Canon Fodder #11: I Believe In Miracles

Fugazi - In On The Kill Taker

When I wrote about End Hits a few months back, I claimed I now had every Fugazi album I wanted. Well, somehow I forgot In On The Kill Taker existed! It’s an album I’ve tended to underrate, as everything between Repeater and The Argument has a degree of searching/avoidance around the righteous rock grandeur that came so easy to them. But the choice to let producer Ted Niceley (Dead Milkmen, GVSB) shape the sound here is fetching, without coming off unduly commercial. Thanks to thirty years of hindsight, songs like “Smallpox Champion,” “Public Witness Program” and “Great Cop” no longer have to push past the threat of bandwagon, cultural co-option or the narcissism of small differences to be accepted as outstanding 90s post-hardcore. Having to flip the record between “23 Beats Off” and “Sweet And Low” is an appreciated breather, too, turning a mid-CD lull into an outro and intro. There’s a bit of irony that this album, once dangerously close to ordinary for indie punks seeking a savior from alternative radio, is actually less alienating on the less convenient medium. But if it’s all classic rock now, Kill Taker remains the invigorating kind.

Ramones - Brain Drain

I long took on faith that the first four Ramones albums were the most worthwhile, and it’s not untrue. But as hinted in my blurb for Road To Ruin, anyone who wants all four would be wise to check out the following ten. And as suggested in my Top 5 albums post, 1989’s Brain Drain is one of two later albums I actually rate over Ruin (if only by a smidgen). The album before Drain, 1987’s Halfway To Sanity, is their dullest, most unrewardingly expedient “hard rock” product, and a real bummer after the critical enthusiasm for Too Tough To Die and “Bonzo Goes To Bitburg.” Brain Drain is often written off as another misfire, but it’s their most fun album since 1983’s Subterranean Jungle (maybe not coincidentally, it’s also the first since Jungle with Marky in the drum seat). In his memoir, Johnny Ramone suggested Drain has some high points, but that producer Bill Laswell demanded many guitar overdubs and allowed for too many Joey songs. Personally, I like those tenderhearted Joey songs and appreciate Laswell’s taste for dramatic flair in hard-rock crossover. Highlights include a blitz through “Palisades Park,” the best Christmas coda since the Pretenders’ “2000 Miles,” and Joey and Dee Dee going earnestly above and beyond for “I Believe In Miracles” and “Pet Sematary.” Few things evoke the Ramones’ left-field genius as much as Dee Dee writing and Joey singing an unironically sad song to promote a Stephen King movie, forcing Johnny to make peace with the arpeggio. I get why Johnny resented it, but I sure don't.

Bob Dylan - Street-Legal

Digging into Dylan’s work between 1976’s Desire and 1993’s World Gone Wrong, I felt confident that I wouldn’t find anything I liked as much as World Gone Wrong, which I like more than anything that follows. Yeah, I said it, though the word "like" carries a lot of weight here. It’s the hype and CD-length bloat - and maybe the voice - that renders Dylan’s last thirty years or so insufferable to me. I don’t doubt people get a lot from indulging the old guy’s whims. The potential for profundity drips from his dense lyric sheet and none-more-wizened voice. I’d just rather pay attention to elders who don’t encourage, if not require, such po-faced lionization. When I heard 1978’s Street-Legal, my challenging opinion got even more challenging.

I can still say World Gone Wrong - ten solo acoustic versions of old folk songs, tossed off rather than sweated over - is my favorite Dylan album of my lifetime. But I wouldn’t have to be much older for it to now be Street-Legal. Where the Rolling Thunder Revue rock of Desire linked long-winded, sometimes dubious tales of social injustice to pleas for wife Sara to take him back, Street-Legal presents Dylan as a straightforwardly seething, sexually active divorcee, cranky about custody battles and a flop movie, not yet using the Bible to dignify his wounded ego and sexist piety. Its appeal for me is a lot like Lou Reed’s Live - Take No Prisoners, a smart guy in a bad mood, facing middle age and hollering over a bombastic, but professional band rather than trying to make nice.

The songs aren’t memorable enough to make this a greater rock accomplishment than Before The Flood, his double-live victory lap with The Band. It’s far less poignant a picture of heartbreak than Blood On The Tracks. But Street-Legal evokes the clash between the anonymous California dad-rocker on the front cover and the ghoul on the back, made-up like a cross between Alice Cooper and Tom Jones. If you want him to make your generation or America proud, this swaggering grumble of an album is an embarrassment. But if you can name a couple acerbic 70s singer-songwriters you’d rather indulge than The Dylan-Media Industrial Complex, you might get off on him trying to make it as just another acerbic 70s singer-songwriter.

Killing Joke - What’s THIS For?

There are other Killing Joke albums I want to find more than the 1981 follow-up to their self-titled debut, but I’m glad I have it anyway (on a UK misprint with the labels on the wrong sides!). Side one screams sophomore slump, surrounding a great song (“Tension”) with three slices of relatively tepid tom-tom goth stomp that negatively compare to Siouxsie & The Banshees’ Kaleidoscope before and The Cure’s Pornography after. But side two finds them streets ahead of those guys, with “Follow The Leaders” storming the castle, wielding sequencers and drums like a cyborg Adam & The Ants. The seven shrieking minutes of “Madness” is visionary filler, hollering into the void as the rhythm section pounds warnings of a sociopolitical-induced coronary that never comes. Had “Tension” traded places with “Who Told You How?” you could have tossed Side A entirely and given the world a definitive EP. Instead, we’re left with a worthwhile grab-bag you need to be a little more goth than myself to call a classic.

Silkworm - It’ll Be Cool

I haven’t figured out why exactly ‘00s Silkworm resonates with me far more than ‘90s Silkworm.  Maybe they “got better.” Maybe they got more comfortable with post-grunge anthemicism and wanted wilder crowds. Maybe I relate to them more as aging hipsters than as mere hipsters. Whatever it is, it’s their later albums on Touch & Go I have the most time for. This unintended 2004 finale (following the death drummer Michael Dahlquist by vehicular manslaughter) is either the least or most essential of those final four, depending on whether you think the career-best side-openers elevate or overwhelm the more familiar post-hardcore Bukowski lurch that follows.

I remember giving my college radio elders a hard time over the Adam Duritz adjacency of Tim Midyett’s vocals at their most striving (play "Mr. Jones" and the acoustic version of "Couldn't You Wait" back-to-back). But such qualms were blown past on the miraculous meta of “Don’t Look Back,” a soaring tribute to the agony and ecstasy of rock addiction. Where five-year-old Janie could believe dancing to the rock’n’roll station made it alright, “Don’t Look Back”’s hero is old enough to know the musical tricks and corporate machinations that go behind the hit songs that carry you through life. Not that he can turn the radio off. What makes the song gorgeous is how the band refuses to give up even as the lyric weighs the pros & cons of doing just that. Midyett’s bass & Dahlquist’s drums convey the “taunt and tall order” of a “simple and strong” beat held for six minutes, Andy Cohen’s guitar solo proof that this stage of self-awareness can still be made into triumph. It’s a working creative class “Prisoners Of Rock’n’Roll,” if not a “Baba O’Riley” long past teenage wastelands. Duritz wishes.

“Penalty Box,” track 3 digital, astutely pushed down one on vinyl to lead side two, is less conflicted but just as commanding. References to hockey, office blocks and serial murder imply the efforts taken for career outcasts to “obfuscate and endure,” each boisterous chorus followed by a lunatic celeste solo from Matt Kadane. Solid Silkworm follows - I love the vocal quirks on “Something Hyper,” the central metaphor of “Shitty Little Yacht” - but they’re songs that less sincere snarksters could compare to fellow Chicago dad-rock transplants Wilco. “Don’t Look Back” and “Penalty Box” are where the band proves their unique power, sadly making sense of why they couldn’t go on without Dahlquist.