Friend and avant-garde folkster Normanuniform (some 12apostrophes readers may know him as Eric Nolan) has released his new album, Woodways, on a Website I built for his music.

Check it out: www.normanuniform.net.

A couple of weeks ago certain planets aligned and I went to two, count them, two concerts, Regina Spektor and Spoon. This is high living for me, since that comes to about 17% of the concerts I have attended in my life so far.

They were both amazing shows. But the venues were like apples and oranges, (literally) like downtowns and suburban malls. Specifically, like First Avenue and Myth the Nightclub. Going with the food simile again, more like apples (if you like apples) and something bad; let’s say spoiled milk.

Regina Spektor played at Myth, in Maplewood (a suburb 15 minutes north of St. Paul). Myth is next door to a shopping mall, has tall boxy walls, and looks, from the outside, like it used to be a Home Depot, a Home Depot with a giant Vegas-style sign showing a fiery “M.”

They frisked me on the way in, and though they were gentle, I wasn’t into it. Digital cameras were banned, we were informed. Before the show started, a girl in red was escorted out, why I don’t know. In the middle of the set, two burly bouncers pushed their way through the crowd on the balcony, where I was, and scanned the crowd on the floor, barking to each other: “Down there!” and “Third row!” Who they were after this time, I don’t know, but the cumulative effect was a lot like prison, with better décor.

I’d never been to First Avenue, the fairly-famous nightclub where Spoon played (it’s featured in Prince’s Purple Rain), but I liked the vibe a lot better. (For Minneapolitans, it felt to me like the CC Club with a stage.)

First Ave was dark, noisy, and relaxed. I can’t imagine that digital cameras or much of anything was banned, and as I stood on the balcony by the stairs, I could barely read the “Stairs must be kept clear for fire hazard” sign through the throng of people cluttering the stairs, hazarding fires. The drinks were good and more affordable. I think I recognized half the people there (although that could have been because we all seemed to wear the same rectangular glasses and Converse sneakers, which tends to make people look familiar in the dark). Tidy, I know, but First Ave felt like the opposite of Myth.

One last thing: although Myth had a stilted vibe for me, Regina Spektor was anything but. She was amazing, full of soul, once beating time on a wooden chair as she sang and played piano, the whole show an accomplished mix of precision and fun.

Myth the Nightclub
[where: 3090 Southlawn Dr., St Paul, MN 55109]
First Avenue & 7th St Entry
[where: 701 1st Ave N., Minneapolis, MN 55403]

Because the best time to make a list of your favorite albums of the year is less than three hours after you’ve had two teeth yanked from your lower jaw, with the dentist breaking one in the process and having to poke around in the hole to tweeze out all the root fragments—right?

10.  Mission of Burma, The Obliterati, 2006
It has its flaws, like the too-sludgy sound throughout and the fact that they let their drummer, Peter Prescott, write a few of the songs when they shouldn’t.  But I’ve been missing guitar breaks for a while, and there’s an amazing one in Roger Miller’s “Careening with Conviction.”  Plus they’re haunted by the freakish size of Nancy Reagan’s head.  I can get behind that.

9.  Sons and Daughters, Love the Cup EP, 2004
I already had The Repulsion Box, so I knew what to expect:  punk set to a Scottish-folk beat.  (Or Scottish folk with punk vocals.)  Nonetheless, “Broken Bones” has some of the most restrained guitar I’ve heard this year, and “Johnny Cash” rumbles along quite nicely.

8.  Michael Gordon (composer), Decasia, 2002
Decasia the movie is a compilation of decaying filmstrips that flicker in and out of resolution for an hour.  Decasia the symphony is the best haunted-house music I’ve heard since Mocket’s Pro Forma.  The even-numbered movements are the spookiest—think Sonic Youth with a full orchestra.

7.  Gorillaz, Demon Days, 2005
A party album about the apocalypse.  “November Has Come” is my favorite song.

6.  Wilderness, Vessel States, 2006
I think every review of this album that I read compared Wilderness to Public Image, Ltd.  Fortunately, I’ve never heard Public Image, Ltd.  Whichever guy is the vocalist, he doesn’t sing so much as declaim, and the guitars sound pretty piddly to my PJ-Harvey-trained ears, but not in a bad way.

5.  The Timeout Drawer, Nowonmai, 2005
In the same post-rock (so:  instrumental-rock) vein as Sigur Ros and Mono, but without the adscititious sense of grandeur.  They wield keyboards, flutes, and cellos when necessary, but the whole album still sounds like it was recorded in a garage.  That’s the charm.

4.  Maximo Park, A Certain Trigger, 2005
I probably listened to this more than any other album I bought this year.  I finally figured out where they got their guitar sound:  Tommy Tutone.  “The Coast Is Always Changing” has the best chorus I’ve heard in a while.  Pure radio pop, or at least it would be if Clear Channel had any sense.

3.  Carla Bozulich, Evangelista, 2006
Carla Bozulich could fart on tape and I’d buy it and praise it.  The Geraldine Fibbers were just that good.  Evangelista is a little disappointing, though, mainly because I was hoping for an album that would sound like “Blue Boys” from the Kill Rock Stars compilation Fields and Streams:  all children’s instruments and toys, shaped into song.  Instead, she borrows Godspeed You! Black Emperor to make an album that sounds a lot like ‘30s blues, only with more screaming.  The cover of Low’s “Pissing” is too faithful, but “Evangelista I”…dude.

2.  Thomas Stronen, Pohlitz, 2006
Basically, he pulled out all his pots and pans, plinked away on them for half an hour, and added some keyboard squiggles to flesh out the sound.  But it works.  With its weird triangle pings, “Dispatches” is my favorite track.

1.  P.O.S., Audition, 2006
Local.  Genius.  At first I thought P.O.S. wasn’t as good as Atmosphere.  Then I noticed that I listed to this album every day, whereas I listened to Atmosphere about twice a month.  It’s like the crapitization of mainstream hip-hop never happened—there’s cello on “De La Souls,” punk screaming on “Half-Cocked Concepts,” self-deprecation on “Living Slightly Larger,” and P.O.S. acts like it all belongs there.  Best line is the first one.

This is the kind of album that isn’t bad on its own terms. Mono plays moody, atmospheric instrumental rock that would have made a good soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings if Peter Jackson were as innovative as everyone says he is and didn’t bow to convention with a full-blown orchestra and choir. Several of the six songs stretch into the ten-minute range, the better to incorporate thrilling sequences of crescendos, climaxes, and decrescendos. The shorter, quieter songs are welcome interludes between the epic-battle, tragic-death compositions that dominate the album. And the art is great—the blue booklet imitates the texture of a cloth-bound memoir, the watercolor portraits inside remind me of Genesis’s We Can’t Dance, and the whole CD comes in a cardboard sleeve like Interpol’s Antics, with a different painting on each side so that you can choose your cover.

No, the issue with Mono is that I already have a Sigur Ros album in my collection, and it’s actually by Sigur Ros.

In other news, I see that Penis Enlargement felt it necessary to weigh in on Pulao’s prelims-vs.-virginity post.  I offer our guest this humble suggestion:  get some better search algorithms.

Sufjan Stevens, Illinois (2005)

Talkdemonic, Beat Romantic (2006)

Victory at Sea, All Your Things Are Gone (2005)

Young People, All at Once (2006)

First off, I should say that this post is several years past its expiration date. It’s like I see a requiem for indie rock in some magazine or another every year, so I shouldn’t annoy anyone by adding my voice to the chorus now. But the sheer mediocrity of three of my recent CD orders left me with no other way to review them than by clustering them into a eulogy. And I threw in Sufjan Stevens for good measure.

So what is “indie rock”? I’ll assign Sufjan Stevens, Talkdemonic, Victory at Sea, and Young People to that genre because they’re all vaguely poppish (which is almost like being rock) and they’re all on indie labels. But stylistically, I don’t think “indie rock” means anything anymore; at this point it designates only a mode of distribution. The underground network of independent labels and distributors, which used to deliver specifically non-commercial rock, has (with the help of online music retailing) stepped into the void created by the major music conglomerates’ continual swallowing of smaller labels. Signing to an independent label is no longer a statement of musical ideals: it’s a viable career move. You won’t have a #1 album, but you can still get your music to the masses.

Which is a shame, because the perpetrators of these albums really don’t need to be heard. Take Talkdemonic. The duo comprises a fiddler, Lisa Molinaro, and a multi-instrumentalist mastermind, Kevin O’Connor. Beat Romantic, the liner notes helpfully tell me, is “the second Talkdemonic record.” Released on the ironically named Arena Rock label, it features lovely cover art of white-barked birch trunks in a row under a canopy of green leaves. And the music sounds like it was recorded in a bedroom with a Starbucks latte at hand. It’s offensively inoffensive. A reviewer might refer to “delicately plucked acoustic guitar,” “whispers of organ,” “reedy violin.” I might put this on in the background while I’m surfing the Internet, then get frustrated halfway through and exchange the CD for something else. The only one of these sixteen instrumental tracks I could identify after it has passed is “White Gymnasium,” thanks to the nautical flute line that graces it. The album is very polished and very pretty, and I mean that in the worst way possible.

For something equally low in energy, trying Young People’s All at Once. After about five listens, I finally cottoned on to who Young People sounds like: Cat Power. Katie isn’t as good a singer as Chan Marshall, but she does offer the same wispy, alcoholic vocal haze; I don’t think she delivers a single song in full voice. It makes me tune out, so I’m not sure I can remember any of the lyrics. These might be lines from “Slow-Moving Storm”: “Angel bright and fair / Take me to your care.” Or they might not be. It’s her voice that mires All at Once in the realm of passionless music I don’t care about. They have some interesting musical ideas, like the distortion-drowned piano riff of “Reapers,” but too many of those ideas meander into collapse. They sound like they got bored while recording; why should I be interested while listening?

I think Victory at Sea’s album, All Your Things Are Gone, is the clearest sign that anything underground about the indie world has long since been abolished. The band starts off with some trendy angular post-punk (“No Reason to Stay,” “Cecille”) before moving into strange storytelling (“The Letter”), but finally softens to reveal itself as a purveyor of Carole King adult-contemporary piano pop (“Turn It Around” onward: six songs out of ten). This kind of music isn’t in vogue right now, but there’s no stylistic weirdness that would prevent Victory at Sea from having a hit single. All Your Things Are Gone is a 2005 release, so it’s past its sell-by date already, but may I suggest “Bored Otherwise” as the potential hit that could have led listeners to this filler-packed extravaganza?

Speaking of hits, filler, and piano pop: Sufjan Stevens. I’m not as in touch with indie politics as I used to be—blame the dullness of the music—so I might be wrong about this, but I think Stevens is today’s biggest indie star. He got enough press on what was probably an off-the-cuff comment about making an album for each of the fifty states that he decided to follow his love letter to Michigan with 2005’s study of Illinois. Even the outtakes got great reviews.

But I must say, I’m not impressed. First of all, Illinois doesn’t have any moves on it that weren’t already in display on Michigan—I suppose Stevens has his Beatles-style “Revolution” with the electrified Superman song, whose title I will not exhaust my fingers by typing, but Stevens’s distorted guitar work only reminds me of the excruciating, incomprehensibly reissued A Sun Came! Otherwise, there’s a lot of the Charlie-Brown-soundtrack piano, orchestral instrumentation, softly sung melodies, and pensive lyrics that have long stocked Stevens’s releases. The musicianship has come a long way since Michigan, in that there’s no spit-filled trumpet here, but then the bedroom-recording aesthetic was part of the charm of early Sufjan (and if Talkdemonic had left some rough edges unsanded, their bland instrumental pop might have had more character).

The word I want to use to describe Illinois is “professional.” And that’s part of the problem. “Professional” implies a received standard, an external framework of values. “Professional” demands a pre-established sound and promises a primarily financial reward. So here’s a word to describe Stevens: “accomplished.” As in “mission.” He found a career path and he’s treading it to the usual terminus.

This is why indie isn’t indie anymore. Underground rock was supposed to be about finding your own voice, about making your own noise. Early indie bands (I’m thinking of those profiled in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life: Black Flag, Minutemen, Mission of Burma) went independent because they had to—major labels weren’t willing to take a chance on their weird music. There’s no reason a major label wouldn’t want to take a chance on Stevens. He’s cute, friendly, low-budget, and has already proven himself. Stevens may decide he wants to stick with Asthmatic Kitty, but that doesn’t mean he’s underground. If you need proof, just get The Avalanche (outtakes from Illinois). I haven’t heard it and I’m not going to, but: recording 150 minutes of music for a single album and then releasing the outtakes separately, as if even your rejects are gems? Smells like Fleetwood Mac to me.

There are two periods in the history of hip-hop that fascinate me.  The first is the period in the late ’70s where various musical and cultural influences came together in the Bronx to create the stuff.  I read today (on Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt) that the New York blackout of ‘77 hastened the spread of hip-hop from the Bronx because of all the looting:  kids who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford the equipment were able to boost turntables, microphones, and other gear that let them start running their own street parties.  It’s a fascinating theory, even if there isn’t any proof.

The second is the shift that happened right around the time I started forming my adult musical taste, when the mainstream of hip-hop went from pop-rap (MC Hammer, LL Cool J, Young MC) to hardcore.  Suddenly the hit rap songs I was hearing about were songs my radio station wouldn’t play.  I don’t think “Nuthin’ but a G Thang” ever made it onto WCFX-FM in Mt. Pleasant.  (Maybe it hit the local college station.)  This was only a couple of years after Nirvana slaughtered Poison.  Suddenly, all music was hardcore.

I said I was preparing a post about why I thought Bo$$’s Born Gangstaz was such a good album.  In my brain, that post assumed dissertation status.  It involved a short history of Lichelle “Boss” Laws’s career, including her #1 rap single, “Deeper”; a breakdown of her potent rhythmic and rhyming skills; an exploration of her inversions of hip-hop’s gender tropes; a section on her use of violence as myth and reality; and a chapter on the function of her sidekick, Irene “Dee” Moore, who compared to Boss is more acutely psychotic and also more immature–Vader to Boss’s Sidious.  This is weighty stuff for a one-hit-wonder’s not-quite-gold album that in 47 minutes features 280 F-bombs, many of them on the final proper track:  “I Don’t Give a Fuck.”

I’m too lazy to write it, so I’ll get to the point:  Born Gangstaz is such a great album because it both embodies that seismic shift in hip-hop and comments on it.  Because despite Boss and Dee’s repeatedly insisting that “that’s the way the shit really is, G,” that this is “how I live,” Laws puts the lie to it herself with the intro and outro:  answering-machine messages from her parents, who object to the snippet of “I Don’t Give a Fuck” that serves as her greeting and explain exactly why.  Turns out Laws, who poses on the album art with guns a-plenty and guns down friend and foe alike over the course of 12 of the hardest raps ever, spent 12 years in Catholic school, took tap-dance lessons, and even went to college for three years.  In short:  she’s faking it.

Laws was eventually outed as a fake by that renowned bastion of street cred, the Wall Street Journal.  How exactly you out someone who’s already outed herself, I don’t know, but suddenly Boss dropped off the radar.  Born Gangstaz sold almost 400,000 copies, but her follow-up was rejected by her record label.  Read the story here for more details.

Boss is the hardest rapper I’ve ever heard.  “Catch a Bad One” ranks up there with Black Fork’s “Silicone Wetnurse” and Babes in Toyland’s “Handsome and Gretel” (obviously I’m taking a broad definition of “punk” here).  But she’s not keeping it real at all.  It’s all fake.  And when she tells you it’s all fake, she also turns her street narrative into American myth.  There are as many references on Born Gangstaz to paranoia and mental disturbance as there are to killing people or smoking chronic.  It seems entirely possible that all the murder happens only in Boss’s head–especially because, in real life, it really was all in Boss’s head.

That’s not to say there’s no reality here.  “A Blind Date with Boss” is a revenge fantasy about men who don’t give Boss and Dee their due respect, but it follows “Recipe of a Hoe,” which is a riot-grrrl-esque criticism of the sexual politics of the rap industry.  “1-800-Body-Bags” is a skit that implicates not only black gangbangers and gangsta rappers for street violence, but also the white-run entertainment industry for encouraging the thug image and profiting off it.  And as to why Boss might want to display that image, listen to her father’s comment on the outro:  “By the way, baby, thanks for the Rolex.”

There’s also the myth, which comes from the origin stories Dee drops on “Catch a Bad One,” “Born Gangsta,” and “Diary of a Mad Bitch” and Boss’s own tales of hustling, violence, and paranoia.  This is the story of American outlaws.  One of the album’s skits is even called “Thelma & Louise.”  Boss is the gunwoman, Dee the getaway driver, and not even a squad of cops can stop them.  And finally, the relentless hardness of the raps puts the album over the top into satire.  No one could be as ruthless, as violent, as unremorseful as Boss is.  She’s parodying the image of a hardcore rapper by turning it up to eleven.  She has to, since she’s faking it–she can’t allow her credentials to be questioned for a second.  But she also makes it clear that hardcore can easily cross the line into cartoonish, and that you need some depth to make it work.

It’s like she predicted the last ten years of mainstream rap.  Once the hardcore persona becomes a component of the genre, there’s no more space for imagination or criticism.  A lot of the raps and party anthems of the past few years are recycling the tired cliches that Boss was already debunking in 1993.  Maybe I’m giving her too much credit, but even if I am, Born Gangstaz is a spooky, bloody, Kill Bill Vol. 1 of an album that still deserves to be heard.

What with the move and all—thanks to Salma, Dan, Kris, and Sarah—I haven’t had a lot of time to write. (Summary of my new apartment: I really like living off the ground again.) So here’s a short post, a roundup of what I’ve been watching, reading, and listening to this week:

Merry Krismix: For which I have Kris to thank. This is Kris’s half of our mix CD exchange, and compared to mine, it has a lot more, you know, mix. The 16 Horsepower, Go Team!, Asha Bhosle, and Gorillaz songs are my favorites. Plus, “Rudie Can’t Fail” reminded me that I need to pick up London Calling. (But the artist on the last song got cut off—who played “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left”?) And Hank is on the cover. Thanks, Kris!

On the Waterfront: Kinda boring. Marlon Brando spends the whole movie looking like he just got struck in the face, so when he actually does get struck in the face, it’s really bizarre. The whole thing suffers from 1950s-brand soundtrack overload, where every emotion is cued by a string crescendo that comes through the speaker distorted.

Abbey Lincoln, Abbey Is Blue: I heard “Afro-Blue” on the Current a few months ago and had to check it out. The song, which has a great horn riff, outshines the rest of the CD, which is mainly supper-club jazz with sad melodies that would sound better if the accompaniment were louder in the mix. She has a great voice, though.

Victory at Sea, All Your Things Are Gone: Aimee Mann without the Aimee Mann. A couple of really good piano-pop songs, a couple of other songs that aren’t quite as good. iTunes, my good people!

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: So. Very. Boring.

Bo$$, Born Gangstaz: I’m writing (mentally) a post on why this is such a good album, but for now: It’s such a good album. I had it on tape (!) in high school, lost it for a long time, and just this week got the CD again. It holds up. It’s pretty violent, though—kind of hard to take in one sitting.