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.

John Coltrane - 'A Love Supreme' (Impulse!)

This ended up on my shelf because I got it for free or someone left it at my house or for some other reason like that. I'm not making an excuse because A Love Supreme is certainly nothing to be ashamed of; but I never actually listen to it, or any other Coltrane records for that matter. And I'm not sure why - I mean, certainly there's a lifetime of rewards to pull out of the grooves on all of those classics (or between the 1s and 0s here). Maybe I'm just a bit sick of hearing about A Love Supreme, and I just never came across any of the others on vinyl. This is certainly the Coltrane album that graces the most university dormitory CD shelves -- wait, who am I kidding? College kids don't own physical pressings of music anymore! But regardless, this is an insanely venerated record that is certainly a bold, confident statement of emerging free jazz spirituality -- I just prefer the more discordant explorations of the Alice/Ali years. Particularly Sun Ship! Now that's a record. But actually listening to A Love Supreme is a supremely harmonious act; the tone of Coltrane's sax is like a giant buttery raft and the Garrison/Tyner interplay is as telepathic as reputed. Everything swirls in a big ball of magic and it's a sound that has become such a template over the past half-century that is almost sounds clichéd. There are some solos of note - or duos at times, like Tyner's leading of the middle part of 'Resolution', with chords so perfectly chosen and Garrison/Jones responding to the chopping with the perfect support. Garrison's solo in 'Pursuance' has that classic, elegant feel, like a wood nymph stepping confidently out of the darkness, wrigging in the spotlight for a bit, and then retreating to some other role. I think a good reason for A Love Supreme's popularity is how peaceful and content it feels, and that it comes just on the precipice of total madness in his own life. Crescent, from about the same time, is just as confident (from what I remember) and it's like one last glance backwards before taking the door to Interstellar Space. Maybe I also have a bit of a snobby elitist chip on my shoulder, just thinking about how for many this might be the one free jazz or Coltrane disc they own. And ironically, the latter is true for me.