Day 8: Van Weezer

Back in the fall of 2019, I was driving somewhere and a song I didn’t recognize came on the radio. It seemed odd I wouldn’t recognize it, since it had a dated 80s hard rock guitar-driven pop melody sound that was very similar to a lot of the music I grew up with through junior high and high school. The song turned out to be “The End of the Game,” a newly-released song by Weezer. I don’t know how much I’ve ever considered myself a Weezer fan, even if I liked a number of their songs and had a couple of their albums in my music library. I wouldn’t go see them live if they were headlining their own show, but if they were touring as part of a package deal with some other bands, then yeah, they might be fun to see.

I liked this new song quite a bit. I was based around the kind of guitar hero histrionics I was drawn to growing up, but was all presented in a way where you couldn’t really tell if the band was going for that sound legitimately or in some kind of sarcastic hipster way, which is kind of Weezer’s wheelhouse for all of their music to start with. 

It wasn’t long until I saw they had a new album on the way. They were calling it “Van Weezer,” which, when paired with the sound of the new song, seemed like a direct reference to Van Halen. Weezer trying to put together a Van Halen era album was intriguing, but the release date was far off in the future. This was still fall of 2019, and the album wasn’t scheduled for release until May of 2020. I thought, okay, kind of way into the future there, but it’s not like I’m eight years old and a new Weezer album is my equivalent of Christmas morning. Hopefully it will come out with a good “drive with the windows down” summertime sound and that will be that. 

Then I remember getting to May of 2020, looking up the album again to see exactly what date it was coming out, and saw it had been pushed back to May of 2021. We were three months into the pandemic then so things like this happening were becoming too familiar, but it was still perplexing: Most music is either bought online, downloaded, or streamed, so they couldn’t be delaying it because stores were closing down. The only thing I could think of was their tour had been cancelled, and releasing a new album at least a year before they’d be able to support it on the road wasn’t optimal. I thought that was a stupid reason if I was right; after all, there are lots of musical acts that tour without new albums, and it made more sense to give the fans some new music while they waited for the tour. I’m not one of Weezer’s touring consultants though, so things happened as they did and I settled back to wait for another entire year. It was beginning to feel like this album would have to be the Holy Grail of 80s tribute rock performed by a 90s band struggling for relevance or it would be a sour disappointment. 

Fast forward a year. The album came out yesterday. 

First off, it’s no grail, holy or otherwise. It still absolutely sounds like Weezer, with the same awkwardly-constructed lyrics, vague Beach Boys quality of the backing harmonies, and the somewhat incongruous loud guitars. In a lot of ways, it sounds like an up and coming band tried hard to emulate Cheap Trick, and put together an album that wasn’t as consistent as the one the real Cheap Trick released themselves in April. It does have an old-school hard rock flavor that I appreciate, which will probably keep it in rotation a little longer than a typical Weezer album might have lasted, including one song that blatantly builds itself around the riff to Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” to the degree they could have just sampled it.

I guess in the end I expected more and hoped for and got a little less than I imagined. It’s an amusing album, but there aren’t many songs on it that stand out and announce themselves as potential favorites. I’ve even wondered a little if I would have liked it more had it been released on it’s original date a year ago. I guess if I was a Weezer megafan I probably would have liked it more. As a classic rock fan, I probably like it more than I may have otherwise. I suppose the biggest thing about it now is that as a music fan, at least my patience has finally been rewarded. I don’t have to speculate anymore what it will be like, and I can appreciate the things I like about it the most. 

Album of the Week: A Thousand Suns

I have somewhere in the ballpark of 20,000 songs in my music library, which translates to just shy of 2,000 albums. Earlier this year I wrote a blog post in which I came up with the definitive list of my 10 favorite albums:

4 - “A Thousand Suns” by Linkin Park. Percussive, aggressive electronic post-millennial rock. A masterpiece of the genre.

That’s #4. Out of about 2,000.

I wouldn’t call “A Thousand Suns” a true concept album in the sense of having characters and a plot line linking the songs together, but it’s definitely the kind of thematic work that is best appreciated as an entire continuous piece instead of a collection of individual songs. It was a huge departure for a band widely seen as one of the originators of the rap-metal genre. For this album, the metal side of the music had been downplayed in favor of a broader, heavily electronic sonic palette. It was hugely divisive throughout Linkin Park fandom when it came out, as either being a groundbreaking work or too much of a departure. 

I firmly came down on the groundbreaking side.

The two frontmen of the band, Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda, had always been an incredible vocal tandem, whether they were alternating between singing and rapping or melodically complementing each other. Mike has always been the kind of frightfully gifted artist that forces people to look past the stigma of someone playing loud music in a rock band not having any talent. Chester’s vocal range could go all the way from melodic and lullaby-gentle to a scream of pure rage that would hurt your throat just to hear. 

For me, favorite songs or albums, the real favorites that resonate in the core of my being, usually aren’t the ones I learn to love after months or years, but instead connect with me almost right away. From the beginning I could tell “A Thousand Suns” would be something different. I actually wrote a very short blog post about my reaction on the day it came out:

It was release day for Linkin Park's new album "A Thousand Suns." I downloaded it before going to school this morning, and have played through it twice now.

At the risk of falling into cliché territory, it's really next-level stuff for them. Not so much metal, more industrial but still melodic, and very dark and moody. 

I can barely wait for the next time I feel depressed so I can put it on and really enjoy it in the way it seems to have been intended.

In another short post five months later, I added this: 

Being there now I can honestly say...wow.

This was in the wake of my dog dying. Yeah, I was sad about that, but in retrospect losing the dog and the dark months that followed were ultimately less about losing him and more about other feelings being triggered. If you were around in those days and saw what I was going through and were concerned about how badly I was hurting…well, that concern was not misplaced.

Everyone has pain. Despite the facades we put forth on social media, or the smiles we use in real life to hide it, or the mindless, reflexive way we answer the questions “How are you?” or “How have you been?” with “Fine,” we all have something we keep hidden. The lucky ones, the people closest to being actually happy, are either fortunate enough to have less pain than most, or they’ve just found ways to manage their hurt.

We aren’t all there, though. Some of us need help. But help isn’t always going to take the same form. Sometimes we need something external to help articulate the pain, to translate what we feel. To show us we aren’t the only ones struggling. We need something that will give us a place to retreat while we heal that will also provide us with the extra strength needed to push our way out of whatever we’re enduring.

When you’re touched by the emotion an artist implants into their work, it stays with you. You feel connected to the artist that brought that into the world, since you know that, at some level, they understand what you’re going through. 

After decades of being a fan, I finally saw Linkin Park perform live at the Minnesota State Fair a few years ago, while they were on tour to support their album “The Hunting Party.” It was a great outdoor show. A band I was barely aware of, AFI, opened, and played a few songs I liked from the album of theirs I had downloaded in preparation of the show. 30 Seconds to Mars played in the second spot. Jared Leto was a great frontman and they put on an energetic show; their album “This is War” is another favorite of mine, and I enjoyed hearing so many songs from it.

Linkin Park came out just as darkness was beginning to settle. It was a musically tight show with plenty of vocal superpowers on display from Chester and Mike. The lasting image that has stuck with me all this time has been from a vocal break during their performance of “Final Masquerade,” when Chester was spinning around on the stage, arms out, eyes closed, retreating into his music, maybe hiding from whatever pain brought on his suicide this past week.

Hopefully he was finding a moment of safety in the beauty and power of his song from whatever the pain was that plagued him. It's horrible to think that one of the people who had helped pull so many millions of people through their own hard times couldn't find a way to escape his own.

Album of the Week: Hi Infidelity

When I was in seventh grade, REO Speedwagon’s “Hi Infidelity” was the biggest album in the world. It stayed at number one on the Billboard album chart for four consecutive record-setting months, according to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, which I listened to regularly back then. 

In a way, “Hi Infidelity” was one of the templates followed by most artists who released albums during the 1980s. It would not be inaccurate to say it was the album that gave birth, for better or for worse, to the power ballad. Songs like “Keep on Lovin’ You” and “Take it on the Run” were appreciated both because they were love songs, but also because they still rocked. 

The band played with a power and ferocity that showed off their long career of playing on the road. Neal Doughty, the main keyboardist, hammered away at his piano and synthesizer solos with a speed me and my three years of piano lessons couldn’t comprehend. Guitarist Gary Richrath held the songs together with glittery melodies, explosive solos, and hammering acoustic strumming in the background throughout.

The only standard of cool that mattered in the junior high hallways was whether or not you had the REO Speedwagon tour shirt. Not the black concert t-shirt but the classic 80s concert jersey, with the tour design on a white background and black sleeves. Even the heavy metal burn-outs who populated my school bus had the band's logo sketched on the homemade grocery bag book covers of their school textbooks. I remember hearing about how the kids in choir wanted to use “Keep on Lovin’ You” in some performance, but the choir teacher shot it down because of something to do with inappropriate lyrics. To this day I don’t remember what it was that was so awful, but I think a decision like that stands as a testament to a more innocent time, when it wasn’t as necessary to release separate versions of albums with both clean and explicit lyrics. 

My favorite song on the album was, and still is, the opening track, “Don’t Let Him Go.” It was supposedly a single toward the end of the album cycle, but I don’t remember hearing it on the radio until the band had crossed into classic rock territory. “Don’t Let Him Go” was all power and energy, and one of the best album openers I can think of. The off-beat cymbal splash you hear in the drum riff was something I tried duplicating many times in my bedroom, using my seventh grade band drumsticks, my practice pad, and a few of my dad’s hardcover spy novels borrowed from the living room to complete my imaginary drum set. I never quite felt like I mastered it. 

I was still a few years away from my first real rock concert so I couldn’t go to the show, but I did get the LP, then recorded it onto a blank cassette so I could listen to it in my bedroom through the headphones and not irritate my parents. It wasn’t a very long album, so I was able to squeeze it onto one of the mythical 120 minute length blank tapes, where it shared space with at least two of my other junior high touchstones: “Foreigner 4” (we never called it “4,” it was always “Foreigner 4”), Styx’s “Paradise Theater,” Journey’s “Escape,” and Billy Squier’s “Don’t Say No.” Combined, those albums served as an early 80s hard rock starter kit/tutorial for an emerging music fan only months out of Catholic elementary school. They all stayed in heavy rotation on my cassette player (and loudly on the turntable when our parents weren't home) for at least eighteen months, until “Pyromania” was released and Def Leppard conquered the world. 

I don’t know if music is like this anymore. I think it would be a challenge for anyone to name more than a small handful of bands who would release albums now that were essentially collections of love songs, most of which were happy, and all performed with undeniable musical talent. I don’t know of current artists that bridge genre so thoroughly the way this album did. If that’s something we’ve culturally lost, it’s really a shame.

Album of the Week: Magic

Ten years ago this fall Bruce Springsteen released “Magic,” the first album he had put out with the E Street Band at full force since 1984. Barack Obama’s election was a year away and a lot of America was still coming to terms with how the world and the country had changed during the two terms of George W. Bush. While “Magic” is a very driven rock album, it’s also a pointed criticism of the actions and consequences of the Bush administration. It’s arguably Bruce’s most political album to date. 

Sadly, the idea of criticizing George W. Bush as misguided and incompetent seems almost quaint now. To be fair, most of the album doesn’t really go after the man himself, but tells the stories of characters, some of them returning veterans, experiencing the confusion and disillusionment of defending a country and a set of ideals that don’t seem to follow through as expected. The title track is the only song addressing this theme directly, or as directly as you can through metaphor, bringing forth a thinly-veiled attack on the politics of distraction that are at least as present now as they were ten years ago: “Trust none of what you hear, less of what you see / This is what we’ll be.”

Even with all of that, I still think of it as a summertime album, in the most positive of ways. In fact, the first time I got behind the wheel of my car to drive anywhere after my final work day of the school year, “Magic” was the album I played. It seems to creep back into the rotation for awhile at the beginning of each summer. 

The songs, regardless of the stories they tell, boil down to relationships. Much of the music follows a recognizable template used in many of Bruce’s songs, in which he will contrast the joyful bounce of a rock-and-roll party anthem with depressing, and even nihilistic, lyrics. I’ve always been able to take in this album on two levels: thinking about the political statement, and enjoying the musical tone: the storm warning siren saxophone solo by the late, great Clarence Clemons in the middle of “Radio Nowhere;” the organ part from “Living in the Future” that echoes right out of half the songs on “The River” album from 1981; the self-assured strut of “You’ll Be Coming Down;” the mid tempo warm-weather carnival romance of “Girls in Their Summer Clothes.”

Like most of Bruce’s albums — and, let’s face the facts, like most albums period — there are a few songs here that don’t carry their weight. That’s okay, though. When you take an album as a continuous piece of music instead of just a collection of songs, even the weaker moments play their roles in contributing to the overall narrative. There are three or four songs here that I don’t think I’ve ever included on any derivation of a “Best Of Bruce” playlist, but when I listen to the whole album all the way through, they’re just as essential as any of my favorites. 

Like I said eariler, “Magic” came out in the fall of 2007, which, if memory serves, was within a month of when I sold my town home and bought my house, which serendipitously happened about three weeks before the housing market went underwater. Bruce and the E Street Band toured behind the album, and came to St. Paul sometime later that spring — I’m thinking March, but don’t quote me on that. My cousin John came up to the Cities and stayed with me so we could see the show. We’d bought four tickets, and the other two went to my sister Jenny and the guy she was dating, David. I don’t have the timeline locked down on this, but I think I’d already met David for the first time by then, a few months earlier at Thanksgiving. Either way I hadn’t spent much time with him before the concert, so it turned out to be another chance to get to know him better. 

A few years down the road and he became my brother-in-law. Since he showed himself early on to be the kind of guy who would bring my sister to a Springsteen concert, he scored some good points with me.

It was not the last Springsteen concert we both attended. 

Album of the Week: Celebration Rock

I haven’t known a life without summer vacation since 1973. After having been a regular part of life for so long, my summers have a feel: Freedom, openness. An absence of structure, an abundance of possibility. 

Summer starts incrementally for me: Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial beginning, since it has the first day off I’ve had in about two months. June first is when the weather nerds on TV banter about Meteorological Summer to remind everyone they’ve received an education and can do more than dress up and smile. For my corner of the world, the first Friday in June ushers in another level summer when we have Track and Field Day at school, signaling to everyone that the academic year is almost over. Next Thursday will be the last day of school for the kids, then Friday is the last for the teachers. After that summer has basically arrived. Because seriously, other than the people in charge of setting text in the calendar factory, who considers June 20 to be part of spring?

With all the time and opportunity and warm weather, summer quickly becomes a season filled with celebrations, planned and spontaneous, genuine and accidental. One of the albums that has become a standard summertime soundtrack for me is the appropriately named “Celebration Rock” by the Canadian duo Japandroids. The band released a new album this past winter, “Near to the Wild Heart of Life.” It’s more mature and subdued, and probably my favorite album of 2017 so far. I’ve had more time to spend with “Celebration Rock” though, so it would probably get my nod as the favored of the two.

The album consists of fast, loud, pounding anthems ideal for the summer, and perfect for summer driving. Every song sounds almost exactly the same, which is usually a negative, but in this case makes the songs seem more like separate movements in one thematic piece of music. They're all centered around barely contained chaos, noise, and energy. Lyrics like “We yell like hell to the heavens” are less about being statements of rebellion as they are of ferocious joy. Some of the song titles make strong enough declarations of this on their own: “Fire’s Highway;” “Adrenaline Nightshift;” “Continuous Thunder. The guitars and the drums throughout the album seem to be in competition to be louder and faster than each other without losing control, while the backing vocal harmonies sound like a garage full of friends trying to annoy the neighbors late at night on a summer weekend.

The first and the last sounds you hear on the album are the popping explosions of distant fireworks. My house is circled by four different Minneapolis suburbs, none of which is more than three miles away from me. Because of this, I hear fireworks going off almost weekly from some summertime festival or celebration. More often than not I can follow the sound if I step outside at night, and even see quick flashes of color erupting just above the distant horizon. With my last benchmark of summer only days away, I’m looking forward to getting back to those nights and those celebrations, and having this album playing in the car for some of those long summer drives.

Album of the Week: Neon Future 1

One late night not so long ago I was driving through St. Paul with a car filled with women (something that probably doesn't happen as often as you might think). We were listening to the modern alternative radio station here in the Cities, which, it seems, plays party music on Fridays around midnight. Since we were all engaged in meaningful conversation (like the picture of this Icelandic neo-blues singer the women couldn't stop looking at) I suddenly realized there was something coming through my car speakers that I didn't recognize. It was this boring, repetitive beat without any discernible melody. 

"What the hell is that?" I remember saying out loud.

One of the women in the car, the one riding shotgun, said, "Um, that's dance music.”

I reflexively changed the station before I even realized I was doing it. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would listen to dance music in a car so I couldn't see a reason for it to even be on the radio. Of course, it didn’t occur to me that not everyone listens to the radio exclusively in their car as I do, and some people might actually listen to it at home or in some other setting more conducive to dancing than driving north on 35E in the dark. 

Earlier in the month, the same woman trying to school me about dance music challenged me to write about it this May when I posted I was planning to buy a new album based on someone else’s recommendation that would be a little outside of my norm, and write about it. Since I didn’t have any dance music in the library, I figured it couldn’t hurt. 

That turned out to be wrong, though — I actually DID have one album of dance music that I’d forgotten about. I’m referring to the album “Recharged” by Linkin Park, which is a collection of dance remixes of the songs from their “Living Things” album. I’d never listened to it very much, even though I’m a big fan of the band. Using that as my dance music sample felt like cheating though since I already had it and it was more of a rock band temporarily deviating into dance instead of a true dance music act, so instead I did a little research and went with “Neon Future I,” a semi-recent release from Steve Aoki. I’d heard of him from an interview he did on one of my favorite podcasts. He seemed like a reasonably thoughtful and normal guy, so I figured he’d be as good as anyone for a dance music introduction.

I’ve played through it a few times now, and I don’t hate it. He seems to be mostly about heavy percussion sounds and layers of triumphant-sounding keyboards. I couldn’t even tell if any real drums were being used; I suspect they weren’t, but that was okay. Dance music doesn’t seem to be as much about instrumental virtuosity as it is about constructing and programming a piece of music for a very specific purpose, almost as an instrumental narrative, which I’ll admit is a skill set all its own. Most of the album was upbeat and positive with a wide open sound. I could see why fans of this would be able to stand in a venue, close their eyes, and let the sound fill their head to push everything else out of the way. There could be something reaffirming inside of moving along with this programmed sound, just enjoying life for awhile and being in the moment. That’s the same thing that any music fan is looking for when they go to a show. If people seek that out at a club where they can move around in more space than just the two square feet right in front of the seat they paid for, I can appreciate that. I can see this being an album I’d put on if I just want something to fill the quiet that I wouldn’t have to pay a lot of attention to. That isn’t such a bad thing. 

All the same though, as far as becoming a dance music aficionado goes — I don’t plan on making a Costco run for glow sticks anytime soon.