Album Reviews - not fitting for Halloween edition

PORTASTATIC - I HOPE YOUR HEART IS NOT BRITTLE  - 8.5/10
This is the first of two Mac McCaughan involving records that I will be reviewing today, and it is certainly the more unexpected of the two.  Where Superchunk is frequently brash and energetic, Mac McCaughan's more or less solo debut with the Portastatic moniker is very nearly anything but, with only "Tree Killer" really expressive of the sort of fast paced kineticism typical of McCaughan's regular gig.  The change involved in I Hope Your Heart is not Brittle is not unwelcome, however.  In place of the rowdy teen punk wannabe sound that Superchunk seems to eternally encompass, even as the band members surpass 40 years of age, this Portastatic debut is remarkably laid back.  Rather than surging, it meanders slowly through melody after melody, with a disinterestedness that is every bit as endearing as Superchunk's anxiously zooming nerves.  Where Superchunk tries to be '80's punk but is too nice to do it all the way, Portastatic, at least on this record, seems to want to show some post-rock atmosphere but is again to sunny to pull it off.  I Hope Your Heart is not Brittle has the same fireside warmth of Rachel's or sedate Mogwai and infuses it with a sort of lo-fi folkiness.  What emerges is a sort of Americana that is not entirely surprising.  Just as Superchunk practically embodies American indie rock with its fusion of pointedly American punk and hardcore with American good kid attitude (the sort of attitude Suede or Blur could never pull off), Portastatic brings out a sort of American backcountry relaxation and laziness (as opposed to the frenetic pace I associate with the American cityscape) and infuses it with the earnest sensitivity that it deserves but rarely gets in a way that's neither proud nor showy.  This is not really a folk-record, though.  It's far too self-aware and creative for that.  It is, however, perhaps the ideal autumn record.  Highlights include "Polaroid", "Creeping Around", and "Naked Pilseners".

SUPERCHUNK - ON THE MOUTH - 8/10
It's clear from the first note that this album is nothing like I Hope Your Heart is not Brittle, if one were to compare the two - a prospect which immediately seems silly.  On the Mouth is pumped full of angst, energy, and determination.  Opener "Precision Auto" declares as much, as McCaughan sings, "do not pass me just to slow down: I have precision auto."  I'm not sure what the words mean, but the sense in which he sings it makes it clear that Superchunk has somewhere to go, they work hard to get there in this album. In many ways, On the Mouth is the paragon of Superchunk albums.  Where No Pocky for Kitty was harsh and moody, On the Mouth takes this energy and infuses it with a happy-go-lucky angst that has become Superchunk's identity.  For this reason, it would probably make a great intro to the band for someone who wanted to sum it up in 45 minutes.  In general, it's also pretty solid and very consistent - maybe too consistent.  To be sure, I prefer the layout of this album to that of Here's Where the Strings Come In, which started out brilliantly but fell off by the end, but there is less variety here than in No Pocky for Kitty, Come Pick Me Up, or the more recent Majesty Shredding - all undeniably spectacular albums.  Taken individually, all of the songs on On the Mouth are pretty spectacular, and though Superchunk does well to slow things down every so often here, to great effect on "Mower" and "Swallow That", it in general starts to feel like they're sometimes just going through the motions at times, though, I should clarify, it's not as if this album lacks passion.  Altogether, it's a solid album, and a very Superchunk album.  Perhaps because of this, it doesn't feel as new or different as Come Pick Me Up does.  Highlights include "For Tension", "Package Thief", and "Swallow That".

SWERVEDRIVER - RAISE - 8.5/10
Swervedriver has always seemed like the best of all possible bands to me.  They're a little bit shoegaze, a little bit grunge; a little bit indie, a little bit rock 'n' roll (I'm sorry: I hate that term and I promise I meant to use it ironically).  Raise is just a very, very good album, but one that's hard to describe because it's got a bit of everything in it.  I'm not really sure why it gets the shoegaze categorization - there's a good deal of texture here, at least as much as you would find in Ride, for instance, but this isn't sweeping, elegant music.  It's loud and punchy.  It's even good driving music, because this band is called Swervedriver and there are songs called "Song of Mustang Ford", "Pile Up", and "Deep Seat" on it.  It doesn't come off as crass, though.  This somehow manages to be a cool kid's album with some awareness, and despite "Pile Up" sounding like arcade driving game music, the rest of it is heavy in a way that imparts a pensive atmosphere.  Rather than being loud and noisy like a souped up Camry, Raise is sleek and thought provoking like an Alfa Romeo.  This aspect of introspection is really necessary here, and Swervedriver do a great job of it.  With a bit more consistency on this, their debut, Swervedriver would have hit it out of the park on the first try, but as it stands they would have to wait for their next two albums to do that.  Highlights include "Rave Down", "Sandblasted", and "Deep Seat".

SUEDE - COMING UP - 9/10
Suede's first two albums are consensus classics, yet Coming Up isn't.  To be honest, having bought and listened to it, I'm not quite sure why.  It's undoubtedly poppier, but it's poppy in a novel and entertaining way.  Album opener "Trash" isn't just a hit single - it's a hit single with a message about superficiality and all those other Brett Anderson lyrical obsessions and a bittersweet guitar riff that soars above the rest of the music.  What does this tell us?  First of all, Richard Oakes may not be Bernard Butler, but he's no slouch.  Of course the anecdote is that Brett thought his tape was a Butler demo, but he really does bring a great deal to the table.  The atmospheric's on Coming Up are certainly different than those of Suede's first two albums, but that doesn't mean they're bad.  Previously, Suede's sound was consumed in darkness, and Butler provided a veritable cornucopia of sounds to back up Anderson's high and angsty voice.  Here, the production tends toward the high end, giving it a "cellophane sound", as Anderson intones in "Trash", that evokes the superficiality of music as a whole.  Some have also poked fun at Anderson's self-derivitive lexicon.  For instance, he uses the probably meaningless phrase "heavy metal stutter" in "Starcrazy" as well as Dog Man Star era B-side "Killing of a Flashboy".  I will agree that this does nothing for me, and I don't like the phrase in either song.  In the end, this challenge is meaningless, however.  Anderson is working toward a new, ultra-modern vocabulary that has been missing from poetic discourse.  He's not trying to talk about things in the accepted vocabulary of Romantic poetry and Realist novels, he's trying to invent a new lingo that properly explains contemporary society, and if he has to use eminently modern words with no real long tested connotations, there's no fault in that.  In fact, it adds a valuable lyrical imagery to an album whose sound aesthetic already tends toward the ultramodern.  Coming Up may be a bright and sugary album, in contrast to its dark and depraved predecessors, but its sparkly exterior is a but a showy facade that works because it's self-aware.  Closer "Saturday Night" and the melancholic "Starcrazy" remind us that the happy go lucky attitude that seems to pervade "Trash", "Beautiful Ones", and "Lazy" are by no means meant to be taken seriously, and the almost Blur-esque sarcasm of "Picnic by the Motorway", with an emptily echoing chorus reminiscent of such Blur tunes as "Yuko and Hiro" and "The Universal", backs this up.  Coming Up, like every Suede album, has its inconsistencies.  "Filmstar" and "She" fall well short of the rest of the album, just as "Introducing the Band" and "The Power" lacked the subtlety of the remainder of Dog Man Star and "Moving" and "Animal Lover" lacked the depth of the rest of Suede.  All in all, however, Coming Up is every bit as good anything else Suede ever did, fusing Anderson's dark wit with an ironic bubblegum texture that confuses our expectations and thus makes for an interesting shift from the previously established Suede aesthetic.  It seems they weren't able to continue their high quality output afterward, but this first release without Bernard Butler should have served to secure Brett Anderson's status as one of the great musicians of recent times.  Highlights include "Trash", "Beautiful Ones", and "Starcrazy".

In Defense of Oasis

Quite the arduous task, isn't it?  But despite being frequently brilliant, though at times merely good, Oasis has never been a critic's darling.  Even their successes are swept under the rug: check out this brief comment on "Live Forever" if you don't believe me [http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lists/7852-the-top-200-tracks-of-the-1990s-50-21/].  It's all their own fault, really, and it wasn't just their in your face attitude - Blur never gets half the posthumous dissing even though Damon Albarn has every bit of the attitude that the brothers Gallagher have, but if you start acting like The Beatles, suddenly people think you think you are The Beatles.  The fact that Oasis never were about reinventing the wheel brings about challenges of plagiarism that are in some cases accurate.  That Oasis seemed to want to be their idols just makes them more susceptible - in 1993 Liam was wearing Ian Brown's hair, in 2003 he was wearing John Lennon's glasses.  That post-Be Here Now Oasis was a mere shadow of their former selves makes them fruit ripe for the picking, when the transition between pop stardom and indie quaintness is seen as the ultimate sin, even as bonafide indie stardom becomes more and more real, and Bon Iver and Arcade Fire take home Grammies.

Oasis don't come off to me as just a bunch of wannabe rock star copycats, though.  Sure, they didn't make much of an effort to differentiate themselves from their influences, but the music they recorded was so much more than The Beatles, 1990 Edition.  The Beatles never had the power or the passion that reveals itself in Oasis, and for that reason, we can at the very least thank Oasis for bringing The Beatles to the sensitive chap.  In this sense, Oasis is the ultimate fusion of popular music.  The older styles can't be missed, and I won't try to pretend they aren't there, but Oasis takes them to infinitely more dizzying heights.  "Don't Look Back In Anger" may take some of the piano bit from "Imagine", but it then does what Lennon never could, which was write a boy meets girl song with some reality and some emotion in it.  This realism is the real core of Oasis' music.  The images they present are intense and powerful, yet they're grounded in reality, and Liam's vocals and Noel's guitar have the power and passion to match these forces.

Definitely Maybe, being Oasis' first album, is able to avoid a great deal of criticism.  Where it's heavy, this gravity is palpable - "Live Forever" and  "Slide Away" display a passion that many would deny Oasis ever had.  These songs not only have a desperate energy that can't be missed by the listener, but treat subjects very real to our own life: the unachievability of lasting life and love.  The difference on Definitely Maybe, when it comes to the critic's perspective, is that when Oasis doesn't try to be weighty, they don't end up being straight pop.  In a sense, perhaps the critics are too generous to Oasis' debut.  "Rock 'n' Roll Star", "Supersonic", and "Shakermaker" cover subjects of no greater intellectual and emotional vitality than the banal moneymaking songs of Bon Jovi or Aerosmith.  On Definitely Maybe, however, this comes off as a sort of innocence that I don't think is at all absent.  "Rock 'n' Roll Star" may be the sole song about wanting to be a rock star that is actually genuine.  The realism of Oasis' early music is that they're true working class Mancunians, and therein lay much of their charm for the Britpop fanatics of the '90's.  When Liam says it, he really means it.  This is what makes "Digsy's Dinner" and "Married with Children" such timeless works of art.  The former is an endlessly charming song about the lightest of romantic interactions and the permanence they can achieve, and the earnestness in Liam's voice is an instant winner.  The latter is almost the opposite: an unashamed yet not gloating break-up litany, yet it manages to be this without either complaining or ranting.  It's character assassination is so gentle as to be non existent, and this makes it seem so real.  Definitely Maybe is an album of blue collar urbanites showing their softer side, and maybe not quite knowing how to do it, making it an absolutely likable album.

What's the Story (Morning Glory)? is a step toward the Oasis everybody knows, and many don't love.  There is indeed a sense of self-importance here that was missing in their debut, but this is not a hindrance.  Instead, it enables the true flowering of Oasis' musical genius.  How so?  This sense of self-importance does have the drawback of making any flaws not only apparent, but painful.  On Definitely Maybe, the band could get away with a pointless or pedestrian lyric, or an inaccurate observation, because it had an aura of carefree innocence, like it was just a practice round that shouldn't be judged too seriously, and any "Live Forever" type triumphs become a sort of spontaneous burst of musical genius, the sort of thing Blake, Byron, or Pushkin would be proud of.  On What's the Story, this safety net is gone, and the stakes are much higher, because this is a serious album, not playful stuff.  Nonetheless, they hit it out of the park more often than not.  It starts slowly, "Hello" sputtering at times, and "Roll with It" alternating bland pop with touching sincerity, but it soon hits its stride.  Though not the biggest "Wonderwall" fan, I must admit the popularity it has gained for being the sort of serious song of which I speak, and the album only goes up from there.  "Don't Look Back in Anger" takes the predictable, and flips it, taking optimistic and wide-eyed imagery and crafting from it a song about failure as well as success, a song about people being people, warts and all, just trying to get ahead.  Listen to it again: it's more real than it would seem.  "Hey Now!" goes past this mark, mixing not joviality into it.  It is very much a patchwork of dark and moody symbols, whose refrain brings us to think about our connections to the past as individuals.  After a brief instrumental that is like a 40 second slice of the '90's as I remember it, "Some Might Say" ensues, with its intense guitar riff turning into a message of secular faith and hope, reminding us that our daily lives may indeed have a purpose.  "Cast No Shadow", perhaps the deepest song of the album, is a comment on the essence of the songwriter, a modern poet taking up the labor of that the imagists left undone.  "She's Electric" is a bit of neo-Digsy's nostalgia that is to some extent repeated in "Champagne Supernova" with the added question, "how many special people change?", while the title track is the most intense song on the album, raising more questions than it answers.  What's the Story (Morning Glory)? is a serious work of songwriting, and perhaps it was too serious.  For Be Here Now and it's successors, Oasis adopted the soul of What's the Story (Morning Glory)? and took it farther than it could perhaps ever go.  It's philosophical soul was lost for the Oasis creed of optimism in the face of ever darkening times, while its fragile seriousness was preserved even when the material didn't match this atmosphere.  Thus the decline of Oasis, which for many became a caricature of rock stardom, the very essence of taking one's self too seriously.  Oasis' first two albums, however, show that this seriousness was very justified.