Nick Young:Listened to: MP3
Not all bunnies are cute. I personally can’t think of bunnies without conjuring up images of “Donnie Darko’s” Frank standing alone in the middle of a golf course. Perhaps this is why Echo & the Bunnymen’s name never stood out as being that weird or ill-fitting to me. The “Bunny” from “Donnie Darko” embodied that twisted, disturbed sound that Echo & the Bunnymen could pull off when they were at their best.* On “Heaven Up Here,” the band’s frenzied sophomore LP, they truly were at their best.
As the paranoid, mood-setting notes of “Show of Strength,” pierced the aether with savage grace, I experienced that special kind of early eighties angst I thought only The Cure could give me. On “With a Hip,” vocalist Ian McCulloch began to experiment with intertwining vocals long before overreaching emo bands made them into sickening clichés.. At this point in music history, the celebration of misery was only starting to be ravaged by the process of commercialization. We still had a long way to go before “Miserabilia” became something to sing about.
I was particularly impressed with “Heaven Up Here’s” fifth and sixth tracks, “A Promise,” and “Heaven Up Here.” McCulloch conveys the sound of betrayal better than any other artist I can think of as he moans “you promised,”** with androgynously spectral vehemence.
*I belong to the generation that never experienced the 1980’s. As far as I’m concerned, “Donnie Darko” and Echo & The Bunnymen can coexist in harmony.
**he later chants “a promise” over and over as though he’s been condemned to do so.
-Nick
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Mike Natale:
Listened to: MP3
There’s not much to write about Heaven Up Here, because, to be honest, there’s not much there. You know your in trouble when the most interesting thing about the album is the band’s name. I was utterly, utterly bored by this Joy Division knock-off. It lacked all of Ian Curtis’ soul, and anything really interesting musically. Every track blended together and the only track that’s even worth listening to is “A Promise”. That’s it. There’s the whole album right there. Every other track is a suckier version of that. I realize my more indie-oriented counterpart would probably be livid from reading me say this, but really, the instrumentals offer me nothing New Order can’t give me, and the vocals offer me nothing the Talking Heads can’t give me better. I guarantee you I will forget that I even listened to this album in about a week. At least The Heart Of Saturday Night was good, just not great. I know, this is short, but fuck, I just can’t understand it. This album isn’t even that good, let alone great, let alone one of the 500 Greatest albums. Do you realize how many great albums got ignored (such as the previously “switched in by me” 1984 by Van Halen and Songs of Leonard Cohen) to put Echo & The Bunnymen? Echo and the fucking Bunnymen! And maybe I could excuse this if it were the very bottom. Like, 500. But for fuck’s sake, George Michael’s Faith ranks lower than this. And that’s an album people have actually heard of. When future generations look back on our culture today, are they really gonna go “I truly feel that the greatest albums of the 20th century are Sgt. Pepper’s, Pet Sounds, and Heaven Up Here”? If they do, then we have failed the future. So why don’t I do us all a favor, and swap out the dull droning of Echo & The Bunnymen with a truly unique, non-white-noise, exciting, brilliant album by a band we all went through a phase of (or if not, you will now).
Would Replace With: Sublime by Sublime
Rather than infest this list with another 80’s, whiney “I’m so miserable being British middle-upperclass” album (look, fellas, The Cure was fun. Joy Division was brilliant. That’s enough. You only need two of each animal on the ark), I thought it best that ska-punk be represented (unless you count No Doubt, which isn’t really ska-punk to me, but that aside), and there was only one band, one album, that could possibly fulfill such a role. The brilliant magnum opus that is the studio debut of the Long Beach rockers Sublime. Fun Fact: Every 2 hours in the United States, a joint is sparked up while listening to “What I Got” or “Santeria”. From the opening, almost overture violins on Garden Grove to the Summertime riffing “Doin’ Time”, this album is the #1 go-to for driving around with the windows down in summer. From a decade full of depressing grunge (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots) or emotional balladeering (Jeff Buckley, Radiohead, R.E.M.), Sublime was an absolutely refreshing breath of upbeat musicality. Even as I’m typing this, I can’t help but bounce my leg and drift off into dreams of beaches, cold ones, and that small zipper-bag in your wallet you hope no one finds. As opposed to Heaven Up Here, where every track is forgettable and similar, each track on Sublime is unique, catchy, and for the love of God, as I’m trying to type I can’t help but sing-along to every word of “What I Got”, even shouting “I can play the guitar like a motherfucking riot!”, much to the displeasure of my sleeping family.
This album is part ska, part punk, part reggea, part rap, and all kick-ass. Seriously, if you can’t enjoy What I Got, Doin’ Time, or Santeria, get your ass some Prozac. Then you have Wrong Way, which takes a subject of teenage prostitution and let’s Bradley (who very tragically died of a heroin overdose before this album got released) talk about it as realistically as he can. Rather than lament about the tragic state of society, he talks like your average man would about the situation.
“A cigarette pressed between her lips/But I’m staring at her tits/It’s the wrong way./Strong if I can,/But I am only a man,/So I take her to the can,/It’s the wrong way.”
Yeah, he fucks a 12-year-old. But it’s not malicious. It’s not gangsta rap rape. And before you can even process the insanity and depravity he lightly recites, it goes right into the absolute bouncing punk Same In The End, which is honestly a better punk song than anything Blink-182 ever produced. Then we get to the only real political track Sublime’s laid-back, spliff-smoking attitude ever allowed them to compose. “April 29, 1992 (Miami)”,which we analyzed in twelfth grade (must fucking awesome class ever), is about the Rodney King riots, but Brad has the balls to point out “If you look at these streets/it wasn’t about Rodney Kind/In this fucked up situation with these fucked up police”. Sure, it’s a rap, but it’s intricate, bouncy, fun, and probably the most spirited and inventive hip-hop I’ve heard since Paul’s Boutique (Chronologically speaking. I’ve been listening to Sublime long before this project started). I’ll be honest, this post is delayed solely because I keep taking breaks from writing to rock the fuck out to these tracks.
Then we get to the song everyone from my 14-year-old sister to my 50-grumble-grumble- year old mother to my grumble-grumble-grumble-year old grandmother knows, Santeria. With a hook so strong everybody can sing, with Bradley displaying a voice that shows more vibrator than violence, and a guitar solo which can only be describe in a cliché manner: sublime.
Then “Seed” becomes the quintessential example of how good it feels to change tempo throughout a song. You can mosh and mellow out to the same track (admittedly, you’re probably so high by this point that the couch and Cheetos are far too appealing to mosh). And with just a howling “Go!” we get to Jailhouse, which could be a Bob Marley demo, and I mean that in the best possible way, and it only mellows out more as we get to Pawn Shop, an anthem for those of us who prefer our items cheap and pre-owned. The guitar and bass on this track alone should already having you creaming your jeans over the genius of Sublime, but if not, Paddle Out oughta wake your dumb-ass up. Seriously, the band on Paddle out is the same band as the track before. You know when you watch American Idol, and the singers there can’t do more than one genre, and complain about how “singers have a niche”? I want to send them this album. Hardcore punk tracks like Paddle Out get packaged between Pawn Shop and The Ballad of Johnny Butt, two of the mellowest tracks on the album.
Burritos is the closest thing to ska I’ve ever found myself enjoying, and Under My Voodoo is one of the greatest songs to jam to in the history of the world, with Bradley tearing those vocals apart, and proving how vocally fearless he really was, going place even Buckley would have admired (In fact, had he had more time, I could have easily seen Buckley covering this in one of his café gigs).
Then we have the sex-aspect of the album. Sure, “Get Ready” is all about smoking pot, but really, positioning a smooth, bass-heavy track titled “Get Ready” right before “Caress Me Down”? I give the boys of Sublime more credit than to say that was just coincidence. And can I just add that Caress Me Down is not only the greatest ode to the hand job ever, but is the finest porn-star-name-drop ever? “Mucho gusto, me llamo Bradley, I’m hornier than Ron Jeremy” ? That line helped me pass Spanish. No joke.
Then we have the reprise to What I Got, which to this day I’m not sure if I prefer to the earlier one, which brings us to Doin’ Time. I had a friend of mine tell me she had a dream in which the world was about to end, and suddenly every speaker in the world started playing this track. And, to be honest, if the world was gonna explode, I’d be fine with this track being the last thing I ever heard.
So, absolutely, skip Heaven Up Here and crank up Sublime. Every fiber in your being will thank you for it.
-Mike
P.S. Gig tonight, 1/9/10, 10:30 pm, at the Massapequa Bowling Alley in Long Island, New York. Free admission, come out if you can.
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As is the custom, I want to thank you guys for reading, and come back tomorrow for #178: The Byrds’ Greatest Hits by The Byrds.
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