Cold And Bouncy
High Llamas

Since the High Llamas first arrived on these shores with 1995's Gideon Gaye (the band actually dates back to 1990), the London-by-way-of-Ireland quintet has worked tirelessly toward crafting increasingly elaborate versions of the same album--an album that isn't even theirs to begin with. While single-minded devotion is commendable, head Llama Sean O'Hagen's obsession with realizing the pop ideal promised by Smile (the aborted "teenage symphony to God" attempted by the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks in the late '60s) now verges on a folly that's leading him to a hopeless (though admittedly blissful) oblivion.
Gideon Gaye presented a limited but highly successful attempt at an Irish-flavored Smile, while 1997's Hawaii offered a sprawling, blatantly derivative take on Wilson and Parks's mix of rustic Americana and orchestral pop. Now with Cold and Bouncy, O'Hagen incorporates Smile's banjos, harpsichords, organs, strings, and horn arrangements with a healthy dose of the electronic percolations he picked up from his work on last year's Stereolab album, Dots and Loops.

As the High Llamas get more ambitious, what they achieve is analogous to a computer enlargement of a sharp and colorful photograph: The boundaries stretch and the vision expands, but the material itself becomes increasingly flat and diffuse. Where pop elements are often handy in making more challenging music accessible, O'Hagen's attempt to expand pop's ambitions has yet to produce conclusive results.

Like past albums, Cold And Bouncy intersperses supermelodic vocal constructions between lush instrumentals for a series of pleasant but largely indistinguishable compositions. On a track like "Showstop Hip Hop," the computerized bleeps and blurps add a significant new texture which lends a wonderful sort of "dub pop" sound to the extended introduction. Once the song breaks into the verse, however, it surfs good vibrations all the way and washes out with the rest of the album. While the High Llamas search for the outer orbits of pop, it seems more and more like the group long ago exceeded the genre's limits and unknowingly floated off into space.

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Deconstruction
Meredith Brooks

This item will be released on September 21, 1999. You may order it now and we will ship it to you when it arrives.

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Do The Collapse
Guided By Voices

Any doubts about Ric Ocasek producing Guided by Voices' latest record are swiftly put to rest within the first few seconds of "Teenage FBI," the brilliant opening track on Do the Collapse. As new-wavish keyboards snake around Robert Pollard's nasal vocal delivery it's apparent that GBV have always been, among many other things, a great new-wave band and that Ocasek, the one-time crown prince of new-wave techno geeks, is a natural fit. Do the Collapse is GBV's most polished effort yet, although the slick production doesn't sabotage GBV's lo-fi, garage aesthetics. The songs virtually leap out at the listener with typical spontaneity and the hooks still come early and often. This time out Pollard has surrounded himself with a loose aggregate of musicians including the Breeders' Jim Macpherson on drums and guitarist Doug Gillard, a holdover from 1997's Mag Earwhig! The lineup does an exceptional job fusing all of their disparate influences with a consistency not seen on previous GBV releases. Every song here is a gem; there are echoes of Syd Barrett on "Dragons Awake" and "Wormhole," the Who (circa A Quick One) are recalled on "Much Better Mr. Buckles" and "An Unmarketed Product," and the record's most astounding track, "Liquid Indian," finds GBV channeling a myriad of unlikely '70s sources and mingling them with their own sensibilities to create something all their own. The beauty of Do the Collapse is GBV's ability to seamlessly stitch together the best of '60s British garage pop, '70s prog-rock, '80s new wave, and '90s indie rock to create their own personal history of rock & roll.

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In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
Neutral Milk Hotel

Just from the opening seconds of Neutral Milk Hotel's second album, you know it's going to be special: the acoustic guitar strum is catchy beyond belief, and Jeff Magnum's intonation lends credibility even to a line like "When you were young, you were the King of Carrot Flowers." Listening to In the Aeroplane is like stepping through Alice's looking glass; you enter a fantastic new universe that, while it doesn't always make sense logically, feels like the home you never had.

Led by Jeff Magnum, In the Aeroplane over the Sea finds the Neutral Milk Hotel assemblage loosely performing a series of narratives backed by folksy acoustic guitar. But from that springboard, a quiver of instruments (horns, organs, accordions, saws, banjo, zanzithophone, etc.) are layered into a sometimes rootsy, sometimes lo-fi, and often psychedelic mix. Contrary to most pop experimentalists, NMH songs stretch way past the two-minute mark: "Two Headed Boy" transforms from a Guided by Voices-ish romp into a New Orleans big band funeral march, "The Fool" is as catchy as anything Poi Dog Pondering ever produced, and "Holland" builds up to a crescendo of saw, Uillean pipes, a chorus of voices, and fuzzed-out guitar. Simply irresistible.

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It's Heavy In Here
Eric Matthews

Orchestrated pop hasn't been much in vogue since the late '60s when bands such as Love, the Zombies, the Beach Boys, and the Beatles tooled around with instruments usually found in an conservatory. But with his conservative, finely tailored sartorial sense, Eric Matthews hasn't let that stop him from crafting an unusually good piece of retro-pop in the mid-1990s. Once a member of Cardinal with the Moles's Richard Davies, Matthews indulges in the sort of atmospheric pop somewhere between "Good Vibrations" and dry martini lounge music--and without sounding contrived or self-consciously cool.

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Long Train Runnin' [BOX SET]
Doobie Brothers

This item will be released on September 14, 1999. You may order it now and we will ship it to you when it arrives.

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March 16-20, 1992
Uncle Tupelo

After ripping it up on No Depression and Still Feel Gone, their first two albums of twangy punk rock, Uncle Tupelo unplugged for this remarkable tribute--half originals, half political and religious covers--to the band's old-time influences. While the new songs of frontmen Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy are consistently strong here (especially Farrar's "Grindstone"), it's the album's haunted covers of old folksongs that are the true keepers. Tweedy's apocalyptic version of "Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down" and Farrar's earnest readings of the beat-down "Moonshiner" and the labor song "Coalminers" are as frightening, beautiful, and passionate as anything the band ever recorded.

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More Oar: A Tribute To The Skip Spence Album
Various Artists - Rock

Skip Spence's Oar has as tangled and bizarre a history as any record in memory. It's odd enough that a major label--Columbia Records--would issue it in the first place, given the schizophrenic nature of the offerings, which reflected its creator's shaky mental state. But Spence was a founding member of both Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape, so presumably he maintained just enough cachet to get on the shelves, where most of the few copies of the album languished. But those who came across this cracked classic (including Bill Bentley, the producer of this collection) were captivated and its cult has grown over the decades. More Oar features a sagely selected assortment of Oar aficionados headed by Robert Plant, Beck, Tom Waits, and Jay Farrar interpreting tunes from the album (which has been reissued with additional cuts). The tribute is sequenced to reflect Spence's wildly divergent creation. Ironically, Oar in its psychedelic/folk/blues/country formative state felt like an anthology, so the tribute album mix-and-match approach suits Oar splendidly. Stick around after what appears to be the final track to hear a recording Spence made in 1995, less than four years before his death at age 52.

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Pet Sounds [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED]
The Beach Boys

If you need some pointy-headed pundit to sell you on the merits of Pet Sounds, your money might be better spent on an ear specialist. Brian Wilson's gift to 20th-century music elevated this pop album into a beguiling musical and emotional cogency that still operates outside pop culture's fickle space-time continuum--and limited critical lexicon. There's never been another record to compare (Rubber Soul, its inspiration, is close; Sgt. Pepper's, its response, misses the point), and certainly no album has been as dissected, overanalyzed, and predigested for public consumption. In 1997 Capitol Records devoted an entire four-disc box set, The Pet Sounds Sessions, to its thorough deconstruction. The techno-marvel centerpiece of that project--the album's first true stereo mix, painstakingly conjured out of multitape session sources by producer-engineer Mark Linett (under Wilson's supervision)--was at once heresy and revelation. Now the label has gratifyingly seen fit to offer both mixes on a single disc (along with alternate versions of "Hang On to Your Ego," the original title of "I Know There's An Answer"), an idea that should please the orthodox and heretics alike. And while the album has always clearly been The Brian Wilson Show featuring the Beach Boys, biographer Brad Elliott's concise new notes attempt to be more inclusive of a wider band perspective. The result (three of the five band members claim credit for the album title) sometimes resembles Rashomon. If Pet Sounds forever crystallized the band's various creative (in)differences, it also became Wilson's grand karmic joke on his band mates; its burgeoning reputation (Mojo magazine's panel of pop experts once elected it greatest album of all time) guaranteed they would sing its songs--and praises--until the end. And if putting two different versions of the same album on one disc seems like overkill, look at the bright side: it's a perfect excuse to listen to the glorious Pet Sounds twice.

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Telegraph [ECD]
Richard Davies

Don't expect to love Telegraph on the first listen. Where Davies's earlier work always had a hook to draw you in, this album initially comes off cold. Granted, the minimalist arrangements and early Bee Gees style harmonies that marked his solo debut are still prominent, but these songs take time to unfold. Three or four listens, and the album begins to transform. Five or six, and it seems outright brilliant. A single chord or piano flourish leaps out with the emotional intensity of a new romance. Lyrics that should be trite (say "Crystal Clear"'s "In the end/all my blues are red again") become almost tearful. This is Davies's gamble. He's traded hooks for emotional depth. He's betting that his audience is smart enough to work a little. This is pop made to age gracefully.

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BOOKS

Flowers in the Dustbin : The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977
by Jim Miller, James Miller

It appears that Flowers in the Dustbin author James Miller has just about had his fill of rock & roll. After chronicling a succession of triumphs in the development of the genre and its allied ancestors and offspring, here the veteran music scribe and editor of the superb first edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll surveys an environment tainted by "the Muzak of the Millennium" and "artifacts of stunning ugliness" (exemplified by Marilyn Manson and Wu-Tang Clan). Miller ponders, "What if rock and roll, as it had evolved from Presley to U2, had destroyed the very musical sources of its own vitality?" The erudite yet eminently readable author doesn't answer his query in these pages, but he does prompt a longing for a time when pop culture moved too fast and impulsively to be processed and packaged.
Miller makes it his mission to tell the story of the "explosive growth" of rock & roll by recounting creative and commercial breakthroughs, dating from Wynonie Harris's 1947 recording of the jump-blues hit "Good Rockin' Tonight" through the last-gasp mutiny of the Sex Pistols and the death of Elvis Presley in 1977. In between, the development of top-40 radio begets the payola scandal of the '50s, Norman Mailer's "white Negro" becomes the model in a line of ever-more-self-conscious mavericks, and the 1960s trinity of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan pile remarkable musical and lyrical innovations atop one another like gifted children eager for attention. Once rock had reached its zenith, from the author's perspective, it didn't so much crumble as settle into regurgitated mush. That Miller is able to chronicle these dour developments in such an involving manner is testimony to his talent as a writer and historian, and to the thrill of rock & roll when it's right.

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