elliott smith - figure 8

I've always been underwhelmed by the sad anti-folk guys like Elliott Smith. I know plenty of people who've had their lives changed by his music, but it just never hit me in the same way. The closest I ever came to that kind of crippling worship of a dead musician was my Nick Drake phase, but even that passed without much of a problem. It's just never been an archetype that particularly appealed to me.

It's not that I don't get it, because Smith is a clear music idol in the classic sense--almost blatantly so. He's a would-be punker who writes heart-wrenching songs of lost love, drug addiction, and the general struggles that come with being alive, all wrapped up in incredibly lush production and tied off with a trademark voice worn audibly thin from a decade of self-imposed stress and abuse. It's an image everyone can relate to to some degree.

I just don't think his music is that good. I really don't. He's an impeccable guitar player, and he has an perfect ear for layering just enough vocals and instrumentation to turn bittersweet tunes into the final product he wants without making them too grandiose. The songwriting's just not there.

The few Elliott Smith songs I enjoy, I absolutely love to death. "Angeles," "Say Yes," "The Biggest Lie," and "King's Crossing," if I'm in the right mood. (I can almost hear the collective groans of Elliott Smith fans as I type this.) The rest is incredibly mediocre. There's an undeniable passion behind the notes, but it just does nothing for me.

I suppose if I focused on the fact that Smith killed himself a few years after making this album, and that this is really his last unified work as an artist, I could come up with a response that's a little more emotional and positive. But even with that tall tale looming behind every track, I'm just not moved. This isn't Nick Drake singing "Black-Eyed Dog," characterizing death himself calling out to him--this is just a fucked up dude singing about how fucked up he is. It's not that special.

I hate to be such an ass about this, and I'm not trying to senselessly demean another human life with this piece, but I just feel like someone has to stand up and oppose the hype that's been building around Elliott Smith for the last decade. He's an okay songwriter. Not the rock laureate for a lost generation. Everybody chill out.

gorillaz - plastic beach

(Note: Starting now, every Friday will be a new blog post, while every Tuesday will be one of my column pieces.)

I have a rather large music collection. Large as in 30,000+ songs. Large as in 78.7 days worth of music. Pretty huge.

The upside of this is that every time I go through my library, I can find amazing new music I’ve never heard before.

The downside of this is that I rarely have free space for new albums.

For this reason, I’ve never listened to a single track from Plastic Beach, despite the fact that it was ridiculously hyped for nearly a year and was finally released to a ravenous public all the way back in March, reaching number two on the Billboard 200 in the process.

So, here for you today, I’m going to review said album, completely free of all outside influences—no prior hype or disappointment to take into account. A natural review of a major release, purely on its own merits.

Let’s do this.

---

Plastic Beach is a lot of things.

It’s a concept album, as far as I can tell, but what that concept actually is, I have no idea.

The name “Plastic Beach” implies a kind of futuristic, dystopian landscape, an image that clashes with many of the sounds on the album. At times the Gorillaz production team lays out dense, futuristic sounds with heavy synth lines, while other tracks carry sunny hooks over fluttering melodies, seemingly at home on a regular beach as opposed to this plastic one.

It’s simply unclear what this album is supposed to be.

While “Demon Days” was a complex album that took numerous listens to unravel, “Plastic Beach” just comes off as sheer overkill—too many styles, too many cameos, nothing really singular about the album at all.

Plastic Beach has one of the most impressive guest lists I’ve ever seen, yet the majority of the stars enlisted for the project do remarkably little to help it. In the case of Lou Reed’s cameo on “Some Kind of Nature,” it actually hurts the song. (I love you Lou, but you gotta stop.)

Mark E. Smith, Mos Def, and De La Soul all make honorable contributions, while the mini-Clash reunion on the title track is almost unnoticeable, and Snoop Dogg seems to have stopped by the studio with no real idea what the album was about. (. . . I mean, I don’t know what it’s about either, but still, you’d think somebody would’ve clued him in.)

In the midst of what does turn out to be an incredibly lush, vivid album, the guest spots just end up as distractions. The finest tracks on the album are the ones where Damon Albarn (of Blur) and whoever else makes up the fictional Gorillaz band take front and center.

“On Melancholy Hill” and “Rhinestone Eyes” are the runaway highlights, and they feature nothing but flowing electronic production and Albarn’s vocals.

You can’t help but think that the album as a whole would have improved from this simpler treatment. The Gorillaz project just seems to have taken over the actual musical qualities of the album, which is a shame.

- 10/25/2010

polysics - neu

Way back in my freshman year of college, a MySpace tour came around to my bumfuck, middle of nowhere Catholic institution with Say Anything and HelloGoodbye headlining.

For a college that attracted nothing but Christian acoustic trios and third-rate comedians for outside entertainment, this was a monumental event. Absolutely everyone went to this thing. Except for me.

At the time, I was just getting into Say Anything, but HelloGoodbye was the absolute bane of my existence (and my recent ex's favorite band), and there was just no way I was gonna put myself through that kind of emotional torture just to hear “Alive With the Glory of Love” and that one other song I kinda knew and liked. So I missed out.

The next day, the band people were talking most about wasn't Say Anything or HelloGoodbye, but the oddball opening act: Polysics. Descriptions varied from person to person, but the consensus was that they were a weird group of Japanese people in matching jumpsuits, and “Matt would've loved them.”

For some reason, I'm just now listening to them for the first time. Long story short, they were right.

It's hard to imagine this band playing live at a 200 year-old Catholic college, not to mention performing alongside such conventional bands as Say Anything and HelloGoodbye. Nobody does insane manic energy like the Japanese, and this is as perfect an example as any. These guys are unhinged right off the bat, launching without hesitation into an insane mess of noisy synth goodness that always seems a half-beat away from spinning completely out of control. It's Devo on crack, basically, with a little less new wave and a lot more punk attitude, and the end result is incredibly satisfying.

The number of influences packed into Polysics' sound is ridiculous. The drums and bass pound away with solid offbeat precision, an army of synths churn out waves of fluctuation digital chaos, and the frontman barks out distorted chants and screams with the power and drive of every great punk shaman that came before him. It's crazy and beautiful and funky and discorrific and I love every second of it.

The more I listen to this album, the angrier I get that they were actually opening for HelloGoodbye. Polysics have been playing damn near constantly since 1996, yet they get stuck playing with some shitty synth-pop act that's gonna be forgotten in a few years (if they haven't been already). Just hearing the words "shimmy shimmy quarter-turn" is enough to piss me off--imagine having to stand offstage as a few talentless fucks got an entire college campus jumping around and singing their bullshit songs, while just a few minutes earlier they had been staring at you without moving a muscle? I'd sure as hell be questioning my career choices leading up to that moment.

I can't imagine Polysics giving a shit though. They clearly inhabit a musical universe all their own, one HelloGoodbye couldn't even comprehend, and that ought to be enough to let them sleep well at night.

getting back on track

I haven't posted anything in a long, long while, and that needs to be fixed. People have actually been telling me to write more, which is very flattering. So from now on, I'm gonna try to stick to a semi-strict schedule: every Friday afternoon I'll post a review, either of the album I'm listening to at the time, or of a recent concert I've been to.

I started writing a music column for my college paper a few months back, which took up a lot of my writing energy, but I'm gonna push myself to put out two good pieces a week (in addition to all my regular college work). I might also try to post my columns here too, once I figure out the legality of it. So look forward to that.