NEVERMIND

the ghost of christmas past from the future

Since weathering the calamitous effects of reverse-culture shock, CP has been blessed with a lot of time to reflect on requisite mind junk that gets all muddled between the ears and screams for sorting; including and not limited to his once sour relationship with the Radiohead song "House of Cards."  Upon the release of In Rainbows, Carmen cited HOC as a low-point, a mired, superfluous track that disrupted the album's overarching flow and demanded almost a .8 drop on his infamous rating system: "The Strawberry Criterion."  If prompted this CP would have most likely described the track as, "a total suckfest that sullies all its bordering tracks with its suck and pretty much fistfraks itself for the entirety of its five minute twenty-eight second run time."  Shockingly, he was wrong.  When examining HOC as a stand-alone track, it becomes easier to admire its ambiance, the hypnotic guitarring and swirling woo's.  Lyrically HOC holds its own against cerebral-detonators like "Videotape" and "Bodysnatchers," while in no way surpassing the aforementioned, it still manages to convey that sometimes we build mountains of worry on foundations of hot air.  What the listener is left with is a song that's nowhere near as superfluous as "Faust A.R.P." or as drab as the first three minutes of "All I Need," but at the same time never aspires for the sonic brilliance of "Reckoner" or "Jigsaws Falling Into Place." So you can see how one can mistake the thing.  

This will never turn into a video blog.  

Youtube gives Carmen's computer panic attacks.

CP'S TOP TEN ALBUMS: #1

Perfect.

CP'S TOP TEN ALBUMS: #'s 2-4

#2 The Bends by Radiohead

After recording the vocals for "Fake Plastic Trees," Thom Yorke stumbled out into the London night, sobbing, and proceeded to drink himself into a drunken stupor.  This occurred because the album, that moment, wasn't only a culmination for Yorke after a long recording process, but it was a culmination for all rock music up until that point in history.   The song is about knowing, either consciously or sub-consciously, that the person you love isn't able to reciprocate that telltale emotion, knowing this and still being unable to wretch yourself from that person.  When the song crescendos with Johnny Greenwood's white-noise sound wall it is physically painful.  It's the sound of the limitations of rock music crumbling like an empire.  "Just" is about a really annoying person.  After The Bends, Radiohead chose to augment their sound both to evolve sonically and because they simply had no where else to go.  This is as good as rock will get.  And on "Street Spirit," the album's, and most likely any album's, most implausibly beautiful track, lush arpeggios carry Thom Yorke's pained musings on insignificance into an icy atmosphere populated by phantasms and half-speed remembrances, and he coos as the album eases to a regretful halt, the most simply perfect lyric that anyone could have wrote it and only Radiohead could have wrote it.

Immerse your soul in love.

#3 Frances the Mute by The Mars Volta

Covering over seventy-five furious minutes in five songs, Frances the Mute blends so many genres it forges a genre unto itself.  Songs traverse prog, jazz, metal, shoegaze, marimba within single movements, the lyrical pendulum swings from verbose English to blazing Spanish to dead as dead Latin without missing a beat, decibels oscillate like a bungee jumper.  This isn't mind-bending music.  This is music that wiggles into your axons and dendrites and sets C4 explosives at the base of the axon terminals and run for medula because of all the shrapnel.  Seeing the Mars Volta live is akin to watching a fireworks store on top of a skyscraper catch on fire.  Omar Rodriguez-Lopez composes songs with meticulous care and Jam-rock experimentation, all while shredding and power-chording like Carlos Santana's bad acid nightmare.   Cedric Bixler-Zavala's banshee falsetto lasers lyrics that are so esoteric and abstract they come off as the mad ravings of an Inquisition-era priest receiving plague revelation on a night drenched in moonlight.  It is incomprehensible and enlightening.  "Cassandra Gemini" is the epic to end all epics, over 32 minutes in length with 12 distinct movements and an ancient scroll of lyrics that are just so good Carmen can barely stand it.  LOOK.

Behind this snail secretion, leaves a dry heave that absorbs.

A limbless procreation, let the infant crawl deformed.

A bag replaced the breath of these suffocating sheets.

And now when the craving calls, I'll scratch my itchy teeth.

Come on and sing it now.

Sink your teeth into the flesh of midnight.

 

#4 Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan 

The greatest double album of all time.  No other artist, ever, has ever dragged language past its inherent limitations to the lofty doorstep of universality that all music strives for.  Dylan's lyrics aren't good because of their guile or delivery or topicality or emotionality; they are good because they fill the listener with the hot goo of recognizing that they are playing audience to something that is entirely, undeniably true.  From a certain  standpoint, esthetics aside, art seeks only to give rise to notions and musing that are already present in its audience, yanking the veracity out like teeth and holding the bloody kernel up for everyone to see and saying, "You see, this was part of you all along, and you're not not alone, not by a long shot."   Four decades later, Blonde on Blonde's most extraordinary feat is that it says this with such lucidity, simplicity, woefulness, bombast and assuredness that time melts away around the sound and you're left with nothing but yourself and the music because you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that you know exactly what this maniac is talking about.

CP'S TOP TEN ALBUMS: #'s 5-7

#5 Sea Change by Beck

     Being awesome, Carmen has never been subject to having his heart-broken, but with unflinching certainty, he can attest that it sounds exactly like this album.  On every strummed minor chord or cello moan, you can feel a heart shattering into a thousand jagged opaque heart shards and the wobbly sighs that mist out as the jagged pieces make their painful way through the rest of the self.  This is melancholia on a whole other plateau.  This is reassembling the abstract puzzle of the hopes and dreams of what you thought your life was while being constantly draped by wet towels.  Bottomless Sadness.  As "Golden Age" floats through your skull like a sound mist with a tinge of false hope, the promise of starting anew, but in the brain attic  knowing full well that starting again is the last thing you want to do.  Somewhere on here is the recorded sound of a soul being torn apart by longing.  Every soundscape is laced with reverb, every note has a heartbeat and its rhythm is failing and it is crushing.  Lyrically, there isn't a metaphor in sight, not a line of whimsy or lyrical presumption.  Sea Change is assured only in its confusion and drift, in Beck's inability to reconcile his wondering, tortuous thoughts and his busted, bleeding everything.  Turns out it's really, really, really sad and its sadness is matched only by its beauty, which is a metaphor if CP ever saw one.

#6 The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie

     Sure, The Beatles invented the concept album, but Bowie brought the concept into reality, while claiming that he was an alligator.  The percussive fade-in of "Five Years" ushers in a messianic tale of apocalypse, love, madness, connection, loss, sacrifice, and the redemptive power of music.  Throughout, Bowie's voice is desperate and confidant, moving from surreal reservation on the opening track to fraught squeals as he howls "you're not alone, take my hand" as "Rock & Roll Suicide" fades to a close.  The up-tempo tracks are stellar and the slower numbers, like "Starman," are chocked with dreamful wonder and DB's incomparable understanding of rock melody and orchestration never falters, which is a feat in respect to the different modes the album shifts through.  As always, the horns are brassy, the Les Paul's furious, the acoustics soothing, and the xylophones are slinky as spinal cords.  Ziggy Stardust is a perfect rock song.

#7 OKONOKOS by My Morning Jacket

      A flawless, massive live album from the Best American Rock Band in History.  Every song sounds like a twelfth encore, punctuated by epic, melodious guitar, dripping with psychedelia, Bonhamized drumming and Jim James' seraphic wail.  His voice is otherworldly (See JJ's covers of "Rocket Man" and Dylan's "Going To Acapulco" for sonic validation).  The band bashes the cochlea into concavity with its leaden cadence with gems like "Run Thru," a with schizoid haiku lyrics and a density of sound approaching neutron star levels.  Shimmering epics like "Gideon" and "Dondante" are volatile and cascading and splendent.  "Steam Engine" massages the soul with its reverb waterfall and slide guitar heroics, calmly telling you of the soul's permanence, lullabying you into utter agreement before pounding certainty into your self-core with its pulverizing outro drum solo.  "Dancefloors" is fun.