DoubleShot: Nightmare of You

I am going to try something new with DoubleShot. The idea is to highlight an album that truly resonated with me. A personal classic. Or just a really great entry album. By that I mean, the record that brought me in to a band's fold. And, then, their follow up. The sophomore. Slump? Brilliance? We'll see.

We'll start with Nightmare of You.




Nightmare of You - Nightmare of You - 2005 (iTunes)

A band I'm pretty sure you have never heard of. I was at the gym when a friend of mine stuck my earbuds into his iPod and made me listen. One song in and I was hooked. I picked up the eponymous debut album at Amoeba that day and, I gotta tell ya: this album is 5 years old and has never, ever left my iPod. In some playlist or other I have this record. Why is it so good?
First off, there are tremendous hooks. "The Days Go By So Slow", "Dear Scene, I Wish I Were Deaf", these are two epic, hook-laden, retro-80s, lush emo rock songs, deceptively steeped in 50s songcraft. The way singer Brandon Reilly wraps his throat around wordplay and rhyme schemes of, say, Thumbelina, only add to the catchiness of the songs.
The album is relentless in it's pop-hook assault. The electro-nightclubbing Simple Minds-esque "My Name is Trouble" and quasi-college Indie "Why Am I Always Right?', the brilliant "I Want to Be Buried in Your Backyard", paint vivid pictures of desperation, loss, death, love and all of them make you want to lower the top and sing along on a coast drive.
Does it stop?
Nope.
The skiffle pop of "Ode to Seratonin".
The faux-country of "Marry Me".
The urgent "In the Bathroom is Where I Want You".
The driving "The Studded Cinctures".
It's amazing that every single song on this album is great. It's like a best of record by a band you've never heard of but wish you did so you could collect all the rest of their colection. Except that this is the debut.
Closing on the french cabaret inspired, "Heaven Runs on Oil", well, if you can't tell, I think this album is an unknown classic.

Grade A+
A Side: The Days Go By So Slow, Dear Scene, I Wish I Were Deaf, I Want to Be Buried in Your Backyard
BlindSide: Everything Else.
Downside: Nothing.

Septenary

In between this album and this year there was a brief, forgettable ep called "Bang". I have it. I don't care for it.
But a few weeks ago I got a tweet from NoY that their new album was out. I downloaded it from iTunes immediately.

It's called...



Nightmare of You - Infomaniac - 2009 (iTunes)

Starting off with "Good Morning, Waster" I think we're on an interesting ride but, I got the sense that something was wrong. Now, I often give a cursory listen to a second record and dismiss it as not as good as the first, because I'm an impatient a-hole and I want immediate gratification. But this song sounds like a leftover b-side from the first record. It feels like Reilly is trying to sell the tunes through vocal gymnastics, like they all know nothing is really as good as that first record. It's a mellow place to open things with and bleeds into the simplistic "Eustacia Vye" that feels like, gulp, a Panic at the Disco track. A little too Beatles-y for my taste.
The lazy-versed and catchy-chorused, "I think I'm Getting Older" smells of "first single" but it's really obnoxious. What I hate most is that I am singing along even though I know that this is not a great tune.
The first sign that the band hasn't lost all songwriting prowess comes on "Someday, but not Today", which steals heavily from mellow 70s AM radio top 40. It builds to a nice chorus that I can't help but sing along to. It pairs, weirdly, with the retro-70s stuff My Morning Jacket tried earlier this year.
The 50s songcrafting is back on "Hey, Sweetheart" and that's a welcome sign.
But the more troubling things come just after.
"Experimental Bed" should really read as "Experimental Bed of Music that we are not really up to."
"Amsterdam" is just bad but--
"Gavi". Gavi sucks. I assume they are writing from the perspective of a self-serving, indignant, unctuous swinger but the lyrics are so poor and forced that it's almost as embarrassing as its subject matter. In fact, it's really the worst thing this band has committed to...what do we call it now that vinyl is dead, anyway?
The album rights itself, slightly, with "Tell Me When its Over", a song that would fit well into their calssic, hooky, canon. And "Pair of Blue Eyes" and "Please Don't Answer me" are terrificly classic NoY. But they can't save the record.
The last track, "Goodnight, Devil" bookends the album. It wears its adoration of Pink Floyd's the Wall on its sleeve but, even so, that's light years better than most of this record.

Too bad. I was really hoping that this follow up would be as terrific as the first. It's not. It's not awful, but it falls many stories from the debut's heights.

Grade C-
A Side: Someday but Not Today, Tell Me When It's Over, Goodnight Devil
BlindSide: Eustacia Vye, Please Don't Answer Me, I think I'm getting Older
DownSide: Gavi, Experimental Bed

Listening Post: Ani DiFranco - Red Letter Year

Ani DiFranco - Red Letter Year - 1988 (iTunes - Amazon)

Dammit, Ani. Just as I was ready to completely write you off you go and do something like this.
Red Letter Year is good. It's the best she's done since Little Plastic Castles. It's also the first album in 10 years that SOUNDS like something that was made by someone who made that album and the ones that preceded it.
To those who say that motherhood and happiness have had a negative effect on DiFranco's music, I say, pishaw! She wears overt happiness as well as she wears (or wore) anger.
Ani's music has seemed aimless and meandering the last 10 years. Hooking up with her lifemate, Mike Napolitano, has brought the MUSIC back. There are actual, dare I say it, songs here.
The opening, Red Letter Year, is haunting and mellow but incisive and edgy and the album just gets better.
All This actually rocks with ominous fury. Present/Infant is such a pleasant examination of motherhood from a woman who once pined with longing and jealousy so many years ago at the woman who was coiffing herself for a man.
The N'Orleans Jazz of the Red Letter Year Reprise is such an ode to her new hometown but also shows a zest for life that has been missing for so fucking long.
Ani DiFranco has grown up. She's happy...finally!
And she's allowed, gulp, production. Good, layered production.
The glee in the woman in love (without man, daughter, whomever) who is "smiling underneath" is a welcome visitor after those so many years of depression.
Sure Red Letter Year falls into a miasma of repetition by the end. But, who cares? It's better than so much else out there. And it's just nice to see that Ani hasn't used up all her talent or traded it in for Sunday Brunch Music.


Grade B
A Side: Red Letter Year, Emancipated Minor
BlindSide: Present/Infant, Smiling Underneath, The Atom
DownSide: Star Matter

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Now playing: Ani DiFranco - Emancipated Minor
via FoxyTunes

Listening Posts: Ani DiFranco - Reprieve

Ani DiFranco - Reprieve - 2006 (iTunes - Amazon)

An interesting thing happened while listening to Reprieve. I found myself caught up in the mood and ambiance that had left me so cold on the most recent DiFranco records.
The slow, almost inert opening track, "Hypnotized" actually succeeded in keeping me just that. As the album progresses its obvious DiFranco hasn't abandoned her politics. She's still angry only this time her venom is focused less on bad relationships & the record industry (that stuff still lingers) but she takes aim at Halliburton and others on tracks like "Millenium Theater" and "Shroud". It's just that the music is, as so often displayed over the last 2 decades, boring. Uninspired. Overt in it's self-indulgence.
Reprieve isn't a bad record. Ani DiFranco is simply not the same person who recorded those first 8 records. She's, well, she's boring.

Grade C-
A Side: Hypnotized
BlindSide: No surprises
DownSide: Nothing that great.

Listening Post: Ani DiFranco - Knuckle Down

Ani DiFranco - Knuckle Down - 2005 (iTunes - Amazon)

On first listen, the opening track of Knuckle Down, the title track, filled me with a sense of hope. THIS is the Ani that I remember. It's not the best but it's close to the original sound. Maybe, just maybe, she'll give me and her listeners an album filled with what we fell in love with in the first place.

Yeah.

No fucking way.

Ani's still thinking she's a female Tom Waits hoping to score the next Jim Jarmusch movie. Newsflash, Ani! Those movies suck! Oh, fuck it. Never mind.
God help me, I don't think I'm gonna get through this. I can't recall a Listening Post where the artist has fallen so far from their heights.
Oh, yeah. It's a Listening Post now. It was a Reflecting Pool until I had no relationship with the music. Now it's all discovery.
But not good discovery. Not like when you discover a bag of money in the attic of your old house. More like when you discover shit on your shoe that is stuck there with old gum.

Grade D-

ASide: Knuckle Down
DownSide: Don't get me started.

Listening Post: Ani DiFranco - Educated Guess

Ani DiFranco - Educated Guess - 2004 - (iTunes - Amazon)

If I had to make an educated guess I would say that with the exception of putting a gun to Ms. Difranco's head, she wouldn't remember any of these "songs".
These are meanderings.
When Springsteen holed up with a 4 track he came out with the disturbing and penetrating "Nebraska". 3 years after 9/11 and Ani Difranco is still noodling around with her poetry book. And no real ideas. No real songs.
This album is bad.
I think the people that are buying it and making it Number One on the Billboard Internet albums all did so out of habit. Out of Habit. Remember songs like that, Ani? Remember??

Grade F

Listening Post: Ani DiFranco - Evolve

Ani DiFranco - Evolve - 2003 (iTunes - Amazon)

Ugh.
This album, as I've read, is the swan song for the Ani DiFranco "band" and I couldn't be more ready to kiss that crap goodbye. I think the woman that I fell in love with for her ideas, ideals and attitudes, has been bogged down on the ability to experiment and possible cajoled and seduced by other musicians.
But that's not fair because that statement takes the onus off Ani and strips her of the responsibility for these borefests that she's been proffering.
Songs like O My My are the type of syncopated Jazz influenced stuff that, well, I despise. Maybe it's great but it offers me nothing. I'm just not wired to like this stuff.
I think, at this point, it's obvious that Ani Difranco and I do not own any of the same records in our collection. She's got a lot of Utah Phillips, Miles Davis, and protest stuff and I like Queen. I'm also pretty sure that falling in love, having a child, enjoying life, has stripped AD of everything I liked about her.
I need my Ani angry. Not happy.
Her music has never been of interest to me. It was the music coupled with her worldview that made it all work. Now that she fancies herself a "musician", I'm left cold.

Grade D
A Side: Evolve, Here for Now
BlindSide: -----
DownSide: Shrug, Serpentine

Reflecting Pool: Ani Difranco - Revelling/Reckoning

Ani DiFranco - Revelling/Reckoning - 2001 (iTunes - Amazon)

At this point I'm not really sure why anyone would care about Ani DiFranco and her records. I think, and I'm not sure, so don't quote me, but, I think she HAS to record something because otherwise, well, that's the way the business works. Record, tour, make a living. You have to give your audience something new so they know you're alive otherwise every tour is really just a best of retrospective, yes?
So, Ani goes about her business, recording new music that makes her happy, even though it has almost nothing to offer the listener. She isn't the finger plucker of yore. She's in love with Jazz and seems to have let those influences take over.
This album isn't offensive, nor is it memorable. It's a Sunday morning, coffee and newspaper background CD.
There is one song that struck me, however. It comes towards the end and it's called "Sick of Me". I'm sure it's supposed to be a relationship song. But when she asks:
how sick of me
must you be
by now?
My answer is: A Lot.

Grade: C
Nothing stands out in any way on this record.