Dillinger Four - More Songs About Girlfriends and Bubblegum (1997)

Dag, yo. I guess I was sixteen when I first heard Dillinger Four and although at first I couldn't stand the singer who my friend said "sounded like a fucking girl" in-between choices like Fenix TX and Showoff in his car, this band gradually changed my life. Every aspect about that first record not only grew on me, but changed my opinion on the matter at hand. For example, at first I thought "man, this record sounds funny." At this point, I think all records should sound like Dillinger Four records. They sound perfect. At first I thought "man, those guys don't sing so good" and now I think people should only sing exactly like that, and bands that try to can't pull it off.

I guess the most interesting (read: uninteresting) thing about my discovery of what punk rock could be is that while Midwestern Songs... did completely change my life, this 7" is what made me realize what a great band Dillinger Four really was. If it was still available, I would suggest everyone listen to it as a crash course in the band. Like a real punk band, they cram two songs onto each side. One side is sung by Paddy, who if you're unfamiliar sounds like a bear who has been up all night drinking and smoking. The other side is sung by Erik, who if you're unfamiliar sounds like a tenor choirboy who has been up all night drinking and smoking. On this record in particular, his voice sounds at it's best - more pop-punk than squealy, more Billie Joe than "a fucking girl." The guitars, basses and drums sound like they've been bombed by an analog tape squadron and they explode just off-time enough to make it feel like it's real people playing the best rock and roll you've ever heard.

Dillinger Four makes a lot of astute points about politics, economy, social stereotypes and religion on this 7" without ever feeling like they're telling you what to do with your life, and fuck, man... at this point in my life it was about time I heard a band talk about things that were important to me without being dicks about it. There is a ton of this now, but I feel like in the mid-90's it was very hard to find a good punk band that wasn't either sucking the teat of major labels or so anti-establishment that they lost the idea that punk is about connecting with the disaffected youth, not alienating them even further.

And this is why Dillinger Four are the proper heirs to Minneapolis wunderkind the Replacements. The four songs on this record, despite all that was mentioned before, are four perfect pop songs. Like the Replacements, their live shows can be train wrecks, on record they still sound like they could fly off the rails at any second and they can tackle heavy subjects like your friends at the bar instead of like your professors. And like the Replacements, they really don't sound like anything that came before it, which is ironic because there are a ton of bands that are trying to do the Replacements thing now and completely failing. I guess the problem is that their trying, and people who are as ahead of their time as Dillinger Four was in 1997 just kinda do it.

It's also worth mentioning that this was one of the very first 7"s I ever bought and I'm very sad to say that I can't find it anywhere now. Even sadder is that a 7" I bought around the same time turned up out of nowhere the other day, and that was the Social Climber 7" by Civ. Sometimes life ain't fair.

The Replacements - Pleased To Meet Me (1987)

I don't think there's too many bands that have moved up to a major label from an indie that have done it as well as the Replacements (Nirvana, Green Day, i don't know, maybe the Blood Brothers?) That's kind of remarkable considering how overproduced all of the Replacements' major-label records sound - that 80's new-wave or major-label punk sound. Ugh. This record is no exception with Jim Dickinson attempting to EQ all of the heart out of everything.

But the song are SOOOOOOO good. I remember I used to hate this record because I thought I was supposed to hate it. No Bob Stinson, man. Come on. My friend Joe from the Hot New Mexicans alerted me that this was a classic record, and while it might not be Let it Be or Tim it comes pretty damn close. In fact, there is an urgency here that was lacking on much of Tim, with the opening track jumping out at ya and tackling ya to the ground and the poppy rasp of "Never Mind" making drinking sound fuckin' important maaaaan.

It's also got one of the Replacements defining moments, "Alex Chilton." What can you say about a band who writes a pop song, a SINGLE, as an ode to a musician who never quite make it that they admire, all for a major label, for MTV. As they say in the next song, it was nice that The Replacements kept "one foot in the door, the other foot in the gutter." Even if the Replacements weren't the equivalent of our worst drunken selves playing rock and roll, the music here is so good and also varied. This record takes a lot of the experimenting on Hootenany and makes them ALL real songs. The quieter songs "Skyway" and "Can't Hardly Wait" are especially good on this record. I guess the real funny thing about this Replacements is that at most people will attest that this is their third best record. "Nightclub Jitters" and "The Ledge" kinda take it off course for a bit, but if they didn't go of course they wouldn't be the Replacements, yeah?

Electric Light Orchestra - Eldorado (1974)

sorry, i snoozed on this one yesterday... what are ya gonna do.

This past year I got turned onto Electric Light Orchestra because of a Greatest Hits CD in the jukebox at work (The Essential Electric Light Orchestra to be specific.) What I didn't realize was how many amazing songs this band had written that I already knew but had no idea it was ELO. The best way to describe ELO is if the Beatles decided to stay together, keep making records, get an orchestra and focus largely on being from the future. On a recent van trip, my friend Matt and I decided that we kinda like ELO even a little more than the Beatles.

I've been doing my best to dig in on some albums by this band after listening to that "essentials" collection on repeat for four months straight, and the plus side to this is that a lot of people don't give too much of a shit about ELO so it's easy to find their records pretty cheap at thrift stores and record shops. This is the second ELO album I bought (only four bucks!) and apparently this is the record when they went from being an okay cheesy rock band to their expansive sound that they stuck with for years. By "expansive" I mean they added an orchestra and started making arrangements that are completely fucking ridiculous.

This album starts off with "Eldorado Overture", a cinematic classical piece made for a rock band with a full orchestra. The themes of this song come up throughout the record with the Bach-esque introduction to "Boy Blue" up until "Eldorado Finale" which transcends the melodies into an elaborate fanfare bringing everything back around. The songs in between follow the concept of someone who escapes into a fantasy dream world because reality is boring. Apparently.

This far out story line and baroque leanings doesn't stop Electric Light Orchestra from being extremely accessible on their first record with a full-realized lineup (including a fucking choir! yeah?) as slow jams like "Can't Get It Out Of My Head" and rockers like "Boy Blue" will remain with you for days, and the funky "Laredo Tornado" follows them up nicely. The record loses some steam at the beginning of side two, but the title track closes out the record quite strongly as it is one of the best tracks.

The amount of styles represented by Electric Light Orchestra on this record is mountainous and Electric Light Orchestra flows in and out of them so effortlessly it is a wonder why they aren't more recognized as one of the most important and best bands of all time. I guess in part it might be because nobody has ever really attempted to match the complicated arrangements on this record except ELO on future records (and maybe Queen.) It might also be because ELO's later records failed to capture the same ingenuity as this era, perhaps due to a number of line-up changes, loss of strings in lieu of synthesizers or the ugly ELO Part II that didn't even have main songwriter Jeff Lynne. Fuck it, though. Don't care. They thankfully left enough great records to keep me busy hunting at thrift stores for a while.

Blink-182 - S/T (2003)

This is one of my least favorite albums of all time, and it is also by one of my favorite guilty pleasure bands of all time. Everyone talks about their growth in this album but during that growth, they've lost the ability to write a song that is enjoyable to listen to. We put this on in the van yesterday and it was torture to get through it. Let's talk about singles, okay? Do you remember the first time you heard "Feeling This"? I mean, I remember turning it up and laughing for hours and hours and hours. Hearing snotty white-boy faux-rap on top of painfully forced production, all eventually leading to a chorus that contains the same exact four chords of every other Blink-182 song (proving that they haven't REALLY progressed) and then a poorly exectured "Goodbye Sky Harbor" by Jimmy Eat World-style ending. Granted, the song still brings me joy, but I feel like it is for the wrong reasons. "Miss You" can't do the same, as once again Tom's over the top pronunciation takes away from the potential of the vocal melodies. I guess. Mark's not doing too well either, singing at the bottom of his range sounding as if he is bored and asleep.

Oh, by the way, did you know that Travis Barker can play the drums really well? Because he shows you at every single second of this record instead of ever exchanging his bullshit fills and "creative rhythms" for some fucking subtlety. We don't need to be assaulted with a million drums like we're idiots, dude. Someone told me that Travis just spent a few days giving Blink-182 a bunch of beats to use on this record and they cut them up wrote their songs around them. Yawn.

Where a lot of people say that Blink-182 progressed, I feel like sometimes progression is unnecessary. Do we really need cell phones that have special Lost footage on it? Or that can download rare AC/DC tracks and wallpaper. NO. We just need to get in touch with each other. Blink-182 have expanded on their songwriting mostly by adding what seems like a fifth chord to their repertoire of four, and in tracks like "Obvious" and "Stockholm Syndrome" it seems like they don't know how to use this new chord to their advantage, to bolster the forward momentum of the songs and keep it interesting. This is a bummer, because you can tell that they WANT to make it interesting, they just get so lost in it that this record becomes a bunch of bland textures, like a million shades of grey. Robert Smith's appearance is atrocious by the way as is their experiments with dub music.

So I guess the question is why do all reviewers think that a band abandoning the thing that they're good at to do half-assed versions of what other bands do better is "maturing." Easily the best song on this record is "Go" which is less than two-minutes long, is a straight forward pop-punk jam, but mostly abandons chords in the verse for single notes on the guitar and has really poignant lyrics about domestic violence. THAT is a natural progression for Blink and seems like one of their best songs ever. A lot of the production choices on this record are pretty cool too, but it just doesn't make sense. Maybe if the new directions they were going in harnessed the fun that really represented Blink instead of such a drab setting, the production could shine in the way it clearly wants to. A band really does have the right to not give a shit about what anyone thinks of their record, but I believe that maturing is acknowledging that while embracing your natural talents as musicians: even if that natural talent is to make very minimal song structures strong and unique while telling dick and fart jokes.

Andrew W.K. - The Wolf (2003)

Look, ya'll. Andrew W.K. is a fucking genius. That's all there is to it. He is simultaneously making music for the masses as well as for the very select few. He talks about partying as a state-of-being, not about doing drugs and drinking. He is the most singular artist of our generation meanwhile all of his albums represent significant growth and change. He is both a dumb celebrity and a brilliant icon of our times. Fuck yeah.

On this record, Andrew W.K. has slowed the tempo down a little bit and started embracing his inner Jim Steinham as every piano part and guitar solo soars through the air like a eagle of rock. This was really offputting at first as I have heard this album described by friends as a "gay ice capades meets metal and I don't like it" but I think that this is the record that made a lot of Andrew W.K. fans notice that something bigger was going on than just a guy who said "party" a lot. From the tribal chant of "Make Sex" to the orchestral beginning of "Never Let Down", this record subtly expands on the "every instrument all the time" sound of I Get Wet by adding more instruments all the time. The lyrics also reach an even greater point of absurdity such as "you / you live alone / and i do too / I really really really really want you" and "don't ever stop the song / you can never stop, singing your song / singing it loud and you're singing it long / and you can never stop / no, never stop, the song."

I think my favorite moments on this record are where the songs do COMPLETE ABOUT FACES within less than a minute of the song starting. For example, "Never Let Down" starts out with heavy orchestral pounding before immediately changing to a metal power ballad and "I Love Music" starts out with solo piano before changing key, tempo and instrumentation to become 1980's end-of-movie-credits music mid-verse! And it all ends with Andrew W.K. saying "Victory Strikes Again!" which is the name of track number one on this record, bringing it back around full circle. FUCKING GENIUS. Most people stopped their Andrew W.K. collections at I Get Wet and that is a shame because while there is no party rocker like that record, each record gets more and more ridiculous. Missing out on The Wolf is like missing out of The Royal Tennenbaums because it had different characters than Rushmore and to that I would say "fuck you."

The World/Inferno Friendship Society - Speak of Brave Men EP (2004)

Man, if there's any unsung heroes of underground punk rock it is The World/Inferno Friendship Society. I must have seen them two or three dozen times in the early aughts, and every time was almost like a religious experience. They have this rare thing where they pretty much have a cult who follows them around, but that cult doesn't ruin it for the people who want to just watch this incredible band live. They were the first band I ever saw that had all their albums available on the internet for free. I interviewed them for a radio show and they gave me a copy of their record "Just the Best Party" about a year before it came out and told me to spread it all over the place on the internet. My old band broke up and a show offer with them caused us to get back together for about three or four years. They incorporated a million members, glockenspiels, a horn section that wasn't playing ska, fire-breathing, tons of percussion and an element of drunkenness that was more friendly than sloppy. No matter how hard I would try to do things like this with my current band, I think we will always feel like a poorly executed World/Inferno Friendship Society to me.

After a while of hearing the same songs however, (not to mention going to the Halloween shows to find them never living up to the one show where Jack led a pumpkin effigy into the streets of Brooklyn, stood on top of two dumpsters, lit it on fire and started spitting fire at it at two in the morning when the cops finally showed up and chased us all away all while playing "Ich Bin Ein Weimar (sic)") I for some stupid reason lost touch with seeing this band every time they came into town. The Speak of Brave Men EP was the first thing I heard from these guys in about three years and nothing has changed really, except for the better. These songs were new (yay!) and for a change you could hear the guitar well on the songs (as it was recorded with glossy All American Rejects producer Tim O' Heir.) It is just three songs, but the quality of all these songs is fucking staggering. It is surprising that this band isn't as big as Gogol Bordello or the Dresden Dolls, it seems like they've been doing the cabaret punk thing forever and as well if not better than everybody else. These three songs would later end up on Red Eyed Soul which was their first full length in a really fucking long time. Then they released another full-length a year after that and went on tour with Against Me! It's good to have this band back in my life.