Isolation

Pet Sounds
The Beach Boys, 1966

[I'm getting serious about doing some more music writing, so hopefully there will be some regular posting here in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!]

Let me start by saying that this is one of those big important landmark pop albums that I just never listened to. I should make a list of those one day, actually. I picked up a copy last week, and I've listened to it intently ten or twelve times now. Normally, I haven't written here about records that I don't have some history with, but I'm going to break that rule now, because I have something important to say about this album that I haven't seen written anywhere else:

Pet Sounds is a sad, sad, sad, sad record. Maybe the most melancholy I've ever heard.

It's quite excellent, don't get me wrong, but not for the reasons I usually like popular music. There is no groove here - it's not funky, doesn't swing, doesn't rock, has no grit or grease whatsoever (OK, the cover of "Sloop John B" doesn't completely obliterate its calypso roots, and "Here Today" has a rocking feel to it, but that's about it). It's solidly in the midcentury definition of popular song recordings. We tend to skew the 1960s towards rock, soul, and folk music in our generational imaginations, but looking at the top 40 charts for the year Pet Sounds was released, I see hits by Petula Clark, Herb Alpert, the Ray Conniff Singers, Frank Sinatra, etc. That's the tradition that this album belongs to, really.

But it goes beyond that, because there's no strong personality behind the microphone either. The singing is only fleetingly self-expressive, instead opting for a clean (if adolescent) vocal style. No singer puts a real signature on any performance. I think we can consider this a recording of compositions by Brian Wilson, much like a recording of compositions by, say, Heinrich Schütz. We're supposed to hear the composer more than the performer here.

Much has been written about all the studio trickery and experimentation that went into recording this album, and rightly so. Here's an essentially self-taught kid from Hawthorne, California, with a big sonic palette in his head, achieving really amazing results by knob-twiddling in the studio. He's obviously got a pretty masterful ear, which is why I am certain that the overall sadness of this album was a desired goal.

You see, the real sadness comes from the way the vocal tracks are isolated. In every single song, the lead singer sounds like he is alone in an empty room, unable to truly connect with the rest of the music. It's as if the vocalist is in a constant state of lonely yearning, reaching in vain for meaningful contact with the rest of the world. This can't be accidental - the vocal parts are in a very different sound-space from the accompaniment (with a big wet reverb, among other things), and somehow the fact that it's in mono instead of stereo only emphasizes this more.

It's fitting, since so many of the lyrics are about longing and wishing, or other kinds of subjunctive mood (see "Wouldn't It Be Nice," "God Only Knows," "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times," etc.). When listening, I thought that my maudlin response to "Wouldn't It Be Nice" was preconditioned by how it was used in the film Roger and Me, but upon further listening, it's all right there in the music and the production. I mean, it's actually got a bridge with a slower tempo, plus all that flipping back and forth between chest voice and ethereal falsetto, as if trying to bridge some gap between the current state and the desired one. Performed and recorded differently, this might have been a happy-go-lucky chugging little ditty, but what's on record is at the very least bittersweet and at the most darkly pessimistic.

Getting back to my point about listening to the composer: the melody of the chorus for "God Only Knows" has a very satisfying shape, spun out into some effective counterpoint, and nice modally-inflected harmonic motion, contrasting the more chromatic and dramatic structure of the harmony in the verses. The most fascinating song for me, though, is "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)," which falls into the very small category of songs I can't believe anyone ever thought could be on a popular record in a million years. It doesn't do any of the things that commercially-successful songs are supposed to do, yet it's absolutely compelling, like a message from another world, or music heard in a dream.

This is an album to listen to with a glass of wine (and all sharp objects removed from the room) on a lonely Saturday night. Beautiful, thought-provoking, strange, and very very sad.

Get it on itunes:

Rockin Out

The Woods
Sleater-Kinney, 2005

[Yes, it's been a long time since I've posted anything here. Maybe it'll be a while before I do again - I want to, but it's been difficult to find the time.]

Sleater-Kinney is one of those bands that I'd heard of a lot, and knew a lot about, before I'd heard a single note. Such is the odd way of media and criticism, not to mention hipsterism. The music itself is one thing (be it live performance or recording), but its footprint in culture is quite another. It's hard to talk about music directly, as I've proven here many times, but to become a shared experience in the larger world, words have to be used, it seems. (Whether musical expressions need to be shared on that scale, and whether scaling up might enhance or corrupt, are issues way beyond this silly blog.)

In any case, while I had some admiration for the band, and enjoyed the songs that I'd heard, I never bought an album until this one. And I admit that part of my motivation was that my daughter was starting to investigate rock music, and I realized that it was slim pickings on my record shelf when it came to women-led bands. This disc was part of solving that problem, and also a way of guiltlessly spending money on something that I wanted. A win-win for sure.

This is pretty raw punk energy expressed in tightly arranged songs. Here's a parallel that springs to mind: what Led Zeppelin did to synthesize and re-energize the English rock of the 60s decade, Sleater-Kinney attempts to do here for the Seattle-ish alternative rock of the 90s. (Yes, Zep-heads, feel free to pounce, it's just an analogy.) There's a fair amount of variety here in terms of style, though everything hangs together because of the lead vocalist's passionate delivery and the way the production is just drowned in layers of bittersweet feedback.

I genuinely like every cut on the album - it can be exhausting to listen to, since the emotion is ratcheted up high, but of course that's kinda the point. One standout for me is "Rollercoaster," which takes a couple of hot guitar riffs and thundering drums, and puts them in the service of what could almost be a Beach Boys song. The fact that Corin Tucker seems to be on the verge of utter hysterical meltdown throughout made it a favorite of mine during some recent personal issues. She barely keeps contact with the song-structure and tonality, just enough to draw needed power from it.

The other highlight for me is "Modern Girl," which just drips with acidic irony, cranking it to levels I didn't think pop music capable of, honestly. Starting out simply sarcastic, with an optimistic twangy guitar supporting lyrics about love and consumerism. But it gets darker as it goes, and by the last chorus, so slathered in thick swaths of lo-fi analog feedback and clipping, we are in deep ironic territory indeed. She sings not that her life is a sunny day, nor that it's like a sunny day. No, she sings "my whole life is like a picture of a sunny day." Just as that sweet optimistic melody repeats while it rots from the inside. Again, not easy to listen to, and not exactly subtle, but it gets its point across for sure. Leave the subtlety to Ira Gershwin.

Get it on itunes: