From My Cold, Dead Band: The Letter U and the Number 2

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

"The Unforgettable Fire (25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)" by U2, $23.99 (Amazon.com)

Wow. I don't know if it's the same way for you — or if you figure into these numbers yourself — but a good number of my friends hate U2. (Bono, mostly.) In the wake of the band's recent performance in Las Vegas and the near-simultaneous announcement of a Seattle tour date, my Facebook news feed lit up like a silver-and-gold Christmas tree of hot, hot hate. If hate were donuts, America conceivably could run on Dunkin'.

I understand the reasons behind this animus, even if I don't entirely agree with them. U2 has an awfully big target painted on its ass, and the band helped to paint it there. Bono talks when he should sing; the band tends to follow its muse into strange corners (blues? techno?) at the expense of the songs; and let's be honest, the band's latest album kinda stinks.

So let's pretend it didn't happen. In fact, let's imagine that there have been three bands called U2, all with the same lineup. There's the journeyman rockers who get off a few good riffs every now and again ("How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb," "All That You Can't Leave Behind"). There's the experimental band determined not to sound like itself ("Achtung Baby," "Passengers"). And there's the U2 we grew up with, the band that was altogether in favor of singing songs "about wars between nations," and whose impassioned, staccato message was delivered without irony. That's the U2 we grew to love, and it's the reason we keep coming back to these guys even when they piss u off.

To their credit U2 is fully aware that they've led a triple life, and they throw the occasional bone to the fans who remember when the band's every show closed with "40." The 25th anniversary pressing of "The Unforgettable Fire," released earlier this week, is such a concession — a beautifully-remastered version of one of the band's three best albums coupled with a disc of rare and unreleased material. And it's priced just under $25.

I won't bother explaining to hardcore U2 haters why a remastered "Unforgettable Fire" is worth having; either you get these guys or you don't, and hearing Bono more clearly ain't gonna help if you've already drawn a bead on him. But if your appreciation for U2 is forgotten and not forsaken, there's much here to warrant a purchase. The early-1980s muck is stripped away from "Pride" and "Wire." The cool blue depth and dimension that Brian Eno engineered into "Bad" and the title track is restored. And cleaned-up versions of some of the better b-sides U2 ever put down (including "The Three Sunrises," which to my ears should have been an album track), as well as single mixes I never knew existed (Daniel Lanois' joyous reduw of "A Sort of Homecoming" stands out) are worth the money all in themselves.

So much time has passed that it's easy to forget that 1984 was a make-or-break year for U2 — their "Live at Red Rocks" videos were smeared all over MTV and "New Year's Day" and "I Will Follow" were beginning to find their way onto mix tapes. They had to do something to win over America, and if they'd continued in the vein of "War," they surely would have — and sealed their fate in the process. But U2 chose to gamble — to hire a producer who didn't much like their music, to enlarge its musical vocabulary through right-brain dithering that bordered on the batshit loony (they recorded portions of the album whilke in the nude), and to labor to make a record that would confound their own expectations.

The only difference between "The Unforgettable Fire" and the supposed game-changing albums that would come later is that U2 didn't know that was the kind of record it was making. "The Unforgettable Fire" is rich with good mistakes, the kind that humanize a record. It's a credit to modern-day U2 that in re-releasing "The Unforgettable Fire" it hasn't erased those errors, but rather put a bow on them. This reissue is a gift.

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From My Cold, Dead Band: $25 worth of XTC

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Drowning Here in Summer’s Cauldron: XTC, circa 1980.

English Settlement: Amazon MP3 dowload, $9.49; CD available through eBay, $10-$12

Skylarking: Amazon MP3 download, $9.49; CD available through eBay, $8-$12

(EDITOR'S NOTE: The Spellout welcomes Gregory Crosby, who has joined this bl-g's quixotic quest to educate the public about "the new wave." Y'know Franz Ferdinand? The Gossip? It's like that, except old. And better-produced. And good.)

If you had the pleasurable misfortune of being an English major, you probably threw your hands up in despair at some point at having to wade through the tall grass of the pastoral tradition in English poetry: “Enough with the fucking shepherds already!” (And that’s a hundred years before you even get to Wordsworth’s paeans to Nature.) It wasn’t until I spent three weeks in the English countryside a few years ago that the seeming obsession with flowers, flouncing, and flowing, babbling-on-and-on brooks at last became clear: it really is “This other Eden, demi-paradise,/This fortress built by Nature for herself,” an overwhelming profusion of greenery and immaculate, lovely gardens (when it isn’t, of course, the gray, cracked asphalt of an industrial wasteland).

But when I reflect on that summer, it isn’t Sidney or Shakespeare or Keats who provides the soundtrack, but a few lads from the railway town of Swindon who were one of the great bands of the 1980s, XTC; specifically their triumphant double album from 1982, English Settlement, and their disputed (by the band themselves no less) masterpiece of 1986, Skylarking. You kids can be forgiven for perhaps having only hazy knowledge of the band—thanks to a protracted contract dispute with their label, Virgin, the band went on strike from 1992 to 1999, releasing no new material during those years, a kiss of oblivion for a studio band that didn’t tour (thanks to band leader Andy Partridge’s stage fright). By the time the band came out of hiatus, their cultural momentum had dissipated, and XTC more or less ceased to exist in 2005.

Fans of XTC might direct the uninitiated to one of their singles collections, or to early albums like Drums and Wires, and that’s fine. But to get the full pastoral punch of Andy Partridge’s and Colin Moulding’s songs, English Settlement and Skylarking are the best portals. Both albums display the essential Englishness of the band, an Englishness less like, say, the high Victorian nostalgia of The Kinks and more in line with the cynical, joyous arcardias of the first Elizabeth’s reign: what humble but knowing shepherds might have piped if they’d had keyboards, electric guitars and four-tracks.

English Settlement is a sort of White Album of this sensibility, ranging from the literal sensuousness of the hit “Senses Working Overtime”; the pop plea for liberty, “Ball and Chain”; the comic hooliganism of “No Thugs in Our House”; and charming rondeau of “Yacht Dance”; and the claustrophobic anti-auto “English Roundabout.” Everywhere the simple life is under threat, and everywhere Partridge’s and Moulding’s lyrics push back, making great pop songs out of lefty political pleas for non-violence (“Knuckle Down”), gender equality (“Down in the Cockpit”), and anti-materialism (“Jason and the Argonauts”) that follow in the grand, countercultural English tradition of Levellers and Lollards.  

Skylarking hits some of the same notes, but condenses them into an ice cream cone of cosmic pop loveliness that’s already melting before you can even get a lick. Or, as Partridge put it long after the fact, the album is “a summer’s day baked into one cake.” It was long after the fact because the band was famously unhappy with ceding control to producer Todd Rundgren, and disdained the final product; ironic, given that Skylarking is the height of the band’s achievement. The album begins in summer’s cauldron and cycles through all seasons, human and terrestrial, in an array of glittering, perfectly crafted pop gems.

I put Skylarking on at least once every June—no album quite kicks off the promise and melancholy of summer the way it does, from the sexy romp of “Grass” through the over-the-top heartache of “1000 Umbrellas” to the jazzy, existential terror of “The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul.” As a bonus, the 2000 re-issue of the CD includes the single “Dear God,” the unofficial anthem of angry (and very English) atheism. If you’ve never delved into XTC, you can do worse as the coming weeks heat up then play English Settlement while sipping Guinness and manning the grill; then slip on Skylarking as the twilight settles and the citronella candles flicker.

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From My Cold, Dead Band: $20 worth of Simple Minds

Monday, March 30th, 2009

Early Gold: Amazon MP3 download $9.49;
$11.68 at Easy Street Records

Sparkle in the Rain:
$10.78 at Easy Street Records

I've tried. Heaven knows I tried. Forgive me for putting on my old man typeface for a minute, but I have tried time and again to get into all the alt.indie.college bands that Pitchfork and Idolator seem to think important these days — Death Cab, Decemberists, that goddamn Vampire Weekend — but I get so fucking bored.

The problem is that at age forty-cough I have lived long enough to hear a lot of this stuff two and three times. One of the more jaded of my musician friends once said, "There's only so much you can do with bass, drums, guitar, vocals and a 4/4; that's just the mathematics talking." I don't think we've yet exhausted rock music's full range of expression — every now and again there's a TV On The Radio or a Tokyo Police Club to put things another way — but there's no denying that it's getting awfully crowded in there, at least to my ears. Now I know how those Rolling Stone assholes felt when they dismissed my favorite bands as Roxy Music or Velvet Underground ripoffs.

One of those bands, Simple Minds, took a real beating from those critics even before "Don't You Forget About Me" made their name. They were compared unfavorably to the Velvets, to the Doors, to Peter Gabriel — and once "Don't You" was released, ever after to U2. But time has silenced those haters — or, like me, it has driven them to a steady diet of ambient, alternative hip-hop, reissues and Neko Case — and today, it seems safe to issue a defense of pre-"Breakfast Club" Simple Minds. Besides, you've already heard so much of what made early the Simple Minds great … in the music of TV On The Radio, Arcade Fire and Radiohead.

Look, before you tell me I'm full of shit, I want you to watch this clip:

That's what Simple Minds sounded like from 1979 through 1983, and that's the Simple Minds you'll hear on "Early Gold."
While learning its way to the stadium-sized rock that would be its post-1983 calling card, Simple Minds did a hell of a lot of soul-searching, experimentation and good-old blundering, and in the course they made some terrifically good music. The stalking-cat thump of "Premonition," the Joy Division-like hypnosis of "Thirty Frames a Second," the industrial disco of "Sweat in Bullet" — these are the songs of a band that doesn't care if it ever gets a hit. By the time "Early Gold" gets to a song you've heard — the new-wave epic "Promised You a Miracle" — you're sold on Simple Minds as a studio band, and you'll be primed for their further adventures.

The good news is that the band's 1984 breakthrough album, "Sparkle in the Rain," is a triumphant affirmation of all that came before it; the bad news is that it was the last great album the band ever made. After the one-two punch of "Sparkle" and "Don't You Forget About Me," Simple Minds traded personal for populist: Having gotten a taste of stadium life, they began making records that were built to play live, and they never recovered. There's been a good song here and there over the years, but for the most part, my enjoyment of Simple Minds' music after "Don't You Forget About Me" has been largely predicated on the fact that the band made "Sparkle in the Rain," one of the best "big music" releases ever.

"Sparkle in the Rain" was produced by Steve Lillywhite, producer of many of the big-music epochs of that era (he also produced the first few U2 records, XTC's "Drums and Wires" and Big Country's "The Crossing"), and it may well be the most orgasmic explosion of ascending riffs, exploding drum sounds and cold blue keyboard wash ever put to record. As "Rain" plays through, a curious thing happens: The music gets bigger and bigger and vocalist Jim Kerr says less and less. "Sparkle's" first two songs, "Up On The Catwalk" and "Book of Brilliant Things," each have a full set of lyrics — verse-chorus-verse, with a bit of improvisation at the end — but by song three, "Speed Your Love to Me," the verses have become disjointed and Kerr ends up repeating some of them a few times:

I couldn't sleep a wink last night
I'd love to hold on
Love to see the fires in motion
Love to feel a free world turn tonight

Meanwhile,"Speed Your Love" builds and builds, and is still building as the song fades out. It's easy to imagine the song continuing forever, or at least until the band drops dead from exhaustion.

Song four, "Waterfront," is something else again. Over Derek Forbes' pulsing bassline, an Eno-esque bed of keyboards and the kind of fat, echoing drumbeat that only Lillywhite can deliver, Kerr sings a quartet of what he called "anecdotes," changing their wording slightly from one instance to the next:

Step in step out of the rain
I'm gonna walk on up to the waterfront
Said one million years from today…
So far, so cool, so close, yet still so far

Splashy keyboard hits are timed against cymbal crashes, and guitarist Charlie Burchill plays a pair of wailing, up-down chords; the effect is not unlike watching waves crash against rocks and the waters receding, over and over again. A middle eight builds a bit of tension on ascending chords, and as Kerr wails "Soooooooo faaaaaaaaar," your mind tricks you into thinking that a key change is in the offing — but the song smashes back into the same melody, the same pattern of hit-and-backbuild, and "Waterfront" reassumes its aura of bombastic, yet dreamy hypnosis.

"Sparkle in the Rain" remains my favorite Simple Minds album. It enabled to accept much of the crappy music the band made later in their career, and more importantly, it tinges "Wolf Like Me," "No Cars Go" and "Reckoner" with nostalgia. When I say, "Hey, that sounds like 'Sparkle in the Rain,'" I mean it as a supreme compliment. That's probably why those dinks at Rolling Stone didn't want me as a freelancer.

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