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Tuesday, May 17, 2005
THE LOSING KIND
John Doe
Forever Hasn't Happened Yet
Yep Roc Records : 2005
[Buy it]
BABY, C'MON
Stephen Malkmus
Face The Truth
Matador Records : 2005
[Buy it]
THE BEAST AND THE DRAGON, ADORED
Spoon
Gimme Fiction
Merge Records : 2005
[buy it]
It's crunch time in Moistworks' Astoria bureau: We're making slow, sure book progress in the mornings. (Mornings! Who knew?) We're fact-checking days, and don't ask where. We're out running when we get home, limping home from out running, working on magazine articles 'till bedtime. Is it because we're sexy? Because, we're trying to dig ourselves of debt? You decide. And now? A few quick ones while we're away:
"The Losing Kind" might just be the best song on John Doe's new record. Those in the know know that Doe was a prime mover in X, and that X was one of the great American bands. (Check out the excellent and long-unavailable Unheard Music documentary, recently rereleased on DVD). X is also one of the great American love stories. In some ways, one of the saddest. I once had the chance to ask JD about Blue Spark - a near-perfect song he'd written for his then-wife, Exene: "I wrote it in an apartment overlooking an old amusement park that overlooked the ocean," he said. "The spark was the spark of the bumper cars. The song's about sitting in that apartment, waiting for Exene to come home, wishing she would love me."
This song, too, is churning and aching, in various, self-evident ways. Grant Lee Phillips and Dave Alvin sit in with the band, and Doe himself is in fine fettle: Would Jim Morrison have sounded this good if he'd lived? Even if the voice had held up, I doubt it would have contained half the wit, wisdom, or, frankly, compassion.
* * *
When Pavement broke up, I had something like this to say about Stephen Malkmus & Co.:
Formed in the cow-country of Stockton, California, rock's reigning white-collar band wrote songs that drew comparisons to Southern surrealists and the New York School of poets. In later years, as the band members shifted and scattered geographically - to Brooklyn, Louisville, and Portland, among other places - one got the sense that Pavement's music didn't inhabit the American landscape so much as course through it at 90 miles an hour. Thus, melodies with sweep and passion; the lyrics, a blur of notes scribbled on the backs of postcards. In Pavement's hands, ballads about country clubs and doctors turned into eulogies for suburbia. "Minerals/Ice deposits" crept around the edges of their love songs. Pavement never signed to a major label, and despite a brief flurry of Nirvana comparisons, they never did strike it big in the traditional sense: The group hit more targets by shifting trajectories than most bands did by standing still and taking dead-aim.
Still, Pavement managed to come across as honest and impassioned, invested their music with feeling, and forged a real connection with their listeners. How did they manage it? Perhaps it's because, for all the inevitable comparisons to John Ashbery, Michael Stipe, and anyone else who allowed Rolling Stone writers to cram words like "elliptical," "equivocal," and "esoteric" into a single review, Pavement had more in common with British bands like Wire, The Fall, and the Swell Maps. Like them, Pavement reacted to a fragmentation in rock music by writing songs that were themselves fragmented. By setting beauty against noise, and loosing melodies like breakers rising out of indifferent oceans. Eventually, they transcended fragmentation altogether, turning the neurosis of a deeply neurotic form - rock at it's hard-won, too-brief moment of maturity - into a series of conventions, and moving within them with grace and confidence.
"Because they're full of rock," Matador Records exec Gerard Cosloy said, when asked the significance of the band's name. And, by the end, Pavement did aspire to the condition of Great Rock Band, connecting to their audience via the medium of sheer riff, and soaring melody. Listening today, you can almost remember a time when it seemed we could abandon the detours we'd learned to take to reach a sincere connection to music. The main road had finally been repaved.
What can I say? I liked Pavement a lot. And, I have to say, I liked Malkmus's solo stuff a lot less. Until this, forthcoming song, which makes me think that maybe, just maybe, he's reclaiming some of the guitar-hero-in-sheep's-clothing grandeur he once had. Which makes me happy. "You say that you're to old to yell/But too young for hell/Baby, c'mon!"? It's Coy Mistress for the slacker set!
* * *
"The Beast and Dragon, Adored" is the lead-off track from Spoon's new, should-be breakthrough, "Gimme Fiction" - a song I haven't seen other MP3Js get to. But it's a lovely song, and it, too, has some of the weariness you hear in Doe's voice, and Malkmus's. In this case, less a nostalgia for the way things were than a wistfulness for ways they might have been. Or so I gather, from what's being referred to as the band's "deconstructive impulse."
* * *
Dedicated Moistworks readers might want to check out North Carolina Bureau Chief Brian Howe's newly published The Hold Steady interview. Here's the abridged version:
NCBCBH: Why do you think so many modern guitarists are so concerned with acting like the don't give a shit?
THS: Because they're poor players.
NCNCBH: Yeah, I've had friends go from crackheads to preachers in like two months.
THS: Well, the record comes out tomorrow.
posted by Alex
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