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ALBUM REVIEW: ELLIOT SMITH- Elliot Smith

BEST TRACKS: Christian Brothers, Needle in the Hay, Coming Up Roses, Alphabet Town, St. Ides Heaven

While it’s true that Elliot Smith burst upon Soundscape SuperhighwayTM with “Miss Misery”, which played during the end credits of 1997’s “Good Will Hunting”, Smith’s 1995 eponymous album is clearly his best work.  I’m absolutely serious. There’s absolutely no question. Any piece of Smith’s musical legacy found itself originally fully realized on this album.  Thin, croaking vocal lines; meandering guitar plucked by spindly digits; a gloom which rests on delicate instability; it’s all here. And by no means am I disparaging his later work.  Either/Or, XO and Figure 8 still employ everything that distinguishes Smith’s incredibly unique songwriting, but it’s through “Elliot Smith” that this was first done with full confidence. Here, Smith is momentarily plateaued in all of his strengths; stuck in a moment where his songs operate as an extension of him with perfect efficiency.  So, I admit, the soggy singer-songwriter in 2019 is a little played out. But in 1995, Elliot Smith perfected it. I guess if you like that stuff, you might want to steer clear of this album. Otherwise, everything else will fall tragically short.

It’s hard to say whether Elliott Smith fits ridiculously well into the niche of mid 90sdom or invented it.  Smith, while still playing with his INDIE ROCK band Heatmiser, had released his debut acoustic album “Roman Candle” in 1994.  On it, Smith first made evident his ability to blend inconspicuous yet incredibly intricate guitar parts with a wire-thin vocal line spouting perplexingly intimate lyrics.  And beyond that, Smith was able to manipulate all of these assets by simply layering lo-fi single mic recordings. Now that’s what I call DIY. To no surprise, Smith quickly gained a following in Portland (Christ this has to be the fourth album I’ve reviewed that’s included Portland being really into something before everyone else) despite extremely limited success anywhere outside of the city.  Smith’s first encounter with, albeit limited, success came when Mary Lou Lord happened upon one of his shows and was understandably blown away. She immediately asked him to tour with her, and he was subsequently signed to Kill Rock Stars. So what does an up-and-coming, yet under-appreciated, mid 90s sad guitarist/singer who recently got signed on an alternative label following a groundbreaking live performance do, you ask?  Well, write an insanely depressing album of course. And so, “Elliott Smith”, the album, was born.

Similar to “Roman Candle”, this album perfected the lo-fi, single microphone in a room approach which Smith’s music is usually automatically associated with.  Expanding upon simply double-tracking his vocals while plucking a guitar whose leads gasp from being drowned by an open-string drone, “Elliott Smith” manages to further manipulate this sparse pairing by weaving the two together in incredibly subtle ways.  “Needle in the Hay”, the album’s opening track, is the pinnacle of Elliot Smith’s art of master production. I’ll try to do this song justice here but I can’t make any promises that I will. Smith begins strumming down on five chords that have been stripped of all but their bare essentials, building a tension which creeps up your spine as Smith barely mumbles out the melody which has been placed directly on the listener’s ear.  It’s unsettling, to say the least. But right as you think you’ve found a center to the song, a stasis in its delivery, the chorus begins seemingly out of nowhere. Smith’s classic double-tracked vocals slide into to layer above what first appeared to be a standard verse. It’s a deeply disturbing song which most exemplifies Smith’s ability to articulate a soul in decay. Christian Brothers and St. Ides heaven manage to accomplish a similar feat, though through a more straightforward approach.  Christian Brothers, especially, highlights Smith’s use of barren, inverted chords and hauntingly beautiful vocals, with its chorus whispering with a careening falsetto. Coming Up Roses offers a more upbeat sampling of Smith’s songwriting prowess, but still reverberates with the same energy of defeated instability that blankets the entirety of the album.

Elliot Smith’s second album is definitely the darkest, emotionally raw output of a career which unfortunately ended abruptly. Though Smith’s 2003 suicide(?) should by no means be romanticized, it’s impossible to remove this album from an artist who was clearly disturbed.  Listening to it sometimes sucks, because Elliott Smith does such a good fucking job of making music about absolute desolation.

-Cliff Jenkins

CLASSIC REVIEW: Ariel Pink- The Doldrums

BEST TRACKS: Let’s Build a Campfire, For Kate I Wait, Among Dreams, Don’t Think Twice (Love)

When first listening to The Doldrums, you might find yourself asking, “is this a joke”.  And to answer your question, dearest reader, yeah. Or maybe not. But how could it not be? If it is a joke it’s a really good one in the sense that it’s really funny, but an absolutely moronic one when taking into account how much Ariel Pink put into its setup.  So as of now, we’ll look at it as something in the middle, a comment, if you will on, say, society. Even then I’m probably giving it more of a serious analysis than it deserves, but at the end of the day, it’s an album. A really fucking good album, one that makes you question why you even like music.

So it’s 1999 at CalArts.  One Mr. Ariel Pink is disillusioned with the entire concept of art school, is heavily in the midst of a drug binge, and has his Senior Project coming up.  So what does he turn in? Well, his debut album of course. Well, we should call it what it really is: an anti-album. Concocted deep within the infamous, denatured Pink brain, The Doldrums sounds like an assortment of samples taken from daytime television that Ariel recorded him singing on a whim after returning home shitfaced.  But the instrumentation is his. Placed far behind his vocals, Ariel reverbs and generally distorts his self-made backing tracks to shellac over them an air of dissociation and lethargy akin to when you watch too much TV in the middle of the day. But at the end of the day, the compositions sound good and are written well. So when Ariel cries over them in a mocking falsetto it’s confusing: who is he making fun of if not himself and music itself? In all honesty, it’s probably both.  And in case you were wondering, Ariel set up a booth that he sold his CD out of for his senior project. There’s no word on well he did academically, but the CD eventually made its way to Animal Collective, who subsequently signed him.

It’s really difficult to actually analyze the songs on this album.  First of all, the “mixing” melts together synths, guitars, knee-drums, random chirps, TV samples all into a honey-lacquered stew that doesn’t quite sit still within the belly.  Secondly, The Doldrums goads you to take a deeper look into it, only to eventually point and laugh at you once you’ve already spent hours dazed in its taunting sweetness. That’s the most infuriating part of this album.  It’s really clear that Ariel is making fun of saccharine stock music, cheesy love songs, and just popular music as a whole. But he does it with really amazing melodies. “Among Dreams” and “For Kate I Wait” strike me as the easiest examples of this, though not the best.  I mean this in that they benefit from a mix which favors Ariel’s vocals so my point is most readily available. Both live in a rounded synth line that blankets everything but Ariel’s falsetto delivering some of the catchiest melodies I’ve ever heard. Occasionally, the listener may get confused into thinking they were just listening to a lo-fi pop song, but then there’s something up there in the corner of your ear.  What is it? Well, it’s a three-stringed guitar of course, or maybe some knee slap drums. Ariel Pink does not give a fuck about this music, it just springs forth effortlessly. Songs such as “The Ballad of Bobby Pyn” only suffer in that Ariel draws them out too much, stringing along a drowsy atmosphere for over ten minutes while occasionally delivering some half-sung half-line. And just as you go to get mad that you’ve been listening too long, you realize that that’s the point. You’ve been duped.

 – Cliff Jenkins

CLASSIC REVIEW: CALEB FRAID- The Old Rugged Me

BEST TRACKS: 50/50, Anxious to Live, Vertical Blind

Fine, fine, this isn’t what would regularly be denoted as a “classic”.  But there’s something in this album which I haven’t found within really anything else.  It isn’t clear whether this is a result of a personal absence of knowledge surrounding this genre or simply that I have stumbled upon a long forgotten masterpiece (there’s a good chance it’s the former), but The Old Rugged me contains such a distilled spirit of creativity and self reliance that it manages to make me feel wholly lacking in every creative endeavor I’ve ever attempted.  While Caleb Fraid’s 8-track gem has been, to the extent of my knowledge, widely ignored, I would argue the (in)famous Velvet Underground quote is equally applicable to this album. Every person who listens to The Old Rugged Me is guaranteed to start a band.

Picture this, it’s the mid 90s, cassettes still reign supreme simply in their pragmatism.  Wow, what a time! Of course, I won’t try and make the classic “I was born in the wrong generation :,(“ argument, but the music environment facilitated by mid-90s technology is still really fucking cool.  Though the advent of the internet has virtually eliminated 90% of distribution costs, making everything DIY an actual possibility, the inherent magnitude of the World Wide Web makes this distribution infinitely more diffuse.  With cassette tapes, the distribution wasn’t presupposed. As such, not only was the content itself DIY, but so were the means by which it was sold, advertised, and shipped. So what does all of this actually mean you ask? Super localized tape scenes where labels often simply consisted of a handful of bands recording songs on a boombox and then having their stuff advertised in a mailer and shipped out from some dude’s house.  Labels like Shrimper, Amateur Anarchy, and Asswipe all existed as “companies” which refreshingly removed barriers between artists and consumers, and built an underground (hell yeah) music scene which attracted musicians whose creativity could be fostered on something as simple as something like an 8-track. And that’s where Caleb Fraid, a Houston native, comes in. While perusing BandCamp like a certified cool man, I came across FraidAid: a decent collection of lo-fi songs.  Admittedly, I wasn’t blown away. But then I looked at what else Fraid had released and, to my surprise, found over 100 tapes recorded between the mid 80s and early 2000s. Most of the covers were plastered with doodles Fraid appeared to have drawn on napkins. And so I finally came upon The Old Rugged Me, a collection of tracks whose minimal production quality initially mask the startlingly good songwriting beneath it. But don’t be fooled, this album is genius.

The funniest part about The Old Rugged Me is that it doesn’t really sound that far off from the Beatles’ White Album. No, no, I’m serious.  Fraid obviously isn’t concerned with clever recording techniques; rather, he spends two to three minutes using his limited resources to display his phenomenal songwriting.  And it is phenomenal. 50/50 offers us a horribly thin guitar line coupled with Fraid’s double tracked vocals that occasionally diverge to weave in and out of harmony before returning to the binary drone by the chorus. I swear to God, it sounds just like the Velvet Underground.  And the production here actual begins to work to Fraid’s advantage, turning a pretty standard sounding blues-rock track into a playful build which can only be described as a guy playing singing and playing guitar at himself. Similarly, “Anxious to Live” and “Vertical Blind” find their tenderness significantly boosted by its rawness. Whatever may exist within Fraid’s mind for these songs is probably impossible to decipher, but there is no mistake that it’s genuine.  Honestly, it’s difficult to choose a handful of songs to highlight on this thing; every song is a rotation of impulse which sees Fraid’s sparse, yet intricate songwriting ultimately speak for itself.

This album is the pinnacle of everything classified as DIY.  Devoid of pretension, The Old Rugged me exists as an entirely pure expression of an artist who is clearly fully invested in what he makes.  

 – Cliff Jenkins

CLASSIC REVIEW: ATARI TEENAGE RIOT- Delete Yourself

Atari Teenage Riot’s 1995 Masterpiece “Delete Yourself”  sounds as if a punk modified with a synthetic heart and iron lungs was pumped to the seams with amphetamine.  It’s political, it’s blunt, there’s no camp in its rawness. In a decade which saw punk reinvented as a handsome nihilism,  “Delete Yourself” returned the genre to its roots in political panic and aggression. Every song rotates through a handful of ingredients: thrash guitar, screamed one-liners, maybe a movie samples, and a simple techno drum sample.  But it was through this simplicity that ATR captured the essentials of punk’s vigor without a hint of nostalgia (or punk for punk’s sake). There is no close-reading with “Delete Yourself”. It is a pure, volatile reaction.

ATR, a trio consisting of Alec Empire, MC Carl Crack and Hanin Elias, combined elements of hardcore punk, thrash metal and breakbeat with, often extreme, anti-fascist lyrics. The result was Digital Hardcore; a far-left subculture pioneered by ATR which quickly spread in reaction against rising neo-nazi subcultures in Berlin’s electronic scenes.  The genre’s namesake is derived from Digital Hardcore Recordings, a label set up by Empire which signed similar acts such as EC8OR, Sonic Subjunkies and Christoph de Babalon. For eight years, ATR reigned supreme in the Digital Hardcore scene before the subculture’s eventual decline at the turn of the millennium. In 2000, Crack was found in his apartment, dead at age 30 from a drug overdose.  With that, Atari Teenage Riot disbanded: Empire continues to release experimental electronic compositions and Elias has established a career as a solo artist and created her own label: Fatal Recordings.

When first dissecting Delete Yourself, one should familiarize themselves with ATR’s first single, which happens to also appear on the 1995 LP. “Hetzjagd auf Nazis!” (“Hunt the Nazis!”) can be examined as a microcosm of ATR, exemplifying their urgent simplicity and unadulterated fury.  An overdriven three note synth line layered over a breakbeat with Empire screaming “go” over and over for five minutes, “Hetzjagd auf Nazis” descends further and further into ambient obscurity as it progresses. Undeterminable echoed noises fill the space surrounding the mid-heavy synth line which, along with the repeating beat, grounds the track while its peripheral components drift further into madness.  “Speed” begins with a speed metal guitar sample which stands solitary for a mere moment before being swept up by the beat. From here on it’s only a breakneck barrel towards the finish, Empire sputtering out unintelligible lines like News, Drug abuse to the future and the hypocrites cry: Who dies next? while Elias bellows out the song’s half-melody hook. There’s no room for breath, no room for contemplation; there is only an immediacy of terror which ATR thrashes again in futility.  Even slower cuts like “Sex” embrace a gritty tinge of cyberpunk, as Elias delivers spoken word over a wet-reverbed breakbeat coupled with droning ambience. As if the band were lying face up underwater, occasionally able to grasp a breath before being flooded back down, “Sex” embodies Delete Yourself’s thesis of titanic cyberpunk anxiety.  Atari Teenage Riot knows it’s too late; the powers which will overcome all of us are too large to stop.  And Delete Yourself is trying to, even if just for a second, outrun our doom.  

Delete Yourself does not exist to meticulously explore art as enrichment.  Its lyrics are a simple, grotesque indictment of fascism, technology, and the institutions we have created which now rule us.  It finds relevance today among those who feel alienated and exploited by every facet of their existence through its direct plea for individual uprising. It is a rebellion in its purest form.  

CLASSIC REVIEW: WIPERS- Over the Edge

Best Tracks: Doom Town, So Young, Romeo, No One Wants an Alien

Wipers weren’t the first to fuse punk and introspection.  They weren’t the first to rely on atmosphere above blunt force.  And they certainly weren’t the first to rely on raw production to communicate desperation. But Wipers put all of this together in what became a necessary precursor to alternative music as we know it today.  Nowhere is this more clear than on their third album, 1983’s Over The Edge: an album which bellows out a simple, singular message.  Doom.

I know, I know, of the first two classic reviews I’ve pumped out, both are 80s alt-punk born out of the Northwest.  But I couldn’t resist. Unfortunately, the double edged sword of being adjacent to Kurt Cobain means that while bands that otherwise would have been long forgotten have received a decent amount of a spotlight, that spotlight is still dwarfed by the shadow of Nirvana.  And Greg Sage’s rotating cast punk rock trio, AKA Wipers, deserves so much more than that. In mixing the ferocity and simplicity with lo-fi, feedback driven atmosphere, Over the Edge lies bathed in an eeriness which trudges the listener into Sage’s desperate pleas.  It’s a simple dread which seems to speak universally of alienation.

Wipers were, effectively, Greg Sage.  Sage, a wiry native of Portland, was pretty old at 25 to form a punk band in 1977.  And so, he had an edge on his younger, primal counterparts. He grew up on classic guitar heroes such as Hendrix and Clapton, and while Sage certainly wasn’t a proponent of theatrical face-melters, he understood that a guitar had the potential to convey abstract, monolithic human expressions.  When first conceptualizing what would become Wipers, Sage originally planned for his band to be an exclusively studio act. Sage, notoriously self-disciplined, would record the songs and they would be subsequently self-released sans any promotion. While I’m personally glad this plan wasn’t actualized, since it probably would have inhibited the still-limited fame Wipers see today, they would admittedly be the best candidates for this treatment.  Sage’s songs sound as if they’ve been pulled out of an ether; a despondent catharsis in the face of an impending doom. When they fully formulated Wipers by the late 1970s, Sage and an amorphous combination of bassists and drummers decided to release their 1980 debut Is This Real? on Park Avenue Records in an attempt to gain some semblance of a following. And it worked.  Is This Real? became an instant cult hit while Wipers gained notoriety in Portland through their live shows.  And with that, the American Northwest had their first punk band.

While Is This Real? offers a wholly solid introduction to Wipers’ doom punk, Over The Edge is a complete fulfillment of driving introspection.  The album’s opening three songs; Over the Edge, Doom Town and So Young, are all constructed around the same four chords.  But they somehow circumvent repetition. I honestly haven’t fully figured out how Sage managed to make these songs sound so different; maybe it’s the blunted bass subtly moving beneath a thin overdrive, Sage’s simple and ephemeral guitar leads, or his reverbed croon which varies from a gravely plea to a panicked shout.  Romeo offers the first break from standard three-chord punk with a fuzz-coated rockabilly trudge coupled with Sage’s lyrics of absolute isolation and longing which eventually erupt into a singular screech.  No One Wants An Alien is an exploration into variation in that it appears unconcerned with any motif established by the preceding cuts.  Opening with a surprisingly clean guitar carrying a tidy, yet rough melody, the song churns out three minutes of new-wave which could have easily been found on an early New Order album.

Though Greg Sage likely did not know at the time how influential his choice to chimera punk rock and dread-heavy vulnerability would ultimately be, it’s impossible to omit Wipers from the canon of American alternative music.  So as someone who works for a college radio station, I feel pretty obligated to recognize how crucial Wipers were in my current employment. Without Wipers, the Northwest alt-punk underground may have been horribly crippled; something which would have surely impacted the Grunge explosion which current indie rock necessitates.  So to all of you DIY, baby jeans wearing kids out there: take the time to thank a Wiper.