My Big, Gigantic Drum Kit

Albums listened to in full (this one got absurdly long, so page jump inserted; for artists covered, see tags):

• Tom Waits’s Bad As Me.  Over the last decade or so, I’ve detected a shift within Tom Waits fandom. When I first started listening to his music in the early 90s, there was this strong sense of new Tom Waits vs. old Tom Waits, with Swordfishtrombones (1983) the key pivot point. Neither Waits was the superior one, exactly, but the stylistic shift was substantial enough that there were plenty of fans of one who weren’t necessarily fans of the other. Twenty years later, new fans I meet (and by “new,” I definitely don’t mean “young”; I’ve met many relatively new fans who are older than me) seem to consider his career a relatively arc-less one, in which gruff voice+lyrics about oddballs=Tom Waits Music. I suppose that’s fair, as he’s been “new Tom Waits” a lot longer than he was “old Tom Waits,” and he’s since incorporated more elements of his 70s work back into his recordings. 
  
  “Old Tom” made a comeback in earnest on Mule Variations (no complaints about that—”Picture in a Frame!” “Take It With Me,” “House Where Nobody Lives!”). But, as if to emphasize the reincorporation of his old sound, a dichotomy arose in his work: “old Tom” was serious and sad, but when Tom wanted to be “new Tom,” his voice was now gruffer, the oddballs odder, the music increasingly percussive and over-the-top.  It got so close to caricature that when I  heard “Road to Peace” on the radio, I assumed it was a Waits parody.  Exaggerated “new Tom” and balladeer “old Tom” have been coexisting for long enough that I get why a new fan would decide that Waits has always been 1/2 barking, neo-bluesy cartoon character and 1/2 sensitive songwriter (a notion partially supported by Orphans, the triple-album monster that divided songs by approach and on which most of the good songs were b-sides and soundtrack tunes from years earlier).  Which leaves fans like me, who love the Swordfishtrombones to Mule Variations run for its middle ground of humor and humanity, in the position of justifying why that iteration of the “new Tom” works for us, but the later “old Tom”/”new Tom” hybrid “new Tom” doesn’t. Or how there are distinctions to make at all! After all, it’s still “gruff voice+oddballs,” right?
  
  This may seem like the setup for a negative take on Bad As Me, which, from title on down, has some of the signifiers of Waits in clanky, hollerin,’ faux-blues mode like on the fairly unbearable Real Gone, but what’s surprising is that Waits actually strikes a decent balance here for the first time in a while. “Chicago” is an urban chase transplanted from Rain Dogs’ “Midtown” and “Union Square,” and Frank turns out to have a few more wild years left in him in “New Year’s Eve” and “Pay Me.” Best of all is the bonus track “Tell Me,” on which Waits returns to the foolproof tremolo guitar+romantic ballad formula he used on classics like “Downtown Train” and “Hold On.”  The Pazz & Jop ranking for Bad As Me (5!) likely has more to do with lingering affection for the man and his legacy than the initial impact or staying power of this moderately good album, but, hey, it’s a moderately good Tom Waits album, which, after the last decade, is surprisingly noteworthy. 

• Tommy Stinson’s One Man Mutiny.  It’s largely faddishness that dictates the fate of the no-frills rock’n’roll songwriter. There’s only so much room for artists specializing in Stonesy riffs, lyrics that value the well-chosen phrase over the long-form story, and attitude over innovation, and, once we’ve heard what you can do, it’s time for us to move on to the next guitar-slingin’ ne’er-do-well (as Stinson’s one-time bandmate once put it, ” … the things you hold dearly / Are scoffed at and yearly / Judged once and then left aside”). 
  
  As the second most famous Replacement (and, perhaps, second most famous current G’n’R member, for whatever that’s worth), Stinson was largely overlooked from his very first post-Mats recordings, while his former frontman shared the critical and commercial spotlight with the first generation of Mats acolytes. We’re now a generation or two removed, which means Stinson is arguably now more icon than actual influence to some of the artists in the rowdy, but sensitive, rocker mode (and remember, the guy was only 13 when he started; he’s just a few years older than Craig Finn, a first gen Mats fan who just took some time to catch on). 
  
  Anyway, this is a long way around to saying that, while One Man Mutiny is far from Stinson’s best work, it’s still pretty good (and his best post-Mats work—namely, Bash & Pop’s Friday Night is Killing Me and Perfect’s Once, Twice, Three Times a Maybe—is actually well beyond pretty good).  Considering how lukewarm-to-negative I’ve felt about some new, thoroughly hyped artists sticking to well-established templates this year (Real Estate, Kurt Vile, Cass McCombs, Middle Brother), it’s too bad Stinson can’t seem to get a fair shake as a vet who mastered some of those same modes long ago.

• tUnE-yArDs’ w h o k i l l.  I pretty much loved w h o k i l l at first listen on its musical merits alone, but I have to admit to missing some of Merrill Garbus’s lyrical preoccupations until Chuck Klosterman’s thorough misreading of the album on Grantland prompted responses across Tumblr and elsewhere (and, yes, there’s actually an “elsewhere”). Most notably, while I picked up on her preoccupation with physicality and bodies, it wasn’t until Eric Harvey called w h o k i l l  “one of the most resolutely sexual albums of the last few years” that I connected that physicality so strongly to sex.  Which is ridiculous, because of course it’s tied to sex. Adult physicality nearly always is, if it’s not about disease or death, right? (And PJ Harvey and St. Vincent have those two covered, as Harvey pointed out here.) 
  
  What’s even more impressive is how Garbus packs that sexual imagery with complications. On the most overtly carnal (and best) of these songs, “Powa,” she doubles down on the body image issues from her last album’s best song “FIYA” (“What if my own skin makes my skin crawl?”) by loading what’s ostensibly a song about fucking with brutal self-examination.  “FIYA” ends on a note of consolation: “I am not magic yet, but I am in bloom at the end of the world.” “Powa” is sneakier; one of the prettiest, least rhythmically showy songs on the album, it’s about losing one’s self in the physicality of sex, but the lines “My man likes me from behind / Tell the truth I never mind / Cause you bomb me with life’s humiliations everyday / You bomb me so many times I never find my way” betray the self-loathing and debasement existing outside of that moment. Connecting sex and self-loathing is hardly anomalous in pop music (see two albums down), but I can think of few other songs that locate the self-loathing externally and offer sex as momentary reprieve. Extra points for pulling it off with that least sexy of instruments, the ukelele. 

• Twilight Singers’ Dynamite Steps. Twilight Singers albums aren’t exactly “heard one, you’ve heard ‘em all,” but their respective abilities to thrill always seem more tied to what else I’m listening to at the time of release than intrinsic musical merits. I like Dynamite Steps, but I wonder if it’s only contextual that I don’t really like Dynamite Steps like I do Powder Burns and She Loves You or even love Dynamite Steps like I do the last three Afghan Whigs albums (okay, that might be pushing it; I’ve never liked any Twilight Singers album that much). But it’s pretty good.

• The Weeknd’s House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence. As you can probably imagine, this was a pretty heavy three-fer. The most entertaining moment happened about midway through when “Rescue You,” one of Abel Tesfaye’s pre-Weeknd tracks started playing, and all of that debauchery and regret gave way to promises to “save you from his flames.” I’d listened to House of Balloons and Thursday a bit, but Echoes of Silence was new to me; had he actually included a heroic counterpoint to all of that dark stuff?  No, as it turned out, but this little slip of the playlist brought out the unreality of The Weeknd’s world. Not that I’d been taking all of this nihilistic sex’n’drugs stuff all that seriously to begin with.  PBR&B?  More like R&BDSM, amirite? 
  
  Speaking of which, in the Authenticity Wars of 2011, there’s been a lot of talk about narrative conceits, character-building, all of that Lana Del Rey/Tyler, the Creator stuff.  And Tesfaye, of course, can be evaluated on this level, as well, unless you really believe that he’s some sort of neo-de Sadean crossed with Hunter S. Thompson crossed with date rape personified.  But as critics rushed to proclaim authenticity an outdated notion when it came to recreating yourself and cultivating new personas, they stuck to their guns when it came to leaning on authenticity as a function of style.  Is the Weeknd R&B?  Is the Weeknd indie?  Is the Weeknd some combination thereof?  How can anyone who knows anything about R&B prefer the Weeknd to some artist that someone who knows anything about R&B would name here (a difficulty for me, since the other arguably R&B artists I enjoyed this year—Frank Ocean, Terius Nash, Drake, Beyonce, etc.—are considered, well, only arguably R&B in some quarters)?  These questions all seem pretty grounded in the very same outdated notions of authenticity—that is, there’s no urtext when it comes to contemporary R&B or any musical genre (even hardcore, Fucked Up will have you know).  I’ll admit the Weeknd songs I like most are probably those that the sound the least like any R&B I’ve heard before: “The Birds Pt. 1,” with that relentless, ominous march over a synth line borrowed from Kate Bush; “House of Balloons” with that relentless synth over a vocal line borrowed from Siouxsie and the Banshees; “Life of the Party” with that relentless guitar over some lyrics borrowed from Thieves Like Us … well, you get the idea.  But I’m not convinced that hybridity is an authenticity-killer.  This music has  unmistakeable similarities to what’s commonly called R&B; dismissals on grounds of inauthenticity seem like distaste cloaked in genre-policing to me.
  
  What about dismissals on the grounds of skeeviness?  Well, those I’ll buy.  To be honest, I’d remembered these albums as being more extreme than they actually are, which presents a slightly larger problem.  If they were a little more ‘horror movie,’ it’d be easier to pass them off as viscerally entertaining fictions. But Tesfaye renders his narrator(s) as alternately horrifying and pitiful, predatory and self-loathing, which makes it difficult to appreciate these albums strictly as experiments in transgression.  If Tesfaye would drop the sad sack business, this louche, debased construct of his would probably be easier to stomach as cautionary tale or even Grand Guignol shock.  Although, Christ, it’s been three albums’ worth of this guy in one year.  Probably time to move on.  Maybe a sensitive Humane Society employee who saves puppies and has nice, healthy relationships with women?

Individual songs by:

• Toro Y Moi
• Tove Styrke
• TV on the Radio
• Twin Sister
• Tyler, the Creator featuring Hodgy Beats
• Unknown Mortal Orchestra (2)
• The Vaselines
• Veronica Falls (2)
• The Veronicas
• Vetiver
• Vistoso Bosses
• Washed Out
• White Laces