Then Play On

Artist: Fleetwood Mac
Album: Then Play On
Release Year: 1969
Genres: blues rock, roots rock

1) Coming Your Way; 2) Closing My Eyes; 3) Showbiz Blues; 4) My Dream; 5) Underway; 6) Oh Well; 7) Although the Sun Is Shining; 8) Rattlesnake Shake; 9) Searching for Madge; 10) Fighting for Madge; 11) When You Say; 12) Like Crying Like Dying; 13) Before the Beginning.


Not many people know that Fleetwood Mac's career began in the late Sixties, when they played blues clubs and the like, barely managing to pay the bills. Yeah, the band went through quite a few incarnations, and Then Play On is a snapshot of the first- long before Christy McVie or Lindsey Buckingham came aboard. We're still in the band's blues period here, although in a few songs you can hear the artsy pop element within, struggling to emerge. That ounce of pop tendency, added to nine parts aggressive blues guitar, moaning vocals, and handclaps, makes for a nicely strange listen (even though some of it bores me to death).

I like to pick out the overarching mood of every album, and this one is rather dark. Not doom and gloom per se, but "dusky," as George Starostin puts it. Though the lyrics might sometimes contradict it, there is a general pessimistic feel to the whole thing, as if each song is only a futile afterthought. It's an interesting mood, and I like it. Unfortunately, this is also the era of folksy hippie crap (not that all hippie music was crap), and we get a healthy dose of it on tracks 7 and 11. Seriously, that pseudo-spiritual "la, la, la, laaa lala la" on "When You Say" makes me wanna puke- good thing it's short.

But! On track six we get the real treat, and the centerpiece of the album: the fan favorite "Oh Well." What begins as a bitter, rip-roarin' heavy blues chant suddenly morphs into a mystical, medieval-sounding acoustic piece. The second portion may not go anywhere musically over its six and a half minutes, but I'll be damned if it's not worth every second anyway. Love it! Then you have your straightahead blues numbers, and they're solid, with "Rattlesnake Shake" being my favorite of these. Some people hate the "Madge" jams, but they're downright ferocious, and I like them. I only wish they'd cut out that guy calling "Yaaadz? Yaaaadz?" (no, not "Madge") in the middle. Otherwise, I don't usually mind a band padding an album with stuff like this.

So all in all, a good effort from the early Mac, even though it wouldn't have killed them to break a little more from contemporary conventions. But then again, these guys eventually became a platinum album-writing band, so I guess we can't ask too much. Not two thumbs up, but certainly one.

Villains

Alright, time to try out the new style. No more "good song-bad song," no more rating scale. I'm not the all-knowing deity of musical quality, after all, so I'll settle for just posting my personal thoughts on whichever album appears first on my shuffled playlist. This way I can account for subjectivity instead of perching atop that cursed ivory tower of "high art," and we may focus more on the effect of a given album rather than just the same old "form, fluency, and composition" approach I favored before.


Artist: The Verve Pipe
Album: Villains
Release Year: 1996
Genres: alternative rock, grunge

1) Barely (If at All); 2) Drive You Mild; 3) Villains; 4) Reverend Girl; 5) Cup of Tea; 6) Myself; 7) The Freshmen; 8) Photograph; 9) Ominous Man; 10) Real; 11) Penny Is Poison; 12) Cattle; 13) Veneer.

This was another of the albums I picked up at the pawn shop, and I must say it was one of the best ways I've spent a single dollar. It did take me a few listens to pick up on exactly what makes this album different from the piles of other pseudo-post-grunge albums out there, but it came to me. There is real texture in this one, real evidence of loving craft. Sure, the songs mainly follow the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus format, but there are all these subtle touches that really bring out the different tracks and give the album real depth. There's this constant mood throughout, so the whole thing sounds like standing in the middle of a slow, gray rain...and it's a beautiful thing.

"The Freshmen," the album's big radio hit, does its work well enough. It's pretty and it's painful, and I do like the minimalistic guitar work. I still prefer "Reverend Girl," even though there is little in the style to separate it from its peers. I mean, that slurring repetition of the title in the chorus has been done a million times before, but this time there's the distraught lyrics and a nice piano-driven bridge to make it more believable. "Now my lover smells like rain," Vander-Ark sings, and in that moment, I'd say she certainly does.

It's all about the little breaks from the normal style. How could "Cup of Tea" sustain its roaring chorus without the surreal, poetic lyrics and the little "dig it!" in the middle of each verse? What would make me love the chorus of "Myself" more than the unexpected switch to falsetto in its last iteration? Who would expect the guitar solo in "Drive You Mild" to last as long as it does, or for it to actually accentuate the meandering verse structures before and after? And who the hell would expect a song as traditionally-sung and -structured as "Penny Is Poison" to sound as real as it does? I didn't, and I was pleasantly surprised. These guys know how to write a song- too bad they let mainstream pressure get the better of them down the road.