Travis Morrison: Travistan (2004), 10 Year Anniversary Review

Ten years ago, Travis Morrison’s worst nightmare came true. His debut solo album, Travistan, just received the dreaded 0.0 from the indie tastemakers at Pitchfork Media. Now, Pitchfork wasn’t alone in panning the album, but this review especially hurt. The website had previously praised The Dismemberment Plan (Morrison’s previous band), especially the band’s magnum opus Emergency & I. Even more outrageously, the review faulted not the album’s sound, but specifically the lyrics. Now, it would have been understandable if the lyrics were shitty and cliched, but no. Instead, Pitchfork complained that the lyrics thematically lack closure. What? Who the fuck makes a huge fuss about that? However, arguably the worst thing that to come out of this dick punch was that Morrison stopped becoming cool. Concerts were cancelled, people stopped coming to his show and record stores stopped selling his album, all because of one review.

Granted, Pitchfork’s criticisms aren’t completely unwarranted. While the review seems to be a case of over-analysis gone amock, there are still lyrics that could make even the most casual listeners cringe. “Born in ’72” ends with someone shouting “I’ll fucking kill you!” at someone making an annoying noise. I guess was supposed to be a joke, but it comes off as crude and unpleasant. The Thomas Jefferson themed “Get Me Off This Coin B,” despite being only 46 seconds long, may make you roll your eyes with thoughtful lyrics such as “Me and Sally, all the black girls / love that happy leaf” and “I like my nations in constant revolution / and my booty wide.” However, a lot of the lyrics the Pitchfork review faulted the album for, such as Moses singing about growing a beard that can reach his nuts, are actually really easy to miss, given that it’s buried beneath the music. Maybe the reviewer was influenced by subliminal messages.

But enough talking about the lyrics, let’s talk about the sound. Compared to the frenetic Emergency & I, Travistan is a little calmer. In fact, in contrast to the Pitchfork review, most listeners would likely find the music to be the weakest point in Travistan. Time signature changes abound and song structures are usually unconventional, but the music don’t have excitement of Morrison’s previous works. Most of the songs sound like conventional indie tunes along the likes of Wilco or Death Cab for Cutie, with the medium paced tempo and Morrison’s soft voice. Among the more notable tracks, “Change” gives a funky spin to the Exodus story. Symphonic strings fill the heartfelt ballad “Angry Angel.” Electronic beats, bass drums and claps rumble on “People Die.” Heavy drums and pianos pound away on the aggressive “Word Cop.” Interspersed on the record are the aforementioned “Get Me Off This Coin” tracks, simple, cheery ditties about US presidents that, well, want to get off of our money. For the rest of the album, though, Travistan doesn’t try to challenge you, nor does it try to insult. In turn, while you get nothing horrible, you also get nothing memorable.

Travistan is certainly steps down from the Dismemberment Plan, but in a year that saw Hoobastank, Nickelback and that other shitty, shitty Canadian band traumatizing the rock charts, you’d be hard pressed to call this a terrible album, let alone the worst album of 2004. You’d think that an album that received a score of 0.0 would be a catastrophic failure a la Metallica’s Lulu or Batman & Robin. But instead of a disaster, the only disappointment with Travistan is that it’s anything but a major disappointment.

Review: 12 Rods: Gay? (1996)

Anyone who reads music reviews knows that getting a grade of 10.0 from Pitchfork Media is a huge deal. If those pretentious tastemakers give you a perfect score, it doesn’t matter what everyone else thinks, you guys are suddenly the center of the hipster universe. Usually.

Pitchfork Media also has a history deleting reviews. Thus was the fate that befell the Minneapolis band 12 Rods and their EP Gay?. The EP received that coveted grade in 1996, back when Pitchfork Media was still in its infancy and based in Minnesota. Then, in 2008, Pitchfork deleted the review, probably embarrassed that the EP got a higher grade than Funeral or Illinois (you can still read the review here). To make matters worst for the band, 12 Rods got completely eviscerated from Pitchfork Media. All Pitchfork has on 12 Rods these days are two album reviews. There’s not even a casual mention of them being from Minnesota.

With such a evisceration, it sounds like Gay? might actually be a shitty EP. However,  after listening to Gay?, I can say that like Fuck, it’s unfortunate that 12 Rods had to compete against 90s indie giants such as Pavement or My Bloody Valentine for attention (if only Youtube or WordPress existed back then). While the EP does not warrant the 10.0 rating, Gay?, and 12 Rods, still deserve recognition. Being released in 1996, you can look at the EP as an artifact of the time period between the end of the classic shoegaze period and the beginning of the current nu-gaze movement. But you should really look at the EP as an excellently charming, astral work, a mix of MBV’s sprawling shoegaze with a pop-rock attitude. The songs are long and extravagant, but 12 Rods puts in a lot warmth to prevent it from becoming turgid.

“Red” opens the EP with crunchy, Smashing Pumpkins guitars before giving way to a mix of sublime synth chords and dreamy guitars, creating a dangerous, yet welcoming, masterpiece. “Mexico” features Duran Duran dance beats beneath a calming fuzz. “Gaymo” is a slow, beautiful country love ballad topped off by a soaring, majestic guitar solo. “Revolute” ends the EP on a 9 minute long prog track, an epic that’s invigorating the first half, then pristine, then blistering, and then pristine again at the end.

Again, not everything is perfect. The big problem is that despite having only 6 songs, Gay? has a running time of over 38 minutes, which makes the EP drag a little. “Friend” and “Make Out Music” are the EP’s weak points, with both tracks coming off as lethargic mid-tempo mush when compared to the rest of the EP. Still, don’t ignore Gay? all because Pitchfork suddenly thought it was uncool to give this release a perfect score. It’s an overlooked, gay (as in happy) gem worth your time.

Grade: 8/10

Review: Get Him Eat Him: Geography Cones (2005)

Critics and artists aren’t always on antagonistic grounds. Sometimes, critics cross over into the realm of creation. Roger Ebert wrote the screenplay to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, French New Wave pioneer François Truffaut was a film critic before he became a director, and Channel Awesome has created several full length web films. This critics as artists phenomenon is not just limited to the film world, it’s also present in music. Take Pitchfork’s Matt LeMay, a senior writer for said website. And it’s not like LeMay has been all that friendly to musicians; he did trash Liz Phair’s self-titled album. But around that time in the early aughts, he was also the lead singer of Get Him Eat Him. And just two years after giving Liz Phair’s album the death wish, LeMay released Geography Cones. At the end of the day, critics also want to make art just like everyone else.

Not surprising for a band fronted by a Pitchfork contributor, Geography Cones takes musical cues from the who’s who of 90 indie bands such as Built to Spill and Pavement. The most obvious influence on here, though, is The Dismemberment Plan. At times, it can sound so much like Travis Morrison’s band that you’d swear songs such as “One Word,” “Metal Splinters” and “Shirt Like a Couch” were forgotten demos to Emergency & I. Not that I’m complaining much. If you’re going to rip off a band, why not let it be someone as unhinged as the D-Plan? Just like their idols, Get Him Eat Him throws in random dissonant guitar chords, sudden tempo shifts, quirky singing and electronic blips (“Metal Splinters” has a lot of them) to roil stuff and keep it fresh. “Bad Thoughts” displays it’s craziest, an eclectic song that mixes together brutal guitar shredding, throaty growls, whispers and vocoders. Oh yes, Geography Cones uses a lot of vocoders, as if Mr. Roboto’s robots decided to go indie. The vocoders especially shine on “Not Not Nervous” and “Mumble Mumble,” creating angelic, new wave-like choruses.

For the most part, however, Geography Cones feels more like a sampler of LeMay’s favorite bands than a fully fleshed out album. First of all, everything sounds like it was recorded in a bedroom, giving the album a very thin sound quality. In addition, Geography Cones isn’t really ambitious. Even with all the dissonance, vocoders and tempo changes, the songs experiment only enough to not be conventional. LeMay sings well, but he can sound a little timid at times. Except for the out-of-nowhere “Bad Thoughts,” you only feel partially invested what Get Him Eat Him has created. The album’s longest track, “Separate States,” comes off as oddly mundane for a band familiar with groundbreaking music.

Overall, Geography Cones is good but not really BNM material. Go ahead and mock LeMay for writing Dismemberment Plan-lite songs that would fail to match his website’s snooty standards. It’s always fun to ridicule a Pitchfork critic, right? Once you listen to Geography Cones, though, you won’t just find yourself satisfied. When LeMay sings something like “Mumble mumble, sniffle and stumble/And find that I was humbled,” you’ll finally realize that behind the judging words of a critic is a soul. We’re humans too, you know.

Grade: 7/10

Review: Three Days Grace: Life Starts Now (2009)

On Life Starts Now, Three Days Grace don’t care. They really don’t give a shit. As long as the cash keeps flowing in from a crowd of disaffected, naive teenagers hoping to stick it to those jocks by blasting “heavy” music, then Three Days Grace isn’t going to change anything. Lead singer Adam Gontier will keep complaining about how his life sucks blah blah blah and sing with that grating, irritating, David Grohl-wannabe post-grunge/nu-metal vocals overused by so many other “alternative” metal and post-grunge bands. The guitar chords will keep pounding away aimlessly power chord after power chord, so much so that it becomes repetitive and dull.

I can try to highlight individual tracks, but it’s hard to do so with Life Starts Now because TDG refuse to deviate from the formula. This is probably why some of the tracks sound like ripoffs of other (crappy) alt-metal songs. “Break” sounds a lot like Breaking Benjamin’s “I Will Not Bow.” “The Good Life” mooches from Seether’s “Fake It.”

From “Bitter Taste” through “Life Starts Now,” you’ll hear Gontier yelling, lots of heavy guitar chords, some simple guitar solos, overly dramatic lyrics and nothing else. Three Days Grace try to be sentimental on “World So Cold” “Someone Who Cares,” “Last to Know” and “No More,” but you get more of the same: whiny, irritating vocals over forgettable power chords, as well as even more self-deprecating juvenile lyrics such as “Why is it so hard to find someone/Who cares about you?/When it’s easy enough to find someone/Who looks down on you” (“Someone Who Cares”). There is no sense of subtly, no hint of experimentation, no will to do something different with the music. It’s the same old tripe over and over again. Have you no sense of decency, Three Days Grace?

Canadian rock is always mocked for its lack of quality, which is a shame because so many amazing rock artists come from the Great White North, such as Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Feist, Fucked Up, Neil Young, The New Pornographers and Wolf Parade. Too bad money has the tendency to ruin music, so we’re stuck with shit metal bands such as Three Days Grace instead of something tolerable to represent Canada on mainstream rock radio. Ok, calling TDG “shit” might be a little too harsh, because they’re definitely not the worst band to come from Canada. Unlike Theory of a Deadman or everyone’s punching bag, TDG don’t blather about offensive, misogynist stuff such as fucking or taming bitches. It’s like if I had to choose between a sprained ankle or getting my nuts cut off without anesthetic; that sprained ankle doesn’t seem so bad anymore.

Grade: 3/10

Dear Adam Moerder, before you ask a band “Have you no sense of decency?” make sure there aren’t crappier, more hackneyed artists out there you can say that to, mmkay? I’m pretty sure once you hear TDG, you’ll agree that The Bravery is a little more inspired than these guys.

Also, name dropping FTW