I was on my way out the door for the annual St. Patrick’s Day activities yesterday when the news broke that legendary songwriter Alex Chilton had died. A lot of people were looking forward to seeing Alex front the reunited Big Star at the South By Southwest festival in Austin this weekend, so the news comes as as big surprise. The Commercial Appeal is reporting it as a supposed heart attack. Unlike a majority of musicians who were big in the ’70s college radio scene, I can’t imagine Chilton having died from complications with drugs, so natural causes seems most likely, though 59 is still a hell of an early age for that.
Chilton first rose to prominence at the age of 16 when he wrote and sang the international #1 hit song “The Letter” with his first band The Box Tops:
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My feeling’s on jj’s sophomore LP are similar to those on Vampire Weekend’s — it’s just kind of more of the same. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not really anything worthy of note.
Those familiar with Xiu Xiu’s back catalogue will already expect a certain degree of bleak “we are all the world’s filthy disease” lyrics over electronic distortion and gentle acoustic instrumentation. Their seventh full-length, Dear God, I Hate Myself, will not break those expectations. As the title suggests, Xiu Xiu mastermind Jamie Stewart is still the sad sack he’s always been. Within the first fifteen seconds of hitting play, he’s already whimpered out “Beat-beat me to death. I said it. Beat-beat me to death.” Yes, the same themes of broken hearts and self-hatred are here again, but it seems Jamie is reveling in the fun of emotion rather than the despair of it this time.
Long before the VH1 series of the same name, I often announced how much I loved the ’80s. The audacious fashion, the experimental atmosphere, the dancing… I romanticized it all, frequently to the mockery of my classmates. Matthew Good was being facetious when he sang “I Miss New Wave,” but I found a good deal of sentiment to agree with in his lyrics ironically singing the praises of over-indulgence.
The fun thing about following the discographies of one-man-bands is tracking that singular artist’s emotions over time. Everybody Knows It’s Gonna Happen Only Not Tonight is Dieter Sermeus’s third album as The Go Find in six years, and while he has recruited a band to back him up, it’s still a largely solo affair. 2004′s Miami was a heavily electronic post-Postal Service jumble of jingles for hopeless romantics. 2007′s Stars on the Wall opened the space for more acoustic instrumentation, and with that introduced a quiet emptiness that suggested loneliness and abandonment. Sure, there were sad songs on Miami, but they usually ended with a flurry of energy and a chorus of duplicated voices, proving that Dieter himself was all the company he needed to stave off those cold Belgian nights. For Everybody Knows It’s Gonna Happen Only Not Tonight, however, Dieter gets by with a little help from his friends, and in doing so makes his most fully human album to date.
It’s been a rough decade for Gil Scott-Heron. Arrested and imprisoned in 2001 for possession of twenty dollars worth of cocaine (seriously, can you even see twenty dollars worth of coke?), diagnosed HIV-positive on behalf of an ex-lover, and imprisoned again for violating parole when his state-sanctioned clinic did not give him the proper HIV medication. A decade like that for one of America’s most outspoken civil rights activists is sure to make the man grizzled and bitter.
Let me be perfectly clear about one thing here: never before have I wanted a band’s sophomore album to be titled simply #2. If you liked Vampire Weekend’s debut, Contra is for you. If you found their first album trite, redundant, and generally annoying, Contra will NOT change your mind. Really, all the boys from Columbia University have done is taken their first album and cranked up the dial. There’s more curiously placed guitar noodling, more African-inspired rhythms, more slant rhymes using words like aranciata, more perfectly tailored polo shirts. That said, I’ve changed my mind – this album should really be called MORE Vampire Weekend.
Was there ever really any doubt that we’d see another album from Gorillaz after 2005′s Demon Days? Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett are just having too much fun together. The original score for their opera Monkey : Journey to the West was a pleasant diversion, but (after a year and a half of moderate teasing by Albarn and his collaborators) the boys have finally announced a March release for the third proper Gorillaz album, Plastic Beach.