Category: Music

This weekend as I was driving around in the rain with Charlie, I was playing “The Drowning Man” from the Cure’s seminal 1981 release Faith on the car stereo. My friend asked, “Which band is this?” When I told him it was the Cure, he said, “Oh. There have been so many new bands coming out that sound like the Cure, I wasn’t sure whether it was one of them or the real thing.”

Which is to say, this new series of double-disc reissues of the Cure’s early albums, which started last fall with Three Imaginary Boys and continues tomorrow with Seventeen Seconds, Pornography, and Faith, could not come at a more auspicious time. Thanks to bands like Interpol and Bloc Party, which owe debts to Robert Smith’s moody musical style and eccentric vocals respectively, the time is ripe for a rediscovery of the Cure’s legacy. And this series of reissues is definitely the right way to do it.

The sound on this reissue is gorgeously clean. At this point in their history, the revolving Cure line-up was down to a core of three: Smith on vocals and lead, Simon Gallup on bass, and Laurence Tolhurst on drums, with keyboardist Matthieu Hartley abruptly leaving days before the recording session started. Slimmed down to the elemental basics, the band’s playing is honed tight, with Gallup’s big bass sound up front and Smith’s guitars washing over the mix. (For better or worse, this is also the release where, perhaps to fill in some of the gaps in the mix, Smith started reverbing the hell out of his vocals.)

And some of the songs on this disc are stone classics. The major lyrical inspirations for the songs are said to be the death of “several friends and relations” and the terminal illness of Tolhurst’s mother, and that combined with Smith’s meditations on faith and disbelief provide the thematic core for the album. There is a broad sonic range within the basic bleakness of the album: “Primary” and “Other Voices,” which both appear on the excellent Staring at the Sea compilation, are jittery, paranoid fun, as is “Doubt,” while “The Funeral Party,” “The Drowning Man,” and “Faith” are majestic, epic stretches of unremitting rainy darkness. This release is where the Cure found the heart of darkness that was only hinted in earlier songs. The band wouldn’t release another album that was so thoroughly and completely dark until Disintegration closed out their classic period at the end of the 1980s, but the darkness that flowered on Faith is what many still consider to be the Cure’s classic sound, and it would reappear lyrically or musically on almost every other Cure release.

The bonus material is excellent on this release, as with the others in the series. Rounding out Disc 1 is a 27-minute instrumental called “Carnage Visors,” a soundtrack to a 1981 tour film and previously available on the cassette version of Faith. Disc 2 consists of home demos and studio out-takes of the “Faith” material, three previously unreleased songs cut during the Faith sessions, and majestic live performances from the summer of 1981. Disc 2 closes with the Cure’s landmark 1981 single “Charlotte Sometimes,” previously available on the Staring at the Sea compilation, in which the dead ground covered by the Faith sessions yields a sinisterly beautiful flower, a perfect goth pop single.

On April 26, the Cure release expanded editions of Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography. To hear some of the tracks from all three releases, check out The Cure Sampler Listening Party.

If you are going to buy more than one Cure CD and would like to save money, go to the Rhino website.

Review originally posted at BlogCritics.

Via Boing Boing and Joi Ito, the free music download directory at Amazon. Don’t get too excited, though: except for a handful of exclusives (such as a soporific b-side from Moby’s latest album), many of the interesting tracks on the Amazon site are widely available elsewhere, including the artists’s own sites and Salon’s Daily Download (registration or daily pass required).

The interesting bit about Amazon’s service is that it links to everyone’s downloads, not just the interesting ones. So if you were looking for a jazz cover of “California Here I Come,” Amazon is the place. But don’t expect to find buzzworthy singles without a lot of searching. That, after all, is what MP3 blogs are for.

What is more interesting to me is the fact that so many sites like this exist to point people to what is essentially advertising. There is a real ecosystem around free MP3s, and you can see how they can build real buzz around an artist. Look at Bloc Party, for instance; pretty well unknown stateside prior to last fall, but with the help of a free MP3 for their Cure-meets-Thin-Lizzy “Banquet” they were a big favorite going into SXSW. Not surprising that savvy labels like Sub Pop are using free downloads intelligently and programmatically (check the Downloads RSS Feed) to build buzz.

Your Scary ’80s 3 and Your Scary ’80s 4 have been posted on the iTMS store (3, 4) and on Art of the Mix. As with the previous ’80s mixes, the odd numbered one is all the tracks you wish you could forget, and the even numbered one is the one with stuff that you wish you heard the first time they came out.

A Crank’s Progress: your wish is my command. Translation of AKMA’s should-be-famous quotation about the media industries vs. their customers into a Creative Communists bumper sticker:

Nicely done, Paul.

Nuff said, really. I found I was getting that first-of-the-month-so-my-EMusic-account-has-reloaded-new-music-jones on Tuesday (yes, several days late—it’s been that kind of month, thankyouverymuch) and so tonight I decided heck with it, it’s after 10, I’m going to go to EMusic and download some stuff.

An hour later, what do I have to show for it? Two tracks. Out of 40. Doing that math, the download will be done sometime around dinner tomorrow.

Maybe I’ll just have to arrange a visit to the Asheville Starbucks—the only place around that I’m sure has WiFi—tomorrow to wrap things up.

(For the curious, I’m waiting for Sam Prekop’s eponymous release, Coldplay’s debut EP, Chet Baker’s Chet, disc 6 of Bill Evans’s The Last Waltz, and the Black Keys’s Thickfreakness. All of which should be fabulous if I can ever hear them.)

(Also for the curious and new readers, my parents only have dialup because (a) my dad only does email and (b) they can only get satellite, not cable and (c) satellite-based high-speed is pretty expensive for a retiree and (d) they’re pretty far out in the country so well out of range for DSL.)

Depending on your turn of mind, Christopher O’Riley’s first album of classical piano transcriptions of Radiohead songs, True Love Waits, was either brilliant or soporific. The album, featuring faithful two-hand renditions of a set of Radiohead classics, was quite a feat from a transcription standpoint, creating playable works that evoked the harmonic and rhythmic complexities of the originals. I was among the camp that found it soporific, unfortunately. After all, instrumental covers of Radiohead are nothing new—jazz piano virtuoso Brad Mehldau has been including brilliant, imaginative improvisations on “Exit Music (For a Film)” and “Everything In Its Right Place” in his sets and on recordings for years. And after a while, “True Love Waits” seems like one sameness after another.

So I approached O’Riley’s follow-up, Hold Me To This, with some trepidation. The formula here is the same, but the songs are different—and that improves the product. Unlike the first recording, where all but one of the 15 tracks appeared on one of Radiohead’s albums, over a third of Hold Me To This is devoted to tracks culled from B-sides. The relative obscurity of the material seems somehow to make for better music; instead of slavish transcriptions, O’Riley adapts the material more freely, with occasionally stunning results. He also wisely eschews the studio versions of some songs in favor of transcriptions of the concert arrangements, such as “Like Spinning Plates.” The back-masking and tape loops that blurred the edges of the original song give way to an arpeggiated introduction reminiscent of the Moonlight Sonata, against which the vocal melody is set off in block chords.

If there is a criticism of the arrangements themselves, it is of their busyness. O’Riley compensates for the two-handed nature of the piano by filling in missing voices with open-voiced runs and arpeggios. Too often this approach yields a harmonically accurate overload of undifferentiated hemidemisemiquavers. When O’Riley allows some space between the notes, as in “Talk Show Host,” “Sail to the Moon,” or the aforementioned “Like Spinning Plates,” the result is like drawing a deep breath. While the charge of “busyness” could just as easily be levied at Radiohead’s original arrangements, O’Riley has some options for simplification that he too rarely uses.

Ultimately, “Hold Me To This” succeeds better than it deserves to as a standalone album. O’Riley’s formidable technique and intricate arrangements never quite recede far enough into the background to let the listener get totally immersed in the music, but there are pleasures to be had in appreciating formidable technique and intricate arrangements, too.

Oh, and that “soporific” thing I mentioned at the beginning? It helps to turn the volume way up.

(Originally published at BlogCritics.)

…but I sure feel like one after watching this video by Welsh singer Jem (t) for her brilliantly catchy song “They,” in which she performs what the Apple QuickTime newsletter describes as a “gravity-defying astronaut striptease.”

I was perfectly happy enjoying her song without seeing the singer naked, thanks.

I wrote a week or so back about auditioning for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which is the chorus in residence for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I had more or less resigned myself to not getting in. After all, I was feeling a little burned out on symphonic choruses in general, and (more to the point) I have standing engagements through May that interfere with my ability to attend rehearsals.

So I was unsurprised when I got a thin envelope from the BSO today. I figured it for the proverbial “thin envelope,” but opened it anyway. And saw to my surprise that I was accepted in the chorus—albeit as a second tenor. There were also lots of notes about how the director has the option of asking an individual singer to be in every concert for a season or just one concert…

So the bottom line: I’ll be singing something, possibly at Symphony Hall, possibly at Tanglewood, definitely with the BSO, sometime in the next year. God, definitive knowledge is great.

And the irony? On Sunday, not knowing whether I would get in or not and not much caring, I decided to talk to the choir director at Old South Church. I’ll be singing with that choir tomorrow night for Maundy Thursday services (singing the Byrd “Ave Verum Corpus”—how could I resist??). After Thursday we’ll see. From 0 to 2 choirs in four days. Not bad. Too bad job offers don’t work that way.

At some point in the late 1990s, as radio sank further into irrelevance and Clear Channel-approved playlists created a stranglehold on airtime for new artists, television started to come into its own as a way to “break” unknown musicians. One of the best programs for showcasing new artists’ work is—gasp—“The O.C.,” whose strangely moralistic take on the teen melodrama is accompanied by intelligent, thoughtful soundtrack selections. Many of the musicians on the soundtrack would be just at home on an alternative station like KEXP. The show’s soundtrack series—as evident in its latest incarnation Music From The O.C. Mix 4—does what a soundtrack must do: provides memorable musical moments from the show in a musically consistent format. It goes beyond the call of duty by doubling as a new artist compilation.

The collection ranges from quirky rock (the Futureheads, Modest Mouse) to bright and shiny (the New Pornographers’ A.C. Newman, Imogen Heap) to slowgroovy (Flunk). There’s even an old favorite, the Reindeer Section’s “Cartwheels” (from their superb 2002 release Son of Evil Reindeer). The biggest coup? A new Beck song, “Scarecrow,” in advance of his forthcoming new album Guero (see this VH1.com article for the backstory). The one slightly false note, sadly, is the Matt Pond PA cover of Oasis’s “Champagne Supernova.” While still yearningly evocative, the cover lacks some of the grit of the original and feels a little too much like it’s been sweetened for television.

Still, for a collection of soundtrack stuff to be that coherent, there’s got to be a master mix-maker behind the scene. Thank Alexandra Patsavas, the show’s music supervisor, whose job it is to line up new tracks for the show’s writers to audition and slip into the show, and to assemble these mixes. It’s due to her work that the compilation feels less like a “compilation” and more like a really good mix tape.

If I have one complaint, it’s that, for listeners of the aforementioned KEXP and other hipsterati, too many of the artists come with all their indie cred pre-assembled. Imogen Heap, Sufjan Stevens, Carl Newman, Flunk, Modest Mouse, the Reindeer Section, and of course Beck are all familiar names to most indie rock fans. On the other hand, Pinback, the Futureheads, Aqueduct, Bell X1, and Matt Pond PA are all the sort of lesser known discoveries that I was hoping for from a groundbreaking indie compilation series. Hopefully the next series will showcase a few more promising unknowns rather than relying so heavily on known quantities.

Originally published on BlogCritics.

…is seeing your friend’s album in the iTunes Music Store. I was irritated at iTMS yesterday because the New Releases and Just Added pages weren’t updated, and how can one go and salivate over new music on Tuesdays without information? But this morning when I checked, there was Justin Rosolino’s Wonderlust.

For some general background on Justin and the album, check out my past writings about him. Briefly: if you like singer-songwriters, or performers with amazing voices and senses of humor, go check out some of the clips from the album.

So: one down, one to go.

Other iTMS happiness this week: new Nine Inch Nails single, reissues of a flood of classic Brian Eno albums, and remasters of a bunch of 1960s Atlantic jazz including one of my favorite Coltrane albums and a ton of important early Ornette Coleman recordings. Pardon me: I have some listening to do.

New mix, “cool covers,” published at the Art of the Mix—I didn’t bother publishing it at iTunes because I had a less than 50% “found rate.”

This is the first mix on which I’ve experimented with using spoken word fragments as linking tracks. I used a software package called Amadeus II to do the editing. Good software; reminds me of SoundEdit Pro, the first editing package I ever used back in 1989 or so.

(Republished from a post that was made yesterday that disappeared.)

Boston Globe — Living / Arts News: Levine’s pace proves hard on BSO. I actually auditioned for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus (which despite its name is a year-round chorus in residence for the BSO) on Monday. The chorus is involved in far fewer concerts than the orchestra, and the chorus’s director spreads out the assignments, picking subsets of the group for each chorus, so presumably the TFC doesn’t have a lot of instances of blown pipes as a result of Levine’s vigor. I guess we’ll see.

(For recent readers: I’ve sung tenor in various choruses—symphonic, early music, church choirs, glee clubs, a cappella groups—ever since high school. My current singing hiatus, which has lasted the eight months since I left Seattle and the University Presbyterian Church choir, is the longest time I’ve spent outside of a singing group for fifteen years. Which is probably why I’m so out of sorts all the time.)

In January, I bitched about the fact that the pivotal Folkways recordings of world music and American folk were only available on MSN Music. Sometime last week (I don’t know when, I’m behind in my posts), the Smithsonian partially redressed that market inefficiency by opening Smithsonian Global Sound, their own online music store featuring $.99/track downloads (though some longer tracks are more expensive), a wide catalog of field and folk recordings, and a choice of two DRM-free formats—MP3 and FLAC. That’s right, you can buy lossless recordings from the store. Add downloadable liner notes and we’re all in business.

I do have one criticism of the store. This is a good place to buy a la carte from the massive Smithsonian archives, but not a good place to buy albums. There doesn’t seem to be a per-album price, meaning that if you find an album with 20 tracks, you’ll pay 20 dollars. And I think “by the album” is the way that most people will want to explore this music. After all, it’s not as though you’re coming to the Smithsonian looking for “hot singles.” Another, lesser critique: there is no persistent “wish list”—your shopping cart is emptied when you leave your session and there is no other way short of managing a list offline to keep track of songs that you might want to buy at another time.

What’s confusing about all of this is the supposedly exclusive agreement that MSN Music had to sell this music through September of this year, according to the original New York Times article. It sure looks like the same catalog to me.

I’m not complaining, though. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some downloading to do.

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.)