Check your head

There's been a whole bunch of new tunes in m'world recently, and I've been remiss in mentioning it to you.

Lily Allen - It's Not Me, It's You

It's not as much fun as the first album, admittedly, but it's not a bad second effort. Where Alright, Still was a mixture of three, four, and five star songs on my iTunes, this one's a whole bunch of fours without either the threes or fives.

Allen continues to be a hilarious writer whose choice of producer seems to have a fairly strong influence on the musical mood of the tune - Mark Ronson's highlights from the first disc are lacking here - and she turns her sharp tongue on some of the same old targets here - old boyfriends, in particular. But she also branches out some and - oddly - sounds almost more mature at times.

At this rate, she may actually turn into a reliable pop singer rather than an immature flame out - something I certainly wouldn't have guaranteed after her first album.

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Daft Punk - Alive 2007

Well, I certainly didn't expect that.

I grabbed this one because of the "Daft Hands" video and planned to just grab the one song and send back the rest of the stupid techno kraut disc.

First off, this is a live disc. I know, I should've gotten that from the title. I just wasn't paying attention. Library catalog says song on disc. Reserve disc. I'm like an automaton sometimes.

Then, there's the fact that the disc is awesome.

This is everything that I need dance/techno to be. It's got the driving, somewhat repetitive beats that are a must. But where Girl Talk takes the chance to throw in every single reference, sample, snapshot, high hat, one-word-quote, and drumb beat, Daft Punk stick with a single theme and explore its many variations. Daft Punk plays the game more like a classical composer initiating a theme and bringing that back throughout the composition, fading in and out on the tune but never leaving the theme entirely behind.

With this recording being a single, seamless concert recording, it also lets the duo show off their skills as djs letting the excitement ebb and flow, building to multiple crescendos throughout the recording but never falling dramatically, never crashing away with mixes and fades that don't work.

This should be a tutorial for every dance club dj.

And now I just want to check out their previous live effort, Alive 1997.

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U2 - No Line on the Horizon

Man, the reviews on this one have been all over the place...

...from The Onion - U2 might try to pass Horizon off as atmospheric, but it’s really just a grab bag of underdeveloped ideas that never seemed to command the band’s full attention.

from Hot Press - No Line On The Horizon is a mature, tender, reflective record of great musical variety, depth and beauty that could only have been made by four people who’ve experienced just about everything that life can throw at you

from NOW Magazine - The problems that litter No Line fall into two categories: mind-numbing blandness on the part of the band or embarrassing, face-palm-inducing vocal choices by Bono.

from Mojo - The result is a collage of several kinds of classic U2 album, one that has the beauty of their panoramic '80s Eno/Lanois recordings plus the synthetic experimentation and dalliances with pop merriment which revolutionized the band's modus operandi from "Achtung Baby" onwards.

Man, I don't know that I'd go to either of the extremes (masterpiece or piece of crap), but I safely say that I think it's far closer to the masterpiece side of things, and I'm thinking that we're going to have to start looking at U2 in the conversation of "Greatest Band Ever" because very few bands have been as productive at as high a level and with as much success in so many different styles as have the lads from Dublin.

The opening stanza from AllMusic's review is very telling of the band's releases:

A rock & roll open secret: U2 care very much about what other people say about them. Ever since they hit the big time in 1987 with The Joshua Tree, every album is a response to the last — rather, a response to the response, a way to correct the mistakes of the last album: Achtung Baby erased the roots rock experiment Rattle and Hum, All That You Can't Leave Behind straightened out the fumbling Pop, and 2009's No Line on the Horizon is a riposte to the suggestion they played it too safe on 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. After recording two new cuts with Rick Rubin for the '06 compilation U218 and flirting with will.i.am, U2 reunited with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois (here billed as "Danny" for some reason), who not only produced The Joshua Tree but pointed the group toward aural architecture on The Unforgettable Fire. Much like All That You Can't and Atomic Bomb, which were largely recorded with their first producer, Steve Lillywhite, this is a return to the familiar for U2, but where their Lillywhite LPs are characterized by muscle, the Eno/Lanois records are where the band take risks, and so it is here that U2 attempts to recapture that spacy, mysterious atmosphere of The Unforgettable Fire and then take it further.

This album does harken most closely back to the feeling of The Unforgettable Fire but through a very different lens, coming more than two decades after that album. I'm all down with the feelings of Unforgettable Fire; it was a hell of an album.

This one is, too.

The highlights for me all come in the first half of the album as the pace slows and the wanderings increase on what would be the second side - shout out to the old folks in the crowd (Calen, um...Calen).

This isn't Joshua Tree where it's spectacular from start to finish or even All That You Can't Leave Behind that found the band in arena rock mode again and finding themselves in the crosshairs of pop culture. This is the band trying to answer the charges of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb where they'd stayed on the straight and narrow center stripe for two straight albums.

And they can still make a hell of an album by taking a left turn...even when we should've expected it.

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Mark Ronson - Version

I don't know the original versions of the songs that Mark Ronson covers on this album, and from what I can tell in reading some of the reviews, that might be a good thing. A number of the reviews comment on how Ronson's production - as far as I know, his voice is never heard on the album as he has produced the tracks and written the music but brought in singers to man the vocals - has taken the originals and turned them on their heads, often entirely changing the feeling and meaning entirely.

I'm okay with that because he's made a blast of an album. From start to finish, the disc is fun, definitively British, pop fun. There are horns and beats and touches of reggae and ska and soul. It's a blast, man.

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Beastie Boys - Check Your Head (remastered)

It's a completist disease that I have.

Unless you're desperate for a full disc of b sides from this third Beastie album, steer clear of this one.

Me, I'm all down with it.

Heck, I'm the nutcase who even torrented Best of Grand Royal just to get my hands on as much Beastie stuff as I can.

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Talking Heads - Sand in the Vaseline - Popular Favorites 1976-1992

I could've probably named a half dozen Talking Heads songs - "Wild, Wild Life", "Burning Down the House", "Take Me to the River", "Psycho Killer", "Once in a Lifetime". I might've even managed "And She Was" and "Road to Nowhere", but I would've been tapping into some serious brain cell storage space to go even that deep.

Because of this, my discovery that nearly every song on both discs of Sand in the Vaseline was a great find left me moderately and pleasantly surprised. "Girlfriend is Better" and "This Must be the Place" by themselves would have been worth the price of admission.

The first three songs on disc one weren't a great opening for me, leaning much too far into the arthouse scene of early seventies NYC, but once the songs became tuneful - around "Psycho Killer" on the listing - everything fell perfectly into place with wry lyrics, world beat influenced music, and David Byrne's rangy and unconventional voice diving into and out of any sort of reasonable range.

Another strong buy recommendation. Good week or month for music in my place.

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Wilco - Wilco (the live album preview)

Now this one's a little odd. It's a compilation from the people at OneThirtyBPM of live versions of as many songs from the forthcoming Wilco (the album) - which, of course, includes "Wilco (the song)". None of these songs have yet been released in any official capacity yet, and these are probably working versions of the songs, somewhat different, perhaps, than the final versions that will appear on the album when it's released in a couple of weeks.

Listening to these versions does whet my appetite for new Wilco, but it also puts the new songs out in versions that Wilco may not necessarily want to be the first versions that people get of the songs.

This is for fans only, but I do particularly enjoy the Colbert Report version of "Wilco (the song)", "I'll Fight", and "Sunny Feeling"

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Green Day - 21st Century Breakdown

Most of you reading this blog probably know that I consider American Idiot to be the best major label album of the decade so far - at least the best of the ones I've heard - admittedly a fairly limited selection.

When I saw Rolling Stone write that 21st Century Breakdown is even better, so masterful and confident it makes Idiot seem like a warm-up, I was fully, totally, and absolutely hooked and sold.

I will say that I feel Rolling Stone oversold Breakdown. It's a good album, a very good album showing a band trying to recapture the spirit of their previous album while also allowing themselves to stretch beyond the act of simple replication.

Before I get to any more of the review, I have a confession to admit:

I have absolutely no idea what the stories behind American Idiot or 21st Century Breakdown are...none at all.

Most of the time, I listen to the sound of the music not to the lyrics. The words are there, the words matter - especially when they're clever or funny (Lyle Lovett, Randy Newman) - and for many songs I can sing along hitting about 2/3 of the words correctly. But I rarely pay attention to what the words are actually saying, and I've never taken the time to listen through American Idiot with the goal of getting the full and total story. I just don't care. If I wanted to know the story, I'd read the words in a booklet.

Because of that, much of Idiot and Breakdown are probably lost on me. From the reviews that I've read, the story arc of Breakdown is more cohesive, more concrete when compared to Idiot's impressionistic, symbolic protagonists' journey, but I don't care. I don't know who St Jimmy or Whatshername or Jesus of Suburbia are or if they're the same people or not.

And I don't care.

I care that from the opening strains of "American Idiot" through to the closing strains of "Whatshername", I was grabbed and taken on a hell of a ride. Every song has hooks that are among the finest of Green Day's hook-laden career. These are hits with words that mean something. Their audience was huge, the album's sales massive more because they songs rocked than because the words were about Bush and the album was a return of the rock opera format.

And Breakdown doesn't have the same hooks.

It might be a 'better' album, a 'greater' album, a more complex album, but I don't like it as much. It shows that Green Day's reach continues to spread farther and wider, that they have something to say and want to make sure that their music is complex enough to convey the nuances of their words. Their tempo changes are admirable - in the middle of "Before the Lobotomy"'s and "21 Guns"'s titular lines, for example. "Last Night on Earth"'s underlying, almost reversed keyboard warble echos Sgt Pepper-era Beatles. The klezmer sounds on "Peacemaker" are unlike anything I've heard on a Green Day album before.

But I don't enjoy this album as much as I did Idiot.

When I'm in a bad mood and want to vent, when I'm in a mood to rock out, I put on American Idiot, and I can't see myself doing the same with 21st Century Breakdown even though it might be the 'better' album.