ALBUMS A good year for music. Some letdowns from the likes of Boris, Oneida and Lady Gaga but still plenty enough to keep me happy and occupied. It doesn't feel like shit is stagnating. Yet.
1. True Widow: As High As The Highest Heavens And From The Center To The Circumference Of The Earth To me, this is what Nirvana was "supposed" to sound like, a band taking cues from avariety of underground genres - shoegaze, slowcore, doom metal - and making it accessible enough so that people could sing along to it. Unfortunately, if you catch these guys live, there won't be more than a couple hundred people around, but they should be huge. Don't let the title fool you, it isn't pretentious, just heavy, stoned sounding, cowboy doom pop.
2. Smith Westerns: Dye It Blonde Packed with hooks and a guitar sound lifted straight from T. Rex, this is a quick, enjoyable bathroom fuck of a record. The singer is falsetto and is the only weak link (but by no means is he a dealbreaker). If he could shed his indie-ism and get a little showmanship and more money was thrown at recording quality, these guys could easily drop a modern day Ziggy Stardust on an unsuspecting teenage public, hungry for universal rock & roll anthems. While this isn't quite at that level, it's still the best glam related thing released in a couple decades.
3. Black Lips: Arabia Mountain Black Lips have been good for awhile but this was their first step towards greatness, adding more instrumentation and more all out wackiness to their garage rock palate. An inspired response from a band that a lot of people thought were dead in the water.
4. Wooden Shjips: West These guys haven't released a bad album yet and this is the best of the bunch. Pretty much the same vibe here as the previous ones - psychedelic, hypnotic Kraut by way of San Francisco rock with super effects heavy guitar solos that weave in and out of established rhythmic patterns. This is how music from California should sound like.
5. The Psychic Paramount II Here it is, 6 years in the making, the follow up to one of the psychedelic underground's best debuts ever. And this one's even better. A bombastic mountain of jammy instrumental interplay. Never stops moving, constantly driving forward till the end, when all there is left to do is explode and feel your particles sail outward.
6. Ty Segall: Goodbye Bread Sunfried psych pop probably recorded in Ty's apartment bedroom, where he's also obviously been studying Beatles pop craftsmanship 101. This sounds like a product of the mid-'90s, when guitars ruled the Earth, a sound fighting for air in the digital recording to laptop infested waters of contemporary music.
7. Atlas Sound: Parallax I'm not really sure why Bradford Cox makes things under the alias Atlas Sound any more as there seems to be no aesthetic difference between this and the last Deerhunter album. But he just keeps getting better. More song oriented and less experimental but by no means is this radio friendly indie blandness. One gets the feeling that at some point, Cox is going to be a very big deal.
8. Implodes: Black Earth A shoegazey folky, hissy nightmare of a record with soaring, layered guitars interrupting acoustic passages and vocals buried in reverb until unrecognizable (I'm a huge fan of this). Don't worry, the women folk won't run out of the room, it's all sort of pretty, but there's definitely a Lord of the Flies vibe happening here.
9. Wilco: The Whole Love Well, it's a hell of a lot better than the previous pair of albums when it seemed like Tweedy had been neutered. There's a lot of different instruments added into the mix here, giving it sort of a Baroque vibe, but it never gets too wigged out or art damaged. Their penchant for making their lyrics too cutesy and greeting cardesque rears its head a couple times but never enough to ruin anything but maybe 1 song. I would call it a refreshing return to form. After Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, it's probably best to just view everything else as gravy.
10. Peter Evans Quintet: Ghosts The best jazz release of the year. A very postmodern recording with references to everything from glitch to post-rock, all while still sounding close to a traditional jazz record. The references are deeply subtle, as if it could be anything but in jazz, but they really breathe some life to the music here. If one was looking for a good album to introduce themselves to trying out jazz, this would be a worthy offering.
FILMS This list is premature as I still haven't seen Human Centipede 2, the new Roman Polanski or that Woody Harrelson as a racist LA cop flick. I just can't make it to every little movie like I used to and it will be 2012 in a couple days so...
1. The Tree Of Life Look, this year there was The Tree of Life and then everything else. There's been no other film made in this millennium that's even on the same planet. This may be the best film I've ever seen, but I'm going to need at least a decade to let it fully resonate. For now, it's at the least the most ambitious film ever made and Art of the highest possible caliber. For Terrence Malick fans, who had watched his films evolve from idiosyncratic portraits of stoic beauty to full on stream of consciousness internal dialogue narrated epics, this was the culmination of every hair brained but ragingly beautiful nuance he'd brought to the table throughout his career. There's sort of a story but don't limit your perception to finding one, just let each scene and moment (and each lesson) form and diffuse as drops within an ocean sized proclamation that even though this universe is ultimately designed by savage cruelty and violence, human beings can make the choice to strive for grace and goodness, and even though it may not be rewarded according to the universe's values, your life can and will matter. This is not a film for smart people, it's a smart film for everyday people. If you are floating through life in need of a cage rattling experience that will strike you deep in your core, see this.
2. Drive As the revival of the '80s continues to invade and conquer current popular culture, plenty of music but no film had yet declared itself as the uber-hip monolith from which all other future works within the trend will need to behold and build upon, until this came around. It succeeds in pulling off what I would argue is the single most difficult sensation for a film to achieve in that one automatically feels more cool watching it (Besides Pulp Fiction, how many other films have managed to do this?) No other genre has suffered more in the last 10 years than the Action film (I would argue the Batman films are more indebted to Drama) and this was a stylized game changer that clears some space for the genre to evolve within and declares director Nicolas Winding Refn as an artist to be reckoned with.
3. The Beaver Mel Gibson continues to amaze as he further commits to his mid-career transition from lame actor to challenging artist. He didn't direct this film but his hands are all over it. The part of a suicidal alcoholic who just needs to be loved seems single handedly created for only him to play and he eats up the role, knowing it may be his only chance to obtain forgiveness from a world that's turned on him. The gravity of this potential forgiveness is felt throughout the entire film, making the unbelievable ridiculousness of his becoming a talking beaver either a giant middle finger to his naysayers or a terribly inappropriate turn at coaxing the movie going public into rewarding him his desperately sought after second chance. Either way, it's brilliant.
4. Melancholia A few films have tried the formula of concentrating on a small corner of the Earth during a gigantic, world changing event, and Melancholia succeeds more than any other of these. Lars Von Trier has moved beyond his strict Dogma rules but authenticity still dominates the proceedings, meaning the action can feel a little slow at times but all the genuine humanness allows certain moments and sentences to play over in your brain for a long while after the film ends, each time with more meaningfulness. It's a grand exploration on the effects of manic depression on what should be the best day of one's life and what should be the worst day.
5. Horrible Bosses Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, all three the brightest (funniest) stars of their respective comedic galaxies (Arrested Development, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Saturday Night Live), team up here for a comic rendition of Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train. The threesome certainly doesn't disappoint, but who could have possibly thought that the show would be stolen by the likes of former "Most Boring Person on the Planet" Jennifer Aniston going 180 on her typecast as an aggressively slutty dentist and Mr. "Doesn't Seem to Have a Funny Bone In His Entire Body" Colin Farrell as a karate obsessed meth head hell bent on destroying his Father's business? This one's not quite on par with the Judd Apatow machine but it's the funniest movie this year.
7. Bridesmaids It's funny that as soon as women "stoop" to bathroom humor and fart jokes, it's labeled by critics as "daring", but let's just hope this kind of chick flick gets copied more in the future than the endless Xeroxes of Sleepless In Seattle that stink up the theaters every year. Kristen Wiig challenges Tina Fey as the post-SNL Queen by attacking her where she fears to tread, laughing from the gut and not from the brain, and Melissa McCarthy is further evidence that no matter if you are male or female, fat people are the safest bet on being the funniest people in the room.
8. The Adjustment Bureau The best popcorn flick of the year, this story offers an extremely creative take on the concepts of human freewill and the interconnectedness of seemingly small events on a grand scale. There's also a genuinely affirming love story at the heart of it all.
9. J. Edgar Super idiosyncratic biography of a super idiosyncratic individual. J. Edgar Hoover as a character is the ultimate example of repressed homosexuality run amok and is completely fascinating. The development of the FBI was also a lot more interesting than I figured it would be. I found it to be Eastwood's best directorial effort since Unforgiven and a treasure trove for connoisseurs of auteurism.
10. Cedar Rapids Ed Helms gets his chance to carry a movie as a small town dork who gets hisfirst exposure to the big city. The film's not quite on Alexander Payne's level but its satire of the American Heartland has its moments, particularly any scene with John C. Reilly, who may have somehow become the funniest person on Earth even though he's technically not a comedian.
Chuck Klosterman's Top 25 Hair Metal Albums of All Time was published in LA Weekly this week. It was a solid list, very idiosyncratic, obviously the work of a true fan of the genre. Of course, I am thee pre-eminent scholar on all things Glam Metal (Hair Metal gets folks' attention but the preferred term is Glam Metal, as it is a direct descendant of Glam Rock) and so I was inspired to publish my own version of the canon. Remember, music snobs look down on Glam Metal more than any other single genre in musical history, but it is the result of young men living incredibly dangerously - driving fast, killing their friends, OD'ing on every drug within reach and prowling after sluts, you know, the essence of what Rock 'N' Roll is all about. So don't let those Indie virgin dorks tell you otherwise.
25. Britny Fox Once Glam Metal had reached complete overkill in the late '80s, this was one of the few bands that seemed more intune with the glory days than with the carpetbagging balladeers that were ruining everything . Their schtick was that they dressed up in Victorian garb (Britny Fox was the name of some Welsh Royal of the past). The song "Girlschool" and its accompanying video posed a fantasy that was well received by horny, male middle schoolers everywhere.
24. Cinderella: Long Cold Winter For some reason, Glam Metal bands would buy into the shame thrown upon them by music critic circles and would decide to "get in touch with their roots" and try to be Blues artists. It led to a lot of boring, strummy, let's dress up like cowboys music that only brought them more ridicule from the critics they were trying to prove themselves against. This was the best of the Blues influenced stuff.
23. Stryper: To Hell With The Devil Stryper had more melody and harmony in 1 song than most metal bands had in entire discographies. They also had a well thought out, black and yellow striped, spandex costume theme going for them. But the absolute best thing about Stryper was that they were Christian. And proud of it. Known for throwing Bibles to their audiences at concerts and swearing off groupies, drugs and alcohol, Stryper did all they could to subvert the youth looking to rebel to join them in rebelling against the whole system and bang their heads for Jesus. 22. Ratt: Invasion Of Your Privacy Ratt were 1 of the big dogs in the LA Glam Metal scene and this was the album after their mega-hit "Round And Round" and the album the song belonged to, Out Of The Cellar. Every single detail of their previous album was copied, down to having the flavor of the month model on the cover (Playboy Playmate Marianne Gravatte).
21. Kix: Blow My Fuse Kix was a few albums in on a failed music career when Glam Metal finally allowed them to achieve some acclaim with this album. They had hooks, they had a harmonica and they mastered the one surefire thing that will guarantee success amongst rebellious, confused teenagers - the suicide ballad, with their one and only hit "Don't Close Your Eyes".
20. Kiss: Lick It Up It's hard to imagine how big a deal it was for kids my age when Kiss took off their makeup. They had gone to great lengths to never be seen or photographed without their trademark face paint for a decade and all that mystery was gone in an instant when this album cover hit the shelves. There is definitely a new found energy on this album, a lot of it probably due to the new look, but also because of Vinnie Vincent, a formidable tunesmith and guitar shredder whose showcase of abilities on this album allowed Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons to take their rightful thrones, overlooking an entire genre that they had almost single handedly spawned.
19. Quiet Riot: Metal Health This album symbolizes the moment that Glam Metal went from being a fad to being a certifiable money machine. It was the first Metal album to reach #1 on the Billboard 200, it sold over 6 million copies and produced a couple of huge radio hits, the biggest one being a simple remake of Slade's "Cum On Feel The Noize". They also had an awesome mascot which was a guy in a straitjacket and a metal mask. Mascots were essential to Glam Metal bands - Iron Maiden had Eddie, Mötley Crüe had Allister Fiend. It was easier to fit 1 character on a button for your jean jacket than an entire band.
18. Alice Cooper: Constrictor Along with Kiss, no one had more to do with the emergence of Glam Metal than Mr. Vincent Damon Furnier AKA Alice Cooper, whose theatrics and costumes provided a key foundation within Metal culture (still to this day). Alice had made a couple New Wave records before releasing this, a trashy, triumphant return to form. His guitarist at this point was Kane Roberts, who was as muscular as Sylvester Stallone and would constantly fist pump and bench press his guitar in videos, yesssss!
17. Judas Priest: Screaming For Vengeance Judas Priest never wore makeup or hairspray but they were responsible for another vital visual aspect of theGlam Metal scene - black leather and metal spikes. Rob Halford stole the look from the S & M underground and was covered in it from head to toe throughout the '80s. Millions of kids were convinced to buy spiked wristbands and belts, thinking that it made them look tough, completely unaware that it originated from a homosexual subculture. As for music, few could match Priest's perfected formula of twin guitars constantly trying to out-solo one another and the soaring, high pitched operatic vocals of Halford. 16. Faster Pussycat No other Glam Metal took their cues more directly from the Rolling Stones than Faster Pussycat (not even G N' R). Lead singer Taime Downe ran The Cathouse with future Headbanger's Ball VJ Riki Rachtman, the legendary club that was ground zero for the '80s LA Glam Metal scene. Their name is from the Russ Meyer film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and their boozy, twangy rock 'n' roll never strayed from the subjects of fast women or drinking.
15. Judas Priest: Defenders Of The Faith Screaming For Vengeance is considered a bona fide classic but this follow up is preferred by the most devoted Priest fans. Everything is bigger, faster and more dynamic and the homosexual subtext to everything is much more prevalent (Rob Halford came out of the closet as a gay man in the '90s and the Metal community only seemed to appreciate him more).
14. Twisted Sister: Stay Hungry These guys were from New York City, which paled in comparison to LA when it came to Glam Metal bands, and you could hear the lack of sleaze and glitz in their sound, which only made them more unique. They were led by ugly, lion maned front man Dee Snider, who took the whole makeup thing to the extreme to make himself only more appalling. Snider became a hero to the Metal world when he confronted the Parents Music Resource Center in a Senate hearing on how Metal music should be censored. They also made, without a doubt, the greatest videos of any other Glam Metal band in existence and no one should go through life without seeing the videos for "We're Not Gonna Take It", "I Wanna Rock" or the band's cameo in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.
13. Mötley Crüe: Theatre Of Pain The fast life was taking its toll on the Crüe by this time as their music shared the same bloodshot, wasted feel as the band's photos and interviews. They tried to pass off a remake of the old song "Smokin' In The Boys' Room" as the album's first single but it was the next single that was the germ that would infect the whole Glam Metal scene and would eventually cause its demise. "Home Sweet Home" was a tear jerking piano ballad that was easily the band's biggest hit up to that point. It worked because the band's music had been so fast and aggressive that when they took the opportunity to slow down and show a little heart, the contrast was risky and significant. Unfortunately, like anything in American pop culture, once bands figured out that they could just include a ballad and have an easy hit, everyone copied the formula and bands like Poison and Warrant began flooding the airwaves and Glam Metal got softer and softer. Eventually, it got to the point where bands would record nothing but ballads and the focus on sales, targeted at female audiences instead of the long time true fans led to Glam Metal becoming as weak as the music it was rebelling against in the first place. Grunge would come along with the next generation of musicians and its heaviness and authenticity would lay the bloated Glam Metal scene to waste almost overnight.
12. W.A.S.P.: Inside The Electric Circus The band W.A.S.P.'s name is not used here as an acronym for its traditional moniker but instead for "We Are Sexually Perverted", a gloriously stupid mission statement that they would proudly live up to. The band was well known for throwing raw meat at audiences, drinking blood from a skull, torturing women on stage and the lead singer's saw blade cod piece that would shoot out fireworks. By this album, their sound was starting to slicken, but it works as it is also the album most devoted to sexual depravity, with such great tunes as "9.5.-N.A.S.T.Y." (their favorite phone sex line), "Sweet Cheetah" and "King Of Sodom And Gomorrah".
11. Guns N’ Roses: Use Your Illusion I & II Guns N' Roses, who before this seemed to be the polar opposite of artistic navel gazing, released this pair of albums on the same day to an unsuspecting public. Epic, 10 minute long songs with multiple bridges and huge piano solos, different members taking their turns at singing in every style from Acoustic Blues to Punk to Flamenco and experimental interludes with layers upon layers of sound effects. It's easily the most ambitious album within the Glam Metal canon and it was also somehow a massive selling hit. The album is most successful in its lofty intentions with the song "Estranged" (and its $4 million amazing video), where Axl wails and whispers about being alone, unable to love anyone and forgotten by the world, a revelatory soliloquy that would unfortunately come true for him.
10. Van Halen: 1984 Van Halen was maybe the most extreme example of paired opposites within the lead singer / lead guitar dynamic that had been a Rock 'N' Roll staple since its inception. David Lee Roth is basically incapable of being even 1% serious and seems to be on a constant hunt for parties and / or muff. Eddie Van Halen, on the other hand, is the inventor of the ultra-complex finger tapping technique that dominated Metal guitar for a decade and is known to be a controlling, brooding alcoholic. The duo would coexist well enough to create an excellent 6 album run with a highly unique sound - good times music with symphonic flurries of guitar notes. This would be Roth's last album before Eddie scrapped him and brought in other lead singers he could more easily keep under watch.
9. Def Leppard: PyromaniaThese dudes were British and a couple of them had short hair but they were masters at bringing a larger than life dynamic that was important within the 1980s and Glam Metal. Their songs seemed like they could only be played in huge arenas. This album was a gigantic success and produced a number of Top 40 hits. It would take the band 4 years to deliver a follow up though due to drummer Rick Allen losing his arm in a car accident. The band could have easily replaced him with another drummer but they stuck by their friend and patiently waited for him to learn how to use new drum kits specially designed for his disability. No matter how lame you find Glam Metal, you must respect this.
8. Cinderella: Night Songs People like to bring up this album's cover photo to point out how stupid and ridiculous Glam Metal was, to which I say, check out that awesome cover photo! How many different animal prints can you find? Have you ever seen a more obvious looking studio setting? Why didn't they just step directly outside the studio to a city street? Because that's what Glam Metal is all about, fellas - fabrication, plastic, the surface, why would anyone want to dwell on their feelings? or look like themselves? or actually do the work of setting up a public street for a photo when they can easily stay within the comfortable confines of a studio? The music here is also perfectly generic and thus, definitive.
7. Ratt: Out Of The Cellar Everything about Ratt was underrated. Stephen Pearcy was a solid front man, taking on the smug as hell "i"m cooler than you" attitude to perfection, but he was never any kind of star. Warren DeMartini had an intricate, personalized guitar sound but he's practically unheard of. "Round And Round" was the huge hit (the video starred Milton Berle for some reason) but my favorite song was always the cowboy themed "Wanted Man", in which the band directly threatens to kill the listener and then references themselves, even though there's no way either Ratt or listening to records or even pop music at large could possibly exist in the Old West. Awesomeness.
6. W.A.S.P.: The Last Command Another fantastic, sex crazed collection of ditties from W.A.S.P. They try to find other subjects to sing about here with the great song and video "Blind In Texas" and the stomping, monolithic "Widowmaker", which would be my personal entrance music if I was a professional wrestler.
5. Guns N’ Roses: Appetite For Destruction This band came along and upped the ante on everything. More drugs, more tattoos, more controversy and in turn, more sales. They were living proof of the Glam Metal dream, the small town boy getting lost in the big city and for a brief time, were in charge of Rock 'N' Roll as a whole, mostly because of good songs but also because it seemed like anything could happen with these guys at any given minute. That combustibility is what eventually led them to break up after only a couple albums and go on to become very strange old men.
4. Mötley Crüe: Too Fast For Love Kiss and Alice Cooper had provided the influence but this album is the seed that produced the whole scene. Nikki Sixx would later confess he just wanted to make sped up Raspberries tunes and much like that band, a genuine naivete is alive here, buried beneath the filth and sleaze of early '80s Los Angeles. Videos would come along soon and make these guys superstars and the Crüe would eventually end up far away from their original path but these wonderfully melodic songs about wide eyed teenagers on the loose will always be there to remind listeners of the original intentions of Glam Metal. 3. W.A.S.P.This album's opening salvo "I Wanna Be Somebody" is Glam Metal (and America at large) boiled down to 4 words, a definitive statement declaring worship of pure ambition and the live fast, die fast mantra. The song almost accomplishes becoming art after seeing guitarist Chris Holmes' interview in "The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years", in which he downs a couple bottles of vodka and talks about how he will be dead soon in front of his mom.
2. Fastway: Trick Or Treat: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Fastway was "Fast" Eddie Clarke of Motorhead's attempt at making his own mark in the Glam Metal world. The singer was severely high pitched and ginger as a strawberry, rendering them pretty unappealing when compared to the likes of more manly bands. But when their songs were used as the music of satanic metal god Sammi Curr in the movie Trick Or Treat, easily the best cinematic offering of the genre, they finally had the all important charismatic presence they never actually had.
1. Mötley Crüe: Shout At The DevilThis thing called MTV had just come out. Madonna prancing around in her underwear was pretty cool, Michael Jackson dancing with zombies was impressive but then there was this band - a visual onslaught of fake blood, spiked leather, slave women, ninjas, motorcycles, fire, explosions and 4 men in makeup gnashing and screaming at the camera. The record cover was a simple black on black pentagram, they used umlauts in their name and the news constantly reported on them OD'ing on drugs and killing their friends in car crashes. They were an atom bomb upon the lives of my young friends and I. This album provided the book for what was cool from that point on and is the blueprint of anyone who wants to know what Glam Metal is all about.
2. Smith Westerns: Dye It Blonde
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