Day 89: The Dandy Warhols – 13 Tales From Urban Bohemia

After nine really enjoyable songs, I was shocked to discover this was the band responsible for one of my least favorite songs ever. Even hearing it right now makes me want to buy a Kia. Fuck. I’m turning this one off. Too bad, because the rest of it was quite pleasant — a meander through the many forms 90s alt-rock assumed over the course of that wretched decade. It’s a testament to their versatility, in fact, that “Bohemian Like You” could have taken me so by surprise, and could stick out so painfully here, as except for maybe one other track, almost no element of the song sounds like it could have come from this.

A review I read (okay, fine, it was Pitchfork) on another album of theirs accused them of being cultural tourists, who liked to poke their torsos into movements and scenes and critique them without ever committing themselves to any one scene. That makes sense here, in a lot of ways, though I don’t think I would have made that observation myself. Without prior knowledge of the band or what they have sounded like or went on to sound like, this just sounds like a disc of powerfully nostalgic 70s rock unearthed from the cultural detritus of the reflexive 90s. There is plenty to like here, from quiet, almost Byrne-esque singing on “The Gospel”, to the flirt with psychadelica of “Mohammed” (perhaps my favorite track), or the calamitous, arena-sized fuzz-rock of “Nietzsche”.

My one criticism, that unspeakable track aside, is this album doesn’t have a lot in the way of emotion. It’s dispassionate, and — this may just be the influence of the various reviews I read shining through — disconcertingly detached. I don’t see this one aging well, on a lot of listens, as I’m on my 3rd and am already pretty bored with them.

Day 88: Billie Holiday – Love Songs

I posted a couple of days ago about how continuously I find myself realizing how very, very much I don’t know about music. And not just esoteric, obscure things, but like, Music 101. For instance, I’ve never heard the song “Strange Fruit”. I didn’t know about it until a minute ago, when someone brought it up in relation to my listening for the day. “1999, Time magazine called it the song of the century.” Okay. I’ve never even listened to Billie Holiday. I think I’ve heard “God Bless the Child” in the background of a movie or something somewhere, because I can conjure the faintest memory of it, but that’s about it.

And what am I to say about her now? Someone that momentous, that influential. Tasked with an assignment so broad, I’m all the more inclined to shrug it off. Shall I cobble together some words to throw onto the million that have already been written about Lady Day?

Maybe you haven’t listened to Billie Holiday either. Not everyone sits around to listening to this stuff, I remind myself. If you haven’t, you should. Her voice is a powerful instrument, focused, narrow, and forceful. She sings with a fragility that makes her sympathetic, and a sweetness that makes her lovable. On this disc she runs through a bunch of classic love songs, a couple her own compositions, and her talents are on full display. She was a tragic figure, dead of drugs and liquor in her early 40s, by all accounts ravaged by the things she did to herself. On this disc she portrays devotion, an obsession perhaps requited just enough to fall short of a mania. She giggles melodies, her voice flitting around scales effortlessly, channeling that giddy squeal of a woman desperately smitten.

These are great renditions, backed by strong bands, and great recordings. If you want to fall in love with Billie Holiday, give this a listen.

 

Day 87: The Buggles – The Age of Plastic

I read up on this a bit because I realized aside from the usual “First video on MTV” thing I didn’t know anything else about The Buggles, including but not limited to: what the rest of their music sounded like, what country they were from, how many albums they put out, etc. MTV did not invent the one-hit-wonder, right? Surely this was a band and not some kind of single-function apparatus?

I can only imagine the befuddlement of the citizen of the 1980s who fell in love with “Video Killed The Radio Star” and bought The Plastic Age on the strength of that. Instead of that charming hit (in not my opinion, that song is a pustule on my brain that refuses to stop secreting), people get a nearly-conceptual album of synth-charged progressive pop/rock. In fact, after their first album came out, the two principal members of The Buggles would join Yes for an album. But how does something like that happen? In my opinion, “Video…” does not accurately represent the style of the album proper. “Video” was fun, damn near ebullient, with its gratingly high tones and sweet-on-the-cusp-of-irritating vocal hook, but move past it and you have the exciting, dramatic “Kid Dynamo” and “I Love You (Miss Robot)”. They are both much more straight-faced than their hit-single predecessors “Video…” and “Living in the Plastic Age”, and seem to reject its immediacy. From there the album settles into a slower pace. Even when the tempo ratchets up, as in “Clean, Clean”, the songs seem less intended to delight the proles, and more for introspection and analysis. The songwriting throughout is rich and detailed, and rewards close listening.

It’s clear from a listen that “Video…” and “Clean, Clean” are the two most immediate, accessible songs on the album, aside from maybe the title track. The Buggles originally were a trio of songwriters. Bruce Woolley wrote most of “Video…”, at which point they submitted a demo to Island Records without any other material ready to record. Island signed them immediately, and it combusted. They got to work on writing an actual album, but Woolley didn’t end up with songwriting credits for anything but those two very tracks.

While the band sound is consistent between those two tracks and the rest of the album, it’s clear that the two consistent members of The Buggles had their own ideas about what to do with it. Woolley gave the album its two hits, freeing them to write a very self-serious series of meditations on life in a futuristic age. It introduces a whole new undertone to “Video…” to know that rather than being kind of cute and winky, the sentiment of the song was actually probably rather serious. They were clearly a closet prog band. Prog bands are never not serious.