpected and thrilling. I would bet money, though, that we will someday see an out-and-out masterpiece from the Fiery Furnaces.

No, if I’m going to use the word “masterpiece,” I’m going to use it for an album that rings by particular chime from beginning to end, one that achieves the full potential of an artist. We’ve actually seen more than the usual share of masterpieces this year, and now we can add one more – the spectacular second album by the Polyphonic Spree, Together We’re Heavy.

The Spree is the brainchild of former Tripping Daisy frontman Tim DeLaughter, conceived as the only band big enough to give him the sound he heard in his head. The Spree is, at last count, a 22-member ensemble that hits like an orchestra and caresses like a Beatlesque rock band. Their vibe is relentlessly positive, but their intense instrumentation affords them the dynamic range to make even the most treacly sentiments resonate.

DeLaughter’s project first appeared last year, with an album presumptuously titled The Beginning Stages of the Polyphonic Spree. Despite its pompous arrival, the record turned out to be a half-assed EP with a 36-minute monotone drone appended to the end. While some of the songs were interesting, most were little more than endlessly repetitive choruses played with brassy oomph. The Spree’s first outing just didn’t live up to the hype, but with Together We’re Heavy here to provide contrast, it was obviously a glorified demo.

Heavy is the real thing. This is the full flower, an album that utilizes the orchestral instruments as more than volume providers. You can hear the difference even from the first song, “A Long Day Continues/We Sound Amazed.” This eight-minute stunner glides in softly, then explodes with a memorable motif, slipping into a heartbreaking piano-led melody and a surging chorus. Halfway through, the song evaporates, finally coalescing again into a thudding, constantly building coda. This is what an idea like the Polyphonic Spree should sound like, and I’m glad it finally does.

And to follow up “We Sound Amazed” with an absolutely euphoric pop song like “Hold Me Now” is just blissful. Here the Beatles are most prominently referenced, but very few artists are producing full-on orchestral pomp-pop like this anymore, and it’s a style that radiates joy. Not everything here is so utterly sunny – “One Man Show” is deep, dark and textured, and the massive “When the Fool Becomes a King” gets downright scary – but there hasn’t been a celebration of the pure delight of making huge, jubilant, dramatic pop music like this in some time. Together We’re Heavy sounds like the clouds parting around a shaft of brilliant light in a dream, and the muted closing title track sounds like gently waking up.

This is another one of those cases in which words fail me. I can tell you that the Spree’s sound is huge and powerful and joyous and layered and deep, but the words mean nothing when compared to the music. Even if you heard the first album, trust me, you don’t know what to expect from this one. I don’t know what else to say that wouldn’t be hyperbole, except this: with Together We’re Heavy, the Polyphonic Spree has become the best 22-member orchestral sunshine pop band ON THE PLANET.

I can’t fail to give props to my faithful correspondent and friend Erin Kennedy, who first recommended the Fiery Furnaces to me. Erin’s musical taste is even more varied than mine, I think – she appreciates everything from the Velvet Underground to Simon and Garfunkel to Ani DiFranco – and she knew the Furnaces were worth listening to before I did. Plus, she’s a born writer, and her emails (roughly 10 dozen so far…) are always fun to read. So thanks, E. Hope you like Blueberry Boat as much as I do, ’cause I might not have heard it at all without your suggestion.

Next week, Bill Mallonee.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Puttin’ the Backbone Back
They Might Be Giants Rock Out on The Spine

Sweet, sweet internet!

It’s amazing to me that eight or nine years ago, I only had the most basic understanding of just what the hell this thing called “internet” was. I would have laughed at my future self for the shaky withdrawal symptoms I’ve undergone in the past two weeks. Ten days without the internet and I feel like I’ve lost a limb. It’s unreal.

For those of you interested in the minutia of my life, I have moved again, this time across town to a cozy little third-floor apartment. As moves go, this one was pretty painless, except for one significant snag – getting my slam-bang high speed internet hooked up. The first guy Comcast sent over told me my brand new computer’s brand new access card was broken. The fine folks at Dell assured me that it was not, so Comcast sent another chap over, and this one laughed at the stupidity of the first guy and had me rolling inside of an hour.

It could have been much worse, but I swear, those ten days were oddly awful. Confined to the account I have at work, I could receive emails, but could only reply to them in terse sentences, lest the watchdogs sniff out my “personal use of the company resources.” I missed more than a week of Sluggy Freelance, Newsarama, Pitchfork and all the other sites that have become like daily friends. I almost felt like, given a few more days of disconnection, I could join healthy society, maybe go for a walk or have a picnic or something.

Thank God Comcast came through in time.

On the archive page, you will find the column that was ready to go last week, before the Great Disconnect. It discusses my thoughts on new albums by the Cure and Phish, and also the bizarre reign of Ken Jennings, Jeopardy champ. Since I wrote that one, Jennings has broken every record the game show has ever recorded, and he massacred his opponents in the season finale, ensuring his return in the fall. And he’s become just a little bit smug and annoying, too, but he’s still fun to watch.

So it’s a short one this week, which is fitting, since it’s a short record I have to review. We’ll be back on track with longer columns and more in-depth analysis next time. Thanks for your patience, and for worrying about me, if you did. This is my first column from the new place, and my new office has a bright window and a pretty nice view, and I think it will be a creative space for me. Let’s see if I’m right.

* * * * *

I’m not going to make the same argument I always make in regards to They Might Be Giants.

I know, I know, every time I mention John and John and the Band of Dans, I find myself defending them against charges of nonsensical novelty. And really, we should be past that by now. They Might Be Giants have been making witty, clever, melodically satisfying pop music for nearly 20 years now, and if people still think of them as a Bob Rivers or Weird Al style comedy act, well, tough. They’re missing out.

But we know, don’t we, that TMBG is one of the most inventive pop bands on the market, and that time after time, album after album, they deliver the goods. Case in point – The Spine, the just-released tenth album from Johns Linnell and Flansburgh, a brief yet sublime platter that is perhaps the group’s best album since John Henry. It’s weird, it’s wonderful, and yes, it’s wacky, but it’s also superbly written and surprisingly rockin’.

This record had a couple of strikes against it from the outset for me. First, it’s short – only 36 minutes, the latest in a string of tiny releases from TMBG. Second, two of its 16 songs were released earlier this year, on the EP Indestructible Object, a decision that is even stranger when you consider that seven unreleased songs from the same sessions have been shuffled onto another EP, The Spine Surfs Alone. It seems as though the whole lot would have made one swell 26-song record, instead of spreading the songs out and bilking us for extra cash.

But then we might have ended up with another Mink Car, and although I love that album, it does suffer from a slapdash, mix CD quality that prevents it from gelling. The Spine is its polar opposite, a record that glides from one end to the other, gently pulling you along and never stopping short. You can zip through The Spine twice before you even notice, so well-sequenced is it, and there isn’t a song here you’ll want to skip. It’s exactly long enough, with exactly the right songs in all the right places.

And really, that’s all that’s been missing from TMBG records since the aforementioned John Henry. The songs have maintained their high standard, but they’ve been all over the map. On The Spine, they all seem to come from the same place, and it sounds like a fun place to be from. The Band of Dans (who have sullied their name by replacing Drummer Dan with some guy named Marty) is in full effect, Flansburgh rips it up on guitar like he hasn’t done in years, and Linnell’s melodies shift and spin in perfectly off directions. This record is an intelligent, nerdy, rip-snorting hoot.

Highlights are beside the point, but some standouts include the Vocoder-fueled “Bastard Wants to Hit Me,” the loopy “Thunderbird” (which includes a classic inversion of a famous lyric, “We’ll have fun fun fun until T-Bird takes her daddy away”), and the brassy jaunt “Museum of Idiots.” Both the moody “Memo to Human Resources” and the delightful “Au Contraire” (the EP tracks) fit in here like they belong. The guitar lick on “Broke in Two” is a winner, and the early Elvis Costello vibe of “It’s Kickin’ In” is perfect. The album begins with a funny riddle (“Experimental Film,” about spinning art out of ambition and little else) and ends with a sad one (“I Can’t Hide From My Mind,” in which Linnell threatens himself – “I have my house surrounded, I know I’m in there, and don’t make me come in and get me…”).

There’s just too much goodness here to expound upon succinctly, and I know how you all hate it when I gush. The Spine is TMBG’s first serious contender for the Year-End Top 10 List in nearly a decade, because it synthesizes everything great about them into one quick and dirty package. The quirk remains, the sweet songcraft still shines, but the focus is back, and that makes all the difference. Buy this album, see Gigantic (the documentary on John and John) and you’ll know why this band has been around since 1986 and is still going strong.

And for the record, they are so not a novelty band.

* * * * *

Next week, a few surprises that have ranked among the best records of the year. Coming soon, new ones from the Finn Brothers, the Robinson brothers (Chris and Rich of the Black Crowes), Bjork, Matthew Sweet and Tears for Fears.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go?
The Cure and Phish Wear Out Their Welcomes

Like a good chunk of the American population, I have been watching Jeopardy lately.

I have come to the conclusion that either a) this game is rigged, Ralph Fiennes in Quiz Show style, or b) Ken Jennings, software engineer from Salt Lake City, Utah, knows damn near everything. He’s become cockier as the show has gone on, though, and he’s made a couple of mistakes, which means that either he’s a very good actor, or the show is genuine. My bet is that Jennings’ brain is a storehouse of random knowledge – he seems to know quite a lot about an impressively broad range of subjects. Anyway, it’s been fun watching him, and I can’t wait to see how he eventually loses.

I have also been checking out VH1’s I Love the ‘90s this week, which is equal parts funny and sad. I’m big on recapturing lost youth, and on not growing up to any irreparable degree, so watching VH1’s panel of culture assayers explore and demolish years I vividly remember living through is an odd experience. It’s strange to think of 1994 as 10 years ago – I was a sophomore in college, and Pearl Jam was the biggest band on earth. This show is about how stupid pop culture is, and how much we adore it anyway, and in that it’s a smashing success. It just makes me feel old.

But maybe it’s not wise to revisit the past. Maybe one should grow up and leave childhood things behind. And maybe one should know when something, even something treasured, has run its course and should be gently laid to rest. Especially if, you know, you’ve already told everyone you’re going to stop reliving your glory years.

Tops on the list of people who should have stuck to that resolution is Robert Smith. Now, I believe I have mentioned my enduring love for the Cure, perhaps the most important band of my teen years. Disintegration remains in my pantheon, due in no small part to the bond I developed with it as a moody and suicidal teenager. Smith’s tortured, adolescent poetry spoke to my 15-year-old self like just about nothing before it had. I do, truth be told, know how teenaged fans of the new gloom-rock bands feel when they say they see themselves clearly in the lyrics.

There’s a difference, though – the Cure was good. Albums like Disintegration and Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and The Head on the Door are still far better than the ones they’ve inspired from lesser bands. Smith’s textured guitar playing and mournful wailing remain unmatched in the underwhelming wilderness of gothic rock. Smith and company reached such a plateau with Disintegration in 1989, in fact, that it was supposed to be the Cure’s last.

Thus would begin a pattern – every time the Cure would release an album, Smith would call it their final one. Post-Disintegration, the ride has been… somewhat bumpier than before, to put it diplomatically. 1992’s Wish saddled its more epic tracks with half an hour of silly fluff, and 1996’s Wild Mood Swings gushed such effervescent drool that it was almost unlistenable. There were some good songs, but they were muffled and shoved into a corner by the endless loony party that poured out of Smith’s head.

And then came Bloodflowers in 2000. Billed as the final part of a trilogy that also included the Cure’s two best albums (Pornography and Disintegration), the album hearkened back to the wondrous Cure of old. Calling it the concluding chapter of a trilogy invites comparison to the first two installments, of course, but Bloodflowers lived up. Naturally, Smith announced it as the end, the last Cure album, but this time, it felt like he meant it. His playing and singing certainly added to that impression – the explosive climax of Bloodflowers sounds like Smith playing the last music he will ever play.

And I admit, listening to Bloodflowers I felt 15 again. No, that’s not quite right – I felt like a 26-year-old looking back fondly on 15, regardless of how miserable that time actually was. That album synthesized the essence of the Cure into a symphony of resignation and loss, and served as a perfect capper to the band’s career. It redeemed the two preceding albums all by itself, and it would have been an elegant, magnificent bow-out.

But dammit, Smith was lying again. Four years after the fourth or fifth final farewell, here comes the Cure, with a self-titled album and a host of new band members. This time, they’re aiming for a revival, looking to capitalize on the interest bands like Interpol have sent their way. So what did they do? They hooked up with Ross Robinson, the producer behind Korn and At the Drive-In, and they turned up the amps. And they had a toddler draw the album cover.

And they wrote a bunch of really crappy songs.

Robinson happily did not transform the Cure into Korn, but make no mistake, this is the heaviest-sounding Cure album ever. Problem is, they seem satisfied with heavy. Most of these 11 songs are dirges, with two or three notes repeated endlessly, and just about none of the haunting, enchanting guitar of old. Smith just made pretty noise come out of his amp and called it good. Opener “Lost” begins with Smith moaning “I can’t find myself,” and the repetitive three-chord mess that follows backs his statement up. He sounds lost, and his band is just wandering around, looking for a reason to still exist.

Robinson’s great triumph and tragedy on this record is Smith himself. His vocals are mixed loud, clear and center, and Smith howls and screeches and yelps and sometimes even sings with a passion he hasn’t shown in years. He was obviously encouraged to let it all hang out here, but what hangs out is often embarrassing. Occasionally, he turns in a performance that defines him, like the one on “Labyrinth,” but more often than not, he sounds like a Saturday Night Live parody of Robert Smith. The most egregious is “Us or Them,” which finds Smith trying to sell the line “I don’t want you anywhere near me” and ending up sounding like some kind of mental defective.

The Cure is not a complete disaster, like Wild Mood Swings was. “Before Three” is a winner, with its ascending melody, and “Taking Off” is one of the few songs here that does, even though it ends with perhaps the most cringe-worthy vocal warble here. “Anniversary” is also a deep and textured piece, even though it’s not quite as deep or textured as the classic sound it emulates. But for every moment of clarity, there’s at least one blinding display of bad judgment. The album concludes with its worst idea, a 10-minute snoozer called “The Promise” that trudges on under oppressive waves of distortion and Smith’s unhinged caterwauling.

Between self-titling the record, enlisting Robinson and bringing the loud, it’s evident that the Cure is trying to sound young and modern here. This album is the antithesis of Bloodflowers – where that album portrayed an aging Smith finally accepting that his life will never be what it could have been, The Cure shows off a still-aging Smith turning his back on those graceful conclusions, and lunging for a brass ring that is out of his reach. Unsurprisingly, this is the first Cure album in 15 years that has not been touted as the band’s finale.

There are things about this rebirth that I admire, and songs here that I like, but this album’s very existence sullies Bloodflowers, and its content does not justify that. It’s obvious now that Smith is just going to run this train into the ground, and if he ever produces anything as beautiful and heartbreaking as his fabled Trilogy again, I will be stunned. Happy, blissfully happy, yes, but stunned. The Cure is a lousy attempt at updating a sound that didn’t need updating, and a shabby appendix to a terrific final chapter. The album’s finale revolves around the line, “You promised me,” and I can’t help thinking back to 2000, and 1996, and 1992, and 1989, and muttering, “Robert, you promised me…”

* * * * *

Speaking of shabby appendices and broken promises, there is the latest (and reportedly last) Phish album, Undermind, to discuss. Phish will always be to me the sound of freshman year in college. I bought A Picture of Nectar first, was dazzled, and immediately snatched up Junta, Lawn Boy and Rift. Here was a band with serious chops, unbelievable musicianship and a twin sense of fun and adventure. Part Grateful Dead, part Frank Zappa, and part ‘70s prog rock, Phish was one of a kind at the time, and naturally I thought the ride was just beginning.

Rift, of course, was the beginning of the end, but it was a slow, protracted end for a band that should have been mercifully put down years ago. Why do I say this, knowing that legions of Phish-heads will email me with peaceful, loving death threats? Because it’s true – while Phish still put on a great live show in its waning years, the band’s studio output has been in sharp decline since Hoist, and we’ve finally reached the bottom.

Phish is a band that can play rings around just about anyone else on the concert circuit, but for the last 10 years of studio albums, they’ve purposefully decided not to. Bands often do this – they will strip away all the excess, cutting their sound back to the basics so they can recapture the magic and build back up again in a different direction. Phish has just never rebuilt the sound. They started embracing stupefying simplicity on 1994’s Hoist, and just ran with it, writing and playing songs so beneath them that it was laughable.

I thought they had it on Farmhouse, their 2000 album of small yet winning tunes. They finally sounded like they’d accomplished what they were after with the shift toward three-chord funk-rock, and a rebirth seemed around the corner. And then they broke up. Or rather, went on an extended hiatus, but in the music world, it’s almost the same thing. Still and all, going out with Farmhouse wouldn’t have been all that bad.

But no, they had to reunite and foist two lousy records on the public before breaking up again, this time presumably for good. They slammed through 2002’s Round Room in a week, and it sounded like it – uninspired jams sat next to uninspiring banalitites, and it dragged on and on. And now here is Undermind, which recaptures the focus of Farmhouse but does away with anything one might term musically interesting. Honestly, listening to Phish breeze through boring slabs of blah like “Two Versions of Me” is like hearing Zappa’s amazing 1988 band cover the Eagles. It’s a perfect example of wasted talent, and the snoozers come one after another on this sad little disc.

There are two highlights, and they are the only two things worth revisiting on this record. The first is “A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing,” the one nod to the band’s instrumental interplay, but this moody beast is sullied by a chorus that calls to mind Salt n Pepa’s “Whatta Man.” Seriously. And then there’s “Secret Smile,” the best song on the disc, which soars on a sweet string arrangement. Its mournful tone is almost an elegy for the band itself. It would have been a nice way to end the record, but naturally they killed it with the brief and silly “Grind.”

Undermind comes with a short film on DVD that depicts the band running through 30-some takes of “Crowd Control,” one of the simpler songs, and believe it or not, by the 15th take or so, they’re playing it with their eyes closed. Honestly, after only one or two listens, I could play this song with my eyes closed, too. So what’s the point of recording it, then? The songs on Undermind denote a ridiculous lack of effort, both in composition and performance, and they’re a pathetic way for such a great band to leave the stage.

In truth, it seems that Phish has been breaking up for 10 years now. Their albums have grown progressively worse as the members’ solo projects have grown progressively better – Trey Anastasio’s solo band outpaces current Phish by miles, and Page McConnell’s Vida Blue is one hell of a jazz outfit. It’s definitely time to put Phish to bed, and in fact it would have been better all around if they’d realized it during the hiatus. True, we wouldn’t have seen one of the best touring bands on earth make the rounds one last time, but we wouldn’t have had to suffer through Round Room and Undermind, either.

So goodnight, Phish. Ten years ago it might have been sad, but after years of you limping about, coughing and hacking, well, it’s a blessing. Like another recently deceased performer who wasted his talent on material that didn’t deserve him once said, you coulda been a contender.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Like They Said
The Lost Dogs Cover Themselves on Mutt

I was going to write about the Cure this week, but I just saw the Lost Dogs perform an excellent live show, and I just don’t feel like being negative right now.

I find it difficult to explain what I love about the Lost Dogs, and I think it comes down to history. Part of the thrill of Scenic Routes, the Dogs’ debut, was hearing familiar voices in unfamiliar settings. Here was Derri Daugherty, he of swirl-rock pioneers The Choir, singing the acoustic folk title track with a high, clear tone. Here was Terry Taylor, leader of Beatlesque rockers Daniel Amos, taking on a lovely country ditty like “Amber Waves Goodbye.” Here was Mike Roe, voice and guitar hero of barnburners The 77s, lilting his way atop the acoustic “Smokescreen” and wailing through blues standard “You Gotta Move.”

And most of all, here was Gene Eugene, the big brain and sweet voice behind amazing funk-rock monolith Adam Again, bringing indescribable depth to melancholy ballads “The Fortunate Sons” and “The Last Testament of Angus Shane.” Eugene made just about as many albums with the Dogs as he did with Adam Again before he passed on in 2000, and his Dogs work shows a stunning versatility and range. That’s true for all of the Dogs, though. Here were four guys from four very different bands, none of whom had their roots in traditional American and gospel music, playing sweet folk and rollicking bluegrass and tender singalongs. Familiar voices in unfamiliar settings.

Of course, most people are unfamiliar with any of the Lost Dogs’ work, be it together or with their own bands, so that appeal is all but lost on them. Part of the thrill of watching the remaining trio slide comfortably into a rendition of “Wild Ride” is in knowing just how wild the ride has been. Taylor, all by himself, has taken us through the literate twang-pop of the first Daniel Amos albums through the new wave of the Alarma Chronicles, to the sarcastic fun of the Swirling Eddies, to the graceful variety of his many solo albums, and finally to Daniel Amos’ triumphant 33-song comeback, Mr. Buechner’s Dream, the best rock album nobody heard in 2000.

The other Dogs have had similar journeys, with similarly essential sets of albums to their names. And most of those are out of print (with the exception of the Choir’s oeuvre, which is collected in a lovely box set called Never Say Never) and extremely difficult to find. Taylor has begun re-releasing his work as well – the first Daniel Amos album comes out in a deluxe two-CD edition this month – but not enough of the obscure history of these bands is readily available for anyone not already into the Dogs to really understand what I’m talking about.

The boys themselves have now complicated matters a bit. What was once a side project has in many ways become the main gig for Taylor, Roe and Daugherty, with only occasional trips to the louder styles of their original bands. Problem is, there’s a rich backlog of excellent tunes that longtime fans want to hear done Lost Dogs style. These are songs, however, that the average newbie will not know, and will not be able to find.

The solution is called Mutt, the first in a series of Dogs records that will mine the back catalog of Daniel Amos, the Choir and the 77s. Here are nine songs (three from each member of the band) with rich histories, spanning more than 25 years, stripped to their essences and reinterpreted. To use an obvious analogy, this is the spiritual pop equivalent of the original Traveling Wilburys recording “Like a Rolling Stone,” “I Won’t Back Down,” “Cryin’” and “My Sweet Lord.” In their own way, the Lost Dogs have that kind of musical legacy, even though only a few thousand people have heard their songs.

But what songs they are. Mutt is a fully successful project – the new versions of these songs are beautiful on their own, but if you know the originals, they take on new dimensions. It’s a good album for newbies, and a fascinating document for longtime fans. Six of the nine remakes here (there’s also a brand new song) are all but impossible to find in their original forms, unless you know where to look. As far as most newcomers are concerned (which includes much of the audience at the concert I attended), this is a set of 10 new songs.

But the fun of being a longtime fan lies in contrasting these new takes with old favorites. Mutt opens authoritatively with “If You Want To,” from Daniel Amos’ 1991 album Kalhoun. Gone is the familiar intro, and the song now begins with Mike Roe’s unadorned vocal. Naturally, the biggest change here (and in just about all the new takes) is the reliance on acoustic guitars, a Dogs trademark at this point, and the overall tone is mellow and breezy. “If You Want To” is scrappy and punchy in its original version, but here it glides along with great three-part harmonies and a light, airy feeling.

Taylor sings Roe’s “The Lust, the Flesh, the Eyes and the Pride of Life,” from the 77s’ 1986 self-titled record, and he turns what was a youthful rock song into a world-weary Dylan-esque folk tune. It’s an arrangement that brings out the heartfelt lyrics, about Roe’s self-destructive personality traits, and Taylor’s voice is perfect for it. This one works better for newcomers, though, since “The Lust…” is very well identified with Roe. Hearing someone else sing it is jarring at first, but it works. The same fate befalls “Sunshine Down,” Roe’s personal hymn from Say Your Prayers, sung here by Daugherty. The song is so Mike Roe that it’s difficult to associate it with Derri.

Of all the Choir’s songs, I would not have selected “Like a Cloud” for this record. It first appeared on Speckled Bird, the loudest of the Choir’s albums, as a brief moment of beauty amidst the clamor. I’m happy to discover that the Lost Dogs version rescues this sweet love song from obscurity and transforms it into the clearest winner here. The Dogs’ glorious three-part harmonies waft above the web of acoustic and electric guitars, and the extended ending is marvelous. Drummer and producer Steve Hindalong works his magic here on exotic percussion as well.

Many of these songs are not as significantly altered, however. Roe sings Taylor’s “Grace is the Smell of Rain,” from Daniel Amos’ wonderful Motorcycle album, but otherwise the arrangement is similar, if quieter. The Choir’s “To Cover You” is covered note for note here, even down to Daugherty’s lead vocal. And I now have five versions of “Beautiful Scandalous Night,” the most typically Christian song Daugherty and Hindalong have yet written, and none of them are all that different from the others. Hearing Roe sing it here is interesting, though.

There is one song that has been reworked from the ground up, though – “It’s So Sad,” which first appeared on the 77s’ 1982 debut Ping Pong Over the Abyss. What was once a synth-heavy ‘80s pop song is now a screaming rockabilly number, complete with a frantic and amazing electric solo by Roe. Watching him perform this one live on an acoustic is awesome – he never stops moving, yelping or tearing out light-speed guitar lines. Taylor and Daugherty can only stand and stare at him in disbelief.

The show I attended was held at Rock Creek Church in Derwood, Maryland. Rock Creek is just off of a major road that connects with I-95, but MapQuest took me 20 miles off course through the enchanted forest. Seriously, that’s what the road looks like – a heavily wooded path that’s barely large enough to allow two cars to pass unharmed, with insane twists and turns throughout. The church itself is quite nice, and nearly 170 people fit comfortably inside.

In my opinion, that’s a ridiculously low number, considering the sheer quality of the musicians onstage, but for the Dogs at this stage in their career, 170 people in a little church in Maryland is a very good turnout. And the Dogs put on a hell of a show. They have honed their cranky old men act to a Vaudeville sheen, gently pushing the boundaries of what passes for appropriate humor in a church. Roe and Taylor, especially, put on such a display of loving antagonism that newcomers might think they actually disliked each other.

The banter was only half the fun, though. The Dogs ran through nearly every song on Mutt, as well as a nice selection of their older material. The Mutt songs particularly came to life on stage, and I gained a new appreciation for “If You Want To” and the expansive “Like a Cloud.” The Dogs brought Steve Hindalong with them, and he played an impressive array of bizarre percussion instruments in his inimitable animated way. At one point he was shaking what appeared to be a child’s mobile in one hand and a woven straw purse in the other. This guy is so much fun to watch.

The spirit of reinvention that runs through Mutt was in evidence throughout the evening as well. The Lost Dogs are not known for shaking up their repertoire live, but here they debuted what they called a “medley of their hit” that found them opening up their arrangement skills. They also brought a revitalized energy to “Why is the Devil Red,” which just plain rocked. Hindalong especially brought the house down on this one, pounding away on a pair of kettle drums.

They played the one new song on Mutt, “I’m Setting You Free (But I’m Not Letting You Go),” late in the set. It’s a beautiful father-daughter ballad about letting your children grow up while still holding them close, and it joins a legion of Terry Taylor songs about growing older and wiser. The Lost Dogs have found a way to grow old together, both musically and personally, and they’re doing it with grace and a sense of fun. If this group is the final destination for Taylor, Daugherty and Roe, then it’s been a great ride getting here. And if you weren’t there the first time, Mutt and its (hopefully many) sequels will fill you in on what you’ve missed.

I can’t fail to mention Jeffrey K. of Lo-Fidelity Records, without whom Mutt wouldn’t have seen the light of day. Jeffrey puts his heart into everything he releases, and he only would work this hard for bands and artists he loves. You can get Mutt through Jeffrey at his website, and you can listen to clips from every song before you buy. He’s incredibly fast, too – if you’re ordering from within the U.S., you should have your CD in four or five days, tops.

And when you’re done there, keep digging: www.thechoir.net, www.danielamos.com, and www.77s.com. There’s a lot of history there, and it’s all worth tracking down.

Next week, the Cure for sure.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Burning Sensation
Michael Moore Lights a Fire With Fahrenheit 9/11

So, has anyone seen Fahrenheit 9/11?

That’s a rhetorical question. I know many, many of you have seen Michael Moore’s new film, because it rocketed to the top spot on the charts last week, becoming the highest-grossing documentary of all time in only one weekend. And in only 800-some theaters. Whatever else you can say about Moore, the man knows how to turn controversy into ticket sales. He’s almost as good at it as that Gibson fellow.

I went on opening night, last Friday. I arrived at the theater at 6 p.m. to find that the 6:40 p.m. show had sold out. I bought tickets for the 9:30 show, planning to return about 9:00. I was earlier than that, in fact, by about 10 minutes, and when I walked in, two impressive facts greeted me. First, my screening had sold out, and second, more than 100 people were lined up waiting to get in, 40 minutes before start time. I queued up, and while I was in line, the 12:10 p.m. show sold out, too.

It was about then that I realized that Fahrenheit 9/11’s opening weekend would be a phenomenon.

And who would have guessed, 12 years ago, that Michael Moore would one day set box office records? He started out as the scrappy everyman behind Roger and Me, a little film about the little guy taking on the fat cats at General Motors. Over the intervening years, through two more acclaimed documentaries and two television shows (and a fiction film, Canadian Bacon, that no one likes to talk about), Moore has worked tirelessly to maintain that everyman image, even though he’s rolling in the dough by now.

Moore is a terrific filmmaker, a master manipulator and a genius at self-promotion. The publicity push for Fahrenheit 9/11 began at last year’s Oscar ceremony, when Moore used his victory speech for the excellent Bowling for Columbine to bash President Tex and his made-up war. It continued with the release of Dude, Where’s My Country, Moore’s best-selling book, in which he laid out his case against the Bush administration. And it reached its apex, believe it or not, when Disney refused to let its subsidiary company, Miramax, release the film to theaters. If it wouldn’t be so ironic, Moore should give Michael Eisner a cut of the film’s grosses for refusing a cut of the film’s grosses.

Then there’s the publicity he couldn’t buy or arrange, the kind that always sprouts up around films that bash the right wing or the Catholic Church. In the weeks leading up to the film’s release, we heard from the White House (they called the film “outrageously false” without having seen a frame of it), the Republican Congress (who filed a complaint with the FEC to stop Moore from advertising his film past the date of the Republican National Convention) and the ever-popular Move America Forward group, who pressured theater owners into not showing the movie. These people just don’t learn. Moore is right to be concerned that people may think he’s behind it all, that the controversy is a ploy to sell tickets.

Personally, I expect that this is just the same knee-jerk conservative response to anything that presents an opposing viewpoint. Dissent is a threat, not a right, they seem to think, and it should be squelched. Moore’s response to all this is to wonder – publicly – just what it is about his film that has the conservative side scared. After all, they’re in power, they have the White House and control of Congress, and at least half of the country believes anything they’re told on Fox News. (Or, as I like to call it, the Ministry of Information.) What can little old Michael Moore do to threaten that?

Well, that all depends on whether he can turn his record ticket sales into votes. Even with all the Republican machinations before the 2000 elections (a few of which are detailed in Fahrenheit 9/11), the results still came out roughly 50/50. Moore believes that the Supreme Court handed Bush the presidency, in spite of disenfranchised voters in Florida, but whether or not you buy that, you have to admit that they wouldn’t have had the chance if the vote hadn’t been so close. Preventing that situation from happening again is one of the primary goals of Moore’s film.

So he’s targeted the swing states, the voters on the fence. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a vicious, hilarious, full-on assault on Bush and his administration, delivered with all of Moore’s working-class, Joe Sixpack demeanor. It is the most skillfully manipulative piece of propaganda filmmaking I have ever seen. It is the climax of all of Moore’s best and worst tendencies, a polemic that uses every trick in the book (including, yes, the truth, factually presented) to nudge an audience towards a point of view. Some of it is right on the money, some of it is tenuous, and some of it is just plain unfair.

And I say that even though I agree with Moore 100 percent on this issue – Bush needs to go. There are dozens of reasons, and only a few of the good ones are covered in Fahrenheit 9/11, and those are not delved into with much depth of insight. The film’s first hour draws connections between the Bush family and the Saudi royals, and between Bush and Cheney’s business ventures and Middle Eastern oil, and then attributes sinister motives based on them. It all flies by in a blur, and even though this is material covered elsewhere (even by Moore), the presentation is compelling. But the nuggets of information are so closely stacked together that none are given the attention they deserve.

Of course, anyone expecting an intellectual debate from this film should be disabused of that notion mere minutes in, when Moore lingers on a shot of Paul Wolfowitz spitting on his comb and running it through his hair. This is a romp, a savage takedown, an agenda-driven assault, and if you’re not prepared for that, you may find it disappointing.

I did, somewhat, and here’s why. I took tremendous issue with people who skimmed Bowling for Columbine and called it biased, because that film represented a huge leap forward for Moore. For the first time, he allowed the process of making his film to teach him something, and the result was a probing, searching work that never settled on one definitive answer. By the same token, Fahrenheit 9/11 is a step backward, since Moore began with his thesis – George W. Bush is bad – and went in search of footage that would support it.

In a way, his process on this film is similar to that of the Bush administration’s when it came to justifying their invasion of Iraq. They began with a thesis – Saddam Hussein is bad – and scrambled to find evidence, no matter how shaky, to present to both the United Nations and the American public to support their war. (“He has weapons,” they said, pointing to a satellite photo of a truck in the middle of nowhere, one that could have been in Idaho for all anyone knew.)

Of course, Moore’s filmmaking has never gotten anyone killed. If there’s anything in this movie that the Bush administration doesn’t want you to see, it’s the haunting footage from the front lines of the Iraq invasion that makes up much of the superior second hour. We get Iraqis loading trucks with dead and dismembered children, bereaved mothers cursing America for the deaths of their sons and daughters, and a chillingly conflicted view of the troops as both cowboys and angels. It’s all in service to the fully realized argument that this war is pointless, and its cost in human life is too high.

And then there is Lila Lipscomb, the emotional center of the movie. Time and time again, Michael Moore can be counted on to detail the effects of nationwide and worldwide issues on his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Lila Lipscomb is a mother from Flint who lost her son in the invasion, and she makes a cathartic trip to our nation’s capital to confront her own rage. Lipscomb, a flag-flying patriot, questions the validity of the Iraq invasion and the president who ordered it, and her grief (upon which Moore’s camera remains glued) will stay with you more than any other element of the movie.

Moore is a smart man. He knows that statistics and business deals, no matter how sinisterly they are presented, will not shake voters. But amputees fresh from the war, railing against the government, will do it. Lila Lipscomb tearfully reading her son’s last letter home, in which he hopes Americans don’t re-elect Bush, will do it. And especially, those images juxtaposed with a repeated shot of George W. lamely reading My Pet Goat in a school classroom on September 11 for seven minutes after being told of the World Trade Center attacks, that will do it.

When Moore first broached the subject of those seven minutes in Dude, Where’s My Country, I thought it was a bit of a mistake. But now I realize that the inactive president is Moore’s central metaphor, perhaps the image he most wants you to take away from his film. It’s squirmingly painful to watch, but it’s also horribly unfair. In his voice-over, Moore wonders what was going through Tex’s mind during those seven minutes. If I had to guess, I would say that his thoughts were the same as most Americans’ at that time – some variation of “holy shit” repeated over and over, blocking out all reason. Perhaps not the quality one wants in a leader, but understandable, at least for seven minutes, in front of children.

I hate that this film has me defending George Bush, because I want him out of office just as badly as Moore does. But the point of dumping Bush should be to replace him with something better, and somehow using the same manipulative tactics as the administration Moore rails against doesn’t strike me as a clear example of an improvement. Fahrenheit 9/11 is not a film about issues, and is not one that will spark sound debate. It’s an entertaining and at times powerful firecracker of a motion picture, a movie made for cheering and booing, for 20-minute standing ovations and blindly enraged protests. It incites without exploring, and its single-mindedness is its main strength as entertainment and its chief weakness as a political statement.

There is, undoubtedly, a fascinating documentary to be made from the Bush presidency and the events surrounding the Iraq invasion, one that digs beneath the surface to find the real motivations behind the events and the players. It saddens me to report that Fahrenheit 9/11 is not that film. Michael Moore has some good points to make and some important things to say, but it is often the way he makes and says them that devalues his opinion. Fahrenheit 9/11 finds him with his most important message yet, and still he cannot seem to get beyond his snark and his emotional button-pushing long enough to simply relay it. It’s a shame, because while it will undoubtedly have some effect on the election in November, Fahrenheit 9/11 is little more than a political tool with a sell-by date, and it could have been a great film.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

A Ghost is Bored
Wilco's New Album is Less Than You Think

I keep forgetting to mention this.

As anyone who knows me is aware, I am a huge comic book fan, especially when it comes to independent, super-hero-free comics. I wasn’t always that way – oh, I have loved comics since I was a pup, but when I first began collecting them seriously, it was Spider-Man and the Punisher and Youngblood. It was capes and biceps and masks and pronouncements like, “Your villainous plan will never come to fruition, evil one!”

And then I met Rick Lowell, owner of Casablanca Comics in Maine. When I first started buying comics from his store in 1992, I asked Rick what books he read and thought I might enjoy. He said one word – Bone. And I laughed at him, if I recall, like a jackass. But I eventually read Bone, one of the first black-and-white, self-published comics I had ever seen, and I adored it. Creator/writer/artist Jeff Smith employed a clean line and cartoony style to tell a modern fairy tale reminiscent of both the Brothers Grimm and Walt Kelly’s Pogo, and it was touching and funny and heartfelt.

I still buy comics from Casablanca – they ship them to me in Maryland in a big box once a month. This month, I bought the final issue of Bone, number 55. Jeff Smith has brought his epic to a grand-scale conclusion, told the story he wanted to tell, and gone out on his own terms, and since I love it when that happens, I wanted to offer him my congratulations. It’s been a fun ride, even when it dipped into darker places than I expected, and the quality never suffered over 55 swell issues. So congrats, Jeff, and thanks.

And I have bought all 55 issues of Bone from Casablanca, which just puts my age in perspective. But it also tells me how satisfied I have been with their service, and what an amazing comic book store they run up there. In the ensuing 12 years since I laughed at Rick for liking a book named Bone, I have lived in four different states along the east coast, and I haven’t found a store like Casablanca anywhere. I plan to keep buying these pen-and-ink fantasies well into my doddering old age, and I hope to keep buying them from Casablanca until I’m feeble and blind and can no longer read. They’re on the web – check them out here

* * * * *

Believe it or not, I really don’t purposefully try to disagree with people. It just happens that way more often than not.

I don’t mean just the popular opinions, either. I’m okay with swimming against the tide of Britney fans and New Found Glory freaks, and it doesn’t bother me that I hate 50 Cent and Usher and just about anyone you can think of who has been on TRL. Really, I’ve been disagreeing with the general public on a regular basis for so long that I’m used to it.

It’s the critical opinions, however, that get me, especially critics whose perspectives I ordinarily respect. When the music press decides, en masse, to embrace an album I despise or slam a record I love, I can’t help but think that maybe it’s me. It’s especially galling when it’s an artist whose work I have followed and admired for some time. I feel like maybe I’m getting off the ride too early, and that maybe there’s just something I’m missing.

A good case in point is the new Wilco album, A Ghost is Born. I have enjoyed every Wilco album to this point, each more than the last, like most of the critical community. This is especially satisfying to me since Wilco has undergone a near-complete metamorphosis each time out, a trait that seems to alienate the average reviewer. The country-rock twang of A.M. gave way to the epic rock of Being There, the kaleidoscopic pop of Summerteeth and the ambient noise-folk of 2002’s masterpiece, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and acclaim has attended each step on this strange road. And I have agreed with pretty much all of it.

But here’s where that story ends, much to my dismay. Unlike a lot of folks who write about music for a living, I hate being disappointed in anything, even though it sometimes leads to pithy wordplay here in the column. And I hate this feeling I have now, this sense of not being able to join in the fun. Because you see, most every review I have read of A Ghost is Born has been glowing, full of praise for lead Wilco-er Jeff Tweedy for taking his band in yet another superb direction. It’s a party I’m not invited to, apparently, but I can’t just go along in order to feel included.

A Ghost is Born is really quite terrible.

In my humble opinion, of course.

If anyone is still wondering just how much Tweedy needed his departed co-writer, Jay Bennett, well, wonder no more. A Ghost is Born is hushed and scrappy, and often captures the same mood as moments of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but there’s very little substance beneath the atmosphere. The album lasts 67 minutes, and Tweedy has enough material here to fill maybe 25 minutes of that with well-crafted songs. The rest he seems to have made up on the fly, or thrown together out of C-grade bits, and only the production genius of Jim O’Rourke (who did YHF) manages to occasionally hold it together. The songs themselves are sprawling, simplistic messes.

We can start with the good stuff, if you like. The best song on A Ghost is Born is called “Hummingbird.” It’s three minutes of Beatlesque, melodic joy, and it’s the only one here that’s up to the standard set by Tweedy and Bennett as a songwriting team. There’s a stretch of songs from the wistful “Wishful Thinking” to the rough-and-tumble “I’m a Wheel” that is also pretty good, but not great. The web of guitars and dulcimers on “Company in My Back” is a particular highlight, although the song is weak, and “Theologians” brings an enjoyable gallop to the last half of the record. “Muzzle of Bees” is worthy, as well, with its melancholy lope. Even the guitar solo works in that one.

But that’s it. The rest is something Wilco has never been before – godawful boring. And it comes most often from Tweedy’s tendency to stretch tiny ideas to their breaking points. Opener “At Least That’s What You Said” is a sweet, easy piano piece saddled with a two-and-a-half-minute flailing guitar solo that seems annoyingly random. That’s nothing compared to “Spiders (Kidsmoke),” which keeps the flailing guitar, subtracts any melody at all, sprinkles in a lazy, repetitive drum machine beat and keeps…on…going…and…going for nearly 11 damn minutes.

Those scanning the lyrics for signs of Tweedy’s well-publicized struggle with addiction will be rewarded with “Handshake Drugs,” full of references to discreet taxicabs and downtown deals. It’s far more rewarding to read those lyrics than to listen to the song they accompany, a six-minute slog that ends three minutes too late. Atop the boring music is Tweedy’s always-bored voice, which only drags much of this material down. Often, in the past, his voice would stand in contrast to the sly melodies present on every Wilco disc. You know, except this one.

I must confess here that I am not one of those people who hears overused chord progressions and thinks that they represent a classic sound. I hear one-five or one-four-five or one-four-one-five and think that the songwriting is lazy. In the past, Wilco has employed these progressions, but they’ve always twisted them up a little bit, expanding on their wide Americana foundation. Here there is nothing as invigorating as “Monday,” nothing as touching as “She’s a Jar,” nothing as flat-out thrilling as “Jesus, Etc,” except for “Hummingbird.”

As boring as much of the album is, it’s nothing when compared with the much-discussed “Less Than You Think.” Here Tweedy and O’Rourke ruin what could have been a decent three-minute piano interlude by appending 12 minutes of formless noise. That’s right, 12 minutes. Now, I have plenty of CDs that prove that it’s possible to make a 12-minute noise sculpture that is captivating. This is not one of those. This is endless, monotonous garbage. This is something that talentless artists put on their records to seem avant-garde.

But Tweedy is not talentless, and that’s the tragedy of A Ghost is Born. For more than half of this record’s running time, he’s come up empty, but rather than admit that and release a 30-minute EP, he’s bloated the album and infused it with a sense of self-importance. Whether or not Tweedy actually thinks A Ghost is Born is a great record, he’s worked overtime to convince any and all comers that he believes it is, perhaps hoping that they’ll be hoodwinked by the self-conscious artfulness oozing from the seams here.

In essence, if Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was Wilco’s OK Computer, then this is their Kid A, and given that, it could have been a lot worse. Still, this meandering mess is thus far the year’s biggest disappointment, a turd that’s been polished up, gold-plated and hung in the Louvre, and the dutiful art-zombies are lining up to hail it a masterpiece. I wish I could join them. It would be wonderful if I could hear what most of the country’s critics are hearing on this album. I would love to love it. But I fear that this is my exit, and I’m getting off this bus and walking home.

Next week, the Cure.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Old Is the New Young
Growing Up With the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth

I realized the other day that I am now living the most un-rock-‘n’-roll life I have ever lived.

I get up at 5 a.m., run three miles on a treadmill, shower, put on a tie and go to work. I look at the stock pages to see how my company is doing. I work all day at a desk, moving numbers around on spreadsheets and filling out paperwork. I go home, watch the news, and I’m usually in bed by 9 p.m. By all outward appearances, I have become (gasp) an adult, a transformation that sometimes amuses and sometimes horrifies me.

I do feel lately like I’m growing up, even when it comes to my artistic choices. It’s been a long time since youthful energy, bottled and served up raw, has done it for me. I hate the whole garage-rock thing, mainly for its lack of subtlety and skill. The Strokes, the White Stripes, the Hives – I personally can’t wait until they all go away. I much prefer the sedate beauty of “aging” types like Aimee Mann and Terry Taylor, or even the highly technical power of Slayer and Slipknot, to the loud, sloppy, three-chord dreck that purports to speak for the younger generation.

For the most part, I’ve embraced that side of me. I like it when artists grow up, when they pull all that teenage energy into some shape and begin to wield it. I like Bob Mould’s solo stuff more than Husker Du. I prefer Houses of the Holy to any Led Zeppelin album before it. I like later Frank Zappa works like You Are What You Is and Civilization Phaze III more than his revered stuff with the original Mothers. My favorite Alarm album is Change, not Declaration or Strength.

I love it when bands outgrow their original concept. Word is that Green Day is putting out a rock opera this year, complete with nine-minute songs and extended instrumental passages. I know, I really do, that this will be terrible. And yet, just the idea of a band like Green Day, known for lazy two-minute pop-punk hit singles, stretching those conceptual muscles is oddly fascinating to me. Stylistic progressions just knock me out.

The Beastie Boys are another group that have joyously outgrown their own concept. Of course, when your concept involves three Jewish boys from Brooklyn laying down old-school rhymes about sniffing glue, well, you’ve got a limited shelf life to begin with. If you wanted to get a good laugh out of someone in 1987, you could have told them that the Beasties would one day be one of the most respected outfits on the planet, churning out brilliant, five-star albums with a kinetic flow and a politically aware attitude.

It’s been a surprising ride from “your mom threw away your best porno mag” to “I’m sending loving light to all that is,” but the Beasties have gradually evolved into the poised elder statesmen that they are. The Boys are all pushing 40 now, and if you consider that the word Beastie originally stood for Boys Entering Adolescent States Towards Internal Excellence (really), well, this is a group that barely resembles its past self. Diamond, Yauch and Horowitz are revered these days for their sophistication and musical adventurousness, traits that barely appeared on their multi-platinum debut, Licensed to Ill.

And yet Licensed remains their biggest seller. Whenever the B-Boys are mentioned in the mainstream media, you can bet the lyrics to “Fight for Your Right” will be quoted. People seem determined to define this searching, restless band by their past. And here it is, 2004, and the Beastie Boys have finally decided to let them. They’ve created the logical follow-up to their debut with their sixth record, To the 5 Boroughs, and while it’s a fun jam, I can’t help but feel a bit let down.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Beasties’ classic-style rap, with their lyrics that deftly tread the fine line between clever and stupid. But I also love the funky instrumentals they’ve become so good at, and the minute-long punk outbursts, and the acoustic interludes, and the newfound melodic melancholy they debuted on 1998’s Hello Nasty. The best Beastie albums, to my mind, have a patchwork, mixtape quality to them that flips you from one style to another recklessly. Try to find the common thread between the 20 songs on Check Your Head. Can’t be done, and that’s part of its scrappy charm.

To the 5 Boroughs sounds very much like Hello Nasty with all the really interesting bits cut out. It’s an entire album of “Intergalactic” and “The Negotiation Limerick File,” and it represents the B-Boys’ first absolute commitment to one style of music. Boroughs is 15 two-to-three-minute hip hop tracks, all beats and rhymes with little variation, and it’s over in 43 minutes. And they could barely sustain that running time – had they let a few more experiments on board, weaker tracks like “Shazam” and “The Brouhaha” probably would have been dumped.

But that’s just about all the negativity I can spare for this record, because it is a passel of fun. If you harbor any doubts that rap is a storied genre with its own rich tradition, equivalent to classic rock, this album should dispel them. It’s as much a retro pastiche as any record by the Black Crowes, and just as precisely and lovingly crafted. (The preceding analogy just happened to compare two of Jeff Maxwell’s favorite bands, and I’d bet he’s grinning right now.) This is Run-DMC, Grandmaster Flash and the Sugar Hill Gang, ever so slightly updated but just as enjoyable.

Mike D, AdRock and MCA are still in a class of three when it comes to dumb-witty good-time lyrics. The superb opener, “Ch-Check It Out,” all by itself contains these doozies: “Believe me when I say I’m no better than you, except when I rap, so I guess it ain’t true,” “I’ve got class like Pink Champale,” and “Stuck in your ass is an electrician.” It also sports the record’s funniest moment, when AdRock compares himself to Miss Piggy and his bandmates reply, in perfect imitation, “Who, Moi?”

(The runner-up: when Diamond kicks off the last verse of “Triple Trouble” with, “What the Helen of Troy is that?”)

As the title suggests, To the 5 Boroughs is also the Beasties’ valentine to New York City, and here’s where signs of the group’s maturity can be seen. The song around which all the others pivot is “An Open Letter to NYC,” which celebrates the diversity of the Big Apple over a throbbing Dead Boys sample: “Brownstones, water towers, trees, skyscrapers, writers, prize fighters and Wall Street traders, we come together on the subway cars…” As you’d expect, the specter of 9/11 hangs over this record (“Two towers down but you’re still in the game”), but the overall tone is one of hope and togetherness.

Elsewhere, the Boys get political, calling to “impeach Tex” and for a “multilateral disarm.” The thing is, their politics carry the same subtlety as their old-school boasts, which is to say none at all. I agree with the sentiments on To the 5 Boroughs, but the simplistic way they’re delivered is grating. Still, perhaps directness, no matter how clumsy, is the best way to motivate a populace that, when it comes to the Bush administration, remains like James Bond’s martini: shaken, but not stirred.

I can’t help but conclude, though, that all of this grown-up talk would work better if the Boys hadn’t decided to be 18 again musically. To the 5 Boroughs is an interesting regression, one that finds the Beasties unsure of just how mature they should be. They’ve never made a record like this one – usually they are Beastie Boys trying to be men, but Boroughs casts them as Beastie Men trying to be boys again.

Sonic Youth is another New York band that seems trapped in time by its name. In the world of feedback-drenched alt-rock, these guys are the Rolling Stones. The “Youth” in their name has been ironic for some time, especially since they began moving in a more sedate and artful direction on 1995’s Washing Machine. The waves of crashing noise are still here, but lately they’ve been nudged into more meditative directions, and the songs have grown some lovely melodies.

Unlike the Beasties, who are resisting age with all their might, the members of Sonic Youth know how to grow old gracefully. With last year’s swell Murray Street, they welcomed frequent Wilco collaborator Jim O’Rourke to their ranks, and he seems to have smoothed the Glenn Branca right out of them. The result is a fresh, airy Sonic Youth, one that doesn’t jam as much as paint with tones. And as good as Murray Street was, their second O’Rourke album, Sonic Nurse, is even better.

Sonic Youth has always written in a language all their own, and songs that sound like random jams at first gradually reveal themselves as minor guitar symphonies, meticulously arranged. One odd side effect of this language is that once one immerses oneself in Sonic Youth to the point of figuring it out, it’s hard for one to go back to just about anything else. The songs on Sonic Nurse are easier to figure out and love than those on, say, Evol, but the underlying structures are just as twisty and mindbogglng.

Kim Gordon is back out front here after her minimal showing on Murray Street, and her half-screamed vocals provide this album’s only real link to the band’s early sound. It’s been a gradual progression to this point, but Sonic Nurse is a quieter, cleaner piece of work than just about anything SY has done. That’s not to say the intertwining webs of guitar are not here – just check out the extended instrumental second half of “Dripping Dream” – but that the tones are more hushed and considered, and the melodies sweeter and more plentiful.

And the result is a clarifying of the band’s modus operandi. Here the odd tunings, the bizarre chord phrasings, and the tonal interplay reveal themselves as compositions, not just improvisations. These are songs that could only be played by practiced and proficient musicians, and similarly, by bandmates who share a tremendous bond. There is power in the way the members of SY listen to each other and anticipate each other’s moves, especially when playing such tricky and dense music. And of course, the only way musicians and bands achieve such a level of skill is by living long enough and playing long enough. The upside of age is mastery, and Sonic Youth is a prime example.

Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys have had similarly lengthy careers, and both acts have taken their original sound places that one would never have guessed they could go. It will be no surprise that in a country obsessed with youth, To the 5 Boroughs will be a massive success. But at this stage of my life, when I’m learning how to accept my age with some measure of grace, I take comfort in hearing works from long-running bands that are figuring out the same thing. Sonic Nurse is such a work, deeply textured and mature, the kind of record I will reach for well into my thirties, while To the 5 Boroughs stays on the shelf, forgotten, except as a pleasant reminder of a time left behind.

Next week, Wilco.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Bored Now
Mediocre New Ones From Lenny Kravitz and Bad Religion

We lost Ray Charles this week.

I don’t have a lot to say about this one. If you need me to tell you why Brother Ray’s death is a tragic loss to music, then you need to hear his work and read about his life. I have been thinking, though, about the great ones, and about how there aren’t that many left, and about who from the current generation can stand alongside them. How many musicians from the last 20 years will be mourned like Ray Charles, or Johnny Cash?

If anyone can come up with any, let me know.

* * * * *

In the spirit of equal time, I thought I would let my negative side out for a spin this week.

I said last week that I’m always looking for records like Keane’s Hopes and Fears, perfect little marvels that make all the unremarkable sludge I wade through on a weekly basis worth it. Thing is, I often just don’t write about the vast majority of records I buy, because they’re almost all bland and boring and not worth the words. Most of the music I hear makes no impression on me one way or the other, and I would rather spit bile all over a truly awful album than try to find something to say about one that is just painfully average.

Just to show you what that would be like, though, I have a couple shining pillars of tepid mediocrity this time, and all of them are from artists that have previously impressed me, so there’s a tinge of disappointment mixed in with the boredom. That should make it more interesting, at least.

Perhaps the most predictable disappointment to me is Bad Religion’s new one, The Empire Strikes First, mainly because I love the title. I want the t-shirt. It’s brilliant. The album itself, though, is just another Bad Religion album, which may be good enough for longtime fans, but just isn’t cutting it for me anymore. I like this album, but I don’t love it, and I don’t remember it 10 minutes after it’s done playing, and I certainly can’t make the distinction between this and virtually any of Bad Religion’s other 11 albums.

The Bad Religion boys have only twice tried to shake up their formula. Their second album was called Into the Unknown, and contained elements of Pink Floyd-esque space-rock. It was so poorly received that they immediately jumped into the studio to record Back to the Known, an EP of four-chord power-punk, and they haven’t significantly changed since. Their one attempt to spin a new tale was The New America, a disastrous collaboration with Todd Rundgren that made the absence of guitarist Brett Gurewitz achingly apparent.

Gurewitz is back now – he rejoined for 2002’s The Process of Belief, another interchangeable 30-minute slab of the classic sound. I feel like a schmuck for picking on this sound, because it’s swell in small doses. Bad Religion writes some of the coolest lightning-fast guitar-pop songs going, and Greg Graffin has an awesome voice, insistent and melodic. This band also utilizes three-part backing vocal harmony like no other punk band. Their lyrics are consistently intelligent and political as well, tackling the big issues that seem to elude the younger generation.

The Empire Strikes First is no exception, in any of the above departments. Lyrically, in fact, this brought a big liberal smile to my face many times. “Let Them Eat War” is the most striking indictment of the current administration’s policies I have heard in lyric form, wrapping just about all the reasons to vote against Bush in November into two catchy minutes. “Boot Stamping on a Human Face Forever” uses George Orwell’s famous quote about the future as a starting point for further vitriol: “With good books and looks on their side, and hearts bursting with national pride, they sang songs and went along for the ride, and the other side complied.” It’s not all politics, either: “God’s Love” takes aim at an uncaring deity who allows suffering to continue unabated, and “Atheist Peace” sets fire to the notion of faith-based war.

This is good stuff, and it’s too bad that the music is so typical. There’s very little on here that we haven’t heard from Bad Religion before, and after 12 albums, that’s unfortunate. If you liked Bad Religion before, you will like this album, too. I like it. I do. It’s just that with such a lengthy history, you would think this band would exhibit some growth, but they haven’t. The unchanging sound even wears thin over these 40 minutes, let alone 12 albums. At this point, you know what you’re going to get when you buy a BR album. For some, that’s a comfort, but for me, that’s a bit boring.

Suffering from the opposite problem, in a way, is Lenny Kravitz. He sounded like he’d finally found his groove on 2002’s Lenny, another album of Kravitz-style nostalgia-rock that somehow managed to feel fresh and individual. As much as I liked 5, his slightly overlong funk record, I thought Lenny left it in the dust, which is why his new one, Baptism, is such a letdown.

Baptism is another retro-rock-funk record, but instead of sounding inspired this time, Kravitz sounds exhausted. Opening shout-fest “Minister of Rock ‘n’ Roll” is unintentionally funny, the kind of brain-damaged anthem at which even Jack Black’s character from The School of Rock would chuckle. Sadly, it’s probably the best song – it’s certainly the only one that possesses much conviction.

Baptism is largely a conceptual piece about fame and its rigors, but done in such a cliched and trite manner that it’s pretty much unenjoyable. By the time you hit the second song, “I Don’t Want to Be a Star,” the realization dawns: you’ve just signed on for 54 minutes of a rich and famous guy bitching about being rich and famous. Lyrically the album is a joke – “Calling All Angels” is just as blah as you’d expect, as is “Sistamamalover,” and “confessional” verses like those on “What Did I Do With My Life” and “Destiny” are embarrassing.

Kravitz has always had a way of selling unoriginal lyrics, but here even his musical gifts fail him. On “Lady” he actually trots out this old warhorse: “She makes me feel good like a real woman should.” And he screams it over a boring repetitive piano pound, putting the focus on the words, and failing to rise above them. Much of Baptism is a slog – Kravitz has mistaken ponderousness for reflection, and on songs like “Calling All Angels,” with its unchanging quarter-notes, you will find yourself fidgeting and perhaps yelling at Kravitz, via your stereo, to do something interesting.

He occasionally does, thankfully. “California” is a cool rave-up, and “Where Are We Runnin’” is fun as well. But that’s about it, and those high points are balanced off by Jay-Z’s awful appearance on “Storm.” The closing track, “Destiny,” is just Lenny and his acoustic, playing the diary-reading folkie, and it’s a role he cannot inhabit. If this boring, slow, seemingly endless record proves anything, it’s that no matter what he says, Kravitz is most comfortable playing a rock star. He may mean this album more, but he’s failed to convince here. Even his voice sounds worn out, like he’s unable to draw up any energy for this material.

And still, I have to say that Kravitz’ problem is, as I noted, different from Bad Religion’s. That band has sounded the same for more than 15 years, give or take, whereas Kravitz has experimented and moved around within his chosen field. Baptism is the sound of an experiment gone wrong, but it certainly can’t be faulted for sounding like his last one, or the one before that. As a whole, his collection is an interesting ride. It’s just this album that bores.

As a quick aside, I was originally going to include the new Fastball, Keep Your Wig On, in this column of disappointments, but as I was giving it a final once-over before writing, I discovered something: it’s great. I don’t know why I found it so unremarkable the first couple of times, but this morning’s spin through it has completely reversed my original opinion. This is their best work, fun and intelligent and inventive and scrappy. Sorry for this unplanned moment of positivity. Won’t happen again.

Next week, the Beastie Boys.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Peachy Keane
On Hopes and Fears and 30 Years

I’m writing this during the last week of my twenties.

I’m not a hundred percent sure where they went, to be honest with you. I remember being 21, and buying Jeff Maxwell a beer he couldn’t drink at Applebees. I remember being 22, and graduating from college. I do recall being between 23 and 26, working at Face and living in Maine, but the individual years seem to have no meaning. From there, well, I have moments, but no impressions of individual years.

In fact, since I was a young’un, I’ve marked my years with music, and that seems to be the clearest way I can remember individual 12-month periods. 1990, the year Little Earthquakes came out, for instance. Or 1997, the year of OK Computer. This just seems to be the way I’m wired. I remember big events – weddings, funerals, etc. – and I remember music. Sometimes I’ll even get the big events wrong, like forgetting how many years it’s been since my grandmother died, but I hardly ever forget release dates of albums that changed my life. It’s sad, I know.

So in a very real sense, my impression of a year is colored by – nay, almost based on – the quality of that year’s new music, and how much it touched me and revised me. I will look back on even the most painful and useless of years – 2003, for example – with fondness if the music was good. And last year’s music was very good, with Rufus Wainwright and Bruce Cockburn and Travis and Fountains of Wayne and newly unearthed Jeff Buckley and so many others. To say they got me through it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration.

This year is already looking up for my personal life. New job, new salary, new love life, new living space (soon) – it’s all going well. But even if it weren’t, I would be tempted to look back on 2004 as a highlight of my young adult existence, just because of the music. I get slagged off repeatedly by e-mailers convinced that I’m too positive, whatever that means, and I do understand that sometimes this column reads like the rave-of-the-week club. The point of all this positivity is that there is good music out there, and in fact there is great music out there, and in fact there is spine-tinglingly, life-alteringly wonderful music out there, in seemingly increasing quantities.

I keep track of my Top 10 List throughout the year, revising and changing as I go, and it’s pretty rare that I hear something early on that I feel will definitely make it to the list by year’s end. Usually, though, I can count on one early entry staying the course, and I usually know that one when I hear it. Last year it was Bruce Cockburn’s You’ve Never Seen Everything. This year, though, is a rarity among rarities, because try as I might to convince myself otherwise, I think I have four right now that will appear in the list. Four. That means, if I’m right, that either I only have six more entries to come from releases in June through December, or I will hear music that strikes me, captivates me and energizes me more than the top four I have now.

First, of course, is Marillion’s Marbles, which still sounds like magic to these ears. I don’t believe there has been a day since its arrival on my doorstep that I haven’t spun at least one track from this masterpiece. Guaranteed to be in the top five.

Second is Spymob’s Sitting Around Keeping Score. I haven’t heard a snarky pop album that was this fun and smart since the glory days of Ben Folds Five. (Or at least since Fountains of Wayne’s last album…) Spymob is proof that being funny doesn’t prevent you from writing great, touching songs.

Next up is Muse’s astonishing Absolution. Here is an album that achieves as grand as it dreams, that paints everything in sweeping yet nuanced strokes, that creates massive vistas and places you smack in the middle of them. I would bet money that no one will release a bigger-sounding, more openly dramatic chunk of art this year.

And then there is Keane.

Keane is proof that the world cannot live without a guitar-less pop trio of some sort. They are a British band (yes, another one) with high melodic aspirations and a full, rich, piano-driven sound. And their debut album, Hopes and Fears, is another record about which I would change nothing. It’s as perfect and yearning a pop record as one could dream to hear.

This is what the experience of hearing an album like Hopes and Fears is like for me. The first notes set the tone – “Somewhere Only We Know” is a mid-tempo stunner, all ringing pianos and Tom Chaplin’s dramatic tenor, and within three minutes the band has out-Coldplayed Coldplay. It’s one of those songs where you think you’ve heard the chorus, and then the real chorus comes in, and you can’t help the childlike grin that slides up across your face.

Two more perfect songs and I start to emulate the record’s title. I’m always searching for records like this one, with beautiful melodies and songcraft in each track, and when Keane manages the hat-trick with the soaring “This Is the Last Time” and the delightful “Bend and Break,” I find myself both hoping and fearing for the remaining eight songs. Can they possibly keep this up? I hope they can, I fear they can’t, and it’s off to track four.

“We Might as Well Be Strangers” is heartfelt and gorgeous. “We might as well be living in another time, we might as well be strangers, for all I know of you now,” Chaplin sings, and the ebb and flow of the music is so perfectly matched that the silly grin comes back. The streak continues with “Everybody’s Changing” and the amazing, ‘80s-creepy “Your Eyes Open.” That’s half the record now, and nothing that isn’t worth praising. I haven’t even noticed until now that there are no guitars on here at all – it’s all Tim Rice-Oxley’s piano and keyboards, filling the spaces elegantly.

Track seven is called “She Has No Time,” and it seals the deal – even if the last four tunes are crap, Hopes and Fears will get some serious stereo time in the coming weeks. Chaplin unveils what seems to be a necessity for dramatic British singers these days – a flawless falsetto that rises above even the most ethereal elements of the music. “She Has No Time” is the album’s most heartrending song, its chorus tumbling upwards, cresting and breaking beautifully.

After that, anything would sound second-rate, and “Can’t Stop Now” has all the markings of a b-side. Here, I think, signals the start of the decline. But wait – Chaplin and Rice-Oxley pull it off. The song is a pseudo-Queen pastiche, but it works, especially the pounding coda. It is the weakest song here, but it would be the best thing the Gallagher Brothers ever wrote, just to name one example of inferiority. But the sound is wearing thin, and we have three songs left.

And then Keane performs an astonishing album-ending coup, concluding with three songs that rewrite the formula. Both “Sunshine” and “Untitled 1” revolve around grooves and atmospheres. They’re both fantastic. “Sunshine” takes its central melody, centering on the line “Can anybody find their home,” and repeats it in a glorious crescendo. The analog synth solo in the middle is worth the whole four minutes by itself – its final wobble into the chorus may be my favorite musical moment here.

Finally, there is “Bedshaped,” the most epic-sounding thing on Hopes and Fears. It is here that Keane fully explores just how much melodic noise you can make with just bass, drums and keyboards, and Chaplin pulls off his most inspired singing on the swooping chorus. Rice-Oxley really whips out the Rick Wakeman in the middle, too, and by the song’s enormous climax, he’s probably multi-tracking himself 12 times. There’s no other term for “Bedshaped” – it’s a grand finale.

And I’m left breathless, with that same goofy grin. This is what I want my life to sound like. This is how I want to mark my years. A decade from now, I will likely not be able to tell you with any great detail how I spent the summer of 2004, apart from the times spent with the people and the music I loved. And I love Hopes and Fears. It helps lessen the blow of turning 30 – if I have 30 more years of music like this to look forward to, then bring ‘em on.

Keane is another band I look forward to following – it will be fascinating to grow with them, and to see where they go next. Needless to say, Hopes and Fears is one of the best debut albums I have heard in ages, and one of the best albums in recent years. But hey, I’m 30 now, so feel free to not trust me. You can trust this, though, and it may not be good news for some of you – as long as music like this keeps dancing its way into my life, this column will continue to be relentlessly hopeful and positive. Because as the man said, “music is the best.”

Oh, and if that’s not enough to make your life worth living, I just heard that Creed broke up. That alone fills me with hope for my next 30 years. Happy birthday to me…

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Fallen Angel
Joss Whedon Signs Off, Just When TV Needs Him Most

In this space not one year ago, I wrote a tearful farewell to a television show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I got some flak for that, and don’t think I didn’t. People who have never watched Buffy have a very specific idea of what they think it is, and the funny thing is, they’re often right. It’s a silly show full of monsters and demons and kung fu. But that’s not all it is, and the way the show uses its absurd supernatural elements to underscore deeply emotional storytelling and finely detailed character studies only reveals itself over time.

The cumulative effect of the Buffy shows has been their greatest asset and most glaring weakness. Both Buffy and its younger brother, Angel, require tremendous commitment and concentration on the part of the audience to fully appreciate their long-form narratives. Later seasons are impenetrable for new viewers, so dependent are they on what came before.

That’s an artistically rewarding notion, but unfortunately a commercially disastrous situation for a weekly television show. And while it’s crucial that newbies start with the earliest episodes, those first seasons are the weakest, and they contain very little of what would draw the intelligent and the discerning to the shows. The main attractions, the elements that make Buffy and Angel extraordinary works, are both a) completely missing from the necessary starting point, and b) impossible to understand without that starting point.

So naturally, new viewers turning in to the fourth season of Angel last year were mystified. They arrived during the second year of a massive story with roots stretching back to the first season, involving a vampire with (and without) a soul, his homicidal son, a bunch of mystical prophecies, a beast that blocked out the sun, and a goddess giving birth to itself. And no attempt was made to catch newbies up. Even as the story reached new heights, ratings sank to new lows.

The WB renewed Angel conditionally. The network demanded changes to the very fabric of the show, requiring no season-long arc and more single-episode stories for year five. I hate to say it, because agreeing with television executives gives me the worst rash, but the demands made sense. The thinking was that if creator Joss Whedon made it easy for new fans to jump aboard Angel, they would, and they would stay because the show is quality. I can’t fault the network for that.

But I can fault them for what happened next. Whedon made the changes – Angel Season Five felt like a new beginning, like one of the earlier seasons, made up of 43-minute stories that spoke to theme rather than to plot. It faltered here and there, but was mostly fun and interesting viewing. Plus, the plan worked – ratings spiked (no pun intended – James Marsters of Buffy fame also joined the cast this year, and who am I kidding, of course the pun was intended), and critics chimed in with accolades. Whedon described it as hitting a stride, and by the time the excellent “You’re Welcome,” “Smile Time” and “Hole in the World” aired, it was hard to disagree with him.

So what would be the most logical thing for the network to do? Why, cancel the show, of course.

Again, I can see both sides here. Angel is an expensive show, even though it often looks cheap and cheesy. It’s full of location shots and difficult stunts and makeup effects, and why pay all that money to produce a show that plays to a dedicated but small cult, when something like Superstar USA (officially the meanest show in the history of television, by the way) is much cheaper and more likely to appeal to the masses?

Reality television is taking over, make no mistake, and it’s primarily because it’s so inexpensive. Point a camera at some exhibitionistic moron and let it run. No need for writers or story editors or effects people or even actors. And because people just keep watching and watching this stuff, the ad revenue keeps pouring in, and with a smaller production cost than even your most low-rent scripted show, the profit margin is immense. It makes sense. It sucks, but it makes sense.

The casualty is quality television, of course. Television that challenges and moves while it entertains, television that utilizes the medium’s inherent serial nature to really connect an audience with characters’ lives, television that goes beyond what television normally tries. Just look at Joss Whedon’s recent history: Buffy ended at seven seasons through a mutual agreement between Whedon and star Sarah Michelle Gellar, but his fledgling (and fantastic) Firefly was unceremoniously dumped after half a season, and Angel was hacked off at the knees during one of its most successful runs.

And I can’t fail to mention Tim Minear’s Wonderfalls. Minear co-produced Angel for years, writing some of the best episodes, and he left to develop a show about a strange girl who hears strange voices. It was yet another expensive, challenging endeavor, and Fox canned it after four episodes. The reality is that Fox will simply make more money by releasing the Complete Series DVD set than they would in advertising revenue by airing the remaining seven episodes.

It’s simple economics, and art doesn’t enter in. The better a show is, by and large, the more challenging it is for the viewer – it makes them think, it makes them connect, and it demands their time and attention. Hence, fewer people will watch an involved, complex show than one that lets them laugh at idiots and feel better about themselves. The fewer regular viewers a show has, the lower its profit margin. It’s to the point now where a network can tell, just from the first couple of episodes, whether it wants to invest in something or let it die. If it’s not a hit right away, it’s gone. No room for slow builders.

In that sense, Joss Whedon has been very lucky. Angel was a slow builder, no question. It had the advantage of spinning off from Buffy the Vampire Slayer at the height of that show’s popularity. The high school years remain the strongest, in terms of audience share, if not story, and the broody vampire with a soul was a big part of that. Angel was weak in its first year, despite tossing off one of its finest episodes, “Lonely Hearts,” almost immediately. But it grew. Man, did it grow.

Angel has always suffered from N.B.S. (Not Buffy Syndrome) to me, and I never connected with it the way I did with its big sister. But if you’re talking about huge, far-reaching plotlines that still speak to character and sting with emotion, you can’t do much better. Angel’s five years wrap together into a single massive story, one which leaves every character irrevocably changed. The first four seasons form a huge rising crescendo that finally climaxes in a revelatory way.

While the fifth season seemed like a fresh start, it quickly became the reason for the other four, the most important statement of the show’s mission yet. Angel and his team had clashed with Wolfram and Hart, the evil law firm, throughout the show’s run, but at the start of year five, they were working together. Angel had become CEO of the firm’s L.A. branch, in an attempt to change things from within. The prices he and the other characters pay for this decision are heartbreaking and powerful, more so than anything else in the show’s run.

And the final episode? It’s called “Not Fade Away,” which should give you some indication of its defiant attitude. It was, in a word, perfect. It was dark and violent, relentless in its brutality, and yet, funny and moving. Season Five was about the nature of heroism, and how that often means making whatever difference you can in an evil and unjust world. It’s not about winning, it’s about continuing to fight, and as Whedon said, the last thing you see in “Not Fade Away” is the last thing you need to see. It’s odd, because there was supposed to be a sixth season – this is not the way Angel was meant to end, and yet, it ends exactly the way it should.

That’s the brilliance of Whedon and his team. They pulled the finale together in almost no time, after finding out that their child was slated for execution. And still, it worked – it tied up all the loose ends, and left us with a stirring final scene worthy of the great show it was. Angel has always been the underdog, fighting for respect, but Whedon has never compromised his dark yet hopeful vision. Angel went down swinging, fighting for quality television against a rising tide. The message of its final episode is that nether the odds nor the eventual victor is the point. It’s all about how you keep on fighting.

September 2004 will mark the first fall season without a Joss Whedon show in eight years. Money and bad taste have finally succeeded in driving one of this medium’s treasures from the airwaves, and television will be all the worse for it. But it was a great run, a marvelous group of stories, and no revenue shortfall or last-minute cancellation can change that. I hope Whedon (or someone of similar talent) figures out that the DVD model is just waiting for long-form stories like Buffy and Angel. Original seasons of episodic programs, direct to DVD, and into the waiting arms of a ready audience. Why not?

For now, though, thanks to all at Mutant Enemy and the casts and crews of both Buffy and Angel for eight incredible years. These were shows that explored what television could accomplish. That their shared universe stayed on the air for eight years is proof that quality can stem the tide. It can be done. The good stuff just needs to be found, nurtured and supported. So what are we waiting for?

Let’s go to work.

* * * * *

I wanted to write about Keane this week, but I just don’t have the time. Next week, then, but let me put in an early recommendation: Hopes and Fears, Keane’s debut album, is excellent. Like Ben Folds does Britpop, but not nearly as stupid as that makes it sound. More in seven days.

See you in line Tuesday morning.