WJHU PRESENTS: DRUNK ROCK BY emily bihl

Drunk Rock: Because Sometimes Nostalgia Needs A Little Help. Drunk Rock is a new, ill-advised, potentially-regular column in which WJHU Creative Director emily bihl gets weepy and nostalgic about old albums that you may have missed (or wish you missed). We hope you enjoy. Contact emily at [email protected]

[drunkrockwjhu]

WJHU's DRUNK ROCK presents: DRUNK ROCK "WHITE LIGHT/WHITE DOG", which is when emily gets her ass around to reviewing something that's still sort of current, as opposed to ancient shit that nobody cares about except when they're loaded. Enjoy.

Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City

Lyrically, Ezra Koenig is at his best when he’s judging people. This album has some of that, and it doesn’t disappoint when it appears (“And punks who would laugh when they saw us together/ but they didn’t know how to dress for the weather”), but for the most part, it’s surprisingly absent.  What we get instead is a whole lot of existential soul-searching and, relatedly, sort of a creeping feeling that maybe—just maybe—Ezra got his heart broken sometime between Contra and now. It’s sort of like finding out one of the mascots at Disney World is actually an 85-year-old alcoholic or discovering that your favorite baseball MVP used uppers or bennies or whatever it is that people get upset about (I don’t watch sports). In past albums, he’s given the impression he spends most of his time either avoiding women or accusing them of being Nicaraguan guerillas…That’s the Ezra we know and love. Now we get the sort-of-regretful “Everlasting Arms”, the sort-of-fed-up “Hannah Hunt”, the unconvincingly-named “Worship You”.  I don’t know about you, but even if the songs themselves are sort of endearing and still-catchy, I’d prefer to continue believing that Ezra is some kind of human experiment to create a living, breathing human based on Evelyn Waugh characters, engineered by the Ivy League. Tell me more about your favorite seersucker bowtie, Ezra! Or where in the city to pick up some deadstock 1900s throw pillows. Everybody I know just goes and listens to The National when they’re having real feelings, anyway.

  But in terms of Vampire Weekend’s other trademark moves, Modern Vampires of the City is pretty much in line with the band’s preceding albums.  You get all the preppy-chic name-drops you’d expect (Kennedys; Tarrytown and Rye), plus a lot of insanely obscure other references that are (presumably) meant to show you just how much of life you’ll just never understand because you didn’t go to Columbia. The Paul Simon influence is still very much alive and kicking, with some fun bongo accents, but so, too (unfortunately) is the predilection for auto-tune that VW seems to synonymize with “progress”. The digitized aspects of the album are definitely dialed up—single “Diane Young” is a good example of what I mean, even if it isn’t a good example of a song.

  One of my favorite moments comes after one of the album’s two weird soliloquys—in the unfortunately-named “Finger Back”. “I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die” recalls the delicious hooks (maybe something from “Walcott”?) of earlier albums. Considering that the rest of the song is a total mess, I’d say this is important. For reasons. I do love the part in the spoken-word bit about “averting her eyes to the laminated poster of the dome of the rock”, because hello, that’s every Falafel shop on planet earth in one sentence, right there.

  The most interesting song to talk about on the album has got to be “Step”, which I will address in typical Drunk Rock fashion by not talking about it.

  My least favorite song on the album is the penultimate “Hudson”, because it’s so incredibly dirgey—which, granted, could be part of the point considering the “wrap me in the flag” reference to military burials, but this is just one of those situations where being clever doesn’t make for good music—a place that, I sincerely hope, Vampire Weekend doesn’t fall into later on. Talking about this song with sometimes-contributor, always-commenter Richard, I was promptly informed that I am dead wrong and “Hudson” is actually the best song on the album. I credit this (mistaken) opinion with the fact that our good buddy has been down with the flu recently and probably was thus incapable of enjoying any music paced quicker than whale calls. IMO, the best track is the worst named, “Everlasting Arms”.  As usual, Richard and I are in diametric opposition.

  HOWEVER. I still give this album a solid rating—it’s a little more “down” than I like my VW to be, considering I still use “White Sky” as coffee substitute in the morning, but I’m stamping Modern Vampires of the City with “Good But Not Quite As Good As Contra”, a rating that I’m coming to find that absolutely nobody understands because I’m apparently the only person on planet earth who enjoyed Contra more than Self-Titled. Whatever.

  Final thoughts: We’ve all already independently acknowledged how weird it is to include the word “Vampires” in the album title, right? So we don’t have to talk about it? Okay, great. Second: as an avid Vampire Weekender, I’m also realizing how many times you can listen to something and still think that RapGenius’ lyricists were listening to an entirely different song. I wish that I, too, were paid to make up inane shit about popular music and embed Talking Heads videos and reaction gifs into everything…but alas, I’m just doing this for free.

Drinking game: Drink every time a religious reference is made over the course of this album. Feel free to stretch non-religious lyrics as far as you like to make them religious (that’s what the analysts at RapGenius are already doing, anyway). Anyone still alive when the album is over is now the new head of your Vampire Weekend suicide cult.

I originally thought the chorus was saying “We workshopped you”, which I thought was a) more interesting, b) more prep-school-plight-y, and c) more hilarious in conjunction with the melodramatic line “Who will guide us through the end?” that follows it. It reminded me of how class generally ran when we were studying The Catcher in the Rye back in high school. Back then it was always very clear who among us would even be capable of guiding us through the end, and it was always that one pretentious Republican asshole with the snapback. As a graduating English major, I can tell you that these things don’t really change. That guy probably has a retainer now with RapGenius.

Which, coincidentally (?) is where I’m from. So either Ezra is trying to reach me through his music, or….? Perhaps relevantly, it’s been pointed out to me on several occasions how short a drop it is from appreciating Ezra Koenig in the way I currently do to actually stalking him*. I maintain that I teeter endearingly on the edge of that chasm, but…some people are just mean.

*Footnote-in-footnote: In a recent GQ spread, Ezra wore a chambray necktie by New York menswear label Ernest Alexander (where I used to work) which was (presumably) a sample and thus I (presumably) at some point touched. This brings my count of enchanted objects to one. It’s also somewhat amusing to me that that’s the sort of thing GQ assumes Ezra Koenig should wear, because up until now I’ve never known what the fuck he was talking about when he referenced clothing in his lyrics (sweaters on the ocean floor? Is that an allegory?) and obviously I know what Ernest Alexander is. Moral of the story: I forget.

This is sort of unfair to say, actually, considering that most of my complaint with the album in general is that it’s not very peppy, and I’d probably be pretty happy with an album of 12 “Diane Young”s. The wordplay, too, is sort of endearing, if a little on-the-nose.

The other, occurring in “Ya Hey” which, much to my disappointment, is not an Outkast! cover done entirely in reverse. It does, on the other hand, feature one of the few musical references on the album that I actually understood—i.e. one of the few musical references on the album that was to a genre other than Hip Hop. 

[drunkrockwjhu]

(Yeah, yeah, I know, it's not technically Drunk Rock. But I wanted you all to get a chance to read my latest contribution to WJHU's editorial series "ON DECK WITH WJHU" without having to read it in your head as if you're William Shatner...that is, without the Johns Hopkins News-Letter having inserted a paragraph break every time they blink. Enjoy.)

IS IT REALLY SO STRANGE?

emily bihl

The other day, I was having a drink with a friend when I mentioned something about The Smiths/Morrissey. My friend nodded at the mention, paused for a second, and then asked me, “What is The Smiths/Morrissey?”

Now, this is a relatively “with it”, culturally aware individual—a music student, no less, who studies at a conservatory—from the American Northeast (I mention his geographical origin only as a point of context and not as a dig on other parts of the country; I myself am only almost entirely from the American Northeast). And yet, he had no idea who The Smiths were. Which caused me to wonder, to borrow a phrase: is it really so strange?

Granted, The Smiths were never the most popular band on the planet, but this incident did recall to memory the time that another friend blank-facedly asked me who “this Keith Richards person” was, and we all have doubtlessly seen our fair share of soul-crushing screenshots from Twitter users asking, typos aplenty, who the heck Paul McCartney (lovingly referred to as “this old guy”) is. Are we past the era where there’s a set “canon” of artists, groups, musicians, whatever, that one is reasonably expected to be versed in? And, if so, who’s to blame for this? Globalization? The Internet? The death of radio? Maybe even…our parents?

Here’s what I figure: with the advent of the Information Age came an absolute barrage of choices—we could choose whether to buy a whole album or just one track (or whether to “buy” it at all, as the case seems to have been), whether to listen to AM/FM radio in the car or to listen to satellite radio or to just listen to our own iPods, our own music libraries in a tape loop (“What’s a tape loop?”, asks everyone reading this born after 1992). With all these choices, I think it’s increasingly clear that most of us chose to pretty much stay within our own musical comfort zones—the indie got indi-er, the mainstream got mainstream-er, etcetera. With Sirius/XM’s appealing method of restricting entire stations to one genre, our generation grew up never having to “accidentally” listen to a country song (and, god forbid, “accidentally” like it). If you wanted hip-hop and nothing else, you got it. If you wanted acoustic sets from pop-folk artists, there was a station for that. Hell, if your mood happened to coincide with an upcoming release promotion, you could even listen to “Coldplay Radio” or “The Killers Radio” on satellite and never hear a song by any other artist so long as you stayed on that frequency. And don’t even get me started on Pandora—talk about “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want.”

So, technology triumphs and everybody’s happy listening to what they like. Right? Well, not exactly, or else I wouldn’t be writing this column. Something is lost by the increasing separation of people into generic groups—something cultural. It used to be that, as much as individuals had their own musical preferences, there was something of a shared collective consciousness. Think about Elvis, for instance—imagine an America in which the only people who were listening to Elvis 1968, or were even aware of him, were hardcore rock n’ roll enthusiasts who lived within 25 miles of Memphis. No screaming teenagers, no Milton Berle show, just a guy playing guitar for an audience full of other guys who played guitars. Now, while I hope to God that Justin Bieber isn’t today’s Elvis, the current situation is that if you don’t want to listen to Justin Bieber, you don’t have to. Don’t get me wrong—that’s great. I thank my lucky stars every day that I don’t have to listen to Justin Bieber. But when you hear George H.W. Bush announcing that he “doesn’t follow The Biebs”, it sorta makes you think—you can bet your blue suede shoes that LBJ “followed” Elvis. Hell, he probably had a NASA program devoted to harnessing all that sexual energy to defeat the commies (“Shake, Rattle, & Roll to Victory!”).

So, how do we combat this? Surely I don’t expect anybody to delete their Spotify accounts or take a magnet to their iPods—that would be insane. The thing about technology is that there’s no way to undo what’s already been done, and what’s more, I think we can all agree that we wouldn’t want to.  But the only thing to do, so far as I can tell, is allow yourself to branch out. Talk to your friends who roll their eyes at Neutral Milk Hotel—ask them what they’re jamming to instead. Get in a conversation about a scene you know nothing about. Surprise yourself-- seriously, how many of you thought you would like a band called Old Crow Medicine Show before you mysteriously found yourself singing “Wagon Wheel” at the top of your lungs at the bar in the middle of the night? Count how many different genres are in your iTunes library. I’m as guilty of this as anyone else, which is why I feel comfortable offering advice on the topic—even if you’re ignorant about hip hop or terrified of soul music (God save you), I’m willing to bet you know someone who isn’t. Sure, they might call you a poseur and tell you to fuck off, but maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll introduce you to the millennium’s answer to The Smiths or Joni Mitchell or Johnny Cash and change your life. Or, maybe they’ll patiently, earnestly introduce you to something and you’ll hate it—that’s okay too. If you were looking for hip hop and then you found hip hop, and heaven knows you’re miserable now…. Well, that’s all part of the process.

But in any case, let’s do it. Let’s create the collective cultural consciousness of our generation. Let’s create a canon. Let’s share something, even if it’s not what the Grammys thinks we should be sharing, even if we don’t all like all of it. Let’s give the history books something to say about this generation’s music, other than that we stopped paying for it.

[drunkrockwjhu]

Tomorrow’s election day, and I have one thing to say to you: “Obama, I wanna go surfing.”

Alright, alright. That’s not actually what surf-rock[1] band The Drums are saying in their song “Let’s Go Surfing”, but it pretty much sounds like it, and I needed some way to relate this article to Election Day, and I often find myself fitfully musing about what if that really was what they were saying in the song, and how super awesome that would be. “Obama/I wanna go surfing/Obama/I don’t care about nothing.” Invariably this train of thought leads me to wonder if Mister Prez really does know how to surf—he grew up in Hawaii, after all—and, what do you think, guys, does he wear boardshorts or what? One of those wetsuit dealies? I don’t actually know anything about surfing, but I do know that Obama is the hippest president of all time[2] and that if anybody was gonna fill out a pair of board shorts like a boss, it’d be him. Dude’s pretty buff, even if his hair is graying at an alarming rate that makes me question the profundity of modern science. I mean, if the White House doesn’t have the most up-to-date defenses against aging, who does? Amirite?

Anyway, tomorrow, when you’re standing at the ballot box trying to decide whether to vote for “Most Likely To Be Able To Surf” or “Most Likely To Outlaw Surfing In An Eerily ‘Footlose’-esque Piece Of Legislation”, I’ll be making some hard-hitting decisions of my own. Namely, I’ll be trying to decide for about the eight-hundredth time whether my favorite contemporary surf-rock band is The Drums, or Surfer Blood—a band who actually does make lyrical allusion to Barack Obama[3]. (Why didn’t I lead with that, then? I don’t know either.)

In the category of band names, Surfer Blood clearly wins out—naming yourself something containing the word “surf” when you’re a surf-rock band is so deliciously tongue-in-cheek that it basically makes up for the fact that their album cover featuring a hungry shark is a little too on-the-nose for my taste.  The Drums is an okay band name but it also sorta seems like the kind of band name you’d come up with in middle school, a time when one of my best band-name contenders was “The Bassments”, which, obviously, is a pun on Bass, which presumably said band would contain. Thankfully The Bassments never came to pass, and we all know that even if they had, they wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good as The Drums, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a pretty mediocre name. Thankfully, naming is a pretty irrelevant category for considering the merits of a band.[4]

Lyrically, we start to run into some problems right off the bat. The Drums have a really nice way of not overcomplicating things: “The days go by/and I never needed you” pretty much gets straight to the damn point, which I respect. And you’ve got to love a band that has a song whose chorus goes “I want to buy you something/But I don’t have any money/No I don’t have any money”. Who hasn’t been there? I pretty much live there. These guys aren’t T.S. fucking Eliot, that much is clear, but they seem pretty comfortable doing what they’re doing, and they’re catchy as hell, and sometimes it’s best just to say what you mean. Not always, obviously, but sometimes.

But then again, sometimes obscurity is its own reward. In that corner, we’ve got Surfer Blood. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know what a “Catholic Pagan” or “Adolescent sour mash”[5] is, but hey, you do you, SB. At the other extreme, one does sorta get the sense that they get sick of trying to rhyme sometimes and just shrug. “I have to rhyme with ‘into’ again? Can we just—oh, wait, how about ‘aaah-aah, oooh-ooh’?”[6] Yeah, that works, guys. That works. But neither of these extremes makes them unrelatable: don’t we all just wish we “knew everything it takes to get along”? I mean, we all went to middle school and felt like thoroughly dysfunctional organisms. I distinctly remember thinking that there had to be some sort of standard-issue First Aid Kit-type set of tools that everyone else in my class had been given in order to function properly. To be fair, back then “everything it takes to get along” probably consisted of a Hollister hoodie and some Pumas, but let’s not pretend that concept is any less mystifying now than it was then.[7]

And then there’s the final category: presence of a song about Twin Peaks. In this category, Surfer Blood wipes the floor with The Drums like Norma mopping up after a long day at the Double R Diner[8]…largely because, well, Surfer Blood has a song about Twin Peaks and The Drums don’t. Is this a fair criteria on which to judge a band? Probably not. Do I care? Definitely not. Am I going to systematically list the top 5 Musical References To Twin Peaks right here, right now? Well, now that you mention it, yes.:

1.     Surfer Blood’s “Twin Peaks”, obviously. It doesn’t actually reference TP that much lyrically, aside from saying “Twin Peaks and David Lynch” every so often, but it’s such a good college-life song: hanging out on the couch, talking about Twin Peaks, trying to decide how much trouble you’re putting yourself in if you make a move on the object or your affections, self-loathing in response to the outcome of that decision (regardless of which way you went), and, of course, “making fun at the video store”. If this is the wrong way to spend Freshman year, I don’t wanna be right[9]. Did I mention it’s catchy? It’s so damn catchy.

2.     McChris (or is it MC Chris?)’s “Twin Peaks” which not only is just a big ol’ David Lynch-punning romp lyrically, but also makes use of the actual TP theme song. Bonus points for the Ghost Busters reference, shortly followed by “That’s right, I put a Ghost Busters reference in a song about Twin Peaks! Everybody’s happy!” It’s a pretty stupid song, but I like that sort of thing.

3.     Twin Peaks’ “The Black Lodge”. Not sure if any of the actual song is about Twin Peaks, but the opening is part of Log Lady’s monologue, and Log Lady is obviously the coolest character in that show. Plus the owls hooting in the background[10].

4.     A tie: either Fieldmouse’s “Falling (Twin Peaks Theme)” or She’s So Rad’s “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart (Twin Peaks Cover)”, both of which, aside from being kinda mellow and expected, are actually pretty good tunes when just playing in the background somewhere. In other news, does anybody know of any “An Invitation To Love”-inspired tracks? Because that would be some next-level shit, that right there.

5.     LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down (With Twin Peaks Theme Intro)”. What does this have to do with Twin Peaks, really? Not much. But have you heard the live recordings from the last LCD Soundsystem show at MSG? Fuckin’ heartbreaking. Especially this track, for obvious reasons. If you’re honestly going to ask me why this made the list, you either a) have no soul or b) don’t know about the clause in my contract with WJHU that requires me to mention LCD Soundsystem at least once per article.

Uh. Wow. Aren’t we glad that just happened?

So, er, like I was saying. Don’t forget to vote.

[1] In iTunes, The Drums are listed as an Electronica band, but this strikes me as obviously untrue. In fact, just the other day, when describing another band as being “surf-rock”, the friend I was describing to said, “Like The Drums?” to which I enthusiastically replied, “YEAH!” even though the band in question was almost wholly (but not quite, Douglas Adams fans) unlike The Drums. I was just so excited that my friend was using The Drums as a cultural referencepoint that I got carried away with myself. (But, much like Sam in Garden State, I went back afterwards and admitted that what I said was basically untrue.)

[2] Or at least since Taft.

[3] “Barack Hussein Obama would have a field day/If he knew at all” (Catholic Pagans)

[4] Didn’t stop me, though.

[5] Points for using the phrase “sour mash” in a song, though.

[6] “Come pick me up in the morning/And we can find a hole to crawl into/We’re still pretending to be lightweights/My arms and legs, they will grow soft, aaah-aah, oooh-ooh” You’ve gotta hand it to those guys.

[7] Seriously, what was it about Hollister hoodies?

[8] Nobody likes this joke. Nobody.

[9] It’s also probably important to mention two other lyrics in the song, “Your sexual advances/Are unconvincing and untrue”, and “Your humor’s getting sour, too”, for their resounding truthiness. In the scheme of the aforementioned Freshman year, didn’t everybody have that one romance that was almost wholly unromantic to the point of just being vaguely insulting? Didn’t everyone also have that one love interest who was originally into weird shit in a way that made them seem really intriguing and complex but ended up just being, like, sorta alarming? No? Not everybody? Just me? Okay, then.

[10] And if you don’t know why this is relevant, you probably are not enjoying any part of this article. My bad.

[drunkrockwjhu]

A lot of people like to get on my case about assessing various things based on aesthetics, and since a fair portion of my previous spouting about The Yeah Yeah Yeahs has revolved around stage performance and general visual persona, I sort of know what I’m getting myself into. But it’s not even really about that. At the heart of it, my affection for The Yeah Yeah Yeahs isn’t really about looks—it comes from something much more difficult to name than that. Karen O. represents an alternate reality in which CBGB never closed; Hot Topic never opened; and the kids in your high school who used to eat lunch in the art room grew up to rule the world.

Here’s the thing: we can talk about a song like “Maps”, off of Fever To Tell, and how it’s one of the most understatedly devastating[1] tracks in recent memory. But as incredible as it is, it’s also sort of the “Here Comes Your Man” of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ career[2]. We can talk about the sort of eerie, foreboding locomotion of something like “Cheated Hearts” from Show Your Bones. But these are, in some ways, isolated incidents—and you can’t really talk about the band without talking about their relationship to the category of Art Rock (which, admittedly, is sort of an aesthetic thing), and you also can’t talk about It’s Blitz! without talking about the inherent problems with this sort of categorization—and since both Richard and I self-identify as being rather difficult people, this is, of course, exactly what we intend to talk about.

But let’s back up for a few seconds—in the albums leading up to It’s Blitz!, specifically Fever To Tell, lead singer/goddess K.O.[3]. was ostensibly really broken up about complications with her (ex-?) lover Angus [4]. Not much is known about Angus—dude’s named after a kind of cow, let’s be real—but it’s safe to say that somehow he made himself impervious to the glowing aura of capital-C Cool that surrounds Karen O. at all times, probably with witchcraft or a trade with the devil, or something, and thereby managed to break the poor girl’s heart. As someone who still holds a grudge against Julia Roberts for The Lyle Lovett Incident, something that occurred when I was barely capable of forming full sentences, it’s safe to say that I’m not ever going to be a big fan of this Angus guy. But, while I hate to sound like I’m in any way minimizing the hurt that Karen O. undoubtedly experienced with ol’ Cowman, it does occur to me that maybe she needed to experience this heartbreak, and, by extension, produce Fever To Tell, in order to produce the powerhouse that is It’s Blitz! A lot of us artsy types are really fond of justifying our pain in retrospect in this way—it’s okay that we suffered every waking moment for ten months so long as we have a really good novel/love song/interpretive dance to show for it afterwards—and I think a lot of us are kind of walking around suffering very acutely just in the hopes that that’ll happen, but sometimes I think it’s real. Maybe Fever To Tell was to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as It’s Blitz! was to Ulysses [5]—which is to say, maybe it was something very Column A that needed to happen so that something very Column B (and, in some ways, “better”) could happen in reaction to it.

Or—and here’s where I throw in an alternate theory and screw everybody up—maybe The Yeah Yeah Yeahs turned into a different band between the making of Fever To Tell and It’s Blitz!. It’s equally plausible—here I’ve been going along, trying to convince you that It’s Blitz! is the dawning of the REAL Yeah Yeah Yeahs, just because it’s a really impressive and courage-of-your-convictions-y album. But maybe the reverse is true—maybe FTT is the real YYYs, and IB is the album we should all be regarding as self-conscious and sellout-y, and abbrevs are sweepin’ the nash, bro[6].

Here’s why these are both valid ways of considering the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ body of work, and then here’s why they both don’t really matter: to my mind, a huge percentage of the emotionality of Fever To Tell gets totally zapped out of It’s Blitz. Maybe it’s just the relief of getting over the whole Angus debacle—or maybe literally anybody else in the band besides Karen O. has a creative say in these things, beats me—but It’s Blitz is the closest thing to a Talking Heads album we’ve seen in my lifetime. It’s loud, it’s pulsing, it’s good to dance to[7], it makes practically zero lyrical emotional appeal—it’s here, it’s queer, etcetera. And yet, I think this was the album that was really there for a lot of us, in spite of the sort of dormant relatability of it. I don’t know whether to blame it on the “we’re stuck in the middle of Ohio with artsy kids, let’s do a fuckton of drugs” Oberlin origin story or with the “we’re a New York band and we know that there’s a certain tradition that deserves to be upheld in that mantle” origin story, but this is where The Yeah Yeah Yeahs stop being another indie band with a girl with a weird haircut and starts being something history-making. I hesitate to use the word “innovative” because, as I said, there’s a real knowledge of tradition here, but something really happens at this stage in the band’s career.

And then, at the height(?) of their popularity and just as mysteriously as anything else in the band’s evolution, the incredible genius of drummer Brian Chase is scaled back on his playing with the band[8]. Think of it: the guy who ostensibly gave “Gold Lion” its relentless, demolition-derby drum hits sort of lays off and starts going to fashion shows[9]. What does this mean for the band? What does this mean for…HUMANITY? What the hell’s going on here?

Well, unfortunately, we haven’t gotten to find out yet, because we haven’t really gotten to see what’s come next. I mean, sure, Karen O. does movie collabs like a boss[10], but when are we getting a new album? It’s sort of an incomplete way to wrap up this article by saying, essentially, that the game’s afoot but we don’t know what game or when the game’s coming out or who will still be playing the game when it does, but… that’s honestly the state of things. Hate to pull a Sherlock on you, but we’re not going to find out whether the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are alive or dead until they come back next season, sorry. It’s Blitz! came out in March 2009, a time that most of us can hardly remember because of the severity and frequency of alcohol poisoning that occurred in the interim. In 2009, some of us were still in high school, enjoying[11] the days between picking a college and getting shipped off to said college. Those same people are now staring down the barrel of Real Life that’s pointed at us, trying to decide whether we can tolerate filling in bubbles with no.2 pencils again in order to get into grad schools, or whether we should cut our losses and pretend that we’ll invent the next Facebook if everybody gets off our case for a minute. And y’know what would inevitably make this whole clusterfuck a lot easier? SOME NEW GODDAMN TUNES FROM THE YEAH YEAH YEAHS.

Okay, maybe not. But as I mentioned before, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were there last time we were on a life-path precipice, and there is a sort of hopefulness in the widespread success of the band. In a world where The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are rightfully appreciated for being awesome, we can believe in the existence of parties where everybody doesn’t go “huh?” when you put on Kate Bush. We can believe in entire days when nobody asks “what the hell are you wearing?” when you outwardly embrace your inner art-rock. It’s Blitz! sort of signaled, to the uncertain high schoolers we were when it came out, a Revenge of the Nerds. And I think a lot of us found that in college[12], but I think a lot of us are also still looking—still looking for a start-up that’ll let us spout our bullshit opinions on music three times a day, looking for a job that’ll hire us and not crush our souls, looking for a city[13] that’s as weird as we are.

Don’t take that hope away from us, guys. Nick Zinner, if you’re reading this, we need you to gather up your bandmates—pull Karen out of the recording studio of whatever indie children’s film she’s wrapped up in now, tell Brian to put down the brightly colored pants and back slowly away from Lincoln Center—and go make an album. We’re exactly the right age to need you again.

[1] I would like to posit that you could play this song for any English-speaking individual in the modern world and they would understand this. Everybody knows what “they don’t love you like I love you” means—it means that the speaker has somehow, accidentally or in some consistently marginalized way, gotten closer to the “you” than various comparable—but, and this is important, more socially acceptable—individuals have. If you’ve ever played the role of primary confidant to someone in spite of their significant other; if you’ve ever gotten too close with someone twice your age; if you’ve ever watched The Breakfast Club, you know what this means. And yet it’s not a cliché, and that makes it genius. (But, as I may have mentioned, that’s not what we’re talking about.)

[2] Meaning, of course, that it’s a great song but it received too widespread commercial success to be regarded as a cornerstone track in the band’s lifetime. Look it up on The Pixies’ Wikipedia page—this is a thing.

[3] How cool would it be to have your initials be K.O.? Like “knockout”? Especially if you were a “knockout”, so to speak—I think it’s one of those things that makes you cooler if you’re already cool, but would make you lamer if you were already lame…a concept which, as a wise guitarist once told me, applies to almost anything in the world. Except money. (His words.)

[4] Not much is known about him by me, that is. Richard seems to know sort of a fair amount about him—i.e. anything, i.e. that he’s the frontman of indie band Liars and that his last name is Andrew, making his initials AA. AA + KO, guys. AND WE WONDER WHY THIS RELATIONSHIP WAS A MESS. Anyway, even though some of you would probably point out that I shouldn’t go writing articles about people I don’t know anything about, I would like to say, in my defense, that there’s at least a 50% chance that the reason Richard knows about Angus is that he has personally arranged to have him stalked by a trained sniper. Our hero Rich over here has some supreme hate for anybody who fucks with Karen O. And who could blame him?

[5] You’re welcome, grad students.

[6] Sorry.

[7] Canadians notwithstanding.

[8] An old boyfriend of mine told me this, shortly after I met him (him meaning Brian Chase, not the boyfriend). I don’t actually know if it’s true, and for once in my life I’m not going to look that hard to find out.

[9] No really. I met him at New York Fashion Week. Have I mentioned I met Brian Chase? I met Brian Chase. Brian Chase Brian Chase Brian Chase.

[10] Anybody seen Frankenweenie yet?

[11] And I use that word deeply facetiously.

[12] Case in point: Hopkins has a beekeeping club, a Quidditch team, and multiple breakdancing outfits. Even if none of these happened to be any good—and I’m the last person you should ask—just the fact of their existence makes them, innately, not high school. And as everybody knows, anything that’s not high school is better than anything that is high school.

[13] It must be said, however, that you can’t do much better than Baltimore for something like that.

[drunkrockwjhu]

Confession time.

I, like many (I hope) other folks my age, came to indie rock not through an overwhelming desire to (further) alienate myself from my schoolmates or be purposefully obscure (as some of you may remember, there was no glory in that back in Middle School), but rather quite by accident. Furthermore, I came to indie rock through relatively mainstream means. Specifically, the Garden State soundtrack.

I’ll skip over the part where I tell you that the opening fade-in of “Caring Is Creepy” still gives me absolute chills and rockets me into a corner of my subconscious that I, just as often as not, forget exists. I’ll skip over the part where, in spite of my from-birth desire to be as contrary as possible, I, sitting on my couch in pajamas, wholeheartedly nod when Natalie Portman tells Zac Braff, “you’ve gotta listen to this one song, it’ll change your life.” I’ll even skip past the later episode where I lovingly, if illegally, burn the CD for the first bowtie-wearing boy who ever blindsided me with my own affection for him. Nobody wants to hear about that anyway, and what’s more, it’s not what Drunk Rock is about.[1]

Anyway. Back to the point.

I had never heard anything[2] like The Shins—their lyrics, ostensibly, made exactly zero sense[3], and yet, yet!, there was something wildly accessible about them. I had thought that grown-up music was supposed to be hard, difficult to grasp, an acquired taste full of concerted effort.[4] But here were The Shins! They had a dumb name! They looked like out-of-work kindergarten teachers! They sang about being turned on by tennis shorts![5] Who the fuck were these guys?!

But who they were didn’t really matter. Soon enough I was listening to them on heavy, heavy rotation on the way to and from school and maybe even in the locker room in the fleeting, walk-to-the-gallows-like moments before gym class.

And that’s sort of the problem with The Shins—whereas, normally at this point in the article I’d find some way of aligning the emotions in their songs with something I was going through at a goofy time in my life, The Shins eschew this. “I left all my friends at the morning bus stop/shaking their heads/’What kind of life you dream of?/You’re allergic to love!’” While I might[6] have some conception of what this is supposed to mean now, as a jaded[7], complicated[8] college Senior on the cusp of whateverthefuck, I had absolutely no idea at that point. But that didn’t mean these lyrics didn’t mean anything—in fact, I always got the distinct impression that James Mercer knew exactly what he was talking about. Listening to The Shins is, in that way, like listening to someone sing in another language—beautiful, emotional, foreign. And so The Shins became, if not my favorite band, then at least the band I was most proud to name among my favorite bands. Oh, Inverted World was the ideal album for filling up time—and at a moment in one’s life when one is constantly trying to get from one unbearably unsatisfying moment to the next[9], The Shins were the ideal band. Listen, just humor me here: next time you’re on a car trip, I double dog dare you to put on song one of the album[10] and not go on to listen to the album all the way through. You can’t do it, can you? Of course you can’t. Do you think I’d double dog dare you for something I was just going to end up regretting and being proven wrong about? What kind of asshole do I look like?

First off, the album moves seamlessly from start to finish. Even otherwise-technical-blips such as Your Algebra[11] fall through the cracks (in this case, a good thing) because, even where they fail, they still fit. Here’s what’ll happen: you’ll press play, and then the next time you’ll move a muscle is (approx.) 33 minutes later when the album is finished. With some albums, it’s virtually impossible to listen to less than the full tracklist; Oh, Inverted World is exactly such an album.

Does this, in and of itself, make The Shins great? No. Of course not. Are they, however, Great? Yes. Duh. Of course they fucking are. First off, you don’t befuddle an entire nation and leave them still wanting to buy every album you’ve ever touched without being at least a little bit genius[12]. Second—James Mercer, after bestowing gleaming album after gleaming album onto his adoring public with The Shins, went on to create Broken Bells with Danger Mouse as a side project, which ended up being one of the most successful hype-machine-worthy masterpieces of the 2000s.[13] Three—I saw The Shins just this summer[14], and they still fucking rock. Yes, that one’s not very technical support[15]. But it’s true, and I’m telling you about it. Really, dude, you should’ve been there—it was sick.

[1] Drunk Rock is about the music you used to listen to, and the person you used to be before you were smart enough to realize you weren’t as tidy as all that. Maybe. Or maybe it’s just about booze and good music. (I don’t know; I’m pretty drunk.)

[2] This is not strictly true—I had, of course, grown up to Talking Heads. Let’s be real, here; I’m not a cavedweller.

[3] “Godspeed/All the bakers at dawn/They all cut their thumbs/And bleed into their buns/Till they melt away.”

[4] That is to say, Brian Eno.

[5] “Turn A Square”, Chutes Too Narrow

[6] It’s about girls, right?

[7] Ugh.

[8] Dammit.

[9] That is to say, Middle School.

[10] Which, if you’re wondering, is “Caring Is Creepy”—and honestly, if you gain nothing else from this album, remember that that is probably one of the best fucking song titles in the history of fucking song titles. REMEMBER THAT.

[11] Side note: try to make it through Freshman year algebra class without thinking of this phrase fifty thousand times. “You can take YOUR ALGEBRA and stuff it, Mrs. Tingley!” “To hell with YOUR ALGEBRA.” Point is, if Holden Caulfield were incised about Order of Operations, he’d basically use this phrase all the time.

[12] I reiterate: they have a song called “Caring Is Creepy.” C’mon.

[13] If you think I fact-checked this, you are reading the wrong damn column.

[14] I also saw The Shins at the Electric Factory in Philly back in High School, right when Wincing The Night Away came out. It is partially because of this night that I firmly maintain that, if a boy agrees to go to a concert of a mutually beloved band with you and doesn’t pay you back for the ticket it is AUTOMATICALLY a date, but that’s neither here nor there.

[15] In my defense, it does sort of prove that The Shins’ whole “we’re inexplicable and endearing and say things like ‘lah-dee-dah’ in our songs” gimmick is more than a gimmick—or, at least, more than a gimmick that we as a music-consuming public are smart enough to catch on within, what, eleven years? Eleven years, guys. ELEVEN YEARS. Fuck it, these guys should run for President(s).

[drunkrockwjhu]

Note: This is Drunk Rock, a new ill-advised, potentially-regular column where emily gets weepy and nostalgic about old albums that you may have missed (or wish you missed) the first time around.

Okay. So. Readers.

None of you are going to want to hear this—none of you are going to want to hear this much in the same way that a lot of people don’t want to hear a lot of things anyone might be apt to say when drunk (“your boyfriend is cheating on you”/ ”your dad is hot” / ”have you gained weight?”)—but I have to say it, because it is my job. Or, moreover, because it is the principle objective of this non-paying endeavor I have unceremoniously committed myself to with zero prompting. And, if we’re being honest, how many times do you drunkenly declare something and then not follow through? Er, wrong question—rather, how many times do you drunkenly declare you’re going to do something stupid and then not do it provided you’re still drunk?

Chances are you have a few physical (and emotional?) scars that are pretty good testament to the fact that you follow through with your drunken dares. But that’s just a guess.

What was I talking about? Oh yes. Vampire Weekend.

Vampire Weekend is a band that, regrettable as it may be, is pretty much incapable of producing a less than perfect pop album. If you are in college and you have not spent at least one summer car ride/weepy Sunday night/emotionally confounding make-out session listening to Vampire Weekend, I simply do not know what kind of life you are leading.

Now. Don’t get confused. I’m not saying that Vampire Weekend is a particularly profound (“aaooh, aaaahh-ooh, oooh-ooh, oooooh-oooh—ooh-oooh-oooh, oooh-ooh-oooh-ooh”) or universally applicable (“you spilled kefir on your kaffiyeh”) band. I am just saying that, damn, the boys from Columbia know how to craft a good hook. And here’s the kicker: they know how to make an album that a) is going to make you grin at some point during its appealingly-versatile thirty-one minutes and b) is going to somehow seem applicable to you[1], even though you’ve never accidentally had a homosexual liaison with a diplomat’s son and you literally don’t give a fuck about an Oxford comma and you don’t even know how to spell horchata, let alone know where to find some.

Vampire Weekend are good storytellers. They’re probably assholes, as most good storytellers are, but that doesn’t make it any easier to ignore that infectious impulse to join them in singing about sweaters at the bottom of the ocean or Wolfords or whatever the hell else it is that they’re on about now. Seriously, do you guys even know what Wolfords are? Do you know who Richard Serra is? I do, but only because I googled all that shit when I had “White Sky” stuck in my head for the ten billionth time. Jesus. You’re singing it now, aren’t you? And you still don’t fucking know who Richard Serra is.

Go to their concerts even though they suck live. Go buy their albums even though you already know all the songs. It doesn’t matter. They’ve won anyway. They’re just too damn clever and deliciously unaffected. They’re making you think that they’re you, even though they probably have friends who have yachts and go on ski vacations to the Alps and you’re still considering it a good life when you have a frozen pizza left at the end of the week. Vampire Weekend is cooler than you, and they know it, and they never wear socks and somehow make that seem like an okay thing to do, and yet I fucking love them. Why shouldn’t they be assholes[2].  when they’ve achieved complex psychological, Stockholm Syndrome-level shit like that? Congrats, boys. You probably deserve it.

[1] Some of you who feel particularly well attuned to Vampire Weekend’s lexicon and, ehem, moral dilemmas may already be mobilizing to come to my apartment and yell about how Vampire Weekend really gets you. But think about it: both you and Vampire Weekend studied undergrad at a university in America. That’s literally where the similarity ends. You have exactly as much of a shared experience with Ezra Koenig as you do with the Unabomber. Chew on that for a few minutes before you come throw pebbles at my window.

[2] When I saw VW back in the day, back before killing “A-Punk” on Guitar Hero had gotten anyone laid or “Cape Cod Kwassa-Kwassa” had provided college students with any reason to remember who Peter Gabriel is (while simultaneously continuing to viciously ignore the enormous musical influence of Paul Simon), the band tried to get the entire audience to sing the (never-before-heard) “ooh” chorus portion of “White Sky”. When we failed miserably (duh), Ezra became visibly agitated and audibly facepalmed.  Here’s a fun trick: unearth someone who has never heard that song from whatever rock they live under. Describe the “ooh” portion to them without singing it. Ask them to sing it back to you. See how well they do. Now try to tell me that Ezra isn’t a douchebag.

[drunkrockwjhu]

Note: This is Drunk Rock, a new ill-advised, potentially-regular column where emily gets weepy and nostalgic about old albums that you may have missed (or wish you missed) the first time around. For its first iteration, she takes on New Wave by Against Me!.

New Wave is an album that was undoubtedly guilty of neglecting the golden rule of “under-promise, over-deliver”. Any modern punk band that previously produced, say, a song called “Cliché Guevara[1]” is expected to be at the top of its game at all times, and, if grumpy Pitchfork comments section remarks have taught us anything over the years, it’s that that’s sort of musically impossible.

(Tangent: as of this line, I have written 65 words of body text, and 107 words of footnote. This is less about drinking and more about me being a writing sems major. Augh. Anyway.)

The problem with Against Me! isn’t that New Wave wasn’t a good album—New Wave is a good album. It’s got “American Abroad”, which is as rollicking as it is generically pissed off—a tried and true formula for a two-minute punk song. It’s got “The Ocean”, which is a little softer (requisite) and idealistic (requisite) and subtlety sexually confused (also requisite). In fact, the only song that’s not so good is “Stop”, and it’s entirely possible that I only think that because I got sick of hearing it play as the lead-in to news radio in the days leading up to the 2008 election. No. The problem with Against Me! isn’t really about New Wave at all—the problem with Against Me! is that they were just too damn good. In the same way that everyone is always trying[2] to one-up each other by pointing to “The Day Green Day Sold Out For Real Real, Guys” (which, by the way, I’ve heard timestamped as everything from the day Dookie came out to, quite ridiculously, when American Idiot the musical opened on Broadway), people love to discredit new fans of good music when they consider themselves to be old fans of that good music. So, while I imagine that a bunch of old scraggly punk rock types (“old” here being, like, 27) got pissed off at Against Me! simply because of New Wave’s popularity, I also want to go ahead and admit that, sure, it’s understandable to me that those punk rock types had just grown so accustomed to AM!’s old stuff that anything less than sheer brilliance looked to them like garbage.

And here’s where I make the interesting point: If Against Me!’s New Wave had been put out by any band other than Against Me!, would it have instead been hailed as the really really decent album it is?

We’ll never know, obviously, because that’s not how reality works. We do get something close, though, which is Ben Lee’s Ben Lee Sings Against Me! New Wave and is, predictably, the worst thing ever. If you’re starting to look at this scientifically at this point, like with isolating variables and that shit, you’re probably thinking, “Well, but emily, you’re saying New Wave might’ve been good if it wasn’t produced by AM!, but then you’re saying that there’s this other version of New Wave by Ben Lee which is, essentially, exactly that, and that’s a complete failure. Something’s gotta give.” But here’s where you’re gonna be the one looking like an asshole: nostalgia isn’t about science. Drunk feelings aren’t about science. This column is made up almost exclusively of drunk feelings and nostalgia. Weren’t you paying attention? Obviously not. Jerk.

New Wave is a good album. The end.

[1] Is there any kind of Rock n’ Roll hall of fame for song titles? If so, this should definitely go in there. Along with “Get Innocuous!” by LCD Soundsystem. Are these the only two bands I ever talk about on this blog? Answer: yes. But “Get Innocuous!” is just a brilliant title and it also sorta reminds me of “Oscillate Wildly” for some reason which is a damn good association to have if you ask me. So I guess “Oscillate Wildly” by The Smiths also belongs in the hall of fame. You know what wouldn’t go in there? Anything by Fall Out Boy. Ever. Learn what a run-on sentence is, assholes.

[2] It’s possible that this is a little hyperbolic, and that it’s not so much a situation of “everyone always” doing something as much as “people I happen to repeatedly be in the same room with often getting drunk and” doing something.