I used to think it was bizarre that Linda Perry, leader of the horrifically bad 4 Non Blondes, reappeared a few years after "What's Up" as the writer of Pink's "Get The Party Started" and Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful". Now it just seems like, okay, maybe she was an industry striver the whole time.

Still pretty weird that the Housemartins' drummer turned into Fatboy Slim, though.

And that the keyboardist from Heavenly was creator and co-host of Junkyard Wars.

[Edited to add: Thanks to locke61dv for turning me on to this.]

Also in the bowl: Squeeze, Joe Jackson (or is it J. Geils Band?), a little Dresden Dolls, and, at least for one of the vocalists**, a lot of Morrissey.

The Morrissey thing: It's unnerving to hear this much Moz in the voice of someone who's securely and pointedly straight, but wants us so badly to know about his enlightened views. "Buffer Zone" is about vulturous abortion protesters; "Virginia Radio" goes "Everything I say is misconstrued / You'd think I hate every ethnic group and gay"; and I don't even know what to make of the lyric "I hate to break it to you, honey, I'm pro-choice", which is addressed to a sexy nun in the title track, but there it is. The Sterns aim for "mopey", "sulky", maybe even "tormented" (courtesy of all the Catholic imagery), but the darkest mood they pull off is "in a snit".

So despite the killer tunes, I'm not sure what I think.

The Sterns on MySpace

[*] Supposedly it's about Harriet Miers, which makes it differently problematic.

[**] I thought it was all one guy, but somewhere in their press kit they boast about having three frontmen. I'm guessing about who sings what; the liner notes don't help.

Y'know?

Anyway: a few bangin' tracks that I suspect are Epworth's and a few definite snoozers I suspect are Lee's. (We might learn the truth once it comes out for real; at the moment, it's digital-only and lacking credits.) Then we have a baffling, intriguing handful like "Mercury" where the band spend the whole time pulling quarters out of each other's ears-- there's a viable, handsome new style that lies in that direction, I think, but I don't know whether they'll make it there if they try to go on foot.

Bloc Party on MySpace
Epworth (as Epic Man) producing UK rapper Plan B | Epworth remixing Interpol

Anyway, Pink Stars Yellow Moons was classic and this is mostly just okay, but the exceptions are better than the rest, not worse, so my heart is a little warm.

But in search of more details about a line in "Two Crosses", I found two things: an interview with Finn in which he says that the album is entirely about the same cast of characters, unnamed to make the task of untangling the narrative more difficult; and a message board thread in which a truly huge number of lyric snippets are cross-referenced and a number of theories (some certainly garbage) are hatched.

Possibly I'm the worst possible sort of listener for this album-- attached enough to the idea of a running inter-song narrative that I miss it, but not so attentive that I got the clues. Nor am I sure why eleven stories about the same themes should bother me more than one eleven-song story with lots of thematic repetition. Maybe Stay Positive's grim theme-- the main thread connecting the songs seems to be a murder-- made me tune out.

Anyway, the music's still bombastic; most of the songs are trying way too hard to sound like climaxes and turning points, and the fact that they might actually be those things only partially mitigates it. What would otherwise be cutely self-referential declarations about music's power to save souls sound defensive. I could see it growing on me (though I've liked it less with repetition, not more) or becoming a valued piece of the overall Hold Steady project (you don't have to listen to read the lyrics!) or being redeemed by the CD-only bonus tracks (Hold Steady b-sides have generally been awesome). But I don't find myself with the boundless patience I had for their last album.

The Hold Steady on MySpace

While I liked other songs on Bluebird (Jagjaguwar, 2000), it was only "Bride" that made Sarah White's name stay in my head long after she seemed to vanish from the indie world. Her voice sounds like a coffee-table puzzle in which seven different kinds of defeat interlock to form a surprisingly-shaped contentment, which is half of why I loved the song; the other half is the way the guitar acts as the main rhythmic element, constantly anticipating itself with the sound of fingers on strings.

So that was a long time ago, and I guess I burned the blueprint of that song into my brain thoroughly enough that the presence of drums on her newish album White Light (Antenna Farm, 2006) is a constant surprise. Every single whack of the snare drum sounds potentially deafening, like, man, I'm glad that guy is all the way in the corner, or else I'm pretty sure it would overwhelm Sarah White's voice.

But as I said, "or else I'm pretty sure it would overwhelm her" is White's specialty.

Sarah White - Bride
Sarah White & The Pearls - Spoken Word

MySpace | home page

So that was a long time ago, and I guess I burned the blueprint of that song into my brain thoroughly enough that the presence of drums on her newish album White Light (Antenna Farm, 2006) is a constant surprise. Every single whack of the snare drum sounds potentially deafening, like, man, I'm glad that guy is all the way in the corner, or else I'm pretty sure it would overwhelm Sarah White's voice.

But as I said, "or else I'm pretty sure it would overwhelm her" is White's specialty as a singer.

Sarah White - Bride
Sarah White & The Pearls - Spoken Word

MySpace | home page

But in a few of these songs Jimmy Urine runs bady afoul of the fact that a male misanthrope who writes songs about women has about five ways to sound like a misogynist fuckwad, and with limited context (i.e. not knowing the guy personally) I can't tell the difference between

#1: Writing songs whose point is to make you look like a creep (playing with audience/performer relationship)

#2: Meaning to reclaim the whole idea of hostility as being about you, not about whoever you shout at (though this can segue into "Hey, I'm just expressing myself" which is usually a veil for #5)

#3: Just wanting to push people's buttons

#4: Expecting people to realize you have just as much contempt for men

#5: Actually being a misogynist fuckwad

We suspect from past MSI records that Urine's feelings about people he hates and/or thinks of only as sex objects are complex and interesting and probably forgivable. But we also suspect from those records that he can weave lyrics a little tighter than "You wouldn't take no for an answer you fucking BITCH". That the thread in question is dayglo and looks like it can't possibly hold weight is beside the point, because he's done it before.

MySpace, with whole album streaming

(In the context of all that, you have to give him a pass on the record's one entirely forgettable song: "MVP", where he sappily addresses a (new?) beloved and confesses that the song was "the hardest to write". Fair enough.)

So I like Thorns, but even with a softer side showing, Beans hasn't calmed down at all; his forceful delivery can wear out a listener fast, making all his metaphors about the physical harm that his mic skills do to his rivals unfortunately vivid. And yet I started writing this post meaning it to be positive. At the very least I'm impressed. Beans is a difficult listen and yet it never seems that way while his music is playing. Like I said, self-contained.

MySpace page

Anyway, the particular bouncy piano + drum schtick that drives most of this Paper Cranes record may be part of the problem. (I think it's just banging the same chord every beat while the drummer accents the 2 and 4, but I'm not sure. I JUST KNOW IT WHEN I HEAR IT.) There's still something slightly incongruous about anyone scruffy or hostile riding this style, and maybe that's the sort of thing the critics respond to.

On Halcyon Days the Paper Cranes pull two other genre exercises-- the Clash-dubby "Horse Track" and the New Order/Cure/whatever pastiche "Middle Class Guilt". I react almost involuntarily to the signifiers in that last one: the bass prominently carrying a melody, the ice-water synth strings, the racing cymbals during the chorus (that last one maybe from playing too much Rock Band); I'm actually kind of glad it doesn't add up to much, lest I like it just enough to feel conflicted about ultimately disliking it.

It all just makes me sad in a similar way to when, in the course of my elementary-school-age self reconstructing the timeline of the prior few decades of pop culture, I realized that Grease and Happy Days weren't actually from the 50s. Reuse of culture is great, but with the Paper Cranes (and so many other bands) I get the feeling they know the difference between collage and Mad Libs, and prefer Mad Libs.

I am now totally unsurprised he ended up working with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats.

And then, with a single mighty leap...

So for one thing, Wolf has obviously made his peace with the fact that a nasal-voiced absurdist rapper who tries to fuse his existing style with indie rock is going to end up sounding like John Linnell a couplet away from getting booed offstage at the Scribble Jam. That's life. It never bothered me.

There isn't a single track on Alopecia that doesn't reward close listening, but if you listen to it as a whole album (which you should), some of them carry more weight than others. "The Hollows" has a creepy and unexpected section right in the middle, punctuating a defiant but vague anthem (dedicated to "all my underdone, other-tongued, lung-long frontmen") with eerie fragments of a trip to Berlin. Meanwhile, Doseone crawls all over the verses, hissing lyrics from elsewhere on the album. The meaning is unclear but the effect stays the same every time I hear it: I get a chill down my spine when the guitar punches in to end the bridge. In fact, every time he sets aside his usual coded messages in favor of a real objective correlative, it gets to me. One recurring motif on the record is Wolf ducking into a bathroom in some public place because he needs to be alone-- to masturbate, in "Good Friday"; to write down a song, in "By Torpedo Or Crohn's"; to practice his "plane wreck face" in "Gnashville". So that's the most life-affirming record I've heard all year, one whose hero is constantly hiding out to try to process what's going on, or prepare for disaster.

So anyway, he's back, with what seems to be a concept EP about a man "born of double seed" with seven fingers on each hand. The whole thing is soaked with the feeling that the narrator was doomed to some terrible fate by the circumstances of his conception, though the identity of that fate is obscure. It wouldn't work with clearer edges drawn around the details, though: the narrator's doubly-human-ness blurs into being half human, and the way to make up for his incompleteness might be to find a woman, or it might be to buy a robot, or to accept death at the hands of muderous enemies. Even with an ostensibly unifying conceit, Francis works mostly by juxtaposition of unrelated ideas, like in the Buñuel he wrote a song about all those years ago.

Musically, he sets the bar pretty high on opener "The Seus", cramming a Jon Spencer Blues Explosion-ish song-sketch with lots of doubled vocal tracks and shouted exclamations, and though that one does rattle itself to pieces by the end, I would have liked a whole EP of that just fine. He settles down, though, still experimenting with how much old Pixies fire he can bring into his well-established solo sound, hitting the mark way more often than I've come to expect in the past decade. This may even send me back to Bluefinger-- the one other record he's released under his old stage name, rather than "Frank Black"-- which I remember being so-so.

[You can hear three songs from the EP at blackfrancis.net; click on the guitar. Also, while writing this post I learned about the Irish hero Cuchulainn, who some or all of these songs might be about.]

Except that Sway has talent to spare, and I think he comes off better here than in the high-pressure world of "official" releases. The best track is "Black Stars", a loving, curiously relaxed (given its high velocity) rap about Ghana. The Lily Allen mashup's nice too, and then we get excerpts from guest appearances, freestyles, and a radio show on which Sway encountered rapper and MTV reporter Sway Calloway, who also goes by "Sway".

Sway's good humor and ability to shrug off disagreements mostly offset his (standard-issue) arrogance and declarations of superiority. He can get a little self-pitying, though, as when he expresses surprise that anyone could be offended by his song "Fuck New York" or disses the other Sway. And the less said about his alter-ego Charlie Boy the better. But it's free and sporadically brilliant.

* You can get it from swaymixtapes.com if you give a name and address-- I strongly endorse mailinator.com for things like this-- or hit Google for one of the many blogs that posted it on Rapidshare or whatever. Alternately, at least listen to "Black Stars" on his MySpace page.

Now it's not. Great! But there's the same repetition of key 'exciting' words and phrases, and the same accumulation of fetishized entities from pop culture: Joey Ramone and Debbie Harry, Wings (there's a whole song called "Jet" about the Wings tune of the same name), the 1910 Fruitgum Company. The air of unreality this creates abruptly becomes sad when Helen starts hitting the "we'll be in love forever and ever and get married and have kids because we're in love" themes too hard, especially in "First Boyfriend". Barbie as celebrity stalker; charming.

Anyway. After Soul Coughing, it came as a shock that what was good about
Doughty's songwriting was compatible with the timidity and MOR-itude
that he seemed to want. But I guess it is, and I now often underestimate
him-- the Spanish lyric of "Wednesday (No Se Apoye)" isn't flimsy
multiculturalism, as I first thought; it's an MTA sign telling New
Yorkers not to lean on the subway car door. But the seconds the stakes
inch upward, as when a (sampled?) female voice does an embarrassing
imitation of Doughty's 90s-era vocal cadences in "More Bacon Than The
Pan Can Handle", I say to myself, there has to be a better way than
this.

Two incidents so close together-- sounds like a trend! But somehow it drives home how UNrevolutionary the whole thing is when considered as a means of distribution. Selling early access to *specific* albums, when someone thinks it'll work out in the long run, is a glorified fan club system; the fact that it involves listeners potentially getting "something for nothing" notwithstanding, none of the money-making parties have to discard any outdated paradigms in order to sign on. It's just one more promotional option.

That's not to say there's no good in it. Fan clubs could use a little glory. Fans are also the only people who'll care about the element of surprise that digital publication apparently allows. A week is just long enough for anyone else to get fidgety or forget what they signed up for.