Category: Music

When R.E.M. released Up in 1998, long time fans were polarized. Some, expecting the trademark R.E.M. sound, were surprised and disappointed by the drum machines and electronic textures. Others, aware of the band’s necessary change in direction following the departure of founding member and drummer Bill Berry, listened with an open ear. I fell somewhere in the middle: I thought there were some outstanding tracks but overall felt that the performances were tentative and uneven. Now Rhino has reissued the album in a new 5.1 DVD mix (along with all of R.E.M.’s other Warner Brothers output), and with a new mix and seven years in between, I’ve got a new perspective on the album. Up shows a band in transition, but much more solidly grounded in their old sound than it seemed at the time—and writing some of their finest songs of their entire career.

Up’s sequence is probably the least satisfying part of the album. Opening with “Airportman,” a buzzing, ambient track with no discernable lyrics, the track is both unapproachable and unmemorable—not a good omen. But from there the album scales some serious heights, particularly on “Hope” and “Walk Unafraid.” The former remains a spine-chilling portrait of mingled hope and fear in the face of some unspecified grave illness. The latter may be one of the top ten songs R.E.M. has ever written, as shown by their electrifying performances of it on tour in 2003. So what’s the problem? With “Walk Unafraid” as track 9 of 14, there are five lesser tracks between it and the end of the album. Anticlimactic, for sure.

I approached the reissue hoping that it would clean up some of the fuzzy production and allow for the sort of revelations that hearing the material live provided. I got some of those moments—but few. The band really was feeling their way through new musical styles, and no amount of sonic wizardry can keep layers of drum machines and keyboards from dragging down some of the songs (“Diminished”). However, “Airportman” gains an increased sense of presence and menace and “Walk Unafraid” sounds more vital. And “At My Most Beautiful” reclaims some of its promise as a Brian Wilsonesque sonic tapestry (though the deaf-in-one-ear Wilson would have preferred mono to the 5.1 mix)—in particular, a gorgeous cello line that’s buried in the stereo mix pops to the front on the 5.1 version. It’s interesting that Elliott Scheiner, the producer on the remaster, opted not to clean up the original recording—the fractional second of studio chatter is still there just before the mandolin enters on “Daysleeper,” for instance, but if anything this humanizes the occasionally too-spacious sound of the 5.1 mix.

Hearing the newly reengineered songs opened my ears to them all over again. I think the slightly flat mix of the original release was partly responsible for my muted reaction. Up has now regained its place for me among R.E.M.’s top albums. More emotionally naked than just about any other release, and more sonically adventurous than any of their other later albums, this is a band confronting massive change head on and doing it with refreshing honesty and maturity.

A word about the reissue: fans looking for bonus songs will be disappointed, but that’s not to say there’s nothing new. The package contains a CD that is essentially identical to the original CD version, a booklet with excellent liner notes, and a DVD containing the 5.1 mix of the songs, a bonus video shot during the studio sessions with live-in-studio versions of “Daysleeper,” “Lotus,” and “At My Most Beautiful,” lyrics, and photos. There’s nothing revelatory in the video, unless it’s that the group was clearly thinking hard about live performances of this material even while the record was being made.

This reissue is one in a series of R.E.M.’s Warner Brothers albums to be re-released in CD+DVD format. Also available are Green, Out of Time, Automatic for the People, Monster, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Reveal, In Time: the Best of R.E.M. 1989–2003, and Around the Sun. (Linked titles point to BlogCritics reviews of the reissued albums.)

(Originally published at BlogCritics.)

doveman: best limerick ever, originally on Zoilus, previously on Greg Clow. Let’s get this on as many music related blogs as possible:

There was a composer named Glass
Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass
Philip Glass Philip Glass
Philip Glass Philip Glass
Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass

Tin Man: Sing Softly. Interesting story from my friend the Tin Man about being asked to identify himself as a member of the Gotham Chorus, not the Gay Gotham Chorus, for the sake of a bunch of Baptist college girls who were paying to sing in Carnegie Hall with them. I like the solution that Mipiel identifies in the comments: “after the concert, casually walk hand in hand with Matt until the Baptists can see, and then give each other a big hug and kiss. Then walk away as if nothing happened. If they’re unable to accept that gay men (and lesbians) are ordinary people just like them who do ordinary things like singing Beethoven that’s their problem, not yours.”

Still, it sucks all the way around—sucks for Tin Man and Matt, sucks for the Alabama kids that they have to be protected that way, sucks for Tin Man’s former glee club director that he, even as the concert manager, didn’t feel he had enough power to turn the occurrence into a “teachable moment” for his Southern guests.

I’m reminded, by contrast, of Robert Shaw, who regularly integrated Southern hotels and restaurants as he traveled around the country in the ’40s and ’50s with the Robert Shaw Chorale. Or Donald Loach, who directed the Virginia Glee Club from the 1960s through the 1980s, who integrated diners at truck stops in rural Virginia with his integrated Glee Club at the same time that the state was mounting its Massive Resistance campaign.

At a friend’s request, I made “everything reminds me of pink moon” as an introduction to three artists who sound better together. Available almost in its entirety at the iTunes Music Store; full information at Art of the Mix.

My parents arrived yesterday afternoon from North Carolina, and last night we took them into Harvard Square to see the Boston Camerata. I’ve written about the Camerata before, and based on the fact that their recording of medieval and early American Christmas carols is one of our all time favorites, you can imagine the excitement. My mom, in fact, leaned over before the show started and said, “Who could have guessed twenty years ago when I bought that record that I’d be seeing the Boston Camerata in Cambridge?” (Of course, it was more like 25 years ago, but hey.)

The group turned out, at least for this performance, to be a much smaller ensemble than I had ever imagined: two sopranos, contralto, tenor, baritone, bass, flute/recorder, violin, viola da gama, and on bass and lute the music director Joel Cohen. But even with only ten people on stage their sound filled the church. All the women in the choir had tremendous clear voices, led by the example of the glorious Anne Azéma, and the men’s voices were resonant and powerful if somewhat less absolutely distinguished. Joel Cohen only sang on a few all-group numbers and one or two comic solos, where he used his dramatic bass to good comic effect.

The program was New Britain and New France, based on the New Britain recording that the group made almost twenty years ago, and consisted of pairings of twentieth century folk tunes and hymns with earlier antecedents, some as old as the twelfth century. There were some wonderfully salacious French tunes in the first half of the program, but the part that got my blood racing was the third part, which featured ballads and “wandering songs” as they were adapted over the centuries. The story of the eternal ballad is familiar to anyone who’s dipped more than a toe into the waters of folk music—or even bothered to see whose songs Led Zeppelin was covering on its first few albums—but the Camerata took things one step further by tracing melodies, texts, and thematic ideas. So they linked together a set of songs about gypsies—the original “outsiders”—and closed it with a 1925 Ohio tune called “Gipsy Davy,” which to my surprise and delight I recognized as a cousin of the tune “Black Jack Davey,” which has been performed both by the Carter Family and by the White Stripes. (Yes, I’m a music geek.)

The fourth and last part of the program delved into shape note singing, which was fantastic, and which prompted my dad to say afterwards that it reminded him of growing up in the mountains.

I’m now hooked on the Camerata all over again, and couldn’t be happier to hear that they’ll be doing their “American Christmas” program next year (since I missed them at Christmas this year). A note in their program also tipped me off to the Boston Early Music Festival, which looks like it will be another amazing time.

…until you’ve heard Nina Gordon, late of Veruca Salt, singing Straight Outta Compton (warning to sensitive ears—as on the original version, the F-bomb gets dropped about once every five seconds in that MP3). A bit like the bluegrass cover of “Gin & Juice,” but (thanks partly to the mental image) just that much more delicious. Thanks to Ben Hammersley for the post, fortuitously entitled My AK47 is a tool, that led me to discover this jewel.

The first time I ever heard Iron & Wine, I was on the bridge over Lake Washington heading from Seattle into the forested eastern shore of the lake. It was about 10 o’clock at night, and a voice that sounded like it might have come from a century ago was coming over KEXP’s airwaves. I got off the road, rolled down my windows, and listened to the song (“Upwards Over the Mountain” from The Creek Drank the Cradle) as a chill went down my spine. As I heard the rest of that first album and then the 2004 follow-up, I was still taken by the hushed intimacy, but I started to wonder if the other shoe would drop, or if the band would, like the Cowboy Junkies, keep making the same record over and over again for ten years. Iron & Wine’s new EP, Woman King, which hits the streets on February 22, happily answers no: this is a welcome evolution in Iron & Wine’s sound.

Like the Talking Heads in their live concert movie Stop Making Sense, Sam Beam has slowly added instruments and layers to Iron & Wine’s sound over the course of two albums and two or three EPs. The most recent EP, Woman King, adds fiddles, and even an electric guitar to the mix, while keeping the delicate vocal harmonies and gentle melodies that have been the bedrock of Beam’s sound.

That’s where the similarities end to Beam’s previous work. The lyrics, while focused tightly on women, cover a wide thematic ground. “Woman King” imagines the title character as an apocalyptic warrior, the Biblical (“Jezebel”) to impossible couplings and doomed relationships (“Evening on the Ground (Lilith’s Song)”).

The biggest difference, though, is the driving spirit. In fact, “Evening on the Ground,” with its driving rhythm and dueling fiddle and electric guitar, is positively aggressive—not an adjective that you’d apply to any earlier I&W releases. Other songs are actually playful—an observation Beam himself made in an interview for Splendid Magazine conducted while the record was being made. If The Creek Drank the Cradle was a lullaby and Plug Award winner Our Endless Numbered Days a ballad, Woman King is a swinging dance across a sawdust floor with a once-taciturn partner. Beam’s songwriting continues to astonish with intimacy and newfound confrontation, and the broader sonic and lyrical palette that this release displays shows him to be a master who’s still growing. If this is the EP, I can’t wait to hear the next album.

This review was originally posted at BlogCritics.

This has been sitting as an open tab in NetNewsWire for so long, it’s got a new design since the first time I opened it. What Goes On – The Beatles Anomalies List is a listing of all the apparent goofs, flubbed notes, patches, studio chatter, etc. that can be heard in every recorded Beatles song. Nice place to come check if you’re losing your hearing, or that really is someone belching during “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).”

Salon launched Audiofile yesterday, the new MP3 blog of their music critic Thomas Bartlett (and the replacement for the Wednesday Morning Download). Nice bonus feature of every MP3 the feature has pointed to since it was the WMD.

Note: I’m a Salon subscriber, and I don’t know whether these features are generally accessible with a day pass; apologies if they aren’t accessible.

Metafilter: The Master R.I.P.. Great soul jazz organist Jimmy Smith, whose work has touched you through the Beasties’ whole-hog sample of his 1972 song “Root Down,” died February 8. I’ve been sitting on a review of the concert album that came from; looks like I sadly need to expand it to a retrospective. Other coverage: Billboard, MTV.com, Business Wire, BET, BlogCritics.

Boston.com: INXS reality show beckons: Slide over here, audition. So remind me: why am I busting my butt interviewing with every software company in the greater Boston area when I could be standing in line at the Middle East to audition for “Rock Star” and replace Michael Hutchence in INXS?

Oh yeah: because I have a voice…but no stage presence. Another dream dashed.

A few noteworthy developments in digital music this morning. First, one that I failed to note from last week: Beck has released a new EP, called “Hell Yes.” It’s odd, but I don’t really like him coming back to this style after seeing what he can do in more traditional forms on Sea Change. Or maybe I’m just getting too old to do the Beck nonsense groove. Or maybe he is.

On a better note, a rare Elliott Smith EP, the UK release of “Speed Trials” featuring that song, an alternate version of “Angeles,” and “I Don’t Think I’m Ever Gonna Figure It Out,” is available from iTunes today.

Also in the iTunes store: looks like Warner is finally making their part of the Elvis Costello discography available, starting with the oddly brilliant Spike and the oddly uneven Mighty Like a Rose.

And in the interests of free downloads (and old news that I’m just getting around to finding out about), there’s a free 13-track compilation from Universal Motown in the iTunes store. So far pretty straightforward listening, but I’m excited about the Scissor Sisters track (if not the Michael McDonald one).

There are starting to be some interesting back catalog additions to the iTunes store, too, including some of the K Records stuff that was added to eMusic last week; some key Miranda Sex Garden albums; a classic Ofra Haza album; and a bunch of original and posthumously released Tim Buckley recordings.

Speaking of free, I didn’t get to go to the Low show this weekend in Somerville, but Bradley’s Almanac did, and he has an excellent review (plus samples!) at his blog. He’s got a good selection of other concert recordings too…

Finally, the music blog rundown: it looks like Doveman is shuttering the Wednesday Morning Download column for Salon in favor of a coming-soon-now actual music blog. And 3Hive is doing some really good music blog work.

I haven’t written about eMusic for a while, but this week I’m feeling much more charitable about the service. Chuffed, even. Because while for several months I’ve been filling my 40 download a month quota by digging through the Fantasy Records back catalog (not that that’s bad, but honestly it gets monotonous after a while to hear only really good jazz!), this week I checked and was thrilled to see a bunch of releases from Ryko had been added to the service. Including, thank you very much, Mission of Burma’s Vs., some early Replacements, and the entirety of Frank Zappa’s recorded works. Now if they’d just put up the early Elvis Costello releases, which as far as I can tell aren’t on any of the download services yet, my bliss would be complete.

It also looks like K Records, the oddly brilliant Olympia label, has been added, meaning that a bunch of Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Dub Narcotic Sound System, and Halo Benders albums are available, as well as Beck’s brilliantly lo-fi folky One Foot in the Grave.

The best part, of course, is that 40 tracks for $9.95 a month is about four times cheaper than buying the albums on iTunes (and the downloads are 128 to 192 bit MP3s), and buying a booster pack of downloads is an equivalent bargain. The only challenge will be pacing myself.

Ed Harcourt wants to be tough but he can’t help it—his heart is right out there on his sleeve. His new album, Strangers, is just now getting its US release after several months of worldwide availability (see an earlier Blogcritics review by one of our Italiian correspondents), and it’s the evidence that our Ed is a softie—it’s an album full of shimmering gentle love songs with an occasional hard rocking ringer thrown in.

That’s not to say that he doesn’t have a sharp edge to his tongue. He gets off some good one-liners to the tenderest of his melodies, “This One’s For You,” including the fine “I’d wear you on my arm like a brand new scar.” (Try that one as a pick up line sometimes.) Sometimes it works, as in “This One’s for You”; sometimes the images get a little thick, as in “Loneliness.”

Harcourt apparently isn’t totally comfortable with the intimacy he offers on songs like “Something to Live For.” The listener is ultimately kept at bay by gestures like the rocking “The Storm is Coming,” which is a fine song but seems out of place here, and the bitter “Only Happy When You’re High,” a US-release only bonus track. Maybe Harcourt’s getting the rocking out of his system on other projects like his new band Wild Boar will lead to a less hedged performance on his next album. I’ll be listening.

This post originally appeared on BlogCritics.

I feel a bit odd just now, as though I’m part of the machine or something. Here’s why:

1. Go to the Sub Pop home page, which currently offers a link to a site for the new Low recording.
2. Click on the Low splash page.
3. Click on the link in the navigation that says “>S>P info page.”
4. Scroll down the list of reviews for the new album, and click on the one that says “Blogcritics review of ‘The Great Destroyer.’”

And there you’ll find me. Guess I’m really part of the star making machinery now.