By Max Hill
Throwback Review: The Clash – London Calling
The best punk rock album of all time is barely a punk rock album at all. As much Bob Marley and The Beatles as it is The Stooges and The Sex Pistols, London Calling manages to say something more subversively political and unabashedly honest about England in the seventies than any straight-forward punk rock outfit, before or afterwards.
Sprawling an astounding 19 tracks, London Calling’s musical diversity is still a revelation. The group co-opts everything from reggae and funk to rockabilly and jazz in order to deliver their snarling — but never sloppy — message. Mick Jones and Joe Strummer, surely punk rock’s McCartney and Lennon, balance their diametrically opposed musical tendencies beautifully, letting the album precariously balance on the verge of total hysteria.
On album highlights like “Lost in the Supermarket” and “Train in Vain”, Jones proves that his comparably delicate and measured vocal style can be just as subversive and insurgent as Strummer’s rebel yell. Even bassist Paul Simonon, the often overlooked beating heart of The Clash, gets his moment in the spotlight on “The Guns of Brixton”, one of the best anti-police anthems of all time. Bobbies beware.
That London Calling manages to come off as so well-balanced, so deliberate, is to underrate just how bravely rebellious its songs are. London Calling is a viciously veracious account of life in London’s merciless seventies underbelly; “Hateful”’s frank portrayal of drug deals and addiction rivals The Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting For the Man”; “Spanish Bombs” brilliantly uses the Spanish Civil War as a metaphor for the political unrest of the time.
The album’s best quality might be that it’s still fun to listen to, despite its weighty subject matter: The Clash manage to say something completely worth saying, something no one else was saying at the time, without lecturing or sermonizing. London Calling is as much a musical masterpiece as it is a masterpiece of social commentary; I dare you to try and find another punk rock album that can boast the same.
Deerhunter – Monomania
Bradford Cox, Deerhunter’s cross-dressing, gaunt frontman, has described Monomania as an avant-garde rock and roll record, and listeners of the band should expect nothing less. The band — whose core is the writing partnership between Cox and lead guitarist Lockett Pundt, the latter’s talent for pop melodies grounding the former’s experimental bent — have built a rewarding musical career in subverting expectations and treading their own path. Monomania is no different in this respect. Shedding any leftover shoegaze tendencies the band had acquired since 2008’s Microcastle, the album feels like a return to the punk-rock inspired sound of Deerhunter’s earlier albums.
The majority of Monomania’s twelve tracks build on a fairly straightforward, tried-and-true guitar, bass and drums skeleton. The limitations of this setup seem to have inspired a completely new musical tone in the band: Cox’s airy tenor has never sounded so acidic and impassioned, and the band behind him has never sounded quite so insistent and loud. The songs seem to draw inspiration from artists like The Rolling Stones and Bo Diddley more than ever before. Monomania is the closest that Deerhunter are likely to get to a straightforward rock and roll record, as though Cox and company are doing their best impressions of the hip-gyrating, sweat-coated rhythm and blues bands of old.
This doesn’t always work as well as it’s intended to. As good as the songs here are — something we’ve come to expect from the band — they lack the diversity that other Deerhunter albums have hinged on. Instead of giving Monomania the singularity and focus the band surely intended, this sameness gives the album a tiring, repetitive quality which keeps it from ascending to the level of most of their previous work. Overall, though, Monomania comes off as an interesting and mostly successful new musical direction for the band, who’ve once again solidified their status as one of the most interesting acts playing today.
Phoenix – Bankrupt!
I’ve tried to put my finger on why Bankrupt!, the latest release from Versailles foursome Phoenix, doesn’t speak to me the way their effortlessly brilliant Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix did. Maybe everyone is asking themselves the same question — with its impenetrably simplistic peach cover and emotionally vacant singles, the group’s much anticipated follow-up to Wolfgang seems like its carbon copy, infused with twice the Euro-trash synths and half the historical references of its predecessor. Bankrupt! even features a sprawling, mostly instrumental mood piece halfway through the album, reminiscent of Wolfgang’s “Love Like a Sunset.”
To be fair, Bankrupt! is a lot of fun to listen to — its synths are warm and tasteful; its choruses are plentiful and suitably catchy. The lead vocalist Thomas Mars’ smooth vocals soar in all the right places. Lead single “Entertainment” is a modern-day “Hong Kong Garden”, and “Drakkar Noir” joyously apes 70s funk. The album has its high points, and it’s light on the low ones: there’s a consistent string of likeable tracks from start to finish, and it rarely seems to drag or overstay its welcome.
Bankrupt! is a perfectly pleasant, well-made pop album, and it’s sure to soundtrack many a summer and inspire more than a few sunbathed make-out sessions. But it’s forgettable and shallow. Wolfgang, on the other hand, hit me right away: I still know every song by heart, whereas I had to listen to Bankrupt! a third time while I wrote this review just to remember what half the songs sound like. With so much incredible, breathtaking music in the world, listening to an album as unremarkable as Bankrupt! feels like time wasted.
