Flop - 'Whenever You're Ready' (Sony 550/Frontier)

Are you ready for a hot take? Here goes: Rusty Willoughby is one of the greatest unheralded songwriters currently alive, and his best work stands up against the best work by Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Roy Harper or anyone else you might want to put in that canon. And that best work, for me, falls squarely within the boundaries of the three albums recorded by Flop in the mid-1990s. Unfortunately I only have And the Fall of the Mopsqueezer on cassette, which lies outside of the purview of this blogging project, so we must start here with their major label debut-swansong, Whenever You're Ready. The story of Flop, whenever it is written, which is rarely, is always the same - being from Seattle, they got signed to a major label in another case of right-place-right-time syndrome, this being one of the more crippling examples. They recorded this stunner of a second album for Sony, but because the major majorly fucked them around w/r/t promotion and marketing and general support (Steve Albini is always right!), the band collapsed in a mess of bad vibes and their third album, originally meant for Sony, went back to their first label, Frontier. We'll get there soon enough – oh, hooray for it being Flop Day on this blog! Willoughby's previous and future band was Pure Joy, who are also great, and fell somewhere in-between the Paisley Underground sound of Rain Parade/Game Theory and the crunchier melodic punk of Fastbacks (for whom he briefly played drums). For Flop, he brought in Bill Campbell on second guitar and the sound thickened immediately, especially on this record - er, sorry, CD. Campbell's guitar lines do a lot of chugga-chugga and pickslides and things that you hear on metal records, though it's not metal in the slightest; but it's hardly soft rock either, despite the acoustics of 'Parts I & II' or the psychedelic residue throughout. Generally, the production here is thick and booming, which is evident from the kicking drums on the opening 0:01 of the disc; one would situate this closer to the 'hard rock' genre than pop-punk were it not for Willoughby's angelic, soaring voice and the incredible hooks in his songs. Instead, Flop ends up in a maligned liminal zone which was doomed, even for the time; too heavy for radio play, too brainy for the heavy scene. But the songs are sophisticated, sometimes beyond belief;  that opening cut ('A. Wylie') is about An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw, so that indicates from the get-go that this is a far cry from whatever Mudhoney and Tad were writing about at this time. Second cut 'Regrets' mixes beautiful poetics ('And the leaves are convalescing / the sun is warming the baby seed') with verses of urban alienation over palm-muted heavy rhythm guitar. Willoughby's lyrics often implicate scientific/medical imagery (though more so on the later Pure Joy recordings) and mix in just enough pop culture references to conjure songworlds that are relatable while just ambiguous enough to create intrigue. A cursory listen may suggest this is merely a competent punk-pop album, a product of its time, but it's so much more. And maybe the competing tendencies of Willoughby and Campbell make the music so much more interesting; the sinewy guitar lead underneath the driving speed of 'Eat' gives it a catchy, clear direction; the production of 'A Fixed Point' makes it sound like if 'The Ballad of John and Yoko' needed its batteries changed; the back-to-back punch of 'Night of the Hunter' and 'Port Angeles' is an experience of pop perfection. The former has some of the most clever and quotable lyrics of Willoughby's career ('Solvents, glue and heroin/ she said "I don't want to do that at all" - and it's a song about the Robert Mitchum movie through and through!) and the latter explodes family tension with religious imagery. Legendary UK producer Martin Rushent engineered this and for me, as a 15 year old, I didn't initially glom onto Whenever You're Ready as quickly as the other two records, maybe because the production felt so heavy. But now I can't imagine this any other way. There's hardly anyone around who remembers Flop and probably even less as passionate about them as I am, but I urge you to investigate these three records, because for over 20 years they've been  endlessly rewarding and get better with age. The same can't really be said for the weirdly retro artwork, though again, I can't imagine this record looking any different by this point in my life - a life that has been mostly lived with Flop as some part of it.

The Dead C - 'Harsh 70s Reality' (Siltbreeze)

This, really, is it. Though really, I feel like I've been repeating myself on each of these trips through the Dead C's musical lair; I'm just creating an echo of empty language in a feeble attempt to convey how great something is that should just be experienced. Maybe that's a way to portray about this blog overall - a failure to articulate. And there's a window, because that tension between articulation and letting it slide; between intention and affect - that's maybe what's so fucking stunning about this CD. There's a lot of Harsh 70s Reality to make it the singular record that it is (even among the band's already stellar catalogue by this point). Opening with 'Driver U.F.O.', the most blatantly anti-structural track they'd released to date, is not a sensible way to begin your masterpiece. But 'Driver U.F.O.' is not just a jam; despite the millions of free-rock, spacey explorations I've heard in my young life, there's something about this one that makes it more complete. I can't articulate (there we go again) much beyond that, but I don't have to. It's a brilliant balance of all things that are great in improvised music, which includes (but is not limited to) texture, rhythm, space, and dramatic currents. One thing you can do with Harsh 70s Reality is consider it alongside other big records of 1991/1992 - specifically Loveless and Nevermind, two records that inspired billions of my peers but in some ways don't hold a candle to the artistic genius and complexity of this. Or maybe, instead of being so quantitative, we can just appreciate these three cornerstones as being three sides all balancing each other, structurally. It's crazy to think twenty years has elapsed here, two-thirds of my life, and that this would probably pass the "Velvet Underground" test - it was certainly heard by the least amount of people compared to Loveless/Nevermind, but probably all of those who found it went off and started their own bands. I myself came late to this, getting into the Dead C around the time of Tusk and luckily coming across a bunch of these CDs secondhand in a short period of time. Talk about getting thrown into the deep end! Back then, it was the long, loose jammy tracks that spoke to me most - 'Driver U.F.O.' and 'Sea is Violet', for example. Whereas the songs, I didn't click with them right away, maybe not til I came across Eusa. 'Sky' is the real comparison against Nirvana; if you have doubts look at the (insane, amazing, thank god for YouTube) live clip online and wonder what was floating in the water down there. 'Love' has been regurgitated in several forms on various records - this is something else to admire about the Dead C, their continual reappraisal of past compositions - but this one is a slow, 10 minute dirge that might be the best take on it. Much of this record ws recorded live, some as far back as '89 according to the liner notes (a barely readable typewriter font on some beautifully minimal artwork). There's not much distinction between studio and live anyway - the fidelity can benefit this sound, but this is a mid-fi world that messrs. Morley, Russell and Yeats pioneered and conquered. Harsh 70s Reality is rounded off with 'Baseheart' and 'Hope', the latter being another all-time great Dead C classic. This is the CD issue and it omits two tracks due to space limitations, which believe it or not, I've never heard (but don't fear, I'm downloading them now). Some years ago I saw the LP version of this for about $40 and I passed it up, but now that seems like a bargain. 

Consonant (Fenway)

This Consonant album was one of the biggest surprises of 2002 for me, surfacing as a new Clint Conley-penned album of rock songs which was magic to those of us who worship at the altar of Burma. Nineteen years is a long time to hide away, and expectations were understandably low. The band had a guy from Bedhead and a guy from Come, but how good could the songs be? I guess if you spend nineteen years writing stuff, you're going to have twelve good tunes for a CD. But nothing could quite prepare me for how good this actually was. Or IS - because it still sounds absolutely great, a perfect merger of classic rock, 80's and 90's American guitar indie and a bit of the Burma fire. It's all love songs, of course, or rather contemplations of love and loss structured somewhat around these weird acrostic poems by Holly Anderson. There's bitterness seeping out of tunes like 'Call it L---' and 'Who Touches You Now?', but it's the more lunar language that kills me - a hopeless 40something romantic who is struggling to put things into context. Anderson's poems are built around the names of flowers and Conley has certainly adapted them well into rock phrasing, managing to sing lines like 'Cured but curious we embrace post-pathetic happiness: neutered, fixed, companionable' without it sounding as strange as it probably just did to read it. The fuzzy guitars, drum fills and amped-up energy ('Buckets of Flowers, Porno Mags'; 'That Boston Life') are raging with confidence and mastery; for an aging punk, there's no element of embarrassment. Chris Brokaw's guitars find the right places - for those of us who grew up with music that itself grew up on Burma, it's all just perfect. There's oodles of 'Trem Two' style moodiness, but still a hint of 'That's How I Escaped my Certain Fate'. And Roger Miller turns up a few times too. The pop hooks are there - not singsong like the Beatles but subtle, mind-burrowing lyrical fragments that I had bouncing around in my head for much of 2002. I remember having the 'We couldn't ever make enough / time for lips and hips and arms' following around my consciousness for so long that I was starting to go nuts; of course, for a song about the ghost of a relationship (and the song I refer to is the closing tune 'What a Body Could Do'), it's practically supernatural. 'Post-Pathetic' is an absolutely brilliant song, with a bit of college 80s jangle, sharp sharp sharp words, and a self-deprecating sexuality that gets better with every listen. It's the influencer meeting his influencees, and I was pretty much obsessed with this CD when it came out - my digipak is dinged and dented from taking it to work every day. Of course, I haven't played it for a few years which is why it feels so good and familiar now - I actually am on the third consecutive listen. Rock music connects when it's music and lyrics meeting in perfect balance, and that's what's here. I love lines like 'Wasn't she full of wild want / for is he and her she?' but even more when the band is providing the perfect presentation of it. My love for Consonant is pretty strong, and I realise a bit idiosyncratic, but just wait, cause there's gonna be lots of these as we go along.