Review: Vinyl Reissue of Matthew Sweet's 'Altered Beast'

When critics fell over themselves to praise Matthew Sweet’s breakthrough, Girlfriend, they tended to focus on the music’s sweetness: the glimmering jangle of his overdubbed guitars, the comforting retro-ness of his Beatles and Byrds references, the classic concision of his songs, the lushness of Fred Maher’s production. So when Sweet followed that big hit with the deliberately messy and acidic Altered Beast, a lot of the critics were baffled. Perhaps they hadn’t been listening close enough to the underlying nastiness of Girlfriend tracks such as “Thought I Knew You”, “Does She Talk?”, and “Holy War”. If they had been, Altered Beast would have seemed like a more logical progression as Sweet builds on the bitterness of such songs with production to match. Yes, Richard Dashut is best known as Fleetwood Mac’s smash-era producer, but Sweet didn’t hire Dashut for his pristine work on Rumours. Sweet was more interested in channeling the sloppy derangement of Tusk, and just as Tusk was more fascinating and challenging than Rumours, Altered Beast is—in this reviewer’s perhaps unpopular opinion—a similar improvement over Girlfriend. 

The polish flakes away as rusty guitars roar, well-deep drums bash, and Sweet sneers and spits. “Dinosaur Act”, “Devil with the Green Eyes”, “Ugly Truth Rock”, “In Too Deep”, and especially “Knowing People” are straight-up mean, and their loathing feels more authentic than the mass of Sweet’s grungier contemporaries because of his pop rep. It sounds like he was willing to burn down his critical good will for the sake of getting something toxic off his chest. He did make room for some of the more soothing pop styles of Girlfriend, though “Life without You”, “Time Capsule”, “What Do You Know?”, and “Someone to Pull the Trigger” do not skimp on the despair. So while the production sounds messy, the vision is actually quite focused, and for my money, Altered Beast is Matthew Sweet’s underappreciated peak.

Intervention Records’ 100% analog audiophile edition of Altered Beast—the second release in its trilogy of Sweet reissues—doesn’t clean up that messy sound; it just presents its with startling clarity, authenticity, and sonic might. Guitars are remarkably present whether grinding out on “Dinosaur Act”, shimmering on “Time Capsule”, or booming from a bottomless pit on “In Too Deep”. Details reveal themselves. Until now I’d never really noticed that weird percussive touch on “Someone to Pull the Trigger” that sounds like Sweet brushing his teeth.

Intervention’s vinyl is presented as a double album with bonus tracks on Side Four, which shifts the natural side divider—that goofy audio clip from Caligula—to the middle of Side Two (an even weirder Caligula clip hidden at the end of the original CD edition is left out entirely). Bonus tracks are stronger than those on Intervention’s recent edition of 100% Fun. They include what may be Sweet’s best non-LP tracks—the corrosive “Superdeformed” from the No Alternative compilation—and all B-sides from the “Ugly Truth” and “Time Capsule” singles (though not the “Devil with the Green Eyes” single), as well as “Bovine Connection” from the extended Japanese edition of Son of Altered Beast. The American edition of that E.P. will presumably be the next installment of Intervention’s Matthew Sweet vinyl campaign, which remains the vinyl reissue campaign to beat in 2018.

Review: 'That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde'

Nashville will always be the home of country, yet Rock & Rollers such as Paul McCartney, The Beach Boys, Neil Young, Mike Nesmith, The Byrds, and R.E.M. all recorded there. This pop gravitation toward Music City started in earnest when Bob Dylan cut Blonde on Blonde there in 1966. If there’s an artist who tends to lead his peers around like a Pie-Eyed Piper, it’s Bob.

Dylan’s time in Nashville is the focus of Daryl Sanders’s That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde. At 200 pages, the book is a quick read, kind of like what a 33 1/3 book would be if the series banned its writers from pretentious tangents and navel gazing. Sanders keeps the narrative focused, describing the circumstances behind the writing and recording of each of the album’s fourteen luxurious rough gems. There’s light analysis (Sanders notes that “Just Like a Woman” is “intentionally sexist” without daring to explain why Dylan would want to write such a thing) and pretty extensive biographies of the great Nashville session men who brought Rock’s first double album to life.

Sanders could have pumped a bit more life into Nashville, itself. He plainly states the significance of having a Rock musician record in the Country Capital, but there’s only spare sense of the abrasions of two worlds colliding. The Nashville Cats think it’s a bit weird that Dylan’s songs are longer than three minutes, and some bluegrass-playing studio visitors sneer at bluesy stuff like “Pledging My Time”, but the only thing that really shines a light on the town’s friction is a short but scary anecdote in which Al Kooper discusses being chased around town by a clan of Good Ol’ Boys. Yet for a tidy rundown of session facts spiced with quotations from a lot of the guys involved in them, That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound hits the spot.

Review: 'The Kids in the Hall: One Dumb Guy'

The Kids in the Hall were brilliant partly because they weren’t afraid to mine such sinister stuff as murder, alcoholic dads, cancer, empty promises, taxpayer-screwing, head crushing, and half-chicken sexual predators for laughs. Their personal stories weren’t particularly funny because many of their most transgressive bits were rooted in the five guys’ personal stories (well, maybe not the head crushing and chicken lady stuff). So make no mistake—The Kids in the Hall were hilarious, but The Kids in the Hall: One Dumb Guy (coming on October 23) is not. Tragedy and interpersonal clashes are recurring elements of Paul Myers’s new book about the revered comedy troupe.

While John Semley’s 2016 book This Is a Book About The Kids in the Hall achieved a light tone despite the often-heavy material (right down to that author’s generally misguided attempts at cracking his own jokes), Myers takes the material much more seriously. That seriousness also includes involving all five original Kids in the storytelling, and Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson are quoted extensively throughout, as are former collaborators such as Diane Flacks, Lorne Michaels, and the perpetually toweled Paul Bellini, and comedy peers such as Bob Odenkirk, Judd Apatow, Mike Myers, Andy Richter, Fred Armisen, Paul Feig, Thomas Lennon, Dana Gould, and in one of the final interview exchanges he’d give before his death in March 2016, Gary Shandling. Consequently, One Dumb Guy is not as much fun to read as Semley’s book, but it feels like a more fleshed out and official version of the story.

Review: 'Star Wars: The Classic Newspaper Comics Volume 3'

The classic newspaper strips collected in IDW’s Star Wars: The Classic Newspaper Comics Volume 2 hit their stride as writer Archie Goodwin got a complete handle on the films’ plot threads and the characters’ voices and recently-recruited artist Al Williamson mastered their likenesses. The third and final volume of this series continues those highs with more tales set between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. They find the rebels evacuating their base on Yavin 4 and finding a temporary new home on Hoth, and Obi Wan Kenobi making his first ghostly appearance to Luke. We also find out why General Dodonna never made it to Hoth.

One of the more ingenious decisions in creating these strips was to limit the action to the period between the second and third films even though almost half of these strips were published after the release of Return of the Jedi. This saved Goodwin from having to come up with a lot of crazy situations to keep the Rebels engaged after their defeat of the Empire or leaving Han Solo on ice for three years. Goodwin devised ways of introducing characters such as Admiral Ackbar (debuting in newspapers six months before his cinematic debut), Jabba the Hutt, Bib Fortuna, Boba Fett, and Dengar in ways that are respectful to what happened on screen (less respectful to Kenner, Dengar goes by his originally-intended name: Zuckuss). The final strip brings us right up to the initial events of The Empire Strikes Back…complete with a cornily on-the-nose declaration from Darth Vader.

Story-wise, the only downsides are the irritating tendency to sideline Princess Leia (Williamson’s ability to write her bickering with Han Solo is spot-on, though) and the superfluousness of the Sunday strips, which tend to offer nothing but redundant exposition. The Sundays’ full-color art is nice, though, and it looks particularly grand on IDW’s authentically non-digitized pages. Once again we get a lovely hardcover presentation with an informative, extended introduction by Rich Handley and a neat ribbon bookmark. Best of all are the stories and art, which may amount to the finest non-canon Star Wars stories of all.

Review: 'It Must Be Art! Big O Poster Artists of the 60s & 70s'

Poster art made the big leap from the purely commercial to the voguishly decorative in the mid-sixties when hippies started decorating their groovy pads with brain-blistering images originally intended to attract flocks to Dylan concerts or other assorted happenings. During this period, infamous counterculture magazine OZ gave birth to a poster business with the express intent of enticing flower children to wallpaper their dorms with affordable images from the likes of Martin Sharp, Roger Dean, and Heinz Edelman, in essence transforming graphic art into something more personal. Big O Posters hawked its wares from 1967 into the punk era, when decidedly un-flowery artists such as H.R. Giger got in on the fun.

It Must Be Art! Big O Poster Artists of the 60s & 70s tells the story of the company, profiles nineteen of its most significant artists, and most importantly by a great distance, presents many of its posters and other artworks by the profiled artists in full color and at large scales. The art towers above all else both because it is outrageously striking by design and because much of the text is not that interesting. Roger Dean may have produced some truly iconic fantasy images, but he’s kind of a dull dude. The same is true of most of the graphic artists who often tell their own stories via dry interviews. There are a few exceptions when too much acid (David Vaughan), awful wartime experiences (Virgil Finley), or proximity to the infinitely more exciting pop world (Edelman, who designed Yellow Submarine seemingly against his will, and Sharp, who co-wrote “Tales of Brave Ulysses” and created some Cream album covers) intervene. Witchy Vali Myers is the rare artist in this book who makes for interesting text on personality alone, and not just because she’s the only woman who cracked its all-too-typical Boys Club.

But no one is going to pick up It Must Be Art! for its words. While some of the artwork is indescribably ugly (Brad Johannsen’s “Parson’s Crazy Eyes”) or tacky (pretty much everything by Robert Venosa), there’s also a lot of cool stuff in a wide variety of styles. The best of it captures psychedelia at its most garish without losing focus: Sharp’s intricate graphic designs, Dean’s prog dreamscapes, Ivan Ripley’s nursery décor, Rudolph Hausner’s bold and grim surrealism, Graham Percy’s tactile cuteness, Virgil Finlay’s pointillistic intricacies, Wayne Anderson’s mellow, gnomish fairy tales. There are also neat spreads devoted to Yellow Submarine and Giger’s Alien.

Review: 50th Anniversary Remix of The Band's 'Music from Big Pink'

When Dylan emerged from his cocoon with John Wesley Harding in late 1967, he seemingly wiped away the psychedelic excesses he helped set in motion with Blonde on Blonde instantaneously. One of the first major new bands to define the Dylan-provoked “return to roots” movement was The Band. However, the group was never as simple as their Antebellum South image implied.

First of all, they weren’t really a new band—they’d been Dylan’s backing band and collaborators for well over a year—and only one member of the group hailed from the American South. The rest were Ontario boys. The music on their debut album, Music from Big Pink, similarly defies dismissive pigeonholing. While John Wesley Harding and the eponymous debut by Creedence Clearwater Revival— that other misleadingly located face of new Americana— are as stripped to the bones as Sgt. Pepper’s or Days of Future Past are lavishly over-dressed, Music from Big Pink is a complex production full of small details that bring its sepia-hued snapshot of a dead world to vivid life. Eerily echoed backing vocals or organ lines skid out of the deep background. Trippy, leslied guitar lines creak in the foreground. Most intricate of all is The Band’s gorgeous loose-weave harmonies.

These fine details have never popped more than they do on the new, remixed edition of Music from Big Pink. The original mix sounds flat in comparison, though the new mix retains the original’s warmth, crunchiness, and antique atmosphere. Mastering is significantly louder, though at least in its vinyl incarnation, it doesn’t sound excessively loud. That 180-gram vinyl edition is presented as a double-LP set with both discs spinning at 45rpm.

For its fiftieth anniversary, Music from Big Pink is also available as a CD Super Deluxe box set and a pink vinyl edition.

Review: 'Closer You Are: The Story of Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices'

A mark of a band’s legacy is the number of books devoted to it. A cursory search on Good Reads yields over 2,500 results for The Beatles (no, I am not going to account for how many of those are reprints or song books—that’s still a lot of books). A search for Elvis Presley yields only about 850, but there would probably be a lot more results if I’d just searched for “Elvis” and he’d been the only guy who ever had that name. The Stones: about 1,000. Hendrix: about 450. The Grateful Dead: about 350.

The kind of widespread obsession that accounts for such numbers trails off a lot when you start searching for books about nineties bands. Yes, there are over 200 results for Kurt Cobain (again we have term issues here because a search for Nirvana would unearth more, but tons of fiction and spirituality books would muddy the waters), over 150 for Radiohead, and over 100 for Pearl Jam, but barely a handful for such major artists of that era as The Pixies, PJ Harvey, and Liz Phair.

In light of that, the fact that Guided by Voices have now been the topic of three books makes it seem as though they have a relatively decent legacy in terms of nineties indie rock. Matthew Cutter’s Closer You Are: The Story of Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices is the book that brings the GBV bibliography up to three. In some ways, it feels like the first though. Jim Greer’s Guided by Voices: A Brief History and Marc Woodworth’s Bee Thousand (one of the very best entries in the dodgy 33 1/3 book series I’ve read) are both terrific, but they’re short and lean too much on both the collage-like nature of the band’s music and band involvement—Greer was in GBV for a while for Chrissakes.

Cutter is apparently a Guided by Voices insider, and there are extensive interviews with most of the major members of GBV’s vast cast of characters, but his book is the first proper, objective, anything-but-brief biography of the group. It may not be as formally thrilling as the other two books, but it is much, much more informative. And beyond normal fan interest in any beloved band, this really is a fascinating story completely unlike any other in rock. What other artist besides Bob Pollard achieved “fame” when he was nearly 40, has a discography of over 100 madly eclectic albums, or puts so much hand-crafted care into making and packaging them? Who else can drink like that? The lack of support Pollard received from all but his most devoted drinking buddies also makes Closer You Are an exceptional tale of overcoming adversity. By default, it is also the definitive Guided by Voices biography, and since it’s probably going to be a while before a Good Reads search for “Guided by Voices” or “Robert Pollard” yields 350 results, it will probably hold onto that honor for the foreseeable future.

Review: 'Comic Book Implosion: An Oral History of DC Comics Circa 1978'

DC comics was suffering in the late seventies. Some blamed it on the harsh winter of ’78, a period of incessant blizzards that prevented a lot of kids from visiting the newsstand. Some blamed it on DC’s publisher, Jenette Kahn, whose failed scheme to reinvigorate her company involved swelling page counts, cover prices, and titles. Keith Dallas and John Wells accuse unsympathetic distributors in the epilogue of their new book Comic Book Implosion: An Oral History of DC Comics Circa 1978. However, they mostly stay out of the way, allowing quotations from reams of old articles and interviews to tell the story of a topsy-turvy period in comic history.

What we learn is that DC was not the only company in over its head. Golden-boy Marvel was too, only to be rescued from the abyss when it agreed to publish spin offs of a weird new sci-fi movie by the kid who’d made American Graffitti. However, the main focus is on DC, particularly Kahn’s planned “Explosion” that was to see 22 new titles hit the stands in a new longer format only to be cancelled at the last minute. The titles that were to be included in this infamous Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, where those titles ended up, and the reasons for that cancellation are major points of discussion.

There is also a lot of discussion of pricing and the business-side of comics publishing in this book, but all of those facts and figures are the least interesting thing about Comic Book Implosion. What’s more intriguing are the soap-opera drama, the bizarre and desperate ideas (an African-American superhero named Black Bomber whose secret identity is a white racist? Yow.), and the stray triumphs that emerged amidst the turbulence. We see the successful revival of the Teen Titans, the births of Black Lightning and Firestorm, the mania surrounding Superman: The Movie and its handsome star, and the ballyhooed bout between the Man of Steel and Muhammad Ali. And despite the initial failure of Kahn’s planned Explosion, she did a lot of good for DC, such as her cultivation of younger talent and new titles, her abolishment of lazy reprints, and her implementation of profit sharing.

Although Dallas and Wells did not conduct any new interviews for Comic Book Implosion, they culled their quotes from such a wide swath of sources, and from such an interesting line up of industry folk (including Kahn, Larry Hama, Neil Adams, Carmine Infantino, Archie Goodwin, James Warren, Muhammad Ali himself, etc.), that it doesn’t matter much. Yes, it makes for messy storytelling, but that’s basically the case with all oral histories. And Dallas and Wells’s refusal to editorialize allows us readers to decide who are the heroes and who are the villains, who is lying and who is telling the truth, which makes for more involving reading. The cavalcade of photos and illustrations— which includes an 8-page, full-color spread—makes it fun.

Review: Vinyl Reissue of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66’s 'Greatest Hits'

In the year of such earthquakes as Revolver, Pet Sounds, Aftermath, Blonde on Blonde, and the dawn of Hendrix, Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66— with their airy bossa nova rhythms, Bacharach/David covers, and tropical cocktail party atmosphere— must have seemed terribly unhip to the Now Crowd. Removed from any contemporary matters of what is or ain’t with it, Mendes’s jazzy pop remains eternally refreshing like a sweet island breeze. However, there is a certain power too as the group’s most famous song, “Mas Que Nada”, surges like an ice cream tidal wave, and the group’s cover of “Spanish Flea” picks up momentum that would have swept Herb Alpert out to sea.

Sadly, the latter is one of the tracks missing from Mendes and Brasil ’66’s 1970 Greatest Hits collection, though “Mas Que Nada” naturally leads the way, and essentials such as “Going Out of My Head”, a hip-swiveling cover of “Day Tripper (one of three Beatlesongs), a panoramic one of “Scarborough Fair”, my pick for the ultimate version of “The Look of Love” (sorry, Dusty), and Mendes’s own wonder “Look Around” are on board. Ideally, a couple of the more Muzak-leaning songs (I’m thinking of the non-hits “So Many Stars” and “Pretty World”) would have been trimmed to make way for grander stuff such as “Bim Bom”, “Watch What Happens”, and of course, “One Note Samba/Spanish Flea”, but no use crying over the line up of a nearly 50-year old comp. It’s still groovy.

(Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66’s Greatest Hits is now getting back in print on vinyl via Craft Recordings.)

Review: 'Twin Peaks and Philosophy: That’s Damn Fine Philosophy'

Appearing at a time when television’s greatest philosophical questions were “How will MacGuyver save the day with nothing but a wad of  gum and an enema bag?” and “Which toddler will fall on his ass this week on America’s Funniest Home Videos?”, Twin Peaks seemed like an intellectual breath of Douglas Fir-scented air. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s series swam in the murky waters of metaphysics, synchronicity, duality, and other philosophical concepts, and these were not just set decorations for a show often dismissed as arbitrarily weird; they were central to its plot and purpose. So Twin Peaks is an ideal topic for Open Court Books’ Popular Culture and Philosophy series.