Music: New Releases, October 2011 Volume 4

See what’s new this week in music, and whether or not it’s worth your time or money. We’ve got your back!

Coldplay

Mylo Xyloto

In Josh Bazell’s 2008 novel Beat The Reaper, a high-powered surgeon getting ready to operate instructs a nurse to put on his favorite U2 CD, and the narrator informs us “The U2 greatest-hits album is something you learn to live with in medicine. You learn to be grateful it’s not Coldplay.” In other words, even before the end of the last decade, Coldplay was already a sort of shorthand for tired, overworked grandiosity: U2 For Dummies. And while I try to avoid hopping the bandwagon – after all, Martin seems a decent chap, appeared on Extras and all that – nothing about this latest urges me otherwise: won’t win any new converts, won’t kill anyone.

… won’t win any new converts, won’t kill anyone.

I kind of like the terseness of the instrumental title track, building as it does with echoing Big Country guitar and glockenspiel, and apart from the drab synths, “Hurts Like Heaven” with a nice Jonny Buckland guitar solo does a fair job of making the case for the band’s more radio-ready qualities. But it’s mostly a dose of the usual: “Paradise” is Martin at his most indulgently sensitive, “Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall” would be dire on the title alone, and only the spot-the-Rihanna cameo keeps “Princess of China” from being forgotten almost before it’s over. There’s some engaging piano on “Up In Flames,” but its offhand virtuosity gets swamped in the familiar Martin whimper: “Up in flames we have slowly gone / Can we put some water on?” And “Don’t Let It Break Your Heart” sums things up with more generic emotional display. There’s certainly plenty of bands out there coasting on a set of borrowed clichés, and I don’t know that Coldplay deserves to be singled out for it any more than, say, Aerosmith. If they’re your cup of tea, drink up.

Tom Waits

Bad As Me

I was not the biggest fan of Waits’ earliest albums: they tended toward the most obvious kind of sentiment and romanticization of the down-and-out, the songs peopled with drunkards and beatniks out of central casting; when you have as much musical ability as Waits, but can be covered by The Eagles while betraying no sense of irony, it’s time to step things up conceptually. And starting with Swordfishtrombones, he pretty much did exactly that. Bad As Me is, I think, Waits’ 17th “official” album, and up there among his best.

The opener, “Chicago,” kicks things off to Waits’ bellow of “All aboard, all aboard!,” the band slamming along like a freight train being driven by Howlin’ Wolf. Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo offers sizzling guitar runs on “Get Lost,” vintage R&B filtered through Waits’ off-kilter media-savvy perspective.

Now, as much as I love what Waits’ voice has grown into, there are times… well, I had to listen to “Raised Right Man” a couple times through before I realized he wasn’t singing “French fried ham!” – but he’s singing it to a loping Flea bassline that is pure down-home dirt. Here, and on the Keith Richards guest spot on the Stones homage, “Satisfied,” Waits is rocking even harder and straighter than usual: solid but typically skewed. I’d be remiss not to put in a word for Casey Waits’ drumming: he anchors the trickiest signature change with a ramshackle firmness.

…the band slamming along like a freight train being driven by Howlin’ Wolf.

There’s the usual dipping back into the soft-heart-of-the-bottom-of-the-bottle on tracks like “Talking At the Same Time”, “Back In the Crowd,” and “Kiss Me”, but the album’s centerpiece is the stunning penultimate track, “Hell Broke Luce,” inspired by an Iraq vet’s horrifying true story of madness and suicide, as Waits shrieks in the voice of the terrified soldier: “That big fucking bomb made me deaf / Deaf! / I left my arm in my coat!”, over a huge, unholy martial beat. It’s not only the best rock song about modern war since Richard Thompson’s “Dad’s Gonna Kill Me,” it’s sadly one of the very few. The subsequent benediction of “New Year’s Eve” comes as such a relief that you forgive the obvious use of “Auld Lang Syne.”

Deer Tick

Divine Providence

From shambling indie alt-country to loud beer-fueled guitar rock is not your usual career path, but John McCauley and company wouldn’t be caught dead with anything usual. The album is roughly forty minutes of skirting the fine line between straightforward and stupid, and I don’t know if it’s a mark of genius or diabolism, but I’d say it can go either way.

“The Bump” launches with McCauley boasting “I can take a tree / And tear it from its roots,” to a foot-stomping wall of guitar, before degenerating into a cacophony of drunken howling and broken bar glasses; it’s sort of the Happy Hour version of “Farmer John.” “Funny Word” opens with McCauley growling “You fucking douchebag,” and eventually slides into another ramshackle celebration of inebriated stupidity. Things move to the same pace with stuff like “Let’s All Go to the Bar”, “Clownin’ Around,” and “Something to Brag About”: anyone in sore need of Let It Be-era Replacements’ snot-faced noise, meet Deer Tick 2011. Over the course of the album, McCauley shares lead vocals with enthusiastic drummer Dennis Ryan and quirky guitarist Ian O’Neil, but reserves for himself the shouted approximation of Jimi Hendrix’ deconstruction of “The Star Spangled Banner.” As I say, this is not an album on which to seek introspection, but if you’ve been thinking it had been too long since you’d heard a rowdy song about drinking with a fake ID, well turn it up.

… forty minutes of skirting the fine line between straightforward and stupid…

She & Him

A Very She & Him Christmas

No question, She’s voice is ideally suited to the childlike wonder of something like “Little Saint Nick” or “Christmas Wish.” Somewhat frustrating, though, is the lack of musical punch that Him brings to this project. Ward’s a canny enough musician to have done more than simply sit back and play along as he does too often. In particular, songs like “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and “Blue Christmas” have offered predecessors the opportunity for some tasty guitar work, but he seems to think that stepping up too often would be somehow spoiling Zoe’s party.

Ward is also an engaging singer, with gruffly idiomatic phrasing, as he ably demonstrates on the vocal tradeoffs on “Sleigh Ride,” while also lending some nice jazzy guitar runs to the bridge. And the album could use more of that: Deschanel’s gentle cooing of “The Christmas Waltz” and “Silver Bells” would have much more impact with some vocal contrast at the bottom. Biggest disappointment: the version of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is such a quick run-through that it’s almost over before you realize that they’ve inverted the roles, so that She’s the one seducing Him.

Pleasant enough… but not quite the kitsch classic it might have been

It is a nice change of pace to have a newly-composed tune that works as well as the lilting “Christmas Day”: melodically, it’s very much in the vein of the first two She & Him albums, but Ward’s tasteful dose of reverbed guitar tends to reinforce the frustration that he stays in the background for so much of the rest of album. Pleasant enough if you need a new, low-key holiday collection, but not quite the kitsch classic it might have been with both partners’ full engagement.