yo la tengo - ride the tiger

Ride the Tiger has a reputation for being of one of Yo La Tengo's worst albums, and is almost uniformly regarded as their most pedestrian release.  Both claims are spot on.  At best, it's a fun, catchy jangle pop album; at worst, it's an amateurish attempt at Replacements-style college rock, with Ira's trademark feedbac-addled guitar work lacking the gritty punch of their later albums.  It's okay.  Worth the occasional spin, but pales in comparison to any other record they put out.

Yet when you look at it for what it is, outside the overwhelming context of Yo La Tengo's prolific career, it's really a great album.

Bands like Yo La Tengo set the bar for themselves so high that even a great album sounds terrible compared to everything else.  The same case could be made for Pavement, the Replacements, the Beatles, the Magnetic Fields, Sonic Youth, etc.--bands that seem to create their own individual guidelines for criticism, because they're just that good.

If you took Ride the Tiger--or Terror Twilight or All Shook Down or Let It Be--and attributed it to some no-name rock band, it'd be hailed as a phenomenal debut, a sign of great things to come, etc.  Which is probably what happened to Yo La Tengo, until they surpassed that debut continuously for nearly 30 years and became one of the greatest rock bands of all-time.  It's a sad truth that bands of this stature are nearly impossible to review on a neutral level, but there are certainly worse situations to be in as a band.  Instead of these albums being received favorably, they're unanimously declared to be disappointments, let-downs, or mediocre efforts, simply because we know the band can do better.

As for Ride the Tiger, it's difficult to say exactly what makes it so underwhelming.  The overall sound is much more laid-back than your average YLT album, but they've successfully toned it down before (Fakebook, Summer Sun).  The absence of James McNew on bass is noticeable, but they managed to put out five great albums before his arrival, even if Ira maintains the band only "really started" with Painful in 1993.

The only real answer left is that the songwriting simply isn't that good.  There are a few songs here I love ("Five Years," "The Way Some People Day"), but even they are overloaded with a tame Americana gloss and obvious guitar hooks.  The filler on this album is arguably YLT at their absolute worst, and really the filler on any 90s EP is decidedly better than anything on Ride the Tiger.

Yet if you told me this was, say, a Feelies album, I'd tell you it was pretty damn good, a clear evolution from their bracing jangly guitar sounds, and some of the best songwriting they've ever done.  Expectations can be a real bitch.

violent femmes - hallowed ground

There are just as many actual punks in this world as there are accidental punks.  Some work their asses off to be worthy of that lofty descriptor.  Some just luck into it.  Gordon Gano is definitely a punk.  I'm just not really sure which kind of punk he is.

He's a great songwriter. He's a horrible singer. He's ugly as sin. He's cool as fuck. He writes songs about date rape and genuinely loving Jesus Christ. And if it weren't for his band-mates' objections, they would've ended up on one neat little CD for your listening pleasure. Quite possibly side-by-side.

If you were to create a Venn-diagram of Gano's punk/not-punk attributes (which I was dangerously close to doing), that fucker would've been split right even down the middle.

If it weren't for Gano's atheist backing band, the Violent Femmes' debut would've been the greatest punk album ever recorded. “Blister in the Sun,” “Add It Up,” “Kiss Off,” and “Gimme the Car” (as long as we're fantasizing here), paired up with “Jesus Walking on the Water” and “It's Gonna Rain”—any half-assed punk band can combine violent rhetoric with religious imagery (*COUGH*crass*COUGH*), but to legitimately and passionately combine such disparate topics into a true artistic statement...that's punk, my friends.

It's impossible to fight the real truth, however: “Jesus Walking on the Water” works a thousand times better as a work of pure irony than a real description of Gano's religious beliefs. As a song shitting on Christianity in ridiculously over-the-top fashion, it's an absolutely tremendous work of art. As a song about Jesus, it's just plain stupid. Baptists are supposed to be known for their passion, but it sure doesn't seem to translate to folk punk. (Not that Andrew Jackson Jihad stuff, the REAL deal. At least AJJ has the brains to reject the label.)

Any man who can write “Blister in the Sun” and “Add It Up” clearly isn't faking his shtick, but it's hard to reconcile his disturbingly accurate portrayals of teen angst with his downright pretty love songs and (somehow) truthful religious hymns. But I guess that's who he is. And as much as I hate it, and as much as I try to project my own punk icon pipe dreams on the guy, he's just going to be Gordon Gano, as opposed to the Darby-Crash-starring-in-Jesus-Christ-Superstar figure I want him to be.

Which pretty much sums up my reaction to Hallowed Ground as a whole. I want it to be another Violent Femmes, and I don't mind the religious songs—I really don't—but they're just not the same albums. And I suppose it's easier to dream of an alternate universe where Gano put his faith in basic physics instead of ancient religious texts and realized the only thing he's ever gonna see walk on the water is a goddamn lizard.

Incidentally, if he wanted to write songs about Jesus lizards in this alternate universe, I'm totally okay with that. As long as he doesn't start taking himself too seriously this time around.

small faces - from the beginning

I've never been able to accept the fact that the "mod" subculture was a real thing.  An old jazz term, stolen by a bunch of white kids in London who wore suits, listened to R&B and ska, took copious amounts of speed, and beat up kids wearing leather jackets?  How could that possibly be true?

While the age-old image of "mods vs. rockers" wars was largely tabloid nonsense, it really does appear that the hip thing to do in the 60s was to jump on your Vespa and go see a Who show.  Which is just absurd.

It's possible I'm just prejudiced against rock 'n' roll being played in suits.  I remember being crushed when I found out Nation of Ulysses was a bunch of teenagers in nice outfits being assholes to people who wore jeans to their shows.  But it's also telling that nothing from the "mod" culture has carried over to the present, while the evil "rockers" remain iconic figures to this day.

It's almost beyond debate that the only lasting artifact of the mods is their music, but even then, the fact that they were "mod bands" is negligible at best.  The Who really only played to that style for an album or two, and bands like the Kinks, the Yardbirds, and the Stones were always aiming higher than the mods.  Really, the only true mod band worth listening to are the Small Faces.

It's also worth mentioning that the Small Faces sound like every other mid-60s rock band--they're just a pretty good one.  Surely no one would ever suspect them to be the soundtrack to a middling, over-hyped culture war.  Aside from the (slightly overrated) psychedelic classic Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake and that visceral feedback solo on "What'cha Gonna Do About It," there's nothing particularly groundbreaking about their career.  It's fairly generic stuff, and in my opinion, the best thing they did was form the rhythm section for the Faces.  But what do I know.

The mods clearly aren't for me (unless we're talking about the Back From the Grave-Mods--they're pretty cool).  But clearly they were for someone, because for some reason there have been multiple "mod revivals"--the most recent of which seems to have influenced such breathtakingly mediocre bands as Oasis and Kaiser Chiefs.  There's also a school of thought that ties the mod revival to the ska revival of Madness and the Specials fame.  If that's true, then hey--they did something right.  Beyond that, you can just call me a rocker, and if the war against the mods ever decides to kick up again, I'll see you on the battlefield.

Note: I'm back.  Decided to start writing again.  Got pretty goddamn sad around January, and the blog was the first thing to go while I went on a little wallowing spree.  Weather's getting warmer and I'm feeling like a real person again, so I'm back to doing stuff.  Brewing beer, exercising, updating the blog--whoa!  Living life!  Exciting stuff!