Day 51: Hall & Oates – The Full Discover Package

The best part of this project so far is having my myriad musical prejudices dismantled, as has happened today. The only thing I ever heard of Hall & Oates was “Maneater“, which is a truly awful song. This wasn’t an issue, of course, because until 500 Days of Summer came out I never heard anyone mention Hall & Oates ever. Once it came out, I started hearing about them constantly, and the only logical assumption was that since “Maneater” was such an atrocity, their recent resurgence was some sort of jean-jacketed ironic crypt-digging. I had enough of that in my teens, when I walked around quoting Regis Philbin all the time. I counted myself out.

Well, what the fuck. This best-of (one picked at random from the dozen or so Rhapsody had listed) proves that idea wrong at least 11 times, because there are some devastatingly good songs on here. The realization crept up on me during the first track, “Do What You Want, Be What You Are“, which is pure aural sex, but it dug its nails in with “I Can’t Go For That“, which, holy fuck can I ever not even begin to count the levels of holy fuck. First off was having one of those moments of “Oh, that’s where that Girl Talk sample came from“, followed by feeling that drum machine and bass guitar pinching at tugging at the long-neglected marionette strings that are attached to my dance like a crazy white motherfucker articulation points. I almost broke out dancing at a crowded fucking bus stop. Yes yes yes. Where has this song been for the past almost-two-months of my life? YES.

There were 14 other songs on here. Actually that counted Maneater, so there are really only 13 other songs on here. I have a hard time remembering whether any of them are as good as “I Can’t Go For That”. Seriously, I can barely remember a single other track. I’m scanning through, and listening to the first 30 seconds of each just to refresh my memory, and I’m remembering loving most of them at some point during the day, but “I Can’t Go For That” is such a powerful song that it eclipses pretty much everything else here. Although, “One On One” and “Do What You Want…” both made me want to make out with the least inanimate object in the room every single time I heard them, and are having the same effect now. Anyway, about half of the tracks on here are pretty disposable, I’d say, but 6 of them are unassailable. Guilty pleasure? Fuck that.

Day 22: Elefant – Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid

The early 00s were an exciting time. All the kids who grew up listening to their dads’ Rolling Stones records and their big sisters’ The Smiths records were finally working up the nerve to drop out of grad school and spend their student loan disbursements on old hollow-body guitars and fixer-upper tube amps. Out of nowhere came The Strokes and almost simultaneously a whole slew of The bands (Off the top of my head? The Vines, The Walkmen, The Hives, The Killers, The White Stripes) emerged and defined a new marketable archetype, garage-rock rebirth. Interpol hit around this time and brandished the minor-chord emotional tugs of their adolescent heroes so deftly that it looked easy. Just like that a new iteration of pop was crystallizing right before our eyes, as bright, jean-jacketed kids mined these stores of sorrowful music for as many emotional cues as they could collect. Being young and freshly liberated from the career track and unburdened of the stress of working on their theses, they fixated on the most celebratory element this music had to offer: groove.

On Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid, their debut LP, Elefant is at all times concerned with snake-charming your ass and hips, and they usually succeed. The sequencing on the record eases you into it; “Make Up” introduces the band’s hyperactive rhythm session, and by the time you reach “Bokkie” the heavily-syncopated and often rhythmically rebellious guitars have goaded their drum machine side into the open. The bass guitar gets grungier, the drums get more 4-on-the-floor, and then the chorus hits, and cuts loose pure upbeat-hi-hat-hiss dance rock. This is followed by “Tonight Let’s Dance“, which sounds like something The Killers really liked approximately a year before they released Hot Fuss. After that, the band makes a stylistic detour that fails to excite or impress (“Static On Channel 4”) before settling in for a back half that has more stomp than it knows what to do with, as in the simmer of “Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid“, which stands as evidence that this band’s rhythm section consisted of two certifiable geniuses that could be a boon to a more creative songwriter. This song has one of the best bass riffs I’ve ever heard — the way it yo-yos at the 2:45 mark stands as my favorite ‘moment’ on this album, and one of two that I can recall. That leads me to the problem. Aside from those bits, there’s little here that insinuated itself in my memory.

All throughout, the music is palatable and pleasant, but doesn’t break any new ground. The songs are well-tailored and unobjectionable, but bring no new insight to a formula that was obvious as soon as it appeared, apart from half-heartedly introducing a more effects-based sound to the dance-rock of the time, lacing songs with Tom Morello-esque guitar start-stops and rushing synths. Unfortunately they don’t seem to mean anything; they’re a gussying-up of sorts. Elefant comes across as a band of talented but uninnovative musicians who either deliberately or by subconscious influence settled into what had become a profitable (and most importantly, novel) new genre. Perfectly middle-of-the-road and workmanlike, the result sounds like something focus-grouped for a Target commercial where kids in neon clothing appear to be having exceptional amounts of fun.