Friday, January 9, 2015

Redundancy Reigns On The Last Internationale's Debut

The Last International - "We Will Reign" [Epic Records]
While dozens of remarkably talented up and coming bands with profound, creative - and if not, at the very least, somewhat unique - things to express, struggle to market themselves and/or garner the attention of a major label, somehow The Last Internationale managed to rise above all of them, and then celebrated by pissing out this mediocre album of middle aged biker anthems.  Having ex-Rage Against The Machine drummer Brad Wilk in their personnel likely helped them get attention, and surely with producer Brendan O'Brien (Pearl Jam, Michael Penn.. he's got a decent resume) on deck to orchestrate the whole thing (strings were maybe pulled? Favors called in?), the label suits couldn't help but green light this belly flop by virtue alone.

The brass tacks: We Will Reign is a tepid "classic rock" sounding album that borrows more than it offers, stumbles more than it strides and bears with it the shame of a band touting a lot of clout over little content.

From the opening track, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Indian Blood", you get a pretty thorough summation of what this album has to say.  The song presents the Orwellian concept that "one does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship", as vocalist Delila Paz belts in her reedy Annie Lennox meets Florence Welch tone: "the seeds of revolution will grow tight around our children's necks, like nooses that are used to keep the slaves in check / And decades later we still can't figure out why it remains the same...".  The subsequent title track "We Will Reign" then goes on to say... well, the exact same thing: "We might have seen it all / We're building walls because we love to see them fall".  And this same principle is revisited on the 4th track "Killing Fields", the 5th track "Battleground" .... and yet again on the closing track "1968" - the latter most title possibly being a veiled reference to the infamous shootout between military police and the Black Panthers socialist party in April of that year - or maybe the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or any number of other Johnson Era unrests and resistances. A theme album concept is one thing, but dedicating five songs on a ten song album to an identical message is verbose, to say the least (hah! - PUN intended!), especially when the remaining tracks are left feeling alienated, random and disparate: three lover's soliloquys, a working man's lament, and one painfully ham fisted, but surely intended to be bittersweet, rock ballad ("Baby It's You"); the last mentioned's refrain worded in kitschy "white-trache" dialect: "It doesn't matter what they say, I know I'm gonna love you any old way....blah blah blah don't want nobody, cause baby it's you...".  

All this criticism aside, the basic song structures on We Will Reign's tracklist are all fundamentally boilerplate rock n' roll;  no different than you'd hear in any American dive bar or in any episode of Sons of Anarchy you choose.  You can sing along, fist pump, air guitar or dance drunkenly to any song on here until the bartender kicks you out, or you knock over Tig's beer and he beats your ass. These are stereotypical American outlaw anthems here that, vexatious and cliche as they might be, still appeal to a certain segment of the population (ref: all above made projections). Rock n' roll music was a revolution once upon a time, and while The Last Internationale can attempt to present themselves as juggernauts of the movement; their claims are imperious, their arsenal is lacking - and the only aspect of them that might be a reigning force to be reckoned with are their delusions of grandeur.  


Friday, January 2, 2015

A Shout Over Whispers... Or, New York Times Music Critic Jon Caramanica Is An Ass Hat

Passenger "Whispers" NEW & SEALED vinyl LP record
$19.99
includes shipping within the United States


Those unfamiliar with Passenger (aka Michael Rosenberg, post 2009) might at first check the setting on their turntable to be sure the LP isn't playing at 45 RPM. Rest assured, though it's only slightly off putting, his voice really does sound a little leprechaun like, but that's fine; get past that and you'll find the craftsmanship of his compositions entirely endearing on Whispers, Passenger's 6th studio album, and fifth as a solo artist. 

Historically, when a founding band member goes solo using his previous band's name, you can expect a number of disappointments, ranging from haphazardness to jarring disparity in continuity. Some would hold that 2007's Wicked Man's Rest was the sole effort released by Passenger as a proper band, and those same would likely discount everything Rosenberg released independent of his former partner Andrew Phillips as "not quite".  The reality of the matter, however, is that Rosenberg continues to mature with each subsequent effort, and the Passenger moniker he continues to carry with him as a solo artist casts no shadow of shame whatsoever on his illustrious early work with Phillips. 

Unfortunately though, Whispers hasn't received the same positive critical support as Wicked Man's Rest did, having been called by one New York Times misguided (and, in my opinion, consistently mentally retarded) critic Jon Caramanica: "limited in its arsenal".  Caramanica goes on to fucking stupidly boldy
state that Rosenberg's writing comes off like, quote "a teenager's scribbled poems", and suggests that Rosenberg's criticism of the popular appeal of Twitter and other social media platforms is ironic, considering the role they played in growing Passenger's success early on. Now, whether or not Caramanica has any familiarity with the "scribblings" of teenagers is in question, alongside just what sort of teenagers he knows?  Teenagers most of us know could never pen, with any experienced intelligence, songs like "27", an upbeat, but at the same time deeply pondering, comparison of personal and social expectations ("The only thing I get told is I got to sell out if I wanna get sold..." and "I write songs that come from the heart, and I don't give a fuck if they chart or not...").  Sure, your average teenager could express the same level of frustration, fuck-all and angst, but what's missing is the qualification, the worldliness.. as in where Rosenberg states in the middle eight: "27 years done, written 600 songs only 12 get sung; 87,000 cigarettes have passed through these lungs, and every single day I wish I'd never smoked one; a week brushing my teeth, a week getting my hair cut, 8 years sleeping and I'm still tired when I wake up..." Your average teenager doesn't have the wherewithal or maturity to make these observations (not to mention your average teenager doesn't clearly state that he's 27). And while it's true social media played an enormous role in catapulting Passenger's success, that doesn't mean the artist has to love it and all it represents. It can be explained in the same way that even though your job pays your bills, you still hate going there every day.  So with this in mind, when New York Times critic Jon Caramanica tries to raise a brow at Rosenberg's criticism of people "slowly dying in front of fucking computers", it doesn't mean they didn't do anything for his career... for you, reader: doesn't the corporate cube farm that you spend 9 hours a day decomposing in pay for your vacation time, your home, your material possessions? See, it's not the ends, it's the sorrow in the means to them. How can a respected music critic be so obtuse? 

Why Whispers hasn't been critically acclaimed is baffling, really. The album runs in the same Irish folk vein as Mumford & Sons, though with a bit more Caribbean flavor here and there - but where Mumford's songs are arguably more or less just a bunch or rhyming words, and their appeal is more about form than content, Passenger meets - and maybe even exceeds - that same now popular form, but with songs that happen to include meaningful, well wrought lyrical refrains as well.  The only real criticism of this album is the occasional over-emphasized message in some of the tracks ("Hearts on Fire" and "Scare Away The Dark"), but all in all, Passenger's whispers here are very much worth listening to.