Caught in the Carousel

Letter from the Editor - November 2008

I finally had some free time this past week and although I promised myself that when that rare occurrence finally came, I would read Death In Venice, paint the CITC office and begin work on my long-planned critical analysis of The Philosophy Of Obsolescence, but instead I nightbastarded away most of my time YouTubing Amy Winehouse clips and thinking way too much about her Back To Black album.

That is SO 2006.
I know, I know.

But listen: I've been talking about Amy Winehouse a lot these days to my friends and family and unsuspecting people in line behind me at Whole Foods and let me just tell you why that's been happening: I got to Amy Winehouse later than most—sure, I watched her slow physical self-annihilation in the press, that winceworthy way she disintegrated into a motley and tragic caricature, swerving across sidewalks with a wobbly, yet surly gait, punching the air with a cigarette in her lips, her beehive wilting and bent at the waist. That's been sad material—witnessing the falling apart of someone so young and talented is painful and deeply lamentable.

Her physical dissolution made Pete Doherty look like Vin Diesel, and it became so commonplace to see her falling apart in newspapers and magazines—Amy Winehouse Takes A Swipe At Reporter, Amy Winehouse Gets Blood Delivered To Her Home, Amy Winehouse Smokes A Lot Of Crack And Holds Somebody's Baby—the incidents, shocking as they may now be in retrospect, made no impression on me.

And then I actually heard Back To Black. I won't go on about the contents therein, but let me just say this: Filled with old, dusky blues, graveyard jazz and the kind of smoky soul that comes from the back of a 1940's nightclub, parts thick clouds of cigarette smoke and bleats its pained lamentations out the front door and down the wet streets of the heart, Back To Black is quite simply one of the best albums I've ever heard. The music sounds like it's coming from an abandoned phonograph wobbling away in the half-light of a hotel room in 1947. Or 1953. Or 1966. Or now. It's as important an album as Blood On The Tracks, Ok Computer, Grace, Shoot Out The Lights, London Calling, The Queen Is Dead, Rubber Soul, Exile On Main Street—you get the idea. It's one of the big ones and if you're keeping count, they don't make the big ones as often as they used to.

And that's what's been keeping me up at night: Whatever happened to great albums? I know that this is a subjective matter because while I might think, for example, that Back To Black is a modern classic, you might disagree, and go running to your room clutching your Sonic Youth and your Death Cab For Cutie. So we won't be splitting those types of hairs in this discussion, but I do want to explore the notion that great albums are coming with far less regularity than they used to.

The music journalism intelligentsia have their Hall of Fame secured and locked in—and that's fine, but where are the new classics that deserve to be hung high next to Sgt. Peppers or What's Goin' On or Never Mind The Bollocks? In my estimation there have been some recent entries but it seems as though other eras were cranking out future classics with a workman-like regularity.

Look at 1985:
The Cure—The Head On The Door
Husker Du—New Day Rising
New Order—Low Life
The Church—Heyday
Jesus And Mary Chain—Psychocandy
Camper Van Beethoven—Telephone Free Landslide Victory

Or 1980:
The Jam—Sound Affects
Bob Marley and the Wailers—Uprising
Pretenders—Pretenders
Talking Heads—Remain In Light
Squeeze—Argybargy
Dire Straits—Making Movies
Elvis Costello and the Attractions—Get Happy!

Or 1979:
Blondie—Eat To The Beat
The Clash—London Calling
The Specials—The Specials
Nick Lowe—Labour Of Lust
Rickie Lee Jones—Rickie Lee Jones
Swell Maps—A Trip To Marineville

And just for fun, the following is a partial list of albums that I consider to be truly great and worthy to stand next to the masters:

The Stone Roses—The Stone Roses
The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy—Distressed Gentlefolk
The Replacements—Tim
Violent Femmes—The Blind Leading The Naked
Trashcan Sinatras—Cake
Patti Griffin—Living With Ghosts
Joe Henry—Kindness Of The World
Augie March—Strange Bird
Del Amitri—Waking Hours
Aztec Camera—Knife
Tom Waits—Rain Dogs
R.E.M.—Reckoning
Game Theory—The Big Shot Chronicles

I know this is a useless exercise because we all have our own lists and as soon as we write stuff down we think of ten others and then it's dark out and dinner is cold and we're running around the house trying to find our vinyl of The Style Council's Confessions Of A Pop Group, and then we have big problems. This is a discussion that will never end, which makes it fun to have, but for the sake of space and time, I'll get right to it. All I'm saying is that I fear that listeners are happy to get a few songs from an album that they can ferret away to their IPODs, and that's that. It's not very often, but whenever I hear an album that's cohesive and brilliant all the way through—in recent years I've found this on Justin Currie's What Is Love For, The Music Lovers' The Words We Say Before We Go To Sleep, Augie March's Moo, You Bloody Choir and The Thrills' So Much For The City—I'm utterly thrilled.

But back to Back To Black.

Back To Black reminds me that great albums-potentially even classic albums—can still be made. It's a staggering piece of work—anachronistic, yes, in sound and feel, but also in that it plays front to back like a work of art. And the effect of such an album is wholly experiential because it requires the listener to not only turn the dark corners, walk the wet avenues and mope across the night in big, sad circles with Amy Winehouse, it also asks that we leave her apocalypse and take stock of our own. The stuff we thought had dissolved under faded scars, the stuff we thought had worked itself out and while we were purposely not tending to it, had eased those knots into smooth, fast freeways-that rubble always needs a good walking through and a good piecing together. It's painful, but it's essential and if you don't survey that wreckage, it's going to rebuild itself without you and you're going to feel it like a fever you can't break for the rest of your life.

This is why we need Back To Black.
This is why we need great albums.

Perhaps we've become a listening public that just wants a few catchy scraps for the gym or the drive home, but to forget what an album feels like to listen to all the way through is a tremendous marginalization of the experience. And frankly, that seems to now be a lost art. As Ernest Roth once wrote: "It is a terrible thought that never again will music require any exertion…boys and girls carry it in their transistors, like sandwiches…"

On to the new issue!

We've got a great one this month:
** We've got TWO Scouting Reports for you: Fronted by Suzanne Santo and guitarist Ben Jaffe, Ironworks recording artists honeyhoney were not only kind enough to submit to our Scouting Report questionnaire, in a CITC first, they each filled one out.
** We had our sixteen-year-old musicologist The Vinyl Princess sit down with Ethan Scott, lead singer of Arizona's desert goth kings The Spider Hole, who filled out our questionnaire with some of the most thoughtful answers we've ever gotten.
** We've got reviews! Among others, we've got:
** Thomas Cooney on Raphael Saddiq
** New CITC Staff Writer Chauncey Allcock on the new Keane album. And, I should add, CITC is one of the first American outlets to review the album.
** New CITC Staff Writer Patrick Holian on the new Eagles Of Death Metal.
** Designer/Staff Writer Lyn Dunagan on iDolphin, Nick Motil, the Jeff Michaels Band and Laura Warshauer
** Dr. Slurpee, Podiatrist to the Stars© on Dengue Fever
** Jessica Simons on We Are Scientists
** We've also got reviews of new ones by Red Wanting Blue, Mark Geary, Eulogies and Katy Mae.
** We've got MP3 Downloads: New ones this month by our good friend (and former Scouting Report subject) Julian Pitt of the Welsh outfit Armstrong, as well as tracks by the Tom Fuller Band, the Dark Romantics and Andy Yourke.

We're already working on the next issue. That's us, hammering away in the dark.

Enjoy!

Love and Rockets,
Alex Green
Editor, Caught In The Carousel
Alex670@earthlink.net