→ June 12, 2009
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Nine new-ish songs.

I’ll be on our Chicago affiliate with Chuck Swirsky tonight, but I’m taping it before the show so I’m not sure exactly when it will air.

Anyway, I have discovered that there is one substantial benefit to XM (Sirius XM, XM Sirius, whatever the hell they’re calling themselves this week) – an hour or so of their alternative stations usually gives me a half-dozen songs I like enough to purchase. Of course, listening for an hour a week is sufficient, so I’m not about to renew my subscription (which I let lapse in 2006), but I get it via DirecTV at home and occasionally in rental cars, which is how I came across these songs.

Ida Maria – “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked” (video)

Arresting title, for starters. Ida Maria is a Norwegian singer who has a smoky voice and exudes a woman-on-the-verge vibe throughout the song (“What the hell do I do that for?) and seems to have some issues to work through (“I like me so much better when you’re naked”). The unbalanced lyrics ride on top of an upbeat, sparse guitar/drum backing. Good luck getting this out of your head.

Tokyo Police Club – “Your English Is Good” (video)

The shoutalong intro is kind of menacing – “Oh give us your vote/give us your vote/If you know/what’s good for you” – and the generally obnoxious lyrics, complete with snotty delivery, are backed by an Arctic Monkeys kind of rapid Britpop/punk guitar riff.

Men Without Pants – “And The Girls Go” (no video, but the whole song is here)

Best band name I’ve heard all year, and it turns out it includes Dan the Automator (of Gorillaz, Handsome Boy Modeling School, and Dr. Octagon fame). It’s delightfully trashy rock, deliberately underproduced so it has a garage feel, with a guitar riff that never quite resolves so you’re given the sense that you’re listing to one side as you listen. That’s a good thing, by the way.

Rise Against – “Audience Of One” (video)

I was familiar with Rise Against from their acoustic song “Swing Life Away” but hadn’t heard any of their regular material until I heard this on XM. It’s solid-average, plays up a little with some good tempo changes and unusually sharp lyrics (not just for neo-punk but for rock in general), with the opening stanza, “I can still remember/the words and what they meant/As we etched them with our fingers/in years of wet cement” the first of a handful of strong images which, really, is about all it takes to rise above the lyrical level of the average rock song.

Living Things – “Oxygen” (video)

I had Living Things pegged as a one-hit wonder – and it wasn’t even a big hit or a particularly great song – after their terse and kind of juvenile anti-war song “Bom Bom Bom,” which hit #21 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart in 2005, but this is definitely a step up for them in the songwriting department. It has a stronger hook and a wave of sound behind a chorus that features some actual singing that wasn’t present on “Bom Bom Bom.”

Editors – “Blood” (video)

This song is actually from 2005, but I didn’t hear it at all until last year and didn’t think it worth buying until the second or third time I caught it. It’s very Joy Division/Interpol, and if you don’t like those bands, I don’t think there’s anything I could tell you about this song that would make it worth your while. Mostly I just wanted to mention that I was sure the first line in the chorus was “Blood runs through your feet,” when in fact, it’s “Blood runs through your veins,” so either the Brummie accent pronounces “vein” with a long “e” or my ears are shot to hell.

Franz Ferdinand – “No You Girls” (video)

They write good songs – I doubt you needed me to point this out. I was thinking the other day about how FF are kind of like Stone Temple Pilots in that, while you weren’t paying that much attention, they’ve racked up a bunch of good singles that would make a pretty strong greatest-hits album if the record company was in the mood for a money-grab. STP was there after four albums; FF might not even need that long.

Cage the Elephant – “Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked” (video)

CtE seems like your basic college jam band, which really isn’t my style, but the slide guitar riff and the vocalist’s half-rapped/half-drawled delivery had me singing the song to myself at the SEC tournament despite the fact that I didn’t think I even liked it. The lyrics aren’t especially clever – the singer meets a prostitute and a mugger and sees a crooked priest on TV, territory I’m pretty sure we’ve covered before. Apparently the song went top 40 in the UK last year but just started getting radio play here in the last few months.

Matt & Kim – “Daylight” (video)

Picked this one up a few months ago – I’m a sucker for a good call-and-response song, and this one comes with a shuffling percussion beat for a sort of minimalist punk-pop sucker-punch in just under three minutes.

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→ May 29, 2009
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Top 20 21 Prince songs.

So today mental_floss is running the quiz that I suggested to them back in April, which led to the idea of a whole week of Klaw quizzes: Can you name the six #1 hits authored by Prince?

To celebrate this, here’s a countdown of my twenty favorite Prince songs, which I recommend you skip until you’ve tried the quiz. Prince completists out there will probably notice that all but one of these songs were released as singles; in part this is because I am generally a singles guy instead of a deep tracks guy, in part because I think deep tracks guys are usually pretentious boobs, and in part because my first introduction to early Prince came from The Hits which, if you ignore the third disc that is clearly for pretentious boobs, is rather awesome.

(EDIT: Why 21? Because somehow I deleted “Raspberry Beret” when reordering songs, didn’t notice it, and added a 20th song before posting. Of course, I wrote the whole thing two weeks ago, so I’m just guessing that that’s what I did.)

21. “Partyman.” Prince had a very long peak, but it wasn’t a steady one; the late ’80s were relatively fallow for him and he didn’t bounce back all the way until Diamonds and Pearls in 1991. The video for “Partyman” starred a relatively unknown Dutch sax player named Candy Dulfer, who then had a crossover pop hit called “Lily Was Here” a year later.

20. “Little Red Corvette.” I wonder what Prince song has actually received the most airplay over the years – it seems like “Corvette” is a staple of eighties stations the way that Visage’s “Fade to Grey” is de rigueur for ’80s new wave compilations. It’s a good enough song, with lyrics that walk the line between clever and all-right-we-get-it-everything-is-about-sex, which kind of sums up 64% of the songs Prince recorded, with the other 36% just about sex without any of the metaphors.

19. “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?” Prince was pretty big on the synth early in his career, before the New Wave crowd took it and played it directly into the ground. This was one of Prince’s catchier synth hooks; “When You Were Mine” has better lyrics (“You didn’t have the decency to change the sheets”), but he sounds like he recorded his vocals with a towel stuffed in his mouth.

18. “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” His first US top 40 pop hit, with 28 more to follow. I wonder how many programmers and listeners realized what exactly Prince was saying in the chorus.

17. “Black Sweat.” I think this is the only post-name-change song on the list; it sounds a lot like early Prince with better production values and a very catchy drum machine riff behind it. It’s less-is-more music.

16. “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man.” Ten thirty-five on a lonely Friday night.

15. “Sign O’ the Times.” Hated this song when it came out, because it was so strange. Now I like it, because it’s so strange. Prince was never big on social commentary, at least not in songs he released as singles, but “Sign” is entirely about it, and one of the first mainstream songs to talk about AIDS.

14. “Thieves in the Temple.” Honestly, if it wasn’t for this song, I’m sure Prince could propose that we all forget that Graffiti Bridge ever happened and get a unanimous “amen” from the congregation.

13. “1999.” Might not have made my list at all on January 1, 2000, because I was so damn sick of it.

12. “Let’s Go Crazy.” Dearly beloved … Purple Rain was Prince’s breakthrough, and I’d like to think the main reason is that he veered so much farther into rock territory than he ever had before. He was already working his own wide-ranging style of fusion, and by assimilating a big chunk of not just rock but distorted guitar-driven rock, he created something pretty amazing that no one has been able to match since then. Oh, and this wasn’t even the best song on the album.

11. “Delirious.” Great song that sounds kind of dated now. It’s begging for a remake that replaces the little Casiotone synthesizer he used on the original track with some guitar.

10. “U Got the Look.” Prince invents text messaging, with the help of the hey-she-got-kinda-hot Sheena Easton.

9. “Alphabet St.” Perhaps better in the version released as a single, without the embarrassing rap from “Kat,” although for embarrassing it’s tough to top “Dead on It” from The Black Album. Also, getting “Alphabet St.” as a single meant that you didn’t have to buy Lovesexy and end up with one of the more ill-advised album covers in music history. (This was the most ill-advised cover in music history. I warned you, but you’re going to click anyway.)

8. “Pope.” I think this is the only B-side on the list – it was unreleased before The Hits came out. Very catchy, with humorous lyrics and that same less-is-more feel that a lot of Prince’s best songs have. It’s poppy by Prince standards.

7. “Raspberry Beret.” My wife was floored when I told her this wasn’t one of Prince’s #1 songs. I’ve often wondered if this song gave Ian Broudie the idea to call his side project the Lightning Seeds (a mondegreen from the line “thunder drowns out what the lightning sees”). And no, I don’t think the urban legend about “in through the out door” is true.

6. “Sexy MF.” Not one you’re going to hear on the radio any time soon. Sort of a funky NPG jam session with plenty of sexual innuendo and a syncopated beat that feels like an odd time signature or a record that keeps jumping ahead. I could argue for any song from here on for #1.

5. “When Doves Cry.” Hell of a guitar intro, brilliant lyrics, and no bass line whatsoever.

4. “Soft & Wet.” This was actually Prince’s first single, according to Wikipedia, but I’ve never heard it on the radio. The title gives you a fairly clear indication of what the song is about, and what almost every song Prince recorded in the first four or five years of his career was about. It’s dated with the heavy synth use – almost funk meets new wave – but the hook is sharp. Great first line, too, although that might be the reason I’ve never heard it on the radio.

3. “7.” No one seems to know to what seven people the song refers, but the mystical lyrics and catchy chorus made it kind of a surprise hit. Of course, in the U.S., it peaked at #7.

2. “Gett Off.” One of the best opening stanzas to any song, ever: “How can I put this in a way so as not to offend or unnerve/But there’s a rumor going around that you ain’t been gettin’ served/They say that you ain’t you know what in baby who knows how long/It’s hard for me to say what’s right when all I wanna do is wrong.” The song was sort of a return to Prince’s glory days of sex-driven funk, but despite serving as the first single off the Diamonds and Pearls album, it didn’t make a dent in the singles charts until the album’s second single, “Cream,” went to #1.

1. “Kiss.” Iconic? Anthemic? Timeless. There may be no better exemplar of less is more in music.

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→ March 17, 2009
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Forgotten songs, part one.

This may or may not be a recurring feature here: songs I really like and never stopped liking but that, for one reason or another, were never huge hits in their times and have since been gathering dust on the music world’s shelves. I haven’t listed anything too obscure – I think everything here received radio airplay in the U.S. – and most are available for download via amazon.com. I started out with a list of over twenty candidates but pared it down to something more manageable. If you’ve got a forgotten classic of your own to nominate, throw it in the comments alongside your adulation of these tracks.

Love Spit Love – “Am I Wrong” (video)

I hated the Psychedelic Furs while they were peaking – I think it was because the name was too weird; my music preferences during childhood were often predicated on ridiculous things like that – only to discover afterwards that they produced some pretty amazing stuff. Half the band re-formed as Love Spit Love, who had a minor hit with this atmospheric, melancholy ballad. They’re probably better known now for their cover of the Smiths’ “How Soon is Now,” which became the theme song for the TV show Charmed, but that’s a perfunctory money-grab compared to “Am I Wrong.”

Moloko – “Fun For Me” (video)

I first heard this on WFNX in 1997 when it was playing as my alarm went off one morning, and despite not hearing it again for years, I remembered enough of the lyrics to track it down during what one might call the Napster era. It sticks in your head like treacle – and I know it’s not just my head, because everyone for whom I’ve played this song hasn’t just loved it, but become a little obsessed with it, regardless of what type(s) of music they typically liked. Which makes some sense, since I’m not sure how you could assign any genre to “Fun for Me.” But perhaps that’s why it never become any sort of hit in the U.S., given our tendency toward narrowcasting even on mainstream radio stations.

Pigeonhed feat. Lo Fidelity All-Stars – “Battleflag” (video)

I first heard this during my summer in Seattle in 1998 while pulling into the parking lot of the Safeway on Queen Anne Ave., and I sat in the car until the damn thing was over because I was riveted to the seat. It’s sort of like Prince meets … well, some other side of Prince, yet the end product doesn’t really sound that much like Prince but more like something by a couple of guys who really like Prince but also like overdubs and drum/bass samples and that ubiquitous handclap. There are a couple of versions around, but the best remix is the one found on MTV’s AMP 2.

Susanna Hoffs – “All I Want” (video)

Susanna Hoffs turned 50 in January, which I find horrifying, since I doubt I had a bigger crush on any celebrity during my formative years. I’m pleased, however, to discover that she still looks damn good. Hoffs released two solo albums in the 1990s between the Bangles’ breakup and inevitable reunion, neither of which did much on the charts, but her second effort included a fantastic cover of the Lightning Seeds’ “All I Want,” taking out the twee and turning into more of a folk-rock song. Sadly, the album is out of print and isn’t available for download. (Why wouldn’t a record label just push all of its songs out as mp3s? Is there some hidden cost of which I’m unaware? I imagine it would just be free revenue every time a song sells. And why post the video on Youtube if you don’t intend to sell the song?)

Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth – “They Reminisce Over You” (video)

As far as I’m concerned, the Bad Boy era killed hip-hop after an incredibly prolific decade of high-quality hip-hop songs, from the Golden Age of Rap coming out of New York to the short-lived jazz-rap movement (Digable Planets, anyone?) to southern California G-Funk in the early ’90s. (Warren G doesn’t qualify, sorry.) Producer Pete Rock was part of the jazz-rap movement, sticking with jazz and jazzy samples and lots of horn solos behind the, uh, smooth rhymes of C.L. Smooth. “T.R.O.Y.,” named as an homage to the late Troy Dixon of Heavy D and the Boyz, was easily their finest moment, built on a bass/horn riff from jazz saxophonist Tom Scott with fluid lyrics from C.L. Smooth.

Stone Roses – “Love Spreads” (video)

The opening 30 seconds constitute my main ring tone. If you like great guitar riffs, the entire album from which “Love Spreads” comes (Second Coming) will be right up your alley; guitarist John Squire wrote some enormous hooks and fills just about every available space with memorable licks. I still have no idea why this song, the first single from Second Coming, wasn’t at least a huge hit on “mainstream rock” stations, given the big guitar sounds and the catchy ad-infinitum chorus at the end. Also recommended: The Stone Roses’ guitarist’s post-breakup project, Seahorses, recorded one incredible song called “Love is the Law” (video) featuring awesome guitar work and the priceless line “Strap-on Sally/Chased us down the alley/We feared for our behinds.” Incidentally, the Stone Roses are going on tour this summer after more than a decade of “when hell freezes over” responses to reunion rumors.

Mansun – “Wide Open Space” (video – live version)

“Wide Open Spaces” garnered some modern-rock and mainstream-rock radio play when the album came out in 1996, but nothing else from the album broke through and their follow-up work wasn’t very good at all. (Incidentally, the album’s opening track, “The Chad Who Loved Me,” should have been all over the place in the fall of 2000, right?) There’s a lot of ’70s epic/arena rock to this song, but with this great underlying tension from that repeated two-note guitar riff. “Wide Open Spaces” would also rate highly on my list of “Songs I wish I had the range to sing.” Even solo, in the car, it’s a stretch.

Monster Magnet – “Negasonic Teenage Warhead” (video)

I know, they were completely ridiculous, a pastiche of stoner rock, New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and even a little bit of glam thrown in, but before the bombastic (if catchy) “Space Lord,” Monster Magnet threw down this straight-out rocker that will have you shouting “I will deny you!” for days. I wonder how much singer/songwriter Dave Wyndorf thinks he owes to Guns N Roses or White Zombie. It’s one of sleaze rock’s finest hours – or four-and-a-half minutes.

Catherine Wheel – “Waydown” (video)

This song wasn’t a great example of the Catherine Wheel’s music – “Black Metallic” and “Heal 2” are probably their signature songs – but it’s easily my favorite song by the group, still bringing that faint My Bloody Valentine influence to a much more polished finished product. The music is all energy and tension even as the lyrics describe a rapid, willful descent. It wasn’t quite grunge enough for its era but was harder and heavier than the hair-metal that grunge replaced.

Peter Murphy – “Cuts You Up” (video)

Murphy was the lead singer of the goth/arthouse band Bauhaus, which spawned the better-known Love and Rockets after its breakup. While “Cuts You Up” didn’t reach the commercial heights of L&R’s “So Alive,” it’s a seductive hook-laden Roxy Music-esque track that’s almost too sophisticated for its own commercial ambitions. Murphy tried to recreate the formula with “The Sweetest Drop” on his next album, but missed the mark somewhat painfully.

Say Trickle – “It Doesn’t Count” (video)

I know I promised nothing too obscure, but I’m making an exception to my own rule for this little-known British pop/rock band that sort of got caught between the Madchester craze in the early ’90s and the Britpop revival of a few years later. If they had a hit, this was it, although it just scraped the lower reaches of the modern rock charts and didn’t chart at all on Billboard‘s Hot 100. Unfortunately, Say Trickle’s only record is long out of print, but at least the video survives on Youtube.

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→ January 26, 2009
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JoePo’s iconic songs.

My ballot:

“American Pie” – Don McLean
“Bohemian Rhapsody” – Queen
“Hey Ya” – Outkast
“London Calling” – The Clash
“Nuthin But a G Thang” – Dr. Dre & Snoop Doggy Dogg
“Respect” – Aretha Franklin
“Purple Rain” – Prince
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” – Nirvana
“Stairway to Heaven” – Led Zeppelin
“Welcome to the Jungle” – Guns N Roses

I think Prince – who had to be on the ballot in some way – should have been represented by either “Kiss” (his best song and one of the most-covered songs of the last thirty years) or “When Doves Cry” (probably more iconic than “Kiss”), both of which hit #1 in the U.S.

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→ December 9, 2008
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Hip-hop hagiographies.

From a CNN story on the rapper Common:

Lyrically, violence has never been his thing; soft-drug use has been mentioned but rarely glamorized; he removed homophobic references from his lyrics years ago; and while there have been hints of misogyny and the occasional N-word in his verses, neither has been a staple of his rhymes.

Well, as long as they’re not staples, that’s okay, then. I’m glad we had this talk.

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→ August 21, 2008
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Five songs.

Chat today at 1 pm EDT over at the Four-Letter.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a singles guy more than an albums guy, and true to form, I bought five individual songs this week to throw on my main iPod playlist, from favorite to least favorite:

“No Sex for Ben,” by The Rapture. The lyrics are amusing, but that’s only good for one or two listens. What makes this one of my favorite songs of the year is the sound, almost like an undiscovered Prince Paul confection from Paul’s Boutique, sparse yet layered with a percussion track that jumps straight off the wax. The song is a diss record aimed at a DJ named Ben Rama who said something (maybe?) bad about the Rapture, which led the band to call for a boycott in Rama’s bedroom, so to speak. It’s pointless lyrically, although I like the like about Rama “looking like a poor man’s Arthur Baker,” which is the sort of allusion the Beastie Boys love to make – except they’ll make fifty in one song, instead of just one.

“Float,” by Flogging Molly. I readily admit to being a sucker for Irish-tinged rock or folk. I liked everything I heard from Carbon Leaf and had a soft spot for Black 47. I love David Downes’ arrangement of the traditional Irish folk song, “Dulaman,” which is a lot more listenable than the Clannad version, even if it’s far less authentic. But somehow Flogging Molly escaped my notice until I caught “Float” on WFNX earlier this week. It’s a faux Irish-folk song, sung in a Corkonian accent (although lead singer Dave King is from Dublin, not Cork), with a catchy chorus and well-orchestrated build to a stomping finish.

“Lake Michigan,” by Rogue Wave. I could have gotten this for free last fall or winter, when it was the Starbucks free iTunes download of the week, but never got around to grabbing it. I’ve long had a theory that pop/rock songs with quickly-sung lyrics, like “Lake Michigan’s” single-breath stanzas, have a higher chance of crossover success. I have no idea why this is, but I’m subject to it, as I definitely hear the appeal of the fluid, almost rotating lyrical lines in Rogue Wave’s harmonies.

“Let’s Dance to Joy Division,” by the Wombats. Apparently, “wombat” is the Australian term for “arctic monkey.” Again, it’s a one-joke song, and not even a particularly funny one, but this style of pseudo-frenetic, punk-influenced pop-rock has grown on me.

“Sequestered in Memphis,” by The Hold Steady. Pretty strong Replacements vibe here with the kind of smirking irony that works in tiny doses but gets a little old when the “Subpoenaed in Texas/Sequestered in Memphis” line is repeated as a sing-along chorus over mechanical hand-claps. The music makes the song listenable, with a sort of driving, bar-band feel, but the lyrics are just too Replacements/Bruce Springsteen, apparently part of an album-long concept about a murdered woman in Memphis. The singer’s voice reminds me of Paul Weller’s.

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→ July 21, 2008
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Klaxons cover.

So one of my Facebook friends linked to The Klaxons’ cover of “No Diggity” (surprisingly faithful, but then again, why mess with perfection?) and I ended up finding this version of “Golden Skans,” by the Kaiser Chiefs, one of my favorite new bands of the last few years covering one of my favorite songs of the last year.

And from the annals of misheard lyrics: For years, my wife would sing the lyrics to the first song as, “I like the way you work it/Yo diggity.”

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→ July 1, 2008
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Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends.

Coldplay’s Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends is the first full album I’ve bought in at least two years. I have always been a singles guy, whether those were songs released as commercial singles or just deep album tracks that I liked. The idea of the album as a cohesive artistic unit rarely succeeded for me, and I always interpreted it as more marketing/finance than art, since it was not terribly economical to sell songs individually when that involved moving physical product.

Then came the compression algorithm behind MP3 files, which allowed for delivery of single tracks at virtually no cost to the vendor, with some loss of audio quality to the consumer (although much audio quality had already been lost with the move to CDs, and most of us can’t hear the difference or just don’t care). The record industry decided to stick two fingers in its ears and one up its ass in a rather stunning combination of physical dexterity and willful ignorance, continuing to push albums and refusing to unbundled them for digital distribution for several years. I have always wondered why this didn’t constitute tying, a type of antitrust violation where the purchase of one product is predicated on the simultaneous purchase of another product even though the two products could be sold separately. Even to this day, some labels and artists refuse to allow their albums to be sold as individual tracks, which, in the existence of a significant black market for music, is like leaving the keys in your car on an urban street with a “steal me” sign in the window. (I have, in fact, done this, without the sign though.)

I bought Coldplay’s new album with the idea of reviewing it, rather than out of any specific desire to have the entire album. I loved Parachutes from start to finish, but felt that A Rush Of Blood To The Head was far less consistent (and we all know how important consistency is), with a fair bit of filler. I didn’t bother with X&Y because I don’t like the type of Coldplay song that my friend Nicole refers to as “mopeysuck,” like “Fix You,” and probably would have bought new Coldplay material as each single came out if it wasn’t for my intention to review the album.

Of course, that’s a long intro to lead up to the obvious point that I am glad I bought the entire album, because it’s good. It is an extended bit of experimentation by a band trying to break out of the musical corner into which they had boxed themselves, and while bits of it dance over the line into pseudo-prog-rock and there is one moment of undeniably twee music perhaps better suited to now-defunct fey Britpop bands like Geneva, Viva la Vida feels more like a transitional album for a band on its way to an extended run of commercially and artistically significant music.

Most of the middle tracks on the album involve multiple movements, a risky maneuver that can leave the listener liking half of each song. On “42,” a mopeysuck intro leads to a more uptempo instrumental transition followed by the peculiar but catchy singalong chorus of “You thought you might be a ghost/You didn’t get to heaven but you made it close.” Similarly, the two-part, seven-minute track “Lovers in Japan” starts with a driving background reminiscent of Mercury Rev’s “Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp” (also uneven yet fun), but around the four-minute mark switches to the second part, a mopeysuck ballad with no apparent connection to the first movement, although I imagine they would just be split if released as a single. Every one of these songs has a great sequence in it, but only the two-part “Yes” – actually the song “Yes” plus a hidden track, sold as a single song in the downloadable version – delivers in both halves, although the transition is jarring and the connection between the two pieces is not evident.

The album kicks into high gear when “Yes” is followed by “Viva la Vida,” which should put Coldplay into Record of the Year territory (especially since they’ve won the award before – and you thought the baseball writers were predictable). It’s a classic combination of upbeat music as an ironic background to an extended lament, this time with a deposed monarch (or tyrant?) as narrator. It’s probably the closest Coldplay has ever come to putting an actual groove into one of their tracks. “Viva” is followed by the lead single, “Violet Hill,” a dark, almost gothic ballad carried by a Bonham-esque drumbeat – you might wonder if they’re on Violet Hill because the levee broke and they had to head for higher ground – with a distinctive modulation behind the chorus’ final line that provides a sinister contrast to the words (“If you love me/Won’t you let me know”).

What elevates the album despite the trademark strain of melancholy that always infects Coldplay’s music is the way that nearly every song possesses a sort of musical greed that drives it forward, or perhaps pulls the listener in and forces you to want to come along for the ride. There’s more layering than ever before, almost a 180 from the sparse arrangements of Parachutes and much of X&Y. There’s also a lot of what I could only call prog-rock leanings, like the Russian-sounding, minor-key violin solo in “Yes,” or the heavily syncopated transitional movement in “42.” If this is a sign that they’re heading full-on into Yes or King Crimson territory, then this is my stop and I’m getting off, but I’m hopeful that Viva la Vida is more of a sign of maturation in their music, and that we’re about to get their equivalent of The Joshua Tree or Revolver the next time out.

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→ April 29, 2008
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Def Leppard.

My wife has Dancing With the Stars on, and Def Leppard is performing “live” in their studios … except this is clearly the original recording of “Pour Some Sugar on Me” from Hysteria. I’m not shocked that Joe Elliott can’t hit the same high notes he could 20 years ago, but I’d be shocked if a single microphone back there was on. This is Ashlee Simpson territory – all we need is for Elliott to make some rambling, breathless apology as the show is ending. As my wife said, “If you’re not going to actually play it, why come on the show?” Good question.

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→ April 26, 2008
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Help.

I’m at a wedding and the dj is playing “Sweet Caroline” … and he’s pausing like we’re in the 8th inning at Fenway. Someone call 911 – I’m about to fake my own death.

UPDATE: He’s also played “Time to Say Goodbye” – beautiful song, not exactly appropriate for a wedding – and Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them.” Not sure I can explain that one at all.

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