Tag: album assignments Page 8 of 9

If testosterone had a sound, that sound would be AC/DC. That’s what I realized after listening to Back In Black on repeat. Testosterone is about a few different things:

• Power
• Domination
• Fucking
• Competition
• Display

It is a powerful, mood-altering substance, and under its influence, every one of those things is really, really fun. It does not give a shit about anybody’s feelings, and will not hesitate to crush its opposition and revel in doing so. I’m not a hardcore user, but as a male I’m still on a pretty steady drip, and what that means is that these songs sweep me up every single time. When that hormone is flowing, moments like Brian Johnson screaming “Don’t try to push your luck just GET OUTTA MY WAY” are just awesome. I’m plugged into the power, vicarious domination, and it feels good.

That’s the magic of AC/DC — between the pounding, bone-deep rhythm section of Phil Rudd and Cliff Williams, and the twin guitar onslaught of Angus & Malcolm Young, there is an enormous amount of force in their music, and Brian Johnson’s voice crackles along the top. They chose their name well, because this band’s sound is electric. Without testosterone, it could be scary. With testosterone, it is thrilling.

It’s directly akin to the thrill I get from an action movie, or from watching a football game. There’s a damn good reason AC/DC was the sole artist chosen for the Iron Man 2 soundtrack, and why the song “Back In Black” opens the first Iron Man movie. The sound defines the character perfectly: the epitome of swagger, speed, sleekness, and strength, always ready to unleash fire and explosions. He’s testosterone on legs (and jets), and “Shoot To Thrill” is his middle name. Similarly, when Von Miller destroys Tom Brady (or Cam Newton, or Alex Smith, or anybody), the resulting crunch is a satisfying echo of “Hell’s Bells.”

When I witness those moments, my superego has left the building, and the id is bellowing “YEAH!!!” This all crystallized for me as I walked out of the Deadpool movie (which I loved), got into my car, and cranked up AC/DC like I’d been doing for days. It’s id, baby. Testosterone rush.

Now, when that rush fades and I shine a colder, more rational light on these things, they’re hard to defend. When people ask me why the endless explosions, punching, and mayhem of superhero movies are fun for me, the rational mind doesn’t have an answer. When Dante points out to me that those people on the football field are getting badly hurt, and I know that many of them live with constant pain and/or brain damage for the rest of their lives, I can’t tell him he’s wrong.

And god knows I can’t line up behind lyrics like “Don’t you struggle / don’t you fight / don’t you worry cause it’s your turn tonight” from “Let Me Put My Love Into You.” I’m a feminist, and the feminist in me is not cool with thinking of sex as “giving the dog a bone.” I recoil at “You bitch, you must be gettin’ old”, and can only giggle or eyeroll at the goofy Satanist imagery, or strident insistence that “rock and roll ain’t noise pollution.” I get that AC/DC has a sense of humor (“Big Balls”, anyone?) and that lets them off the hook partway, but I also couldn’t argue with anybody who is repelled by them on a lyrical basis.

But shit, those muted strums erupting into the power chords of “Back In Black”! The rhythm! The riff! The drums! The vocals! I am never not going to love that feeling, and my testosterone-fueled id has notified me that I’d better get comfortable with a little hypocrisy about it. Every single song on this album, including all of those I just mentioned, gets my foot pounding and my head banging. I can’t help the pleasure — it’s part of my nature.

And you know, as expressions of male aggression go, hard rock music is pretty damn safe. Rocking out in my car is nonviolent, harmless, and maybe even a little bit theraputic after a frustrating day. So shake a leg and have a drink on me, ’cause I got the power any hour to show the man in me.

Of all the rock stars who were popular when I was 8 years old, none was more confusing and frightening to me than Meat Loaf. Sure, there was Kiss, but between their Marvel comic and that movie where they all had superpowers, they fit comfortably into the superhero mold for me. Alice Cooper hosted The Muppet Show, so he had to be safe. And yeah, Judas Priest and Black Sabbath and the Sex Pistols were all out there, but they weren’t even on my kid radar.

But here was this giant, messy, sweaty guy on TV, seemingly screaming into the mic. His album had a bad word right in its title! The cover showed a big black half-demon-ridden motorcycle rocketing up out of a spooky graveyard, with an enormous screaming bat in the background. And he was named MEAT LOAF. (Hence, both frightening and confusing.) Surely this had to be the epitome of that freaky heavy metal I’d heard about.

By the time I got to high school, I was more ready for him, but Denver radio seemed to have no interest, so it wasn’t until my freshman year of college at NYU that I finally clued in. Meat Loaf was all over New York radio, despite having peaked 10 years prior. Once I heard “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” a few times, especially now that I’d had some dashboard light experience of my own, it all started to make sense. So I bought Bat Out Of Hell at last, and from the first few seconds, it floored me.

The first song is the title track, and it opens with some power chords, and then a fierce, bravura piano part from Roy Bittan, The Professor of E Street Band fame. (E Streeter Max Weinberg also plays on the album.) The band kicks in with frenzied abandon, revving and revving to a classical climax, which then swings around in the Baba O’Riley rhythm, crashing down with thunderous piano chords and guitar screams to lock into a solid groove, over which an electric guitar solo will soar, finally resolving into the main melody line. That’s all in the first ninety seconds. It’s an overture to the grand epic which begins at 1:55, when Meat Loaf starts singing, and then goes on for another eight minutes.

This is Jim Steinman songwriting. You can’t talk about Meat Loaf without talking about Jim Steinman, and he made sure of that by placing “SONGS BY JIM STEINMAN” prominently under the album’s title on the cover. I recently read a critic’s quote about Steinman to the effect that he’s in a class by himself, simply because nobody else wants to write the kind of songs he writes. To smother them with adjectives, they are, by turns: majestic, theatrical, ridiculous, emotional, surprising, bizarre, affecting, hilarious, strange, histrionic, heartfelt, sly, and beautiful. He loves grand sweeping gestures, silly wordplay, classical movements, tempo changes, dramatic dialogue, sound effects, and melodic/lyrical callbacks. If they should all occur within the same song, so much the better.

They certainly all do in “Paradise By The Dashboard Light,” surely one of the longest, goofiest, and show-tuniest of all rock classics. Now listen, I love authenticity and soul-baring in rock music just as much as anybody. But for me there is something extremely appealing in this exaggerated fantasy-comedy scenario, elevated by its music to mock-operatic proportions. There’s so much pleasure and surprise in its every twist and turn.

We start with a 50’s rock and roll swagger, only missing the doo-wops in the background, then leap into Broadway production number grandiosity. But wait, here comes a whole second singer (Ellen Foley), another nod to musical theater as two characters stake their space in the song, sliding into a duet. Oh, and now we get the doo-wops, or rather the “ooh, shop shops”. The chorus recurs with more voices behind it, and falsetto parts amid the Broadway sparklers. New lyrics lead into another “doubly blessed”, which suddenly gets blindsided by a speeding truck of double-time teenage lust, switching quickly into makeout sound-effects and… Phil Rizzuto?!?

All at once we’ve got a hilarious baseball/sex metaphor going on, which both builds tension in the song and comically undercuts it, but just as you think the song and the teens are about to climax: STOP RIGHT THERE! True to its adolescent theme, some realms can’t be visited without a serious commitment, and this song commits to its character interactions while, again, throwing in the punchlines. Will you love me forever? Let me sleep on it! The back-and-forth of these two is just flat-out funny, especially the increasingly pleading tone in Meat Loaf’s voice as he keeps trying for a free pass. And then another turn, resolution of the sexual theme into the song’s final punchline — he swears to love her til the end of time… “so now I’m praying for the end of time / to hurry up and arrive / ‘Cause if I’ve gotta spend another minute with you / I don’t think that I can really survive.” Praying for the end of time, so I can end my time with you. It’s a masterful comic resolution, but the song has one more trick up its sleeve.

Over the outro, Foley lyrically reprises the beginning of the song — “It never felt so good / It never felt so right / And we were glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife,” restoring a sweetness to the memory and dissipating the bitterness and frustration of just a few moments prior. Meat Loaf’s part adds even more poignancy to the nostalgia: “It was long ago and it was far away / And it was so much better than it is today.” These parts give a thematic heft to everything that preceded them, making this a truly touching story rather than just a silly throwaway.

See, that’s part of the Steinman secret. Sure, it’s theatrical, it’s over-the-top, it’s downright preposterous. But if you look closely enough you’ll also find that it is deeply felt, even amid all the absurdity. That’s why Meat Loaf is such a perfect singer for these songs. He is one hundred percent willing to go way over the top, but he also sings with such commitment that he absolutely sells the genuine emotion that lives in these overwrought boxes. Check out some of the quieter songs, like “For Crying Out Loud” or especially “Heaven Can Wait.”

That song might as well be straight out of a musical (and indeed, was originally written for a Steinman musical, which apparently was going to be a… well, a science fiction version of Peter Pan.) It’s nothing like your typical rock song, but it also steers clear of the gaudier edges of Steinman’s oeuvre, and with Meat Loaf singing it becomes a genuinely lovely ballad. But whether it’s tender moments like this or headlong thrill rides like “All Revved Up With No Place To Go”, what binds this whole album together is that it is just. Pure. FUN.

And that’s a pretty damn great thing to be able to say about a rock and roll record.

Bruce Springsteen tells a story about the making of The Rising. He told it to Mark Binelli in a 2002 Rolling Stone article:

Springsteen still remembers the moment he realized that he needed to make this album. It was a few days after September 11th, and he was leaving the beach. A man drove by, rolled his window down and yelled, “We need ya!” Then he rolled his window up and kept going. “And I thought, ‘Well, I’ve probably been a part of this guy’s life for a while,’ ” Springsteen says. “And people wanna see other people they know, they wanna be around things they’re familiar with. So he may need to see me right about now. That made me sense, like, ‘Oh, I have a job to do.’ Our band, hopefully, we were built to be there when the chips are down. That was part of the idea of the band, to provide support. The most fundamental thing I hear from fans, constantly, is, ‘Man, you got me through’ — whatever it might be. ‘My divorce. My graduation. My high school. This part of my life, that part.'”

Bruce made it his job to be there for us after 9/11, to provide support when we needed it, and damn, does he ever come through on this album. I got The Rising when it came out, and always enjoyed it, but I never really listened closely to it until Robby assigned it to me this week. (Well, this fortnight — in case it’s not obvious, we’ve shifted this game to a biweekly basis.)

Listening closely to this record is a revelation. These songs aren’t just songs. They’re medicine. They’re a balm, not just for a nation or its people suffering after an attack, but for anybody who has ever suffered a deep, fundamental loss. Because what becomes abundantly clear after listening to this album is that it is all about loss. That loss might be national, it might be personal — it really doesn’t matter to the one doing the grieving.

See, some of these songs are clearly about the towers falling, or the first responders, or the people lost in the fire. Some of them are about different sorts of losses — loss of a loved one, loss of a relationship, loss of innocence. But if you listen to the songs enough, you find that all those things are really not so different.

What Springsteen knows, and what he articulates so beautifully in these songs, is that 9/11 is powerful both as a real, historical event and as a symbol. Every single one of us, if we live long enough, will suffer our own personal 9/11 — a moment when something or someone we thought was a fixed, permanent fact of life is suddenly taken from us. In the space of moments, and utterly without warning, the belief collapses, or the deception is revealed, or the person leaves, or dies, leaving us bereft and bewildered. Staring at an empty sky. Most lives will have more than one of these moments.

Springsteen gives us two things for the pain. The first, very simply, is recognition. In healing from a wound, processing a loss, or recovering from a trauma, the presence of a witness can be an invaluable comfort — someone who knows what you’re going through, who sees you, simply sees you, as you are suffering, and acknowledges that the pain you feel is real, and valid.

Bruce witnesses that deep, excruciating grief in songs like “You’re Missing.” In the lyrics, he looks at his surroundings and lists what’s still around, what’s normal — “Coffee cups on the counter, / jackets on the chair / Papers on the doorstep” — and then returns, over and over, to the loss. “But you’re not there. Everything is everything, but you’re missing.” It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes about grief, from poet Graham Nelson:

“Much of the sense of unfairness in grieving comes from the appalling way that a sudden absence seems to affect nothing else: not the trees in the garden, not the books on their shelves, not the crockery to be washed up. We know that the world has been transformed, and yet the world does not.”

“You’re Missing” perfectly captures that essential experience of loss, resolving into a weeping keyboard solo at the end, washing over a mournful beat and repeated string figure.

Then there’s the devastating “Paradise”, the quietest and darkest song on the record. In it, the narrator radiates pain, a pain strongly suggestive of a dead child:

Where the river runs to black
I take the schoolbooks from your pack
Plastics, wire, and your kiss
The breath of eternity on your lips

He dreams, over and over, of the one he’s lost, and returns to one thought: “I wait for paradise”. He’s waiting for nothing but death, dreaming over and over of that reunion, of crossing that river to be with the child again. But then, at the end of his dream:

I see you on the other side
I search for the peace in your eyes
But they’re as empty as paradise
They’re as empty as paradise

Even the idea of death as succor is denied him. Wishing for death when you’re alive is no road to relief — the paradise at the end of it is even emptier than the life it leaves behind.

Springsteen does more than witness for us, though. The second part of his medicine is to bring air, light, tenderness, music, hope, and life into that darkness. Not to overwhelm it, not to deny it or block it out — just enough to tinge the experience with a possibility of grace. Even “Paradise” ends with, “I break above the waves / I feel the sun on my face.”

Thesis statements for this approach bookend the album. The first song, “Lonesome Day”, is clearly about a personal loss — “Baby once I thought I knew / Everything I needed to know about you / Your sweet whisper, your tender touch / But I didn’t really know that much.” The singer is newly, unexpectedly alone, but also still grounded, knowing that “it’s gonna be okay / If I can just get through this lonesome day.” Even in the midst of personal destruction, he repeats, “It’s alright / It’s alright / It’s alright”… or it will be. And until then, all he needs to do is get through the day.

The album ends with a broader scope. “My City Of Ruins” was actually written before 9/11, about the economic wreckage of Asbury Park, but after that day, the phrase “my city’s in ruins” couldn’t help but evoke the searing images of Ground Zero, shown over and over on every American television set. Bruce takes us through those ruins, and asks, “Tell me how do I begin again?” Then he answers: “With these hands.” That phrase, repeated over and over. With these hands, I pray. With these hands, I pick myself up. With these hands, I rebuild. And finally he is shouting a new chorus: “Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up!”

That’s how hope returns. With simple survival — get through the day. With simple tasks, the work of hands, of faith, of small pieces, built up slowly into the bigger pieces that can once again let us rise up.

Other strands of vitality make their way through the album, including a strong motif of eroticism. Sensual images echo around the collection. “Let’s Be Friends (Skin To Skin)” juxtaposes two concepts within its title — friends who get “skin to skin” are surely friends with benefits, at the least. The song describes a relationship with someone who is very different from you, but who might be able to join you after all, an erotic joining urged and justified with “don’t know when this chance might come again / Good times got a way of slippin’ away.”

That theme repeats much more strongly in “Worlds Apart”, along with the image: “In your skin upon my skin, in the beating of our hearts / May the living let us in before the dead tear us apart.” Over Middle Eastern instrumentation and chanting, Springsteeen sings of lovers (and perhaps hemispheres) separated by a huge cultural gulf, but hoping that they can “let blood build a bridge over mountains draped in stars.” There’s no question that sexuality is part of this connection — the song contains one of his sexiest and most startling lines ever: “I taste the seed upon your lips, lay my tongue upon your scars.”

The tongue makes another appearance in “The Fuse”. Against the backdrop of a funeral, and an ominous sense of impending doom, a husband and wife meet: “Quiet afternoon in the empty house / On the edge of the bed you slip off your blouse / The room is burning with the noon sun / Your bittersweet taste on my tongue.” That last line is sung a capella, the only such moment on the album. It’s a musical choice which puts enormous force behind the lyric, placing eroticism front and center as a means to cope with the inevitable loss and destruction at the other end of the titular fuse. Making love, when it’s loving, is the opposite of death — life-affirming, life-creating. It’s a beautiful antidote to the pain that pervades so many of the album’s songs, including this one.

Another antidote Bruce prescribes: music. It manifests exquisitely in “Mary’s Place.” That song has another typically bereaved narrator, carrying a locket with the picture of his lost loved one, hearing her voice on the horizon, dreaming of her in his arms, wanting to know how he can live broken-hearted. Then he puts her favorite record on the turntable, and drops the needle. Over music that slowly gathers force, Springsteen describes a song slowly gathering force: “Band’s countin’ out midnight… Floor’s rumblin’ loud… Singer’s callin’ up daylight… And waitin’ for that shout from the crowd…” The lyrics imbue the music with an almost magical power, and when the song explodes with “Turn it up! Turn it up! Turn it up!”, it’s an explosion of joy, and relief. For that moment, everything’s alright. Better than alright.

It’s a perfect reflexive moment: a musical balm about music as balm. “Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain,” the song urges, and what rains down is healing and comfort. That’s The Rising. Thanks, Boss, for being there when we needed ya.

The Velvet Underground & Nico is one of those albums about which a lot has been written. Most of it, I haven’t read. I know the Brian Eno quip about how only a few thousand people bought it, but each one started a band. Other than that, I haven’t taken the class. I’ve listened to the songs an awful lot over the years, but that’s all. Consequently, I’m a bit self-conscious of the fact that I am highly unlikely to have an original thought about it.

With that disclaimer out of the way, here’s what’s in my head. One of the most striking things about this record, to me, is the fact that it was released in 1967. Yet not only does it sound (almost) completely contemporary, it would be a challenging and avant-garde album even today. Not only was it way ahead of its time, I think it’s still pretty well ahead of ours.

Musically, I identify 1967 with Jefferson Airplane, Sgt. Pepper’s, the Summer Of Love. Yet this record seems like it came from another planet altogether, and perhaps it did. The album radiates New York City, and mostly not the pretty parts either. The Velvet Underground’s New York feels like the yin to 1967 San Francisco’s yang. Where the Frisco vibe was laid-back, open, and loving, New York is tense, paranoid, and angry. Where the hippies wanted to save the world with peace, Lou Reed’s characters mostly want to annihilate themselves or each other. And where the primary theme of the Summer Of Love is freedom, the primary theme of this album is pressure. Both states can produce remarkable accomplishments, and in 1967, both did.

They’re worlds apart musically as well. Where the California sound was all about pretty chiming and blues tropes, The Velvet Underground & Nico is redolent with atonal shrieks, shatters, bangs, and staggers. The song structures are often bizarre — take “European Son”, whose lyrics run out about seven minutes before its music does. Much of that music careens crazily up and down non-traditional scales, veering into feedback and hyperactive hemidemisemiquavers, in front of a guitar strumming over and over and over on the same chord, until it’s more of a drone than a rhythm. In fact, some kind of drone comes up in a lot of the VU’s songs on this collection — it’s behind “Venus In Furs”, “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, “Heroin”, “Femme Fatale”, and more. It’s kind of their signature sound here.

Speaking of drone, let’s talk about Nico. This may be heretical, but I’m not sure her presence is a net gain for the record. Her vocals are certainly interesting, and often surprising, but their effect on the songs tends to be odd and distancing, generally to the detriment of the overall experience. “I’ll Be Your Mirror” fares the worst — it’s far and away the sweetest song on the album, but her frosty tone dampens its warmth, and her heavy German accent makes the gorgeous words harder to understand. Similarly, the lyrics to “All Tomorrow’s Parties” read on the page as compassionate, or at least pitying, but out of Nico’s mouth they sound contemptuous. That tone works better on “Femme Fatale”, which really is a sneering song, one that perhaps sounds a smidgen less misogynist when sung by a woman.

On the other hand, Lou Reed inhabits these characters with a marvelous intensity. That little laugh in “Heroin”, after “it’s my wife and it’s my life”, encapsulates the junkie’s longed-for detachment, finally achieved via a spike in the vein. Or how the obsequious “Oh pardon me sir, it’s furthest from my mind” in “Waiting For The Man” brings across the nervousness of the character while slyly upending the more common racial accusation.

“Venus In Furs” is probably the song that captivated me most this time around. While plenty of the other tunes explore darkness, this song finds a beauty and even a healing in sexual masochism. It has to be one of the first sympathetic portrayals of BDSM in rock — even now not a terribly crowded field in any medium. “Strike dear mistress, and cure his heart” pierces straight to the center of a crucial truth for submissive masochists — that the touch of the whip brings relief, release, and comfort. Sure, endorphins are a part of it, but on an emotional level that willing submission to pain allows them to befriend it, even control it, rather than letting it control them.

That’s a different kind of insight for a 1967 album, and the Velvet Underground pull it off so brilliantly. Almost makes me want to start a band.

I don’t know if Robby knows this, but he keeps picking things that have challenged me in some way or another in the past. There’s Elvis Costello, who has negative personal associations for me. There’s the Don Henley country album, which is, y’know, a country album.

Now there’s Joni Mitchell’s Blue. During my teens and twenties, when my musical taste was forming, I just could not tolerate Mitchell’s voice. It’s an idiosyncratic instrument, prone to swoop low and then swing wildly high, within the space of a few notes, and something about it got under my skin. I didn’t mind “Help Me”, but the rest of her material simply did not work for me.

That has changed. I’ve got Adult Onset Joni Mitchell Appreciation Syndrome, and I remember exactly how it kicked in. About 15 years ago, I was Christmas shopping at a store in Boulder that’s long gone now. They had music playing, and I was struck by how amazingly good it sounded. Dizzyingly good. Even setting the vocals and lyrics aside for a moment, every note had this diamond-pure quality. It sounded like one or two people, playing beautifully in your living room. Clean, sweet, perfect. I asked the clerk what it was, and you can probably guess the answer: Blue, by Joni Mitchell.

The album still sounds like that to me. I’m still just astounded at its simple intimacy. Something locked into place for me that day, and now Mitchell’s voice belongs in that intoxicating sound, in a way no other voice would. The highs and lows she takes it through are a perfect match for the bittersweetness of these songs.

Listening to the album again this week, I was struck by Mitchell’s ability to capture a tiny moment, and use it as a camera obscura that projects a bigger emotional picture. In “A Case Of You”, there’s a little story, and a little image. A bit of dialogue from a fight, and Mitchell sitting at a bar, drawing a map of Canada on the back of a coaster, with her lover’s face sketched on it. This little image anchors the chorus, placing its emotional declarations in a context that feels so real. It doesn’t just feel like I’m there with her — it feels like I’m the one at the bar, drawing on the coaster.

“This Flight Tonight” does the same thing — Mitchell sitting on an airplane, drinking champagne with the headphones on. (An image echoed poignantly in Liz Phair’s “Stratford-On-Guy.”) “Up go the flaps, down go the wheels,” and in rush love, longing, regret, doubt, excitement, yearning, fear. So many of these songs place the bitter and the sweet right next to each other, creating a potent ache:

• “You got the touch so gentle and sweet / But you’ve got that look so critical / I can’t talk to you baby / I get so weak / Sometimes I think love is just mythical”
• “Oh, you’re a mean old Daddy, but I like you fine”
• “Applause, applause — life is our cause / When I think of your kisses / My mind see-saws / Do you see — do you see — do you see / How you hurt me baby / So I hurt you too / Then we both get so blue”

Perhaps the best example of mundane images reflecting deep emotional pain is “The Last Time I Saw Richard.” The first two verses tell a story that sets up an argument, with Richard arguing that all romance is a path to despair, while Joni insists that “love can be so sweet.” It’s that last verse that’s the killer, but it starts almost comically ordinary: “Richard got married to a figure skater, / And he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolater.” But then comes the gut punch: “And he drinks at home now most nights with the TV on / And all the house lights left up bright.”

He took her advice, and now here he is, right where he said he’d be. And now she is too, blowing the candle out at her cafe table, angry and sad and drunk, with nothing to say to anybody. And yet her last words, the last words of the album, allow yet for hope: “Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings / And fly away / Only a phase, these dark cafe days.”

It’s the perfect ending note, on an album full of perfect notes.

Bob Mould’s 1990 album Black Sheets Of Rain was quite a shock to my system when I first heard it. See, I was never dialed into Hüsker Dü in my teens, so my first exposure to Mould was through his gorgeous, extraordinary album Workbook in 1989. That album blew me away — it was so beautiful, so passionate, and so perfect for what I was going through in my life back then. So I was very eager for Black Sheets Of Rain — I bought it the day it came out, and couldn’t wait to hear it.

Then I heard it. Whoa. I emerged 55 minutes later, bludgeoned and dazed, not quite sure what had happened to me. People, this album is heavy. Layers and layers of buzzing guitar in an intense wall of noise, a sludgy bottom end, and drums like punches to the face. Over all this come Mould’s tortured vocals. A throaty singer even in his tenderest moments, here he was more often than not ragged and hoarse, screaming about sacrifice, betrayal, depression, disappointment.

The one exception is “The Last Night”, which recalls the acoustic sound of Workbook. Everywhere else that acoustic guitars dare to appear on Black Sheets Of Rain, they function as curtains to be swept aside by the electric assault, as in the opening bars of “Hanging Tree”. On “The Last Night”, Mould layers his voice to harmonize with himself, and while he employs that technique throughout the album, everywhere else he uses it to turn his voice into power chords. And where in “The Last Night” he is calmly resolute, most everywhere else he’s either despairing or really, really pissed.

Here’s the thing, though. While I’ll probably always love Workbook more, I find Black Sheets Of Rain an incredibly powerful album, and listening to it 25 years later, it now strikes me as pretty much the perfect album to kick off the 1990s. More than a year before the radio waves got completely Nirvana’d and Pearl Jammed, this album announced the alternative future. Everything about it is grungy, right down to the cover. It bails on the Hüsker Dü hyperactive punk thrash, changing it out for grim marches through forests turning black. It’s got these enormous riffs, surrounding Mould’s voice like canyons, and his words ring through them. Those words are just as angsty as anything Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder ever thought of:

Slag heap keeps growing higher
Every morning the sky, it’s on fire
Is there an upside to every downside?
Keep it inside, it’s a downward slide of broken glass
Keeps building in piles
And I don’t know
I don’t know if the sun ever smiles

There’s another dimension to the record, too — hidden in the slag heaps are some amazing pop tunes. “It’s Too Late” even got a fair amount of play on modern rock stations, and with good reason, but there are even better rockers on here. “Out Of Your Life” wouldn’t sound out of place on a P!nk album, and “Hear Me Calling” is both moving and catchy as hell, especially the repeated “you win again” over the fadeout.

But the best track of all is “Stop Your Crying”, an absolutely killer composition delivered with shocking power. The lyrics are excellent, the chorus towering, and Mould’s vocal delivery is revelatory, or perhaps apocalyptic. The verses are fierce but controlled — it’s between them that the action really intensifies. As guitars swoop and swirl in massive phalanxes, Mould groans, screams, bellows his fury and frustration. He’s like a wounded animal in the ending vamp, shouting incoherently over lunatic soloing, before the riff triumphantly returns to close out the track. Everybody should have been rocking out to this song in 1990 — what a pity they weren’t quite ready.

World Party is neither a world, nor a party. Discuss. No, wait, don’t discuss — I have more to say. In fact, World Party isn’t even a band. World Party is pretty much one guy: musical polymath Karl Wallinger. Aside from the occasional guest musician, Wallinger writes, produces, sings, and plays every instrument on every World Party album. He burst on the scene with the excellent 1986 album Private Revolution, and followed it up with the even better Goodbye Jumbo in 1990 and Bang! in 1993.

I became a big fan pretty much the moment I heard “Ship Of Fools” on the radio in 1986, and have listened to all three albums regularly since they came out. They’re dazzling records, especially the first two. Not only is Wallinger great at writing every song and playing every instrument, he’s also great at expressing every genre, or at least every genre along the pop/rock/funk/R&B axis. He’ll go from a brilliant Beatles pastiche to a perfect Prince homage to beautiful Beach Boys harmonies. Even better, at least for the trivia-minded, is the way he has a tendency to slyly quote bits from some classic song, even as he reworks them into a World Party song, giving you lots of moments of recognition. “Hey, isn’t that the melody line from the bridge of The Who’s ‘Getting In Tune?'”. All that stuff makes those albums feel like treasure troves.

For various reasons, World Party kind of fell off my radar after Bang!, but I knew he’d done another couple of albums since, and every time he came up on the iPod shuffle I would think, “Damn this guy is great. I have got to get those other albums.” This year, I finally got partway there by acquiring 1997’s Egyptology. It’s tough to live up to expectations that have built for so long, and Egyptology doesn’t. It’s a fine, solid alt-pop record, but unlike Wallinger’s previous work, it is not dazzling, and it is not stuffed full of fun surprises. In fact, on parts of it he sounds downright weary.

Witness “Hercules”, which can’t even stir itself to be a full song, instead stringing together some halfhearted non sequiturs, and repeating the line, “You gotta be Hercules” amid long, aimless guitar solos. The first two lines of that song are, “You get up / you get down,” and Wallinger employs that trick of throwing together opposites over and over again throughout the album. In fact, pretty much the entire first track (“It Is Time”) consists of variations on that — “It is time to remember / It is time to forget / It is time to be dry / It is time to be wet,” and on and on. In “She’s The One,” “I was her / She was me.” In “Piece Of Mind,” “It’s not in heaven / It’s not the trees… It’s not the ocean / It’s not the air.” Et cetera.

However, even considering those complaints, Egyptology offers plenty of pleasures too. Wallinger can’t help but write catchy melodies, and he’s still a very very good producer and musician, so the tracks themselves tend to sound great even if their lyrics (and occasionally, their vocals) don’t always go the distance. There are also flashes of the old World Party playfulness, such as a crazy piano bit in the middle of “Call Me Up”, whose words are “Whatever happened to those bits in the middle / You know, those crazy piano bits?” The harmonies and instrumentation on “Vanity Fair” (one of the album’s strongest tunes) do a great job of evoking a 1960s Young Rascals-ish feel.

Best of all, though, is the head-and-shoulders standout track, and the only thing that really relates to the album title: “Curse Of The Mummy’s Tomb.” Its start isn’t promising, throwing out yet another casual pair of opposites: “Do you find yourself in darkness? / Do you find yourself in light?” From there, though, it quickly delves into the real darkness, blossoming into a prodigious seven-verse epic in the Dylan mode. Each verse has 11 lines, followed by some variation on the title. These verses take us through an extended metaphor, and while I don’t have Karl Wallinger right here to ask what the metaphor means, for my money the Mummy’s tomb is the subconscious, the curse is the way that unresolved issues in the subconscious can steer us into dysfunctional behaviors, and the exploration of that tomb and exorcism of that curse is what happens in the process of therapy.

Consider: in the first verse he describes the questions that haunt him, struggles with his conscience, and says “There’s so much that I forget / Is that the curse of the Mummy’s tomb?” He’s in that initial stage, trying to figure out what’s going on in his mind, and realizing that he may have forgotten (or repressed) some key information. Then in the second verse he declares that “We’re all the bold explorer… asking for directions / To the house that knows no pain,” and shows us a character watching children play and wonders “who led us all astray?” He’s pondering the mysterious process in which children become encased in adulthood, and how very often the strategies we devise as children for coping with our situations no longer serve us well as adults, causing us to suffer and seek a way out.

The third verse starts to describe the descent, and the dangers inherent therein. There are demons, traps, and spies (echoing Dickinson’s line “The Soul unto itself / Is an imperial friend — / or the most agonizing Spy — / An Enemy — could send –“), ready to “seize the fool” who explores these inner recesses. Wallinger brings up the conscience again, and says “I’m too busy with my gloom,” highlighting the way depression can itself be a block to therapy. But at the same time, he longs to be rid of “the fever that’s the curse of the Mummy’s tomb.” In verse 4, he looks at how the “curse” can isolate you from others, and gives the most explicit link yet between the metaphor and the emotional concepts it maps: “And our vanity betrays us / And our nerve it disappears / After crossing the dark threshold / Into loneliness and tears.”

Verse 5 sees him deep in the process, confronting early experiences of family and parents. He depicts those parents as the king and queen of the family, but it’s also no accident that “mummy” is British slang for “mother” — Freudian machinery is certainly at work here, as he visits “a time so long forgotten / But it seems like yesterday / When the queen was in her palace / And the king was on his way / To the bosom of his family / To the holy golden womb / What was that love?” Notice that besides the royalty metaphors, Wallinger explicitly invokes the female body, specifically in a maternal sense. In the penultimate verse, he gives a great description of both how difficult and how rewarding therapy can be. It is a process of untangling and decoding the self, and the understanding thereby gained can lift an enormous burden from your life. “There are strange signs and ornaments / That’ll really tell you all / But they’re easy to misunderstand.” He ends the verse (before the one-line chorus) with “It’s up to you now,” which is the realization we all reach at some point when we’re grappling with ourselves.

That sentiment gets picked up again immediately in the first line of the final verse: “Nobody there to help you.” It’s the climax of the song, and in it the protagonist confronts a deep sense of loss, perhaps even the literal death of “mummy” — Wallinger refers to “life without the queen.” But in the end his soul becomes integrated, and hope returns with the realization that “There’s no curse… / Just a Mummy’s tomb.” When we come to peace with ourselves, when we really understand ourselves, we need no longer be trapped in self-destructive behaviors with mysterious origins.

Interestingly, the key realization Wallinger highlights is, “This life is but a dream.” I interpret that as the understanding that what I experience as my life is really the product of my senses interacting with my mind, which uses its pattern-matching prowess to attempt to impose some meaning on all the input it gets. Yet I have more control over this construction of meaning than I might think, and I have control over some of the input too. Though my mind is always at work constructing a narrative, I can step into the authorship role as new understanding shatters old assumptions, and as I make choices that determine (to a limited extent) what the nature of my experiences will be.

I’m not making the case for this to be the correct or the only interpretation of that song, but it is my interpretation. I think it’s a phenomenal work, and even though the rest of Egyptology might fall short of World Party’s previous oeuvre, “Curse Of The Mummy’s Tomb” is one of their best songs ever, and well worth the album’s price on its own.