2011 Crate Digging Retrospective (Part 1)

Well, it’s close enough to December, I suppose. I was going to do another album, but nothing really sparked my interest, so I figured it’d be nice to go ahead and jump into the retrospective list-type substance. In the next couple weeks, we’ll discuss the best songs and the best albums of the year. But this week, I kind of wanted to talk about those old albums we might have revisited, rediscovered, or discovered for the first time in 2011. Let’s call this our 2011 Crate Digging Retrospective.

Pat Benatar – “Heartbreaker”

From: Brandon Hall
To: Natalie Snoyman, Sarah Braunstein, Chris Mollica

Hi, Natalie, Sarah, and Chris!

I’m really excited to hear what you’ve been listening to this year. Since starting AV in April, I’ve pretty much only listened to the albums we’ve already discussed at length. I listened to Dookie all the way through, got reacquainted with Pinkerton, and probably said way too much about Hounds of Love, though I easily have a few thousand more words left in me on that subject.

There are a few albums and artists I managed to put some serious hours of listening into that we never got the chance to discuss here. Pat Benatar was actually one of those artists. For some reason, I don’t remember where the urge came from right now, I just felt like I wanted to rock out to some Patty B. (Has anyone ever referred to Pat Benatar as Patty B? No, right? I bet I just offended an awful lot of people who will never read this.) Anyway, I won’t speak at length on the subject, because I just grabbed her greatest hits, but goddamn that was some cathartic shit. “Heartbreaker,” “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” “Love is a Battlefield,” and “We Belong” are still fucking killer tracks. The breakdown in “Heartbreaker” about two minutes into that glam-rock, Queen-aping headbanger of a track still gives me chills. Of the 20 or so tracks on that greatest hits album, about 10 or 11 of them are show stoppers. 50% might not seem so great, but a 20 track greatest hits album is kind of bloated. Having 10 show stopping songs in a career is a pretty awesome run. Also, it’s kind of wild how well the songs hold up. There’s a classic 80s rock vibe to a lot of the songs, which is to be expected, but songs like “We Live for Love” sound downright contemporary and very few of the songs fall victim to what we think of as 80s cheese, by which I think I mean crappy synthesizers and funk bass.

The same cannot be said of Bonnie Raitt, who I decided to check out for the first time after Justin Vernon of Bon Iver tried to make her and Bruce Hornsby cool again with his album, Bon Iver, and the cover/medley of Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” and “Nick of Time.” Raitt’s Nick of Time won four Grammy’s in 1990 including Album of the Year. (Incidentally, she won it over Fine Young Cannibals’ The Raw and the Crooked, also nominated that year (srs.), and I won’t even begin to list the absolute gads of seminal, important, still-very-relevant albums that came out in 1989 that weren’t so much as glanced at by the Grammy’s, which begs the question: were the Grammy’s ever relevant? Like ever? I’m kind of under the impression that the Academy Awards, at some point (maybe in the 30s?) made some objective sense. Anyone have any clue when the last time was that the Grammy’s had a clue?)

Bonnie Raitt – “I Can’t Make You Love Me” from Luck of the Draw

Bon Iver’s Bon Iver is an album I’m interested to discuss in the coming weeks, one that definitely has not aged well save for a few songs, and I think it has quite a bit to do with the fact that that chintzy, cheesy 80s synthesizer crap does not age well. Raitt’s “Nick of Time” was a huge hit but listen to the beginning of that song and tell me your gag reflex doesn’t kick in just a little bit. [ed: apparently EMI doesn’t want you to hear this song either! You can see the video here – the only place I was able to find one and I’m sure EMI will track it down and kill it soon enough.] I dug into two of her albums from around the same time, Nick of Time and Luck of the Draw and two things were pretty consistent: the song writing was typically excellent, the song compositions, on the other hand, typically involved a highly criminal use of the synthesizer and the funk bass. “I Can’t Make You Love Me” from Luck of the Draw is a pretty undeniably awesome song, but for that goddamned accompanying Cassio synth. Even the Hornsby ivory tickling isn’t all that grating. As a rule, the closer Raitt gets to acoustic on these albums, the more tolerable the songs. But Jesus, fuck, those are the exceptions. I can only wonder what Raitt’s legacy would be if she hadn’t let her songs be so egregiously defiled, if she hadn’t succumbed to this 80s infatuation with all the cool effects you can make a keyboard do. “Ooh! Look at this one – it sounds like chimes!” “Oh sweet! It has a drum beat already programmed in it! That should save on the cost of a session drummer. And it sounds so real, too!” Ugh.

Bon Iver – “I Can’t Make You Love Me/Nick of Time” Cover

Also, WTF, Justin Vernon? Srsly? You’re into Bruce Hornsby and Bonnie Raitt? I can’t tell if he’s being sincere or just being cute. Liking something so easy to hate definitely earns you cool points, I suppose. And considering the sound of Bon Iver, it seems he probably really does dig that sound, which, okay. Maybe he’s really into Dean Koontz and Tom Clancy novels, too. Who wants to put money on macaroni and cheese being his favorite food? Any takers on PB&J?

Spending so much time with Bonnie Raitt has made me think that Justin Vernon is kind of lame. This was not a positive event for me in 2011. I really want to like the dude. He made “Skinny Love” fergodsakes. And “Holocene.” But, yeesh. If you list Bruce Hornsby and/or Bonnie Raitt in your OK Cupid profile, I’m probably on to the next one.*

Talk Talk – “Ascension Day” from Laughing Stock

I’ve spent so much time on Bonnie Raitt, that I won’t spend too much time on the artist that I just discovered for the first time this year thanks to a reissue, but I can’t not mention them. The band is Talk Talk and I discovered them thanks to their reissue of Laughing Stock this year and the really awesome writeup in P4K about the album. I can’t say anything that wasn’t better said in that article, but Laughing Stock just absolutely blew my mind in a way that so very few albums manage to do. It came out in 1991, the same year as Luck of the Draw and they couldn’t be further apart. Laughing Stock is expansive and experimental and forward thinking. It buries itself in the recesses of a shadowed world, before exploding in fits and rages of jazz and classical infused post-rock freak outs. It flutters in the dark and silent spaces of a macabre, sullen reverie and has few if any true predecessors in the world of pop or rock. None that I can think of, at least. Maybe some Floyd or Wyatt or Arthur Russell, but even those are stretches. The sound developed on their last two albums laid the foundation and remain touchstones for every post-rock album that came after them. I practically wore my CD out before grabbing 1988’s The Spirit of Eden and 1986’s The Colour of Spring. That Talk Talk were releasing these albums at the same time Bonnie Raitt was crapping all over hers seems almost unfair. Unfair because the sound everyone thinks of when they cringe at the thought of the 80s is the one Raitt flooded our radios with. I knew all the words to “Something to Talk About” when I was 9, but didn’t hear word one of the Pixies until I was in college (Doolittle also came out in 1989), and didn’t hear Laughing Stock until I was almost 30.

The lesson as always, the radio and the Grammy’s are our enemies and should die a horrible, bloody death.

How about you guys? What dusty old albums caught your ears this year?

“We belong to the light, we belong to the thunder,”
Brandon

*[Unless you’re really hot, obv. Exceptions can be made.]