Not The NY Times Book Review

I never really stopped buying books...I'd just stopped reading them. Video killed the radio star and the internet killed my old reading instinct in much the same way.

Until around the end of 1998 (the time I finally went online and never looked back), I used to kill whole evenings lying on my bed with some music on the stereo, a drink within easy reach, and a paperback or hardcover propped up on my chest. Hell, I'd even read some books more than once, which seems pretty incredible in light of how much time that would consume these days, heh heh.

Happily, it appears that some recent determination on my part to reacquire my old habit has paid off, and I've finally started hacking away at the large pile of books I've accrued over the last 5 years. A couple of things have changes since my old voracious reading days of yore, however. Firstly, my frequency is way down: I don't knock these things back at anywhere near the pace I used to. Secondly (and perhaps more amusingly), my reading venue has changed: 80% of the reading I've been doing has been while sitting on the porcelain throne, the other 20% in my reclining PC chair with some music going in the background on "slow" nights.

Anyway, following are some thoughts on the books I've read since kick-starting the habit a few months ago. You might notice a definite trend in most of these titles, perhaps. I guess I figured I might as well read all of the similar-themed titles at a shot...


FM: The Rise And Fall Of Rock Radio (Richard Neer)

I picked this up a few years ago while shopping around at Borders, but in the end I didn't find an awful lot to reccommend in it (which explains its current residence on the shelf at the local Half Priced Books store). Ultimately, FM came off as far too New York-centric for me to get really engrossed. That said, I did recognize a few of the names dropped in the story, and I'm certainly familiar with all of the changes in formatting ideas and programming practices that became pandemic in American radio over the last two decades. Sadly, though, I just wasn't terribly entertained by Neer's writing style, and he is quite frankly too nice of a guy to throw punches or dish the dirt in a satisfying fashion.


Radio Daze: Stories From The Front In Cleveland's FM Air Wars (Mike Olszweski)

Now this is more what I had in mind: a history of FM radio with names I could attach voices and memories to, not to mention tales of radio subterfuge and promotional dirty tricks that I actually remembered as well as laughed at. Even better yet, the events in Radio Daze center around WMMS (100.7 FM), the station that not only defined the sound of my teenage years, but was also a cultural and marketing force that so dominated the Cleveland radio market from 1975-1985 that it staggers the imagination now to think of a time when one station could mean so much to so many.

Even though I am only intimately familiar with WMMS from 1983 onward, I was surprised to find the opening chapters of Radio Daze just as fascinating as the familiar era that dominates the last two-thirds of the book. Olszweski does a fine job setting up the introduction of FM rock to Cleveland while introducing the air crew and the original programming incarnation of WMMS. Back then, the most popular WMMS DJ was local legend Billy Bass who was instrumental in the station's rise to free-form prominence, attaining notoriety well outside of the state of Ohio. The Bass era was then followed by the station's meteoric ascent into the stratosphere towards the end of the 1970s following the arrival of the "classic" WMMS lineup, which included such crucial central figures as Kid Leo, John Gorman (several of his hilarious motivational "War Bulletins" to the staff are printed in their entirety), Denny Sanders, Jeff Kinzbach and Ed "Flash" Ferenc.

Eventually, the powerful nostalgia this book evoked in me became tainted with melancholy as Olszweski begins to allude to the storm clouds starting to gather on the horizon by the onset of 1984. To resort to cliche, all good things must come to an end -- and as Radio Daze moves into 1986, it almost becomes an almost funereal reading experience as the old Buzzard slowly but surely begins to come apart at the seams.

Starting with Gorman and Sanders' surprise defection to start up WNCX (which was, for a very short time, the most interesting station on the Cleveland airwaves until the corporate higher-ups pulled the plug and transformed it overnight into all-recurrent classic rock Hell), Radio Daze goes into almost painful detail outlining point-by-point the fall from grace and eventual disintegration of the old WMMS. While the old Buzzard magic was certainly beginning to dissipate by the time WNCX signed on, things went completely to hell a couple of years later in the wake of the Rolling Stone radio poll fiasco and the departure of Kid Leo for Columbia Records (followed by rest of the classic-era air staff over the following years). By the time a syndicated Howard Stern show had nailed the coffin shut on the once-invincible WMMS Morning Zoo once and for all, the old Buzzard that I had grown up with was long gone.

While simply covering WMMS alone would have been more than enough for me to enjoy Radio Daze, Olszweski always pulls back at opportune times to provide a bigger picture of the Cleveland radio market, telling stories about of the rise of John Lanigan and WMJI, the doomed alternative rock upstart WENZ, and the constant wars fought on multi-format turf as different stations lined up to take their shot at WMMS' throne.

Well paced, entertaining, and occasionally eye-opening in it's behind-the-scenes tales, Radio Daze is a fantastic read and very highly recommended to anyone who loved Cleveland radio, particularly The Buzzard, in the "good old days."

(The latter folks might also find this link of interest as well)


Above Hallowed Ground - A Photographic Record Of September 11, 2001 (The Photographers Of The New York City Police Department)

OK, so there wasn't a lot of actual reading to do in this one, but I don't think added text could do a lot to make this book any more remarkable than it is.

God, what an amazing, horrifying collection of photos (taken from police helicopters as well as right smack in the midst of The Pile itself) to gaze at for an hour. The aerial shots in particular are just spellbinding in driving home the sheer scale of the destruction and chaos of that day. There is also a weird, blue-hued beauty to these pictures that is difficult to convey in text - they seem to take your breath away while demanding you to respect the awesome task at hand for the people who showed up to look for survivors, douse the flames, and ultimately clean up the titanic mess left behind.


Inside Out - A Personal History Of Pink Floyd (Nick Mason)

If there is one thing guaranteed to get me reading again it's the release of a new Pink Floyd book, and since this particular tome was written by the band's drummer (after a decade of holdups and delays), it was even more of an automatic grab for me than the late Nicholas Schaffner's definitive biography from 1991.

However, while Schaffner had the luxury of being an outsider who didn't have to worry about how someone might react to his take on events, Mason appears to have been forced away from writing a "definitive biography" of the band and into telling "his version" of the story (largely to avoid ruffling feathers or even sparking a lawsuit from his apparently extremely touchy bandmates, past and present). Thus, there isn't an awful lot in here that will really surprise longtime fans (though the occasional enlightening bit of information does show up from time to time). While this might seem a hindrance, Inside Out is made immensely entertaining by Mason's delightfully irreverent writing style: he often had me snickering aloud with his memories of early band gigs outside of London in 1967 and rueful summations of some of the more comedic stumbling points in the band's career in the decades after.

With Mason acting all these years as the band's unofficial historian and archivist, it was surprising that a handful of incorrect bits and misattributed dates (particularly towards the latter years) sneaked through the editorial process all the way to the finished product. Of course, it is the nature of Floyd trainspotters (like me) to read these parts, blink, make an audible sound of confusion or "no, that's not right," and briefly wonder if Mason wrote this particular chapter in a rush or simply didn't bother to do his own fact-checking. But any disappointed drooling-geek episodes are put aside after turning the next page and seeing more of the amazing, incredible, awesome photos that are, on their own, worth the entire price of the book (that being said, I think that at least one, and maybe more of the older pictures have been digitally retouched a la the cover of Simon & Garfunkel's Old Friends box set to remove incriminating cigarettes from a certain band member's hand).


Radio Waves: Life And Revolution On The FM Dial (Jim Ladd)

A kind of West Coast cousin to Neer's FM, written in a much more enjoyably sarcastic style and far more entertaining and incisive to read.

It must also be mentioned that, being the words of Jim Ladd, Radio Waves can also get rather preachy at times and Ladd seems prone to bashing an Important Point into a bloody smear on the pavement (yes yes, Jim, all radio and music since the death of John Lennon is a soulless sham to the Way Things Were and before Sgt Pepper's everything was a big ol' vacuous sock hop...I get it already!). While Radio Waves contains enough humor and insight into the workings of a major FM radio station to make it worthy of a look, be advised that there will be times (especially during the character conversations) where it feels like you're being condescended to by someone who just can't let go of the year 1969.

As was the case with FM, Radio Waves is basically a dramatized autobiography with the corporatization of FM radio serving as the chief antagonist to Ladd's idealistic vision of beating the "tribal drum" of social and political awareness from his glass booth at "Radio KAOS." Unlike Neer's book, however, Ladd is much more comfortable with dealing out tales of excess and betrayal behind the scenes. While nearly all of the major characters in Radio Waves are therefore creatively re-named to protect the guilty and the innocent, I would imagine that anyone who is familiar with the Los Angeles FM scene in the 1970s and 1980s would be able to suss out pretty quickly who is supposed to be who.


NP The Clash London Calling

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Vicious Pink

Even in a genre largely populated by ephemeral one-hit wonders, the U.K. duo Vicious Pink were a mere blip on the synthpop radar, playing exactly one live show (at The Ritz in 1984) and launching a couple of spaztastic electrodance classics up the dance club charts before vanishing as quickly as they had appeared.

Made up of keyboardist Brian Moss and statuesque singer Josephine Warden, Vicious Pink remains almost entirely unknown outside of the dance underground because their music was far more explicitly aimed at clubs than concerned with success on the pop charts. To that end, their work tended to have a quirky and more extended feel than mainstream radio would tolerate ("8:15 To Nowhere" would sound perfectly at home on the soundtrack to Ferris Bueller's Day Off, for example). Despite the odds stacked against them, though, Vicious Pink were able to briefly attain a cult-level of success without ever breaking through to bigger things.

Although they had started releasing music professionally as early as 1982, Vicious Pink failed to attract much attention until the release of "Cccan't You See" and its instrumental b-side "8:15 To Nowhere" in 1984. Over the next two years, both sides of this single accrued some substantial airplay in clubs on both sides of the Atlantic as multiple versions were serviced to clubs over the timespan, keeping it "fresh" for far longer than would have been likely under normal circumstances. Also popular, but on a significantly lesser level, was the rather startlingly electroclash attack that was "Fetish." About as likely to garner mainstream airplay as Soft Cell's "Sex Dwarf" or Berlin's "Sex," "Fetish" was a wonderfully trashy dry-humping synth epic that eventually found a rather appropriate promotional platform years later as HBO used it during their popular series Real Sex II.

Only one album was ever released by Vicious Pink ... actually, it was released by their record company in 1986, after the duo had already ceased recording. Vicious Pink, therefore, was merely a collection of their previously released singles more than it was a cohesive "album" in the usual sense of the word.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: "Sex Dwarf"

A decade before Lords Of Acid started making a killing off of marrying driving techno to breathless soft porn with Lust, the English electropop duo Soft Cell released Non Stop Erotic Cabaret, which did a far better (and more inherently listenable) job of blurring the lines between seedy decadence and mainstream dance music.

While a gloriously doomy remake of an obscure 1964 Gloria Jones single called "Tainted Love" remains for many people the beginning and end of Soft Cell's career, the synth duo of ex-art students Marc Almond and Dave Ball created a host of other songs just as good, if not better, than that monster 1981/1982 smash. Among these unsung classics was their debut single “Memorabilia” (later covered by nine inch nails), “Where The Heart Is,” “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye,” a cover of The Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go” (which was famously mixed onto the 12” single of “Tainted Love”) and “Sex Dwarf.”

Perhaps the most infamous track in the duo’s limited canon (Soft Cell broke up only two years later),"Sex Dwarf" is not only one of the most hilariously over-the-top (and lyrically sharp) paeans to sadomasochism in the pop canon, but perhaps one of the sleaziest records (electronic or otherwise) ever released. While the lyrics are definitely bent towards a more, shall we say, deviant persuasion, the production of the song itself is a tour de force for the period, combining then-state-of-the-art Synclavier synthesizer and Roland 808 drum machine technology with, er, voice acting and sound effects to create an undeniably catchy, unstoppable monster of a track with no possibility of ever getting airplay on any station worth its FCC license (one can only imagine what the fabled and rarely-seen video to this song must have been like).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, “Sex Dwarf” failed to make any ripples in the U.S. outside of the dance club scene -- "Tainted Love” remains the only Soft Cell single to ever chart in this country. The story is only slightly different on their home turf: while they managed more than a half-dozen entries onto the U.K. singles lists (and certainly provided some inspiration, at least sonically, to bands like Erasure), “Sex Dwarf” is similarly not listed among their greatest chart hits. Go figure.

Muuhhh

It's been a long time since I was sick to the point that I felt as helpless as I did last night. What started out as a nasty allergy attack Tuesday morning gradually morphed into a four-alarm viral/cold/flu whatever it is that had my nose running like a damn faucet and my brains scrambled to the point of unusability. This was the kind of sick where everything had a weirdly chemical "sick" smell to it, there was a distant ringing in my ears, and my entire being felt like a stack of crumpled-up, soaking wet paper towels.

To paraphrase The Verve, the drugs didn't work: popping pills to combat the worst of the symptoms provided no relief whatsoever from the onslaught. I tried my usual sick defense of bundling myself up head to foot in blankets and layers of clothes in an attempt to "cook" the fever out of me, but even that seemed like a hopeless task as I'd awaken a couple of hours later dripping in sweat and actually feeling worse than before.

Ah, but it's always darkest just before the dawn, as the old proverb says, and that was the case here as well. I gradually awoke just before 8 A.M. this morning feeling not too bad at all, and I laid there in bed for a few minutes, afraid to stand up and suddenly feel like re-heated shit again. A little bit of dizziness and distant "murgh" feeling remains as I write this, but this is certainly better overall than I have felt for a couple of days now.

Against my better judgment, I'm gonna attempt a return to work this afternoon (I can't really afford two off days in a row right now and too much needs to be done today anyway) and see how that goes. I think that a shower followed by a big breakfast is in the cards since I haven't had much beyond chicken salad, orange juice, water and a fistful of pills over the last 48 hours.

Thank God for ibuprofen.


Addendum: OK, very bad idea.

All was going well until I got my breakfast at Bob Evans, at which I point I think I very nearly fainted (having never done so before, I'm not really sure what the hell happened). The waitress had put my plates down in front of me, and I had just taken a bite or so when I was overcome with dizziness to the point that I literally couldn't sit up anymore: I just moved my plates aside and rested my head on my arms like a first grader during "naptime." While this happened it felt like all of the blood in my body pooled up in my gut: my arms and legs were buzzing all over as if I‘d been sleeping on them. A bit scarier was that all of the sounds of the restaurant faded slowly away to a near-silence before starting to come back at last.

When I was able to sit back up, I was soaked with sweat from head to toe as well as a bit embarrassed for what had happened (I think I freaked out the waitress a little bit, but I left her a good tip for bringing me more water after she asked if I was OK).

From there it was on to work to at least get some work caught up, but it was apparent pretty quickly that I was not improving. Luckily, I was able to reach Brian and arrange for him to cover tonight as well as tomorrow so I can try and beat this thing once and for all. Chunky chicken noodle soup, stat.

In other news, blogger has apparently really taken a shit as it took me about 24 hours to post this update from when I wrote it. Way to drop the ball, there, guys.

Also, Moe is trying to get some neutered sex on with Ghidorah. Oh dear.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Jon And Vangelis

It was one of those brief artistic larks that worked: in 1975, Yes lead singer Jon Anderson made a guest appearance on Heaven And Hell, the current album by Greek composer/ex-Aphrodite's Child member Vangelis (born Evangelos Papathanassiou), planting the seeds of what became a successful partnership a few years down the line.

There was some gossip that Anderson's burgeoning friendship with Vangelis resulted in the singer asking the keyboardist to join the ever-shifting Yes lineup, but pesky "creative differences" with the rest of the band prevented this from ever happening. Whatever the case, the early 1980 sessions for the follow-up to Tormato didn't go well at all -- the result was Anderson and keyboardist Rick Wakeman abandoning ship, leaving the rest of the members to sink or swim on their own. Interestingly enough, the resultant Yes album, Drama, found Anderson and Wakeman replaced by The Buggles, as singer-producer Trevor Horn and future Asia keyboardist Geoffrey Downes joined the lineup in their stead.

Now free to do whatever he wished, Anderson contributed vocals to another Vangelis album (See You Later), before embarking on a full-album project with the prolific composer called Short Stories and credited to Jon & Vangelis. A largely improvisational work, Short Stories was greeted with a cautious reception stateside, but enough interest was generated overseas (the album and it's single "I Hear You Now" both went into the Top 10 in their respective U.K. charts) for the pair to give their collaboration another shot, the fruits of which arrived a year later.

Centered around the twelve minute title track (a kind of aural gangster movie replete with tough-guy dialogue and sound effects), The Friends Of Mr. Cairo was a work that benefited from a more deliberate and song-based approach than its predecessor. Featuring the lush, eerie swirl of "The Mayflower," the uplifting classic "I'll Find My Way Home" (whose melody was later lifted by B-Tribe on their 1994 single "You Won't See Me Cry"), and the more solemn, yet still expansive ballad "State Of Independence" (covered to great international success later on by Donna Summer and Moodswings), Mr. Cairo didn't just sound like a quantum leap forward from Short Stories, but it also sold far better: staying on the Billboard album charts for nearly eight months.

Following the success of Mr. Cairo, Jon & Vangelis released their next project -- the symphonic textured Private Collection -- in the summer of 1983 to good critical response but disappointingly cool sales (probably thanks to the lack of a radio-ready single like "I'll Find My Way Home"). Following this, Anderson found himself joining in with a newly revitalized Yes lineup which would soon seize the top of the charts with the Trevor Horn-produced 90125 and its attendant hit singles.

On a final note, 1991 saw the release of what is to this day the last Jon & Vangelis album, Page Of Life. Perhaps due to the length of time elapsed since Private Collection, or the more "contemporary" (read: less inviting) sound of the music, Page Of Life failed to make much of an impact anywhere.

The Fab Five Live

Thanks to a very lucky break at work last week (a regular customer of ours just strolled on in to the store and dropped off a pair of concert tickets, saying that he couldn't make it to the show and he didn't want anything for them) , Sarah and I headed downtown last night and took in the Duran Duran concert at the The Bert L. and Iris Wolstein (formerly CSU) Convocation Center. It was our first show in nearly two and a half years (the last being none other than Peter Gabriel), and it turned into a pretty enjoyable night out, all things considered.

Since I've seen Duran Duran in their Medazzaland incarnation back in 1997, and I was less-than-thrilled with their reunion album Astronaut, I was actually more psyched to take in the night's opening band, VHS Or Beta. As openers, they were a lot of fun to listen to, but not the most exciting live act in the world to watch. Happily, VHS Or Beta made up for their lack of stage presence with a half hour of snappy, Cure-by-way-of-Daft Punk disco-rock, which seemed to catch the fancy of quite a few in the audience. It also didn't hurt that Duran Duran were kind enough to allow their guests the use of their Vari-Lite rig, so at least a shifting palette of greens, purples and yellows kept the eyes busy while VHS Or Beta laid down the robogrooves.

You'd have thought that The Beatles themselves were in the house judging by the deafening level of screams that greeted the "classic lineup" of Duran Duran when they took to the stage and kicked into "Sunrise" (their comeback single and hands down the best track on Astronaut). Following that quickly with "Hungry Like The Wolf" and assorted other classic hits and new songs, Duran Duran put on a pretty damn good show - even better than when I'd seen them before ... though I suppose for a face value of $56 a (decent, but not amazing) seat, the crowd wouldn't have been very happy with anything less. They boys have certainly been taking care of themselves as well as most of them looked to be in dependably pretty fighting form, save perhaps for Andy Taylor's cowboy/Keith Richards getup. Hell, even Simon LeBon's famously-limited voice sounded pretty strong.

About four or five songs in, once my ears accustomed to the frankly rotten sound mix (keyboardist Nick Rhodes was almost completely drowned out whenever the others were playing), the show really started to wear my defenses down. The set list was well paced, with some rather surprising selections performed ("Hold Back The Rain" and "Careless Memories") in lieu of some of the expected bigger hits ("The Reflex" "I Don't Want Your Love" and "Come Undone"). I even have to admit that the band flogged Astronaut pretty effectively onstage, and the new songs certainly seemed to pick up some kick from the live setting (looks like I'll have to give the album a second shot and see what sticks this time).

Hands down, the high point of the show was the midsection at which time the boys started knocking 'em out of the park one after the other. Following the surprise of hearing Rhodes play the Eastern-flavored instrumental "Tiger Tiger" while the rest of the band slinked offstage for a quick breather, I was knocked sideways by a strong rendition of "The Chauffeur" (my favorite song to this day from Rio). From there it was onto an always-lovely "Ordinary World" and then a beautiful rendition of "Save A Prayer" while digital snow fell on the screens suspended behind the stage. Ah, bliss.

From there on, it was nearly all the tried and true crowd pleasers, as the band dragged out "Is There Something I Should Know," "Girls On Film," the traditional show-closer "Rio," "Notorious" and "The Wild Boys" (the last two are almost wincingly silly songs, granted, but the crowd absolutely ate them up).

So, a surprisingly entertaining show overall (if nothing else it made me drag out some old Duran faves from the CD shelf - what more can you ask of a show than that anymore?) and a nice night out on what almost felt like the first real spring day of the year. Here's hoping that this same regular stops by the store again if he can't make the U2 show in December...

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Heaven 17

When keyboardists Ian Craig-Marsh and Martyn Ware departed from The Human League in 1980, the success of vocalist (and sole remaining member) Philip Oakey's reconsitutued lineup a year later with the international smash Dare made many people wonder if the two ex-computer operators had just made a terribly wrong-headed career move. However, Marsh and Ware wouldn't stay out of the spotlight for long.

The pair's first move was the creation of faceless ongoing production concept a la Alan Parsons under the name British Electric Foundation. A couple of heavily synthesizer-based instrumental works consisting largely of cover songs were released by BEF over the next year or so (including the exceptional Music For Listening EP and the full-length Music Of Quality And Distinction). While some of BEF's tracks were intriguing, busily-programmed instrumental workouts, others featured guest artists handling the vocal chores, including Tina Turner, who would soon find her career revitalized as a result of BEF's assistance on her remake of "Ball Of Confusion" (the success of which set up her monster comeback in 1984 with Private Dancer). Another track featured the vocals of Glenn Gregory, who soon after joined Marsh and Ware on a permanent basis under the name Heaven 17.

Over the course of their first two albums (Penthouse And Pavement and The Luxury Gap, which were then smashed together into a self-titled release stateside), Heaven 17 may not have equalled the level of massive global success that the The Human League had reached, yet they managed to create some of the most strikingly original and downright funky electropop of the era. Examples of their expertise include "Play To Win," "Crushed By The Wheels Of Industry," "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thing," "Come Live With Me," and their best-known UK hit "Temptation" (which was featured briefly in the movie Trainspotting). While none of the above songs made much of an impact on the U.S., there were a few that did, largely thanks to (once again) MTV -- these included the exhilirating, relentless drive of "We Live So Fast," the bleak gothic grandeur of "Let Me Go" and the fleet-footed electro R&B of "Penthouse & Pavement."

Like so many other acts in their genre, however, Heaven 17 burned brightly and fizzled fast. By the release of their third album How Men Are in late 1984, the bloom was already off the rose, and subsequent releases failed to make much of a splash anywhere, triggering the the band's dissolution in 1988. By that point, the production expertise of Martyn Ware was already resulting in notable albums by the likes of Erasure, ex-Soft Cell singer Marc Almond, and the one-and-only international smash by Terence Trent D'Arby.

Nearly a decade later, Heaven 17 reformed and surprised many with the release (and tour) of 1996's Bigger Than America, which found the trio creatively revitalized and still capable of cranking out dancefloor-friendly statements like "Designing Heaven," "Freak!" and "Resurrection Man" alongside more reflective works like "An Electronic Prayer" and "Dive," which may well be the most beautiful track the trio have ever recorded.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: 'The Man Machine'

Being one of the most influential bands in all of music over the last three decades, so much has already been written about Kraftwerk that I'd considered just skipping them altogether in favor of writing about the usual more obscure electro-pop fare. Some further thought on the matter changed my mind, since I realized it's a toss up between these guys, The Human League, and Gary Numan as to who had more of a hand in pushing me so heavily into electronic music as a teenager.

I won't bother with bios, behind-the-music stories or career overviews on this edition of the Sunday Synthpop Brunch, since so many have already been written about this iconic act (including a very interesting memoir by an ex-band member). Instead, we're simply going to zero in on what I feel is Kraftwerk's finest moment: their 1978 album The Man Machine.

Over the course of their three high-profile offerings (Autobahn, Radio-Activity, and Trans-Europe Express) pre-1978, Kraftwerk already earned a reputation for sounding rather bloodless on record, and even by that standard The Man Machine seems particularly sleek and refined -- a rather ironic quality given that the album represented a step towards more straight-ahead pop song structures. Perhaps the ultimate sonic demonstration of fabled German efficiency, The Man Machine is a masterpiece of tonal economy -- there is not a wasted note or beat to be found anywhere on this album. Making even Autobahn sound warmly inviting in comparison, The Man Machine is the most perfectly airless work Kraftwerk ever released -- even the occasional lyrics (when they're not sung through a vocoder) are delivered seemingly without intake of breath and are nearly free of any variance in tone.

All of this detached perfection would probably be unlistenable if it weren't for the songs themselves, which are among the most striking and memorable in the Kraftwerk catalog. Sandwiched between the forbidding, lockstep precision of the "The Robots" and the title track, The Man Machine offers up a handful of simple, yet elegant electronic works like "Spacelab" and the weirdly timeless single "The Model," which manage to get your feet tapping along to the rhythm while the songs seemingly do nothing more strenuous than gleam silently like distant stars on a clear winter's night. The real prize, though, is the lengthy, hypnotic synth ballad "Neon Lights" which for me is the definitive Kraftwerk track: arid, dry, ultraclean, almost standoffishly robotic in execution, yet possessed of a shimmery, innocent beauty that has yet to wear out its welcome after all these years.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Pete Shelley

Following the abrupt dissolution of The Buzzcocks in 1981, songwriter/guitarist/lead singer Pete Shelley set to work crafting a solo album called Homosapien from a batch of songs initially intended for the band's next album.

Working again with frequent Buzzcocks producer Martin Rushent (who was then coming off of a worldwide smash hit with the Human League's Dare), Shelley's work would retain the pop sensibilities of his old band but with a drastically different production ethic: as was the case with many then-modern synth albums from the likes of the League, Steve Winwood, and F.R. David, Homosapien was a weirdly stripped-down sounding work -- many of the tracks having a sparse, almost demo-like quality due to a near-total reliance on synthesizers and drum machines with hardly any human accoutrements of any kind to flesh out the sonic picture.

Stylistically, Shelley seemed to bounce all over the map on Homosapien, deploying ridiculously twee dance-pop confections like "Qu'est-Ce Que C'est Que Ca?" alongside more funk-derived rhythmic pieces like "Witness The Change." Alongside these period-pieces, if you will, was the more immediately striking (and catchy) title track, a relentless, stomping dance number possessed of a weirdly dense and unforgiving production sound for it's time (and almost certainly an influence on the music of a young Trent Reznor years later: listen to the nasally vocals and the way the synths seem to snarl malevolently in the mix). The same was true of "Telephone Operator" from the following year's EP XL-1, which was noticeably harder-edged and "bigger" in sound, with some caustic guitar textures buried beneath the synths that give this already-menacing single a real kick in the ass.

While Homosapien is what gave Shelley's career a spark in the States (thanks to MTV, the album actually surfed the bottom half of the Billboard Top 200 album chart over the summer of 1982), XL-1 is what finally attracted a smattering of attention back home in the U.K. as "Telephone Operator" blipped and and off the Top 75 in the spring of 1983, followed by the EP's monthlong residency in the lower reaches of the Top 50 over the summertime. Sadly, what little momentum Shelley managed to build up at home and in America by the middle of 1983 was quickly lost, perhaps largely due to inactivity: it would be another three full years before he returned again with the comparatively lackluster Heaven & The Sea ... and by that time, the world had ceased to care.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Yaz

It was one of the biggest surprises of 1981 when keyboardist Vince Clarke abruptly left Depeche Mode just after their debut album Speak And Spell had achieved a significant breakthrough on the UK charts largely thanks to his work on what would become one of their signature singles: "Just Can't Get Enough." While co-synth player Martin L. Gore would eventually steer Depeche Mode into darker thematic waters over the next few years, Clarke's next move was to further refine his kinetic robopop style under the guise of Yazoo (simply Yaz in the U.S. - God knows why).

Unsurprisingly, the limited output of Yazoo has Clarke's distinctively detailed compositional fingerprints all over it. Stocked with ultraclean, incredibly catchy electro-pop gems as well as some equally compelling and far less sunny material like the doom-laden ballad "Winter Kills" and the eerie experimental tape loop collage "I Before E After C," Yaz's 1982 debut album Upstairs At Eric's was Clarke at the top of his game aided and abetted by the blazing R&B vocals of Alison Moyet (who gave the dry synthesizer dominated music a warmer and more palpably human counterpoint than Depeche Mode vocalist David Gahan was capable of at that point in time).

Apparently, it wasn't just the fans of Speak And Spell that were pleased with the results of this new collaboration: Upstairs At Eric's met with instantaneous success and the popularity of Clarke's new project, for a while, even eclipsed that of Depeche Mode. Despite this runaway success in England, Upstairs At Eric's never took the U.S. market by storm (though it ultimately managed to sell over a million copies over the following decade). Despite never reaching higher than #73 on the Billboard Hot 100, "Situation" became the duo's U.S. "hit" and the song that still accrues the most airplay for them on 80's-themed weekend and specialty shows. However, it was the album's second UK hit "Don't Go" that really caught my attention, largely thanks to airing of it's deeply silly monster-movie video on MTV. Right up there on the same insanely catchy plane as "Just Can't Get Enough," "Don't Go" features a typically head-turning Moyet vocal that adds even more urgency to Clarke's dancing synth arpeggios and driving electronic percussion.

The following summer saw the release of the second and final Yaz album You And Me Both, which managed to top the charts in Blighty (Upstairs At Eric's never made it past #2), but yet didn't have the longterm sales legs shown by its predecessor. The album also managed to yield another UK Top 3 smash with "Nobody's Diary," which retains the danceability of and dancing keyboards from "Don't Go" but adds a more reflective and sorrowful delivery from Moyet, who sings lyrics that could be interpreted as a commentary on the imminent end of their creative partnership.

Following the dissolution of Yaz00, Moyet embarked on a solo career that, while virtually a dead issue in the United States outside of a lone Top 40 single in 1985 ("Invisible"), has seen considerabe success overseas. Clarke landed in an even shorter-lived collaboration next: with Feargal Sharkey under the moniker The Assembly. In 1985, however, Clarke found his musical soulmate at last in vocalist Andy Bell and the two of them formed Erasure, which not only has become far and away Clarke's most permanent musical project to date but also yielded him a true American breakthrough at last with 1988's The Innocents.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: 'Primitive Man'

Years before they became a two-hit wonder in the U.S. (thanks to "Crazy" and "Electric Blue"), Australia's Icehouse were haunting a handful of new-wave and college stations with their dark-tinted, yet highly melodic electronic pop. Sounding at times like David Bowie fronting Joy Division, Icehouse had a much starker sound early on than hinted at by their later American chart hits. This was especially true of their second album, Primitive Man (1982), largely due to the fact that there was no actual band at the time. After dissolving the intial band lineup, singer Iva Davies crafted Primitive Man nearly single-handedly, with assiatance provided by producer Keith Forsey (a session drummer for sundry Georgio Moroder projects in the 1970s and later become one of the pre-eminent pop producers of the 1980s), and it's from that album that we source this inaugural Synthpop Sunday Brunch.

The hypnotic reverie "Hey Little Girl" served as the Icehouse's true American breakthrough, at least as far as MTV was concerned. Though the fledgling channel had a couple of earlier videos by the band in sporadic rotation from their archives, this clip received heavy airplay for months on end in the summer and fall of 1982. Alternating color and black-and-white photography to dreamlike effect, "Hey Little Girl"'s hazy, shadowy visuals perfectly complimented the song's skittering, skeletal percussive track and eerie, chime-like synth chords.

Perhaps due to the original videoclip for the song being rather unremarkable in comparison, "Great Southern Land" never became as well-know its predecessor...at least not until its prominent use years later in the movie Young Einstein (which I believe represents the entire U.S. career of Australian hellspawn Yahoo Serious). It's a real shame this song fell through the cracks stateside, for its breathtaking sweep arguably represents the pinnacle of Icehouse's career. As with "Hey Little Girl," it doesn't take a lot to make "Great Southern Land" work: a driving bassline, a simple synth figure, a double-tracked vocal and a compressed Linn Drum loop is all it takes for Davies to conjure images of wide, empty desert vistas in our mind.

The 2004 Music Wrap-Up

(Note - Yeah, I know, it's February of 2005, and I haven't written anything in nearly a month. I usually do these year-end recaps a bit late anyway, but this one comes far later than usual as the result of a catastrophic screwup that wiped out this entire post in its original form back around the middle of January. From there, it took me the better part of a week to get up the stomach to attack this project again, and then a couple more weeks of additional listening to music before I felt ready to rewrite and re-summarize. Lesson learned - always compose longer posts in a word processing program and then paste them in here and format...)

2004: it was the best of times and it was the worst of times – an unending avalanche of alternating good news and bad news, artistic brilliance and cynical crap, keen executive foresight and quick-profit idiocy.

In the all-important realm of new and vital music, it was once again those pesky independent labels operating largely below the mainstream radar that did nearly all the grunt work in discovering and serving up the best material the year had to offer. As far as bands that actually “made it” to the majors and made a big splash on SoundScan were concerned, it helped a lot if your band name was Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand, or perhaps Los Lonely Boys. Beyond that qualification, it wasn’t a pretty picture for new artists unless your sister had a mysteriously-popular reality show on MTV, or you had a movie career (and augmented breasts) to use as a launching pad for your singing aspirations.

What very few breakthroughs that did emerge at the mainstream level in 2004 were almost entirely poached from overseas deals (Keane, The Darkness) or simply bought up from the minors in the tried-and-true fashion that has existed since the so-called Alternative Rock Revolution. In the case of the above-mentioned trifecta of Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand and Los Lonely Boys, these albums were literally swooped down upon as they started to break open from Sony’s faux-independent labels operating in a little shack on the same corporate premises.

Thanks to the ongoing ripple effect of the corporate media conglomeration orgy of the 1990s, bland, vaguely rebellious meat and potatoes rock and inconsequential brand-obsessed hip hop continued to dominate the airwaves to the exclusion of nearly all else. The picture here hasn’t really changed much, as the major labels saturated all mainstream musical outlets virtually unopposed, pumping them full of some of the most insipid, uninspired and market-tested-for-your-safety product in recent memory. The independents, long used to this drastically-tilted playing field, continued to exploit the opportunities for promotion offered by longtime allies at college radio and the internet, while two recent additions to their arsenal -- satellite radio and digital distribution – began to experience some rapid upward growth (largely in response to the decade of “comfortable” stasis reigning at FM).

Incredibly, this runaway consolidation that has engulfed the music industry (as well as most of the entertainment media itself) since the early 1990s continued into 2004 as Sony and BMG merged at last, effectively reducing the Big Five to the Big Four ... or, perhaps more accurately stated, the Big Two (Universal and SonyBMG) and the Not-So-Big Two (WMG and EMD). Hell, one could even refer to this new recalibration of power as the Axis (Japan and Germany) vs. the Allies (U.S. and U.K.).

The big news in corporate land aside from the latest mega-merger was the total sales picture, which continues to look muddy at best. This is actually troubling news for the industry, as for the first eight months of the year, 2004 represented a confident step back into upward sales momentum for the first time since 1999. Then along came the fourth quarter and the shit-eating grins in the corporate suites started to vanish in a hurry as those thirteen all-important sales weeks damn near completely erased all of the healthy gains posted until then.

The late-flagging sales pace at the retail level was in direct opposition to the already-strong sales of legitimately available downloaded music – sales of which began to soar towards the year's end as the emergent iPod culture began to flex its developing sales muscle at last. It is this developing battle of digital file sales vs. physical CD sales that will likely be one of the most watched stories of 2005, and the results will have seismic impact (as if they haven’t already) on the way music is promoted by the majors in the coming years. If CDs can manage to stay the course and build on last year’s minor gains, then perhaps the worst of the industry’s slump is indeed history at last. But if CD sales flag again (especially at a pace relative to what was seen during Q4 2004), then we may soon see just how ready the U.S. music market really is for an all-digital future.

As far as albums themselves were concerned, it still wasn't a banner year, though the ratio of wheat to chaff product appeared to show some real signs of improvement for the first time in the new century. Perhaps reflecting the industry's soaring fortunes in the a la carte download business, songs/individual tracks seemed to be more dominant than albums in determining the worth of a given artist once again, though there were some encouraging signs pointing to labels remembering for the first time in a decade how to make albums that people will actually want to play more than once. In-house guidelines quietly put into place by Sony, for example, started trending CDs away from the 13-15 song / 65-75 minute excesses common to the last decade, favoring a 10 song, 40-50 minute approach instead. This "all-killer, no filler" style of thinking seemed to be coming back into vogue across all labels towards the year’s end...whether the results actually matched the intent, however, is still wide open for debate.

Of course, the music industry being what it is, smart moves are always sabotaged by the kind of thinking that might be a grand idea when it comes to marketing snack foods and children’s toys, but not necessarily so for selling music. Perhaps the single most infuriating practice becoming commonplace is the repackaging of current albums, which nearly always means added tracks or visual content that was not available on the initial release. Until 2004, this practice was largely reserved for underperforming albums that were judged to be in need an added incentive to kick their sales into gear (usually achieved with a new song or remix added to the updated version). But the re-issue of Usher’s Confessions (the biggest selling album of the past year by some margin) only six months into its run, followed by expanded editions of breakout albums by Franz Ferdinand, Los Lonely Boys and Gretchen Wilson signaled a full willingness on behalf of the majors to quit beating around the bush and to see if they can indeed sell a blockbuster album twice. What kind of message does this send to fans conditioned over the years to purchase new albums the second they hit the street? What kind of sympathy are these fans to have for the major labels and their ongoing heavily publicized battle against online piracy when they pull this kind of shit in return?

Continuing along this apparent dropping of the pretense of consumer friendliness, the labels also seemed to be forcing diehard fans to purchase the same product twice in different formats, not just CD itself. The apparently inexorable march into a 5.1 surround future continued in 2004 as more advanced-resolution format SACDs, DVD-As and (towards year’s end) DualDiscs made their way to shelves, with many of these updated editions offering bells and whistles unavailable in any other fashion. The most glaring example of this was the SACD-hybrid remaster of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, which offered a second disc of b-sides, remixes and non-album tracks that was not available on the DualDisc version, which instead offered promotional videos for the album’s singles unavailable on any format.

While SACD and DVD-A appear to be eking some kind of uneasy co-existence on racks, DualDiscs (which represent the technological fusion of DVD and CD technology onto a two-sided disc often sold at the same price as a regular compact disc unlike some SACD/DVD-A titles which can retail upwards as twice the price) remain an unproven commodity, though an intensive release schedule in the coming year will certainly raise their visibility. Amusingly, the format launched with true ham-handed aplomb – the entire run of the much-ballyhooed initial major label DualDisc release (The Donnas’ Gold Medal) were defective pressings, with no option available for replacement copies as the title was immediately deleted from the WMG catalog (but customers returning them for a CD copy were allowed to keep the special DualDisc slipcase as a reward for giving it a whirl anyway). Nice!

Alright, enough with the industry news/rant prologue: without further ado, here are the lists and awards I’ve bestowed upon the most notable albums (for better and for worse) of the last 12 months. Enjoy!


THE BEST ALBUMS OF 2004


1. U2 How To Dismantle An Atomic Bom

2. Todd Rundgren Liars

3. Max Richter The Blue Notebooks

4. Keane Hopes And Fears

5. Brian Wilson SMiLE

6. Snow Patrol The Final Straw

7. Ulrich Schnauss A Strangely Isolated Place

8. Massive Attack Danny The Dog

9. Tears For Fears Everybody Loves A Happy Ending

10. The Black Keys Rubber Factory

11. VHS Or Beta Night On Fire
12. Zero 7 When It Falls
13. Comets On Fire Blue Cathedral
14. Secret Machines Now Here Is Nowhere
15. The Whiles Colors Of The Year
16. Prince Musicology
17. The Blue Nile High
18. Isidore Isidore
19. Lisa Gerrard & Patrick Cassidy Immortal Memory
20. Interpol Antics

Honorable Mentions:

Aerosmith Honkin’ On Bobo
Ambulance Ltd. LP
Arcade Fire Funeral
Bjork Medulla
The Church Forget Yourself
Client City
The Dissociatives The Dissociatives
Dogs Die In Hot Cars Please Describe Yourself
Eagles Of Death Metal Peace, Love, Death Metal
Faze Action Broad Souls
Franz Ferdinand Franz Ferdinand
Green Day American Idiot
Iron And Wine Our Endless Numbered
Japancakes Waking Hours
The Killers Hot Fuss
Kaki King Legs To Make Us Longer
Kings Of Convenience Riot On An Empty Street
Lambchop Aw C’mon
Lambchop No You C’mon
The Libertines The Libertines
Longwave Life Of The Party
Menomena! I Am The Fun Blame Monster
Morrissey You Are The Quarry
Mylo Destroy Rock & Roll
Orbital Blue Album
A Perfect Circle Emotive
Grant Lee Phillips Virginia Creeper
Phoenix Alphabetical
Radio 4 Stealing Of A Nation
RATATAT RATATAT
Rush Feedback
Scissor Sisters Scissor Sisters
William Shatner Has Been
The Shore The Shore
Supercilious The Next Time We Go Sublime
Tortoise It’s All Around You
Trans Am Liberation
T.V. On The Radio Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babies
Tweaker 2 A.M. Wakeup Call
United State Of Electronica Emerald City
Vangelis Alexander
The Veils Runaway Found
The Von Bondies Real Gone
Tom Waits Real Gone
Wilco A Ghost Is Born
Worm Is Green Automagic
Pete Yorn Live From Jersey
Zombi Cosmos



1. Various Artists Left Of The Dial - Dispatches From The ‘80s Underground

2. Various Artists Black Power - Music Of A Revolution

3. Tangerine Dream The Bootleg Box Set, Volume 2

4. Fleetwood Mac Rumours (Deluxe Edition)

5. Talking Heads The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads

6. John Mellencamp Words & Music - Greatest Hits

7. Paul Simon The Rhythm Of The Saints

8. Nine Inch Nails The Downward Spiral (Dualdisc)

9. Soundtrack Garden State

10. The Cure Join The Dots - B-Sides And Rarities

11. Tangerine Dream Thief
12. Pearl Jam Rearviewmirror
13. Neil Young Greatest Hits
14. ZZ Top Rancho Texicano: The Very Best Of ZZ Top
15. The Verve This Is Music – The Singles
16. Slowdive Catch The Breeze
17. Fleetwood Mac Tusk (Deluxe Edition)
18. Nirvana With The Lights Out
19. Brian Eno Another Green World
20. Pink Floyd The Final Cut

Honorable Mentions:

The Allman Brothers Band Stand Back – The Anthology
Curve The Way Of Curve
Def Leppard The Best Of Def Leppard
Brian Eno Before And After Science
Brian Eno Taking Tiger Mountain
Fleetwood Mac Fleetwood Mac (Deluxe Edition)
A Flock Of Seagulls Listen
John Fogerty Blue Moon Swamp
Daryl Hall & John Oates The Ultimate Hall & Oates
George Harrison Cloud Nine
Bruce Hornsby Greatest Radio Hits
Grace Jones The Collection
Lamb The Best Of Lamb 1996-2004
Paul Simon Graceland
Soundtrack Grand Theft Auto – San Andreas
Tangerine Dream Live Aachen - January 21st 1981
Tangerine Dream Live Montreal - April 9th 1977
Tangerine Dream Live Sydney - February 22nd 1982
Travis Singles
Various Artists Happy Birthday Newport! 50 Swinging Years
Yes Drama


THE LETDOWNS AND WORSE

The Beatles and John Lennon front the letdowns of the year, as it looks like Capitol Records has started to scrape against the very bottom of the barrel at last -- both projects are really only for the hardcore collector/fetishists despite the marketing campaigns put in motion to sell them. To be fair, it must be said that the Fab Four’s latest exercise in repackaging (The Capitol Albums Vol. 1) actually failed on non-musical counts, as the shrill, compressed-to-the-pain-threshold mix and terribly-conceived packaging alone conspired to make this project feel like a callous rip-off. Lennon’s Acoustic, on the other hand, features some strikingly shoddy-quality material that (along with the bonus material on Rhino’s otherwise-excellent reissue of The Cure’s Three Imaginary Boys) stretches the definition of what is “releasable” in new and rather unpleasant directions.

While we're on the Beatles tip, Abbey Road engineer Alan Parsons issued an electronica record (A Valid Path) last year with hardly anything on it worth a second listen save for the title track , which featured some typically blazing slide guitar work from David Gilmour. Further casting shame on the heady 70s, Christine McVie and her old band Fleetwood Mac both issued completely inconsequential albums; McVie’s emergence from retirement was rife with lazy clichés and faceless, by-numbers music, while the mighty Mac’s Live In Boston failed to capture lightning in a bottle in the same fashion as 1997’s excellent live album The Dance.

A few 80s icons returned to the fray with dissapointing results, most notably the original lineup of Duran Duran, whose Astronaut contained a catchy coulda-been-a-hit-in-1987 single or two, but was also depressingly free of the fleet-fingered musicianship that made Rio such a potent new wave classic. Another long-awaited release from The Cure turned into yet another ultimately frustrating dry-hump as the venerable act issued what was on the surface a startlingly ferocious effort, yet forgot to pack enough songs to warrant more than a handful of listens. Even more of an unpleasant surprise was just how tired and out of ideas R.E.M. sounded on Around The Sun, which is quite possibly the dullest and most instantly forgettable work of their career. Other acts running on fumes these days include Marillion, who tried to step back into their trademark progressive opulence with Marbles but wound up merely marking time (and far too much time at that) ... which can also be said of They Might Be Giants’ Spine, and The Orb’s meandering Bicycles & Tricycles.

Now, there are albums that I expected more from are then there are the albums which just flat out sucked. The most blatant examples that come to mind in the latter category are Gene Simmons’ perfectly-titled Asshole and Courtney’s Love’s disastrous “comeback” effort America’s Sweetheart (which pretty much shot in the gut whatever was left of her career in music). In perhaps of the most notable achievements of this past year, Brian Wilson managed to both kick ass and suck rocks simultaneously as Gettin’ In Over My Head, released a mere three months before SMiLE, was as pathetic as the latter was brilliant (then again, maybe it just needs another 35 years of work). Other notable stink bombs from the past year -- Damien Rice’s whiningly tuneless compilation of B Sides, David Byrne’s head-scratching Grown Backwards, Concrete Blonde’s stillborn Mojave and Trey Anastasio’s excruciating cod-classical mess Seis De Mayo.

Upping the ampage a bit, Lostprophets’ Start Something continued in the grand late-1990s tradition of screaming and lot and turning all the knobs up to 11 rather than actually recording anything of long term interest. Pulling a similar stunt was The Prodigy, who apparently spent the last 7 years creating the most annoying major label electronic album ever with Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned. Also kicking out the jams and leaving the songs at home this time around was Rick Springfield (!), and while his music has been getting increasingly broody and farther-removed from his ultra-slick 1980s heyday, no one was prepared for the nu-rawk assault of Shock Denial Anger Acceptance (which was far more Linkin Park than “Love Somebody”).

In the almost universally sucky category of cover albums, Wilson Phillips reanimated and dined noisily on the brains of classic 60’s pop with California. The same messy result happened when Warners released the reggaefied all-80’s-remakes soundtrack to 50 First Dates, except that many of the bands on this album still had a viable career when the project was commissioned. A remix album terrifyingly named What Is Hip? – The Remix Project Volume 1 attempted to squeeze blood from a stone by having a dozen and change modern electronic producers and DJs rework songs from the Warner Bros. vault and make them modern and hip -- and the end result sounded like the lamest mash-ups your mother ever attempted on your iMac. Lastly, while The Best Of Sixpence None The Richer was not a true covers project per se, the compilation managed to prove beyond a doubt that this band’s amazing penchant for making every song they re-interpret (“Dancing Queen,” “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” “There She Goes,” and “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times”) sound blander than store-brand vanilla ice cream remains nearly unmatched among their peers.


THE HORROR, THE HORROR…

With over 30,000 titles now released and reissued annually (and that is just in the U.S., folks), the product pipeline occasionally carries along with the flow some Hell-sent project so horrifying in nature that you have to wonder at the mentality of the label execs who green-lighted it. While some of these projects are tied to movies (Dirty Dancing – Havana Nights, Kevin Spacey singing the hits of Bobby Darin simply because he wanted to in Beyond The Sea) or aimed at people who can’t let go of being beat up a lot in junior high school (Insane Clown Posse’s Hell’s Pit), others seem to beggar belief that there is any kind of market for them whatsoever. Occupying this latter category in 2004 were The Ultimate Bang Tango, J.C. Chasez’s Schizophrenic, Joey McIntyre’s 8:09, Kathie Lee Gifford’s Gentle Grace, Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell Live With The Melbourne Symphony, a 3-disc reissue of David Bowie’s Black Tie White Noise, Barbie’s Hit Mix, 10: 1993-2003 – Ten Years Of K’s Choice, Girls Gone Wild Music Volume 1, Phil Collins’ Love Songs – A Compilation Of Old & New, Dennis DeYoung’s The Music Of Styx Live With Symphony Orchestra, Danny Aiello’s I Just Want To Hear The Words, The Best Of Coal Chamber, Regis Philbin’s When You’re Smiling, Kenny G’s At Last – The Duets Album, a solo album from Verve Pipe lead singer Brian Vander Ark (Resurrection), and newly remastered/expanded editions of not only Warrant’s “classic” catalog (Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich and Cherry Pie) but also Tormato by Yes.

Standing out in a field all its own in this category was William Hung’s Inspiration, which is one of those once-in-a-decade cultural nail bombs that sells exclusively on the premise of “oh my fucking God, I HAVE to hear this!” Known to millions for spectacularly bombing his American Idol audition on TV, Hung functioned as a kind of Asian-American Mrs. Miller for the 21st Century, and appeared to be honestly clueless as to just how bad a singer he really was. Whether or not the album was truly another horseman of the cultural apocalypse, the bargain-basement produced Inspiration not only raised (or lowered) bad karaoke to near-gold sales status in the U.S. but also single-handedly set back Asian-American stereotypes about 3 decades. Nice work, Bill.


ENOUGH ALREADY!

So few bands have the ability (or possible chances at individual solo success) to stop when they’re on top like The Police and The Beatles did. Instead, these bands choose to slog on through year after year, long after anyone has ceased caring barring a devoted but dwindling fanbase. Sometimes, said band is actually making music that is an improvement over a decade’s worth of crap, as in the case of Bryan Adams (Room Service), which was too little too late to save him from the abyss. It can also be that a band like New Edition (One Love), who have apparently come to the collective realization that their solo careers have long since withered into dust, so why not fire up the ol' nostalgia machine one more time. More often, however, it’s extended blasts of potato-chip-scented flatulence from the distant past (hello, Silent Nation by Asia!) that make you want to hit the ceiling fan and never invite these guests into your life again.

Being that there is still a sizable portion of the record-buying public out there who desperately want to believe that rock music stopped evolving around 1989, it is possible to perhaps nod your head and say that ok, maybe people like Kevin Dubrow (In For The Kill), 38 Special (Drivetrain), Bang Tango (Ready To Go), The Scorpions (Unbreakable), Heart (Jupiter Darling), Jack Blades (Jack Blades), Overkill (Unholy), Gwar (House Party), Anthrax (Music Of Mass Destruction and the live Greater Of Two Evils), L.A. Guns (Rips The Covers Off), King Diamond (Deadly Lullabyes Live), George Lynch (Furious George), House Of Lords (Power And The Myth), Yngwie Malmsteen (Attack!!), Krokus (Rock The Block), Lynyrd Skynyrd (Lyve), Danzig (Circle Of Snakes), Enuff Z’ Nuff (?), and W.A.S.P. (The Neon God Volumes 1 and 2) still deserve to have a semblance of a career, even at the indie level. Well, what can I say? If you are one of those people, don't take this paragraph too hard, o.k.?

Ah, but there are more walking corpses still stinking up the bins than there are reformed hair metal bands, so we'll share the scorn a bit and list some more artists a decade or more past whatever prime they once had but still refuse to stagger off into the musical sunset. Led by their undead masters The Rolling Stones (Live Licks), this bunch includes the likes of Morris Day (It’s About Time), Dobie Gray (Drift Away & Other Classics), Mike Oldfield (Tubular Bells III), Ready For The World (She Said She Wants Some), Cowboy Junkies (One Soul Now), Crosby/Nash (Crosby/Nash), Gary U.S. Bonds (Back In 20), Harry Connick, Jr. (Only You), Crash Test Dummies (Songs Of The Unforgiven), Southern Culture On The Skids (Mojo Box), Cypress Hill (‘Til Death Do Us Part), Lionel Richie (Just For You and Encore! Live At Wembley Arena), Lisa Loeb (The Way It Really Is), Richard Marx (My Own Best Enemy), Blues Traveler (Live On The Rocks), Royal Crown Revue (Greetings From Hollywood), Black 47 (New York Town), Rusted Root (Live), Adam Sandler (Shhh Don’t Tell), and Boyz II Men (Throwback).

It was once commonplace for a successful band to wear out its welcome over a period of years and not months, but the current industry practice of squeezing every last bit of airplay from a smash carries with it the danger of a very speedy shelf-life for any band lucky enough to score a mainstream hit of any kind. Furthermore, the days of albums being two or three singles deep as a rule are largely over from a promotion standpoint. Thus, your average big hit single is now mercilessly bludgeoned by radio for 30-40 weeks on average instead of the 10-15 weeks that was custom in the previous decades (when it was also considered good business to have more than, say, one good song per album). So it has now become far easier than ever for new acts to be pounded into a greasy smear on the carpet before their second radio emphasis track hits, never mind their second album. Such unlucky overnight-has-beens trying to attain a new lease on life last year included Better Than Ezra (Live: New Orleans – House Of Blues), The Corrs (Borrowed Heaven), Afroman (Afroholic – Even Bettertimes), Collective Soul (Youth), Uncle Kracker (72 And Sunny), Big Head Todd & The Monsters (Crimes Of Passion), Lit (Lit), The Cardigans (Long Gone Before Daylight), Tantric (After We Go), Orgy (Punk Static Paranoia), Sister Hazel (Lift), Fatboy Slim (Palookaville), Saliva (Survival Of The Sickest), Local H (Whatever Happened To P.J. Soles?), Hillary Duff (Hillary Duff), Meredith Brooks (Shine), Seven Mary Three (Dis/Location), Drowning Pool (Desensitized), The Calling (Two), and Marcy Playground (MP3).


THE CHRISTMAS WRAPUP

Not that we've been seeing a bumper crop of outstanding Christmas albums over the last decade, but the new holiday releases for 2004 were a pretty sorry bunch indeed. In fact, the sole notable Yule releases for the year were the garage-rock-leaning Christmas With The Kranks soundtrack and John Waters' hand-picked freakazoid novelty comp A John Waters Christmas (which, if nothing else, was defiantly unafraid of pissing anyone off during its running time). Everyone else this year either played it safe (which ultimately torpedoed the otherwise promising-looking Chris Isaak Christmas) or reissued older holiday-themed material with a couple of new additions slapped on (Brian Setzer, Denis Leary).

Farther down the desirability ladder, there was (as always) a dumptruckful of treacly holiday schmaltz laid on thick by such recidivist MOR slop artists as Clay Aiken, Josh Groban (on the Polar Express soundtrack), LeeAnn Rimes, and the godforsaken Mannheim Steamroller (who really should have stopped releasing these back in the 80s) that dominated the scene, followed by the umpteenth re-re-re-releases of catalog pieces by the likes of Frank Sinatra, The Beach Boys, Johnny Mathis and their ilk.

In the flat-out "terrifying" category, there was Afroman’s Jobe Bells abomination (as if making one comeback attempt this year was bad enough), a hair metal compilation called We Wish You A Hairy Christmas, and William Hung's Hung For The Holidays ... but none of them measured up to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's third Yule release The Lost Christmas Eve, which was yet another pious overbearing Jim Steinman-esque rock opera paralyzed of cracking a smile lest it somehow be taken as anything less than an Important Artistic Statement. T.S.O. also considerately released a freaking box set of all of their holiday fare titled The Christmas Trilogy, which (if nothing else) at least portends an end to these overcooked, sub-Meat Loaf epics.


MISCELLANEOUS DEBRIS, AWARDS AND OBSERVATIONS

I didn’t think I’d ever need to create a BEST ALBUM BAZ LUHRMANN NEVER RECORDED award, but then again these kinds of records never announce themselves the way your average rock albums do. Anyway, some guy named Lazy Boy felt the need to record a kind of combination comedy/self-help album in a similar vein as Luhrmann’s left-field hit with Lazy Boy T.V. – which, while a nice diversion, is also a record that should date as quickly as that “Sunscreen” song did back in early 1999.

Whatever John Frusciante has been doing to himself since cleaning up his act in the late 1990s has certainly kicked his work ethic into overdrive lately – for the last six months, the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist has been so absurdly copious in output that he’s making even Prince look like Boston in comparison. Thus, Frusciante collects the INSANELY PROLIFIC ARTIST award for DC EP, The Sphere In The Heart Of Silence, Will To Death, Inside Of Emptiness, and Shadows Collide With People…all of which were released (and in most cases, recorded) in 2004.

It appears that indeed old rockers never die … they just cease going after your daughters and start leering at your mothers instead. Once again splitting the BLUE-HAIRED VEGAS ROCK award between them, Michael McDonald (Motown Two) and Rod Stewart (Stardust… - The Great American Songbook III) have created a mini industry between them of peddling “safe” old standards re-recorded and ready to use in any phone company commercial that needs them.

The best modern examples of TRULY SICKO ALBUM ARTWORK may not have the same capacity to repulse as in the 12” x 12” heyday of vinyl, but a select few CDs every year like perpetual gross-out champs Cannibal Corpse’s Wretched Spawn and up-and-coming acolytes Cattle Decapitation’s Humanure always manage to make you feel relieved that the advent of the CD era has seen artwork shrunken down to it’s current point … you really don’t want to see these images any bigger than they already are.

Along with stomach-churning artwork, OBNOXIOUS ALBUM TITLES AND BAND NAMES (and once in a while a classic label name like A Violent Turd) can always brighten up even the most boring label release sheets, and there were some fine examples of both in 2004. Such great names seen during the last year include I Killed The Prom Queen, Eddie Spaghetti, Sluts Of Trust, Rotting Christ, Gore Gore Girls, Gorerotted, Goretex, Pig Destroyer, A Wilhelm Scream (film geeks will chuckle, the rest of you can keep reading), Scum Of The Earth, The God Awfuls, The Clinton Administration, Well Hungarians, and, last but far from least, the Exploding Fuck Dolls.

It goes without saying that the best album titles are the ones that take on a hilarious shade of meaning (whether intended or not) when seen alongside the name of the artist or band. For proof of this wonderful synergy, look no further than G.G. Allin’s Expose Yourself compilation, Bile’s Frankenhole (not to mention their best-of Regurge – A Bucket Of Bile), Pygmy Love Circus’ The Power Of Beef, Exhumed’s Platters Of Splatter, Holy Shiite by Dayglo Abortions, Gibby Haynes And His Problem, and Great White’s live compilation Burning House Of Love (which, granted, was not released with the band’s input or blessing, but you have to admire the sheer balls on the fly-by-night Italian label that issued it anyway).

Speaking of live albums, whatever happened to artists earning the right to release live or "rarities" albums? Rather than being a much-hyped "event" release capping or summarizing the career of the biggest superstar acts (whether active or defunct), these albums are now more prevalent in the marketplace than actual physical singles, for crying out loud. The release of concert recordings from bands as recently-arrived as Evanescence, String Cheese Incident, 3 Doors Down, and John Mayer (who released his second double live album in 2004), or rarities albums from the likes of Damien Rice, Incubus, and Static-X has already become everyday business. Aside from a plausible corporate aim to nip internet piracy in the bud, the mere existence of these albums seems to underline just how fleeting fame can be in this modern age.

Coming out of one of the most divisive election years in modern U.S. history, it's no surprise that politics played a bigger part in the record industry than at any time I can remember. Even the underground punk scenesters who made careers out of coruscating Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s didn’t have the visibility attained by Steve Earle's The Revolution Is Now, Bad Religion's The Empire Strikes First, John Fogerty's Deja Vu All Over Again, Fat Wreck Chord's compilations Rock Against Bush Volumes 1 & 2, moveon.org's Future Soundtrack For America, the soundtrack to Fahrenheit 9/11 (not to mention a separately-released Music Inspired By… tie-in) and Songs In The Key Of W by The George Bush Singers enjoyed in 2004. Too bad that high media visibility was all that these releases could boast. Sigh.

Getting back to brighter topics, here’s an award I enjoy bestowing almost as much as the year’s best album, and that is the year's MOST SATISFYING FLAMEOUT. Even better, this year's award is a draw! Woo! It's not often I get to dance on two graves at once, and this being the era of Behind The Music-savvy spin, these stories won't stay in their present hilarious state for long, so let's enjoy kicking these inflated egos while they're still down.

For about eight months this year, this award was a lock for Janet Jackson. Following her world-famous disaster of a promotional stunt (showing a little jeweled titty to all of America during the SuperBowl halftime show) heralding the release of her latest cartoony sonic handjob Damita Jo, dear Miss Jackson actually found herself doing real damage control rather than basking Madonna-like in the intended manufactured controversy. In a rare show of mass wisdom, the American buying public passed on Damita Jo -- which was a big enough flop upon release not even Virgin Records believed in it enough to try reissuing with bonus tracks around the fourth-quarter as was originally planned -- and sent poor Janet careening down to the celebrity B list (at least until she enlists the services of Clive Davis to plot her comeback). Classic!

Ah, but then along came Ashlee Simpson -- the even more-annoying younger sister of Jessica -- who scored an instant #1 with Autobiography thanks to evil MTV relentlessly airing a reality series based around the making of said album. While this flashy achievement was indeed a pretty low point in the year for our country, there was a delicious price to be paid a few months later when Ashlee was caught lip-synching in perhaps the most satisfying fashion imaginable -- live and in front of an audience of millions watching Saturday Night Live. Simpson's pathetic rifling through various excuses as to how this happened in the days that followed was bad enough, but then she compounded the error with her side-splitting "singing" performance during the Orange Bowl a month later, making her the biggest music industry laughing stock since Milli Vanilli (and their songs were actually better).

Finally, it wouldn't be a year end awards ceremony without at least one nod given in gloriously bad taste, and here it is -- my first annual BAND MOST LIKELY TO BE WEARING KEVLAR ONSTAGE award goes to Alter Bridge, who (going by the recent history of new rock acts created out of the acrimonious dissolution of far bigger rock bands) also might be well advised to keep their backstage doors locked once their equipment is off the truck and on stage, lest their debut album (One Day Remain) also become their last.

All right, enough with last year, let's get going into 2005! New Order, Nine Inch Nails, Coldplay, Doves, Sigur Ros, Tool, Foo Fighters, The Raveonettes, Moby, Daft Punk, Erasure, Soundtrack Of Our Lives, Audioslave, Hot Hot Heat, Queens Of The Stone Age, Oasis, Mercury Rev, Kasabian, The Bravery, Lemon Jelly, here we come...

January Blues

The holidays are over and another new year has begun, and just as before it always feels empty and dull. If December is a party that winds up as the month goes on, January is the month-long hangover that follows.

January is the eternal joykiller -- a party crasher who winds up sitting next to you, smoking stinking miniature cigars and talking in a dull monotone for hours about subjects you couldn't care less about, only succeeding in making you feel uncomfortable, irritable, and finally impatient as hell to leave.

January is a bleak, dead, soulless month. Even when there is a blanket of snow is on the ground, the sky in January always looks as gray and featureless as a cold slab of metal. The trees stand claw-like in the wind this time of year, stripped of leaves and offering no protection from rain, sleet or snow.

January's torpid, glass-eyed shuffle even drags out the days at work, making them feel like an endless slog through ankle-deep muck. This is the ass-end of the music business schedule - a dry wasteland of fourth-quarter cast-offs and slapdash compilations of Love Songs. It's a month when sales power down and down and down from the previous month's highs, a month with hardly anything to offer to create excitement or at least dispel the feeling that I am simply marking time at the store waiting for February to begin.

For many years, probably since I was a teenager, January has been my annual low point -- far and away my least favorite month of all. While everything above certainly counts as reasons why this is so, I think I hit upon what it was that really bothers about this month when I was driving home from work tonight: it's the lights being gone. No, I don't mean that in a kind of hackneyed "Ohhh, I wish it could be Christmaaaas every daaayyy" fashion, but more along the lines of "why can't these be seasonal lights for the Winter season rather than just the Holiday season?"

The loss of the holiday lights in windows, doorways, sidewalks and storefronts just sucks out all of the attendant feelings of warmth and beauty that make even the worst December weather tolerable (at least to my goofy psychological sensibilities) -- a blizzard around the holidays is far prettier than one in the depths of January. When the lights come down, it's not so much signifying the end of the holiday season as the start of the gray season, when even gently falling and drifting snow brings to mind Joy Division rather than Vince Guaraldi.

This is probably why I've always been so slow to take down our decorations every season since I left home ... not so much sadness at seeing the holidays ended as seeing the colors gone and replaced by cool, empty, open space. Moe's been sorely testing my patience climbing the Christmas Tree lately, and trying Sarah's by attempting to rend the tree skirt (not to mention chewing on the lower branches and wires), but so reticent am I to resign myself to the rest of the cold dim chasm that is January that even Moe's best efforts haven't been enough to get me working on putting all of this stuff away just yet.

Mm, only 4 weeks till February. I think we're gonna make it.