new album opinions

Anyone care to weigh in on the new Gorillaz, Spoon or Built to Spill albums?

If by new BTS album you mean There is No Enemy, it's pretty good. Sounds like they always sound. It doesn't expand their vision any, but if you normally like what they do, you'll like this one too.

I'd say the same about the Spoon album.

I concur with the above assessments re. Spoon's Transference.

I would add that it's not as accessible as Gimme Fiction or Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, however. I'm not sure, but I suspect this was intentional. Oh, and the song "Mystery Zone" really reminds me of "Train in Vain"...no one else I've discussed it with feels the two songs are similar.

To me Spoon peaked on Ga X 5 - prior to that I always found them consistently very good but not great. But that record I thought they nailed it and it's among my fave albums of the last 5-10 years.

That was where they were able to mix their artier leanings with their pop sense - and it added up to some emotional heft also. Those songs were affecting not just affected. I never really cared for their artier / experimental side as much - I don't think it's what they do as well and they're self-conscious when they go down that path..........they do pop with memorable hooks well though.

The new record to me is a notch below their albums from Girls Can Tell through Gimme Fiction. But it's still a good record, even if the songs don't stick in your head with the same immediacy as on Ga X 5.

"Who Makes Your Money" is very "Hurdy-Gurdy Man"-ish.........

Before their recent show in Atlanta, I was discussing Spoon's catalog with a friend of a friend who is a much bigger fan than I...he off-handedly commented that the Pixies influence had been a little too obvious up until Girls Can Tell...

I'd never even thought of that, but it makes sense.

You should hear their first 7-inch EP. The band was an out-and-out Pixies clone.

Just my opinion: Gorillaz is not as inspired as past work; Spoon I've never cottoned to; Built to Spill gets a big thumbs up.

I'm not sure what my opinion around here is worth anymore, considering I am writing a book about Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne and have moved away from music stuff--but there it is.

Do you mean you've moved away from music writing, music listening, or both?

I know for myself personally I read less than I did when I was younger - I used to be a voracious reader but not so much any more. I remain sort of music obsessed but less with new stuff.

What's that Hawthorne story about the guy who goes looking for the sin that even God won't forgive? I haven't read Hawthorne in ages but somewhere around my cluttered place is a collection of his stories that should be revisited.

Mats,

I've just moved away from music writing...I don't think I'd ever be able to be anything but an ardent music listener.

You may be thinking of "Young Goodman Brown."

After a quick perusal of my Hawthorne collection the story in question is "Ethan Brand", but "Young Goodman Brown" does cover similar ground.

Good stuff.

Of course! Ethan Brand--another happy little story. Something he says kind of reminds me of our TP message board:

"The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims!"

The "coconuts" floating out to the ship in Typee...I remember reading that the first time and thinking, "What the hell is wrong with this guy?" (It was the first Melville I'd read.)

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I'm not sure what my opinion around here is worth anymore, considering I am writing a book about Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne and have moved away from music stuff--but there it is.

Erik... That gives you more, not less, credibility in my book! I always appreciated your opinion on any album. Keep offering it up, please.

p.s. What's the theme of your book?

I've been re-reading Melville recently and have been pondering something: obviously, he was deeply interested in philosophy and metaphysical stuff, but did he knowingly craft his stories with multiple layers of symbolism and allegory or what? Because I'm starting to think others (including Melville's friend and neighbor Hawthorne) applied a critical framework to his writing to demonstrate complexities and thematic underpinnings that weren't actually there.

Is this intellectual heresy on my part?

Melville was very interested in metaphysics and ontological concerns--and I do think there are some very conscious attempts to write a deeply psychological novel with Moby-Dick and Pierre. His correspondence at the time shows that he was thinking well beyond the literal--and certainly, as you say, he was inspired by what he perceived to be the figurative, murky depths in Hawthorne. I mean, one reading of the "A Squeeze of the Hand" chapter shows that he's operating on a couple of levels (in this case a humorous and sexual level).

Thanks for the insight, Erik.

In trying to get a handle on this question, I read some contemporaneous criticism–as well as stuff from right after Melville died–and I got the impression that there was a lot of confusion about what exactly he was up to...obviously, Melville was a much more prodigious writer than Salinger, but I sense a similar resentment or dissatisfaction among his readers during the latter part of his life, as if they felt he owed the world more ripping, semi-autobiographical yarns instead of the deep stuff he produced instead. And while he wasn't a recluse, he didn't really go out of his way to set any records straight publicly, did he?

Your book should be pretty interesting...

"but I sense a similar resentment or dissatisfaction among his readers during the latter part of his life."

The sad part is he had no readers and no one who would publish his work late in life. (Commercially, he peaked in his late 20s.) Melville pretty much died an anonymous author--he spent most of the latter part of his life as a customs house inspector in Manhattan and actually wrote a lot of poetry (most of it for the drawer not publication). Moby-Dick utterly failed, as did Pierre and the Confidence-Man (and Isle of the Cross, a missing manuscript, couldn't even find a publisher). He often mentioned in his letters how he was destined to write the kind of stuff that had little commercial weight--but that "deep stuff," as you rightly term it, pretty much transformed American Literature when it was rediscovered in the 1920s. (He died in 1891.) Billy Budd was written late in life and published posthumously. Melville, like the best of all American artists in different media, was a relentless searcher.

Somehow, I managed to get through life without ever having anyone put a gun to my head and make me read "Moby Dick." I recently picked up a used paperback edition and gave the story a spin.

For years, I'd been under the impression that Melville's most famous book was tedious as hell. Perhaps the sheer bulk of the book is what drives this reputation? I don't know ... but I found it to be riotously entertaining. Wickedly funny. Quite a good read.

...

It also provided the thematic material for one of the better Tom & Jerry cartoons done during that herky-jerky 1960s phase with all the jagged elements and weird sound effects. I love that phase.

Aw, thanks nosepail--that's much appreciated. My book is about the friendship between the two--using that as a wedge into a dialectic between their works (yawn). I happen to live 40 minutes from where they both lived for a time, so it's been interesting to romp around their properties and pore over primary source materials.

I thnk we should ask kjoiuytrjhg. Bet we could gain some choice insights there.

OK, let me just say, the calibre of discussion on this board is amazingly high! (at least from those contributors not named nosepail)

Last Great American Whale - Lou Reed

Whatever happened to Laurie Anderson's production of Moby Dick? Is she still working on that thing? I don't think she's released anything else since that was announced, so I fear that the project may have overstepped the allegorical for her and has in fact become her white whale.

Of course, being a performance artist that might be her entire point anyway. And if nothing else, it would be a dandy way of dodging ever producing work again.

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Whatever happened to Laurie Anderson's production of Moby Dick?

I seem to recall that it was performed live here in LA, at UCLA's Royce Hall, a few years back. Unless it was still a "work in progress" at that point.

Or maybe it was purely a theater piece and no music was intended to be released.

"I found it to be riotously entertaining. Wickedly funny. Quite a good read."

Yes, yes, yes!! That is part of the essence of the real Melville. He's like an onion (like Shrek)--lots of layers. I still crack up at certain lines in Moby-Dick...granted, I'm immersed in it, but if the good folks on TP validate me...all the sweeter. I'm proud to be among people who can swing from Replacements to Kraftwerk to Ishmael. My kind of people.

Queequeg would fit in quite nicely on the Denver Nuggets I think