The albums that have hogged the CD player of late ...

Hallelujah the Hills – Collective Psychosis Begone

Post-modernists will love Boston’s Hallelujah the Hills. “Made inventions, broke conventions/Raised a glass to new pretensions/Meta-meta-meta-and the novel is dead” singer/songwriter Ryan Walsh shrieks, and hipster literature professors will rejoice worldwide. The good news is that rock ‘n roll fans will rejoice as well. HtH exhibit the kind of madcap free-for-all egalitarianism that characterizes bands like The Arcade Fire. The band mixes equal parts fuzzed-out guitars, cellos, trumpets and synths. They chant in unison. They write songs with Sufjan-like titles such as “It’s All Been Downhill Since the Talkies Started to Sing” and “Slow Motion Records Broken at Breakneck Speeds.” And unlike Sufjan, they make an unholy racket. It’s a ramshackle, lo-fi, amateurish indie mess, but Walsh’s off-kilter David Byrne warble and the band’s unerring pop sensibilities combine to forge something that is both accessible and bracing. I’m hoping that the collective psychosis sticks around for a long time.

The Mendoza Line – 30 Year Low/Final Remarks of the Legendary Malcontent

Maybe it’s twisted, but divorce albums frequently make me very happy. Here are a few that have brought me great joy in the midst of profound relational misery:  Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights, Van Morrison’s Hard Nose the Highway, Exene Cervenka’s Old Wives’ Tales, and Bruce Cockburn’s Humans. And now we can add The Mendoza Line’s 30 Year Low to the list. Co-leaders Tim Bracy and Shannon McCardle recently split up after ten years of marriage, but they left a scorcher of a record in their wake, equal parts poetic grace and bitterness and recrimination. Bracy handles the poetic grace department, and his spare, Dylan-inspired folk songs are fragile and delicate and achingly sad. But it’s McCardle who stuns here, unleashing a snarling, barely contained rage on tracks like “31 Candles” that is frightening in its wrathful intensity. Don’t mess with this chick. Final Remarks of the Legendary Malcontent, the accompanying odds ‘n sods collection of live tracks and covers, is just fine, but it’s 30 Year Low that is truly worthy of your intention. Hurts so good.

The Safes – Well, Well, Well

The Louvin, Everly and Wilson clans have already taken this band of brothers concept as far as it can possibly go, but Frankie, Michael, and Patrick O’Malley – collectively known as The Safes – do nothing to damage that great sibling legacy. Taking their cues from The Kinks and The Who, they bash their way across ten short power pop anthems that clock in right at the thirty minute mark, just like ten great radio-ready singles should. There’s absolutely nothing innovative here, but as long as massive hooks, power chords, singalong choruses, and sweet brotherly harmonies ring out over boomboxes and iPod earbuds, there will always be an exalted place for songs like these in my musical pantheon. As one of the titles proclaims, “Cool Sounds Are Here Again.” Indeed they are, and this is perfect summertime music.

Richard and Linda Thompson – I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight/Hokey Pokey/Pour Down Like Silver/First Light/Sunnyvista/Shoot Out the Lights

Both Richard (Sweet Warrior) and Linda (Versatile Heart) have new or about-to-be-new solo albums out now, and they’re very, very good. But the new music has prompted me to revisit the six albums they recorded as husband and wife between 1974 and 1982. And I’ll just come out and say it:  this is as fine a musical run as you will find in contemporary music, equal in substance and quality to what The Beatles and Dylan did throughout the sixties, what Van did from the late sixties through the mid-‘70s, what U2 did from the early to the late ’80s, what the newly sober Steve Earle pulled off from the mid ’90s through the early oughties, and what Radiohead has accomplished throughout their restless career. In other words, this is as good as it gets in terms of sustained greatness.

Bookended by the masterpieces they recorded at the beginning and the end of their tempestuous marriage, these six albums could loosely be categorized as “folk rock,” but any label is inadequate, and doesn’t begin to account for the sandpaper and sweetness of the harmonies, the jaw-dropping guitar work, the compassion of the social outlook, or the clear-eyed honesty of the love songs and anti-love songs, the ongoing chronicle of two people who loved and hated one another. In a more just universe, Richard Thompson would be widely heralded as one of the greatest songwriters and guitarists on the planet, and Linda Thompson would be justly celebrated as one of our finest singers. But the universe is not just, at least when A&R men and American Idol ratings and Soundscan totals are involved. So don’t look for them on a VH1 “Behind the Music” special anytime soon. Instead, revel in the wonder of two consummate musicians who sparked and burned and created timeless, beautiful, and harrowing music.

“America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside our hearts. It rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.”
– Ronald Reagan, 1984

I suspect the golden age of political campaign songs has passed us by. It’s not like it used to be back in 1960, when John F. Kennedy enlisted his pal Frank Sinatra to stump for him and sing “High Hopes” with new lyrics:

K--E--DOUBLE N--E--D--Y
Jack’s the nation’s favorite guy
Everyone wants to back—Jack
Jack is on the right track.
‘Cause he’s got high hopes
He’s got high hopes

It may have been corny, but Sinatra brought that ring-a-ding swagger to the convention hall, and made it work.

And it sure as hell isn’t like what it used to be back in the halcyon days of the summer of 1984, when Ronald Reagan, the old rock ‘n roller, appropriated Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” for his re-election campaign. Never mind that the song was written from the viewpoint of an alienated Vietnam veteran. For a few weeks there we had yuppies in yellow ties pumping their fists and acting like crazed frat boys, and music fans from the Redwood forests to the Gulfstream waters chortled in the giddy hope that music could change the world, or at least provide a decent soundtrack to the political chicanery.

This week Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton announced her theme song for the upcoming 2008 presidential campaign:  Celine Dion’s “You and I.” You may know the song as a commercial jingle for Air Canada, with Celine shilling for airline tickets. That should probably tell you all you need to know, but just in case you want the sordid details, here’s the chorus:

You and I
Were meant to fly
Higher than the clouds
We’ll sail across the sky
So come with me
And you will feel
That we’re soaring
That we’re floating up so high
‘Cause you and I were meant to fly

I don’t know about you, but my heart isn’t exactly swelling with patriotic fervor. Although it’s a song that could inspire any fan of unicorns or rainbows, it seems to be lacking in that pragmatic grounding that could animate potential voters to get behind a candidate who must deal head-on with terrorist attacks and melting polar icecaps. And as poetry it absolutely sucks, expressing sub-greeting-card sentiments that even the Hallmark Company would have the good sense to reject.

But you can rest assured that we’ll be hearing it, ad infinitum, for a long time to come. It’s going to be a long seventeen months, and I’d prefer to skip the whole sordid American Idol Goes to Washington extravaganza if I could. At least in that sense, the song achieves its original goal. It makes me want to travel abroad.

I blame it all on Max Yasgur. Max is the guy, way back when, who agreed to lease out his farm in upstate New York for a little soiree called Woodstock. And ever since then hordes of young adults have labored under the illusion that it’s a great idea to try to watch a rock concert in 100-degree heat, half a mile from the stage.

This curious notion seems to be undergoing a renaissance in recent years, as once-small festivals mushroom (even the non Deadhead ones) into mammoth multi-day events. You all know the litany – Coachella, Bonnaroo, Glastonbury, Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits, and many, many more. It’s possible to see 80 or 100 bands at these events. There’s only one problem. You can’t actually see them.

Don’t get me wrong. God knows I love live music. I’d spend my life in some dive bar if I could, hanging out with a couple hundred other people, reveling in the wonders of some new or up-and-coming band. There’s little in life that I enjoy more. But it’s precisely because I enjoy that interaction that I’m mystified by the appeal of the mammoth festivals.

I’ve given it the ol’ college try, and the post-college try. Before that I gave it the ol’ high school try, and had my first experience at such an event in July, 1970 when Sly Stone failed to show up for a free concert in Grant Park in Chicago, at which point there was a riot goin’ on, and I ended up trying not to breathe tear gas as I ran away from police who were firing rubber bullets. That was a rollicking good time. I’ve watched The Rolling Stones in their heyday along with 80,000 people in old, rusting Cleveland Stadium, and heard later about some kid who sailed out of the upper deck and landed on the infield below. I’ve sat in the midst of a sea of wasted humanity many, many times, everybody completely oblivious to the music. Are we havin’ fun yet? But, you know, I actually kinda care about the music.

Columbus, Ohio, where I live, has its own corporate version of Yasgur’s Farm; a former cornfield transformed into a concrete amphitheater and named after a local car dealership. It is one of the most soulless places in the universe. Usually it is home to Styx/Foreigner/REO Speedwagon packaged nostalgia, Genesis reunion tours, and overpriced burritos and watered-down beer. Thanks very much, but I’ll pass. But occasionally it tempts me. I forget myself, forget the lousy times I’ve invariably had in similar environments, and somehow succumb to the notion that this time it will be different. So when Farm Aid came through Columbus a few years ago, I naively forgot 35 years of my musical history.

Up there on the stage, theoretically, were a lot of people whose music I loved – Willie Nelson, Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller, John Mellencamp. But back on the lawn seating it was hard to tell the Emmylou speck from the Willie speck. Giant jumbotron screens on either side of the stage projected the faces of the musical performers, but from where I sat the giant jumbotron screens looked like 12-inch TV sets. So I watched Willie and Emmylou on the little TV set, was mildly entertained by the sea of wasted people around me, sweated in the sun, got drenched by the late afternoon thunderstorm, and groused at the prospect of an $8 watered-down Coors. Are we havin’ fun yet?

So enjoy the festivals, ye neo-hippies. Be safe. I’ll catch you again in the fall, when musicians return indoors, and I can actually bear to pay money to watch them again.

British Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin, born on April 16, 1786, discovered the Northwest Passage, but disappeared in the course of the exploration. After serving (1836-43) as governor of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Franklin was sent in search of the Northwest Passage in 1845. His ships, Erebus and Terror, were last seen in Baffin Bay on July 25 or 26, 1845.  When nothing was heard from the party, no fewer than 40 expeditions were sent to find him. In 1854, Dr. John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company found the first proof that Franklin’s vessels had sunk. In 1859, Leopold McClintock, commanding Fox, a search vessel outfitted by Lady Franklin, discovered a cairn that revealed Sir John had died on June 11, 1847, in King William’s Land and had, in fact, found the Northwest Passage. Further expeditions were sent to the Arctic, but they simply confirmed the earlier discoveries.
-- from Wikipedia

Sometime during my high school years I discovered the traditional folk songs of the British Isles. While almost everybody else I knew was debating the various and sundry interpretations of “Stairway to Heaven,” I and a few of my friends were checking out bands such as Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Planxty, and Pentangle, who were singing songs that were centuries old and tarting them up with a backbeat and electric guitars. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, try to think of roll ‘n roll versions of “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain” or “Home on the Range.” Except instead of musical American cheese, think of good songs featuring meaningful lyrics, great storytelling, and heartbreakingly beautiful melodies.

In preparation for a review for Paste, I’ve been listening to a recently released box set of material from Pentangle, some of which is known to me, and some of which is not. But I’m discovering all over again how much I love this music. There’s a good reason why these songs have survived for hundreds of years; they sock you in the gut. They touch on themes that still sound all too relevant and contemporary. In this case, death, and grieving over the death of friends, never seems to go out of style, and our children’s children’s children will still be making up new songs that will simply be variations on a theme. This particular Pentangle song is from the early 1850s – relatively recent as Trad material goes. But it sounds as ancient as David’s psalms, and as contemporary as a downed Apache helicopter in Baghdad.

‘Twas homeward bound one night on the deep
Swinging in my hammock I fell asleep
I dreamed a dream and I thought it true
Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew

And now my burden it gives me pain
For my long lost Franklin I would cross the main
Ten thousand pounds would I freely give
To say on earth that my Franklin do live
—Traditional, “Lord Franklin”