Wednesday Wadio

In a word, wow. I was so, so ready for a new Radiohead album. It’s been at least 3 years since the last one which I could never really get into. Upon first listen of In Rainbows at 2 o’clock this morning, however, I knew I was in the room with something very special. If you haven’t already heard, read this article about how the band has made the album available only as a download, and that they ask fans to pay them what they think it is worth. You can enter in $20, $10 – I know one cheeky bastard who entered $0 – and then you’re taken to the download page. Nobody knew they were even recording a new album, let alone releasing it in such an innovative and original way until just a few days ago. Amazing story.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbXrdOwDlGc[/youtube]

“Nude” was the first song I heard off the new album a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve included a live version of incredible quality in this post. I use the word “spooky” quite a bit in my Wadio posts, and this one is going to be no exception. Maybe I just dig spooky music. It begins with a spooky baseline and rimshot combination as Thom Yorke’s eerie, distant vocals creep in and a guitar starts to pick away in time. It grabbed me from the first 10 seconds I heard it and has so many subtle and sophisticated chord changes that it’s not going to get old anytime soon. By the time the second guitar comes in and starts playing chords the volume has increased significantly and I’ll be goddamned if you’re not seriously digging it. Have a look and a listen:

After a day of spins, we can say this is the record we wanted them to make – or at least, it’s the middle-of-the-record we wanted them to make; everything from “Nude” through “Reckoner” is warm, organic, and instant classic. Less paranoid – or focused on paranoia – than recent past. – StereoGum

Friend and PITF denizen, Taz, sent me an excited email from Munich after I wrote to him last night to find out what he thought. Always one for a creative and thoughtful response, he did not disappoint:

“Loving ‘In Rainbows’… basically a masterpiece… simply not one bum note… 3 years in the making… and the perfection shows… to be honest on first listen to the splintery fractured guitar-fueled plaintive Yorke vocal hysteria at the end of ‘Bodysnatchers’ I knew I was in for something special… Hail to the Download Thieves! A magnificent addition to the rock pantheon.”

If you’d like the MP3 for the song, Nude, if my remote woodland satellite internet connection ever stabilizes I am going to offer it here for download for a few days as I want to get the word out and spread a little love. And because the album version gets me so excited that I want to stuff a large, slimy piece of salted pork down the front of my camoflage shorts. Hey, whatever floats your boat, right? Soak it all in and if you want the entire record you can pay for it – whatever amount you want – and then download it from the In Rainbows website. Music website StereoGum has a very active thread where fans are sounding off in large about what they think of the album. Yes, I was so ready for this.

69 Love Songs

“It makes you blind, it does you in
It makes you think you’re pretty tough
It makes you prone to crime and sin
It makes you say things off the cuff”

The Magnetic Fields are definitely in my top 10 list of all time favorite bands, and considering my fanatical obsession with music – that’s no small feat. I’m sure Stephen Merritt is reading this right now and crossing himself in relief. It’s hard to encapsulate the Fields, or any of Merritt’s many incarnations for that matter, in one song – so I decided not to try. Love is Like a Bottle of Gin is a favorite of mine, but due to it’s slow tempo and short length a record company executive would definitely never choose it as the first track to play the uninitiated. Luckily I don’t think the Magnetic Fields have ever made a proper music video, so I was happy to settle for this fan-made clip that sets the gloomy and brilliant tune to scenes from the Britcom Black Books. I’m not entirely sure why, but beggars…

“It’s very small and made of glass
and grossly over-advertised
It turns a genius into an ass
and makes a fool think he is wise”

The man behind the Fields and several other bands (the Gothic Archies, the 6ths, etc.) is an absolute musical genius. In addition to his prolific output under multiple band names, he has also scored all of the massively popular Lemony Snicket audio books and movies, released the astounding 69 Love Songs (from which this song is taken) a 3 CD collection of tunes he and the Fields-of-the-moment wrote and recorded in one studio session back in 1999 and is as revered in the deep alternative scene as you can get. I’ll provide some links towards the end of the post where you can branch out and learn more for yourselves, and I sincerely hope you do. You may remember the incredibly catchy song from the Southern Comfort ads of a few years ago. The old folks dance around to it, assumably while getting cocked on the only adult libation which still makes me gag due to one particular night of early-teens indiscretion. Strange Powers is as good a place to start as any and I might have featured it had it been up on YouTube.

“It could make you regret your birth
or turn cartwheels in your best suit
It costs a lot more than it’s worth
and yet there is no substitute”

LILABOG, however, is an incredible song in its own right. From the unique time signature, to the distorted and spooky guitar sound to the lyrics’ uncanny ability to draw parallels between how love can make you act just as stupid as downing too much strong, cheap liquor. I think learning these words should be part of gym class or sex ed in high school as it covers a lot of important bases simultaneously. Namely – stay away from both entities until you are much, much more cynical and jaded.

69 Love Songs

“…this excellent little 7″ is just about the best thing Frank Black has released in the last decade.” www.boomkat.com

All the Threshold Apprehension reviews I read this morning, while mulling what I myself would throw down, said that the song is a “return to form” and very reminiscent of Frank’s work with the Pixies. Yes, he recorded his latest album under the moniker Black Francis as opposed to Frank Black. And yes, he utilizes his amazing screaming capabilities at a level not seen since Bailey’s Walk. Is this Charles Thompson’s version of a mid-life crisis, perhaps? He is 41 this year. Is dusting off the old nom de plume and wailing like a banshee akin to pulling into the driveway in a 2007 Mustang when the wife thinks you’ve been saving for a mini-van?

Threshold Apprehension, although released as a single, doesn’t have a traditional video to accompany it. I’ve posted a crazy live version below, and you should also check out this fan-made accompaniment if you want to hear what the studio version sounds like. I’d recommend that so you can share my sheer joy 57 seconds into the song when the single strum becomes a double and the tune all of a sudden makes me want to punch my accelerator. The part where he describes drinking Grand Marnier, snortin’ speed and then “doing 185 on the new Ring Road” doesn’t help either.

If you combine 80’s-era Pixies, 2004-era Pixies and Frank’s solo touring between 1993 and the present I have seen the man in concert 14 times – and I’ve never seen him put down his guitar except to pick up another one. I’m not sure what got into him at the performance above earlier this year in Toulouse, but I likey. Recently I decided to make a Frank Black “best of” playlist for my iTunes and as it sprawled to over 30 songs (he has released no less than 13 solo albums since the Pixies’ demise in 1992 – two of them doubles) I realized how much joy this unique and prolific songwriter has brought to my stereos over the course of my life so far. Actually, take a prolific songwriter and feed them bathtub meth through an IV for half a day, hook them up to a solar power generator and then maybe you’ve got something better resembling Frank.

Bluefinger, not to be confused with a Daniel Craig-era James Bond villain (hat tip to FrankBlack.net) was inspired as a whole by an obscure Dutch artist with whom Charles apparently feels quite an affinity. It’s his latest thematic focus in a long line of space aliens, cowboys, science fiction writers and fellow musicians and I just have to say – whatever works. Well done yet again, Mr. Thompson. Now get back on the treadmill so you can continue trying to impress the babysitter next time you drive her home in the ‘Stang.

“It goes without saying that the only people who should be allowed to purchase Unkle Dysfunctional are those (like this writer) who own one copy of Pills n’ Thrills n’ Bellyaches for each room of their apartment.” – CokeMachineGlow.com

For the uninitiated, the Happy Mondays were one of the central bands of the late 80’s “Madchester” movement which also included Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets, James and the Charlatans. The focal point of the ‘scene’ was the legendary Haçienda club, the colored history of which is available in excruciating detail on any number of sites. To the initiated, if you were already aware that the first Happy Mondays album in 14 years was released earlier this summer, you may well be wondering how it is, how Sean sounds and what it’s all about? As a lifelong fan of the group, who even got to see them in 1990 as a 16-year-old in Boston, I’ve listened to the album a big bunch of times and am here to lay it on you. I have thought of this at long length and can sum up my review in one sentence:

It’s better than I expected, but tragic due to the large number of good ideas hastily thrown together and wasted.

I haven’t bothered to look up the producer, but with more time spent and a different set of fingers twiddling the knobs, the mostly mediocre material could have easily comprised a legendary comeback of biblical proportions. And Sean Ryder was set for it – his cameo on the Gorillaz “Dare” last year made for the best song on an album of very good songs. His cohort Bez recently came back into the limelight after winning Celebrity Big Brother 5 and 50 thousand pounds along with it. Before I talk about the album’s highlight, let me first expound upon the tragedies – I owe it to my 16-year-old self.

Songs with great musical production have god-awful, chanty lyrics. I am thinking particularly of “Deviant” and “Cuntry Disco”. The music in Deviant is funky and wonderful, and I rap along to the chorus with delight every single time I hear it. But the verses, Sean mindlessly rhyming one word throughout – “She grabs it and stabs it and flabs it and…” make me feel like I’m playing some kind of drinking game. And losing. Deviants could have been an amazing song if someone had put the brakes on and said “Right… we’re on the verge here, but the versus sound worse than a Yoko Ono solo album being played backwards through a bullhorn.” Why, oh why, didn’t somebody say that! Give me a day alone with the masters and an unlicensed copy of Pro Tools and I’ll save the world.

The best tune on the record is without a doubt “Jellybean”, and it’s beyond cruel that it’s also the first. I remember driving around Burlington, singing the uber-catchy chorus after I’d heard it just once and wondering if I wasn’t about to experience something amazing – a solid Mondays album nearly 15 years after their last one sank an entire record label. But it “were all downhill from ‘ere” as they’d say in Manchester.

There’s no video as far as I could locate, but I found a decent clip of them performing it in Middlesbrough, England on May 26th of this year. I suppose even just one above average song on an album as unlikely as Unkle Dysfunctional is a pretty good average – so I’m featuring it on Wadio today and that makes me happy. A year ago I’d have bet a lot of money against it. Ecstasy money.