The Motley Fool on Google Video. Notes that selection is still slim and prices are surprisingly high. Also points out that the fastest growing video download site online is YouTube.
Ryan Adams – lloR N KcoR
(Lost Highway)
Part of my 2003 Top Ten list as published by Neumu on Jan 11, 2002
As someone who’s loved Ryan’s rock ‘n’ roll since I saw Whiskeytown make a big rock noise in a tiny alt club back in ’97, I think this is his best solo album yet. Those who cavil about Ryan stealing from U2, The Smiths & (as always) The Replacements are missing the point: those were great riffs in 1986, and they’ll be great riffs in 2020. Those who worry that sensitive boy poet Ryan isn’t here are missing the point: even if the counter-balancing Love is Hell EPs aren’t enough, he’ll be back with your precious Heartbreaker 2.0 soon enough. Until then, the rest of us can dig things like the guitar hook at the end of “1974,” the Bono piss-takes in “So Alive,” “Luminol” & “Burning Photographs” and the sheer melodic power of “Do Miss America,” & “Note to Self: Don’t Die” and “The Drugs Not Working.”
Paul Westerberg – Come Feel Me Tremble
(Vagrant)
Holy Crap! When did Paul Westerberg turn into Robert Pollard? And why didn’t I get the memo? You’d think that there would have at least been an announcement on the Skyway mailing list. You know, something like “Mr. Paul Westerberg would like to announce that he’s going to start taking career cues from Robert Pollard, releasing disc after disc consisting mainly of first-take lo-fi home recordings under his own name and at least one pseudonym. Mr. Pollard is reported to be flattered and will continue to base his stage persona on The Replacements.”
Fountains of Wayne – Welcome Interstate Managers
(S-Curve)
I think that it was Tolstoy who said that all crappy albums are crappy in the same way, but no two great albums are alike. Or start alike, for that matter.
Over a chugging guitar, Welcome Interstate Managers starts like this:
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Liz Phair – Liz Phair
(Capitol)
Dear Liz,
I got a copy of your new album the other day. But it’s weird: when I put it on, it didn’t sound like you at all. It sounded like Michelle Branch or Avril Lavigne or one of those chick singer/songwriters who were all the rage last year. What’s up with that? I was confused. I mean, the reason that you’re one of my all-time favorite singer/songwriters is pretty simple — like, for example, Bob Dylan or Neil Young, you’ve always sounded like you. In the past decade or so, you’ve released four (and I’m counting Girlysound here) incredibly amazing albums, each one featuring well-crafted songs with smartly ramshackle arrangements full of wit, fun, life and, oh yeah, sex.
Loose Fur – Loose Fur
(Drag City)
The alt-world conquering by all things Jeff Tweedy accelerates in 2003. By the time that stupid War in Iraq is over, we’ll all be sick of him. In a roll call that doesn’t even include the Uncle Tupelo reissues, he’s releasing enough music in the early part of this year to make Robert Pollard shake his head in disbelief.
Seriously: there’s the DVD of the film (“I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”), the Minus 5 album (Down With Wilco), the Wilco EP, and probably strangest of all, this Loose Fur album. To my ears, Loose Fur is essentially a one-off jam session between Tweedy, multi-everything Jim O’Rourke and drummer Glenn Kotche. And like all jam sessions, it alternates moments of bullshit with moments of brilliance — sometimes within the same song!
The actual session predates Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but it’s certainly related. The opening track, “Laminated Cat,” is known to fans of the YHF demos as “Not for the Season,” and its dual-guitar build sets the pace for the rest of the record: long, steady-grooved songs that often build into something else. You can almost hear Tweedy opening his mind to the next phase in his music — much of the feel on Loose Fur isn’t replicated as much on YHF as on the live shows that followed it.
So “Elegant Transaction” starts out a bit like Nick Drake but mutates into a cross between a lost Forever Changes outtake: that is, if Arthur Lee had conceived it as a bluegrass album. “So Long” starts with the chattering guitar that infiltrated “I’m the Man Who Loves You,” and after Kotche stops randomly hitting his cymbals, it evolves into almost a slow, sad shuffle with an endless “Da da da da” chorus.
They kinda messed up with “You Were Wrong:” it’s an actual song, and wouldn’t be out of place on YHF, except for the fact that it’s not all that great.
Finally, there’s the gorgeous “Chinese Apple,” another slow starter that glides on a bed of acoustic guitars for awhile until they discover another repeating riff lurking that they then mount and ride home.
Overall, Loose Fur is kinda interesting, especially as a historical document, but it’s not much more than that. It’s for fans only, and nothing wrong with that. I’m one, of course, but I’m guessing that I’m speaking for more than one fan when I say: yeah, cool, but when’s the next full-length Wilco album coming out?
. . .
As published on Neumu, February 20, 2003
The Soft Boys – Nextdoorland
(Matador)
Once upon a time — back when “punk” was beginning to add modifiers like “post” and “hardcore” — there was a band called the Soft Boys. And the Soft Boys did something that very few bands ever do: they released a perfect album. The album was called Underwater Moonlight, and from the first guitar sting of “I Wanna Destroy You” to the final harmonies of the title track, it was full of fabulous melodies, sideways riffs and slyly perverse lyrics. It’s one of the pinnacles of guitar rock, and would have sounded equally great in the mid-’60s or the mid-’90s. But it was hardly noticed at the time, and after it came out in 1980, the Soft Boys broke up.
Bob Dylan – Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue
(Sony)
One of the reasons, I think, that Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder period is so loved by Dylanphiles is that it’s kind of absurd. This isn’t meant as an insult — but the idea of a traveling gypsy show rumbling around the Northeast is one of the few bits of sustained public whimsy that Dylan’s put forth in his long career. Considering that they fall in between the not-so-fun failing of his marriage and the really-not-so-fun Christian period, the general good-naturedness of the shows have taken on a mythic quality. Among Dylan bootfans, these shows are some of the most prized. So after a quarter of a century, we’ve finally been obliged with an official release, Vol. 5 in the Bootleg Series.
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Gomez – In Our Gun
(Virgin)
At their best, which they are often here, they ride their endlessly elastic, endlessly hypnotic and endlessly weird groove straight towards bliss. I’m not sure what “I’ve been thinkin one thing but doing something else in a daze, yeah” means, but I spent most of the first part of this year singing it.
. . .
Part of my 2002 Top Ten list as published by Neumu on Jan 17, 2003
Foo Fighters – One by One
(RCA)
Their continued success — both artistically and commercially — is one of the most bittersweet stories in rock and roll. They’ve done some fantastic stuff, but … sigh. And on their last album, I thought it finally caught up to them: for the first time, nothing special. But Dave Grohl’s recommittment to rawk, as evidenced by his works with Queens of the Stone Age and (especially) Tenacious D, has been good for his heart. So he sticks it out on the album cover as he wears it on his sleeve — you can hear it in every vocal and every riff. Bittersweet still, yeah, but on this record, he’s earned the right to call himself a “new day rising” in what might be his best song ever, “Times Like These.”
. . .
Part of my 2002 Top Ten list as published by Neumu on Jan 17, 2003