Canon Fodder #9: Swallow My Pride

Ramones - Leave Home

More Songs About Degeneracy And Girls. As much as this sophomore album repeats the thrills of a classic debut I’ll wax rhapsodic about for a full post eventually, it’s got plenty of classics of its own. “Pinhead,” “You’re Gonna Kill That Girl,” “Oh Oh I Love Her So,” “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment.” Sire used it as the second half of a single CD with the debut in the early ‘90s (as was the style at the time). But isolated on LP, it's easier to appreciate how they aimed to get a notch closer to their dream of being an American Sweet (“Blitzkrieg Bop”…”Ballroom Blitz”) here compared to the first album.

Teenage Fanclub - Shadows

I referenced this “late triumph” from 2010 a while back. It’s a gorgeous album - their first with a full-time keyboardist - where the three singer-songwriters sound a lot better twenty years in than the Byrds did, even if they never transcended those obvious antecedents or flew as high. Now taking half a decade between each album, accepting their post-major label status and producing themselves again, each of the core trio had to come up with less than one song a year, a possible explanation for the total lack of audible strain. And I think one of them must have learned how to play lap steel? Or a facsimile thereof? Sadly, singer/bassist Gerard Love split with the group over a lack of desire to tour after the next album, their drummer since 2000 outed himself as a twitter TERF, and I have no desire to engage with whatever they get up to next.

Ramones - Road To Ruin

They obviously hadn’t given up their pop dreams on this, their fourth album. A movie and an album with Phil Spector came after, and “I Wanna Be Sedated” might be their most famous song if not hook. But the word “Road” feels appropriate for their most Arena Rock album to date. It even ends with them whining “it’s a long way back” (Ok, to Germany, but you can’t expect them to just say Queens). Marky makes his debut on drums, with Tommy still behind the board but not interested in the road any more, engineer Ed Stasium making his co-producing debut. The sound feels thicker, heavier, eyes maybe on AOR (the Cars having made their debut splash while this was being recorded). Check out the effects(!) on that solo(!) on the ballad(!) “Questioningly”! The first four Ramones album are usually grouped together, either because of the 2-for-1 CD reissues or because the next one featured such a drop in quality. But it could also be argued that the first three represent the classic quartet, and Road To Ruin their first attempt as established road dogs to feed the cult, pick up some new leather pinheads AND try something novel for radio, maybe more of a piece with later highlights like Subterranean Jungle and Brain Drain than what came before. But, as someone who not only knows what Subterranean Jungle and Brain Drain sound like, but celebrates it, I needed to own this either way.

The Bangles - Ladies And Gentlemen, The Bangles!!!

A welcome compilation of the The Bangles’ pre-Columbia recordings, capturing their evolution from ‘60s throwback trio the Bangs to the quartet that recorded the gorgeous debut LP All Over The Place. This stuff didn’t set the world on fire - not sure how many people in 1982 really wanted women to prove they could be The Grass Roots - but with their albums quickly burdened with commercial considerations, it’s great to hear how tight their harmonies and instrumental attack were from the start, no A&R man pushing Susanna Hoffs forward and their original material back. Not that there aren’t covers, here: if “Steppin’ Out” doesn’t really live up to Mark Lindsay’s madness, “7 and 7 Is” more than does justice to the Love classic’s instrumental pummel. It’s hard not to wonder how different their career might have been with a more sympathetic producer than David Kahne, and Ladies And Gentlemen makes the case we missed out.

Afghan Whigs - Do To The Beast
Afghan Whigs - In Spades

It took me a minute to get on board with the reunited Afghan Whigs, now three albums deep into their resurrection. When I saw them at Terminal 5 just over a decade ago, I was annoyed that original guitarist Rick McCollum’s trademark chickenscratch was barely audible in a line-up that was otherwise Greg Dulli’s post-Whigs Twilight Singers project (Whigs bassist John Curley already involved there). Did they need three guitarists AND a keyboardist up there swamping the classic ‘90s sound? By the time Do To The Beast was released in 2014, McCollum had been let go, making it an Afghan Whigs album in name only. Such a blatant case of brand exploitation ticked me off, but eventually I accepted that Twilight Singers albums were still worth checking out under any name. The snarly two-guitar sound of the ‘90s band may be gone forever, but Dulli never gave up on surly, sexy rock grandeur in the years since, and might even be trying harder now due to the bump in tour guarantees he must be getting with the old name.

Dulli’s sense of drama has always been a little embarrassing in its transgressive aspirations. While Gentlemen was a gorgeous portrait of boozy hatefucking and macho self-loathing, the albums before and after frequently traded romantic clarity for pulp fantasy, the kind that makes writers open positive reviews with - and I quote…Uptown again: riding shotgun in some dealer’s Chrysler, peeling out of a motel parking lot with the darkness at the edge of town nipping at your bumper. And you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?” Luckily, your driver has the answer, because Greg Dulli albums never bury the lede: “Whenever you’re here, you’re alive.” The Afghan Whigs were four young indie rockers in Cincinnati who loved both kinds of ‘80s Minneapolis music and weren’t afraid to do a rock version of a Motown song. Everybody calm down.

But when Dulli sang “I got a dick for a brain, and my brain is gonna sell my ass to you” he wasn’t lying. This is a guy who studied Physical Graffiti and Purple Rain and will always keep up with the latest in R&B. The epic sweep of his music does its best to push you past any valid qualms with his “dancing with the devil” White-Boy-Rick bullshit (I have to wonder if Black Love would have gotten its hooks in me if I’d been less of a cloistered alterna-boy and realized shit like “Honky’s Ladder” was basically Tarantino shouting you-know-what to the camera in Pulp Fiction). While he hasn’t abandoned his shtick (the cover of, ahem, In Spades, has a drawing of a devil/vampire/something eeeevil on it), it hasn’t curdled either. As with Tarantino, you don’t have to think he’s profound to think he can shoot a set piece. The sonic swamp now a lyric-burying feature rather than a McCollum-burying bug, I finally accepted the first two reunion albums have set pieces galore. The latest, last year’s How Do You Burn?, possibly due to the lockdown-era need for “remote engineering,” unfortunately trades the horns and strings for digital vocal filters. Putting one on the Marcy Mays reunion was goddamn criminal. And not the sexy kind.

Desaparecidos - Payola

If you find a copy of the book Marooned in a used book store, you’ll see I refer to Desaparecidos’ Read Music/Speak Spanish as the best rock album of the ‘00s near the beginning of my chapter about Dio’s Anthology. If you look at my Top 300 Albums Of All Time list, you won’t find it anywhere. While I still own and enjoy the album, I have to admit Conor Oberst hollering about the madness of American capitalism over a post-Pinkerton sludge lost just enough mojo to go from Godly to Really Good over the last two decades. This is probably due to how little I need Conor Oberst hollering in any other context, and increased perspective on the desperation of my own early 20s (I still remember Ken the record store manager boggling at how every single song would end with hysterical bawling).

When a follow-up named Payola was announced for 2004, I was basically salivating. When the band reunited long enough to finally record the thing in 2015 (on Epitaph instead of Saddle Creek!), I just couldn’t click with the old righteous anxious fury. Not sure what my problem was, because now I hear a more than worthy sequel, all distorted keyboards, easy as hell guitar leads, found sounds and basement show bash-out, Oberst foaming about being “ra da calized/ ra da calized/ ra da calized/ ra da calized,” praising Camila Valejo and whimpering that “MariKKKopa”’s “Sherriff Joe is AWful!” with the infectious anguish Rivers Cuomo spent on the state of his balls. The album has 14 tracks over 40 minutes instead of 9 over 30, so maybe they knew album three wasn’t coming any time soon. That slight bit of vault clearing indulgence - plus the choice to end on a tribute to “Anonymous,” more Make Believe than Pinkerton, imo - keeps the album from being an improvement on the original. But they manage to do that emo fucker justice.