Josh Ritter's "Sermon on the Rocks" coming October 16

Every Josh Ritter album is written with a new voice. It’s rare that an artist changes styles with each album while still maintaining exactly the things that make him unique, but Josh often pulls it off. Sure, the voice he used in his debut self-titled album wasn’t his, it was Bob Dylan’s, but basically since then, there’s been new characters singing to us every couple of years.

Album Review: Blitzen Trapper - "All Across This Land"

It’s hard to say what happened to Blitzen Trapper, because in reality, nothing happened to Blitzen Trapper. They were a topic of discussion at one point, and since then they’ve done nothing but release inventive, ambitious, and at-times wonderful albums at a near prolific rate (2012 was the first year we didn’t get new tracks from the band since 2006). Typically bands that explore as many different sounds as Eric Earley and his Oregon-based quintet have, from space cowboy punk music to psychedelic folk to country rap, to a full-album live cover of Neil Young’s Harvest, get more critical doting forced upon them. 

One at a Time - "The Pretender" (1976) by Jackson Browne

What is One at a Time? Check out the introduction here.

#391 "The Pretender" (1976) by Jackson Browne

Since I went to see Jackson Browne last night at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, NJ, the man is on my mind, so today I’m going to cover The Pretender, from 1976, listed at #391 on Rolling Stone’s list.

One at a Time: "Something Else By The Kinks" (1972) by The Kinks

What is One at a Time? Check out the introduction here.

#288 "Something Else By The Kinks" (1972) by The Kinks

Well, my old computer broke, and I lost most of what I had written, but I'm finally starting to catch up.

When I left off, I had slowly chugged through 23 of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums, with The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan as my number one, and The Slim Shady LP as my number twenty-three. Because I'm so far behind, I'm gonna start with a couple of albums that I know well enough to write about without listening to them for a week straight.

Josh Ritter - Getting Ready to Get Down

Fans of Josh Ritter know how clever he can be, whether he’s singing about bones or orbitals, dogs or empty hearts or love in nuclear war. Perhaps he is at his best when discussing complex, polarizing topics like religion in “Thin Blue Flame,” or “Galahad.” But Ritter clearly outdoes himself with his latest single “Getting Ready to Get Down.”

Often faith is in the background, or at least not always explicitly stated up front. But now, “Get Down,” off his upcoming album “Sermon on the Rocks,” promises to be something of a takedown of religion and Christian doctrine.

The lyrics are a mouthful, and they are tight. If you don’t pay attention you might get overwhelmed, and good luck trying to keep up out loud. There is no subtlety here, with lines like “What kind of God would ever keep a girl from getting what she needs?” What she needs is sexual fulfillment, and Ritter has no qualms about stating it out in the open.

The song is disdainful of the country-clubbers and the uppity ‘ladies of the auxiliary’ who believe the protagonist – a woman who was sent off to Bible school to try to teach her chastity – is possessed by the devil and consumed by sin, for having learned about sex.

Ritter throws it all out there, laughing at the uber-conservatives who believe that “to really be a saint you’ve got to really be a virgin/Dry as a page on a King James version.” Countering that are his own beliefs, that if you want to be a good person, try being a “strength to the weak…a joy to the joyful,” and “give your love freely.

The final message is that no one can tell you who you should be, and “When you get damned in the popular opinion/It’s just another damn of the damns not given.”

If the rest of the album is along the same lines of old-school Bible bashing, then it’ll be something to look forward to.

Album Review: "All Your Favorite Bands" by Dawes

Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes

For me, love for a new Dawes album isn’t always at first sight. I can never put on their record and listen to it spin a couple times and decide that it’s solid material. I’ve found that, with all four of the band’s albums under their current name, it has been a slow build to a feeling of intensity about their work. It’s like how most serious relationships aren’t founded on a sexy haircut or a witty line; it takes time and effort, but it builds into something lasting.

            Each first listen to each of their albums has left me thinking wistfully of the previous album, or, in the case of North Hills, wishing every song could be as good as “When My Time Comes.” But something keeps bringing me back, and eventually I get to the point I was at a little while ago, where I flipped through playlists on my iPod and noticed that most queues had seven or eight Dawes songs – and all from different albums. The more I listen, the more I find things I love about each song, the more I come to appreciate what must’ve gone into the making of the album. And that, in my opinion, is the sign of a great piece of work.

"Something More Than Free" by Jason Isbell July 17, 2015

Album Review: "The Desired Effect" by Brandon Flowers

Culture is cyclical. Every so many years, people get nostalgic and start re-creating things from their childhood. We just have to wait around thirty years or so until the people who were too young to do anything but lionize the artists of the time to be the ones creating the art. For instance, sitcom characters of the early 2000s had plenty of references to '70s shows, but more recently we've got shows with explicit mentions of '80s shows like Community's extended riff on who the actual boss of Who's The Boss was, 30 Rock's ridiculous Night Court reunion, or any random Happy Endings episode mentioning anything from The Golden Girls to Three's Company. There's been a rash of filmmakers putting out passion projects that are very reminiscent of E.T./Close Encounters of the Third Kind-era Spielberg, like JJ Abrams' Super 8 and Brad Bird's Tomorrowland. These are the movies that these guys have spent years trying to get to a position of power so that they can make, and they are clearly influenced by spectacle-worshipping films of the '80s. My point is, it seems like it takes about three decades for things to become cool again.

One at a Time: "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1967) by The Beatles

What is One at a Time? Check out the introduction here.

#1 "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1967) by The Beatles

"Sound and Color" by Alabama Shakes coming April 21, 2015

One at a Time: "All Things Must Pass" (1970) by George Harrison

What is One at a Time? Check out the introduction here.

 
#437 "All Things Must Pass" (1970) by George Harrison

Something to Be Said: A Night with the E Street Shuffle

Parker Millsap at Rough Trade (3/31/15), The Bowery Ballroom (4/1/15) and The Sinclair (4/3/15)

Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant has, if nothing else, a very distinct sound. It’s a sound that few – if any – try to emulate, and those who do generally fall far short of their mark. Parker Millsap, however, in opening with “You Gotta Move,” had that tight, strained-yet-smooth sound that Zeppelin fans go wild for. His is the voice that hurls itself over the audience like it hurts the singer, going for that rough, raw, hard-hitting kind of sensibility that perfectly embodies the group.

One at a Time: "Elton John" (1970) by Elton John

What is One at a Time? Check out the introduction here.

#468 "Elton John" (1970) by Elton John

Elton John is a little bit uneven. "Your Song" is a classic, but one that is uneven itself. I mean, the lyrics are pretty basic. "Take Me To the Pilot", "Sixty Years On", "The Greatest Discovery", "The Cage", and "Border Song" are some of my favorite Elton John songs.

One at a Time: "Document" (1987) by REM

What is One at a Time? Check out the introduction here.

#470 "Document" (1987) by REM

For a list with 11 Bob Dylan albums, 10 Beatles and Stones albums, 8 Bruce albums (etc.), I find it to be quite lacking in REM albums. I'm not saying that those acts don't deserve everything that Rolling Stone gives to them (although, c'mon, do they really?), but that for a list that seems to rely very heavily on going back to the same well over and over again, at times including mediocre albums by great artists, why isn't this band one of those, especially when their better-than-mediocre albums aren't even included? REM has a lot of albums that are better than the worst Bruce album, or better than the worst Beatles album. Instead, they have three on the list: "Automatic for the People," "Murmur," and here at #470, 1987's "Document."

"Kintsugi" by Death Cab For Cutie coming March 31

Death Cab For Cutie are those guys who are so indie, so twee, so hipster that they draw scorn simply for existing. They are one of the genre codifiers for our current term indie music; the release their albums on vinyl, CD, and motherfucking cassette tapes; their lead singer was married to Queen of Twee Zooey Deschanel.

And despite all of this, their in-your-face-indieness never bother me the way it has with bands that have followed like Arcade Fire, Kings of Leon, Vampire Weekend, The National, or Daft Punk. I can't fully explain it, but it might be because their music is so much better than all of them, that it's pretty forgivable. They've always seemed less like they were doing it intentionally, and they've gone through a lot of change. Or is it growth?

One at a Time: "Tunnel of Love" (1987) by Bruce Springsteen

What is One at a Time? Check out the introduction here.
 
 #475 "Tunnel of Love" (1987) by Bruce Springsteen

Moving up the list from the bottom, we next come to "Tunnel of Love" by Bruce Springsteen, from 1987.

"Tunnel of Love" is almost like a fork in the road, and Bruce started going in one direction, which is the direction that Rod Stewart took. That road ends up in soft-rock radio-land, where you wear a tuxedo and record Christmas albums and make old ladies happy. Thankfully, "Tunnel" only partially takes that road. Yes, the title track is very synthy, and there's no true rock and roll song on the album, but it still succeeds in many ways.

The Ultimate Setlist: Dawes

What is The Ultimate Setlist? Here's the introduction.

Coming up with your own personal perfect setlist requires an intimate knowledge of the artists body of work, and of their habits on stage. I wanted to make one for Elton John, but I don't think I'm there yet. I could definitely come up with 20-30 songs by him that I know and love, but so much of it is just going to be the 20-30 songs by Elton John that everybody loves. I need to become more acquainted with more of his music to find the oddities and oft-overlooked songs that stand out in my own head in order to write down a unique setlist. Sure, I know his greatest hits, and every song on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Honky Chateau, Madman Across the Water, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, and Empty Sky, but there's just so many others that I don't. That's only around 90 of the pushing 400 songs in the Elton John catalog.

One at a Time: "Armed Forces" (1979) by Elvis Costello and The Attractions

#482 "Armed Forces" (1979) by Elvis Costello and The Attractions

What is One at a Time? Check out the introduction here.


I think that part of the reason that my big-ass re-rank of Rolling Stone's 2003 list of 500 Greatest Album's slowed down so much was that in using a random number generator to select the album I would do next, I was on occasion completely unprepared. I'm trying to listen to as many of these in advance of writing about them, but it's hard to pre-listen to the one that's going to get randomly selected. So, I'm going to start listening to ones that I don't know that well in preparation, but writing and ranking ones that I already own and have heard before.

One at a Time: "Green River" (1969) by Creedence Clearwater Revival

 #95 "Green River"(1969) by Creedence Clearwater Revival


I've never known much about CCR. I like their hits, but somehow their full catalog has escaped me. "Green River" is much more present and alive than the other boring, classic-rock hits that my brain tends to lump CCR in with. The guitar is alive, and there is no distance in the way that I expected.