Furthermore, Malkmus' level of vocal engagement reaches its lowest ebb yet. Often, he sounds as though he's sleepwalking through the emotional motions here, pacing cadences in time with central melodic motifs, allowing them to hoist him aloft like a crowd surfer until the inevitable Jam Moment arrives.
On a deeper level, though, the book registers as an indictment of modern North American life, as the hopes, dreams, and delusions of a test-tube dude ultimately sound no less ludicrous than those of real people living real lives in a country that's going to pieces at an ever-accelerating speed.
So, go ahead, lob your darts: it’s international minstelry, it’s theft, it’s plainly synthetic. But in the musical sphere writ-large, what isn’t?
More importantly, who cares? Hit play again.
Your average rock outfit peppers its catchy rapture with gnarly rupture.
This is the region where Kunstler resides; much of The Long Emergency was spent recounting his forlorn drives through all-but-withered towns where industry was on the wane and farms were selling out to developers dead-set on building McMansions the locals probably couldn’t afford.
“I’m sorry that I wrecked that tour for us/The drugs left me wigging out on the bus,” Bemis apologizes to his bandmates on the herky-jerky mea culpa “Sorry, Dudes. My Bad.”
All is not uplifting though: Black teams playing in white regions, according to the book, require police escorts to and from games.
All but invisible before, their bitter voices are heard here.
"I wore leather pants and suede cowboy boots — to high school — had hair down to my ass, knew grown men with names like Trashy and Freak, sold out nights at Hollywood's storied venues, such as the Roxy, Gazzarri's, and the Troubadour," Williams brags. "I wrote songs that made dozens of people sing."
Every race on Earth — and a few, like Merpeople, that aren't legit — comes in for a psychopathic revisionist-historical drubbing here.
Swapping files between Michigan and California, this Wire-worthy, Never-Never-Land Hanson cobbled together a freak-folk mystery blissfully impervious to patience, logic, and sobriety.
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