Kanye West: “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”

“Can we get much higher?”

That question comes early in Kanye West’s latest album, and though it isn’t actually uttered by the man himself, its placement on the record, and the sheer number of times it’s repeated, gives me the strong impression that it’s very much a question weighing on Yeezy’s own mind. It’s a philosophical question, a sort of reference point for everything that follows, and I also suspect that it’s not really meant to be rhetorical, even if Kanye never actually answers it. And while I’m conjecturing, let me say that I also think it has a couple of different meanings, one of them decidedly more inspirational, one darkly subversive.

To the former, I think it’s a question about how– if, really– we can rise above the confines and limitations of our own present situation; if you’re Kanye West, that means a life of luxurious, soul-crushing excess. Let us pause for a moment here to note the sad irony of West’s situation in 2010– and I say that with tongue firmly in cheek, because really, when you’ve just released what is inarguably one of the best-reviewed albums in hip-hop’s history, how sad can you be? Surely, though, there is an uneasy chuckle to be found in considering that West is in nearly the same place as Taylor Swift is, each of them with new records out and each of them the subject of serious scrutiny as to just how much of their music is autobiographical. Swift’s Speak Now has won raves, somewhat perversely, simply for its level of candor, its Rumors-styled play-by-play on a series of failed relationships. West, meanwhile, finds himself undergoing a baffling form of mass pop psychoanalysis, critics and fans pouring over his songs and wondering What it Means about the life and the interior monologues of the artist himself.

I confess to being interested in that only insofar as West is an innately fascinating guy, a bundle of contradictions that are reflected not only in his outlandish public persona but also in the music itself. To wit, Fantasy is a decadent, far-reaching album that tries to redefine what the scope of a rap album can be; it remains rooted in what is actually a fairly conventional form of sample-based hip-hop and weaves through its dizzying tapestry signifiers from all of Ye’s previous albums, but the final product here is an album of nearly unparalleled ambition. Songs routinely pass the five, six, even nine minute marks, and one critic, Neil McCormick, was moved to dub this the Sgt. Pepper of hip-hop. It’s kind of an odd comment to make regarding an album so flamboyant, as Pepper is in many ways a fairly conservative entry in the rock canon, but I take his point: West has created an array of textures and sounds that seems to rewrite all the rules of the game, and it’s to his credit as a crafstman that the album hangs together so well even though it employs hooks from both Bon Iver and Rhianna, verses from Nicki Minaj and Fergie, a piano breakdown from Sir Elton John and a spoken-word segment from Chris Rock.

It’s excessive in other ways, too, the lyrics amounting to a pile-up of profanity and hedonism. But to say that West is going for something akin to shock value would be, I think, a gross mistake. You can tell as much about his vision for this project by what he left off the album than what he put on, and to that end, I’m both slightly saddened but also impressed that West’s free Web single “Christian Dior Flow”– for my money, still one of the best things he’s cut this year– wasn’t included on the album proper, one assumes because it simply didn’t fit with what he was trying to do here. The same could be said of really any of the G.O.O.D. Friday tracks, and in particular of the “POWER” remix; a flashier song than the version included on the album, to be sure, what with its giddy Jay-Z assist and all, but I think the simpler album version speaks more pointedly to the album’s central conceits.

You’ll notice a few other little tweaks to some of the songs we thought we knew– there’s a new verse on “Devil in a New Dress” and what sounds like a slight revision to the “Monster” beat, to say nothing of the three minutes added on to “Runaway”– and they all point to the fact that, for all of its excess, Fantasy is ultimately the result of careful consideration, of a particular vision, a man with Something to Say. In other words, it is not, I don’t believe, a case of West simply letting his subconscious run amok, no mere sonic bloodletting or thinly-veiled autobiography, though I suppose there are elements of that. No, what I think this is, ultimately, is West’s brutal takedown of the American Dream– his Don Draper album, a more over-the-top rejoinder to Elvis Costello’s National Ransom, a piece in which West assumes the very natural role of a man who’s worked hard and seemingly gotten it all and finds that the ensuing cavity in his soul is slowly killing him.

It’s a record borne of a particularly modern malaise, though, to Ye’s credit, it’s a great deal more exciting and visceral than that might sound. I give credit to that resounding opening question. Through all of this, West wants to know: Can we rise above? Can we ever transcend? Can we get much higher?

But I think that lyric is something of a double entendre. The chilling prospect here is that the question of getting “higher” isn’t a metaphoric one at all, but a purely physical one– that is, a deranged assertion from a man who has everything that now he wants some more. Is this, then, the outcry of the soul emerging from hibernation, or is it the dark, twisted call of America’s dream, mutated into a monster? I would suggest that neither interpretation is unfounded, and that perhaps there’s something to each one of them, though I do find it interesting that Ye’s posse-style, battle-rap boasting in “Monster” culminates in an existential meltdown (“I crossed a line/ and I’ll let God decide”). Then again, what does one do with an album that culminates in Gil Scott-Heron‘s equation of true happiness and success with a wife and kids and a home, all coming mere minutes after West declares his intent to finally fill that void in his soul by marrying a porn star?

There’s some complicated stuff going on here, and on that note I might make a closing comment or two about the album’s artful sprawl. Another critic I like, John Mulvey, has suggested that this album might be more fun to write about than to actually listen to, something I understand but don’t entirely agree with. For the most part West keeps things bumpin’– despite its myriad textures, its broad production flourishes and its bloated guest list, it’s hard to hear “All of the Lights” as anything other than a killer, addictive rap single with major pop crossover appeal– but I take Mulvey’s point: The songs I find myself coming back to the most are the ones that are rooted either in a more traditionally-minded take on posse rap (“Monster,” “So Appalled”) or in lean, soulful funk (“Dark Fantasy,” “Gorgeous”). Meanwhile, I think the three minutes of vocoder noodling at the end of “Runaway” are at once honest and rather affecting, though I don’t suppose I’ll sit through the whole thing very often at all. So with all of that said, I’ll end by noting that while I love this album dearly, and think it is not only Kanye’s culmination so far but also a hip-hop classic in the making, my preference, as far as 2010 rap goes, remains for Big Boi and his Sir Luscious Leftfoot, an album that’s equal to this one in its ambition but also more streamlined and effortless in its will to entertain; where West always sounds like he’s trying very hard to make a Masterpiece– and, to his credit, I think he’s very much succeeded– General Patton sounds like he’s mostly just interested in ensuring that the listener has a good time. To that end, Kanye’s album is like an arthouse movie and Big Boi’s is a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, only in this case the latter is every bit as innovative and substantive as the former, which makes it, in my mind, the greater achievement.

I suppose I could also contextualize Kanye’s work by saying that Big Boi rhymes circles around him– but then, Big Boi rhymes circles around basically everyone, and Kanye’s grown immensely as an MC; more to the point, we’re now evaluating Fantasy on the terms of more traditional hip-hop albums, when in fact its achievement is something that puts it in a different class. This is, to some degree, an entirely new breed of rap album, one that uses deep introspection as a vessel for a spiritually-minded sort of politics, art-rock tropes as a re-imagining of what hip-hop can mean and do.

Good God! Born Again Funk

I’m terribly late in discovering the joys of the Numero Group’s excellent “gospel funk” anthology– a follow-up to their earlier “gospel funk hymnal” of the same name, this superb set came out in January of this year– but I am neither surprised nor particularly disappointed that it took me so long to get around to it. As to the former, it seems like there’s a release like this nearly every year that I don’t catch until the very end, something along the lines of 2006′s stellar underground funk box set What it Is or last year’s epic black gospel collection Fire in My Bones; this particular album falls almost exactly in the middle, seemingly with one foot in each of the two camps represented above. And as to the latter– well, I suppose I’m just glad to have discovered it at all; this is utterly riveting music from top to bottom, and I suspect it will spend enough time in my player to more than make up for lost time.

This “born again funk” collection is the result of endless crate-digging, something the Numero crew seems to have endless time and resourcefulness for; everything here could charitably be described as obscure, vintage cuts that some true believers you’ve almost certainly never heard of. And it’s exactly what it says it is: Deeply funky music made from a pious place, but devoid of any hint of gnostic-style rejection of the sweaty, the earthy, the human. It’s exactly the kind of album that I find to be endlessly fascinating, in other words– sacred music, performed with supreme attention to sensual pleasures.

And the pleasures are many. These eighteen nuggets fit onto a single CD, yet they suggest a depth and a vastness of sound and experience that is somewhat surprising for what is technically a fairly narrow subgenre. As a collection, it all hangs together impeccably well– these songs all could have come from the same label, or the same studio, certainly the same era– and yet the range of moods and expressions is impressive, to the extent that each song here sounds as though it could probably serve as a door to an entirely separate realm of terrifically sweaty and spiritual funk music. The first song on the album– performed by Pastor T.L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir, and called “Like a Ship”– is remarkable, funky keyboards and jangling tambourine suggesting a fairly earthly flavor but the choral backing sounding like straight-up church music. The next song is just as good, and fairly dissimilar to the first; Ada Richards’ “I’m Drunk and Real High (In the Spirit of God)” is pure roadhouse funk, perhaps even on the bluesy tip, performed with the kind of righteous piety that saves the could-be-campy lyrics through the sheer audacity of its sincerity.

What everything here shares in common: The heart may be on the heavens, but the eyes are on the hips. That first song has the kind of fathoms-deep bassline that shakes the walls and would have been a point of jealousy among any secular funk band of the era, as would the similarly throbbing bass and ice-cold hi-hat work on “The Same Thing it Took,” performed by the Inspirational Gospel Singers. The latter song features a lead vocalist who belts it out just like Aretha would– though whether it’s gospel Aretha or soul/R&B Aretha is up for discussion, as the material here blurs the distinction significantly. I can’t decide whether Richards’ vocal, for instance, is the stuff of a juke joint or a church house, and I suppose it really doesn’t matter. Other songs are fairly well drenched in organ, funky keyboard tones, and wah-wah guitar– but also in singing that’s pure gospel.

That said, while the balance on these songs is fascinating, the charm of a collection like this is in its mess and its loose ends; this particular set is one delightful left turn after another, and some of the best stuff here is the most off-balance, like Andrew Wartts and the Gospel Storytellers’ “Peter and John.” Honestly, the track sounds like it takes cues from a blaxploitation film– only, the story is straight out of the Book of Acts, and its intentions are purely evangelical. Some, I suppose, will find it to be a little cheesy, but I think it’s totally righteous– honest-to-God gospel/funk magic, equally driven by its devotion to the Lord Jesus and to getting those asses up out of the pews.

Over the Rhine: “The Long Surrender”

A new Over the Rhine recording is always a fairly momentous thing in my life, and my enthusiasm for each new release– different as they all are from one another, and across-the-board excellent– has traditionally dictated that I briefly declare each one to be my new Favorite, a title that lingers for a few weeks, perhaps months (I think Ohio held on to the belt for a good year or more) before I am forced to admit that picking the best of the bunch just isn’t conceivable, perhaps not even desirable, and I go back to saying that, as much as I love each one of them, Good Dog Bad Dog will always be my true favorite, for sentimental reasons more than anything else.

Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist– who perform as Over the Rhine with a rotating cast of extras– have been at this for twenty years now, and by my count, they’re up to thirteen or so studio albums, to say nothing of a fairly major array of live recordings and archival releases. The latest is called The Long Surrender, releasing officially in the early weeks of 2011, and I dare say that this time, they really made my new favorite Over the Rhine album. Yes, I know how all this must sound. But I’m sticking by it.

Certainly, it is the best-sounding Over the Rhine album, something that should come as a surprise to absolutely no one; the album marks their first collaboration with Joe Henry, a record producer whose work always favors warmth, intimacy, and simplicity as a road to something resembling the Truth– a sensibility that seems custom-built for Linford and Karin. One might be less surprised that Henry and OtR have found each other than that it took them so long to get around to it; the universe has its own timing for this sort of thing, I suppose. But what astounds is how sympathetic the pairing is– for someone who has no history with this band to speak of, Henry understands what makes for a great Over the Rhine album with remarkable clarity, and he has aided them in creating just that– not a departure so much as an album that embraces the band’s essential Over the Rhine-ness and therefore feels, immediately, like their most essential work.

Which is all to say that this isn’t quite a curveball– it doesn’t lunge out of the same left field that produced the oddball classic Films for Radio, or even the festive Trumpet Child– but rather it is a deepening of the sound of albums like Good Dog Bad Dog and Ohio, albums that chase the elusive spirit of Americana without seeming to care so very much about whether they actually catch it; the fun, it seems, is in the pursuit. Even so, this is their most seamless and integrative album, more graceful than anything they’ve done in its elegant conjuring of country, folk, gospel, and jazz.

They made the thing in Henry’s basement studio, a geographic locale that seems to possess oddly transformative powers. I suppose I ought to give some of the credit to the session players, particularly the rhythm section of Jay Bellerose and David Piltch; though Linford and Karin always find their way back to the tried-and-true, melancholy slow-burner dynamic– it’s what they do best, after all– those songs, sometimes so brooding on their best albums, achieve a certain degree of lift-off here, a lightness and a freeness that goes down to the foundation, specifically to the light touch summoned by Henry and his players. If you really want to hear just how much magic Henry brings to these things, listen to the Ohio track “Idea #21″ side-by-side with the new recording “Only God Can Save Us Now.” Both are, basically, gospel songs, but, stacked beside each other, it’s amazing how comparatively forced and leaden the former sounds compared to the more organic new material.

Henry adorns these slow-burners with the appropriate level of detail, always just enough– there are a couple of sax parts from his son Levon, a duet with Lucinda Williams, gospel ensembles on a couple of songs, some lovely steel guitar from Greg Leisz. What he doesn’t do is turn this into anything other than an OtR album. He understands, for instance, that Karin is a staggeringly gifted singer– she is, in fact, the singer, in my mind– and this album feels like a showcase for her more than any of the group’s past albums; she kills on “There’s a Bluebird in My Heart,” a jazzy little torch song that’s totally in her wheelhouse but is no less impressive because of it. But I think her most mesmerizing work here is in a song called “Rave On”– a number that’s written as a rock and roll song, with a title that suggests both a road song and a tip ‘o the hat to Buddy Holly, but performed as something else entirely. Henry captures it as a sort of holy moment where time seems to stand still; there’s an ambient quality to it, but also a pulsing intensity and some remarkably tactile, sensual pleasures to be found in the stand-up bass and percussion. It’s unclassifiable, and, as a sound recording, I think it’s the band’s best moment on file.

Elsewhere, there are links to the band’s past work, especially in the opening number, “The Laugh of Recognition,” a bridge back to the “Born” days. There is a song, “The King Knows How,” that swings like rock and roll and stings with gospel fire, and stands apart from anything else recorded by either OtR or Joe Henry. There are two tracks with lyrics from Henry which are, again, rather amazing for how in-tune with the Over the Rhine aesthetic they are. Without consulting a list of songwriting credits, you won’t be able to tell which two they are. There are songs that reveal just how fine Karin and in particular Linford have become as lyricists; in the early days, Linford’s lyrics were almost too clever for their own good at times, but here he has a song called “Infamous Love Song,” a long rambling thing (in the best possible sense) that condenses the history of the band into something a little cheeky and full of grace. Leonard Cohen would have a tough time wrapping his head around it. On a related note, I think Tom Waits would be proud to consider the album finale, “All My Favorite People,” as a sequel to his own gospel homecoming number, “Come On Up to the House.”

But again, The Long Surrender is noteworthy not for how it deviates from the Over the Rhine template but for how it refines it, and to that end, this is, like all their albums, an album about Over the Rhine– and I dare say an account that’s every bit as intimate as Drunkard’s Prayer. No small feat. Of course, saying that it’s an album about Over the Rhine is just another way of saying that it’s about marriage, about art and the creative life, about brokenness, about transcendence, about grace. That the album begins with “Laugh of Recognition” is fitting; it’s a song about abject failure, I think, and that is, on some level, appropriate for a group that has never achieved the level of fame they so richly deserve, a band who once recorded an entire album chronicling a near-divorce. It is indeed a moment of recognition, of all the roads that have lead them here– and it sounds also like a new beginning.

The characters in these songs are broken figures– see the beguiling mash-up of tragedy and farce in “Only God Can Save Us Now,” a song set in what I reckon to be either a retirement home or a mental ward– and, pretty frequently, those characters are Linford and Karin themselves. “Infamous Love Song” speaks to their history with humor and wit, but also candor– it’s a song about the artist’s life in which the search for transcendence often takes a back seat to mere survival. “Oh Yeah, By the Way” might actually be their saddest lyric ever, and that it is a duet vocal feels like a further twisting of the knife, and an indication that the anxieties and fractures of the Drunkard’s Prayer album are never entirely vanquished, in this or any marriage. But the most moving thing here– and not just because it boasts a vocal from Lucinda Williams at her most vulnerable and human–  is “Undamned,” a song second, perhaps, to nothing but “I Want You to Be My Love” as the group’s simplest lyric. It’s a song about fallen human beings doing the only thing they can do– falling back into the arms of unconditional grace– and questioning whether it is a love song or a prayer seems to miss the point of it altogether.

All the threads of the record are woven together in the finale, a surprisingly jaunty number called “All My Favorite People.” I hear a lot of love in this one; it isn’t a mere document of broken humanity so much as it’s an invitation, to fellowship and shared experience, to the patient awaiting of grace. The refrain is beautiful: “All my favorite people are broken/ Believe me, my heart should know.” It’s a song of experience, another laugh of recognition, a peaceful, coming-to-terms moment, and it’s followed only be a brief, instrumental benediction, because no further words will suffice.

Robyn: “Body Talk”

The full picture now before us, the sheer breadth and clarity of Robyn’s vision becomes self-evident: With her Body Talk series, now rounded out to a nice, complete trilogy, the Swedish teenybopper turned indie icon reveals that, to her, pop music is a limitless playground, and she’s the one writing the rules. Her mastery of her chosen idiom– clubwise pop music, the dancefloor clearly in focus but not necessary to enjoy either the craft or the depth of feeling involved– is, in 2010, on roughly the same level as the total dominance of the rap game shown, perhaps, Big Boi, or maybe Kanye– which is to say, she isn’t just running this stuff but outpacing it, having proved long ago, and reasserting now, that she can play inside the lines of the genre when it suits her but she doesn’t especially need it.

Speaking of Kanye, his G.O.O.D. Friday series of Internet leaks basically takes a page out of Robyn’s playbook; beginning much earlier in the year and extending almost until its end, the Body Talk series doesn’t innovate the album format so much as the way albums are assembled and released. The idea was always to release three records in the span of about half a year, and the first two Body Talk discs were a pair of mini-albums, eight songs apiece, that suggested the true virtue of Robyn’s ambitious 2010 plans were the sheer generosity of it. The third one– not titled Body Talk pt. 3 but simply the Body Talk LP– flips the script. Its makeup is comprised of five songs apiece from the two EPs, rounded out by five all-new recordings. And as it turns out, the real story of this whole endeavor isn’t the sheer abundance but the way it’s all come together, for the LP is no greatest-hits sampler of the previous year’s work, but an album assembled with specificity of vision and attention to craft, making it not just a primer on the Body Talk material but a carefully-worded statement: This is what Robyn is saying in 2010, and if it isn’t exactly succinct, it is finely focused.

What’s here, and what isn’t here, is important, as is the running order, because it shows just how much forethought went into these releases. To that end, I should say that I somewhat miss the scrappiness of the EPs, which were just a little more ragged than this longplayer and, despite their comparative brevity, also a bit more varied; that’s mostly because Robyn has chosen to excise the acoustic cuts that peppered those first two albums, keeping this one solely within the realm of steely dance-pop and synthesized sheen. Keeping an acoustic song or two would have broken things up a bit here, as, if there’s any complaint to be had, it’s that the fifteen songs here might sometimes dip just slightly into monotony, particularly in the middle. But it’s a minor quibble: Robyn does break things up with the inclusion of a pair of oddball, talky house numbers (first EP standout “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do” appears in the second slot here, building the tension before “Dancing on My Own” delivers the cathartic release, and “We Dance to the Beat” is well-placed later on as a sort of momentum-shifter into the third act)– and of course, in this context, her delightfully brash, sassy, gangsta-copping Snoop Dog duet “U Should Know Better” is even more of a left-field delight.

What’s important, it seems to me, is that she’s honing in on a particular side of her music and her persona– one in which, perhaps, those acoustic songs just don’t quite fit– and she’s exhibiting both her mastery of it and the depth of what it all means. The effect of the album’s sequencing is impressive, grouping songs together in a way that weaves a loose narrative out of Robyn’s familiar themes of empowerment and fragility, independence and loneliness, strength and heartbreak. Could she possibly have begun the album with a more fitting thesis than “Fembots,” her terrific single about a dancefloor warrior whose steely veneer masks a human heart? She follows it with a couple of well-rounded rejoinders: “Don’t Fucking Tell Me…” is a litany of modern anxieties that turns, at the end, into a statement of level-headed defiance, and “Dancing on My Own” maintains a stoic strength in the face of internal angst.

Things are fleshed out from there, and I use that term deliberately, as the album’s biggest take-away is that its auteur is very much a human being; these are songs about how she is prone to falling in love, vulnerable to being burned by love, capable of experiencing wrenching heartache, and able to remain resilient. “Love Kills” gives away its theme in its title, and one of the new songs, “Time Machine,” turns out to be a stellar addition to the Body Talk narrative, almost confessional in its assessment of regret and its admission of the singer’s own hand in turning a relationship sour. For my money, the best thing here is actually “Indestructible,” which is practically an anthem in its determination to forge ahead, even knowing that love kills, cynicism be damned. These songs in the middle stretch seem to throw Robyn for a loop, emotionally speaking, but she finds her footing with a series of boastful battle songs later on, including the Snoop collaboration, “We Dance to the Beat,” and the first-EP highlight “Dancehall Queen,” obviously an earned and irrefutable title for Robyn to claim.

The whole thing works, though, not just as a capital-A Album but as a fairly staggering collection of stand-alone tracks; put this on shuffle with the EP material that didn’t make the final cut and you’ve got a playlist of killer singles, all released in a very short span of time, that I’m not sure anyone, even Kanye, could quite match. On this level, I’ll say only that I can’t really argue with any of the selections made here– yes, I like the acoustic tracks, but find it hard to disagree with the choices of material here as basically the best stuff from the series, and the new songs are all worthy additions, especially “Time Machine,” a killer pop tune produced by teenybopper architect Max Martin, who did  some early Brittney Spears songs as well as some teenaged Robyn stuff, making his presence here a nice full-circle gesture. But this record brings the singer full-circle in a good many ways, paying off the initial Body Talk promise in spades and standing as a fantastic and generous pop masterwork that could, one can quite easily imagine, be an enormous hit in some alternate, more just universe.

I Was a King: “Old Friends”

Ringing in the new year a bit early with this one; I’ve still got a handful of 2010 albums I’m intent on reviewing, including Robyn and Kanye and maybe a couple more, but I’m also starting to get some 2011 stuff in my mailbox. The first one to really grab my attention is Old Friends, the second album (and Sounds Familyre debut) from the Norwegian power poppers I Was a King. This one is a ragged, homspun joy, improving mightily on their already-fine first record, so please do remember it once its January release draws near. My review is here.

Daniel Lanois: Born Again

One of my favorite stories of 2010– and one that, I must say, has garnered surprisingly little attention– is that of Daniel Lanois, a true legend who is experiencing what I’m very tempted to call his best year ever. It’s a creative rebirth, of sorts, that a more dramatic person might attribute to his near-lethal motorcycle collision from earlier this year, the kind of thing that sometimes has an oddly restorative effect on creative types; then again, given that much of his 2010 output was completed before the accident, it’s probably more reasonable to suggest, simply, that some things do indeed get better with age.

The thing about Lanois is that he’s always been involved in great record, and sometimes it’s almost in spite of himself. There’s something about him that serves as a sort of creative catalyst for great musicians to do some of their best writing and performing– something Bono has affirmed time and time again– though there are times when it seems as though the man tries everything in his power to dilute the impact of those performances by wrapping them in a thick layer of sonic gauze. To that end, I confess to having a bit of a love/hate relationship with what has been called the Lanois Sound, and can really only talk about it on a case-by-case basis. I, for one, think his artier inclinations served the mood on Dylan‘s Time Out of Mind quite well, and I have no beef with the swampy textures he brought to Emmylou’s Wrecking Ball. Less satisfying to my ears are the album he did with Willie Nelson and his work on Peter Gabriel‘s Us, and though his U2 albums are generally quite good, Lanois has seemed, for most of his career, completely ill-equipped for recording a really good, visceral rock and roll song, and I suspect that The Joshua Tree could have been an even better record had it been preserved with a little more of its grit and energy intact.

But the real problem with the Lanois sound, as I see it, is not that it’s an inherently poor sonic template to work from– again, I think it has quite often fit the music rather well– but that it is evidence of a certain degree of ego, or at least of meddling, in that it suggests Lanois is insistent on leaving his own huge, unmistakable stamp on everything he records. There is a quite common knock against the man, that he makes Bob Dylan sound like U2 sound like Emmylou Harris, and if that’s an exaggeration, it’s only a slight one. But I would contend that it’s a criticism that doesn’t hold up to his two most noteworthy 2010 releases– which, for my purposes anyway, are the record he made with Neil Young and the debut of his own band Black Dub, not the Brandon Flowers solo album, which I honestly just can’t muster the enthusiasm to hear.

The sound of these albums– and of the Neil, in particular– is not drastically different from anything he’s done before; indeed, Lanois spoke in interviews about how he worked his “sonics” into the Young album just as he has so many times in the past. But if the difference here isn’t extreme, it is significant. What’s remarkable about Le Noise, at least to my ears, is the sympathetic relationship between performer and producer. Here, Lanois doesn’t sound like’s trying to impose himself so much as he’s serving the songs in the best way he knows how. And to that end, the production doesn’t necessarily sound all that similar to his work on, say, Time Out of Mind, save for on the two acoustic numbers, which do indeed bear some of the ol’ Lanois reverb-heavy/high-ceiling echo of that great album. Instead, the songs are abuzz with noise, awash in pure volume; the productions are, to borrow one of Young’s own lyrics, “a rumblin,’” something that not only fits the frame of mind that the singer seems to be in but gives the album a vitality that’s missing from some of Lanois’ lesser works. There are, in other words, no songs that feel like arty pretension just for the sake of it– nothing like the Dylan track “Dirt Road Blues,” a song so stripped of its grit that it easily ranks as my least-favorite Lanois production of all time– but rather the production feels like an honest, full-bore interaction with the writing and the performance, which makes the whole thing feel significantly less Lanois-centric than his usual fare.

As for the excellent Black Dub LP, it’s probably fair to say that the very existence of this project is as much responsible for Lanois’ creative rebranding this year as anything else. I get the impression that he’s sorta always wanted to lead a full-on rock band– hanging around with U2 all these years was bound to have that effect on him– and finally seeing that dream made real has loosened him up considerably, at times almost too much so: He sounds like he’s having a blast, simply letting loose with his guitar freak-outs and getting lost in drummer Brian Blade‘s rhythms on “Ring the Alarm,” but at seven minutes it is, perhaps, a tad indulgent. But I would take a Lanois who is indulging in simply having a good time over the more portentous, self-serious Lanois of old any day, and, to that end, it might be said that he’s tapping into a side of himself we’ve never had on record before, sounding like he’s having a blast in the slippery grooves of “The Last Time” and becoming positively playful in the spirited, good-natured ragtime number “Sing.”

There is, of course, a lot of seriousness to the album, but why shouldn’t there be? The picture we get of Daniel Lanois here is much fuller and more multi-faceted than any we’ve seen before, so the songs mentioned above fit quite nicely in the context of the more solemn, introspective spiritual “I Believe in You” as well as the earnest, inspirational “Canaan,” both songs that one somewhat wishes U2 would cover somewhere down the road, whether Lanois happens to be in the producer’s chair or not.

Film Break: “Megamind”

I’ve reviewed the new animated film Megamind for CT, and I must confess that I was significantly more taken by it than I expected to be. Certainly a great choice for all-ages entertainment as we head into the holidays, and, if it isn’t quite up to Pixar levels of excellence, it at least follows the promising path marked out by Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and How to Train Your Dragon.

CT Review: Elvis Costello

I’ve already rambled on and on about Elvis Costello and his wonderful new album, National Ransom, so I had best keep this short. For those who think a couple thousand words is just too much– and really, who am I to argue?– you can take a pass on my long review and check my quick capsule review over at CT.

Black Dub: “Black Dub”

Over at CT, I’ve reviewed the self-titled album from Daniel Lanois’ new band, Black Dub. It’s a fine work, and heralds a bright future for Lanois in particular; I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of his obtrusive production style over the past few years, but, between this and the Neil Young record, it turns out that the man’s having a pretty great year. He’s only one part of the Black Dub outfit, though, and, as far as that goes, I’m impressed by how convincing the record is both as a full-band album and a real rock album, albeit one’s more about tricky rhythms than lickety-split riffs, about playfulness and experimentation as much as bold, spiritual candor. Kind of a strange little concoction, actually, but I find it to be quite winsome.

Back to the Treme

I’ve written quite a lot about the vitality of New Orleans as a musical locale and focal point in 2010, but only a little about the excellent soundtrack to David Simon’s New Orleans-set HBO drama Treme, a show that was, I suspect, partially responsible for the sudden surge of great pop records, either from or about that wonderful city, over the past ten or twelve months. To be honest, the album, fine though it is, isn’t one that immediately captured my attention in the way that some of those others did, but it’s with repeated listening– and the arrival of a physical copy, complete with a fine, thorough set of liner notes– that I begin to realize just how special the album is; in fact, at this point I’d place it close to the top of the heap. Its sheer breadth and the diversity of its roster makes it a more ambitious and eclectic set than the excellent new offerings from Trombone Shorty or Dr. John, just to give two examples, while, simply on the level of personal taste, I think I’m a bit more drawn to it than the wonderful Galactic record simply because its greater adherence to the history and the sacred music of the city make it feel a bit more rooted and real than the party-record vibe of Ya-Ka-May.

In fact, its sense of rootedness in tradition and culture make it feel, more and more, like a peculiarly essential tapestry of sounds and styles associated with New Orleans; the analogy that’s becoming increasingly hard for me to avoid is to call this the New Orleans equivalent of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, for, like that record, this one takes a sort of cross-section approach to its chosen idiom and conjures, with beautiful and astounding clarity, the spirit of the music it’s celebrating. That said, this one is more a celebration of a place, where O Brother was really about a particular strand of musical history; as a result, the Treme set is wider-ranging but also messier, its loose ends making it an appealing musical approximation of a city and a family of musics that are organic, in flux, growing and changing. To that end, there are a lot of songs here that I’d call “pop” songs only insofar as they’re fairly structured and self-contained, but also some shorter numbers that really just qualify as snippets, some instrumental pieces, and a few tasteful archival cuts mixed in, seamlessly, among the new recordings, all of it coming together not neatly but with real flair and a clear sense of wonder at all the moving parts of New Orleans’ musical history.

This set is noticeably more grounded in the city’s past than either the Shorty or Galactic records, both of which offered metallic fusions of the city’s musical roots with its forward-thinking present, resulting in songs that straddled the fence between rock and swing, or brought the city’s hip bounce culture to traditional line music. There’s some of that here, but also a great number of tracks that simply revel in the timelessness of New Orleans brass, jazz, and funk music– all played with the sort of spirit and grit that speak to a history that’s still being written, tradition that still informs the everyday and shapes the face of things to come. To that end, it’s worth noting that this set has a foundation in the song “Indian Red,” arguably the best-loved of all New Orleans standards, at least in some circles, and a rousing anthem of pride in the city and its culture; it’s rendered three times here, each in a different way, each respectful of history, each showing what a living, breathing, still-malleable thing the song still is. Dr. John’s version is just a killer, full-band barn-burner– perhaps the best song he’s cut this year, which is saying something; Clarke Peters, an actor in the show, leads a ghostly chant version; and Donald Harrison, Jr. finishes the trifecta with a rousing, instrumental jazz version that could have been a highlight on most any jazz side from the 50s or 60s.

All that being said, there are songs here that speak more explicitly to the city’s changing face and the way its historic music doesn’t fade away or remain stagnant, but instead evolves into fresh new expressions. Just about my favorite thing here, I think, is a recording by the Free Agents Brass Band called “We Made it Through the Water,” which sort of adheres to some of the patterns of second-line music and New Orleans funk but also dips into hip-hop with a rapped verse that is legitimately good as MCing, not just a novelty, and ends with a stirring riff off of an old gospel standard. The song is just as hot as can be, not only for its musical acumen but also for its heart, which incorporates all the themes of this record, and really of all the crop of terrific New Orleans albums from this year: A love for a culture, for a city as a geographic and spiritual focal point that’s honored precisely because of its elusiveness, its warts-and-all soulfulness; a sense of political indignation, of lingering wounds and scarcely-buried anger, that bubbles over when memories of Katrina and its aftermath are rekindled; and a sense of determination that moves well past mere obstinacy into something genuinely inspiring.

On the political tip, I should note that the album doesn’t hide its affections or its leanings– this is a David Simon project, after all– and there is, less than halfway through the record, a delightfully zippy take on Smiley Lewis’ New Orleans R&B classic “Shame, Shame, Shame,” performed by actor Steve Zahn and remodeled as a rather vicious dark comedy satire of the Bush administration’s handling of Katrina, complete with crass impersonations of the Bush family members and a foul-mouthed, firebrand sense of moral outrage. Some, I suppose, will think it a tad preachy; personally, I find good old-fashioned moral outrage to be both useful and rare enough that I’m generally fairly delighted no matter where it pops up, and Zahn’s tune is a real hoot regardless.

At any rate, the charms of this disc lie largely in how it simply refuses to clean up or organize a place, and a spirit, that are simply too messy, too teeming with life, to be anything other than sprawling, full of loose ends and diversions. Which is to say, the beauty of this record is in its moment-to-moment appeal, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t note a few more favorites: The lovely Irma Thomas, who really can do no wrong in my book, teams with the equally unimpeachable Allen Toussaint on keys for a stone killer soul belter called “Time is on My Side,” while Wendell Pierce– another actor from the show; Wire fans know him as The Bunk– goes the complete opposite route for an endearingly sweet, rough, and intimate slice-of song in “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You.” There are some delightful brass band funk tunes here, including some guest spots for Kermit Ruffins and Trombone Shorty, and there’s also a sweet song– basically a love song for the city, where even something as catastrophic as a hurricane is sort of smiled on as just another part of the character of the place– called “I Hope You’re Comin’ Back to New Orleans,” performed by the New Orleans Jazz Vipers. It’s a song for the city, yes, but also for its citizens; it’s a homecoming call that really gets to me even though I’ve never called New Orleans home, which I suppose is as good an argument as any for the power of this music not as a geographically-specific but rather a spiritually-generous tribute album, and, simply as a listening experience, a sheer pleasure.