Real Life Rock (285 page)

6
Woods,
Sun and Shade
(Woodsist)
There's a little of Velvet Underground's “New Age,” more of the Kinks' “Waterloo Sunset,” a lot of the Beatles and more of the Beach Boys, but the feel of the bedroom is stronger: from the high, high voices of “Pushing Onlys,” the primitive, fully realized pop song “Who Do I Think I Am,” the tunneling playing in “Out of the Eye,” this is the band the fifteen-year-old music obsessive Jason in Dana Spiotta's novel
Eat the Document
would have formed, if only in his head.

7–8
Diann Blakely, “Dead Shrimp Blues,” with comment by Lisa Russ Spaar,
The Chronicle of Higher Education
(July 15)
For years, Blakely has written what she calls “duets” with Robert Johnson: her poems visiting his songs, his songs breathing in her poems. Here she has Tennessee Williams and Maggie from
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
cross paths with the blues singer in Clarks-dale, Mississippi, so she can address him directly, circling around the imagery in one of at least two Johnson songs built around a metaphor for impotence. She writes like a window-peeper: “I'll undress / Down to my humid white-girl slip.” Spaar follows the way Blakely's words curl around Johnson's until it can seem as if Johnson's are curling around hers; she rescues the phrase “posted out” from the murk of Johnson's song so you can hear it crack in Blakely's.

9
Eleanor Friedberger,
Last Summer
(Merge)
Jittery—someone talking too much, for a moment gritting her teeth if that's what she has to do to squeeze out the five or six words that matter. That's the story, until near the end the tension begins to break—with Friedberger's own piano running the music in “I Won't Fall Apart on You Tonight,” her harmonica breaking “Early Earthquake” open with a huge laugh, her distantly doo-wop guitar chording letting the last song end the album miles away, and lives away, from where it began.

10
Mekons,
Ancient and Modern 1911–2011
(Sin/Bloodshot)
This is a treasure chest, and what it contains is the whole of the band's thirty-four-year stumble-and-fall career: Tom Greenhalgh's no-hope chronicles, Sally Timms's icy X-ray gaze, Jon Langford's rousing odes against all odds—odes to defeat, because the game is fixed. But across eleven songs, none of that touches the delicacy, the detail, the tiny gestures that make the music new: the quiet, measured, rock-hard spoken interludes by Susie Honeyman and Sarah Corina in the
title song; the intimations of plague, carried by fleas or ideas, in “Warm Summer Sun,” mapping the same blasted terrain PJ Harvey is crossing in
Let England Shake
. And then there is “Geeshie”: a dive into Geeshie Wiley's uncanny 1930 “Last Kinds Words Blues.” “Lu and I,” Jon Langford says of Mekon Lu Edmonds, “became obsessed with the unpredictable insanity of the chord progressions, the length of the bars. Then we tried to play an instrumental version, cut it up into pieces”—and then let Sally Timms walk the tune from a Mississippi juke joint to a Weimar cabaret, turning Geeshie Wiley into Kurt Weill, though the tune in its new form moves so lightly on its feet it could be, to Weill's endless delight, the other way around.

Thanks to Andrew Hamlin

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER
2011

1
David Lynch,
Crazy Clown Time
(Sunday Best)
Lynch has written songs before, most memorably for Julee Cruise. He's recorded, notably with John Neff for the 2003
Blue Bob
. But he has never tried anything like this: singing and playing lead guitar on a full-out set of songs. By its end, he has mapped a version of America—an America bordered on one side by teenagers getting drunk and on the other by perverts insisting they're just like anybody else,
fuckhead
—a picture of ordinary life as funny and unsettling as you can find in
Mulholland Dr
. or
Lost Highway
. There is terrific psychedelic Duane Eddy guitar—a slow, seductive rhythm, reverb as big as a house. Again and again, there is a talking voice playing with syllables, stretching them out, bending them, curling them, until you become altogether attuned to the musicality of every inflection. But most of all, there are scenes you can visualize as you listen. For “Football Game” there is dramatic, gonging guitar, and the feel of the Top 40 death ballad brought up to date. “I went down . . . to the football game,” says a beaten-down character missing half his teeth (he's not that far from David Thomas in “Nowheresville,” telling a story about the guy who thought his wife was going to leave him, how he had this great idea to build a motel on the new interstate, but then they put the interstate on the other side of the valley . . .), and you don't take him seriously until “I saw you / with another man,” and the stakes go up.

“Good Day Today” plays with '60s yé-yé, Hooverphonics' synthesizer lounge ambience, cheesy French movie music, with tiny background synthesizer
uh-uh-uh-uh-uhs
, all so someone you do not want to meet can tell you, “I want to have a good day today,” which is to say he'll do whatever he has to do to get it—don't pedophile serial killers deserve one too? There is “Speed Roadster,” Bruce Springsteen's “Stolen Car” as a stalker's reverie, and “These Are My Friends,” where the singer tells you, “I got a truck,” that he's “got two good ears, and my eye on you”—it's a high-school love song, Marty Robbins's 1957 “A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation)” crossed with Larry Clark's
Tulsa
, a creepy, moving version of Rosie and the Originals' 1960 “Angel Baby” slowed down to a crawl: “These are my friends, the ones I see each day / I got a perscription fer a product, keep the hounds at bay.”

These are rich, sometimes tricky studio assemblages; after a few listenings you're only scratching the surface, but with “Crazy Clown Time” you might get everything the first time. It's Lynch in his high, thin voice, the old man suddenly reinhabiting his teenage self, Frank from
Blue Velvet
stopping you on the street to tell you
just how it was
when “Susie, she ripped her shirt off, completely”—and it's that
completely
that still has him shaking his head in wonder after all these years. “Calling Little Richard,” the song begins, and he's right there, the parents are gone, and while the party gets increasingly out of control (“Then he poured beer all over Sally . . . Danny spit on Susie”), nothing really terrible happens. But the tempo slows, the atmosphere goes heavy and dark, as if the party has moved from Fred's house to the roadhouse in Twin
Peaks. “Susie had hers off completely,” the man keeps saying, as if he's trying with everything he has to remember exactly what that looked like, and just can't. It would have been interesting to hear this on the radio in 1965, a dank, gothic, blues version of “Double Shot (Of My Baby's Love).” “It was really fun,” the old man says finally.

2
Sometymes Why, “Too Repressed” (YouTube)
Aoife O'Donovan of the Boston traditionalist band Crooked Still in a side project with Kristin Andreassen and Ruth Merenda—though apart from background laughter this club performance is really all O'Donovan, with her angelic face, her soft, probing tone, and a new song which starts off like any other hand-me-down ballad she might take up. Until she gets to the chorus. “I want to
fuck
you,” she sings, “but I'm too repressed / I want to
suck
you / But I can't take off my dress.” She's as convincing on the first lines as she is unconvincing on the second.

3
Martin Scorsese,
George Harrison: Living in the Material World
(HBO)
A three-and-a-half-hour documentary on George Harrison, the Quiet Beatle, otherwise known as the Dull Beatle? Yes, and when it's over you'll want more. Never has Harrison's music sounded so rich; never has his story been told with less pomposity and more grace. And, after Harrison's years of seeking a higher truth, a purer life, a moment of shock, what he said after he and his wife, Olivia Harrison, fought off the man who broke into their house determined to exterminate the Beatle “witch”: “I never tried to kill anyone before.”