Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

2001
by Scott Miller

"Now Mary" - The White Stripes
This rocks like mad, and then there's that ridiculous tempo speed up that they stay in lock step for all the way out of it, and that really rocks like mad. Hardly anything could have been a better influence on '00s music than the White Stripes, with their disdain for anything digital or mechanized. Maybe most importantly, after thirty years, there is finally a big-time American youth market act with a better mastery of blues than the best British practitioners. White Blood Cells remains the big one for me so far (starting with the spot-on hilarious attackers/photographers graphic), pointing easily to an intervening era of would-be adepts' heads being too full of the wrong stuff to ever write a song about how you should behave respectfully toward your mother.

"How It Goes" - For Stars
This is as tuneful and shimmering as anything in a large top tier of nebulous-overwhelmed-feeling music, getting the prize for some extremely respectable vibraphone (or I may mean xylophone) playing that steps up about halfway through the song. "Don't be so profound": a good line, and, often enough, good advice to and from indie folk tasked with making listenable music.

"Early Riser" - The Bevis Frond
Nick Saloman's reputation for deeply underground prog, garage, psych type jams is corroborated a lot more at a Terrastock performance than on any studio recording I'm familiar with; this economical, nuanced song could have been one of the better ones on some Teenage Fanclub record.

"Chainsmoking In the U.S.A." - The Posies
A surprisingly sturdy track from what I considered a one-off, we're-not-really-back-together e.p. "It's getting way too easy/It's getting way too easy for me and you to get what we want": I'm not certain how Jon Auer would have me apply that, but I like it; if it nudges me away from self-satisfaction, okay.

"I'm Waking Up to Us" - Belle and Sebastian
Since the strangely awful Boy With the Arab Strap, they have kept shaping up as one of—I'll say—the top five artists of the decade. Keep letting them talk (as good heavens they do on this one) and they will keep saying interesting enough things; keep giving them arrangement budgets, they'll keep coming back with ever-worthier results.

"Romeo" - Basement Jaxx
Catchy for the ages. How sick has my family gotten of me walking around singing, "You used to be my Romeo"? Besides a fantastic sense of the rhythm of lines, there's an intersting—I want to say Oscar Wilde-like—conversational tone: "You see, my dear, I have had enough/Of keeping quiet about all this stuff"

"Jaded" - Aerosmith
I used to be fond of mentioning Mike Shipley as an example of a big name producer I didn't like that much. Until I heard this. The '00s have had a problem with productions going too big for the real world. A lot of hip-hop tracks sound awful on an iPod, I guess because the huge bass distorts all over going to m4p, and a lot of guitar pop is red-lined for fear of sounding puny in any shuffle context, but you want to turn it down, and when you do, it's grainy and dimensionless. "Jaded" is as intimidatingly huge as anything, and also just plain sounds like a million bucks. I don't know how he does it; simply a very good bag of tricks, I'll guess, and ears that I suspect have grown top-notch.

"Mississippi" - Bob Dylan
A lot of coats of unreality have been sanded and stripped off when we meet the Bob Dylan of Love and Theft and "Mississippi." No struggle, game, or "power of expression" is ever going to be so decisively resolved as to end struggling, but details of human relationships once small in the scheme of means to ends are now in sharp focus: "My ship's been split to splinters and it's sinking fast/But... my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free/I've got nothin' but affection for all those who've sailed with me."

"Still Fighting It" - Ben Folds
This power-ballad-redux threatens a middlebrow smartaleckiness with "You want a coke? Maybe some fries?" but ends up better than all that in a sympathetically wistful and amusing comparison of notes with the next generation. "You're so much like me/I'm sorry."

"California" - Rufus Wainwright
I get a "this is all so easy for me" vibe from Rufus Wainwright that makes me approach him as not quite one of us, and this oddly evidence-free dis of California (a state grown smug in its diversity and car ownership?) is a risk not to help, but I'm solidly won over. The delivery of "You're such a wonder that I think I'll stay in bed" lifts it perfectly from petulant to funny, and I have no idea why "my new grandma Bea Arthur" is funny, but it unquestionably somehow is.

"Captain EasyChord" - Stereolab
This is my favorite result from Stereolab, who are first-rate as a static principle but often system-alarm low in density of information per minute of music. This lurchy but captivating piano groove is one of the more subtle, novel, and evocative sheer pieces of music here. There's an unrelated second half of the song which is just fine, but not involved in what grabbed me.

"Working Girls" - Pernice Brothers
Everyone likes this song. It's a well above average poetic take on job market dissatisfaction, less because of the frankly dreary suicide references than idiosynchratic turns of phrase like "She summered every winter" and "I feel sullen/I feel sullen." Interesting vocal recording approach, that of Joe Pernice: compress the breathy frequencies to unity; but it works.

"Mine and Yours" - David Mead
Bill Forsyth at Minus Zero Records handed me this among things to buy on my 2001 visit, and I get a lot of converts. Nothing too quotable lyricwise save the very nice "I'm a mess to be made this evening," it's a tightly-wound precision watchspring of harmonies and cadences, staged within familiar conventions but with an exceptionally keen ear for musical payoff.

"One Morning" - Ken Stringfellow
This slightly Mersey-beat festival of vocal sevenths is one of the more ambitious pieces of songwriting to be consigned to an acoustic guitar arrangement. This first of the mature Ken solo albums (the one with the Edward-Scissorhands like picture) inaugurates the peculiar set of expectations one would never have guessed from the Posies, such as more than one full-on soul number.

"The Middle" - Jimmy Eat World
There's a Chinese puzzle quality to how the I Don't Know But I've Been Told simplicity of the chorus and the repeated "everything everythings" and "all right all rights" work out to something more joyous than the sum of the parts. The singing conveys a positive attitude more relentless than the world has yet seen; there is simply no stopping it. This young girl will take the time to work it all out, she will not care about people who won't let her be herself, and everything will be all right, any questions, thank you, I thought not.

"For the Stars" - Elvis Costello and Anne Sofie von Otter
For all the pedigree and firepower of this project, there's a winsome gawkiness to it. Anne Sofie von Otter's vocals are head-voicy, she doesn't sound emotionally engaged, and she's unusually pitch-inaccurate for a modern release—all of which are virtual quality control givens. And of course Elvis Costello comes in, and is so Elvis Costello that your brain can focus on nothing else for many seconds, kind of like trying to watch Hamlet played by Yogi Bear. Of course, it's an out of control winner. The verse is classic, the chorus on "For the stars were so much/They were so much brighter then" magnificent and transporting. Would anyone but E.C. follow that with a line as ungainly as, "If I couldn't put a price on your head"? But you just smile. That is the question, Mr. Ranger, sir.

"Imitation Of Life" - R.E.M.
Pete Buck wasn't sure about this one: okay, it was a mere nice song, but music can be so much more. Seeing as this is the best R.E.M. song in a decade's diameter, I think the lesson for us all is: if you write one of the best songs of the year, just take the bullet. The chorus of "That's cinnamon, that's Hollywood, come on, come on" makes an indelible impression, and the way I've seen Stipe do it live is great: he sings some lower part that isn't quite as good the first few times, as if to say sorry, my voice just won't do the part that was on the record, then nails the regular high part the last few times. Kind of like James Brown throwing off the cape and running back to the mike.

"Girl Inform Me" - The Shins
Nina Gordon from Veruca Salt told me I had to get this; they're needless to say relatively big now. The Shins are good at getting at frames of mind that have a fragility to them, of the kind that might inspire the inspired line, "This is no umbrella to take into the wind."

"Timorous Me" - Ted Leo and the Pharmicitsts
Soon after it came out, someone (I want to say it was Doug Mayo-Wells) sent me this among some D.C. artists. I flipped. The vocal is a powerhouse of right-there energy (in what, one-bit resolution?), going through some vignettes recalling long-past acquaintances. The emotional vividness of the descriptions is startling. For a friend of such early childhood he "only [knows him] from photographs": "I only wonder what it is I even miss him for." For a female fan he wasn't quite bold enough to hit on: "But I watched her sing along with every word/In the prettiest voice that I never heard." I'm not always satisfied with Ted Leo's sense of musical climax, but when he gets it right it can be blazing (like at "the color of the sea from way up there" in the also great "Stove By a Whale"). I'll illustrate. I'm reviewing the 2001 CD with my wife Kristine today in the car; we're discussing stuff like volume disparity affecting playing order. We get to the number one song. She's got her hand on the volume, asking, "do the drums come in?" "Really late." Verse one over, no drums. "They're a tease," she says. Verse two comes and goes. "A girl doesn't like to be teased too much." The break has some toms and tambourine. She looks at me like, was that it? Third verse. "Now me and Jody spend a lot of our time..." Now I've got the left hand raised up like I'm holding a flag. Second line, "Just sitting in silence," I bring the hand down smack on two and four with the snare, and finally the whole kit comes in. I clarify: "Genius."