Without sounding erratically different than their perfect LP, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, Yo La Tengo’s new record reinvents the band anyway.
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The press release for Dirty On Purpose’s Hallelujah Sirens compare them to the customary array of influential atmospheric fuzz bands – Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth – while proclaiming the band’s ‘originality,’ which, while superfluous and somewhat condescending (with more bands in Brooklyn than individual hairs on my ass), it is also true. What is meant is that Dirty On Purpose are less writing Beatles pop songs than using a large, layered and distorted sound to cause the songs to rise and fall which, like comparable bands, creates an album that is less a group of songs and more a shifting one-song, sometimes loud and sometimes quiet. This is not to say that all of the songs are too similar or that the album is meant to be one long piece, but rather that Hallelujah Sirens is more akin to the rumble of conversations in a cafeteria than the individual ones in a lonesome coffee house.
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I hadn’t ever voluntary subjected myself to the Dixie Chicks before. I’d heard them through walls or in restaurants or just a capella covers my sister would belt out, but I’d never given them attention. A right lucky thing, too, I found after being drawn in to see Shut Up and Sing. The film’s poster had made it seem it might be some laudable F the Man type propaganda, like the recent The U.S. vs. John Lennon. It was also playing in the local theater, so I was able to eat a pita on the walk over.
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You can say one thing for Mohair: They’re excited to be playing music. The ten songs on their US-debut, Small Talk, are full of power chords and cymbal crashes while vocalist Tom Billington sings with gusto. And while there are glimpses of magic in the record – the Springsteen-esque keyboard that begins “L.A. Song,” the all-t00-sporadically sprinkled horns – Mohair sounds like a band too content with having found a songwriting niche to settle into.
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Pleeseeasaur, while not the worst thing Comedy Central has ever produced, is surely not worth all the expensive packaging Comedy Central bestowed upon it. With two discs – one CD and one DVD – and a fancy fold-out package, perhaps CC’s money would have been better sent giving us some Strangers With Candy outtakes or some old Whose Line Is It Anyway? than Pleaseeasaur.
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It is surely no coincidence that The US vs. John Lennon has been created and released now, in this political climate, a few weeks before elections, for the movie is surely propaganda. A documentary about the political life of John Lennon post-Beatles, the film aims to evince much the same reaction as Fahrenheit 911 or The Daily Show: that is, one of camaraderie with the acerbic tone aimed towards current political and governmental trends.
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