A Few Old Sodas

I’ve compiled a list of 2007 songs, a mix if you will, that you can get drunk to. Here they are:

2007-12-15T17:43:00.000-05:00

1. “Push Push (Lady Lightning),” Bang Camaro
A Boston band made out of a dozen local indie bands. A drummer, bassist, three lead guitarists and between twelve and twenty lead singers depending on who the can get to the gigs. Everybody likes AC/DC, nobody hates Def Leppard. Well, that’s Bang Camaro. Plus a little Van Halen, Dokken, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath. It’s a gimmick and the band knows it. But it’s a damn good gimmick. I officially declare that if you don’t like this song after four listens and four PBR tall boys (note: 64 total ounces) you have no soul. Listen to the drums during the one minute outro. Fucking glorious.

2. “Surrender,” The Dropkick Murphys
Like the Sox, you kinda gotta like the Dropkicks if you live in Boston. However for non-Bostonians, who loath the Sox, the Dropkicks still rock. Nobody does Celtic punk better. They were always competent composers of gutter poetry, hardcore jigs and smart, simple lefty rallying cries, but the Dropkicks topped themselves with this year’s “The Meanest of Times.” “Surrender” is best paired with Bushmills (but not after those four PBRs because of that whole no beer before liquor thing).

3. “A Bottle of Buckie,” Ted Leo & the Pharmacists
A song about actually drinking makes sense about now. And nostalgia is good to. Ted Leo is a New Jersey punk (or arguably ex-punk) that is really starting to get into a Springsteen thing, albeit through the Clash. Whatever. This song makes me reminisce about stuff that never happened to me.

4. “Thrash Unreal,” Against Me!
This is a punk rock “Glory Days.” Or maybe it’s “Summer of ’69.” It’s so fucking cornball but it’s my favorite song of 2007. I love how he can’t not scream lyrics. I love the pop punk “oohs and aahs.” I love the exclamation mark after their name. Like “Push Push,” this song might seem annoying pre-fourth listen, but that fourth spin will hook you (Note: it will only hook you if you’re kinda wasted and have a friend to drunkenly scream the lyrics with. Also, you should say, “Man, this song fucking rules! IT FUCKING RULES!!!,” to your friend mid-song and then shake him/her vigorously. If my calculations are right, and I’m pretty sure they are, your will reply with half-mast eyelids, ‘Totally, dude, totally.”).

5. “Borne on FM Waves of the Heart,” Against Me! (with Tegan Quin – of Tegan & Sara)
If “Thrash Unreal” is the punk rock “Glory Days,” than this is the punk rock “Almost Paradise.” You know, that Mike Reno (Loverboy)/Ann Wilson (Heart) duet from “Footloose.” P.S. Notice the double shot of Against Me! Risky so soon, but all the best mixes have double shots.

6. “Girls Who Play Guitar,” Maximo Park
As long as I’m this deep in why not. Maximo Park is as danceable as New Order, while not nearly as skeletal. They cultivate club beats into these really sick, fully-bloomed songs as lush as a Beatles or Queen song. “Girls Who Play Guitars” may be this year’s best pop single.

7. “Energy,” The Apples in Stereo
It took six albums and 15 years for The Apples to get where they wanted to go. It was totally, totally worth the wait. They’ve finally realized modern rock’s promise of mixing the perfect pop/punk/new wave cocktail. “Energy” blends Cheap Trick, the Cars and the Ramones while always sounding vaguely like a ’70s sitcom theme song. Goes well with an indie rock “Totally ’80s” tribute album minus the crappy songs.

8. “Karma’s Out to Get Me,” Fancey
Todd Fancey is the New Pornographer least likely to succeed. Which sucks because this year he released the coolest New Pornographers solo project ever. On “Schmancey,” the Pornographer guitarist added a few more layers of sunshine and gloss to the AM radio gold redux he pioneered on his 2004 debut. It’s winter right now but this song will go really well with a summery rum drink.

9. “Take A Chance,” The Magic Numbers
Hooky, catchy, poppy, makes-you-wanna-dance-and-sing-and-twirl-in-circles music paired with stabbed-in-the-heart, kicked-in-the-crotch, makes-you-wanna-drink-a-bottle-of-Chardonnay-with-Bridget-Jones lyrics. Totally see this band live if you have the chance. Picture ABBA as a first-rate bar band covering the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” arranged as a rock opera by Pete Townshend. Now imagine that without any of the annoying qualities typically attributed to ABBA, the Archies and Townshend. Usually pop this complex and wonderful and this dependent on three-part harmonies and dueting guitar and bass lines doesn’t go over well live. But the Magic Numbers nail it.

10. “Mutiny, I Promise You” The New Pornographers
This should have been the 2007 summer’s jam. (Hey, where was this summer’s jam? Where was the “Crazy,” the “Hey Ya!,” the “When Doves Cry”? One of the shit things about the fall of radio, MTV and major labels. No more ubiquitous summer jams). Anyway, this should have been it. It’s got everything a summer jam needs: a rising, euphoric beat; gentle, breezy female harmonies; a cool, sticky, melting-down-you-arm ice cream cone melody.

11. “Underdog,” Spoon
Spoon’s Britt Daniel is today’s indie rock poster child. No nasty mane of hair, inked up arms or detached distance from his fans, Britt’s a clean-cut and chatty (but not with the press) dude celebrating mainstream influences the Beatles, Elvis Costello and Motown. Just listen to this song. Listen to this absolutely perfect song. Hooky Kinks and Monkees moments, ’60s soul pop spiked with a tiny bit maximum R&B, that same “symphony in a song” thing pioneered by Phil Spector, Berry Gordy and Brian Wilson. If you don’t like this after the first 23 seconds I will refund the cost of this mix.

12. “American Wedding,” Gogol Bordello
Have you ever been to American wedding? Where’s the vodka, where's marinated herring? Nothing gets these bitches going, not even Gypsy Kings. Gogol’s fourth album is the year’s best drinking soundtrack. Hands down. No debate. Every polka-punk thump, violin screech and poetic, Ukraine-accented chant makes you wanna reach for the Smirnoff (or if you went to American University, the Tenleytown Vodka). You should really be drunk by this point the whole mix won’t make the right impression.

13. “Walken,” Wilco
I always thought they were overrated wankers. They just needed a better guitarist. Nels Cline was hired and problem solved. Jeff Tweedy just needed a foil. Top five album of the year thanks to Nels Cline’s guitar solos.

14. “Been There All the Time,” Dinosaur Jr.
J Mascis is a big weirdo but he’s really, really good at writing songs. Also the guitar solo, hello? There’s a reason I put him back-to-back with Nels Cline.

15. “Do You Remember?,” Cheeseburger
Rock ‘n’ roll doesn’t get more childish than Cheeseburger. I don’t think that this song can be enjoyed, or even tolerated, sober.

16. “Icky Thump,” White Stripes
Paging Mr. Zeppelin, Mr. Led Zeppelin to a white curiosity phone. We wanna hate Jack White for being a pompous nut job who’s convinced he’s Page and Plant in one. But we can’t cuz even after making the most derivative album in a career of full of derivative stuff, White’s genius has tricked us (read: me) into thinking he invented rock.

17. “Gotta Get Outta This City,” Baker
Locals. Really cool. Real new wavy but not as wussy as the New Porno types.

18. “I Can’t Take It No More,” John Fogerty
Fuck Clapton, the Stones, Steve Winwood and Springsteen. No, no, I take that back, I take that back a thousand times. Springsteen rules. But geez, why are all these old dudes so friggin’ anemic now? Fogerty’s new album ain’t a masterpiece but at least he’s still pissed, can still rock and knows how to mic a guitar.

19. “Brainstorm,” Arctic Monkeys
Hailed by the UK press as the greatest thing since either the Clash or the Beatles, they are not. But they don’t suck as the backlash suggests. There’s only a few albums away from making an album of the year. But don’t see them live yet. They’re still too cool for school and look like well dressed, drunk mannequins.

20. “Alcohol,” Gogol Bordello
Self explanatory.

This Week's Album: Sigur Ros - "Hvarf/Heim"

2007-11-30T16:49:00.001-05:00

An odds-and-ends, double-disc collection of unreleased songs, re-recorded, mostly acoustic numbers and a B-side, “Hvarf/Heim,” again proves the Sigur Ros' two great theses: Melody matters more than lyrics and new age can rock as hard as rock can rock. Singing in their native tongue, the Icelanders rely on melody, not words, to carry their soundscapes, which borrow as much from George Winston and Enya (without sucking at all) as from Radiohead, U2 and the Cure’s “Disintegration." The platitudes you have probably heard about them as still dead-on. Haunting, yes. Bombastic, sure. Sublime, for sure. Complex, very.

Last Best Show: My First Ween Show

2007-11-30T16:37:00.000-05:00

A trip to a Ween show is like a visit to Oz. Remember when Dorothy awoke in that wigged-out Technicolor dream? Everything was recognizable - cornfields, apple trees, ruby slippers - but totally new. This is a Ween concert.

Wednesday at a nearly sold-out Orpheum in Boston, Ween’s guitars, amps and fog machines looked like guitars, amps and fog machines. But they were somehow different. Brighter, more vivid, with a wicked menace just around the corner just like, that's right, OZ.

Backed by a bassist, drummer and keyboardist, the Pennsylvania duo of Gene and Dean Ween began simply. Dean led the band through “Fiesta,” the instrumental opener to Ween’s new album, “La Cucaracha.” Gene joined in for the lo-fi punk of “Nan.” Then the fog rolled in like think reefer smoke, the laser lights fired up like the mothership descending and the eerie, magnificent music swelled to Oz-like levels.

With the weighty, grand rock of “Take Me Away,” the show transitioned from a couple of talented dorks jamming in their basement to the kind of spectacle you’d expect from a Blue Oyster Cult arena tour circa 1977. The pomposity raged on with the P-Funk-on-cough-syrup of “The Grobe,” the Jimmy-Buffett-on-coke of “Bananas and Blow” and the weed-happy prog metal of “Transdermal Celebration.”

The dream reached peaks during the guitar histrionics of “Voodoo Lady,” which riffed on Prince’s “Partyman,” and the epic new tune “Woman and Man.” Dean is a six-string nut whose solos stole generously from both unsurprising (Hendrix, Zappa) and unpredictable (Eddie Hazel, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Ritchie Blackmore) sources.

Gene, Dean’s foil and the band’s main vocalist, is an anti-frontman. Everything Bono ain’t, Gene is: a lump of atypically charismatic oddness born to lead a band with no qualms about performing a song like "HIV," in which the only lyrics are "HIV" and "AIDS." But Gene’s range extends to tenderness. “Your Party” was built of sensitivity and nostalgia as much as weirdness and whimsy.

Beyond Gene and Dean, the third factor at a Ween show is the crowd. A band with a cult that seems just one bad trip away from drawing pentagrams in goat’s blood, the Orpheum audience was as unhinged as any. Basically, these people were fucking fucked up. Lots of hotboxing (and maybe lines) in the bathroom stalls, collapsing in the aisles mid-dance/freakout, and screaming requests with a rock lust as impassioned as Romans calling for the next slave to be tossed to the lions.

Undoubtedly the faithful will tell you Ween’s show was Boston’s best of the year. Don’t believe them. That’s just the Oz hangover talking. But don’t scoff if they tell you Dean’s “Voodoo Lady” riffage was as good as anything Eddie Van Halen pulled off at the Garden last month. They may be right about that.

2007-06-28T14:48:00.000-04:00

Is it me, or does he still look like the fucking man?

2007-05-25T17:13:00.001-04:00

Sonrisa Salvaje is the holy grail of hoke. When you dig up an album of sea chanteys sung barbershop quartet style by William Shatner, Mr. T, Hervé Villechaize and Roger Moore, call me. Until then David Lee Roth’s Spanish version of Eat ’Em and Smile will be camp champ supreme. But being campy doesn’t stop it from being fuckin' great. Recently issued on CD for the first time – the original vinyl and cassette album was quickly deleted from Warner’s catalogue – “Sonrise Salvage” has hair metal’s best band (guitarist Steve Vai, bassist Billy Sheehan and drummer Gregg Bissonette) and Roth stumbling through “Asi Es La Vida” (“That’s Life”) like some manic Spanglish Sinatra. Como que no se puede amar?

Last best show: Heaven & Hell - 5/17/07 - Tsongas Arena, Lowell

2007-05-25T15:00:00.000-04:00

Born a century too late to thrill the great halls of Europe with debuts of Puccini’s masterworks, Ronnie James Dio’s fate is to rock, like a hurricane, thousands of headbangers with his opera-ready, vibrato-heavy, soaring vocals.

Dio is currently rocking Heaven and Hell (the title of his first album with Black Sabbath), which is, in essence, Black Sabbath minus Ozzy plus Dio. This may sound like total shit, and it is if you never liked Sabbath to begin with, but if you dig metal you’ll dig this elfin-yet-trollish frontman belting out songs about “Children of the Sea” and “Voodoo” and other AD&D shit.

As infantile as anything peers Judas Priest or Iron Maiden ever wrote, Dio’s lyrics border on absurd—“There’s a place just south of Witches’ Valley / Where they say the wind won’t blow / And they only speak in whispers of a name / There’s a lady they say who feeds the darkness” from “Lady Evil” are proof of that. As does his stage presence—in all black he stalks the stage like a cat (or at least like a dancer from “Cats”). But put together with his voice, his lyrics and posing combine to form a mighty metal overlord.

What’s not infantile is Tony Iommi’s guitar (or maybe it’s just infantile in a better way). In the 40 years since Iommi picked up the guitar he’s continued to weather and absorb metal’s evolving style. He’s added the furious flurry of notes from speed metal and the sharp grind of modern metal while retaining his trademark riffage. “Sign of the Southern Cross” was as epic as “Iron Man,” the monster plod of “Shadow of the Wind” somehow made the same riff he’s written a dozen times sound new and the bluesy, echo-heavy effects during the long instrumental break in “Heaven and Hell” sounded downright David Gilmore-esque.

The quintet has a combined age of over 200 but they attacked the extended set like kids on their first tour of Japan in ’74—something Sabbath just can’t do with a space case like Ozzy anymore.

A free summer jam by Denver's best band, the Swayback

2007-05-25T12:13:00.000-04:00

http://whatarerecords.com/ZMP3/Swayback_WaitingForTheMan.mp3

Last best show: Elvis Costello & the Imposters - 5/15/07 - Avalon, Boston

2007-05-17T13:29:00.000-04:00

Standing stock-still on stage in finely-cut black suit, a statue of steadfast rock cool, Elvis Costello stared down the crowd through his black shades. Having just finished a mighty and vicious “Radio, Radio”—his fifth encore—he seemed to be saying, “Come on bitches, I dare you to dare me to blow your mind yet again, cuz I’ll do it.”

Of course we took the bait and feverishly rooted him on to a frenzied “The Imposter” and six more encore songs.

Costello’s reputation as a guy more interested in Tin Pan Alley-tinged adult pop collaborations than rock ‘n’ roll—he’s approaching Santana’s rate of collaborations; although none of his suck ass as bad as Santana’s—was erased as he and the Imposters (Attraction keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas with new bassist Davey Faragher) spent 100-minutes tearing though the songwriter’s back pages.

The show was an Elvis-ophile’s dream. Missing that old-guy paunch but breaking a sweat early, Costello opened with “Welcome to the Working Week”—the first cut off his first album—and played as if he was getting paid by the song through ten tracks in 40-minutes including “Lover’s Walk,” “Clubland” and “Beyond Belief.”

At first it seemed Costello’s sweat-beaded brow indicated inevitable exhaustion, instead he was like a tip-top athlete whose perspiration proves he’s just warming up. The first ten songs—none of which were hits—were just prelude to a four-song main set finale and a 12-song encore that just kept going.

“Alibi Factory” elevated the show to transcendence. Costello sung the great tell-off with a mix of vitriol and good humor in front of his unexpected, avant guard guitar licks and Nieve’s violent Theremin and keyboard blips and bleeps. From there he pushed the band into a risky, rewarding space with a chaotic, complex “Watching the Detectives” and a youthful, punchy “Lipstick Vogue” to close the main set.

After thirty seconds offstage Costello returned for the big, organ-propelled ballad “A Man Out of Time” and version of “(I don’t want to go to) Chelsea” that seemed to both lag and rush—one of the show’s only disappointments, the snarl the band approached the song with in ’78 was missed. Costello quickly recovered with “Uncomplicated” and the stare-down-the-crowd fierceness of “Radio, Radio” and “The Impostor.”

For his second encore Costello returned with only an acoustic guitar to do a version of “Alison” twisted enough to thwart would-be singers looking for the originally melody. The show climaxed at a fever pitch with “Pump It Up” and “(What’s so funny ’bout) Peace, Love & Understand” with the added lyrics “Bring the boys back home/Bring ’em back alive.”

Costello will likely team with Burt Bacharach, the Brodsky Quartet or some other adult talent on his next project, but it kicked so much ass to see he’s still got that juvenile rock kid in him. Let’s hope the snotty, cool tike kicks and claws and bites his way free from Costello’s debonair maturity more often.

People often ask me how I make such bad grammier and make me living writting word and stuff

2007-05-17T12:03:00.001-04:00

One of my former editors pointed out: "Microsoft Word, by the way, is not a 'who.' At least not yet." While totally true, my subhead would be totally emasculated if wrote: "Those that think I’m too late to get on the blog train should note that I’m ahead of the guys who write the code for Microsoft Word who don't yet know that 'blog' is a word.

Last best show: Arcade Fire - 5/10/07 - Orpheum, Boston

2007-05-11T14:54:00.000-04:00

Rock shows so rarely make me feel like I'm watching a “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”

It’s probably because so few rock shows have someone with Arcade Fire frontman Win Bulter’s gravitas doing a damn convincing Captain Nemo-going-down-with-the-sub impersonation looming over a 10-piece band and playing a 12-foot-tall pipe organ bathed in a ghoulishly-dim red light.

Not every moment of the Arcade Fire’s sold-out show was as creepy as Bulter singing “I’m standing on a stage/Of fear and self-doubt/It’s a hollow play/But they'll clap anyway” and playing his gargantuan pipe organ. But they were all nearly as cool and compelling.

The band mounted a stage show more intricate than anything I’ve seen in months – if not years. Slender rods spread around the stage pulsed red, an IMAX-sized backdrop broadcast abstract film clips, and five circular video screens above the band on poles flashed images of the band through fish-eyed lenses or neon bibles with fluttering pages or choreographed snow and static. And everything was suffused in a crimson glow.

Reinforcing the chaos, the Arcade Fire looked (and kind of acted) like mob of gothic bookstore employees and cabaret cocktail waitresses who got blitzed on absinth and raided a Prague polka music shop. Traditional rock instruments mixed with French horns, violins, accordions, glockenspiels and many more to oddly rock-out on “Black Mirror,” “No Cars Go,” single “Keep the Car Running” and the especially sweaty and undulating “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels).”

While the band did manage to rein in the pandemonium for a few songs – the restrained “Ocean of Noise” and the moody encore lullaby “Neon Bible” – more often they were totally unhinged swapping instruments, shouting wordlessly at us (us shouted back) and banging on random drums and cymbals while writhing on the stage floor or jumping into the crowd.

And it was great to see. So few arty bands are this rowdy or visceral or, well, good when playing live.

This week's album: Maximo Park - "Our Earthly Pleasures"

2007-05-11T14:49:00.000-04:00

Like a lot of Brits, Maximo Park makes pop that’s doubles as art. The follow-up to the band’s debut “A Certain Trigger,” “Pleasures” has the same dance-y feel as good New Order, but it's not nearly as skeletal. Like pals Field Music (whose "Tones of Town" is top ten of the year), Maximo Park cultivate club beats into fully-bloomed songs as lively and lush as a Beatles or Queen cut. “Our Velocity” is a massive U.K. radio hit, but its album opener “Girls Who Play Guitars” that may be this year’s best pop single. It's so friggin' good. Expect it to open my next mix.

Sweet-Ass Band Alert!: Witch's Hat

2007-04-20T10:14:00.000-04:00

Imagine if Rush pulled the sticks out of their asses and just tried to write some KISS shit. Imagine Judas Priest kids in a Ween world. Imagine Tolkien and Freddie Mercury collaborating on the next AC/DC record. Imagine all the people living in fucked up rock harmony. Favorite lyric from new CD “Mastery of the Steel”: “Are you male, are you female? Are you maybe an alien from a spaceship sent to teach me how to love?”

The Bad Plus are a jazz trio

2007-03-30T16:02:00.000-04:00

When your roommate asks you what you’re doing on your way to the Bad Plus, you’ll have to say, “I’m going to see a jazz trio.” You’ll probably mislead your roommate into thinking you dig shit like Kenny G, Michael Bublé or Pat Metheny. But what else can you say?

The Bad Plus don’t sing, they’re all about improvisation and they play traditional jazz instruments (piano, upright bass and drum kit). They’re jazz. Even if drummer Dave King is loath call himself a jazz drummer.

“I want to protect myself ascetically because I don’t want people to picture me playing at a Sheraton hotel,” King told me. “It’s like what they say, ‘A million cocktail musicians have destroyed what a few geniuses created.’”

The trio’s doesn’t swing or bop, but it’s also not Phishy or (too) reminiscent of Medeski, Martin & Wood. King and bassist Reid Anderson grew up listening to classic rock (pianist Ethan Iverson we’ll get to later, that guy's a friggin' nut), but there’s no fusion rock feel to the Bad Plus.

Instead, like experimentalists Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, the Bad Plus create new music (which we still gotta call jazz, because, as previously mentioned, what the fuck else can we call it).

“We truly feel like we’re the most honest jazz group out there because we’re not pretending to be Miles Davis,” says King. “We’re playing from the truest part of ourselves. When you hear us you can feel that we’re dedicated to it. I would question whether you can feel the same thing when you hear Wynton Marsalis play.

“You can hear that he loves jazz, but can you hear another motive too? Is he doing it to steer peoples’ opinions about what jazz is and what jazz isn’t? His playing just seems loaded with all this other bullshit.”

And here’s where the diatribe begins. Like some kind of jazz Robert Moses, Marsalis has spent his career reconstructing the music’s history to fit his vision, which starts with Dixieland and ends with Kind of Blue. Meanwhile, King has spent his career pissing on Marsalis’ reconstruction.

“The irony is that we all grew up loving those early Wynton records,” he says - and he's right to say it, the early Wynton records are as good as Davis in 1963. “But that was before he made ten billion dollars trying to steer the entire jazz education program to his direction and became a zealot who wouldn’t let anything new in…But you know when Wynton is all alone in his apartment he’s cranking up Led Zeppelin. I’ll guarantee it. You don’t think his drummer Jeff Watts loves John Bonham? You put on ‘When the Levee Breaks’ and Watts is going ape shit. But can he tell Wynton he digs it, or that he digs Radiohead, and keep his gig? I don’t know.”

While King thinks the new traditionalists attempt to keep jazz pure is moronic, he and his band have been accused using jazz’s oldest gimmick -- covering rock tunes -- to draw in listeners. On every one of their albums there’s a cover that could be considered a pander or ironic or both, including “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Heart of Glass,” “Iron Man” and “Chariots of Fire.”

King says the covers aren’t jokes. Jazz is about taking on standards, but the Bad Plus don’t see a point in doing the hundredth version of “Straight, No Chaser.” So they starting doing rock tunes with worthy melodies -- or tunes that confounded pianist Ethan Iverson (now more on the group's friggin' nuts-o).

“Ethan’s a different kind of guy,” says King. “He listened to Art Tatum religiously when he was 13-years-old, he wrote a tune called ‘Modern’ in fifth grade, he wore a suit to school from second grade until he graduated from high school.”

When the trio first began playing together, King and bassist Reid Anderson began brainstorming rock tunes to cover. When Iverson revealed he’d never heard the Who, the two began digging into Iverson’s rock ignorance.

“Jokingly we suggested Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and he asked, ‘Who is that?” says King. “We knew we had to do it because we knew Ethan would approach the song the same way he’d approach Stravinsky.”

Since recording “Teen Spirit,” the band’s tastes (and ambition) have expanded. It probably pisses off Wynton but earlier this year they did six-night stint at jazz’s most legendary venue, the Village Vanguard. Last month they performed a seven-movement score with the Mark Morris Modern Dance Group. This week they’re releasing their new album produced by Tony Platt (who ran the boards for tons of rock records including Back in Black, Foreigner’s 4 and albums by Iron Maiden, Cheap Trick and Motorhead).

“If you get past the press blurb about how we play ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ and you actually check out what we’re doing you’ll see we’re true to it,” says King. “We’re interested in improvised music that has no stylist boundaries so we’re going to confuse people that want to hold on to boundaries.”

In other words, they’re a jazz trio.

This week's album: Kings of Leon - "Because of the Times"

2007-03-29T13:00:00.000-04:00

Imagine if a sedated Iggy Pop fronting a 1986-era U2 recorded a Keith Richards-produced, Paul Westerberg-rewritten “Radar Love” and you’ll begin to approach the sheer awesomeness of Kings third album-opener “Knocked Up.” And that’s just the first seven minutes. A single sub-par tune (“McFearless”) taints the album, for the rest of the record the red zone-driven needle bounces between Replacements “Let It Be” great and Stones’ “Let It Bleed” brilliant. Maybe no album before has managed to come up with such a natural blend of punk, metal, new wave, garage, psychedelica and Americana.

This week's album: Arcade Fire - "Neon Bible"

2007-03-19T17:05:00.000-04:00

Thanks to blog blather, it’s hard not to think this album should be better. But blather aside, the Montreal band made a great second record full of early Talking Heads, Velvet Underground, Waterboys and Echo & the Bunnymen sonic homages. Contrarians who hate bands that make second albums (NME, Pitchfork, et al.) will likely say it’s too flamboyant in its big, gothy production, but they’re just looking for something to hate. Fans second albums unite. It is our time. For the Pogues reference alone, listen to “Antichrist Television Blues.”

BREAKING

2007-03-16T17:02:00.000-04:00

Man at Shins show in a Ramones shirt complains about excellent openers Viva Voce, "Those guys gave me a fucking headache." Reminder: he was wearing a Ramones shirt.

Nickelback suck. Nickelback suck ass.

2007-03-16T16:58:00.000-04:00

At least that’s the opinion of me and the rock intelligentsia, the erudite critical tastemakers who run the East and West Coast-based rock rags.

But if Nickelback is so bad how come the band fills arenas everywhere from Montana to Massachusetts. If the Canadians’ insipid post-grunge makes Creed seem catchy and creative, how has its 2005 album, “All the Right Reasons,” managed to sell 5 million copies and spend a year in the Top 20?

Well, it isn’t because band members are tough guys who understand Middle America in ways the weenies in Of Montreal or the Shins can’t. Nickelback helps fill the commercial void left when Trixter hung up its hairspray, but Nickelback can’t quite fill the emotional void (if Trixter left an emotional void, which they may have, which is a bit scary). Unlike hard-rock phenoms Hinder and Buckcherry - who share AC/DC’s penchant for albums composed of eight songs about slutty chicks and two about booze - Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger is concerned with more heady stuff (read: wimpy, vulnerable sniveling).

The typical argument goes like this: Heartland America hates emoting and loves stone-cold riffs. Or more simply: Morrissey, no. Ozzy, yes.

But the argument is bullshit. Take a look at Kroeger’s songs. On “Too Bad” he moans about his dad not being around. On “Never Again” he laments abusive relationships. And then there’s his biggest hit, “How You Remind Me,” where he mopes, “I said I love you and I swear I still do/And it must have been so bad/Cause living with me must have damn near killed you.”Take out the “damn” and you’ve got a heartfelt apology. Not the type of thing Bon Scott is likely to offer as he kicks a used groupie to the curb after a few old sodas.

So if Kroeger’s open and introspective enough to spend a Sunday discussing “Fried Green Tomatoes” with Oprah, how’s the Canadian selling himself as a true-blue hard rocker? It’s his image that matters.

Middle America doesn’t cotton to condescension. Accurate or not, indie rockers have the reputation of being too cool for average folks (don't act like you don't know this already). Whether intentional or not, David Byrne and Jello Biafra exude pretentiousness, they exude a I'm-fucking-smart-and-your-not vibe. Kroeger doesn’t. At shows he’s fond of shouting classic, rhetorical questions such as, “Are you ready to rock?” and “You getting enough beer out there?” He comes across as a normal guy with normal values: He wants to drink, vent and rock, just like the rest of us.

This doesn’t excuse the fact that, musically, Nickelback sucks ass. But it doesn’t need to. At one time or another, everybody in the rock intelligentsia loved something just as bad (Interpol, Dashboard Confessional, Oasis).

OK, nothing is as bad as Nickelback. But let he who didn't once think "(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” was as good "Astral Weeks" throw the first stone.