Beck - Midnite Vultures (1999)

A memorable mix of funk rock, R&B with an alt rock twang

In spite of a Grammy award for the Best Alternative Music Album, Bek David Campbell aka Beck's 1998 release Mutations, was little more than a side project, apparently finished in 14 days – an album to keep the fans content while he was busy working on the proper follow-up to the critically adored Odelay (1996). So, on his 1999 seventh album effort, Midnite Vultures, Beck took his musical playfulness and experimentation to a whole new realm. 

Midnite Vultures is a cut-and-paste alt rock blend of 70s funk, 80s hip-hop, 70s R&B and 80s dance music. If Rick James and Kraftwerk had made an album that was produced by the Beastie Boys and engineered by Prince, the result would have sounded a lot like this. For an album that's mostly about sex, Midnite Vultures oozes sexiness all throughout. Just as Beck takes a unique approach to his music, on this album he takes a unique view of sex and what is considered sexy. 

At various times, Beck is both admiring and parodying the likes of Prince, Rick James, and Barry White. Just look at the album's horns-and-bass opener, "Sexx Laws" The chorus finds Beck singing "I want to defy/ The logic of all sex laws/ Let the handcuffs slip off your wrists/ I'll let you be my chaperone/ At the halfway home." On "Nicotine and Gravy," Beck's narrator tells a potential conquest that he'll "leave graffiti where you've never been kissed." The song bounces and oozes along on a drum and bass groove until it gets to the snake-charming synth break in the middle. Never before has the line "Her left eye is lazy" sounded more seductive. "Mixed Bizness" is the best funk number on Midnite Vultures, and finds Beck singing that he'll "make all the lesbians scream." 

"Get Real Paid," a warped little '80s techno number, features the line "Thursday night, I think I'm pregnant again" followed by the line "Touch my ass if you're qualified." Needless to say, we're not dealing with your basic "Oooh baby I want you so bad" lyrics here. The rolling, twangy "Peaches and Cream" is one of the wilder sexcapades on Midnite Vultures, as Beck sings "You look good in that sweater/ And that aluminum crutch/ I'm gonna let you down easy/ I've got the delicate touch." Other lyrics include "We're on the good ship menage a trois" and "You make a garbage man scream." 

Beck's most blatant parody of the sex music genre is the hilarious "Debra,". It's the wickedly funny story of a guy who picks up a girl at JC Penney and takes her for a ride in his Hyundai, all sung in the most sincere Prince-like falsetto. Simply brilliant. 

For most artists, albums like Mellow Gold (1994) and Odelay would be considered as creative highpoints. But for Beck, after listening to this 'album of the year' Grammy nominated album, it appears that those albums were just the beginning, he exceeds even your highest expectations.

Highway: 30 Years Of America (2000)

Supposedly the Very Best of this Classic Country/Folk Rock Duo

The compilation box set Highway: 30 Years of America is allegedly considered the "best" of this folk rock band’s output. To be honest, a more appropriate "best of" collection for America would be a vinyl single with "Horse With No Name" on one side and "Tin Man" on the other. Even those two songs aren't all that interesting, but they do have at least a little camp-humor value. The other 62 tracks on this three-disc box set include typical odes to "Woman Power" such as "I Need You," "Baby It’s Up to You," "Only in Your Heart," and "My Dear." 

There’s nothing wrong with uplifting songs about womanhood, but they all sound pretty forced when sung by a group of guys. Highway also includes quite a few songs with themes that still seem to be stuck in the ‘60s. How else could you explain song titles like "Nothing’s So Far Away (As Yesterday)," "You Can Do Magic," "The Last Unicorn," "Sister Golden Hair," and "Daisy Jane"? 

Some of these songs were recorded well after the band’s heyday – America continued to record will into the mid-Eighties, even though no one really cared about them after the mid-Seventies. Their last album "Here and Now" was released in 2007. Halfway through the second disc of this box set, you begin to realize that America really only wrote five songs. They just re-arranged each of these songs a few times and changed the words around a bit. 

Still, I can understood why someone would like to own a few songs by America – these songs are relaxing, smooth and non-challenging. It’s fine music for listening to when you’re in the lounge at a Holiday Inn, for example. But for the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone would want to own SIXTY-FREAKING-FOUR songs by America. 

Guided By Voices - Under the Bushes Under the Stars (1996)

Revisiting the Lo-Fi Indie Rock Band's prolific first studio Album

If any group in the world has attention deficit disorder, it's got to be the Dayton, Ohio based Lo-Fi Indie Rock band - Guided By Voices (GBV). For they discover a great melody, play with it for a minute or two, then toss it aside and find a new one. Maybe main songwriter Robert Pollard gets bored easily. Or maybe he is always trying to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as the man who has written the most songs. 

Either way, the 24 tracks on their ninth album (and their first real studio album) released in 1996 - Under the Bushes Under the Stars did keep Guided By Voices in place as the kings of the two-minute pop masterpiece. Guided By Voices meld the quirky with the familiar on this release, as the band take classic pop melodies and hide them inside discordant guitars, fuzzy drum sounds, and fragmented arrangements.

"Rhine Jive Click" is driven by a simple guitar-and-cowbell rhythm, with drums being added only during the refrain. Tripp Lamkins of the Grifters joins the band on "The Official Ironmen Rally Song," but the song is one of GBV's simplest and catchiest tunes. The Grifters' guitar noise only shows up during a brief solo. "No Sky" is a classic GBV two-minute power-pop offering, as Pollard repeats "Could you keep a secret from me?" On "Bright Paper Werewolves," Pollard drops the line "Anyone can scratch/ and anyone can win" with a voice that oozes sincerity. GBV cuts loose on "Your Name is Wild" and "Ghosts of a Different Dream," letting the guitars breathe a little bit as they tear through these rollicking rockers. "Look at Them" dabbles in psychedelia until a crunching guitar pops up in the chorus, while "Atom Eyes" could've been written by R.E.M. around the time of Reckoning with its Byrds-like guitar work and sing-along chorus. 

Under the Bushes Under the Stars contains some of the oddest song titles you'll ever hear ("Man Called Aerodynamics," "Redmen and Their Wives," "Lord of Overstock," and "To Remake the Young Flyer" to name a few). The songs bearing these unique monikers have lyrics that are just as intriguing, with Pollard spewing out lines in his casual pseudo-British voice. Interestingly, many of Pollard's lyrics and song titles have been cited to have come directly from his fourteen years of experience as an elementary school teacher. Believe it or not, the guy was 40 years old when this album was released. And he still fronts the band besides a successful solo career. So much for the notion that indie rock is a young man's game. If you have been a occasional GBV listener, this is a good album to start with.

The Morning Birds

Pastoral spectacular-sounding harmonies

Mix one part classic pop; one part emotive rock n’ roll swagger and you'll get THE MORNING BIRDS - a cool Indie Pop Band from Idyllwild, CA featuring the awesome twosome - Jennifer Thorington and Samuel Markus who play sublime pop and experimental (and super luscious) rock'n' roll. 

The Morning Birds are a pleasant hybrid of sonic and spiritual understandings expressed through music, art, and moving images. The Morning Birds cinematic tones make you feel as if you’re floating on a cumulous cloud at daybreak being transported to another time and place. Enuff said, Hearing is Believing!! Hear why they are different & shop one of their 6 great Morning Birds albums now @ www.themorningbirds.bandcamp.com. Alternatively, check out their website  and like their fanpage on Facebook.

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Rewind to one of the Best Indie Rock Albums of the 1990's

When the dust settled across the music secen of the 90s, Neutral Milk Hotel's 'In the Aeroplane Over the Sea' was  recognized not only as one of the best Indie Rock albums of the 1990's, but as one of the best records ever made. 

I don't say this to snobbily provoke people who still haven't heard of this then obscure but now famous group, and I certainly don't say this to somehow stroke the ego of its frontman Jeff Mangum, whose gentle brush with quasi-fame was more than enough to scare him into seclusion, corresponding with the outside world every now and then just to tell them there will never be another Neutral Milk Hotel album. 

I say it because it's one of the few things I sincerely believe about music, and because I feel, strongly though probably naïvely, that if everybody owned In the Aeroplane Over the Sea the world might magically turn into a better place. I'm not the only one who feels this way. In fact, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea commonly inspires reactions like this in people (reactions, incidentally, which horrify its creator). 

For a very small group, the figure of Jeff Mangum brings out a level of devotion similar to that inspired by literary figures like William Blake and Walt Whitman. Like Blake, Mangum references a deeply personal mythology that roots surreal imagery in emotional realism and is built on mystical themes like reincarnation, otherworldly beings, and the holiness of freaks and outcasts. Like Whitman, Mangum's words all flow out in a rapturous stream of lines and lines. And like both writers, Mangum's work is composed equally of an enveloping compassion for people and a horror at their hatred and violence. 

One of the things that's so amazing about this album is that it's so ambitious it seems like it should have been a total, laughable failure. Using acoustic guitar, drums, a heavily fuzzed bass, bowed banjo, theremin, zanzithiphone, uillean pipes, and Salvation Army clarions of trumpet and trombone, Mangum and co. attempt an epic psychedelic folk-punk concept album about Anne Frank's life, death, and subsequent reincarnation through the art of her diary, which causes its reader to create an elaborate fantasy about forever protecting her by being reborn fused to her as a Siamese twin. And it works. 

Mangum sings about dead dogs dissolving and draining away, semen staining mountaintops, bridges bursting and twisting around, shrouded and rose-eyed ghosts watching the earth from an orbiting comet, bottled fetuses tapping on jars, their hearts filled with singing needles, couples alone in afternoon rooms pushing fingers through each others' mouths, through notches in each others' spines, into each others' souls. 

It all sounds ridiculous, but it's dead-serious and indescribably moving, because actually Mangum is singing about the horror and beauty in the world, and about transcending that horror by allowing that beauty to annihilate you. He's singing about love, but much bigger than love between a boy and a girl; he's singing about loving the world that surrounds you and even loving those who try, and succeed, to destroy you. And he's also singing about something else, something that can't really be put into words, but that is true and living and moves through his unlikely imagery and sonic tapestries, glowing brighter with each successive listening. 

Everyone I know who has this record treasures it. It has helped my friends sunk in depression, I've been to weddings where selections have been used as the first dance, I know people who want it played at their funerals. And I understand why Mangum, emphatically humble and self-effacing, must be terrified by the level of devotion this little collection of songs inspires, but I also understand that devotion. 

In a world that constantly seems crass and cheap and mean, where cynicism is the dominant philosophy and sarcasm the dominant conduct, where what matters most is showing off what you can buy, where the most popular television programs encourage us to laugh at ordinary people willingly allowing themselves to be publicly frightened and humiliated for money, this record shows you the world trembling with beauty, transparent, enveloping, able to be redeemed or destroyed by how much love you bring to it, and, ultimately, holy. Will Robinson Sheff  

10 Best Bob Dylan Songs to Die For !!

Undoubtedly the 10 Best Classic Bob Dylan Hits ! 

The former Robert Allen Zimmerman is an icon. A legend. No doubt on that! Not just under-appreciated and over-praised, the man we know as Bob Dylan manages to be both derided and worshiped at the same time. Fans and critics alike, both prone to over-analysis, often render his music impotent with their endless blathering dissection. Let us try not to go there. It is fun though.  

Bob Dylan has recorded around 35 albums. He has written hundreds of songs. Many of them are mediocre or even terrible, but the amount of greatness that has sprung from the mouth, mind, guitar and soul of this one man is astounding. So here is a list of  ten favorite Bob Dylan songs. (Ask again in 6 months, and it's likely that at least half of them will have changed.)

No matter. Here they are. They are lovely, poetic songs. Some are funny. Some are loving. More are hateful (though often still funny) and even murderous. Bob Dylan wrote them all, and thank God for that.

10: "Oh Sister" - I came across the Desire album pretty late in my Dylan appreciation, and after a brief infatuation (and quick burnout) with the directness of songs like the upbeat rocker with a message that is "Hurricane" and the over the top melodrama of "Joey," I still can't get this countrified, incestuous lament out of my head. Dylan at his creepiest.

9: "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" - Mean Dylan! Mean Dylan is still probably my favorite Dylan. This one's classic, because he acts as if he's being civil and fair and cordial and all that, but he's really just pissed off.

8: "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol" - People give Dylan a lot of shit for his social protest songs, often implying that they were insincere and opportunistic. Maybe so, but they're still damn good songs. This one's more of a 'ripped from the headlines short-story' type affair anyway. This is one of those Dylan songs that I like because, after innumerable listens, I still can't figure it out.

7: "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" - More Mean Dylan. But this is different. It's Too-much-acid Mean Dylan, and you can't beat that. The scene in Don't Look Back where he punks young Donovan by singing this number is one of the most sublime moments of cool in the history of film. Or music. Or sublime moments of cool in general.

6: "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" - Funny Dylan on Drugs. This is some amazing freestyle (or 'stream of consciousness' as the eggheads call it) business. Imagine being right there when he came up with this one off the top of his blunted head. Genius. And the false start still feels authentic no matter how many times you hear it.  

5: "Idiot Wind" - Really Mean Dylan. This one is so mean it morphs into a kind of self-loathing, even without the 'it was me all along' final line. What the hell all that "shot a man in Italy" stuff is about though I just don't know. Ideas?

4: "Tambourine Man" - Yes it's some kind of Yuppie Rock Standard by now, but so what. This is as beautiful and arresting a portrait of drug addled loneliness as could be. That "take me disappearing through the smoke-rings of my mind" verse is pure poetry, and gets me every time.

3: "Positively 4th Street" - I'm really not a hateful person. I swear. And neither is Dylan. It's just that he's really good at writing Mean songs. "I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes, you'd know what a drag it is to see you." Ouch. Yes. Tell 'em Bob, let 'em have it. Aren't you glad Dylan never wrote a song about you?

2: "All Along the Watchtower" - From the under-appreciated John Wesley Harding album. The first four songs on the first side of this record are just amazing. ("Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" really freaks me out though. I think it's about homosexuality. No?) Anyway "Watchtower" may have arguably been done better by Hendrix, but it's as subtle and intriguing a bit of lyricism as exists in rock. It's like the first chapter to a great book that was never written.

1: "Girl From the North Country" - Is this the same melody as "Boots of Spanish Leather" or is it just me? This is my mom's favorite Dylan song. (She's still pissed at me for stealing all her records. Thanks mom.) What can you say? It's a heartbreakingly beautiful ode to love lost. The version with Johnny Cash off of Nashville Skyline is good too, if only because you get to hear Cash say "breast." robert whiteman