Those in Cokemachineglow’s readership less, erm, webzine-oriented may not be aware of Sub Pop’s claim that the new Wolf Parade record “may be this generation’s Marquee Moon.” It is not that, whatever that is. Wolf Parade are a band good enough to function without such referents, and At Mount Zoomer seems, at this early point, to be an ideal follow-up to the band’s (let’s call it) epistemologically incendiary debut. Still, in the record’s final third a sonic strain is explored that moves with a sort of locomotion and instrumental segregation that does recall Television but also evokes a moody Springsteen gravitas.

By which gibberish I mean: it sounds like Wolf Parade. Different as they may be as songwriters, Boeckner and Krug create a singular sort of record, and as such their explorations into new sonic territory on At Mount Zoomer always feel genuine. It feels like Wolf Parade. It sounds like them. Hence “Fine Young Cannibals,” which by name and punchy clean guitar lines and rhythmic strut and stomp may recall, say, a certain other band more recently dubbed CMG AOTY-worthy—okay, Spoon—but which recalls, more specifically, Wolf Parade. The changes are subtle but decided: keyboards higher in the mix, a limber, confident pace, less eager to set your heart aflame and more eager to release a strong record. Which they do pretty handily, as it turns out, because this is Wolf Parade. It feels like them. It sounds like them. Two years ago they may’ve opened with the caterwauling climax, but here they wait four minutes to turn resolutely anthemic, Boeckner bellowing “There’s nothing here,” before letting the song drift away like a ribbon down a highway. It’s a model of restraint, easily one of 2008’s finest indie rock songs, and probably the least impressive track on At Mount Zoomer.

This is me biting my tongue.

E-40 must give firm handshakes or something. Nearly three decades into a meandering career he has somehow consistently been “in” with some of rap’s most innovative beatmakers, from the sputtering proto-crunk of No Limit’s KLC to the bombastic mega-crunk of hyphy jam-manufacturer Rick Rock. He’s a hustler, I’ll grant him that. But get past the clamorous, boat-rocking production, and the central product is cantankerous. There are pieces of Ikea furniture more inspiring than the words E-40 puts on paper. More economical, too.

How this bona-fide goofball with a slur heavier than his body mass index manages to weave his way around a nimble hyphy beat is one of the seven mysteries of west Oakland, and “Turf Drop” doesn’t answer the question. Actually, “Turf Drop” doesn’t answer any questions, what with the cameo from Lil Jon, a man who is definitely in the question-asking business (Whaaaat?) as opposed to the question answering business (Yeaa-ah). Even more perplexing are the track’s lyrics (good luck following ‘em; you’ll need your Encyclopedia Hyphy) and dance—where you try to occupy as much territory on the dancefloor as your flailing limbs can manage. Finally, something E-40 can be great at.

How, why, and what the fuck is this? Check the way the next sentence begins: A two-minute freestyle from Jay-Z over a decade-old Too $hort beat recorded in defense of Cleveland Cavalier LeBron James at the expense of Washington Wizard DeShawn Stevenson and then played at a night club like five times, apparently, and introduced by legendary P.O.S. and fellow Cleveland Cavalier Damon Jones—exhale—“Blow the Whistle” is a glib, mean-spirited romp. “Who the fuck is overrated? / If anything they underpaid him,” Jay gloats corpulently, pitting his verbal dogs on the beleaguered Wizards player who deigned to claim James wasn’t the King and who has responded to this backlash with such underdog sincerity that at times I’ve found myself rooting against my own team. If the backstory and moral impetus for this recording don’t make sense to you, then you are probably not Jay-Z or LeBron James. Jay’s a great glad-hander but here’s just circlejerking, equating himself with James and James with Jay and both with the Rat Pack and boasting of James’ sexual prowess in one instant and then like having the orgasm for him the next. The whole track is an equation the two have been playing footsy with for years, a sort of self-appointed equivalency flirted with but here made savagely real. It is, yes, valid: these guys are big shit. But nobody of such high status should carry themselves like this, with the anonymous, blustery malevolence of a geek talking shit over Halo.

Download mp3

Adventurous arrangements aside, the simple sensibilities and straightforward poetry of Tom Waits have always been at the core of his appeal. As such, Rain Dogs is the epitome of “grizzled” and it latches onto the heart like a rusted bear trap, particularly the cathartic closer “Anywhere I Lay My Head.” Waits can’t sing, but he sings here, belting out desperately poignant imagery (“My heart is in my shoe”: beautiful) in his instantly recognizable growl.

I point this out because, by the same token, it seems Scarlett Johansson does not possess great vocal range, but rather than utilizing the pipes she was born with, crafting her own distinctive, if flawed, vocal style, she and producer Dave Sitek opt for a different approach, one leaning heavily on filters and studio trickery. Johansson—or Sitek—chooses to bury her voice in a placid sea of synths, reaching for a soulful tone but coming off as sleepy and, worse, even slightly uninterested. It’s pleasant and all, but when the source material is so sparse and deeply visceral, this by comparison feels artificial, as if spawned from the mind of an android. Surely Johansson and Sitek needed to take a slightly different approach, as all good covers are reinterpretations and not reproductions, but this track doesn’t carry near the emotional weight of the original. It’s almost as if it aims for something detached.

It’s probably unfair to compare Johansson to Waits, starlet dabbling in music to a veritable legend, but my frustration with Johansson’s cover is this: if she loves Waits’s material so dearly (I’m not doubting her affection for it; she probably loves it every bit as much as I do), why not attempt to carry on its spirit by singing as nakedly as Waits? Such a startlingly bare approach would have been far more interesting and potentially a lot less lifeless than this lethargic rendition.

My Morning Jacket die-hards know that the band has always harbored a cheesy mischievous streak that’s resulted in ’80s covers and prominent use of Jim James’s falsetto. Their drum machine driven “cover” of “West End Girls” was probably a result of copious amount of ganja in the recording studio at 3 AM, but their live version of “Careless Whisper” actually kicks some legitimate ass, and Terri Nunn proclaimed MMJ’s questionably in-tune rendition of “Take My Breath Away” as the “greatest Berlin cover ever.” (Did I just make that up? Google that shit.)

But Z‘s (2006) opener “Wordless Chorus” was arguably the first time that Jim James utilized his falsetto for something other than cheap yuks, and the result was an instant Jacket classic, opening nearly every one of their incendiary live shows with dub basslines eventually giving way to joyous falsetto caterwauling and a “Benny and the Jets” tribute. And nearly everything on “WC”’s wildly successful parent album was as good, cementing My Morning Jacket’s status as adventurous Southern rockers more than willing to think outside of the box, not to mention as the only outdoor festival act outside of Radiohead that you should rightfully kill yourself for missing.

If the opening title track from MMJ’s forthcoming Evil Urges is any indication, Jacket studio album number five is going to be a touch nutty. Z validated their willingness to take risks, so they further the freakiness by taking that album’s “It Beats 4 U” to Paisley Park Studios, imbuing crisp drum licks and a tentative guitar line with breathless falsetto verses and a S-E-X-X-Y chorus all “Eeeeevil uhr-ges, bay-beh!” This is how it goes up until the three-minute mark, where it morphs into a twin-geetar Southern rock fest that makes fellow CMG scribe Peter Hepburn “happy about life.” I could say the same about the entirety of MMJ’s back catalogue, and “Evil Urges” is no different. Do I hear an early contender for AOTY?

Download mp3

The iconic “W” spinning on the landing page of Weezer.com is so mesmerizing it almost makes me believe. Rivers Cuomo—late of moustachioed eccentric collaborative new-media democratized music makings—and his merry band of clap-alongs have written a radio-friendly comeback single about not caring whether they have a radio-friendly comeback. This cut from Weezer (The Red Album), currently streaming from Weezer’s website, is chock full of such contradictions, and I’d wager much of your listening pleasure is predicated upon whether they strike you as brilliant irony or dubious bullshit.

But before we get into all that, it’s worth noting that there’s a big chorus hook backed by an even bigger guitar crunch. This should go a long way for people interested in some sort of “return to form.” Even if the version of a Weezer comeback offered by “Pork and Beans” seems to be The Blue Album as filtered through The Green Album, there is still, after all these years, much to be said for this patented hybrid of power-pop and pop-metal. The song could easily be enjoyed just on this genuinely ass-kicking radio-rock tip, but that’s exactly the problem with all the other conceptual baggage here.

If the song was indeed written in reaction to Geffen instructions to write more commercial material, then its seditious lyrics are either voided by the wholesale capitulation involved in going home and writing said commercial material, or worse, they’re a calculated attempt to boost record sales by wrapping faux-defiance in pretty paper. This dynamic is extended into many of the sonic features of the song that are purported to recall Pinkerton or be an example of Weezer’s new “weird” direction. Presumably the “Scorcho”-y acoustic guitar off the top, the various squeals and squeaks, the little keyboard twinkles, and the string dissonance in the second verse represent strangeness, but are all mixed so meekly in comparison to the big beat, lead vocals, and power chords that they barely register, much less disrupt the song’s relentless forward progress.

Meanwhile Rivers’ intimate dorkiness is much less charming now that he’s writing about being an established rock star fighting with his mega label. We’re not in the garage anymore, and the song’s frequent declarations of indifference to the opinion of fans and execs, made in a song that so clearly panders to both, doth protest too much. Witness, too, how fist-pumpingly anthemic the first lines of the chorus are: “I’mma do the things that I want to do / I ain’t got a thing to prove to you.” This sentiment, a fairly staid statement of defiance, is the key thrust here; all the “quirky” references to Timbaland and Rogain are just window-dressing.

That is, unless Weezer is finally pulling it all together. Every other listen I think this song is everything it wants to be: conservative and ambitious, conciliatory and defiant, Blue Album and Pinkerton. It’s the return of Rivers songwriting instincts and his deprecatingly dark self-parody. It’s the anti-anthem anthem, opening up a broad space for critical exploration of what it means to be an aging band in the major label system. In this scenario the sonic quirks are ironic nods to the sorts of things with which Timbaland would embellish his beats (except transposed into a big-rock context), thus functioning as simultaneously arty, commercial, insolent, and hilarious. The tensions and contradictions are all knowingly deployed to highlight a meta-level on which this song gestures toward and away from everything that everyone wants it to be.

The central experience of listening to “Pork and Beans,” then, depends on whether you fall into one camp, the other, or both. This in turn is likely predicated as much on what you bring to the song as what it brings to you. If you’ve never bought into the Rivers-as-genius concept, I can hardly imagine this convincing you. Ditto if you once obsessed over Songs from the Black Hole character names but the last three albums have made you callous. If, however, you’ve been able to shield a small shred of teenage tenderness from the cruel march of time, you may find that the long and torturous tale of Weezer has found its apotheosis here, in the triumphant return of all that was great about one bespectacled nerd and his Marshall stack.

“Soul on Fire” takes what was once Pierce’s tried-and-true solo meditation on the fine line between transcendence and self-destruction (also: how religion and drugs are a path to both) and finally stretches it so thin as to render it nigh transparent. In fact, since Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (1997) overtook Pierce’s Spacemen work, establishing his identification with dense orchestral sweeps, every official release has had the diminishing returns of an artist unsure how to respond to his own best efforts: Let it Come Down (2001) approximated known techniques with inferior songs, and Amazing Grace (2003) only works when thought of as a departure, hardly standing on its own two legs. It’s been Pierce’s steps off the beaten path that have surprised: the overwhelming Royal Albert Hall (1998), the Complete Works compilations (which somehow have greater cohesion than anything released in an official capacity since), and his beautiful remix of Yoko Ono’s “Walking on Thin Ice.”

It’s so disappointing, then, to realize that “Soul on Fire” presages a predictable “return to form.” Pierce tries to pare down Let It Come Down‘s oversaturated ambition while capturing the essence of Ladies and Gentlemen‘s largeness and pantheistic submission.

Pierce’s imagery is less central than redundant. Where Jason Molina of Magnolia Electric Co. might use moons, lightning, and other natural elements, these lyrics are palettes to be explored in as full a way as possible. Here, Pierce continues to explore the same two dimensions of being “on fire.” How believable is the assertion that one is so in the throes of passion that their soul is ablaze when it takes four years to release an overcooked, repetitive registration of now-rote images? I’m starting to think that Pierce owes himself a trip to the edge of the rock scene before another assertion that the bottle or the Lord defines the contours of his being. The song cycles the same gospel rock-out formula that Spiritualized has been oscillating the volume dial over for a decade. The man needs a reboot.

How Will I Know if I’m Awake pings every Beach Boys/Byrds/Orchestral Pop trope imaginable without ever really sounding like those bands. “Love is Burning Down Tonight” is the album’s centerpiece, a wash of piano riffs and the album’s typically dense string/horn/woodwinds arrangements accompanying a beautiful duet between Cash and Kapousouz that obliquely chronicles the end of a relationship.

There’s several things to note here, but the first is how, despite the vast potential for cheesiness with this kind of potentially derivative stuff—welcome back to the late ’60s, again—Cash pulls it off here (and throughout the album) with a sincerity that is both affecting and gorgeous. It ain’t pastiche, in other words; Cash manipulates ’60s Orchestral Pop with ease to complement his complex compositions in a way that highlights the strength of the form. The strings and things flutter around the basic rock combo, adorning and accenting vocal ideas and compositional moods rather than overwhelming the track with the sounds you expect to hear. In fact, with the possible exception of the outro, this track sounds younger than most of the music it seems to emulate which, almost 40 (!) years on, is quite breathtaking to consider.

Kapousouz is so good on this track it makes you wish she’d done more on the album; both voices are weary as it fits the tone of the song, but both carry with them a sense of inevitability and, weirdly, hope, which only makes the song even more emotionally charged. These are two people with clear agendas and constraints talking to us but not necessarily to each other, and without making it explicit the track ties into that curious ability of people to express themselves eloquently to casual bystanders but not to their partners, as well as our innate ability to convince ourselves it won’t be so bad. And in most cases it isn’t, even though it is, and this song rests so comfortably on that cusp that it’s astounding.

Download mp3

I was into Toxicity (2001) in a way that I was into very few other records at the time. It’s not that I was more into it than other music. Quite the opposite, actually. I recognized very clearly the limits of form and the internal missteps of the record, even as I spun it over and over in my closet-sized freshman dorm room. I listened to Toxicity critically. I listened to it the way I listen to music now, picking through elements individually, trying to quantify the dynamics between them, judging what worked and what didn’t.

I guess I should back up a little. This is a rough stage in my musical development, one in which I parsed music I didn’t really like instead of seeking out music that I did. Chet Betz (who met me during this period) has since characterized that poor little bastard as the kid “who would geek out over the new Jimmy Eat World record and shit.” He’s not wrong, unfortunately. I was a pud. I knew the qualities I had liked in music before but instead of finding those qualities in new artists I was bemoaning their faint traces in whatever dreck crossed my path. (I also owned the D12 album.) For whatever reason, though, this critical intensity was leveled most steadily upon System of a Down.

A major theoretical component of this opinion was as follows: “In an odd and mostly incorrectly utilized way, Serj Tankian can wail.” So now, in 2008, when I see a video of Serj sitting behind a baby grand piano in an abandoned city street like, say, Jason Mraz, I reach back through time seven years and exchange a high five with that silly prick taping Rolling Stone pages to his walls. This is premature.

Even though the visual backdrop of “Sky Is Over” is pure “How to Save a Life,” Serj hasn’t backed off a jot nor a tittle from caterwauling opaque, vaguely anti-establishment hog shit. “Even though we can’t afford / The sky is over,” he warns, as he scribbles on a vanilla sky using a digital effect roughly as awe inspiring as the touch-up feature in iPhoto. As the digitized guitars swell to sub-My Chemical Romance Queen-aping pomposity and Tankian waddles passionately toward the camera, the audience is left wondering what the fuck he is getting at. He pretty much just keeps singing that chorus I quoted above, and that chorus does not make sense. “Don’t litter?” the audience asks itself. “Reduce carbon emissions?” Then, completely lost, “Fuck Bush?”

Then as the video ends, we see a message scrawled almost illegibly in the heavens. It reads (I shit you not) “Civilization Is Over.” And though even my freshman self would surely have considered this ending lame, I still reach through time and punch him in the throat out of pure spite.

It might be true that in a post-“Young Folks” world Jag fick feeling might just sound like Another Scandinavian Pop Album, but “Koltrast”—a quiet track stripped down from the arrangements elsewhere on the album—really highlights Järvinen’s strengths as a songwriter: she’s elliptical, considered, and has a fabulous voice.

The slow acoustic guitars bring this into a Bright Eyes-ish Venn Diagram with Peter, Bjorn & John; it’s the subtle accents that really complement the writing, however. Dungen helpers tone down their flutes in favor of Beatles-like backing vocals that twirl around poking reeds. Beyond-the-kick drums enter at some point; it’s unclear when, and the production really lends “Koltrast” this feel of Just Happening, like musicians are wandering up and joining in whenever they feel like it. And it earns that sensation; Järvinen seems melancholy, perhaps, but not not much that as contemplative, considering the world around her and letting you know about it honestly and openly. It’s a beautiful sensation, and one that she manages to extend to the more robust arrangements elsewhere on the album where she blends twee and tweed like there’s no difference.

Download mp3