Author: Stephen Deusner

Wilco are perhaps the most mythologized band in America. In 2002, upon completing their critically lauded Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Jeff Tweedy and his cohorts slew the major-label dragon by taking the album, which Warner-owned Reprise Records had rejected, and selling it to Warner-owned Nonesuch Records for a handsome profit. Essentially, Warner bought the album twice. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot debuted at number 11 on the Billboard album charts and was named album of the year by several publications.

Capturing all this hubbub was filmmaker Sam Jones, who released his fawning documentary, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, just a few months after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The grainy, black-and-white feature chronicled the band’s ordeal recording and releasing the album, as well as the passive-aggressive infighting that led to the dismissal (and subsequent fan vilification) of longtime multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett.

In 2004, following Tweedy’s much-publicized battle with painkillers, Wilco released a follow-up, the underwhelming and underperforming A Ghost Is Born. Several months later, two books appeared giving very different versions of the band’s history and creative method: Learning How To Die, by Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot, and The Wilco Book. The latter is perhaps the more interesting of the two.

As its title suggests, The Wilco Book is a form of mythologizing. Band members, engineers, and guitar techs explain their musical philosophies and unique approaches to whatever instrument they play, record, or tune. There are impressionistic passages from Tweedy about writing lyrics and constructing song cycles around vague concepts, alongside extremely technical descriptions and diagrams about stage set-ups and PA wiring. The book contains a section explaining not just how the band relates to its audience in a live setting but how its equipment is set up to complement that relationship.

The book works best when the text and images complement each other, as when the band members caption Michael Schmelling’s photographs of their instruments. Particularly enlightening are the photograph of Tweedy’s bass from his years in Uncle Tupelo and a box of multicolor guitar picks, which, Tweedy explains, are “the only way to keep track of the days of the week on the road.” But mostly, these images treat the equipment as icons, signifiers of a holy entity and therefore possessed of supernatural powers. But Wilco are not engaging in self-praise. It’s the music, not the musicians, that is elevated beyond the ordinary. The Wilco Book hints that the band members are merely conduits for a larger American pop tradition, conducting music the same way wires conduct electricity.

What will most interest hard-core Wilco fans about this book is the disk of 12 unreleased tracks, recorded during the sessions following Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the sessions for A Ghost Is Born. On its own, this disk is an album of hidden tracks, any one of which would sound better and more excusable coming at the end of a proper album — after 12 or so minutes of silence. However, heard in conjunction with these images and passages of text, they likewise tell a story in a summary, disjointed fashion and reveal more about the band’s creative process than a straight narrative like Learning How To Die ever could.

The Wilco Book explains how Wilco make their music, but it neglects to explain why Wilco make their music, what drives and inspires them. Adding more biographical information or third-person commentaries might have illuminated the band’s restless spirit. Only Rick Moody’s essay gives an outsider’s perspective or any background on the songs themselves. The Wilco Book implies a creative intimacy with Wilco, but by not delving into their creative urges, it fails to deliver on that promise.

Such motivations, however, are not easily summed up in images or text. Only the music itself can answer the question why. Perhaps when the band members take to the Orpheum, when all the people and instruments and equipment featured in The Wilco Book join together on stage, the why of Wilco will be self-evident. n

In The Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson writes of Bill Murray: “It is those who are merely inhabiting a difficult position (up a tree or at the dead end of an argument) who have the best chance of being funny.” In movies like Ed Wood, Rushmore, and, most recently, Lost in Translation, Murray communicates desperate sadness and pointed, self-entertaining humor as, respectively, a droll transsexual, a disaffected millionaire, and a disconnected action hero. He is his own straight man; his constant smirk is haunted by perpetually tired eyes and that slightly furrowed brow.

In the bizarre world of indie pop, Murray’s psychic twin is James Mercer, singer and head songwriter of the Shins, an Albuquerque, New Mexico, band that sound so unlike any expectations of an Albuquerque, New Mexico, band that they relocated to Portland. Ensconced in the Northwest, they recorded Chutes Too Narrow with Built to Spill collaborator Phil Ek. It’s the follow-up to their 2001 cult-fave Oh, Inverted World!, a quirkily nostalgic album about the “untied shoelaces of your life.”

Chutes Too Narrow takes its title from the song “Young Pilgrims,” a bouncy piece of chipper college-pub folk whose lyrics at first seem charmingly impenetrable in the spirit of early R.E.M., only without the mumbling. The more you sing happily along with Mercer, however, the more you realize “Young Pilgrims” is about seasonal depression, social isolation, and thoughts of suicide: “I know that I’ve got this side of me/That wants to grab the yoke from the pilot and/Fly this whole mess into the sea.”

This is how Chutes Too Narrow operates: It grabs your ears with its bright melodies, energetic music, and contagious pop hooks, then it slowly reveals the songs’ inherent darkness and Mercer’s fears and frustrations. From his difficult position he has the best chance of writing impossibly sunny melodies, which sound in this context like a wish for something better out of life — a Rushmore, to borrow a motif from one of Murray’s movies.

Mercer’s position is made all the more difficult by friends who traffic in petty betrayals and lovers who lose interest, and he dutifully tackles them on Chutes Too Narrow, roughing them up a little in the process. “Secretly I want to bury in the yard/The grey remains of a friendship scarred,” Mercer sings with bitter resignation on the opening track, “Kissing the Lipless.” The subject of “Mine’s Not a High Horse” gets a similar kiss-off: “You’ve got them all on your side/That just leaves more for doubt to slaughter/’I never knew he thought that’/I heard you say falling out of the van Will you remember my reply/When your high horse dies?”

Life’s disappointments transcend Mercer’s circle of friends, and the album takes a surprising, if fuzzy, political stance. “So Says I,” the album’s first single, sounds like a protest song, but against what? “Because it made no money/Nobody saved no one’s life,” he sings (it’s too melodious to be called ranting), referring either to the Bush administration’s condemnable foreign policy or the RIAA’s strong-arm anti-piracy tactics (or something).

All this jaded grousing would be coal in your Christmas stocking if the band didn’t seem to be having such a blast. Save for a few down-tempo numbers like “Pink Bullets” and “Those To Come,” most of these major-key, three-minute pop songs have resolutely upbeat tempos and a spry spontaneity that twine around the lyrical desolation. The Shins aren’t the only band to dress sad thoughts in happy music, but they manage to delineate a very specific space for themselves somewhere between optimism and pessimism, irony and sincerity, maybe even life and death.

But, says Thomson of Murray, “Is there really something in the man that hates to be exposed?” Even when he’s at his most confessional, Mercer still seems to be holding back, and the impenetrableness of his lyrics sometimes comes across as a defense mechanism. There are parts of him that hate to be exposed, so he covers them in references to Sir Thomas More and strange, almost surrealist images like “You tested your metal [sic, but intentionally so] of doe’s skin and petals/While kissing the lipless who bleed all the sweetness away.”

At times, such lyrical opacity lends songs an unexpected emotional weight. A remembrance of a fond childhood friend, “Pink Bullets” recalls the more autobiographical songs from Oh, Inverted World!, such as “One By One, All Day” and “Know Your Onion!” “It seems now a thousand summers passed,” he sings, “when our kite lines first crossed/We tied them into knots and to finally fly apart/We had to cut them off.” Mercer’s dilemma is not whether to share this memory in a song, but whether to remember at all (“I don’t look back much as a rule”). It’s easier to cut those ties completely rather than continue to fray the knots, but more than any of his peers, Mercer realizes the benefits of sweet, fleeting nostalgia: “Your memory is here and I’d like it to stay/Warm light on a winter day.”

The past can never be recovered, and that puts us all in a difficult position.

The first sound on the Jayhawks’ fifth album, Rainy Day Music, ought to please the band’s longtime fans and alt-country purists alike. “Stumbling through the Dark” begins with a simple line of tinny Rickenbacker guitar notes that recalls ’60s folk-rock in general and the Byrds in particular. These few crystalline notes suggest the Jayhawks are returning to a time when they were just an unpretentious band from Minneapolis whose stripped-down Hollywood Town Hall sounded like fresh snow covering the grunge landscape in 1993.

In the ensuing decade, founding member and co-songwriter/harmonizer Mark Olson left the band and the remaining members abandoned their Midwestern twang for narrow-scope obsessions with Alex Chilton on the bitter Sound of Lies and with Brian Wilson on the overeager Smile. If Rainy Day Music isn’t a return to full form, it is a return to a time when the Jayhawks were content to make solid, sturdy, unglamorous alt-country.

While it doesn’t dramatically alter that familiar sound, the album does expand the band’s range of influences — from the Byrds (“Stumbling through the Dark”) to the Faces (“Angelyne”) to the Eagles (“Madman”) to David Bowie (“Don’t Let the World Get in Your Way”). At the same time, the biggest influence on Rainy Day Music is early Jayhawks. Fortunately, the band, which now consists of original members Gary Louris and Marc Perlman and returning drummer Tim O’Reagan, have the good sense not to re-create that sound note for note but to try to capture its big-hearted spirit. On most songs, they actually succeed: Rainy Day Music comes closer to capturing the Jayhawks of yore than either of its predecessors came to Big Star or the Beach Boys.

It helps that the Jayhawks strip the arrangements down to their bare bones, replacing the guitar feedback of Sound of Lies and the programmed drums of Smile with acoustic guitars, gentle drums, and occasional flourishes, like the driving banjo on “Tailspin” and the shuffling percussion that moves “Madman.” Ethan Johns’ production is airy and expansive, creating a nostalgic intimacy and gently complementing the elegant austerity of Louris’ songwriting. “The Eyes of SarahJane” and “Angelyne” (doesn’t Louris know any Marges or Belindas?) float by with cheery momentum and contain the band’s catchiest choruses, while “All the Right Reasons” and “One Man’s Problem” are tenderhearted enough to live up to the album’s title.

If Rainy Day Music sounds far removed from Sound of Lies and Smile, the lyrics reveal another story: Like its predecessors, this album is concerned with its own place in the Jayhawks’ oeuvre and the band’s place in the larger rock-and-roll canon. But where Lies was bitter about limited prospects and Smile was disconcertingly upbeat about relative obscurity, Rainy Day Music is easygoing about everything. The Jayhawks are finally content to be what they are: a great American band that still hasn’t gotten its due (ironically, the Big Star of the ’90s).

While almost all the Rainy Day songs have a tinge of romantic discoloring — confusion, regret, loneliness, devotion — many of them hint at larger, more self-reflexive issues. “Stumbling through the Dark,” for example, is both an ode to lovelorn clumsiness and an acknowledgement of musical misdirection, beginning with a fan trying “to attach a meaning to words that you’ve heard” before Louris addresses the anxiety of influence (“The men who proceeded us here/Left only questions and fears”) and admitting that he himself has been “stumbling through the dark.”

Similarly, “Save It for a Rainy Day” seems directed at nÅ-metal fans obsessed with parental mistakes and marathon brooding: “Looking like a train wreck/Wearing too much makeup/The burden that you carry/Is more than one soul could ever bear,” Louris sings before advising, “Don’t look so sad/Save it for a rainy day.” It’s essentially the same wisdom he offered on Smile, but here a catchier melody makes it more effective and promising.

The ultimate ode to band life is “All the Right Reasons,” which sounds like a pledge to diehard Jayhawks fans. “I don’t know what day it is/I can’t recall the seasons/And I don’t remember how we got this far,” Louris sings, evoking the daze of days spent touring and recording. “All I know is I’m loving you for all the right reasons/In my sky you’ll always be my morning star.” A simpler, more sweet-hearted valentine will be hard to find this year.

The trouble with reading so much meaning into these songs is that they don’t always turn up such reassuring discoveries. Search too deeply in the lyrics to “You Look So Young” and you’ll be creeped out: “You look so young/Have you ever been afraid?/You look so young/And I’m feeling so ashamed.” The song is obviously about the heartbreaking contrast between innocence and romantic disappointment, but didn’t anyone think these lyrics might be misinterpreted?

For many bands, a step backward like this — essentially negating two full albums — might signal either commercial sell-out or artistic bankruptcy, but for the Jayhawks, who’ve had a love-hate relationship with their own strengths and genre proclivities, Rainy Day Music is neither a fallback nor an admission of defeat. Instead, flawed as it is, the album is a thank-you note to the band’s many loyal fans.

On April 8, 1994, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, violently ending his life and his tumultuous music career. What started five years before as an outsider’s itinerant dreams of artistic legitimacy had mushroomed into a brand of grossly iconic celebrity that threatened to overwhelm the music itself. The story of Cobain’s tragic life includes a childhood marked by poverty and divorce, a brash wife, an infant daughter, an intense and undiagnosable recurring stomach pain, and some of the best music of the 1990s. With bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl, Cobain wrote songs that were darkly ferocious, desperately funny, achingly honest, and phenomenally influential.

In the eight years since he took his own life, popular music, once ruled by Nirvana knockoffs, has been overrun with rap-rock and teen-pop product, recycling the sexism and misogyny Cobain despised in ’80s heavy metal. But the turmoil on the charts and airwaves cannot match the recent controversy surrounding Cobain’s estate. Professional widow Courtney Love, formerly a musician, sued Novoselic and Grohl for control of her late husband’s songs, alleging he was the group’s major artistic contributor, a claim the bandmates heatedly deny. If any of this sounds even vaguely ambiguous, consider this: COURTNEY LOVE WAS NEVER IN NIRVANA.

Earlier this fall, Love apparently realized what had theretofore been obvious to everyone else and suddenly and surprisingly relented. Just a few months later, we have Nirvana, a de facto greatest-hits set that includes one previously unreleased song, “You Know You’re Right.”

If Love lost that battle, she did score one victory: In a heated bidding war involving almost every domestic publisher, she sold the rights to Cobain’s personal diaries to Riverhead, a division of Penguin Putnam, for $4 million. A few months later, we have Journals, an admittedly well-designed and even physically beautiful book that includes high-resolution scans of the actual notebook entries written in Cobain’s own hand.

It’s difficult to view these releases and the headline-making brouhaha that preceded them without a dose of skepticism. By all appearances, the rights auctions, legal in-fighting, and marketing blitzes seem greedily, cynically opportunistic. Buy a piece of a dead rock star! Purchase a genuine relic from a rock-and-roll saint! Just in time for Christmas!

The compilation, after all, only has one unreleased track; the rest is just a repackaging of 13 tracks that have long been available on the band’s proper albums. Oh, but what a track it is. We couldn’t have hoped for something so raw, so brutal, and so intense. Recorded during Nirvana’s final session, just three months before Cobain committed suicide, “You Know You’re Right” begins with an odd chiming sound that gives way to a slow, rumbling guitar riff, the likes of which haven’t been heard on corporate radio in ages; then Cobain’s low, wounded vocals take over before the song erupts in a violent chorus of hey hey heys. It’s worth the steep price of the disc (unless you can download it), and it proves Cobain was still writing fierce songs so late in his career, which makes his death all the more tragic.

After that three-minute maelstrom, Nirvana offers a chronology of the band’s short run. There are three tracks from their brief stay at SubPop (including the brilliant kid-trauma of “Sliver”), four from Nevermind, another four from the hastily recorded In Utero, and two from the band’s swan song, MTV Unplugged in New York. Conspicuously missing from the tracklist are the songs that proved as popular with fans as the radio hits: “Territorial Pissings,” “Polly,” “Something in the Way,” “Serve the Servants,” “Oh Me,” and the Leadbelly cover “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?,” which reveals the band’s blues influence. The unintended result is that Nirvana reduces the band to nothing more than the sum of its singles.

The most fascinating thing about Journals is that it is not at all fascinating. There are no real surprises here, only the modest revelation that Cobain was a normal guy with normal worries and fears. He wrote grocery lists, took notes for his driver’s exam, worked a brief stint as a janitor. His sense of humor was sharp and self-effacing, as in this mock-biography: “It’s the classic case of two bored art students dropping out and forming a band. Kobain [sic], a saw blade painter specializing in wildlife and seascapes, met Novoselic whose passion was gluing seashells and driftwood on burlap potatoe [sic] sacks.”

He frequently indulged in grotesque imagery and lengthy rants against the government and mainstream American pop culture. He believed women were superior to men and African Americans were better musicians than whites. He developed a superiority complex to separate himself from “a redneck loser town called Aberdeen.”

More than anything, Cobain was obsessed with his own band — and rightly so — especially with how Nirvana would be perceived. He wrote several drafts of press releases and tracklists and drew numerous sketches of album covers and T-shirt designs. And, like all but the most talented or self-deluded musicians, he wrote endless variations on his lyrics. In particular, he seems to have fretted over “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in the months leading up to the Nevermind sessions; Journals contains the scribbled-out lyrics from that and other songs.

As Nirvana became increasingly popular, Cobain found he had less control over how the band was seen and how his songs were heard and interpreted. While his humor took on a more sarcastic edge, he wrote defensive explanations for his own widely reported heroin use. But he saved his severest scorn for rock critics and music journalists. “Why in the hell do journalists insist on coming up with a second rate freudian evaluation on my lyrics when 90% of the time they’ve transcribed them incorrectly?” he asked, concluding, “there are more bad rock journalists than there are bad rock bands.”

Anyone looking for insight into Cobain’s “genius” or answers to hard questions will be sorely disappointed with Journals. Despite its attempts to mythologize him, this book can only present him as merely human. On the other hand, perhaps it was this everyguy quality, this ability to speak simultaneously for himself and for so many others, that attracted so many people to Nirvana in the first place and inspired such fervor in fans that they would look to his journals for insight into his life.

Ultimately, Nirvana and Journals are two versions of the same story, both recounting identical dreams and the same unsustainable life. In Journals, Cobain writes the same four words over and over, like a mantra: “Punk rock is freedom.” In the early stages of his career, when he was sleeping on couches and pushing brooms for money, the music Cobain loved fed his dreams of escaping his roots and becoming a true artist; as his career progressed, the music he made was enough to keep him going. Almost.

And you will think the Austin-based band And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead might be working a gimmick or two. First, they’ve got that long, seemingly tongue-in-cheek name, which, besides being the best use of ellipses ever by a rock band, hints at a comic-book braggadocio most often attributed to rap groups like the Wu-Tang Clan. It’s an audacious name, suggesting puns like “killer live shows” and “death metal” and implying lots of loud, loud noise.

It might also be a reference to the dismembered corpses of instruments they leave behind: The band is renowned for ritualistically trashing the stage during live shows, dismantling drum sets, gutting guitars, bashing basses, and killing keyboards. Such violence has many precedents in rock history, from the Who to Jimi Hendrix to Nirvana, among too many others, and it might appear a bit contrived on the surface, like a novice poet writing his name in lowercase letters à la e.e. cummings.

But Trail Of Dead — namely, Kevin Allen, Neil Busch, Conrad Keely, and Jason Reece — doesn’t play the name or the destruction as affectations; in fact, the band treats them so earnestly and seriously that they almost become pretensions. The name is taken from a prayer to the Mayan corn god, Apuk. And the band members insist it’s not “talkin’ ’bout my generation” angst or counterculture rebellion that drives them to splinter guitars and trash stages but the intensity of the music they create.

The band’s approach to that music can be generously described as ambitious and cathedral or disregarded as ostentatious and noisy. With a predilection for Dungeons & Dragons imagery — monsters on album covers, winged women on their Web site — and a peculiar strain of bleak existentialism, these guys seem more like dorm-room outcasts than feted art-punks. On past albums, songs carrying Led Zeppelinesque titles such as “Prince With a Thousand Enemies” and “Gargoyle Waiting” confront big issues like religion and identity. They famously named their second album Madonna, more for the Catholic symbol of divine purity than for the American symbol of artistic vampirism.

Source Tags & Codes, the band’s third album, does not dispense with the lengthy name, the destruction, or even the weighty subject matter, but it is perhaps the first time the band’s music overshadows everything else and coheres into a unique, powerful statement. The members themselves form a similarly cohesive unit, switching instruments and vocal duties from track to track, creating songs that are more elemental, focused, and dynamic.

Like its predecessors, the new album is noisy, busy, loud, smart, angry, and inquisitive. Discordant interludes crowd between the songs, which meander from anthemic rockers such as “Another Morning Stoner” to punk firestarters such as “Days Of Being Wild” to the hazy indie comedown of the title track.

Fifteen or 20 years ago, this sort of music would have been labeled “college rock” and played on university radio stations with the Pixies and Sonic Youth — two obvious influences. Source Tags & Codes conveys a strong nostalgia for the days when 120 Minutes and college stations were still viable outlets for new music by bands suspicious of videos and loath to sell out.

But today, Trail Of Dead tours with labelmates Queens Of The Stone Age and gets attention from mainstream press such as Rolling Stone and Spin. And instead of the Pixies and Sonic Youth, singles “Another Morning Stoner” and “Relative Ways” get played with the Promise Ring and the White Stripes.

I abhor the word “emo,” but there are similarities between Trail Of Dead and many of the bands that commonly fall under that rubric, just as the band shares the Pixies’ blistering experimentalism and Sonic Youth’s ugliness/beauty contrasts. Source Tags & Codes similarly combines punk ferocity with the current minigenre’s emphasis on emotional intensity.

But relative to their emo brethren, Trail Of Dead are more worldly and less naive — they’re the older brothers who’ve been to college and read a little Nietzsche, some Descartes, and lots of Sartre. They make art-damaged rock for philosophy majors. And they write songs about women instead of girls — all of whom are long gone. These women didn’t make a dramatic country-song exit, packing their bags and cussing their men. Rather, they long ago drifted away and are now lost in the hazy mist of memory, distant muses who still inspire the band’s art. “It was there that I saw you,” they sing in the lead track, “In the heat of the summer’s embrace/And as time went by/I wondered what became of you.”

Ultimately, such unabashed romanticism is Source Tags & Codes‘ singular audacity. Amid the apocalyptic rock of “Heart In the Hand Of the Matter” (“Ride the apocalypse/Coming through the city side/There is nowhere to hide”) and the sharp-edged punk of “Days Of Being Wild” (“Find my pulse/Trapped in a locked box/Teeth in a grind/All-night amphetamines”), there lies a novelistic examination of lost loves and lost opportunities, an unexpectedly plaintive nostalgia that flirts with sentimentality. On “How Near How Far,” they sing, “Looking back in time/Through verses set into nursery rhymes/At oil-painted eyes/Of muses left behind.” Elsewhere, they describe “the stained-glass caverns of my mind.” All of this would sound precious and pretentious if not for the crashing cacophony around the words and the sense of gravity and true loss in the music.

Ultimately, Source Tags & Codes is about all the things surrendered to time: lovers and loved ones, youthful rebellion, hope in God and redemption. The yearning for these things can never be fulfilled, and Trail Of Dead sensitively evokes a deep, fundamental sadness that is no gimmick but immense and complex and marks Source Tags & Codes more deeply than any mere gesture.

And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead

with The Witnesses

Young Avenue Deli

Tuesday, September 24th

The teen-pop craze hasn’t died; it’s only died down.

Post-9/11 scuttlebutt was that the nation and its kids would turn to more substantial, more serious music to help them cope with such a tremendous tragedy. And yes, sales for Britney and ‘NSync have decreased noticeably, as have music sales in general — for the first time in 20 years. Consumers didn’t turn away from teen pop; they just stopped spending their money on music.

If teen pop isn’t burning out but fading away, so too will many of its stars. Already, second- and third-tier acts such as Jessica Simpson, Mandy Moore, O-Town, C-Note, Fresh Step, Dream, Eden’s Crush, M2M, LFO, and 98 Degrees are steadily migrating to has-been status. Which raises the question: Who will survive the teen-pop trend? Who will outlast the fad and stick around for another decade? Who will be teen pop’s Bon Jovi, its Stone Temple Pilots?

Britney Spears is an obvious choice. Her movie, Crossroads, didn’t shatter any box-office records, but it did sell more tickets than Mariah Carey’s abominable Glitter. And her third album, Britney, may not have outsold her two previous releases, but its sales were still as modest as her python dance at last year’s MTV Music Awards — which is to say not modest at all. But as a product, Spears is popular enough to be intrinsically linked to the fad, and her career will likely die for teen pop’s sins.

Another possibility is Christina Aguilera, but she played the slut card early in the horrendous “Lady Marmalade” remake — in the video, she looks like Dee Snider playing Dr. Frankenfurter — so she has fewer options these days. The Backstreet Boys and ‘NSync? Together, doubtfully; individually, maybe. Pink has probably reached her creative peak with “Get the Party Started,” and no one can prove conclusively that Michelle Branch isn’t Jewel.

So, almost by process of elimination, the best hope for longevity looks to be Canadian boho club girl Nelly Furtado by virtue of the fact that she was never strongly associated with teen pop in the first place. She’s got something none of the other kids have but all of them want: credibility. Already, she’s scored a critically acclaimed, strong-selling debut album (Whoa, Nelly!), two diverse hits (the ballad “I’m Like a Bird” and the propulsive “Turn Off the Light”), a Grammy for Best Female Vocal Pop Performance, and a high-profile cameo on the Tomb Raider remix of Missy Elliott’s single-of-the-year “Get Ur Freak On.” Not only does she write her own songs and play guitar and piano, she also has a producer credit on Whoa, Nelly!, and her live shows have been garnering praise for their energy and intensity.

It helps that she doesn’t look like a teen-pop star. With her Iberian features and loose-fitting club clothes, she’s more flygirl than pin-up girl. Her dark hair, pixie face, easy smile, and penetrating eyes don’t fit the teen-pop-princess mold, and she eschews skin-tight nude suits and Moulin Rouge undies in favor of baggy jeans, sporty tops, and Adidas sneaks. She manages to be simultaneously exotic and casual, an ethnic variation on the all-American pop-singer image.

But her physical qualities are much less interesting than her music, which boasts splashes of international flavor, bubbly pop hooks, and churning dance beats. While the Latin pop sensation has gone the way of swing music, Furtado invigorates her songs with Portuguese instruments and rhythms, not to mention British trip hop and American hip hop. Whoa, Nelly! has a lively sense of adventure and discovery that Ricky Martin and Shakira never approach.

Furtado comes by such eclecticism naturally. The daughter of working-class, Portuguese-immigrant parents, she grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, singing traditional fado songs with her mother and playing ukulele and trombone in school. She set out on her own when she was 16, moving to Toronto and absorbing as much urban music as possible, from hip hop and drum-and-bass to folk and rock. She even fronted her own trip-hop band called Nelstar.

All these influences, whether from family tradition or her own musical curiosity, lend Whoa, Nelly! its crackle and pop. Some of the best moments straddle genres and cultures: “Legend” lays a subdued bossa-nova groove over a jazzy piano line that heightens the song’s loneliness, and “My Love Grows Deeper, Part 1” lifts the chorus of Portishead’s “Wandering Star” as its bridge. It shows taste and daring to seamlessly incorporate an album track (not a single) by a semiobscure band into a dance song, especially when other singers are performing half-baked covers of obvious hits.

But Furtado’s big moment is “Scared of You,” an emotionally scarred love song (worthy of Fiona Apple at her most vulnerable) which Furtado sings in English and Portuguese, accompanied by a stark fado-style guitar. “Maybe that’s why I was/Scared of you/And I know you were scared of me too,” she sings then switches tongues: “Desculpa me se eu te deixi.” Furtado doesn’t showboat her bilingual lyrics; instead, she understates them to create a dreamy, damaged, devastating song.

But idiosyncrasy of this nature doesn’t necessarily ensure a lengthy career. What truly makes Furtado a viable artist isn’t her good looks or her musical adventurousness; it’s her unscripted persona, the sense that she is the same offstage as she is onstage. With so many young singers filtering through marketers and handlers, Furtado is more direct, more unguarded. She has true poise and personality, which ultimately give her music personal meaning beyond its global sound.

“There are two sides of me,” Furtado told Canadian magazine MacLean’s in October 2000, before the release of Whoa, Nelly!, “the urban, street-smart English singer, and then the Portuguese singer.” The challenge facing her is to balance these two poles — American vs. European, modern vs. traditional, electronic vs. organic — without losing her youthful exuberance and musical restlessness. If she can manage that, she’ll be a relevant and important artist long after teen pop has faded away.

Nelly Furtado

The New Daisy Theatre

Saturday, March 23rd, 8 p.m.

Back when the grunge wave subsided and a slight lull set over the music scene, media prognosticators predicted that electronica, already a burgeoning subculture in Europe and a few major U.S. cities, would be responsible for the next great pop-culture revolution. And while such trends are never initiated by marketing directors or rock critics, for a while it seemed that they might be right: The Prodigy’s Fat of the Land debuted at the top of the Billboard Top 200 albums chart in 1997, and their song, “Smack My Bitch Up” (which now sounds so quaint in this Eminem age), stirred up a lot of controversy. MTV took time out of its busy Road Rules/Real World schedule to create and market Amp, a show featuring videos by electronica acts such as the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, and Orbital, spawning two well-received compilations in the process.

Thanks to nü-metal and teen pop, however, electronica never became the Next Big Thing, but it has become a big thing. Instead of overtaking the music scene in a sudden, earth-shaking wave, electronica — in its basic form as well as its many permutations — has gradually and quietly insinuated itself into mainstream culture. Moby and Fatboy Slim have become celebrities, albeit dubious ones, and BT, who has worked with artists as disparate as M. Doughty and DJ Rap, recently produced ‘NSync’s would-be avant-garde single “Pop.” Despite the fact that Amp has been relegated to MTV2, house turntablists are now a staple on MTV’s beach parties and awards shows.

If electronica has seeped into mainstream consciousness, then other musical elements have filtered into its aesthetic, diluting and mutating the genre into a hydra of offshoots. Disco adds flair to the dance music of Basement Jaxx and Daft Punk, while ’70s lite-rock mellowness informs Air’s most recent albums and punk adds fury to Atari Teenage Riot’s political rants.

With the Crystal Method, it’s good ol’ rock-and-roll. The duo — Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland — released their debut, Vegas, back in 1997, when electronica was still emerging from the underground. In July, the group released its long-awaited sophomore album, Tweekend, and launched its high-profile minifestival, dubbed the Seven Day Tweekend Tour, which features a rotating lineup including Überzone, Adam Freeland, and Beck collaborator DJ Swamp.

Perhaps as a result of a prominent slot on the hard-rock Family Values tour and the four-year interval between releases, Tweekend is a much more focused, hard-hitting album than Vegas, its sound streamlined to reach a wider audience. Jordan and Kirkland construct each song on a tight rhythmic base and then elaborate on that theme until they arrive at melodies and mood. There are few tempo changes from song to song and most feature a limited set of signature noises and sounds. If it’s a little bland at times, Tweekend certainly has one thing going for it: From the silly heavy-metal album cover (depicting a bikini-clad babe sunning herself on the beach while nuclear reactors smolder off-shore) to the nifty Peter Frampton-style talk-box vocal on “Ph.D.,” it is perhaps the most rock-and-roll electronica album in recent years.

Guitars punctuate almost every song on Tweekend, and the beats are heavier, more percussive and thudding, than those on the previous album — closer to the pounding drums of Orgy or Korn than, say, Roni Size or Orbital. Approximating the get-in/get-out approach of the best pop music, Jordan and Kirkland have pared down the songs on Tweekend to clock in at three to five minutes, as opposed to the meandering nine-minute tracks on Vegas. The result is a highly accessible album full of shorter, more digestible chunks of music.

Tweekend also features a very impressive roster of collaborators, most of whom reinforce the rock sound. In addition to producing several tracks, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine contributes a supremely funky guitar to the first single, “Name of the Game,” and Jon Brion, who has worked with Aimee Mann, Macy Gray, and Fiona Apple, produces and plays Wurlitzer on the atmospheric “Over the Line.” Perhaps the most curious cameo is by Stone Temple Pilot Scott Weiland, who sings on the dark “Murder,” the only song on Tweekend to emphasize vocals and to employ a more traditional song structure. “You know it’s hard, you know it’s murder,” Weiland sings, his vocals almost unrecognizably new wave, before launching into a nü-metal scream. A should-be single, it’s one of the album’s highlights.

Of course, Tweekend is a dance album and incorporates other elements into the mix. Occasionally, the sound suggests sluggish disco, while a faux-soul chorus turns up on “Ten Miles Back.” In addition to Morello, “Name of the Game” also features DJ Swamp on turntables and raps by Ryu of Styles of Beyond. Unfortunately, as the album progresses, the songs get longer, the guitars fall away, and Tweekend becomes just another run-of-the-mill dance exercise. In other words, the Crystal Method fare best when they rock out.

It’s promising, then, that rocking out is Jordan and Kirkland’s goal on the Seven Day Tweekend Tour. At a recent show in Philadelphia, the duo stood behind two keyboard stations like a techno Elton John and Billy Joel, re-creating the sound of both Vegas and Tweekend with surprising, almost dubious, clarity. But they varied the tempos and structures dramatically, building to intense, ear-piercing climaxes and making the songs more dynamic and aggressive.

While rock musicians can jump around with their guitars and twirl their mike stands, Jordan and Kirkland are pretty much tied to their cumbersome equipment. Perhaps realizing that this immobility makes for a fairly static concert, the duo have synchronized an intricate light show to create more of a spectacle. Rigged to an arch above the stage, multicolored, seizure-inducing lights and lasers pulse and flicker in time to the songs, alternately wowing and annoying the audience. More than re-creating a rave atmosphere in a concert space, the spectacle recalls the glory days of monumental light shows by groups like Pink Floyd.

If hard rock informs Crystal Method’s electronica, then Überzone — the opening act for this week’s local show — builds its songs on hip-hop beats and grooves. The brainchild of Southern Californian Q (who bears a striking resemblance to James van der Beek), Überzone combines old-school scratching and rhyme throwdowns with flurries of techno beats and ambient synths.

Überzone’s catchy and surprisingly diverse debut album, Faith In the Future, twists and pops with hip-hop and dance rhythms. Like the overwhelming majority of recent rap releases, almost every song on Faith In the Future features a collaborator, forming a very eclectic roster. Over wicky-wicky beats, Beenie Man spouts his growling patois on “Science Fiction,” while former Helmet frontman Page Hamilton sounds alarmingly like Seal on the smooth and soulful “Frequency.” But the big guest-artist coup on Faith In the Future is an appearance by godfathers of rap Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force on “2Kool4Skool.” As the crew trade back-and-forth rhymes, Q rises to the occasion, answering them with an increasingly hyperactive mix that threatens to short-circuit and explode.

But Überzone is never simply the backing band for a crew of guest musicians. On solo tracks like the rubbery “Bounce” and the ambient, synth-saturated title track, Q’s beats are too strong and his grooves too hypnotic to be upstaged. Ultimately, he emerges as the star of Faith In the Future, rightly so.

Neither the Crystal Method nor Überzone will be that Next Big Thing that electronica once promised. But thanks to their signature blend of seismic beats and rock chops, Jordan and Kirkland have indeed become a big thing. And with a boundary-breaking sense of adventure and stellar grooves to match, Überzone is on its way as well.

Local beat

by CHRIS HERRINGTON

“Brooklyn might suit me just fine” might be a line from the Lucero song “All Sewn Up,” but it would make just as much sense coming from the mouth of Inside Sounds owner Eddie Dattel. Dattel, whose local record label produced Eternal Egypt, the companion CD to the current Wonders Series exhibit at The Pyramid, will see the album travel with the exhibit to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in November.

Eternal Egypt is the fifth Wonders Series disc that Inside Sounds has produced (the label also did the listening companion for The Dixon’s currently touring Visualizing the Blues exhibit) and certainly isn’t the first to travel with an exhibit. “I’ve been on Home Shopping Network talking about these CDs,” Dattel says. “This isn’t the first time, but to be at the Brooklyn Museum of Art is a big deal for us.” Though most Wonders exhibits originate in Memphis before touring the country, it isn’t a given that Inside Sounds’ companion CDs will travel as well. As Dattel says, “For us it’s more of an accomplishment because these other shows aren’t contractually obligated to pick up our CDs. They just think that they are the best available.”

An instrumental New Age collection, Eternal Egypt was produced and arranged by local composer Grayson Wells with assistance from world-music stalwart Richard Graham. “Grayson is one of these cutting-edge musicians and composers who uses a lot of sampling,” Dattel says. “He’s at the right age [31] where he has the classical background but also is tapped into the techno world. I thought he would be a good choice for this because he’s somebody who can easily master musical genres that he may not be familiar with. So I knew he’d be able to do what I needed. I wanted the CD to have the [cinematic] feeling of being on a journey and also have some authentic, traditional Middle Eastern music.”

Dattel says that the album, available in local record stores as well as at the exhibit, hasn’t sold quite as well at The Pyramid as others, most notably the label’s companion to the 1997 Titanic exhibit. But it has done well on the open market. “We’ve found this weird niche with belly dancers,” Dattel says. “Belly-dance schools are starting to use it in their classes.”

A couple of area music and cultural festivals of note this weekend: In Brownsville, Tennessee, located on the “Music Highway” between Memphis and Nashville, Blues Festival 2001 takes place at the West Tennessee Heritage Center and at the home of blues legend Sleepy John Estes. Music on Friday night will run from 5 p.m. to midnight and will feature artists from Brownsville and nearby Jackson. Saturday’s lineup, from 1 p.m. to midnight, boasts a couple of notable Memphis performers. J. Blackfoot, the soul singer who got his start at Stax in the ’70s as the lead singer for the Soul Children, will headline the festival with a 9 p.m. closing slot. Pulling double duty will be local one-man-blues-band Richard Johnston, who will perform at the Sleepy John Estes stage at 1 p.m. and again on the Main Stage at 4:30.

Of more local interest this weekend is the annual Cooper-Young Festival, set for Saturday. The musical lineup this year features local acts such as Charlie Wood, FreeWorld, Ed, Planet Swan, Dahrius, and Valhalla. The headliner will be Sun rockabilly performer Sonny Burgess, who will take the stage at 5:30.

The alt-country movement is dead.

Also known as y’allternative and insurgent country, the genre that gave us Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks, among many others, has breathed its last breath. And while there’s no autopsy to perform or any evidence to gather, it seems apparent that the time of death was 1999 and the cause was pop music. That year saw the release of Wilco’s Pet Sounds-inspired Summerteeth and the Old 97’s poppy Fight Songs — strong albums by artists who had outgrown the genre that gave them their starts.

Perhaps one of the major reasons for alt-country’s success during the ’90s — and one of its constricting factors — was its emphasis on song over sound. It was a songwriter’s market, attracting many aspiring musicians to its fold and nurturing their talent for lyrics and melodies. All anyone needed was an acoustic guitar and a few capable backup musicians. The music itself was rarely ever revolutionary, but songwriters working in this genre were able to produce some stellar work while cultivating devoted fan bases.

But as the community that formed beneath the No Depression banner became increasingly insular, the warm reverence that marked the genre soon curdled into keep-it-real elitism. When bands sought to expand their sound outside alt-country, which was an inevitable trend, fans booed as often as they cheered — and never so loudly as for the Old 97’s Fight Songs. Many fans and Dallas-area journalists criticized the band for disowning its roots, but they didn’t realize that this transition had been a gradual process beginning with the band’s debut album, Hitchhike to Rhome, a jangly alt-country discovery. The follow-up, Wreck Your Life, saw that acoustic twang develop into a harder, more electric sound, while the band’s Elektra debut, Too Far to Care, was loud and angry and gloriously messy. A more radical departure, Fight Songs remains the band’s shining moment, a 12-song meditation on lost loves and lost cats that places equal emphasis on song and sound.

So in the context of this progression of twang to pop, the band’s new album, Satellite Rides (Elektra), sounds like a step back. It has more twang than Fight Songs, more pop than Too Far to Care. But it retains all the elements that have made the Old 97’s one of the most fascinating groups around. Singer-songwriter Rhett Miller remains compellingly ambiguous: He’s both the sweet-natured boy who lavishes girls with affection and the rebellious troublemaker who exudes a slightly dangerous sexuality. And the rest of the band — bassist Murry Hammond, drummer Philip Peeples, and guitarist Ken Bethea — do more than simply back him up; playing as a tight unit, they infuse the songs with personality and dynamic energy.

The album displays a unique flair and cohesion: Each song seems to have its own complementary twin or twisted doppelganger. The first single, “King of All the World,” shows Miller on top of the world, a strange place for a guy who thinks too much about how relationships inevitably sour. But by the second-to-last song, the brilliant “Book of Poems” — the equivalent to Fight Songs‘ “Busted Afternoon” in its propulsive hook progression, if not in tone — he’s having nightmares again and his book of poetry isn’t enough. One song later, he’s a nervous guy again, wishing us goodbye. Miller remains unbending in his faith in love and romance, even though he admits he’s been hurt by it many times: “I believe in love,” he sings on “Rollerskate Skinny,” “but it don’t believe in me.”

While it’s not quite as consistent as its predecessor, Satellite Rides is an ingenious album that brims with humor and heart. The sound may be a little different from the Old 97’s earlier work, but the songs remain the same: unflaggingly energetic and catchy, simultaneously funny and heartbreakingly sad.

The same is true of the Old 97’s one-time peer Joe Henry. His sound may have evolved into something completely different from alt-country, but the elements that made his early work stand out still shine on his more recent releases.

When founding member Mark Olson left No Depression giants the Jayhawks in 1997, there was a rumor that Henry would replace him. Whether the product of actual discussions between the band and the singer or just wishful thinking by many distressed fans, the collaboration never happened. And not surprisingly either: The year before, Henry had released Trampoline, an album that completely disowned his alt-country background for a more urban and experimental sound.

Such a transition would have been a career-ending risk had the album — and its successor, the near-perfect Fuse — not been as assured and revelatory as it was. Trampoline set drum loops and erstwhile Helmet leader Paige Hamilton’s scorching guitars against Henry’s sophisticated songwriting, and the more eclectic Fuse exquisitely combined jazzy neosoul crooning and dark cabaret pop.

While his new album, Scar (Mammoth), doesn’t top Fuse for cohesion and originality, it does exceed it in ambition. With an elegantly smoky atmosphere and an impressive roster of guest musicians, including jazz legend Ornette Coleman and pianist Brad Mehldau, Scar sounds at times like a concept album, especially with so many names in the song titles: “Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation” (which gets my early vote for best song title of the year), “Nico Lost a Small Buddha,” and “Edgar Bergen.”

Like its predecessor, Scar also showcases Henry’s keenly observant songwriting. The Richard Pryor song is a poetic funeral dirge that examines the comedian’s influence on American culture, his uneasy relationship with his audience, and his failing health brought on by years of drug abuse and disabling multiple sclerosis. “You watched me while I tried to fall, you can’t bear to watch me land,” Henry sings as Coleman delivers a beautifully angular saxophone solo.

But the big story on Scar is “Stop,” which was rearranged and renamed “Don’t Tell Me” by Henry’s sister-in-law Madonna for her most recent album, Music. With vocals as detached as the stiff beats that bubble beneath the melody, Madonna’s version sounds antiseptic and unconvincing next to Henry’s exotic take on the tune. He brings out the fiery sexuality in the lyrics, and the exotic percussion and Middle Eastern-sounding strings reveal strange, complex emotions.

Further widening the rift between Henry and his folksy beginnings, Scar is an accomplished album full of dark, closeted emotions that proves he still has a gift for lovelorn lyrics and sharp melodies. These are the same talents that made him successful as an alt-country artist, but in this more exotic setting, they bloom more brilliantly.

Once considered to be the saviors of alt-country, North Carolina’s Whiskeytown seemed to have all the ingredients to break through the genre barrier and garner mainstream success: a young, tortured-soul singer named Ryan Adams; a sound that wasn’t too country; and a promising deal with major label Outpost Records. But in 1999, during the round of mergers that restructured almost every aspect of the music business, Outpost dissolved and shelved Whiskeytown’s third album indefinitely. Dealing with that shattering disappointment and amid squabbles among the musicians — of whom only Adams and violinist Caitlin Cary were founding members — Whiskeytown followed its label’s lead and dissolved too, leaving that last album unreleased.

Some two years later, upstart Nashville label Lost Highway Records has made Whiskeytown’s heretofore-unheard swan song, the horribly titled Pneumonia (Lost Highway), available at last. It’s a calculated risk for the new imprint: Because the band is now defunct, the album is virtually unpromotable — no videos, no tours, no radio or television appearances.

Fortunately, Pneumonia might be good enough to overcome that handicap and secure the band’s legacy as No Depression leaders as well as to perhaps gain Lost Highway some prestige points from fans and critics. It’s easily the band’s most accomplished and accessible album to date, despite — or as a result of — the fact that Whiskeytown seemed torn between the safety of the alt-country umbrella and the excitement of experimenting with and expanding their sound.

Pneumonia‘s most outstanding and accomplished tracks are also its most bizarre and unexpected. Lolling along on Hawaiian-sounding ukulele, psychedelic flutes, and bossa nova beats, “Paper Moon” indulges in some sweetly eclectic orchestration that recalls the grandeur of old Disney soundtracks. And “What the Devil Wanted” loops a dark, muted piano theme behind Adams’ vocals, which, plaintively void of any twang, are treated to sound like a scratchy record. The result is evocative and mysterious, and the song ranks among the best the band has ever produced.

At the forefront of Pneumonia are Adams’ gravelly voice and his songwriting, both of which display a greater range of clarity and emotion to match the band’s more diverse musical backdrop. The further he and the band stray from their alt-country roots, the more dynamic and original the music is. And it’s truly a shame that a group finally on the cusp of creating something memorable disbanded before they could reap the rewards. Pneumonia is Whiskeytown’s best and most consistent collection of songs, and it hints that had they stayed together, they might have lived up to all the expectations.

Ultimately, the alt-country movement and its binding sense of community may have run out of momentum, but certain elements of the music — especially the value it placed on intelligent, meaningful songcraft — still thrive in the works of artists like the Old 97’s and Joe Henry.

In other words, alt-country is dead. Long live alt-country.