Battles - Gloss Drop: B+

"Ice Cream (feat. Matias Aguayo)"

Want to hear one of greatest bass performances of year? Listen to Gloss Drop. Want to hear one of the greatest drum performances of the year? Listen to Gloss Drop. Want to listen to some hilariously skonky keyboard performances? Listen to Gloss Drop. And if you want to get some mind-blowing visual accompaniment to a fantastic single, I would suggest you click on that link above and sit back as your eyeballs get thoroughly reamed.

But if you want to hear an album that’s distinct from track to track, I would still recommend Gloss Drop, but would not promise that you would be reeling once the album comes to a close. While Battles maintain their high level of instrumental proficiency throughout their newest record, hearing them play off of each other for nearly an hour can get a little tiring when there are few shifts in texture or style. Most of Gloss Drop is instrumental, but this principal is also applicable when vocals are present. Matias Aguayo (of “Rollerskate” fame) puts in a fun performance for “Ice Cream”, the album’s clear highlight, but Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead and Yamantaka Eye of Boredoms don’t really add much to their respective songs and those tracks and others begin to slump and blend towards the album’s end.

But I’m being negative. Gloss Drop is still great for its musicianship and at the very least is perfect background music for a particularly rousing game of Twister. The album’s not as outlandish as the group’s watershed moment, Mirrored, and Battles may have diluted their math rock leanings to an extent, but it’s still great fun to hear these guys mull over melodies, even if it should be in smaller doses. Gloss Drop’s definitely worth your time. You might even learn something.

Battles - Gloss Drop: B+

Bill Callahan - Apocalypse: B

"Drover"

There’s that age old question every person hears in their English class from high school through college: “Do we really think that the meaning we find in these books was actually meant by the writers that wrote them or are we just scrambling to make them seem relevant?” You’ll hear a lot of variations on that statement, but that’s basically it. We stake so much in literature, lifestyle and music that the norm has become hyperbole in how we assume meaning down to the very arrangement of words in sentences in service of a greater, elusive whole. It’s a sentiment that will always have backlash, but that romanticism for hidden genius stems from the desperate hope in all of us that everything in our lives happens for a reason.

The problem I have with Bill Callahan’s fourth album, Apocalypse, is the same I had with R.E.M.’s latest release, Collapse Into Now. As I inspect Callahan’s words and the pastiche that surrounds them, I wonder if the things he’s saying actually mean anything to anyone besides Bill Callahan. He speaks of the world coming to an end and derides America before bringing it back into his good graces with really no clear structure or purpose. Apocalypse is very flimsy as a result of this, and, the more I look into it, the more I see it as a record of hollow rhetoric as opposed to anything remotely substantive.

Take “America!” for example. In it, Callahan repeats his country’s name in a mocking tone, never changing the three notes he sings in each verse as he describes an apparent longing for his country while he’s traveling overseas. “I watched David Letterman / In Australia,” he sings, maintaining that mocking tone. In the song, he rattles off American artists, presumptively his idols in the context of giving them military names like Captain Kristofferson and Sergeant Cash. “What an army!” he rejoices in that unwaveringly derisive tone. But then the song stops and Callahan switches to his grave deep voice. “Never served my country,” he intones. Then the song picks up again as if the deviation never happened.

Pretty funny joke of a song, right? But… is it a joke? At one point Callahan has clear respect for his idols by assembling them in an army, but then ridicules them by making it clear that he’s not concerned with the military. The drop-off that occurs in the song could actually be effective in conveying a serious mood to counteract his belief in the silliness of militarism but doing so produces a paradox in which he inevitably dismisses his idols. Does Bill Callahan not actually like Johnny Cash or Kris Kristofferson? Does he not like that you can watch David Letterman in Australia? Because based on that fucking annoying tone he takes throughout most of “America!”, you’d think he hated America, but actually liked it in the most incongruous and parabolic way possible.

So clearly it’s a song fraught with contradiction, which would be fine if it were organized. As I’ve just shown, there is no real message in “America!” More likely Bill Callahan had a couple contradicting ideas that touched upon similar subjects and put them all together on one track. So as a piece of music to be analyzed, it’s useless, because it has no mission statement despite sounding like it has the confidence of several. So, though I appreciate the ambition, the song is ultimately a total failure. It’s meaningless and sung like a Jim Gaffigan joke, and I hardly think that was Bill Callahan’s intention.

But man does the song sound like it means something. Honestly, if you didn’t feel like being a grumpy music skeptic, you could listen to all of Apocalypse and be sated by its hushed arrangements and Callahan’s honest to God gift for just saying words. You could sit back and assume that you were listening to an album with meaning, and that’s mostly why I didn’t give it such a low rating. For however empty the album’s lyrics prove to be, Callahan gives one Hell of a performance. His voice is deep and conversational and can tell a very engaging story, even if it turns out to be a mind numbing dead end. When he makes the sound of a flare gun in “Universal Acclaim” at the point of its use in the story, you couldn’t ask for a better musical accompaniment, and Callahan comes off as redoubtably endearing as a result. He’s so good at storytelling it’s a shame so much of Apocalypse is so deceptive.

However, the pointlessness of the album becomes too overwhelming. Its “mission statement” comes barreling through on second to last track, “Free’s”. “Is this what it means to be free?” Callahan asks in his amiable tenor. “Or is this what it means to be owned by the free?” Well, Bill, I’d say it would be pretty tough to confuse those two, so I’d chalk it up to words that sound profound because they’re opposites. “And the free / They belong to me,” he later sings, in a last attempt to breach some kind of coherency. He fails, but you wouldn’t know it based on the song’s beautiful aural accompaniment.

This speaks nothing of the nine-minute closing track and the other moot commentaries of America, an apocalypse and endless piles of bullshit. In “Riding for the Feeling”, Callahan even replaces the first and last words of the song’s title indiscriminately, as if acknowledging that his words are nothing more than placeholders. And yet, if you’re not careful, Apocalypse can be the most poignant turd you ever heard. It’s undoubtedly pleasant, but any scrutiny will indicate that it’s a gilded record, buoyed by the nebulous words of a convincing vocalist. There are some great moments on Apocalypse, but, shaken of its pretenses, it’s little more than a boring spoken word album. And I want to parse meaning from it about as much as I want to read The Catcher in the Rye for the seventy-fifth time.

Bill Callahan - Apocalypse: B

Hauschka - Salon des Amateurs: B+

"Girls"

It’s not a very fair comparison to make, but I cannot listen to Haushka’s newest album, Salon des Amateurs, without equating the German-born pianist to the Colin Stetson of ivory tickling. The man has been known in the seven years or so that he’s been making music as the guy who fusses with the piano and perverts its sound in ways that yield odd results. He then records the best of these contortions and, in this case, accompanies them with electronic instruments and brass. With all this in mind, listening to Salon des Amateurs gives me the impression that I am listening to a tame version of Colin Stetson’s apocalyptic bass saxophone farts; a little strange but rarely warranting of a double take.

However, with all this talk of distorting the piano, the sounds emitted from Hauschka’s, for the most part, sound pretty much like that of a piano. Sometimes it’s a little funky, sometimes a little muted, but there’s nothing particularly breathtaking about Salon des Amateurs in regard to Hauschka’s use of his instrument. In fact, what the album sounds most like is the iconic music that would go over B-roll of white-collar workers bustling through the streets of New York City in the Roaring 20’s. Salon des Amateurs is an excellent album to listen to on the drive to your job at a hedge fund or while you’re waiting in the lobby of a time machine transporting you to The Harlem Renaissance. In this regard, Salon des Amateurs invariably works best as background music, but it is fantastic background music at that. The album could make you a little lighter on your feet as it soundtracks your day, hardly the experimental hodgepodge that has characterized Hauscka’s earlier work.

So while Colin Stetson definitely has the upper hand in the ambition department, Hauschka is much better at crafting songs, writing pieces that come off as undoubtedly cohesive if a little boring as Salon des Amateurs comes to a close. Still, it’s fun to hear an artist be nostalgic for the post-retro. Salon des Amateurs may be unobtrusive by its nature, but it is a testament to Haushcka’s reliance on consistency over experimentation to make an album that does its job very, very well.

Hauschka - Salon des Amateurs: B+

White Denim - D: B+

"At the Farm"

From the onset of their newest album, D, it is clear that Austin’s White Denim will always have to contend with the fact that they sound a lot like The Black Keys. Now, I would argue that D is actually better than The Black Keys’ most recent offering Brothers, but, for as long as lead singer James Patralli has an almost identical tone to that of Dan Auerbach, the two will always be compared to each other. And, because The Black Keys came first, they will probably always win creative supremacy.

But of course just because an artist came first does not mean that they are automatically better than similar bands that form down the road. The reason why I find D more enjoyable than Brothers is because, where the latter was more focused on fleshing out basic templates into well-executed song modules, the former features a great knack for instrumentation, which allows White Denim to expand musically into a more diverse pallet of sound. It cannot be understated how excellent of musicians White Denim are. While throughout D you will hear dexterous percussion and nimble bass, when the group opts for no vocals at all, comparisons to The Black Keys are rendered moot as the band comes into their own through the masterful pushes and pulls of some of the greatest jam bands of all time. It should be no surprise then that D’s best track is the instrumental, “At the Farm”, in which the rhythm section of bassist Steve Terebecki and drummer Joshua Block pull no punches, Block even embellishing with the rare drum solo that feels juuuuuuuuust right.

It may be more beneficial for the group to be solely instrumental. Although Patralli’s voice is competent, it is very difficult to overcome that daunting creativity shadow that looms over the group whenever he opens his mouth. Also, Patralli’s lyrics can be distracting at times, as on the annoying “Drugs”, which brings D down with its insipid take on its subject matter. Despite all this, the album is worth listening to for the group’s genuine talent at putting together a song. Its Achilles heel may be very exposed for criticism, but its quality gives me confidence that, with time, White Denim will be able to overcome it.

White Denim - D: B+

Foo Fighters - Wasting Light: A-

"White Limo"

In the last four years, Foo Fighters have become the quintessential band of teens living out their rock and roll dreams. The group frequently tours with and features on their albums members of Queen, they get Grammy’s thrown at them with every album they make and they even got Geddy Lee on stage to play “YYZ” with them for one show. Even though they were formed long before it was made, Foo Fighters now more than ever seem to me like the first band of the Guitar Hero generation, hard to believe considering that the group’s frontman was part of the rhythm section of the band that would arguably kill the careers of the artists they now idolize.

After Foo Fighters burst into the new millennium with the brilliant One By One, however, the group’s accomplishments began to sag like that of their forebears. 2007’s Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace had some fantastic singles like “The Pretender” and “Long Road to Ruin”, but the album was ultimately quite uneven, the group clearly grappling with their quickly distancing poles of “Monkey Wrench”-like aggression and “Next Year”-like softness. Unfortunately, regardless of this, Echoes was an improvement on the album that preceded it, 2005’s In Your Honor, an album that was even more unbalanced in its direct attempt to segregate the group’s disparate styles.

Apparently Dave Grohl and the group sensed this imbalance, making it clear in the promotion for Wasting Light, the group’s seventh album, that they were going to go “back to basics” for their newest release. Apparently, the album was recorded in a garage, the group recruited Nevermind producer Butch Vig, re-enlisted guitarist Pat Smear and even brought in Nirvana bassist Krist Novaselic to play on a couple tracks.

While I don’t necessarily believe that bringing the remaining members of Nirvana back together (or at least the Nevermind version of Nirvana) was needed to bring Foo Fighters back to their roots, any excuse to reinvigorate one of the first groups I had ever fallen in love with was good enough for me. Luckily, Wasting Light delivers on the group’s promises. It is certainly the most aggressive album Foo Fighters have ever released, but it is also filled with the great vocal hooks and melodies that made albums like The Colour and the Shape and There Is Nothing Left to Lose such classics in my mind.

The album continues that aforementioned aesthetic of Foo Fighters living out their rock and roll dreams through the great music they make and the heroes with whom they collaborate. “Sweet Rosemary” features a distinct backing vocal performance from Fugazi’s Bob Mould, an excellent base through which Grohl’s hollering can hit harder. “White Limo” is a thrashy slice of hard rock that features Grohl bellowing through what sounds like a broken intercom. The video is pure nostalgic bliss for late-80’s schmaltz. The group rides around in a white limo filled with booze and cute pale white girls in cut off jean shorts. Did I mention that Motörhead’s own, Lemmy Kilmister, drives said limo? The fidelity is low and the good times proficiently roll. The past gets polished and I couldn’t be happier.

What’s interesting about Wasting Light, though, is that it also continues Foo Fighters’ recent trend of not having an overarching sound to accompany their album. There is no looming gloom like in One by One or a light tenderness as in There Is Nothing Left to Lose. Wasting Light is just a collection of excellent hard rock songs, a fact I had to grapple with for a while before I gave it the grade you’re seeing above. Grohl screams more like he did on The Colour and the Shape and Taylor Hawkins’s drumming is surprisingly tame and unmemorable here, but, other than that, I don’t see a point in explaining the melodics of every track on Wasting Light when you can just get it and explore its excellence for yourself.
 

But I will say this. After Foo Fighters have finally exploded into a world-renown entity that can level Wembley Stadium and Madison Square Garden, I’m glad that people hardly associate Dave Grohl with Nirvana anymore. I find that people who constantly do that will always scoff at the new music the man makes and will always point to Foo Fighters’ self titled debut as their best simply because it was released closest to In Utero. I think with Wasting Light we’re seeing a clean break from Grohl’s past, Novaselic, Vig and Smear gimmicks notwithstanding. There is a generation of music lovers being born that will remember Dave Grohl for “Everlong” as opposed to the drum beat to “Scentless Apprentice” and while, to some, that is a travesty, I’m glad that Foo Fighters are finally not being mislabeled as the one-off they never were.

Foo Fighters - Wasting Light: A-

Paul Simon - So Good or So What: B+

"Questions for the Angels"

So Good or So What is worth the listen by virtue of the fact that it demonstrates that, after decades of writing some of the most formative music of all time, Paul Simon still has something to say. We are all familiar with artists long past their prime coming out with boring new music, making albums that come off as more self-congratulatory than genuinely interesting. With reviews that I have written for albums like Robbie Robertson’s How to Become Clairvoyant and Peter Wolf’s Midnight Souvenirs, I do not believe these kinds of albums are necessarily all bad, but I will admit that they are mostly enjoyable within the context of themselves, which can often be enough to suspend one’s disbelief over the course of a long player.

This is not the case with Paul Simon, however. On his newest solo album since 2006’s Surprise, the man has a thirst for experimentation or at the very least variation, a quality you’d be surprised how many albums like this starve for. Simon expounds upon his beliefs on America’s two wars, the economy, love and faith. I can proudly say that there isn’t a song on So Beautiful or So What that looks backwards; Simon is well grounded in the present musical landscape and looks to the future of his children and music with vacillating degrees of hope. Still, it’s the fact that Simon looks that way so consistently that makes the album feel just right.

So Beautiful or So What begins in a way that would seem to contradict this sentiment. On “Getting Ready for Christmas Day”, Simon praises the preparation for the holidays, but does so by incorporating sampled voices and lazy guitar that suggest a contemporary approach akin to modern trends in hip hop and electronic music. Add in Simon’s topical lyrics (“I’ve got a nephew in Iraq / It’s his third time back / But it’s ending up the day it began / With the luck of a winner / He’ll be eating Turkey dinner / On some mountaintop in Pakistan”) and the track ultimately reserves itself a place in the quickly lengthening line of excellent Christmas songs that have been released in the past year.

Elsewhere, Simon observes a wry sense of humor to write some excellent musical poetry. Whether he’s positing a waiting line to Heaven in “The Afterlife” or embodying the failed musician still hopeful for a big break in “Rewrite”, Simon is funny, endearing and not so comfortable as to shy away from controversy. “Man becomes machine / Oil runs down his face/ Machine becomes a man / With a bomb in the marketplace,” the man sings on “Love Is Eternal Sacred Light”, repeating that last line for chilling effect. I have never been an avid fan of Paul Simon’s work as a solo artist or with Simon & Garfunkel, but if you needed any primer for the genius behind some of greatest lyrics of all time, So Good or So What would not be a bad place to start.

And while there isn’t a style of Simon’s on the album that I don’t embrace with open arms, I find myself partial to So Good or So What’s most delicate numbers. “Love and Hard Times” is an episodic piano-led number that first imagines God and Jesus scoffing at the “slobs” man has become in the brief time they come down to visit, then speaks of reclaiming lost love as if it were contingent on the harmony of the universe. “I loved her the first time I saw her / I know that’s a songwriting cliché,” he sings, showing deference to lyricism to ears that would have easily forgiven him. “Questions for the Angels” similarly ponders the universe through the accounts of a homeless man wandering Downtown Brooklyn. It’s a beautiful song that glorifies the small scale so that the Jay-Z reference makes “Party in the USA” sound like the drunken uncle at a wedding. Of course Simon doesn’t intend for these lyrics to be profound; he is self-aware on the album almost to a fault. But if you’re like me, frustrated with the diminished returns of past artists coming back to tell us how kickass they were nearly half a century ago, it’s plenty transcendent just to hear a sixty-nine year old artist sit down and talk about life for a while.

Paul Simon - So Good or So What: B+

Stevie Nicks - In Your Dreams: B-

"Ghosts Are Gone"

Here’s some revisionist history for you: Has anyone noticed that Stevie Nicks has a really annoying singing voice? I find it to be the stuff of washed up rock stars’ wet dreams, when 70’s heroes like Meatloaf thought they had a fighting chance in the 90’s by softening their style to the kind of soppy mush that you could only properly consume with a spoon. Stevie Nicks’s devilish warble has made me uncontrollable wince for every single song she’s released since her time with Fleetwood Mac. It reminds me of the lite-rock radio station I was forced to listen to while my mom drove me to school from Pre-K all the way up to sophomore year of High School.

So basically my enjoyment of Stevie Nicks’s newest album, In Your Dreams, is a constant struggle between that voice I find so maddening and the surprisingly catchy melodies Nicks consistently writes. But then, like the best of storylines (Halo, The Twilight Saga) a third party comes in and knocks me right on my ass, that being Nicks’s penchant for positively dreadful lyrics. “White Sargossa Sea” tells a miserable tale of a couple whose sole interesting quality is that “The only thing they did together / Was to make love,” there’s a good ol’ vampire pander for the cheap seats in “Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)” and Nicks fails hilariously to make Mardi Gras sound like a wedding ceremony in “New Orleans”. The lyrics seem to get progressively worse as In Your Dreams continues. The album hits a new high (see: low) in “May Be the One” with the line, “You may be the one / But you’ll never be The One,” which I can only see making sense if it were sung to either Neo or Jet Li. But then last track “Cheaper Than Free” makes all the competition its bitch, as it is a wellspring of laughably awful phrasing. If you were considering getting In Your Dreams, let these last choice lines from “Cheaper Than Free” be a warning to you of what lies in store:

“What’s cheaper than free? / You and me”

“What’s faster than a fast car? / A heart”

“What’s better than high fashion? / High passion”

Stevie Nicks - In Your Dreams: B-

tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l: B+

"Gangsta"

The best song on California singer/songwriter Merrill Garbus’s second album under the name tUnE-yArDs comes three songs in. “Gangsta” begins with thumping toms and expressive bass as Garbus juxtaposes growls, screams and falsettos in her characteristically unhinged voice. However, as it progresses, the track begins to disintegrate. Garbus’s warning of, “Never move to my hood / ‘Cause danger is crawling out the wood,” gets chopped and rearranged as horns atonally blurt out the sirens signaling the track’s collapse. It’s a fascinating situation to listen to, because it sounds like Garbus’s own insanity is causing the track to implode. It plays out like she is bouncing off the walls of a house that’s crumbling around her, so dedicated to her own insanity that she causes the negative feedback through which the song is destroyed.

The only song on w h o k i l l that gets close to matching that glorious cacophony is last track, “Killa”. In that track, Garbus exerts her dominance by abusing the listener with riveting threats like “I’m a new kinda woman, a don’t take shit from you kinda woman.” “Read or not, I’m a new kinda killa,” she hollers and you’d almost feel your life was in danger if you were to doubt her. Eventually, her madness proves too cumbersome for one voice and Garbus splits herself into two characters, each ranting into a speaker like it’s the time-out corner. “I’m so hip!” hilariously yells one Garbus. The track is so deranged that I literally cannot think of a way that it could be performed live short of Garbus, night after night, cutting herself in half and having each side scream at opposite sides of the venue.

There are a lot of smaller moments on w h o k i l l that utilize the freakiness featured so prominently on “Gangsta” and “Killa”. “My Country” is a pretty chaotic opener, Garbus again juxtaposing double tracked screams with fragile falsettos before a honking saxophone steals the show in the track’s second half. Both it and lead single “Bizness” employ abstract vocal manipulations that are reminiscent of Jònsi’s “Go Do”. Throughout the album, Garbus proves to be an enthralling vocal acrobat, often coupling her demented performances with lyrics just as gasp inducing. The centerpiece of “Riotriot” is when the song stops so that Garbus can holler, “There is a freedom in violence that I will never understand!” a line ripe for analysis because it walks that enviable line between brilliant social commentary and pure nonsense. And it’s hard not to have a strong reaction to the last line in “Es-So”. “I ran over my own body with my own car,” she softly sings over rambling guitar. And yes, you should feel bad for laughing at that line.

But I guess my main criticism of w h o k i l l is that there are six tracks between “Gangsta” and “Killa”. Many critics have been citing the album’s entirety as a jaw-dropping spectacle as if to say Garbus is constantly hurling herself at your speaker system. In fact, aside from those two tracks, Garbus exercises significant restraint on w h o k i l l. When inspected, many of the album’s qualities that one might consider strange actually stem from slight tweaks of African rhythms. And when that aspect is further inspected, Garbus’s use of these African influences proves to be no more bizarre than their use by Vampire Weekend. I think when critics speak of w h o k i l l being divisive for its off-kilter nature, they are referring more to Garbus than the album, itself, which is an important distinction. While Garbus is clearly the bananas in the w h o k i l l fruit salad, the album’s arrangements do not always support her over her numerous creative hurtles.

Which isn’t to say that there is a bad moment on w h o k i l l as a result of this. It just means that the album becomes a lot more conventional in the time between “Gangsta” and “Killa”. Garbus crafts some positively immaculate vocal harmonies on “Doorstep”, singing sha-la-la’s in the background while she pleads over a relationship in the process of breaking. You may be surprised to find that a majority of the tracks on the album begin with slow builds instead of a swift kick in the face. In fact, the longest song on w h o k i l l, “Woolywollygong”, is a dark acoustic number. In the track, Garbus sings a lullaby to a sleeping a figure, as if the song itself is being used to ward off boogiemen. Despite its creepy guitar riff and spare percussion, “Woolywollygong” is oddly beautiful, Garbus’s voice reliably accommodating to the track’s uneasy nature.

The unfortunate thing is that the slower songs in between those two misfit anthems that I have mentioned in all this review’s paragraphs now feel slow to start in comparison, even bordering on lulls at times. Each track on w h o k i l l has its own personality, but the fact that they don’t go all out and don’t throw caution to the wind keeps the album from becoming the oddball Mecca it very well could have been. So, while, I do not dislike a moment of w h o k i l l, these moments of relative quiet make the album good and centered as opposed to radical and great.

While it would be more courteous to praise Garbus for keeping w h o k i l l grounded with more straightforward topics and arrangements, I honestly wish she hadn’t. Not every album needs to be an all-encompassing utopia of balanced extremes; sometimes it’s appropriate for an album to just never let up and it’s a little frustrating that Garbus was significantly contained on this release. For all my talk of softness and self-control, though, w h o k i l l is still one of the more unique and off-putting albums you will hear this year. I just wish it had gone the full Monty in terms of wall-to-wall craziness. Then it would have been a real treat to hear peoples’ reactions to it.

tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l: B+

Brad Paisley - This Is Country Music: C+

"Toothbrush"

I really wanted to like This Is Country Music, I really did. With modern country music sounding like a parody of itself with goofy artists singing hyper-patriotic songs in embellished southern drawls, it’s strange to say there was a time when the genre could be used for cogent social commentary and the listening spectrum was not always a choice between the strictly conservative and The Dixie Chicks. So I was excited to hear Brad Paisley’s newest album after hearing the praise the man received for 2009’s American Saturday Night. The reviews coming in for This Is Country Music were following suit, so I expected there to be some legitimately intelligent music for me to chow down on.

Little did I know how wrong I would prove to be. Any hope I had that This Is Country Music was going to be anything but shameless pandering was destroyed with the album’s first few lines. “Well you’re not supposed to say ‘cancer’ in a song / And telling people that Jesus is the answer can rub ‘em wrong,” he sings on the title track. “It ain’t hip to sing about tractors, trucks, little towns or mama... But this is country music, and we do.” Now, I will be the first to admit that I am a political liberal, but as a music fan, those lines are insulting. I don’t know what fascist music industry Brad Paisley’s been toiling under the past decade, but I’ve heard tons of songs about mama, little towns, trucks and, oh yes, even Jesus sung by rap, rock and pop artists alike. Paisley saying that country music solely deals with these subjects is not only silly but patently false. And this is the first single for This Is Country Music. The song sets a tone for the rest of the album that it never gets close to shaking.

But what I like about This Is Country Music is probably more interesting to talk about first. As pompous as he sounds on many of the album’s songs, Paisley can have a really clever voice when he doesn’t have the right wing breathing down his neck. For example, “Camouflage” is a cute tune about the titular pattern being the new fashion craze. It’s a good song despite the fact that, as if beamed down by the Gods of Redneck Ridicule, Larry the Cable Guy yells “Git ‘er Done” not once but twice on the track for seemingly no reason. Elsewhere, “One of Those Lives” has a decently executed moral about appreciating what one has and “Toothbrush” wittily describes the stages of love through the objects Paisley brings to his girlfriend’s house.

Also, there is no getting around the fact that Paisley is a masterful guitar player. All over This Is Country Music, the man will go off on great solos that transcend the rudimentary arrangements in which they are placed. “Eastwood”, which features whistle work from none other than Clint himself, is an excellent example of this. It is essentially an instrumental through which Paisley can realize his dreams of being an axe-slinger in a Spaghetti Western, but it’s still quite enjoyable and probably the best track on the album. It seems that, with This Is Country Music, the best voice Paisley possesses is with his six string.

Alas, Paisley’s lyrical faux pas cripple This Is Country Music from being worth the listen. There are some respites, but Paisley generally has the subtlety of a banjo over the head on this album, and it gets tiring fast. Paisley’s celebration of summer feels like sand thrown in the face on “Working on a Tan”, that hackneyed phrase is relentlessly repeated like it’s unique in the Blake Shelton duet, “Don’t Drink the Water” and we know that Paisley and Carrie Underwood really love fucking each other in the ode to gratuitous PDA, “Remind Me”. But for all the blatant attempts to be mawkish and curt, This Is Country Music gets quite lazy, defecting to boring ballads and a chorus like “Wish I could be the lake that you’re swimming in,” by its end. There’s a theme established in the first song that completely disappears in the album’s second half only to reappear on the very last track. This all makes the album sound thoroughly half-assed, pushing aside storytelling for rote sentimentality and common denominators. In the context of most of the mainstream country we have had to put up with, This Is Country Music will sound above average, but it is a genuine disappointment to find that Brad Paisley is an artist just barely better than the worst.

Brad Paisley - This Is Country Music: C+

Friendly Fires - Pala: B

"Live Those Days Tonight"

A turkey on the cover would have been more appropriate.

Friendly Fires - Pala: B