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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
This is not to say that the only exciting hip-hop or pop this year was produced by Timbaland or the Neptunes (see 50 Cent's "In da Club," produced by the sometimes brilliant Dr. Dre) or, indeed, to suggest that the only noteworthy music being made this year was hip-hop.
Coldplay somehow overcame the criticism that they were just a weak version of mid-'90s Radiohead to become an absurdly popular and critically respected band. All this despite still sounding like a weak version of mid-'90s Radiohead. Chris Martin's melodic gifts are formidable, and he's an amazing singer. But the band as a whole tends toward a kind of cheap, bombastic sentimentality, U2 without the very real grandeur. And the lyrics? "God gave you style, God gave you grace/ God put a smile upon your face." Ouch.
As for Radiohead themselves? They put out "Hail to the Thief," in many ways the album everyone was hoping they would make. That is, a happy blend between the catchy prog-rock of "OK Computer" and the fractured experimentation of "Kid A." Perhaps living up to expectations is the worst thing a band like Radiohead can do, though, because I think this was the year that Radiohead lost their elusive status as "most important band in the world," a title they had owned for at least the last four years. While "Hail to the Thief" is no less brilliant than their last few efforts, it is permeated with an unpleasant coldness, a heartlessness that makes it a difficult album to love.
This was a banner year for the recently invented "Americana" genre, a largely bogus grouping of singer-songwriters with varying degrees of twang. Emmylou Harris released "Stumble Into Grace," another gorgeous album showcasing her peerless singing, and produced by Malcolm Burn with slightly less ham-handed tactlessness than usual. Lyle Lovett's "My Baby Don't Tolerate," while not quite as spectacular as his 1996 Grammy winner "The Road to Ensenada," and featuring a bit too much of the cutesy goofiness he can lapse into, served as a reminder that he is the kindest, most compassionate voice in pop. Lucinda Williams' "World Without Tears," perhaps her best record yet, has her voice in top form, spitting and drawling through songs with that inimitable combination of macho toughness and vulnerability. My vote for most heartbreaking moment of the year is when her cracked voice sings "Baby sweet baby if it's all the same/ take the glory any day over the fame" on "Fruits of My Labor."
Americana also lost its former poster boy this year, everyone's favorite brat and Parker Posey's current beau, Ryan Adams. After toiling on a record titled "Love Is Hell" for far too long, he finally turned it in to his label, Lost Highway, which rejected it. So, in two weeks, he wrote and recorded "Rock N Roll," a loud, sloppy, distortion-heavy record that gleefully rips off a host of '70s and '80s rock bands, from the Smiths to the Stooges.
What separates Adams' parroting from that of his more solemn peers in Brooklyn is the forthrightness with which he does it. At a recent concert in New York, he prefaced the song "So Alive," which sounds shockingly like U2 if the Edge's delay pedal had broken, by saying, "I'm donating the proceeds from this concert to charity. See, I'm being like Bono." The other thing that separates him is his savantlike talent and versatility as a songwriter. He is his generation's Paul McCartney, only with a little less innate cheesiness, capable of churning out reams of brilliant songs in practically any style. The shelved "Love Is Hell," now released as two EPs, showcases these skills like never before. It is Adams' most complex, least purely derivative work to date, and Lost Highway would have done well to release it as a full record and to give it the kind of marketing put behind "Rock N Roll."
"Love Is Hell" also makes clear the enormous influence that Jeff Buckley has had on Adams' work. Both Buckley and Nick Drake, two prodigiously talented musicians who died far too young (three decades apart), are exerting an ever increasing influence on music being made today. Drake can be heard nearly everywhere that quiet, intimate music is being made, but particularly in the work of young singer-songwriters like Josh Ritter and Damien Rice. Unfortunately, while both Ritter and Rice are talented, Ritter is a little too dull, and Rice a little too melodramatic, for their music to have nearly the impact of the phantom Drake.
Buckley's influence has been perhaps a more useful one, pushing singers into a new, operatic frontier, with a surplus of vocal plasticity. You can hear him not only in Ryan Adams but in Coldplay's Chris Martin and a host of other, lower-profile singers. The best of them are able to take the inspiration of Buckley without indulging in the compulsive gilding-the-lily excess that Buckley himself was unable to resist.
This was also a good year for the carefree joys of power pop, led by those bards of New Jersey, Fountains of Wayne. Their "Welcome Interstate Managers" garnered extravagant praise and even earned them a surprise Grammy nomination for Best New Artist (the surprise stemming partly from the fact that they've been releasing music for the last seven years). These guys have some serious songwriting skills and a pretty great sense of humor ("I saw you talking/ to Christopher Walken"), but in the end the record comes off as a kind of tour de force of flippancy, always opting for the clever turn of phrase.
