Sarah McLachlan - Wintersong

For me, tied up unceasingly in the traditions of Christmas is the music that goes along with it. Our bodies are hard-wired to create music, and it is an essential part of who we are. The same is true of Christmas. Whatever particular tradition you celebrate, be it the birth of Christ, winter solstice, Chanukah, or even Kwanzaa, I think there’s something inborn in each of us that makes us transform a little around December. Christmas makes us happy, content, generous, and even makes some of us burst into song.

Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong is the latest contribution to the Christmas music canon. Sarah is one of my favorite female singers, because she is able to create such a specific atmosphere with the power of her voice. She is incredibly talented, and no one else sounds quite like her. She brings a unique quality to everything she does, and Christmas music is no exception. On Wintersong, she covers the spread from hymns to pop classics to lost pop gems to original material. With this album, I am struck by Sarah’s ability to inject soft melancholy to something like Christmas, and to make me feel not sad about it, but contemplative. Her voice is haunting in places and soothing in others, and that is brought home especially when she performs this sort of material. Each artist can bring their own perspective to Christmas music, and therein lies part of the beauty of it.

Sarah’s rendition of “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” catches me as being particularly beautiful. The style and cadence of her voice lend itself to this song to bring out the effect of it twice as well as when John Lennon did it. Sarah McLachlan is on another level of entertainers, one of performers who use their fame for philanthropic efforts to help the less fortunate. On “Happy Xmas (War is Over),” she records with the Sarah McLachlan Musical Outreach Choir & Percussion Ensamble, and the kids add a whimsical element to the already wistful music. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “In the Bleak Midwinter” are very nice and uplifting tunes. “River,” which was originally recorded by Joni Mitchell, has sadness and yearning in its gentleness, and Sarah’s one original tune here, “Wintersong,” is the most melancholy moment on the album. But like I said before, the lowness of the music doesn’t depress you; instead, it makes you quietly reflect on the true meaning of Christmas, and you realize that very little is necessary to truly enjoy it. Sarah pulls off a very neat trick here, making music that makes you feel sad, but a good kind of sad, a sad that makes you feel happiness all the more.

The most interesting moment on the album is “The First Noel/Mary Mary.” She very oddly chooses a minor key for this uplifting carol, and then adds deep drums and echoing voices to give the song an Arabian feel. It seems weird, but she doesn’t oversell it, and instead delivers a gently subtle performance, like everything else she does. It’s quite a feat, but Sarah makes you believe it 100%.

Sarah McLachlan has made a very pretty album with Wintersong, and its beauty is soft and subtle rather than vast and engaging. She doesn’t try very hard, but I don’t think she has to. I probably wouldn’t like this album nearly as much if it weren’t composed of Christmas music, and my estimation of it will probably go down a bit in the beginning of January. But for now, with Christmas almost upon us, I gladly add it to the canon of Christmas music.

Prime Cuts:
Happy Xmas (War is Over)
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
The First Noel/Mary Mary
Wintersong

22 Rating: 10

On behalf of all of us at Drop 22 (which is just me), I want to wish you and yours a very merry Christmas! May the joy of Jesus’ birth fill your heart!

Weird Al Yankovic - Straight Outta Lynwood

Parody bands are the best, bar none, at what they do. They have to play such a wide array of styles, and they have an energy not found in other mediums of music. Only wedding bands can rival them for proficiency, tightness, and endurance. And as far as parody bands go, Weird Al Yankovic commands the best one.

Weird Al has a pretty good gig. The ebb and flow of trends in the music world is crazy and unpredictable, and every standard artist runs the risk of becoming not relevant at the drop of a hat. Weird Al, on the other hand, rides on the coattails of the current trend, whatever that may happen to be. He will always be popular because the entire point of his music is to do a version of what is already popular. It’s really kind of ingenious.

His latest album, Straight Outta Lynwood, is his tightest, most cutting, most relevant album to date. Like only Weird Al can, he sweetly skewers the MP3 craze, hip-hoperas, American nationalism/superiority, and ridiculous litigation. Since the mid-nineties, he has been kind of hit or miss, and he’s fallen into an alternating good album/bad album pattern since Off the Deep End. Running With Scissors was pretty smart and witty, but Bad Hair Day and Poodle Hat were a little on the kitschy and esoteric side. Though as the years go by and he has tried more and more things, he constantly comes up with new ways to attack the parody animal. Even so, he remains the same on a few things, like his polka medleys. Straight Outta Lynwood contains his 9^th one, and the trend has not lost even a tiny bit of its irony or hilarity. “Polkarama!,” the latest entry into his polka catalog, successfully skewers/pays tribute to Weezer, the Killers, Snoop Dogg, Franz Ferdinand, Kanye West, the Black Eyed Peas and more. The opening track, “White & Nerdy,” is the best, though. It pokes fun at a section of society that revels in its ridiculousness, and wears it like a badge of honor: geeks. Parodies of nerds and nerd life are always well-received and embraced by nerds. All the things Weird Al mentions are elements of geek-world that geeks enjoy about themselves. As a player of Dungeons & Dragons, I must admit I got a charge out of the “Got skills, I’m a champion at D&D” line. I gladly admit that I’m a geek, and “White & Nerdy” celebrates the stuff I love about that distinction.

The rest of the album is nothing to sneeze at, either. “Canadian Idiot” is more than just the logical extension of Green Day’s “American Idiot.” It’s a commentary on a relevant social issue as well as being entertaining, like a good comic book. I’m amazed at Weird Al’s band’s ability to adapt itself to any style under the sun with such precision and accuracy, as “Close But No Cigar” (style parody of Cake) and “I’ll Sue Ya” (style parody of Rage Against the Machine) demonstrate. “Weasel Stomping Day” is an example of Weird Al’s twisted sense of humor, and “Don’t Download This Song” is a deliciously ironic statement about internet “pirates,” as well as artist “rights.” Then there’s “Trapped In the Drive-Thru,” a note-perfect parody of R-Kelly’s uber-epic “Trapped In the Closet.” The actual “Closet” clocks in at 42 minutes, and goes from a standard tale of infidelity to completely ridiculous situations over the span of its twelve parts, and doesn’t have even a shred of a sliver of a point. “Drive-Thru” is similarly pointless, or maybe the point of it is that it is pointless. It’s funny, but too long for me to actually listen to.

Hopefully, Weird Al is actually immortal, so he can go on making fun of music trends as long as there are trends to be made fun of. He is a vitally important presence is the music world, as he teaches us to not take ourselves completely seriously. Many artists have learned this lesson, and see a parody of one of their songs or their style by Weird Al as a high honor. As for those who haven’t, they just illustrate the point that Weird Al has been making all along.

Prime Cuts:
White & Nerdy
Close But No Cigar
I’ll Sue Ya
Polkarama!

22 Rating: 11

OK Go - Oh No

OK Go start playing, and I can’t help but be waiting for the catch. It seems too simple, too basic, too good to be true. Here we have a rock band that plays rock, and there’s nothing else. One part of me says “At last, a band with no agenda or plan!” But another part says, “That’s it?”

And indeed, that’s it. I’ll admit that rock and roll has become pretty cumbersome lately, with the likes of Coheed & Cambria and Green Day making high-concept metal and rock, almost qualifying as art. Then you have bands like the Killers, making rock that takes itself very seriously. That’s all well and good, but you need a little fun to balance all that out. OK Go provide the no-strings-attached jubilation necessary to create a break from the ponderous (but still good) rock music that has become all too common these days; the problem is that it passes away so quickly. It’s nice while it lasts, but that’s not very long.

OK Go bears a striking resemblance to the Cars, and their second album, Oh No, has a lot in common with that band’s pop niceties. Oh No is a very pop album, from the high-octave backing vocals to the pastel shirts of the band. The biggest example, however, is in the band’s video for the big single off this album, “Here It Goes Again.” At the base of it, this video is not much; just a stationary camera with no special effects or CGI. It involves the members of OK Go doing an elaborate dance on eight running treadmills, arranged in a 4x2 square, with alternating directions. It’s a little hard to explain, but unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past four months, you’ve already seen this video. It got released on YouTube the day before it premiered, with an insane number of people viewing it the very first day. The dance created such a buzz that many people don’t know that it’s actually the band doing the dance, or even that it’s a music video at all. The dance itself is pretty amazing, and it reminds me of the Mentos and coke thing that some people did, synchronizing the coke explosions to music. If that’s not a pop phenomenon, I don’t know what is.

Oh No begins on a pretty tight and intense note with “Invincible,” a light-hearted superhero story with a dirty groove. Most of the rest of the album sticks pretty closely to that formula, with the deviations (“Let It Rain,” “Maybe This Time”) being kind of haphazard. OK Go is a pretty simple-minded band, and for the most part, they stick to what they have expertise in. It’s when they don’t that things start to fall apart. They don’t exhibit much in the way of originality, either. The guitars and vocals only have two tones (loud and quiet), and the two aren’t really all that different from each other. Like any album of such a specific color, it starts to unravel toward the end. “A Good Idea at the Time” and “The House Wins” are fun and bouncy anthems, but other tracks, like “Television, Television” and “Do What You Want” have a lot of intensity but not much grace, tunefulness, or even pop appeal.

This is only OK Go’s second album, but they should have learned a few tricks of the trade by now. They can’t be expected to be fall-down awesome like the Smashing Pumpkins and the Decemberists were at this juncture in their career, but they are expected to at least progress a little. All in all, Oh No isn’t groundbreaking or world-changing, but it does make you snap your fingers and nod your head a little. There just wasn’t anything to make it very memorable.

Prime Cuts:
Here It Goes Again
Invincible
The House Wins

22 Rating: 3

Death Cab for Cutie - Plans

Transatlanticism left me begging for Ben Gibbard to let his inner rock star out. 2 years from the release of that album, he seems to have taken my advice and done the opposite. Gibbard and crew have made one of the prettiest, most touching, and emotionally affecting albums in a long time… so why do I feel like I’ve been cheated out of something?

Basically, Plans is the work of a man who is really not all that ambitious. I can understand that, since I’m not all that ambitious either. But every single track on Plans makes me think that Death Cab for Cutie could have done so much more. I realize that Death Cab got a lot of media attention super-quickly because of Transatlanticism, and all that pressure can cause some people to withdraw. I think that’s what happened with Plans. There was so much hype surrounding it that Death Cab purposefully made it underwhelming, as if to say “We’ll make whatever album we want to make, and we won’t be swayed by the likes of you.” You gotta respect that.

Chris Walla is a masterful producer, I must say. His style is very understated, subtracting elements rather than adding them, and that suits Death Cab for Cutie very well. Sometimes he goes as far as to have just Ben and an acoustic guitar, as on “I Will Follow You Into the Dark.” Plans is a very quiet album, and Death Cab doesn’t grasp for anything throughout the entire proceedings. The problem is not that it doesn’t shoot for the moon, but that it doesn’t even shoot for the tops of the trees. It’s pretty, but it doesn’t challenge or captivate us the way some of their previous albums did.

The bouncy fun of “I Was a Kaleidoscope” and “Death of an Interior Decorator” is only present on one song (“Crooked Teeth”), as the dark intensity of “We Looked Like Giants” only shows up on “Someday You Will Be Loved.” “Crooked Teeth,” while the big single, doesn’t have the mark of lyrical excellence that we’ve come to expect from Gibbard. It’s a little like those two songs were only included as hold-overs so Ben could get back to the ponderous beauty of the rest of the album. There is beauty, but it’s a schmaltzy beauty, and even a cheap beauty in places. I’d rather Death Cab didn’t try for beauty at all if it’s going to be cheap. The exception is “What Sarah Said,” which is marvelous. Here, all the elements come together in exactly the right way to create a song that is filled to the brim with pain, sadness, and unbelievable beauty. It represents a moment where the protagonist’s understanding shifts to a higher level, one that can only be reached when you have a brush with death, be it your own or that of someone you love.

Speaking of death, there seems to be a lot of it on Plans. However, that’s a point of credit to the album, because it’s evident that Gibbard has an understanding of death that not a lot of other artists have. I myself have been very close to death, so that resonates with me in a very special way. Gibbard has said in interviews that Death Cab for Cutie’s other albums have been about looking back in sadness, but that Plans was much more optimistic. After all, to make plans, you have to have something to look forward to. It is optimistic, but it’s odd that an album that is so optimistic would be so concerned with death. The album is nice, but it feels incomplete, and I feel like I only got half the story. With the exception of “What Sarah Said,” the whole thing feels kind of like a joke you don’t really get, but laugh at anyway. Your joke has a good build-up, Ben. I just hope that with the next album, you give us the punch-line.

Prime Cuts:
What Sarah Said
Soul Meets Body
I Will Follow You Into the Dark
Brother On a Hotel Bed

22 Rating: 9

(Just for the record, Transatlanticism has increased in my estimation from a 10 to a 13.)