See you in September!

A.B.C. is going on vacation for two weeks. I'm going to be flying to Austin and then New Orleans to see Jandek's first two United States shows.

So, posts will resume on Monday, September 12th. My alphabet is almost done- when I finish, I've got some tricks up my sleeve, just you wait. I may/not have time to post from the road- feel free to check in.

(9/1/05: Flew to Austin on Saturday, and was scheduled to head to New Orleans on Tuesday. I'm safely back in Boston now.)

S, XI

Supergrass- I Should Coco

So I had this one breakup that necessitated the splitting up of communal stuff. I got the gems of the coffee mug collection- “If You Were Not My Sister In Law You Would Still Be My Good Friend” remains a stunner to this day- but got shafted in the record department. For example, I managed acquire this Supergrass record. There’s nothing wrong with it: totally good stuff if you like trebly, snotty punk-y pop music that presages the Hives and bands of their ilk by almost ten years. However, there’s plenty wrong with it if you’re me and you think of an ex every time you put the record on, and there’s even MORE wrong with it when you’re me and you remember that somehow you gained a Supergrass album AND lost all of the Queen CD’s. Goddammit.

Super Sox ‘75

If you’ve been to my house more than three times, you can skip right over this review because you already know how much I love the 1975 Red Sox. You know because I forced you onto the faded booger green couch to watch the chapter of ‘Ken Burns’ Baseball’ dedicated to the team.

Jesus, what a bunch of characters they were- New Hampshire-born Carlton Fisk behind the plate, Rick Burleson at short, the aging but still potent Carl Yastrzemski, the amazing defense of Dwight Evans buttressing the rookie 1-2 punch of Fred Lynn and Jim Rice (best rookie duo ever, for my money).

And the pitching!

A few years back, my friends Evan and Tracy mentioned to me that they were going to a restaurant where Luis Tiant would be signing stuff. I joked that the sickest autograph ever would be El Tiante inscribing “Mike- Everything I know I learned from you” on a glossy and forgot about it. That shit couldn’t actually happen, you know? No fucking WAY! A week later, though, they produced an 8 x 10 with the dream inscription and I shouted in the middle of the restaurant. The guy who had hilariously spiraled and pirouetted his fat ass all over the mound with such success had autographed a picture for ME? Goddamn!

And Bill Lee? Forget it. The free-thinking lefty whose autobiography I read a zillion times before the age of 12, the guy who didn’t throw faster than eighty but always managed to beat the Yankees with an amazing assortment of bullshit junk pitches. Left the press scratching their heads to such an extent that he and his quotes have been entered into the canon around here (“I didn’t say I smoked marijuana- I said that I USED it.”), the man who I called shitfaced from the middle of the Longfellow Bridge the night the Sox won the series (just because I have his number doesn’t make me a stalker, okay? I’m an ENTHUSIAST!).

I can’t begin to understate the importance of the 2004 Red Sox- a team that we, as fans, left for dead so many times during the course of the season, the same team that rose up to provide us all with a conclusion that none of us would ever dare imagine. Seriously- if you asked any baseball fan to come up with the craziest, most unbelievable scenario ever, the optimal dramatic circumstances for the Sox to win it all, nobody could have come up with such a script as what actually happened. Everything after game three of the ALCS was pure porn for Sox fans, the craziest confluence of events anyone could ever imagine, such an unbelievable script that no one would buy it (which is why I’m immediately suspicious of any fiction writer who claims not to like sports in general, baseball in particular- some of that shit is just too good, too improbable). It meant so much to so many people. Hell, I’m getting a championship tattoo in a few weeks.

The reason that I mention the 2004 Sox is because prior to last season, the ’75 Sox were all we as Sox fans had to rally around. All of the famed missteps over the years hung over us like a sigil- Denny Galehouse, Bucky Dent, Aaron Boone, Aparicio, even Bob Gibson (though it must be said that the ’67 Sox never had a fucking thing to be ashamed about- that team was phenomenal in its grit and overachievement). The closest they came, the biggest moment of glory was game 6 of the ’75 series, still among the best games ever played (though I have to admit that I was stunned at both games four and five of the 2004 ALCS- amazed, in particular, that probably the two best games I have ever seen were played back-to-back, and that my team won them both). I have the whole of game 6 memorized. Hell, we all do- Lynn, Tiant’s fatigue, Geronimo, Carbo (!), Foster, Evans, finally Fisk. The single craziest chain of events ever, leading to the ball crashing off the pole that was recently bequeathed the man’s name, the biggest victory, up until recently, the Red Sox ever had. All of the events of the season, every scratch and hiccup narrated by Ned Martin, the man whose voice I grew up listening to. Jesus, this is one of those gushing reviews, and I’m going off about this spoken word baseball CD! Whatever, though. I checked the 12” version out of the library a dozen times as a kid, digested it and filed it under folklore, as so many others did. I’m so happy to have the remastered version on my rack.

Superchunk, II

Superchunk- Here’s To Shutting Up

Hmph.

I spent the last review talking about how much I appreciate the fact that Superchunk has been a band that’s never feared evolution or change- you’d think that I would have more positive things to say about this, the followup LP to “Come Pick Me Up”. I appreciate the fact that “Shutting” contains far more deviation from the 2gtr/bass/drums formula than any previous album, utilizing strings and synths and steel guitar. Right on, you know? It just feels like there’s too much reliance on production tricks and the aforementioned weird (for them) sounds, not enough on writing songs- too much midtempo for my tastes. Shit drags early on and I start looking at the internet, stop listening. Granted, out of the entire Superchunk catalogue I’ve spent the least time with this one, but honestly, there hasn’t been much to pull me back in.

Superchunk- Cup Of Sand

Hello, folks, and welcome back. I’m Don Bixtler, joined by former all-pro record reviewer Dick Johnson, and we’re here at the 2005 Record Review Invitational. Mike Fournier is on his fourth Superchunk review of the evening. Dick?

He’s an anecdotal reviewer who makes ties and attempts to give enough contextual clues to initiate novice readers without boring the veteran ones.

Fournier’s warming up- he’s playing solitare and drinking a glass of water, petting what appears to be a cat on his lap. Is that his normal pre-review routine, Dick?

I believe the cat is a girl.

Not the cat, Dick.

Well, Don, you talk about routine- this kid’s got some ‘em, but they’re strange. For one, he usually works a full day before he sits down at the desk. Before he starts the reviews, he spends at least half an hour looking at baseball scores and esoteric messageboards. I guess you could say he’s warming up.

He’s already listened to the CD once, from what we understand. He appears to be scanning the tracks, listening to snippets of many songs. How does this fit into his routine?

You talk about process- a lot of the time he’ll listen to the CD all the way through, then listen to spots over again. A lot of preparation time for each review.

Even the short ones?

Well, sometimes he’ll just listen to a record one time.

He’s staring off into space.

Very focused tonight, Don. Very focused.

He’s started writing! He has started the “Cup Of Sand” review!

Well, you talk about reviewing, Don, and you have to look at the curveballs, the ones that get thrown at you that you don’t have much of a bead on. The singles compilations are the hardest.

Why’s that?

Well, Don, the fact of the matter is that there are very few completely great ones out there. Most people forget that every single comes with a b-side, usually an unfinished or underdeveloped song that shouldn’t have ever seen the light of day to begin with. Fournier’s here trying to review a double CD of Superchunk singles and b-sides after already listening to three of the band’s full lengths. This is going to be a difficult review for him.

He’s progressed past the initial discussion of the record’s form. What do you think will be next?

Don, you talk about patterns, and this guy’s name comes up- he’ll probably mention listening to the record in a car, or with a girl, or with a bunch of-

He’s stopped the review, Dick.

He’s written that he’s already written about enough singles compilations so that the readers should know the drill by now. A bold move.

Is it a good move?

Well, Don, you talk about gambles- assuming that readers have already seen enough of his stuff to know that b-sides album reviews are a little on the short side. The old fans may appreciate the gesture, but I’m sure that his newer readers are going to feel left out in the cold.

There you have it. We’re going take a break to hear from our sponsors, Fagan’s- “When Nothing But The Best Will Do.” We’ll be right back. This is the 2005 Record Review Invitational.

Superchunk, I

Superchunk- No Pocky For Kitty

I spent much of my freshman and sophomore years of college trying to be punk as fuck- I was loosely affiliated with the tastemakers at the college radio station and read Maximumrocknroll with a fervor that bordered on fanatasicm (a hell of an equation, I realize now, after the fact).

Despite my façade, I fell into listening to a bunch of bands that didn’t quite qualify for P.A.F. status. Jawbox and Shudder To Think and Samiam all signed to major labels, relegating them to a status that was somewhere on the outskirts of poseurdom. Pavement played what essentially pop music obscured by sheets of obfuscation and feedback. And there was Superchunk, too.

The argument that I always used to hear from the hardercore-than-thou kids I sometimes skated curbs with was that chicks liked the band, which made them tremendous pussies. Why liking Superchunk was strictly a feminine trait was something I couldn’t figure out, because, honestly, they didn’t SOUND that different from a lot of bands that were being listened to. ‘No Pocky For Kitty’ was a record that moved at a zillion miles per hour more than half the time, with an unclean production provided by Fluss that made the band sound up-front and real every time they stepped on the distorto to end or emphasize a song. They reminded me of Husker Du, even back then- the pop kernel was hidden under the pounding wave of noise, if you wanted to be patient and wade through it. If not, the growl was enough.

MIX TAPE: Seed Toss

Superchunk- Come Pick Me Up

How far back in the Superchunk discography can you toss the seeds? I’d say all the way back at ‘On The Mouth’, the act’s third proper LP, which followed the driving high-octane blueprint the band had laid down and out on the first two albums- infectious, pounding punk albums which left subtle bubblegum pop aftertastes in yr. mouth after you’d chewed on ‘em for a while. Still, though, back then the band’s evolution was in full effect, boyee, even though it wasn’t so visble as it is now with years of hindsight.

Go back to ‘Swallow That’ on ‘On The Mouth. It’s rudimentary, not too far removed from the rest of the band’s catalogue, really, but it works- the slow build, the development, chorus, culminating in the furious outro. I mention the song because it was my first inkling that Superchunk wasn’t going to be a stagnant band. The succession of albums that followed supported the theory- “Foolish”, the breakup album, contained blazers, sure, but the band slowed down the tempo and turned down the volume, allowing songwriting to take center stage, a trend that continued on “Here’s Where The Strings Came In” and arrived most fully at “Indoor Life”, the band’s quietest, lushest and in many way most successful album to date. It was a bit of a shock for me when it arrived, because I was still very much in knee-jerk mode, still raw and riding on the notion of the thing more than the thing itself, hanging ten on didactic waves looking for some sort of definition.

“Come Pick Me Up” picks up where “Indoor” left off, finding the band in the same well-orchestrated, rehearsed space, except with more experience and confidence. As a listener, I was over the kinda initial shock of the aging, the toning down, and simply dug the record for what it was- thirteen tracks of exceptional pop songs. The flavor of the gum has changed, though- the pop’s up front, and the punk thing, the aggressiveness, is the aftertaste. The band’s pogoing days informed their pop stage- they wouldn’t have arrived at the pop if they hadn’t spent so many nights, years blowing their voices out hollerin’, scraping fingers raw on bar chords.

Sunny Day Real Estate

Sunny Day Real Estate- How It Feels To Be Something On

I’ve mentioned the apocryphal nature of Sunny Day Real Estate elsewhere on this web page. For the sake of review, though, here we go: the band broke up under mysterious circumstances in the mid-nineties after releasing a great debut (‘Diary’) and a follow up that inspired legions of sensitive boys in tight shirts to go back to the basement and practice their time changes (‘LP2,’ or, if yr. feeling Zeppelin, the Pink Album). There were rumors fueled by shady internet postings about singer Jeremy Enigk being born again, followed a fresh round by about the band reforming (which turned out to be true).

Early SDRE stuff had a tendency to rely on the loud/soft dichotomy to deliver the goods, the whole Pixies/Nirvana thing. LP2 didn’t lean so heavily on the trick- there was more of a focus on songwriting, trying to get parts that flowed into each other. That album was a success, but didn’t always cohere. If you listened to the rumors, the record was pieced together from several sessions (believable, I think- the last song, ‘Rodeo Jones’, first showed up on a promotional CD single from the ‘Diary’ days). Still, though, despite the kinks in the track order, ‘LP2’ was canonized, deified. The eventual news that Sunny Day was getting back together was strange- it’s common as hell nowadays for bands to reform and tour. Back then, though, in 1998, bands re-forming and putting new records out was fairly unprecedented. Everyone was excited, but wary. What if the new record sucked? How would it retroactively rub off on the existing discography?

Not even an issue.

‘How It Feels’ is the band’s magnum opus, the best record of their career. Lush and fully developed, excellent musicianship throughout, with nary a scream to be heard (just the one at the end of ‘The Prophet’, which echoes the lyric “With a scream”). There’s a sense of orchestral playfulness to be heard, reminding me of the solo album that Enigk put out during Sunny Day’s hiatus. The band sounds confident and relaxed as they navigate their way through the gamut of heavy-ish rock, pensive post-whatever and loping waltzes. Enigk’s vocals are as consistent and strong, ranging from whining falsetto (an acquired taste, I know) to his normal insect mating call. Tension builds and releases with more ease and less overly dramatic bombast, sighing and heaving at moments the pre-breakup act would have never thought of. Not a dud to be found.

(If there was any justice in this world, some cable network would pick up my idea for a reality TV show: Sunny Day Real Estate following around this starlet of the past, narrating her day the same way that Jonathan Richman did in “There’s Something About Mary.” The trials and tribulations of a once-hot actress who has fallen out of favor with the viewing public, trying to scrape together a comeback as successful as Sunny Day Real Estate’s.

What’s the show called?

You guessed it: How It Feels To Be Goldie Hawn.

Execs, get in touch.)

MIX TAPE: Guitar And Video Games

Sunny Day Real Estate- The Rising Tide

Yeah, it sounds a little bit different than ‘Goldie Hawn’- that’s because they could afford to get a better producer, one, and went down to three members who played all the instruments in the studio, two. A little bit less organic as a result, the three of ‘em swapping instruments back and forth in this new, fuller-than-ever sonic environment. New record label, blah blah blah.

I wasn’t fond of this one for a while, but it’s grown on me, snuck up a little bit. The songs tend to yawn on longer at the beginning and end, the elongation machine, and because of the whole in-studio three piece thing described above, they tend to be a little bit simpler, probably so they can be played live with more ease, I don’t know. Bigger, dumber riffs than I’m used to from the band, anyway. Thing is that they work. Granted, I’m not so fond of ‘Television’, probably the biggest, dumbest song on the record (and, not surprisingly, the single), but with that aside, the beefed-up production and stripped-down songwriting works a whole hell of a lot better than that lackluster Fire Theft record that came out a few years down the road from this one.

S, X

Iggy And The Stooges- Raw Power

Part of this gig is backtracking, checking out the past to make more sense of what’s going on in the present. So I checked out Iggy and the Stooges after years of hearing lip service paid to the man and his band.

The first thing to mention is that this is a newly remastered CD- apparently there were years of grumbles from Stooges fans, speculation about what ‘Raw Power’ would have sounded like had it been mixed so the bass was audible. I’m probably the worst person to comment on the whole debacle, seeing as how my limited Stooges knowledge comes from the re-release, not the original (I did find it new in a cutout bin, which may have some bearing on the argument).

First listen had me ready to pan Stooges fans as victims of critical hysteria- this is, after all, an album that starts off with the lyric “I’m a streetwalking cheetah with a heartful of napalm”, which, in addition to being very silly (but so silly that’s tough) dates the record instantly (napalm? Wasn’t that….oh, right. Vietnam! These guys are OLD!). Beyond that, though, a few lyrical miscues aside, the shit just slays. Iggy’s dynamic and has great range, and the guitars screech, howl and fairly jump out of the speakers and onto yr. jugular, proto-everything. It’s so easy to trace both punk and metal back to the Stooges catalogue, the snarling howls and calls of the no future desperate who don’t give a fuck about giving a fuck.

Sun Kil Moon- Ghosts Of The Great Highway

Mark Kozelek’s best album since ‘Songs for A Blue Guitar’- sounds like the cheeriest end of the Red House Painters’ spectrum. All the standard tricks and signifiers.

I feel like I should say more, but man, I had such a tough time reviewing all the proper R.H.P. records that I had to get Wesley Willis to guest/ghostwrite one review for me via a psychic.

Hey…..I wonder if she’s available. Hang on.





She IS! She’s going to connect me direct to a famous dead person. Wonder who I’ll get this time?

(Connection begins.)

Hello?

THIS IS BABE RUTH.

Get the fuck out of here.

THE BAMBINO.

What’s going on, my man?

I’M SO FUCKING GLAD THE SOX WON IT LAST YEAR. MOTHERFUCKERS ALWAYS SAYING THAT I DIED EARLY BECAUSE I LEFT BOSTON.

Is it true?

I WAS ALREADY SMOKING TEN BLACK CUBAN CIGARS AND FUCKING FOUR WHORES A NIGHT WHEN I WAS LIVING THERE.

This is beginning to sound a lot like a Denis Leary bit.

FUCK THAT. HE STOLE ALL OF HIS BEST JOKES FROM BILL HICKS, ANYWAY.

Whoah! You know Bill Hicks?

JUST BECAUSE I’M DEAD DOESN’T MEAN I’M STUPID. LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING- I KNOW ABOUT A LOT OF THINGS. LIKE THAT PALMIERO KID JUICING. WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS?

Did you ever do steroids, Babe?

I’M THE GODDAMN SULTAN OF SWAT, YOU ASSHOLE. I NEVER DID ‘EM, LOU GEHRIG NEVER DID ‘EM, JIMMIE FOXX. NOW THERE WAS A BALLPLAYER!

Uh, yeah. Listen, I need help with this Sun Kil Moon review. It’s Mark Kozelek, right, and he-

FOXX COULD HIT THE COVER OFF THE BALL. UNLESS MATTHEWSON WAS PITCHING. ONE OF THE BEST, KID. HIM AND SPAHN AND THAT NEW KID CLEMENS AND CY YOUNG. OL’ CY. I REMEMBER THIS ONE TIME AT THE HUNTINGTON AVENUE-

Sun Kil Moon?

FUCK MUSIC, KID, WE’RE TALKING BASEBALL! SO CY’S GOT THE TWELVE-SIX CURVE, AND HEY, DO YOU HAVE A LIGHT? BEEN A GODDAMN LONG TIME SINCE I HAD ONE OF THESE-

C’mon, man.

DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE C’MON MAN ME! I’LL WRING YOUR SCRAWNY LITTLE NECK LIKE A-

(connection ends, new curse begins. My fault.)