Blunderbuss: Jack White drifts in and out of classic rock revival

Jack White: artist or revivalist?

Jack White, the pale, floppy-haired guitar master behind the White Stripes, Raconteurs and Dead Weather, released a solo record a few weeks back called Blunderbuss. Like its name sake, the record sounds really cool but is still an expensive museum piece.

Often, White is really at his best here. He writes very good songs, has a cool and strange voice and,finally, he has a backing band that can play. There's a lot to like.

There are some really neat songs on Blunderbuss. "Freedom at 21," "Missing Pieces" and "Sixteen Saltines" at the album's starting point are all White Stripes-style blues rockers with more effort put into arrangement. The sound is a lot bigger, which I think is a good thing.

White was impressive on Colbert

I wrote a while back that I thought Jack White's best production was behind him.

Then, last week, I saw him on the Colbert Report -- with a pretty badass backing band -- for a performance of "Freedom at 21" off his new record, Blunderbuss. The tune had the usual White signature retro-blues-garage sound, but the song was pretty far left of center.

And the band is really good. The drummer here (check the video for yourself) is light years better than any other I've heard with White. For the first time with White, it didn't sound like I was listening to a gimmick. This is music.

 I have to say. after seeing the performance, I'm interested in giving the new record a shot. If the performances measure up to what he did on the Colbert Report, it may be his best record yet.

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Spiritualized: Big British rock to tug the heart strings

Spiriualized's Jason Pierce

There's a whiff of brit rock revival in the air. Blur isn't getting back together after all*, but the band announced a massive retrospective (box set ) of its 21-year history. Jarvis Cocker is out touring with Pulp again. (check them out on Jimme Fallon last week.)

And this month saw the release of Spiritualized's 7th record, Sweet Heart Sweet Light.

The Shins polish up their pop for Port of Morrow

James Mercer is back with a new, heavyweight The Shins record.

Twelve years ago, at the dawn of the aughts, The Shins achieved a bunch of buzz on the back end of the "garage rock" craze -- a lo-fi sound that covered a whole slew of "the" bands from  The Von Bondies to The Libertines -- and an assist from the indie sweetheart film, Garden State. Natalie Portman and Zach Braff meet over a Shins song.

Now, Shins frontman and songwriter, James Mercer, is back with a new The Shins record, Port of Morrow, and a new The Shins band -- the original members departed after Mercer broke them up in 2009 or so. The result is a pretty enjoyable record with very strong pop sensibilities. It is at once far removed from the garage sound of the band's  Sub Pop debut, Oh, Inverted World, yet not far at all from band leader James Mercer's upbeat songwriting and trademark vocals.

Grooveshark: Painless way to try out tunes before you, er, buy 'em

I recently wrote positive things about Spotify. And I meant them.

But things change. I'm no longer using a Mac as a daily driver and Spotify's desktop app is not the most stable thing in the world on Ubuntu, the Linux OS I'm now using every day. So I'm not using Spotify anymore, either.

So naturally, I've been looking for alternative services to preview records. It's a pretty helpful thing to do when you're trying to keep up with a music blog. No need to do any more than dial up a record and listen to it a few times, free of charge.

Craig Finn goes for gravitas over guitars

Craig Finn is looking as clean cut as his new solo record.

Craig Finn, the bespectacled front man of The Hold Steady, has a solo debut out called Clear Heart Full Eyes. It's a nice, but mostly predictable sort of record -- the kind that you'd expect from a straight-forward rock and roll prose stylist like Finn.

For anybody well-versed in The Hold Steady, Finn's word-rich lyrical style is still there. As a solo artist, though, he steers clear of the wall-of-guitar sound that propels the best Hold Steady tunes. Here, guitars mostly provide the ambiance for a set of songs that swing from slow blues jams to alt country-ish whiskey drinkers.

Fishbone: The Movie

I was a huge fan of Fishbone. In high school, as a kid learning to play bass, Fishbone's amazing Norwood Fisher was an inspiration. As a lot of other strange West Coast band's -- from Jane's Addiction to Primus -- became popular, Fishbone faltered, even though they were far more interesting, creative and just plain musical.

1991's The Reality of My Surroundings was about as big as the band ever got. The album is a masterpiece, a mix of metal, funk and soul, the likes of which have not been heard since.

Favorites of 2011

This wasn't the best year for new music from my view.

I promise I'm not sliding into a haze of oldster griping about nothing being good anymore (I'm sure that's coming some time). It's just that little of the new music this year held up to last year's best. Nothing, certainly, approached The National's High Violet, far and away the record of the year for 2010.

For me, the year's best records sound like music's future. Not its past. A lot of indie rock this year has felt far too mired in trying to sound like it was recorded in the '50s. That's fine. Some of those records are enjoyable, but I have a hard time getting past the gimmick of that sound being much more than just that: a nostalgia trip. It sounds neither fresh nor particularly like art. What do those bands sound like outside of the studio?

World's hardest working band, The Black Keys, didn't work hard enough on El Camino

The Black Keys are all work. Perhaps they needed a little more time
 for their latest, El Camino, a good record that sounds a little stale.

Is there a harder working band in all of Rockdom than The Black Keys?

No other serious rock band I know of works at the same pace. The blues/garage duo from Akron have released 7 LPs in the last 10 years. In addition, they recorded the superb Chulahoma EP, produced and recorded the Blackroc record, wrote a record for the late Ike Turner and frontman Dan Auerbach had a solo record that very well could have been another Black Keys album.

That work ethic has certainly paid off. If you had told me in 2003 that The Keys would be headlining the Wells Fargo center in Philadelphia in 8 years, I would have said you were nuts. I liked the band a lot, still do, but I never would have guessed theirs was an arena-filling sound.

Coldplay keeps trying to get those U2 shoes to fit

Cold Play is big. But are they U2 big?
And is that even a fair question?

It's been a while since I've written a word about music. I've been really busy and relatively uninspired by new music -- not a good mix for a hobby blog about music. But I thought I'd take a second here to talk about one album that's now a classic and a second one that is brand new and what they have in common.

Lost a little in the discussion of  seminal grunge and alternative records celebrating 20 years -- from Nirvana's Nevermind to Pearl Jam's Ten -- is the 20th anniversary of another record, this one by a super group and, like R.E.M., one of the bands that, like 'em or not, are really responsible for shaping the sound of rock music for the last 30 years.

Wilco find a bit of that old spark on The Whole Love

Wilco today, and, yes, that's a Saturday Night Live shot.

It's been a long time since Wilco turned the musical world on its head with one of the best rock albums of the last 10 years. 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was an amazing work for a number of reasons. It was the perfect sound for the time. It overturned expectations for a band that had cut its teeth on alt-country and breezy pop, thanks to Jim O'Rourke, whose remix of the material evidently led to a complete remake of the band at the expense of songwriting multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett. And the band's sound was deemed so revolutionary that its label, Reprise Records, refused to release it. It was all the stuff of a perfect rock legend.

VIDEO Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks -- "No One Is (As I Are Be)"

Found this video for the new Malkmus record. Check it out. Hear that Beck?

Stephen Malkmus keeps pace with Mirror Traffic

Mr. Indie Rock: Stephen Malkmus

I was listening to Mirror Traffic, the brand new solo work of Stephen Malkmus, the 45-year-old frontman of the quintessential '90s indie rock outfit, Pavement, and realized that Malkmus epitomizes my generation's real classic rock.

In the world of serious popular music, where the holy grail is to find that new sound, calling something classic can be tantamount to insult. The term "classic" denotes over-ripe records that have topped radiostation turntables for more than 50 years now. Classic is out-of-date bloozerock. It's "Layla" pumping out of the tattered speakers of a riverside purple van. (Is that freedom rock? Turn it up man!)

That's not what I mean with Malkmus. 

Google Music Beta has a blog: Magnifier

Just came across this: Google Music Beta, a service i'm using all the time now, has a blog with free songs, called Magnifier. If you have Google Music (it's still invite-only, though I think anyone who applies will likely get an invite a couple weeks later). Every day, Magnifier will offer free songs from featured artists.

If you haven't heard My Morning Jacket's new one, head over now and get "Holdin' on to Black Metal" and  "The Day is Coming (live)" right now.

Mister Heavenly finds the strange crossroads of doo wop and indie rock

Kattner, Thorburn and Plummer are Mister Heavenly.

The idea behind Mister Heavenly's Out of Love sounds both preposterous and pompous. The trio -- a veritable indie rock "super group" composed of Man Man's Ryan Kattner,  Island's Nick Thorburn and Modest Mouse drummer Joe Plummer -- has called the effort "doom wop," a dark indie rock record inspired by vocal doo wop bands of the '50s. Sounds nuts, doesn't it?

After my initial reaction -- "holy crap this is weird" -- I found the songs on Out of Love to be much more than intellectual exercises or sound experiments but actual, enjoyable songs. True to the concept, a lot of the music has some of the indie rock weirdness you'd expect from a band like Modest Mouse or Man Man, but then, after a good verse of thumping, guitar rock, the band will veer into a Phil Spector-style chorus full of background harmonies and swelling, wall-of-sound-sized key accompaniments.

The real crazy thing is it works.

OK, maybe I'm wrong about Deerhunter

I've complained a bit here about "not getting" the indie rock outfit Deer Hunter, whose Halcyon Digest got a lot of attention from critics last year. I've found myself circling back to the record and am really enjoying portions of it. This song, "Desire Lines," performed live on a show called The Interface is a pretty terrific track in my opinion. They're definitely hipster douchebags, but dig these wonderful ambient, cascading guitar lines.

Washed Out's got the theme music to your melancholy summer nights

As far as music taste goes, I like a lot of different things, but I tend to stick with what I know: buzzy indie guitar rock. Greatest rock band ever as far as I'm concerned is Sonic Youth. Rounding out a list of favorites would be Radiohead, Pavement, Pixies and Modest Mouse.* You get the idea.

I try to factor in those preferences when I approach writing about a record like Washed Out's new one, Within and Without, released by Sub Pop on July 12. It's a pretty good  example of where the "dream pop" or "chill wave" wing of indie music is right now: moody and ambient, yet eminently danceable music that owes a great deal to the keyboard-dominated new wave and U.K. pop of the early '80s.

Washed out has been a favorite band of the indie blog tastemakers, like Pitchfork, where the record scored a "Best New Music" tag and a rating of 8.3 (out of a possible 10).  The band -- which is really just a stage name for Earnest Greene and his laptop --  received a bunch of buzz on the release of last year's EP Life of Leisure, which featured a well-played single "Feel it All Around." (If you've watched Portlandia starring SNL's Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein, you've heard "Feel it all Around" during the opening sequence.)

Shit Luck: The Video

Posted this on Google+ last week... Just happened to find this great fan video for an old Modest Mouse song I really love. It's just a great video

Believe the Hype: Spotify is good

The Spotify player

So, I managed to grab an "exclusive" invite to Spotify. Those invites were so "exclusive" that music and tech blogs were posting links to what might best be described as mass invite engines. The service launched last Wednesday and I was trying it out by Friday.

What is Spotify? After Google, which also launched this month, Spotify is the most buzzed about music service since Pandora. It started in Europe, where it gained a ton of users, and had been gearing up for a U.S. launch for the better part of the last year.

Does it live up to the hype? I think so. I've never been a big Pandora fan. I've found it really hard to plug in an artist and not land on a song I really didn't want to hear within 15 minutes. I think I've been around for Pandora hitting that sweet spot for a good hour only two or three times. Generally, a good old-fashioned iTunes genius playlist is better. And the new Google Music instant playlist is even better than that.

Yo alt rap: Where's the love?

Tribe's Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Q-Tip

A funny thing happened to me just a few days ago. Well, not funny. Just an unexpected nostalgia trip.

I was perusing my Twitter feed and came across an item on Slate about a new documentary by Michael Rappaport about one of my favorite groups of all time: A Tribe Called Quest. Right after I put the piece down, I got my Tribe all queued up and ready to go: People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders.

All three albums still sound terrific. They could be brand new.  But in fact Tribe's classics are now 20 years old. The middle record in that trio, perhaps the best, was released in 1991. I had been thinking about doing a series on key overlooked rock records that were released in 1991 in response to what will likely be a great big nostalgia dump for the 20th anniversary of Nirvana's Nevermind this September. But I hadn't until that moment thought about the equally great rap records of that same period. In fact 1991 was as great a year for rap as it was for rock.