The Masters of Domesticity

By now, no Yo La Tengo album sounds remarkable on first listen, or it sounds remarkable in that it sounds like other Yo La Tengo albums. In the car, though, when it's easier to separate songs from the general flow of the album, it's easier to hear and appreciate that it sounds like other Yo La Tengo albums because the songs are really good.

What I hear on the new Popular Songs more than anything else, though, is how they've mastered sounding like us if we were in bands. Put us behind a microphone and we'd half-whisper/half-mumble lyrics, uncertain of our ability to truly carry a tune. We'd hit the drums gently, disconcerted by how loud they are, but when we found a good riff that we were confident in, we'd play that guitar riff as loudly as we could. When we finally wrote a classic pop song with a strong melody, we'd sing it proudly. The first time we discovered that we could play soul music, we'd treat it as a goof in case others didn't think we could play it as well as we did. The next time we cut a soul track, we'd know we didn't have to treat it as a joke; that we could do this and would do it well.

We're music fans first, so we'd likely make music that would reflect the breadth of our tastes - or at least to the degree that we could figure out how to play them. We'd play music that was fun - garage band particularly - and if we were guitar players, we'd occasionally the physical pleasure of trying to shape feedback and distortion, trying to control something that's largely uncontrollable (and something that sounds really cool).

We're not conceptualists, so instead of working up a master plan, we'd play the songs we had and go from there. We'd figure the album's like a meal or a home movie or a summer picnic - there will be another one, and it will be fun too.

A Cycle Skipped?

There are certain books and writers that should be read while you're young - Hunter Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Bukowski, to name a few. After reading all the canonical stuff high school asks you to read, some outlaw lit's a pretty valuable thing. Unfortunately, once you pass your undergrad years, the outlaw stance seems a little wobbly. I eventually developed a new appreciation for Thompson and Lester Bangs, but I now find the Beats and Buk hard to stomach. Still, someone had to tell readers that you don't always have to mind your manners, and that there's a bigger, grittier literary world than you found in Henry James.

Another artist I thought you had to deal with while you're young is Lou Reed, but unlike the literary rebels, I can't think of anyone who's picked up his subject matter. Is anyone writing songs about the romance of our darker impulses? Is it possible that you still can't sing about your mixed feeling about addiction, self-destructive love and the wild side? And if someone is doing it, is that person doing it in undeniable pop forms like Reed?

(Thoughts after listening to the epic, weirdly Vegas version of "Heroin" on Rock & Roll Animal yesterday.)

Hands Off the Wheel

By now, it can't be a surprise that the Drive-By Truckers' odds & ends album is better than most. The Fine Print - due out next week - is their sayonara to New West Records, who evidently were displeased with the decidedly un-big rock Brighter Than Creation's Dark. Fortunately, their sweepings and leftovers still have a lot of meat on them, but the greatest pleasure of the album might be that they've never seemed more relaxed or had more faith in the car to find its own way home.

The opener, "George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues," presents them in their country rock mode addressing their cultural heritage, but they do so with a lighter touch, unable to escape the comic image of No-Show Jones on the riding lawnmower his struggles with modern technology. "Mrs. Klaus Kimono" almost mocks the band itself, bringing its love of foreboding to a horny elf that has the hots for Santa's wife. Even Hood's veteran-coming-home-legless song "Mama Bake a Pie" eases up. He sings the sardonic comeback, "Since I won't be walking / guess I'll save some money buying shoes" over an atypically bouncy, almost pop melody that prevents his saga of a life falling apart from becoming unbearable to listen to.

There are some unnecessary tracks. I don't think anybody needs to cut the covers they do live - they're better as surprises - but the versions of Tom Petty's "Rebels" and Warren Zevon's "Play It All Night Long" are good fun. Hood, Shonna Tucker and Jason Isbell each take a verse, but Dylan's words and sentiment suit Hood's vocal talents particularly well. The moralist, good ol' boy, punk, student, historian and smartass in him all come out in a perfectly unified vocal, much the same way that Dylan's one voice slyly incorporated many points of view. The other verses are good, but none are as revelatory as his.

Similarly, alternative versions are rarely special, and the world will keep spinning just fine whether anyone hears alternate versions of "Uncle Frank" and "Goode's Field Road," the latter of which churns along in the Truckers' default mode. Still, a slightly undersold vocal with less drama in the arrangement makes the song more chilling.

After "George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues," the highlight is "The Great Car Dealer War," which sounds like it came from The Dirty South era. Like so much of that album - and the best DBT songs - it takes us into a mundane life that would be comic if not for the desperate choices their characters have to make to live in America these days. But the converse is also true; their grim moments have touches - like the song's title - that never let you forget that there's a joke in there somewhere. On The Fine Line, that nugget of humor, dark as it is, isn't buried as deeply as it is on other albums, and a lack of dread is welcome once in a while.

When I Form My Band ...

... I'm destroying every recorded moment I don't use. I'm burning the tapes from my analog period, I'm bulk-erasing all hard drives, then just to be sure, I'm taking those drives and any other miscellaneous file-carrying devices to the outskirts of Vegas, where I'll get hammered and shoot them with semi-automatic weapons that otherwise scare the shit out of me. I'm not leaving anything laying around to be rescued, remastered and released as a bonus disc or as bonus tracks to reissues of my music. Rhino is releasing a new version of Chris Bell's I Am the Cosmos, itself an album that was posthumously assembled from tracks in varying states of completion. Now it's paired with even more tracks in various states of completion. Me - I'd rather have my band remembered by the tracks that represent us the way we wanted to be represented.

Careful with that Tweet, Eugene

I often feel cast as an evangelist for Twitter for the simple act of defending it to people are so remarkably hostile to it. Inevitably, its critics say that they don't care what someone had for breakfast, dismissing its triviality. Evidently, the worst use of the tool invalidates it entirely, which doesn't make any sense. We don't assume cars are bad because drunks hit people with them, or that computers are bad because people do all sorts of creepy and disturbing things with them. If the poor use of an object or technology marks it as worthless and dismissable, there's little that we've developed that can stand the test. Fire? Bad.

How Things Go Wrong

Adam brought in his CD by hand. The CD's in a white sleeve with simply "Adam" and "In the Beginning" written in Sharpie on it. The CD is theoretically for sale through his Web site, but with a stage name like Adam, Google can only do so much.

In the Beginning is, as you might expect, Christian music - Christian hip-hop to be exact, but without drum machines or any programming. As such, it often sounds like little more than a collection of demos. The one winner is "Sweet Sixteen." Bad title that promises cliches a-plenty, but the Spanish guitar figure and a backing singer cooing "Take your time" gives the song a fleshed out quality that little before it has had. Adam's flow's pretty good, and for a moment, you can imagine this as a possible slow jam hit.

Then the words start to add up and the cliche I feared turned up. Sweet Sixteen skips school to see a 22-year-old guy who knocks her up, then in cad fashion straight out of a Jack Chick comic, suggests that she sees "the special man." In New Orleans, that's a hard line to hear with a straight face because for years, it was the slogan for a commercial for a discount furniture store. People with no credit or bad credit would go see the special man, and he'd say, "Let 'em have it." It would be great to think that Adam was making a connection between abortion and discount furniture, but more likely it was just slack writing. "The special man" phrase is the only live one in the song; everything else is commonplace and forced to fit to make sure the point isn't lost.

UPDATE: After writing this, I decided to try to find Adam and found Google more powerful than I thought it might be. Here's a link to "Sweet Sixteen" on YouTube.

Too True an Echo

Smithereens' drummer Dennis Diken just released Late Music, and like the Smithereens' albums, it reveals its roots a little too clearly. In the case of Diken (with Bell Sound), the album often refers to Pet Sounds as closely as the Rutles did the Beatles, minus the jokes. I enjoyed the album as it played, and periodically he veers toward other vocal-oriented, lightly psychedelic bands, but it's often hard to hear his songs because of the songs they evoke.

Mocking the Lame

It seems unkind to expose well-meant, hapless demos, but someone's got to do their part to disabuse some people of the notion that music's for them. Mind-Melting Demo Disasters does exactly that, though if my experience is representative, almost anyone who'll commit music to tape/disc won't be dissuaded by abuse, rational feedback or a lack of attention from anyone. Here, few are truly catastrophic, but you can hear derivative track after derivative track, each dotted with some unique bad idea or misestimation of talent. My favorite - the July 16 track, with a vocalist singing"la la la" instead of the lyrics he has yet to write.