Sharon Van Etten - Tramp

Ever since I saw Sharon Van Etten on the AV Club's AV Undercover performing the Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy," I've been enamored. Van Etten's slow, wistful, and sad, but charming delivery on that cover evoked full and pure passion, the kind that one can only recreate with experience in lost love and confusion. With Tramp, Van Etten assembles an album that reaches new heights in frankness, earnestness, and beauty. All these characteristics are most elemental on "Give Out" where Van Etten sings the lines: "You're the reason why I'll move to the city/ Or why I'll need to leave." It's a case of pure honesty, and a case where, as a listener, you have that "I should have thought of that!" moment. The peppier, but folksy "Serpents" discusses change, in people, and how we're never simply standing still. But, the delicate "Kevin's" is the album's deeply heartfelt love letter. It's a sultry piece of desire and heartbreak and loss of control. Tramp is infused with folk, country, and rock elements, but it lives and dies by Van Etten's memorable, iconic vocals. That, and those aforementioned high quality lyrics.

The album occasionally feels like a dream. As a testament to its layering and Van Etten's calm-aggression, on a song like "In Line" she gets Feist-y, well, and feisty too, but primarily, her poetic softness sounds strongly and not at all parroting like the solid tracks from The Reminder. There are experiments here, but most of them exist because of ambiance rather than strange instrumentation or complex arrangements. The slow-building, partially chorale, "All I Can" is just such an example. Van Etten smoothly transitions genre, from a whispering bit of church pastoral to a rumbling, tumbling slow-rock with subtle Beirut-esque horns. The beautifully harmonized "We Are Fine," seems almost to protest too much lyrically, as the male and female vocals refrain "I'm alright/ I'm alright" over and over. That's what we do sometimes, when it comes to love, when it comes to preservation. Because the power of words lies not only in our ability to utter them, but also in our ability to use them to convince ourselves, to advocate to our own subconscious. The highlight of the last half of the album is the run from "Magic Chords" to "I'm Wrong," and it all ends with elegant beauty in "Joke or a Lie," a song about becoming comfortable with having tried.

Listen to Tramp on Spotify here. You'll love it. Van Etten is excellent.

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Lana Del Rey - Born To Die

"Video Games" is still a very good. Nothing can, or will, tarnish that fact. Born To Die, Lana Del Rey's debut, isn't terrible. Hell, it's actually sort of enjoyable. The title track "Born To Die," if you ignore the hipster-death-punk video, is a good enough. Even the candy-coated, vocally confusing "Off To The Races" isn't all that bad. The problem with Lana Del Rey doesn't really lie in her music. If this album had come out blind, her reviews would have been far more favorable. The music is interesting, if sometimes dispassionate and bland, and the lyrics, though sometimes wanky, are good too. No, the problem here isn't with the music. The problem is with the internet. And Del Rey's use of it to gain stardom. See, had "Video Games," "Blue Jeans" and "Diet Mountain Dew" not blown up as they did last summer, this album wouldn't have drawn the bile and ire it is now. Del Rey is prey to the old problem. She has over-promised and under-delivered, instead of adhering to the axiom's opposite advice. That's not her fault entirely. It's the fault of the machine in place here online that turned her into a sensation, when really, a tempered opinion would have been more appropriate. It is, as many have pointed out, the online world did this to Black Kids, another band who was loved for an EP and hated for an LP.

Is Born To Die good? No. It's reasonably decent. On the backs of the tracks we know, Del Rey is enjoyable. And complaints about her inability to sing, or at least demonstrate some Adele-esque range, are foolish. She's not a good singer. That's not the point. She's an image. She's the broken, childish, oversexed, lost and confused image of a generation of women and girls whose sexualities and personalities have become interchangeable. Del Rey isn't a good example. She's the weak, man-needing character that decades of liberation have tried to dissuade. If she's a parody, hooray. But I don't think she is. Still, it's not about her voice. It's not about the music. Her failure, at this point, hinges entirely on the promise we perceived and the disappointment we feel from overly raised expectations. It's a problem as old as time. There's nothing about Del Rey that is less concocted than Britney Spears, Katy Perry, or Rhianna. She's formulaic. She's normal. She's just not as talented. And her team didn't do as good a job for her as those of the respective pop starlets I just listed. And that's okay. Born To Die isn't great. And if not for all the press, it wouldn't have had to be.

Sure, the lyrics are alternately profound and cheesy. Sure, Del Rey's voice populates many ranges but none particularly well. But, claims that the music is inherently forgettable are unfair. The first half of the album is actually pretty memorable and solid. It's the second half that's the problem. And that's because, boom, fame, followed by a frantic rush to compile enough songs to fill and LP. It's not a good excuse, but pop artists have been forced to throw albums together for generations. Look at Beatles For Sale, and the Rolling Stones' Black and Blue. Not everything is a hit. I'm not saying Del Rey is on par with the greats either, but the glasses through which she was viewed switched from rose-colored to shit-tinted in 15 minutes. And in all fairness, songs like "National Anthem" are hackneyed and slack. Del Rey isn't great. She's hit-or-miss. Listen to Born To Die on Spotify. It's free there. And it's worth the experience. At least once.

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Mikey Joseph O'Connor - The Love is Letting Go of Fear EP

Back again and on a prolific streak of songwriting, friend of the blog and It's A Thing! co-host Mikey Joseph O'Connor brings us a softer, gentler, happier, and even more honest set of song with The Love is Letting Go of Fear EP. What's different from The Day I Stopped All This? I mean, what could Mikey have possibly done to top the earnest, honest, tragic last love letter of last Autumn's EP? You probably think I'm building this up too much. You're probably right. At least in a sense. The answer to the question, the what's different question, is everything. On Love is Letting Go, O'Connor isn't merely working on letting go of fear, as the title might suggest. He's not even in the throws of a clear philosophical conundrum. See that wayside over there? Yeah, that one? Well, that's where all of Mikey's anger and frustration and disappointment seems to have fallen. The anguish inherent to The Day I Stopped All This is no more, and this new EP is very different kind of love letter.

This love letter is about amends, first. "Dear Aaron and Sarah... Sorry" is a brilliantly open-hearted, fully culpable and responsible song. It's a song that apologizes with its title, and clarifies that apology with its lyrics, its music and its frankness. It's a song about abuses. (And there's some continuing distinct Replacements vibe in there.) And having learned to transcend them. This is also a love letter about falling in love. "Earthquake Weather" is that song. O'Connor croons over a jaunty guitar, piano and bass composition about finding true love and remarking on the insignificant moments, the little ones, that become so huge when romance is attached. Love is restorative here. In a very prevent-the-city-from-shaking-apart way. Here's a video of it. LIVE!


Mikey Joseph O'Connor - Earthquake Weather from Mikey Joseph O'Connor on Vimeo.

It's a love letter crying, "It's us against the WORLD and all the evils therein." The darker "The Lions Den" is a song about breaking apart, but not because of the internal, human conflicts that come with love cast asunder by its parts. Instead, it's a song about an outside force, something bigger and darker and more indomitable, that seems ready to swallow both the song's protagonist and his subject of rescue. It's also one of the most brilliantly composed songs O'Connor has ever created. And it's a love letter about pure joy and thanks. "The One Good Thing" closes the set with an incredibly open and vulnerable character study. It opens with the stellar, inspiring lines, "My dreams go bad because I still can't trust myself/ And my dreams come back because of my mental health." It's a fucking incredible track too, with a solid piano riff, a ripping guitar solo, and a gorgeous refrain "You're given to me like a song that's on the radio."

In short, and in long, The Love is Letting Go of Fear EP is spectacular. Listen to it. You can check it out exclusively through Mikey's ReverbNation page.

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Cloud Nothings - Attack On Memory

Bombastic, high-speed, energized, and strained (in a good way) the Cloud Nothings' newest album Attack On Memory captures the potency of punk with a more refined, jam aesthetic that feels at times, nearly Hendrix-ian. Gone though, are the lo-fi tendencies that marked 2011's Cloud Nothings. Where that album felt like it could have been a basement recording, generated by a talented up-and-comer, Attack feels like a full embrace of production and a battle cry onto the rock scene. The sound here is full, lush, and ear-fucking in its power. But what remains are the grainy vocals and lost-but-not-directionless lyrics of Dylan Baldi. The changes between the debut and this album are for the most part good ones. Lo-Fi as an aesthetic can only do so much, and it became a band-wagon way of recording in recent years that sometimes gives an impression of artistic spareness, even if the material didn't really warrant it. But, it served Baldi well on those first two releases. On Attack it is somewhat of a mixed bag. The physical, punishing nature of the music, so well mixed, is beautiful, but sometimes feels like a late-'90s power-pop group, especially on "Stay Useless."

The opening track "No Future/No Past" is excellent, but sets a precedent that's different from much of the album. It's a slow, loping, heartfelt track that seems like a funeral march or a stay in Purgatory. Baldi cranks up the power on "Wasted Days" a nearly nine-minute track that breaks down into a brutal, overpowering jam in the final minutes. "Separation" is phenomenal, falling in at track 5. It's a speeding, somewhat Jimmy Eat World-esque song loaded with crashing and splashing cymbals, and a brilliant hook. It also has no lyrics, but doesn't need them because it feels like a sort of impromptu big of rocking out. That gives way to "No Sentiment" a screaming, straining flex of muscle. The somewhat brighter and lighter "Our Plans" follows, again with a perfect hook and a lot of charm. It feels sadness, but sounds like promise, and that's a powerful thing for any song. And the closer, "Cut You" has a similar mellowness that's almost more pleasing. It's a track about worry and the future and what things will be, and our respect for patience and our respect for ourselves. A gorgeous track to close the album, and it's all about fear in regards to love. Listen to Attack On Memory below, or check it out on Spotify here.

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SOPA, PIPA and the Internet

It's all black today. Dozens upon dozens of websites are shut down to protest SOPA and PIPA, two wanna-bills that could fuck the internet, users of the internet and this country for a long time in the name of whiny conglomerates. You can still go to Wikipedia today and look them up, but that's it. Luckily, lots of congresspersons are backing out of their support for the bill already, but here's the thing, and here's what should really be said, aloud, in fiery language.

1. If the United States is a free-ish market economy, then companies like the record labels, NewsCrap (sorry, Corp) and so many others need to LEARN HOW TO COMPETE AGAIN. Just because your model is broken, because there are tools now that allow certain aspects of your materials (and I'm a writer, and I write a comic, and it sucks having material used without payment) to be misused, then change the way you distribute. If a film company realizes that off-shore sites steal their movies, well, that will ALWAYS happen, but they can take action to release the film online for a reasonable price in a safe, consistent, well-designed online venue. If I have the option to go to a shitty, pop-up laden site to watch new movie for free, or the option to pay $2 to see it on my browser, I'd pay the money. Not everyone wants subscriptions, not everyone likes iTunes, so please guys, take some initiative and become competitive in a new way instead of crying that the world changed and left your dinosaur ass with mouthful of rotten fern. Look at Louis CK.

2. Whether you believe it or not, various lobbying industries, people who link, even to sometimes questionable content, are providing you free press and free marketing. If I talk about an album in this space, and I offer people tracks that were uploaded somewhere, there's a better chance that they'll buy the album. The same goes for links on message boards, comment streams and all of it. Assuming that one pirate makes a slippery slope where no one will ever buy your shit is stupid. I mean, Adele's two albums topped the sales charts this year... and you know those are free tons of places.

3. If you want people to respect your industries, engage them instead of litigating against them. You can't change the minds of the population by telling them they're wrong and punishing them. Guess what, that just makes people think you're an even bigger dick. People don't like being told what to do. We all have a conscience. We will pay for things if you treat us like people instead of wallets.

4. Just make better shit. Part of the reason that people steal movies and music and other media is because there's a pretty heavy consumer risk involved. If I go to some terrible new release film like Anonymous, I'm out $15, plus 2 hours of my life, (which if I'm working is another $40). That makes me not want to take chances on movies because they more often than not SUCK. Music is similar. And even while I listen to a lot, I wouldn't if I had to drop $15 for every risk. You guys realize that a lot of people don't have money right? Maybe if you designed your system to entice buyers by giving them the option to buy into something, we'd trust you more. And hey, if we pay for it once, and our computer breaks or we lose it for some reason, how about you guys take the initiative to give us what we paid for again.

5. More than that, the internet isn't some magical territory that requires magical new laws. It's an extension of the world that already exists. People were lending each other records and CDs and VHS a long time ago. People were recording movies from TV and pirating that way too. It's unfair, yes, but you can't just brutalize your way out of the changes in the world. So, really, let's get smarter, not more litigious. If you don't want people to experience your art, don't put it out there. If you don't want them to steal it, don't put it out there. If you want people to see it, then expect it to be stolen, but count on the fact that if you do great work it will motivate more people to pay a little instead.

That's all I have to say about that. This rant is meant only to create new positive relationships.

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Thoughts on Lana Del Rey's SNL Performance

Yes, Lana Del Rey was far less than good last night on Saturday Night Live. She warbled, often seeming to forget how, yes HOW to sing her songs. And while some places have said she was pitchy or off-key, it was more that Elizabeth Grant seemed unable to sing the songs the way she had on the YouTube videos for both "Blue Jeans" and "Video Games." Her stiff stage presence has come under fire, but I don't care about that nearly as much. SNL has a small stage despite its vast reach, so Del Rey's stillness is fine. The problem really was the singing. And it wasn't that she was even that bad, you see, she just wasn't anywhere near the hype that had built over the entire preceding Summer of 2011. Is that okay? Yes. If we each thought about it, we'd probably be just as nervous and stage-frightened to have been thrust suddenly into the live spotlight after months of harmless web-based fame. But, here's the thing that IS troubling. I think I, yes, me, could sing her songs more to the exact tune of the videos than she did. And that's all she had to do. She didn't need to take chances, or try vocal histrionics, or bust out Rhianna-style dance moves. All Del Rey had to do last night was sing the songs the way they are on YouTube.

She did not. She lost the melody multiple times. She garbled words. She seemed almost drugged to the point of disaffection. So, it brings to mind the greater Lana Del Rey issue: Is she any good... really? Her inability to perform either song well, or even just warm up by the end and rock on, is troubling because she is an internet phenom artist. Is it possible that she can't sing these songs? She did it once. Or. She succeeded in creating the pieces once. That's my main question. Can she do this or is she strictly a studio, carefully produced artist? The bigger issue, though, is what she really is and what she really wants to be. Grant (again her real name) released an album in 2010 called Lana Del Ray (with the "a" instead of the "e") that was bank-rolled by her father, and after being available for a short time, completely disappeared. By all accounts it was a fairly non-exciting pop album, but even I can't be sure. Then, one year later, "Video Games," a new image, a new style, a new persona (potentially) and lots of pseudo-indie-web-cred.

Who is Lana Del Rey really? Is she this new iteration, or is she a more traditional pop artist? (Videos from her new album would point to latter.) I'm starting to think that she's the musical equivalent of a Barbie Doll. She's poseable, but not very. You can dress her up in lots of pretty costumes and you can put her in lots of interesting settings wherein she, too, becomes interesting. But, I don't mean to rag on her either. She has put out at least 2 great songs. And whether she's the Second Coming, or just a flash in the pan, "Video Games" made my best songs list for last year. Still, if she's an entirely fabricated creation, who would let her go out and do so little, so seemingly doped up and unsure? I mean, the least she could've done is tear in half a picture of the pope. Especially if you're nervous... MAKE IT A JOKE. At least then, people can say, well, she wasn't too good, but she sure can cover her ass with more than a jig. <= Because Ashlee Simpson is once more briefly relevant!

We will see how Lana Del Rey bounces back. My guess is that she'll be fine, but her album will meet with mixed reviews here in the States. And with time, she'll hone her live performing skills, and she'll decide how to sing her songs, and she'll own this. Because, here's the thing, if she can really sing, if she really loves music, then she's earned this. And if not, then she may just be a repackaged attempt to sell some records and make some rich asshole richer. It's a tough call, but considering that most of SNL is as inconsistent, it seems unfair, at least, to lambast her right now. And if you haven't seen them, take a look at the videos below.

 

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The Shins - "Simple Song"

Wowsers we've got to welcome the Shins back into our arms warmly! A couple days ago, we were graced with the release of a brand new track, one that is as creative, delightful and fucking incredible as anything the band has ever done before. It's called "Simple Song," but it's far from that. This new sound, one that's more generally rocking, with hints of warbling madness and goofiness, retains the same old love we remember from Chutes Too Narrow and Oh, Inverted World! with catchy-as-hell riffs, and true and earnest lyrics. Plus, it's a song that flies forward despite being one of the longer songs in the band's ever-growing repertoire. Bottom line, "Simple Song" is perfect and teases you with every lyric and note. Now, who else (other than me) can't wait for their new album? Oh, I see hands... so many raised hands.

Another point of accolade: The site for the song, linked here, uses such a wonderful reel-to-reel player graphic in place of the traditional timeline for the track time tracking. (Confused yet?) It's a sweet and simple design point that really speaks to the Shins' fans and to a certain '70s nostalgia that is evident within the track. Dig on this. And happy Friday the 13th... Muwahahaha.

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