In my metal days, I followed guitar players from band to band, not singers. It was a plus, for instance, that Graham Bonnet sang with Alcatrazz, coz I knew him from Rainbow and the Michael Schenker Group, but Graham Bonnet wasn’t the reason I bought Alcatrazz albums; the reason (as embarrassing as this is to admit) was guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen, who could, at the time, go wheedly-wheedly-wheedly-woo faster than anybody. (And Steve Vai was a reason to pay attention after Malmsteen left, but that’s another story.)

The exception to this rule was Ronnie James Dio.* I bought Holy Diver not because I thought Vivian Campbell was a hot guitar picker — he was okay, but not interesting enough for me to follow to other bands. I bought Holy Diver because of Dio’s work with Rainbow and Black Sabbath. And coz “Rainbow in the Dark” was the freakin’ bomb. And what made “Rainbow in the Dark” the bomb wasn’t Campbell’s de rigeur pinch harmonics and pro forma hammer-on/pull-offs, it was the cheap faux trumpet keyboard flourish, those almighty stomps on the one and three, and how Dio almost-but-not-quite rolls the “r” in rainbow and loses it in “dahk.” What strikes me most after a week reviewing Dio’s catalogue (with Black Sabbath. Rainbow, and his own band) contrasted with some of his contemporaries, is that Ronnie James Dio wrote honest-to-god songs, not just platforms for guitar licks and wheedly-wheedly-woo solos.

The next thing that hits me is the calibre of Dio’s performances. There’s his sheer conviction, which sells lines like “we’re the throw before the toss,” and makes them sound meaningful, if not actually profound. And there’s the tonal quality of his singing. Metal vocals fall on a continuum from castrati operatic wailing to the almost literally monotonous bark that characterizes a lot of extreme metal. Dio is right in the middle — harsh enough to convey aggression, but actually carrying a tune and hitting notes. It’s the quintessential metal voice — for my money, only Metallica’s Hetfield comes anywhere close.

Dio is still probably the most famous musician I ever spoke with in person, after a 1985 CMJ panel on “crossover,” the then-nascent music-marketing niche that, depending on who you asked, was either hardcore punk with prominent guitar solos or socially-conscious speed metal. Dio in no uncertain terms disapproved of the form. Metal, he said (and I’m pretty sure I have this quote exactly right, nearly a quarter-century later) “should be about magic, and gods, and demons,” not politics. At the time it struck me as kinda hidebound, even a little goofy,** when contrasted with content like “Reaganomics killing me, Reaganomics killing you.”

But here’s a thing about Dio’s lyrics: if they’re a little Dungeons & Dragonish, if he maybe sang the words “rainbow” and “dark” a bit too often, they’re also nearly free of metal’s least likable lyric tropes. There are handful of Lilith or Morgan Le Fey-type evil women in his oeuvre, but Dio hardly ever succumbs to metal’s reflexive misogyny or virigin/whore dichotomies. And sometimes he jumped farther out of the D&D manual than he got credit for; Holy Diver’s “Inviisble” has a sympathetic portrayal of an adolescent struggling with sexual identity issues. It wasn’t just an extraordinary thing for a mainstream metal artist to tackle in 1983***, it was positively brave.

R.I.P., R.J.D.

At least we still have your music.

*Technically I guess Ozzy should count, too, but I was first a fan of those two Randy Rhoads’-enhanced solo records, and only went back to Ozzy-era Sabbath later.

**I had a graveyard crossover radio show at the time, basically an excuse to play D.R.I., Hüsker Dü’s “59 times the Pain,” and Straw Dogs’ “Young Fast Iranians” over and over again, so I took it kinda personally, although not personally enough to stop me from seeking him out after the panel for some oldschool fanboy gush.

***Metal once had a leather-clad hold on the title “most homophobic music genre,” although gangsta rap probably loosened it.

album of the week: a reference of female-fronted punk rock 1977-89

Anybody who’s known me long enough is doubtless tired of my riff about how what jumpstarts the aging process is when you stop falling in love with new music. It’s a little worrisome that I followed up a spin through the new album from The Alarm (Direct Action; not bad — seemed stronger than Guerilla Tactics) by exhuming some of their ‘84 and ‘85 material (embarrassing as it is, although I know by some objective standards those are not good records — watered-down Clash or U2, depending on which album you pick — they still get my blood pumping).

But I think it’s reasonable to make some exception for older music that you never actually heard before, and that’s what the floating-around-the-internets 12(!)-volume Reference of Female-Fronted Punk 1977-89 is chock full of. I’ve made it through volume 5 so far, and along the way revisited plenty of familiar names (Poison Girls get a special shout-out as a “oh yeah, I need to listen to that album right now!” pick — “Other” still knocks me out.)

What’s primarily amazing about this compilation, though, isn’t the trip-down-memory-lane aspect, it’s the incredible breadth of artists I’d never heard of before. You know the saw about how 25 people bought the first Velvet Underground album and/or the first Big Star album, but they all formed bands? A Reference of Female-Fronted Punk 1977-89 suggests that if a few million people heard The Sex Pistols, a few thousand of them started bands that only 25 people heard. Or maybe heard only for Warhol’s fifteen minutes. There are plenty of underexposed English-singing artists from the US and the UK, but what knocks me out about the selection as a whole is its polylingual and global scope.

My absolute favorite find so far is Sweden’s Fega Påhopp (”Cowardly Attack,” if I can trust the Internets) who apparently only released this one stunning single. The B-side “Hålla masken” is swell enough stuff, but the A-side, “Pärlor åt svinen” (confusingly mislabeled as “Hålla masken” by A Reference of Female-Fronted Punk 1977-89) is the stunner. It starts out rather unassumingly (if I were splitting genre hairs I’d call Fega Påhopp “postpunk”; certainly not hardcore) but midway through the song takes a hard left turn and accelerates into deep uncharted waters. The vocal performance is flat-out amazing — I was reminded of the first time Kristin Hersh curdled my blood with “Hate My Way,” and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins demented utterances in “I Put A Spell on You.” And I played it again, and again, and again.

Just so you don’t think Ive become a helpless fuddy-duddy, I did listen to some new stuff this past week, with Male Bonding (cue the Pitchfork hype-cycle backlash in three … two … one … but I thought this was solid, if every safe) and, especially, Effi Briest at the top of the heap.

p.s. If I listen to a lotta Ronne James Dio this week, that ain’t about nostalgia, that’s about paying respect.

song of the week: When You Were Mine

I recently stumbled across Sound as Language, a blog which has a whole lotta overlap with what I like, but writes about quite a few things that are new to me. I liked the way Will wrote about Good Luck like I should already know about them, and I liked the picture of the band, looking none too glammed out, apparently rocking some library stacks very hard. So I bought their new demo from bandcamp. Holy crap. I had to go buy their previous release Into Lake Griffy immediately afterwards, and it’s another case of if-I’d-heard-this-back-then-I-woulda-had-to-find-room-in-the-year’s-best-list. (In the mean time, the 2010 list is already looking like it’s gonna be awful crowded, but it’s pretty surely gonna have some Good Luck in it.)

Singers Matt Tobey and Ginger Alford are both blessed with the sort of rock’n'roll voices that sound really good when they’re straining for a note; they sound real fine harmonizing too. Listening to Tobey’s guitar work, e.g, the fluid hammer-on/pull-offs on “Decider,” he sounds like the sort of guitar player I should have been dutifully following from band to band for years — not because he can play some jaw-droppingly ornate parts, but because he’s got the restraint and taste to play simply when the song calls for it.

Good Luck self-identify as “Pop Pop Punk PUNK” which doesn’t sound wrong, exactly, but seems somehow inadequate. “Stars are Exploding” sounds enough like an excellent pop-leaning punk band plowing through a John Darnielle tune that I had to double-check that it wasn’t a cover of a Mountain Goats song I’d somehow forgotten. (Which was silly, because if it was a Mountain Goats song, I wouldn’t have forgotten it.)

Prince’s “When You Were Mine” was always one of my very favorite of The Purple One’s tunes. Good Luck play it straight and hard, with an outstanding, impassioned vocal performance from Alford. I can’t stop playing it, and it only makes me hungry for more.

Tears in My Beer sounds kinda like a country album title, and maybe not a good one either, but this North Carolina trio’s debut is rambunctious, noisy indie pop. It sounds like not a lot of microphones were involved, and they were all pretty much traumatized. Bassist Savannah Levin takes the lion’s share of the lead vocals (drummer Karl Kuehn delivers the rest). Levin could easily call to mind Be Your Own Pet’s Jemina Pearl, not just in her vocal timbre, but also in her exuberant delivery. Museum Mouth reminded me superficially of Times New Viking as well as BYOP — both comparisons they stand up to surprisingly well. They’re plenty rough around the edges, but the songwriting is solid, with some welcome mood and textural shifts — there’s even a slow (well, slower) pretty song, albeit with the same needle-in-the-red vocal treatment. I want to hear more from this band for sure — and I wouldn’t mind if they went just a little higher-fi next time. I feel like right now there’s a boatload of bands hiding behind sloppy fuzzed-out production because if you cleaned up the recordings you wouldn’t have anything very interesting left. That’s not a problem Museum Mouth needs to worry about.

No need to take my word for any of this: stream Tears in my Beer at punknews.org, hit up Sound as Language to snag the I am the Idiot of the Jungle EP, and vist Museum Mouth on MySpace for a link to free teaser single “Outside”.

(h/t to Deckfight for the heads-up!)

I’ve been sticking with the new weekly format so far, but I’m starting to feel overwhelmed by the stuff slipping through the cracks:

• I feel bad, for instance, for not devoting a week to Paula Carino and her excellent new Open on Sunday (at first I thought Ross Bonadonna’s guitar work was a little busy in places, but the songs won me over/I warmed to the arrangements anyway; I catch myself humming Ross’s licks as well as Paula’s vocals lines).
• Like probably a lot of folks, I learned about Honneycombs (yes, with 2 n’s) because their gorgeous cover of “Nightime” (on youtube) that made the linky rounds in the wake of Alex Chilton’s passing. Arson Garden fans will be delighted to know there’s new music from April and James Combs, but Ida fans should know that the Honneycombs release is distinguished by beautiful three-part harmonies and elegant, acoustic-rooted arrangements. (Don’t miss the fine cover of The Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” available free from their website.)
• I’ve also been much enjoying the new releases from old fave Bettie Serveert (rockin’ again!), recent faves One for the Team, and Titus Andronicus (RIYL The Thermals, Hallelujah the Hills), and new (to me, anyway) faves Nana Grizol, The Happy Hollows, and The Light Footwork.
• Also still scratching my head over the dense, weird, but increasingly fascinating Hidden from These New Puritans
• I sort of expected that this week might be largely given over to hotly anticipated releases from Apollo Ghosts or Dum Dum Girls; both were initially a little disappointing but Apollo Ghosts, in particular, may just need some time to sink in.
• And then I learned the new Medications album was available early exclusively from the Dischord site, so I got to hear the ex-Faraquet folks’ latest post-punk/math-rock goodness sooner than I’d reckoned.
• And also, suddenly wondering whatever became of The Manhattan Love Suicides led me to learn they broke up, but just re-released/re-mastered the self-titled album with a passel of bonus tracks including the post Burnt Out Landscapes singles, and splintered into two new groups with new releases. The Blanche Hudson Weekend, with TMLS lead singer Caroline, sounds almost exactly like TMLS, i.e., awesome. The Medusa Snare, initially sounds more like Skywave to me than it does either (post-Skywave project) A Place to Bury Strangers or (Skywave influences) Jesus and Mary Chain, i.e, awesome.

However, for this week at least, all of these worthies were trumped by Standard Fare’s The Noyelle Beat. This is yet another indie pop band with co-ed vocals who doubtless would have loved the C86 scene if they were old enough to remember it. There’s a lot this around right now, and goodness knows I listen to my fair share of it and then some, but this band and this album really stand out. Hooks a-plenty, but what really sets it apart, I think, is more sophisticated songwriting than most of those working the general territory — lots of little bridgelets, breaks, overlapping parts & such —- and singer Emma Kupa. She can (and sometimes does) do the wispy pretty thing that is quintessential to the twee genre, but she can also belt with a lot more grit and verve than most.

It took me a while to warm to Love Is All. The coalescing of three members from the (underwhelming, to me at least) twee band Girlfrendo into the textbook post-punk act Love Is All made me suspicious of bandwagon-jumping, since it happened when retro post-punk was suddenly very marketable. (Although I did love the cojones of titling an album Nine Times the Same Song.) But by the time of their second full-length, A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night, they were penning a few songs (especially “Wishing Well” and “Big Bangs, Black Holes, Meteorites”) that disinclined me to worry who they were or weren’t derivative of.

I’m not sure Two Thousand and Ten Injuries has anything quite as good as those two tracks, but “Less Than Thrilled” and “A Side in a Bed” certainly come close. More importantly, I think it’s Love is All’s strongest, most consistent release to date.

If I wrote for NME or Pitchfork or something else where I got to influence what things get called, I would assert that the strain of post-punk to which Love is All (and Los Campesinos!, Johnny Foreigner, Life Without Buildings, Bearsuit, Smokers Die Younger, Nanobots, Help She Can’t Swim, et al) belong should be called “clatter pop.” Two Thousand and Ten Injuries has a shade less “clatter” and a little more “pop” — it’s perhaps a bit less chaotic and speedy. But that turns out to be arguably a strength rather than the weakness I might have predicted.

Song of the Week: Ted Leo and The Pharmacists, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”

After a few spins few through The Brutalist Bricks, it’s clearly another entry in Ted Leo and The Pharmacists’ increasingly long and impressive unbroken series of really good albums. I know that songs from its back half (especially “Gimme the Wire” ) are hitting me hardest first. I wouldn’t be comfortable yet trying to rank it in the Leo canon, but basically I feel like almost of his albums are tied for second anyway, if that makes sense.

But the Ted Leo track really knocking me out right now is a cover of Tears for Fear’s 1985 hit, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” I like it so much that I even watched it in video form which I basically never do. I’ve played it way more since Mr. Leo posted it on his soundcloud page.

Those first two Tears for Fears albums have long been guilty pleasures of mine, which helps, but I think this cover is extraordinary. For one thing, although it’s in many respects quite faithful to the original arrangement, it is one smokin’ slab o’ rock. There’s just about enough of a ragged edge that I can believe it was tracked live. For another, it sounds like it was a Ted Leo song all along. Well, except for the lyric. But that bridge melody? Totally sounds like a Ted Leo vocal part. There are a lot of covers I love, but it’s rare for an interpreter to p0wn a song as completely as Ted Leo does this one.

Here’s a working definition of lack of critical distance: on Friday, March 12th, I learn that the new Vulgaires Machins album, Requiem pour les Sourds had been released on March 2nd. I’m frustrated that there’s been nine whole days that I could have been listening to this album, but wasn’t. That’s like, more than a week.

Requiem pour les Sourds doesn’t mess a lot with the formula of Compter les Corps, which I’m completely fine with: my tolerance for undeniably catchy, indie-rock inflected pop-punk with terrific male-female harmony vocals is prodigious. When it’s delivered with this much passion and such great production values, my appetite approaches the infinite. (The joie de vivre of these performances stands in sharp contrast to the cynicism or even nihilism of the lyrics — at least as far as my high-school French can decipher them.)

I’m still evaluating what I think are the highest points, although “Parasites” and “Mourir pour le Système” are early standouts. As with Compter les Corps, I think it flags a tiny bit in the middle of the second side (I love that “Une Chanson Acoustique” — “An Acoustic Song” — is about as close as les Vulgaires Machins get to hardcore, but its moves are perhaps a little too expected). But I’ve listened to it straight through several times already, and I don’t feel like I’m going to get sick of it anytime soon.

A relatively rare English-language interview (linked from the Vulgaires Machins website, which makes few concessions to non-French speakers) confirms what I had deduced on my own: Vulgaires Machins listened a lot to The Pixies, and California pop-punk, eventually bumping into, and admiring the political content of, Bad Religion and more musically complex artists like Fugazi. (The article doesn’t say so specifically, but I bet they like Strike Anywhere, too.)

This is the second week in a row I’ve heard a record that has an almost definite lock in my year-end best of list. That option implied by “almost” part could be exercised, for instance, if this turns out to be the best music year ever. Or not.

On the latest release, Meaningless Friendly, So Cow basically sounds to me like a slightly (but not obnoxiously) lo-fi amalgam of Television Personalities, The Wedding Present, and Boyracer: smart, catchy, sometimes noisy pop with a distinctly from-across-the-pond air. (The original C86 scene is an obvious influence, and Beat Happening, too.) Several tracks from earlier releases (These Truly Are End Times and I’m Siding With My Captors) were more-or-less shmushed together to make last year’s eponymous So Cow release; this betrays So Cow’s origin as Brian Kelly’s one-person project, with a little more hush and acoustic guitar evident.

In addition to the official releases, there’s also the ultra-rare, not-really-released Wackity Schmackity Doo, and some nifty goodies are findable on the intertubes, including a swell live set on WFMU from last year, and a spiffy pair of free all-covers EPs, So Cow in a Shed, and So Cow in the Sitting Room.

I think it’s all pretty marvy. Yes, “marvy.”

I try not to get too caught up in the whole expanded/remastered reissue thang, but I’m making an exception for these updates to to the original Buzzcocks releases. The albums are rounded out not only by contemporaneous singles and a passel of demos, but also full live sets. I dived in with Love Bites, which I’ve probably listened to much less than either A Different Kind of Tension or Another Music in a Different Kitchen. At least some of the demos have appeal beyond the die-hard fan; my favorite so far is an early version of “Promises” with a lot of “da-da-da” in place of clearly-not-written-yet verses — a fascinating glimpse into the band’s songwriting process, but also fun on its own.

Song of the Week: Public Image Ltd., “Home”

Song of the Week: Ozzy Osbourne, “Over the Mountain”

I’m certainly not going to accuse PIL of ripping off Ozzy — the songs themselves are totally different, lyrically, thematically, even melodically. But the chugging riffs that power these tunes were definitely twins separated at birth, and raised in different, but equally strife-torn, places. And is it just me, or does Vai kinda quote a phrase or two of Rhoad’s solo on the Ozzy track? I guess with all those blissful layers of noise, it’s a little hard to tell for sure.