The Stooges: Getting into the mix– three more that fans want raw (Boston Phoenix, 8/24/10)

Raw Power is viewed by many as one of the all-time great rock albums — but its hyper-trebly, David Bowie–mixed brittleness has been almost as infamous as the musical mayhem on the wax. At first, the band self-produced the record. James Williamson explains, “Our management was busy breaking David Bowie in America, they weren’t paying any attention to us. So we got to make the album without any adult supervision. But they finally heard it and said, ‘This isn’t gonna fly,’ so they brought in their golden boy in hopes to salvage it. Bowie came over to LA on some days off from his US tour and did it — and you know, I have to say, he really took a bizarre approach to the mix.”

The ensuing decades saw the album’s legend grow, with an endless parade of bootlegs purporting to offer the “real” mix before Ziggy Stardust had got his bass-stifling hands on it. In 1997, Sony reissued a “definitive” version overseen by Pop himself, an overblown monster that hit the ceiling of digital distortion. Fans who’d lived with the Bowie mix and their bootlegs for decades were irate. Williamson and Ron Asheton were both openly critical.

This year’s remaster of the Bowie mix puts a sheen on the original vinyl release — but for most fans, agreeing to disagree is just part of loving Raw Power. “If it was up to me,” says Williamson, “I’d just release all the tracks and let whoever buys the album mix it for themselves. I mean, why are we arguing about this for 30 years?” Amen, James — but aren’t arguments part and parcel of being an obsessive rock fan? With that in mind, let’s look at three more of rock’s most controversial mixing jobs:

THE BEATLES | LET IT BE [1970] | Near the end of their seven-year dynasty, the Beatles’ January 1969 attempt at a return-to-roots album flamed out in confusion and miles of magnetic tape. Wall-of-sound producer Phil Spector fashioned the spaghetti into a hit album, but with tacked-on string sections and other cheesy touches that rubbed fans the wrong way for decades — until a Spector-less version of the album, Let It Be . . . Naked, was released in 2003, sans cheese.

METALLICA | . . . AND JUSTICE FOR ALL [1988] | Metallica rebounded from the death of bassist Cliff Burton with this double-platter breakthrough album thanks to the crossover hit “One.” But amid the MTV adulation, many fans noticed a distinct lack of bass guitar. Perhaps the band were just hazing new member Jason Newstead, but whatever the cause, fans still wonder whether there isn’t some kind of alternate mix that includes an audible low end.

NIRVANA | IN UTERO [1993] | Kurt Cobain and company’s choice of Steve Albini to record what would be their final studio album seemed a logical choice, especially with Cobain wanting to avoid a repeat of the grunge-o-matic sheen that Butch Vig had left on their previous multi-platinum long-player. But the tracks the band brought back from their Minnesota sojourn did not please the label overlords. As Cobain put it, “The grown-ups don’t like it.” Nirvana eventually remixed a few tracks after Geffen’s consternation crumbled their resolve.

Yearend: 2008 Top Ten Albums (Boston Phoenix, 12/31/08)

1. Metallica | Death Magnetic [Warner Bros.]
2. M83 | Saturdays = Youth [Mute]
3. TIE: Ladyhawke | S/T [Modular] ; Lady Gaga | The Fame [Interscope]
4. T.I. | Paper Trail | [Grand Hustle/Atlantic]
5. CSS | Donkey [Sub Pop]
6. 3-WAY TIE: The Sword | Gods Of The Earth [Kemado]; Witch | Paralyzed [Tee Pee];  Torche |  Meanderthal [Hydra Head]
7. RTX | JJ Got Live Ratx [Drag City]
8. Judas Priest | Nostradamus
9. TIE: Boris | Smile [Southern Lord]; Gang Gang Dance | Saint Dymphna [The Social Registry]
10. Mercury Rev | Snowflake Midnight [Yep Roc]

See everyone else’s Top Tens here:

Year in National Pop: New attitudes (Boston Phoenix, 12/22/08)

HE’S GOT IT! Like T.I.’s “Whatever You Like,” Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” was a straightforward ode to being rich and getting laid.

Music is a drug, as they say, distorting perception and shaping reality into æsthetically appropriate patterns and themes. In heady times like these, it can be a real trip to look back through the past year and see what our musical idols were telling us about ourselves all along — whether showing us our most craven inner id, or echoing the cynicism that grows in our hearts as we react to the madness around us. As MGMT said in one of the most beguilingly mind-bending pop moments on record this year, “We’re fated to pretend.”

The interface between reality and fantasy is almost always a war zone in contemporary rap, but this year it felt as if the fantasy were ready to snap. Rap’s sonic frontier shifted radically, as the legal hazards of sampling meant that most rappers had to get by with synths and beatboxes. Whereas Kanye West’s new digital sobfest 808s and Heartbreak faltered, other rappers were able to make spare production work. “It ain’t frontin’ if you got it” is a line uttered in two Top 10 rap tunes this year: Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” and T.I.’s “Whatever You Like,” both straightforward odes to being rich and getting laid, in that order. T.I.’s song is particularly epic and seductive, if only because its brazen fantasy is so tawdry and false: when he offers to “gas up the jet tonight and you can go wherever you like,” he seems to forget not only the then-$4-a-gallon gas tariff but also his own ankle-cuffed house arrest.

“Whatever You Like” was eventually dethroned from the #1 spot on the Billboard “Hot 100″ by another T.I. smash, his duet with Rihanna, “Live Your Life,” a song equally obsessed with the twin goals of reaching for the stars and making that paper, with, at the beginning, T.I.’s somewhat contradictory spoken exhortation to “stop lookin’ at what you ain’t got and start bein’ thankful for what you do got.” T.I.’s success here hinges on his understanding that the goal of a pop song is to put the zeitgeist in a blender and hit “puree.” “Live Your Life” does that with gusto — did I mention that it’s dedicated to “all my soldiers over there in Iraq”? Of course, it doesn’t really matter what you’re singing or rapping about if you have Rihanna. Which may explain why “Live Your Life” was one of three #1 hits Rihanna had in a year where she didn’t even put an album out. The 20-year-old Barbadian is the bellwether of a trend in superdivas where the ability to get a tell-tale sing-along hook on the radio is more crucial than the ability to display a multi-octave voice or manufacture lyrical introspect.

If there was one constant in 2008′s pop sweepstakes, it was the rapid ascent of female solo artists willing to toe the line between pop diva and electroclash queen. The ubiquity in 2007 of Daft Punk and Justice seems to have emboldened a new generation of producers to harshen up the beats of dance pop and add some grit to tween pop. How else explain the jolting dance rock of, say, Miley Cyrus’s “Fly on the Wall” (on the otherwise turgid Breakout), or Britney Spears’s über-catchy “Womanizer”? The thing about diva pop is that as pop music (somehow) becomes more flagrantly sexual, the hand tips toward female artists who know how to channel that sexual energy into a dance vibe. Which means that even an ode to being cheated on (like “Womanizer”) or a diatribe against an ex who couldn’t commit (like Beyonce’s tribal detonator “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”) can be a banger if there’s enough sass and ‘tude thrown in.

This new attitude also opened the door to newcomers (with the right producers). I was particularly impressed with a number of production jobs by French electro-shocker Space Cowboy, who worked magic for ennui-laden British tart Nadia Oh (with her offhandedly slut-tastic “My Egyptian Lover” off her Hot Like Wow album) and especially rising star Lady GaGa (whose album title The Fame could be prophetic if enough people hear glam-slam-thank-you-ma’am smashes-in-waiting like “Starstruck,” “Just Dance,” and “Poker Face”). Of course, the story of the year in terms of sassy chicks being provocative is Katy Perry, who turned her back on her strict religious background just long enough to pen her ode to making out with another girl as long as her boyfriend doesn’t mind, “I Kissed a Girl.”

Meanwhile, the more accessible acts of the underground seemed intent on reanimating the corpse of the ’80s. M83′s lauded Saturdays = Youth whooshed listeners back to their respective proms with its John-Hughes-soundtrack-that-never-was. New Zealand oddball Pip Brown a/k/a Ladyhawke put together a stunning pastiche of invented ’80s-isms, creating anthemic dance pop that rocks hard and mopes harder — like Bananarama fronting Depeche Mode. And São Paulo players CSS continued to party all over the world on Donkey, with their increasingly sophisticated synth/guitar rock/pop carried aloft by lead singer Lovefoxxx’s mix of innocent ineptitude and charming viciousness. Brooklyn’s Gang Gang Dance departed from their formless morass of wordless space jams to merge sparkling washes, weightless euphoria, worldbeat-inflected gaiety, and sex-starved dance-floor whump on Saint Dymphna.

When pop music is at its giddiest, heavy metal can be depended on to bum everyone back down to earth, and the new Metallica record would do just that if it weren’t so thrilling to hear these dudes defiantly back in the saddle again. Sounding like the by-product of a series of stern talkings-to, Death Magnetic sees Hetfield, Ulrich, and company return to the Black Forest guitar romanticism so painfully missing from the ugly-sounding records they’ve pumped out over the past two decades. If they’re still coming at you with songs about suicide, war, depression, and anger, at least they do so within the confines of tightly arranged jams and unbelievably gratifying waves of rockitude. But whereas Metallica got real, the rest of the metal world continued to get more unreal.  Amon Amarth and The Sword continued in the vein of 2007′s top metallers, High on Fire and Mastodon, constructing elaborate mythologies to deepen their prog-metal labyrinths. The result is accomplished stoner thrash with song titles you can barely pronounce (e.g., the Sword’s axis-shifting single from ’08′s Gods of the Earth, “Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzepherians”).

And whereas metal has become more knotted and complex, so much of what used to be called “indie rock” has become contemplative. The patience required of metal fans in recent years to make it through tedious works by Sunn O))) and Earth has now beset the not-quite-rock world. Plodding gorgeousness permeated new works by indie luminaries Beach House, Portishead, and The Bug, to name a few. Meanwhile, the runaway success this year of newcomers Fleet Foxes — with their winsomely anachronistic CSNY-meets-Appalachia — was a resounding victory for the twin indie virtues of preciousness and perceived authenticity. But I was most impressed with the back-to-nature lushness of Mercury Rev’s Snowflake Midnight, wherein the band used programmed beats and a myopic obsession with the natural world to shed their previously annoying Flaming Lips–isms and discover an X’d-out bliss. It’s like catharsis on tape.

Metallica: Death Magnetic (Boston Phoenix, 9/10/08)

It’s hard to say who detests Metallica more: the post–“Black Album”/post-therapy bandmembers themselves (if their lyrics are to be believed), or their fans, whose twisted hate of their idols could be said to exceed the self-hate of the men in black. Since Metallica’s albums tend to be spaced apart by half a decade, each new record has been, for the faithful, a frustrating game of Lucy-pulling-the-football-away-from-Charlie-Brown: first the agony-inducing bummer that was the double dose of Load and ReLoad, then the quizzical ugliness of group-therapy by-product St. Anger. Well, listening to this new Rick Rubin–produced record in all its glory, I can only say, “Huzzah!” (or rather, “Huzzah-ahhh!”, as James Hetfield might put it). First and foremost: anyone who saw the Some Kind of Monster documentary and remembers the debate on whether there should be guitar solos will be pleased to hear that Mssrs. Hammett and Hetfield finally decided to change their votes to “yes”: the lead break that comes in at 5:33 of “The Unforgiven III” might be the most face-melting moment in the Metallica discography. Of special note is the 10-minute instrumental “Suicide and Redemption”: listening to it, you almost forget that there are supposed to be words in rock songs, since it’s filled with building riffs, escalating volleys of tension and release, and moments of frantic drum abandon from Lars Ulrich that should do a lot to redeem his standing in Modern Drummer’s Drummer of the Year polls. In summation: I give this one FOUR STARZ-AHH!!

The Sword: Throwing Dice, Taking Names (Boston Phoenix, 5/12/08)

HEADY METAL: If anyone can show Metallica how to re-bottle their lightning, the Sword can.

Let’s say your band are named the Sword, your albums have titles like Age of Winters and Gods of the Earth, and your latest single is “Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzephyrians.” Would these count as hazardous levels of irony?

“There’s no irony at all!” says drummer Trivett Wingo. And he’s serious, or at least as serious as Bruce Dickinson or Robert Plant or any of metal’s storied mythmakers has been. Although this Austin quartet have existed as the Sword only since 2003, they’ve shot to a lofty position in the metal hierarchy by sticking to the old-fashioned way of doing things: presenting, with a poker face, a 20-sided fret-burning obsession with Fantasy that has even the most wizened Gygaxians consulting their Monster Manuals.

“People spend far too much time thinking about music rather than actually experiencing it,” laments Wingo. “It’s supposed to be a ritualistic counter-cerebral thing, like when you’re in the fucking cosmic dance with Shiva, fucking rocking out to some Zeppelin jams, you know what I’m saying?”

It would seem that Lars Ulrich does. “Lars is pretty much obsessed with the Sword, and he mentioned that Metallica had been listening to a fair amount of us when they were writing [their forthcoming Rick Rubin–produced LP], so I’m interested in seeing if it has any kind of Sword inspiration on it. I wouldn’t be too surprised.”

Bold words for someone so new on the scene — but if it takes an army of handlers to instruct a middle-aged Metallica on how to rebottle the lightning they rode in on 20 years ago, the Sword have that shit covered. Which is probably why they’re opening for Metallica across Eastern Europe this summer.

A cursory listen to Gods of the Earth might support Wingo’s casual assertion that the Sword’s æsthetic is “confined to the past” — if “the past” refers to the rehearsals for Master of Puppets. Much as with Master, multiple tunes begin with acoustic arpeggios that give way to chugging bombast, with lengthy excursions into gorgeously morose twin-guitar Black Forest Old World classicism. And echoing the Lord of the Rings shout-outs in Zep’s “Ramble On” and Iron Maiden’s odes to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” the Sword indulge themselves in literary reference: “Beyond the Black River” and “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” are named after and themed on short stories by Conan creator and author Robert E. Howard; “To Take the Black” is from author George R.R. Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s enough to inspire young metalheads to visit a library. Well, almost.

How does this fit in with what’s going on now in underground metal? And how does it fit in with an increasingly historically conscious metal fanbase, one that can catch references, sniff out irony, and peg influences?

“We try to stay away from a lot of the shit that’s going on out there right now. As far as our influences, what’s informing our music, we don’t pay any attention to chronology. I’m a huge Zeppelin fan, but who isn’t? Does that make my taste antiquated? People seem hyper-obsessed with chronology in metal. If I sit down with a guitar and play some folk songs, people won’t go, ‘Oh man, what’s this Bob Dylan bullshit, what do you think this is, the ’60s?’ No, they’d go, ‘Oh, that’s folk,’ because it’s the form and structure of folk music. But if you come along and play really heavy hard-edged rock music, and people say, ‘Oh, it’s Black Sabbath ripoff music,’ I say, ‘Well, that’s heavy metal.’ ”

Amen to that.

THE SWORD + TORCHE + STINKING LIZAVETA + NEVER GOT CAUGHT | Middle East downstairs, 480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | May 18 | 617.864.EAST