Real Life Rock (283 page)

10
Robert Johnson's Hellhound on My Ale (Columbia Legacy/Dogfish Head Craft Brewery,
dogfish.com
)
As a promotional tie-in, I figured this had to be terrible: all concept (“Brewed with Lemons,” the front label reads, with the second label explaining the flavoring “as a shout out to Robert Johnson's mentor Blind Lemon Jefferson”), no beer. It comes only in a twenty-five-ounce bottle, there was no one to taste-test it with, but I opened it anyway.

It was rich without noise, with a huge head. Flavors swam through the glass. It was so smooth it was like drinking a sunset. I reached for the bottle and it was empty.

SEPTEMBER
2011

1
Fucked Up,
David Comes to Life
(Matador)
“If you want a picture of the future,” George Orwell wrote in
1984
, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever. And remember that it is forever.” Fucked Up is a little like that. There must be few forces in the universe as unrelenting as the singer Pink Eyes' hardcore slam of words,
slogans, chants; at first listen he's one single giant battering ram. At more than seventy-five minutes, the lifelong love story of
David Comes to Life
might as well go on forever. That's all there as the album opens, but by the end it's gone. I can't speak for the subtleties of the story: it's hard to catch a reading of
The Sorrows of Young Werther
in the middle of a riot, and a short novel's worth of lyric sheets is not music. But as a work where words less tell a story than signify that, somewhere, a story is present, this is a gorgeous, invisibly layered, extraordinarily ambitious, and fully realized testament to how far, in the present moment, pop music can go. Throughout, female voices sweep in to undercut Pink Eyes' male stomp, and every time you hear those voices, they seem to be coming from different people, from different times. There's never a lessening of speed, frenzy, of action-movie
action
, but as the songs go on, all eighteen of them, an emotional if not narrative clarity begins to take over. Near the end, with “A Little Death,” “The Recursive Girl,” and “One More Night,” the numbers feel increasingly fresh, new, invigorating; the musicians sound as if they, too, are about to seize a new life.

2–3
Eleventh Dream Day,
Riot Now!
(Thrill Jockey)
and
the Coathangers,
Larceny & Old Lace
(Suicide Squeeze)
The Coathangers are a casual female punk band that's been hanging around Atlanta for five years; Eleventh Dream Day is a Chicago group led by Rick Rizzo and Janet Bean for almost a quarter of a century—and just as a ninety-year-old is more likely than a fifty-year-old to live to a hundred, chances are Rizzo and Bean will still be pounding—Rizzo's guitar playing can be more percussive than Bean's drumming—when guitarist the Crook Kid Coathanger, drummer Rusty Coathanger, bassist Minnie Coathanger, and keyboard player Bebe Coathanger have gone on to other names. The Coathangers start off their third album with “Hurricane,” and they live up to the title in an instant. Just as you can see Patty McCormack in
The Bad Seed
in their “Hurricane” video (on You-Tube), you can hear Sleater-Kinney in the blunt insistence of the singing, Delta 5 in the displacing bass breaks, and, most of all, Kleenex in the playground shouts of the chorus. And you can feel a glee, a sense of both escape and arrival in the right place at the right time, that makes where the band learned its tricks irrelevant. And after that it's like a show where the costume changes are more compelling than the music. The group tries on one style after another, until, well before the record ends, each song sounds more contrived than felt.
Riot Now!
is Eleventh Dream Day's tenth album, but there's no pose struck anywhere on it; almost every track is infused with discovery, doubt, unease. The songs feel less like songs than jagged, almost random pieces of the same bad day. “Tall Man” is a moment of panic boiled down into a few words and a riff from Dramarama's “Anything Anything”: you can imagine Rizzo and Bean seeing a guy on the street, saying, “He sure is tall,” then, half-jokingly, “He's too tall,” then, not joking at all, “He's too fucking tall to fucking
live
,” then the two of them imagining a building falling on him. With Bean shouting behind Rizzo's everyman leads, there's a core of ferocity in every number, and, with the way Bean's voice sometimes seems to be suspended above Rizzo's, a question mark to his exclamation point, a core of fatalism. There's no hint in their music that life is ever going to get any easier, or any less interesting.

4
Lydia Loveless,
Indestructible Machine
(Bloodshot)
On her second album, this twenty-one-year-old country singer from Ohio shows herself drinking white lightning or gasoline (cartoon on the front cover) and smoking a cigarette (photo on the back). She and her band are weirdly disconnected, as if the band was playing on one side of the street and she was recorded walking by on the other side and making up songs as she went. Moments of truth leap out of sarcasm and disdain (“They get away with shit / That I never will,” Loveless says in “More Like Them,” a grown-up version of Claudine Clark's teenager's “Party
Lights”). In “Can't Change Me,” which is a blast of pain, not bravado, there's a weight, a grounding, that allows Loveless to ignore meter and come across as if she's seen everything twice. What you're left with is a big, warm, open, sometimes desperate voice.

5–6
Rave on Buddy Holly
(Fantasy) and Buddy Holly,
Not Fade Away: Complete Studio Recordings and More
(Hip-O)
Aren't tribute albums terrible? Yes, and from Paul McCartney's Screamin' Jay Hawkins imitation on “It's So Easy” to Karen Elson's flattening of Holly's swirling melody in “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” to Patti Smith's benediction on “Words of Love,” this celebration of Holly's would-have-been-seventy-fifth birthday lives up to the genre—save for the Black Keys' modest, spooky “Dearest,” Modest Mouse's offering “That'll Be the Day” as if they're remembering some other song the title just happens to remind them of, and Lou Reed, with Laurie Anderson on electric violin, turning Peggy Sue into a grunge queen. Holly has to be smiling; he's heard this all before. As you can hear on
Not Fade Away
, people were revising his music before he was barely cold in the ground. You listen to the six CDs, collecting performances from 1949 to the first days of 1959, as if to a novel unfolding—until the end, when it all goes to hell. You hear the quiet, soulful, fiercely ambitious demos Holly made in his last months in his Greenwich Village apartment; no sooner did his plane go down in that Iowa cornfield in 1959 than his producer Norman Petty got the tapes, fixed them up, and, again and again, put them on the market. The contrast between the music as Holly made it and Petty's successive dubbing sessions—featuring strings, the clueless New Mexico band the Fireballs, and nameless hacks—is so stark it suggests not greed but resentment: a producer's desire to dissolve an artist's singular intelligence into a product cheesy enough to prove that his music could have been done by anyone, and wasn't worth doing. So go back and listen again to Holly alone: “Love Is Strange,” “Dearest,” “Peggy Sue Got Married.”

7
The Jet Age Compendium: Paolozzi at Ambit,
edited by David Brittain (Four Corners Books)
Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) was perhaps the first and certainly one of the best pop artists—a magpie who could pass a newsstand, come away with a movie of headlines and images playing in his head, then go home and burn it down to a single collaged frame—as he did in 1947 with
I Was a Rich Man's Plaything
. Twenty years later he began working with the London arts magazine
Ambit
, and for seven years after that he let the Vietnam War invade his mind the way he'd once made room for sex magazines and soft-drink ads. He wrote absurdist essays and fractured plays, layered photographs, cut pictures out of magazines to make new magazines, and even produced his own newspaper: a one-page broadside called
Bad News at the Breakfast Table
. Aside from an obscene two-panel comic strip in the bottom right corner, a list of corporations on the left border, and sex ads bottom left, it consisted entirely of reports of mid-1960s American riots and murders. It had to have been devastating then, because it's devastating now: a portrait of a country where anyone can be killed at any time. News item:
MAD SNIPER KILLS
15,
WOUNDS
31
FROM U OF TEXAS TOWER
. News item:
PERCY'S DAUGHTER IS SLAIN IN CHICAGO
. The specter of Charles Whitman firing down into the campus plaza in Austin is part of the national consciousness, but who remembers that Valerie Jean Percy, daughter of soon-to-be U.S. senator Charles Percy, was killed in her own “palatial suburban home”?