Flipping This Quarter

Yeah, and then life happens. Sorry about that.

I still have every intention to get the new site going. My plan is for it to be bigger and much, much better with multiple writers that write better than me. I also plan on promoting it instead of, like this one, just throwing it up. However, I do not know when this is going to be.

So, my immediate plan is to build up a backlog of posts so that the transition will not be as susceptible to outside interference–that damned life we talk about. What this means is that it is unlikely I will post further on this blog. I will make an announcement here when the new site is up, so keep your rss going, both of you.

If you would like to know when the new site is online but don’t want to keep checking here (with a feed or otherwise), leave a note in the comments and I’ll let you know.

This is starting back up a bit later than I intended. The move I talked about in the last post will still take place, details to come later.

In looking at the upcoming albums, I’m a little excited. Some great albums, some stuff I don’t know, and some stuff I wrote off after one listen. It’s fun coming back to these.

The bad news is that my mp3 player is currently half working and that half is the right ear. It surprises me how much my listening habits have adapted to portable mass music. This makes part of me quite sad. If I was born twenty years earlier, I think I’d feel the same about vinyl.

With any luck, a new album will be posted tomorrow.

My apologies for being lax the last week or so: it’s that time of the semester, and I’m sure you all understand.

One of the benefits of being a student again is the happy breaks of happy length. Instead of spending Christmas and New Years in my cold bare apartment, drinking the good beer and watching sword-and-sandal epics, I’m spending it at my parents’ place where I’ll be watching every bowl game in Hi-Def and drinking the good beer on someone else’s dime.

Point is, I may have a sporadic post here or there, but probably not. Limited access to computers and all that fun stuff. But after the new year, when I come back, there will be excitement. A little peek: FTQ will be moving to its own domain, changing its name, and adding a few relatively like-minded authors. I must say, I’m am pretty excited about our future, at least in this regard. Stay tuned, and I will of course let both of you know when the new site is up and running.

And Merry Christmas to you and yours; may you pass it without the need of too many stiff drinks. Listen to some good Christmas music if you can find some — I have two Christmas albums on my mp3 player for the trip home this year, which is two more than any previous year.

Release Date: March 1971
Date I Got: 26 March 2005
Best Track: Debris
Other Notable Tracks: Stay With Me, Miss Judy’s Farm, That’s All You Need, Memphis

Historicity, I believe, is a key component in determining "good" music. This makes new music reviews exercises in prognostication, guesses at the direction of popular and not-so-popular trends. It’s much easy to write and think and deal with a thirty-six year old album than a six month old one. Writing and thinking and approaching, say, The Beatles or The Eagles, carries a certain amount of baggage, but you know where they stand in history. So, you don’t like the Beatles, but it hardly changes the fact that they’re the predicate for a whole bunch of modern music.

Historicity cuts both ways. Time has that habit if cutting and discarding the chaff as being unimportant or unnecessary. Today’s second-tier band is still worth listening to, but will that be true for my kids? Is a second-tier band from my parents’ generation worth spending time with? Not all that is cut away is bad, but not every hidden gem shines.

I am assuming Faces–and early Rod Stewart in general–to be second-tier, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fuckin’ amazing, because it is. My point is this: age doesn’t make a whole lot of things better and music isn’t one of them.

But whatever. If I’d been around with this came out, it’d probably be counted among my favorites. Even so, I do have friends that count it as such. I find it hard to really get into this album despite how great it is. I think age has a lot to do with it. It’s an album that has, if you will, potential contextual energy while a lot of newer music (and the great old stuff) has more of a kinetic contextual energy. What I mean is: no one cites Faces or Rod Stewart as influence. Maybe this is sad–I’m willing to hear arguments–but it doesn’t worry me all that much.

This is the only Faces/Rod Stewart I have, which probably is sad. If you’re looking to get into it, this is a great start, as every track is excellent. The production isn’t great, but that’s a personal issue I have with a lot of late 60’s/early 70’s rock albums.

Still, I’m not going to crank this in order to enlighten the neighbors as I do some other music.

Addition: You really have to love youtube. Watch both of these live versions, then tell me I’m wrong about all the above, because I am. Right now I’m adding "Seeing a Faces Show" to the list of things I’m going to do when I build a time machine. Were the 70’s really this fun?

Get a Second Opinion!!
[allmusic]
[Live - Stay With Me] [Live - Miss Judy’s Farm] [Live - Memphis]

Release Date: 8 December 1976
Date I Got: 2 August 2007
Best Track: Hotel California
Other Notable Tracks: Wasted Time, The Last Resort

What’s the best way to approach the Eagles?

Being an artist my parents liked, I grew up with the Eagles, but they don’t carry the same nostalgic level as, say, Billy Joel. They’re not an artist I identify childhood with.

And the critical consensus, it seems, regulates the Eagles to secondary status in music history — if even that high. Chuck Klostermann once wrote an essay where he argued that Billy Joel is "cool" precisely because he is so "uncool." I don’t see anyone making the same argument about the Eagles.

So here it is: coming at the Eagles from a familiarity, but not of fondness; from critical indifference, but not hostility: from thirty years after the fact, on the bad side of the 80’s which always messes everything up.

I say this about most artists that have achieved a place in the public consciousness, but it’s nonetheless true: the Eagles are better than you thought and not as good as you think.

What I mean is, like all the other artists of their stature, the Eagles are revered at a level beyond what they deserve. And through whatever machinations the indie kids use to critique they have decided there’s nothing of value to be found here. They are wrong.

The reason I point all this out is simply to say that it’s difficult to come at the Eagles without some sort of baggage, be it positive or negative. It’s partly for this reasons that I find the best tracks on this album are the non-hits.

Sure, everyone knows "Life in the Fast Lane" and "New Kid in Town" and "Victim of Love" and they’re okay, you can sing along with them while cruising down the interstate. But for whatever reason–I chalk it up to the baggage, but I’m probably wrong–they aren’t the best tracks. Maybe it’s because, being hits, they are indelibly tied to a time period, but they don’t sound as vibrant as they probably should. Age has got a hold of them, though I do kinda dig the semi- proto-metal of the verses for "Victim of Love."

What that leaves us with, then, are a few pretty great tracks: "Wasted Time" is the ballad the Eagles should be known for. One of the more delicate pieces, it’s almost on almost-on-the-edge; there are times where you can hear it almost break apart in some sort of emotional catharsis. It never quite reaches that point, but it’s the closest Glen Frey (I think it’s Glen Frey) ever got to convincing me he knows what he’s talking about.

"The Last Resort" is over-the-top in a hippie sort of way, but it’s cool (maybe because it’s so uncool?). I mean, the pity and anger mix we get by the "Jesus, people bought ‘em" line, is something to admire. Rock Stars have all the answers, but some things even they just can’t understand: "They called it paradise…I don’t know why."

But yet, the reason this album appears on top-100 lists is not for any of the above reasons or songs. It’s because of the title track, which is indisputably the Eagles best track, if not one of the best mainstream tracks from the 70’s. I’m not going to get too much into it because it’s been gotten into too much as it is. I’ll just say that I love the feeling the song gives off, portraying the lethargy of resignation towards things outside of your control. It’s a different sort of tension, one that doesn’t really provide much angst, just a sense of: yeah, that’s how it’s got to be.

Ask me tomorrow, though, and I’ll tell you something different. That’s why it’s great.

Get a second opinion!
[official] [allmusic] [myspace]

Release Date: 8 November 1994
Date I Got: 1 June 2005
Best Track: The Last Resort
Other Notable Tracks: Wasted Time, Hotel California

Growing up, I didn’t know to many adults that I would now consider music geeks. Those that came closest were my parents and a couple they were friends with. They all liked the Eagles, and I grew up listening to the two Greatest Hits sets.

I think I must have liked it well enough. But after I "got into" music I didn’t listen to much my parents did. I got a copy of this album because the opportunity arose and, being a Live album, might contain many of the songs I knew.

It does, but this isn’t really that great of a thing; this I’ll talk more about tomorrow. Quite succinctly, I can’t say I imagine a situation where I would want to listen to this album.

Even The Eagles’ indisputably best track Hotel California is empty here: the foreboding of the original instrumentation is replaced with a, I don’t know, something that sounds like The Beach Boy’s Kokomo. It may just be the congas. Still, the Latin-like groove here could work if it sounded like being held in a Mexican border jail where no one speaks English and the guards have big mustaches. But that stereotype isn’t the one in play here. Instead, this is more like your woman taking a second glance at another guy while lounging next to the hotel swimming pool. It’s still slightly unnerving, but mostly clean and harmless.

Those are the keywords for the entire album. Though I imagine some would claim that the Eagles’ are always like that (and they have somewhat of a point), it’s just bad here. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this is just a cash grab, an artifact from a reunion tour commenced because the market would support three-digit tickets. But we know better, and they even say so at the beginning of Tequila Sunrise: "Just for the record, we never broke up, we just took a fourteen year vacation”

The exception here–because there always is one–is the version of The Last Resort, which is as good as the album version, if not a touch better. It’s the emotional highlight of the album: I’d like to think that the words become truer and sadder as one ages, and the two decades since its writing has made it more poignant. It’s the only point on the album that approaches any sort of pathos and any sort of earnestness.

Get a second opinion!
[official] [allmusic] [myspace]
[Video - Hotel California (Hell Freezes Over)]
[Video - Tequila Sunrise (Hell Freesez Over)]

Release Date: 25 March 2003
Date I Got:  26 June 2003
Best Track: Ladies Man
Other Notable Tracks: Rock and Roll Motherf****r, Get Loose

Why, given the relatively easy access to the classics would you choose to listen to a band that is derivative musically and adds nothing lyrically? For this reason, I lump The D4 into the same category as The Hives, The Vines, The Strokes and maybe even The White Stripes (though not to the same extent). Simply put, everything I may like about this album I can get–and get it better–from the Stooges.

I got this album at the same time as the Trail of Dead album, but I think I listened to this one maybe twice, and not once in the last 4 years. I made a mixed CD that summer of the new stuff I was getting and I included Ladies Man. That’s about the only lasting contribution this album had made to my life.

But some people like the Hives, and somebody must have liked this album to release it in the States (The D4 are from New Zealand). I’d like to believe that those who love this just don’t know their music history. It’s not that this is bad, just that it doesn’t give or tell us anything new.

Get a second opinion!
[allmusic] [myspace]
[Video - Get Loose]
[Video - Party]

Release Date: 24 July 2001 (Columbia)
Date I Got: 27 September 2007
Best Track: Short Skirt, Long Jacket
Other Notable Tracks: Shadow Stabbing, Commissioning a Symphony in C, Long Line of Cars

I can’t be sure, but I think this is the first album I ever "professionally" reviewed. I had friends throughout college that held editor positions on the campus newspaper, so I wrote a few music reviews and a few movie reviews and, later, op-eds about campus life. If you think my music writing is insufferable and long-winded and whatever else, you should see those op-eds that no one read. (Those that I know did, though, liked or at least respected it. Alas.)

So this, I think, was the first music review I did. I have no idea what I said, but I think I didn’t care for it all that much, finding it mostly mediocre. Which is essentially how I feel about it now.

In a lot of respects it is better than Fashion Nugget. The lyrics are not as memorable, though they are not as determinedly ironic, so I’m okay with it. The music is stronger overall, but not as good as on The Distance. Musically, Commissioning a Symphony in C is the best track, creating a nice little chord progression with some staccato strumming. The words leave a lot to be desired.

Long Line of Cars is this album’s "Stickshifts": another song that has the potential to actually say something worthwhile, but falls short.

But Cake lives and dies by the catchiness of their tunes. Consider the first single: Short Skirt, Long Jacket –  easily the catchiest of the bunch. It’s a simple song in which the singer tells us the traits he desires in women, beginning many of the lines with "I want a girl with…" I love this rhetorical device; it’s an effective formulation that allows self-containment and easy internal comparisons within the song which build on all the other comparisons. In other words: by writing the song this way we can easily contrast the different traits he wants to gain some complexity and insight into the human condition.

That said, it doesn’t fully work, but works well enough. Additionally, it’s hard to argue with his perfect woman. Really, I think it’s a song about making the transition from "high-school girlfriend" to "real-life girlfriend;" having a relationship that is reflective of a growth in, well, maturity. There’s also, I think, an undercurrent of ruthlessness which, if you sort of maybe have a crush on the Lady Macbeth types, you understand. Now I’ve said too much.

Check out the video (linked below): like much of Cake’s music, I like the idea, but it doesn’t completely succeed.

Get a second opinion!
[official] [allmusic]
[Video - Short Skirt, Long Jacket]

—–
BONUS COVERAGE!!! Sheep Go to Heaven

Prolonging the Magic came out in between this album and Fashion Nugget. I’m surprised I don’t hav it, as it contains easily my favorite Cake song: Sheep Go To Heaven.

The song came out when I was in high school, and that’s probably why I loved it: going to a high school in a very politically and religiously conservative area when you are neither makes…actually, it would take to long to recount why I hate my hometown so much (and I’m spending Christmas there! Yippee!) so I’m not going to try. Goats go to hell.

Nonetheless. I’m down with any indictment of conformity (given the appropriate context and actions, etc.) The video (linked below) puts a finer point on this despite its South Park-esque animation. It’s pretty great and includes a murderous rampage as an extension of existential angst (Camus? Camus?), dude being cast from Heaven for ill-timed jumping jacks, and a dog committing suicide. Best part, though, is the jury of his "peers" telling him to Go to Hell.

[Video - Sheep Go to Heaven]

Release Date: 17 September 1996 (Capricorn)
Date I Got: Summer 1999
Best Track: The Distance
Other Notable Tracks: Nugget, Stickshifts and Safteybelts

You know "The Distance" just as everyone knows "The Distance." It came out about the time I got into popular music, though I don’t have the memory of hearing it on the radio the way I do with other songs of those months. I liked the song well enough and eventually picked up the album used for cheap.

Although, I gotta say: listening to it again for the first time in a couple years, I’m at a loss as to why it got big. The insistent baseline and story of single-minded determination are good, but the song feels like it lacks a foundation. It is a novelty song.

And it would be on a novelty album, if the other tracks were catchy enough to be memorable. The songwriting isn’t strong enough to support the "cleverness." The two almost exceptions, not including "The Distance", are "Nugget" and "Stickshifts and Safetybelts."

The latter doesn’t fully succeed because it’s still too tongue-in-cheek, but it’s pretty decent lyrically and the jaunty guitar work doesn’t detract. In the hands of a better (by that I mean: more earnest) artist, it would take a trivial disconnect — lovers isolated in personal bucketseats — and make it into a lament on the barriers technology erects to discourage human bonding. I give points for trying.

"Nugget" is a different beast. The copious uses of "fuck" seem out of place on an album that is, more or less, kid friendly. Indeed, while I’d like to claim that I liked this song back in high school because of it’s funk-like rhythm, it’s really because the chorus is: "Shut the Fuck Up!" (I’m no better than you.) I think it’s aged better than the other tracks, partly because the universal and timeless sentiment, and partly because it makes no sense:

Heads of state who ride and wrangle
Who look at your face from more than one angle
Can cut you from their bloated budgets
Like sharpening knifes, two Chicken McNuggets
Shut the fuck up.

Indeed.

Get a second opinion!
[official] [allmusic]

Release Date: 6 February 2007 (O.I.E.)
Date I Got: 1 August 2007
Best Track: Green Eyed Soul
Other Notable Tracks: Corinne, Get Wise, Vagabonds and Hooligans

This is one of those albums that served as partial impetus for this blog. I got it from a work friend shortly before I left and moved cross state lines. It was a hectic time and I never listened to it or many of the others I got at the same time.

I’ve now given it a few listens in the last week, which is good because it has grown on me some. It is not completely my speed: a bit too indie, a bit too poppy, and a bit too something else. It’s a good album that provides a few solid tracks that would make good selections on an appropriate mixtape.

I am finding it difficult to describe the album accurately for I lack the appropriate knowledge base of RIYL artists. At various times I hear Matthew Sweet or Built to Spill and Some Artist that I can’t Think Of, but those comparisons are crap as I’m sure you know.

"Green-Eyed Soul" is pretty sweet, opening with a jangley picked guitar figure and a "na-na-na-na" chorus. Lyrically, it’s not as good as "Get Wise", which might actually be the best track, but I’m wary of the "The World Would Be Better Without Religion" stance because I think it’s wrong, but John Lennon has the same problem in "Imagine" so this may not even be a criticism. It’s hopeful, to say the least, and if I was willing to admit that I was an optimist, I think I’d be more down with it.

No Religion, no guilt
Just People acting like they should
No politicians spitting lies
Come on and get wise

"Corinne" is the track Allmusic recommends, and it’s a good one. It’s the most anthemic and longest cut. It reminds me vaguely of "Hey Jude", but I’m quite crazy sometimes. You can listen to this one on their Myspace page, linked below. And I see they are coming to town with the good Reverend. I think I’ll be at that show.

Get a second opinion!
[official] [allmusic] [Myspace]