AR: Talkie Walkie

Air - Talkie Walkie (2004)

• Slick, French pop-electronica featuring strummed / plucked guitars and banjos, synths and pianos, persistently subdued vocals, and the just the right amount of here-and-there sound effects (whistles, strings, flutes, whathaveyou).
• Despite all that instrumentation, maintains a very separated, almost minimalist feel throughout. A nice little busy but not busy paradox.
• Has the feel of an instrumental album, even though the majority of tracks have plenty of lyrics. So it's in the "voice as instrument" box, with the majority of those voices coming in the dreamy and/or Eno-ish Ambient IV end of the continuum. (See esp. "Run").
• The razor's edge strength and flaw here is that dreamy quality. While it's lush / gorgeous throughout, there's a lack of tension that tends to make this disc fade into the, er, subconscious a bit. A neat aesthetic, but one that wears under repeated listens.
• There are a few missteps on the disc because of the aforementioned quality ("Mike Mills," "Another Day," and "Biological"), and the best tracks ("Alpha Beta Gaga" and "Alone in Kyoto") could easily sit as film music (and in the latter case, actually does in Sophia Coppola's Lost In Translation)
• Not Air's best but a good album; this is kinda the epitome of a rec (solid). Don't let my characterization under-emphasize the sleepy beauty here.

Status: Recommended (solid)

Nyet's Fave: "Alpha Beta Gaga"

AR: Undertow

Tool - Undertow (1994)

• This is thick, low-ended, musically intricate but ultimately really, really bass-heavy metal.
• The album cover is about perfect - if you get the general vibe of bleak, despairing nihilism, then the message has already been conveyed.
• The vocals are angry-spoken / shouted, but delivered with a chilling reserve that gives the enterprise a scary-in-its-sincerity edge.
• These alterna-rockers, um, don't like the mindless mainstream very much, particularly their religious subset.
• It's rife with thudding riffage measured by melody - the opening tracks are where the action is decidedly at, with "Sober" blowing away the field - it was the hit single that shot this band to MTV prominence, though there are plenty of gripping, thrilling moments on the disc besides.
• An hour of it is a bit much, and some of the spoken word experimentalism toward the end gets a little too creepy for its own good. The end result is powerful if front-loaded album that permits some thick-as-mud opportunities to express all kinds of frustrated angst. It's not hard to see how this got so popular, but the message paints itself into a bit of a corner.

Status: Recommended (solid)

Nyet's Fave: "Sober"

AR: Californication

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication (1999)

• A bit of a comeback album for the proto pop-funk-metal outfit, Californication represents a "maturing" - believe it or not - of the band. No doubt, it's teeming with their signature sound and energy, frankly hypersexual lyrics and spat-rap vocal deliveries - their style's all over it, and you'd never mistake Keadis / Flea's musical approach for anybody else. Still, the rough edges are smoothed here, there's a lot of emphasis on pop-accessibility / melody / palatability - everything just seems a little more in-its-placed, a little more controlled, and consequently a little more adult-contemporary.
• The first half of the album is dotted with mellifluous radio-friendly numbers, all of which were wildly successful and made this a monster hit of an album - "Scar Tissue," "Otherside," "Californication," and "Around the World" have superhooks and glossy, sweet harmony backup vocals. This approach, though, works less well than in the then recent past, as the wild tendencies with which to contrast are absent. They are professional songs, the logical conclusions of a band that went from cock-socks to Stevie Wonder covers to "Under the Bridge."They're great, don't get me wrong, but the umbrella of safety shadows them.
• The singles also never fail to remind me of the litany of similar sounding bands from the mid-nineties - Third Eye Blind, Three Doors Down, Sugar Ray all come to mind - and this really sounds like that vaguely too-crafted sound but with a RHCP stamp to render it palatable (to me).
• Probably obvious, but I'm a little disappointed by the sheen-turn that this album takes - it makes the album feel like a faded memory of rawer, realer, more ragged times. I unfailingly compare "modern" RHCP to their magnum opus, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and this is just nowhere near as exciting.
• The album is additionally pretty uneven, with most of the meat upfront and some hit-or-miss experimentation at the back end. Some of the back end is drilled - there are so bona fide successful out-of-comfort zone exercises in "Savior," "Right On Time" and "Road Trippin'." There are some embarrassing lyric-laden misses, too, though. Seriously, WTF is an "alligator-hater?"
• Overall, a professional delivery that is better than I'm making it sound. RHCP crafted their utterly original niche sound brilliantly, but by this point, however skillfully, I feel they're echoing themselves. The musicianship is great and the reminiscent-of-Gang of Four polyrhythms entertaining as always, but Californication is a good, not gripping, disc.

Status: Recommended (solid)

Nyet's Fave: "Otherside"

AR: The Velvet Underground & Nico

The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

• Good timing with the recent John Cale review - an excellent example of the experimental mindset infecting rock n' roll and birthing a proto-alt rock classic. This is a seminal art-rock album, brilliant along a variety of generic axes, and an absolute thrill to hear even after a bajillion listens. Kinda provokes the track-by-track account...
• "Sunday Morning" is a sunshine pop-rock classic with just enough off about it to render it excellent. A personal fave, and one I quote often.
• "I'm Waiting For the Man" = slacker yowled garage rock - thanks Lou Reed - about waiting for a heroin fix. The dirty drive combined with the vaguely homosexual yearn is superb.
• "Femme Fatale." Ah, Nico. Ali W infected this one quote a bit for me with her spot on Nico impersonation, and yes, it's true, Nico couldn't really sing. Again, the slightly off-key vocals, the barely distorted vocals - these details kill. The monotone backing vocals slay!
• "Venus in Furs" is a trance-inducing, Doors-esque drone number about BDSM. Cellos included. Genius.
• Back to the garage and a rough-run freak-out guitar solo for "Run Run Run." The driving rhythm is downright meditative.
• Nico's back for the epic "All Tomorrow's Parties." Matter of fact grandeur. Sprawl and pounding piano and the drone of the after-hours, the monotone delivery resonates well.
• And the epic and dynamic are not OVER yet - "Heroin," via simplistic, spare guitar and cello, delivers an accurate rendition of vein-dripping opiates. Very broad and dramatic, this one's a trip.
• "There She Goes Again" is the snide-delivered grandfather of the La's "There She goes." Good, but a bit of filler, methinks.
• "I'll Be Your Mirror" puts Nico back up to deliver that bad-vocaled sappy sentiment. Cute love song of devotion; the fact that something this bright and eyelash-flashing is on the same disc as "Heroin" in incredible and dizzying.
• "The Black Angel's Death Song" lets the drone get to be a bit too much - it's one of two songs on here that the drone effect kills.
• The second one being "European Son," a noise-rock prototype which is too chaotic for its own good. Not a great closer at all.
• The ending drags an otherwise magnificent album down. Perhaps appropriate that a couple of experiments did not entirely work, of course. This one is a personal favorite despite its flaws - its ragged edges give the tracks undeniable soul, and teach of a time where fractured noise and art were well on the same side of the fight. Nowhere near perfect, but a must for anyone who remotely likes rock. This album is, in short, filthy great, and resonates well with my art-dirty heart.

Status: Recommended

Nyet's Fave: "I'm Waiting For the Man"

AR: B.P. Empire

Infected Mushroom - B.P. Empire (2001)

• Israeli psychedelic goa trance music, AKA a genre with which I am 127% unfamiliar. It's breakneck, frenetic dance music that is extraordinarily scattered / busy and has a sort of psychotic, dark edge. Beck said that it "sounds apocalyptic." She also just suggested that while listening to it we should be wearing dark, hooded robes. Hmmmm... It has a broad electronic/instrument palette, uses TONS of effects, and contains occasional found-sound movie-quote clips and the like. Pretty typical fare from what I do know, but this strikes me as rich, crisply produced and far from boring/repetitive. And Beck's right, there is a pervasive religious trance vibe, and I suppose that puts the trance in psychedelic trance.
• Several seven to eight minute tracks that blend into one another, none of them sticking to a distinct melody for long enough to make anything on here sound like something other than an aural collage.
• Really nice pacing, though - I do know (enough to know) that techno can sometimes be full-speed-ahead-cap'n-aye-aye, and this seamlessly slips from energetic bombast to borderline ambient dream passages (the vast majority of it backed by a thumping beat, though). I also appreciate that it on occasion adopts a New Wave sheen - this is electronic music, sure, but it's "organic" enough to throw in some synths or bass/guitar passages that border on New order / The Police. Cool.
• The great trick, though, is finding the subliminal sweet spot - this is energetic enough to work out and/or dance to, but I've also found it to be dreamlike enough to use as background reading/writing music. That's a fairly rare combo, though I suppose one could argue that being able to read to something does not exactly speak to its attention grabbing nature.
• I'll have to hear more from this genre to give any kind of authoritative evaluation, but for the electronic music I do know, this strikes me as good-not-great - solid throughout, but nothing too standout.

Status: Recommended (solid)

Nyet's Fave: "Unbalanced"

AR: The Wall

Pink Floyd - The Wall (1979)

• Ridiculously grandiose, self-indulgent double disc archetypal concept album about crafting psychological barriers between the self and the outside world (comprised of dead fathers, oppressive mothers / schoolteachers, untrustworthy wives, modern dystopia, etc.). I can't even begin to get into it; check out this complete analysis to get an idea of the scrutiny this super-bestselling album has garnered.
• Really walks the border between plainly emotionally-pained and self-obsessed to a "oh poor baby rock star" degree; fortunately, a lot of the tunes are so direct and honest-feeling that I, for one, am willing to count it more amongst the authentic expression ranks (and less against the clueless, no-perspective ranks). Doesn't hurt that there are a slew of great tunes on here, ranging from the operatic to the rocking to the funky to gorgeous ballads to near New Wave sound effect splash.
• The playing on said tunes is top notch, unsurprisingly, but the album is also dotted with memorable songwriting throughout. It's not as though Roger Waters cracked new territory hear - WW II-derived isolation and angst is, like, so 1942 - but for such a popular, commercially-oriented album, there is a "speaks to me" (HA!) treasure-chest of lines and sentiments all over the album. Just for one example, "Nobody Home" is the sort of histrionic, melodramatic goofiness that would normally turn me right off, but in its place amongst the soaring dynamics of this album, it slays me.
• It really is, in short, art-craft. Replete with sound effects and nuances to keep repeated listens interesting. And the usual larger than life Pink Floyd aesthetic - even the ballads are somehow loud - so independent of how proto-emo it is, the work is thoroughly enjoyable.
• With the caveat that the first disc is LOADS better than the second, and the more music theater aspect (which really comes to fruition on the second half of the second disc) sort of causes the whole monstrosity to collapse on itself. I.e., I'm in the camp that finds "The Trial" and Nazi plotlines of the second disc to be a bit much, even by Floyd standards. So The Wall is brilliant on the whole, but after riding the emphatic/absurd line well for 3/4s of the album, it can't keep the trick up. Not enough to kill it, but enough to keep it off the Island.

Status: Recommended

Nyet's Faves: "Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2"; "Comfortably Numb" - real original, I know.

AR: The Academy in Peril

John Cale - The Academy in Peril (1972)

JC, if you don't know and lack the critical faculties to utilize Google, is a classically trained avant garde composer and former bassist for The Velvet Underground. This a post VU solo effort and largely a reference to said classical training*; as such, it's mostly instrumental, quasi-modernist classical compositions with one rather jarring Eno-esque trip into the realm of pop smack in the middle of the record ("Days of Steam"). The instrumentation is fairly varied, with solo piano, trumpet, strings, acoustic guitar, drums and bass, and found sound / spoken word all dotting the record, reaching the maxima of London Symphony in moments and the minima of minimalist solo piano in others. The weird-just-to-be-weird perhaps unsurprisingly rears its head, too, with static television producer instructions running alongside a string quartet on "Legs Larry at Television Center" and whispered, menacing taunts thrust at Henry VIII on "King Harry." Um ... yeah. All said, this is more-or-less a music-as-museum-exhibit work, not meant to sit behind the clinking of cocktail glasses nor to be so much enjoyed as appreciated.

* - It's a great title, but such melodrama probably deserved more in the way of an exhibit of exactly what is threatening the academy. I fully confess that I'm not well-steeped in this domain, so maybe I'm brutally missing something, but I just don't think this album bridges the classical-pop-modernist-experimental gap enough to warrant a title that references the alleged conflict.

I did my usual trick and listened to this one on repeat until it sunk in, ... alas, it's fairly intractable. I almost automatically tune it out the second I stop listening closely (aside from the above-mentioned weird moments and the pop melody), so I'm hard-pressed to recommend it along anything like the usual continuum. Headphones and an anti-MTV-generation level of focus are musts. With that rather colossal caveat, this is good stuff - the tracks notably lack the dissonance of many a mod-clas tune, and even those weird moments aren't particularly grating. It's just a bit difficult to follow the logic - the pop tune is by FAR the thing that stands out most - and while that betrays by naivete more than anything else, it still stands there as an indictment. So while I recommend this as an odd excursion, I don't really recommend it for everyday consumption - I prefer genre-blending forays to full-on leaps into the avant garde, and this one makes me jump a bit too far. Still, worth checking out.

Status: Recommended (solid) ... sort of

Nyet's Fave: "Days of Steam" (lame, I know)

AR: Seven Swans

Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans (2004)

Three things stand out about this great indie-darling folk singer-songwriter's 2004 entry.

One, it's sparer than much of his other work. Whereas Greetings From Michigan employs a bit of a kitchen-sink aesthetic, this is predominantly acoustic guitar / banjo and tenor vocals with occasional help from two back-up singing angels females, some bass, and an organ. The setting is intimate and feels as though it's with a straight-faced coffeehouse companion in the wee hours.

Two, it's no less beautiful for being spare. "Hauntingly gorgeous" repeatedly comes to mind, particularly on the first half of the album where the tightly crafted tunes absolutely drip. That straightforward spare-but-luscious vibe gets dropped at moments for the tense ("Sister"), the dark ("A Good Man is Hard to Find") and the downright apocalyptic ("Seven Swans"). A wide range of emotion is skillfully captured by limited instrumentation here, and the lack of tricks guarding said emotion serve to emphasize brutal sincerity.

Three, it's explicitly Christian, and this is the factor that garners easily the most scrutiny in album reviews. The indie rocker genre, couched as it is in the slack-jawed ironism of e.g. Pavement, is not known for its investment in institutionalized religion or heartfelt declarations of faith/devotion to G/god(s) of any kind*. So when a bona fide star, fresh off the borderline absurd declaration of a project to make an album for each of the fifty-nifty United States - itself a sort of epitome of yeah-right ironism - delivers a side album on religion, the horn-rim bespectacled get uncomfortable. This had all kinds of potential to be self-indulgent and HELLA AWKWARD, an album that alienated the seriously religious ("how dare he!") and the seriously ironic ("how dare he!") alike.

* - With the possible exception, I suppose, of the declaration of love for Jesus Christ on Neutral Milk Hotel's "King of Carrot Flowers, Pts. 2 and 3." This is a bombastic blast that disrupts the song sequence to great effect, and honestly, I've never been able to tell how sincere it is. Whether it is ironic or not, though, it will make your average hipster CRINGE in public. Religious love is too post-ironic to bear, maybe?

Fortunately for all involved, the three standout factors interweave and make this a powerful album for both sides. The spare, confessional nature of the music, along with the pervasive beauty that consequently bears marks of inspiration, nail a particular region of religious music in a way that seemingly only a hyperaware indie musician could. He dodges the pitfalls of preachiness by keeping his accounts to narratives-not-imperatives, and he one-ups more or less every Christian rock band out there* by eschewing platitudes and delivering his devotionals in original verse, thereby dodging anything resembling cheesy. The Christian element is refreshingly subtle, and I say that even though there are narratives about prophets and Abraham and Revelations and Transfiguration. He flat out executes a non-imposing but revealing personal Christian account of his own faith / spiritual love, so even though the elements are so obviously culled from *the* religious tradition, they are not obtrusive for the listener.

* - I should confess that this is based on a very limited knowledge of Christian Rock, and my impressions are largely based on television commercials for Time Life compilations that include masses swaying like idiots to glazed out tunes of "lift me higher" and such. But it does seem to be enough of a shtick that Stevens's utter self-awareness makes that brand of Christian pop rock look utterly insincere and foolish. He's more Kierkegaard than youth group evangelical is what I'm getting at, and there's a fervor to his message that is plainly absent from those acoustic strum-alongs.

Indeed, some of the religious sentiment is so bland as to be vague; the love songs' target is only obvious in context and could have been about a comely lass just as easily. And some of the poetry, outside (again) of the accompanying music, is fairly plain. In other words, while a gorgeous work that gives us a seemingly pure narrative of Sufjan's religious leanings, this album isn't quite a revelation, just devotion put to music. Put exceptionally well, but it's not like the concepts here are explosive. Still, this is a classic strength/weakness - his non-attempt to transcend keeps the disc reined in, simultaneously stopping offense and providing a nice juxtaposition of passion and restraint.

There are some relative missteps. "Abraham" is the most overtly biblical tune but doesn't really grab me, and "Size Too Small" is pretty enough but doesn't crackle. The organ in "He Woke Me Up Again" grates. Most of this occurs toward the back half of the album, making this another front-loaded experience. All of that said, the front is incredible, the middle tune "Sister" an epic work of somehow-intriguing cyclical anticipation, and the closing duo - "Seven Swans" and "The Transfiguration" - put an awesome, traditional sense, stamp on a cohesive disc. ("SS" in particular contains a single stratospheric wail that gives me chills of exactly the kind that were aimed for; the song haunts so well as to be unnerving, and that is beyond a compliment).

The front of this disc is more than enough to warrant its recommendation. The first four songs exhibit expert songcraft, and coming off the heels of GFM, it continues to be hard to believe that there exist humans with this much creativity in their pinkies. Seven Swans is, plainly put, a gorgeous disc that happens to be about Sufjan's relationship with God. Very brave of him to attempt it, impressive of him to have pulled it off, and more impressive still that he did so in a way that does not intrude on the listener's beliefs, just invites him/her to hear some tunes with no pretense of will to convert, just share.

Status: Recommended

Nyet's Fave: "Sister"

ADDENDUM: I forgot to mention that this was an album review by request for Aaron, my bro, who is quite the SS fan. This album is also one that we got for my mom one Christmas on the strength of GFM (i.e., not knowing anything about this disc or its religious content), so hopefully she'll have a newfound reason to check it out again.

AR: Yield

Pearl Jam - Yield (1998)

To cut to the chase: context matters. I don't remember exactly when I obtained my copy of Pearl Jam's fifth and arguably last great studio album, Yield, but I know exactly when I got it. Without entering into the unnecessary details, I am given not to fly but am mos def given to foul, dark moods, and Yield hit me at a needlessly upsetting time and saved the day. We're talking feel-bad afternoons assuaged by headphone sessions, couch therapy consisting not of recollections of childhood but simply closed eyes and concentrations on a workingman's rock album. Rock-solace, if you will. So be forewarned that perhaps even more than usual, my take on this album is terrifically biased and probably not worth trusting one bit.

Don't mistake my meaning. The album *is* top to bottom good, nary a hint of a bad moment, varied in a way that grabs interest but remains cohesive, and hits a resonant frequency of earnest rocking optimism. But I'm not really sure that any account of its objective merit could possibly capture what it meant for me at a relatively key time. I am sure I on some level got suckered; for all of Pearl Jam's grasping at gravity, this is really just a sweet-spot pop-rock disc, odd enough to keep the fan-base while straightforward enough to catch FM play. With a fairly damn plain "look up" theme, too - "yield" to the vagaries instead of railing against them, accept what you can't change etc. on some base level. It caught me when I just needed someone to be there for me. Turns out someone was a CD.

In by-this-point formulaic PJ fashion, the disc starts with a breakneck "1234,1234" and the full-speed-ahead punk song "Brain of J." Its descending riff and "Soon the whole world will be different!" chorus kick the disc off in epic fashion. A up-for-air slowed down bridge is followed by another PJ-staple, the pyrotechnics Stone Gossard guitar solo. Classic opener that uses a aural explosion as its close; the empty room drums and clean electric strumming over meandering bassline intro of "Faithful" that follows is a gorgeous segue. The would-be ballad claims "I'm through with / screaming" as it drops into the snarling chorus. "We're faithful / we all believe / we all believe." It's never been clear, given said snarl, how sincere this is, but the guitar-based affirmation that kicks in at 1:53 or thereabouts is transcendent enough to make me buy in. This tune follows a hill-shaped slope, and eventually comes back to a quiet close that is eerily backed by spoken words echoing Vedder's lines. In short, a sick 1-2 combo to open things.

"No Way" uses a fuzzed out streamlined guitar riff under a convincing brink of frustration Vedder to create reams of tension. The pleading lyrics of this song ("I just need," "it's so absurd," etc.) reek of desperation, but the real key is the mysterious chorus. "I'll stop trying to make a difference / I'm not trying to make a difference / I'll stop trying to make a difference / No Way" - hard to tell if this is despair or defiance, but the mood of the song is dark and appropriately enigmatic. It's probably clear, but this is the perfect type of "embrace the struggle" track and an exemplar of how this work helped me stare moods down.

The next couple tracks, "Given to Fly" and "Wishlist," are the singles from the album. "GtF" is borderline U2 in its bombast, but Eddie's sincere emoting stays well south of cheesy. It was the first song I heard from the disc*, and it's really in the archetypal Pearl Jam single catalog along with "Betterman" and "Black." Not to reuse a concept, but it's an affirmation tale against a classic rock, pretty guitar pattern and a polyrhythmic tom beat. One could make a reasonable case that it's a post-ironic work; the cynicism of disappointed youth is left behind for epic, accomplish-anything breath. A solid entry that, again, stays within the realm of the legitimate (read: not treacly) for me. "Wishlist" is also very straightforward / simple repetitive poem piece. What it lacks in lyrical originality it makes up in calming presence. There's additionally a good amount of regret that creeps through all the repeated "wishes."

* - I actually heard this on a TV commercial for the album. A real, "order now for $16.95 plus shipping and handling" style TV commercial for a rock album. Behold, the late '90s.

"Pilate" is a back-and-forth acoustic ballad that intersperses dissonant choruses against its silk verses. It allegedly refers to the Pilate scenes from Master & Margarita, a personal favorite novel, so that wins it points. The clash of its choruses rings well with the dissonant-through-and-through "Do the Evolution," a tune that evokes the weirdness of past Pearl Jam experiments like "Bugs." It's frantic and bristling, and also just happens to feature in-tense-city guitar parts at the 1:00 mark and one of the better self-referential song moments out there following the "sing in the choir" line at 2:00. The whole song is a giant, hair-raising crescendo; I still get slightly edgy to it on the 1000th listen.

The next track is a tempo experiment "called" "●." PJ pretty routinely throws left-field experiments on their albums; this is one of the better ones. It's a good break for the album, too, because as great as the first half is, the second half ups the ante quite a bit. "MFC" is straight-ahead rock with a good mix of guitar-poundage, backward effects and PJ-sound splash guitar effects. A favorite line from the disc: "They said that timing was everything / made him want to be everywhere / there's a / lot to be said for nowhere." The song blows by in 2:30, but ups the heart rate just enough for it (the heart rate, natch) to be knocked back down by the near-country ballad "Low Light." I go back and forth on this one - it sticks out from the rest of the album quite a bit, and sometimes I appreciate the break while others I just want the same wall of adrenaline that follows. Regardless, it's another one that finds the good spot of saccharine but not sticky, and even successfully pulls off a 3/4 time signature.

The closing trio makes the disc, really. "In Hiding" revisits the epic territory of "GtF," but this time dresses the struggle and triumph in interlaced guitar lines and perfectly-placed rough-edged riffage. I.e., this is just as o'er-the-top dramatic, but backs it with a quite Quadrophenia-era-Who-symphony. Importantly, whatever sent the narrator into hiding and led him to "swallow his words to keep from lying" is ultimately conquered - "It's funny when things change so much / it's all state of mind."Another line to latch onto. "Push Me Pull Me" follows as a spoken word piece over another chaotic, swirling rocker that uses found sound and feedback to mirror madness. It also contains the standout metaphor - standout in terms of "huh?" - that the narrator is "like an opening band for the Sun," also over a nifty song breakdown that falls right back into the nuttiness afterwards. It's on the shortlist for Nyet's favorite spoken word piece.The album closer*, "All Those Yesterdays," rounds things out with a near straight-ahead, close the bar down ballad. The "You've got time to escape" section is pretty much Beatles psychedelia redux; it's a surprising inclusion and is sort of doubly disorienting ("in a good way") given that the chorus so prominently involves "Yesterday." The general message - "when you gonna wash away / all those yesterdays" - again sits well if, say, yesterday did not go all that well. Great fadeout to a great disc.

* - Technically, there's a hidden track called "Hummus" that's an exercise in a Middle-Eastern genre. It's oddly entertaining given that it sounds like a trad wedding rip-off, complete with tambourines and hand-claps, and it's accelerando close works well. Still, I routinely forget that it's even on the album as I like "ATY" so much. So ... there ya have it.

Again, take it for what it's worth - sorry to be repeatedly vague, but this album is more about its cathartic prowess than its music for me, so your experience is nearly guaranteed to be different. I know some find parts, particularly the singles and the would-be punk tunes, a little too polished, going so far as to call it a relatively boring PJ disc. I disagree profoundly with all caveats that it's stubborn subjective disagreement - if it's not rough enough, turn it up. The description that's accurate is that Yield is largely a retreat from the frank wackiness of Vitalogy and No Code and a return (of sorts) to Ten days, so if you're a fan of the disc that broke them into superstardom, you'll probably dig this one, too. Just to give some kind of relative indication, I find this one less classic-rock-indebted than Ten and altogether more sincere; like I've indicated, it sits in a middle space amongst many pop-rock conventions that does the job well for me. Believe it, folks - Yield is a Nyet-treasured one and makes the trip for me regardless of what it does for you. But don't fret, I'll listen on some coconut headphones.

Status: Desert Island Recommended

Nyet's Fave: "In Hiding"

AR: Zenyattà Mondatta

The Police - Zenyattà Mondatta (1980)

Considered by some to be the fifth-place-out-of-five-studio-albums effort (and by others to be "one of the best rocks albums EVAH"), Zenyattà Mondatta finds The Police somewhere amongst their polished punk-ska origins, their New Wave heights and their adult contemporary Sting-BS demise. I.e., they're already rock stars, so the exuberant ragged youth that framed their early album is fairly well gone, but they're not quite the smooth-edged pop machine that would deliver the uberslick Synchronicity. And Sting was nowhere near waxing pansily about fields of sunshine yet. :) The consequence is a heterogeneous album that blends a lot of styles while sticking to the general Police aesthetic of Sting's glossy vocals, splashy, effect-laden but quite clean guitars, and upfront, catchy melodies against an intricate-interplay backdrop of a super-talented drum-bass-guitar trio. (Seriously, as pop-immediate as The Police's song-writing chops were, the mere fact that this alleged punk-ska would-be band was so damn dexterous and inventive with their instruments made them stand out, too). It's a thoroughly intriguing listen thanks to the off-kilter mystique it generates by its genre-variation, and even if it is limited in its delivery of the normal Police hits avalanche, that just makes it a *relative* gem.

Not an avalanche, sure, but that's not to say hits aren't there. The album opener, "Don't Stand So Close to Me," is a cinematic piece that might as well taunt other albums with its economy of lyrics. With a dark mood that starts with a lower-range vocal from Sting over buzzing synths and escalates to his usual falsetto fireworks, this epitome-of-the-New-Wave-pop-sound tune relays the story of an illicit teacher-student near relationship. The song is almost anxiety-provoking - its upbeat chorus clash jarringly with the mood that the verses set, and this content-tone mismatch only adds to the taboo-tension. The tune is quick but extraordinarily memorable, even before you read a little and learn that Sting used to be a schoolteacher. Hmmm...

The other hit* from the album, "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da," tensely rides another excellent guitar pattern as it loosely riffs on the inanity of meaningless speech (particularly of politicians, but also of ... wait for it ... pop songs). If any song is guilty of Beck's most-hated Police-sin - that of endlessly repeated choruses - this is the one. You *could* argue that this is meta-commentary at its finest, the meaningless tune about meaningless tunes, a sort of genius in simplicity ... or you could argue that such a point is pretty trite and just gets annoying after a few listens. I tend to the latter, willing to grant Sting a little koan-capture in his ode to pop-babble.

* - Both of these hits have questionable lyrics that prick my ears every time. "DDDD,DDDD" is the only pop song this side of a Nirvana album to liberally use the word "rape(s)." "DSSCtM" has the all-time awful couplet of "He starts to shake, he starts to cough / Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov." It's a terrible rhyme regardless, but more than that, it's a painfully obvious allusion and cheapens the song quite a bit. Not to mention the inconrguities between "Mr. Stung" and Humbert Humbert - other than the generalized pedophiliac content, it's not clear that these two men really have all that much in common. So the two big swingers on this album have their issues, one thing that holds it back a little for me.

The non-hits accent this album well, though again, noticeably not as well as other Police albums*. The band engages in some you-thought-the-English-Beat-was-hoppy,eh? oneupmansship with the infectious beats (sorry) of both "Canary in a Coalmine" and "Man in a Suitcase." Ska pop YEAH! "Driven to Tears" is a classic Police reverb-drenched suite that boasts a filthy, angular guitar solo, and "Bombs Away" plays with bell tones and sing-songy choruses underneath its overtly political lyrics. "When the World..." is a Eastern-influxed three chord meditation, accomplishing more on the tenth listen than the first, and a cool bit of minimalist songwriting. "Shadows in the Rain," another bit of world music that dances all over a central circular bass riff, is a surprise highlight of the disc, another meditative work that displays the notion that the power of the trio did not lie solely in Sting's popcraft.

* - This may be a bizarre association that applies to only the Nyetverse, but I really feel a lot of these early '80s albums carry the shared mark of showing one or two tracks that are legitimate standouts and several other songs that maintain a special status for those born in approximately 1967. It's not just that, it's a certain sparse production aesthetic that I associate with New Wave that ties them together, but really, a lot of these B-sides benefit greatly from their context. I swear I've heard arguments from that demographic that e.g. "Man in a Suitcase" is genius in how it retells the classic rocker-on-the-road-blues narrative, but methinks this is playing the "rock achieved perfection when I was in middle school" card a little too strongly. I mean, it's a catchy enough ska-bumper, but genius? I don't see it - I think that classic status as a lot more to do with the band and the era that song qua song. I digress...

The rest of the disc is fleshed out with three not-entiurely-melodic, dark instrumentals* (a routine feature of Police albums) that don't entirely measure up to past efforts (even though one did win a Grammy). That one, "Behind My Camel," is particularly strident and disrupts affairs a bit. They're solid, film score-esque entries, but it's clear that the pop machine engaged in some album-filling from time to time. Again, I'm no instrumental-basher, and other Police instrumental entries are fantastic, but these reek of a quick album production time.

* Quasi-instrumental, whatever - "Voices in My Head" contains a chant, sure.

I think the characterization of ZM as a relatively weak Police disc is a fair one and one that carries the automatic caveat that relatively bad Police is pretty interesting, cool stuff by normal standards. It is definitely shwank to hear the band in transition and basically grab-bagging from the world's genre supply (hence "Mondatta") while on tour. I'm not sure that they really "make it their own," but they do channel it well. It's a nice document of the mixed bag that their music could be, both stylistically and qualitiatively, and well worth your investigation. And just to drop a final emphasis, be sure to give those backup songs time - they're not going to grab you by the face like other efforts, and close-listening reveals a lot going on in the seemingly limited three person dynamic.

Status: Recommended (solid)

Nyet's Fave: "Canary in a Coalmine." SKA!

AR: 100% Fun

Matthew Sweet - 100% Fun (1995)*

* - For all my pretense of mysterious personality, intellectual complexity and interest in challenging music ... I sure do own a lot of power pop. Sigh...

It's not like Matthew Sweet invented the pop juxtaposition of the sad and the saccharine; happy verses and choruses have been twisted by morose bridges at least since Lennon/McCartney claimed they could work it out. But Sweet sits squarely in this pop tradition and embodies the contrast well within the wire-horned frames of the '90s arch-ironic hipster, delivering tight three minute guitar vessels that sound oh-so-upbeat while discussing broken relationships and self-loathing. The hyper-ironic stance really captures it - angry post-punk fuzz guitars cut the jangle pop with a rough edge that makes those Sweet melodies oddly sinister, and rock-star worship-me guitar solos blow away the introverted singer-songwriter personality that must have crafted these sensitive tunes. It's a shimmery, engaging exercise in aural-emotional dissonance that heavily influenced indie rock in the years to come. The M.O. is far from subtle - the phrase "100% fun" comes from a line in Kurt Cobain's suicide note, for cripe's sake - but Sweet pulled it off with serious aplomb and tight songcraft. The result is a thoroughly enjoyable album that stands up as more than a document reporting where Weezer, The Shins, Elliott Smith, etc., got at least some of their inspiration.

100% Fun is sans doubt a seminal alt-rock album from Matthew Sweet's relatively short-lived heyday, but that doesn't necessarily make it a flawless work. Just to keep the irony contrast motif running - and to deliver a line usually reserved for job interviews - this album's biggest strength is its weakness. Namely that the front half is so strong as to render the album top-heavy and a trip downhill. This entails the positive, natch - "Sick of Myself" is a friggin' alt-rock masterpiece, a beast of an album-opener that click-click-click-clicks into being and delivers straight-up Truth as it details the experience of a lovee causing the lover to self-deprecate. Seriously, I know I am given to hyperbole, but this is a masterful tune that gets me every time - I generally don't even hear lyrics, but these slay me:

Verse 1:

You don't know

How you move me

Deconstruct me

And consume me

I'm all used up

I'm out of luck

I am starstruck

Chorus:

There's something in your eyes

That is keeping hope alive

'Cause I'm sick of myself when I look at you

Something is beautiful and true

In a world that's ugly and a lie

It's hard to even want to try

I'm beginning to think

Baby you don't know

Verse 2:

I'll take or leave

The hope to breathe

The choice to leave you

I'll throw away

A chance at greatness

Just to make this

Dream come into play

I don't know if I'm wide awake

(Chorus repeat)

[Badass Guitar Outro]

(Chorus repeat)

[Badass Guitar Outro, Now With False Ending Excellence]

An all-time best, and one of the few honest love songs out there. The rest of Side A is no slouch, either - "Not When I Need It" (dios mio check that Elliott Smith outro), "We're the Same," and "Giving It Back" are all gems in a similar vein, and "Lost My Mind" branches out with a dose of swirling psychedelia that breaks pattern but intrigues all the same. Side B, as noted, simply can't keep up - it's pleasant enough, but the drop-off is noticeable and renders the overall experience disappointing. Consistency throughout is one of my requirements, so while an EP of the first four tracks would have left me singing praises, 100% Fun invariably leaves me with a sour taste. (The album closer, "Smog Moon," has garnered its share of praise, but it treads too much in Oasis-esque bombast territory for my tastes and may play a large part in said sour taste). So while I'll fully agree that this is an emphatically good entry by Sweet and emblematic of the power pop genre, the album has always fallen short for me - I have the same experience with it today as I had the day I got it, which for unknown reasons I remember was Christmas 1995.

So check 100% Fun - it's tighter than Sweet's other work, so if you like your pop scraggly, go that way, but it's polished scruffy-sappy aesthetic hits some of the heights that he was after. It paved the way for alt/indie acts to follow, and even if Sweet never really hit that elusive homer, he did lay down some great work here.

Status: Recommended (solid)

Nyet's Fave: "Sick of Myself"

AR: MACHINA / The Machines of God

Smashing Pumpkins - MACHINA / The Machines of God (2000)

Death knell number one of Smashing Pumpkins was/is pretty much universally regarded as a failure. It's a heavy, industrial extension of their previous album Adore as well as Corgan's solo work on e.g. the Ransom soundtrack, only this time it's fairly bogged down in a ludicrously self-indulgent prog rock concept, a washed-out production aesthetic that passes the point of interesting to severely blurred, and a severe lack of melody. The entire band contributed to the disc before things fell apart band-breakup-wise, but it comes off as a Billy Corgan solo project anyways. This is all kinds of Not Good - Corgan is a somewhat whiney vocalist obsessed with themes that usually find the emo-barrel anyways, so a tinny vocal over blase computer-modded backdrops ends up sounding like a terrible singer-songwriter album. There's just not enough to enjoy here, and if you're familiar with the surrounding circumstances, the pervasive idea that this is an egoist riding his band into the ground with a final parade-of-excess taints the album.

I am, as referenced before, a former die-hard for this band, so you might suspect that I'd be capable of getting past the flop-consensus and really delving into this work. Your suspicions are, um, unfounded. Like Joss Whedon's best automotons, I try to be my best - try to listen to every album multiple times, let tracks sink in, grab the concept of the concept album - but with this one, I can't do it. The production, professional as it may be, kills the disc for me to the point that I can't discern whether I'd like these tunes even if I could properly hear them. And I inevitably compare this work to the rest of the SP ouevre, and it falls miles short. It's hard to get around - the tracks that are overtly angry/industrial are the best moments of the album, but they reek of posturing, and the epic, proggy, aka more traditional SP songs serve to remind that I'd rather be listening to their other discs.

I suppose it's worth noting that it's not a *bad* album, it's just a boring and therefore disappointing one. There are even some good moments - e.g., I enjoy the opener "The Everlasting Gaze," mainly because it's as close as anything will get to being a Billy Corgan-Axl Rose love child - but they're few and typically marred by vocal tics of a cappella scream-bridges that are fairly tired by this point. In short, unless you really enjoy dissecting nondescript concept albums of the dying breaths of '90s alt-prog rock, skip this one.

Status: Not Recommended

Nyet's Fave: "The Everlasting Gaze"

AR: The La's

The La's - The La's (1990)

Quick review for a quick 35 minutes of a pop-bliss album: The La's sole entry into the world of popular music is a stupid-good gem of jangly twelve string simpleton rock. It's invocation of the British Invasion is overt, but it's so steeped inside an '80s alternative sensibility that it doesn't seem, ha ha, "out of time," so to speak. Actually, while one may be tempted to invoke the Kinks and R.E.M. in describing the sound of this disc, I'll go ahead and smack of sacrilege as I say the bright tones and happy times remind me sharply of The Monkees (!). Minus the sitcom buffoonery, natch, but this is a similar shimmery sunshine pop with pop, and it's a brilliant addition to any collection.

The album is anchored by a tune that dictates that yes, even if you're sitting there saying The-La's?-Never-heard-of-them, you have indeed heard them. "There She Goes" has littered numerous soundtracks, up to and including So I Married an Axe Murderer, with good reason - it's saccharine love ditty genius, the type of tune that seems it was carved out of the air rather than written. And while that tune does a fair job exemplifying the aesthetic employed here, what makes this a classic album is the variety they accomplish within that nouveau-Invasion approach. On repeated listens, some of the subtle tension and grit, the neat stylistic tricks, start to become apparent, and "There She Goes," in all its sleek perfection, sticks out as more glistening than the remainder of the album. Great trick - the smooth edges of pop are ever-so-slightly detailed by the teeth of the underground, and something that achieves a fantastic cohesion reveals itself to be varied and intense. Yes - intense jangle pop. I know.

Highlights abound: "Son of a Gun" is a fantastic, energetic but spare acoustic opener, "I Can't Sleep" is a bright stomper, "Timeless Melody" is a sad-sung soarer ... actually, I'm going to bail here before I just write a adjective-laden description of each and every track. Just listen - it's top-to-bottom excellent, and again, exquisitely varied so as to sustain a thousand spins. Fuzz rock? Eastern European taunt rock? It's all here, down to a Who-esque extended melodrama to close in "Looking Glass." This one justifiedly makes all kinds of lists - it's really a shame that, thanks reportedly to a songwriter with maniacal perfectionist tendencies, it's the only album the La's ever recorded. Highly rec'ed, even if the ultimately unfulfilled promise makes you sad.

Status: Recommended

Nyet's Fave: "There She Goes"

AR: American Slang

The Gaslight Anthem - American Slang (2010)

This review is by request from reader "Jon Sigma," who asks the straightforward and thoroughly justified question: why the hell, given that this band sounds *remarkably* similar to Against Me!, is everyone making such a big deal about this band? So in my newfound interest in writing concise reviews, I'm going to write a paragraph that covers what this album sounds like, one paragraph that parses Jon's question, one that attempts to answer it, and a wrap up paragraph that gives something resembling the smoldering embers of an original thought of my own experience of hearing it. Review, VOILA! These are the terrible trials of someone engaged in the perpetual reading of grad school texts.

By invoking cultural allusions like Bon Jovi, The Sopranos*, "George Costanza's employer" and "Michael from The Office," I am simultaneously dodging the lame routine of name-checking this band's powerfully obvious musical influence/ancestor AND engaging in the equally lame routine of referencing the fact that said comparison is inevitable in reviews of this band. I'm not sure if referencing the fact that referencing the fact is routine has yet become routine, but that sprinkling of meta-cheese makes this word salad oh-so-tasty... aw, screw it... restart paragraph one:

* - On two levels, really, if you think about it.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. Phew. American Slang is a half-hour blow-by of (unsurprisingly) anthemic blue-collar rock music, steeped in a particular kind of Americana - think more pop-rock, heartland blues and Motown than, say, the folk-Americana of the Grateful Dead - and delivered with a familiar, emotive vocal snarl. It's the same frustrated, wistful sickness of the suburbs that his Bossness mastered decades ago, but delivered with enough of an edge of Clash-esque genre-mixing to qualify as not entirely derivative. (Feel free to question how incorporating not one but two 1970s acts renders things non-derivative). Bruce rather famously mocked the pathos of barroom remembrance ("speedball? "really?) while engaging in music that heavily evoked the '50s, and this is a sort of post-ironic update of that idea; "Don't sing me songs about the good times / those days are gone" sung in the 2000s version of indie-rock BruceTimbre is largely the game here, and it's largely effective. It's nostalgia music on two planes - in the fact of its hearkening to '70s barroom rock AND it's constant references to "when we were young" - and via its great composition / insightful if occasionally embarrassing-to-this-cynic's ears lyrics, it hits a nice middle ground of longing for the comfort of the past while admitting that it probably wasn't all that comfortable. It's heart-on-its-sleeve big-verse-bigger-chorus rock, which for a lot of people is pretty much the epitome and aim of the sport. Oddly, it's not always particularly catchy, just sort of big, if that makes sense as a categorical difference. It's no doubt a good album start to finish that feels downright professional in its tight structure, but really, for all its commercial success, it lacks standout single material. You know, like a workingman's album should.

So it's admittedly good - but how did it manage to leap its way into critics' hearts and MTV show soundtracks? Jon noted accurately that it if you listen to this with a punk ear, the similarities to Against Me! are readily apparent (and indeed, The Gaslight Anthem opened for AM! once upon a time). I've listened to this disc and tried to dissect the phenomenon / Jon's q over the last week, and I think it comes down to three possibilities. One, the question on face is at least a little misleading, as it's not like this band has broken through and Against Me! didn't. The latter got all kinds of mainstream press with 2007's New Wave, including "album of the year" status from Spin and the like. I.e., one answer to this question is that TGA is successful BECAUSE they sound like Against Me!, and this is just the nostalgic-anthemic pop-punk formula, now with extra BS, succeeding once again. But if we grant that TGA has been more successful (or at least it's strange that they succeed with such immediate similarity), we're led to another possibility - that the overt Bruce-similarity is so overwhelming that the Against Me! similarity goes unnoticed. A quick survey of the reviews shows AM! coming up about 1/30th as often as the Boss, so there may be something to that - the consensus admiration of TGA's successful incorporation of Springsteen as an obvious influence sort of blocks out accusations of derivation from other bands. But that, natch, just invokes the question of why it's okay to mimic Springsteen. So I'd prefer to dwell on the third possibility*, that as similar as TGA may sound to both AM!** and BS, there is at least one important difference - the treatment of nostalgia - that distinguishes them.

* - Damn the paragraph rule - there is a fourth possibility that one should at least keep in the back of one's head, and that is the whim of the momentum of critical reception - i.e., if the right person in the right context picks up on the band and has enough influence to get the ball rolling, then bands that sound extraordinarily similar will have highly divergent career arcs. This is akin to saying "it's arbitrary" and is thus deeply unsatisfying, but it is worth noting that sometimes the locus of explanation is in the social process of establishing something as "good," what assholes like me sometimes refer to as "reification," rather than being in the content of the art itself.

** - Damn the paragraph rule again, because I should also note that TGA has an important difference in sound from AM! - the latter is given to rebellious punk anthems, while the former utilizes a much cleaner guitar sound reminiscent of an undistorted fifties electric. In other words, both bands are fairly bright and glossy sounding with big, stringy melodic guitar leads over their cha-chung guitar and bass rhythms, but AM! is more immediately recognizable as a punk band whereas TGA comes off as more of a good ol' rock band. Both are fist-pumping rebel-rousers of a type, even outside of lyrical content, but AM! seems more inherently angry - okay, "irked" - relative to TGA's sad/hopeful sound. This is yet another way of saying that "TGA sounds more like Bruce than AM! does," but it may betray the notion that discontent and that odd strain of despair/hope are just flat out more compelling to critics now than the rebel yell, even if it's just in the guitar tone.

Now that I've shattered all my rules of brevity, I'll keep the actual thesis short. AM!'s nostalgia is one, personal - it's a literal remember when *we* were young and did thing X - and two, defiant. They are nostalgic, true, but nostalgic explicitly for the energy and rebellion of their youth so as to bring it to bear on their current state. This strikes me as an emergency, midlife crisis sort of nostalgia, or even better, that of a seventeen year-old yearning for when he was ten. It's powerful, but there's something trapped about it, like the nostalgia-experiencer is still naive enough to think that this time, things are going to be different. It's also steeped in personal history and again, more "teenagey" in that respect, a little too focused on the immediate narrative. So it's brimming with optimism and energy, but optimism that does not realize its ultimate futility. TGA's nostalgia, by contrast, is a more general, collective nostalgia, speaking on the shackles of youth and such as experienced in middle-class America. Two, it's more aged in its assessment. It makes the paradoxical realization that nostalgia simultaneously releases and leaves one stuck, and so does not try to rally the nostalgia for energy of rebellion, instead merely looking for a largely qualified dose of sad comfort. That difference is key - the TGA version is almost automatically more mature and thereby more attractive to the critical audience who is itself aged and, as noted above, in charge of awarding stars and generating buzz about albums. Note that I am not saying that it's a "better" nostalgia - you could make the charge that it's a cop-out, resigned sort of past-longing. As futile as the teenaged version may be, at least it rails its fists against the void, doesn't just wax about it. And finally, if you'd like to grab me a beer sometime, I'll expound on the following thought - that what critics appreciate via the overt Bruce-referencing is that the album appears to be nostalgia-for-nostalgia, and so dodges charges of repetition by appearing as another stairstep locked in the American music narrative. Not to mention that said nostalgia happens to be about a favorite artist from the youth of many an influential critic. So, it seems, aping an all-time critic's darling in a way that seems to be about, loosely, that critics' darling - so not imitating at all, but invoking - may just be a really solid career move.

There are a few factors, sadly, that stand between me and joining the critical consensus. One, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, I'm a textual learner, so i find it really tough to concentrate on sung / spoken lyrics (unless it's the obvious center of the art, as in folk or hip-hop). That which grabs my attention from this album is occasionally compelling and also occasionally embarrassing, so I'm not as in love with TGA's songwriting as others are. Two, I am not the world's biggest Bruce Springsteen fan - I don't dislike him, but his overwrought, melodramatic tendencies tend to grate on me. Seeing their shadows here, and in less catchy / radio-friendly form, doesn't make me dislike them, but I'm not drawn by any means. Three, while I try to be something of a post-ironist - someone invested in getting to the authentic and not just, believe it or not, the distanced critical snark - I don't think this nostalgia / hypersincerity is really the right way to go about it. Four, there's too much mid-tempo here that results in a bit of the samey, dangerous for an album that is already confined by its adherence to a couple of easily-recognized influences.

So while I get the mode in operation here, and again, I think this is a finely crafted, top-to-bottom solid album, it doesn't really do it for me on a profound level. I have the repeated experience of "this sounds stirring" rather than being stirred, and that is the quickest way to put it. More than usual, I recognize this as an instance of preference at work, and I wouldn't bemoan anyone whom it does strike meaningfully. There is definitely a lot to enjoy here, not the least of which is arch-professional musicianship, and more than a few little fun allusions mixed about - keep an ear out for an embedded "Please, Please Mr. Postman" chorus. But even the tune I enjoy most, the quasi-jazzy number noted below, comes off as formulaic to me - this is what catchy, genre-bending jazz-blue-collar-rock sounds like - so I'm left short of the mystic depth others seem to feel with this disc. Definitely worth spinning, but I'm at least somewhat with Jon in questioning the extent of the praise that this one's grabbing.

Status: Recommended (solid)

Nyet's Fave: "The Diamond Church Street Choir"

AR: Radio City

Big Star - Radio City (1974)

Big Star's sophomore effort ultimately suffers greatly from comparison to their debut. Out of context, this is a nice, jangly guitar power pop-rock album, full of hooks and pleasant leads and enough emotive singing to grab ears. In context, though - i.e., against the supremely balanced desperate emotion and glistening harmonies of #1 Record - it comes off as overly ragged and bitter-raw relative to the pop-perfection of which the band is known to be capable. Consequently, Radio City is a bit of a letdown.

None of this is to say that this is by any means a *bad* album. In fact, just like its predecessor, it went on to inspire myriad Byrds-calls in the alternative sounds of the 1980s, and contains some of the classic tracks - the head-boppin' opener "O My Soul," the perfectly melancholy "You Get What You Deserve," the almost ridiculously-timeless soundtrack-of-a-sunny-day staple and critical darling "September Gurls," and the all-time transcendent, simplistic, confessional closer "I'm in Love With a Girl" - that define what the band is all about. Still, the sound of the album grates in too many moments. A prime example is the otherwise solid ""Life is White" - a strident harmonica destroys the track, and this tendency for distracting, trebly lines rears its head enough to damage the experience.

I'd be a moron to dis a power-pop classic, and it's true enough that there's a lot to love on this disc. But Radio City failed to deliver on the band's promise, and whatever inspirational qualities it has are dampened when you hear it, as I usually do, after #1 Record. It's still a staple to own - I'm not going to steer you AWAY from "September Gurls" - but it's a rec that's nonetheless qualified.

Status: Recommended (solid)

Nyet's Fave: "I'm in Love with a Girl"

AR: Paid in Full

Eric B. & Rakim - Paid in Full (1987)

In 2010, Eric B. & Rakim's breakthrough effort sounds like an archaeological dig through a hip-hop tomb. It's an immediate, pleasing album of its own accord, sure, but much of its contextual power lies in its emphatic sense of music-as-museum. Whether you are well-versed in hip-hop history or not (or, like me, somewhere lost in between), this classic is a powerful trip, an essential document for late 20th century popular music.

Throwing this one on the stereo really is a quick course in vinyl anthropology. For one, it smacks of the pared down essence of the hip-hop genre. The super spare beats, samples and record-scratching DJ effort are the minimalist skeleton for music from all over the hip-hop map since; the silk-smooth, multirhythmic MCing is likewise the paradigm for every would-be street-rhyme-slinging poet. Eric B. has legendary, establish-the-art level chops on the turntables, and Rakim is routinely name-checked as a candidate for best MC of all time. These are names whispered in hushed tones when they're not being screamed in admiration, godfathers of the entire community. The production on this album is crisp though still organic and a little raw by modern standards; still, you'll have no trouble discerning the pristine qualities that made these two stalwarts if not chart-topping stars.

For two, the album plainly reveals where the idea of "stealing" James Brown horn and drum breaks came from. It's a move that prompted a lawsuit in addition to dictating the quick-cut / fill-style so integral to rap's sound. But specifically, it centered the sampling library on the ouevre of Brown, Parliament, Funkadelic, and other select artists. I.e., it established major pieces within the canon, and so is a pivotal timbre-establisher, too. But it's not just that it established the proper sources of sampling. The seamless quality of said sampling served key, too. Outside of the record scratching and vocals, most of the instrumentation of the album is plucked. I highly doubt any live drum playing went on. But you'd be hard-pressed to note this - album credits allude to five, six songs sampled per track, and while some elements may leap out, this crediting often reveals how subtly background elements can be worked, too. It's unnecessary to go into the classic merits-of-sampling debate here, but turntablism saw its one of its pivotal popular moments here and crept along its path towards legitimate art.

For three, and perhaps most importantly, the album just *is* the artifacts that are strewn all over the hip-hop landscape. Half the album is an experience of "Oh, that's where that came from!," as major hooks, phrases and lifted lines from numerous modern hip-hop hits pop up in their "original" form*. For a well-after-the-fact listener like me, those iconic moments make the disc. Most famously, the slinky funk number "I Know You Got Soul" contains the lyrical aside "pump up the volume" that was turned into the driving sample of a huge electro-dance hit. "Move the Crowd" should jump out as the bassline from the everpresent sit-com theme "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air." "As the Rhyme Goes On" contains the "why would I say I am" lyric that was checked by Eminem years later. The title cut "Paid in Full" contains a tight, circular bass and drum line that is a hip-hop staple with good reason; it's a perfect pattern that, under Rakim's incredible flow, makes one want to hear the tune roll on forever. This paragraph, in fact, could roll on forever: to see where this seminal album sits within the genealogy of a lot of hip-hop, check a site like whosampled.com - a slew of people have sampled this album which, as mentioned, itself sampled a slew of artists.

* - "Originated," of course - many of the littered elements that can be heard everywhere today are really widespread grand- and great-grand-children. But a lot of them are lyrics lifted as so fundamental to the genre's history that listeners would be expected to recognize the allusion to this classic immediately. So if the newer songs are Simpsons episodes, this album is a collection of classic film and television in monolithic form. The originals are, I don't know, books or something.

All of this history aside, the party disc makes for a great contemporary soundtrack, too. No skits here - that's a convention waiting in the wings at this point - but the album does break down for three (!) instrumental tracks that exclusively showcase Eric B.'s dizzying skills, plus a fourth track that serves as a dub-model karaoke track for one to try to emulate Rakim. All told, twenty minutes of the forty-five minute album are occupied by scratch-wizardry; this is often pointed out as a minor weakness as it starts to feel like indulgent filler after a few spins. This is probably a fair criticism as the magic is really in the interplay between the two artists (plus you can imagine how it would come across if rock bands took up half of their albums with look-at-me guitar solos). Still, the birth-of-the-artform aspect gets those tracks a pass, and there are plenty of highligh duets here to make the album a classic beyond its historicity; "I Ain't No Joke," "I Know You Got Soul" and the title track all smoke today just as well as they did two decades ago.

Paid in Full is, in short, a highly revered album that established numerous elements of the old-school rap motif. It's an historical classic that stands up as a rich listen years later, giving the modern listener a nice little deja vu trip as it displays just how powerful a stripped down '80s hip-hop LP can be. It ain't perfect but it's bad-ass, a must for your collection.

Status: Recommended

Nyet's Fave: "I Ain't No Joke"

AR: Room Noises

Eisley - Room Noises (2005)

(Cracks knuckles).

Eisley, a quasi alt-country-rock sister group, appears on first, second and third pass to produce music that is best heard from an adjacent room. Their vocals are immediate and pretty, reminiscent of Frente or maybe the country version of little-known Canadian band Immaculate Machine, and hit all kinds of syrupy sweet harmonies with regularity. But were there ever a time for the application of the concept "cloying to the point of irritating," this is it. Good but fairly nondescript pop fills this disc, and there are some tracks that utilize enough of the interesting and off-kilter so as to warrant attention. The opening lilting ballad "The Memories," the strongly country-tinged "Golly Sandra," and the closing, spare and elegant catchiness that is "Trolleywood" hit all kinds of sweet spots. But once that three-part harmony, medium high register motif is established, and they keep going back and back and back to it, it's enough to make me stab my eardrum with a chopstick.

So Eisley embodies a fundamental problem for me - it's probably entirely arbitrary and self-specific, but the resonant frequency of their voices appears to be my tolerance. As in, hearing them evokes nails on chalkboard irritation. Which is strange - if I can get over the effect, I can recognize that this is reasonably well-crafted indie-pop, pleasant stuff even, work with not a whole lot distancing it from that of someone I love, Neko Case. And I can get over it by sitting in an adjacent room instead of near the stereo. But for whatever reason, upon attention paid, their sonic patterns actively hurt my brain. I'm completely serious, the effect is lessened if I read a book across the house and just let them sit as background music, but that of course is hardly a ringing endorsement.

I know what it is - they're too immediate, too vibrant, too trebly. Part of this is probably the mixing. But if I try to be remotely objective, this is just not interesting music - it's a group that clearly has chops, is capable of sounding exceedingly pretty, but a group that has thrown together an album of for-the-most-part middling, good-but-unremarkable stuff that also happens to arbitrarily irritate me. Again, there are some highlights, but nowhere near enough to make me put this in the player any time soon.

Status: Not Recommended

Nyet's Fave: "Trolleywood"

AR: Veckatimest

Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest (2009)*

* - (In the continuing battle to keep these reviews short, I will try to keep this short; do not mistake length-of-review as correlated to quality-of-art).

A critically-lauded end-of-2009 list-topper, Veckatimest is nonetheless an album that splits impressions. The gist: it's a stately chamber-pop disc, full of lush harmonies, strings, and echoey, warm, open-room vibes that scream intimacy with every precise pluck of an acoustic and/or crystal clean electric guitar string. Record-level reverb gives it a cabin-composed vibe, and light, mostly-upper range vocals positively haunt. Horns make appearances, synths add flourishes, and sometimes tinkly-key range pianos drive the rhythms, ones that are universally mid-tempo. It's semi-mysterious, delicate, elegant, and borders on precious; it fits the category in my head called "shimmer" music, standing alongside Bon Iver and Beach House in that loose genre. More than anything, it's exacting, painstakingly composed music that feels more chamber than pop, and more than that, it's calming, delicious songs with evolving patterns and subtleties that lend themselves to repeated listens. And the neatest trick of them all: this is a qualified "pop" in the sense that it's imminently followable yet odd, and it does not earworm like a virus but sinks like a vaguely familiar story that maybe you've heard before.

So why does an album described that way split? Apparently precision in composition treads on grounds clinical, and people have gone so far as to call this "boring" due to its "everything in its right place" nature. And that wispy familiarity that intrigues me causes others to yawn. Strengths are weaknesses, and two sides do not understand one another.

While recognizing that samey-ness to the disc, I do NOT fall in the camp that thinks Veckatimest evokes ennui. I rather think that the smoky aura that surrounds the mellifluous tones dripping from this album creates a desire to grasp at the music, a desire to "get at what they're up to." What I mean is that yes, this album sits like a dream, and other people's dreams - "No one wants to hear," etc. - are among the more boring things in the world. Particularly if they seem crafted and meticulous, edited dreams! But this, one, is organic enough to feel like one's own dream, and two, shifts patterns in a dancing-lights way. Even in its samey serenity, even in that predictable late night nod-off atmosphere, it still plays to your curious child-like wants for bedtime tales. The disc may never pay off those wants and leave you in the still-groggy state, but since when were your dreams supposed to teach you anything?

For all that talk of the vague and faintly recognizable, several tracks on this disc stand out. The opening two, "Southern Point" (a jazzed-out, multi-part folk gem) and "Two Weeks" (the Beach Boys meets Orphan Annie summer bliss piece), pulled off the rare trick of grasping me on first listen (I had marked 4 stars on each before they finished!). "All We Ask" is a parabolically dynamic, stomping, epic melodrama; "Cheerleader" and "Dory" anchor the middle of the album with the poppiest riff and swirling moodiness, respectively; and the collapsing chorus of "While You Wait for Others" slays. "Foreground" closes the album with a surprisingly effective simple piano riff under floating vocals. And those are just the ones I feel like writing down - there are ample beaming moments on here, and nary a misstep; in addition to its emphatically great opening, this disc also meets the top-to-bottom quality measure.

If there is anything resembling a flaw, it is that the disc is so cohesive as to be overly homogeneous. I am struggling to describe the songs to differentiate them as they are largely all mid-tempo numbers that flit about the same instrumentations and dynamics (though again, subtle and delicate as they may be, they are upon-further-inspection varied and more than maintain interest for me). This is primarily an admission that there is something to the above-referenced criticism, and I can see why perhaps an ADHD persuasion may disincline you to sit still with this album long enough to detect the differences. So the gripe is a fair one.

There are also parts that, while no-doubt original, strongly echo inspirations. This is most obvious in the waltz outro of "Fine For Now," which - primarily in splash guitar and vocal delivery - distract me by sounding so much like Jeff Buckley. Other moments evoke Reinhold-era Ben Folds Five (of all things). Minor, minor complaints - while I respect the reaction of impatience that others have, if you have an inkling of an inclination toward intricate music, you'd be crazy not to zombie-follow the paths of the Pitchfork / NPR masses and pick up this beautiful, relax-ed/-ing effort.

For sheer prettiness, Veckatimest deserves its accolades. It pulls the neat trick of being very upfront but somehow blocked by a veil, immediate but complex, all the usual juxtapositions combined with expert craft that render albums great. And it maintains this level for the entire disc; no easy feat. It's a je ne sais quoi issue that keeps this one far from the Island (and really, I didn't even consider that, critically high-ranked as it may be). Gorgeous, yes, but its tendency to fade from memory - yes, like a dream - keeps it out of the pantheon. Still, for an immediate, wrap-yourself-in-ephemeral-glow experience, Grizzly Bear's praise-garnering effort nails it and is not to be missed. It may take a few listens to sink in, but it's well worth the investment.

Status: Recommended

Nyet's Fave: "Two Weeks"

AR: The Fame / The Fame Monster

Lady GaGa - The Fame (2008) / The Fame Monster (2009)

The past 24 hours of arch-pop blaring from the windows of the house de fleur have been quite a break from the usual stream of choice '94 "Tweezer" jams and scratchy DIY GBV recordings, Coltrane solos and Steve Reich Phases that I normally allow to publicly escape my sound bubble and craft the public opinion of what-that-guy-in-that-house-listens-to. All in the interest of maintaining the mystique, ya? Um, no. When someone, let's call him "Enter Sandcounty Man," requested that I review Lady GaGa's double album reissue of epitome-of-glitz-pop, he did so with all kinds of "now don't laugh" and "this should be a change" qualifications. But as much as I love me some, e.g., Built to Spill, I also have to throw out that There's Nothing Wrong With Pop. I mean, yes, there's something wrong with a lot of pop, that whole mindless pandering to the masses thing, or more exactly, the mindless acceptance by said masses of half-assed derivation. But pop (or, say, Pop!, said the Erasure fan) as a genre distinction and not just a declaration of album sales, can be brilliant. Not independent artist brilliant, not musical genius brilliant, but brilliant by its own tight-craft standards of the catchy, contained and attention-seizing.

So screw that "guilty pleasure" notion. I'll just ignore the comments of passers-by - "Oh, some thirteen year-old who identifies with Lady GaGa's outsider narrative must live in that house" - and enjoy these tunes de GaGa that I am so clearly enjoying. Those earworms are catchy for a reason, eh, and while the empty calories of a thumping bassline and dance-your-cares-away anthemic choruses may be just candy, well, um, candy tastes good. And ftr, the GaGa is a damn fine confectioner.

On that loosely connected metaphor, it's also worth noting that millions of marketing dollars go into candy packaging, so much so that it almost overwhelms the candy itself*. The packaging, natch, can make the candy, and this is certainly a pretty played notion when talking about pop music acts. But Lady GaGa is one of those cases where it makes no sense to even consider the music apart from the singer/packaging - the artist's work is interlaced with her videos, the albums and songs mere pieces in a larger fashion/idea show, all of it presented by an artist so mixed in the pop culture concept of celebrity that her DEBUT album is called The Fame. The overall Lady GaGa Project is a sort of multimodal affair, where to get a grasp of what she's up to involves taking in the whole scene. All of it, the insane wardrobe choices, the hypersexual-yet-ambiguously-so front, the chameleon aspect of her styles (both musical and iconic), are key. Her much, much larger-than-life gestalt renders melodies not just catchy but emphatic, corporeal statements, completely dominant of the local soundspace (and it doesn't hurt that the industrial disco metallic synth sound - you *have* to know what I'm talking about - is an implicitly overwhelming sound). So while I usually angle these album reviews at the experience of the album, the candy not the package, that doesn't really work for this / these two GaGa entries. They seem much more about the feel of the album blasted in the club, over the car stereo and out in the ether than the particular experience of close-listening over headphones in the study.

* - You could stretch the analogy to point out that the constant formula adjustments of candy products - dark chocolate peanut butter cups, crunchy peanut butter cups, peanut butter chocolate sticks, inside out peanut butter cups* (damn, Reese!) - mirror the attempts to keep up with the fickle tastes of pop consumers.

** - My favorite marketing claim of late? "Now Better Tasting." Think on that for a bit - a claim to superiority over itself, and a claim that tells you nothing. Better how? Saltier? Sweeter? Or just "releases more dopamine upon consumption?" I know it's not much different from the "new and improved" claim of old. But there just seems something about is as a response - "I'd like to eat more your food, sir, but I would like it to taste better/ "Well, guess what? Now it is better tasting!" / "Well, that certainly worked out!" - that cracks me up.

Sadly enough, I am ill-equipped to evaluate the packaging for two reasons. One, given that Lady GaGa is an absolute megaspectacle, I am sure people have covered this angle ad nauseum. I can give you the basics - she's a classically trained music student who attacked the NYC club world, she's very musically talented but also a master of the entire demonstration as a work of performance art, and she (at least claims to) wants to let her freak flag fly sans restriction so as to let the high schoolers out there in the margins know that it's okay, there are people out there just. like. them. It's much more detailed a storied than that, but that's the basic gist - real music first, chic scene second, this pop craft third. And somewhere in there is that she's a huge friend of the LGBT community and embraces a couture aesthetic. A succinct way to think about it is that she's a fairly normal, educated person who acts off-puttingly weird in an intentional way that knows it's patently intentional and comes to symbolize all that is cool, sexy, and weird-kid friendly. While wearing clothes made of dead Kermits. AND on top of all of this, she's a shape-shifter who never shows the same face twice. Got it? See, I told you I'm not qualified. Since that succinct way failed to be succinct, think of this way instead: she's an icon sans features, robotic space age cool with sounds from the future and all, but you'll never pin her down beyond that. Keeping it real is keeping it ever-changing, with the only consistency being that it's BIG, FAMOUS and AWESOME.

That's my impression anyways. Because two, I'm largely not with it enough w/r/t the contemporary pop era to hang with the nuances of every move she makes. Yes, it's true; things are passing me by. I surely get that this reeks of postmodern synthesis - multiple styles, ironic disdain for "the scene" while creating it, insisting on representing the fringes of what is cool and acceptable while simultaneously becoming its center. A pop-star at essence because there is no *real* Lady GaGa, so the act can become whatever pop requires. I get all that, and I *really* get the influences she's milking - Madonna, Peaches, Gwen Stefan, EuroClub, disco diva - those shine through. But as far as trying to keep track of the daily what she's doing, how she relates to the other female artists of her own time... well, this ain't my scene, man. All I can do is throw her hit discs on and enjoy them over headphones in the study. So in a way I am, indeed, not really the target audience. So it goes.

I will latch onto three aspects of GaGa before I hit the albums. They are:

1. Lady GaGa as hero*. Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful" is a lovely ditty that was life-affirming in isolate, but once it became an anthem for the LGBT community and oppressed and/or down-trodden individuals generally, it took on a huge power. There's meaning in the pop sometimes, and similarly, whether "real" or not, LG's approach/message of "be thyself, screw what 'they' say" has positively affected a whole ton of people. It's hardly original - I mentioned somewhere else that this is severely trod-upon, David Bowie and Rocky Horror ground - but it clearly speaks to a certain segment of the new outcasts population. And as a weirder-sympathizer and someone who definitely latched onto music as a means of solace, I fully support that angle. It could be wholly insincere - there's really no telling with an ironic tornado like LG - but the effect is, at least in part, a good one.

* - There's also an aspect that LG is sort of a style hero, introducing all kinds of people who would otherwise never be exposed to high concept fashion, performance art, foreign styles of music, etc. It seems like a weird thing to note, but a lot of reviews say things like "she's unoriginal, but I'm happy she's introducing the masses to couture." Which is a roundabout way of saying, I suppose, that she's an effective mass-marketer?

2. Lady GaGa as chameleon. I already mentioned the personal appearance / style thing, but what's more striking is the lack of an identity in the music - the styles are all over the place (again, the exception being that the synth sound is fairly pervasive), but even the vocals are radically different from track to track. It's a sophisticated twist on the pop notion of identity - not just a refusal to be pinned down, but a refusal to be anything in particular. Again, it's trod-upon Madonna/Britney/Michael Jackson territory, but as Pitchfork reviewer Scott Plagenhoef notes, it's occuring at "internet speed." It makes for a decentered pop act, something that challenges concepts of branding and iconography nicely. I.e., outside of the disc jockey saying "here's the new Lady GaGa song," I'm not entirely sure how one knows it's she.

3. Lady GaGa as derivative. With so many influences on sleeves - and I'll let you play the "spot them" game, but that above-linked Pitchfork review nails the ones on The Fame Monster - the urge to accuse her of sampling-esque unoriginality is there. Indeed, many critics cite "nothing new" as a complaint. In my book, this seems to miss the point. One, this is pop - derivative is the name of the game, at least on some level. Two, this just speaks to the holistic approach one needs to take with LG - the song qua song is just one aspect of the show, and even if it's genealogy is plainly showing, perhaps it hasn't been presented in the particular context before. Three, and this is sort of an offshoot of two, part of the context is that she can pull off ALL of these influences and meld them together. Maybe the only thing that LG shares with Phish is a seamless ability to genre-hop, and even if any one thing isn't particularly impressive, the string of channeled past stars is collectively mind-blowing.

And quickly, the albums. First, just to explain why I am putting them in the same review: The Fame came first in 2008, but 2009's The Fame Monster was originally conceived as a bonus disc for a reissue of the original album. The two pieces were different enough - and indeed, there's something darker and more coherent about the bonus disc than the original album - that LG changed her mind (or someone changed his or her mind) and released them separately. And then released them as a big double album, too, consolidating a lot of the different versions of The Fame (American European, Japanese bonus tracks, etc.). All of this, I have decided, is too much to keep track of, and since I acquired the whole thing as a The Fame/The Fame Monster package, I pretty much think of it as one sprawling entity.

The double album, then, wastes no time getting to the business of GaGa - club beeps and that fuzzy, huge synth sound blow the roof off "Just Dance," an energetic anthem piece that is a BIG HIT about the BIG CLUB life. Its tone matches its subject matter, and as mindless as it is, it deserves its reputation as one of the hugest hits of the year. And that's really (unsurprisingly) the gist of The Fame - several single-ready, huge hit entries about celebrity buoyed by a mixed bag of filler. "Paparazzi" is probably the best concept song on there, a love song about obsession and pursuit (backed by a gorgeous video) that also has a divine, crystalline moment chorus. "Poker Face" is enough of a mind-brander that bands from all over the genre-map covered it; it's more of a Euro-disco meets Peaches piece with some arguably gratuitous sexual lyrics, but it grooves appropriately. "Lovegame" carries that same near-gratuitous label with all its "disco-stick" talk, and imho is not very exciting in its neu-Ace of Bass execution, though catchy enough to get the job done. The single that largely misses the mark is "Eh Eh [Nothing Else I Can Say]," a song that is pure pop sans club beat, almost evoking Cardigan's "Lovefool" or something in that wispy range.

One weird aspect of the LG sound, though, is that even the songs I don't like, I don't mind (or I even enjoy) hearing - that makes no sense, but there's enough interesting going off in each one that even the weaker or flawed entries tend to sit well with me. Some examples of these "bad songs that I still like" include "Beautiful Dirty Rich" (too whiny or something), "Money Honey" (plain riff and annoying chorus), "Boys Boys Boys" (nails on chalkboard grating in moments), and "Brown Eyes." This last one I enjoy almost because it's too ridiculous - it's a retread of the Mötley Crüe hit "Home Sweet Home" and some kind of weird Beatle-esque guitar riff. So it's on face preposterous, and yet I hum it! This is not to say the album is all bad catchy moments - "The Fame" (a cool Basement Jaxx meets Sheryl Crow vibe), "Again Again" (solo piano soul a la Alicia Keys, sort of), and "Summerboy" (which effortlessly channels No Doubt's best hepped up 21st century disco moments) all legitimately kick. So to sum up, the disc is a little uneven and all over the place, becomes frankly annoying in moments, and yet I have no trouble listening on repeat for hours. I like it even when I don't, which is a great sign.

The Fame Monster, if lacking the highest highs of the first disc, manages a more end-to-end coherent vibe. All of the tunes enhance the sophistication of her debut disc, plus the lead single, "Bad Romance," is the type of "sophomore" album effort that doesn't bat a lash in its declaration of here-to-stay. It's darker, more intricate than the previous singles, and gets delivered with a perfect cocky-snarl all the way up to its soaring, pleading, classic chorus. The Fame Monster features, too, some flat-out wacky homage moments - "Alejandro"'s silly melodrama is only lacking a declaration of something in the air that night in terms of ABBA genealogy, and "Speechless" is an awkward ballad that makes you wonder if LG will don a little mustache to sing this Queen ditty in concert. But those questionable steps aside, the remainder is thoroughly solid; "Telephone" is a pulsing, syncopated rhythm-driven club explosion*, "Dance in the Dark" is a sheen epic that echoes of New Order levels of bounce with a Cher-esque supervocal, and "Teeth" is as close as LG will get to a hip-hop stomper (it weirdly sounds like a coked-up chain-gang spiritual with diva attitude). Again, this whole second disc, even including those weird tracks, brings a dark, soupy complexity that strikes as a nice trend toward intricate but still immediate pop.

* - Albeit, again, one whose lyrics are about the club it's being played in? And Beyonce, what with her DirectTV shilling, almost makes this sound like a Boost Mobile commercial.

In a way, LG makes for a really easy review - great enough in moments to unhesitatingly recommend, undeniably an enjoyable experience even when it's bad, but so full of awkward and / or annoying moments that the rec gets qualified immediately. She does certainly sound, in her multi-genre/personality attack backed by supersynths, to be delivering pop from the near-future. And beyond that, it's multi-faceted music that, while often about the club, manages to hit on some of the sinister and complex sides of fame and the modern life. Even if it's only to render them grandiose and make money off of the cool-to-be-odd art concept, it's a lot more engaging and invigorating than your average club anthem. So let this double disc spin in your player for a bit, blast it out to the streets and let 'em know that the same house, the same guy can pump out tunes from both corners of culture and grab what he/she will from both, sans embarrassment.

Status: Recommended (solid)

Nyet's Faves: "Just Dance," "Bad Romance"