I’ve been writing about a band called The Weakerthans for Paste.  If you don’t know them, you should check them out. They play loud rock ‘n roll, and they have a lead singer/songwriter who sneers like a punk but who has the heart of a romantic poet. His name is John K. Samson, and I love his songs.

I used to play one of his songs, called “Hospital Vespers,” around the time when my brother-in-law was dying of cancer. Samson’s songs used to be filled with F Bombs, little musical tantrums that got old pretty quickly. Then, impossibly, he became a great songwriter, and he started writing poetry. But he’s still tossing F bombs, even if he doesn’t use the precise words. “Hospital Vespers” is an upraised middle finger to death, and the impersonal way people die in our culture, and it’s one of the most humane, compassionate songs I’ve ever heard.  I thought about it when I thought about my brother-in-law. Now I think about it because I’ve just written about the band, and because several friends are currently going through the same thoughts and emotions I went through a few years ago. I hate death, so I pray for healing, and I believe that God can and does still work in those ways. But often He doesn’t, and if He doesn’t, then I pray for humanity, for decency, for something like a death that respects and honors the individual.

In any event, “Hospital Vespers” goes like this:

Doctors played your dosage like a card trick.
Scrabbled down the hallways yelling Yahtzee.
I brought books on Hopper, and the Arctic,
something called “The Politics Of Lonely,”
a toothbrush and a quick-pick with the plus.
You tried not to roll your sunken eyes and said
“Hey can you help me, I can’t reach it.”
Pointed at the camera in the ceiling.
I climbed up, blocked it so they couldn’t see.
Turned to find you out of bed, and kneeling.
Before the nurses came, took you away,
I stood there on a chair and watched you pray.

What can be said in these times? “Words, words, words,” Hamlet said. They’re all I have, and they don’t help. But if I could, my friends, I would stand on a chair and block the camera. It’s the least I can do.

Panda Bear – Person Pitch

My insightful but historically challenged friend Jeremy tells me that Person Pitch sounds like The Beach Boys on LSD, which is an accurate enough assessment on one hand, but which ignores the fact that Brian Wilson spent years playing in the sandbox for a reason.

Mr. Bear (real name Noah Lennox) is a member of acid-folk experimentalists The Animal Collective (naturally), and his second solo album is far removed from both his band’s catalogue and his lovely but downbeat solo debut Young Prayer. Here Lennox drags the Beach Boys chorales kicking and screaming through an acid house/early Pink Floyd blender. The resulting mashup of new millennium beats and sixties flower power is sometimes too schizophrenic for its own good. But when it works, as it does on the spectacular 13-minute aural collage “Bros,” it reminds me of Wilson’s magnificent pastiche Smile. Lennox piles multi-tracked harmonies atop clattering drums, fuzzed out bass, spooky sound effects, and enough backward-masked tape loops to warrant full demonic condemnation from the conservative evangelists of America. The rest of you will probably find it delightfully, lysergically lovely.

Frog Eyes – Tears of the Valedictorian

You should care about Victoria B.C.’s Frog Eyes for one reason:  the utterly strange songs and weirdly compelling vocals of Carey Mercer. Mercer’s ocular cohorts whip up a sonic wall of skittering electric guitars, circus calliope, and pounding piano. The music is bracing enough; rock ‘n roll as refracted by the Tom Waits funhouse mirror. But it’s Mercer and his paranoid proclamations, delivered in a declamatory, querulous yelp, that really command the attention. There’s a bit of David Bowie there, a bit of Bowie acolyte and Destroyer/New Pornographer Dan Bejar, and more than a touch of madness:

Reform your countryside! Reform your shafted side!
Konstantine: you are the beggar of the blasted blue light
Oh (rich) Richie’s in the back
He ain’t going to like it when you go
And Howard sells the power to the power-hungry proles,
Incriminating photo shoots that show you wanting gold

There’s probably medication for this sort of thing, but it’s oddly convincing just the same. Even more strangely impressive is the nine-minute “Bushels,” which finds Mercer careening off into one of the more damaged falsettos you’ll ever hear, chanting “The wheat’s got to last/London, you’re cold, but the wheat’s got to last.” Easy there, dude. I suspect the wheat will hold out, but damn if it isn’t alarming to consider the possibility that it won’t.

The Narrator – All That to the Wall

There’ll be a new Modest Mouse album any day, but for those of you who can’t wait, there’s the second album from Chicago trio The Narrator. Lead singer/songwriter Sam Axelrod clearly shares the Portland band’s penchant for angular guitar rock and quavering vocals. “Son of the Son of the Kiss of Death,” “SurfJew,” and “Breaking the Turtle” are superb tracks. The only real misstep here is “All the Tired Horses,” a lousy cover of a lousy Bob Dylan song from an album (Self Portrait) that is usually ignored for a reason. Everything else really is good news for people who love Isaac Brock.

Let me get this out of the way at the start:  in spite of what’s coming, I like Lucinda Williams. I love her music, which I’ve followed avidly since her late ‘70s blues albums on Smithsonian Folkways. I’ve seen her in concert several times. I don’t know her personally, but I wish her well. But she’s still made a near-stinker of a new album. I wish it wasn’t so.

West, due out February 13th, is the latest in a series of gradually declining releases since 1998’s masterpiece Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. That album, redolent with sweat and dirt, love and lust, captured a sense of place as well as any album ever made, as Lucinda explored the American Deep South with idiosyncratic, finely detailed geographical and personal reflections. Essence and World Without Tears, the albums that followed, were solid efforts, but failed to recapture the magic entirely. With West, the decline is far more precipitous.

To be sure, West has its high points, most of them grouped near the middle of the album. “Fancy Funeral” is a starkly moving ballad, Lucinda mournfully recalling her recently departed mother, poking at the hole in the soul that seems incapable of being filled, her always-fragile voice cracking and breaking in ways that will melt your heart. “Everything Has Changed” is a lovely and bittersweet acknowledgement of emotional hollowness, while “Rescue” is a harrowing 3:00 a.m. confession of existential loneliness. Of the few uptempo tracks, “Unsuffer Me” is a searing slow-burn blues, and “Come On” a righteously pissed off howler and indignant middle finger to a former lover. These songs finally move the album beyond its prevalent downbeat dirge and into full-blown Neil Young/Crazy Horse territory, and they can hold up with the best Lucinda has ever written.

But there are problems. Sweet Jesus, are there problems. Williams has never been known for her hook-laden melodies, but the somnambulant opener “Are You Alright?” takes mind-numbingly repetitious to a whole new level, while the second track “Mama Sweet” fixates on the two words in the title and repeats them like a mantra. It’s not so much “hypnotic” as “nap inducing.” If you’re still awake ten minutes in, you’ll discover a pretty good album. Unfortunately the trend continues late as well, with the ill-advised nine-minute talking blues “Wrap My Head Around That” followed by the laconic “Words,” which actually contains some pretty good ones. Sadly, they are masked by a tune so quiescent and monotonous that you may not be able to remain conscious to hear them. It makes me realize how indebted Lucinda was on her earlier albums to departed guitarist/producer Gurf Morlix, who injected both energy and supremely melodic, chiming guitar runs. The fact is that on at least half these tracks Lucinda commits the unpardonable musical sin:  she’s deadly boring.

More disturbingly, “America’s best songwriter” (according to Time Magazine) seems remarkably unfocused and lazy. “Are You Alright?,” that snoozer of a leadoff track, offers such lobotomized sub-Hallmark Card sentiments as “Are you sleepin’ through the night?/Do you have someone to hold you tight?” before the title phrase echoes, ad nauseam, through an extended coda. It’s a stultifyingly dull and cliché-ridden five minutes, all the more shocking because Lucinda is capable of genuinely great writing.

Lucinda Williams has too strong a track record to give up on her entirely, or to think that she might not be considerably better next time out. So I’ll be listening for her next move. But with West, America’s best songwriter has gone south, and this time she’s nowhere close to the geographic or emotional epicenter that gives her best work such deep weight and resonance.

Some new or about-to-be-released music that I’ve enjoyed of late …

Fountains of Wayne – Traffic and Weather

Fountains of Wayne frontmen Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood will remind you of the two smirking wiseacres who always sat in the back of the class during your high school years. They’re hip and they know it, they’re cynical, and they’re too clever for their own good. They rhyme “diner” and “Carl Reiner,” “law degree” and “Schenectedy,” “routine” and “Lichtenstein.” They find the ridiculous and surreal in every current cultural fad, and they pepper their lyrics with topical references that will be out of date by the time their next album is released.

That’s okay. These smartasses also happen to write the best hooks extant in rock music, and their delicious power pop is guaranteed to make old farts like me jump on the couch and play air guitar. The fourteen songs here borrow shamelessly from every great band from The Beatles to Weezer, and if they don’t really do anything here that they haven’t done on their previous three albums, songs like “Someone to Love” and “New Routine” certainly reinforce the notion that that there is, and always will be, an exalted place in the rock ‘n roll canon for three-minute songs with clever lyrics and singalong choruses. Best of all is “Fire in the Canyon,” where the smirk is replaced, finally, by some honest, melancholic soul-searching, sweetened by spot-on Simon and Garfunkel harmonies.

Joe Craven – Django Latino

Originally released in 2004 to overwhelming indifference, Joe Craven’s Django Latino is being re-released on Compass Records. Don’t miss it this time; it’s a great album. Craven, a longtime musician in David Grisman’s Dawg Music ensemble, is a one-man band who plays mandolin, mandola, cavaquiño, violin, ukulele and a full range of percussion instruments, including cookie tins and martini shakers. Here he multi-tracks himself to play nearly every part on these wondrous songs associated with gypsy guitarist extraordinaire Django Reinhardt and violin maestro Stephan Grappelli of the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. These songs, originally recorded between the 1930s and 1950s, are among the most beloved of the jazz canon. Here Craven adds his own unique spin by adding elements of cumbia, meringue, samba, and tango. Not a jazz or world music fan? Okay, then consider this: Joe Craven’s playing will make your jaw drop in wonder and amazement. He’s a dazzling soloist, his virtuosity matched by his ability to swing. Django Latino is both a fine tribute and a stunning reinvention.

Milton and the Devils Party – How Wicked We’ve Become

In case you were wondering, that’s “Milton” as in “John,” not as in “Berle.” There’s little to laugh at on How Wicked We’ve Become, but enough heartfelt angst and literary allusions to keep even the most introspective, morose English major happy. Or at least as happy as introspective, morose English majors ever get. Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Norman Mailer all make cameo appearances, as does sadsack Morrissey from the introspective, morose musical world.

It’s enough to make you think that these songs were written by an English professor. And then you find out that they were. But if Daniel Robinson doesn’t do much to disguise his day gig, he also does just fine as a part-time rock star, turning out tuneful, spiky guitar pop that is reminiscent of Marshall Crenshaw, The Police, and early Elvis Costello. There are deep undercurrents of longing and yearning in the lyrics, cleverly disguised by the bright, uptempo music. The themes are universally relevant, although it’s probably not a bad idea to keep a thesaurus near your iPod just in case. But if you can handle “The palliative promise of eternal life/Has turned into a stultifying curse” as a jangly guitar anthem, then you’ll thoroughly enjoy this little genre exercise in pop existentialism, and probably score better on your SATs as a result.

Jon Rauhouse – Jon Rauhouse’s Steel Guitar Heart Attack

Those of you who associate the pedal steel guitar solely with cry-in-yer-beer country weepers are in for either an unpleasant shock or a delightful surprise. Jon Rauhouse plays pedal steel guitar the way John Zorn plays the saxophone. That is, he thoroughly messes with your head as he takes you on a schizophrenic musical journey. On … Heart Attack Rauhouse covers western swing, Hawaiian music, Big Band standards, ‘60s easy listening schlock, Bing Crosby crooners, the TV themes to Mannix and the Andy Griffith Show, and gunfighter ballads. Along the way, he’s helped out by members of Calexico, Giant Sand, The Mekons, Kelly Hogan, and the incomparable Neko Case, who lends her pipes to the old Sinatra chestnut “East of the Sun (and West of the Moon).” Best of all is Rauhouse’s take on Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” where the pedal steel does a Broadway turn. It’s great, uncompromising, wildly eclectic music.