ALT-ROCK MARATHONERS

Your weekly leg up on upcoming new releases: Juliana Hatfield, The New Year, Mercury Rev..

Three long-running alt- acts return from years in the wilderness, either reinvigorated or simply to reclaim lost ground. I can’t hear them outside of the context of their larger careers, but if there are any newcomers out there, let me know how these sound completely new, will ya?

Juliana Hatfield: How to Walk Away (Ye Olde Records, August 19)

A few weeks ago I picked up Hatfield’s 1994 break-out album Become What You Are in the dollar bin of the sketchy used CD store down the street. Listening to songs like “My Sister” and “Mabel” I was a bit surprised by how immature it sounded: the clumsy rhythms of her lines, the easy sentiments, the barely invested singing, the simplistic arrangements. It sounded like high school poetry in the worst way, which made it strangely compelling, as if she had bypassed all the usual music-biz checkpoints and plunked these songs right on my desk. Fifteen years later—by very stark contrast—How to Walk Away is studiously adult, which is not quite as surprising as the mere fact that she has stuck around for so long. Launching her own label and taking the reins of her career, Hatfield has been going AOR gracefully over the past few years, which suits her better than early 90s alternative ever did. Producer Andy Chase of Ivy streamlines these songs with a careful, uncluttered sound, as Hatfield voices spectacularly grown-up disappointments about love, life, and music.

On repeat: “This Lonely Love”

The New Year: The New Year (Touch and Go, September 9)

Four years doesn’t feel like a long time, but in the indie-rock world, it can be an eternity. Think of all the bands that have come and gone since 2004, when the New Year released their second album, The End Is Near. Many bands might seem old hat with that sort of interval, but the Kadane brothers have been refining their signature sound—slow-moving indie-rock with delicate vocals, mordant observations, and shimmery guitars—for nearly two decades now. It has yet to sound dated. The New Year, their third album, begins with a slow, slow fade-in to Folios, then transitions into “The Company I Can Get,” another epic in miniature: “I need all the company I can get / even that redneck in the red Corvette,” sings Matt Kadane as the guitar lends his self-deprecation a certain splendor. Therein lies the contradiction that keeps the New Year compelling after so many years: As down on himself as Kadane always sounds, the band (with Steve Albini again producing) always lift him up… a least a little bit.

On repeat: “The Door Opens”

Mercury Rev: Snowflake Midnight (Yep Roc, September 30)

Continuing the band’s migration away from noisy to ethereal—which is neither as egregious as detractors declare nor as righteous as the agonistes claim—Snowflake Midnight (Mercury Rev’s seventh album and first in three years) alights in the same Casio forest that swallowed Grandaddy a few years ago. Synth bleeps and programmed motorik beats replace the baroque orchestrations of The Secret Migration and All Is Dream, but the band keep the music simultaneously dense yet airy, occasionally reaching for majestic (“Senses on Fire”) but often settling for something just shy. John Donahue’s lyrics remain determinedly soft-focus and sentimental, and his fascination with beautiful butterflies and vulnerable snowflakes often sound inspired by a schoolgirl’s notebook cover circa 1982. Snowflake Midnight sounds a little dippy at times, but Mercury Rev sounds genuinely reinvigorated, emerging from their cocoon once again as the American Sigur Ros.

On repeat: “Senses on Fire”

Stephen M. Deusner is a freelance music journalist based in Washington , DC. Don't ask him about Norwegian pop or house rabbits, unless you have a few hours.

PARANOIA THEY DESTROY YA

But it makes for enjoyable reading.

Last time I wrote a bit about Jon Ronson’s Them, which to a certain extent deals with conspiracy theorists and others of that ilk. If you’re itching to dive into the political and cultural underworld, I’d recommend finding a copy of Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen’s The 70 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time (Citadel, 2000). It’s a virtual catalog of nutso thinking and baseless panic. Or maybe not. Could be some basis of truth to the notion that “Somebody Out There” is “Behind It All.” I doubt it, but maybe I’m just part of the system, and don’t even realize it.  The thing with conspiracies and their attendant theorists, however, is that the entire idea usually hangs on a tattered framework of circumstantial evidence and illogical leaps from Point A to Point B, not to mention enough wishful thinking to fill a hangar at Area 51. But it makes for enjoyable reading. 

Jason Matthew Smith is a Texan who never developed an accent, thanks to a steady diet of television reruns during his formative years. He now lives in Utah, where everyone thinks he sounds just like John Astin, the original Gomez Addams. 

PUTZ N’ RUINS

Casing The Bank Job and The Ruins.

Jason Statham is a putz. One or two bad films you can chalk up to a bad agent, bad script or bad karma. But when you knowingly take a role in an Uwe Boll film (In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale) you’ve essentially announced to the world, “I don’t give a shit!” Lucky for Statham that The Bank Job (Lionsgate, 110 min) came along, giving him another chance to polish his head and sharpen his British slang in a manner more becoming of the star of Snatch. Based on the true story of a gang of amateur thieves duped into retrieving compromising photos of a British royal from a safe deposit box, director Roger Donaldson spits out characters like Guy Ritchie (minus the quirky names) and sprinkles in enough of the ‘ol ultraviolence to keep the kids entertained. But deep down he’s a “substance over style” sort of guy, so it’s no surprise the film’s focus is on how the plan comes together (and subsequently falls apart) rather than on the Hong Kong tomfoolery of Statham’s Transporter saga. It’s only one rung up the ladder, but here’s hoping the British Bruce Willis can keep the momentum going. Extras on Blu-ray include a commentary, deleted scenes and facts on the real robbery which went down pretty close to how it was portrayed in the film.

Then there’s Scott Smith, whose first novel, A Simple Plan, was a solid piece of neo-noir literature, receiving almost universal acclaim. His long-awaited follow-up, The Ruins, took more than a decade to write and jumped immediately to the best-seller list.

Did I mention it was about a man-eating plant that sucks the life juices out of some teenagers in the jungle?

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But should it really take anyone 12 years to write a Stephen King knock-off that King himself could have vomited out in an afternoon? The Ruins read like a bloated screenplay. So it’s no surprise that the author himself turned it into one for first-time director Carter Smith, casting relatively unknown actors (with great abs and tits) in what is essentially a survival story with monster-movie tendencies. The performances are strong and the set-up is suitably ominous. But once the foursome gets stuck atop their pyramid prison, the story becomes a grim, humorless endurance-test, mixing trendy torture-porn and intermittently unconvincing computer effects. When your bad guy is a multi-tentacled vegetable, dude, you gotta crack a smile now and then. Blu-ray includes three separate Making Ofs, a commentary and deleted scenes all in HD.

Straight outta the third most dangerous city in America—Saginaw, Michigan—Greg Walton writes from a basement bunker. His only window to the outside world is a sweet surround sound set-up and 65" inches of hi-def glory.

DISCOVERY: NOA BABAYOF

I picture Greg Weeks’ Hexham Head Studio out deep in the woods somewhere, accessible only by playing the right combination of notes on a magical ocarina. Jackrabbits push the knobs and squirrels turn the dials, getting an open, airy sound on some of the freakiest folk around. Of course I kid Hexham Head, but its rise, along with Weeks’ label Language of Stone, seems to reflect the growing trend for going green. The records out of this psych-folk and -rock scene—by Mountain Home, Orion Rigel Domisee, and Weeks’ own Vespers—are earthy and airy, outdoors albums evoking the elements. Weeks’ doesn’t have a roster so much as the beginnings of a movement.

The latest addition to Language of Stone is Noa Babayof, an Israeli singer-songwriter with an eye for beguiling lyrical imagery and the kind of phrasing that the word gossamer was invented to describe. On her debut, From a Window to a Wall (Language of Stone), subdued folk accompaniment and quivering string arrangements add pastoral drama to her songs about love, death, and remembrance, emphasizing but never overpowering her delicate melodies. She hits some of her notes gently flat, which makes her sound a bit like Astrid Gilberto but gives her an otherworldly presence on stand-outs like “Indian Queen” and “At Your Death”. At times she recalls Vashti Bunyan, Sachiko Kanenobu, and other recently rediscovered folk singers, as if emanating from some obscure corner of music history. But like her labelmates, Babayof anchors her music in the here and now, making it sound immediate rather than settling for record-collection escapism.

Stephen M. Deusner is a freelance music journalist based in Washington , DC. Don't ask him about Norwegian pop or house rabbits, unless you have a few hours.

CRITICAL CONDITION

It's true: the rock critic has gone the way of the buffalo.

As the recorded-music industry withers, so does its unruly stepchild, pop-music criticism. Newspapers are jettisoning reviewers of all kinds, rock magazines are disappearing, and music websites tend to pay (if at all) even less than the defunct magazines.

While the space for pop-culture analysis shrinks, the two-thumbs-up universe expands. Websites like Yelp allow civilians to review pretty much anything, and online merchants encourage their customers to post critiques. Most of these comments are useless, but they're easily available, and usually attached to multi-star or numerical ratings. If you'd prefer a yes-or-no answer over reasoned consideration, the web offers a worldwide break from heavy lifting.

For critics dejectedly watching their self-image fade, the latest crisis is the "instant" album, a phenomenon that includes not just download-only releases but also hard-copy ones like The Raconteurs's Consolers of the Lonely. Never mind all the beginner-band, industry-dropout, and dubiously legal music that's sloshing around the Internet. People can actually walk into a record store—if they can find one—and buy a brand new major-label CD that no one from Rolling Stone has heard yet.

That doesn't mean that writing about music will disappear. But rock criticism as a paying career, never a prudent career option, is looking increasingly iffy. For rock writers, it's a good time to be independently wealthy.

But then it always was. While large metropolitan dailies and a few of the bigger alternative weeklies employ full-time critics, most rock writers are freelancers who support themselves doing something else. (Rock reviewers are no more likely than cult musicians to have health insurance.) The Bush administration's economic shambles makes life harder, but it doesn't change the fundamentals of freelance writing, a field no one enters to get rich.

Enough about money. The larger issue is the role of pop-culture criticism, an impure form that was never welcomed by most of its audience. It may seem that the golden age of rock writing is over, but actually it never happened. Pop-music critics really didn't have much influence, and were appreciated by the biz primarily for their willingness to fall into line. Mavericks could be tolerated if they were amusing, especially since it was clear that no cranky commentator could damage music's major franchises. (Remember when hip critics hated Grand Funk Railroad? It had so little effect on the band that ultimately many of the detractors converted. That also had no effect on the band.)

Rock critics, like film reviewers, are fundamentally at odds with most of their readers, who want just two things: tips on which new cultural products to consume, and validation of their own opinions. A reasoned analysis that challenges their own viewpoint is about as welcome a surprise as a rat's tail in a bottle of supermarket salsa. (Readers aren't always wrong to reject rock criticism, of course. Lots of it is worse than supermarket salsa.)

A timely review of a new pop-culture consumable serves several purposes. It's a news item, informing people that the album, movie, or whatever exists, and what broad category it inhabits. A review is also entertainment, offering such pleasures—depending on the writer—as well-turned phrases, incisive jibes, or crude appeals to accepted opinion. (Heavy-metal "rocks!" Chick flicks "suck!") Lastly, if there's room, a review is a consideration of style, craft, influences, development, integrity, and so on. You know, art.

In today's always-on mediaverse, few readers have the patience for such matters. Free-market efficiency channels cultural opinions, which can be Googled faster than a vending machines can dispense a bottle of Dasani: "A-," "one thumb up," "buy now," "wait for the DVD." And since every click can be tallied, pop-culture businesses know for sure what they always suspected: Most consumers don't care what most critics think.

This reflects new technology, but not such a new attitude. The rapport between music consumers and reviewers has been always shaky. It's no coincidence that the cherished zeniths of rock criticism occurred during periods when, or in places where, the music under discussion was hard to hear.

For English-language rock criticism, the standard was long set by British music weeklies. If callow, absurdly trendy, and often rash in their judgments, New Musical Express, Melody Maker, and Sounds were great fun to read. Their energy had something to do with their weekly schedule, but owed more to the stodginess of the BBC. With precious little rock being played on the radio or TV, the music press had a near-monopoly on manic pop thrills. When satellite TV, commercial radio, and the Internet arrived, Melody Maker and Sounds disappeared, and New Musical Express retrenched. I rarely look at it anymore.

Much the same happened in the U.S., albeit on a near-subterranean level, with glam-rock, garage-rock, and punk. The mainstream U.S. music mags didn't get the Stooges, Ramones or their followers, and neither did "album-oriented" radio, which was already drifting toward a "classic" format. The obstacles to hearing or acquiring this insurgent music were boons to print journalists, notably at alternative weeklies and fanzines. Something was happening here, and you had to read to find out about it.

There's more to read than ever, of course, on myriad blogs and websites. But consumers can skip straight to the MP3s, or take their guidance from specialized search engines. Skipping the informational middleman has never been easier—or at least, not since rock criticism first forced itself into the conversation, demanding to say more about the music than AM DJs or the rate-a-record teens on American Bandstand.

Rock criticism is still demanding its say, however hard it is to deliver commentary that is both timely and informed as an ever-increasing number of CD and digital releases zoom directly to potential fans. Reviewers have to accept that they're often behind the buzz, even as their editors insist that their reviews must run on the official release date—whenever that is. (Internet release? CD release? First gig at which a tour-only disc is available?)

Amid this frenzy, I'm hoping for more care and less haste, more in-depth analysis and fewer premature discharges. But I'm expecting lots of stars, thumbs, and letter grades. At least the writers who specialize in the latter will have a new excuse: The Raconteurs made me do it.

Mark Jenkins currently writes about music and film for the# Washington Post #and NPR.org, among others. He is the co-author of# Dance of Days: Two
Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capital (Akashic Books).

CITY BY NUMBERS

City of Men doesn’t measure up to God.

Fernando Meirelles’ City of God was an entirely different sort of gangster movie: tragic, violent and brutal, but with an agonizing loss of childhood innocence. It was every bit as brilliant as Goodfellas but subtitles kept it out of the mainstream. “If I wanted to read at the movies I’d a brought along a copy of Guns ‘n Ammo, goddammit!” Now City of Men (Miramax, 106 minutes) follows, a sequel in spirit that takes us back to the slums of Rio de Janeiro and introduces us to two teenagers about to hit manhood, even though one of them already has a kid. The moral choices are clear cut – work for a living or kill for a living. But director Paulo Morelli lacks Meirelles’ subtlety in fleshing out the gangbanging lifestyle, which is really no different from any American inner-city thug. Dissecting our culture’s epidemic of fatherless criminals is a noble effort—and the movie certainly does it in style. But City of God was a genuine work of art; its sequel is simply a paint-by-numbers forgery with a really nice frame.

Straight outta the third most dangerous city in America—Saginaw, Michigan—Greg Walton writes from a basement bunker. His only window to the outside world is a sweet surround sound set-up and 65" inches of hi-def glory.

I AGE, THEREFORE I ROCK (STILL)

Rock against ageism.

Ageism is what it is. And I'm not talking about teenage-backlash or a twentysomething's glib naïveté.  Most of it comes from within; sabotaged by our own kind. Think about it. It's not that we grown-ups ever lost interest in music. Music (as dictated by industry mafiosi, radio, media, etc.) lost interest in US. [More...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentati on of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

LESSONS OF HAR-MEGIDDO

This summer, visit sunny Armageddon—and see what it offers the world.

By David Poe

You may know Armageddon as the name of a Swedish heavy metal band, a Bruce Willis movie, or a euphemism for the apocalypse.

But Armageddon is also a little town between Jerusalem and Galilee, a place I visited two summers ago. Known as Har-Megiddo to the locals, the hill of Armageddon has been a theater for so many violent conflicts over the centuries that its name became a synonym for war. Its blood-soaked history may be why it appears in the Bible as a sort of staging area for the end of the world as we know it.

Think of Armageddon like Waterloo, the town whose namesake developed after Napoleon suffered his final defeat there: he met his waterloo in Waterloo. But unlike Waterloo, Gettysburg, the beaches of Normandy or the death camps of Dachau, Armageddon is essentially a pile of rubble.

This is not to say it's not an interesting historic site. Like rings on a tree stump, its excavation sites expose cross-sections of trash and treasure. Roman, Babylonian and Egyptian empires held sway there, but many other civilizations sent troops into the region for treasure, land, retribution, God. Standing on that lonely hill, I realized how many different cultures fought for it—and that I had never even heard of most of them.

They all lost.

Today, like Armageddon, George W. Bush's name has become a synonym for war. His idea to win the hearts and minds of Middle Easterners by killing them has not worked out.

Bush may have succeeded in persuading moderate America to associate the religion of Islam with terrorism and mainstream Muslims to perceive American troops as Christian crusaders, but wars of choice are not sanctioned in either group's sacred texts. And on the secular side, even Gen. Petraeus testified before Congress that there is no "light at the end of the tunnel" in Iraq.

What Petraeus and the majority of both Americans and Iraqis understand is that there is no violent military solution there. The president may have won Western oil interests a chance to claim the spoils of his mini-Armageddon in Babylon, but Bush is losing his war for peace.

John McCain has promised to continue Bush's war. Barack Obama has vowed to end the war, although some question his plan to do so.

Both presidential contenders would do well to visit Armageddon. They might reflect there on the futility of other battles waged and lost over the millennia by foreign powers in the Middle East.

Because no matter how the Bush administration and its supporters characterize it, the war in Iraq is not a crusade, a magnetic bumper sticker, a debate for the situation room. Nor is it World War II, in which enemies were defined by borders and Allied fighting was a response to a nationalized attack. Like Armageddon, the Bush war is made of a lot of dead people, and it looks like the end of the world.

David Poe is a singer-songwriter and composer. Visit him at www.myspace.com/davidpoe.

WHAT IS PUNK?

Everything and nothing.

1977—I'm in high school. I ride the subway at night instead of giving 100% to my homework. Uh... “Why?” Graffiti. Yes, that was my empowering activity as a young man. I was contributing to the prodigious chaos that decorated the subway walls and doors of the day. Tellingly, we called this 'bombing' the trains This visual assault of color and seemingly meaningless words, was for the average subway rider, a perfect metaphor for the unhinging of society in the late 70's—the urban blight era that will surely have a mythic place in American history, similar to the Wild West.

Where does punk come in? It was being born concurrently. Well, truthfully, to use the child-bearing metaphor, it had already been conceived invisibly somewhere, and had developed anonymously, and had now been thrust into the larger world, with a name and identity. Punk rock was a living idea, something human beings bear into the world from time to time, and other human beings recognize as being ‘of them’.

That's what happened to me, and that idea was first articulated to me through the Sex Pistols. Punk appeared to be a musical extension of what I was seeking through graffiti. There were shared ethics of simple and neutral concepts—my tag was the utterly meaningless Tag-e—of self projection for its own sake—you just want to ‘get up’ and share a common reveling in the human chaos of society.

Graffiti collectively was a jumble, a mess, so as this was the year of Saturday Night Fever, of slick sharp clothing and dance moves, something downtown called me—loudly. Soon, I'd meet two or three punks, and found that punk was a vague ideal, already morphing, but threaded through everything that was downtown and underground.

When downtown, I quickly realized I had to shut up about the Sex Pistols. I also had to shut up about punk. It wasn't ‘til five years or so later—when it was timely to say 'post-punk'—that people from the downtown scene I knew would acknowledge the connection. But in the meantime, there was a scramble downtown to identify oneself with punk-like movements. People who would later develop indie rock, made no-wave. Avant-gardists like John Zorn adulated hardcore. I knew two places I could count on finding punks, Max's Kansas City, and hanging out upstairs at Mudd Club. They seemed to have their dedicated niches.

So I'll tell you what I thought punks in '77 were like. I ran two of my dicier assertions past bona fide punks Legs McNeil and Lydia Lunch and I'll also tell you what they said:

—Punk was working class. There wasn't a high value placed on sophisticated, nuanced lyricism.

—Punk was apolitical. Since Punk saw itself as re-claiming youth culture and rock n' roll from the 60's and the 'Age of Aquarius', punk wasn't very bleeding heart.

Legs McNeil, founder of Punk Magazine author of Please Kill Me—and coiner of the term ‘punk,’ responds: "For the most part, punk in NYC was tired of the Vietnam War and leftist politics that stifled creativity in the early 1970's, but that doesn't mean we were apolitical. And whoever wanted to be political was allowed to be. I mean, you didn't have to ask permission, that's what it was all about."

—Punk was masculine. Men wore leather jackets reminiscent of 50's gangs. The masculinity affected women in that they were either bomb shell types, or fairly butch—and of course an edgy, and socially outgoing personality was essential. The nerdy/ cool girl who was more bookish than brash, was celebrated in later post-punk/ indie rock.

Lydia Lunch, front woman of Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, responds “…Or were butch bombshells—when punk first hit, there was a squadron of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Types—tough-talking bombshells who had graduated out of the glam scene which was all about style, sex and blurring the boundaries of what was accepted. Hot shit chicks who'd just as soon fuck you as fight you, or preferably both, simultaneously. Sex was still a pretty vicious weapon, especially when wielded as both bait and trap, wrapped in leather and tucked between a pair of thunderous thighs, whose greatest joy was squeezing the life out of an unsuspecting punk monkey.” (Yes, indeedy.)

—Punk bands put on a show. They may have eschewed large drum kits, fog machines and big lighting, but The Ramones still did similar rock posturing on stage to big commercial rock acts. Iggy the proto-punk, acted more like Mick Jagger on stage than Thurston Moore.

—Punks valued the will-to-do, over time-perfected know-how.

—Punks felt spontaneity was the best context, therefore the presentation of anything was best left haphazard and imperfect.

So music related to the punk movement, quickly veered away these original tenets. The Clash were punk, but the social consciousness so tiresome to the original punks, was part of their punk energy. The heavy dogmas of kids in the punkish Hardcore scene, were in contradiction to the nihilism of punk. College educated and ironic indie-rockers like Sonic Youth, still did Ramones and Stooges covers. The grunge/Nirvana era essentially proclaimed itself punk in the film The Year Punk Broke ('91). Metal technicians Metallica eventually cut their hair and covered Ramones songs. And recently The Dresden Dolls—with their heavy theatrical makeup and moody tango/ ballad interludes—hyphenated punk into their self proclaimed genre, punk-cabaret.

Why is punk such a grand concept, that so many scramble to define it in their own way, and appropriate it? Hyphenating punk never goes out of style, because punk directly reflected the vacancy of American life without truly escaping it. Because it gave the juvenile delinquent status as an intellectual. But were punks the first to do so? Maybe not. But when punk got its name, straightforward, unembellished (in true punk fashion) and a face or two (or nine or 17) to give it life, it became an archetype for Americans like me.

Martin Bisi is an American producer and songwriter. Visit him at www.myspace.com/theendcredits.

PLAYS WHAT HE THINKS

Hamell on Trial checks in from the road.