The Capstan Shafts Chick Cigarettes

I was going to say that this album is to The Capstan Shafts as Propeller was to Guided by Voices — the dodgily-recorded breakthrough early album packed with catchy songs. Well, this album may not be as good as GBV’s Propeller. But it’s pretty durn good, and despite the obvious influence of Robert Pollard on Dean Edward Wells, it’s good in a very different, uniquely Capstan Shafts-y, way.

New Grenada Parting Shots



This release does not feature the excellent song “Parting Shots” (a.k.a. the “he’s constantly thinking about what you’re thinking about him” song); they saved that for the follow up Modern Problems. But it still has brainy co-ed spiky tuneful indie goodness a-plenty in songs like “Nerd Alert” and “Just Inside a Week.” And the design is gorgeous.

The Capstan Shafts Her Versus the Sad Cold Eventually


An instant classic. Wells dramatically expands his sonic palette, and improbably comes up with a batch of songs not overshadowed by their awesome titles. There’s “He Would Die for You (Were It Up to Me),” (a murderously green-eyed, yet lovely, piano interlude) “‘Lauren Behold’ (A Conversation with a Stripper over Canadian-style Health Care),” (acoustic pop song enlivened by squally electric guitar underpinnings), and “She Can’t Stand the Quiet (Unless It’s Me Shutting Up),” (a plaintive, atonal, but oddly compelling,lament) — and 17 more.

I loved it so much I bought several copies as gifts.

I love the cheap-sounding keyboards (Casio? I can live in hope). I love the also cheap-sounding and frequently fuzzed-out guitar and bass (Slates amps and Skinny Rat guitars? Sounds like they could be), the determinedly plonky single-note guitar lines they play, and the sudden sheets of blissful noise they make. I love Golf’s “what is pitch and why should I be bothered with it?” and “Do I think I’m Stephen Malkmus, or do I think I’m Andy Falkous?” vocals. I love that the song title “FKUSA” stands for “French-Kissing in the USA” and not the ruder thing it also might stand for. I love how that song devolves into its own remix, and then further devolves into what Jason Korzen* might call an “ambient industrial dronescape.” I love “Mlle Amy Dutronc”’s occasional backing vocals and her lead turn on “Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray”. I love the “we can’t afford all those fancy microphones” drum tone. I love the unexpected, gloriously ragged horns that rip open “It’s Coming Straight for Us” just when you think you’ve pegged it as a foul-mouthed and perhaps uninspired rip-off of Aiden Moffat’s songwriting style.

I love how, while some of Smokers Die Younger’s influences are obvious enough, this band doesn’t sound especially beholden to any one of them in particular.

I love the sheer stones this band consistently displays: the potentially-offputting name, starting their album with the harshest, least-welcoming track (”Bad Driving School”), tackling a Patsy Cline showpiece song with nothing like the requisite equipment, avowing that their eclecticism warrants coining their own genre (”hard trasp”).

I love that I can listen to X Wants the Meat straight through and want to hear the whole thing again immediately.

Perhaps most of all, I love how Smokers Die Younger takes attributes that would usually be weaknesses and mutates them into strengths.

If you would like to see if you love them too, you can listen free to maybe my favorite song, “I Spy Dry Fear” at last.fm. Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation can hook you up with a physical copy if you’re in the UK or don’t mind international postage&packing; I got my 320K MP3 hookup from Pure Groove Digital, which I endorse despite a clunky download user interface; and iTunes Music store is another digital option.

* SDY sound nothing like the sprites, truly, but Korzen’s coinage is too apt to not swipe, and too good to not attribute.

I try to avoid Neutral Milk Hotel as a point of comparison, not least because it sets a standard that’s insanely difficult to live up to. To say an album isn’t as good as In the Aeroplane over the Sea is criticism so faint as to be useless. Jeff Mangum used an intensely personal vocabulary of metaphor and symbolism to make a singular and complex album that retains emotional directness in spite of lyrical content that is sometimes willfully obscure (and sometimes seems to deflect personal connections through historical vehicle of Anne Frank).

Comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel also often strike me as fundamentally misguided. Colin Meloy of The Decemberists (for instance) is also an obviously literate songwriter with a similar vocal timbre who sometimes uses similar arrangements. I don’t think The Decemberists are much like Neutral Milk Hotel in terms of their artistic approach or goals (or, really, the level of artistic achievement). I don’t mean to slight Meloy’s outfit too much; “I Dreamt I Was an Architect” is clever, pretty, and despite an intrinsic preciousness it’s not emotionally unaffecting. But “Two-Headed Boy” is deeply weird — the lyric is weird, Mangum’s melody and phrasing are weird, the very sparseness of it is weird. But it’s also compelling, because Mangum inhabits the performance completely; there’s something almost scary about the way he sings and plays the song.

Like The Decemberists, Elvis Perkins’ Ash Wednesday shares many superficial qualities with Neutral Milk Hotel: a timbral vocal similarity, arrangements centered around an acoustic guitar that marches doggedly along through the songs, often picking up other instruments along the way, sometimes including a saw. But as unfair as the NMH comparison may be — Ash Wednesday was in the upper percentile of 2007 releases, but probably not of the decade — it also seems apt, both thematically and because one of Ash Wednesday’s hallmarks is the intensity of Perkins’ performances.

Ash Wednesday also evokes another classic album it can’t quite live up to. Like Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers, Ash Wednesday is a record that seems to be fueled by deep and nakedly evident pain. It wrestles with age-old questions like “why do bad things happen to good people?” and “what am I doing here, anyway?” (Given the details of Perkins’ biography this is scarcely surprising.) When Perkins sings “No one will survive Ash Wednesday alive,” he really sounds like he means it, and his intensity is compelling and maybe even a little scary.

Perkins’ artistic approach isn’t merely diaristic; the opening “While You Were Sleeping” piles a Dylan-esque torrent of fable-like events upon its sleeper over it’s 6-minute span:

The heavens fell/The earth quaked/I thought you must be/but you weren’t awake/You were dreaming/You ignored the sun/You grew your power garden/For your little ones/And you found brides for them/On Christmas Eve/They hung young Cain/From the Adam tree.

“Sleep Sandwich,” (which would’ve been my mix-pick) is full of oddball but evocative imagery, like, “Last night was the science fiction/Movie with you and me/You in your velvet space helmet/Me in my rainbow hat,” and the even better, “You write the Bible/And I’ll read it off my eyelids.” Even a pair of songs (”It’s a Sad World,” “Good Friday”) that skirt the “sleep with me ’cause I’m hurting so bad” cliché do so with unusual sublety and ample conviction. Thanks to some truly gorgeous harmonies, they’re also among the album’s strongest (Perkins’ stable of backup singers includes Shana Levy from Let’s Go Sailing and Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond).

Producer/arranger Ethan Gold makes an enormous contribution to the excellence of this record. Throughout, his choices support and enrich the songs without overwhelming them. Allmusic doesn’t list any prior production credits for him, but I just can’t believe this is a debut recording effort. Gold seems to have chosen not to use pitch correction software on Perkins’ vocals, a choice which I applaud. Perkins pushes his voice out of his range and beyond his technical chops, but it adds to the honesty and immediacy of his performances.

Colleen (real name: Cécile Schott)’s story would be intriguing even if I didn’t love the music. She assembled her first release, 2005’s Everyone Alive Wants Answers by manipulating samples from old records — the sort of records that are usually filed in the “classical” section, whether or not the composers are strictly from the early 18th through early 19th centuries. That album’s extensive use of loops and the often prominent presence of vinyl surface noise gave it a superficial gloss of glitch-pop electronica, despite the unusual sound source choices.

It found considerable critical favor, and when in response Schott began touring, she felt that performing with a laptop would be too sterile and uninteresting, and opted to work live with acoustic instruments. The ensuing The Golden Morning Breaks was assembled from original source material, and much less reliant on looped sounds.

Les Ondes Silencieuses (The Silent Waves) is even sparer. My wonderful girlfriend observes that Erik Satie is perhaps the best touchpoint. I also hear some of Harry Partch’s fascination with the tonal qualities of unusual instruments, although Schott adds the dimension of manipulating the sound sources significantly after they are digitized. Since Schott’s compositions are assemblages, they don’t fetishize performance technique the way many “classical” recordings do. Her lack of “first chair” control over the clarinet (for example) imparts a certain unusual quality of fragility, (even, almost naivety) to her music.

Les Ondes Silencieuses has a very sculptural aspect. “Echoes and Coral” evokes images of moving slowly through some darkened, twisting gallery and seeing its bell notes revealed like hanging beacons as I turn corners. The concluding section of the baroque-influenced harpsichord piece “Le Labyrinthe,” despite its name, makes me think of circling a single, dense, complex, object and observing the play of light and shadow on its surface. (I noticed that when Schott talks about her creative process she sounds more than a little bit like my favorite sculptor, Sarah Sze)

Colleen’s music is often, but not always, pretty in a conventional, accessible, sense. There’s ample musical tension and discordance to keep it wll clear of new age/aural wallpaper territory. At its most intense, as on “Past the Long Black Land,” and “Le Bateau,” Schott’s viola de gamba even evokes a more stately version of John Cale’s mind-bending see-saws on “Black Angel’s Death Song.”

Throughout it’s a surprising, thoroughly rewarding musical experience and very highly recommended.

“Black Blade” is to my mind the least successful of the band’s three collaborations with author Michael Moorcock. I like the tongue-in-cheek presentation of Moorcock’s infamously melancholy protagonist, Elric (”I just wanna be a lover/not a red-eyed screaming ghoul”), but I can’t overlook the song’s lack of a chorus (”black” in one speaker and “blade, blade, blade” echoing away in the other does not a proper chorus make), or its lapses into the ridiculous (the “grow, grow, groooowww!” break; the song’s concluding section, with the vocoder voice of Elric’s evil sword boasting over a “Baba O’Riley”-ish keyboard bed).

“Monsters” is the track most emblematic of Cultösaurus Erectus’s identity crisis. With a lounge-jazz sax solo, a near-rip of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man,” and a section that sounds, well, kinda like Blue Öyster Cult, it’s got a few too many ideas for one song.

Most of the other tracks don’t gel for me in one way or another — “Divine Wind” is too straight a blues number; the instrument tones don’t blend pleasingly in “Deadline”; and “Hungry Boys” is tinny just where I think it needs to crunch. The nadir is “The Marshall Plan,” about which the less said the better.

Happily, the album improves dramatically at the end. Thanks in part to a rare, not-unDaltrey-esque lead vocal turn from one of the Bouchard brothers (I’m guessing), “Fallen Angel” sounds more than a bit like a late ’70s tune from The Who. “Lips in the Hills” has an almost punky energy level. As an adult, “Unknown Tongue”’s soft-core account of adolescent S&M-tinged sexual self-exploration/demonic ritual seems distinctly creepy, but I still remember the potent kick it gave me in my own adolescence, and the chorus harmonies are still sublime.

Star rating: 1.78

On January 1st, 2008 I finally finished my “not quite the best of 2006″ mixes. Yes, six. The most recent addition to make the list was The Electric Kisses, a perfect fusion of Dirt Bike Annie and The Kiss Offs, who I discovered in December 2007. The month isn’t even over, but if I made the mixes now I’d have to find a way to cram in “The Competition” from Remember That I Love You.

I can’t claim to be cool with respect to anti-folkie Kimya Dawson. I’ve had a vague sense for years that I should probably listen to her old band The Moldy Peaches, and I had a copy of Hidden Vagenda already, but it was the movie Juno that set me off on a Dawson mega-binge.

Dawson’s music is featured throughout the film, which makes perfect sense: she writes and plays exactly the music you’d expect Juno’s character to write and play. It’s usually (but not always) smart and sarcastic, and it’s longer on heart than on technical chops.

I worked my way through Dawson’s catalog in more-or-less chronological order, and I convinced myself that smidges of puerile humor and deliberatley ragged performances were an essential part of her formula — that they provided a counterpoint without which Dawson’s confessional lyrics might seem a bit too intense. Maybe they also helped to distract the picky listener from Dawson’s limited stylistic and vocal range, too.

But Remember That I Love You downplays the scatological humor considerably, and ups the competence quotient considerably. It’s not high fidelity and it doesn’t evince finicky perfectionism or anything — the harmonies on “Loose Lips” are as loose and one-take as anything else on her albums. But crucially, none of the songs sound made-up-on-the-spot, and there aren’t any how-deep-is-your-fandom endurance tests like the latter half of I’m Sorry That Sometimes I’m Mean’s “Sleep.” (I wonder if any wag reviewed that record with the phrase “…to the listener”?) A shade less spontaneity and comic relief certainly makes for Dawson’s consistent release; thanks to songs like “I Like Giants,” “12/26,” and the aforementioned “The Competition,” it’s also probably her strongest.

But the 7 songs in between are mostly pretty good, and a few are better. “The Great Sun Jester” is the median of sci-fi author Michael Moorcock’s collaborations with the band; not as good as “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” but better than “Black Blade.” Allen Lanier’s “In Thee” and Albert Bouchard’s “You’re Not the One (I Was Looking For)” are two of BÖC’s most straightforward love songs — no one in either tune seems to be any kind of supernatural entity — but they’re also both melodically sturdy and surprisingly unclichéd. Werman’s bag of production doodads does less damage to the title track and “Moon Crazy,” than to “Dr. Music,” maybe in part because their lyrics are better. “I Am The Storm” has some very silly lines (and weird scansion in the chorus) but it’s catchy and I like it. The pièce de résistance for me is “The Vigil.” It’s a lengthy epic about (I think) extraterrestial visitors that even Tom Werman can’t sabotage; if I assembled my own BÖC best-of, it’d be a shoe-in.

Star rating: 2.56

If you can get past its flaws, however, Imaginos represents a substantial recovery from the disastrous Club Ninja, and it’s arguably the strongest BÖC outing after the ouster of the original rhythm section. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Imaginos sessions allegedly began as a solo album for ex-drummer Albert Bouchard, and the song cycle (of which the released album is supposedly only a fraction) was cooked up with BÖC’s pleasantly-demented Svangali figure, Sandy Pearlman, starting in the early 70’s. (The wikipedia article on Imaginos has the bare bones of the album’s convoluted history, but currently omits to mention any of the epic mudslinging I’ve heard described.)

You can’t really follow the story by listening to the album, which is probably for the best. You can read a plot summary at the wikipedia entry referenced above, but I recommend against it. It’s all about secret mysterious forces, after all, and I think it benefits from being as murky and ill-defined as possible. Vaguely spooky mumbo-jumbo like, “seven years of labor for the instruments of time” is more evocative if you know less about what it specifically refers to.

Despite the strikes against it, Imaginos offers at least two bonafide classics of the BÖC canon, “In the Presence of Another World” and “Del Rio’s Song.” The former is almost reminiscent of occult goths Fields of the Nephilim, with its darkly swirling arpeggios and concluding, heavily-processed, horror movie vocals. The latter, by contrast, sounds of a piece with the band’s masterful first three records; the verse and chorus hooks are easily strong enough to stop the plot-advancing midsection from dragging it down. And if Imaginos offers only two real peaks, the lows aren’t so bad. Only the closing title track makes my skip finger itchy, partly because of the dumb chorus (”Ooh Imaginos, ooh Imaginos”) but mostly because of Jon Roger’s grating lead vocal. (It’s perhaps worth noting that neither Joey Cerisano’s stereotypical metal screech*, the overlong outro, nor the unwieldy title quite ruin “The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankenstein’s Castle at Weisseria” for me.)

Star rating: 2.11

*Cerisano’s vocal credits include BÖC, Korn, and Michael Bolton. Ye gods preserve us.

Novelist John Shirley titled his first book, Transmaniacon, after a BÖC tune; presumably working with the band as a guest lyricist must have been a dream come true for him. Unfortunately, it didn’t make for a good record. Heaven Forbid starts promisingly with “See You In Black,” which is creepy and vicious, yet simultaneously, oddly heartwarming — it’s basically an anti-domestic violence number, but sung from the decidedly un-PC perspective of wishing ill upon the abuser. “Harvest Moon” is primo Buck Dharma — sweetly melancholic and effortlessly melodic. I love the line “young people feeling restless, old people feeling old.”

But after that, the album sinks into a morass of plodding, sadly unimaginative rockers that are both stagy and stodgy. “Hammer Back” and “Power Underneath Despair” feel much more forced than, say, “Career of Evil” or “Cagey Cretins,” partly because their lyrics traverse well-traveled country, but also because they’re not very hooky. Buck Dharma’s sparkling, fluid solos almost redeem a few of these songs, but not quite. A spare live version of “In Thee” (originally from 1979’s Mirrors) closes the record; it’s no insult to the original version, but it’s no essential reinterpretation, either.

Star rating: 1.36