"Self-Titled" - Say Anything

The first time I heard them, I hated Say Anything. The voyeuristic lyrics and psychotic, frenzy-filled music irritated me to no end. I told my friends I thought it as disgusting. I listened to them only on rare occasions; usually to show my friends the inane lyrics of “Wow, I can get sexual too” or the comical (even to me) beginning to “Every man has a Molly.” And that could have been the end for us.

But I worked at a radio station, and my job was to listen to CD’s that came in. When I received In Defense of the Genre, it had been two years since I had given “…Is a real boy” a fair listen. “In Defense” had hits and misses for me. Mostly misses. But I kept coming back, in no small part because of the length of the discs (“In Defense” encompasses a whopping 27 tracks). I would remember a melody I liked and listen to five or so songs before finding the right track.

Somewhere in this time, I looked up the lyrics to some of their more confusing songs. I quickly found descriptions of their singer/songwriter Max Bemis struggling with mental illness, pills, and reclusive living. These things had tormented him for much of life, and he wrote songs that helped him cope.

I scoured the Internet for more information. Even the worst of worst offenders, “Wow, I can get sexual too,” had a deeper meaning: Bemis had spent almost an entire year holed up in his bedroom with no access to the outside world. At least that’s what Bemis said in an interview.

 I finally gave in. I liked them.

By the time the self-titled CD had come out, I had listened to every Say Anything song dozens of times, and shown them to anyone I could find.

Bemis promised that the new album’s 13 tracks (a very small track list for SA), would be more accessible, and more complete than previous works. He wasn’t lying.

What we received was a Say Anything we’d never heard before.

The new album is undoubtedly more commercialized and much more produced, but only a fool would mistake it for selling out. The lyrics are still provocative, but the newly married Bemis is more optimistic than we’ve ever seen before. There are tracks on the album in which a repentant Bemis accounts for his transgressions, like “Crush’d,” a song to his wife, in which he states, “When we spoke, no joke,/ I started shedding slutty girls/ like snake skin”. Bemis hasn’t gone completely soft on us though, and the band’s single, “Hate Everyone,” recounts Bemis’s sentiments toward the world, as he screams, ”I hate everyone/ upon this cursed earth,” before accepting that he is “mired in hypocrisy” and one of the people he hates. It’s clear we’re still listening to the outpourings of an anxious and angst-ridden front man, despite his newfound hopefulness.

If Bemis’s marriage has played a large part in his cheerfulness, so too has his spiritual life. Previous religious themes were more tongue-in-cheek, more playful and trite, (Jesus Died a Jew) but now Bemis explores his faith with an almost reckless openness. Fans more accustomed to his metaphors about rape and murder may be caught off guard by the multiple mentions of Jesus Christ (three times in the first three songs). God plays a major role in this album, and songs about Bemis’s faith bookend the album (as well as serve a large majority of the middle).

 For the first time in a Say Anything record, listeners are treated to complex melodies, harmonies, and structure all wrapped in a softer song that doesn’t lose itself to a heavy rock outro. The result is the moving “Cemetery,” a duet featuring Bemis and his wife Sherri Dupree of Eisley. She serves as the only guest appearance on the album, which is a wide departure from “In Defense” which featured big names from the genre in nearly every song.

Even with all that’s done right, there are still considerable misses on the record. Bemis has a tendency to slap his emotional sentiments on a song before considering a theme or a careful song structure and sometimes it gets unnecessarily messy, as evidenced in the chorus-less, amorphous “Mara and Me.” On the other hand, the standout tracks are stacked a little heavily towards the beginning, and by the time you reach the end, the album’s careful producing and band’s systematic song structures grows a bit stale. “Property” and “Young Dumb and Stung” are too rigid and controlled, and slow the CD’s pacing tremendously.

Luckily, the album ends with a homerun, a beautiful climax in “Ahhh… Men” in which Bemis imagines heaven during a gloomy van ride. As the rhythm and gang vocals swell and grow more powerful, Bemis screams, “So can I lie in your grave?” The result is eerie, chill-inducing perfection.

As the album’s final note resounds, it is clear this is the best we’ve heard from Say Anything.

Check out: Do Better, Cemetery, Ahhh… Men, Hate Everyone

4/5

  • posted on 01/22/10

"So Wrong, It's Right" -- All Time Low (Hopeless Records)

Okay, Confession time.

I like pop-punk. You know, the kind of poppy music that makes your ears feel like blowing bubbles after listening... you know, like that.

So naturally, when I read in Alternative Press that All Time Low was coming out with a new CD, I knew I'd throw out a pair of Hamiltons and make the purchase. But in the six month period of recording and producing the album, something terrible was brewing in the pop-punk scene. That something was the release of scathingly terrible CDs, defiling the already trashy name of pop-punk.

For example, take The Starting Line's third full-length: "Direction." After "Based on a True Story," The Starting Line hinted at a darker, edgier and (dare I say) more artistic side to their music. Direction would be their triumphant departure from the generic. Instead, the disc released was a rambling mess of terrible lyrics and even worse hooks. Ironically, what "Direction" lacked was any bloody clue where the on-ramp was. The Starting Line actually had the audacity to rip off their own flamboyant hook from "Bedroom Talk," a song about having the "s" word, and duplicated it on a song called "21," a song about drinking alcohol. Okay, pop-punk, I know we're shallow and an intrinsic paradox, but really, are we that bad?

For the months leading up to All Time Low's full-length debut, I listened almost exclusively to "good" music. My Last.fm was a blur of Brand New, Explosions in the Sky, and Radiohead.

When All Time Low's CD hit stores, I broke tradition and didn't buy it on the day it came out. I was so above pop-punk these days. When I made my pilgrimage to Target, I had less hope than Michael Moore on the company baseball team. But I bought it, and listened to it, sneer included.

And then la-di-freaking-da, it was exactly what I want from my generic pop-punk albums. Hooks so saccharine they give you cavities? Check. Obligatory lyrics about girls? Check. An undisputable embarrassment when someone notices they're the only band you've listened to for an entire week? Check.

All Time Low is exactly what pop-punk needs. Alex Gaskarth doesn't nasalize his voice too much. They don't deviate from the same effing chord progression you've heard a million times, they just make it sound slightly better than last time you heard it. And seriously, if you're listening to pop-punk in the first place, that's fine.

Stand out Tracks include "Let it Roll," "Six Feet Under the Stars," "Stay Awake," and "Poppin' Champagne."

Buy it if: you still miss blink-182.
Stay away if: you're not brave enough to like pop-punk.

Track List

  1. This Is How We Do
  2. Let It Roll
  3. Six Feet Under The Stars
  4. Holly (Would You Turn Me On?)
  5. The Beach
  6. Dear Maria, Count Me In
  7. Shameless
  8. Remembering Sunday
  9. Vegas
  10. Stay Awake (Dreams Only Last For A Night)
  11. Come One, Come All
  12. Poppin' Champagne
  • posted on 1/08/10

  • originally posted on 11/19/07

"Family" -- Le Loup

The vocal majority of music journalists has been mourning the death of the cohesive album ever since that first time we all downloaded Napster just to see if it would really work. “Nobody wants anything but a single!” the cries rang. “Why should anyone bother making whole records anymore?”

I’m not convinced. I think the album is attending its own funeral like Tom Sawyer, hiding in the rafters while Pitchfork says nice things about it. For one thing, iPods and peer-to-peer programs haven’t really done anything to the album that radio stations haven’t been doing for fifty years. Moreover, every year sees the release of just as many well put together records as the year before.

For your consideration I offer “Family” by Le Loup as an album worth buying. Most albums these days, even the conceptual ones, are melodically top-heavy to a fault. The best and catchiest songs show up first, generally followed by a handful of boring tracks that anyone but a purist will skip, and then at the end (almost inevitably) comes a six- or seven-minute hit-or-miss ballad.

Le Loup took obvious care in ordering the songs on “Family”—more specifically, in avoiding those clichés. The chosen structure, a steady gain in momentum and complexity across the whole album, is definitely a breath of fresh air. Considering the instrumentation—delightfully varied and perfectly balanced throughout; and the harmonies—just a little dissonant at just the right times; Le Loup earns its place alongside psychedelic folk-rock bands like Grizzly bear, Yeasayer and Fleet Foxes.

But the effect isn’t always so positive. It isn’t until track four that a really compelling melody shows up, and there isn’t a single chord anywhere until the penultimate song. The album is so spare and the melodies so subtle that at times, to put it in undressed terms, it gets boring. It’s not that the songs are repetitive or too long; they aren’t. But the first 45 seconds of “Sherpa” are composed solely of percussive ticking, like a sped up clock. And it’s not until the two-minute mark of “Celebration” that a discernible melody emerges (although when it does its sheer sweetness more than makes up for the delay). It’s a major accomplishment that the songs never feel contrived. But in their commitment to subtlety they sometimes fail to offer us an immediately recognizable reason to keep listening.

This struggle to be neither boring nor overzealous is right at the center of what it means to make consequential music today. And there are albums—like Fleet Foxes’ self-titled debut—that get it exactly right, offering immediate accessibility and enduring depth. But most albums don’t. So instead of wondering why a band like Le Loup can’t hold our attention, it’s worth asking whether some of the fault might be ours. iTunes may not have killed the album, but there’s no denying modern society’s short attention span. We’re surrounded by so much art all the time that it gets tough to decide what to pay attention to; often we just gravitate to whatever is shouting loudest for our attention.

And it’s too bad, because while bands like Le Loup take time to grow on you, they’re good enough to earn it. You may never hear “Family” on mainstream radio, but that’s all the more reason to go out and buy it. The CD comes packaged in a dazzlingly colorful cardboard sleeve that looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, and even before you start listening, even while it’s still in the shrink-wrap, you’ll know the album isn’t dead.

  • posted on 11/10/09

"Unmap" -- Volcano Choir

When Justin Vernon came out of his cabin in Wisconsin at the beginning of 2007, he had just finished recording “For Emma, Forever Ago,” the critically acclaimed, near-perfect folk album that would make him famous as Bon Iver (pronounced bone ee-vair).

But it was almost a year after he self-released those recordings, (time for bit torrent versions of the album to bounce all over the internet,) before it generated enough buzz for Jagjaguwar records to give it a proper release in early 2008.

Vernon didn’t let any grass grow under his feet. In that intervening period, he was already hard at work crafting songs for the “Blood Bank” EP, released this January, as well as working on a number of songs with fellow Wisconsinite band Collections of Colonies of Bees. They named the collaboration Volcano Choir, and September 22 saw the release of their nine song debut “Unmap.”

The image that title evokes of a map erasing itself is a perfect analogy for the course the record follows. For the first several songs, it takes us exactly where we expect it to, with spare vocal arrangements and relatively straightforward song structures leading the way. But there’s just enough strategic dissonance layered across these tracks that we don’t know where we’ll be led next.

And halfway into the fourth song, “Dote,” we realize we’re lost. And we stay lost through most of the album. It’s not that the songs sound the same; they’re actually wildly diverse. But every part of them—their swelling and receding volume, arbitrary instrumentation, and intermittent lyrics—arrives totally unanticipated.

It’s the eighth track—“Still”—that puts us back in familiar territory. They take “Woods,” Bon Iver’s a cappella song, and layer across it an undisguised instrumental buildup. This crescendo, its escalating intensity reminiscent of Sigur Ros’s “Glosoli,” is indisputably the high point of the album.

Most of Volcano Choir’s songs are too dreamy and experimental to sound anything like Bon Iver. Vernon’s ghostly voice is still distinct and recognizable, but the emphatically minimalist instrumentals invite comparisons to Phillip Glass over Iron and Wine.

It’s a lot like “The Avalanche,” Sufjan Stevens’ b-sides collection. There are new versions of old songs, a few new songs that just didn’t fit anywhere else, and a few songs so weird you wouldn’t expect them to fit anywhere at all.

But the songs on “Unmap” do fit together. There’s an artistic unity here that Sufjan’s 20 track bargain bin clearly lacks.

So maybe don’t put all these songs in your party mix. But on that night in the middle of winter when you just can’t sleep, you can sit awake by the window and follow the sound of Justin Vernon’s voice into that dreamy, unmapped land he’s singing from, and get lost.

  • posted on 11/10/09

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