Review: 'Illustrated History of Rock'

You know rock and roll has lost its bite when it becomes the subject of a big picture book for tiny little tots. What hand-wringing dads and moms once considered hymns of Satan is now fit for toddlers in Luis Demano and Susana Monteagudo's Illustrated History of Rock. 

Review: PJ Harvey's 'White Chalk' and 'White Chalk-Demos' on Vinyl

PJ Harvey tended to work in phases, beginning her career with a couple of psycho-blues breakdowns, continuing with a couple lusher, more somber productions, then onto two relatively traditional yet eclectic rock and roll records. Then came the outlier. There's nothing quite like White Chalk in Harvey's oeuvre, or any other rock artist's for that matter. White Chalk sounds like it was flown in from some hard-to-pinpoint era when people still lived in log cabins, lit the night with bonfires, and whispered of phantoms haunting the surrounding woods. Harvey plays ghost throughout every aspect of the record from her washed out image on the cover to her lyrics awash in death to her weightless vocals that never push into her trademark Beefheart bellow. Yet her banshee shrieks that climax the album will drag chills up your neck more assuredly than any of her earlier, more forceful stances. The archaic arrangements of hollow piano and acoustic guitar, dulcimer, zither, concertina, harp, and so on contribute immensely to the singular mood. Even on the odd occasion Harvey and co-producers John Parish and Flood opt for electricity, they use decidedly old-fashioned tools such as the Mellotron and the minimoog (courtesy of former Beefhearter Eric Drew Feldman). Harvey created specific sustained moods on each of her first four albums, but she had never done it as masterfully or specifically as she did on White Chalk. It's so specific that I'd feel as weird playing the album at any time but Halloween season as I would playing "Jingle Bells" in July. White Chalk is haunting, sincerely scary, beautiful, poetic, autumnal, gloomy, and my very favorite album by an artist who made several of my favorites.

White Chalk is so old-fashioned that it also feels wrong listening to it on any format but good old vinyl, and I've spent the last decade or so kicking myself for not grabbing the wax upon its 2007 release before it went out of print. So it's the album I've been most looking forward to since last year's announcement that the whole Harvey catalog would be remastered for vinyl. I'm not disappointed. Without any fanfare or even an indication on the LP jacket, inner sleeve, or labels, White Chalk spins at 45 rpms. It sounds fabulous. The vinyl is flat and quiet with a properly centered spindle hole. My copy has a series of unfortunately-placed scratches during the a capella opening of "Broken Harp", but this is more likely a flaw particular to my copy than a production error.

This release's accompanying disc of demos isn't radically different from the main feature. White Chalk - Demos sounds like White Chalk stripped of everything but Polly Jean's contributions. That means it's great because Harvey's work on White Chalk is great, but it's no substitute for the final album and no font of revelations either. It does make one fully appreciate the little ear-catching touches Harvey's collaborators added. White Chalk - Demos may have been of more interest to non-completists if it included the itunes-only bonus track "Wait", which is a really good song in the folk-rock mode Harvey had previously only attempted on "Good Fortune" from Stories from The City. Still, I'm glad it was not appended to the proper album because it strays so far from the utterly perfect mood of White Chalk.

Review: PJ Harvey's 'The Peel Sessions 1991-2004' on Vinyl

John Peel was likely the UK's most revered DJ, and being summoned for one of his BBC "Peel Sessions" was way cooler than a command performance for the queen. Peel called on PJ Harvey eight times from October 1991 to May 2004, and she participated in one final session in tribute to Peel eight weeks after he died on October 25, 2004. From those nine sessions, Harvey selected a dozen performances for her 2006 CD compilation The Peel Sessions 1991-2004. 

While Harvey's inaugural Peel session is considered one of the series' best, possibly because it captures her before she'd even put out Dry, the four performances she selected from it feel a bit redundant because they are all songs from that debut that do not differ significantly from the recorded versions aside from Steve Vaughan's extra wiry, extra distorted bass sound. They're all great songs performed well, but The Peel Sessions really gains value when PJ Harvey works through less familiar material or less familiar arrangements, which is what she does for the remainder of the disc. "Naked Cousin", a Rid of Me outtake that finally found a home in 1996 on the Crow: City of Angels soundtrack, is flat-out awesome--as devastating a song and performance as any on Rid of Me. I've loved her take on Willie Dixon's "Wang Dang Doodle" ever since I heard her do it totally solo on 120 Minutes in '93, and the full-band version here is considerably wilder. Her and John Parish's voice/guitars reading of "Snake" contains a vocal even more uncontainable than the one on Rid of Me. A completely fuzzed-out version of the Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea bonus track "This Wicked Tongue" sounds like a return to Rid of Me's lo-fi aesthetics in the days when PJ had polished up her sound on disc considerably. Her voice and guitar reading of "You Come Through" from the tribute session is much more intense than the airily atmospheric version on Uh-Huh Her.

That back two-thirds of The Peel Sessions renders the disc nearly as essential as PJ Harvey's proper albums, so it's very conscientious of Island/UMe to include it in its current PJH vinyl reissue campaign. It sounds just as full-bodied as the other LPs in this campaign.

Review: PJ Harvey's 'Is This Desire?' and 'Is This Desire?-Demos'

If there’s any doubt that OK Computer was the most influential album of 1997, just listen to the albums of 1998. With a single flip of the calendar, artists responsible for some of the most organic music of the nineties suddenly adopted Radiohead’s synthesized, sci-fi textures. They still used their guitars, but they tended to costume those guitars in heavy effects or bury them deep in the mix.

Review: 'Now Is the Time to Invent! Reports from the Indie-Rock Revolution, 1986-2000'

A big part of running Psychobabble involves trawling the Internet in search of cool-looking upcoming books to review. One that interested me when I came across its pre-order page on Amazon was Now Is the Time to Invent! Reports from the Indie-Rock Revolution, 1986-2000, and I immediately put in a review-copy request with Verse Chorus Press. That was October 2012. For whatever reason, the book didn’t come out that year or the year after that or the year after that. It just kept getting put off, but my interest never waned, because I could never find much retrospective coverage of eighties/nineties indie-rock. In fact, I often feel like that whole scene was some weird dream that only I dreamt, a dream that left behind fab recordings by nocturnal phantasms such as Throwing Muses, Pavement, The Breeders, and Belle and Sebastian. While there’s never been a shortage of nostalgia for all things fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, the only thing from the nineties anyone seems to remember is Friends, and Friends sucked.

Review: PJ Harvey's 'Dry' and 'Dry Demos'

In 1992, Polly Jean Harvey punctured the grunge lethargy like a switchblade through a dingy flannel. Harvey neutered most of her guitar-wielding peers with legit rage and a harrowingly expressive voice weaned on Siouxsie Sioux and Captain Beefheart. That voice and her filthy guitar work led the eponymous trio PJ Harvey (Steve Vaughn: bass; Rob Ellis: drums) through eleven bluesy blades on their debut Dry.

Review: 'Rock and Roll Woman: The 50 Fiercest Female Rockers'

Who would you select if tasked with choosing “The 50 Fiercest Female Rockers”? Once I was through grumbling about that measly number, I wouldn’t select a lot of the ones who make it into Meredith Ochs’s new book Rock and Roll Woman: The 50 Fiercest Female Rockers. To the writer’s credit, she makes a strong case for even the ones who made my eyes roll while perusing the table of contents. Ochs’s colorful prose and infectious love for her subjects nearly brought me to the precipice of reconsidering the artistry of Gwen Stefani or Sheryl Crow.

December 9, 2009: Psychobabble’s Wholly Subjective 20 Best Albums ofthe ‘00s

The Psychobabble agenda is retro at all costs. Of course, “retro” is a relative term, and as someone who gets nostalgic over things that happened last weekend, I have a fairly arbitrary definition for it: basically, anything that happened before I hit puberty. I’ve made a few exceptions here and there, but I try to stick to pre-mid-‘80s music and movies as best as possible. With the coming end of a decade, I’m making an exception to sift through some of the best (read as: “personal favorite”) items of the ‘00s. This week we’ll be running down 20 of the most worthwhile records to rock this dwindling decade.

20. Mountain Battles by The Breeders (2008)

So, The Breeders released two of the best record of the ‘90s, then ignominiously faded away as the two principal members—Kim and Kelley Deal—dealt with various addictions and personal problems. By the ‘00s they were pretty much a distant memory, vaguely recalled by most as ex-Pixie Kim Deal’s side project and the group responsible for the weird but enthralling hit single “Cannonball”. When The Breeders reformed to a small amount of hoopla and put out the fairly forgettable Title TK in 2002, they seemed more like relics of the ‘90s than ever. A six year gap followed; then Mountain Battles. Jaw drops, eyes bug out, hands begin drumming ecstatically on thighs. Sneaking out with barely a whisper of media interest, The Breeders’ fourth album in nearly two decades may be their best, covering as wide a range of influences and moods as Last Splash while dispensing of the instrumental filler and striking a more consistent overall tone. This is a mature album made by a wonderfully immature group. “Overglazed” sounds like a great lost Who single written after Townshend suffered a severe blow to the skull. “Bang On” and the sublime “Walk It Off” are jaunty, bouncy fun, as is the Tasties cover, “It’s the Love”. All of these could have been big college radio hits if such a thing still existed. “German Studies” could vie with any of the weirder tracks on Last Splash while outdoing most of them for groovy danceability. There are moments of haunting atmospherics (“Night of Joy”, “We’re Gonna Rise”) and Zeppelin-esque heavy rock (“No Way”) and country folk with harmonies like melted butter (“Here No More”), all proving that The Breeders are well worthy of rediscovery.

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19. Sunny Border Blue by Kristin Hersh (2001)

Throwing Muses were one of my favorite band born in the ‘80s. Fractured and furious, their music was demanding, but Kristin Hersh still had a way with a pop hook that held all of the mania together (as did little step-sis Tanya Donnelly, the “George” to Kristin’s “John and Paul”). Hersh’s solo records drop much of the shrieking and cacophonous electric guitars of the Muses in favor of raspy whispers and sparse acoustic backing, but that grit and fury are still very much present. Sunny Border Blue is full of spitting anger (she sounds particularly hungry for the jugular on “Spain”), but the melodies and instrumentation—unplugged guitars, keyboards, and percussion with the occasional trumpet—are beautiful. Hersh’s lyrics, reportedly inspired by marital woes, come off like pages torn from the more vitriolic passages of her diary, and her rendition of Cat Stevens’s “Trouble” (from Harold and Maude) may be the most inspired cover version of the past twenty years.

18. Beautiful Creature by Juliana Hatfield (2000)

Critics often dismiss Juliana Hatfield because of her girlish voice and penchant for sugary pop, but the former Blake Baby has just been strengthening and strengthening as a songwriter for the past 20 years. Her earlier solo albums (Hey Babe, Become What You Are) are refreshing fusions of grubby indie-rock and girl-group bubblegum that were sometimes marred by preciousness and juvenile self-analysis. Since these are the albums for which she is best known, many do not realize how much she has since matured. Her lyrics, while no less self-examining than they’d always been, are less cloying, her taste in backing musicians is keener, and her melodies are just as delectable as ever. It’s a shame that she was essentially forgotten by all but her most devoted fans at the turn of the century, because she simultaneously released two albums that revealed how worthwhile and varied her music remained. Total System Failure is a blow-out of hard Led Zeppelin-style riffs and Jesus Lizard noise that manages to be as catchy as any of Hatfield’s pure pop. Beautiful Creature is quiet, pensive, largely acoustic, and the best argument for Hatfield’s place in the canon of great singer-songwriters. “Choose Drugs” and “When You Loved Me” are heartbreaking love songs. “Hotels” is an infectiously atmospheric meditation on road-weariness. “Daniel” and “Don’t Rush Me” are more upbeat and poppy, but their lyrics continue the melancholic themes of the rest of the record. The one misstep is a pretty big one; as its awful title suggests, “Cool Rock Boy” falls back on the teen-cutesiness of Hatfield’s most unbearable early work, but the rest of the album is consistently fine, as are the ones that followed it.


17. She’s the Dutchess, He’s the Duke by The Dutchess and the Duke (2008)

There has never been a shortage of bands that draw gluttonous reserves of inspiration from The Rolling Stones, but it seems as though most of those bands either reference the early Blues-&-Berry Stones or the Sleazy-‘70s Stones. The Dutchess and the Duke are one of the few that favor the mid-‘60s Stones, when they were immersed in raw folk, baroque guitars, and jangly pop. “Reservoir Park” is a ringer for “Mother’s Little Helper”, “The Prisoner” swipes its riff from “Paint It Black”, the climbing guitar line of “Mary” is reminiscent of “Sittin’ on a Fence”, and “Strangers” gets off on the same C&W jive as “Connection”. They also possess an evocatively morbid lyrical bent that brings to mind some of the Stones most withering cuts, like “I Am Waiting”, “19th Nervous Breakdown”, and “Yesterday’s Papers”. Right now you’re probably thinking, “So, why would I bother with these kids when I could just dust off my copy of Aftermath and hear the real deal?” Well, smart ass, you should check out The Dutchess and the Duke because