Music Wonkery

Thor’s latest album is Devastation of Musculation (Smog Veil, 2006), and insofar as it’s accurate to say that Thor is growing as a musician (within the confines of traditional metal, anyway), he is. His last album, 2005’s Thor Against The World, drew mainly on the glammy sounds of KISS, Alice Cooper and Sweet. It was a damn good album, but there were times when the metallic content dropped lower than might optimally have been desired. It seemed that, for all his talk of epic space-battles and Norse gods, Thor was going soft here and there.

Not so on Devastation of Musculation. The new album is harder, faster, and darker than its predecessor, and is evidence that, after decades of half-jokey and often-forgettable entertainment, Thor is figuring out how to do it right (albeit without sacrificing what makes Thor, Thor). The very first track, “Lords of Steel,” stomps along in a Black Sabbath mode and features some very nice extended guitar wailing the likes of which have rarely been sighted since acid-washed jeans went out of style. Maybe it’s not the greatest thing ever put on tape, but it’s a damned entertaining invitation to bang your head. The rest of the album continues in a similar British Heavy Metal vein, galloping along with an array of galloping Maiden/Priest grooves, while Thor grunts about the Devastation of Musculation, The Queen of The Damned, Odin’s Son, and Lies of Eternity in a voice that, for what it lacks in technical accomplishment, more than makes up for in personality and commitment to the moment.

After all, isn’t that what metal is about? If you strip the music away from, say, a Slayer album, you’re left with what amount to a bunch of supremely silly words. There’s nothing inherently scary about

Trapped in purgatory
A lifeless object, alive
Awaiting reprisal
Death will be their acquisition
The sky is turning red
Return to power draws near
Fall into me, the sky’s crimson tears
Abolish the rules made of stone

I mean, come on! Every high school has some trenchcoated dork who writes doggerel like this in his notebook and thinks he’s being deep! And yet, throw in some manic drumming and heavily distorted guitars and the very same silliness that would get a dark and serious high-school poet laughed at, shunned, and these days examined by a team of psychologists, police investigators and anti-terror “experts,” somehow transmogrifies into a pounding, sinister all-time classic of thrash metal.

By the same token, lyrics like the following from Thor’s “Queen of the Damned”...

The deadliest of hungers
She feasts on human blood
The rapid sound of thunder
Bringing evil from above
The vampires all surround her
For the final feast
But she still holds the power
Until a new queen is released

... kind of suck out of context. But as hundreds of overly serious college theses and misguided poetry seminars have inadvertently proven, rock lyrics are not meant to exist apart from the music they are sung to. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, right? Write “Louie, Louie, hey, hey, wa ne ga go” on a page, and you’ve got nothing. But put it over that classic riff, and you’ve got magic, son. In the same way, once Thor puts his lyrics over thrashing guitars, a double-bass-drum attack, and presents them in his own powerful and guttural voice, those same stanzas become exactly what they should be: the audio equivalent of the best B-grade horror movie ever made (which, by the way, is Evil Dead II. No debate allowed.)

Oh, in case you’re wondering, the phrase “Devastation of Musculation” refers to two things: the poorly defined retribution that awaits the foes of THOR as he rides the universe on his steed; and a story that Thor heard about a guy who pumped up his biceps so far with steroids, oil in injections, and heavy reps that his arm actually exploded. According to Thor himself,

“Everyone is under pressure to achieve the impossible every day. People risk their lives to be more beautiful, more handsome, more skinny, more muscular and faster, stronger, richer, and deadlier. Trying to make sense out of these desperate measures is what this new album is about. It is easily the darkest and most powerful album I’ve ever written.”

Coming from a guy who used to pose in poodle hair and tiger-stripe bikini briefs, this kind of statement might be easily dismissed. But, even considering that metal at its finest needs to stay stupid in order to stay metal, there’s something to this. Thor seemed to wear a smirk through half the songs on Thor Against The World. On Devastation, there’s not much smirking. There’s more skulls, smoking corpses, demons, and smoky battlefields. And if the music doesn’t necessarily stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Number of the Beast, Reign In Blood, or British Steel, it’s still the best B-Movie Metal you’re gonna find.

If you’re looking for subtlety, I suggest you pick up Tool’s excellent latest album. But if you’re looking for well-done classic metal sung by a former bodybuilder who had the sense to stay out of politics, you’re in good shape with Devastation of Musculation. Somehow, now, in his third decade of recording stone-obvious muscle rock for a parade of indie labels, Thor seems to be figuring out how to balance camp and carnage. By any standard, Devastation of Musculation ain’t half bad, and as long as you take it for what it is - the aural equivalent of movies like Escape from New York and, yes, the animated classic Heavy Metal, you can do much worse than to heed the mighty word of THOR.

[Crossposted at blogcritics.org]

There’s a good reason why. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of George Jones crooning his towering hits “A Good Year For The Roses” and “He Stopped Loving Her Today” over the staticky radio my father kept on the workbench in the garage right above the ratchet set. The first of these two was probably one of the first songs I ever heard in my life, and the second was, when I was six, one my very first favorite songs not produced by Disney. (Just to prove that I had unimpeachably excellent taste in music even at that tender age (oh, yeah), two other favorite songs from my kindergarten years were “Cloudy and Cool” by Chet Atkins and “There Ain’t No Good Chain Gang” by Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard) The keening string sections and Jones’ over-the-top vocals made a big impression on my young mind and had two long-term effects. Aside from leaving me with an unfortunate and abiding affection for the schlockier output of 70’s-era Nashville, those garage days also made me a George Jones fan for life.

Since that time, I have gone through phase after phase, getting way into Pink Floyd, hair metal, Wax Trax industrial, punk, ‘grunge’, Neil Young, Zappa, Elvis, Tom Waits, Charles Mingus, and so on and so on world without end amen. And yet, time after time I return to the music of my early childhood: I always return to rockabilly, honky-tonk, and especially the music of Johnny Cash and George Jones.

What is it about George Jones that’s so alluring? Honestly, seen from a distance he’s almost comical. If any fan of his ever wants an unpleasant shock, I recommend playing one of Jones’ more purple performance (say, “The Grand Tour” or “He Stopped Loving Her Today") back to back with one of Jim Nabors’ bigger slices of schmaltz, such as “The Impossible Dream” or “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Although the two men approach a song differently, there are similarities: each is gifted with an absurdly resonant voice that they use to maximum effect, and they share a knack for working the hell out of a song. But most importantly, the two have done their very best work when trying their damndest to get into self-parody’s pants.

In a deeply perceptive essay collected in his book Grown Up All Wrong, the venerable Robert Christgau (longtime music critic for New York’s Village Voice) captures what, aside from his voice, makes George Jones so compelling. Although his technical prowess and the unique timbre of his voice (seeming to emanate not from the head or chest, but from a constant sorrow choking his throat into a sob) would be enough, that’s not all there is. It’s the strange feeling that there’s something off about the incredibly harrowing performances he turns out at the drop of a hat.

Christgau notes, as many have noted before, that Jones is a famously shallow character. Those close-set eyes don’t seem to hide stunning depths of emotion that he can call on to fuel his histrionic ballads; instead, Jones’ most intense performances always seem to be just that, astounding performances, feats of technique and talent that can be turned on and off like a spigot. Put a song in front of him, and no matter whether it’s a goofy jingle or a musical setting of a Donald Hall poem, he’ll turn out a performance that sounds like it comes straight from the heart.

In short, the man seems to lack introspection. While it’s tempting to hunt in his famously dissipated biography (for example, his tumultuous marriage to Tammy Wynette, or the time he was kidnapped by some business associates and put in a room with a pile of cocaine until he was high enough to agree to their wishes) for clues to the wrenching pain he can communicate in song, those clues seem to be false leads. Instead, we just need to take George Jones at face value: if the song makes you sad, why bother asking whether that comes from the singer or from you?

What the appeal of George Jones all comes down to, at the end of the day, is those immodestly emotive performances delivered in that voice, that astonishing voice, deep and full and rich and sounding as though every syllable is wrenched from the throat of a man caught between desperate prayers and miserable sorrow.

George Jones started his singing career in the saloons and honky tonks of East Texas as a teenager, and after a stint in the Marines (partly to escape the aftermath of his first doomed marriage), he signed with the local Beaumont, Texas label Starday.

At first, there was little hint of the full depth of Jones’ talent. His first few recorded sides were masterful impressions of other singers - Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams, and Roy Acuff among them - but nothing that sounded like George Jones. Still, between 1954 and 1960, Jones started to build a pretty good career as a hardcore honky-tonker, turning out worthy slices of rockabilly that contained few hints of the full measure of his talent.

But around 1961, Jones turned a corner. Under the guidance of producer “Pappy” Daily (also his former label head and producer at Starday), Jones released three crucial singles - “The Window Up Above,” “Tender Years,” and “She Thinks I Still Care.” In them, he made two great breakthroughs. The first was musical. By slowing the music down from a gallop, and making some more pop-oriented choices in the instrumentation, Daily gave Jones’ voice more room to play with the melody. The results were his first fully realized vocal performances, and although his voice hadn’t yet deepened into what it would become, there were finally glimmers of his fabled tone.

The second innovation was the material. Jones has always thrived on love songs, especially the hard parts of live, but these songs were more plaintive and descriptive than some of his other singles had been. “The Window Up Above” was about a man watching his woman cut his heart out with another man, “Tender Years” was a noble if surely vain pledge to wait for a woman who was still sowing her oats, and “She Thinks I Still Care” was a masterful song full of (naturally) empty denials that he still carried a torch for the woman who’d left him.

It’s at the end of “She Thinks I Still Care” that the first big moment happens, at least to my ears. After a string of protestations, “just because I asked a friend about her,” “just because I saw her out somewhere,” Jones delivers the last line of the song like he had never sung anything previously: “just because I saw her and went to pieces, she thinks I still care.” On the word “pieces,” his voice breaks, falls down an arpeggio, and melts into nothing, all without sounding forced, silly, or out of place. Like the sun breaking through the clouds, it’s the first time we really hear Jones learning what he does best.

After this point, Jones began a two-decade run of wild success, racking up dozens of top-ten hits, touring widely, and continuing to refine his style. He released some very successful duets with Melba Montgomery (including the rough but ready “We Must Have Been Out Of Our Minds"), and cut album after album after album for Musicor Records. The Musicor years saw a number of hits, including “A Good Year For The Roses” and “Walk Through This World With Me,” two of his very best ballads, and a boatload of the novelty songs that have been Jones’ stock in trade. The best of these, like “The Race Is On” and the fantastic moonshinin’ song “White Lightning,” rank among his best stuff; the others tend to be completely forgettable.

But at the same time, Jones was beginning a long, slow death-spiral into drink and drugs that soon began to overtake his career. Many of the albums he cut in this period were second-rate affairs, compiled from sessions tossed of with whatever material was at hand when he sobered up enough to realize he was low on money or when his management decided to flood the market further.

By the late 1960s, this had taken its toll. Jones had earned a reputation for missing live dates (and the nickname “No-Show Jones") and decided to make a change of venue by moving to Nashville. There he formed two of the most important relationships he’d ever make: he met his third wife, country singer Tammy Wynette, and his long-time producer, amanuensis, and creative better half, Billy Sherrill.

With Wynette, Jones began to record a number of very successful duets that also seemed to parallel the arc of their relationship, such as “Take Me” and “The Ceremony.” Unfortunately, after a few years of whiskey, cocaine, and hijinks with handguns and car wrecks, Jones and Wynette were singing “We Loved It Away,” and Wynette was writing for George a solo hit called “These Days I Barely Get By.” As the drugs took deeper hold of him, Jones entered a two-decade career twilight, punctuated by moments of genius and moments of utter ruin.

The greatest of the strokes of genius was 1980’s LP, I Am What I Am. Billy Sherrill was an in-demand Nashville producer, key inventor of the “countrypolitan” sound and devotee of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. Consequently, he sought to stuff every crevice of every track he produced with a panoply of strings, steel guitars, keyboards, choirs, and drums saturated with acres of reverb and echo. Although had Jones initially balked at Sherrill’s sound and his autocratic way of running sessions, by 1980 their working relationship had become deep and strong.

It was Jones’ trust of Sherrill that led him to cut for I Am What I Am a song he wasn’t too sure about, an absurdly maudlin, mawkish, pathetic, bathetic, over-the-top ballad called “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” It was the story of a man who pledged eternal love to a woman who refused to love him back, until he finally died of his broken heart. On paper, it seemed to be much the same as dozens of other songs Jones had cut over the last quarter-century, only twice as sentimental. And yet somehow, over months of drunken missed takes and coked-out false starts, “He Stopped Loving Her Today” emerged as the probably the greatest performance of Jones’ career, and one of the finest vocal performances ever committed to tape.

(An aside. What is it about geniuses with drug problems? The mental image of George Jones peeling himself off a sticky studio couch with a crushing hangover and stepping up to the microphone to unfurl a searing and perfect vocal take reminds me of the legendary session that bassist James Jamerson played for Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On. Jamerson reputedly came up with the perfect and eternal bass line of the title song in one heroic take from the floor of the studio, lying flat on his back because he was too high to get up. What is it about geniuses with drug problems?)

Since the high water mark of his “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” his last #1 single, Jones has aged into a gray eminence of country music, releasing decent-to-good albums that sell okay and are mostly totally ignored by the country establishment. His voice has somehow only deepened and become richer with age, even as Jones gets well into his seventies. He has also become one of the great touchstones of country music, a wellspring from which scores of younger musicians have drawn inspiration. And yet, Nashville treats him like a leper. In one telling incident from 1999, the Country Music Association refused to let Jones sing all the verses of his latest hit, the CMA-nominated “Choices,” at the Country Music Awards, citing time constraints. Jones chose to boycott the show instead, and in a surprise move, singer Alan Jackson sang a verse or two of “Choices” at the end of his own CMA performance, in a show of solidarity with one of his idols.

In the same year, No-Show Jones almost lived up to the promise of his other nickname, The Possum. Newly sober yet somehow hammered on vodka, Jones wrapped his car around a Tennessee underpass and very nearly died. Although he had been through countless close shaves and near-death experiences in his career, this one seemed to bring it home to him that it was finally time to straighten up and fly right. With each passing year, it seems more and more likely that The Possum will die peacefully in his sleep rather than as a pink smear decorating a quarter mile of lonesome highway.

Any serious fan of American music really needs to have some George Jones in his collection. But knowing just what to buy can be rough. Jones has recorded dozens of LPs in his half-century career, and the majority are wildly uneven affairs that aren’t really for novices. On the other hand, the greatest hits collections also tend to have drawbacks: they are poorly selected and cheaply licensed, confined to one era or one label’s output, or too broad and expensive for beginners.

The new Epic/Sony Legacy collection The Essential George Jones nearly overcomes all these pitfalls. Like the rest of Sony’s Essentials series (chronicling artists like Johnny Cash, Michael Jackson, Herbie Hancock, and Dolly Parton), it does a pretty good job of introducing novices to the high points of Jones’ career. But at the same time, there are some glaring omissions that keep it from being the one-stop bargain it wants to be.

For this to be the perfect Jones best-of, there are some requirements that must be met. One of them is fidelity. The people who put together The Essential George Jones had the good sense and grace to kick things off with early songs that weren’t big hits, like the non-charting half-berserk rockabilly of “No Money In This Deal,” and the Hank Williams clone, “Why Baby Why.” Although these songs didn’t get a lot of national play, they are crucial to a fair treatment of Jones’ career.

But if you’ve only got two discs to work with, a fair view of Jones career means a nearly unbroken string of slow weepers and mid-tempo duets about love gone bad, going bad, or doomed to go bad someday soon. And indeed, of Essential‘s forty tracks, about thirty are of this ilk, and it’s worth it. On slow songs, Jones’ rich tone and unique way of pronouncing lyrics so that the vowels come out rounded and full are presented to their best advantage, and even though the entire second disc is twenty slow ballads right in a row, Jones’ superhuman talents make sure that every song stands on its own as a fully realized little story.

However, there are a couple areas where Essential falls down. Most importantly, it appears that the compilers weren’t able to secure the rights to any of Jones’ sides recorded for the Musicor label. Although that era of his career, covering about 1965-1971, was one of his most uneven, it’s also an era that contains several stone classics.  Any truly essential collection absolutely must include “A Good Year For The Roses” and “Walk Through This World With Me,” to name my two favorites But since these songs aren’t here - and believe me, I’m not just picking nits - this collection isn’t the only George Jones you’ll ever need.

The collection also includes only three songs from the nearly twenty albums Jones has recorded since 1986. In fairness, I understand the need to bias a collection of this kind toward the hits (and indeed, the collection is thick with number-one hits), but in my opinion three songs over twenty years is hardly a fair representation of Jones’ often respectable output in that time.

The Essential George Jones is pretty good, and almost even good enough. But since it skips right over his Musicor years (not to mention most of the last twenty years), it falls a little short in being the only Possum you’ll ever need.

But I’m here to talk about More Songs About Buildings And Food, Talking Heads’ second album, originally released in 1978. The name of the album is a bit of joke on the dreaded “sophomore slump,” but it’s not an advertisement of the contents. Well, “The Big Country” actually is a song about buildings and food, but only obliquely, so I will pretend it doesn’t count. Instead, Talking Heads’ second album sees them moving away from the very stark and spiky arrangements they used on their debut, and starting to incorporate some of the soul and overtly funky gestures that would underpin their later, more experimental work. Although all the songs on Buildings and Food were written by David Byrne, producer Brian Eno (in his first of many collaborations with the group) moved Chris Franz’ drums and Tina Weymouth’s bass to the front of the mix. As later proven on their own work as the Tom Tom Club, Franz and Weymouth had a greater sense of fun and of uncerebral playfulness than Byrne. These tendencies were already on display, and their earnestness helps offest the nerdy coolness of David Byrne’s persona.

One thing that sets More Songs About Buildings And Food apart from the Talking Heads albums that came after is that it almost sounds unfinished. That’s not to say the songs are half-baked (they aren’t) or the production job has glaring holes in it (it doesn’t), but rather that you can hear the band, especially Byrne, reaching for something new all the time. The band’s best album, for my money, is the double live The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads, which includes live performances of some of the material from Buildings and Food. Before I gave the latter album a very close listen, I thought that all of David Byrne’s little experiments on the live record - stretching out or smothering his vowels, spastically repeating phrases or chop|ping them in|to harsh syl|la|bles - were a function of his being on stage and looking for a way to do something new with a lyric he’s sung a thousand times before. But this is not so - the same kinds of bizarre little tics festoon the original album versions, and the music that underlies them sounds just as spontaneous as it does on stage.

Although Eno had begun to deepen the band’s sound with sneaky production tricks, Buildings And Food still sounds like it was recorded live in the studio. This is very different from his later contributions to the band’s sound, which would result in complex audio collages that sounded frankly (and gloriously) studio-generated, and that the band would have to work hard to approximate on stage. But for the time being, Eno decorated songs like “Stay Hungry,” “I’m Not In Love” and “The Girls Want To Be With The Girls” with judicious and subtle intrusions that don’t obscure the band’s odd hybrid of postpunk and rigid funk. In fact, Eno’s contributions are so subtle as to be practically stealthy, only revealing their complexity under close scrutiny.

Just listen to “Found A Job,” for example. Although it sounds at first blush like a simple scritchy and nervous four-piece arrangement with a very dry (echoless) sound, the choruses are loaded with panned guitars and background keyboard flourishes, and David Byrne’s vocals suddenly sound like they’re coming from a much bigger room. While perhaps not as thrilling as the adventures of later albums, the excellent songwriting and production on Buildings and Food rewards repeated (even… obsessive...) listening, with headphones.

What really elevate Buildings And Food above merely being a step forward from their debut (titled ‘77) are the last two songs, the famous cover of Al Green’s “Take Me To The River” and the airy narrative song “The Big Country”. The former was the first time on album that Talking Heads really relaxed into the deep grooves that Franz, Weymouth, and keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison were capable of creating. The bubbling bass line and open textures seemed especially novel after nine straight songs full of twitchy energy, and were a harbinger of the band’s explorations in the years to come. On the other hand, “The Big Country” featured possibly David Byrne’s most lucid and straightforward lyric yet, presaging the narrative dexterity he would bring to songs on their next album, Fear of Music, such as “Heaven” and “Life During Wartime.” Underpinned by an incongruous-sounding slide guitar, Byrne’s narrator muses from an airplane about the cities and buildings and fields he sees below, muses on the miracles of production and transportation that tie them all together, and then suddenly dissolves in a fit of what - ennui? - boredom? - self-loathing? Whatever the intent, the lyric is more finely drawn and evocative than anything Byrne had yet done.

For the reissue, Rhino have appended alternate versions of songs - alternate takes of “The Big Country” and “I’m Not In Love,” a countryish version of “Thank You For Sending Me An Angel,” and a 1977 version of “Stay Hungry” that closely recalls the feel, if not exactly the sound, of the outstanding live version on The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads. None of these additions are particularly essential, but they are interesting for those who are curious about the band’s self-conscious evolutionary goals.

What are valuable, though, are the DVD extras. (For the record, that is the first time in history I’ve had occasion to write the foregoing sentence.) Two live videos, of “Found A Job” from 1978 and “Warning Sign” from 1979, do a great service for those of us who were born too late to see the band in their heyday. Whereas Jonathan Demme’s film Stop Making Sense, which chronicled Talking Heads’ 1984 tour, presented a band who seemed relaxed and comfortable with a large stage, a gigantic audience, and the funky presence of the great Bernie Worrell on keyboards, the earlier footage shows a much younger, hungrier group far more intent on getting across. That’s not to say that the band had become complacent by 1984, but rather that by then they had come to expect everything would go as planned.

The difference can be most easily seen by watching bassist Tina Weymouth. In the 1978 clip, filmed in New York, she is a tiny ball of energy, almost being played by her bass rather than the other way around. She rocks back and forth and stares intently at Jerry and David as she absolutely rips into the acrobatic bass line of “Found A Job.” (The bass, too, is high up in the mix on this video, and should forever put to bed the calumny that Tina Weymouth could not play her instrument.) By 1984, she’s barefoot and smiling, relaxed and happy as she practically surfs on the mile-deep, funky grooves she lays down. It’s not a difference of competence; it’s a difference of comfort, and it’s a bit of a revelation to actually see the how the band worked together in their early days before MTV, world music, and the acrimony that would break them apart.

As befits a crew of ex-art students, the “photo extras” section of the DVD is well put together too. The mishmash of backstage candid shots and album cover treatments from the USA and Japan is okay enough, but the Western Union telegram welcoming the Heads to San Francisco and concluding “WELCOME TO SAN FRANCISCO WE LIKE YOUR RECORDS BREAK A HEAD -THE RESIDENTS” is just… super cool. Cool also are the numerous lyric sheets in various stages of completion, which probably (though it’s hard to tell) give a glimpse into the recondite depths of the creative mind of David Byrne. Also included is the very curious and undated “Self Deconstruction of a Song,” an essay about “The Big Country.” It begins...

The first thing we hear is a bottleneck/slide guitar. It brings to mind a sound which was originally used in country and western music to mimic violins. It is not meant to mimic violins here but to mimic country and western music. This, along with the initial major third chord sequence, brings to mind a basic, earthy down-home feeling which implies a primitivism and lack of sophistication. (At the same time, in the context of Talking Heads, it implies an intentional primitivism and an awareness of this nievete [sic])

Finally, the 5.1 Surround Sound remix on the DVD side is absolutely spectacular. Even on my non-surround, ten year old stereo components, I heard details in the production I’d never even suspected were there before. In fact, the full impact of Brian Eno’s deft hand on the band’s sound isn’t fully appreciated until you’ve heard all the tiny, tiny little complicated noises he packed into songs that on older CD releases sounded fairly straightforward. This new tech-mology scares and confuses me, but I think I like it!

Talking Heads are easy to take for granted. Their songs are perhaps on the radio more now than when they were together. The band are practically iconic, and their videos especially are practically a capsule cultural history of the mid-1980s. But every one of the band’s albums contain deeper pleasures than the radio hits we all know. Rhino have long been one of the best reissue labels in the world, even after their acquisition by Warner Brothers, and if the other seven Talking Heads albums have been presented as well as More Songs About Buildings And Food they have a lot to be proud of. Now, if Rhino would only have had the decency to release the album as two discs, a DVD and a blue-book compliant CD (as was evidently done for the European release) instead of the clumsy gimmick of a DualDisc, this package would have been perfect.

This post also appears at blogcritics.org

Well, I think I’ve figured it out: it’s a trick. Smoke and mirrors. The closer you look, the more it melts away and the more the baby unicorn behind the curtain looks like a badly malformed cow fetus floating in formaldehyde. But just as people never tire of Penn & Teller, David Copperfield, and the guys running the three card monte game outside the bus depot, I can’t ever get tired of Cheap Trick. Take my money! This is fun!!

As part of their ongoing effort to monetize every niche and corner of their prodigious back catalog (it’s called churn), Sony/Legacy have finally taken it upon themselves to reissue a number of Cheap Trick’s mid-period albums in slick new remastered and expanded packages. The pick of these is probably 1979’s Dream Police, which for my money is probably the last Cheap Trick album I’d urge anyone to run and by. Wait. That didn’t come out right. It’s not that Dream Police is a bad album, not that. What I mean is, it’s the last solid album they made, and after 1980 the band’s output became decidedly… let’s be generous; uneven.

The reissue of Dream Police is a definite improvement over previous CD versions available in the USA. The new mastering job puts every instrument in its place, from the steely multioctave thronk of Tom Petersson’s 12-string bass to the keening strings that overlay the title track. The bonus tracks too add value: live versions of “The House is Rockin’ (With Domestic Problems)”, “Way of the World”, and “I Know What I Want” revisit the band’s classic hard-hitting Live At Budokan sound, and a stringless version of “Dream Police” reveals just what a slight creation that song is.

And I think that’s the key to Cheap Trick. When Bob Dylan writes a song, he builds you a 12-cylinder Duesenberg - a juggernaut clad in steel and burlwood that purrs and roars and can top 200 miles per hour. When Cheap Trick write a song, it has two pedals and a little propeller on top, and if you pump your legs fast enough and pray, you might get airborne and not die. Songs like that rely completely on the strength of the personalities behind them, and dedication to minimalism is Cheap Trick’s greatest strength. No matter how you slice it, “Dream Police” is a ludicrous song, practically sub-Spinal Tap in its lyrical complexities and burdened with a hook that labors a little more than it should. But it all works in spite of that. Minimalism means not burdening songs down with more than they can carry, and there is an underappreciated art to that. I defy you to listen to “Dream Police” all the way through and not be gripped with an inescapable urge to keen out “Police, Police!” with Robin Zander during the rideout chorus. The band have enough charisma, enough goofy-pretty conviction, that the primary colors they work with end up seeming as subtle in their way as Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

The album itself is enough of a hooky ride to make it worth having, with the unsubtle thrills of the grinding “Gonna Raise Hell” (about raising hell), the barely restrained throbbing of “Need Your Love” (about needing love), and the Beatles-meet- Alice-Cooper rocker “I’ll Be With You Tonight” (which is about how tonight he’s gonna be with her, tonight). But the bonus tracks do act as welcome reminders of the greatness that was Cheap Trick on stage, and the track-by-track commentary notes by the band in the liner notes are more informative than most. While I will probably wait a lifetime to read liner notes as brutally honest as the ones Elvis Costello wrote for the Rykodisc reissue of Goodbye Cruel World, which began “Congratulations! You’ve just purchased our worst album,” it is still fun to read Bun E. Carlos’ thoughts on Cheap Trick’s songwriting, or to discover that the band in general agree that the album would have been better if they’d have laid off touring so much during recording.

It is also a surprise to realize that the band started recording Dream Police before they hit it big. If you listen to the albums in order of release, it definitely seems like Cheap Trick hit their stride with 1977’s In Color and 1978’s Heaven Tonight. After that came their commercial breakthrough with the platinum smash of Live at Budokan and then their first dealing-with-success album, Dream Police, which seems a little forced; the ideas just a little thinner, the songs not quite as transcendent.

But that chronology is wrong. Cheap Trick recorded started recording Dream Police before they toured Japan. They surely weren’t feeling the pressure of following up a smash hit at the time. Therefore if Dream Police is cheesier and kitschier than their four prior albums, it because the band were rushing to put out a followup; it’s an intrinsic part of Cheap Trick’s nature, part of what made them who they were. No, their first true post-success album was 1980’s fairly wretched George Martin Production, All Shook Up. And although they would continue to produce albums of varying quality, becoming ever more professional as they went, it’s pretty clear that sky-high success was too big a thing for the little band from Rockford, Illinois. (The runaway success of “The Flame” notwithstanding; all four members of the band have expressed regret, saying they hate the song. (Of course, it’s easy to say that when you’re sitting on a big pile of money.))

Not that Cheap Trick ever really seemed like they needed success. Their act was never arena-sized. If you see Cheap Trick today, you will get what you always got; a pudgy accountant playing drums like Gene Krupa, a skinny weirdo in tapered trousers with a five-necked guitar, a bass player who covers three octaves at once, and a big-voiced singer delivering giant choruses. Cheap Trick are a quintessential bar band, one who lucked into grabbing the brass ring and nearly let it undermine them. Dream Police is a slight but rewarding artifact of late-70’s power pop. What more do you want?

(This post also appears at blogcritics.org)

Ali Farka Touré himself is a farmer and local (what… chief? mayor? paterfamilias?), who tends to his village first and his music second. In 1995, he reputedly begged off a US tour claiming that he could not leave his home because if he did, he risked losing his land in an armed skirmish. When in 1998, one of his US labels, Hannibal, wanted to record a new record with him Touré insisted the producers bring a mobile recording rig to his compound at Niafunké. The stunning resulting album, aptly titled Niafunké, was recorded whenever farm chores did not press and whenever the mood struck to pick up his guitar.

In 2000, Touré decided to come to the USA for one last tour before devoting all his time to a village irrigation project. I was lucky enough to see his New York date, August 8, 2000, and I can’t ever forget it. A big man in person, on stage he looked ten feet tall, wielding his electric guitar like it was a toy and wrenching from it some of the most searing melodies I have ever heard. He was playful, switching between guitar and njerka (a small one-stringed fiddle) and stopping to explain to the New York audience what he was singing about in the eleven languages he writes in. About halfway through the show, he struck on the game of lifting his leg way up in the air and bringing it down onto the stage with a huge *boom*. His band worked the *boom* into the deep percolating groove they had built, and soon Touré was *boom*ing away, each one accented by a chord from his guitar that sounded like trees breaking in the wind. The entire night was unforgettable and absolutely one of a kind. Ali Farka Touré is often compared to John Lee Hooker, whose elemental blues sound seemed to emanate from some half-remembered Mali of the mind, but on that night Ali Farka Touré sounded like Timbuktu.

Before the show, I shared a cab with record producer and Hannibal label owner Joe Boyd, who asked me about African music and what I thought about it. I mentioned Ali Farka Touré, Johnny Clegg, Fela Kuti and a few others before bringing up Angelique Kidjo, who had just released her pop-inflected album Oremi the previous year. Boyd looked at me quizzically and said, “you like that? That speaks to you?” I admitted that it didn’t really, it just sounded nice, and he told me that someday, smart kid that I was, I would figure it out, I would get it.

Later that night, I got it.

I should also mention that on that same night, I met Mr. Touré briefly in his dressing room, where he took my stammered compliments with leonine reserve (I speak no French; he gave no indication whether English was among his many tongues). Up close, he seemed positively regal. It was not just that was a large man, but he radiated a genial calmness, a sense of presence, that made it seem that he was simply… in charge. When I saw him on stage seemingly shooting lightning from his fingertips or dancing with his one-string gourd fiddle, It was then that I got it. The god dances and we all must watch. That night was the best concert I have ever seen, or hope to see; it literally changed my life. And now, he’s gone. And if his passing matters this much to me, who orbited him once for about forty-five seconds, in Mali it will surely be met with public fetes and much sorrow.

If you have not yet begun your collection of Ali Farka Touré recordings, I would recommend starting with Talking Timbuktu, which is in some ways his most accessible album. Made with Ry Cooder, it is a little less skeletal (and a little more Western) than much of Touré’s other work, and is a good point of entry to his music and to Malian music in general. After that, you can take your pick of any one of a number of his records: I am partial to Niafunké and The Source, though many people swear by his self-titled debut on Mango, or Radio Mali, a collection of radio broadcast recordings. You should also check out his last album, 2005 Grammy winner for Best World Music Album, In The Heart of the Moon, which he recorded with Kora master Toumani Diabate. In something of a departure from his other albums, Touré gently winds circular rhythmic guitar lines around and underneath the ethereal waterfall plinking of Diabate’s kora (a kind of many-stringed west African harp). Although it was never intended as one, it is a fitting capstone to the career of a giant of Malian music.

Musically, the album tends to stick to easy tempos and sparse arrangements organized around acoustic guitar, keyboards, and the Chicas’ twining harmonies. Because of this, matters sometimes threaten to succumb to the dreaded mid-tempo syndrome. But although the dreaded mid-tempo syndrome has rendered hundreds of otherwise fine albums as sleep-inducing as a bathtub of warm syrup, on Bloom, Red & the Ordinary Girl the live-sounding, spacious production and gorgeous singing helps to make sure that mostly doesn’t happen.

Tres Chicas’ secret weapon, however, is definitely masterful songwriting. Each of the Chicas wrote songs for this album, and working together must surely have raised their game. There are so many styles, voices, and narrative devices here that it’s possible to believe that they are the work of a dozen different writers.

Take “My Love,” “Shade Trees in Bloom,” and “Red,” three selections from the middle of the album which also happen to be the sources of the album’s title. I suspect each was written by a different Chica, because they are so distinct yet so absolutely in line with what Tres Chicas are about.

“My Love” is a gently swaying love song that paints in deft strokes a story of slightly distressing devotion with lines like “I’m not Jesus Christ, I’m just an ordinary girl/ and everywhere I go, you go/ Under high silver skies, you shelter me from rain/ you make it very plain you’re mine, my love.” Is this love actually shelter, or is it stifling and crippling? The song never quite decides.

Next is the quiet “Shade Trees in Bloom.” In stark contrast to “My Love,” this song’s lyrics are plainer and more direct, almost sounding like the “straight from my heart” centerpiece of a lost Broadway hit, with stanzas like

All quiet now, just listening
Sometimes what you think is the end is the beginning
I’ll put you to sleep but you keep laughing
Let’s put our arms together, baby, we’ll see what happens

Different again is the vituperative heartbreak of “Red,” in which the three sing, “You have gone off to another, one who you think suits you better/ I don’t wish you well, and I’ll see you in hell/ And I’m sitting here burning your letters,” like a young Elvis Costello circa All This Useless Beauty. Even though not every lyric on the album works perfectly, most artists don’t show this much range in a career, much less in the span of three songs.

It is good that Cary, Lamm, and Blakey have decided to make Tres Chicas a permanent thing. They are talented songwriters, and Bloom, Red, & The Ordinary Girl is packed with fine writing that only rarely dips into anything resembling the standard folk/country coffeehouse confessional mode. Although some of the imagery is a bit overcooked, and a couple songs do melt into mid-tempo torpor, those aren’t fatal flaws in an otherwise accomplished and thoughtful and… (pretty? that’s condescending)... and, and… luminous batch of alt-country songs. All twelve songs together in a row can be a little too much to take, but my iTunes’ shuffle function proves that on their own, each one is a gem. I’m not going to like this album in every mood, but it sure sounds nice right now.

Between 1993 and 1998, Pansy Division released six albums in this vein on the Lookout! label, albums that helped define that now legendary label’s ‘90s-era sound. Like label-mates Green Day and Screeching Weasel, Pansy Division relied on fast tempos, trashy guitars, and a knack for big pop hooks tied to snotnosed lyrics. By 1994, the band was supporting Green Day on national tours, and became de facto poster children for the nascent queercore movement. They have since jumped to Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label, where they released their seventh album in 2003.

The new Essential Pansy Division, out now on Alternative Tentacles, is a witty, thoughtful, and often profane thirty-song stroll through the band’s career. The running order jumbles up songs from all seven of their studio albums, so that 1993’s “Fem in a Black Leather Jacket” sits next to “Who Treats You Right” from 2003’s Entertainment. I would like to kvetch, because I’m a kvetch and a pisher besides, that ordering the tracks in this way obscures the band’s musical and conceptual growth, but that isn’t really true. Like the Ramones before them, Pansy Division have not really changed their modus operandi in fifteen years, preferring to refine and embellish a winning formula.

Have they matured musically? Well, “He Whipped My Ass In Tennis (Then I Fucked His Ass In Bed)” is no more or less hooky than “Cocksucker Club,” recorded a good dozen years before. Have they matured lyrically? Well, if you consider a song about circle jerking called “Alpine Skiing” an improvement over the older “Groovy Underwear,” then sure. But what is really striking is that Pansy Division have been models of consistency throughout their career. Individual songs may be a little stronger or weaker, but they have found a winning formula that works for them, and it’s a good one.

What makes Pansy Division more than just a very gay Barenaked Ladies, though, are the deep songs. Right in there with all the endless dicks (viz. “Dick of Death,” “Touch My Joe Camel,” “Horny In The Morning") are a few songs that hit with an ugly punch. “Denny” is about a porn actor from before the days when they knew about AIDS:

Denny picked me up, Denny did me
He’s got a tattoo of his dick on his belly
It was double vision disorienting
Denny’s kind of a dorky fella
Denny’s dramatic, Denny’s dark
He ain’t nothing like the restaurant
He’s got HIV+ tattooed in black
In 6 inch letters on his back
He said, “I want them to see
What they’ve done to me.”

“Deep Water” is written from the point of view of some anonymous kid tortured with guilt and repression and waiting for the day he can leave home. “I Really Wanted You” is a bittersweet song about an old crush getting married (to a woman, presumably). On a lighter note, the jaunty “No Protection” is about shooting down a guy who wants to ride bareback, sung through a vocoder (like what Cher used on “I Believe") over a disco beat. Songs like these deepen and complicate the bouncy, happy sex romp that Pansy Division normally sings about, and coming as they do between songs about blowjobs, they pack surprising power.

In closing, I have to say that I am so used to hearing boy-meets-girl songs, hetero-themed get-it-on songs, and the like, that listening to thirty gay-themed punk songs in a row induces a little bit of vertigo. It’s not just a simple matter of Pansy Division swapping out “dick” for “pussy” in their lyrics; the differences are deeper, fundamentally cultural. If you’ve ever spent more than a few days in England, you’ll know what I mean when I say that it’s the little things that are the most surprising. People look the other way before crossing the street. Bar etiquette is different. Standing in line is different. The money is funny colors. Every where you turn there’s people speaking a language that you understand, but saying things that you have to think a little about to really comprehend.

Although my days of listening to Pansy Division albums ended about the time I graduated college and no longer had access to everyone in the dorm’s record collection (ten frigging years ago!), which means I’m not completely up on what the kids are listening to these days, I can say for sure that The Essential Pansy Division is a well put together compilation, perfect for the gay nephew, homophobic uncle, or SoCal punk fan in your life. Also included is a DVD disc of live performances, TV appearances, and videos that, though inessential, do make this the only Pansy Division album you will ever need to buy.

Of historical note is the fact that the album contains the very first recordings by alt-country icons Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, and John Hiatt.  If like me you only know these artists by their later work, Heartworn Highways is a bit of a revelation. Though a little rough and maybe a little less accomplished than their later stuff, the songs here belong unmistakably to their creators. John Hiatt’s sharp lyrical poetry, Rodney Crowell’s gift for atmosphere for melody, and Steve Earle’s scrappy defiance (and leftism) are already in full view. But these treasures are only the smallest part of what makes Heartworn Highways worth a listen.

The song that kicks off Heartworn Highways, “L.A. Freeway” by the great and reclusive Guy Clark, sets the tone for the album. Clark’s plaintive song conjures a laid-back atmosphere that, like most of the recordings here is Most of the tracks here are really intimate - living room intimate, front porch intimate. More than that, “L.A. Freeway” serves as sort of a mission statement for the album as a whole with its theme of leaving the urban life behind and getting back to one’s roots.

The homey, homespun vibe continues straight through until the last notes of the closing song, a Christmas Eve jam on “Silent Night” with Clark, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, Steve Young, Susannah Clark (guy’s wife), and Richard Dobson. Along the way, chairs creak, whiskey is sipped, audience members have important questions for whoever’s singing, microphone stands make noise, and people come and go.

Guy Clarke contributes three other songs to the album, including an early version of his classic “Desperadoes Waiting For A Train,” about “a man who was kinda like my grandfather, but was really my grandma’s boyfriend.” It is a perfect song about how this man helped raise him, with lyrics as sharp as a knife and scenes as sharply drawn as any ever have been, and it is made even stronger by the care the producers have put into sequencing the record. You see, just before “Desperadoes” is a wonderful David Allan Coe song called “I Still Sing The Old Songs” which closes with a few lines from “Red River Valley.” “Desperadoes” opens with a mention of the same song. Rather than seeming gimmicky, touches like these elevate Heartworn Highways from a mere compilation to a statement about what country music meant to some of its future saviors.

It should be clear by now that I am not so much reviewing this album as falling in love with it. This was not a sure thing - I don’t always have patience for confessional living-room singers and their confessional living-room songs. Performances like these live or die on the quality of the writing. But despite the fact that these are songwriters still learning their craft (Townes Van Zandt’s “Waiting Around To Die” is actually, so he claims, the very first song he ever wrote), there really isn’t a single dud, outright cliche, or bit of hokey filler here. And although the homespun authenticity of the whole thing sometimes feels a little studied, a little put-on, that’s a minor sin to commit in the making of music this good. I could try to run down more highlights from this album, but the truth is, you’re either going to dig all of it or none of it, and I wouldn’t feel right choosing this Steve Earle song over that Townes Van Zandt when they are all pretty much gold.

If Hank Williams III’s most recent album is his Moby Dick, a strenuous and difficult work about struggling with forces beyond his control, Heartworn Highways is more like Lake Wobegon Days, an intelligent, smart, and unpretentious album of people singing songs about living the way they want to, and what it means to them. Heaven and hell don’t seem as close as friends, whiskey, and the velvet black of a Tennessee night, and all these geniuses love each other’s company. It’s just a little sad that all these artists who showed so much promise in 1976, who were kicking hard against the rigid conformity of Nashville’s establishment, still remain marginal (if highly respected) figures in the scene they tried to topple. Still, whatever happened after, and whether or not their revolution succeeded and on what terms, Heartworn Highways is a fine chronicle of a great time in country music history.

At some point on your first run through Straight To Hell, it will hit you that you haven’t once heard a distorted guitar. The album is so punk-rock in attitude and execution, and the tempos are so headlong, that you are sure that at some point somebody plugged a Gibson into a cheap fuzz pedal. But that never actually happened. Instead, Williams’ band chases his rough whine of a voice with keening country fiddle, a driving tick-tack beat, plenty of tasty Martin and Telecaster guitars, and a nice helping of steel guitar and Dobro just like all those old country albums I grew up on. The playing is raucous but clean - as fiery and precise as anything I’ve heard that raise a storm without needing overdriven amplifiers.
Straight To Hell, starts off with about thirty seconds of a scratchy, plaintive country-gospel ballad called “Satan Is Real,” which quickly degenerates into basso-profundo laughter (presumably from the dark lord himself) as the band kick into the real album opener, a honky-tonk barnburner called “Straight to Hell.” That’s not just a name - it really is the theme of the album. Like Hank Williams Sr., Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard before him, Hank III is one of those artists who sing about a life of pills, whiskey and madness but constantly lament that all this fun means they will burn forever in hell. This tension between gleeful dissipation and crushing depression is what gives Straight To Hell its kick. On the title songs, Williams tears into lines about “looking for trouble” with the same fury as he sings the chorus, “I’m going straight to hell, ain’t nothing slowing me down / I’m going straight to hell, so you just better get me one more round.” Meanwhile the band kick up an electrifying honky-tonk mess.

Since this is an old-school country record, and since Hank Williams III is maybe a tad too eager to take after his forebears, better than half of the songs on the album hoe this same row. “Pills I Took” is a wide-eyed story of destruction and mayhem, and it’s not perfectly clear whether Williams’ narrator (Williams?) is more proud or ashamed about the blood on the carpet and the broken mirrors. “Thrown Out of the Bar” gives a shout-out to country maverick David Alan Coe and is the first of about half a dozen songs on the album that take predictable but well deserved swipes at the neutered shiny ‘stars’ who pass for country music royalty today. But more than that, “Thrown Out of the Bar” is just another of ten or so excellent songs the joys and perils of excess. Whether the joys or the perils are the point, well, I guess that’s your call.

Williams seems to instinctively understand that this dance with the dark side it what gives a lot of the best country music its power. On the bleak “Country Heroes,” he takes the standard country song story about drinking with your elders to a creepy level, singing “sometimes I feel like I’m out of control… and I’m here getting wasted, just like my country heroes.” Considering that is grandfather drank himself into his grave at age 29 and George Jones, prominently namechecked in the song, has consumed tragic-heroic amounts of booze in his time, it’s a little unsettling that Hank III is so intent on getting plowed. Similarly, “Crazed Country Rebel” is about an interstate drink and drugs spree that doesn’t sound so much fun as frantic, as if he’s not doing whiskey, pot, ‘shrooms, and coke for fun, but because they just might finally kill him.

The thing that really sets Hank III apart from the pack is his anger. The same anger that gets him “thrown out of the bar” and high on “them pills I took,” or that he numbs down while “drinking with all my country heroes” also shows up as a fierce defense of traditional country against well-scrubbed newcomers and Yankees. He dedicates “Dick In Dixie” to the high purpose of putting

The dick in Dixie, and the cunt back in country
‘Cause the kind of country I hear nowaways is a bunch of fuckin’ shit to me.
They say I’m ill mannered, they say I’m gonna self-destruct
But if you know what I’m thinkin,’ you know that pop country really sucks.”

We are then invited to kiss his ass. As he states again and again, Williams can’t stand the new breed of country musicians “kissing ass on Music Row” who have replaced the “outlaws that had to stand their ground” and he can’t listen to country music in the same room as “some faggot looking over at me.”

There is even a takedown of Kid Rock (of all people) on “Not Everybody Likes Us.” Williams is deeply proud of his Southern heritage and his family and can’t stand it that a Yankee like Kid Rock is dabbling (poorly) in country and claiming a redneck background. I can grant him the fact that Kid Rock’s country experiments aren’t too great, but goddamnit, I’m a Yankee too, a country-raised briarhopper from Ohio, and my heritage is George and Johnny and Willie and Chet and Waylon. And if you don’t like that, well brother, you can kiss my ass too.

In a great book called High Lonesome: The American Culture Of Country Music Cecelia Tichi writes about how country music became popular in part because it served to re-invent a shared (if largely fictional) down-home shared heritage for an increasingly displaced rural population in the middle of the 20th century. Tichi argues that during the Great Migration of the 1930s, when it seemed like half the population of the grain belt washed up in California, songs like “The Old Folks Back Home” became a lingua franca that brought together migrants from Oklahoma and Alabama alike in a new culture that they could share, built from shared impressions of an ideal America they had left behind and that they still held out hope of returning to.

That is to say, a major job of country music has always been to tie listeners back to a more perfect, even idyllic past that they can share even if they have never even been to, say, Texas or Tennessee. Examples of this sub-genre might be the Carter Family’s “Clinch Mountain Home,” Dolly Parton’s “Tennessee Mountain Home,” Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” the standards “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Home on the Range,” and even newer songs like Alan Jackson’s “Chattahoochee.” In a way, Hank Williams III is the just end point of a long trend in outlaw country away from idyllic stories about church and simple folks in favor stories about toughness, hard living, and defiant integrity. Home is the bar and church is, well, where you go to meditate about the hell waiting for you.

Hank Williams III has a stronger claim than most to the actual roots of country music, and Straight To Hell amounts to a 13-song defense of a reconstructed outlaw country past. To make this claim eerily explicit, the album comes with a second disc that contains a 42-minute bonus track, a druggy medley that includes train sounds, pig snorts, other found sounds, and bits of performances including a recording by his grandfather’s. It is definitely self-indulgent, but that goes just as well for the whole album.

The sound of Hank Williams III wallowing in inherited misery makes for great listening. In fact, his self-indulgent tendencies give his new album a focus and power that any other set of new-old songs about drinking, drugging, and women would probably lack. Whether Hank Williams III’s preoccupation with his own legacy manifest as a rant against Yankee ‘faggots’ crowding up Music Row or a creeping (and slightly creepy) obsession with walking in the footsteps of his idols, it makes for seriously compelling music.

Straight To Hell is a fascinating and feckless record, raw and rambling and full of piss and whiskey. I’ve heard punk rockers go country before, but I’ve never heard real country, old school country music get punked up from within. Hank Williams III is country’s ragged edge, and it sounds like he’s trying to find a way to live there for good. Straight To Hell is not an easy album, and it’s not a perfect one, but it’ll do just fine.

Like many of the recent generation of indie rock bands, The Beatings thrive on tension. The Pixies’ signature loud-soft dynamic makes up a large part of their DNA, but they add new dimensions to this by-now routine strategy by adding Sonic Youth-style sheets of noise and by using three singers, one male with a brittle monotone that can burst into melodic (almost-)screaming, one male with a high and thin voice, and an occasional contribution from bassist Erin Dalbec who (in the best Kim Deal/Kim Gordon tradition) acts as a burst of sunshine over the grey-blue musical landscapes.

Guitarists Tony Skalicki and E.R. interweave their turbulent guitar lines over powerful drumming from Dennis Grabowski. All bassist Dalbec has to do with so much going on is add drive and punch to Grabowski’s drumming; that she is able to add harmonic interest is just icing on the cake. The muscular sound drives the fast songs and keeps the slow ones moving along, and the band create gorgeous textures to go with the turbulent rhythms. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a band before who could sound like Public Image Ltd. and Galaxie 500 at the same time, but I’m glad to have had the chance.

Highlights on Holding On To Hand Grenades include the stately and noisy “Upstate Flashbacks,” the driving hookiness of “Feel Good Ending,” the chilly resignation of “Stockholm Syndrome Revisited,” and the cute little weird vignettes like “Oh Shit, My Phaser’s Jammed” and the acoustic “Harry’s Wild Ride.” The album does peter out a bit toward the end, stumbling with “Pennsyltuckey” and “Villains,” which simply go on too long, and “False Positive,” which mainly suffers for sounding like a couple songs sequenced before it.  Still, out of sixteen songs a maximum of three or four could be considered as filler - an impressive ratio by any standard.

It’s not as if Boston’s punk tradition needed saving, and it’s not as if The Beatings need their talent affirmed by comparison with the greats of that scene, but it’s true: if ever the world needed an heir to Mission of Burma, Galaxie 500, The Pixies and so on, The Beatings are it, and on their own terms. Holding On To Hand Grenades is an impressively self-assured statement of purpose that should be the Beatings’ entry to the World of Bigger And Better Things.

This album is available from cdbaby.com.