[Post-Punk]
Joy Division
Unknown Pleasures
*****
Closer
*** 1/2
Still
***
Even though Joy Division’s monochromatic music has inspired bands as disparate as U2, The Cure and Interpol, its influence in pop culture seems to have peaked in 2007. Credit this increased presence to the beautiful, Anton Corbijn-directed biopic Control—a chronicle of singer Ian Curtis’ life, which ended with his May 1980 suicide—and three lavish, double-CD reissues of the Manchester, England, band’s catalog by Rhino Records.
Of the three releases, 1979 debut Unknown Pleasures is the essential buy. A grayscale shade of post-punk hollowed out with rigid digi-drums and ghostly keyboard echoes, Pleasures includes some of the band’s best tunes: the haunted death-dance “She’s Lost Control” and t
he bass-driven “Disorder.” A July 13, 1979 live concert included on the reissue’s second disc captures the full severity of Curtis’ rumbling baritone, especially how it meshed with the band’s jarring guitar zig-zags and robotic beats.
The posthumous full-length Closer today almost feels like a sophomore slump. Although the album exhibits a heavier synthesizer influence—giving the album a Gary Numan/early Depeche Mode vibe in places, especially on the fantastic, poppy “Isolation” and the funereal sprawl “Decades”—Closer’s songs are denser and harder to assimilate, mainly due to dreary tempos and meandering arrangements. Its accompanying live concert is most notable for a brisk keyboard-drenched version of “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” pre-dating the single by two months.
Still—a 1981 collection of rarities and the band’s final live performance, two weeks before Curtis killed himself—is fairly cohesive for an odds ’n sods collection. The majestic creeping-death horror of “Dead Souls” and the howling “Ice Age” are highlights, as is one of the few recordings of Joy Division doing “Ceremony” (a song that New Order, founded by the three remaining members of Joy Division, later popularized).
Lavish, black-and-white packaging full of gorgeous photos and extensive liner notes marks all three releases, which do a fantastic job documenting how young and evolving Joy Division still was when Curtis died. His premature death forever overshadowed Joy Division’s music, and often made it seem immune to criticism, but these reissues are great because of their flaws, fitting for a band plagued by its own humanity. –Annie Zaleski
[Arena Rock]
U2
The Joshua Tree 20th Anniversary Edition
*** 1/2
U2’s 1987 The Joshua Tree is the band’s most-beloved album, a seminal musical moment of the ’80s and considered by many to be one of the greatest records ever made. Chances are that if you’re even a casual fan of the band, you’ve owned it for years. So what do you get from the new 20th-anniversary edition, aside from slightly better sound to replace your worn-out old CD? Well, if you’re willing to shell out 60 bucks for the deluxe package, you get a 56-page hardbound book and a DVD with a live show from Paris and the documentary Outside It’s America. But if you’re a little less U2-crazed and just want the regular version, the main plus is a bonus disc of B-sides and other rarities.
It goes without saying that none of these songs lives up to “Where the Streets Have No Name” (pointlessly included on the extra disc in its single edit) or “Bullet the Blue Sky.” But none of them sounds like it was mistakenly left off the actual album, either; many sound half-formed, aimless, like warm-ups for the great music that made the cut. Some (“Luminous Times (Hold on to Love),” “Silver and Gold”) capture the ringing guitars and arms-wide-open-to-the-sky phrasing that defined The Joshua Tree, but for every one of those there are two that sound like tossed-off larks.
If you’ve managed to avoid picking up The Joshua Tree for all this time, though, this is the perfect opportunity. The roots of everything good (and, admittedly, everything annoying) that the band has done since are right here, just as wondrous as ever. –Josh Bell
[Country-Rock]
Gram Parsons with the Flying Burrito Brothers
Live at the Avalon Ballroom 1969
*** 1/2
Nobody does archival preservation like the Grateful Dead, so it stands to reason that when Amoeba Records honcho and Gram Parsons devotee Dave Prinz went foraging for unreleased live material from his hero, he unearthed exactly that in the Dead’s legendary concert vault.
That discovery—two crisply recorded, full shows from April 4 and 6, 1969, when Parsons’ Flying Burrito Brothers opened for the Dead at San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom—represents, arguably, the most significant addition to Parsons’ catalog since the country-rock progenitor’s 1973 death, documenting the Burrito Brothers in peak form just after the release of debut album The Gilded Palace of Sin.
Ever wondered whether the unimaginably sweet vocal harmonies of Parsons and Chris Hillman could hold up on live versions of “Sin City” or “Dark End of the Street”? (They do, by and large.) Whether an in-the-moment rendition of “Hot Burrito #1” would out-weep the heart-wrenching album cut? (Absolutely.) Whether “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow’s pedal-steel guitar might be further liberated onstage? (Yup, check out the band’s raucous cover of Waylon Jennings’ “Mental Revenge” for proof.) You don’t have to imagine anymore.
An argument might be made that two discs—with repeat versions of nine tunes—could have been pared down, but doing so would have totally undermined the spirit of the Dead. Besides, cutbacks would have meant not hearing two primo bonus cuts, a 1967 cover of the Everlys’ “When Will I Be Loved” and a wistful ’69 solo demo of “$1000 Wedding.”
One quibble: the packaging is weak, literally. Both the staple-attached liner notes and the front and back cover-bound CD sleeves appear destined to fall apart, a sharp contrast to music destined to hold up forever. –Spencer Patterson
[Pop-Rock]
Counting Crows
August and Everything After: Deluxe Edition
****
The dreads and quest for acceptance, understanding and The Girl remain, but it was this 1993 breakthrough that first introduced a grunged-out world to the second coming of the San Francisco scene in the form of Counting Crows.
“Mr. Jones,” “Round Here,” “Rain King,” “Omaha” and the seven other tracks composing the remastered August appear on Disc 1, as do six completists-only bonus demos produced by guitarist David Bryson. A 1994 Paris concert fills Disc 2, and it’s here that the reissue fully comes alive.
The 13 songs explore the group’s past, present and future. Previous collaborators Sordid Humor’s “Jumping Jesus” precedes rarity “Margery Dreams of Horses,” while the nihilistic “Perfect Blue Buildings” contains snatches of “Miller’s Angels,” from future sophomore effort Recovering the Satellites (Satellites’ “Children in Bloom” appears later in the set). It’s a beseeching, 12-minute “Round Here,” however, that best showcases the group’s proclivity for fluid, as-the-spirit-moves reconstruction of both inflection and sentiment.
Live, the band is less Bonnaroo-approved “jamming” than emotional freefall alternately set to purposeful guitar; mandolin and accordion flourishes; and gasping, devastating near-silence. And August’s deluxe edition proves Duritz & Co.’s leaving-it-all-on-the-floor mentality was not merely an afterthought, but a performance cornerstone from the beginning. –Julie Seabaugh
[Jazz-Rock]
Donald Fagen
Nightfly Trilogy
*** 1/2
How fitting that the main complaints about studio geek Donald Fagen’s Nightfly Trilogy—the box comprising two solo discs he recorded during Steely Dan’s 12-year hiatus and another he made while participating in the reunited band—have far more to do with technological formatting than the music?
As one of only two voting members of the Dan, Fagen had plenty of room to spread his wings in that outfit. So there is virtually no substantive difference between Fagen’s solo music and that of Steely Dan. There are overlapping sidemen; Steely Dan partner Walter Becker produced 1993’s Kamakiriad; and producer Gary Katz helped bring the Aja sound to 1982’s The Nightfly, the best of this set’s three discs. Closely behind is 2006’s underrated Morph the Cat. Kamakiriad doesn’t quite meet that standard, though it is stronger than Steely Dan’s Everything Must Go.
If you like Steely Dan, you need this music. The liner notes are Fagen at his snarky best, and the bonus disc includes such rarities as a surprisingly wonderful cover of Al Green’s “Rhymes.” Even if none of the albums reaches the highs of Steely Dan’s best work, they all share that band’s remarkable consistency for making solid music uniquely mixing jazz-licking rock, pop wizardry, studio fetishism and icy cynical lyricism.
The downside is that the liner notes, credits and much else are only accessible on a paired, “interactive” MVI disc, while the bonus disc is nothing more than the bonus MVI audio tracks from each disc superfluously gathered again (since, for some reason, the bonus songs were not inserted where they would fit chronologically onto the original discs). Each of the three MVI discs requires (separate) online registration, promising extra content (which, so far as I can tell, does not appear to exist), loads slowly and can only be read by select computers and DVD players. In short, they are the opposite of Fagen’s music: clunky and lacking in elegance. –Richard Abowitz