The '90s were, by most acounts, a great time to be American or British—dot coms and economic prosperity and rising tides blurring (urg) the disparity between haves and have nots, making even slacker jobs—say, civil service—relatively comfortable and attractive and bohemian; everyone could enjoy the bank holiday together. The guy who turned me on to Blur along with a host of other bands in the '90s, something of a mentor, seemed to perfectly exemplify this type: He worked a slacker job, had a great apartment on Capitol Hill, sported an Artists for a Work-Free America t-shirt and meant it, and just generally seemed like a man of leisure. And men of leisure need leisure rock like Blur. But it's hard to maintain a life of leisure in a great depression, and while we might get a lot of blistering punk rock in the coming years (or, shit, fingers crossed some green public works really will solve employment and environmental problems in one fell swoop), what will happen to the leisure rock of the world? Sure, the actually privileged leisure class may continue to make the stuff, but so what if us proles can't actually enjoy it? And what then to make of all this Blur reunion talk?

Barack Obama’s victory in this year’s presidential election inspired unprecedented euphoria and optimism among many Americans young and old. The celebration in Seattle Tuesday night was like a mixture of Dems winning the lottery, the World Series, and an unlimited bar tab for life. All this mad joy for a… politician? Unfuckingbelievable. Those who were reveling in the streets Nov. 4, 2008 will be telling their grandchildren about it, should we be fortunate enough to have a livable climate that long into the future.

By contrast, the new CD Yes We Can: Voices of a Grassroots Movement (released by Hidden Beach Recordings and sanctioned by Obama for America and the Democratic National Committee) will mostly inspire yawns. It’s like 17 helpings of warm milk, with only Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours” igniting the sort of excitement Senator Obama managed to generate during his excellently run campaign. Stevie’s song—one of the greatest ever to bear the Motown imprint and one that could make even John McCain sashay saucily—stands out, well, like Obama amid a conference room full of Palins.

The bulk of Yes We Can consists of defanged, soft-focused R&B, mildly “uplifting” pop that brings me way down, and (to be undiplomatic) nutless rock that puts me in the mood to veto more than to vote. Jebus, these are some stultifying, stilted songs, unworthy of buttressing the Obama and MLK speech snippets that sporadically accompany the music. There’s something seriously awry when Jackson effin' Browne has one of the most rockin’ tracks (“Looking East”) on a CD in 2008.

I realize that it’s predictable for a political machine at Obama’s level to err on the, um, conservative side with regard to cultural matters, but one would think he’d want something a little more adventurous to represent his administration. John Mayer, Lionel Richie, Dave Stewart, John Legend (covering U2’s “Pride [In the Name of Love]”), Jill Scott. Sheryl Crow, Keb’ Mo’, and some other blandness merchants do not signify a bold step into the future, but rather tepid backtracking to the past.

If I were curating the compilation, I would’ve asked these American artists to contribute:

Flying Lotus
Madlib
Public Enemy
Andre 3000
Terry Riley
RZA
Lightning Bolt
George Clinton (or just grab Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove”)
Black Dice
Animal Collective
LCD Soundsystem
MF Doom
Beans
El-P
David Byrne
Girl Talk
Brightblack Morning Light
Steinski
Matmos
NOMO
Themselves/Doseone

These are the sorts of musicians who symbolize change to me—or who simply have the potential to catalyze large blocks of people to face the future and solve problems or to provoke innovative thought.

Quincy Jones’ excellent pop-jazz LP Gula Matari (1970, CTI; issued on CD in 1999, but now apparently scarcer than innovative-thinking major-label execs) is selling for $80-$100 on amazon.com. Last week I bought a copy (in good shape) at Jive Time (Capitol Hill) for 99 cents.

Um, WTF?

The spaceship is at the edge of the galaxy. It’s in hyper-drive. Stars and gas clouds appear, approach, and pass at the speed of light. Out here where no one can hear you scream, the lead singer of A Flock of Seagulls, Michael Score, is suffering because he doesn’t have a photograph of the woman he loves and will never see again. She is on Earth; he is in deep space. And the deeper he flies into the great abyss, the harder it is for him to recall her face—the end of her nose, the lids of her eyes, the flesh of her lips, the whole frame of her beauty.

Desperate, Score uses a computer to reconstruct her image. He types in a few instructions, and on the screen appears what very much looks like his lost love; he gets excited, he presses the print button, the image stutters out of the printer—but it’s all wrong, this is not how she looks like, his memory is failing him. Score crumples the printout and leaves the computer room with a type of grief that only astronauts can understand. If he had just one photograph of her, something to remind him, he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life wishing, wishing—wishing he had, before departing Earth, packed a picture of her into his suitcase.

...Only a small number of emotional situations can be worse than this: As the ship passes the rings and moons of Saturn, heading toward the limits of the solar system, suddenly you realize—patting your pockets, searching your bags—you forgot to bring a photograph of the woman you love; the woman whose body, whose beating heart, whose life-breath will never be present to you again. And the space between you and her grows; and the stars are getting colder. [What sorrow can compare to] the galactic sorrow of a lovesick astronaut.

With "Wishing" in mind, I now want to consider not the video of the Cure's "Pictures of You"...

I've been looking so long at these pictures of you that i almost believe that they're real I've been living so long with my pictures of you that I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel

Robert Smith's sorrow in "Pictures" is the very opposite of Michael Score's sorrow in "Wishing"? Smith's problem is having too many pictures of the one he is missing. In space, Score is longing for just one photograph--even a snap shot, anything! On earth, Smith is tormented by an abundance of images.

What can we make of this? We can say that all the love-sick memory really needs is just one photo? Both Smith and Score would be happier if each had just one photo of the lover they've forever lost to time.

It was looking a little shaky there.

You know, what with Mercury Rev, Buffalo's long-running widescreen indie fantasists, recording one of the most pastoral and wondered albums of the late '90s in the form of Deserter's Songs, and then following it up with years of increasingly daft and unintentionally comic soft-rock cheese.

But Snowflake Midnight, which came out last month, is somewhat of a re-alignment of the band's lost ethereal strengths, built from songs like "Senses On Fire," which float and sparkle along like light on a lake.

It was released, incidentally, to the day, on the 10-year anniversary of Deserter's Songs.

What's even more interesting, though, is the all-instrumental bonus sister-album Strange Attractor, which Mercury Rev just put out for free on their web-site at the same time, and follows the best threads of the band's reboot.

Whole careers have been based on Deserter's Songs, a musical virus, from The Flaming Lips to The Polyphonic Spree to Of Montreal. Wayne Coyne, in fact, has, consciously or not, patterned the creative arc of The Flaming Lips on Mercury Rev's years-long progression from the busted squall of the early records to the lush, haunted, 'Wizard Of Oz'-styled surreal optimism of the subsequent ones, and it's been entertaining to watch the alternate realities swarm around the same idea.

Mercury Rev were first, of course. And first to become shit. So the fact that Strange Attractor is one of the best things the band has ever done, and free as well, suggests the parallel stories are not quite over.

Opening track "Love Is Pure" is a quiet rise of single-note pianos and small, steady waves of electronic South Asian sounds, gone before you know it, like a lost Brian Eno record, and it's a lovely little thing. Then, urgent and hypnotic, there's "Because Because Because," which shows an influence of mid-period "Hoops"/"The Sunshine Underground" Chemical Brothers, a hushed side-effect from their one-time collaborators. Some songs only last a minute or two. If bits like "Loop, Lisse, Loop" might sound like bad planetarium jazz, there are also loads that recall Cliff Martinez's soundtrack to 2002's 'Solaris,' but more innocent and old-fashioned, like a big wind-up toy.

It's a slight, sideways collection of songs.

A real surprise.

Exactly what Mercury Rev needed to make.

[Download]

For their forthcoming Merriweather Post Pavillion, due out January 20th on Domino. I think Pitchfork's Paul Thompson put it best: "Whoa dude. WHOA DUDE. Whoa. Dude." Indeed.

That new Of Montreal album, Skeletal Lamping, is out today in a variety of whimsical formats. Pitchfork doesn't think much of it, giving it a 5.9/10 due in large part, it seems, to the album's unusual structure, in which some songs fragment into two or three distinct passages while others bleed into each other to create continuous suites. For me, that's not such an issue, and while I might not rate Skeletal Lamping as highly as Hissing Fauna when end-of-year list-making time rolls around, I'm still pretty enamored with it right now.

One thing's been bugging me though: there's an isolated vocal melody at 2:09 of "For Our Elegant Caste" (pitchfork: "one of the most annoying choruses of the year") that I swear is from some ELO number on the Xanadu soundtrack (I mean that as a compliment)—only, I can't find that melody anywhere. Am I just hallucinating? Or is it only kind of stylistically similar? (My hunch is that Georgie Fruit has at least watched Xanadu a time or two.)

Bonus: Stranger columnist Michaelangelo Matos gives the album a kinder consideration for Salon, despite the inevitable Flaming Lips comparison (I never made room for this argument in my review of their show, but here goes: Of Montreal > Flaming Lips [at least from the perspective of 2008]).

Psychic Ill’s Dins (2006) is one of the best rock albums of recent years. Without being blatant about it, they update the expansive, heat-mirage psychedelia of Texan '60s legends Thirteenth Floor Elevators and the Red Krayola. “What made Dins revelatory,” I wrote in another publication, “was its adept alternation between disorienting atmospheric meandering and thrusting rock motion.”

From the few tracks I’ve sampled so far, Mirror Eye promises to be sublime, too.

Now enjoy some footage from last year’s PI show at the Funhouse.

Rap metal that doesn’t suck is rare. Outtasite—Seattle rapper Michael Singleton and guitarist Joel D. Davila—do a sound job of making the maligned genre seem worth not consigning to the scrap heap of history. Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Rhyme Cartel Records is releasing Outtasite’s Careful What You Wish For (the local rap legend appears on the title track). Back in July, Stranger hiphop columnist Larry Mizell Jr. wrote about Outtasite in his My Philosophy column:

Now I'm not mad at Outtasite the rapper, he's solid—but the "hard rock," guitar-laced jammy jams his group cranks, while mostly avoiding the easy trap of poorly conceived rap-funk-rock stuff by dint of his legitimate rhymes, still strike me as overly slick, dudebro X Games fare. But I've only seen the guy's name on the Showbox's marquee (featuring Sir Mix, just as of Friday), so there must be a number of folks that do vibe on it.

I can see Larry’s points, but my expectations for rap metal are so low, even an adequate version of it can sound all right. Davila flaunts some Tom Morello-like dexterity on his ax and Singleton flexes some above-average vocab and thoughts with a flow that splits the difference between street and backpack. If you can like only one Seattle rap-metal outfit, make it Outtasite. If you can’t, that’s okay, too.

Karen Dalton’s cover of the Band’s “In a Station”

Tonight, Olympia almost a cappella dream pop ensemble Lake play an all-ages show at 2020 Cycle with Desolation Wilderness and Hoquiam. I review their new K Records album, Oh, The Places We'll Go in this week's album reviews:

One of the distinguishing oddities of Olympia is Capitol Lake, a man-made reflecting puddle scenically situated between downtown and the Capitol Building up on the hill. It was immortalized in Beat Happening's "Our Secret," although you probably wouldn't want to go swimming in it, not even with Calvin Johnson. Young K Records ensemble Lake may not take their name from this particular body of water, but they certainly share some of its perfectly composed calm and antique charm.

Lake are a soft-rocking glee club whose cool, almost a cappella dream pop and lyrical doo-wop wouldn't sound entirely out of place in 1951, the year Capitol Lake was dredged out of some mudflats. They're also archetypically Olympian, a loose collective whose fluctuating membership draws from a pool of singers, songwriters, and musicians that includes members of Kickball and Swimming, and the prolific Karl Blau, who recorded Oh, the Places We'll Go at Anacortes's Department of Safety. (Speaking of prolific, Lake have supposedly recorded a dozen albums' worth of material, although this is only their third full-length.)

The album is book-ended by the title track and its sequel (as well as a brief instrumental coda), two placidly optimistic Seussian anthems whose coed vocal harmonies; swinging drumming; deep, bobbing bass; and accents of piano, guitar, horns, and hand percussion all pleasantly recall Vancouver, BC, contemporaries No Kids (both are fans of Fleetwood Mac). That resemblance is even clearer on the gorgeous "Blue Ocean Blue," with its airy female vocal lead and its spare rim shots, cowbells, and hand claps. Lake chart a fairly steady course across the album, trading off vocal duties, slowing down a bit for the dark, jazzy "Minor Trip" and the echoing, synth-inflected "On the Swing," picking up the tempo for the melancholy dance number "Counting." This Lake is as welcoming to dip into as it is postcard picturesque.

A correction: Lake's debut album, not Oh, The Places We'll Go, was recorded at the Department of Safety.

Thank Fuckin' A! "Every Stitch" and, to a less specific extent, every other song on this album was exactly the brain-flushing rock blast I needed this morning (granted, I'd heard it before). That's all.

The remedy is self-medication and a pair of headphones. If I’m gonna be staring at a pitch-black ceiling for a few hours, I might as well have a decent soundtrack and a healthy buzz. A hearty European beer, perhaps a cup of Calimucho, and a good record can expedite a solid night of sleep. Or at least make that darkness a little less lonely.

Some of my favorite sleepy time soundtracks after the jump… and feel free to suggest some of your own.

Who remembers the Telescopes? They put out some sweet psychedelic 12s for Creation Records in the 80s/90s, and then faded out, only to return to action to little fanfare about a decade later. Now the Mind Expansion label (run by Randall Niemann of Füxa) is going to issue Singles Compilation 1989-1991, which contains their finest material—and which will probably ruin all your plans to make a fortune selling the original vinyl releases on eBay.

The Telescopes kind of paled in comparison to contemporaries like Spacemen 3 and Loop, but they possessed some brilliant melodic charms of their own. This collection is a timepiece from an era that many bands are still trying to emulate (nu-gaze, anyone?).

The Telescopes’ “Flying” [see video below] embodies that much-used formula of the time: Beach Boys vocal harmonies + Byrds guitar jangle + UK twist on the “Funky Drummer” beat = first wave of British shoegazer rock (to grossly generalize). (For info on how to order the comp, see Niemann's MySpace bulletin after the cut.)

Barsuk Records is pleased to announce that we will be re-issuing Death Cab for Cutie’s classic 1998 debut album, Something About Airplanes, on November 25th. This limited deluxe 10-year anniversary CD edition will include a bonus disc featuring a recently-unearthed recording of the band’s first-ever Seattle show, a February 1998 set at the legendary venue The Crocodile Café. The reissue will also feature beautifully redesigned artwork, including extensive liner notes by noted musician and writer Sean Nelson (whose band Harvey Danger was the headliner of the bonus disc show, and who sings lead vocals on the DCfC set’s never-before-heard cover of The Smiths’ “Sweet and Tender Hooligan”).

I think this is awesome. Something About Airplanes, still, is one of my favorite Death Cab records, and I'm so glad that it will get a moment in spotlight now that the band has gone and gotten all famous. (For the record: We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes is my favorite DC record, and Something About Airplanes is a close second. Transatlanticism and Narrow Stairs each have really solid moments, and I will never, ever like Plans.)