Nightswimming

            On “Nightswimming”, Michael Stipe croons about “Septembers coming soon…”.

A lyric from arguably the most melancholy track off of R.E.M.’s Automatic For the People, which is also debatably one of the most melancholy albums of the past quarter century.

Sure, this song is about a lot of things – even a surface analysis reveals some pretty hefty themes: the loss of innocence, childhood succumbing to adulthood, and fantasy colliding with reality. And maybe some people getting nekkid.

But what is this tune really, on the surface?

A lament.

That horrible feeling that soon the humid August hothouse weather will be replaced by unbearable cold. That horrible feeling combined with the vague, childlike excitement that accompanies any change of season. A change is a ‘comin, weather (get it??) you like it or not.

There is a paralyzing beauty to R.E.M.’s 1992 studio effort – which was critically acclaimed at the time of its release, and for many years following, as more people discovered everything R.E.M. could be. Typically, I would agree with the statement that “early R.E.M. is the only R.E.M. for me,” because, dang, just take a listen to their 1983 debut – Murmur. Or 1987’s Document; or heck, even 1988’s Green. And Green was the band’s big label debut – and it still shines of the odd-ball, blurry indie rock that makes their early catalog sound more like The Soft Boys – only more lo-fi. Like The Meat Puppets if they weren’t so creepy.

But, I digress – I do not agree that R.E.M.’s early catalog is their only great work simply because of Automatic for the People. Like I mentioned before – paralyzing beauty. Streamlined production that spruces up vague lyrics about life, death, and everything in between.

Sure, “Everybody Hurts” is the one true stinker – skip that one every single time ya play it. Please.

There are so many great references to rock n roll imbedded in the album, too. The title track is a take on “Rock On”, by David Essex – just take a listen to the songs side by side – very similar, no? Those cool, dark vibes, what else is rock n roll? A temptation, something dark and twisty, something that can get you through. Something powerful.

Sure, give “Rock On” too much of a listen and the result is a looootttt of cringing. I don’t even know why. But the embarrassment follows a good listen. Probably the lyrics about “the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen” and something about her wiggling on a move screen.

And the “Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” – well, there’s the classic “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, a song recorded by Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds in 1939. But that isn’t the version that Stipe and Buckley are referencing. The Tokens had a #1 hit with the tune over two decades later, in 1961.

The nostalgia that is immediately infused into anything that references even these couple of musical oldies is something tangible and rare. Nostalgia that is partially self-delusion, as any nostalgia usually is – the feeling that things “were better back then”, with the irresistible urge to “go back” when that is impossible and even pointless to ponder. Something about the nostalgia emanating from the songs on Automatic feels legitimate. Like the pointless aspect of wanting desperately to go backwards is acknowledged, but the feeling remains.

“Sweetness Follows” is full of practically parental, or even grand-parental advice, about all the little things that can “pull you under”, and how easy it is to get “lost in your little lives”. Something worth lamenting, sure. The battle against the tide of time.

Maybe that is more what “Nightswimming” is about. Fighting that battle but losing, and being perfectly, painfully aware of that loss.

Marshall Crenshaw and the Bottlerockets at the Beachland Ballroom August 16, 2012

Cleveland’s Beachland Ballroom is a strange little venue; only recently converted from a Croatian dance hall, the place is somehow surreal when serving as a place to see rock n roll shows. By “recent”, I of course mean in terms of how long rock music has been around – something that is hard to tack down, but is something that Marshall Crenshaw seems to know a thing or two about.
Since the early 80s, Crenshaw has been churning out the kind of tunes that would be American Classics, had they been penned only a couple of decades previous and crooned by The Crickets instead of Crenshaw’s band of kind-of short men. (Crenshaw is not the world’s tallest man, and, supposedly, early on in his career, he refused to hire taller band members. This is not a fact. I read this on Wikipedia.I find it hard to believe, but, hey, it makes for an interesting anecdote, doesn’t it?)

Crenshaw is one of those musicians who seems like he should be at least as appreciated as Neil Young, or Elvis Costello. Apparently, this is not the case, if the strewn crowd at Marshall’s gig at the Beachland Ballroom Thursday night is any indicator. There were a handful of relatively excited folks – and more dads than you could shake a stick at – but it even took a couple of drinks to get anyone in the audience to sing along. Which is sad, because Marshall’s songs are incredibly catchy and downright fun to sing along to.
Crenshaw started out the evening with a slew of old favorites, a cerebral, punchy version of “Someday, Someway” from his 1982 self-titled debut; “Something’s Gonna Happen”, his very first release, and just about every other tune from any decent “best-of” collection.

“There She Goes Again”, “Cynical Girl”, “Mary Anne” – you name it, Marshall and the Bottlerockets (some of them, as Crenshaw joked,) played it. Honestly, what else would you hope for with a Crenshaw concert? You want to hear your favorite songs, but the problem being when you come to the realization that “your favorite songs” make up half of the man’s discography. Even the more obscure picks that Crenshaw made were perfect. “Television Lights” (which my introduction to Crenshaw when I was but a very pudgy girl obsessed with music. Now I am not so pudgy, but the fascination with tunes has yet to fall away.) was a particularly beautiful number, leaving some audience members (Read: me) overtly nostalgic and cooing.

The band plowed through a couple covers as well – Crenshaw joking about “what the crowd would least expect them to play now” before diving into Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression”, as well as “Valerie” by Richard Thompson, and some other song I can’t remember.

Every song was a hit with the crowd, as much as anything could be a hit with the rather stodgy group. The Ballroom had laid out seats for concert-goers, making the show the single most comfortable one that I have ever attended – perhaps this was something that the Ballroom planned in anticipation of the highly-dad oriented crowd Marshall apparently attracts.

But perhaps that “dad” contingent is just a feature of the Ballroom – last spring I saw Pere Ubu there, and my boyfriend and I were by far the youngest in the room. However, Pere Ubu is a band loved by many dads, even if they tend to fall on the weirder side of dads. I am hoping to make it to a Shonen Knife concert at the Ballroom on Tuesday. I do not know if there will still be such a high concentration of dads, but I sure hope there will be. More word on that later.

Crenshaw loved the crowd, and he was quite happy to entertain the bunch late in to the night – even if that meant not one, but two encores. Encores made up of beloved Cranshaw classics – “Starless Summer Sky”, songs that portions of the crowd must have been hankering for throughout the performance – as well as a couple more covers, like “Little Sister” by Elvis Presley – who died thirty-five years to the date of Thursday’s show.

All in all, Thursday’s show was incredible, the only downfall being the fact that Crenshaw’s lead guitar had hardly enough volume – and it looked like he was pulling off some incredible solos.

So what if people don’t know enough to show up to a dirt-cheap performance by one of the greatest song-writers of the past half century. It would have been pretty amazing to walk in on a performance of “Cynical Girl” if you had never heard it. Might be a life-altering experience. Or maybe not. It would just make you want to take a look into everything you had been missing.
watch?v=_sgQYHQSqjQ

10/10 Yo La Tengo: I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One

Artist: Yo La Tengo
Album: I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One
Label: Matador Records
Release Date: April 22, 1997
Key Tracks: “Damage”, “Stockholm Syndrome”, “Sugarcube”, “Autumn Sweater”, “One PM Again”, “Center of Gravity”

Robert Christgau referred to Yo La Tengo’s eighth major studio effort as the band’s “career album” in his review for SPIN magazine.
I think that he is on to something.

Yo La Tengo is arguably one of the greatest rock bands of all time – when considering all possible facets of judging this. Ira Kaplan’s ability to write catchy songs, eerie songs, musically competent, emotionally true songs is above and beyond any songwriter of the past thirty years.

And this album caught me off guard.

Not because it is a lengthy compilation of pieces that edge onto each other in the true Abby Road tradition; not because “Autumn Sweater” is doubtlessly one of the most beautiful songs ever penned about avoidance; and not even because it features a cover of The Beach Boy’s “Little Honda”.

Because after hearing it, I not only enjoyed the tracks, I not only felt the need to listen to “Sugarcube” on repeat, but I felt like I needed it. I desperately needed Ira’s whispery voice in my ear and the album’s lonely sound running through my headphones. I have never desired to “get home and listen” to an album with such a fiery determination that fueled my fast-paced walks back to my dorm the beginning of my sophomore year at college.

For a great length of time, I somehow thought that “One PM Again” was actually titled “One AM Again” – a sentiment that any youngster is pretty familiar with. The realization that the tune was actually referring to the time period following lunch and before dinner somehow made the track even more beautiful.

I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One is a sort of a soundtrack – and I get the impression that it has been a soundtrack to many people in many different circumstances than the one I related to – but there it was, my soundtrack, my anthem.

Whatever you want from me
Whatever you want I’ll do
Try to squeeze a drop of blood
From a sugarcube

Not getting what you want and realizing you never will.
If any song more perfectly describes what it feels like to be an angsty young woman incapable of expressing her wants and needs, I have yet to stumble upon it.

I used to think about you all the time
I would think about you all the time
Now it just feels weird, cause there you are

“Damage” could be a lesson on obsession. What is love without a healthy dose of obsession – probably not healthy but fun to write about. But seriously, guys. Isn’t love just a little bit crazy? The combination of so many intense feelings, and isn’t fascination and the “feeling of being a kid again” a portion of what it feels like to be completely enamored with someone? What you make a person out to be versus the reality of being around them.

The album is full of statements about love. “Stockholm Syndrome”, one of the tracks composing what Christgau designated as the “perfect nine tracks”, is about infatuation.
Sympathizing with your captor. Seeing past their flaws, and dreading the moment you find yourself alone. The feeling of indulgence that threatens every interaction. Don’t want to chase them away.

No don’t warn me
I know it’s wrong
But I swear it won’t take long
And I know, you know
It makes me sigh
I do believe in love

This album is perfect. There is enough melancholy to last a lifetime in that gorgeous hour, eight minutes, and ten seconds.
I can hear the heart beating as one: two hearts, far apart, beating in unison. Physical bodies hundreds of miles away. But throbbing hearts pumping together, making a collective, rhythmic pounding that changes time and space until they are bone on bone, skin on skin.

See Yo La Tengo go to rock school:
watch?v=zDgpQBaziy0

The Judybats: Down in the Shacks Where the Satellite Dishes Grow “Like the Smiths if Manchester was Tennessee in the Heyday of Alternative Rock”

The Judybats were a couple of Tennessee rockers who were first recorded doing a Roky Erickson cover.

And this album, the one I mention in the title — although I came by it due to the incredible ten cassette for one dollar deal at the bargain bin that is Marc’s – the premier cheap-o outlet catering to the Akron-Cleveland area – is proof that this band was more than simply a couple of alt-pop wannabes that managed to get signed for one album on Warner Bros.

In a lot of ways, this album was a bit of a mystery to me – or at least the people behind the music. Nothing more to me than the pictures included in the liner notes. No heart-throb frontman for me to form a crush on, no evident overarching theme. The Judybats weren’t “alternative” the way most of the bands dominating radio waves in the early 1990s. They didn’t sound punk enough to be punk, they’re lyrics were too stylized to be categorized as normal modern rock, and at times their sound bordered on being cringe-inducing, in a decidedly non-American sort of a way.

In fact, at times Jeff Heiskell’s words border on being overtly open, something that usually comes from songwriters from across the pond. Like, say, Damon Gough, or, well, Stephen Patrick Morrissey.

What is the title track of this album but a story of melodramatic regret; a story too woeful to be completely true but too emotionally honest to be a complete farce? Sounds like Moz’s early solo work – when he could play around with blatant characters without the McCartney-Lennon tension that such antic would have brought up if he had aired them within earshot of Johnny Marr.

The Judybats had quite a few numbers that were more than a little reminiscent of 1988’s “Late Night, Maudlin Street”. The fourth track on DINSWTSDG (if you will allow me the hideous acronym,) “Margot Known as Missy” even contains traces of the constant illumination of antiquity that Morrissey has always specialized in. After all, what else are his lyrics rank of if not references to old movies and classic literature?

Who names their kid “Margot” anymore but someone who loves black and white cinematography, anyway?

In a lot of ways, the title of this blog is flawed. Or at least partially flawed. Because the Judybats were not so much like The Smiths as they were like the best of Morrissey’s solo discography. Like Moz, the Judybats put out a handful of respectably decent albums with a few definite clunkers on each release. Unlike Moz, they did not have the resources to continually put out albums that were successively mediocre as time drug on.

They disbanded, sort of, in 1994 after Full-Empty, their fourth studio effort. In 2000 they kind-of sort-of reunited for ’00.

I don’t know much about the Judybats.

And I don’t plan on learning much more about them.

Because their mystique is half of their intrigue to me. A notion similar to the one that I hold about dear old Morrissey.

The less I know, the better.

The Melancholy of The Ramones

People say some pretty stupid things about The Ramones.
Because they are too hard to nail down.
They weren’t starving, impoverished Post-World War II punk rockers (albeit with fabulous publicists) like The Sex Pistols were; or angry, politically informed cerebral punks like Joe Strummer and Mick Jones.
And they just couldn’t mesh with the arty post-modern accuracy of bands like Television and the Talking Heads. Perhaps some of this can be attributed to the fact that The Ramones’ self titled debut actually came out in 1974, three years earlier than the first established wave of CBGB rockers. But I don’t really think that chronology plays that big a part in the overall feel of the band.
Because earlier punk acts – and there were plenty of them – like The Stooges, MC5, and The New York Dolls are still markedly unlike Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee. The Ramones lacked the raw blues feel that Iggy developed, staggering onstage in the late 1960s; they didn’t quite have the hard garage-rock edge that MC5 had, and they certainly didn’t take their wardrobe as seriously as David Johanssen or Sylvain Sylvain did around 1971.
So how do you categorize a band whose sound is based sheerly on a handful of barre chords and incredibly rhyme-tastic lyrics? Lyrics so rhyme-based that, once, when seized with the desire to scrawl something, anything originally penned by Dee Dee in a manifesto-sort-of-way in one of my middle school journals, I literally could not find one line that didn’t at least kind of make me cringe when it was torn away from the raw power of the band’s music.
I don’t feel that way anymore. I am not longer immature enough to be completely turned off by rhymes, and as I have grown older I have found the poetry in Ramones lyrics – words just as hard to categorize as the rest of The Ramones.
In order to understand the band, by default, you need to understand punk rock and what punk rock really means – that it is a lens more than a lifestyle, more than a code of dress or even a type of rock n roll music. That, in many ways, it has a lot more in common with the ideology that was the trademark of the counter culture of the 1960s than might be immediately obvious.
The Ramones were more than a band – they were a couple of kids from Queens who all adored rock n roll music. Enough to try and start a band, which is a pretty hefty amount of dedication in and of itself. And they wrote about things that few bands had wrote about before – and not because they were trying to impress anyone but the people kind enough to listen to them.
Songs laced with images from dopey monster movies and themes like boredom and frustration.
These were just as much statements about youth culture, about modern society and about punk rock as they were the band’s humble attempts at making a record that would actually bring in a good paycheck. And for that reason The Ramones are sincerely the most punk of all punk bands – because they never tried to be punk rock.
Joey notoriously idolized Pete Townshend and financially viable rock n roll – the reason that the foursome teamed up with Phil Spector for 1980’s End of the Century was thanks to Joey’s adoration of Spector’s early work.
There is something so very melancholy about the Ramones. Something about a band that desired commericial success in a way that later punk acts, like The Replacements, would never dream of. The Ramones did not want to be a punk band. They wanted to be The Who, The Beatles, they wanted to sell out stadiums and go on world tours with their music.
But the band only ever scored one gold record – 1988’s compilation album Ramones Mania.
The band disbanded in 1996 – after relentlessly touring for over two decades.
On April 15, 2001, Joey died after a long and complicated battle with lymphoma.
On June 5, 2002, Dee Dee overdosed at the age of 50.
On September 15, 2004, Johnny succumbed to prostate cancer.
All within eight years of the band’s disbandment, almost as though they needed the Ramones as much as their fans needed them.

10/10 Shonen Knife: Rock Animals

Artist: Shonen Knife

Album: Rock Animals

Label: Virgin Records US

Key Tracks: “Concrete Animals”, “Catnip Dream”, “Cobra Versus Mongoose”, “Brown Mushrooms”

Release Date: January 25, 1994

Rating: 10/10

I didn’t know a lot about Shonen Knife the first time I heard them – and this makes sense for a couple of reasons.

a)      I was about seven years old on vacation, and heard them on a cassette tape my father was playing in our family’s hotel room

b)      It was 1999, and the Osaka trio’s peak commercial success had been about half a decade before, around the release of Rock Animals

Reasons aside, the songs stuck with me. And not because they were “cute” or because they were “quirky” but because the songs felt decidedly true. “Froot Loop Dreams” felt honest and real, even to a seven year old who would rather pick the marshmallows out of Count Chocola than chow down on the cereal harked by the song’s main character – Toucan Sam. These girls knew what they wanted to sing, and if that meant choco bars (and the deep desire to subsist solely on them), summertime laziness, or even the protagonist of the 1948 children’s book My Father’s Dragon.

Rock Animals is a unique creature for many reasons, and not even just because the album artwork is admittedly more commercial than anything else that graced the covers of the band’s previous releases. Everything about this album is more commercial – and for a reason – it was released on Virgin Records in the United States only a couple of years after Shonen Knife toured the UK with Nirvana.

The Nirvana.

As in Kurt Cobain on the tour right before the release of Nevermind, the album that would change everything for everyone in 1991. The music video for “Tomato Head” even face the critique of Beavis and Butthead in America, as well as regular rotation on MTV in the early nineties.

The legendary Thurston Moore even supplies guitar riffs on the album’s third track, “Butterfly Boy”. Sure, the English feels like it is pretty phonetic, and maybe not even in quite the same endearing way it was on earlier recordings, like 721 or Pretty Litte Baka Guy.

Rock Animals is a turning point in many ways for the group. This was their big break in America, and their following albums frankly did not reach the same kinds of audiences that this particular album did.

Regardless of the kind of complaining one could do about the album, gems like “Concrete Animals” stand out as some of the finest tunes in Shonen Knife’s discography.

Generally speaking,

Every park has them

Commonly they are at the sandbox

Occasionally they are vandalized by someone

They are painted many colors

Elephant, Raccoon, Tiger

What kind of lyrics are more punk rock than that? Yamano might as well have been David Byrne.

There is something so poignant and lonely about some of the snippets of Yamano’s words. Something lost. Something unique. Something that isn’t taken too seriously but is very much there.

They are too big to carry back home

They are too heavy for me to move

After the sun sets they have a secret party

Nobody knows, they dance together

 

 

 

Talking Heads: “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”

Talking Heads: This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)

Stop Making Sense

“I don’t sing many love songs. The only one I do I sing to a lamp.”

— David Byrne

There’s a reason I picked the live, 1984 rendition of the final track of the Talking Heads’ fifth studio release Speaking in Tongues.

It’s better.

Better in the same way that girlfriends can be better, and in the same manner that it would be better if you would run far, far away.

David Byrne’s yelping is inarguably more visceral. Weymouth’s bass line, which penetrates the entirety of the piece, feels rawer, purer.

The quote above is lifted from a sort of pseudo-interview that is featured on the anniversary release edition of the Stop Making Sense DVD. And I don’t think anything truer could be said about the songs featured in the performance, or about Byrne’s discography in general.

For the most part, Byrne focuses on everyday things – civil servants, buildings, TV shows – stuff that simply does not require any understanding of the metaphysical. But “This Must Be the Place” is a different sort of beast.

You got light in your eyes

And you’re standing here beside me

I love the passing of time

 

The song is principally made up of several images – none of which particularly make sense in any logical sense. Images of home, images of things coming into being and consequently passing.

I’m just an animal, looking for a home

Share the same space for a minute or two

And you love me till my heart stops

Love me till I’m dead

 

This is  song about family, nostalgia, the shock of realizing you are alive, marriage, relationships, loneliness, and, most of all, about love.

10/10 Badly Drawn Boy: Have You Fed the Fish?

Artist: Badly Drawn Boy

Label: ArtistDirect

Key Tracks: “40 Days, 40 Fights”, “What Is It Now?”, “You Were Right”, “Coming Into Land”

Release Date: November 5, 2002

Rating: 10/10

Maybe I think this album is beautiful because it arrived in my life at just the right time. It’s shocking when I read the mediocre reviews it received when it was released a decade ago. Songs like “40 Days, 40 Fights” and “What Is It Now?” are classics to me, songs that described larger themes of life and loss, yet somehow provided the perfect sonic background for a second grader dealing with issues like classmates who poked fun at my mismatched wardrobe.

Have You Fed the Fish? is sort-of a concept album, or at least there are a couple reoccurring themes. Sure, the themes are a bit oblique, and occasionally, if you weren’t tuned into to the emotional playing field that Damon Gough is playing with, they might even seem a little overbearing. The themes: the things you need, the fear of what is “now”, lifelong love, and the necessity of detail.

Sure, the album starts out with an audio clip, one that sounds like it is being recorded on a  commercial air flight – and instead of seeming saccharin and overbearing, Gough manages to come off as perfectly charming. Sure, the clip mentions Badly Drawn Boy, and Gough does name drop. But you’ve got to understand – he probably recorded this after writing the slew of excellent songs on the album. And if he was a little full of himself after penning “Imaginary Lines” and “All Possibilities”, reality is the only thing to blame.

Sometimes I need your body next to mine
I could draw us an imaginary line, i’m
Just don’t breath, I don’t need your allergies
I am falling out of bed not out of love, love

Then Gough has to get all breath-taking when he sighs:

I know you’ll understand…

Cooing it in the self-assured way that only someone who knew so well that you never, never would.

There is something gorgeous about the Sergeant-Pepper-esque way that the album slide into itself. Short, sweet numbers, like the fourteenth track on the record “What Is It Now?” effortlessly fall out of the preceding number, in this case the melancholy “Tickets To What You Need”.

And the album’s make up isn’t the only thing that pays homage to the Late Great Beatles. “You Were Right”:

I remember doing nothing on the night Sinatra died
And the night Jeff Buckley died
And the night Kurt Cobain died
And the night John Lennon died
I remember I stayed up to watch the news with everyone
And that was a lot of nights
And that was a lot of lives
Who lost the tickets to what they need?

By the end of that track, Gough hits home the entirety of the album in one line when he mutters

And songs are never quite the answer
Just a soundtrack to a life
That is over all too soon
Helps to turn the days to night
While I was wrong and you were right

Making the following eight tracks an study in the potential beauty of a pointless endeavor.

Guided By Voices “Class Clown Spots a UFO” Review

Guided By Voices

Class Clown Spots a UFO

Label: Guided by Voices Inc.

Grade: B+

Key Tracks: “Class Clown Spots a UFO”, “Keep It in Motion”, “All of This Will Go”

Guided by Voices have churned out more lo-fi pop gems than any other band over the span of the past twenty years – even if you take that brief six year hiatus period between 2004 to 2010 when the band wasn’t making anything at all into account. Besides, during those couple of years front man and song-writing-probably-part-robot Robert Pollard managed to release a couple of incredible solo albums that sounded remarkably like the best GBV material. (2006’s dazzling Normal Happiness and 2008’s well-constructed Zoom (It Happens All Over the World) EP)

That being said, it’s important to acknowledge that the band has released its fair share of clunkers, as well. Thankfully, it is pretty hard to honestly isolate any given GBV record and declare it to be the stinking one of the lot, as the weakest of the band’s material typically co-exists alongside its shoddiest. For a lot of folks, Do the Collapse was the ultimate disparity in the band’s discography. But those folks seem to forget that that album starred a couple of fantastic tracks, including “Wrecking Now” and “Teenage FBI”.

When the original line-up of GBV dissipated sometime around 1997 and Robert Pollard enlisted the help of Cleveland’s Cobra Verde the albums that followed (especially Universal Truths and Cycles and Do the Collapse) were just as rocked out as Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, but in an entirely different, decidedly more rock-poppy way. Cleaned-up and occasionally longer than three minutes, this new material was just not as fleeting or as vital as “Gold Star for Robot Boy” and “Blimps Go 90”. But there’s something charming about oddball pop songs with surreal lyrics, like “Everywhere with Helicopter” and “Back to the Lake”, so this newer stuff can’t be totally discounted.

When GBV reunited in 2010 with the original line-up (Tobin Sprout, Kevin Fennel, Mitch Mitchell, and Greg Demos) they played exclusively the material that they recorded together, so that goofy stuff that Rick Ocasek produced in the late 1990s was out. However, with the release of the band’s newest material (Let’s Go Eat the Factory in January of this year) the sound that Pollard and co. are working with now is a sort of mash-up of pre- and post-Cobra Verde GBV.

Let’s Go Eat the Factory was a tad bit disappointing for anyone looking for a great album, but it sure was comforting for any GBV fan, eager for new material. Class Clown Spots a UFO is decidedly more accessible and more refined than Factory, and, frankly, a finer recording.

When GBV played the Nelsonville Music Festival last month, Pollard prefaced the band’s rendition of “Class Clown Spots a UFO” with the remark along the lines of “Isn’t it great when you get to hear the best one?”

And he has a point.

“Class Clown Spots a UFO” is the finest track on the new album, with that trademark, inexplicable melancholy that accompanies all the best GBV material. Heck, there are even horns. And drumming so fine from Kevin Fennel that the tune moves along seamlessly. You feel pretty bad for the class clown – no one is going to ever believe he saw a UFO!

Some tracks on the album abandon the typical GBV format, like “Keep it in Motion”, which trades Pollard’s custom wordiness for simplicity in the lyrics department that perfectly accompanies a steady drum beat – one to which you can practically see Pollard swinging his mic chord to.

Sure, there are some really terrible songs on this record that you will probably skip over even on repeated listens – like “Worm with 7 Broken Hearts” and “Jon the Croc” (although the latter does have an appealing title that is oh-so-reminiscent of GBV before Pollard had fluffy white locks.

Class Clown Spots a UFO is up there with the best, most highly regarded lo-fi rock, even if it doesn’t have the pops and skitters that made Alien Lanes and Vampire on Titus some of the most remarkable music to come out of the past three decades.

tUnE-yArDs at the Wexner Center for the Arts

What kind of people congregate to see wonky-pop/Afro-beat/sound looping expert Merril Garbus (aka tune-yards) perform on a Monday night in Columbus?

Everyday kinda people – that’s who!

Dancing hipster girls (the polite Urban Outfitters kind), people who could-be college professors (take a gander at their glasses, and hopefully their fanny packs too) and even a couple “record store guys” (smell the judgment radiating off those plaid-shirted-Ray-Ban wearing fellas!).

“You guys are out there taking notes!” Steve Marion, frontman for opening act Delicate Steve remarked between one of the band’s crystal-clear, hyper-clean, and ultimately unsatisfying tunes. Not that Marion and co. weren’t trying, and not that the band’s vaguely world music inspired sound wasn’t, at certain moments, at least admirable. Numerous numbers involved at least one of the band members thrashing or pulsating some beat or another that was kind-of memorable.

Things turned for the decidedly less boring when Garbus took the stage after Delicate Steve’s mercifully short set. Greeted by the characteristically quiet, attentive crowd, Garbus broke into a startlingly powerful series of comical yelps and howls. Although the oh-so-hip (maybe they were even “so hip they could not take it”, like Garbus sang about on the tune “Killa”) didn’t know how to react to the her antics at first, after she broke into a smile the audience seemed to chill out a bit.

“You Yes You” opened tune-yard’s excellent Monday night set, and if the reception to that brilliantly organized song was great, imagine how the delicious thrumping of “My Country” and the painfully gorgeous rhythms of “Bizness” went.

Something about Garbus’ cool demeanor – never taking herself too seriously, although with talent like that, she actually could afford to – kept the audience and the band pretty intimate, and with the tiny curtained and divided stage in the Wexner Center auditorium, it felt a little like a private concert for seventy-some people.

Numbers like “Powa” and “Gangsta” soared, Garbus’ masterful looping and the excellent goofiness of her accompanying, highly skilled bass and saxophone players lifting the already impressive tracks off and out of Garbus’ second album, W H O K I L L. Songs as complicated and in depth as those found on the New England native’s fine 2011 release could have easily fallen into jammy territory in less talented hands, but thankfully that never happened. Each familiar track evolved out of a beat set up by the foursome onstage until it was visceral recreation of the recording.

And typically older material or new material isn’t particularly enjoyable in a live setting. Not so with tune-yards, the two older songs (off of 2009’s bird brains) and a promising new number spiraled into greatness alongside the more publicized  W H O K I L L material.

After an amazing encore, although looking awfully tired, Garbus said goodnight to the assorted Wexner crowd before disappearing behind the stage.