The Fiddleback

Six years ago, give or take a few months, Fred Thomas’ beloved Saturday Looks Good to Me quietly disappeared. The sudden silence from Thomas’ longest running project was a bit of a bummer for many, especially considering that the last album the band released, 2007’s Fill Up the Room, featured some of Thomas’ most mature, strongest songwriting, and seemed to be moving the project in a new direction. That being said, despite that album’s many strengths, it still felt like something of a transitional record—the glistening, retro pop that had defined SLGTM’s previous releases was still around, but many of the songs were more rooted in Thomas’ folk-pop impulses and conveyed a new, urgent restlessness. As such, while Fill Up the Room was a fine album, it felt like a disappointing finale for a wonderful band simply because it was pointing toward exciting new things that were never going to materialize.

In the years following Fill Up the Room, Thomas worked through some of those ideas with his experimental electronic pop duo City Center, in his fine solo work, and in other projects. After six years of probing electro-pop and downer folk jams, then, the sudden and surprising announcement of Saturday Looks Good to Me’s reinstitution for a tour and new album led to almost as many questions as it also led to excited bedheads jumping up and down in front of their record players. Now, close to a year after the announcement of SLGTM’s return, those questions are being answered in the form of One Kiss Ends it All, the band’s first long-player in six years, and one of the strongest, most fully realized releases in the band’s impressive discography.

Haxan Cloak | Excavation
From the lone noose emerging from darkness on its cover to its grim electronic beats and brief, warped vocal samples, Excavation is pretty clear with its intentions. Here, Haxan Cloak (aka Bobby Krlic) has made a sonic representation of what the album’s press materials refer to as “the journey after death.” Judging from the jagged beats, dour, pulsing synths, and gently fucked ambient interludes, I’d say Krlic’s journey is a little more Inferno than Paradiso. Even the album’s closing track, “The Drop,” which introduces some vaguely hopeful synth work, feels, at best, as if its conjuring a Tron-like Purgatorio. Dour as it may be, Excavation is a riveting composition that rewards repeat listens with its attention to detail and the sense of adventure that comes with its cathartic plunge into the unknown. —James Brubaker

Uh oh, kids—this month I turn my attention to 33 1/3 volumes about albums from the 60’s. While I adore plenty of albums from the 60’s, I also resent the degree to which so many baby boomers romanticize the decade with self-important nostalgia and insufferable self-aggrandizing pop canon-making. That being said, there’s always something that feels a little bit safe, or bored about most of the 33 1/3 volumes about major 60’s albums. Maybe it’s because the albums have already been talked and written about to death, or maybe it’s because the writers of these volumes simply expect readers to accept the importance of the albums in question. Regardless, here are some reviews of some 33 1/3 books about albums from the 60’s. A couple of the books are pretty good, but mostly they’re pretty boring. Maybe you’ll find one you like?

#37 | The Who’s The Who Sell Out | John Dougan

The Who Sell Out is a precariously placed album in rock history. The album was an early-ish concept album and a tremendous document of its historical context, but for many, the album didn’t age well, maybe because it was too much of its time. Perhaps my own life experiences (most notably having a father who was a disc jockey in his youth and who, to this day, adores old radio jingles) helps me see past the album’s dated references so that I can enjoy the songs. For those without ex-DJ fathers or similar experiences, though, John Dougan’s volume on The Who Sell Out might do the trick. Dougan does a nice job of exploring the radio culture that gave shape to The Who’s weird, classic album, and the ways the album mucked around with that culture. Through an examination of London’s swinging sixties, pirate radio, youth culture, and the intersection of pop and art, Dougan contextualizes The Who Sell Out to an impressive degree, revealing, in the process, layers I never knew were there to be uncovered.

#6 Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn | John Cavanagh

Cavanagh’s volume on Pink Floyd’s first album is conventionally journalistic in nature. The volume includes loads of quotes from interviews Cavanagh conducted with folks who have been a part of Floyd’s story since the early days, including Nick Mason, Storm Thorgerson, and Peter Jenner. And, while Cavanagh teases some interesting material out of these folks, the end result is dry as the volume privileges information to style or argument. That is to say, Cavanagh doesn’t really have much to say about Piper, but he does a fine job compiling attitudes and anecdotes from anyone who would talk to him. The material is interesting, but the journalistic approach feels a bit uninspired compared to so many of the other books in the 33 1/3 series that make thoughtful, searching inquiry their foundation. I do appreciate Cavanagh’s restraint in not turning this volume into “another book about ‘mad Syd,’” while still including quotes from Peter Jenner and Kevin Ayers—Jenner is quoted as saying, “It was Syd’s album,” and Ayers, “There was something magical, but it was all in Syd Barrett”—to illustrate just how important “mad Syd” was to Pink Floyd’s beginnings, and this wonderful album.

#35 | Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited | Mark Polizzotti

Polizzotti’s volume on Highway 61 Revisited is an archetypal rock book. The author spends his volume’s pages providing ultra-close readings of Dylan’s songs, and mixing in a healthy dose of context, history, and recording information. And while Polizzotti does a fine job breaking the album into easily digestible chunks, the book ultimately leaves me with a resigned, “So what?” followed closely by a resolute, “Oh great, yet another book about Bob Dylan’s brilliance.” But who can argue with that? Dylan is brilliant. Highway 61 Revisited is brilliant. But what’s the story, here? What’s the argument? And that’s the problem with Polizzotti’s book—it’s a fine, utilitarian volume that doesn’t really tell us much new about Dylan. Also, at times it’s difficult to tell if the author is employing hyperbole, or if he’s just a little out of touch. One of my favorite examples of this is in the early-going when, after quoting the opening lines of “Like a Rolling Stone,” Polizzotti writers, “Practically every school child knows the famous opening by now.” Of course, I had an entire freshman composition course who didn’t even know who Bob Dylan was. Ultimately, then, in addition to not having anything new or interesting to say about Dylan, Polizzotti’s volume also comes off as entitled and with a grating sense of self-importance.

#43 | The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers | Ric Menck

There isn’t much to really get excited about in Ric Menck’s volume on The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Menck presents a history of The Byrds leading up to the album, then walks us through the album track by track while recounting loads of sensationalized studio drama and vivid musician shop talk (Menck was/is the drummer for Velvet Crush, and his experience shines through in the shop-talk, making for one of this volume’s strengths). Mixed in with the largely banal approach to The Byrds’ classic album are a handful of cool anecdotes about how Menck came to love The Byrds, the time Velvet Crush played with Robert McGuinn, and the time an acquaintance of Menck’s met The Byrds while they were recording The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Ultimately, Menck’s volume is competent and good enough, but it also embodies every middling rock book stereotype that keeps the genre from transcending its mediocrity.

#74 | Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle | Richard Henderson

Richard Henderson’s volume on Song Cycle is as straight-forward a rock-doc volume as they come. For an album as under-appreciated, and under-represented in writing, this straight-forward approach manages to be both useful and effective. At times, Henderson’s deluge of information and formal prose makes the volume a bit dense, but more often than not, the author hits his mark. Highlights from the volume include a personal vignette about Henderson’s discovery of Song Cycle, and his examination of the controversial and bizarre attempts to market Parks’ difficult album. Even with these highlights, though, Henderson’s volume is more useful than dazzling, and this time that’s fine, especially for a book about an album that has received as little coverage as Song Cycle.

Maybe you saw Deerhunter perform the title track from Monomania on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon a few weeks back. Bradford Cox hid his face behind a mess of jet-black rock star hair, and wore tight leather pants and a bloody bandage over what appeared to be the stump of his middle finger. The message was loud and clear: Deerhunter were going for their own weird take on glitter and glam. As the song drew to a close, Cox tossed the microphone down and walked off stage. The camera followed him as he walked the halls of NBC, stealing a foam cup from a Late Night staffer, taking a sip then throwing the cup on the ground. The clip ended with Cox pushing a button to call for the elevator then waiting for said elevator to arrive. While Cox’s appearance and demeanor pointed us toward a glam-reinvention of Deerhunter’s sound, the absurdity and awkward humor present in Cox’s demeanor indicated something else was going on, as if Deerhunter might be drawing attention to the weirdness of Cox’s act of performative transformation.

This same slightly off, glam-reinvention is prevalent throughout Deerhunter’s latest album, Monomania, resulting in a collection of songs that is a noisy and smart exploration of restlessness and identity. As such, Monomania represents a fairly drastic shift from Deerhunter’s 2010 masterpiece, Halcyon Digest, an album that was largely quiet and ponderous, and that found Cox and co. exploring themes of nostalgia and mortality. (As a side note, this drastic shift from a quiet album, obsessed with the past and the specter of loss to a glam-inflected album about restlessness and artifice resembles a similar move by another high-profile Georgia-based band—that is to say, if Halcyon Digest is Deerhunter’s Automatic for the People, then Monomania is clearly their Monster. While the comparison is nothing more than a stray observation, I find it somewhat curious that Deerhunter, like R.E.M. before them, followed a beloved release that felt utterly personal and deeply felt with a loose, wild album of noisy garage rock about obsession and the slippery nature of identity).

As for the band’s new thematic and sonic intentions, Monomania makes itself fairly clear in its opening salvo of “Neon Junkyard,” a slippery, fuzzed-out bit of guitar scuzz, and “Leather Jacket II,” a slipperier, more fuzzed-out, scuzzier burst of garage rock. In the prior, Cox gives the album its first mission statement as he sings about “finding ancient language in the blood,” and the need to draw on ritual to “memorize the words” so that they might “show you the way.” Here, Cox lays out his interest in performance and artifice, implying that, in this instance, originality doesn’t mean nearly as much or, perhaps, contain quite the same promise of transcendental release as the performative nature of artifice and ritual.

Rhye | Woman
Woman is a seductive album, and has slowly become one of my favorite albums of the year, so far. Aesthetically, the album finds its creators, singer/producer Mike Milosh, and producer Robin Hannibal, building minimalist r & b slow-jams with mercilessly sexy (but refined and never vulgar) results. At times, the stripped-down arrangements and smooth vocals recall a less emotionally raw How to Dress Well, but the overall aims of that project and Rhye are so different that, despite the surface similarities, the comparison doesn’t really hold water. Check out “Last Dance,” in which dated keyboards and blink-and-you’ll-miss-them horn blasts buoy Milosh’s hella-silky voice as he begs, “Don’t tell me to change.” Meanwhile, “3 Days,” teases listeners with a harp introduction before bouncing into a slick, retro groove. On Woman, Rhye have made a quiet, subtle but undeniable album that manages to feel adult in its treatment of sexuality and relationships without sounding boring or needlessly “grown up.” 

When Kurt Vile released Smoke Ring for My Halo in 2010, a lot of folks were caught off guard. While that album’s sonic palette wasn’t particularly different from what Vile had released before, the new songs were crackling with a newfound sense of melodic urgency, and created an impressive sense of sonic space that proved inviting for listeners. Perhaps the biggest difference between Vile’s previous work and Smoke Ring for My Halo was that album’s sense of scope—the songs weren’t particularly long, or big, but they felt more fully developed and resonant than Vile’s earlier songs.

On Wakin on a Pretty Daze, Vile continues to expand and grow his sound, resulting in an album full of big, gorgeous (and long) songs that are deceptively complex and loaded with Vile’s signature stoned-loner musings. Perhaps most surprising about this expansion is, as Vile’s sound grows increasingly polished, Vile’s chill-weirdo persona has become more prominent—and important—to the success of his songwriting. In album opener, “Wakin on a Pretty Day,” over a lush, rootsy arrangement, Vile sings about his “phone ringing off the shelf,” before quipping, “I guess he wanted to kill himself,” presumably in reference to his phone. This is, undoubtedly, an odd lyric, but it points to Vile’s charm—his willingness to, on the one hand, get lost in his own head, while, on the other hand, make his quirky brand of solipsism transparent and accessible to his listeners. Over the rest of the song’s nine minute run time, Vile contemplates the witty things he’s going to say and drops some chill guitar licks and pseudo-philosophical lyrical nuggets like “You can say I’ve been most all around,” and “Nothing always comes to mind.” This all ends up feeling playfully irreverent and weirdly confessional and sincere—Vile may be tossing non-sequitors around, but he is completely sincere about it.

We get another glimpse at Vile’s endearing idiosyncrasies on “Snowflakes are Dancing,” when, over an urgent bed of folk-rock acoustic guitar that wouldn’t sound out of place on an early-ish R.E.M. album, Vile sings, “Snowflakes are dancing/Discman is pumping/heaphones are loud, chilling on a pillowy cloud,” before providing the context that the song’s speaker is high on the “comfort of codeine,” and listening to “Springsteen, pristine.” References to codeine and Springsteen aside, what stands out most here is Vile’s description of a Discman, pumping. A Discman. Let that sink in—Discman. Disc. Man. This lyric is a perfect representation of Vile’s approach to songwriting: the anachronism is tossed off without fanfare, just a fact of life for the song’s character, which gives the narrative a sense of being outside of time. Maybe the narrative is set in 1992, and the Discman makes chronological sense. Or, maybe, the song’s narrator is talking at us from the present and he’s had that Discman since he was twelve and somehow it still works (which would be a fucking miracle because Discmen tended to be horribly constructed—I went through about five of them from 1992 – 1996).Or, maybe the guy just bought a new Discman, because I guess that’s a thing you can still do. The point is, the reference to the Discman is unusual, but it makes perfect sense in the context of Vile’s generally out-of-step songwriting, and it makes even more sense when considering how out of time and “classic” the songs on Wakin on a Pretty Daze feel.

And all of the songs on the album do feel out of time: “KV Crimes,” is a midtempo, seventies, power-pop stomper, full of gloriously crunchy guitar riffs, that finds Vile’s narrator realizing that his “heart is overgrown,” and asking, “Do you risk it exploding all over?”; “Air Bud,” (which may or may not be named after this) is playful and airy, with hints of early 00’s synths cutting through the bright guitars. “Was All Talk,” with its more pronounced electronics and drowsy vibe feels utterly contemporary; and album closer “Goldtone,” reads as an updated take on the seventies singer-songwriter sound, augmented with shimmering vibraphones and driven by a subtly evolving structure.

Let’s be honest, Wakin on a Pretty Daze works as well as it does because Kurt Vile is a pretty weird dude, and the album manages to invite us into that pleasant weirdness and make us feel comfortable about it. Nowhere is this more apparent than on “Too Hard,” Vile’s attempt at a song about growing up and getting old. Here, over gorgeous and subtle acoustic guitar work, Vile sings, “I will promise not to smoke too much, and I will promise not to party too hard.” Even as Vile is trying to be a better person by traditional moral standards, he doesn’t promise not to smoke or not to party—only not to do those things quite as much or hard. But within the song’s logic that’s enough—here, we get to this album’s core humanity, an acknowledgement of flaws and fragility, a sentiment which is echoed moments later when Vile sings, “Life is like a ball of beauty, it makes you just want to cry, then you die.” While “Too Hard,” is largely about the speaker growing up and promising to “do [his] very best” to be a man, or something, the speaker’s quirks and flaws become a perfect example of why Wakin on a Pretty Daze is such a compulsively listenable album.

Phosphorescent | Muchacho

Matthew Houck’s Phosphorescent has been making solid country-tinged folk albums for about a decade now. And while Houck’s rootsy base-sound has always been fairly conventional, with songs like “At Death, A Proclamation,” from 2007’s Pride, and “Hej, Me I’m Light,” from 2010’s Here’s to Taking it Easy, the songwriter has shown the capacity to write some seriously big-sounding songs that gain extra weight from surprising production choices. Now, with Muchacho, Houck is more fully exploring those bigger ambitions to impressive ends. Album opener “Sun, Arise!” begins surprisingly with a twinkling synth riff, which is gently repeated through most of the song’s run. “Ride On/Right On” stomps along like a nervous hybrid of seventies power-pop and Neil Young style roots-rock, balanced atop a subtle base of psych-rock organ. Even on a more conventional country-soul ballad like “Down to Go,” all bluesy-horns and sad-saloon piano, Houck’s songwriting and performance bask in a pathos that his previous work only hinted at. Muchacho isn’t a total reinvention of Phosphorescent’s sound, but it does find Houck embracing the bigger, bolder tendencies that have produced some of the highlights on his previous albums. I’m not going to say that Muchacho is Phosphorescent’s best album, because, you know, subjectivity and all that, but it’s easily my new favorite.

Washed Out | Life of Leisure (EP)

Though I can’t say I totally dig the whole “chill wave” thing, I’m a big fan of Washed Out (aka Ernest Greene). His debut album, Without and Within, was one of my favorite records of 2011, which is why it’s a little odd (or lazy) that I’m just now getting to Washed Out’s first EP, released in early 2010. Life of Leisure is constructed out of the same carefully layered synths and dreamy, reverbed vocals that made the LP so enjoyable. But where Without and Within hinged on sad romance and mellow atmospherics, Life of Leisure is a noisier, more upbeat, made-for-the-summer recording. Standout tracks like “Get Up,” “Hold On,” and “Feel It All Around” perfectly compliment those gauzy, late-afternoon summer drives or weekends at the beach. The songs are too short, and it’s obvious Greene learned new production tricks by the time he made Without and Within. But as the weather heats up and the long summer nights feel closer each day, I can’t help but wish some of Life of Leisure’s sun-washed grooves and late 80s LA vibe had made it into a long play format. The irony of the EP is that while it gives us a soundtrack for our leisure and play, its running time reminds us of that awful feeling that creeps in around mid-July: summer only lasts so long.

Gabriel Blackwell | Critique of Pure Reason

There is a moment in Gabe Blackwell’s debut short story collection, Critique of Pure Reason, where the whole book threatens to eat itself. That moment is a seemingly inscrutable piece of prose called “Latitude 33° 11’ North, Longitude 40° 28’ West,” which is partially built around John Conway’s “The Game of Life” (not, mind you, the game of Life). See, the story includes these diagrams that coincide with the way that groups of cells evolve in Conway’s game, and between the diagrams is a narrative about Donald Crowhurst’s ill-fated boat race and his boat, the Teignmouth Electron. I mean, what the fuck, right? When I read this story in Blackwell’s collection, I was dumbfounded. But then I did a little research and came back to the piece and suddenly the story was one of my favorites. All of Blackwell’s stories are rooted in forms and layered with references, ranging from the obscure to the archaic, but every time a story pretends that it might get away from us and, you know, eat itself, some brilliant notion or quiet beauty emerges and suddenly everything makes sense. Elsewhere, “A Night at the Opera,” in which the Marx Brothers are interrogated by the CIA, is both funny and unsettling.  “A Model Made out of Card…” partially explores the heartbreaking life of Rondo Hatton (who starred in The Brute Man, which was featured in an excellent episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000), humanizing a man who, for many of us, only existed as a terrifying B-move actor. As I learned through my experience reading “Latitude 33° 11’ North, Longitude 40° 28’ West,” Blackwell’s work might sometimes require a little bit of work from the reader, but his stories never feel like work—in fact, these stories are thrilling thanks to the risks they take and the trust Blackwell puts in his readers.

Spencer Moody | Ask Me About Psychic Healing (Kickstarter project)

Spencer Moody, vocalist for one of my all-time bands, The Murder City Devils, is running a kickstarter campaign to fund his new solo record, which he describes as a "something to play loud in your car. Something for a party. Something to help us feel better when life is crappy." Given Moody’s work with MCD, Dead Low Tide, and Triumph of Lethargy Skinned Alive to Death, this new record is sure to please. Gifts for backing the project range from handwritten thank you notes to original pieces of art. Check it out. Make a donation.

 

James Brubaker

One of my favorite things about the 33 1/3 series is its willingness to let its books play with form. Not every rock book needs to be an extended essay, or artist biography, or session guide, and some of 33 1/3’s finest moments happened when the gods of tired rock-book tropes were out to lunch. Cases in point: Marc Woodworth’s fragmentary volume on Guided By Voices’ classic Bee Thousand and LD Beghtol’s guide to The Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs, two of my very favorite volumes in the entire 33 1/3 series. This month’s reviews also take a look at a long-form interview, religious meditations, and an unconventional glossary, of sorts.

#38 | Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand | Marc Woodworth

I’m from Dayton, Ohio. Guided By Voices are from Dayton, Ohio. I don’t know where Marc Woodworth is from, but he might as well be from Dayton, Ohio because one of this volume’s greatest strengths is its evocations of that tired, broken city that spawned Guided By Voices. In a series of short segments that recall GBV’s signature album’s structure, Woodworth combines band member narratives, fan testimonials, GBV history lessons, song descriptions, recording histories, word clusters, poetry, and a fake “found text,” by Professor Bart O. Roper, LLD, that analyzes Bob Pollard’s lyrics, to explore and celebrate what, for many music fans, is the cult classic to end cult classics. Woodworth’s Bee Thousand playfully turns the album inside-out and somehow, despite the book’s intentional lack of focus, ends up as one of the most comprehensive and satisfying volumes in the 33 1/3 series.

#21 | Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ Armed Forces | Franklin Bruno

Franklin Bruno’s Armed Forces is a bit strange. The book is put together as a glossary of sorts, with each section focusing on a song, band member, idea, lyric, or whatever Bruno felt was important enough to make the cut. The volume’s first entry is for “abbreviations,” and, true to its name, lays out some key abbreviations that the author uses throughout the text. Other less obvious entries (because, c’mon, we know each song will have its own entry), include “Agora Ballroom,” where Costello played the night of his infamous altercation with members of Stephen Stills’ band, the “British Union of Fascists,” “Emotional Fascism,” which was the original title of Armed Forces, and simply, “X,” which begins as such: “If ‘Two Little Hitlers’ is the barbershop scene from The Great Dictator, “What’s So Funny [(About Peace, Love, and Understanding)] is that films ‘Sequence X.’ This was the production’s internal name for Chaplin’s final speech” (144). As the above might suggest, despite the book’s disjointed nature, Bruno does a fine job of exploring a number of threads surrounding the album’s creation and themes, finding, perhaps, his biggest successes through examinations of Costello’s treatment of race and politics across the album.

#49 | U2’s Achtung Baby | Meditations on Love in the Shadow of the Fall by Stephen Catanzarite

Stephen Catanzarite’s approach to Achtung Baby is unique within the 33 1/3 canon. Rather than discussing the history of U2 or their classic album (outside of a few pages in his epilogue), Catanzarite sets out to explore the songs’ spiritual themes through the lens of a manufactured narrative that he applies to Achtung Baby. The result isn’t exactly fiction, but is a sort of literalization of the album’s central themes of love, loss, and redemption as illustrated by a series of meditations played out in a series of faux-scenes that run parallel to the album’s songs. While much of Catanzarite’s dramatization of the album’s treatment of spirituality and morality are engaging and smart, the author occasionally betrays an unsettling fixation on tradition. Most troubling is Cantanzarite’s sixth chapter, “Fear of Woman,” which focuses on the album cuts “Mysterious Ways,” and “Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World.” What troubles me in this chapter is Cantanzarite’s conflation of popular culture’s treatment of the concept of the empowered woman, whose “sphere of influence is apparently determined by her ability to either emulate or exploit a man’s baser instincts,” with, what he terms, “radical feminism.” This misreading, at best, signals the author’s ignorance of his subject matter and, at worst, illuminates a willful attempt to disregard the positive influences of feminism. That Cantanzarite goes on to discuss our cultural flight from some essentialized version of “authentic womanhood” might point to the later, but who am I to judge, never having met the man. Despite this book’s troubled sixth chapter, Catanzarite’s reading of Achtung Baby through “the Shadow of the Fall,” is an engaging, if strange read.

#24 | DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… | Eliot Wilder

Eliot Wilder’s volume on DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… is a unique entry in the 33 1/3 series. Rather than attempting to provide historical context for or analyze DJ Shadow’s classic album, Wilder simply talked to DJ Shadow (AKA Josh Davis), transcribed their conversations, wrote a brief, rambling, and somewhat baffling introduction (including the author’s personal history as a music fan, a discussion of “The White Album,” and a brief but bizarre discussion of postmodernism), then shipped the manuscript off to the editors. While I certainly miss the strong authorial presence that we find in many 33 1/3 volumes, Wilder’s interview with Davis is weirdly refreshing—instead of trying to situate Endtroducing… into a moment or context, and instead of crafting a narrative about the album’s development, Wilder lets Davis reflect on his own development as an artist and his creative process. Davis doesn’t tell us anything earth shattering or surprising about himself or his music, but I found myself pulled in by his openness and, as a result, I have to commend Wilder for recognizing that sometimes its best for an author to just get out of the way of his subject. Endtroducting…isn’t quite top-shelf 33 1/3, but it shows the series’ flexibility and willingness to try new forms—and, of course, in this case, the experiment was reasonably successful.

#69 | The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs | LD Beghtol

When I first learned that 69 Love Songs was receiving the 33 1/3 treatment, I was incredulous. I wondered how the hell one of these tiny little books could manage to tell anyone anything about Stephen Merritt’s sprawling opus. As it happens, LD Beghtol, who worked with Merritt on the album as a singer and designer, was up to the task. Laid out like a wildly irreverent ‘zine, and presenting information in the form of a glossary and personnel interviews, Beghtol’s volume isn’t so much a comprehensive volume about the album, so much as it is the perfect companion to the album. In the book’s “glossary” section, most of the entries are presented with tongue planted firmly in cheek (the entry for “Shadows” begins with “A place of crepuscular gloom where people seek mutual validation”), and illuminate the terms’ placement in and relevance to the album’s songs. The book’s second half is then given over to reflections about each of the album’s sixty-nine songs from Merritt and the rest of the album’s participants. The book includes some other odds-and-ends: contributor’s notes, a crossword puzzle, twenty questions with Stephen Merritt, etc… In the end, Beghtol’s take on 69 Love Songs is unlike any other volume in the 33 1/3 series, and it is easily one of the most joyous and celebratory. Simply put, if you love 69 Love Songs, you’ll find plenty to appreciate about this book.

In the six years between Justin Timberlake’s crowd-pleasing classic, FutureSex/LoveSounds, and his latest album, The 20/20 Experience, Justin Timberlake acted in movies, spent a lot of time with Jessica Biel, stopped spending time with Jessica Biel, then started spending time with Jessica Biel, again. Then suddenly, out of the blue Timberlake and Biel were married and there was a new album on the way.

The first thing critics and audiences will notice about Timberlake’s latest opus is that it’s, well, an opus. The album’s ten tracks clock in at right around seventy minutes. Only two of the album’s songs, “Suit & Tie,” and “That Girl,” are shorter than six minutes. Only “That Girl” is shorter than five. In this regard, The 20/20 Experience is anti-pop. How can radio stations program these songs? How can an audience, rumored for decades by armchair pop-psychologists to have ever-shrinking attention spans, digest a single seven or eight minute song, let alone an album full of them?

Some critics will probably take issue with Timberlake’s lack of discipline and editing, will read the lengths of the album and its songs as arrogance and needless bravado. After only two listens, I took to Twitter and declared that The 20/20 Experience was a fine album in need of, you guessed it, editing. The Latin-inflected “Let the Groove Get In,” I said, while a fine song, didn’t fit the album one bit, and should have been excised from the final product, along with about ten minutes of outros and breakdowns from the other songs. In the heat of the moment I firmly believed that The 20/20 Experience was one of those all-too-common inventions of the post-CD era: a good enough seventy-minute album that could have been a forty-minute masterpiece.

I was wrong.

There’s no way around the fact that The 20/20 Experience is made up of long songs. Repetitive, trance-like songs. Songs made up of movements. In a much-quoted (and quite misleading) answer to a question about song lengths on The 20/20 Experience, Timberlake suggested that he had set out to make long songs and because Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin were “allowed” to make long songs, that so to should Justin Timberlake be allowed to make long songs. That some listeners might understand this response to mean that Timberlake set out to make long songs for the sake of making long songs is understandable. And, if that were Timberlake’s only reasoning behind the album’s immense songs, then the songs’ lengths could be troublesome. Nobody likes long songs because they are long. In fact, more often than not, audiences enjoy long songs in spite of their length. Alternately, some might infer from Timberlake’s flippant response that he was trying to make long songs only to lend his pop the kind of weight that rockist listeners and critics attribute to classic rock songs by the likes of Floyd and Zeppelin. Here’s the thing: both of the above readings of Timberlake’s comment rest on the assumption that his songs aren’t long for actual reasons when, in fact, Timberlake’s long songs find productive uses for every second of their run times.

Consider album opener “Pusher Love Girl,” a dazzling, sustained burst of soulful funk. The song opens with a brief orchestral fanfare that could have been lifted straight off a Golden Age Hollywood love film. The strings merge slickly into a bouncy groove that drives most of the song’s first movement. Here, the lyrics are sweet: “Hey little Mama,” Timberlake sings, “I love this high we’re onto.” The pusher/drug metaphor here is sweet, almost cloying. Dig a little deeper and the metaphor can turn dark, but for now it stays well within the boundaries of pop music’s expectations. About halfway through the song, the strings return for a brief interlude that segues into a new, slightly tweaked funk vamp. When Timberlake steps back to the mic, his vocals are a bit edgier: through mild distortion, and against a backdrop of vocal hooks (“I’m just a ju-ju-ju-ju-junkie for your love.”) Timberlake sings, “My heroine. My cocaine. My plum wine. My MDMA . . . Now I can’t wait ‘till I get home and get you in my veins.” The metaphor hasn’t been driven entirely dark, but by acknowledging the gritty reality of the song’s central metaphor, “Pusher Love Girl” is acknowledging both the euphoria and withdrawal of addiction, which translates to an acknowledgement of both the euphoria and sometimes frightening compulsion caused by love. Most impressive, though, is that Timberlake achieves this dual acknowledgement without ever making “Pusher Love Girl” feel heavy. The song isn’t meant to make us think about the joy and pain of love, or any other such nonsense, but it embodies both of these attitudes in a slick pop package.

“Strawberry Bubblegum” employs a similar structure, the song’s first half riding an ice cold groove as Timberlake seduces an off-screen interlocutor who he met, “when she said, ‘hey,’” while “popping that strawberry bubblegum.” The song’s first half is sexy and intimate, a fine song, but nothing particularly surprising from Timberlake. Where the song earns its legs is in its second half, which reintroduces the song’s titular gum as a symbol of personal affection over a groove of warm electric piano and a beat that sounds pre-programmed from some grandmother’s Lowrey organ. Here, Timberlake slides back toward a sweeter sensibility: “If you’ll be my strawberry bubblegum, then I’ll be your blueberry body pie.” It’s not as if the outro’s refrain isn’t at all sexual, but the emphasis has shifted towards a more innocent, playful expression of that sexuality.

Elsewhere, Timberlake extends his songs with prolonged codas that double as emotional climaxes. “Tunnel Vision,” a harrowing and dramatic song about alienation and obsession, builds on trance inducing repetition until its final coda when the rhythms fall away and Timberlake repeats the song’s chorus over strings. Then there is the finale to “Mirrors,” the album’s big-pop anthem that dissolves into an outro that doubles as the album’s emotional climax (and please hold that thought, we’re going to come back to it).

I understand why some people might be put out by an album full of long pop songs, but here’s the thing—sure, The 20/20 Experience is built around long songs, but those songs are long for a reason. The repetition on songs like “Tunnel Vision,” and “Hold the Wall” creates an uncanny tension, as if Timberlake is spinning pop versions of Neu songs, while the segmented songs mix tones and themes to better express the depth of experience that Timberlake is trying to communicate. Now, let that last sentence sink in for a second because there is something important in it: Timberlake is trying to communicate a feeling. The songs on The 20/20 Experience aren’t just randomly collected club bangers and love jams. These songs find Timberlake trying to communicate something specific about love, and to that end he has created a series of larger-than-life songs, monuments of sound, all designed in an attempt to contain the uncontainable joy, ecstasy, and heartache of love. If we think about it that way, four minute songs hardly seem appropriate. Of course, this brings us back to another potential problem with The 20/20 Experience, that it is an album all about—wait for it—love. 

Real fucking original, right?

But let’s forget about originality for a moment. It’s pretty obvious that The 20/20 Experience is an album that is primarily concerned with love. Love is, after all, what pop songs primarily concern themselves with. Pop songs are all about calling me maybe, and me and my boof, and overwhelming hair flips. We expect pop songs to be about love and all of its related sensations. In this respect, The 20/20 Experience is not an original album.

But there is something about Timberlake’s songs, this time, that gives them a particular edge. If we take two steps back from The 20/20 Experience, we can almost make out a kind-of-sort-of narrative running through it. The album opens with a thematic prelude and call to action in “Pusher Love Girl” and “Suit & Tie.” “Don’t Hold the Wall” tells a story of old affairs ending as new loves begin (“I think I heard what you said/He’s not what you thought and your fed up…Well, I’m the best ever.”). “Strawberry Bubble Gum” is a celebration of new love, of flirtation and seduction. “Tunnel Vision,” explores feelings of vertigo-inducing paranoia and obsession that can sometimes accompany new love (“A crowded room, anywhere, a million people around, all I see is you there, everything just disappears”). “Spaceship Coupe,” and “That Girl” are straight love songs. Who knows what the fuck “Let the Groove Get In” is doing, and then “Mirrors” and “Blue Ocean Floor,” are both simultaneously meditative and ecstatic, the first a reflection on a love lost and regained, the second a prayer to the depth of the singer’s love. While the narrative isn’t particularly compelling, in it, to borrow a phrase from Paul Simon’s “Hearts and Bones,” we see “the arc of a love affair.” Of course, while most of Simon’s songs landed at the end of their love affair’s arcs, symbolically coding post-divorce loneliness with the whistles of trains in the distance, Timberlake’s arc is a straight line, constantly, optimistically accelerating upward. In effect, Timberlake is telling a story here, and that story is all about euphoria.

Nowhere on the album does the story’s trajectory become more apparent than in the closing moments of “Mirrors,” which provide the song’s emotional core while also illuminating the emotional content for the rest of The 20/20 Experience. As the body of the song resolves into an outro, an oddly distorted chant, vaguely resembling something out of “I Am the Walrus,” (and, perhaps, not coincidently, also mirroring the rhythm that bridges the two sections of “Strawberry Bubblegum”) begins from beneath the song’s dense arrangement. As the track quiets down, we can begin to make out what it is, exactly, that is being chanted: “You are-You are the love of my life.” As the chant continues, Timberlake sings over it, “Baby, you’re the inspiration for this precious song/And I just wanna see your face light up since you put me on.” At first, this doesn’t seem peculiar. Pop artists are always singing about love and junk. But through the repetition of this chant, and Timberlake’s fragile delivery of the subsequent lyrics, something begins to sound a bit off—the lyric reads as too honest, too earnest, too real. And to be honest, the lyrics are all of those things.

But why are these lyrics not quite right? Let’s unpack this response: the only place we hear similar sentiments in pop music is in the carefully designed and test-marketed adult-contemporary market where such words never quite ring true. Often, when we hear such open, direct proclamations in song, they feel dishonest and calculated. Alternatively, through pop music aimed at younger markets, we are also accustomed to pop songs that obscure their emotional cores with references to phone calls, dancing, and kissing. In these songs, love becomes consumed by an uncomfortable form of synecdoche; only, through the act of representation, the pieces destroy the whole—love is trivialized, is destroyed and is actually replaced by phone calls, dancing, and kissing. Perhaps the distinction between these two approaches is one of maturity: on the one hand, we have the aggressively adult and somberly direct proclamations of idealized love, and on the other we have the trivialized, junior high interpretation of things conflated with feelings. What makes Timberlake’s utterances on “Mirrors” so stunning is that they land squarely between these two norms—these lyrics are straightforward and even a little bit cheesy, but they don’t make us cringe; the lines feel genuine, as if Timberlake is breaking the last taboo of pop stardom by revealing something true and honest about himself. In essence, in this moment, Timberlake is partially traversing the threshold between pop star and human, reminding us that he, too, can be a little bit vulnerable.

Ultimately, this moment in “Mirrors” resonates forward through album closer “Blue Ocean Floor,” then backwards through the rest of The 20/20 Experience. Essentially, the outro of mirrors, the album’s climactic moment, unlocks the rest of the album and reveals just how personal The 20/20 Experience is—this is not an album of generic pop songs about love. This is an album made as a statement of passion, as a document of love’s euphoria by an iconic pop star for the love of his life. Once we come to recognize these stakes, The 20/20 Experience begins to feel utterly vital. Paradoxically, by avoiding the trap of making generic love songs to sell to an audience hungry for love songs and, instead, making an album that is a statement of his own, very specific, love, Timberlake’s album transcends pop to become a universally joyous and soulful collection of songs that is as easily relatable as it is compulsively listenable.

Despite The 20/20 Experience’s vitality and enthusiasm, I’d be remiss not to point out its few flaws. No matter how hard I try, I can never quite get past how out of place “Let the Groove Get In” feels in the context of the album. The song is fine, a Latin riff on the album’s structural obsession with grooves and repetition (which, come to think of it, plays nicely to the album’s nods to domestic bliss—you know, hitting the right groove and riding it out), but the Latin vibe of the song’s first half feels a bit disingenuous, as if it exists as a ploy to move a few extra units.

Additionally, I suspect some might take issue with the album’s narrow treatment of love. Sure, Timberlake hints at darkness through moments in “Pusher Love Girl,” and “Tunnel Vision,” but the overarching theme, here, is euphoria. Timberlake isn’t interested in the work that goes into building a lasting relationship. This album’s version of love is intensely ecstatic, naïve, and purely romantic (and, as with most pop songs, at times it all feels a bit co-dependent). While such an easy approach might read as a bit immature, it is also a large part of the album’s charm. The 20/20 Experience exists, not as a document about the truth of love and relationships, but about the extreme responses we feel to love. With this as the album’s goal, it’s difficult to read the album as anything but an impressive success.

But those issues are easy to forgive. In fact, the thing that I find most striking about The 20/20 Experience is that, despite how unapproachable it seems at first, thanks to those long songs, I’ve come to prefer it to FutureSex/LoveSounds. The new album’s long, shifting songs seem, at times, modeled after its predecessor’s “Love Stoned/I Think She Knows.” As breathtaking as that older song is, Timberlake’s new approach to the long song is now both more refined and bolder. Perhaps the biggest difference between the two albums, though, is that on The 20/20 Experience, Timberlake has something to say. This might seem like an unnecessary distinction to make with pop music, but the songwriting and performances are so captivating on The 20/20 Experience because of the raw enthusiasm and passion Timberlake has for his subject matter. While nothing on the new album feels as immediately innovative or game changing as “SexyBack” or “My Love,” the album feels more cohesive and necessary as a whole. Looking back, FutureSex/LoveSounds feels like an album that, at times, was trying too hard to have something to say, to be important, and ended up coming off as a bit disingenuous. The most infamous example of this is “Losing My Way” (you know, “My name is Bob/I work at my job”), FutureSex’s big “message song.” On that song, Timberlake’s attempt to “say something” comes off as embarrassing and forced. And perhaps this is why the six years fans had to wait between albums was worth it: on The 20/20 Experience, Timberlake genuinely has something to say about the bigness, necessity, and urgency of love, and he feels that message so deeply that he doesn’t have to preach, lecture, or talk down to his audience—he just had to make a collection of songs that embody the euphoric bliss of romantic love at its rawest and purest.

To a point, I wonder how successful this album would have been were Timberlake not so visible to the public eye. In listening to The 20/20 Experience, it’s hard not to imagine Timberlake singing these songs to and about Jessica Biel, and I wonder if, without the knowledge of the couple’s relationship, if these songs might not sound a bit tame or easy. Still, Timberlake and Biel’s relationship is a part of this album’s context, and the couple’s celebrity makes Timberlake’s pure, honest expression of love something of a risk. Surely, Timberlake had little to lose by making this statement, but by blurring the line between personal emotion and his iconic pop star sensibilities, Timberlake has made an important work of art that celebrates the brilliant highs and quiet moments of bliss and entanglement that can result from a big and generous love, while at the same time challenging the bigness of pop stardom by celebrating the personal in a way that feels surprising and new.