|
 The
Major Lift
This
month, Virgin Records lays on us the best album I have heard
in years: the Good, the Bad and the Queen’s self-titled
debut. The supergroup of sorts are led by Damon Albarn, the
man who enjoyed provincial success with Blur throughout the
’90s and who has become even more commercially successful
in recent years by playing Svengali to cartoon pop band Gorillaz.
Blur
was Albarn’s ode to British tradition, an English guitar-heavy
band in which he placed himself firmly in the lineage of distinctly
U.K. songwriters such as Pete Townshend, Steve Marriot, Ray
Davies, Ian Dury and Morrissey-Marr (occasionally exploring
arty and progressive realms as well). Gorillaz was Albarn’s
move from classicism into pop-art and U.S. success—and into
a working relationship with producer Danger Mouse (Gnarls
Barkley), who also helps bring this album to life.
In this most recent incarnation, Albarn has progressed into
incredibly subtle abstraction. Here is an impressionistic
world built up around the most English of stuff: not the scooter-riding,
Union Jack-wearing, Martin Amis-reading, “Oi” world of Cockney
and supremely British self-consciousness, but a more ancient
and scary  Englishness
of colonialism, moss-covered tombstones at odd angles in ancient
graveyards, smokestacks and gap-toothed leers. Spices from
distant lands come in the form of African percussionist Tony
Allen, the man who defined the rhythmic nature of Afrobeat
music in the 1970s with Fela Kuti. There’s even the gaunt-faced
figure of Clash bassist Paul Simonon hovering above it all,
laying down some of the fiercest, throbbiest dub basslines
since Lee “Scratch” Perry’s “Panic in Babylon.”
Simonon’s primal throb is used most prominently in “History
Song” and “Three Changes,” the latter an album highlight among
many, wherein Albarn declares his own Anglia a “stroppy little
isle of mixed-up people.” He has always wanted to tell us
the English story in his own way, to dredge up expansive realizations
about English culture via miniatures and sketches (much the
way novelists such as Martin Amis and Nick Hornby have done),
yet he has never quite found the voice or vehicle to do so.
The cheeky posturing of Blur’s Parklife seemed forced
(even glomming on to the Who’s Quadrophenia mythology
by borrowing actor Phil Daniels, aka Jimmy the Mod). But The
Good the Bad and the Queen stands as Albarn’s masterpiece
to Englishness.
It is a subtle, beautiful, complex and avant-garde work, with
Simonon, Allen, former Verve guitarist Simon Tong and Danger
Mouse breathing rare life into the odd textures and equal
balance of polish and calculated rawness. I have found it
to be the same kind of transformative listening experience
I had when I first heard the Smith’s The Queen Is Dead
at 17. The difference is that this album feeds the artistic
jones of the adult in me, the needs of someone who has been
around the proverbial block a few times and who has developed
catholic tastes in music.
 At
the other end of the creative continuum, Switchfoot may not
have reached such transcendent heights, but they have released
the best album of their career, Oh! Gravity. The title
track (and first single) is a limber, energetic wallop of
a song that shows the onetime Christian rockers also want
to dip their bread in a little of that angular, ’80s stuff
that the Killers and Franz Ferdinand have enjoyed. “Awakening”
is more of the euphoric, guitar-rich, Christian-in-everything-but-the-G-word,
pop-rock bluster that the group have made their idiom. The
guitars are like clotted cream on this album, and the hooks
come at you in waves; turn off your analytical mind and be
swept up in the lightweight lyrical sentiments and simplistic,
vibrant energy of this one.
On the other hand, if I have a great concern for our artistic
culture this winter, it’s that a lot of people will be exposed
to the new Fall Out Boy album, Infinity on High. In
truth, “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race,” has all of
the resonance of Glass Tiger’s “Don’t Forget Me (When I’m
Gone)” or Deep Blue Something’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,”
and perhaps we’ll only understand that fully once as much
time has elapsed on these youngsters. The fact that the song
is produced to the nines and infused with R&B funkiness
is just . . . annoying. Babyface and Jay-Z help out on this
LP, finally bridging the gap between the Backstreet Boys-with-guitars
tackiness of emo and the materialistic, nouveau riche tackiness
of R&B. This is like crossing the proton streams in Ghostbusters—a
bad idea in anyone’s estimation.
 Young
London songstress Lily Allen has already become a star via
MySpace and her U.K. success. (She’s the daughter of U.K.
comedian Keith Allen, who guested on New Order’s World Cup
anthem all those years ago.) The pop phenom has got it all
over her American counterparts, and shows an interesting eclecticism
on Alright, Still, fusing hip-hop, R&B crooning
and ska bounce. Her first single, “Smile,” is in heavy rotation,
but this album is actually pretty deep, with a bunch of tracks
of equal quality and cleverness popping up. This is a fun,
vibrant, colorful release.
Onetime Wu-Tanger Ghostface Killah’s new album is a little
less fun and a little more edgy and weird, in a good way.
Ghostface is a true eccentric (he’s, like, bugshit crazy)
and it shows in sometimes wonderful ways on More Fish,
which follows closely on the heels of Fishscale. “Stones
From Greece” is a saga about a man who claims Jamie Foxx screwed
him over and didn’t give him script credit for the movie Ray.
The musical beds throughout the LP are extraordinary,
whether it’s mind-numbing drum loops or lush R&B instrumentation.
But “Street Opera,” Killah’s ode to good times with his son,
makes me uncomfortable. Here, the rapper pines for the times
when he and junior “ran trains for hours up in the Days Inn.”
I’ve consulted urbandictionary.com regarding this “trains”
business, and I don’t need a plane ticket to Austria to declare
that shit dead wrong. (Calling Dr. Freud.) My dad took me
fishing, OK?
 As
perennial trust-fund kid Carly Simon slips into senior citizenship,
she has chosen to wrap her dulcet tones around standards and
covers. Into White is her fifth album of such fare,
following two years after the lushly cosmopolitan Moonlight
Serenade. This album is a bit more intimate and stripped-down,
but so, so schmaltzy that it’s hard to take seriously,
from Cat Stevens’ quaint, airy-fairy title track to her hushed,
croaky evisceration of Lennon-McCartney’s “Blackbird.” This
album is evidence that large record companies allow certain
superannuated artists to do whatever the hell they want. (“You
want to do ‘Oh, Susanna’ and ‘Scarborough Fair,’ Carly? Oh,
what an awesome idea! You are so awesome, Carly. This album
is going to be awesome.”) By the time you get to Simon’s rendition
of “Over the Rainbow,” you just might yearn for Ghostface
Killah’s tales of gang bangs with his son to cleanse the syrup
from your palette.
—Erik
Hage
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