Monday, November 19, 2018
Saturday, November 17, 2018
Every Can Album Ranked
This late in their career, Can so faintly resembled the Krautrock pioneers of the late '60s and early '70s that I could have heard most of this album out of the blue and thought it was a Can-influenced art pop band. The band ended up disowning this album, and Holger Czukay isn't even on it, although he returned for the next one. The late '70s albums are more sonically detailed than the earlier ones, but they sound cacophonous rather than rich. They incorporate new influences (world music, for one) without sounding anywhere near as vital and groundbreaking as when they were redefining rock, funk and psychedelia. "Seven Days Awake" is the highlight here, a successful blend of Future Days era guitar jamming with Jaki Liebezeit's newfound interest in manic percussion. Unfortunately there's little if anything else to recommend. While Can's self-titled album that followed is no masterpiece, it's superior enough to Out of Reach that I wondered how they could have fallen so far so fast. It turns out they pulled an Abbey Road/Let It Be; Out of Reach was recorded after Can, but released first, so Czukay wasn't "back" at all, although he and the rest of the core quartet recorded one more album after those two.
Chronologically, Flow Motion is the point where Can sounds like a different band. "I Want More" is Can's first dalliance with disco, and it actually got them on Top of the Pops, but far from being cause for concern, it's actually by far the most listenable thing here. At this point, they were just adding genres to their utility belt without bothering to put a personal spin on them. Flow Motion is a consciously poppier album than any of the others, but "I Want More" is the only instance in which it really commits.
Saw Delight's opening track "Don't Say No" is a flagrant ripoff of "Moonshake" from Future Days. On the one hand, I can understand the temptation to self-plagiarise. If I'd written some of the songs Can wrote between '69 and '73, I'd be tempted to mine some more material out of them. But why "Moonshake"? I could understand if they thought "let's jam on "Halleluwah" for a few hours and see what we come up with" or "let's see where we can take "Pinch" that it didn't go before", but "Moonshake" is a brilliantly succinct three minute song better left as a one and done. "Don't Say No" is six and a half unnecessary minutes long and has two of the guys from Traffic on vocals for some reason. NO NO NO NO NO. That's more words on one song than I've spend on any of the other albums so far, but there's not much to say about the rest of Saw Delight. The later Can albums tend to have one song that rises to the top, and in this case it's "Call Me', with its snaky keyboard and pulsing bass line.
Rite Time is a comeback album recorded with Malcolm Mooney ten years after Can's last album, sixteen years after where I'd draw the line on their classic era and twenty years after Mooney last recorded with them. "She Brings the Rain" from Soundtracks showed that Mooney could actually sing, even if he didn't have much of a range. It's understandable that the band wouldn't want to play to Mooney's strength (stream of consciousness sing-speak) for fear of it coming off as a regression, but Rite Time constantly forces him out of his comfort zone without ever advancing the band's sound. Were it not for him, this album wouldn't have sounded out of place in the late '70s.
Can is a conventional album for one that starts off with two eight minute songs, but that works in its favor. Can had absorbed disco as early as 1976, but didn't run with it across a whole album until now. It's both a blessing and a curse; it created a simpler framework that was refreshing after the sound and fury of their last couple of albums, but Liebezeit's beats themselves are the most staid and simplistic he'd ever recorded. Interestingly, as with Out of Reach, the album's best song "Sodom" invokes Future Days yet again. There isn't a Can album after Future Days that doesn't try to recapture its glory at one point or another, other than perhaps Flow Motion, but it isn't surprising that they'd turn to their last classic album for inspiration more than once.
Landed is considered by many (including unofficial Professor of Krautrock Julian Cope) to be the worst Can album, but while it's not one I listen to often, I can't imagine reaching for it and deciding to put on Flow Motion or Out of Reach instead. I'd go as far as to say it's the last genuinely good Can album, but no farther. Can's jamming, while it didn't resonate at this point the way it used to, doesn't feel like aimless noodling the way it often would in the future. This album is notable as being the one from which Hunters & Collectors took their name.
Damo Suzuki's departure meant the end of Can's classic era, but Soon Over Babaluma is a pretty strong effort that achieves a delicate balancing act of trying out new things without completely abandoning what works. The world and pop music influences that would dominate later albums are applied more tastefully here, and the album is lighter on vocals than past and future albums; Irmin Schmidt and Michael Karoli share vocals, but keep them to a minimum. The closing track "Quantum Physics" is the best song here, and could have passed for a draft of a song from a fourth album with Suzuki even without Karoli doing his best Suzuki impression.
Soundtracks is a compilation, not an album - "the second album of The Can, but not album number 2", as stated on the back cover - but fuck it, I'm including it. Soundtracks does what it says on the tin, collecting pieces commissioned for film soundtracks (something Irmin Schmidt would do a copious amount of in his post-Can career), and functioned as a stop-gap while the delayed Tago Mago took shape. It contains Mooney's last recordings as well as providing an introduction to Suzuki. The two best songs are both Suzuki's; "Mother Sky" is a fairly straightforward rocker, but one that gives Michael Karoli an excuse to cut loose for 14 minutes, and "Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone" looks forward to the tight funk Can would perfect on Ege Bamyasi.
Can is generally considered the original Krautrock band, but the sound associated with the genre was codified by Neu! with their motorik beats and single chord meditations. Can played around with something approximating that formula in '68 and '69, but never went back to it after "Father Cannot Yell". It's a hell of a way to introduce Can, evincing The Velvet Underground's "European Son" in the way Michael Karoli sounds as if he's making up chord changes on the spot over Holger Czukay's insistent bass line and just nailing it by chance, but Irmin Schmidt's fluttering keyboard and Malcolm Mooney's rapid, impenetrable prose give it its own sound. The four songs here form a mission statement for a band that wasn't content to sit in one place for too long; following "Father Cannot Yell", "Mary, Mary, So Contrary" slows things down and forms a blueprint for much of Karoli's lead guitar work to come, older song "Outside My Door" steers things back in a more conventional rock direction, sounding a bit like "Born to Be Wild", and then "Yoo Doo Right" concludes the album with a twenty minute locked groove that serves as a dry run for some of Can's best songs to come. Like Damo Suzuki who followed, Malcolm Mooney was a foreigner, in his case a black American sculptor. Like Suzuki, his outsider perspective gave Can something they proved unable to generate on their own. None of the musicians in Can could have emulated Mooney's beat poet delivery and stream of consciousness lyrics and nor did they try.
Unlike Soundtracks, Delay 1968 is often thought of as a compilation (and classified as such by Wikipedia), but is technically an album. Can recorded their would-be debut Welcome to Thy PNOOM in 1968, but they couldn't get anyone to release it. It came out thirteen years later, two years after the band broke up, as Delay 1968. Various Mooney era songs had shown up both on bootlegs and on official rarities compilations such as Unlimited Edition (1976), but an entire lost album is a hell of a thing. Delay 1968 is less experimental than Monster Movie, but is appealing raw and home to some of Can's finest moments. "Butterfly" and "Uphill" are rough sketches of the aforementioned archetypal Krautrock sound. The Fall's Can tribute is called "I Am Damo Suzuki", but it's not hard to imagine Mark E. Smith hearing the ersatz funk of "Nineteen Century Man" and being blown away by its boneheaded simplicity. And of course it's unsurprising that Radiohead, another band indebted to Can, covered the elegiac "The Thief" in concert.
Can was already morphing into something different towards the end of Damo Suzuki's stint with the band. Future Days has a lighter sound than the two other Suzuki era albums, and is more subdued. Suzuki's vocals are buried in the mix (as if it wasn't hard enough to decipher his lyrics) and Liebezeit's drumming less inclined towards rock and funk. Future Days' rewards are subtle yet abundant. With four songs each, Future Days and Monster Movie appropriately bookend Can's classic era, even though they sound nothing alike. The opening title track packs a lot into a song that follows the same structure for its nine and a half minutes, as Liebezeit's drumming suggests a motorik beat interrupted by jazzy accents while Karoli plays some of his bluesiest guitar over a decidedly non-bluesy chord progression. "Spray" is a fluid jam dominated by Liebezeit's busiest drumming on the album and Schmidt's spooky keyboard intrusions. "Moonshake" is conceptually an outlier, a concise and straightforward pop-funk song that provides the perfect bridge into "Bel Air". "Bel Air" is Future Days' masterpiece, a 20 minute piece that slowly builds until it reaches the stratosphere with Karoli's guitar effortlessly gliding along. Damo Suzuki left Can after Future Days because he considered it the apex of his work with the band and thought it would only be downhill from there. It's not hard to see why he felt that way.
In the middle of its three album run with Damo Suzuki, Can was at its most concise. The band still made its songs by editing down jams that sometimes lasted hours, but the editing was tighter than ever. Even the nearly ten minute "Pinch" justifies its length because it's a seemingly effortlessly amorphous jam ripe with enough possibilities that it had to run almost as long as "Vitamin C", "I'm So Green" and "Spoon" combined. That last one is the Texan indie rock band's namesake, while the twisted psychedelic 6/8 time ballad "Sing Swan Song" provided Kanye West with the sample for "Drunk and Hot Girls. The breadth of artists Can has impacted in one way or another is remarkable. Unfortunately, Ege Bamyasi is inexplicably home to the atrocious "Soup", a long, shrieky and self-indulgent song that proves that even with their game at this level, they could do wrong - it's just that outside that one egregious misstep, they didn't.
Mad respect to Malcolm Mooney, who, as I mentioned, took Can places they couldn't have otherwise gone, but Damo Suzuki's more elastic, versatile vocal style opened up even more possibilities. Hours and hours of jamming served as Can's adjustment period and Suzuki's chance to find his place; Tago Mago is not a transitional album, but a fully formed reinvention. The album has one absolutely awful song, in this case "Peking O". It's awful for all the same reasons as "Soup". The album also ends with the just merely decent "Bring Me Coffee or Tea". Yet the first five songs are enough for me to put Tago Mago right at the top. It's not insignificant that on Ege Bamyasi, Can was able to express in ten minutes what once took twenty and in three minutes what once took ten. Take away "Peking O", but leave "Soup" on Ege Bamyasi and Tago Mago is still 20 minutes longer, but I could listen to an hour of their psychedelic funk peak "Halleluwah" (a mere eighteen minutes as it stands). "Aumg" - twenty minutes long - is Can at its most brazenly experimental, playing around with studio delay effects and wordlessly chanting. And they could be concise when they wanted to be - the four minute "Mushroom", formed around a two note bass line, might be Can's simplest song, but, like much of Tago Mago, it sounded utterly alien in 1971 and still does today.
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Monday, November 12, 2018
Every R.E.M. Album Ranked
Say what you like about Up, but at least it tried to shake things...uh...in a non-downward direction after drummer Bill Berry left a Bill Berry-shaped hole in the band's lineup. Reveal is an attempt to get back to business as if nothing happened, but Berry's absence affected them more than they cared to admit; it threw them off balance at a time when things weren't guaranteed to come naturally to begin with, and this passionless album is the best they could muster as a result.
Around the Sun distinguishes itself from Reveal by virtue of the fact that it sounds as if a modicum of effort was put into it, but even the band ended up bored with the result and retired most of the songs from the their live sets after Accelerate.
R.E.M. could have ended things on a relatively high note with Accelerate, but they just had to push it. Collapse into Now is a return to the creative wilderness of Reveal and Around the Sun. It's just...nothing.
It'll always be known as the panic-induced album they made after Berry left (prompting the band to hire multiple drummers, use drum machines for the first time since their debut and even get in on the act themselves rather than find a permanent replacement), but I think Up is better than most people give it credit for. Scattered among what is admittedly one of the band's least cohesive albums are some excellent discrete efforts; the keyboards and effects on "Lotus" and "Parakeet" give them a neat twist on the R.E.M. rock and ballad templates respectively, whereas "At My Most Beautiful" forsakes all musical artifice and shows Stipe at his most direct and vulnerable - something that once would have been impossible. On the other hand, there are at least four undeniable duds. Up is a long album - trim the fat and you still have a ten song album that sits in the middle if you arrange the band's catalogue by length. An OK album becomes a decent one that way, but nothing can make it great.
The band's first decent album in over a decade, Accelerate worked because the band didn't overthink it and just made something they'd enjoy playing live. It's their most straight up rock album since Monster, or in fact ever. Michael Stipe sounds as into it as ever, Mike Mills' backing vocals make a welcome return and Bill Reiflin (Ministry), Bill Berry's long overdue replacement, earns his keep. Unfortunately, Accelerate proved to be, as Sick Boy would say, "a blip on an otherwise uninterrupted downward trajectory".
Out of Time brought the mandolin that debuted on Green to the ears of millions via "Losing My Religion", the band's biggest hit and one of its best songs, but that song is an outlier in what is otherwise a spectacularly poorly chosen set of singles: "Shiny Happy People", which the band famously disowned, the ill-advised funk experiment "Radio Song" (featuring KRS-One!) and the forgettable "Near Wild Heaven" with Mike Mills on lead vocals. Besides "Losing My Religion", it's the deep cuts that make Out of Time worthwhile; "Low" breaks new ground for the band, with its sparse hand percussion, palm-muted guitar and simple, stark organ; "Half a World Away" has the band indulge its folky side and makes me wish they'd done it more often and spared us a couple of those singles; "Country Feedback" is the anti-"Shiny Happy People", a dirge that brings to mind Neil Young, who played lead guitar on it seven years later at a Bridge School concert.
Monster was the first R.E.M. album to gain a bad reputation, and it doesn't usually come in ahead of any albums that came before it in lists such as these. Undeniably there's some filler - heaven forbid an R.E.M. album should have any of that - but it also kicks off with two of its best and most brazen rockers "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" and "Crush with Eyeliner", and contains one of its best ballads in "Strange Currencies" and two of its most underrated and adventurous numbers, the falsetto "Tongue" and the distortion-seared farewell letter to Kurt Cobain "Let Me In". Monster received favourable if not fawning reviews initially, but only a fraction of Automatic for the People's audience bought it, and perusing bargain bins in the 90s was a reminder of just how many people soured on it. The obstreperous denunciation was no doubt due in part to its opacity, especially relative to Automatic. How many R.E.M. songs hit you on an emotional level even though you don't know what they're about? With some exceptions ("Let Me In" in particular"), Monster's songs don't generally work on that level. It delivers the obliqueness fans had come to expect without the emotional gut punch that had always been implicitly bundled with it. It's also because it not only came along after an improbable string of winners, but also was the first R.E.M. album to pay no deference whatsoever to its immediate predecessor.
R.E.M.'s first LP has paradoxically aged well while sounding very much like a product of its time. "Talk About the Passion" and other tracks written in the style that would come to be known as "jangle pop" spawned a thousand indie bands, while "Perfect Circle" set a high bar for the band's ballads and the brilliantly elliptical "9-9" and "West of the Fields" showed their post punk influences. The only real flaw is its timid, non-committal production and the early Stipe mumble robbing it of some of its impact, as was the case with the preceding Chronic Town EP.
Automatic for the People has been so irrevocably hammered into the public consciousness that it's easy not to notice that it's one of the weirder albums to have sold 8 million copies in its first year. It probably wouldn't have sold that many if "Star Me Kitten" had retained its original title "Fuck Me Kitten", although the lyric remains intact and is by far the most easily parse-able phrase in a cryptic song even by Stipe standards. Even the singles are weird. After Green and Out of Time led with "Pop Song 89" and "Radio Song" respectively, Peter Buck's D minor arpeggio in "Drive" (lead single as well as opening track) is a cold welcome, sort of like if they'd opened Out of Time with "Country Feedback", but the song is one of R.E.M.'s best. "Man on the Moon" joins "Don't Fear the Reaper" in the canon of catchy songs about the inevitability of death. The best known deep cut "Nightswimming" is deceptively inviting; while it's one of the band's prettiest tunes and the lyrics are some of Stipe's most straightforward, it has no chorus, only a baroque, circular piano figure that is gradually joined by strings and horns.
Out of Time is a disjointed album that is caught between R.E.M.'s proclivity at the time to write upbeat pop songs that didn't quite become them and their talent for darker fare, and Green is the same to a lesser extent. There's only so many times you can listen to "Pop Song 89", and while I'll always be an apologist for "Stand" (I think it's just stupid enough to work), I can understand how it can grate, too. But damn, when Green on, it's on - the rockers "Orange Crush", "Turn You Inside Out" and "I Remember California" make it worthwhile on their own. Then there are the first mandolin tracks in the R.E.M. canon - "You Are the Everything" and "The Wrong Child" are excellent, but "Hairshirt" proves that the rule of three isn't always paramount.
Fables has the weakest reputation of the IRS-era albums, but to my mind it also has the best run of three opening tracks of any R.E.M. album, the harmonic fever dream "Feeling Gravitys Pull" (sic) battling it out with "Drive" for the title of R.E.M.'s best opening track. It's easily their darkest album besides Automatic, but it works for me, and it's only when the band steers away from that that it goes awry - "Cant Get There from Here" (what is it with R.E.M. and apostrophes?) is an oh-so-jaunty pop number the band only included because it seemed to go down well when they tried it live, and "Wendell Gee", though slower, similarly applies a false patina of country.
The band's last album for IRS, Document is an appropriately transitional album that is bigger and bolder than their earlier albums, but too singular to pass for a Warner Bros release. From the band's first minor hits, the oft-misunderstood "The One I Love" and the rapid-fire "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)", to the band's first and only flirtation with saxophone, "Fireplace", everything here sounds as though it should only work in isolation, yet somehow it all comes together. Also deserving of a mention is the band's cover of Wire's "Strange", of which it can be truly said that they made it their own. Whereas the original was a glacial, dirge-y outlier on the over-before-you-know-it punk exercise that was the English band's debut, R.E.M.'s version is an upbeat number that sounds like something they could have written. Stipe even went as far as to put a personal spin on a line he'd misheard to begin with, assuming Colin Newman was singing "Colin's nervous and the lights are bright" and substituting his own name (the name in the original was in fact Joey).
If Murmur was a TV spot advertising what R.E.M. was capable of, Reckoning was the full widescreen presentation. It is what Peter Buck or Bill Berry (I don't remember which) called a "very human record", not least so in its production, which is both cleaner and more natural at the same time. Reckoning builds and improves upon Murmur's idiosyncratic pop template, except when it moves beyond it - I refer to "Camera", a stunning slow-burn beyond the scope of anything R.E.M. had attempted before.
Lifes Rich Pageant aka We Dont Need No Stinkin Apostrophes is the first R.E.M. album to be rid of the Stipe mumble, and what a way to announce it - "Begin the Begin" opens with a brief guitar riff that gives way to overdriven chords, Peter Buck allowing his guitar to feed back. Over this, Stipe begins his call to arms, no longer hiding behind the rest of the band. The lyrics are typically impenetrable in their specifics, but the general message is clear. The political focus doesn't abate from there. "Fall On Me", with its brilliant counter-melody from Mike Mills, rounds out another opening run of three - hell, make that four with "Cuyahoga" - and "The Flowers of Guatemala" is one of the prettiest songs ever written about genocide.
In 1996, Warner Bros re-signed R.E.M. for another five album contract for 80 million dollars, the biggest such contract at the time (there was a bit more to it than "here's 80 million dollars", but it was still beyond most people's wildest dreams). What seems overconfident in hindsight was predicated on the notion that the commercial failure of Monster was an aberration. The band signed just before the release of New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which they recorded quickly on tour (some of the recordings are live, others from soundchecks) in order to complete their previous contract. It was well-received critically, but just how good it is is one of R.E.M.'s best kept secrets because so few people bought it. It starts like no other R.E.M. album with "How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us", its spaghetti western harmonica looking ahead to Gorillaz' "Clint Eastwood" five years later. One of the best sequential song pairings on an R.E.M. album comes with "E-Bow the Letter" and "Leave". On the former, the titular implement on Peter Buck's guitar gives the song the quality of a slowly rolling wave, over which long overdue guest Patti Smith expertly coasts. At seven minutes, "Leave" is R.E.M.'s longest long and would still be even without its acoustic intro, which gives the false impression that it's of a piece with "E Bow" before a siren-like synth ushers in the most spirited, anguished rock song the band ever recorded. The rough (by R.E.M. standards) sound owing to atypical recording environments elevates some of the songs, giving "Undertow" and "Binky the Doormat" a welcome coating of sleaze, while potentially rescuing "Bittersweet Me" from overcooked mediocrity. Putting New Adventures in Hi-Fi at #1 is probably a less popular move than being a Monster apologist, but most people will agree with me on one thing: R.E.M. never sounded this good again.
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