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Arctic Monkeys Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not (Domino)
Not since Oasis first lumbered onstage in the Nineties has England's already hyperbolic press worked itself into the kind of critical lather that has greeted Arctic Monkeys. One U.K. publication called them "Our Generation's Most Important Band" and declared the Monkeys' debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, the fifth-greatest Brit album ever -- the same week it was released. The British press is only slightly more enthusiastic than the British public, which recently made the disc England's fastest-selling debut album of all time.
The good news: In the case of this unpretentiously artful punk band, the reality nearly meets the hype. This unassuming foursome of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds specializes in propulsion, momentum and repetition -- in succinct riffs and snarly, wordy lyrics, courtesy of frontman Alex Turner. Anxious guitars interlock with racing drums to create a raw and vigorous roar, with no frills beyond maybe a spot of maracas.
Hailing from industrial Sheffield's suburban wasteland, the Monkeys first picked up their instruments three years ago, and at early gigs gave away demos that soon swept the Internet. Before the band even signed to a record label, its fans sang along to every song at concerts.
Turner's hyper-realistic observations help explain why his group inspires this much loyalty. He bluntly documents the lives of young Northern England clubbers in an intensely regional Yorkshire whine, an unlikely star describing a decidedly unglamorous sliver of nightlife. Whatever People Say I Am is practically an old-fashioned concept album about working-class clubbing, a Saturday Night Fever for the British sons and daughters of parents raised on disco and punk. Yet Turner's aim isn't to be the best dancer, or to escape to the big city: It's merely stayin' alive, and pulling a few birds. The opening track, "The View From the Afternoon," sets the stage with dead-end dive-bar lyricism: "I want to see all of the things that we've already seen," Turner sings. Subsequent songs name those things -- bored cops pummeling underage drinkers; vindictive doormen; and fistfights before, during and after dancing. The album's first U.K. smash single, "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor," nails a current night out's diminished returns: "There isn't no love, no Montagues or Capulets/Just . . . dirty dance floors and dreams of naughtiness."
"Riot Van" introduces the album's second act by dramatically dropping tempo and drums, and although it boasts the disc's sweetest and fleshiest melody, the violence and vitality don't falter. "Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured" chronicles a calamitous post-clubbing cab ride through Sheffield streets with Strokes-ian swagger. On the second U.K. hit single, "When the Sun Goes Down," Turner paints a nasty but vivid picture of provincial hookers and pimps ("He told Roxanne to put on her red light/It's all infected, but he'll be all right"), spitting out details of place and character that would make any MC proud. The final and longest cut, "A Certain Romance," sums up everything that's come before with galloping tom-toms; climaxing, then gently subsiding guitars; and a nuanced mix of sympathy for the local bad boys and sorrow for what they've wrought: "The point's that there isn't no romance around there."
Will America warm to Arctic Monkeys? The band lacks a single as undeniably hooky as, say, Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out," but Whatever delivers more than that: a start-to-finish rush of invigorating riffs and pointed narratives that heightens with repeated exposure. They've made an album that U.S. punk fans of several generations could enjoy, if not claim as their own. It seems unlikely that this world of chavs in track suits with pool cues in fists will translate to the average Fall Out Boy fan. But for now, Arctic Monkeys are turning their cold small-town roots into callow Anglo cool. (BARRY WALTERS)
Ray Davies Other People's Lives (V2 Records)
"Things are gonna Change (the Morning After)" -- the opening track on Ray Davies' first album of new original songs since the quiet death of the Kinks in 1996 -- starts with peals of sea-gull-cry feedback and the surprised grunt of a guy who sounds like he's been shaken awake for a new day of hard luck and trouble. "My turn to get punched in the face," Davies sings, and he's just getting started. "You feel shite/ The air bites/Oh, will I ever learn/Your ear's deaf/Your girl's left/Never to return." No one should have to face all that before the first cup of coffee.
But when the rock kicks in, it is with reassuring familiarity: a chunky metallic heft hearkening back to the Kinks' arena-era winners Misfits (1978) and Low Budget (1979). And there is, Davies swears in the song, light at the end of the bruises: "You've paid your debt/Get up, you wreck/And crawl out through the door/Love will return." It's hardly a warm bedside manner, but nearly everything Davies wrote and recorded in the Kinks' three decades came with a sting in the tale, slugging guitars or both. In that way, Other People's Lives is a typical, welcome Kinks album -- with no other Kinks.
It is hard not to miss them, especially the slightly loose, animal-instinct crack of drummer Mick Avory and the combative crunch-and-shove guitar of Ray's brother Dave. The straightforward arrangements and well-groomed playing of the studio hands on Other People's Lives(recorded and mixed over four years) all but scream "solo album" compared to the pub-combo charge and fighting tension in even the Kinks' most sophisticated Sixties art pop. But there are jolts of expertly conjured deja vu: the "Waterloo Sunset"-style background ooo's in "After the Fall"; the blowsy Preservation-flavor horns on the recent single and hidden bonus track, "Thanksgiving Day." And Davies, who turns sixty-two in June, sings with the bright, slightly sour force and thespian's flair of his greatest hits. He doesn't sound a day over "Lola."
This is, however, a darker Davies than you remember. "I just had a really bad fall/And this time it was harder to get up than before," he sings in "After the Fall," a song actually cut in late 2002 but now impressively prophetic, given Davies' subsequent encounter with a mugger's gun in New Orleans in 2004. In "All She Wrote," what seems like your basic Dear John letter with punchy guitars -- "So don't pretend to be a new man/Be chauvinistic, that's your way/Now you're free to make your play/For that big Australian barmaid" -- turns out, at the very end, to be a suicide note. And the disgust in "The Tourist" ("Checking out the slums/With my plastic Visa") runs both ways; the locals, bitter and greedy, are as jive as the day-trippers.
The pessimism is no surprise. Davies' bluntness is. The most endearing quality of his incisive Sixties studies of Britain's class system and stiff upper lip -- the fallen noble of "Sunny Afternoon"; the prancing fops in "Dandy" and "Dedicated Follower of Fashion"; the prisoners of suburbia in "A Well Respected Man" and "Shangri-La" -- was Davies' ambiguity, his curiosity for foible and sympathy for dreamers. In contrast, the title track here is just cannon fire, a cantina-noir broadside against tabloid journalism: "Can't believe what I just read/Excuse me, I just vomited." Well, scandal sheets are as old as printing itself, and there is profit in hurtful gossip only when someone buys and believes it.
More often, Davies is at his best on this album: as a melody man in the bruised romance "Over My Head"; a portrait artist in "Thanksgiving Day," a sharp, bemused look at American myths of bounty and family; and a power-chord Noel Coward in "Stand Up Comic." When he played the latter song live in New York last fall, Davies acted the part in full -- a cockney nightclub joker stuck doing low-rent gags for low-brow joes -- the way he used to do the lovable boozer in the Kinks' "Alcohol." But "Stand Up Comic" is less about cheap laughs than how far we are willing to sink for the sake of sensation. "Style/Never was much/ Never has been/But the little bit that was/Was all that we had," Davies laments before bidding his audience good riddance. "You've all been watching too much television," he snipes on his way to a nice stiff drink. "Well, I'll be in the public bar, minding my own business."
It is a cocky, winning performance by a singer-songwriter who, on this album, for the first time in his rock & roll life, is truly on his own. But Davies is, as he once wrote and sang, "one of the survivors." We are lucky to still have him. (DAVID FRICKE)
Elbow Leaders of the Free World (V2 Records)
Nearly unanimously acclaimed in England as the album that should finally endear Elbow to a mass audience, Leaders of the Free World boasts bigger guitar crescendos, fewer keyboard eccentricities and simpler sentiments than usual from this moody Manchester quintet. What it lacks are top-quality tunes: Although ballads like "Great Expectations" suggest frontman Guy Garvey might shine brighter as a solo singer-songwriter, there's nothing on Elbow's third album as undeniably gorgeous as Asleep in the Back's "Newborn" or Cast of Thousands' "Fugitive Motel." Pumped up with arena-seeking guitars but stripped of the art-rock complications that originally connected Elbow to early Peter Gabriel and late Talk Talk, Garvey's wonderfully wounded tenor here mostly resembles the overly familiar coo of Coldplay's Chris Martin. And let's face it: England needs one more Coldplay like North America requires another Nickelback. (BARRY WALTERS)
Jesse Harris Mineral (Secret Sun)
Jesse Harris writes pensive and catchy pop songs the way some people dash off grocery lists. But on the three albums he has released since his tune "Don't Know Why" became Norah Jones' introductory smash, he's struggled to deliver them convincingly. He's squandered sturdy material on overwrought singing, or by awkwardly pumping slight songs into rock anthems.
No such trouble is evident on Mineral, a collection of musings on relationships that is easily Harris' best work. Here the guitarist-songwriter seeks stark simplicity: Helped by drummer Kenny Wollesen and organist Larry Goldings, Harris cultivates a daydreamy atmosphere that lingers from one song to the next. There's little electric guitar, and the transparency of the sound totally changes the way Harris sings -- it softens his sometimes strident vocal tone and encourages him to phrase in shrugs rather than declarative shouts. A few minutes with sullen future standards such as "Slow Down" and "Somewhere Down the Road," and it becomes clear that this spaciousness is the X factor Harris' songs have been missing. (TOM MOON)
Merle Haggard Box Set: Strangers/Swinging Doors and The Bottle Let Me Down (1965; 1966), I'm a Lonesome Fugitive/Branded Man (1967), Sing Me Back Home/The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde (1968), Mama Tried/Pride in What I Am (1968; 1969), Hag/Someday We'll Look Back (1971) (Capitol Nashville/EMI)
Merle Haggard wasn't the first outsider to rebuke Nashville prissiness in the Sixties -- Johnny Cash, who arrived from Sun Records in Memphis, deserves that honor -- but Hag was the most down-to-earth soul that the Music City had seen for some time when he loped onto the scene in the mid to late Sixties. An ex-con from California with Oklahoma roots, he sang eloquently about booze and prison life. His beginnings were in honky-tonk Bakersfield, where he learned first-class musical directness from guys like the great Buck Owens and Wynn Stewart.
For years, Haggard's Sixties and early-Seventies work has been represented chiefly on compilations. This bunch of reissues restores ten of those albums, all with interesting bonus tracks; four of the ten albums have never appeared before on CD. Each showcases Haggard's awesome gifts and inextricable orneriness: There is no Tennessee gothic or flashy Texas ego to this outsider; Haggard was more about subtlety and West Coast calm. A hummable, elastic honky-tonk tune can convey everything he wants to say. His melodies carry a broad range of topics, from cranky love songs ("I'm Gonna Break Every Heart I Can") to prison tunes ("Sing Me Back Home") to perfectly wrought whiskey-and-wine songs, to looks back at his parents' lives. Sometimes, as on the scarily good "I Can't Be Myself," Haggard seems to want to jump out of his own skin; other times, as on "I Threw Away the Rose," he's as centered in his own smooth, crusty tenor as any singer ever has been. In all cases, Haggard sounds like country's coolest customer.
These reissues underscore how Haggard's music far exceeds "Okie From Muskogee," the anti-hippie 1969 smash that made him internationally famous. Cash rocked country up and then went on to become his world's black-clad cultural ambassador. George Jones showed how the field needs at least one opera star, and Willie Nelson yoked local songwriting to American poetry. Haggard proved how crucial it was for a country guy to say what was on his mind -- and because he was such a sublime recording artist, he was able to make it stick, right from the start. (JAMES HUNTER)
Billy Bragg Box Set: Life's a Riot With Spy Vs Spy (1983), Brewing Up With Billy Bragg (1984), Talking With the Taxman About Poetry (1986), The International EP/Live and Dubious (1990) (Yep Roc)
Four early discs from Eighties post-punk's pre-eminent lefty as far as his reputation is concerned, Billy Bragg might as well have carved this machine entertains leftists into his guitar. A British socialist folk singer wiv a 'eavy working-class accent, he plugged in and cranked up to impress kids who loved the Clash as much as he did. But his early records were as concerned with heartache as with striking miners, and these bonus-disc-augmented reissues reveal that his love songs have aged much better.
Life's a Riot With Spy Vs Spy slashed through the overwrought pop goop of 1983, not least because it's sixteen minutes long -- just Bragg, a distorted guitar and seven wise, bitter assessments of twentysomething existence, most indelibly "A New England." (The expanded version includes the live favorite "A13," a tongue-in-cheek Southeast English rewrite of "Route 66.") Its follow-up, 1984's Brewing Up, is more of the same: spare and unsparing, with Bragg equally frustrated by media bias and a faithless lover. The bonus disc features the melancholic Between the Wars EP, as well as the Smiths' Johnny Marr helping out with a casual version of his own band's "Back to the Old House."
Marr also turns up on Talking With the Taxman About Poetry, from 1986, Bragg's most likable record: The arrangements sand off his splintery edges, and songs like "Greetings to the New Brunette" integrate his romantic and political interests into an "ideological cuddle." The Internationale EP (1990) is a misstep, though: a soggy collection of tedious socialist anthems. Fortunately, it's complemented here by a gaggle of crisper live recordings, and a DVD with earnest but rambunctious concert footage from Nicaragua, East Germany and the USSR. All four reissues also appear in a box set, Billy Bragg: Volume 1, with another vaguely redundant live DVD. (DOUGLAS WOLK)