Spooked

It’s the week before Halloween and though I know I have to wait another week for the Great Pumpkin, I’m already spooked. It started with this:

The Flaming Lips – Convinced of the Hex

www.colbertnation.com

I bought Embryonic last week and was instantly hooked in a way I haven’t been by a Lips album since The Soft Bulletin. I put it on the stereo in the other room and went about my kitchen-cleaning duties; I just about dropped a full glass of water when I heard the statics and squawks that get the album started and pretty much form its foundation throughout. Maya jumped, too; I think she wanted me to put on the Little House audiobooks again. No deal, hon.

What was it that caught me about this album? I’ve heard great reviews of this album from friends and reviewers alike. I’ve also heard more than one friend or reviewer describe large parts of the album as “filler” or “a bore.” I can almost appreciate that opinion, that sort of “I like a couple songs, but what about this snoozer?” kind of attitude. So why isn’t every song a winner?

I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble, but tight songcraft has never been the Lips’ forte. What we are more often left with in their more recent albums is an overwhelming sense of blissed-out near-naivete. Songs about spiderbites and hero scientists, album covers decked out with gleeful cartoons about self-destructive robots, shows with confetti and man-sized frogs – it’s been a nonstop children’s television show for the Lips for a while now. But other than “She Don’t Use Jelly,” do we really have an example of a tightly structured pop song? I haven’t found one.

I think maybe we were all caught a little off-guard when Embryonic came out a dark, sprawling mess. But I find nothing about it boring. There is a solid string of tension drawn straight across the baseline of every track. Temporary releases, such as in the delicious synth-infused chorus of “Silver Trembling Hands” or in the phoned-in animal sounds on “I Can Be A Frog,” only make the darkness expand a little further on all the other tracks.

That’s what makes a great album – not a collection of winner songs, but a theme and an atmosphere that takes hold and doesn’t let go until the end. At this point in my life, I’m frankly a little spooked to find myself continuing to defend the virtues of an album over the virtues of a song/single. But it’s time I admitted that song structure is becoming a secondary component of my musical enjoyment. Perhaps it’s temporary, but the opening of a musical space and atmosphere is much more important to me right now.

That’s why Embryonic hits me in all the right places. The same part of me that appreciates the primal urgency of “The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine” (complete with genius incorporation of cell phone speaker sounds) also loves the musical white space gathered around guitar shrieks that is “Powerless.” I am not looking for a song anymore; I’m looking for an idea.

It was this search and a Facebook conversation (is there any other kind?) with a fellow local Lips fan that led me to revisit an album full of what I considered filler – highly unpleasant filler at that.

Still with me are the many times I listened to Third and couldn’t get anything like a pleasurable experience out of it. There’s nothing really resembling a song anywhere on this album, and dissonance is the rule established right up front, when Beth Gibbons hits a nasty E-flat while everyone else sits on an even-keeled, standard E-minor chord. On other tracks, choruses are replaced with Sabbath-esque guitar drones topped by synth air raid alarms. In fact, alarm sounds are a consistent theme from “Hunter” to “The Rip” to “We Carry On.” It was only after a few runs through the album that I hit a point where I wasn’t looking over my shoulder on those tracks.

But understanding that as a thematic element Portishead used to create a great album rather than a collection of great tracks is what brought me around. Portishead has been on a progression, one that’s hard to sense, what with an 11-year gap between their last two albums. Dummy was a popular appetizer, hinting at the desperation evident in the self-titled second album. What follows in this album might be best described as the portrait of the menace chasing after the desperation, the creation of an image of a worst fear about to be snuffed out by the full realization of that fear. Truly hopeless is where Third leaves us, and the completeness of that sense, upon hearing the last guitar-synth skronk amalgams on “Threads,” is what finally got me.

It finally made sense in the context of an album like Embryonic; songs can easily lose their individual meaning in the course of creating a larger piece of music with individual parts, “movements” maybe, tied together with a theme. Embryonic revolves around fear based on the potential for evil in humans as well as superstitious tendencies. Third revolves around abject despair. Taken as individual works, skipped through as I often do when impatient, the songs may not make sense. But as a complete package, they represent two of the most original bands of recent times, both at the top of their creative curves.

About the same time I was comparing these two albums in my mind, I got this tweet from hip-hop activist/media assassin Harry Allen.

“One of my biggest musical surprises of the last year: How much I love the “best of” CD by Starland Vocal Band (“Afternoon Delight”). No lie.”

Not wanting to believe the hype, I sat on this one for about a half-hour before actually replaying, saying I admired that tweet about as much as it repulsed me. A brief Twitter conversation took place, in which he went to greater lengths to explain why he loved the CD. We shared our mutual affection for ABBA. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the “Afternoon Delight” gang. Here they are.

And that’s why I found myself committing the embarrassing act of downloading the original Starland Vocal Band album to find out about the fantastic vocals and arrangements Harry Allen (Harry Freaking Allen!) went to such great pains to describe. And yes, something unexpected happened.

It was twofold, really. I was first disabused of the notion that this was some anonymous choir of easy-listening standard-singers. Years of episodes like the PCU scene and the Simpsons references led me to believe there was zero substance there. But you can hear the blues and country/western influences even deeper in the songs than just in the slide guitars and banjos. These are trucker gospel anthems disguised by the lack of a full choir as well as that sticky semi-stage-musical ’70s studio patina. (more bass in teh bass, i wantz it)

And there are these complex, non-standard harmonies that are oddly pleasing to me. They rear their heads in such lovely, unexpected spots that the other unforgivable production sins are almost forgivable. I end up being quite satisfied by songs because of well-arranged chorus harmonies, even when the rest of the song is simply adequate. Even the harmonies in “Afternoon Delight”‘s chorus do not conform to the standard-issue harmony book.

What’s clear, here, is that these folks knew how to craft a song. And they knew how to craft a series of song to create a theme for an album: hard-working folks in pursuit of the simple pleasures and encountering the typical heartbreaks. Honestly, it doesn’t sound that earth-shattering when I write it, but considering what I had understood the Starland Vocal Band to be, my opinion of them has come a long damn way. Between that realization and their clear talent, I gotta say I see where Harry’s coming from.

And THAT may be the thing that spooks me most of all. I’m still not certain Starland Vocal Band’s going to make my regular rotation soon, but I am disconcerted that I had come so far as to consider songs unimportant to a good album, only to have my faith in the power of song renewed by this most unexpected of sources.

So…what the hell do I do now?