The Scientoligist and The Southern Baptist

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#4 Beck- Sea Change vs #13 Violent Femmes- Add It Up (1981-1983)

An ongoing theme (meme? motif? pointless ramble?) of this exploration for me is the question of what is worth more...an album that is good beginning to end with few weak points but few standouts or an album that contains amazing tracks and tracks that get skipped everytime the come up. Of course, quantifying art, even art in the sense of track 10 on a cd, iis hard and often pointless, but thats what this whole thing is about, so it matters here. If half of an album is the best half an album ever, and the second half is forgettable, where does that album stand?

The Arguments: It should be noted at the outset that I love concept albums. Maybe its due to my fascination with the beatles and dabbling in jam and prog in high school (hang out with stoners, what do you expect? im not proud of it), but theres something about an album that is more than a collection of tracks, but tells a story or has a thread the listener can follow that appeals to my narrative-driven self. And Beck's Sea Change is a concept album. Written shortly after it happened, Sea Change is a 12 track exploration (and perhaps therapy session, if scientologists didn't hate therapy) of Beck's breakup with his finace. And its having that knowledge, having that lens, that makes the album something special. Sure, "The Golden Age" and "Guess I'm Doing Fine" are great tracks, and maybe its no great mystery what they're about even if you don't have that foreknowledge, but a simple lyric like "Put your hands on the wheel/Let the golden age begin" which opens the album certainly takes on quite a bit of added significance when heard as a line about a devastating breakup, rather than anything else. There's a cinematic quality, too, to this album...not only does it tell a story, but the album sounds like it belongs put to film, like it deserves beautfiul images to go along with the melodies (I once came up with an entire idea for a screenplay while listening to "It's All in Your Mind"). The songs are simple, beautiful, and heartbreaking, with "Guess I'm Doing Fine" occupying a keystone position on ever sad mix I've ever made. The problem is that while the first half of the album is mind-blowing, the second half, for me at least, drags a bit. The songs are good, but lose that magic the first tracks have, that wide open, heart-laid-bare, quality that Beck does so well when he wants. And that begs the question, if 7 tracks are amazing and 5 are okay, where does that rank?

Having Add It Up on this list at all feels a bit like cheating. After all, by definition, a "greatest hits album" should have a leg up on any other album, and is not composed in the same way. And maybe it is. But this is an album that I've gone through many phases with...never loving, but always there. It should be noted up front that I think "Blister in the Sun" is one of the worst songs the Femmes recorded, lacking any of the edge, politics, or early new-wave/folkpunk vibes that make these songs so great. at the same time, with the exception of "American Music", none of these songs is among my faves (and one of them is a song that I hated listening to so much I excised it from my ipod). The album is full of dark and funny takes on death, of others ("Country Death Song") and self-inflicted ("Out the Window), sex, with others ("Gimme the Car", "Black Girls" etc) and self-inflicted ("Blister in the Sun", yes, that's what its about) and politics ("I Hate the TV", "America Is...") and religion ("Jesus Walking on the Water"). What the Femmes paint for me is a vivid picture of Americana, not a happy one, but perhaps an accurate one ("American Music", the most upbeat song on the record, could serve as a thesis statment for the music). Listening to it now, I hear very clearly where the Femmes fall historically, somewhere between the Velvet Underground and the Talking Heads. They are great, and important, but in spite of all of that, the songs are never more than enjoyable to listen to. They don't move me the way that album up above does.

Score: Maybe 7 great songs is enough (and maybe a greatest hits album is a little bit cheating, even if its not greatest enough to win).

Sea Change d. Add It Up (1981-1983) 68-52

Representative Tracks:

You're Not Punk, and I'm Telling Everyone

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#8 The Get Up Kids- Four Minute Mile vs. #9 The Thermals- Fuckin' A


The year is 2000, and I've just returned to my hotel room from a Berkeley Tower Records with the new Smashing Pumpkins album Machina. Proud of my new purchase, I run into my roommate at this conference (MUN, natch), Matt Kaplan, who informs me he just found the greatest album ever made on 7". He is referring to Four Minute Mile, an album I've never heard of, by the Get Up Kids, a band I've never heard of. Rather than ask him for a listen, I scoff, probably mumble something about the Beatles, and slip my new CD into my discman. Machina, it should be noted, is terrible, and Kaplan later moved on to hardcore and straight edge, and then law school. I, on the other hand, moved muscially to a place where he wasn't so far off.

The Arguments: Four Minute Mile is not the greatest album ever made, but its is pretty excellent, and better than I remember. In the interest of full disclosure, (theres a pun in there somewhere) when my computer crashed last winter I had to re-rip all of my cds, and for some reason only half of 4MM made it back. So I hadn't heard it in a while. And it is great. While the Get Up Kids went on to make albums that meant more to me, were more "emo", and sucked more, this album is actually close to perfect. Perfect for shouting along to in the car, at shows, or moping along to on a bleak winter day. It reached its peak for me when I left for school, as it is (as much of GUPK early output is) lyrically often concerend with leaving home, leaving people, and relationships across a distance, but there haven't been many times in my life when something on this album wasn't resonant ("Shorty", maybe my least favorite song, was the anthem of a prolonged argument/falling out between my sometime-friend-sometime-arch-nemesis in high school, Sebastian Clark). While Matt Pryor certainly doesn't have the best voice around, and the recording isn't amazing, the sound is urgent and driving, the lyrics heartfelt and pithy at the same time ("I don't want you to love me anymore...than enough" was the first one that got me) and the album's overall arc is impressive, from the drive and angsty outpouring of the first couple of tracks through the slow burn of album closer "Michelle with one 'L'".

Fuckin' A opens with a track that my brother has called "the most punk song of all time" (and he should know). Of their three albums to date, Fuckin' A is the best example of The Thermals throw back punk/pop-punk...a scant 12 songs on an album totalling 27 minutes, but each packing quite the wallop...like a shot of concentrated rock (thats a terrible sentence). While there is nary a bad song on the album, and there are certainly standouts ("A Stare Like Yours") and I love their politics ("God and Country" is a great precursor to the anthemic message of The Body the Blood the Machine; the band refused to let Hummer use "It's Trivia" from their debut for a commercial), strangely, even 27 minutes is almost too much. It's not that the songs are bad or boring, its just that this album (and the one before it) stick pretty closely to a formula, driving guitar, swing drums, verse-chorus-verse and out, and it becomes repetitive and harder to hear the standouts as standouts. This is, unfortunately, mirrored in their live shows, which while fun and powerful (like the music) feature the band doing almost the exact same movements and patterns on every song. This album is perfect for my shuffle tendancies...any two or three songs at any given time are great, but as a coherent album leaves a little variety to be desired.

Score: A classic early emo (said completely unprejoratively) album takes down a great collection of songs by up and coming punks

Four Minute Mile d. Fuckin' A 86-53

Representative Tracks:

Old Guard vs New Guard

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#1 Revolver (The Beatles) vs #16 Palo Santo (Shearwater)

In what will undoubtedly be a recurring theme of this blog, this is a match up of the old vanguards of my music taste and the torchbearers of the new. The Beatles obviously need no introduction, other than to say they were my first favorite band and introduced me to rock music (no small task). Shearwater, which I discovered as a side project for current fave Okkervil River (whom they have since completely separated from), is a new love of mine, and it started with this album.

The Arugments: Palo Santo (which apparently is actually a concept album loosely based on the life of Nico (0f Velvet Underground and Nico fame) is the perfect album for being stuck in a cabin (or apartment) on a brutal winter day, and makes a surprisingly good companion to certain winter oriented fantasy novels I may or may not have been reading when I discovered it. With its string arrangments, imagery of wolves and unicorns, winter and storms, the band, led by multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Meiburg and his soaring voice, can sound positively medieval at times. The lyrics are erudite and dense, and while not always accessible always conjure haunting and evocative images to go along with the often strange melodies that can be expected from a band that features instruments from cellos to banjos to pipes, and who is anchored not by a drummer but a "percussionist". Its a great album with a number of great songs, and five years from now will undoubtedly mean even more to me.

Unfortunately, it draws a matchup against a band that probably means more to me than any other (with the possible exceptions of weezer and smashing pumpkins, but we'll get there). The problem I've always had with the Beatles is that while I have the utmost respect for their entire catalog (at least post Please Please Me) its always been a challenge picking out a favorite anything...no one song is so above the rest that it can be singled out, and while each album has a ton of classic tracks and wonderful experimentation and the fact that it is by the Beatles going for it, listening to Revolver again I was reminde how much of it I actually don't like. While the last half of Revolver (with the possible exception of Dr. Robert) is unimpeachable, the first half is hit or miss, with absolute classics (Eleanor Rigby) sharing space with what, by the Beatles standards, can only be considered duds (Taxman? please). Taken in context, Revolver deserves its ranking...both on my list, and on most professional "Best of All Time lists" where it consistently is in the top three, and often number 1. It was revelatory for me, as a pre-teen, and trying to imagine how it sounded in 1967, with songs that featured only strings (on a rock album!) a sitar, and closed with a track that I think is at least partly if not awfully responsible for much of psychadelia and (and perhaps even some techno) ("Tomorrow Never Knows") is nearly impossible...as even a dabbler in rock history, the one-two combination of this and Sgt Peppers later that year must have been like the advent of technicolor...it was like a whole different medium. There are also songs that I still love as songs..."For No One" is certainly one of my favorite tracks of all time, and again, the last handful of tracks featuring "And Your Bird Can Sing" and "I Want to Tell You" are just great.

Score: Revolver is good enough, and historical enough, to beat an upstart like Palo Santo, but not by as much as it should, and my overall level of enjoyment while listening through it again does not bode well for this number 1 seed to make it as far as it seems like it should.

Revolver d. Palo Santo 74-63

Representative Tracks:

The Real Deal

Now it begins.

Incidentally, I am not the only person who made a bracket on that website pitting albums against each other. Apparently its a popular thing to do. Who knew?

Anyway, we being our tournament, officially, in the New York Bracket (bottom left). The brackets, in clockwise order from New York, go New York, UK, Pacific Northwest, LA. The match-ups in the NY bracket are as follows:

The Beatles- Revolver (1)
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Shearwater- Palo Santo (16)

The Get Up Kids-Four Minute Mile (8)
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The Thermals- Fuckin' A (9)

Beck- Sea Change (4)
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The Violent Femmes- Add it Up (13)

Bear vs. Shark- Terrorhawk (6)
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Desaparecidos- Read Music/Speak Spanish (11)

The Mountain Goats- We Shall All Be Healed (3)
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Sublime-Sublime (14)

Harvey Danger- Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? (7)
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Wilco- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (10)

Elliott Smith-XO (2)
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Beck- Mutations (15)

First up: Revolver vs Palo Santo!

Preliminary Match: Who's Number 64?

Just like the NCAA, a little pre-tourney face-off for the right to face the overall number 1 seed in the first round. Today's matchup:

Badly Drawn Boy's Hour of the Bewilderbeast vs. Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights

The case: These albums are about as different as any two on the list...the former being a finely crafted pop record, the latter a dark homage to Joy Division and 80's new wave, and the torch bearer of, if not a genre in an of itself, then a new chapter in a genre's life. And while Turn on the Bright Lights has great atmosphere, innovation, and some truly brilliant songs (especially the final track "Leif Erikson" which, for my taste, showcases the bands strengths...brooding tone, haunting vocals, and lyrics that border between nonsense and genius) the edge in this match goes to Badly Drawn Boy (nee Damon Gough). The album's greatest strength is also one of its biggest weaknesses: Gough shows a knack for genre bouncing and manipulation, from the straight piano-and-a-guitar singer songwriter style (that one assumes is his baseline) of songs like "Pissing in the Wind" and "Epitaph" to funk on "Disillusion" to, well, hip-hopish beats on "Body Rap". But some forest is lost for all those trees...a brilliant, tightly crafted pop record is hidden amongst the overlong album's 18 tracks, and were it cut down to 12 it might lose some experimentation and ability to call back and cycle through themes, but it would gain a coherence and lack of filler that would make it truly great. Gough writes songs that can be sweet and funny at the same time, and the album is littered with little jokes (the splash at the end of "Fall in a River") and melodies that stick with you long after listening.

Score: In the Hour of the Bewilderbeast defeats Turn on the Brightlights 63-48

Representative Tracks:
Badly Drawn Boy- The Shining

Highlander

The question is simple: what is my favorite album of all time? like so many lists, not the best, not the most listened to, but favorite. Using unscientific criteria, I made a list 0f 65 albums, then ranked them, then seeded them a la March Madness. Each album will receive a full listen, be compared to whatever album its up against for the week, a score will be given (just like a basketball game!) and the winner will move on to the next round. Til the end. There can only be one.

Here's the bracket:

64 Album Showdown

Killer of Time

This blog exists because I am unemployed. If you have ever been unemployed, you know it leaves you with a lot of time on your hands.

This blog exists because I like music. And lists. And making lists about music. I thought of a project that is music and list related, and would kill time, and needed a place to put it. If you're reading this, welcome, please participate. If not, hopefully I'll get a job soon.


The premise: An NCAA style showdown of my favorite albums of all time. Why not just make a list? This takes longer (see above). Enjoy.