# 109 - Meat Puppets - Up On the Sun

I have totally let this thing go. It's taken an entire eight week term, followed by two whole weeks at home, admittedly during which I have been doing a day job, to get together the resolve to actually finish the blog. And I write this first paragraph now wondering whether I'll have to rewrite it again, like I did two weeks ago to account for a hiatus of merely eight weeks from the Saturday on which, full of optimism and with no essay to do my fingers first hit keyboard, having actually ordered the album so it would arrive at college at the same time I did. I blame alluc.org (instead of myself, of course), which I can't seem to leave alone when I'm on the computer, but also the ability of work to fill every remaining minute of my waking hours. I really want to get involved in some sport as well, and I think joining a team would be really good for helping to shed that pesky loner status, but I just can't see myself finding the time.

* * *

Aaaaaand here we are again. It’s now Boxing Day. Although I’m not going to rewrite the paragraph above and instead let it stand as a lasting testament to my slovenliness and indiscipline, I will finish the entry. I was going to skip over Up On The Sun with a brief paragraph saying it was really good (it really is – more below) and that I’m tired of being stuck on it then go on to one of the other CDs I’ve bought since the beginning of last term, but I have even less of a clue about what to write about those, so I think I’ll sweat it out.


The previously mentioned overall goodness of Up On The Sun is probably a place to start. A review of almost any band after punk inevitably details the older influences of that band, such as Big Star for Teenage Fanclub and Neil Young for Dinosaur Jr, and I'd say that a lot of newer bands are usually better than their older influences. I’m not saying ‘all/almost all bands from the ‘80s and 90s are better than their 60s and 70s influences’ or ‘pop music is getting better as time goes on’, because I don’t know enough about music to make such a bold statement (that would make me some of crazy internet-based blowhard!). Is professing a preference for skill and innovation over raw originality in music pathetically apt for describing the basis of one’s preference for interior designers? Maybe it would be, but those are my personal criteria and if you think that makes you better than me then fuck you. Maybe I don't care so much about originality because of my relative inexperience with music and because only on a couple of occasions have I been annoyed at a lack of originality in a song, but I think that the disparity in musical knowledge within the audience of the average music journo means that no good one will ever resort to the word ‘derivative’ to put down an artist. All of this should tell you that I don’t mind a bit that Up On The Sun sacrafices originality to draw on vaguely folkish 60s hippie music, but that I love how the Meat Puppets can synthesise these influences into a brilliant album in a way that is both skillful and innovative.

The best example of this is the first track and title track. It is completely brilliant, one of those songs that just seems totally, effortlessly and uncannily right on every possible level from the first note onwards. Only this song could take opening lines like:

A long time ago

I turned to myself

And said, "you are my daughter"

and make them sound like a call from the deepest part of the heart. As it happens, one of the three old reviews dredged up for the reissue liner notes does a good job at describing why this, on one level a pretty weird statement, fits in so well with every other perfectly interlocking part of such a song: "[Is it] psychedelic? It is, in the best sense of the word, in a way that really does have something to do with heightened perception and not merely a nostalgic reference to a two decade old style."

At first I thought that the other songs on the album were vastly inferior to the first, and that this was just a great song on a mediocre album. I was therefore happy to come to my senses and find a varied crop of songs, from the lackadaisical and chiming 'Hot Pink', to the Madness-esque 'Buckethead'; 'Too Real', railing against small-town small-mindedness, and the darkness-into-light 'Two Rivers'. Curt Kirkwood's guitar, as in II, defines the texture and flavour of Up On The Sun and its style is critically shifted from that of II. Instead of trying to describe said critical shift by cramming metaphor after elaborate metaphor into my sentence structures like Elvis into a jumpsuit (that was a similie, didn't count) as I normally would, I'm just going to make a handy list:


1) From a water boatman to a sea snake
2) From a ballerina to a figure skater
3) From a mirror ball to a laser light show
4) From pins and needles to a headrush
5) From wind chimes to Tibetan gongs

The liner notes offer their own explanation for this transition. Apparently the band had attempted a home recording, taking all the time they needed to use their outmoded 8-track to its full psychedelic potential. This approach fell through when the tape turned out to be incompatible with any other machines, and so the band had to tighten up their arrangements in order to get the album recorded within restricted studio time. The Kirkwood brothers are thus more fluent in their chosen languages, with stronger and more confident lines of melody. Derrick Bostrom is, unfortunately, still the world's most workmanlike drummer, laying the same old basic beat behind almost every song (except on Up On The Sun, of course, where the nimble cymbal taps melt delicately in mid-air).

OK, well that’s it. In the end I stuck together bits that I’ve written tonight and bits that I wrote over the last couple of weeks. I didn’t exactly grit my teeth and write an all new and properly coherent blog, but it’s late and I just want to get it out, hence the lack of proper ending.

# 108 - The Replacements - Stink

I bought this on Saturday from the record and CD fair held in Oxford Town Hall, from the same guy, in fact, who sold me Let It Be (also by the Replacements, not the Beatles) about nine months ago. Briefly talking to him, I discovered that he's a fan of the band as well, so I was going to say that it's good that he stocks something relatively obscure for no other reason that he likes it and thinks other people should hear it, but it turns out Stink is available on Amazon and Play.com and probably on the high street too, so maybe it's not as unpopular as I thought it was and maybe he's not as rugged an individualist for carrying the Replacement's music. Still, he was an actual human being who feels the same way about a band as I do, so I'm a bit pissed off that I didn't have a longer conversation with him.

There isn't much on this CD that breaks out the punk paradigm enough to resemble anything like, say, Sixteen Blue from Let It Be, with the exception of one track; Go, which is like a very short classic rock song, but with the rough edges left on so that it might all the better snag your heart and pull along with it up into the sky. Bob Stinson's guitar sounds brilliant on this song and on others like Kid's Don't Follow (featuring an apparently real recording of the police dispersing reluctant partygoers), Stuck In The Middle and God Damn Job, especially since he is more to the foreground than multi-instrumentalist singer Paul Westerberg on this album, which is a pure guitar album (with the exception of the crucial addition of a harmonica to the crypto-blues of White And Lazy), than he would be on Let It Be. Westerberg, for his part, manages to display his vocal talents amply here, even when doing the shoutier vocals, which might conceal it.

Because of time restraints I chose to do Stink, which at about 15 minutes long some call an EP and some call a mini-LP, this week and to do the other, longer album I have to write up later. Being back at uni, I now no longer have the luxury of spending 7 hours half writing the blog and half watching stuff on tv-links.co.uk, so this was more of a concentrated 80 minute effort and I hope the brevity of it will be excused.

# 107 - Led Zeppelin - VI

So this is the last of the Cambridge Three. I've got two more albums lined up though, so fear not reader, should you actually exist. Am I right in thinking that, without any links leading to this site, no Google search will actually find it? Never mind though, after I build a colossal empire of withering criticism, you faithful few/none who read this when it first gets posted will be able to say that you 'read him before he got big'. Actually, the lack of withering criticism that may be apparent on this blog is due to the obvious fact that I don't buy music I don't like just to trash it; especially when considering that at roughly an album a week I would spend about £500 a year on this blog, assuming I'm that committed and honest enough to pay for it, so I don't want to end up with a load of albums that I don't like. So many critcs, mostly in the NME, feel the need to prove, presumably to themselves, that they are qualified to write up one band by, as a snarky little aside, sticking a knife into another less favoured band in the same article. Music criticism, as implied in the name, should define what's bad from what's good; but that's just insecure bitchiness.

So what can I say about this, an album that's 37 years old and has sold more than 30 million copies? Obviously I'm not going to try to add to the critical pantheon; that would be stupid. I bought this album really to take back to uni because it's got the highest concentration of my favourite songs on it from my Dad's copy of Early Days/Latter Days (Black Dog, Rock And Roll, Stairway To Heaven, When The Levee Breaks, plus The Battle Of Evermore, which I don't really like). Why buy an album that you could just copy the best bits of? Considering that, to be honest, even the greatest hits has some crap on it, why take a chance on three unknown album tracks? I suppose I've always wanted to own this album because it's just a cool album to have. Shallow and materialistic I know, but there's the truth of it. I suppose the passage of time and homage payed by grunge bands has severed the group's music from all their biographical baggage (crazy debauchery, Aleister Crowley etc.) and made them, maybe not hip, but non-hippy and just pure rock, so that you can feel comfortable listening to them if you don't give a fuck about Lord Of The Rings. As an example of this, there's a Facebook group I've joined called Since When Did Indie Rock Refer To Pussies Afraid Of Amps?, which pillories the current lack of interesting and compelling electric indie rock in comparison to 15-20 years ago, when Sonic Youth, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr et al. were at their zenith. To close off the statement describing his group, creator Paul Haney writes a wickedly straightforward snub to the Pitchfork crowd: 'Led Zeppelin is better than your favourite band and always will be.'


The cover art is great though, isn't it? If you were going buy an album for aesthetics alone, this would really rate highly. People think of Led Zep as this really mystical, weird band, but it's only a couple of photos taken from inside a half-demolished house. Wistful, austere, a beautiful picture of urban decay; but not mad or Tolkienesque or anything, though I suppose it is the exception to both the rest of the album's artwork and that of a lot of the other albums though. And of those three songs, Misty Mountain Hop and Four Sticks are good and Going To California is really quite beautiful, stretching the boundaries of acoustic rock even by today's standards. I especially like the line about him smoking his stuff and drinking all his wine. And When The Levee Breaks kicks arse more than anything else in the world, despite it being the most inapropriate song to play in New Orleans since, I don't know, Riders On The Storm. I think I got my eight quid's worth here.

Apologies for the fragmented nature of this post. I guess I don't have enough time to order it all properly because I'm going to ITALY TOMORROW!!! Yessss!

# 106 - The Upsetters - Super Ape

How to review your first dub album - assume you know nothing about dub. This is unfamiliar territory for me, like Case up on the Rastafarian space station in William Gibson's (sublime) Neuromancer:

It was called Dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community.

This album is sensuous. I'm not sure about worship or community, though. In fact the impression I get is quite the opposite. The funny thing about this album is that all the musicians sound totally disconnected from one another, as if each of them was sitting by his or herself in a cupboard somewhere, singlemindedly playing or singing their own little part over and over again until it was totally perfect, like musical automata without the computational capacity to conceive of that singular task being part of a track on an album somewhere. The fact that it all hangs so well together as this tapestry of disparate and splendid parts is what makes the sound of this album so appealing to me.

I knew about this album before I found it and bought it on impulse through an article in Mojo about Lee Perry and his Black Ark studio, where this album was presumably recorded. The article goes into details on his complex, intense and freeform religious convictions, including a personal genie called Eenie Meanie Tekel. Hypothetically, if I met Lee Perry in the street (a street in Switzerland now, apparently), could we have a good old hypothetical chat about Super Ape? My own spirituality - that is to say a non-spirituality, being as I am more or less an atheist - would surely be incompatible with his. Would it be a more worthwhile conversation if I claimed to believe in the same things? I don't think it would. People who listen to music from different cultures and assume they are partway assimilating themselves into those cultures are mistaken. Sure, cultural differences between two people can be bridged by mutual understanding, but it doesn't follow that you automatically become connected to a person or people by exploring their culture. A person who tries to bridge boundaries of nationality, class, race or religion by doing this comprehends people by making rigidly inaccurate mental models of them, instead of engaging them as individuals with their own ideas and thoughts; as equals, in other words. Whatever else Perry believes, he must surely, like everyone else, believe in himself as an individual personality, and not just his own culture and spirituality made flesh. It's what we all have in common that's more important. I think that if you hypothetically met most musicians from anywhere in the world on the street they'd be happier that, instead of having to immerse yourself in their culture in either its more superficial (clothes, hair, drugs) or profound (philosopy, religion) forms in order to feel an affinity with their music, you liked the music they had made well enough with their own creative ideas for it to appeal to you from across cultural boundaries by simply being good music on anyone's terms. I've never really listened to anything outside of pop and its derivatives before, but I enjoyed this album. There was stuff in it I'd never heard before, and that's enough for me.

# 105 - Meat Puppets - II

There already might be an indie-ey theme developing around this blog, and I hope to redress that with the other two albums I bought in Cambridge on Saturday, so hang on. I can't believe I had to go all the way there to physically shop for music, though admittedly I could have gone to Ipswich, which is less than half the distance in the opposite direction, but I don't know it. I really, really miss Fopp. Easily the best thing to arrive in Bury in, say, 20 years, it had the unfortunate effect of putting the town's inferior but still decent music retailing incumbent out of business before it folded six months later, so off to Cambridge I went. Luckily Jolly (James Oliver-Smith, plus he's the sort of person who might say jolly!, though he never does) wanted to come too and had a car to drive us. By the way, if you're planning to see Run Fatboy, Run, it is incredibly average.

This was a reissue, with seven extra tracks tacked on to the original 1984 release. Oddly, it's the extra tracks that toy with normality and established genre music: vocal harmonies on a cover of What To Do by the Stones, funk on I'm Not Here and punk rock in the first half of Teenager. As the sleeve notes, two live reviews by contemporary journalists and a piece comissioned for the reissue by indie music writer Michael Azzerad, make clear, it's the stuff that made the cut that's out of the ordinary. While Curt Kirkwood, the album's sole songwriter, is credited with bringing in diffuse older influences, namely country, bluegrass, Tex-Mex and the Grateful Dead (Azzerad's words not mine - I was under the impression that Tex-Mex is a kind of food), his songs are so much more than an amalgamation of tastefully unfashionable influences. His guitar work is brilliant. It's exploratory but not really experimental, because having to be experimental would be too much like following the rules for this guy. It goes all over, always searching, sometimes in familiar places and sometimes not; it feels like the guitar is everywhere around you at once and that it's somehow evocative of things that you've never experienced. There's psychedelic car chase music in Magic Toy Missing and in We're Here there's a song that sounds like people waltzing under a beautiful night sky. If stars talked to the stargazer rather than just gazing back, the result would be Aurora Borealis. If a man plodding through the desert to his death with vultures circling overhead was plucked at the last moment to safety by a friendly bird of prey, he would remember the experience through the haze of heatstroke as Plateau. Listening to this album might give you cause to think I'm talking rubbish about it, but I am sure that by then it would have imbued in you visions that were different but just as special as mine.

But here's the thing. Although Curt Kirkwood's unpolished voice, with its '"free-associative tone control"', fits well on the quiet tracks, on the louder Lake Of Fire it sticks out like a sore thumb, especially along with the pseudo-Biblical lyrics, which would be done sooo much better by Black Francis in a few years time. So there's a fly in the ointment there. Chris Kirkwood is a decent bassist, but the real problem is that Derrick Bostrom really lets the side down with his drumming. His constant and unchanging beat might seem like a solid foundation, but songs like this are houses built on sand - they only last so long before you get fed up with them and they crumble. There's a theory I have about why people get bored of the music they at first love. When we listen to a song and like it, our minds pick out the best bits; be they be a riff, the way the singer's voice sounds or the propulsiveness of the rhythm section; and bring them to the surface of the music, neglecting everything else. After repeated listens, though, every element of the song is heard, and that's when the annoying niggles come to the surface, a monotonous drum beat, say, and cause the listener to cast the CD into a dusty corner and renounce all love or knowledge of it. Songwriters: it doesn't matter how good that special touch is, if there's a chink in your song's armour it is living on borrowed time. I've had Meat Puppets II for four days; in four months I might hate it. But 'tis better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.

# 104 - The Jesus Lizard - Liar

What an album to start with! To make rather unoriginal use of an extended metaphor, imagine Surfer Rosa as a male-to-female transsexual weightlifter, coming off the steroids and growing big bitch tits because of it. Muscularly powerful but totally precise, the songs have these exhilarating, pounding rhythms laced with white hot guitar lines that drive through the brain, scouring it of the day-to-day crud of mundanity. That Yow's somewhat onomatopaeic singing resembles Black Francis' in no way reduces the slice of yowly originality he carves out with it. You do well to recognise the name of the song you're listening to in its vocals, but a leaf through the lyric sheets finds typical Albini-pack filth and degradation. I'm not necessarily saying they're derivative, but that's not really important. Like the best rock music, the vocals are only a particularly psychologically potent part of the instrumentation. This is a real headphone album. I find that concentrating on the origin of the sound from when you listen to music with phones on has the cool effect of placing is it inside your head. Which is where Liar should be. In your mind.

According to some indie survivor on Amazon's review page, Puss from this album was put on a double single with Oh, The Guilt by Nirvana. Depending on your point of view but in the best possible way in either case, Puss is the song that most resembles Nirvana or Nirvana resembles the song Puss most. The other jewel in the crown is Boilermaker, with an agression that just keeps ratcheting the song up until it dissolves into an acidic guitar solo. Gladiator is equally driving and pugnacious, The Art Of Self-Defense has got this cool electric gargling, Whirl has gorgeous guitars that threaten to overpower the bottom-of-the-well vocals. Like the Stooges on Dirt, they can also slow it all down to even more devastating effect, as on Zachariah. There is no song here that has nothing going for it. Even the dirge Slave Ship and the dumb punk Rope sound brilliant in the hands of these amazing musicians.