The Post-Rockist

Electric Six
Switzerland
[Metropolis Records; 2006]

Rockists hate Electric Six. Rockists think that Electric Six is everything good rock should not be: trashy, jokey, lewd, full of hooks and disco and naked ladies. Pitchfork Media’s review of last spring’s Señor Smoke, the Six’s second full-length album, branded the band “dick-and-fart-joke rock.” It called the album’s best song a “head-up-ass ballad.” It called the album sad, for god’s sake.

Well, Pitchfork, maybe it’s because it’s summertime, at least until next Thursday, and I’ve been driving around in my car listening to Fire and Señor Smoke (and Franz Ferdinand and Cake classics), which get me where I want to go. Maybe it’s because I’m not quite ready to give up my pulp fiction, my mojitos, or my stupid loud music until some goddamn leaves start falling and I have to stay inside listening to Joanna Newsom and the Silver Jews. Or maybe it’s because I’m from Detroit, where we are more concerned with Vengeance than we are with Fashion.

But you know what? I love this band. I love this band recklessly. The Six themselves may find my love for them embarrassing, but I am not ashamed.

Electric Six’s sound filters through several plates of synth, kitsch, and genre before it reaches one’s ears, inviting a questionable array of critical classifications including disco-metal, disco-punk, and garage-disco. If I were to contribute to these baffling gestures I would call the new album, Switzerland, a sort of pastiche of European techno-trash and disco-desert-rock, complete with twang, slide guitar, and cowboy beats. But of course this is unsatisfactory. What do I really want to say about Switzerland? I want to say that my first impulse was to be disappointed. Wasn’t the opening track, “Band in Hell,” just a little on the … slow side? Sure, the Devil and Hitler both show up before the bridge, but could I be correctly hearing a chorus with no slapstick at all? A chorus that goes something like, “I’m sorry that I lost you/ … I’m sorry that I am who I am”?

With the wisdom of several spins of the record behind me, however, I can tell you that “Band in Hell” sets a striking tone of southwestern despair and (dare I say) genuine regret that carries the whole album forward. There are venereal diseases where there were once beautiful girls. Where we once did the Macarena all night long, we are now pulling the plug on the party. One song is titled “I Wish This Song Was Louder.” It’s not, and there’s nothing that the Six can do, besides keep rocking our infernal souls into eternity.

(Continued)

I’m From Barcelona
Let Me Introduce My Friends
[Dolores; 2006]

The release of I’m From Barcelona’s LP Let Me Introduce My Friends couldn’t have come at a better time.  This is the kind of music that brings people together – and what better time to bring people together than at the beginning of the school year.

I had the fortune to stumble upon I’m From Barcelona quite by accident.  With the help of last.fm and Jens Lekman I was steered toward the band with the unusual name (who are, in fact, not from Spain, but rather, Sweden).

If you’re like me, hearing the phrase “Swedish Pop” will conjure up images of Ace of Base being played at your middle school sock hop or perhaps drunken renditions of ABBA’s Waterloo on Karaoke Thursday.  Don’t worry, I’m from Barcelona won’t do much to alter your image of Swedish pop music.  Just replace the sequin unitards of 1970’s ABBA with the indie geek chic look of the mid-00’s.  The band is arguably cheesy but undeniably infectious.  (What can I say, I’m a sucker for hand claps.)  With 29 members, I’m From Barcelona is quite possibly the most inclusive band of all time.  I’m From Barcelona has created music videos for their songs “We’re From Barcelona” and “Collection of Stamps,” which are currently circling the internet and helping to build an international fan base.  The first time I saw the video for “We’re From Barcelona” I squealed with delight at lead singer Emmanuel Lundgren’s red moustache.  It’s hard to tell exactly who plays which instrument; however, the chorus consists of approximately 20 people, all with appropriately Swedish-sounding names.  My personal favorite band members are Martin Alfredsson and the charming Mattias Johansson.  I feel like I could call up Frida Öhnell on the phone and chat for hours.  Watching the music videos, you can feel the camaraderie between the band members.  They give each other bunny ears and stifle back giggles.  As the audience, you feel included in the fun.  It isn’t a coincidence that the album is called Let Me Introduce My Friends.  This is just a group of friends and they aren’t in the band to make money; they are making music because it’s a fun thing to do.

Each song gives listeners a new surprise.  I find myself identifying new instruments each time I listen: tambourine, maracas, banjo, tuba, clarinet, trombone, kazoos, and even an accordion and perhaps a xylophone.  Not just any band could get away with a song about stamp collecting.  Personally, I never would have thought to rhyme “Sudan” with “Uzbekistan.”  I’m From Barcelona’s song “Collection of Stamps” manages to make my own postcard collecting hobby seem a little bit cooler. 

(Continued)

Bob Dylan
Modern Times
[Columbia Records; 2006]

This is the first time I have ever attempted to write about Mr. Bob Dylan.  He has always been one of the most important people in my life and has gotten me through numerous hard times, but I have never been able to come up with the words to describe my sincere appreciation and gratitude.  Add that to the fact that there are far too many people already writing about Dylan and not even getting close to describing the depth of his power and influence.  I never would have even considered writing about him in the past, but after watching him exist in the 21st century, I feel that I can now attempt to see if my words do him justice. 

It’s true that Dylan has always been accessible in that he is able to appeal to the masses, but in a spiritual way that prophets like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. have been able to do.  There is an enormous myth that surrounds him and has been ever since he wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” in the early sixties.  However, it seems like the myth has become even more exaggerated among the younger generations, who see Dylan as a sort of father figure of the twentieth century.  When Dylan was just a baby-faced kid performing folk songs in Greenwich Village, other people could sense his importance, but he was still thought of as being just a kid.  To the younger generations today, it is nearly impossible to imagine him in this way, since we see him as a holy paternal figure, instead of just as a gifted artist.  Jack White was recently quoted saying, “I have three fathers: God, my biological father, and Bob Dylan.”  This mentality is prevalent among the X and Y Generations, who grew up listening to their parents’ records while hearing a mystical quality in Dylan’s artistic voice.   Young people are finally getting the opportunity to hear Dylan’s new records at the time in which they are made, instead of hearing them decades after they’ve been released.  This has allowed me to see Dylan as a human being for the very first time.  I have suddenly realized that this person actually exists on earth, in the present, along with me and everybody else.

It is amazing that Dylan’s music is so human and accessible to people of all different ages, yet he still maintains this aura of divinity.  In that way I guess he could be considered Christ-like, being 100 percent divine and 100 percent human at the same time.  His music reaches deep into the spiritual realm and the nature of existence, while his songs take and ache and make love and break just like a little girl.  In recent years it seems like he has attempted to shed some of his mystery and present himself in a more mortal way.  There have been several projects that Dylan has been involved with in the new century that are different from anything he’s done in the past.  Every week for the last few months he has been playing DJ and hosting “Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan” on XM Radio, in which he seems to be having the time of his life.  On this program you can hear his great sense of humor shine through, with lines like “I bumped into Charlie Sheen last weekend and he had this to say about fathers.”  It is quite bizarre to hear Dylan talk so much while he raves about the music that is nearest and dearest to him.  On this show he plays a lot of the music that had inspired him in his younger years, along with artists of today that he seems to appreciate like Beck and The Streets.  By hearing him talk about his tremendous love of music, it reminds us listeners that he is a music fanatic just like you and me.  We also got to see the human Dylan in last year’s Martin Scorsese-directed documentary No Direction Home, which portrayed Dylan as a kid being exploited by the people around him during his formative years as an artist.  It featured a surprisingly frank Dylan of today looking back on this difficult time when the role of “spokesman of a generation” was thrust upon him.  The film allowed us to see from his perspective and removed our fixation on the mythic Dylan of the sixties and forced us to focus on the young artist who frequently felt used and abused during this period.  The year before that he released part one of his autobiography, Chronicles, which also offered a glimpse into how he felt during different eras of his career.  He wrote about the time in the seventies when obsessed fans would stalk him and go through his trash and look in the windows of his house.  After hearing him talk about the toll this took on him and his family, you can’t help but feel awful for ever putting him up on a pedestal. 

In 2003, Dylan co-wrote and acted in the film Masked And Anonymous, in which he played a character that is expected to save the world.  The story takes place in a decaying futuristic society in which Dylan’s character Jack Fate gets sprung from prison in order to put on a concert.  The film was full of unusual characters and situations in a world gone wrong, and the best part was seeing Dylan play an exaggeration of himself who was regarded as some mythical hero.  Dylan has also managed to shock his fans by making bizarre television appearances over the last several years: he was a guest star in an episode in the sitcom Dharma & Greg, he was featured in a Victoria’s Secret commercial, and most recently he performed in an iPod commercial.  Judging from these strange appearances, it is clear that Dylan does not take his messianic stature too seriously and has no intention of maintaining his mystique.  In fact, Dylan has spent his entire career trying to convince people that he is not God or any other ridiculous role that has been thrust upon him.  He’s always just wanted to be an artist and a musician that had no responsibility or obligation to try and save the world.  On one of his early albums he sang, “Ain’t no use a-talking to me, it’s just the same as talking to you.”  Since the beginning of his career, Dylan had a humility about him that people chose to ignore while they made him their personal savior.

With his latest album Modern Times, Dylan has again managed to write terribly moving songs about the human condition while questioning the spiritual world around him.  The songs offer tremendous insight into what it is like to be a living, breathing human being existing in a world that seems like it is falling apart.  The album is full of imagery of impending doom, but it also offers redemption somewhere along the line.  This is a reccurring theme that is evident from the beginning of the album. The first two songs are given the titles “Thunder On The Mountain” and “Spirit On The Water,” which include classic spiritual terms that depict the presence of God in the physical world.  Dylan begins by predicting the coming apocalypse in “Thunder On The Mountain” while he searches for a way out.  The song is filled with fear and chaos over reeling and rocking Chuck Berry-guitars while Dylan plays the prophet and also the drunk who finds it funny that the world is ending.  By the end of the song you feel overwhelmed with the madness of the world, but you manage to have a smirk on your face.  Dylan cools it down with the next track “Spirit On The Water” where he plays the heartbroken romantic who thinks love, or at least sex, is the answer, while the music swings to a charming beat.  Early on he sings, “When you’re near it’s just as plain as it can be. I’m wild about you gal, you ought to be a fool about me.”  But just when you think Dylan is writing a simple love/lust song, he plunges deep into the darkness.  Later on he sings “I wanna be with you in paradise and it seems so unfair.  I can’t go to paradise no more, I killed a man back there.”  This is just the type of image Dylan loves to use and this album is filled with all sorts of these lines.  These opening songs set the pace for the entire album, which goes back and forth between love and death and mystery and murder and God and the Devil and innocence and corruption and the spiritual and the physical and humor and heartbreak.   

(Continued)

RIP WOXY

Video may have killed the radio star, and bloated corporate conglomerates may have transmitted a terminal illness to the heart of mainstream radio, but what scourge befell the beloved internet radio station, WOXY.com? In the words of the ever-prescient ABBA, “I work all night, I work all day, to pay the bills I have to pay, ain’t it sad. And still there never seems to be a single penny left for me, that’s too bad. In my dreams I have a plan, if I got me a wealthy man I wouldn’t have to work at all, I’d fool around and have a ball.” Although it must sound funny to you, starry-eyed music listener, in this rich man’s world it truly is money, money, money that determines the bottom line. Despite the bevy of high-quality, forward-thinking and vintage-adoring programming, and a fanbase more dedicated than any madras could hope to conjure, the advertising revenue and subscription services weren’t enough to keep the WOXY boat afloat. Which sucks. But archive-loving indie rockers can take some pleasure in knowing that they can still search through the approximately 200 live lounge acts, explore their Unsigned artists podcasts, research their charts and playlists, and scoff at or adore their comprehensive Modern Rock 500 list by going here.

WOXY started as a terrestrial station in Miami, Ohio in 1983 (97X - “Bam! The Future of Rock & Roll!”) and had to go off the air in 2004 due to financial difficulties, only to resurface shortly thereafter exclusively in the vague netherworld of cyberspace thanks to the kind contributions of wealthy financiers, much like the rich men of ABBA’s dreams. Today it seems doubtful that such a miracle will strike twice, or even if it did, it is sourly unlikely a large investment will do much to support a long-term business plan for disc jockeys Barb, Mike, Shiv, and Bryan Jay to remain competitive in a world of satellite radio and free, funded audio streams on the internet. Friday, September 15, 2006 at 5:00 p.m. EST marks the final broadcast of WOXY. Tune in today for the epic and tear-jerking finale. Time to bust out the highballs and get ready to toast to a carousing in-studio farewell.

MOVE OVER BING; STEP ASIDE NAT KING: Nothing but coal this Christmas.

Prepare for more whisky in your eggnog and dim candles replacing those bright and uptight tree lights this holiday season. Xylophone pings for jingle bells and solitary pillow-hugging woes for missle toes. The reason for the season: two upcoming holiday collections by two of Indie’s favorite forlorn figures. (Continued)

Matthew Friedberger
Winter Women/Holy Ghost Language School
[859 Recordings; 2006]

The following is a suggested Wikipedia entry for Holy Ghost Language School.

Matthew Friedberger (born October 21st, 1972 in Oak Park, Illinois) is one-half the talent of the ambitious, though some would say foolhardy and overreaching, indie rock duo The Fiery Furnaces. While a quick listen to his recent output may cause some music critics to scoff that he is simply “fucking around in the studio,” the main difference between Friedberger and your dropout friend with a basement full of random musical instruments, is that Friedberger has a recording contract.

Matthew Friedberger

On August 8, 2006, Matthew Friedberger released his first two solo albums as part of a single package from 859 Recordings. Winter Women and Holy Ghost Language School, as they were called, were recorded by Bill Skibbe in Benton Harbor, Michigan between December 2005 and March 2006.  While much has been made already of the liquid pop fantasia behind Winter Women (1), there has not been much critical analysis given to the convoluted narrative threaded throughout Holy Ghost Language School’s rock opera, perhaps because while most rock operas typically feature elements of theatricality or musicality to the story, HLGS comes off more as muffled excerpts from a nonsense mystery novel set to noise. An attempt at a track-by-track breakdown follows.

01. Seventh Loop Highway - 3:57

The story opens with Scot Dombrowski of the Full Business Men’s Gospel International Fellowship Foundation (2) saying aloud that he is listening to the radio, while listening to the radio, and then promptly falls asleep and dreams he is listening to the radio. The narrative frame firmly in place, Dombrowski dreams he is driving down the Seventh Loop Highway, most likely in Texas, and he is reading messages on billboards that are instructing him to “start a school for business Chinese taught by definitely not native Chinese speakers.” The liner notes reveal the hand of God pointing down, with a shower of dollar signs sprouting forth. While the notion seems potentially lucrative in theory (3), second thoughts would reveal numerous practical pitfalls to such a business plan.

The Full Gospel church emphasizes the gifts of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost to bestowing prosperity on earth. Dombrowski imagines he is being instructed to overcome language barriers in the international community by conducting business in a divinely inspired tongue, similar to the “tongues of fire” that befell the Apostles in the New Testament’s book of Acts. (”And then appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire… And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit granted them utterance.” - Acts 2:1-4)  Speaking in tongues, or Glossolalia, is a common feature in the worship practices in modern Pentacostalism as well as the Charismatic Movement.

02. Holy Ghost Language School - 4:13

The second track is told from the perspective of an unidentified individual talking to Dombrowski on the phone from his office at 3000 Grapevine Mills Parkway (4) in June. The individual is preparing a pamphlet on “Christmas-ian” attitudes toward competition for coaches of little league boy’s volleyball and Freshmen girls track for a local school district. The narrator suggests to Dombrowski that instead of simply saying a prayer and writing a 50 word translation, as they had been doing, that they should instead sponsor a “prayerfully guided, Chinese chatroom,” and use the advertising revenue to start the Holy Ghost Language School.

At this point in the album, Friedberger begins to transpose vocal sounds, a technique that will become increasingly frequent as the album progresses.

03. The Cross and the Switchblade - 3:54

“From West Virginia to West Side Story, would say the back of the…” sings Friedberger, deliberately omitting words as the music begins to overcome the vocals and set the mood of a mystery movie.

The Cross and the Switchblade is the name of a nonfiction novel by Rev. David Wilkerson.

04. I Started Using Alcohol at the Age of Eleven - 3: 57

After drinking six diet Cokes, the narrator, possibly Dombrowski, takes off to lead a rehab session at the Teen Challenge for Women over 18 center, during which time we hear of Tifani’s early history of alcohol consumption. After she speaks, the narrator asks if anyone has “ever heard a voice, which though you couldn’t understand quite what it said, managed to comfort you somehow?” At this point, the quirky synth beat gives way to a jazzy player piano melody. One person, possibly Tifani, responds in the affirmative. With several layers of his own vocals, Friedberger asks what the voice says. ”It said this…” and then the music segues into the dirty bass riff of:

05. Do You Like Blondes? - 2:51

Dombrowski and Tifani take ATA (5)flight 4377 “to a place it doesn’t go to see someone who wasn’t there.” We learn that Tifani believed, “If only I didn’t know English, then the devil wouldn’t have gotten me.” She prayed that the Lord would show her other languages, perhaps Swedish, so that her soul would be protected. Tifani, however, does not like blondes.

Gossip columnists point out that Friedberger personally prefers redheads (citation needed).

(Continued)

The Mountain Goats
Get Lonely
[4AD; 2006]

Music critics who are a bit more deadline-driven than your fellow Post-Rockists have gotten their opinions to the public earlier and have classified The Mountain Goats’ new album Get Lonely as a break-up album. They are wrong. It isn’t a break-up album; it’s a broke-up album. John Darnielle isn’t screaming at the top of his lungs sado-masochistic death wishes to his lover, as he does in “No Children.” There aren’t the many scenes of the bitter hatred and anger of two people whose relationship is exploding violently. There aren’t even two people, period, in the new album. There is the one lone solitary character, left alone to his own grief, his own guilt, his own self-loathing, and (scariest), his own imagination, which turns out to be his torturer.

To understand the album, all you need do is to look very closely into the box below. (Continued)

Okay, listen up, gentle readers. If the Post-Rockist is a place for recovering music snobs, I think it’s high time we did a feature on today’s pop music, or, music that snobs wouldn’t be caught dead listening to. It is time to review current popular singles that most of us used to call “pop shit” or “guilty pleasures,” only, now that we are no longer snobs, we will simply call them songs. These songs deserve critical thought and attention since they are liked by so many people and are therefore valuable to our society. In the last few decades popular music has become so segregated that people are no longer willing to admit to liking certain types of music simply because it might be considered too pop or too mainstream. For some reason there is a newly established societal rule that implies that if something is liked by millions of people that it is probably invaluable as a work of Art. When did our culture get so elitist? In the sixties it seemed like everybody liked The Beatles, as they were both artistic and popular at the same time. Their music appealed to people across the board and it was never considered a sin to be a Beatles fan. Nowadays if you like an artist that has a video constantly being played on MTV or VH1, there is no way that you could be considered a “serious” music fan. This mentality has been around for quite a while, but it seems to have gotten worse with the rise of the Indie culture. Of course there were the rock fans in the seventies who attended the anti-disco rallies, and burned stacks and stacks of vinyl just to prove to themselves that rock was a superior genre. While this was totally ridiculous on many levels, at least rock fans still loved mega-popular groups like Kiss and Led Zeppelin.

I’ve been amazed at all of these music fans who turn their back on a band they used to love simply because they were able to reach a broader audience. For example, there were so many people who liked The White Stripes when they weren’t so popular, but now that they are superstars these fans could care less about them. This notion has absolutely nothing to do with the music. Music fans used to have loyalty and trust in the artists that they loved. When a favorite artist of yours put out a new album or came to your town, you spent your money on them just to show them support and gratitude. Now it seems that people have adopted such reactionary personalities that they are constantly looking for something new that no one else knows about. If your parent or your neighbor or your little sister likes the same song as you, then something must be seriously wrong. This way of thinking has plagued so many people, who are constantly using music as a fashion to define their personalities, and so if you like an artist that everyone likes, then basically you have the same personality as everyone else. Who are we to use artists to form our identities?

Let’s enjoy all of the music we can and not question it. If it gets your feet moving, your heart pounding, your fingers snapping, your gut aching, your mind expanding, or your hips telling the truth, then that’s what matters. Music is for the uplifting of the individual and collective spirit and does not need to be ranked.

So let’s drop all the pretenses and come to understand why these songs are bumping in every nursery, school yard, office complex, and retirement home across the country.

Paris Hilton - “Stars Are Blind”

Here is an artist that people would love to see fail miserably, but too bad for them. Despite all the negative expectations, this song is really good and has the potential to be quite a memorable hit song, especially since it sounds like nothing else out there at the moment. It has an insanely catchy chorus and reggae beat that has a similar feel to Blondie’s “The Tide Is High.” Ms. Hilton has a pretty and soulful voice that defines her sexuality as well as her sincerity, and every time she sings, “Let’s see what this love can do,” it’s surprisingly moving. It’s the kind of sentiment found in Bruce Springsteen’s early work, as it’s an embrace of the world’s mystery and a commitment to living and discovering love. Ms. Hilton was recently quoted in the press explaining how hearing her album makes her cry because “it’s so good.” Even she seems surprised at how good of an artist she actually is. Just from her first single, she has proven to have a lot more to her than people think. You gotta respect her boldness by putting so much of herself into her album, knowing that she could turn into a Kevin Federline-type punchline, even more so than she already is. ”Stars Are Blind” is one of the best songs of the summer and could quite possibly be sung in karaoke bars for the next few decades and not as a joke.

Stream “Stars Are Blind” and other Hilton tunes.

Christina Aguilera - “Ain’t No Other Man”

This is exactly the kind of music Christina Aguilera should be making. It finally feels like she’s found herself as an artist by focusing on her powerful voice and her love of big band jazz and rhythm & blues, instead of trying to compete with the dance pop of Britney Spears. After spending most of her career trying to be nastier than her contemporaries, Ms. Aguilera seems to have adopted a more subtle and conservative style of music, which suits her much better and is a hell of a lot more sexy. “Ain’t No Other Man” is a true-blue love song that includes lyrics that are as sincere as they come. The song still oozes sex appeal, but in the way Aretha Franklin or Etta James are able to do with only their voices, without resorting to taking off their clothes. The production boasts a contemporary dance beat along with vintage horn samples that prove that she’s not simply trying to create old-timey music. By combining American roots music with a modern twist, Ms. Aguilera has managed to show artistic promise and depth as she has figured out how to be herself. “Ain’t No Other Man” is her best song yet.

Stream “Ain’t No Other Man” and other Aguilera tunes

Justin Timberlake - “Sexyback” (featuring Timbaland)

You gotta respect an artist that tries new things on their sophomore album. Justin Timberlake was able to surprise all the boyband haters a few years ago with Justified as he seemed like the perfect candidate to be the Michael Jackson of the new millenium. This time around, judging from his single “Sexyback,” he has adopted a new style that is much more influenced by the robo-funk of Prince than the disco-pop of Michael Jackson. In fact, the FutureSex/LoveSounds album cover consists of Mr. Timberlake smashing a disco ball! Instead of relying on The Neptunes again, he choose to have Timbaland and will.i.am produce his new album, giving it a much more futuristic sound. On “Sexyback,” his vocals are distorted and subdued, which is totally unexpected from a former boyband singer. For someone who is always able to rely on his signature soulful voice, it is admirable that he doesn’t depend on old tricks to get his point across. Timbaland’s production is in his regular hit-making style, but Mr. Timberlake appears to be the one giving the track it’s originality as he reinvents himself again.

Stream “Sexyback” and other Timberlake tunes.

(Continued)