Pumping on Your Stereo, 10-6-23

Wilco teams with Cate Le Bon, Grateful Dead's Wake of the Flood, Roger Waters recites poetry on Dark Side of the Moon. It's also time to Go Back to Crabby Appleton but maybe not Carly Simon.

Wilco—Cousin (2023)

A sharp turn left after last year's return to roots record Cruel Country, Cousin teams Wilco with producer Cate Le Bon who urges the group to run away from their comfort zone. Nobody is sitting around in a room strumming guitars: Le Bon constructed the album overdub by overdub, the character of the song shifting as much as the sound itself. It's interesting as process, interesting as results even if it's not quite a revelation. Nearly thirty years deep into their career—it feels as if they have much more than thirteen albums to their name—Wilco have etched out the wide parameters of their style, a canvas that allows them to roman and return home at ease. Cousin doesn't startle but it's hardly settled. It's probing and quietly adventurous, a record that's of a piece due to Le Bon's administrations but also because that's how this group operates: they work steadily, doggedly, opening up a project and following it through, leaving it behind to embark on the next journey. That work ethic is the most old-fashioned (and midwestern) thing about them and it helps them craft a record like Cousin, whose nuanced explorations feel curiously comforting. Wilco may have never arrived at this particular destination before but at this point, they know how to pack for the unknown. 

Grateful Dead—Wake of the Flood [50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition] (1973, 2023)

Grateful Dead—Wake of the Flood: The Angel's Share (1973, 2023)

Wake of the Flood is where it all starts to go slightly pear-shaped for the Grateful Dead. The first release on the ill-fated indie Grateful Dead Records, Wake of the Flood also found the group learning how to soldier on without the recently deceased keyboardist Pigpen and the absence of Mickey Hart, who departed under a cloud of management issues. Bringing Keith and Donna Godchaux aboard, the Dead do sound different here—simultaneously looser and straighter, not quite a conventional rock band but too buttoned-up to truly take flight. The awkwardness is ingratiating, especially when it's tied to some of the group's most enduring songs: "Stella Blue," "Eyes of the World" and "Weather Report Suite" all debuted here, sounding like blueprints for what came later. On the double-disc set, the previously unreleased material amounts to two unheard demos—the earnestness of Jerry Garcia's singing on "Eyes of the World" is endearing—and some good material from the January 11, 1973 show at McGaw Memorial Hall at Northwestern University. There, "Weather Report Suite" gets an exploratory reading, and "Playing in the Band" is interrupted by nearly 12 minutes of "Uncle John's Band" which swaps jazz for folk. It's good stuff but I find myself drawn to the misshapenness of the album itself. Throughout the record, the Dead sound like they're either holding themselves back or attempting to place their best foot forward, a politeness that can be ingratiating or enervating, depending on the listener's mood. The extent to which they attempted to clean themselves up is made clear by the simultaneously-released Wake of the Flood: The Angel's Share, two and a half hours of outtakes and false starts that finds the band stumbling and occasionally soaring, a combination that's not only quintessentially Dead but shows that they did choose the tightest completed versions for the proper album. 

Roger Waters—The Dark Side of the Moon Redux (2023)

The first words Roger Waters intones on his word-heavy reinterpretation of Dark Side of the Moon are not heard anywhere on the original 1973 LP from Pink Floyd. They're lifted wholesale from "Free Four," one of the poppiest tunes in Floyd's oeuvre and one of the straightest from the period separating the departure of founding member Syd Barrett and the onset of Dark Side. It's not a question of plagiarism—although it's hard not to think that if David Gilmour attempted a similar stunt, Waters would've sued him into oblivion—but it does illustrate that this iteration of Waters' album-length breakthrough doesn't rely on new ideas as much as restating old concepts in a basso profound voice. Any moment of air from the original Dark Side is now cluttered with words, words, words, whether they're recycled songs or private letters made public. All of this hammers home Waters' trademarked meditations on mortality while also emphasizing how Dark Side is the work not of a great man of history but a band and their key collaborators discovering the outer limits of what they could accomplish. 

Crabby Appleton—Go Back: The Crabby Appleton Anthology (1970-1971, 2023)

Crabby Appleton epitomized a certain strand of 1970s rock: tuneful pros—Michael Fennelly, the lead singer/guitarist, was a veteran of Curt Boetccher's The Millennium—intent on finding the most expedient route to the top of the charts. They produced one knockout in "Go Back," a whirling dervish of tension that foreshadowed the sensibility of power-pop but it's tougher, harder, a rock tune in search of an arena. That venue never materialized for Crabby Appleton. Despite endorsements from Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh, they never assembled critical cache and fell prey to all the standard rock & roll cliches: they ran into label troubles, they couldn't get onto the radio, they had some members that succumbed to excess. After releasing a second album, they disappeared. GrapeFruit's Go Back: The Crabby Appleton Anthology pairs both of their albums, along with some previously lost interstitials, single mixes and other oddities, all proving that while they didn't have another song as gripping as "Go Back," they were a versatile, accomplished band capable of replicating every sound on FM radio in the early 1970s. 

Carly Simon—These are the Good Old Days: The Carly Simon & Jac Holzman Story (1971-1972, 2023)

Toward the end of These Are The Good Old Days: The Carly Simon & Jac Holzman Story—a double-CD/triple-LP retrospective of her first three albums for Elektra—Carly Simon eases into John Prine's "Angel from Montgomery," a song she recorded a year after Prine released it on his 1971 debut. Simon's version didn't make it to No Secrets and it's easy to see why. After striking an appealingly mellow mood, Simon's version veers into studio-funk as she attempts an atypical growl, leaning into the song's final verse as if she needed to emphasize Prine's denouement with italic bold type, then deciding she better highlight and underline it for good measure. It's a tin-eared decision that's not atypical for Simon's discography. For a soft-rocker, Simon never was one for subtlety but her exaggerated instincts were largely camouflaged through the expert studio craft of producers Eddie Kramer, Paul Samwell-Smith and Richard Perry, who worked on Carly Simon, Anticipation and No Secrets, respectively. Some of their work is obscured on These are the Good Old Days thanks to a non-chronological order that bookends the comp with "Anticipation" and "You're So Vain," a sequencing that winds up drifts into ballads that seem almost ambient in their reliance on studio textures in this context, particularly given the extended length of this collection. Those twenty tracks don't seem like an exhaustive chronicle as much as an overly detailed portrait, one that would've seemed sharper and resonant if it was cut by half…but if that was the case, it'd just wind up as a standard Greatest Hits album. 

Teenage Fanclub—Nothing Lasts Forever (2023)

Teenage Fanclub have delivered reliable guitar-pop for the better part of thirty years and Nothing Lasts Forever keeps their streak of solid records alive. My review for Pitchfork: 

Ed Sheeran—Autumn Variations (2023)

Swiftly following on the heels of -, Autumn Variations explores much of the same ground as its predecessor but it gels a bit better thanks to it being the work of an extended collaboration of Aaron Dessner of the National. The vibe is there, the melodies largely aren't. More at Allmusic.

Motley Crue—Shout at the Devil [40th Anniversary] (1983)

Upon its 40th anniversary, I revisited Motley Crue's breakthrough Shout at the Devil for Tidal. 

Nirvana—Essentials

At the AV Club, I whittled Nirvana's catalog down to 30 essential songs. "Aneurysm" didn't make it to number one but it remains my current favorite.