http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Thu, 13 Jul 2006 08:18:34 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/07/13/081834.php Rockbeatstone One thing about small towns is that they’re all the same. Everyone knows everyone else and everyone wears the same clothes and drinks in the same pubs (called something like Deep or Kudos or Vogue). Usually it is the kind of pub with £3 house trebles before 11 p.m. and then £5 entry charge after. But in every small town there’s always that small hardcore of odd kids who don’t. They’re usually the ones with fringes and skateboards. They’re always a minority, but you always notice them. But there’s usually a smaller harder-core of hardcore odd kids. You don’t really see them until they form bands like The Fall, Minutemen, Oneida, Slint or McLusky. These are the kind of bands whose raison d’etre seems to be annoying everyone else (including the rest of the band) as much as possible. Given that Shooting at Unarmed Men were formed from McLusky’s fetid remains (this being hopefully the last time I mention the connection) the same small town antagonism encapsulates their sound. Take track two "A Horse by Day is a Horse by Night" as a prime example. Repetitive thuddy and jerky drums give way to a buzzing fuzzy guitar and a vocal refrain unlikely to leave Morrissey with much to worry about: "All the King’s horse/ Stuck their dicks in my sister." The music itself is pure Mudhoney, but it works, and as the band build to the agitated chorus of “You can’t say ‘fucker’/ Can’t say I was gonna” it’s hard not to get carried along. Similarly the Shellac-inspired rhythm section and nourish chord structures of “Pathos Ate Bathos” give way to desperate and nervous two-part vocal howl that rushes you off your feet. “Pat Yourself on the Proverbial” continues the downbeat paranoid vein later on, drawing you in like an extended version of The Jesus Lizard’s “Pastoral” and “Get on Out and Come Right In” sounds like a Minutemen outtake, all awkward funk and spastic harmonics and shouting. The most antagonistic moment comes after the beautiful closing harmonies of “In Flight Instructions are a Joke, Say I” which manages to recall the sheer fucked-up buffoonery of Butthole Surfers. Imagine listening to five minutes of electrical noise in reverse, only to realise that they’ve just put the album on again after it. Track ten lasts 42 minutes. Even Butthole Surfers had more mercy than that. Admittedly, it’s probably been a while since any of their influences properly pissed on anyone’s bonfire, and the acorns haven’t fallen that far from the McLusky tree, but that’s no bad thing. Turn them up and “Yes” to tinnitus.By Keith Patterson Music50313@blogcritics.org Thu, 13 Jul 2006 08:18:34 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/06/09/165004.php RockbeatstoneSpring is here again, and you know what that means: love is in the air, roofies are in the drinks, and every music publication from here to Istanbul is busy piecing together its annual "Anniversary of Kurt Cobain's Death" cover story. No foolin'; April is the one month of the year during which the Barnes and Noble periodical section looks like the family portrait wall at Ma Cobain's homestead in the Pacific Northwest (provided Ma Cobain adorns her entire living space with nothing but press photos of her late son, which I'm sure she does, just as sure as I am that she actually goes by the namesake "Ma Cobain"). As you read this, there hangs on my wall a ratty old cover of Hit Parader magazine from April 1998 which reads, "FOUR YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH, WE REMEMBER KURT COBAIN," and features a blurred picture of the former pioneer of Seattle's supersonic making a fake-angry face and badly in need of a shower. The story advertised by this cover was a four-page Nirvana career retrospective, augmented by a forum for editorial gossip about Courtney Love as well as the usual fodder about Cobain's personal life (rags-to-riches story, tortured childhood, "was it really a suicide?" etc.), and even independent of the fact that it yielded a totally bitchin' wall decoration that's been keeping me company for the past eight years, the article was a decent, if a little dry, rundown of what Nirvana, and indeed Cobain himself, were all about. Yet annoyingly, though perhaps not unpredictably, Hit Parader and/or any given number of its journalistic contemporaries have been annually publishing this exact same article since about 1995. Never mind no real legitimate new information regarding Cobain's life, death, or music ever seems to surface, or the articles themselves are seldom anything more than ritual recitation of commonly known trivia, the face of a dead rock star on a magazine with the word commemorative written somewhere on the cover is -- to borrow a phrase from the man himself -- a guaranteed unit shifter, if not necessarily a radio friendly one. We Americans love our dead rock stars, especially our dead rock stars whose deaths come with an asterisk (suicide, drug overdose, mysterious drowning, shot to death by the hired goons of a rival rapper, etc.), because this gives us the chance to theorize, to formulate wildly unfounded hypotheses, basically to play a real-life version of Clue: Master Detectiveusing nothing but our handy Internet search engines and timeworn copies of In Utero. These things, for the most part, are harmless; it generally fosters entertaining if not enriching dialogue to sit around with people who have nothing better to do on a Saturday night and guess how the fourth proper Nirvana album would have sounded, or speculate what music in general would be like in 2006 had Kurt Cobain not whacked himself in 1994.A good premature rock death also brings out the hyperbole in the best of us, perennially inciting the ridiculous overuse of terms like "genius," "masterpiece," and "most important musician of the last ten years," as well as a handful of opposing-camp critics who cook up such daring terminologies as "overrated" and "only popular because he's dead" (side note: anyone who refers to a dead rock star as a "martyr" should be required by law to give his or her entire CD collection to a Goodwill store, and subsequently be forced to listen only to Selena albums for the remainder of his or her natural life). To deify a musician who died young is seen as iconic, especially if you're one who can claim that you were a fan of said musician before he or she died (this really puts you in there with the elite); to denounce a dead musician shows that you're too sharp for those damned commemorative Hit Parader articles; you can see through the bullshit, the hype, and evaluate the art for what it really is. A person in the latter category is also the type who might venture a clever statement like, "Death: it's the best career move there is." Cobain's is an odd legacy in that, because he was such a major figurehead in 1990's pop culture, cynics can (and many do) forever blame the declining state of mainstream rock music on the fact that he's no longer here to guide us. From context clues, we can deduce that groups like Nickelback and Creed wouldn't have existed, or at least would have been decidedly better, if Kurt had been around to show them The Way; we can presume that Pearl Jam and the Smashing Pumpkins wouldn't have "gotten all mellow and shit" if Nirvana were still around to make sure the ante was continually being upped; in general, the public at large can assume it wouldn't be necessary for groups like The White Stripes and The Vines to feel forced to "save rock" roughly 797 times per year, 'cause if Kurt were here, it totally never woulda died in the first place, man.Accusatory speculations of this nature do nothing except perpetuate mythology, but that's okay, because everybody knows that a dead rock star shrouded in myth is a far more interesting case study than a living, breathing rock star who will soon be visiting a theater near you. I would imagine that someone who saw Nirvana in concert is about eighty percent less likely to give a shit about Cobain's "legacy" than those such as myself and my friends, whose introductions to Nirvana came about thirteen months after Cobain killed himself. At this point there had already been several dozen magazine cover articles dedicated to his deification and idol worship, as well as the seven thousand or so websites generating gossip and spouting conspiracy theories regarding "the truth behind Kurt Cobain's death." Consider my friend Luke who, in eighth grade, had spent weeks worth of after-school hours in our school's new computer lab researching "the truth": one of my most absurd (and therefore, one of my fondest) memories of our friendship occurred one evening while Luke was having dinner with our family, during which he spent no less than a half hour explaining to my parents and two little brothers exactly why it was impossible for Kurt Cobain to have committed suicide. While I found it entertaining enough (even though I'd heard the rant tens of times before), the same didn't necessarily hold true for my brothers, who were five and nine years old, as their usual "So, how was your day at school?" banter was replaced by the clinically certifiable ramblings of an overly enthused adolescent making assertions like, "See, the way his brains were splattered on the greenhouse wall totally shows that, like, he couldn't have shot himself, because like, the gun was way too big for him to be able to reach the trigger. Kurt was, like, all, uh, short. And stuff."My parents, they mostly stared on slack-jawed, confused as to who the hell all these people were he kept naming but not curious enough to inquire about it, probably content enough to know that at least Luke now had a hobby besides growing ditch weed in his front yard. My mother in particular excused herself from the table an inordinate number of times that evening, "checking the pot roast" every five minutes or so, more than likely going into the kitchen and contemplating suicide herself.This was 1996, mind you, when the buzz surrounding the mystery of Cobain's death was still relatively novel, as the musical tides were starting to turn and self-proclaimed grunge vigilantes were drafting petitions to the Seattle Police Department on their Angelfire sites, calling for a reopening of the Cobain investigation. We would sit in Luke's upstairs bedroom surfing the net 'round the clock, signing as many of these petitions as could be found by day, downloading super-imposed naked pictures of Alicia Silverstone by night; the times were simple, and while students of the case were unquestionably devoted, it seemed content to remain a hobby of Internet wackjobs and thirteen year-old boys who had recently purchased copies of Nevermind and had nothing better to worry about.But that wasn't the case. In the following years, there emerged rumors of a massive treasure trove of unreleased Nirvana material that was simply collecting dust in David Geffen's vaults, just hankering to be released. But wouldn't you know it, that pesky Courtney Love was at it again! As if her reputation needed additional sullying, here she was trying to prevent the legacy of her husband, the genius, THE MOST CULTURALLY RELEVANT MUSICAL FIGURE OF OUR TIME, from being fully realized. Rolling Stone published news briefs every couple months documenting the status of the increasingly elusive Nirvana rarities box set, but every time they thought they'd pinpointed a release date, along would come Courtney with her team of million dollar lawyers to kick things back another couple of months.This went on for a number of years, yielding nothing until 2002, when Love finally decided it would be okay for the world to at least have a taste of what they'd been missing, in turn allowing Geffen to release the fantastic single "You Know You're Right" as the bait track on a greatest hits collection. Predictably this only served to whet everyone's appetite for what may still have been out there, and Love proceeded to drag this out for two more excruciating years. She finally allowed the long-awaited lost tapes of Kurt Cobain to be released in 2004, as a box set titled With the Lights Out (a set of music whose sheer worthlessness I will be complaining about in several minutes here). Courtney Love, regardless of what you think about her, was (is?) the single most important component to the mythology of Kurt Cobain (and provided she didn't mind being hated by everyone in the world - and all signs seemed to indicate that she didn't - she was quite possibly its largest benefactor as well). She was (is?) the antagonist to a protagonist who could no longer fight for himself, which is where we - the internet petition-signers - came in. Every one of Kurt's mistakes from his drug addiction to the improper way he folded his underpants has at one time or another been blamed extensively on Courtney, because to admit that Cobain was simply an idiot who made a handful of major life fuckups is to demystify his legend, and where's the fun in that? Of course, it doesn't hurt that Courtney Love is quite possibly the worst rock and roll wife ever, with only Yoko Ono giving her any real competition. But at least Yoko was only accused of breaking up her husband's band; Love, on the other hand, was the ideal person to actually blame outright for her husband's death. Undoubtedly the circumstances were different, and if John Lennon had committed suicide, Yoko might very well have been prime suspect in the nutjob theories, but Love was just too perfect; she had what could be looked on as a handful of motives, she certainly appeared soulless and cold enough to do it (or at least hire someone to do it, which was the more sensible nonsense proposed by countless speculators), and on top of it all, she was a just a fun person to hate.Sadistic though it may be, Courtney Love is the type of individual whose misfortune you look forward to reading about in Peoplemagazine. Conversely, for fans of Nirvana, it was baffling how Kurt Cobain could be so inherently brilliant at music yet so mind-bogglingly stupid at life, so the logical thing to do was to make a him a victim to a conveniently located victimizer. Many Nirvana fans I've known have said, "if you were married to Courtney Love, wouldn't you be addicted to heroin, too?" My answer is invariably yes, I would most certainly turn to smack out of necessity, but then, I'd never marry someone like Courtney Love in the first place, and this immediately becomes where most of us have to stop measuring Cobain by our own yardsticks. He was making shitty decisions long before he married Love; indeed, marrying Love was merely one in a long line of shitty decisions.For me, the dissolution of the Cobain myth began with Nick Broomfield's 1998 documentary, Kurt and Courtney, an unfocused attempt at disproving the Cobain suicide report which essentially played like one of the home movies that my friend and I used to make with his dad's video camera, in which we'd run around outside and conduct interviews with random kids in the neighborhood. What I learned from this movie is that nothing flattens a conspiracy theory like listening to the inane ramblings of someone who actually believes it. Kurt and Courtney was effective in eliciting a nice sympathy trip for Cobain and doing a definite bang-up job of painting Love as a self-serving queen bitch, but didn't do much for approaching a legitimate, factual case for Cobain's death being a possible murder rather than a suicide.The most plausible argument presented, one initially instigated by private investigator Tom Grant - that it would have been impossible to have ingested as much heroin as was found in Cobain's system and still have been coherent enough to discharge a gun - was immediately shot down by a doctor. Broomfield meant well, but everyone with whom I watched this film left the room shaking their heads, and most of us were only eighteen years old. Perhaps there were elements of cynicism in this reaction, but mainly the whole thing just felt like an episode of Jerry Springer with really, really tragic surrounding circumstances (not that any standard episode of Jerry Springer could be described as anything other than "really, really tragic," but you get the point). Tearing even further away at the mask was the 2004 release of With the Lights Out, the long-awaited three-CD, one-DVD box set of unreleased recordings, alternate takes, and demos. It hit stores the same day as U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and indeed, there wasn't a single track on the entire Nirvana set as memorable as How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb's worst song (no small feat considering the four hours worth of material in the Nirvana box).What was originally hailed as a collection of overlooked masterpieces ultimately ended up being a pile of crappy demos and shoddy live performances, items which might be novel for collectors and aficionados to bootleg and trade on the internet, but are borderline criminal to professionally package and market as a legitimate music release. Truly, if Universal scraped the bottom of the barrel any harder to assemble this material, they would have been chipping wood; With the Lights Out, and moreover the entire myth of the Kurt Cobain's buried treasure, was the biggest music industry sham of my generation, $45.99 that could have been spent on milkshakes and hookers but instead went towards a dozen Neverminddemos that sound like they were recorded over the phone with one of those Talkboy recorders that Macaulay Culkin had in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.Nonetheless, the mythbusters had the week off; With the Lights Out was released to mostly enthusiastic reviews, likely written primarily by watery-mouthed fans of the group just so excited to be hearing Kurt Cobain's voice in an unfamiliar setting that they would have heaped equally hyperbolic praise upon a book-on-tape version Anne of Green Gables as narrated by the man himself. Consider the first track on the box set, a version of Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker" recorded at a house party in 1987. The recording quality is barely passable, Cobain forgets half the words, and he incoherently yowls his way through the half that he does remember. It is, by and large, a worthless recording. But you can't really believe that, can you, not unless you spent your life living under the proverbial "rock" under which it is always suggested that ignorant people reside? No, what it is, you blasphemous nay-saying sodomite, is an "early glimpse at Cobain's genius to come," or, "a blueprint for the sound that would later come full circle on Bleach." Some people will grant you that it's just a bunch of drunk buffoons in a basement having a good time, but it's rare that there isn't some sort of false significance attached to even that.Similarly will people insist that a hissy version of "All Apologies" that sounds like it was recorded in the shower with an unamplified electric guitar is not merely a "pile of shit" but rather a "unique insight into the creative process," meaning that we see answered before our very ears the perpetually baffling question of, "Does a song sound better recorded in a studio with actual recording equipment, or in a bedroom with a cassetteophone with dying batteries?" And there's a question whose answer is worth $45.99 plus tax, eh? When dealing with dead rock stars, it's counterproductive in deciphering the enigmas surrounding them as people if we allow ourselves to view any element of their career as unrevealing, and since nothing is ever enough, we're constantly on the prowl for missing pieces, information either factual or musical to fill in the gaps. This is why roughly every significant concert Jimi Hendrix or Jeff Buckley ever played is now available on CD, and likewise why everything Tupac Shakur ever uttered in a recording studio has been unvaulted, divvied up, and used as feature spots on the albums of rappers who didn't even have careers while Shakur was still alive - well, that and money, of course, but it's our curiosity that engenders the demand.Nirvana's demos and outtakes aren't even like those of Bob Dylan or Elvis Costello, where the alternate versions present the songs in a vastly different light and therefore really do shed light on the creative process; almost without exception, Nirvana's "alternate versions" are really just "unfinished versions." For a fan to find them interesting is understandable; to presume that they have any degree of significance is to wildly extrapolate. The one thing With the Lights Out did reveal about Cobain, or at least about his producers, was that he was a brilliant practitioner of quality control. Nowhere in Nirvana's catalog is there a case of "well, this song should have been included on this album, where this song should have been left off." Disappointingly, With the Lights Out proved that there are only four truly great Nirvana songs that were not originally released on one of their proper albums: "Even in His Youth," the B-side to "Smells Like Teen Spirit"; "Verse Chorus Verse," the unlisted track on the 1993 No Alternative compilation; "I Hate Myself and Want to Die," from 1993's The Beavis and Butt-Head Experience; and "You Know You're Right," a single recorded early in 1994, released on the self-titled 2002 best of collection.It's also telling of Courtney Love's quality-control-o-meter, as well as those of the two surviving members of Nirvana, that none of these four songs appeared on the box set in their definitive versions.So what of all this folklore? How much of it is legit, and how much is completely unfounded horseshit? Well, since this is a music publication, and since it is indeed spring, I'd be remiss if I didn't at least so much as attempt to answer the questions that the rock media has been trying to answer for years, partially because they're cornerstones for good discussion and insightful analysis of what actually does exist, but mainly it's just fun to speculate (plus I know you've all been dying to hear what I have to say about the subject, seeing how this piece isn't nearly long enough as it is). Had Kurt Cobain lived to see 1995, what would the fourth proper Nirvana album have sounded like?Well, a handful of interviews and biographies suggest that the group were on the verge of imploding as it was, so chances are there might never have been a fourth proper Nirvana album at all. But for the sake of debate, and assuming Cobain would have continued on solo ventures even in the absence of his band, I've always fancied the notion that Nirvana V 4.0 would have sounded like a sloppy version of R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People, the then-latest record by a band that Cobain loved, and supposedly the record that was playing on the stereo when Cobain's body was found (a detail presented to us courtesy of Christopher Cross's biography Heavier than Heaven, which dedicates an entire section to the day of Cobain's suicide, fabricating details about the event as though he were writing a series of stage directions).Though "You Know You're Right" suggests otherwise; it's got as catchy of a chorus as you'll find anywhere in the Nirvana canon, but its outro boasts an onslaught of cacophonous noise that you can't find anywhere outside of an amateur Stomp audition. So maybe it would have sounded like "Man on the Moon" played with garbage can lids. If that's the case, it's a shame we'll never get to hear it. What would music be like in 2006 had Kurt Cobain not whacked himself in 1994?Probably still awful. Kurt Cobain was no kind of tour guide; he was simply a doorman. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was a trailblazer, opening the floodgates for countless rock bands to do what they do and expect to have a fair chance at being accepted commercially. But when you've extended an open invitation, you can't expect the riff-raff to simply stay out on principle. Bearing this in mind, groups like Nickelback and Creed don't exist in the absence of Nirvana, they exist becauseof them.It doesn't seem uncommon for music to devalue once it's been revolutionized; much as the Led Zeppelins and Black Sabbaths of the 1970's devolved into the Whitesnakes and Ratts of the 1980s, likewise did the Nirvanas and Pearl Jams of the 1990s devolve into the Creeds and Nickelbacks of the new millennium. And that's not a nostalgic, "the old stuff is better" rant; it's just a simple matter of breaking down formulas. Groups founded on originality - or more accurately, musical personality types founded on originality - will always outshine their successors because they are, for better or worse, original, and their followers will be trying to create from a formula the same thing that its innovators likely created out of natural inclination. Unless a successor can bring something unique in terms of character to the music from which his or her own is derived, what will likely turn up is a pallid imitation. Is Kurt Cobain only regarded as highly as he is because he's dead?Though I'm sure the pages of endless yammering which preceded this statement may suggest otherwise - no. The music Kurt Cobain left us with is largely the work of a great pop music innovator who was constantly evolving and challenging himself. Nevermind and In Utero would probably still be regarded as fantastic albums if Cobain were still alive - Nevermind for being the groundbreaking pop album that it was, and In Utero for being the respectably challenging but naturally forward-pushing follow-up - even if (especially if?) everything else he'd released since had been utter crap. Both albums peaked at number one on the Billboard charts, and while this alone certainly does not justify the celebration of greatness (the album which Nevermind knocked out of the number one slot was Michael Jackson's Dangerous - "Heal the World," indeed), there's no denying the immense popularity surrounding this music prior to Cobain's death.The suicide perpetuated the mythology, and will likely hold an immense bearing on any posthumous work which surfaces in the future, but the material that was released during Cobain's lifetime was mostly given its canonical evaluation well before April 8, 1994. The two remaining studio records - Bleach (1989 Sub Pop debut) and Incesticide (collection of odds and ends and indie singles - who knew, the real version of With the Lights Outwas released in 1992, and even then any hype it generated was of questionable foundation) - are both solid if unspectacular releases, essential for an admirer of the group but probably forgettable to casual music fans. Bleach was Cobain before he hit his stride as a songwriter, though great songs are not completely elusive. Incesticide is, on the whole, a lot of dicking around, though in many ways it's far more accomplished than Bleach; the pop songs are stickier, and the moments of reckless abandon are looser and more ridiculous. However, the MTV Unplugged in New York album is nothing short of indispensable, primarily for its display of the intricacies and depths of Cobain's songwriting, which on occasion can be lost beneath the fuzz and crunch of the studio records. There's a commonplace statement in many discussions in which a song's merits as a written piece of music are being weighed: "Well, how well does it hold up if you play it on just an acoustic guitar?" Unplugged is the evidence. It's also the closest we ever got to Kurt Cobain the person; where Nirvana's studio recordings are often monstrous walls of sound, Unplugged conversely sounds like Kurt sitting on your couch playing you his songs over Sunday tea and biscuits.In other live performances, Kurt was constantly jumping around onstage, possibly in lingerie, sometimes laying on the floor with his guitar and performing a bizarre clockwise running motion; on Unplugged, he was relaxed, seated, and wearing a nice beige sweater that looks like it came from your Uncle Dennis's yard sale. Me, I always liked it (the album, not the sweater, though now that the subject has been breached I'll confess to loving the latter almost twice as much) because songs like "Plateau" and "Lake of Fire" were downright hilarious, and while humor was always present in Cobain's songs, there was something less distant about where it was coming from on the Unplugged record. It was more direct and less ironic, more human and less mythological. Unplugged in New York was the least mythological thing Kurt Cobain ever did; perhaps it only served to proliferate it that he followed it by shooting himself in the face, which remains the most mythological thing he ever did.There is a moment during the MTV Unplugged broadcast, the break during the last verse of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," in which Kurt Cobain opens his eyes, which had been closed for the entire song leading up to this point, and makes what my friends and I used to call the "I'm gonna kill myself" face. It was, at a time, the scariest, most foreboding look I'd ever seen on the visage of another human being; watching it now, as an adult, it looks like he was merely looking out on something that happened in the audience, or possibly taking a breath after screaming the holy hell out of the song's last verse.Whatever the cause, my friends and my original interpretation of that face was, in addition to being young and generally prone to making up random bullshit, the absolute embodiment of the Cobain legend, the inability to allow one glance to go by without burdening it with some kind of interpretive significance.Perhaps that's just the lore talking, or maybe it's just indicative of a great artist in general; whatever it is, it's a fascination that isn't going to die anytime soon, especially not with blathering articles like this being written every spring. But then, that's good mythology for you, inasmuch as every attempt to debunk it only further perpetuates it. That's all right, though; despite what he declared time and time again, Kurt loved his attention, and I can't imagine he would have his legend any other way.- by Kevin Davis Music48853@blogcritics.org Fri, 9 Jun 2006 16:50:04 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/06/06/083610.php RockbeatstoneCan anything good come from Nebraska? Well, except for corn, an adequate college football team, Marlon Brando, and of course, corn. We'll let Sufjan figure that one out. But in answering the initial question, I can tell you this much: Kite Pilot is rather good and they do, in fact, come from Nebraska.Meet Erica Petersen, Todd Hanton, Corey Broman, and Austin Britton. They are the hardworking components of Kite Pilot. From track one of their debut full length album, Mercy Will Close It's Doors, the four take us on an intricate pop journey, packing trumpets, cellos, accordions, and, of course, a washboard. Because what's a band without one?The two vocalists in Kite Pilot (Erica Hanton and Austin Britton) are reminiscent of Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger (of the Fiery Furnaces). Whether this is a good thing or not is up for debate, but in the grand scheme of things, Hanton and Britton's voices are probably a bit more tolerable and universally accepted. It's interesting that I make this comparison because just now I am seeing that the two ensembles are playing a show together. How fitting. Sokol Auditorium in Omaha, June 22 -- don't miss it.There are quite a few standout tracks on Mercy. "A Walk in the Dark" will catch your attention with its triumphant horn fanfare. And consider "Carbon Monoxide" which begins with a ghostly drone and ends up surrendering itself to pop goodness as Erica asks "turning trees inside out / is it up to me to keep the grass so green?" The music on this album tends to remain upbeat and listenable without getting dull, or even worse, obnoxious. This is a feat only finely tuned musicians can pull off. As a whole, the album is pretty ear-pleasing.For all the fast pacing and catchiness Mercy gushes, let's not forget its more somber, contemplative moments. On "Last Night," for instance, Erica quietly warns "last night I saw the future and made my way there / you're going to die of your regrets if you don't do something." The song is a breather on an album full of movement and frenzy, and this is no bad thing.There are a few head-scratching moments. For example, the unnecessary screaming at the end of "Tiny Portraits" will have you asking "why did you do this, Kite Pilot?" However, one or two minor iniquities cannot overshadow the whole happy product Kite Pilot has offered up for our listening pleasure. Kite Pilot didn't change my life, but they have produced a selection of satisfying songs that should tempt anybody with a musical palate hankering for a quality musical experience.- by Ruth Pranschke Music48854@blogcritics.org Tue, 6 Jun 2006 08:36:10 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/05/31/123034.php RockbeatstoneHaving played the name-game for a good six months with my band, I know how difficult choosing a good name can be. The 20 minutes between practice room and my house gave birth to such gems as The Fascists, Whoodini?, and Prostate. With such dazzling creative abilities, I can imagine you’re surprised we were never stars. Spank Rock clearly never had to undergo the trials of weekly 20-minute sessions of name-storming, but I for one, wish they had. Because "Spank Rock" is a crappy name for any band.Luckily the crap stops here, because two tracks in and I’ve already decided that Spank Rock are The Shit. Pitching in as a more commercially viable Anti-Con, or a slightly more avant-garde Outkast, this is one of the freshest sounding hip-hop albums I’ve heard in a long time.The production works mainly on the staple elements of grime artists like Dizzee Rascal: sub-low bass ("IMC"); the rapid-fire snare of drum 'n' bass ("What It Look Like"); and a generous helping of some weird icy synth distortion ("Chilly Will"). Add to this a seemingly random bag of sound effects and eclectic instrumental choices (watch out for Tarzan and some wild cats on "Touch Me") and you’re getting close to the Spank Rock sound. Despite the ultra-modern production though, YoYoYoYoYo sounds and feel like an old-skool rap album. "Competition" is like the hip-hop Gulf War: a laser guided mic-fight without any sign of opposition. "Bump" comes across like a Run DMC remix, and "Far Left" carries more than a hint of Afrika Bambaataa’s electro-funk. Spank Rock (the MC) flow’s like a man in awe of Q-Tip, with opener "Backyard Betty" sounding like an Aphex Twin glitch-disco version of "Breath and Stop", while the man himself outlines his intentions for the bitches littered all over his house (including those in his closet).Despite the assertions on the band's MySpace site that their music sounds like “fat girls in the hot tub”, there’s so much more to this than bitches and ho’s ghetto sexism. This is undoubtedly a great party album, and even better than that, one that has enough substance to allow you to keep you listening after the break of dawn. If you’re constantly being threatened for putting Madlib on the soundsystem at your block’s little get-togethers (I know I am, despite not living on a block or being invited) then lay your hands on this.by Keith Patterson Music48581@blogcritics.org Wed, 31 May 2006 12:30:34 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/05/27/101656.php RockbeatstoneI bought Radiohead's Kid A in the fall of 2000, when I was an awkward, pimply-faced, nerdy high school senior. I'd had my nose in the music periodicals for a couple of weeks, reading the glowing reviews of it; erudite rock critics offering statements like, "Thom Yorke is NOT OF THIS PLANET!!" and, "With Kid A, Radiohead have managed to create a tear in the cosmos, allowing the soundtrack to another galaxy to slip through space and into the mixing booth at Abbey Road Studios," and, Kid A was made by REAL LIVE HUMAN BEINGS! THERE IS HOPE FOR US AS A SPECIES YET!!" Mind you, these were professional publications; I understand that, barring the absence of plenitudes of remarks like "LOL!" and "WTF?", they read like an AOL Instant Messenger dialogue between two eighth grade girls, but that's how excited this record got people. Something was happening here, but we didn't know what it was; it was all we could do to sit back and take it all in.Of course, it's tough to take hyperbole for what it's worth when you're an awkward, pimply-faced, nerdy high school senior. Everything in the world seems somewhat hyperbolized, particularly when you're a musically enthusiastic yet horribly disgruntled patron of the arts in the market for something new, challenging, something downright weird, the type of praise that was being heaped upon Kid A was designed to inspire surreal amounts of gusto. And it was easy hype to build. I ain't gonna mince words; OK Computer changed my life just three years prior, when I was an even more awkward, more pimply-faced, nerdier high school freshman. The record took me three years to unravel; I recall staying up until three o'clock in the morning in my grandmother's basement, laying on top of the pool table and listening to "No Surprises" on headphones, letting its music-box guitar riff carry me away to a place that no music before ever had. I'd play "Karma Police" every morning before school, not really knowing what Thom Yorke was getting at when he sang, "This is what you get when you mess with us," but still knowing that I identified with it, that it was somehow relevant to this day-to-day escapade known as high school that was both defining and ruining my life. I'd play "Let Down" whenever I wanted to feel like depressed was the thing to be, to think that it would be worth it to suffer the most unbearable disappointment in the world to be able to write a song that authentic, that genuine. And sometimes I'd play "Electioneering" and just jump around my room and throw things. A new Radiohead album was long overdue; sometimes a guy needs to have his life changed every once in a while just to keep the vibe fresh (you gotta have a fresh vibe; there's nothing quite so unappealing as an unfresh vibe), and I had been saving up my petty weekly allowance money in preparation.For whatever ridiculous reason, my friend Mark and I had decided to indulge in a little road trip to the Sandberg Mall in Galesburg, Illinois. It's amazing the things you'll use as an excuse to leave the house when you're in high school. The Galesburg mall was hardly half the size of the mall we have here in Peoria, and a Villa Pizza or two notwithstanding, there was nothing there that couldn't be found here. But hell's bells, a road trip's a road trip, innit? After devouring a plethora of dreadful food court gastronomy, I was able to drag Mark and his girlfriend to Sam Goody where I was finally able to acquire a copy of Kid A, an absolute steal for $18.99. On sale.The cover art was glorious. Everything about it looked, smelled, and felt like the future -- everything from the Typeface of Tomorrow font to the translucent foldout paper in the book to the second booklet of random lyrical blurbs located under the CD tray, from the pictures of interplanetary mountains on the cover to the off-the-wall Thom Yorke sketches in Booklet #2, from the album title to the song titles. I cradled it in my arms, professed my love to it, swore that no matter what I'd never let anything happen to it as long as we both lived. I could hardly wait to get it home, out of that uncomfortable jewel case and into a nice warm CD player.Mark's girlfriend made us listen to Lenny Kravitz's Greatest Hits on the way home. I liked Lenny Kravitz in the same way that I liked eating plain white bread; I could dig it as an alternative to nothing, but when brilliance was on the horizon, it just wouldn't do. "Are You Gonna Go My Way?" never sounded worse. I rocked back and forth, imagining what the record was going to sound like. Critics compared it to Pink Floyd, but critics compared anything remotely experimental to Pink Floyd. My friend Joe Bennett had received an advance (read: pirate) copy from a friend of his, and he had informed me that only one song -- "How to Disappear Completely" -- had a recognizable guitar part. This intrigued me as I attempted to fathom what Radiohead had going for them in lieu of guitars. Sure, there were electronics, but those only went so far, didn't they? Bennett also informed me that Kid A was their most depressing one yet, and to that I could only offer a hearty "hell, yes." In music, depression = keepin' it real. Or at least would be the case until Dashboard Confessional came along, but that's another story for another day. I made myself enjoy Lenny's reading of "American Woman," an abysmal song to begin with, and anxiously awaited going home and getting dropped off early.My first thought upon listening to Kid A was that it was nowhere as cool as its cover art. Bennett was wrong about "How to Disappear Completely" being the only song with a guitar part, but it did sit next to "Idioteque" as one of only two songs on the album that I liked. Outer space was definitely the theme, but it wasn't outer space in that grandiose, cosmic sort of way; it was outer space in that B-movie, Space Invaders sort of way. Thom Yorke didn't sound like an alien; he sounded like a human being with a studio full of keyboards he didn't know how to use. I had to scratch my head at the apparent absence of songs. OK Computer had been so successful in that it was able to merge revolutionary songwriting with sonic experimentation, and Kid A seemed at first to entirely forgo the former, and something about it seemed artistically, almost morally, contemptible. I mean, come on, a track that consists entirely of three minutes of white noise? Surely, Thom Yorke and Lou Reed would be doing similar time in purgatory for crimes against amplifier feedback. But art has its ways, I suppose, and for whatever reason, I kept coming back to Kid A, one day after the next, never really understanding it any better but at least becoming familiar enough with it to know what I wasn't liking about it. One thing I found I wasn't liking about it was its apparent lack of commitment to anything. My friend Adam put it best, saying, "I heard live MP3s of them playing 'Everything in Its Right Place' before the album came out, and I thought it was just them screwing around onstage." Yet here "Everything in Its Right Place" was again, the opening track on the album. And then there was the title track, which sounded like a Casio beat with vocals by one of those archaic PC programs where you type in a sentence and the computer reads it back to you. Sheer novelty, something that might be of interest on a B-side or something, but certainly not as one of ten tracks on your first album in three years. I shelved Kid A for a while and moved onto other things. I started getting really excited about Bob Dylan, skipping work the day after Christmas to stay home and listen to Blood on the Tracks, exchanging words with my church history teacher who failed to acknowledge "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" as a legitimate statement on theology. I started writing songs of my own, sitting up all hours of the night with Neil Young's Silver and Gold and studying the art of being wise, musical, and in love (I was at least one of these things, the other two were either feigned or entirely relative), and allowing these obsessions to feed an illusion that the arts were some sort of secret gateway to the ultimate truths of the world. I found myself raising my standards. I went to Co-Op Records and sold a bunch of albums that I had from grade school and early high school that I couldn't relate to anymore: Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, early thrash Metallica, Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, countless one-hit wonders from the late 1990s that no one would remember if I mentioned them, and rightfully so. The idea of intellect replacing angst was an appealing one; the aforementioned bands spent several months being replaced with more Dylan records, the Beatles albums I didn't have yet, relatively obscure Pink Floyd discs like Meddle and The Final Cut that hadn't been ruined by FM radio in the same way Wish You Were Here had been, and the occasional Grateful Dead bootleg my stoner friends would throw at me ("check out this version of 'Dark Star' dude, it's THIRTY-SIX MINUTES LONG, and Jerry fuckin' RIPS. IT. UP!!!"). I became an anal analyst of lyrics, studying meter, rhyme placement, phonetics, and the effectiveness of particular words versus that of other words; learning more about poetry from Bob Dylan and Robert Hunter than I did from all my high school English teachers combined (which worked fine, I got along a lot better with those guys anyway).I suppose you could call it a creative renaissance of sorts, though maybe it was one that was inevitably bound to happen to a musically driven individual upon the maturation of his tastes. Nonetheless, there was a period of several months in which my tastes, and likewise my ability to understand the goals of artists and the reason behind songs rather than simply the songs themselves, grew dramatically, and perhaps it's not without expectation that when I picked up Kid A later that spring, it made a considerable amount more sense than it did eight months prior. I still wasn't sold on it being a great album by any means, certainly not the Earth-meets-Heavens symphony that Rolling Stone and Spin had proclaimed it was, but subtleties began to work their way to the forefront, and I found that Kid A's strength lies in its subtleties. Where "Motion Picture Soundtrack" once sounded droning, it now sounded beautiful and poignant; when Yorke sang, "I think you're crazy/Maybe," it sounded like Version 2.0 of the guy who several years back was singing, "This is what you get if you mess with us." There was an obvious leap in maturity from OK Computer to Kid A, one completely invisible to someone who may not be looking for it. I found its best songs to be pointlessly abstract, but with beautifully simple choruses that somehow kept the abstractions grounded; a chorus like "I'm not here/This isn't happening," was able to perfectly make sense of a phrase like, "I walk through walls/I float down the Liffey." I mean, heck, what can't you do once you've disappeared completely, right? I found myself wondering why "Optimistic" wasn't a song I loved from the get-go. It's the most accessible song on the record by a mile, following the same pattern of running a line like "Big fish eat the little ones" into the ground with a chorus like, "You try the best you can/The best you can is good enough." Everybody should love this song, right? Like, how often does someone not named Raffi write a line like "Big fish eat the little ones?" I was able to make sense of these things, pick out that instead of being a stuck-up horse's arse like he appeared to be in magazines and interviews, maybe Thom Yorke was just a good old bloke with a creative streak and a sense of humor to match. I still thought some of the songs just plain sucked, but I respected them, and was perfectly willing to concede that maybe the world was just hearing something that I wasn't.Amnesiac came out late in the summer of 2001. I'd thrown all expectations out the window. I wasn't expecting another OK Computer, but despite my recent coming around, I didn't really want another Kid A either. It's one thing to understand artistic inclinations, but it's another thing entirely to be constantly up to the challenge; I'd learned to appreciate Kid A for what it was, but I still didn't like it as well as what they were doing when they were a guitar-driven band. When all was said and done, OK Computer was simply a better batch of songs on all counts, and despite its successor's attempt at musically equivocating 2001: A Space Odyssey, it certainly couldn't be accused of being without merit in terms of being aurally stimulating. I simply put my hopes aside and bought the record.Two things about Amnesiac right off the bat: first, one listen to Amnesiac, and Kid A makes a truckload more sense. The songs were recorded during the same sessions, and when you hear the leftovers (a term which I use for lack of a better word -- the songs on Amnesiac are not Kid A's throwaways, but rather songs that would have had about as much place on that album as a penguin would have in the Sahara), the sequencing on Kid A becomes a lot more clear cut, the mission behind the record as a whole a good deal more obvious. Amnesiac has gotta be one of the most disjointed, incongruent records ever released; it's a total mess of beats, riffs, feedback, and an occasional hook if you listen close enough, but it's loose assembly allows it to breathe a lot more. Kid A is very claustrophobic music. It's so smothered in wall-of-sound ambience that there isn't any room for any one thing to do anything on its own, which works brilliantly well when the song is suited to it, but to take in the entire thing is like pouring an entire bottle of Mrs. Butterworth's on one Eggo waffle. The second thing about Amnesiac is that I found it impossible to distinguish between the songs I didn't like and the songs I just plain didn't get. I was pretty sure "Morning Bell" was just a piece of crap, but here they were putting versions of it on both Kid A and Amnesiac, so maybe there was something to it that I wasn't picking up on. (Time hasn't been kind to that one; "Morning Bell" is among the worst songs on both records.) Some of the songs didn't float my boat, as they say, but I didn't really feel qualified to comment on songs like "Like Spinning Plates" or "Hunting Bears" because I'd never really heard anything like them before. "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" sounded like something they'd play in a movie during a scene where a girl had been slipped roofies and dragged comatose back to some frat boy's Lounge O'Lovin'. But visuals aside, I kinda liked it.While the artistic side of me was more than willing to give Thom and the boys the benefit of the doubt, the side of me that wanted a pleasant album to listen to hated Amnesiac even more than it hated Kid A. Unlike Kid A, which was one gigantic musical mystery, Amnesiac was eleven smaller musical mysteries, eleven obnoxious math problems to be solved, eleven tedious puzzles to be deciphered before understanding was to be reached. I adopted the philosophy that okay, Kid A was pretty good, but Amnesiac was a bunch of crap. As far as I was concerned, the melodies were too nondescript and the beats were the soundtrack to a crappy barn rave that no one attended. I liked "Knives Out," and thought "I'm a reasonable man/Get off my case," was a nice catchy chorus line, but beyond that I had no use for this record. If I was going to have a rave, people were going to come and that was that.Later in 2001, I discovered the universe of independent music, and that's exactly what it was -- a universe. I got hip to the notion that there were a bollocks-load of things happening in the musical world that couldn't be read about in Spin magazine, couldn't be heard on regular FM radio, and that most of your disconnected, more unhip friends couldn't tell you about. Through the recommendations of several friends, I started acquiring copies of albums by the likes of The Dismemberment Plan, Mogwai, Sunny Day Real Estate, early Death Cab for Cutie, Songs: Ohia, and began to find the archival music that gave way to it, groups like Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Roxy Music, and all those punk bands from the late 1970s that I never really liked but still played on occasion because I thought it gave me cred to do so.I'm a big believer in the idea that the snob factor plays at least a minor role in the lives of fans of most music that could be considered bizarre or left-field. I wouldn't have become a fan of Mogwai or Tortoise if I hadn't at least once put aside personal musical inclinations simply for the fact that I was listening to something new and different, if I hadn't traded my comfort zone for the desire to expand my horizons. That's a dodgy statement because it suggests that people force themselves to like things that aren't worth liking, but that's not the nature of the comment at all. What it does mean is simply that sometimes you have to just sit back and let yourself experience something for a while before you can pretend to understand it, and in a great many cases, the journey begins with the basic knowledge that at one point you will understand it. Radiohead had proven to be a band whose questions were far more interesting than their answers, a band for whom you constantly had to put aside your comfort zone and prepare yourself for mass confusion, challenge, and adventure.Through rounding out my obsession with independent music, I learned, much to my surprise, that despite being a corporate rock act made famous by Capitol Records and MTV Buzz Clips in 1995, Radiohead were among the most respected of all bands in nearly any indie music circle, and that was an interesting idea. I went back and listened to all their records. OK Computer sounded brilliant as usual, a perfect album designed to stand alongside London Calling and Abbey Road as not only great rock albums, but among the greatest albums of all time. "The Bends" sounded a little dated, but there's no denying the serenity of songs like "Fake Plastic Trees" and "Street Spirit," and even though the multi-guitar attack is *so* 1995, anyone who can't rock out to "The Bends" or "My Iron Lung" has no place as a guest at any of my parties, ever. Kid A proved pretty remarkable, despite several songs that I was convinced would never be good, no matter how hard I tried to like them.Amnesiac still sounded dreadful, like Kid A after someone took a sledgehammer to it. I couldn't stand listening to it, and I couldn't stand that I couldn't stand listening to it, so I kept listening to it, trying to pinpoint not what I hated about it, but what other people seemed to like so much about it. Kid A was easy enough in retrospect; they'd managed to get away with slacking off on their songwriting, but those who didn't concern themselves with such things had an amazing sonic landscape to gaze upon, and it's foolish to assume that doesn't count for something, especially when the songwriting quip is only half-true ("Idioteque" and "How to Disappear Completely" are about as good as songs get, regardless), but Amnesiac seemingly (seemingly, now) had nothing; little in the way of songs, not much in terms of sonic ambition, and certainly no cohesiveness. It was like Radiohead decided to stop being Radiohead and make a dopey sound collage for an introductory film class instead. The question was this: if I loathe this music so much, why am I so much more fascinated with this band in a state of what I consider to be disrepair than I was when I was perfectly content to sit back and just enjoy the hell out of their music? It's the classic Miles Davis conundrum, the classic Dylan quagmire: Miles quits bebopping and starts playing funk-rock, Dylan cans his folkie schtick and goes electric, and people claim to hate it yet they can't shut the hell up about it, continuing to look for things in it and picking it apart as though they're going to find something there. What critics of all three -- Miles, Dylan, Radiohead -- fail to acknowledge, is that it's the questions that define this stuff in the first place. I guess it would be insulting to almost anyone's intelligence to venture some kind of dissertation about how great art never really reveals itself to you, how it's really all about the search for answers to begin with, and ultimately it doesn't end up showing you anything about the work itself but ends up completely schooling you on a myriad of other things completely unrelated. And that was Radiohead in a nutshell. The journey, not the destination. Let the historical record show that Kid A and Amnesiac are both records I now like very much. 2003's Hail to the Thief was support for their cause; immediately hailed as a return to form ("RADIOHEAD ARE A BAND AGAIN!!! PRAISE THE SKIES!!"), it was an album that nary left my CD player all summer, but has hardly returned since (except to bounce around to "A Wolf at the Door," their finest recorded hour thus far, as far as this nitpicker is concerned). Without mystery, there was but pleasantry, and for whatever reason, there was disappointment at this, disappointment at the lack of the challenge, disappointment at the absence of inner conflict created by music that begs to be understood but refuses to be unraveled. Or maybe it's just that Radiohead finally coming full circle put Kid A and Amnesiac in their respective places, and like the songs that comprise them, they now function better in the scope of the whole. Whatever it is, the journey was grand, and as always, the destination seems far less remarkable. Music48380@blogcritics.org Sat, 27 May 2006 10:16:56 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/05/27/034610.php RockbeatstonePerennially the kind of band you've heard more about than actually heard, I'm -- as the title suggests -- metaphorically in the dark going in as I place Quasi's seventh album on my stereo. I'm assuming I can expect some well-constructed indie-rock with nods to Steve Albini's circle of well-constructed and credible indie-rock stable and probably more than a passing acquaintance with the likes of Pavement or Sebadoah."Alice The Goon" opens up with the sound of Olive Oyl's best girlfriend going fully pre-menstrual, rolling out the kind of groovy thunder that Led Zeppelin trademarked, and with enough of those fey nerdy vocals that appeal to fans of Weezer. "The Rhino" continues in a similar White Stripes-y vein, halfway between balls-out rock and party pastiche. The huge organ sound and the pounding rhythm section do manage to equate to a more powerful beast than Jack and Meg's guitar-drum duo though. I'm neither a blues aficionado, nor much of a fan, but Quasi contains enough of that Americana sound with enough quiet and loud to almost satisfy fans of bluster and prettiness. The title track contains a soaring chorus, soaring slide guitar, and some lovely big drums, and yet it still feels somewhat lacking. The most effective moment on the album is the instrumental film-noir-ish "Presto Change-o", which suggests that it's Sam Coombes' voice, which I find grating, rather than the music. The drums are especially powerful throughout (especially on the opening bars of "Merry Xmas"). I'll be honest: While The Going Gets Dark is all a little too arch and a little too indie for me, and as much as I had a sneaking suspicion that I'd quite like Quasi, I knew it wouldn't be that much. They sound like a very competent and talented alt.rock, indie-rock, alt.country (whatever) band, but they lack the full-balled crunch or the sweet fragility required to really get me excited. Drummer Janet Lewis talks in the PR blurb about the rollicking and unruly element of the album, but it always seems tempered by polite restraint. The dictionary definition of Quasi is "almost, but not really" which seems to me to especially fitting. Quasi-good. Music48381@blogcritics.org Sat, 27 May 2006 03:46:10 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/05/24/120308.php RockbeatstoneHmm! The Zutons. Images of cocky, friendly Scousers spring to mind (for those of you who are not au-fait with English colloquialism, Scousers are people from the city of Liverpool). The modern purveyors of "Scouse Rock," the Zutons are certainly not the most talented musicians in the world, but what they lack in technique, they more than make up for in style and passion.When I first saw the Zutons, I was completely overcome with joyous feelings and elated spirits. This is an incredible live band whose songs became more than mere pop-ditties but amazing live pieces of music perfectly catching the mood and atmosphere of the crowd. That I had caught them at the end of a grueling six month almost non-stop touring session was perhaps the reason why they were such a tight and compelling group of musicians that day.Tired of Hanging Around has taken the sound of the previous album, Who Killed the Zutons but has changed tack slightly, presenting songs which appear to have had more thought in the song-writing process. The album as a whole is still the collection of jingly guitars, loud vocals, and basic saxophone, but it somehow feels a better constructed album. The songs are stronger, more confident, and have better themes. This is one recent second album that, unlike so many nowadays, seems to be better than their debut.There is certainly more on offer here. "Tired of Hanging Around" and "Why Won't You Give Me Your Love" are both poptastic tunes that are catchy and in places inspiring. Equally as excellent is the video for "Tired of Hanging Around," which does the song complete justice (watch out for it on a future edition of Rockbeatstone TV). "Valerie" takes one of the funniest names ever and manages to create a love song around it.It certainly sticks in one's mind, and is an easily hummable tune, it is no doubt for this reason that it was chosen as second single. "How does it Feel" is a darker, more ominous song. The spooky backing vocals and weird instrumental effects are particularly effective here, creating a claustrophobic and evil sound.As a whole, the Zutons have again exceeded expectations and released a strong second album. However, while the overall sound is more mature and ultimately, better, I am unsure of the staying power of these songs. The highlights are there and will no doubt be played on indie radio networks across the UK and even possibly in the States. But I feel that this doesn't represent the band at their best.Where they work well for me is in the live arena and, although the album is strong, it will never eclipse the experience of seeing this band live. As with their debut album, they have released a collection of songs that is strong but doesn't do the band justice. It is testament to the band's ability as a live act that their second album is a lot better than their debut. Music48237@blogcritics.org Wed, 24 May 2006 12:03:08 EDT