#53 - Beck's "Sea Change" (2002)

Like fellow genre-hoppers David Bowie and Prince, it isn't always clear where Beck's soul calls home.  Is he a mad dabbler, the jack of all trades and master of none?  Or is he a genuine polymath with no clear allegiances to any specific style or substance?  Such questions make it easy to commit one of two errors when listening to Sea Change.  The first would be to consider it a one-off, with no more of the man himself in it than he put into the tongue-in-cheek lounge sleaze of Midnite Vultures' "Debra."  But, if this album only means to send up or approximate sadness rather than convey the real thing, then Beck needs to quit his day job and start acting full-time.  The second misstep would be to think of Sea Change as a skeleton key to the one true Beck, a portal offering a fleeting glimpse into his psyche.  The latter path is probably the more perilous considering how many critics who thought Blood on the Tracks was the best breakup album of all time were stunned when Bob Dylan claimed the songs were instead based on the short stories of Anton Chekhov.  To me, more compelling than debates about the album's literal truth is the question of how its sound came to be.  Nigel Godrich's production is lush and soft, almost like it belongs on 70s AM radio.  Beck's voice is forlorn, even on tracks like "Sunday Sun" that hint at memories (or premonitions) of a life less hard.  To sustain this type of minor-chord melancholy without becoming morose requires a whole lot of talent and even more discretion.  Most remarkable, perhaps, is the extent to which the music is unclassifiable yet wholly "Beck," while still employing familiar structures and hinting at clear influences.  Just as there's something very punk rock about the three-chord strum and in-your-face morality of Woody Guthrie, so too is Sea Change a country album in spirit, if not sound.  One obvious historical touchstone for this type of full commitment would be The Velvet Underground's Loaded, which found Lou Reed creating polished pop rock mostly just to prove he could be commercially appealing if he really wanted to be.  With songs as strong as "The Golden Age," "Lost Cause," and "Lonesome Tears," the burden of proof has to be on this album's detractors.  If "country-tinged balladeer" is just one of the many hats Beck can wear, then it's an awfully good fit.  Grade: A

#46 - Elliott Smith's "Either/Or" (1997)

I love Bill Bryson.  Whether writing about the Appalachian Trail, the English language, or the sum total of our scientific discoveries to date, he has a real flare for making dry topics exciting.  More accurately, he specializes in framing a subject in such a manner as to make that which is most exciting in it reveal itself.  I also like his modesty as an author.  He knows when he's licked.  If there is content - like quantum theory or the boredom of arduous hiking - that by its very nature is either too vague or too tedious to be compelling, he doesn't force it.  Rather, the writing becomes a meditation on the difficulty of describing the indescribable or the nondescript.  And, because he's intelligent and funny, this works in a pinch to draw the reader back in.  I wish Bryson could ghost-write this review of Elliott Smith's Either/Or because I can't for the life of me find a single interesting thing to say about it.  It's not that it's bad exactly.  "Bad" can still provoke a response.  This is just bland, boring, by-the-numbers indie rock.  What Jack Black's character from High Fidelity might call "sad bastard music."  On the song "Rose Parade," when Smith sings, "They say it's a sight that's quite worth seeing / It's just that everyone's interest is stronger than mine / When they clean the streets, I'll be the only shit that's left behind," all I can think is "Oh, somebody just give this guy a hug and get him to shut the fuck up already."  Of course, Bill Bryson would've put it in a much wittier way.  I know Bill Bryson.  Bill Bryson is a fave of mine.  I am no Bill Bryson.  Grade: C-

#39 - Björk's "Debut" (1993)

björk  noun  \bē-'ork, byawrk\

1 : any of a variety of Icelandic songbirds celebrated for their distinctive tonal quality, yodel-like trills, ability to live in symbiosis with swans, and talent for mimicking human beings.  The björk sang at my windowsill, content mostly to observe "Human Behaviour," while occasionally imitating its mannerisms.  

2 : a liqueur distilled from refined Sugarcubes and treasured for its pleasantly intoxicating effects, which include mild hallucinations and an absolute freedom from stylistic inhibitions.  After downing a carafe of björk, I envisioned "Venus as a Boy" and became "Violently Happy."

3 : a clinical diagnostic term referring to a patient suffering from the rare psychological stresses associated with first being a child prodigy, going on to achieve consistent - yet unremarkable - success, and finally coming into one's own as a late-blooming Debutante.  By the time she was 29, many critics had written the björk off, wrongly assuming her best days were behind her.

Grade: B 

#38 - Guided By Voices' "Bee Thousand" (1994)

Crises in Non-Conformity, a Partial Timeline

1845 - Henry Thoreau, having lived at Walden less than a week, notices he has worn a path from his "door to the pond-side," and reflects, "how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves."

1975 - Writers for Lorne Michaels' Saturday Night Live, while attempting to create a show that subverts time-honored television standards & practices, come to find that the hardest thing to do when developing a skit that "breaks all the rules" is figuring out a way to end it.

1992 - Bob Dylan, ever the upstart, scorns modern recording technology and creates Good As I Been To You, an entire album of traditional folk song covers, in his garage.  Sometimes to move forward, you have to go back.

1994 - Guided By Voices releases Bee Thousand, a twenty-track album of hissy pop rock fragments, quite likely a necessary foil to the slick, bedizened production currently ruling FM radio.  Most bands who record in lo-fi do so for one of three reasons:

(1) it's all they can afford

(2) they enjoy the tinny, mashed-together sound

(3) they are being deliberately non-commercial

At one point or another in the career of Guided By Voices they subscribed to this scrappy aesthetic for all of these reasons.  The problem is that much of its effect derives from the way in which it purposefully alienates itself from its audience's expectations.  In other words, the novelty of a song that cuts out mid-lyric is entirely contingent on the belief that music should have recognizable structures with firmly delineated boundaries.  Likewise, by cultivating this contrarian perspective, you run the risk of substituting one kind of fundamentalist rigidity for another.  Once you don that rebel apparel, the mainstream garb becomes a bad fit and a worse look.  Ultimately, I think this album is a noble exercise in devil's advocacy, a gadfly to keep the music community honest.  There are funny lines and catchy hooks galore, even if they're embedded in texturally homogeneous songs that don't last long enough to imprint themselves on your memory.  I'm not sure if sticking to your indie principles is a goal worth continually sabotaging such promising ideas for, but GBV didn't ask me.  Grade: B-

#28 - Yo La Tengo's "I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One" (1997)

Allow me to get metaphysical for a moment. On a memorable episode of Futurama, the on-again, off-again cartoon from Simpsons creator Matt Groening, a robot named Bender is careening aimlessly through space when an entire civilization of miniature, human-like creatures evolves on his metal frame.  They worship him as a god.  But, despite his well-meaning attempts to do right by his tiny, pious payload, all of his intercessions on their behalf end in disaster.  Eventually he drifts near some kind of stellar cloud formation blinking in binary which we come to learn is not just a god, but perhaps the God.  His advice to the beleaguered Bender is to use a "light touch," explaining that "when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."  Listening to the consistent, quiet daring of I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One it's easy to see how someone might overlook just how good Yo La Tengo are at what they do.  The album isn't gimmicky or trendy in the way that so many others with shorter shelf lives are.  In fact, I would have been hard-pressed to locate this album chronologically on a time-line detailing the last 25 years of indie music.  The shoegaze numbers alone could sound at home in the neighborhood of either My Bloody Valentine's Loveless (1991) or The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (2009).  Over the course of its nearly 70-minute span, this album offers up a cohesive and gorgeous pastiche of reverb-heavy rock, noise pop, gently experimental instrumentals, and pulsing space-age jam sessions.  What's more, YLT does all of this with some seriously versatile musical chops without the result coming off like a high-minded exercise in genre tourism.  For more than twenty years, Yo La Tengo have never insisted.  They've cajoled.  And because they've never aimed a moonshot at the spotlight, despite being critical darlings, mainstream recognition eludes them.  It's true:  they may never sell out Madison Square Garden or play the Superbowl halftime show.  Some people might mistake such modest success for a lack of vision or a failure to catch their big break, as if they just can't seem to stop themselves from flying "below the radar."  As for me, I think that when you maintain a low profile, keep your head down, and "do things right," you are actually flying above it.  Grade: A-

#26 - Death Cab for Cutie's "Transatlanticism" (2003)

To date, Death Cab for Cutie's biggest hit, by a wide margin, is "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" from their 2005 album Plans.  It is, like many of Ben Gibbard's songs, a little bit cloying, a little bit precious, but also catchy as all get out.  Though not exactly Shakespeare, some of the lines are arresting.  Consider the following: "If heaven and hell decide that they both are satisfied, / illuminate the 'No's' on their vacancy signs, / if there's no one beside you as your soul embarks / then I will follow you into the dark."  It's a nice image and it makes for a palatable chorus.  Based on nothing else other than this song particle and Gibbard's collaboration on The Postal Service, I expected Transatlanticism to yield some decent lyrics and some good, melodic ear candy (my ear has a serious sweet tooth).  Well, speaking of Shakespeare, are you familiar with the "infinite monkey theorem" as it relates to statistics?  If not, here's the gist: if an infinite number of monkeys were able to type on an infinite number of typewriters given a long enough timeline, probability suggests that one of the monkeys at some point will eventually produce Hamlet.  To put it in layman's terms, the sun don't shine on the same dog's ass everyday, but sometimes things line up just right.  This is what popped in my head after wasting my time on this wildly overrated album.  Just because Gibbard & Co. have gotten lucky once or twice doesn't make them good musicians.  Turns out that what we have here is a whole lotta monkey typing.  In addition to the music, which consists of one hookless, mid-tempo ode to boredom after another, the lyrics are the worst kind of hackneyed and overwrought nonsense.  There's a lot of first person/present tense narration ("I roll the window down and begin to breathe in"), stupid metaphors ("your brain is the dam and I am the fish who can't reach the core"), trite imagery ("all I see are dark gray clouds"), repetition of lines that don't warrant a first mention ("I need you so much closer"...x12!), and - worst of all - meta-commentary on how the concept for the song came about ("and that's how this idea was drilled into my head").  As the album wore on, I thought things were looking up, but I was mistaken again.  The nearly 8-minute title track starts off with a promising chord progression and begins to build, but ultimately goes nowhere slowly.  "Passenger Seat" likewise sparks an interest before thoroughly disappointing.  Gibbard sings (in the first person present tense - surprise, surprise), "Then looking upwards, I strain my eyes and try / to tell the difference between shooting stars and satellites."  It's not even the best song I can think of wherein the protagonist mistakes satellites for shooting stars.  That would be "A New England" by Billy Bragg.  Nor is it the best song about being in the passenger seat.  That might be a tie between Wilco's "Passenger Side" and Iggy Pop's "The Passenger."  If I end up reviewing many more albums like this over the course of the year, I may be hiring some monkeys to do some typing for me.  Grade: D+