// Category Archive for: Music

Waxing Nostalgic: Alice Cooper, “Clones (We’re All)”

By Jeffery X Martin

Oh, my gods, you guys, it’s 1980! There’s robots and test tube babies and shit! The New Wave is here, and guitar strings are quickly being replaced by wires. Dynamic stage shows are becoming starkly lit installations of performance art. Humanoid beings stand behind keyboards bathed in shadow, soundtracking Dystopia before your bionically enhanced eyes. Science fiction is now science fact and music has embraced it, just like they did the Crybaby pedal and the phrase, “Hey now, mama.”

It was a scary time for traditional rock and roll. Normal rock fans were scorned and mocked, gathering in the alleys at night like Morlocks, forced to live on the streets in makeshift shelters composed entirely of Rumours and Frampton Comes Alive! gatefold album covers. If rock and roll wasn’t dead, it was in a coma and we knew, we knew it was serious. We also knew if anyone could save us, it was the Son of Satan himself, Alice Cooper.

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Music Review: Johnny Marr, The Messenger

By Cait Brennan

“Hear me, the wonder of it,” Johnny Marr sings on “The Right Thing Right,” the opening track of his new solo album The Messenger. Marr essentially invented ’80s Britpop with The Smiths, a band whose hallmarks featured Marr’s blazing melodic runs and (oh god let’s just get it over with) jangling guitars, serving as the perfect counterpoint to those literate, mannered, melancholic lyrics from an obscure vocalist whose name time has sadly forgotten.

In the intervening years, as The Smiths’ influence has grown to legend, countless guitarists have reproduced that iconic sound with near-religious devotion. Everybody, it seems, but Marr himself, who often seemingly took pains to play like somebody, anybody other than that guy on The Smiths records. While Morrissey rose to new heights as a writ-large, Nicholas Ray CinemaScope version of himself, Marr left it all behind, blazing an exhaustive, exhausting trail through new sounds and new identities that would wear out Richard Kimble.

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Music Review: Gene Clark, Here Tonight: The White Light Demos

By Cait Brennan

The experience of being alive is joyous and unbearable. This crude matter we’re made of fights us every step of the way, but something deeper, something more, some beauty and energy blasting through from a source we can’t know animates us, fills us, drives us onward, and the friction, the vibration of energy that moves us, is what we call music. Where does it go, do you suppose, when we’re gone? Nobody knows, but you’ve gotta hope that when the radio breaks, still the signal shines on.

If rock and roll means anything worth caring about, it’s the need to express something real and beautiful and transcendent from the human soul. But that need can lead to soul-destroying results. There’s a fake thing called fame today, but it’s nothing like the sun that blistered down on the rock and roll bands of the 1960s. Know-nothing hambones like Mike Love get out in front and let their egos feast on the callow roar and toxic adulation of the crowd while sucking the lifeblood out of the delicate creative genius that brought them to the party, like a fat tick on a sick dog. The songwriter gets in the way? Kick ’em out of the band and keep the carnival on the road. Don’t mess with the formula, right?

Which brings us to the Byrds’ creative genius, Gene Clark. A down-to-earth, folk-influenced kid from the Midwest, he co-founded the band, and (excepting a few covers written by some stray named Robert Zimmerman) was the songwriting powerhouse behind the Byrds’ golden age. Just a few of the highlights he wrote or co-wrote: “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better,” “She Don’t Care About Time,” “I’m Feelin’ Higher,” “If You’re Gone,” “Here Without You,” “The World Turns All Around Her,” “Set You Free This Time,” oh, and a little number called “Eight Miles High.”

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Music Review: Atoms For Peace, Amok

By J Howell

One of the most difficult considerations in music criticism lies in following an artist’s career for the long haul and remaining objective enough about said artist’s work to give it a fair shake. This notion really hit home for me in a major way recently while listening to and thinking about the most recent Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds record. Push The Sky Away is a record I came to fully appreciate only after at least a dozen spins—long enough to finally let go of some of my expectations from Cave and the Seeds and just listen (review).

That’s kind of the bitch of following a body of work enthusiastically over years (or decades). Avoiding becoming jaded is a subject far beyond the scope of this review, but even if it seems obvious, it’s worth noting that after a certain point, it’s hard to get the same life-altering feeling you got when you heard “Tupelo” or “Taut” or Bone Machine or Doolittle (wait—scratch that, I still get that teenage feeling listening to Doolittle) or “Paranoid Android” for the first time.

What we get in return for following where people like Cave or Polly Harvey or Thom Yorke—with Atoms For Peace’s Amok—lead may not always be that immediate, profound experience of hearing something important for the first time. When you’re lucky, though, the sense of growing and changing, maybe even maturing (it’s okay to wince; I did typing) alongside such artists, finding their work still (and sometimes strangely) relevant to where you find yourself right now, can be just as rewarding.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Robert Hazard, “Escalator Of Life”

By Jeffery X Martin

As a writer, I am in love with the English language. It’s my tool, it’s my crutch, it is my weapon. While I hate to see the language abused and used poorly, I enjoy it when other creative people grab hold of it and whip it around, make it snap and do things it normally wouldn’t. This usually happens in the area of analogies, similes, and metaphors. And I must admit: I love ’em when they’re bad. If you can take a bad comparison and make it work on your behalf, make it seem credible and acceptable, then you’ve accomplished something. It’s a dubious and weird thing, but a thing, nonetheless.

Let us ponder, then, the most excellent badness of Robert Hazard’s “Escalator of Life.”

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Canadian Music Week Film Fest Movie Review: Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me

By Less Lee Moore

When I first heard Big Star, I wondered “Why weren’t these guys huge?” like all their other fans have been wondering for the last 40-plus years. Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me answers the why, but their lack of mainstream success still boggles the mind. When Brian Wilson sang “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times,” he could have easily been singing about Big Star.

The story of Big Star is full of both good things—talent, camaraderie, ambition—and terrible ones—bad luck, personal demons, and death. This mixture of the bitter and the sweet is a good metaphor for Big Star’s music, which fuses the two in an unforgettable aural and emotional experience. This is what drew fans and critics to the band and what continues to characterize their legacy.

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Music Review: Wendy & Lisa, Wendy and Lisa

By Paul Casey

Wendy & Lisa have put out five albums and one EP of original material during the years they have worked as a duo. For such a talented pair this does not seem like nearly enough. The benefit of having so few albums is, however, there is no off period. Their debut, Wendy and Lisa, came out in 1987 and started a (short) string of great albums. It is a classic of the 1980s, and unavoidably a document of what Prince lost when he fired Wendy, Lisa, and Bobby Z. (who co-produces the album).

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Canadian Music Week Film Fest Review: Bad Brains: A Band In DC

By Less Lee Moore

When it comes to bands like Bad Brains, genre becomes meaningless. Influenced by such disparate artists as Chick Corea, The Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Ramones, and Bob Marley, they combined a variety of musical styles into their own unique sound, going on to influence dozens of other musicians (Dave Grohl, The Beastie Boys, Cro-Mags, Red Hot Chili Peppers, to name but a few) in the process.

Bad Brains: A Band in DC, directed by Ben Logan and Mandy Stein, is not an exhaustive account of the history of Bad Brains; that would be impossible, although it would make for an extremely entertaining TV series. When watching the film, you’re not only left with the distinct impression that there are many more stories to be told, but also that you can’t wait to dig into the band’s discography, which includes nine studio albums, a couple dozen singles, a handful of live albums, and appearances on various compilations.

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Canadian Music Week Film Fest Review: Apocalypse: A Bill Callahan Tour Film

By Less Lee Moore

I started watching Apocalypse: A Bill Callahan Tour Film knowing nothing of Bill Callahan. Callahan has been writing, performing, and recording music for almost 25 years, originally under the name Smog, and then with the release of 2007’s Woke on a Whaleheart, under his own name. Apocalypse chronicles Callahan’s US tour in 2011 to support the album of the same name.

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Canadian Music Week Film Fest Review: The Last Pogo Jumps Again

By Less Lee Moore

Photo © Gail Byrek

For documentaries that chronicle a certain scene, be it music, theater, film, or another art form, the question many might ask is why? Is the documentary supposed to shed light on a misunderstood or little-known series of events? Is the documentary trying to cast the people and events in a flattering or unflattering light? Or, as some might speculate, is the documentary just a forum for those involved to pat themselves on the back and say, “I was there”? For The Last Pogo Jumps Again, the answer to all of these questions is yes, but it’s a qualified assent.

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