a coherent collection of random statements regarding God, words and tunes

In the Year of the Blind, the Funny-Eyed Album Is King

     OK, so I got ambitious and went for it a day later. At least now I can take the rest of the year off (provided nothing else comes along)...

     Well, here we are, at the end of another year. And while there's a lot worth keeping, there's also a lot worth leaving behind. If you've been following along (or even if you haven't), I shan't repeat any of it.

     And musically, this wasn't the best of years either. Actually, there's a pretty good chance that it was the worst one I can remember, ever. Most of these albums (and all of the new ones) have been talked about, so I'll keep the comments really simple. But let's just say you have to get to #10 in my discoveries list before you find an album that's topped by anything that came out this year.

     Another interesting thing I noticed was when we started discussing Top 10 lists on another message board, the initiator had a category for Best Comeback. And it hit me: Almost ALL of the best albums of 2006 were comeback albums. The old guys, by and large (with one painful exception) saved this from being an absolutely moribund year musically.

     Anyway, let's start with the Top 10 Discoveries of the year (i.e., those that didn't come out this year, but that's when I found them). Links to the original reviews are provided when available: 

     10. Derek Webb -- Mockingbird -- And again, note that this is as good as ANY Christian album did this year. Another shocking turn of events.
     9. Frank Zappa -- Hot Rats -- I'm really looking forward to Andre's promised buyer's guide to the Zappa pantheon. Suffice to say, the boy was at his best when he DID, in fact, "shut up and play yer guitar." 
     8. Adrian Belew -- Here -- A small personal revelation, and all the Beatles riffs you can eat.
     7. Patti Smith -- Peace and Noise -- I'm gonna get to my own column on Patti next year -- promise. In the meantime, we remembawwwwwwwww - EVERYTHING! Hah-hah...
     6. Peter Hammill -- The Silent Corner and Empty Stage -- The lovely "Song for Wilhelmina" is worth the price of admission, and The Tortured One doesn't stop there.
     5. Lou Reed -- Magic and Loss -- Not everything on here IS magic, but the stuff that is is deep, deep, deep. And loss -- yeah, we got that one here in spades.
     4. Graham Parker -- Struck by Lightning -- I don't think you can find another album this side of fellow sometime Woodstock residents The Band that glorifies and illuminates domestic life this well.
     3. Frank Zappa -- Burnt Weeny Sandwich -- Yeah, I've been spending a lot of time with c.1970 Zappa lately. The disposable opening and closing doo-wop songs aside (yes, I know I'm dissing "WPLJ" - deal with it), this here masterpiece manages to fuse rock, jazz, AND classical, and one wishes he'd broken as much ground after this, rather than becoming everyone's favorite musical dirty-joke teller. "The House We Used to Live In" will knock you on yr butt, pick you back up, and knock you back on yr butt again. It's that good. 
     2. Modest Mouse -- Good News for People Who Love Bad News -- This album is just a joy. Inventive, funny, weird, while synthesizing every influence it can get its hands on. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Brian Wilsons of the 21st Century. Well, we'll see about that, but the promise is there, anyway.
     1. Peter Hammill -- In Camera -- Faith, unbelief and everything between and beyond. A terrifyingly powerful album.

     As for 2006, starting from the bottom up:

     Disappointment of the Year: The Lost Dogs -- The Lost Cabin and The Mystery Trees. It's not even close. Runner-up would be Beck's The Information, which nonetheless makes the Top 10 list below (although the fact that it did underscores what a disappointment this year was in general).

     Best Album of 2006 That I Can't Include (and would be the best if I could include it): Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett -- I said enough back at the link. Buy, and enjoy.

And now, onto this year's "Top 10":

     10. Jai Agnish -- Mechanical Sunshine -- OK, maybe he IS the beneficiary of a (former) hometown discount. But maybe not. It's a nice, quirky little album.
     9. Ray Davies -- Other People's Lives -- It's Brother Ray, for crying out loud. Still, I hope tomorrow he finds better things.
     8. Slaid Cleaves -- Unsung -- A deliberately minor affair, wherein perennial good guy Slaid covers his (mostly) unsigned buddies' tunes and gets them all a payday. That said, "Call It Sleep" ranks with anything Slaid's written himself.
     7. Beck -- The Information -- CSM artist still has his guero groove thang on, but not much else going on here. (CSM = Contemporary Scientologist Music, BTW. ) 
     6. Tom Verlaine -- Songs and Other Things -- Perhaps a bit skimpy in the coherent lyrics department, but AH, THAT GUITAR! How I've missed it....
     5. Brian Eno -- Another Day on Earth -- Busy little boy this year. When's he's OK, he's ambient, and he's ALWAYS ambient. And when he's very good, he's disturbing. Well, on this one anyway. 
     4. T Bone Burnett -- The True False Identity -- Only 14 years overdue, and just about picks up where he left off on The Criminal Under My Own Hat. Give this one to your favorite Bush-hating evangelical friends; they'll thank you for it.
     3. Paul Simon -- Surprise -- Definitely some life left in the old boy, and he celebrates it quite well here.
     2. Weird Al Yankovic -- Straight Outta Lynwood -- Yes, I know. But it's funny from the word "they"; pushes the envelopes of good taste and polite humor decidedly more than usual; and besides, the perverse side of me really, really wants to declare "Pancreas" Song of the Year.
And finally....
     1. Sparks -- Hello Young Lovers -- Yeah, I don't get it either. I really don't. But it's painfully catchy, bombastically yet self-consciously ambitious, and fun to the point of relentless obnoxiousness. And yet, it doesn't even quite qualify as a Simmons-Certified Tranportational Device(r). Nonetheless (roll those title credits, Jeffrey), in the Year of the Blind, the Funny-Eyed Album Is King.

     Thanks for playing along. Now watch, I'll get something in my Christmas stocking that will blow this all away. Well, one hopes, anyway.

Posted by: burninglight at 02:42 | link | comments (10)

A couple more, and done for now….

 

     Let's clear the decks before I get to the Top 10 for this year. Pickins has been slim, but we have a one more late (and for that matter, overdue) entry that will affect the final standings. It's been a pretty lame year overall, though.

     Before we get to the one worth counting (and another I discovered a year too late), a paragraph about another new one that won't be here: Dylan's Modern Times. It's not terrible, by any means, but it's much closer to his output from 1985-1995 than it is to Time Out of Mind or Love and Theft. I'm thinking this might resonate with fans of Good As I Been to You (or the slower and/or swingier stuff from Love and Theft), though. Me, I liked Out of the Groove when a lot of people didn't, but I can take or leave this one. And that's all I got t'say about THAT. 

  So, let's first spend significantly more time on another master from the '60s, who may not be quite at the top of his form anymore but still has a lot to say (and this time a lot of it's about God and babies), and some territory left to discover: Paul Simon. Surprise is, well, a pleasant one. Probably doesn't take over the top of the list but is going to wind up comfortably in the top 5, and I'm still turning stuff up, so stay tuned.

     And it doesn't hurt that his musical collaborator/producer this time around is one of the other great diminutive bald geniuses of rock, Brian Eno (yeah, there he is again), whose hand is pretty apparent in any number of places.

     But this is still a Paul Simon album, and again, it's a good one. And it gets off to a great start with "How Can You Live in the Northeast?" which hints at the both of the two great American tragedies of this century so far, and wonders aloud where God is and where we are in all of it:

How can you live in the Northeast?
How can you live in the South?
How can you live on the banks of a river
When the floodwater pours from the mouth?

How can you be a Christian?
How can you be a Jew?
How can you be a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu?
How can you?...

And everybody gets a tongue to speak,
And everyone hears an inner voice,
A day at the end of the week to wonder and rejoice.

If the answer is infinite light, why do we sleep in the dark?

     Things come down a couple notches for several songs -- none of them bad, just not on the same level. "Everything About It Is a Love Song" is a quiet reminiscence that sounds not totally unlike the latter section of "The Late Great Johnny Ace," only nowhere near as compelling as that earlier tune. "Outrageous" is a bouncy but not entirely memorable song, which stays with you only because of the surprising answer to the chorus "Who's gonna love you when your looks are gone?... God will / like he waters the flowers on the window sill..." Likewise, the mildly zydeco "Sure Don't Feel Like Love" is redeemed more by the typically self-deprecating but insightful lyrics than by the tune itself: "I remember once in August 1993 / I was wrong / and I could be wrong again."

     The dark, meditative "Wartime Prayers" brings the album back up to speed, and reminds us that it's written by a man who's both in his 60s and lived through the '60s, and would still like to see just a little of that promise -- and not least of all, in himself -- in the time he has left:

 

Prayers offered in times of peace are silent conversations,
Appeals for love or love's release, in private invocations.

But all that is changed now,
Gone like a memory from the day before the fires.
People hungry for the voice of God
Hear lunatics and liars.

Wartime prayers, wartime prayers
In every language spoken,
For every family scattered and broken.

Because you cannot walk with the holy,
If you're just a halfway decent man....

I'm trying to tap into some wisdom,
Even a little drop would do.
I want to rid my heart of envy
And cleanse my soul of rage
Before I'm through.

     "Beautiful," by all appearances, is a pretty tribute to those who adopt throughout the world, as each baby brought back from Bangladesh/China/Kosovo is declared "beautiful, beautiful." "I Don't Believe" starts off quiet, builds into a series of sonic blasts (and it's worth noting that Eno begins permanently emerging from the background at right about this point in the album), and closes with the assertion that belief means nothing if it doesn't come out through our hands: "Acts of kindness / Like rain in a draught / Release the spirit with a whoop and a shout / I don't believe we were born to be sheep in a flock / To pantomime prayers with the hands of a clock."

 

     "Another Galaxy" steps it up on both the atmosphere and hope fronts, even as it's breaking your heart: "There is a moment, a chip in time / When leaving home is the lesser crime / When your eyes are blind with tears / But your heart can see / Another life, another galaxy."

 

     The high point of the album, though (unless you think it's "...Northeast") is the epic and swamp-guitar driven (and yet with a sizable helping of "99 Luftballoons" thrown in) "Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean." The refrain of "Nothing is different, but everything's changed" stays with you, and reminds you both of the power of perception and how easily (sometimes) the perception can suddenly be changed.

 

     The album ends with two upbeat songs -- first, the jaunty "That's Me" which carries a great (and typically self-deflating) twist on a old Beatle line, "Well, I never cared much for money / And money never cared for me"; then, the song you may have heard already (if not on The Wild Thornberries soundtrack), "Father and Daughter." Both bouncy and touching, and a perfect ending to a decidedly life-affirming album:

 

I'm gonna watch you shine
Gonna watch you grow
Gonna paint a sign
So you'll always know
As long as one and one is two, woo-ooo
There could never be a father loved his daughter more than I love you.

********** 

      And then there's Derek Webb. After a pretty long string, there won't be any CCM albums (or even moreso, albums by CCM ghetto folk) topping my list this year. And as Mockingbird came out last year, it won't be making the list either. But it would have been the only CCM representative if it had.

 Stranger yet, it would actually be pretty mainstream CCM, if not for the lyrical viewpoint throughout. Which is to say, it's intelligent. And also to say, it's not your typical evangelical viewpoint. He's unashamedly embracing Keith Green as a role model here -- hey, one could definitely do worse. And for that matter, one can hear latter-day Rich Mullins in here too - not trying to be too dark or unfunny here (and hopefully not too prescient either), but can the fatal car crash be far behind?

 

     And likewise in the spirit of Keith Green, this album is being offered as a FREE download, at the fittingly titled http://www.freederekwebb.com. So even if you don't like it, it costs you nothing. But the guy wants to get the message out, and it's a message worth hearing. Because you see, Derek has a few problems reconciling his faith with war, consumerism, and what passes for the American Way in general these days, and his lyrics aren't shy in articulating that struggle. Just a few examples:

 

who's your brother, who's your sister
you just walked passed him
i think you missed her
as we're all migrating to the place where our father lives
'cause we married into a family of immigrants

my first allegiance is not to a flag, a country, or a man
my first allegiance is not to democracy or blood
it's to a king & a kingdom

there are two great lies that i've heard:
"the day you eat of the fruit of that tree, you will not surely die"
and that Jesus Christ was a white, middle-class Republican
and if you wanna be saved you have to learn to be like Him."

or

 

how can i kill the ones i'm supposed to love
my enemies are men like me...

peace by way of war is like purity by way of fornication
it's like telling someone murder is wrong
and then showing them by way of execution

or

 

in God we trust
even when He fights us for someone else
in God we trust
even when He looks like the enemy
in God we trust
even though our hearts are bankrupt...
in God we trust
even through our great presumption
in God we trust
even though He favors no nation-state
in God we trust
even when the blessing is a curse.

     And so on. And all to a decidedly melodic and accessible bunch of arrangements. It won't satisfy your favorite punk rocker (or for that matter, your favorite punk rock blueser ), but it's well-produced music by a Christian with a brain, and Lord knows there's not enough of THAT around, especially lately. So download, and enjoy. Or at least appreciate not being offended by the usual shallowness or mailed-in-ness for a change.

 

    Next week: The Top 10. I'm not happy about it, but it is what it is. We'll just have to get through it together.

Posted by: burninglight at 02:48 | link | comments

Shameless Plugs #8 & 9

And thus completing the series for the very indefinite future....

             

And heck, on the subject of shameless plugs, one could do far worse than to read this. Warmed MY heart, anyway....

Until next time...

 

Posted by: burninglight at 22:57 | link | comments (4)