2008 Music Releases

Let's take a quick break from the regularly scheduled baseball talk for some of 2008's music releases.

First up: Real Emotional Trash by Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks.

I was pretty disappointed by this album on my first listen. My expectations were probably too high, as his self-titled from 2001 and 2005's Face The Truth are two of my favorite albums. I should have kept in mind that Pig Lib (which isn't a bad album, but is more "eh", minus "Do Not Feed The Oysters") came in between the two. After the first listen I said that the album (RET) was OK, but that I doubted it would make my top 10 for the year.

[This is probably going to be similar to 2006 when I said the same thing about the Decemberists' The Crane Wife before it ended up eventually being #2. I had heard some things about the album that didn't sound good and my first few listens were marred by my pre-conceived notions. I'd say now that The Crane Wife is a more solid album than their 2005 release Picaresque, but I still like the latter better. (It's pretty much the same situation as the first two Shins albums. I'd say that I like Oh, Inverted World better because it has some of my favorite songs on it, but Chutes Too Narrow is the more consistent album - it flows better from song to song and there isn't anything that I want to skip when I hear it.) Anyway, Real Emotional Trash is (unless there happen to be a ton of great releases this year) going to be pretty high at years' end.]

After 4-5 listens, I'm started to see that it is much better than I originally thought, but still a couple of notches below Stephen Malkmus and Face The Truth. A lot of the songs are pretty long - too long even - and I think it might have been better if he had taken about 30 seconds off of each song and added another track or two. The length is due partially to all of the instrumental interludes. I understand that it's well within his rights to jam as much as he wants, but it does get a bit excessive. On Face The Truth there was a long guitar part in "No More Shoes" which I really enjoyed. The difference is that that one was more dynamic - I found myself listening to the song just to here it sometimes - but on this album it just seems to serve to make the songs longer or to set up some singing parts (when he gets back to singing after the break in "Hopscotch Willie" it works really well, but it could have been shortened by a bit).

Malkmus has always had a talent for writing lyrics that get stuck in your head (he has said that sometimes he puts words/lines together because they sound good as opposed to having any real meaning) and for me this is most evident on "Cold Son". I think that song stands up there with any of his prior ones - the two lines near the beginning and end of the song "The conjecture is reject the rose" and "Defy conjecture and accept the rose" really make me want to listen to it for some reason.

I've heard that a lot of people really like the first track "Dragonfly Pie", but I don't really see it - the guitar is a bit too menacing sounding for me, though it's still not bad. The build-up on the title-track is pulled off pretty well, but it does take 6 minutes. "Out Of Reach" reminds me of some of his slower songs from back in the Pavement days, and he gets points for having a song called "Baltimore" on there (and bonus points for it being pretty good but, again, too long at over 6 minutes - the end could have been cut down some). "Gardenia" is the shortest track on the album at 2:53 and it's a pretty standard catchy Malkmus pop-type song, though nothing terribly special. The female backing was an interesting touch - not something I remember hearing from him before. "Elmo Delmo" is largely forgettable, but "We Can't Help You" is OK (with some more female backing - they're just "Na, na's" but it's still a nice addition). The last track "Wicked Wanda" actually has the female back-up singing some words, but it's pretty much in the same boat as the last track (not bad, but not that great). This is the first album he's put out that I consider to be by Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks. It's really a band effort.



Overall: It sounds like I'm being pretty hard on the album, it's actually pretty good. My opinions of it are similar to the ones I had about Built To Spill's last one You In Reverse (2006), even though I like the latter better. Whenever I listened to it I enjoyed it, and I liked a lot of the songs individually, but I rarely found myself reaching for it. If it was released by "Joe Band" then I would have probably had a much higher opinion of it. As it is, minus a couple of songs in particular ("Hopscotch Willie" and "Cold Son") I'll probably turn to Face The Truth (or "Night Society" on the Silver Jews' American Water - which is my favorite instrumental song ever (take that Classical music!)) to hear Malkmus rock, or Stephen Malkmus to hear him have fun. It's still #1 so far this year, though.


Next: Destroyer's Trouble In Dream

Same thing as Malkmus - an artist I really like releases an album after I thought their previous one was excellent and so I'm a bit let down. Destroyer's Rubies was my favorite album of 2006 (mostly on the strength of the first half, which is fantastic) and Streethawk: A Seduction (2001) is also really good, but this one is more in line with This Night (2002), which had some OK songs but was, on the whole, kind of boring. "Dark Leaves From A Thread" is more like the best Destroyer tracks - catchy and changing (loud to soft guitars, tempo increases, surprise paino solo, etc.). Bejar has the same talent as Malkmus for writing memorable lyrics (like all 9 minutes 25 seconds worth for "Rubies" - it starts out with "Dueling cyclones jack-knife, they got eyes for your wife") but for some reason that doesn't come through as much this time. The guitar is more subdued than on Rubies, but that wouldn't be an issue at all if something else came up to take its place. "Foam Hands" is a slower number in the vein of Rubies' "Painter In Your Pocket", except that the latter builds up to a pretty rockin' finish whereas "Foam Hands" gets louder, but still kind of just peters out. "Shooting Rockets" is 8 minutes long, but there's no pay-off for your patience. It's kind of difficult to effectively distinguish the last few songs from one another (and, worse than that, I don't really care to).

Everything kind of sounds the same - in that bad way of saying "the same". It doesn't go from louder piano driven song ("The Very Modern Dance") to a more standard rocker ("The Crossover", which happens to get stuck in my head every morning when the crossing-guard yells "Crossover" to me at the cross-walk from the parking lot. Cross.) to a more acoustic-guitar piece ("Helena") to a slower guitar/piano-led one (the excellent "Farrar, Straus, And Giroux (Sea Of Tears)"), like on Streethawk: A Seduction.



Overall: Again, if this was released by a no-name band then I would think it was OK (though probably still not that great) but I was looking forward to it too much. This has that "dynamic" problem that I associated with the instrumental sections on the Malkmus album. I don't think this is technically the correct way to describe it, but to me that means that it becomes a passive listening experience (background music that I don't pay much attention to) as opposed to an active one - it's not something I want to listen to in the car if I'm driving myself. I'll probably give it a few more chances (in all likelihood, a spin or two more than it deserves) because I want to like it, but I doubt it'll move up much.


And last, but not least: Vampire Weekend's self-titled debut.

Everyone seems to love this one - I've heard that it's even been seen on MTV (or something related to it), but I won't hold that against it. It seems to often be compared to Paul Newman's Graceland, but since I'm not too familiar with that album I guess I don't have an easy go-to here. The style on Vampire Weekend is light and fun sounding with some interesting instrumentation (which is apparently influenced by African pop and Western Classical music). None of the lyrics add much for me, but they certainly don't detract from my enjoyment of this album. All of the songs are catchy and nice to listen to (it hasn't happened yet, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of them start popping into my head at random times in the future). I'm not going to go delve too deeply into them individually, because I don't think that will add anything. I will say that I can see why "Oxford Comma" made Rolling Stone's list of best songs from 2007 (#67) and "Walcott" has some really nice strings.

While listening to the album I find myself thinking that this part or that sounds just like something I've heard before but I can't quite put my finger on it - being able to create that sense of familiarity with a style that's not exactly common is admirable.



Overall: I don't think the hype quite matches the product. Yeah, it's really enjoyable to listen to but it's not far and away better than everything else ever (or even this year). As long as it stands up to repeated listens, I think it'll still be up there at the end of 2008.