Day 24: Charlie Rich – The Most Beautiful Girl – 20 Greatest Hits

For those unfamiliar with an artist, a best-of album can be immensely useful. It can show the progression an artist has taken from their oldest hit to their newest, and give one a sense of the path the artist has taken. Something like that would be perfect for Charlie Rich, an artist who had to try out quite a few styles. After trying to make an impression with some jazz and blues numbers he was writing, he caught the attention of people at  Sun Records who hired him as a writer and gave him a crash course in writing pop, giving him a stack of Jerry Lee Lewis records to study. Years of middling releases and failed hits later, Sun Records was struggling, and he was taken in by Billy Sherrill, architect of Countrypolitan, a budding genre that took strong Country vocals and put it over songs stacked to the rafters with impenetrable layers of strings and smooth female harmonies.

This tutelage handily synergized two factors: that Rich had a voice so damned sweet that it managed to infuse this repugnantly schmaltzy sound with honest-to-goodness soul, and that he was, by this point in his career, as desperate as he’d ever been. He had made sacrifices of integrity before (his frequent re-recording of his material over the course of his life leaving numerous iterations of his songs before his Countrypolitan makeover as evidence). Originally considering himself a Jazz pianist and having very little interest in Country, he had his piano taken away from him and ended up crooning on Vegas stages like a regular Tom Jones, and all the while plunged further into as many bottles as he could get his hands on.

The evolution of his style and the subsequent repurposing of his back catalog can be seen in the different iterations, recorded a decade apart, of “There Won’t Be Anymore”. The 1960s version is raw and bluesy, and lets his piano playing speak clearly as a fundamental voice in the music. The re-done 1970s version is more of a country ballad, with the Nashville sound starting to creep in. Rich’s voice is pushed toward the front even more, and given a hefty honk of reverb. It turns into into less of a brusque, smoky song and tones it down, remixing it into a saccharine ballad. Fortunately, as I said, Rich’s sonorous voice was seemingly made for this style of music, as it rings true enough to salvage the formulaic piece the song had become.

And this brings me to why this particular disc is somewhat of a disaster. Years after even that second version was recorded, once Rich was playing casinos and nightclubs (and was apparently none too happy about it), he ended up re-recording all of his biggest hits in the style he was playing them at the time, singing his soulful standards like they were just that: Standards, songs that he’s been hired to perform. He does little to take his songs and make them his own, and the saddest thing of all is knowing this was probably not his desire. Singing with a wistful distance from his own music, the whole experience flattens out, robbing the listener of much sense of his range.

However, even with this shortcoming, this album remains enjoyable, because when it came down to it, Rich was a terrific singer with a distinctive voice, who had a great ear for songwriting. Songs like “Rollin’ With The Flow” and “Behind Closed Doors” prop up quaint cliches with an ineffable sincerity that, even on this hi-gloss re-recording, rings true. The album stands as a testament to the talents of one of the most misunderstood artists last century, who, despite continuous mishandling by executives who didn’t know what slot to fit his style into, had one of the best voices around and an ear that knew what to do with it.

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.

Day 15: Tony Bennett & k.d. lang – A Wonderful World

I was really determined, coming into this project, to find something to like in every album I got. I didn’t want it to become some kind of Man vs. Music where I try to keep from throwing up as I cram an album into my brain. I have every respect for music, no matter how terrible I might think it is. The fact that people can occupy themselves banding together to create sounds that bring (certain) people joy is just unreal. Absolutely unreal.

But then I get hit with an album like this and just have to try really hard to meter my words.

The album is a collection of Louis Armstrong-inspired tunes, performed by Bennett and lang, doing both duets and solo numbers, produced by T Bone Burnett and backed by some unflappable jazz session musicians that I’ve never heard, none of whom (with one exception) have Wikipedia pages.

Perception and how it varies has always fascinated me. Bennett and lang are both seasoned musicians who have been doing what they love for most of their lives now. Bennett, at least, has been in the business, singing jazz, since most of these tunes were written (I’m gonna be hella reckless and not even fact-check this statement, because I roll dangerous like that). It should be obvious that the two would have approached this project with a complex mixture of delight, nostalgia, and reverence for some legendary standards. The result is a Grammy-winning collection of classics done by a couple of masters just having a good time, clowning around with a producer who sweats gold records, a generous budget, and their pick of backing musicians.

To my ears, the result is something appalling. Bennett lazily croons over some paper-thin soft-jazz arrangements (complete with requisite sound-of-the-whales saxophone solos here and there) that are overproduced to the point of being bereft of humanity, as if someone wrote a computer program to create the most inoffensive music possible. It comes out sounding cavernous, and thanks to some production mastery, as slick as a wet porpoise. The whole thing is full of conflicting ideas. Bennett peppers the tunes with an aw-shucks shtick as he chats casually to k.d. lang (through a $9,000 microphone, no doubt, and coming across as pure smarm) and tremolos his voice just ever so, like a true master in command of the craft of phoning it in.

My mom used to work in a call center when I was a kid, and once got a negative performance review wherein her supervisor said she “sounded like she wasn’t smiling.” My mom was flabbergasted, thinking it an absolute bullshit claim, but no, I think it’s totally valid. You can completely hear how someone is approaching you from the tone of their voice, and on this album Bennett sounds like he is smirking the whole way through. And that is because thanks to k.d., he is getting away with repackaging some standards without bringing anything interesting or innovative to them whatsoever.

I’ve never listened to her before,  and if I have it’s news to me, but this album has sold me on her talent. Her solo tracks on this album are the sole redeeming factor in this day’s listening. On tracks A Kiss to Build a Dream On and That Lucky Old Sun, her voice is powerful and rich, full of soul. On those tracks the band behind her sounds completely different, and maybe she just got the good pick of the tracks, but if Bennett hadn’t been on this album at all I’m pretty sure it would have been much better for it. On the tracks they do as duets, she sounds out of place; her highly emotional voice completely overrides Bennett’s rasp, and often it just sounds like someone left the studio door open and recorded someone chatting in the hallway about which of the interns he wants to fuck.

If I sound bitter, it’s because of the title track. One of my favorite songs, one so dear to my family that my mom has urged me to have it played at her funeral, and it gets thrown into the T Bone Burnett meatgrinder and comes out as a gush of treacly sick. Pure calculation, music as a Starbucks-kiosk-bound product. I hate that this exists and I can’t understand why so many people liked it.