It would take a lot for me to ever hate on Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo, an indication how how excellent both The Blue Album and Pinkerton are.  But as I was debating with a friend over the weekend, it feels like Rivers Cuomo has never grown up emotionally or been too emotionally invested in song writing since Pinkerton. 

Pitchfork confirms this with their lambasting of Weezer’s new LP Raditude.  The album ”doesn’t have that stench of minimal calculation on it; if anything, it’s as earnest as the famously confessional Pinkerton, just written by someone whose age doesn’t match his POV. But the record’s teen-boy empowerment message doesn’t have much to offer anyone over 13 years old. Perhaps the proper fictional character to reference isn’t Peter Pan, but Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson from Dazed and Confused– we all get older, Rivers Cuomo stays the same age.”  Ouch!

Given how uneven the song quality was (not to mention the poor audio fidelity) on The Flaming Lips’s last LP, At War with the Mystics,  I can honestly say I wasn’t looking forward to their new record Embroynic. 

And it’s not necessarily Pitchfork’s 9.0 review (out of 10) that has me excited, as much as it is this passage: “There’s a raw directness to Embryonic that’s been largely absent from Lips records since the mid-90s. For the first time in years, they’ve made an album that actually sounds like a band playing live together in a small room. In light of Mystics‘ overly processed, grab-bag quality, the holistic, audio-vérité approach on display here is remarkable– the record is extremely dense, initially overwhelming, but unusually rewarding upon repeat listens. Like the double-disc, high-concept rock epics of yore (think Physical Graffiti or Bitches Brew), it captures them at their most sprawling and ambitious, boldly pushing themselves towards more adventurous horizons.” 

Find it at: Insound | eMusic | Lala

Just the fact that Rhino Records chose to issue a 4-CD compilation on a band like Big Star says more about the label and their ability to reach out to new converts as well as old fans, like me, who will buy anything with “not previously released” or the “definitive remaster” sticker on the cover. Rhino cares about their catalog and that is why they will be here long after the majors have been relegated to clearing houses.

Releasing the Big Star set in the same week as the long-awaited Beatles remasters was a bold move. It appealed to me, since the massive pre-press for the Beatles was driving me crazy. I love it – but I know those stories! While most went to Let It Be, I went to “Don’t Lie To Me” from Big Star’s #1 Record (Stax Records, 1972) – the title, not chart position.

“Don’t Lie To Me” is a Big Star classic, Led Zeppelinish in it’s use of pop music and perfect in it’s distorted backing track. It follows “In the Street” that you know as the theme of That 70’s Show as redone by Cheap Trick. Big Star is one of those bands where the cliche line that REM’s Pete Buck likes to use from time to time: “Only 1000 people bought the first Big Star record but every one of them went out and started a band. (…apologies to the Velvet Underground).

That was certainly true in my case. MORE »

A majority of albums (especially manufactured pop) fall into this pattern.  Which is why I wish more bands put out two or three EPs a year or 7″s.  There’s really no need for a band to release an LP in the current musical landscape. Just give me three to four really great songs at a time.

[via Cracked]

Pitchfork pays homage by bestowing  a 10.0 on the record. I was always a Check Your Head guy, but Paul’s Boutique is pretty nasty.  It was around these albums though, that I began to wonder if the Beastie Boys (as great as they are) would ever mix up their rhyming pattern or style. The answer was sadly no.

Twenty years later, nobody’s asking that question. Paul’s Boutique is a landmark in the art of sampling, a reinvention of a group that looked like it was heading for a gimmicky, early dead-end, and a harbinger of the pop-culture obsessions and referential touchstones that would come to define the ensuing decades’ postmodern identity as sure as “The Simpsons” and Quentin Tarantino did. It’s an album so packed with lyrical and musical asides, namedrops, and quotations that you could lose an entire day going through its Wikipedia page and looking up all the references; “The Sounds of Science” alone redirects you to the entries for Cheech Wizard, Shea Stadium, condoms, Robotron: 2084, Galileo, and Jesus Christ. That density, sprawl, and information-overload structure was one of the reasons some fans were reluctant to climb on board. But by extending Steinski’s rapid-fire sound-bite hip-hop aesthetic over the course of an entire album, the Beastie Boys and the Dust Brothers more than assured that a generally positive first impression would eventually lead to a listener’s dedicated, zealous headlong dive into the record’s endlessly-quotable deep end.

There’s lots to love about this record.

Buy it from Insound | Download it from eMusic

I finally got my hands on Jenny Lewis’s new solo album Acid Tongue and it’s immediately clear that as a solo performer she is much more interesting than she is with her band Rilo Kiley.

Mostly, I think because Lewis is interested in a southern musical stew throwing country, blues, gospel and rock into a pot and seeing what works. It’s obvious these are the genres of music that have influenced and moved her musical outlook.  As a solo artist she is allowed to pursue what interests her the most, with Rilo Kiley it’s almost like she is forced to reign it in for the sake of everyone else in the band.

The album has plenty of highlights and stretches what we have come to expect from Lewis.  If before this album I thought she was a capable front woman for a band or need the soulfulness of The Watson Twins as a crutch, I’m now more than curious about what her future holds.  In many ways this album has raised her ceiling – she’s like a poor woman’s Neko Case.  And I don’t mean that as an insult, but rather the highest compliment I could give a female country artist.

There are a few throw away songs on this album, not that the songs are bad per say, but that I just don’t care for them because they are uninteresting in a pedantic way (”Pretty Bird,” “Bad Man’s World” and “Black Sand” come to mind).

The best songs here have those awkward phrasings and lyrics, that while on her last album seemed to be a detriment, here it works in her favor.  It gives the album personality and a certain quirky charm.  It also helps that several songs shift genres over the course of their duration – “Jack Killed Mom,” and “Acid Tongue” are the best examples of the wildly shifting sounds at work.

Anyway, this wasn’t meant to be a fullblown review of Jenny’s new album.  I came to praise her duet with Elvis Costello on “Carpetbagger.”

Though I don’t think she’ll ever want to be a prototypical Nashville country star, the child-actress raised in Hollywood could be considered something of a country music carpetbagger.  Which is not to say her love of southern musical culture isn’t genuine, I think she combines those tropes better and in a more cohesive sound than many who try.

“Carpetbaggers” is an uptempo rocker and stolen from Elvis Costello.  Even at his age his voice is one for the ages – smoothed out but still nasally. It’s like he’s not even trying in this song and yet, I don’t think it would nearly work as well without him.

Knowledge bomb alert: Carpetbagger, while now considered a derisive term for any politician running for office in a district other than their own, i.e. Hillary Clinton running for Senator of New York, the term was originally given to Northerners who moved south during Reconstruction (1865-1877).  Southerners were worried that white republicans from the north (who came with their belongings in travel carpetbags) were going to loot and plunder their defeated lands.  Which is probably true, since with a coalition of freed slaves and scalawags (southerns who supporter reconstruction) they attempted to politically control confederate states.

Mp3: Jenny Lewis – “Carpetbaggers”

Rolling Stone has posted its review of Guns N’Roses long gesticulating album Chinese Democracy. They give it four out of five stars.  “The first Guns n’ Roses album of new, original songs since the first Bush administration is a great, audacious, unhinged and uncompromising hard-rock record. In other words, it sounds a lot like the Guns n’ Roses you know.”  I’ll beleive it when I hear it, but until then I’m still skeptical; especially given the whelming feeling the early leaked tracks produced about a year ago.  [Rolling Stone]

Never got around to posting this when the site was down for all of last week. Can you tell I’m still bitter about it? Anyway, this is the latest brain-f*ck from Charlie Kaufman. I’ve been digging Wired’s Kaufmenesque profile about the making of the magazine profile. Still, this one looks like it could be great.

Kaufman wrote the films Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Human Nature, Confessions of a Dangerous mind and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A.O. Scott liked it at Cannes. The film will be out in limited release (NY & LA?) on Oct 24.

Initially riding to the mainstream on the wave that carried fellow alternative country acts like Wilco and Bright Eyes to the public�s ears, My Morning Jacket have, through their past couple albums, deftly eluded sonic type casting.

Front man and chief songwriter Jim James is amusingly agile at connecting weird imagery to lyrical snippets meditating on love, innocence, and the other usual suspects of the country canon. And it is this very adept sense of juxtaposition that shines brilliantly on MMJ�s newest album, Evil Urges.

But let’s back up a bit. MORE »