I mean, what would John've thought about the craziness goin' on around us (you can bet yer sweet bippy he wouldn't've kept quiet about it)?  What we're lookin' at today is pretty much the same as what we had back in 1968, when he became the icon of the peace movement -- and, chances are, he'd be front-row-center still as a major voice for the cause!

He'd probably be involved heavily in artistic expression and still writing some magnificent songs (though, some think, he'd probably be semi-retired from performing).

What are your thoughts on it?  If John had lived ... if there'd been no murder ... what do you think he'd be saying or doing today? Leave me a comment or, if you want, just e-mail me with your thoughts. We'll discuss the results on this site as I get 'em ...

THE BEACH BOY RETURNS!

Former (?? There is talk of a reunion with Mike, Al and Bruce!) Beach Boy Brian Wilson has a fantastic new CD out called That Lucky Old Sun, and BBoy fans from around the globe are raving about the new music!

ITROSHO (In-the-Relic's-oh-so-humble-opinion), two tracks on the CD especially stand out: Morning Beat carries a lot of the great "Beach Boys" sound while Can't Wait Too Long is rich in the harmonies that made Brian and the band famous.
You can hear samples from the CD at the Amazon Music Sampler.

MORE THAN JUST LOUIE LOUIE

Y'know, sometimes a band can come on so strong with one hit that we forget they had any others. For example, if I said The Kingsmen, you'd probably think the classic, Louie Louie ... and that's all! (By the way: Didja know there's no comma between the two "Louies"? Writer Richard Berry said so! And that, after the guitar solo, there was a "false start" in the last verse? Unfortunately, some radio stations thought it was cursing, but it was just the words "HEY, Jamaica" cut short!)

But the ultimate garage band also churned out a few other songs as well -- like Jolly Green Giant (which did help the food company a bit after it came out!), Searchin' for Love, Death of An Angel (which was one of the first tunes to handle the subject in a respectable way) and Little Latin Lupe Lu (a major hit for the Righteous Brothers). You can download their version by clicking on littlelatin12.mp3.

Now ... since I've gotta mound of work to do before the 5 AM shutoff-for-shuteye, I'll bring this session to a close. But I'll be back tomorrow with more ... so, until then, remember:
Keep yer eyes on the skies, yer feet on the ground, yer heart with the music ...
and I'll see ya on the flip side.

“When was it decided that listening to music had to be easy?” John Maclean talks about The Aliens difficult second album.

The Aliens new album ‘Luna’ is a difficult beast. The follow up to their 2007 debut, ‘Astronomy for Dogs’, ‘Luna’ is a sprawling behemoth of a record, it’s songs span out in front of you creating rolling, expansive sonic panoramas. A third of the records tracks flow out well past the 6 minute mark, two making double figures, it is safe to say that this is not a primped and preened MTV pop record, where running over the radio sanctioned 3 minute timeline is tantamount to creative blasphemy. It is coincidentally, and possibly for exactly that reason, a mesmeric, psych tinged, honeycomb folk-pop masterpiece. It’s the album that The Aliens should have been able to make first time around but were perhaps not allowed to, where ‘Astronomy for Dogs’ felt muted, like a curtailed version of what could have been, ‘Luna’ runs free. Recorded in the remote Scottish home studio of chief Alien, Beta Band co-founder and Lone Pigeon man Gordon Anderson, the relaxed recording schedule the band adopted allowed them to explore each track with the focus and willful experimentation upon which they thrive.

“It (Luna) was actually a lot easier to make than ‘Astronomy...’ because with ‘Astronomy...’ we decided to do it in a largish studio in london so the pressure was on and we actually only had a week or two to actually record. So we didn’t get that much time to experiment and do what we usually do with tracks,” recalls John looking back to the first time The Aliens committed their singular space folk vision to tape. “ Whereas with ‘Luna’ we recorded it in Gordons cottage up in Scotland and spent 6 months on it. So much more time to experiment with tracks and scrap tracks and add things to tracks, and I suppose as well because Gordon’s slightly fragile at times so when it comes to big cities like London I think he found it really difficult getting to the studio and using the tube. Just moving through all the people and the hassle of a hot summer in london. Whereas with ‘Luna’ he was comfortable in his own fishing village and in his own cottage.” The fragility that John is alluding to reflects the well documented history of mental illness attached to Anderson, who spent the best part of 10 years institutionalised. It is something that has been with him since the Beta Band and inevitably informs both the process and the music of The Aliens, evoking further comparisons with other musical explorers who have flirted with the darker sides of the human psyche such as Brian Wilson and Syd Barrett, who both ploughed into similar psychedelic layered pop.  ‘Luna’ is an incredibly expansive record of glorious 60s tinged folk, songs like ‘Billy Jack’ and ‘Bobby’s Song’ stretching out forever creating giant sonic wormholes that suck the listener deep inside, yet it hangs around a uniquely intimate core, heard, as one might imagine, almost by accident, like a garden hopping youth pressing their ear to a window of Brian Wilson’s studio during the creation of ‘Smile’. It feels like you’re a voyeur to a moment of aural conception, the tinkerings of flawed genius.

The spectre of ill health raised itself again throughout the recording process and again after the album had been finished causing the band to cancel a string of scheduled summer dates. “We haven’t really got our teeth into playing a lot of the new stuff live yet because Gordon got a bit unwell again after the album was finished.” Notes John, “If we had serious funds to make a proper live show then we were talking about actually playing the album as it appears on the record because we think it might suit that...starting at the beginning and going straight through, and getting everyone involved who appeared on the record...but that’s just not possible so we’ve got to scale a lot of it back, I mean there’s so much going on on some of the record that we’ve really got to look at how to produce that live.” It would take a small army to reproduce the album note for note live as the list of vintage instruments and antique drum machines goes on and on, the bands love of excessive experimental sonics highlighted in the song title ‘Theramin’. “We’re all fans of rare instruments. I’m especially a fan of vintage electronic equipment. We use a lot of vintage drum machines and stuff, there’s one called a sonivox which was a really early vocoder used on the radio in the 1940s, but it’s getting harder and harder to afford them. With Ebay everyones a bit more savvy about what they have now. We’re fans of like the old BBC sound workshops where they make crazy psychedelic sounds out of computers they built themselves like. It’s an exciting area of sound.” Though, given the nature of the band and the uncertainties surrounding Anderson every time he steps onto a stage can lead to an audience not knowing what to expect from  The Aliens live the band do have plans to keep the shows as high energy as possible. “ I think there’s a lot more upbeat songs on this record which will translate well live, on the first record there were some songs we didn’t play live because we felt they were too downbeat. We always want the live experience to be a bit more like a club...we want people to move and dance and not just stare at us as we self indulgently moan,” says John. “I think for this tour it will end up being a mix of ‘Luna’ and ‘Astronomy’, The great thing about getting gordon onstage is that you never know what to expect, we never really have a set list so whatever he’s in the mood to play we’ll play.”

There seems scant danger of any self indulgent moaning taking over the sheer triumphant splendor of the songs from ‘Luna’. They pitch and glide, washing various hues over you, this is the sound of joy projected through a prism of stereotyped Scottish dour, songs like ‘Blue Mantle’ and ‘Boats’ find you just wanting to wallow in their sonics as they fall over you like giant aural snowdrifts. So what has been inspiring these mini-opera’s? A lot of salmon and cinema it would seem. Certainly tales of the various recording sessions that stretch back to 2007 have the band debating the finer points of salmon preparation with at least equal veracity to the benefits of diving chord changes. “After you’ve spent all day playing music and sitting in front of pro tools you really don’t want to listen to other peoples music, so we’re always watching films and there’s a lot of ‘Luna’ that’s more influenced by films than music or anything like that. The last film I saw at the cinema was Hell Boy 2 so we love the art house films and the mainstream movies as well.” The Aliens are definitely art house but with ‘Luna’ they may well have the sleeper hit of the year.

But then, last year he was commissioned to create a new suite for the re-opening of the Royal Festival Hall (the venue where he'd performed his first UK shows and where he'd premiered Smile. For the core of this, he took eight songs he'd written with his touring keyboard player, Scott Bennett, co-wrote one new song with Van Dyke Parks, and got Parks to write narratives linking sequences. With Darian Sahanaja and Paul Mertens reprising their

I've written about the result before - both straight after seeing the first live performance of the resulting work, and after obtaining copies of the demos - but today I finally got a copy of the actual CD, so I can hear the completed work the way it was meant to be heard.

The first thing I want to say is that in my previous writing about That Lucky Old Sun I have rather minimised Scott Bennett's importance - when I wrote those pieces, we didn't have any songwriting credits for the new material, so I had no way of knowing who wrote what, and given that Bennett was the only unknown quality while Wilson and Parks are two of my all-time favourite songwriters, it seemed reasonable to credit Wilson and Parks with much of the better material. However, it turns out that Bennett wrote or co-wrote some of the best lyrics on the album, and he definitely should get a lot of the credit. In fact, there's a lot of wordplay in these songs - some of which I'd wrongly credited to Parks, and more that I didn't even notice until seeing the lyrics in print - that makes me consider Bennett the second-best lyricist ever to work with Wilson (just after Parks, and ahead of Tony Asher and Mike Love). I'm a lot more interested in hearing Bennett's solo work after this.

Having said that, this is a Brian Wilson album - and it's a Brian Wilson album that fits in with his other work with Van Dyke Parks - you really can listen to Orange Crate Art, Smile and That Lucky Old Sun as three parts of a trilogy.

It's a mature work - and it looks back a lot at Wilson's earlier work - but it's the work of someone who's got a new lease of life. It's the most exciting music I can imagine hearing from someone Wilson's age (the last time I said that, several people pointed to Scott Walker, but while his latest music is by far the best stuff I've heard from him, it doesn't have that visceral thrill. This is an old man making music with the spirit of someone a third of his age). In fact, according to the electronic press kit which comes on the bonus DVD with the CD, it seems that the more down-tempo elements of the album were added at quite a late stage because people listening to the music felt it was 'too poppy'. Personally, I think the ballads are for the most part the weakest things on the album.

The references to Wilson's older work that do turn up tend to be friendly nods to the past, too, rather than just 'remember this older song? Wasn't that great?' It's a subtle distinction, but a real one.

In discussing the album track by track, I'm going to ignore Van Dyke Parks' narratives. This doesn't mean they're unimportant - on the contrary, they hold the album together and turn what would otherwise have been a merely good record into a great one- but they're not very distinct things in themselves and not very susceptible to review.

One more thing to note before I start in on the track-by-track analysis - many people say, with every new Brian Wilson release "Wow! Brian is really back this time, not like all the other times I said he was back. His voice sounds better than in decades!", and this has become like the boy who cried wolf - there's only so many times anyone will buy a mediocre album that's been hyped up by obsessive fans before they assume the artist in question has permanently lost it.

For the record, I have never before said that a new Brian Wilson album of new material was anything more than 'pretty good'. Other than Orange Crate Art and Smile, both of which are special cases, Brian Wilson hasn't released a new album that even approached greatness in my lifetime, much as I've been hoping otherwise for the last thirteen years.

So when I rave about this album, it really is because it is *that good*. And when I say that Wilson's voice is the best it's been in decades (partly because for once he's singing within his current range rather than trying to hit notes he stopped being able to reach in his late twenties, but also because he's actually engaged with the material) I mean it (he's still not a great singer in any conventional sense, but his voice reminds me of Leonard Cohen or someone now, getting a lot of expression from a limited instrument).

The album starts with the title track, That Lucky Old Sun, an abridged version of the old standard, reharmonised by Wilson and with a gorgeous orchestral arrangement by Paul Mertens which brings out the song's similarities to Ol' Man River. It's funny, but this is a song I'd never really noticed before Brian Wilson brought it to my attention, even though I own versions by Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Louis Armstrong and probably half a dozen other singers. It's a great song but not one I'd really picked up on.

Morning Beat, the first song proper, also brings in many of the themes that will recur throughout the album. I was slightly worried when this started at the premiere, because it starts out like Brian on autopilot - the opening "maumamayama Glory Hallelujah" is a backing vocal line he's been talking about using since the mid-1970s and the riff is clearly yet another variant on Shortenin' Bread, a riff that's obsessed him even longer than that.

But a minute or so into the song it becomes clear how different this album's going to be from much of the sub-par material that's characterised Brian's output since the late 70s, because this song is filled with ideas. Normally, Wilson's solo songs have had one single melodic idea, not especially well developed, but on this album there are several different melodies in each song - and usually each one of the ideas is good enough to build an entire song around itself. In this case, the song starts out as a Shortenin' Bread based rocker, but then a new section ("I'm listening to the morning beat") comes in, at the same tempo but going off in all sorts of odd directions, before returning to the normal verse.

But then the song takes a complete left turn, going from guitar rocker to clip-clop percussion and orchestra, in a middle eight that references Kurt Weill's September Song, before going back into the verse again, and then ending with an abbreviated version of the "I'm listening" section, this time done as staccato punches rather than played straight through. And all this in just two minutes and fifty four seconds.

On previous albums, Wilson has sounded like every song has been a struggle against writer's block - every idea must be stretched as far as it can go in case he never gets another one. This album, though, has him throwing out ideas with the profligacy of a twenty-year-old, confident that however many he sticks in there, there are plenty more where that came from. (It's odd that this isn't usually the pattern with older artists - one would have thought that as the pressure of time became more obvious, it would seem more necessary to get as much done as possible).

The lyrics, meanwhile, are serviceable by themselves, but do, seemingly casually, manage to introduce pretty much every recurring concept for the rest of the album. Other than the sun and the idea of rolling round heaven (both brought up in the title track), this introduces California and specifically LA, the night/day cycle, stars of both the celestial and celebrity kind, sleeping and waking, the sea, rhythm, beats, diamonds, distance, smog and clear air - all of which will recur over and again.

After a narrative section, we go into Good Kind Of Love, the only song Wilson wrote entirely by himself on the album, and God it's beautiful. Lyrically (and very slightly melodically) it's reminiscent of Friends Of Mine by the Zombies. Mertens' orchestration is the star here - he's an unsung hero of Wilson's recent work, writing parts that are nothing like anything that appears on any Beach Boys record, sounding more like mid-twentieth century European concert music, but make perfect sense with Wilson's chords. Unfortunately, one of my favourite parts of the orchestration - a nice little woodwind countermelody - appears to have been removed between the live performances and the eventual recording (either that or it's been buried in the mix - I'm not listening on great speakers).

But this is one of those Brian Wilson songs like Soulful Old Man Sunshine or This Whole World that's almost impossible to describe in terms of normal song structure, having a melody that twists and turns continually so there's a smooth flow through the track but you suddenly realise after a few seconds that it sounds nothing like it did just a moment before, going through very slow free-tempo sections, upbeat Spector/Motown-esque sleighbell choruses and more, with skittering strings and mooing horns. It's just wonderful, and I defy anyone to listen to it without a big grin on their face.

Forever My Surfer Girl is one of the weaker songs on the album - it actually sounds like it could have come off a later Beach Boys album, sounding like someone trying to sound like Brian Wilson by reproducing his tics - all Be My Baby drums and descending bass - along with referencing his past a little too heavily. It's also one of the few places on the album that Wilson tries to hit notes he really can't hit any more, sounding frankly bad on the second line of the choruses.

But even here there's several different musical ideas - the main verse/chorus, a very nice middle eight, and a short repeated piano part that I *know* comes from something else I can't place (in my head it's part of a song on Orange Crate Art, but I can't place it precisely even after listening to the entire album to see if I could hear that part). It's not a great song, but it's decent and pleasant.

(I'd probably also feel slightly more positive about the song were it not for the fact that I wrote an essay 'proving' that Wilson's music is all about goddess-worship before the premiere of the suite, but it wasn't published until afterward - and in the meantime Wilson was on stage singing "a goddess became my song", rendering my point moot).

After this comes my personal favourite song of the album - Live Let Live. Originally written for the film An Arctic Tale, it's been reworked here with new lyrics by Van Dyke Parks, dealing with the smallness of humanity and with a 'save the whales' message that actually works, rather than being heavy-handed moralising. A gorgeous little waltz, I don't know what it is about this song that makes me love it so much, but all I can say is that when I hear the line "I got a notion we come from the ocean and God almighty had his hands on the water" my heart literally stops on the 'God almighty' (amusing, since the song, like so much of this album, talks about fast heartbeats).

The music to the chorus line ("Live let live not die") is the same as that for Sail On Sailor ("Sail on sail on Sailor"), but even given the rather downbeat nature of the lyrics it communicates a hope and love of life where the previous song was more about struggling on pointlessly.

On any other Brian Wilson album post-Love You, this song would have overshadowed the rest of the album to such a ludicrous extent that the rest of the album would have been rendered unlistenable. Here it's 'only' the best song on the album.

Mexican Girl, which follows, has been described rather harshly by David Quantick as 'the most generic song ever written about Mexico or a girl'. There's a grain of truth in that, but it's also interesting just because this kind of music is very far from anything Wilson's done before, all mariachi horns and Spanish guitar. There's also a couple of fun lines in there - "you cast a net on the day we met" and "hey bonita muchacha, let me know that I gotcha". It's far from the best thing on the album, but it's fun and funny and catchy.

California Role is, I am assured, a pun on a type of sushi (tying up with the 'perfect for fish' lines in Live Let Live) as well as the 'rolling around heaven' that keeps coming up throughout the album. The lyrics have quite a cynical bite to them :

Every girl's the next Marilyn
Every guy, Errol Flynn
Sometimes you've got to edit your dreams
And find a spotlight behind the scenes
Here in California, man I gotta warn ya,
Find a California role

But there's also a sympathy in there - "You broke your hand punching the clock so you could heal your heart" and "If you miss your shot it doesn't mean you won't reach your goal". And the uptempo cheeriness of the music takes much of the sting out of the lyrics (as does the filter on Scott Bennett's voice when he sings the lead on the first two verses before Brian takes over - it lends a distance to the lyrics). This is another standout track - so far, the album has alternated the truly excellent with the merely pretty good.

However, the next song, Oxygen To The Brain is another of the better songs on the album. The opening 'Open up, open up, open your eyes' melody is one of Brian's classic little nursery rhyme melodies, like the tag of Wind Chimes. It then alternates between slower, short verses about how bad Brian's life used to be and long, fast choruses urging the listener to make the most of life and get 'oxygen to the brain'. The lyric sounds like it's mostly Brian's work - he's written many songs with the same theme - but the line 'skip the vices versus get to the refrain' with its multiple puns and its commentary on the structure of the song itself is far too clever for someone as non-verbal as Wilson, and must be the work of Bennett (it's possibly my favourite single line in the entire album, but I love puns probably a little too much).

Ending with a reprise of the 'open your eyes' start, the song then goes into Can't Wait Too Long a short note-for-note remake of a snippet of a longer Beach Boys track (recorded in 1967 but unreleased until 1990). This works well enough on the CD, but worked better when performed live - at this point various bits of footage of Brian and his two brothers (Carl and Dennis, the guitarist and drummer respectively of the Beach Boys, both of whom died young) were projected overhead while the band sang the only lyrics in this snippet - "Been too long" - and I'm sure that pretty much everyone there was in tears as I was.

After this comes Midnight's Another Day. When this song was first released on Wilson's website, before the first performance, I wasn't at all impressed, primarily because the scansion was all wrong, but even without that it just didn't really appeal.
I now see that I was completely wrong. While the scansion's still out (I suspect because Bennett fell so in love with one of his puns - "When there's no morning without 'u'" - that he let it go in even though it didn't fit the rest of the verses), I can forgive that for the way the bridge builds up from just piano and organ on the line "all those voices, all those memories" to what sounds like every single instrument in the world on "all these people make me feel so alone". It sends shivers down my spine.
I must have had tin ears when I first heard this. In context, and with the orchestration, it's beautiful. It's far from the best thing on the album, but it might be the most emotionally resonant.

On the other hand, the appeal of Going Home still mostly eludes me. For some reason even the few negative reviews of this album have picked on this as the standout track - people have spoken about this track as Brian's best in decades. While it's a fun track - it references back to Morning Beat with its Shortenin' Bread riff, and it also includes the 'rock, roll' backing vocals Brian's been trying to find a place for for thirty years (he used them in things like his unreleased version of Proud Mary), and best of all it has harmonica by the great session player Tommy Morgan - it's *just* a fun track, a leftover from Brian's sessions with Andy Paley from the mid-90s, given new lyrics. Even so, it's hard not to smile when the instruments drop out and the band sing, almost a capella:

At twenty-five I turned out the light
Cause I couldn't handle the glare in my tired eyes
But now I'm back drawing shades of kind blue skies

It's a fun little song, and I'm glad it's there, and it's *great* live, but it's not the best thing on the album.

Unfortunately, the closer, Southern California, is the weakest thing by far on the album. Which doesn't mean it's bad - it's pleasant enough - but for an album whose other songs vary between 'very good' and 'masterpiece', ending on 'not bad' is a bit of a disappointment. To make matters worse, in the original live performances and demos, the song ended with a nice little fragment of vocal melody that came out of nowhere. Here that little fragment has been expanded into an entire new section of the song, and loses a lot of its appeal. The song ends up sounding scarily like the work of Bruce Johnston (Brian's colleague in the Beach Boys, who has written the occasional nice song like Disney Girls (1957) but who also wrote I Write The Songs). The last "maumamayama Glory Hallelujah" is majestic though, and a perfect ending to the album. (It's not the actual ending - there's a tiny fragment stuck on at the end of the band singing 'working in the sun all day' - but it's the real ending).

This is an astonishing, beautiful album that is much better than the sum of its parts. It's amazing that at sixty-five Brian Wilson is finally starting to realise the potential he showed when he was twenty-three. I can only imagine what he'll do next...

1966

2005

I was not in the least surprised when my sister looked at me very seriously and asked, “Sister. Do The Beach Boys bring babies?”

Narrowing my eyes, I said, “Have you been listening to my records again?”

Pet Sounds had been purchased at a pretty masochistic point in my life; I remember it well. Sickeningly saccharine and deeply mournful; it was an album of nauseous dichotomies that I employed privately to dispel the melancholy of being a lonely child. When I finally developed a spine, it subsequently spent about four years collecting dust in a box. I succumbed to the irresistible pretension of Belle & Sebastian and Sonic Youth, so that I allowed The Beach Boys to become The Box Boys. And thus, I certainly hadn’t expected a six-year-old to ask me if they brought babies into the world.

For all of five seconds, I considered delivering a diatribe on the merits of privacy and leave-my-shit-alone.

However, I was reminded of something Atticus Finch told Uncle Jack about explaining things to children: “Jack! When a child asks you something, answer him for goodness’ sake. But don’t make a production of it.”

With great care, I smoothed down the front of my button-down shirt. I noticed that it needed a good session with the iron. Then I told her to sit beside me.

“No, the Beach Boys do not bring babies. They are quite wonderful when they harmonize though, aren’t they? As for babies, we get them from each other because we love each other, but I’ll tell you about that when you’re older.”

My sister considered me for a moment, her great big saucer eyes turning suddenly to the window of my bedroom. Then she nodded slowly with great understanding, a brilliant smile blooming over her Cherubim features:

“Yes, I see. But wouldn’t it be nice?”

I hated puns, but I suddenly loved my sister with all of my heart.

*

a/n: She really did ask me this, but the rest is fictional. And The Beach Boys can get monotonous, but Pet Sounds will change your life. Even if Brian Wilson did spend three years in bed...

Ok, parem com as tangerinas. Eu, que ainda molho minha cuequinha quando ouço as harmonias vocais de Brian Wilson, me sinto mais solitário dia após dia. Guess I just wasn't made for these times.

Mas vá lá, para alguém que foi educado musicalmente pela cartilha de Pet sounds (sou da geração que descobriu o clássico no lançamento em CD, então para mim sempre soou como o melhor álbum dos anos 90), Brian Wilson é o maior dos deuses falhos, o mais adorável entre os anti-heróis americanos. E aí não importa que, durante os shows, ele permaneça lá, estático, meio aéreo e apático diante de um teleprompter. A vida é dose, e Brian parece ter sobrevivido a ela.

Quando o beach boy finalmente concluiu Smile, em 2004, pouca gente acreditou no que ouviu. Pra dizer a verdade, eu ainda não acredito. Depois de quase ter sido mastigado e cuspido pela loucura, nosso salvador conseguiu o feito de criar uma obra-prima a partir de cacos de uma obra-prima. Ops. No mesmo ano, porém, lançou um disquinho medíocre que funcionou como um banho de realidade: Gettin' in over my head era o típico Brian Wilson solo, quase tão frustrante quanto o típico Paul McCartney solo.

That lucky old sun é, sim, um típico Brian Wilson solo. Mas, ao se deixar renovar pela fome criativa de Smile, o surfista blindado conseguiu finalmente dar forma a obsessões que nunca soaram tão antigas. É, de verdade, o melhor álbum de Wilson desde Surf's up (1971). O problema é que, produzido em 2008, o resultado parece fincado num passado muito distante.

O que significa o seguinte: quem não se emociona ridiculamente com as harmonias vocais de Brian Wilson e não sente nenhuma falta dos Beach Boys tratará o álbum com certo desprezo. Será inevitável. That lucky old sun parecerá até bastante óbvio: bronzeado artificialmente, excessivamente reverente a uma estética sessentista, mais uma declaração de amor à Califórnia, um resumo-da-ópera forjado com algumas décadas de atraso. O pior, para o fã, será reconhecer que o disco é também tudo isso.

Também. Quem conhece a trajetória de Wilson sabe que a egotrip é mais importante que isso - e não tem (quase) nada de oportunista. Para Wilson, That lucky old sun é quase um testamento. Em 17 faixas, há lembranças de praticamente toda a carreira dos Beach Boys - principalmente da fase pós-Smile, de álbuns descansados como Wild honey (1967) e Sunflower (1970). Até os momentos constrangedores (como Mexican girl, que parece uma daqueles odes femininas do Roberto Carlos traduzidas pro inglês) fazem sentido num ciclo de canções pontuado por delírios do antigo parceiro Van Dyke Parks.

Quem não é fã que pule logo da canoa - ou salte para a faixa 12, Oxygen to the brain. A partir daí, o passeio à beira da praia se transforma em um flashback não menos que comovente, com versos sobre páginas rasgadas, capítulos perdidos, surtos de melancolia, ídolos pop que tomam o caminho errado e saudades do tempo em que a maior das vontades de Wilson era poder formar um grupo vocal com os irmãos. "Todas essas pessoas me fazem sentir tão sozinho", confessa. Ah, se fosse fácil. Been too long, um corinho curto, é de cortar o coração em cinco pedaços.

É uma história triste, triste, triste, um filme de Wes Anderson. Mas você só vai perceber isso lá pela quinta audição de That lucky old sun. Até lá, este parecerá um dos álbuns mais brandos, mais inofensivos e amarelados do ano. Aos 66 anos, Brian Wilson ainda sonha sozinho, ainda habita um planeta de sabão, ainda celebra a inocência sem fim. Vai ver não sofria de um simples mal de juventude.

Oitavo álbum solo de Brian Wilson. 17 faixas, com produção de Brian Wilson. Capitol Records. ***

Brian Wilson - That Lucky Old Sun (Capitol Records)

The legendary Beach Boys' songwriter's creative renaissance continues with this beautiful, heartfelt and deeply personal song cycle. A strong candidate for album of the year, and Brian's most consistent work in decades. Unmissable.

www.brianwilson.com

www.thatluckyoldsun.net

If you're not old enough that The Beach Boys were part of your musical education, or you don't know what that "thing" is in the picture above*, feel free to skip this section.

Every six months or so -- provided I decide that it's worth the bother -- I get into a mood and start spinning some of the music from my past which only exists on vinyl records.   Usually, I'm in a really good mood after.   So one time a few years back, I asked Mrs. W. what it is about this music that produces a different response in me than I get, for example, in the middle of a worship service.   She replied using a word that had somehow previously escaped my working vocabulary set.   She said that those songs are 'evocative.'

Unless I'm misreading my dictionary, this is true because many of these songs have an association with a previous time in my life, where I was, what I was doing, that sort of thing.   But certainly many praise and worship songs can be equally 'evocative' of time spent in God's presence, not to mention where I was when I first heard those songs.

Instead, I think these songs do something for me because of unique features of rhythm, melody and harmony -- it's the whole sound that's evocative -- and when it comes to harmony, nothing does it for me like the layered, textured sound of The Beach Boys.   For that reason, I'm a huge fan of Brian Wilson's 2003 album Smile, which is why this week I headed straight to the music store to get his new album That Lucky Old Sun.

I'm not going to do a record review here; I just want to make some observations.   This is an album in a style about which we would normally say, "they don't make albums like that anymore."  But as Mrs. W. so succinctly observed, "Yes, but they do."  Or rather, Brian Wilson does.  Whatever was "in the water" when the Beach Boys recorded classics such as the Surf's Up album over a generation ago, Brian has tapped into it once more to create music that is entirely its own genre.  If you're a young musician reading this who somehow skipped the disclaimer in the first paragraph, don't ever think that all the melody lines have been crafted, all the rhythms have been exploited, all the chord progressions have been sequenced, or even that all the chords themselves have been played.

By the way, I have no idea what the lyrics are about.   I wasn't listening to them.  That will come later, on the third or fourth time through, or when I'm not driving and can read the lyric booklet.   My listening today was all about the sound, that distinctive southern California beach music that defines the 1960s in places like Malibu and Venice Beach; in the same way the distinctive Motown sound defines the 1960s in places like Detroit, Lansing, Flint or Dearborn, Michigan; or anywhere else that the music might have been playing above the noise of a General Motors assembly line.

(Is there something else at play here?  Could the driving Motor City rhythm of a song like "You Can't Hurry Love" have become the musical association connected to the excitement of Huntington Beach, CA?   And the beauty of "Good Vibrations" have been something we linked to African Americans struggling to make ends meet in the factories of east Michigan?   Is it association or something more intrinsic?)

If you've haven't, I'd say buy Smile before you consider That Lucky Old Sun. but I was in no way disappointed.  Instead, as a Christian -- this is a Christian blog after all -- I just wish there was Christian music that was 'evocative' in the same way; or at least captured the rhythm and energy of a good Motown song, or the beauty and complexity of a southern California beach sound.   Then again, I don't know that I see the latter working on Sunday morning at 11:00.   Well, maybe if we all wore sandals, shorts and shirts with flowers and palm trees.

*It's a 45-rpm record adaptor.  You see, records all had different sized holes...why are you laughing?  No, I'm serious...see, there were 7-inch records, they played at 45 RPM and there were 12-inch records that played at 33 1/3 RPM.   What?   No, I don't know what the 1/3rd was for.   Anyway the little records had the big holes, except in the U.K. and Europe.  Stop laughing.   No I'm serious... so you had to buy these little plastic things that would -- stop looking at me like that -- oh, never mind...

Written in collaboration with Van Dyke Parks and Scott Bennett, rock and pop legend Brian Wilson's new album, That Lucky Old Sun, is a paean to Southern California, done as a sort of mini-musical. Though it's got harmonies and rich orchestration augmenting Wilson's piano and the rock and pop music, listeners probably shouldn't be looking to hear a Smile 2 or a Beach Boys redux set of music. Though there are elements of both to be heard in That Lucky Old Sun, the album is nevertheless its own animal, pushing Wilson into fresh territory. It's occasionally weighted down a bit by some sappiness, but for the most part, this is a very strong record that gets better as it goes along, its affection for Southern California and its culture and peoples warm and genuine. Wilson, at 65, obviously doesn't the same voice he had in his Beach Boys heyday, but he uses the voice he does have to maximum effect. The several spoken word breaks that put the songs into a context are a bit disconcerting at first, but upon repeated listens, they work nicely to pull everything together. I have to admit that I may have enjoyed this album more than Smile, but then That Lucky Old Sun doesn't come with the same baggage and the same high expectations that Smile did. I didn't feel I had to like it, but rather I liked it because it was such a pleasant, often beautiful listening experience. It also ends with two of his best solo songs yet, "Midnight's Another Day," "Going Home" and "Southern California," which look back on the past and present with a mixture of trepidation, joy, melancholy and nostalgia, not to mention surprising frankness. I wonder if that, in time, people will look upon this work with more affection and respect than Smile. Time will tell, of course, for but now, I think it's essential listening.

http://www.myspace.com/officialbrianwilson

Theresa Andersson - Hummingbird, Go!
Apollo Sunshine - Shall Noise Upon
Joshua Bell - Vivaldi: The Four Seasons
Bones soundtrack
Sandra Boynton - Blue Moo: 17 Jukebox Hits from Way Back Never
Rodney Crowell - Sex & Gasoline
Lila Downs - Shake Away
Michael Feinstein - The Sinatra Project
Giant Sand - proVISIONS
Gutta - Heads Will Roll
Deitrick Haddon - Revealed
Hollywood Undead - Swan Songs
Terrence Howard - Shine Through It
Jefferson Starship - Jefferson's Tree of Liberty
Sonya Kitchell - This Storm
Donnie Klang - Just a Rolling Stone
Michael Lington - Heat
Amie Miriello - I Came Around
New Kids on the Block - The Block
The Residents - The Residents Present The Bunny Boy
The Smithereens - B-Sides the Beatles
Southside Johnny with LaBamba's Big Band - Grapefruit Moon: The Songs of Tom Waits
Chris Tomlin - Hello Love
Underoath - Lost in the Sound of Separation
UNKLE - End Titles...Stories for Film
Brian Wilson - That Lucky Old Sun
Young Jeezy - The Recession

That Lucky Old Sun, the new concept album from Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson, is going to be worshipped by his fans and possibly ignored by everyone else.  Wilson famously had a mental meltdown in the mid 1960s and he's been damaged merchandise ever since.  He's released solo albums that are either brilliant (SMiLE) or awful (Orange Crate Art), and That Lucky Old Sun leans toward the former while occasionally embracing the latter.

The album is set up much like SMiLE, as a song cycle; here the tunes are linked by some spoken-word pieces that reminded me a little of Mike Love's godawful pseudo-poetry on "California Saga."  The songs, for the most part, are terrific.  They have a longing, nostalgic quality, as Brian recalls the California that may or may not have existed before he changed everyone's concept of the place forever.  "Southern California," which closes out the album, begins with a little bit of autobiography: "I had this dream/Singing with my brothers/In harmony/Supporting each other."  When he hears those voices again, the old days come back to him.  "Forever My Surfer Girl" also tries to resurrect the old Beach Boys magic but, to me, the chorus sounds more like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.

Wilson's voice is far from the supple and breathtaking instrument that it was in the heyday of the Beach Boys and occasionally he sounds not only out of key but completely out of it.  However, in its second half the album is as good as one would hope: "Can't Wait Too Long" (an actual long-lost Beach Boys track, recalling "Surf's Up") and "Going Home" are pretty good and they really do bring back the old chills you used to get when the Beach Boys hit their mark.  It's good to have the big guy making new music, and That Lucky Old Sun is a fine tribute to the California sound that Brian Wilson and his brothers created a long time ago.

UPDATE: Copies of That Lucky Old Sun purchased at Best Buy contain three exclusive bonus tracks: two duets with Carole King, and "Just Like Me And You."

MP3: "That Lucky Old Sun"

MP3: "Just Like Me And You"

Listen to the entire album streamed by USA Today

Listen to the entire album at Spinner.com

Brian Wilson official website

O Rosh Hashana, ano novo judaico, começa na noite do dia 12 de Setembro. O primeiro dia do ano, que eles chamam de "cabeça do ano", carrega grande energia espiritual. É o momento de pesarmos todas as nossas ações e sabermos qual o nosso saldo para o ano que se apresenta. O Sol e a Lua estão em Virgem e Vênus está em oposição a Netuno. Previsões astrológicas à parte, veremos o que o mês de Setembro nos reserva quanto à qualidade musical.

Nesse mês tem CD novo do Apollo Sunshine, Giant Sand, New Kids on the Block (!), Olivia Newton-John & Friends (!!?), Underoath, tem a volta do Jefferson Starship, novo do Metallica, Joan Osborne, Faith Hill, Lindsey Buckingham (guitarrista do Fleetwood Mac), Unwritten Law ao vivo, Pretenders (!!), Thievery Corporation, Tom Morello (do Rage Against The Machine), James Taylor e alguns hypes:

Brian Wilson - "That Lucky Old Sun"

Depois do delicioso SMiLE, um dos maiores triunfos da história da música pop, e do irregular Gettin' Over My Head (2004), That Lucky Old Sun marca o retorno do beach boy em quatro anos. Com participação de Van Dyke Parks e a eterna disposição para transformar tudo em uma grande diversão, há uma grande expectativa em relação ao retorno do eterno garotão de praia Wilson, que terá seu álbum lançado oficialmente no próximo dia 02. Como eu tenho um sério problema de ansiedade, baixei, mas não revelarei muita coisa, pelo menos não agora. Esperem por muitos vocais em coro, músicas felizes sobre garotas californianas e mexicanas, pianos afetados, guitarras estridentes e uma sincera torcida para que o bom e velho Brian Wilson não enterre de vez sua carreira (que já deveria ter sido enterrada).

Calexico - "Carried to Dust"

Hot Rail, Feast of Wire e Garden Ruin (meu favorito) já tornaram o Calexico uma banda memorável. Agora é a vez de "Carried to Dust", que será lançado no próximo dia 09. Menos experimental, mais pop e acessível, "Carried to Dust" é o mais romântico de todas as obras da banda, mais até que "In The Reins" (com Iron & Wine). Muitos acordes ciganos, latinos, letras de amor, guitarra acústica, músicas extremamente bem trabalhadas e arranjadas... enfim, a base da banda de Tucson, Arizona, continua a mesma. Calexico soa 100% como Calexico. Sam Beam (Iron & Wine) e Doug McCombs (Tortoise) participam.

Okkervil River - "The Stand-Ins"

Nem foi lançado e já tem o potencial de ser Top 10 na lista de fim de ano dos sites mais badalados. Depois do aclamado “The Stage Names”, talvez o melhor cd de 2007, o Okkervil River lança sua continuação (isso mesmo, continuação: a princípio, The Stage Names seria um álbum duplo) no próximo dia 09. Pode-se dizer que "The Stand-Ins" é a outra metade de "The Stage Names", uma vez que continua a estória iniciada no álbum anterior. "Starry Stairs" é a continuação literal de "Savannah Smiles" e "Lost Coastlines" é um dueto entre Will Sheff e Jonathan Meiburg, ex-tecladista do Okkervil River, que deixou a banda para se dedicar inteiramente à seu projeto paralelo, Shearwater (excelente, por sinal).  A banda é tão bacana que a "continuação" aparece até na capa do disco, que é a parte de baixo da capa de "The Stage Names", como você pode notar aqui. "The Stand-Ins", porém, soa bem diferente do seu antecessor. Will Sheff grita mais, e o som da banda remete ao rock'n'roll tradicional americano das décadas de 50 a 70, de forma bem agitada, fazendo um folk/rock mais acessível, com bastante cordas e metais. A produção pode não agradar a todos, especialmente os fanáticos pela tendência meio suicida que Sheff lançou nos dois últimos álbuns (especialmente em Black Sheep Boy).  "The Stand-Ins" é bem mais simples (de todas as formas) que os álbuns já mencionados aqui, mas a criatividade da banda continua em alta (o álbum divide-se em três atos, Stand-Ins,One, Stand-Ins,Two e Stand-Ins,Three). Mas só "Lost Coastlines" e a música que fecha o disco, “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed On The Roof of The Chelsea Hotel, 1979” já valem o disco inteiro.

E ainda vale a pena ficar de olho nos novos Mogwai, Mercury Rev e Travis, na segunda quinzena do mês.

I was there when Smile was announced.

After Orange Crate Art and I Just Wasn't Made For These Times Brian Wilson continued to make an incredible artistic recovery. In 1996 he worked on two Beach Boys projects - one, an album of new material written by Wilson and Andy Paley, only had two songs completed before the Beach Boys' squabbling killed the project, but the demos suggested a renewed creativity on Wilson's part (though some have claimed that Paley had more input than Wilson to several of the best songs).

The second Beach Boys project he worked on in 1996 at least came out - but that's about all you can say for it. Stars & Stripes Vol 1 was an album co-produced by Wilson and bemulleted fool Joe Thomas, where various country singers (of the terrible variety you get on country radio for the most part - Toby Keith, Lorrie Morgan, Kathy Troccoli) sang old Beach Boys hits. It wasn't completely terrible - in fact Junior Brown's 409 and Willie Nelson's The Warmth Of The Sun were two of the best tracks the band had done in twenty years - but for the most part it was unlistenable dreck. It's incredibly sad that it's the last ever Beach Boys album - they deserve better than to be remembered like that.

However, for some reason Wilson continued to work with Joe Thomas, who seemed to be positioning Wilson for an 'Adult Contemporary' audience, and in 1998 they released Wilson's second solo album of new material - Imagination. It was, frankly, awful. There were four very good tracks, and the rest... well, suffice it to say that it was considered appropriate for Brian Wilson to be collaborating with both Jimmy Buffet and Jim Peterik from Survivor (the band that did Eye Of The Tiger).

But that album had a remarkable effect - Brian Wilson, who hadn't willingly toured in thirty years, started touring to promote it. And the band he put together was stunning - based around LA powerpop band the Wondermints, it also included Scott Bennett and Paul Mertens (two excellent session musicians who'd worked on Imagination), vocalist Taylor Mills, and Jeff Foskett, a singer who'd covered Brian's parts on stage for the Beach Boys for many years. (There were a few other members, but that's the core group - other people who've been in the band at one time or another include Todd Sucherman, Jim Hines, Bob Lizik, Andy Paley and Nelson Bragg.)

That band were astonishing - capable of reproducing every note of Wilson's incredibly complex music, and almost all multi-instrumentalists (in a typical show Probyn Gregory of the Wondermints might play guitar, trumpet, french horn, tannerin and keyboards as well as singing). The first live shows the band did were revelatory - while Wilson was not in great voice (and Foskett ended up doubling most of his lines in those early shows, as Wilson would forget lines or miss notes so Foskett was a safety net), his enthusiasm was palpable, and the band were clearly the best possible collaborators he could have. The shows got longer and longer, and they added in more and more obscure material, until by 2002 they were doing the entire Pet Sounds album, six songs from Smile, obscure songs from Friends, Carl And The Passions and The Beach Boys Love You, songs like Til I Die and still doing a good selection of the hits as well. (Unfortunately, since 2004 the setlists have become less and less interesting, to the point where now Mike Love's touring 'Beach Boys' do a significantly more interesting set). They released several live albums and DVDs, and in 2004 Brian released a new solo album, Gettin' In Over My Head, which while far from perfect was a *good* album (mostly made up of songs from the unreleased Andy Paley collaboration or from his unreleased 1989 solo album Sweet Insanity, rerecorded with the new band).

But still nothing could prepare anyone for the day when in 2003 at a small gig (not a Brian Wilson gig) with about thirty or so people in attendance, Jeff Foskett announced that he'd been asked to put together a half-hour suite based on Smile for the band to perform the next year.

As it turned out, Foskett was exaggerating his own importance to the new work. It was Darian Sahanaja - the Wondermints' keyboardist and the band's musical director - rather than Foskett the frontman who was asked to piece together the new Smile. But, crucially, he didn't do it alone. Acting as Wilson's assistant, he merely helped Brian sequence the new piece.

Shortly after this, Van Dyke Parks was brought in to provide lyrics where they hadn't been completed in 1967, and the project moved toward actually completing the promised album from nearly 40 years ago. In the later stages Wilson's horn player Paul Mertens also added some very Parksian string arrangements that tied together different leitmotifs from throughout the album, creating links between songs and generally giving the project a feeling of cohesion.

While Brian very nearly didn't go through with actually performing Smile, because it brought back so many memories of a very unhappy time in his life and was linked with many of his mental problems, when he did perform it it was near-unanimously hailed as a masterpiece (with a few exceptions among those who had spent decades of their own lives creating theories about what Smile 'would have been' - some of whom, being proved wrong, either decided they had wasted their lives or that the finished version was created by some evil conspiracy out to use Brian).

So, after all that anticipation, what was the Smile they completed?

The finished album was in three movements, patterned after the structure of Rhapsody In Blue ( a piece which Wilson has described as the soundtrack to his life). The first movement had few surprises - it started with Our Prayer, a brief pastiche of Bach's choral music, before going into a snippet of Gee by The Crows, and then into an extended version of Heroes & Villains. This movement, which then ran through several short bits of songs that had all originally spun out of the Heroes & Villains melody, before ending up with CabinEssence, combined the story of one man's life in the Old West with the story of the journey of European settlers across North America, going from Plymouth Rock and ending up at the Grand Coulee Dam.

The first movement was extremely good - featuring two of the best songs Wilson and Parks ever wrote, that's unsurprising - but the third movement was merely quite good. Wilson has spoken of the third movement as being added later, separate from the original conception of the album, and it shows - it's a collection of little snatches and songs that don't really belong together, much like side two of Abbey Road. The core of it seems to be the material originally intended for the 'Elements' section of Smile, but other bits have been thrown in, seemingly more because they had to be fitted in than because they fit. Having said that, some parts are still stunning - the segue from Mrs O' Leary's Cow (Fire) into In Blue Hawaii (Water) is beautifully done. Using the 'water chant' recorded in 1967 (and used in the 1971 Beach Boys song Cool Cool Water), they added a new lead vocal line, singing in free tempo over the top:

Is it hot as hell in here or is it me?
It really is a mystery
If I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take my misery
I could really use a drop to drink
Somewhere in a placid pool and sink
Feel like I was really in the pink

It's clever, it adds a whole new interesting layer to the music, and it works in context wonderfully.

But the thing that makes the album - the literal centrepiece and the part that turns it from a good album into possibly the best album ever released - is the second movement.

The second movement is bookended by the two best songs from Smile - which is to say, the two best songs ever written - Wonderful and Surf's Up. Wonderful is a beautifully oblique story of a girl's loss of virginity - and loss of innocence generally - with a melody that's a third cousin of the melody for Heroes & Villains, and a story that's not too unlike She's Leaving Home:

Farther down the path was a mystery,
Through the recess, the chalk and numbers,
a boy bumped into her one, one, wonderful

But unlike the Beatles song, here the girl returns to her parents and is accepted by them:

All fall down and lost in the mystery
Lost it all to a non-believer
And all that's left is a girl
Who's loved by her mother and father

She'll return in love with the mystery
Never known as a non-believer
She'll sigh and thank God for one, one, wonderful

While Surf's Up (the song I posted a video of in the first of these posts) is more oblique yet, a torrent of imagery that keeps nearly coalescing into meaning before going off again:

A diamond necklace played the pawn,
Hand in hand some drummed along
To a handsome man and baton

The music hall a costly bow
The music all is lost for now
To a muted trumpeter's swan

Columnated ruins domino
Canvas the town and brush the backdrop
Are you sleeping?

These two songs had been known for nearly forty years, though. The fact that the album featured extremely good performances of them didn't matter - we already had several extremely good performances of them by either Wilson solo or the Beach Boys as a band to choose from.

What mattered was the end of Wonderful, where suddenly it segued into a song that had previously only been known as an instrumental, but is now known as Song For Children. With one line - "Maybe not one, maybe you too , are wondering, wondering who, wonderful you" - we went into unknown territory. The two songs that followed (Song For Children and Child Is Father Of The Man ) had been known as separate instrumentals, one with a brief chant for a chorus that was also used as the tag to Surf's Up. In their 1960s incarnations, those songs were plink-plonk dull instrumentals with not much to them.

Suddenly, with the addition of lead vocals (and additional backing vocals, so that in Song For Children we have a 'child is father of the son/sun' to mirror the 'father of the man' later on) those songs worked as songs. Chuck Britz, the engineer on most of the Beach Boys' 60s records, once spoke about how he'd heard some harmonies from the band that sounded terrible, and he'd told Brian so - Brian had immediately added the one extra vocal line, and it had sounded great, and Britz had never criticised his arrangements again. In the case of the middle of Smile, that process was repeated on a much bigger scale.

With the addition of the lead vocals, and sequenced correctly, these songs went from being forgettable bits of noodling into integral parts of a tightly-structured longer piece which is infinitely better than the sum of its parts - and like I said, the parts include probably the two best songs ever written. Hearing this piece for the first time, and knowing that I'd had access to more than 90% of the actual music in it before in pieces, once I got over the shock of how beautiful it was, I felt like Huxley reading Darwin - "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!"

So by 2004, we knew that Brian had conquered his demons enough to complete an album he couldn't complete in 1967. We knew he was still capable of putting those pieces together in extraordinary ways, and that he could fill in the gaps well. At the time, I thought Smile was going to be the capstone of his career, that he'd probably not do anything more - because how could he possibly top that? I assumed he was going to retire, and it was a good place to bow out.

Because how could he possibly follow that?

DVD
Norah Jones – Live In Austin

and remember, whenever possible buy your music directly from the artist(s) or your local independent record store. both could become endangered without your support.

click here for a list of exclusives available @ indie stores and for a list of stores

Earlier this summer I wrote a music update for Teddy's alternative press at Roger Williams University (the Bird Cage).  Since he has returned to school, he has asked me to write a similar update concerning fall. Well, seeing how it isn't fall yet, and seeing how the deadline was last night, I wrote about the end of summer. Even though I do listen to leaked music, even the greatest leaks aren't more than a month ahead of the release date--well, with exceptions, the infamous leaking of Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, which leaked in a pre-finished form about a year ahead of its official release.

After visiting the Bird Cage website, it's pretty clear that the site's quality is not that visually appealing. Yes, the site looks like it was designed in the middle of the 1990s using the Geocities page builder, and yes there are some pretty noticeable typos throughout the site, including on the main page, but the site isn't exactly being worked on by a bunch of professionals. Teddy took the time last spring (during my final semester) to learn how to use Dreamweaver, and designed the site from the bottom up, "from scratch" you might say. In addition to that, regardless of the few (or is it just two?) additional writers he has helping him out with content, he does all the writing himself. That said, I take pride in writing for this work in progress, and I also take pride in writing for a college audience, as I know I would have looked to greater powers when I was an undergrad learning about all the music being created out there.

The End of Summer Music Update

With the season for love, romance, and reproduction pretty much moving into the backs of our minds (for all you kids who don’t see keep track of these things, it’s called summer, and it’s a time for revealing fashion trends, aromatic plant scents, and densely-populated music festivals), even though we try our hardest for the season to stick around as long as possible, there’s a strange amount of upbeat albums still to be released this year. Actually, there is a nice diverse pampering coming our way in the next few months. August sees the release New Kids on the Block’s and Goo Goo Dolls’s Greatest Hits (I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere near the former one), a single by the Cure (yes, they’re still around, and with a remix album hitting shelves in September, Robert Smith’s hopeful new masterpiece can’t be far away), our family-film pal Ice Cube’s Raw Footage, You & Me by alt-indie rockers the Walkmen (which is currently waiting in line to be heard on my computer—if it’s anything like their last few albums, it will be worthy of more than one listen), Chemical Chords by Stereolab, and Protools by Gza (the Genius).

That list leaves a few out. For all you vinyl connoisseurs out there, Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails CD from earlier this year, the Slip, will be available for the turntables. For fans of superbly crafted, artsy indie-pop, check out the Swedish musician Lykke Li’s Youth Novels that calls forth those extra-special summer moments of youthful passion, flowers, and wildly positive emotional kicks. The first track is a more feminine approach to something out of Dark Side of the Moon. Later in the month (i. e. NOW) is spiced up with That Lucky Old Son by Brian Wilson (wait, that guy is still alive?) both on CD and vinyl, the negatively-received Oceans Will Rise by the Stills (make your own decision), the live disk by indie-rock extraordinaire group the Fiery Furnaces (called Remember so that you don’t forget), and something by some guy called Keith Urban.

While you’re getting over the fact that people actually like Keith Urban and find his albums explosively innovative, heart-warming, and revolutionary (don’t quote me on any of that), you can finish up your eighth month of the year with the fourth album by recently-returned that nine-piece hard rock group Slipknot (oh my, where did all those painful memories of high school come from?), unoriginally entitled All Hope is Gone. The band’s fourth effort is being described by some as sounding like Alice in Chains, and many say that the metal influence is dwindling on most of the tracks. Well, we’re streaming it here at the state government office, and it sounds pretty hard . . . but my place for Slipknot will always be the bottom, repressed area of my heart. To keep it fare, B. B. King’s One Kind Favor comes out this week too, and watch out 50 Cent fans! The Game’s Lax hits shelves, and chances are there will be a low-blow in there somewhere! If you want even more hating, pick up the deluxe edition for a few more bucks.

Speaking of deluxe editions, transition your lives into the shorter days of September with that New Kids on the Block’s The Block album in deluxe form, next week. That’s right, it’s like a cultural comeback of your favorite teenage boy band from nearly twenty years ago—hooray! There’s a lot of stuff coming out in September that you actually should check out, though. The most anticipated album of the year (in my book) is Skeletal Lampings by indie psych-poppers Of Montreal, the follow-up to the album from last year that I played more than any other, Hissing Fauna Are You the Destroyer? I’ve already acquired the album and, after listening to its 60-minute-long-entirety two times in a row last night, I’ve already found myself oddly hooked. Why oddly? You’ll have to read my review of it when you get a chance (and/or when it’s available).

One of my favorite contemporary rappers/club rappers/crunk rappers is Young Jeezy and his Recession hits in a couple weeks. Who doesn’t love a rapper whose samples himself backing his lyrics in his own songs? And who doesn’t love a rapper who raps about having sex in the club with string-wash electronica music in the background? I don’t know much about the limited edition cut of Radiohead’s OK Computer and Kid A, but based around everything that’s gone on with them recently, they probably don’t even know those are being released. Same goes for that Morrissey DVD that came out this month, so steer clear. Instead, give Metallica another chance (any direction from St. Anger is going up) with Death Magnetic (the first single’s already on the radio-waves, and is getting positive attention, though most fans are waiting for the album release). Another album that’s available, though currently unreleased (give it a couple weeks) is Okkervil River’s follow-up to last year’s amazing album the Stage Names. Part two in the two-album series is the Stand-Ins, and it’s more somber, country-rock influenced, with richer verses, more simplistic melodies, and an equal entertainment value. In the “what happened to them” category, we’ve got releases from LL Cool J and Calexico.

If all that doesn’t fill you up for the next few weeks, send me an email and I’ll hook you up with some noise rock, an African Scream disk, an Icelandic pianist who is being thrown into the indie-rock boat, a Korean cellist that isn’t, and some Minimalist Electronica that will make you jump up and say “we’re going to Detroit” (which I hope you don’t actually go through with).