So many of the great '90s rock bands have lost their lead singers, forcing them to either disband or reinvent themselves with new singers. So it’s good to see other '90s bands still going strong with most of their original members, like Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the Smashing Pumpkins. The Pumpkins are no longer doing their best work after 3 decades, but they haven’t run out of inspiration.
On NPR's "All Songs Considered." If you click the link labeled "Hear The Interview And Songs," they play one song ("The Suburbs") right at the beginning of the interview (1:10), and there's one more song ("Month of May") at 16:40. The album is supposed to be released in the US on August 3.
Both of the songs are pretty mediocre for a band that's had so many great songs in the past — and these are presumably highlights of the new album. The music is OK, not bad, but they've lost that magic that made their debut album, Funeral, so compelling.
It's also painful listening to the interviewer (Bob Boilen), after they play "Month of May," struggling to formulate a question about how the band's music has changed. Boilen seems to be an Arcade Fire fan, and I bet he realizes that the new album is probably going to be a disappointment. But when you're on NPR interviewing one of the most acclaimed indie bands, you're not going to criticize their music. So you have to come up with a question like this:
When I think of the scope of your music and falling in love with it in 2004, and then hearing this, I feel like you're sort of gravitating more to, uh, rock 'n' roll fare, and the early stuff was more like, "What kind of sound is this?" I mean, obviously, we've only heard two songs from the record, so it's a little hard to tell.
This is a somewhat understandable reaction to "Month of May," which is self-consciously heavier than Arcade Fire usually is — though it's akin to the scorcher from Funeral, "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)." The question makes less sense applied to the title song, "The Suburbs," which sounds like a watered-down version of songs from their previous two albums. It's not in a particularly different genre than "Rebellion (Lies)": mid-tempo, intense but restrained, piano-driven rock with soaring melodies over a steadily thumping rhythm section. The difference is more intangible: "The Suburbs" just isn't the breath of fresh air that "Rebellion (Lies)" (the #29 song of last decade) was.
What Boilen might have been thinking, but couldn't say, is that Arcade Fire started out seeming like they would be one of the great bands of their generation, but it seems more and more like their greatness was mostly confined to one album. Of course, I'll have to listen to The Suburbs in full once it comes out to see if I'm right about this . . .
This is an ingeniously constructed song. It starts out jaunty and full of innuendo for a few verses. The singer, Amanda Palmer, then takes the song deeper into her psyche by describing the songwriting process itself:
This bridge was written
To make you feel smitten-er
With my sad picture
Of girl getting bitter-er
The shift in the lyrics and music here (flowing arpeggios instead of percussive chords) seems to tell us we've left the physical world and entered her stream of consciousness. The bridge culminates with an obsessively repeated "I want it —," then "I want you —," then "I want a —," while the whole band mimics the repetitive, jerky movements of a wind-up toy (a lyrical and musical transition back to the verse). When Palmer finally finishes the sentence with the same words and melody that started the song ("... coin-operated boy"), her delivery has lost its previous childlike quality. She sounds weary from the one-sided relationship. At the end, the band winds down like a toy running out of batteries. Not only does Palmer's voice slow down along with everything else, but she sounds unexpectedly meek, as though it were dawning on her that she doesn't quite believe everything she's been singing.
I remember sitting in a cafe a few years ago, hearing this chorus for the first time — "You seem so out of context / In this gaudy apartment complex" — and thinking, "Hm, that's a pretty clever hook." Since then, I've probably listened to this song 100 times, and it still sounds startlingly new.
My favorite computer blew up on me. ... But I didn't want to leave the studio without having done anything that day. I saw the [DigiTech Vocalist Workstation] on a shelf and just plugged it into my little 4-track MiniDisc with my mic and my keyboard and pressed Record. The first thing that I sang was those first few lines, "Where are we? What the hell is going on?" I set the vocalist to a four-note polyphony, so even if I play 10 notes on the keyboard, it will only choose four of them. It's quite nicely surprising when it comes back with a strange combination. When it gets really high in the second chorus, that's a result of it choosing higher rather than low notes, so I ended up going even higher to compensate, above the chord. I recorded it in, like, four-and-a-half minutes, and it ended up on the album in exactly the structure of how it came out of me then. I love it because it doesn't feel like my song. It just came out of nowhere, and I'm not questioning that one at all.
The result sounds like a 21st-century version of a Renaissance madrigal.
Have you ever thought to yourself: if God is watching me and has to choose the single greatest 5 minutes of my life, what would they be? For Imogen Heap, the answer just might be those 5 minutes when she was creating this:
This song has a personal resonance to me. I started listening to this song around the time, I was one of many people who had to say an emotional goodbye to someone important to us, and I kept finding parallels between that situation and this song. On one day when we said goodbye, many people showed up wearing this person's favorite colors: red and purple.
This song feels to me like a living, breathing creature on the prowl.
The instrumental interlude (starting about 3 minutes in) is outstanding. First, there's an adventurous and floridly Baroque keyboard solo — which is abruptly cut off and followed by a simple but effective drum passage, backed by just one relentlessly repeated chord. Then the bottom drops out for a moment, and we're back to the catchy chorus.
I had one semester in law school where I had no morning classes on most weekdays, so I had time to have breakfast at home, and I'd always play this, the first song on her great album Speak for Yourself, to get the day started.
There don't seem to be any, as Jon Fine explains in the video clip below:
If you think about rock music -- which was this incredible industry for, I don't know, 30 years -- rock 'n' roll hasn't really minted any kind of massive ... multi-platinum-selling pop-culture superstar since the '90s, I think. The last really big ones have all been hip-hop. The rock bands now that consistently sell platinum generally came from an earlier era -- they're like Green Day or U2. That top level is completely gone.
Now, what you have in its place is you have a much healthier ecosystem in terms of discovering music and finding music, and for that matter nurturing bands on a local level. You know, the indie circuit that I adored in the '80s ... it's a much more accepted thing, as opposed to back then, it was a little more of a secret-handshake thing. ...
There's kind of a cultural impoverishment at the top of the spectrum, but at the bottom, it's just ridiculously healthy.
I agree, especially if we're talking about not just album sales but "rock stars," with the emphasis not on rock but on star. In the '80s, for instance, you had Madonna, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, and others, who didn't just sell tons of records but made a genuine cultural impact in their time.
Does anyone who made it big in this decade (and actually makes good music) even come close? Rufus Wainwright, Regina Spektor, Jenny Lewis (Rilo Kiley), Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service)? Arcade Fire, the White Stripes, the Strokes? Those may be some of my own personal celebrities of the moment, but I don't know how broadly they resonate out in the world.
As Fine suggests, this is a very different question from how good the music scene is overall. In my opinion, rock/pop/etc. music in the 2000s is probably better overall than in the '90s -- or, for that matter, the '80s or '70s. There's more great music available to me and you, but it's less likely to be made by household names.
Of course, the '60s is better than all those other decades, but we'll never get the opportunity to see so much rock innovation, right? The bands/artists around now are severely disadvantaged by not being able to invent any of the genres that have already been invented. At a certain point, doesn't rock have to run its course?
