HEAR ME TALK

I made what I think was my sixth appearance on the WNYC radio show Soundcheck today, participating in their every-Tuesday "Soundcheck Smackdown," where two critics debate the merits of something or other. I've previously been on to discuss the merits of Metallica when Death Magnetic came out, take the anti-Bruce Springsteen position when his last studio album was released, take the anti-White Stripes position upon their breakup, and defend Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." I was also there once in a non-Smackdown context, when my book Marooned came out.

Today I was there to defend Pearl Jam in a deathmatch with Nirvana (defended by the awesome writer Jeanne Fury), since Ten and Nevermind are both turning 20 this year. I have never liked Nirvana, not ever; when they first got big, I was deep into Napalm Death, Slayer and the Rollins Band, and Nirvana just seemed like whiny bitches compared to any one of those three acts. I was never a big Pearl Jam booster, but they at least had good songs (and guitar solos), and when I dug deep into their catalog in preparation for this debate, I discovered a whole bunch of really solid material. I also came to the conclusion that "Black" is their "Free Bird," and that's a good thing.

Anyway, here's a link to the audio. Somewhere around the 15-minute mark, Vernon Reid(!) calls in to castigate us for not discussing Soundgarden instead. I can't say he's wrong, even if ultimately my favorite Seattle band will always be Tad.

TALKIN' LOUD & SAYIN' NOTHIN'

I was on the radio yesterday, jabbering about Led Zeppelin (and, briefly, Manowar). If you want to listen to that (and really, why would you?), here's a link.

LIVE REVIEW: ISIS, MELVINS, TOTIMOSHI

Isis/Melvins/Totimoshi
Webster Hall
Friday, June 18

Farewell tours are weird, the celebratory nature of live rock being counteracted by the knowledge that this will never happen again; the listener can frequently walk away feeling weirdly hollow, as though the experience was somehow lessened by its unrepeatability. After 13 years and five albums (plus several EPs, a half-dozen or so live discs, a DVD, and dozens of austere, dignified T-shirts), the revered post-metal quintet Isis are calling it quits; their current U.S. tour is their final run of live dates. Their Friday night show at Webster Hall, which was followed by a Music Hall of Williamsburg gig Saturday night, was a concise summary of their artistic achievement—in effect, a final report on the work of the last decade-plus.

They launched the set with "Threshold of Transformation," the final track from 2009's Wavering Radiant. The drums were almost absurdly reverb-ed; live performance seems to bring out their prog-rock side, without the songs ever actually stretching. They sounded like Pink Floyd. Even the mammoth riff of "Collapse and Crush" (from their first album, 2000's Godflesh-besotted Celestial), couldn't break the numbed, drifting feel. If it wasn't for vocalist Aaron Turner's occasional roars, the seven-song set, which touched on their entire discography (two tracks each from Wavering Radiant and 2004's Panopticon, one each from Celestial, 2002's Oceanic, and 2006's In the Absence of Truth), would have been pure Gothic post-punk. The dominant bandmember wasn't Turner, but bassist Jeff Caxide, who seemed intent on turning every song into a cover of The Cure's "Fascination Street."

It's possible to have two drummers and still be rhythmically flaccid; the Grateful Dead managed it for decades. Not the Melvins, who've had both Dale Crover and Coady Willis behind side-by-side kits since 2006. Their set, which began and ended with taped music (the theme from Blazing Saddles and "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah," respectively), was one long, floor-shaking drum solo, with guitarist/vocalist Buzz Osborne (wearing what looked like an ankle-length robe with a turtleneck) and bassist Jared Warren (gladiator tunic and cape) throwing riffs and howls into the thunder here and there. Their set began with a death-march cover of Flipper's antiwar anthem "Sacrifice," then continued through an hour or so of mostly songs from their last three albums, all of which feature the four-piece/two-drummer lineup. Among the highlights were "The Water Glass," a military-cadence chant wedded to a huge, Led Zeppelin-esque riff, and "Pig House," which featured a surf-guitar break—both came from the brand-new The Bride Screamed Murder.

The first band of the night was Bay Area power trio Totimoshi, who played on the Melvins' equipment and served as their roadies. Guitarist/singer Tony Laureano has a rough, clenched voice like a Latino Scott "Wino" Weinrich, with a guitar tone that's somewhere between Helmet and Hendrix. He and bassist Meg Castellanos create a loose, bluesy groove, with drummer Chris Fugitt hammering the floor into place beneath them. Two of their six songs were instrumentals; the rest could easily have been, too, because the riff and the groove were what it was all about.

[From the Village Voice.]

TOM PETTY, AGAIN

I've never been a major, diehard Tom Petty fan. Only ever owned one album, Full Moon Fever, as a kid. But I grew up in America, so I know all the hits—heard them my whole life on the radio, and they're all pretty great, one or two boring ballads aside. I have the boxed set, Playback, and last year's Live Anthology in my iPod. I haven't talked about that latter item here, but it's fantastic—four discs (five if you buy the super deluxe edition) of songs from shows going all the way back to 1980, and the band's so tight throughout, with only three membership changes in 35 years, that it could have been one long-ass concert. And the price was unbeatable; I got the four-CD version at Target for $22. What kind of major artist puts out a four-CD live box for $22? That's what you call fan service.

So anyway, the new Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album, Mojo, came out today, and it's really good. As the video clips posted online indicate, the album was recorded almost entirely live in the studio, with minimal overdubbing and stripped-down arrangements. The liner notes even describe not only the session dates but the specific guitars and pieces of equipment used on each song, which is a little more than I need to know, but I'm sure someone cares. The point, for me, is that the songs are good to great. There are too many of them—fifteen in 65 minutes—but only a few drag, and none feel like outright mistakes.

What's really interesting to me is how different it sounds from all the other Petty records I've heard. The acoustic-guitar-led countryish stuff is kept to a minimum, and the jangling, Byrds-y side is tamped down, too. This is a fairly hard blues-rock album, driven by electric guitar and organ. The album's second track, "First Flash of Freedom," is close to seven minutes long, and its middle stretch is a meandering jam that sounds like the Grateful Dead, or the Allman Brothers, or some combination of the two. "I Should Have Known It" is so cranked-up and live-in-the-room, it sounds like the band is covering a track off Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti, especially when the bottleneck guitar solo kicks in. Other tracks have an almost Doors-y feel, minus the lyrical pretentiousness. Organist Benmont Tench gets a lot of spotlight time on this record, and he makes the most of all of it, without ever unleashing his inner Jon Lord or anything like that.

This is a band that communicates on an almost telepathic level. It's the kind of thing more veteran acts should be able to tap into, but can't, for some reason. ZZ Top can; I've seen them live and they're absolutely locked-in, and their strict policy in the studio, never violated, is that no sound will appear on a ZZ Top album unless it's been made by a member of ZZ Top. The horns on "She Loves My Automobile" from Degüello? They learned how to play 'em.

The Rolling Stones don't come close to this kind of cohesion. I don't think they ever had it. They've got (and have had, in the past) some great individual players, Charlie Watts in particular, but they couldn't make a live-in-the-studio album like Mojo if you put guns to their heads.

Contemporary rock bands, especially metal bands (much as I hate to say it), don't know how to make a live-in-the-studio album. Nobody's ever asked them to try. It's all about punching it in, laying down 50 versions of a riff until it's inhumanly perfect. Even Nirvana did it. I remember hearing my audio engineering professor play me "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and pointing out that Dave Grohl had only played his drum part once—one time through the verse, one time through the chorus—and Butch Vig, the producer, had cut 'n' pasted it to get through the rest of the song. How punk rock. How "real."

But I digress. My point is, this new Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album is great and you should listen to it. I foresee myself listening to it a lot this summer.

MUSIC BOXES

Last week, Amazon offered a pretty damn good deal on the Led Zeppelin 10CD Complete Studio Recordings box from 1993. Ordinarily it's $115, but they were selling it for $70, so I decided to grab it, since I've only ever owned Physical Graffiti on CD. Also, I wanted to get this version, rather than the 2009 Definitive Collection, because, frankly, the newer remasters were likely to be compressed and limited all to hell. (I visited a couple of audio-nerd burrows to figure out whether this is in fact the case; opinions varied.) Also, the fetishistic quality of that set actually turned me off - the idea of miniature reproductions of all six In Through the Out Door sleeves and a version of the Led Zeppelin III sleeve with a working pinwheel just felt obsessive and pathetic. Music is sound. I care about sound quality, not playing with (or just sitting and reverently staring at) packaging.

I think I made the right choice. The discs sound fantastic. (Assuming you like Led Zeppelin, of course.)

I have this weird ambivalence about packaging. On the one hand, as a reader and writer, I love a really well-written essay, and some boxes/deluxe reissues have terrific liner notes. The Robert Palmer essay in the Ornette Coleman box Beauty is a Rare Thing is a good example of this, and I'm sure I could dig through my collection and come up with a bunch of others, but you get my point. The trouble is, boxes are also frequently (especially now when they emerge as labors of love from indie labels desperate to dissuade folks from just downloading the audio content) loaded down with extraneous crap. The Albert Ayler box Holy Ghost had a pressed flower, postcards, reproductions of zines, and on and on, when all I wanted was the music and the book. And the new 3CD/1DVD/7"/book/photos edition of Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power just seems absurd to me. (The essays and "testimonials" are pretty much guaranteed to be a total waste of everyone's time, and I like Henry Rollins.)

So I like that the 1993 Led Zeppelin box pairs up the discs into little books, in the process juggling them out of release order so Physical Graffiti can get its own book. I like it because the perversity, the non-deluxeness of it, is so thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of Led Zeppelin, as I understand it: "Here's the album. No, there's no single. No, we don't have a publicist. See you on the road."

I also like it because it's that much easier to reconcile spending $70 on CDs that I'll immediately import into my MacBook and thence to my iPod. Maura Johnston, a writer who's too smart to waste her time talking about American Idol as much as she does, had a pretty good essay about ridding oneself of physical music and going digital-only on pastemagazine.com the other day. She's still got a romantic attachment to the idea of physical music-objects qua objects; "There was value in music having a physical presence—even those records that you’d only pull out for very specific reasons reminded you of their existence during a routine house-cleaning," she writes. "As music becomes less physical, its whole essence becomes more disposable."

I like having some stuff around in physical form, for the simple reason that my iPod and headphones are a unit, in my head. I have a cable that allows me to plug my iPod into my stereo, but I never do it. So there are certain CDs I keep around just because when I want to listen to them, I want to use speakers to do so. These range from Miles Davis's Agharta, which takes over my living room like a rabid animal when I let it loose in the apartment, to Ryoji Ikeda's Matrix, which uses ultra-high frequencies and panning to create effects that headphones simply can't duplicate - it's as much about audiology as aesthetics. And I have the feeling that although these Led Zeppelin albums are, indeed, gonna be permanent fixtures in my iPod, there are going to be plenty of times when I'm gonna want to hear "No Quarter" or "Achilles Last Stand" through speakers, at room-filling volume.