Rants and Raves

J.Ro’s Top 8 of ‘08 (Part 4)

2. “Dear Science,”, TV on the Radio

To call it a critical success would be an understatement, as the newest album by Brooklyn’s TV on the Radio won “Album of the Year” awards from Rolling Stone, Spin, MTV, The Onion AV Club, The Guardian, and Pitchfork.  It also became the trendy album last year for music snobs to praise endlessly and wonder aloud why people would ever waste their time on pop music when they could be experiencing something so much better, and I hesitated to just join in on that.  But the progression of TVotR’s three full-length albums is really enough to make you think they can be the world’s next great art-rock band, pushing rock music’s possibilities to new levels.

Much like Radiohead, they produce music that is simultaneously technologically advanced and organic, experimental and ambitious, yet accessible and familiar.  And most strikingly, their music truly sounds like no one else; you can’t really listen to one of their songs and say, “oh, this sounds like a song by (insert influential band here)”, or even “it’s like a cross between (band 1) and (band 2)”.  It’s just something you have to hear to understand.

Now, on top of all that, TVotR have something that separates them from most of the other experimental rockers I listen to: multi-culturalism.  As much as I profess to appreciate diversity, the fact is that nearly all of the “innovative art rock” I enjoy is made by white dudes from Britain or California.  The core of TV on the Radio, in contrast, comprises guitarist/vocalist Kyp Malone, who grew up in Pittsburgh before moving to San Francisco and then Brooklyn, guitarist / effects specialist / producer David Andrew Sitek (who by the way produces the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), and vocalist Tunde Adebimpe, an immigrant from Nigeria who, like Sitek, went to art school in New York, and whose in- and out-of-falsetto singing style, featured from the beginning on the opener “Halfway Home”, is one of the most distinctive parts of their sound.

Behind Adebimpe’s voice are weird polyrhythms that evoke both African drumming and electronic beat machines, and atmospheric guitar work that holds up well next to Ed O’Brien or Nick Zinner.  The low end is held up by fuzzy guitar and bass, and one of my favorite touches, the recurrence of some nice fat baritone saxes and other horns.

The single “Dancing Choose”, while not that representative of the band’s sound, is one of the immediate highlights of the album, moving at a brisk pace with a lyrical flow and handclaps reminiscent of Outkast’s “Hey Ya!”, but with a slightly more in-depth chorus, rhyming “drowning butterflies” with “broken dreams and alibis”.  Throughout the album, there are hints of angry political statements, with mentions of “the gallows of your family tree”, “Blood on the crescent… while Zion’s behavior hardly gets mentioned”, and “Fuck your war / ’cause I’m fat and in love and no bombs are fallin’ on me for sure”, but for the most part it’s a happier and more celebratory album than its dark predecessors “Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes” and “Return to Cookie Mountain”.

“Golden Age” and “Shout Me Out” are the most completely satisfying and representative songs on the album, shifting from lightly bouncing, almost reggae-like verses to layered, driving segments that keep presenting new textures without ever losing you or seeming out of place.  That’s the real wonder of this band — they do so many “weird” things in their music, but don’t cross the line into unlistenable weird-for-weirdness’ sake indulgence.  At least, not to me.

1. “The Stand Ins”, Okkervil River

It’s been a three-way battle for “city of the year”, music-wise, with New York producing my #7 and #2 albums, and Portland the #5 and #3, but in the end I think we have a winner in the great music city of Austin, TX, reaching #4 and #1.  Okkervil River has been around on the scene for about 10 years, but just began to hit the national consciousness with their indie hit “Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe” from their outstanding 2007 album “The Stage Names”.

The follow-up to that work, and really a sister album of sorts (recorded at the same time, a couple of the songs are about the same character, and the cover art fits together to form an above- and below-the surface themed image), this is the rare album that I can just listen to over, and over, and over again.

To start with what’s obvious to me, Okkervil River are a fantastic-sounding band, with Will Sheff’s passionate, emotive vocals falling somewhere in the Andrew Bird-Win Butler range, atop a rock-solid acoustic / electric / keyboard foundation with flourishes from strings, horns, bells, etc. in all the right places.  Musically, the Arcade Fire are probably the closest comparison I can make, though if I had to pick just one or the other to listen to, I’d probably go with the extra variety of Okkervil.

But what’s even more impressive than the music are that the lyrics have really grabbed my attention.  I generally don’t place a ton of importance on lyrics, just accepting them as a vehicle through which the music becomes more memorable, and only noticing when they’re truly poetic and moving in a way I can’t completely describe, or else so mind-numbingly terrible that they detract from the song (I’m looking at you, new Muse singles).

Fortunately, this is the former case.  Among three short instrumentals to tie the album together are eight of the finest-written songs I’ve heard in some time, each getting better the more I listen to them and what they’re saying.  Also beneficial to my enjoyment of this album was catching the band on an episode of “The World Cafe”, a public radio program with artists playing some songs and talking about the stories behind them.  I loved it already, but the opportunity to think about each of the songs in more detail definitely enhanced my listening experience, so to speak.

After a brief string intro, “Lost Coastlines” starts things off where the Stage Names’ “John Allyn Smith Sails” left us, with a seafaring explorer lamenting the loneliness and uncertainty of a voyage into the unknown: “The ship’s deck now sags from the weight of our tracks as we pace beneath flags black and battered / Rattling our swords in service of some fated foreign lord” (hey, bonus points for the pirate imagery).  It skips along to a Motown-style tambourine beat and bass line, though, and culminates with a carefree outro: “We have lost our way, nobody’s gonna say it outright / Just go ‘la la, la la la la, …’”

It’s followed by “Singer Songwriter”, the first of two songs to absolutely eviscerate the pretentious and ultimately pathetic self-important tormented-artist archetype.  “Songwriter”, a country-folk shuffle, begins with the title character’s family history, comprising authors, filmmakers, lawyers, and entrepreneuers, and then immediately turns on him — “You come from wealth / Yeah, you’ve got wealth / What a bitch they didn’t give you much else” — and continues to tear apart his acceptance-demanding hipster lifestyle: “I heard ‘Cuss’ by the Kinks on your speakers / I saw Poe and Artaud on your shelves / While ‘The Last Laugh’s first scene on your flat-panel screen lit Chanel that you’d wrapped ’round yourself / You’ve got outsider art by an artist who arguably kidnapped a kid on the wall”… Seriously, I could go on to quote the whole song.  “Pop Lie” is just as viscious, attacking the calculated emotional manipulation of the “Liar who lied in his pop song”.  Sheff explained in the World Cafe interview that they had a lot of fun overplaying the pop elements in this one: “We gave ourselves a license to make what we would usually think of as ‘bad decisions’ like having four different organs play the main riff in unison, or overdoing the handclaps.”  It somehow works as both a critique of pop music and a great, fun pop song in itself.  Just as the chorus scolds “You’re lying when you sing along”, you realize that you are, in fact, singing along.  What makes the apparent hypocrisy palatable is the band’s awareness that they are “part of the problem, not the solution”, as Sheff further explained in the interview.  “It would be condescending and disingenuous to just tear down these other figures without turning the gun on ourselves, so to speak.”  And they do in both songs, with “Songwriter”’s lament “And our world is gonna change nothing”, and “Pop Lie”’s ending, “This is respectfully dedicated / to the woman who concentrated / All of her love just to find / That she’d wasted it all / On the liar who lied in this song.”

Really marvelous and ingenious how they have it both ways, tearing down pop stars while making pop music themselves.  And for a time, I saw those two songs as the soul and highlights of the album.  But through repeated listens, they’ve since been eclipsed by the subtler songs, character-driven narratives reflecting deep sadness and emptiness.  The one that seems plausibly autobiographical is “Calling and Not Calling My Ex”, about an ex-girlfriend who made it big as an actress after their relationship ended.  As she “commands a famous figure for every picture”, he describes his life as “slightly disappointingly just gliding softly by”, and it’s easy to see his regret and jealousy even as he calls her sweet, lovely, and smart, and sends his best wishes for her career: “Go turn their heads, go knock ‘em dead, go break their hearts”.  “Starry Stairs” is told from the point of view of an unhappy celebrity (specifically, adult film star Savannah, who was involved with Gregg Allman, Billy Idol, and Slash, appeared in a Tom Petty video, and committed suicide after a disfiguring car accident, convinced that her body-dependent career was over).  She talks about her never-satisfied fans, being picked apart by the “curious sets of eyes safe behind the TV screen” and, in one of the cleverest lines, marvels at the “hot half-life I half-lived”.

My absolute favorite of these songs now, though, is “On Tour With Zykos”, which turns things around to speak from the perspective of a groupie, beginning with kicking a rock star out of her apartment:  “Take your shit, take your clothes and get out of my home / I want you to love me, or I want you long gone”, then proceeding to her dead-end job “clipping pages for the senator’s son”, but it’s in her leisure time of self-reflection that the real depression sets in: “I go home, take off clothes, smoke a bowl, watch a whole TV movie / I was supposed to be writing the most beautiful poems … I can’t say that I’m feeling all that much at all … What a sad way to be, what a girl who got tired.”  It’s an immensely sad song, and one of the many emotional highlights of the outstanding album.

Well, there you have it, the Top 8 Albums of 2008; it took me long enough.  I guess it’s just about time to get started on the Top 9 of ‘09.

© 2009 The Nomenclature.