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We All Try: Blind Spots, The Ground Floor, and more…
We first hear an album at a moment in time, often unrelated to the release date. It’s arbitrary and meaningful.
Chromatics – Kill For Love (2012)
You don’t start things off with an epochal Neil Young cover unless you believe you’re about to make a big and great album. So I hope I can be forgiven for approaching this from the angle of presumed greatness. Banish all images of Drive, hopefully, and let your mind go…
Trailer Trash Tracys – Ester (2012)
In the self-assessment of their name and in the length of their new album (33 minutes vs. Kill For Love’s 78+), the Tracys don’t command attention the way Chromatics do. But Ester has its own huge silences and spaces; serious inquiries into rock history (“Baba O’Riley” rewrite, Tina Weymouth bass); textures transcendent in sum but too heavy and human to attempt liberation at any given moment.
Lee Ranaldo – Between The Times And The Tides (2012)
“Veteran rock musicians making great rock music about the joys of making rock music” is a genre that currently includes Superchunk, Wild Flag and Imperial Teen among its practitioners. I might not have guessed Lee Ranaldo would end up among them, but the virtues of Between are chiefly those, i.e. the fun Ranaldo and his great backing band are able to swirl up from trademark damp chords (probably not something I’d ever say about a Sonic Youth album). But, he’s still learning, too: “Shouts” borrows the twinkling water detail from Meat Puppets’ “Two Rivers,” makes it a new occurrence.
The Primitives – Lovely (1988)
I somehow expected the heady rush of smash hit and Lovely opener “Crash” to lead to an album’s worth of pre-Slumberland noisy pop clang, and it does lead there for song #2 (“Spacehead”), but then it leads to so much else that I hadn’t expected (come discover!) and that makes this really one of the pre-eminent and most delightful 80s pop LPs.
Steely Dan – Pretzel Logic (1974)
A number of years ago, I didn’t want to know that the Minutemen’s music contained any semblance of life other than the awesome one I’d found entirely in them, so, with a few exceptions (Blue Öyster Cult, for one, though I erred toward less heavy Agents of Fortune), I avoided their influences and heard very little Steely Dan. Funny that Double Nickels on the Dime became the album that goes without saying, or at least that’s the world I was brought up into. Anyway, here’s an earlier version of sublime creative economy.
tUnE-yArDs – W H O K I L L (2011)
From pre-Minutemen to post-, though music of such formal daring (that, even so, is necessary, almost expected—a huge relief!—in its songcraft), that finds all its joy five feet from the ground (not in the clouds, o lesser purveyors of long “euphoric” notes), is neither pre- nor post-, only supra-.
Café Tacuba – Revés / Yo Soy (1999)
Like a lot of Japanese rock music (Orange Range, others; I’m no expert there, nor on the Mexican rock music at hand), expert in a way that at first makes the music seem only to refer to its own awesome proficiency in effects. That ignores the quite evident soul spread across these two discs, but it’s a decent way to approach, say, Yo Soy’s track 2: there’s too much subhuman pop music, not enough that’s superhuman. Background.
Frank Ocean – Nostalgia, Ultra. (2011)
I dismissed the voice at first, but then found it in the way narrative efficiency (“Novacane”) gives way to statement of principles (“We All Try”), a one-two punch of rhetorical command; in the former’s array of air bubbles and sonic details, all those sounds that lend the downbeat a playfulness and courage without raising its blood pressure (some of the nicest of their kind since the barking keyboards of The Radio Dept.’s “David”). Not so much nostalgia as busted cryogenics.
Lil B – Angels Exodus (2011)
As famously inconsistent as all those who happily mistake life for art, though from what I can tell here, he only fails to deliver when the subject turns to zombies and vampires. Some artists need not bother with the popular myths of their day.
Lana Del Rey – Born To Die (2012)
I’m not sure what the conversation about Lana Del Rey involved, but all these months later I can’t think of a way to knock Born To Die that wouldn’t be the equivalent of criminalizing the habits of a drug addict who’s harming only himself or herself. (Disclosure: I don’t think of the pursuit of fame as much of a sin, or really believe in role models.) The music spun out of the vicious circle of Del Rey’s sadness and desire constitutes a very pretty and very sincere bummer.
