Acid tongues and happy days..

I don't buy music much anymore.  It's not that I don't enjoy listening to it, although I find a lack of inspiration in it these days.  The production all sounds the same, regardless of how hard they try to make it so unique.  The artists themselves sound bored and uninspired as it is, how am I suppose to have fun listening?

The last album I bought and really enjoyed was The Mars Volta's De-Loused in the Comatorium.  It's a bit spacey, a bit jammy, a bit latin, and a bit rock with some great grooves in between.  I haven't listened to it much since the cd was scratched and some of my iTunes tracks show from it.  It took me a few listens to really get into, but I was hooked pretty quickly. With lyrics that didn't make any sense and exciting uses of rhythm and, well for a lack of a better term, melody, I found myself constantly picking it up.

But now I'm left wondering why it is that I haven't felt that same excitement for music since.  I think some of the fault is maybe my own.  I'm expecting other musicians to give me the excitement I seek in music instead of doing it for myself.  But, I believe some of the fault falls at the iPod.  I found I rarely listened to music on my iPod (Which officially died a few months ago) and would instead just click to the next song when I got bored.  I don't know what it is about an iPod that makes me want to do that, but I think it probably had to do with the 10,000 songs that were available to me at any moment.  I had the luxury of my whole library available by just hitting random and skipping around.  

One of the biggest problems is the lack of a musical revolution.  There just hasn't been one.  Yea sure The Killers are awesome and MGMT sounds amazing.  Whatever makes you happy, but there hasn't been any real shock to the music community worth talking about.  What happened?  Was the last big bang of popular music really in 1991?  Don't get me wrong, it last throughout the decade and some awesome stuff came out of it, but it's time for something new.

So I want to talk about my most recent music purchase.  I was at the Virgin Megastore in SF looking around trying to remember the albums that I wanted to get.  The problem was that while I wanted some new music and I had ideas of what I wanted, nothing excited me enough.  I was left going through several albums over and over completely unenthusiastic about the purchase.  But with some help from my friend Eleanor I came to choose the new album from Jenny Lewis.

Jenny Lewis is the singer and, at this point in the band's career, main songwriter for Rilo Kiley.  It is her second solo album.  It's different from her first, "Rabbit Fur Coat", which was very strongly router in southern folk and country with talk about God, gambling and love.  The new album isn't completely different, there's still a lot of talk of love -- lost and found.  But it's more similar to the last Rilo Kiley release "Under the Blacklight" which had heavy 70's roots.  "Acid Tongue" is very much a live band situation with many guest stars from Elvis Costello to M. Ward.  The problem is, it doesn't sound all that live.  It seems like modern production has taken away that feeling.  Regardless of how live the performance is, it still sound overproduced. I don't want to make it sound like I dislike the album because I very much enjoy it.  As always Jenny produces piercing lyrical content that can be hard to hear at times.  Songs such as "See Fernando", the nine-minute "The Next Messiah", "Carpetbaggers", "Trying My Best to Love You" and "Jack Killed Mom" are all excellent songs with gripping choruses.  The problem comes when you listen to a lot of the other tracks only to find they are all fairly similar.  Some piano chords played in a rhythmic fashion with Jenny's voice softly singing over them gets old a little too fast.  Which is a shame, because she is very enjoyable to listen to.

In the end, while I lay some blame at my own feet for my own lack of excitement in the current music scene, I also feel I have to lay some blame at the artists.  Yes Jenny I know, "Any idiot can play Greek for a day".  I don't want a hit though, I just want a bad-ass listening experience.  Is that too much to ask?  

I hope not.