Dangling Conversations

Posted 16 Jan, 2009 at 20:31 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

Procol Harum's Conquistador, especially as performed with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, is perhaps the finest flowering of progressive rock.

That is all.

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Posted 27 Sep, 2006 at 23:26 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

So consider this a resolution to put up at least one post a month in this space. Here's some stuff I've been listening to a lot recently.

• Le Vent du Nord consists of four veterans of the traditional Quebecois folk-music scene. There's a fairly strong similarity with the maritime-celtic sound that became a Big Deal back ten years ago. I'm about 98.8% sure that these guys would be awesome in concert.
• Every now and then I rediscover music in my collection that I haven't thought about for a while, and the most recent rediscovery is the Concrete Blonde back-catalogue. Fine stuff.
• Kael's recently got me listening to the Killers' first album. (Or not so recently, I suppose, but the sampler he gave me back in June got lost in the shuffle.) The first four songs, for my money, are pretty much perfect; after that, I begin to get bored. I've only heard a remix of a song from the second album, so I don't know if they've shaken things up or not for the new release.
• Listening to them both earlier tonight, I realised that the Decemberists' The Sporting Life has some strong musical commonalities with Adam Ant's Goody Two Shoes. The former song's been my introduction to the band, so I'm left with the question: are the Decemberists new-new-romantics?
• The Impact is the Michigan State University student radio station, and it's pretty great. I find myself in range of their transmitters for almost an hour of my typical Long Drives, and I make a point of tuning in. One of the many songs I've discovered through them is Fred Jones part 2 by Ben Folds, which is possibly the saddest song I've heard all year. (It's also notable for featuring Special Guest Star: John McRae on harmony vocals. You might well think that the lead singer of Cake's voice is not particularly well-suited for blending with the voices of other humans, but he and Ben make it work quite well.)

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Posted 13 Feb, 2006 at 23:48 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

Happiness is rediscovering a great song that you completely forgot.

I quite enjoyed The Royal Tenenbaums when it came out. Yes, it was very self-consciously quirky, but done so well --- and with so much sincerity from the cast --- that it could be forgiven. I've seen the film twice, the last time over three years ago, but I've got a lot of bits of it stuck in my mind. The most intense of these bits (which I remember seriously creeping me out in the theatre) is a sequence where one of the characters attempts suicide; it's spooky to me for a lot of reasons, but the thing that really drove the scene was the music in the background.

Of course, it's often the soundtrack that gives a movie scene its emotional impetus, as The Opposite of Sex observed so cleverly. The song itself, lyrically and musically, fit perfectly with the narrative of the film; moreover, it was the only really contemporary song in a film whose soundtrack was heavily based in older music, and even not knowing the song in advance the difference in production values communicated something to me.

Anyhow, the point of this is: I really, really liked the song at the time. And then the rest of the movie happened, and the song didn't really stick around in my head. Same thing a year later, watching the movie on DVD: great song, and then gone. I've recently discovered it again --- Needle in the Hay, by Elliott Smith --- and have been grooving on it.

It's a song that will always have association of suicide for me: from the character in the movie, and from Smith himself who took his own life in 2003. It's not by any means a happy song to begin with, full of anger and yearning. And yet... it makes me feel better when I hear it. It fills a hole in my mind, and I'm pleased to have rediscovered it.

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Posted 13 Dec, 2005 at 16:17 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

I heard Great White's Once bitten twice shy this afternoon while being forced to listen to the local Classic Rock station. (Or one of them, I don't really keep track of commercial radio anymore.)

I believe that the conclusion is unescapable: classic rock is dead. If the term had any meaning before other than "songs you'd thought you'd gotten away from a dozen years ago", then it does so no longer.

Perhaps the masses will now see their way to rising up and tearing down the bastions of classic rock, replacing them with broadcasters of music that doesn't suck.

But probably not.

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Posted 27 Oct, 2005 at 20:19 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

So what does make a good cover? Here are some songs that (I feel) exemplify the breed.

All Along the Watchtower (Jimi Hendrix): The canonical example of a cover that's better than the original. Bob Dylan wrote this one -- the evocative lyrics and the foreboding tone are all Dylan -- but Hendrix brought it to life. (And Dylan even agrees; I heard that after the Hendrix release, Dylan started to perform the song less like his original conception and more like a fusion.) Jimi brings two things to this song: his fabulous guitar work, and a passion to the vocals that contrasts sharply with Bob's slight detachment.

Boyz-n-da-Hood (Dynamite Hack): West Coast gangster rap done in the style of the Everly Brothers, more or less. The original NWA track is pretty seminal; Dynamite Hack (a punk-lite band that had their 15 minutes) subvert it wonderfully with plucked acoustic guitars and occasionally soaring harmonies. Possibly the best example of "cover as novelty" I've heard.

Downtown Train (Everything but the Girl): Most people from our generation associate this song with Rod Stewart; actually, its first appearance was on Tom Waits' Rain Dogs. The original is hard to beat -- Rockin' Rod doesn't even come close -- and EBTG doesn't even try: their moody duet hits a different tone than Waits' savage isolation: still lonesome, but wistful where old Tom's despairing.

Everybody Knows (Concrete Blonde): You might remember this from the soundtrack to Pump Up the Volume. It's originally a Leonard Cohen song, driven by a steady, relentless tempo and delivered in Cohen's usual half-declaiming style. Concrete Blonde speeds it up and smooths it out, and in doing so refines the insinuation and the biting wit of the original. (There's also a version by Don Henley, which is far less interesting.)

Mad World (Gary Jules): This one's come up before on this site, and I have little to add to prior commentary. Tears For Fears wrote and performed it first, and it sounds like any other Tears For Fears song. Jules turned it into something sweet and sad, far removed from the slightly preachy synth-pop of the original.

Run Run Away (Great Big Sea): Tight and fast: two adjectives that describe the opening track to GBS's major label debut, which coincidentally do not describe the "glorious glam" approach of the Slade original. A marvellous rendition, and a great way to kick off an album.

The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead (Crash Test Dummies): This one's a bit of a split decision for me: I like the Dummies' woman's delivery much more than the XTC original, and I like the faster tempo. I think the loss of a verse weakens the narrative, though, and the guitar in the cover doesn't quite have the crunch of the original. Still, an excellent rendition and one well worth seeking out.

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Posted 25 Oct, 2005 at 16:09 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

As a starting point, let me throw out the following guideline, which you should feel free to deconstruct or rip into or whatever: a proper cover should have two things going for it:

1. It should bear the stamp of the performing artist, as much as possible;
2. It should retain the virtues of the "original" version, as much as possible.

Now one can record a cover which fails to meet one or both of these criteria, and still have an adequate song; but true cover greatness, I feel, requires the above strictures.

Among the songs which fail #1 are the note-for-note covers: trying to recreate the original version as much as possible, whether out of devotion for the subject or more mercenary concerns. For instance, you may remember a Toronto singer named Allanah Myles, who had a big hit (in Canada at least) called "Black Velvet". This was covered by an American country singer -- the two were on the charts at the same time -- and the cover version was almost identical to the original. What's the point?

Sixpence None the Richer covers fail in this regard: their versions of "There She Goes" and "Don't Dream It's Over" are fairly pleasant light listening, but remain to close to their sources... and quite frankly, the Las and Crowded House, respectively, did it better. The Letters to Cleo version of the Cars' "Dangerous Type" (from the soundtrack to "The Craft") is note-for-note with the original down to the vaguely annoying little synth figure after each chorus, and is saved from mediocrity only by the Cleo singer's voice being somewhat more pleasant that Rick Ocasek's.

The second criterion's a little harder to gauge, since one has to separate the song from the singer; for some songs this is impossible, and so effective covers for these songs -- that still allow for the performers' own styles -- are almost unimaginable. (Many of the songs on the newest Tom Waits album, for instance -- without Waits' delivery and the Marc Ribot guitar work, they would be much paler, sadder things.) A few punk/ska-style covers I've heard go too far in this respect; they manage to wrest the song into their genre of choice, but the result ends up sounding either generic or just odd.

(Of course, both of these are subjective; I find the Quicksand version of "How Soon is Now?", originally by the Smiths, to be too far from the tone of the original and without the same brooding melancholy; the Love Spit Love version is too close to the original, with the changes mostly being Pro Tools-style overprocessing. Others will no doubt disagree.)

So those are the rules of the game, at least for now. I've mostly talked about covers that I don't like; next installment I'll get to some that I do.

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Posted 21 Oct, 2005 at 21:21 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

Because I clearly don't post enough about the music in my life...

Cover songs in modern pop music are an interesting phenomenon, because they're something of a throwback. Time was, a popular song was not just for the people but of the people: you heard it being sung on your wireless set, and you could go into town or downtown the next day and the music stores were selling copies of the sheet music. It was expected that a good song would be done by multiple artists, each having their own take on it.

Rock music was born into an age of recording technology, though, and all of a sudden the idea of ownership of a song became... relevant? Conceivable? Between that and the rock mythos of individualism, it gradually became the norm for an act to perform (and record, of course) its own original songs, rather than just performing cover versions of others' works.

(This was a gradual process: much of the Beatles' first couple of albums consisted of songs written by others, and of course the whole industry of white people playing rock started out with producers putting together groups of bright-eyed boys to cover songs by black artists... slightly cleaned up, for the most part. Bill Haley and the Comets' version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" doesn't make a great deal of sense lyrically, mostly because the majority of sexual references in the original verses were bowdlerized into nonsense.)

So now when an artist does a cover -- particularly, when they record a cover -- it's something special. It's a tribute of sorts.

Next week I'll be writing intermittently about specific covers: what works, what doesn't, when a cover beats the original version, and why "Master of Puppets" is so perfectly suited to the right kind of cello quartet. If you've got suggestions for exactly what you'ld like me to talk about (or not), feel free to leave them in the comments. Or, you know, just babble randomly as is the blog-standard across the world. It's all good.

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Posted 30 Jul, 2005 at 22:28 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

The other week when I was spending the day catching up with Kael, we wandered into a used CD store. After scouring the joint for the half-dozen CDs I was sort of kind of hoping to acquire, I flipped through the $2 rack and found a copy of Eternal Nightcap by the Whitlams. For $2, how wrong could I go?

See more ...

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Posted 21 Apr, 2005 at 23:24 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

I'm trying to figure out what it is that fascinates me about the Postal Service.

My initial exposure to them was a brief story on NPR some months ago, about how the USPS was suing them over their use of the name Postal Service. (This, by the way, apparently went nowhere... and rightly so, too.) Shortly thereafter I was visiting some friends out west and one of them played his copy of their album for me.

The music exerts a strange attraction for me, either in spite of or because of how it irritates the crap out of me after prolonged exposure. (How prolonged? I can't listen to the full album in one sitting... and it's not a long album.) The music itself is that sort of techno that sounds like the bastard child of Casio and Coleco; while I've learned to appreciate some of the finer points of post-human music, I'm not convinced that this is one of its shinier moments.

Ignore the beeps and boops and thin little drum machine sounds, though, and what's left is more often than not a wonderfully constructed pop song. Whoever writes the melodies has a real knack for finding interesting tunes, which are complemented by the singer's delivery. The lyrics generally don't tend to be as well-built; one finds a number of nicely turned phrases, but they don't really carry the songs as a whole.

And yet, despite the banality of the lyrics and the sheer techno-evil of the music, I keep this CD in my car regularly, so I can listen to the first few tracks every few days. The melodies and the vocals are, I guess, just that good.

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Posted 29 Mar, 2005 at 09:51 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

It's only March, but it's been a bad year so far for celebrity suicides: first Hunter Thompson, now Paul Hester.

The latter might not be a terribly familiar name, but you probably know his work: he was the drummer and occasional songwriter and vocalist for Crowded House. He tended to get about one song in per album -- this was a point of contention for a while, I'd heard, and might have led to the band's breaking up -- but they provided an interesting set of grace notes: a different take on what Crowded House could be.

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