Les Savy Fav - Root for Ruin

Tim Harrington's antics at Les Sav Fav shows are legendary. The first five rows will often get wet, and I ain't takin' about water. The former webmaster of We Want the Airwaves Back, a 5 foot nothing Asian chick, briefly interviewed him immediately post-show for the zine and claims that when she said she couldn't hear him, he grabbed her by the head and spoke directly into her ear. At the show I saw, played in an alley at the Laneway Festival in Sydney, he stripped down to his underwear (dressy by his standards), revealing himself to be covered in fake sunburn and rambled incoherently for a while. During "Rome", he ran through the crowd (directly past me), climbed onto a wall and proceeded to abseil down it with the aid of one of the plants growing at the top. I'm told he didn't stick the landing as well as he appeared to and actually landed on a friend of mine nowhere near capable of supporting his weight. What does he have against short people? Anyway, it was the best festival set I'd ever seen until Neil Young played at the 2009 Big Day Out.

Even when he screams, which he's been doing less and less often these days, Harrington seems so much more restrained and thoughtful on record. Les Savy Fav's music has increasingly emphasised melody since Go Forth, but "Sleepless in Silverlake", which gently floats over the bassline for its duration, would have been inconceivable back then. Still, Root for Ruin rocks harder than 2007's Let's Stay Friends, and does so straight out of the gate with the up tempo "Appetites", which inexplicably borrows its closing phrase "I love you to the max" from Silver Jews' "Punks in the Beerlight".

Root for Ruin continues the holding pattern that Let's Stay Friends started, but is propelled along with the enthusiastic force of Les Savy Fav's early albums. Let's stay friends!

Electro-Harmonix Freeze pedal

I want one.

Richard Thompson - Dream Attic

Things haven't changed in the two minutes since I posted that Autolux review; I'm still pissed off about the state of modern rock music. Now a 61 year-old has come along to show all those mediocre practitioners of what passes for rock these days how it's done. They should be fucking embarrassed.

Granted, Richard Thompson is a fucking awesome 61 year-old. As the guitarist for Fairport Convention and a prolific solo artist since, he's made his Stratocaster squeal more times than you've had hot dinners. He's particularly known for transcendent live performances, and while Dream Attic isn't his first live album, it is his first comprised of all new material. I'm making it eligible for my yearly Top 10; right now it's number one and will be tough to budge.

Thompson's albums don't always start auspiciously, and so it is with Dream Attic. "The Money Shuffle" is a decent mid tempo rocker, but little more. Later on, however, the album becomes the best showcase in over a decade of Thompson's serpentine guitar solos. His most popular templates are there: the uptempo rocker ("Demons in Her Dancing Shoes"), the folk throwback ("Sidney Wells"), the mournful, glacially slow dirge ("Crimescene, "If Love Whispers Your Name") and the ridiculously catchy pop song ("Big Sun Falling in the River", which sounds a bit like "Wall of Death"). That is to say that that Thompson doesn't really break any new ground here, but his songwriting and performance are in such fine touch that it doesn't matter.

The deluxe edition comes with guitar and vocal demos of all of the songs - mostly acoustic guitar, vocals and nothing else. It's like having an alternative universe version of the album.

Related:
Richard Thompson - Electric

Autolux - Transit Transit

It's been six years since Autolux's debut Future Perfect helped make 2004 one of the best years of the last decade for music. It wore its influences of the past proudly while pointing to a future golden age of rock music that unfortunately never happened. Were it released today, it would still show up the watered down crap that passes for rock these days, and, presumably, slip under the radar and not inspire anyone to do anything about it.

Transit Transit doesn't start with Carla Azar's speaker-shaking drums. She holds back for the most part this time, but she's still what elevates Autolux from solid to compelling. Transit Transit is slower than Future Perfect and could use maybe one "Turnstile Blues", but it's never ponderous and is one of the most interesting albums to come out in some time. It's Kid A to Future Perfect's OK Computer in a sense, and veers off into Sergeant Pepper's-like tangents were its predecessor was more straightforward. It will be a vital album to sustain me during the impending long, mediocre season of rock.

Nirvana - Icon

I've left that image its original size so you can see the tracklist and thus the pointlessness of this new Nirvana release. Apparently done raiding the vaults (for now), Geffen has once again turned to re-releasing the Nirvana songs we already know. With 20th the anniversaries of Nevermind and In Utero coming up, it seems likely that Geffen will reissue them and probably remaster them as Sub Pop did with Bleach. That's fine, because it's overt. Nobody will deny that they're going back to the well for a quick buck. Just make the reissues look pretty and maybe throw in a live disc and we'll happily fork out for more heavily compressed copies of albums we already own. In the meantime, why not liberate some bootlegs? Live at Reading is fantastic.

These are all the official studio versions, with the exception of the last two, which are culled from the equally widely available Unplugged in New York album, a trick Geffen already pulled on the self-titled compilation from 2002. These versions are all making at least their third appearance on a Nirvana CD (almost all of them having been released as singles) and at least one officially released alternative version exists of each of them.

The redundancy of Icon is one thing - a compilation by definition isn't going to offer you much that you can't hear anywhere else - but more importantly, it fails to adequately summarise Nirvana's career. The acoustic "About a Girl", as is the case on the live album from which it is taken, is the only track from Bleach included; so much for any young prospective fans hoping to get an idea of Nirvana the indie band that drove from its small logging town to Seattle to record an album for $600. So how about the effect that being blasted into the public consciousness had on the band musically? Unfortunately you only get a glossy cross section of In Utero. They left out "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" because it isn't one; ditto "Milk It" and all the other abrasive songs that hinted at what Nirvana album #4 might have sounded like. For all its faults, Nirvana acknowledged the existence of the 1992 odds 'n' ends collection Incesticide, but the same can't be said for Icon.

Do I think I can do better? Yes I do. My own tracklist follows. Normally I would make it chronological, but I don't think that's necessary for a band with only three studio albums to its name, plus given how overplayed the Nevermind singles are, I found it necessary to separate them in order to make them most effective. This is not a fan's mix, but a genuine attempt at a compilation that provides a cohesive listen while fairly representing the band's catalogue. It should stand alone as an enjoyable listen for anyone who likes it but doesn't wish to pursue the band's music any further, while providing those who do with a good idea of what to expect.

1. Aneurysm (BBC session version)
2. Blew
3. Smells Like Teen Spirit
4. Heart-Shaped Box
5. Negative Creep
6. In Bloom
7. Dumb
8. Dive
9. Radio Friendly Unit Shifter
10. Lithium
11. About a Girl
12. Come As You Are
13. You Know You're Right
14. All Apologies

"Aneurysm" archetypal Nirvana and is a b-side on the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" single. The version in my tracklist, however, is a 1992 BBC session recording included on Incesticide and is considerably superior. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" arrives early on and the listener has already heard three singles before the halfway mark. "Dumb" showcases a "kindler, gentler" Nirvana. "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" represents the abrasiveness I mentioned earlier and for that reason appears when the listener will have already committed so as not to scare them off. This tracklist provides a balanced selection of tracks(4 songs each from Nevermind and In Utero, 3 from Bleach and 3 non-LP tracks) and can't be said to be a self-indulgent and obscure knee-jerk reaction to Icon - nine of the fourteen tracks have been previously released as the A or B side of a single. For that matter, nine of them appear on Icon in one form or another. It could be leaner, but three more tracks is a small price to pay to get it right.

In conclusion, my proposed compilation rules, while Icon is a piece of shit cash cow that you should physically avoid looking at in music shops. Whether you're a Nirvana-curious pre-teen-to-mid-twenty-something or a Gen X-er who never caught on back in the day and for some reason wants to rectify that now, you're too good for it.

Related:
Nirvana - In Utero (20th Anniversary Edition)
Nirvana - Nevermind (20th Anniversary Edition)

Queens of the Stone Age - Rated R (10th Anniversary Edition)

What is there left to say? It was number 9 in my Top 50 Albums of the Decade and was the dying breath of American hard rock. There's no remaster job on this release, so you wouldn't buy it to replace your original CD or your eight track from the 70s or OKeh Records wax pressing from 1930 or whatever you have. No, the carrot here is a decent bunch of b-sides and a very decent Reading Festival set. Nice, but a DVD would have been nicer.

Extempore #3

Did MTV think it could fool anyone by adding some metal and gangsta rap to VH1's playlist and calling it MTV Classic?