In which Matthew Houck’s band completes their transformation from spacey stoner folkies to kick-ass road band. On this song, and the rest of Here’s to Taking it Easy, the open-ended looseness of their earlier records is invigorated with focus and discipline—but its ragged-edged vibe still feels very much of a piece with almost anything off Pride (its kinship with To Willie is obvious). I do really love it when bands with experimental leanings corral their artier impulses into more structured song forms. Even more, I love it when bands like this get onstage at Letterman and UTTERLY kick the crap out of everyone in the room.

The lyrics are stupid—something about a slacker with no life and an ex-girlfriend or something and absolutely nothing interesting to say about anything—and the singing suitably listless. But, ho-lyyyy CRAP—at the three-minute-mark, this song just straps on a friggin’ jetpack fueled by pure riffage and starts melting your face right off your skull. By the four-minute mark, you’ve already turned the volume up well past anywhere it’s ever been before. At 4:15, “F*** YEAH!” is about as articulate as you’re gonna get. 5:17: you’re calling your buddies to come over so you have something to crowd-surf on. At 6:24, you’re skipping back to start this track over again. The rest of the record is pretty good, too, far and away the best thing ever produced by Florida surfers.

Song of the year, I think.

From my favorite record of the year. Sufjan really challenged himself and his listeners—setting aside, as he did, his banjo for electronics and twee prettiness for sometimes abrasive, ugly noise. Christianity Today’s review rightly concluded that fans of his older music put off by this record “will discover a more complex understanding of Stevens, who as it turns out, is neither a "Christian artist” nor an “artist who is a Christian,” but a human like the rest of us.“

Sufjan the human, however he may have left his old sound behind, still possesses unfathomable melodic gifts and a truly symphonic sense of composition. "Age of Adz” is a wild and uncontrollable and stupendous wall of sound and emotion, a song made up of bits of noise, stray sounds, and instrumental flourishes corralled into something beautiful and personal and giant. I discern in this something not unlike the creativity of God, whose Spirit hovers over chaotic creation and refashions it into something beautiful and new through the ministry of the Word.

Back to the record—while I do love Age of Adz on its own merits, chief among its virtues is how it recalls for me his Adz-heavy concert at the Paramount Theater in Seattle, which was so good I simply fumble for the words. And I love that this record, which I can spin anytime I want, serves mainly to testify about that unrepeatable, live event.

It’s stupid to even try to write anything intelligent about this song. “Gimme Shelter” is simply more a force of nature than a piece of music.

In which Wilco writes and records one of those perfect, balls-out rock songs about highways.

"...cawmpletely informed with hawnky-tawnk music..." →

Edward Norton conducts a thoughtful, intelligent interview with Bruce Springsteen. Resplendent in his Joisey accent, The Boss has a lot of interesting things to say about his scene in the 1970’s up to the release of Darkness on the Edge of Town. “We were provincial guys, with no money… this whole street life in Asbury Park. New York City was a million miles away… the good part about it was that you were very, very connected to place. And it was unique, where you lived, and the people you grew up with were very singular… the irony of any kind of success is that you’re a mutant in your own neighborhood…”

Norton notes that, despite his “intense connection to a locale”, Darkness marked a time when Springsteen was expanding his horizons, reading people from outside his region (like Flannery O'Connor)—even seeing the American West for the first time. Bruce found more locales with textures and interesting stories (the Rattlesnake Speedway near Fallon, NV, for one), and therefore found fodder for his songwriting. This awareness of where he was, I’d say, grounded and focused his next several records through to Born in the U.S.A.

After which point, having become a household name, Bruce really did become a mutant in his own neighborhood; his connection to real people and situations eroded, and his music suffered. Tunnel of Love was all about being famous and divorced. The boring L.A.-period double-albums from 1991, whatever they were called, stunk. The Ghost of Tom Joad was about specific people that Bruce had never met and with whom he’d never hang out. With The Rising, connected as it was to the shared national experience of 9/11, and the less-earnest parts of The Seeger Sessions, which sounded like he was actually having fun playing music, did he touch ground again. But real people and places remain somewhat abstracted with Bruce; are there any identifiable human beings in Magic and Working on a Dream? 

The interview is well worth a listen; for that matter, nearly anything about the intertestamental period between Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town is worth the time.

The fiddle fades out at the end, the sound of a party out in the country at night, heard across dark fields, looking at the blaze of lights on the porch of the house where Billy and his friends are gathered. Effortless, sublime, and beautiful.

"Good try, honey." →

Terry Gross interviews Keith Richards on NPR. The best part is probably the 34:00 mark, when Keef tells her what vowels are. He addresses her as “honey” the whole time. Her interview with Jay-Z (from just the other day) also has more than its share of surreal, deeply comic, WTF moments.