1978: Iannis Xenakis - "Mycenae Alpha"

By Gabe Vodicka on 02-25-10

When the pantheon of modern American songwriters is discussed, you frequently hear the same few names: Springsteen, Young, Dylan. That Tom Petty is often omitted is a testament not to his irrelevance but rather to his continually unassuming nature. Nowhere in the Petty lexicon is found a Nebraska or a Tonight’s the Night; where the aforementioned artists have, throughout their careers, ebbed and flowed with the creative tides to mixed — and oft times controversial — results, Petty’s output has remained remarkably stable.

Also, unlike proven eccentrics such as Bob Dylan, Petty’s public demeanor has rarely amounted to more than the nice, humble rock star. One need only watch the lengthy but engaging Runnin’ Down a Dream, Peter Bogdanovich’s 2007 Petty documentary, or a single episode of King of the Hill, where Petty voiced the well-meaning scamp Lucky for several seasons (see video below), to get a sense of his demeanor. It’s easy to understand why he’s not as contentious a subject as other contemporaries, and thus has managed to avoid the pitfalls of rock ‘n’ roll stardom. To put it another way: he don’t make for great TV. Thankfully, he has made for some pretty damn good tunes over the years.

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In as consistent a career as Petty’s, there are loads of highlights, not least of which is 1994’s Rick Rubin-produced effort, Wildflowers. One of three “solo” albums Petty has released — that is, sans Heartbreakers (although several members turn up here) — it is also one of his most quietly classic. The album birthed several radio singles, namely the ubiquitous “You Don’t Know How it Feels,” but it’s notable mostly for its lack of pomp and circumstance. Rubin has always had a knack for raw, bare-bones production, but on Wildflowers the sound is the first thing you notice. On headphones, it is an incredibly immediate record with nothing obscured in the mix; there’s a slightly coarse edge, but Petty’s everyman songcraft renders its mass appeal obvious.

In fact, Petty’s songwriting shines given the Rubin treatment, as does his voice. Of the pantheon, his tone is perhaps the most startlingly affecting. (Only Neil Young has been known to convey more with a lone sung syllable.) On Wildflowers, his voice dips and rises with a husky world-weariness not immediately obvious on some of his better-known rock hits. Paired with deceptively simplistic lyrics, the results are often extraordinary. And that’s another thing about Petty: as his music sometimes seems to straddle the line between the audacious and the MOR, so too do his lyrics. You might hear Mellencamp singing about getting to the point or rolling another joint, but you probably wouldn’t get “Woke up somewhere in between/ A memory and a dream.” Petty’s brilliance lies in his ability to consistently appeal to the largest of audiences while delivering some of the pithiest one-liners around.

While much of the album’s charm lies in the quiet tenderness of songs like the terrific title track, Petty also proves that he can rock without the Heartbreakers. “You Wreck Me,” about a troubled love, is one of the fieriest tunes in Petty’s discography, and also one of the best. Garage-y and fun, it also harbors some of the record’s best lyrics. “Now and again/ I get the feeling/ If I don’t win/ I’m gonna break even,” sings a confident-sounding Petty over a simple three-chord romp. “A Higher Place” channels the Kinks, all jangly and open. “I was up all night making up my mind/ But now I’ve got my doubts,” Petty intones, less confident but still unabashedly vibrant. The most subtle standout on Wildflowers is the de-tuned acoustic “Don’t Fade on Me.” Its sparse instrumentation calls to mind John Fahey or Six Organs of Admittance (seriously!) and is paired with the album’s most hauntingly expressive vocal performance. It’s a tough, terse song, and endlessly listenable.

Of course, Wildflowers isn’t without its share of blunders. For starters, the length makes it difficult to listen in one sitting, and it’s easy to spot tracks that should have stayed on the cutting-room floor. A couple songs are straight cookie-cutter — namely “Cabin Down Below” and “Honey Bee,” the latter filled with inexcusable lyrics about givin’ Petty some sugar and buzzin’ ‘round his tree. Elsewhere, “Hard on Me” is a failed exercise in slow-burning rock done much better on the earlier “It’s Good to Be King.” The jaunty “To Find a Friend,” on which Ringo Starr makes a guest appearance, isn’t a bad song, but it’s a near carbon copy of the album’s title track.

The last three tracks on Wildflowers, however, combine to form a trifecta of pure awesome that almost makes up for the album’s saggy midsection. Petty does blues-rock right on “House in the Woods,” all swagger and drunken harmony. “What can I do but love you,” he sings, a man resigned to his fate but not the worse for it. In the achingly bittersweet “Crawling Back to You,” it’s ”I’m so tired of being tired/ Sure as night will follow day/ Most things I worry about/ Never happen anyway.” And “Wake Up Time” is as good a closer as any; it’s five minutes of the perfect kind of piano pop, cautious but uplifting. “It’s wake up time/ Time to open up your eyes/ And rise and shine,” Petty suddenly intones in that low, speak-sing way — sounds cheesy, right? But boy is it good. Some hardened critics might cringe at all the earnestness on a record like Wildflowers, but they’re fooling themselves: this is what we really love about the guy. This is Tom Petty, American songwriter.

By David James on 02-18-10

Disco Inferno are the alpha and omega of post-rock incarnate. This may come as a surprise to those weaned on the vanilla palette of your average Explosions in the Sky album, but it’s an unavoidable conclusion. A clearer view is held in light of this kernel of the original definition, cemented by famed critic Simon Reynolds: “using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes.” Shockingly unknown in their time and unheralded in ours, the band deserves far more visibility than history has afforded. My aim is to resuscitate interest in what’s arguably the pinnacle (and inarguably a major touchstone) of modern experimental rock.

D.I. Go Pop is the band’s second LP, issued after a string of increasingly brilliant singles and EPs saw them scaling the humble roots of second string post-punk to the heights of ecstatic invention. Although the smugly ironic title begs otherwise, it’s not a straight reaction against pop forms. Instead of rebelling against or directly subverting pop tropes, this music worked to actively reconstruct the form itself, at least as it was then known. These 33 groundbreaking minutes are the result of a scenario I can only hope went something like this: Singer Ian Crause and company spend an acid-fueled weekend battering their way through a record shop, emerging into sobriety amidst a landscape of molten vinyl, teeming with magnetic tape and jagged CD shards. Realizing the futility of attempting to rebuild or replace the stacks of broken eras and genres, they attempt to assemble something completely alien: something so new and perverse that — instead of prison — they’re rewarded with recording contracts, ample studio time, and one of those gigantic checks given out after golf tournaments. They’d break the mold, change the world, reverse the narcotic slide into sludgy nu-metal and rehashed Britpop, and bask in the light of a devoted fanbase they so urgently deserve. Unfortunately, the music business isn’t known for its reinforcement of ingenuity or its forgiving nature in the face of non-existent sales.

Yet the work survives even if Disco Inferno did not. This batch of tunes was far ahead of its time in the use of sampling, presaging everything from the cut-and-paste electronica of Matmos to Animal Collective’s pop breakthrough Merriweather Post Pavilion. Fusing non-music samples like the staccato camera shutters and pinball sirens of “Starbound: All Burnt Out and Nowhere to Go” to a warped and brittle children’s choir, the band builds a rhythm floor over which the stream-of-consciousness lyrics and languid Durutti Column-esque guitar lines dance. This peculiar melange bubbles up all over the album, increasingly unhinged, until a tipping point where the coiled mystery is unwound and a stray missive like “nobody wants to die, nobody wants to die…” spills out and hangs in the air unadorned. More often than not, the sonic apparitions actually work in service of the observable nature of a given track. Opener “In Sharkey Water” floats in a basin slowly filling from a leaky faucet, an air raid siren in “A Whole Wide World Ahead” vacillates between dread and bravery, and majestic closer “Footprints In Snow” is urged along by… the soft crush of footsteps in snow.

Occasionally swerving into harsher realms of dissonance, cuts like “A Crash At Every Speed” feel at first like each element is at war with one another, a stew full of clashing opposites. Suddenly it congeals, opening up to breathe, and a song is born. To virgin ears, the whole of this album can come across as such. Repeated listens help one ease willingly into the new territory, though that’s hardly a negative point. Remember that when natives first saw the towering sails of Europe’s exploratory ships approaching the coast of America, they simply couldn’t comprehend that they were seeing not mountains over the ocean, but the massive vessels of a culture about to turn their world upside down. The crucial difference is that unlike the conquistadors, Disco Inferno simply wanted to shine on us the light of a fundamentally strange hue, a new context in which to enjoy pop music forms. This won’t decimate society and crush your religion. It will tweak your eardrums, and may just plant a knowing grin on your face.