Metro Pulse/Platters/Hefner, Chicago Underground Duo

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Critic's Classics

The Kinks
Something Else by the Kinks (Reprise)

My familiarity with the Kinks had been limited to the few hits that receive occasional airplay on classic rock radio ("You Really Got Me," "All Day and All of the Night," and "Lola"), even though Ray Davies is commonly regarded as one of the great songwriters of the modern pop canon. So a couple of years ago I went in search of a good introductory disc. Unwisely, I selected the self-titled debut album, a collection of mild R&B songs (though it does include "You Really Got Me" and an outtake of "Stop Your Sobbing"), similar to what the Rolling Stones, the Animals, and Van Morrison's Them were doing in the early '60s, just not as good.

I tried again recently, picking up 1967's Something Else by the Kinks, a nostalgic look back to the golden age of the English middle class. As the rest of the pop music world heralded the coming psychedelic utopia, Ray and his brother Dave recalled earlier times, an era far more comfortable but no less complicated. The melancholy "Two Sisters"—probably an account of the sibling rivalry between the Davies boys—comes down in favor of harried, married domesticity against posh flats and fashionable friends; the music-hall style "Death of a Clown," written by Dave, laments the decline of old-fashioned entertainment—"The lion tamer's whip doesn't crack any more/The tigers don't bite, and the lions, they won't roar." There's an anthemic ode to British public schools, "David Watts" (later covered by the Jam), the delightfully spry "Afternoon Tea," and a nod to the earlier, harder singles in "Love Me Till the Sun Shines." But the highlight is the closing track, "Waterloo Sunset" (followed on the 1998 Reprise reissue by alternate takes and bonus tracks), a bittersweet, understated, perfect pop song. Dave's graceful guitar line sets the tone, but when Ray sings, almost breathlessly, "When I look out on Waterloo sunset/I am in paradise," you believe it.

There's an element of social criticism on Something Else. But Ray's portrait of a disappearing England wasn't entirely, or even mostly, satiric. A cab driver once complimented Ray on the Kinks' songs, but then asked, "Why are you always trying to take the starch out of us?" Ray responded: "I haven't got it in for anybody. Because in all these people I can see the same weaknesses I've got."

—Matthew T. Everett

We reach into our grab bag of new tunes

Hefner
Boxing Hefner (Pure)

If imitation is the sincerest flattery, the Violent Femmes should be blushing from the compliment paid by smarty-pants Britpop quartet Hefner. Thing is, the Femmes certainly aren't making music this good anymore, and Hefner's cheeky attention-getters are most welcome in this dark age of yawn-inducing VF albums like Freak Magnet.

So welcome in Boxing Hefner, a compilation of songs recorded between 1996 and 2000, but which didn't appear on the band's first two records, Breaking God's Heart (1998) and last year's The Fidelity Wars. The question is, Why not? While the very notion of a Built To Spill live record stinks of "fulfilling contractual obligations," Boxing Hefner feels like a cohesive album in full; this is not a spit-shined, slapped-together bastard family of outtakes. Some of the songs here could rank among Hefner's best: the strutting, New Wave preener "Christian Girls"; "Pull Yourself Together," a spare rave-up absolutely trembling with nervous energy; and the particularly Femme-y "Hello Kitten," which finds Darren Hayman following up the lines "love is coming in spurts/I'm so f—kin' happy it hurts" with the chorus "I'm gonna make myself go blind tonight."

There are other influences at work here, too: Luna, Supergrass, The Clean, Pulp, Blur. The latter two shine through on "Mary Lee," a swelling, throbbing, half-hearted admission of roving-eye guilt. Meanwhile, the band could inspire a legion of Mark Eitzel-wannabe crooners with "Destroyed Cowboy Falls," a bare-bones country send-up, woe-is-me heartbreaker that both Jon Langford and Old 97s could learn from—ah, simplicity. Not since R.E.M.'s Dead Letter Office has a jewel box of costume odds and ends shone so brilliantly.

—Shelly Ridenour

Chicago Underground Duo
Synesthesia (Thrill Jockey)

It's true, things move faster these days. It took Miles Davis over 15 years to shift from hard bop to electronicized free-form experimentation. It only took trumpeter Rob Mazurek about three.

Of course, Davis was inspired by Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, while Mazurek, the sale-making half of Chicago Underground Duo, seems to have been inspired primarily by Tortoise. Not that there's anything wrong with that, per se, but it highlights a crucial difference. Miles relied on funk and sonic excess to bolster and propel his textural, cut-and-paste experiments. Mazurek is trying to make his textural, cut-and-paste experiments appeal on their own evanescent merits, a trickier proposition.

It's hard not to bring Miles into it when listening to "Blue Sparks from Her, and the Scent of Lightning" from Mazurek and drummer/vibist Chad Taylor's new album, Synesthesia. After some vintage-synth burbles and floating-in-space lines from horn and vibes, the cut settles into a pulsing funk jam topped by aggressive Milesian slurs and ends with a delicate, minor-key etude for muted trumpet that could have fallen off Davis' Live-Evil on its way to the pressing plant.

All this happens within the space of 12 minutes, at which point electric Miles would have been just getting warmed up; the remainder of the 40-minute recording keeps up the hurry-up pace. Mazurek's restless taking up and discarding of forms, sounds, and ideas has become the hallmark of the Duo, and it keeps things lively and nominally interesting. But as Mazurek races past Davis towards sonic collage as an end, not a means, he bypasses fleshing out, or even fully inhabiting his ideas. As a result, individual moments and juxtapositions on Synesthesia dazzle, but they don't linger a second longer than the next leap.

What Mazurek seems to be trying to do here is admirable in its ambition, but this is primarily music about music, so take anything a critic says on such a hermetic subject with a grain of salt. Still, wherever he's heading in such a hurry, there's enough interesting playing here to suggest you will want to be there when he arrives.

—Lee Gardner