Summertime Rolls: Nine Inch Nails and Jane's Addiction at the Comcast Center in Mansfield, MA (Part 1)

PHUTATORIUS

Short answer: Jane's wins in a rout — and in what was probably an unfair fight. Here's the background. I saw Nine Inch Nails back in 1994 on the Downward Spiral tour. It was at the Nautica Theater in Cleveland; the seats were removed to create a giant general admission pit; and the Nautica's location in "the Flats" — flush up against the Cuyahoga River — sets up a terrific vibe of post-industrial decay, with rusty bridges and rotting barges supplying a suitable background for Trent Reznor's aesthetic. More to the point, I was young, in college, and angry, and to this point Nine Inch Nails had turned out only two albums and one EP's worth of "woe is me, woe to you, my soul is black, so go screw" rock-electronica.

Jump ahead to 2009. The Comcast Center, once the Tweeter Center, is — as it sounds — a heavily cross-promoted venue in the "summer concert" style. This place, along with its 30 or more cookie-cutter counterparts across the country, is nested in a woodsy, off-the-beaten-path locale. It has the usual Pavilion and Lawn seating, which in 2009 means they've gone and replaced most of the Lawn with seats just like those in the Pavilion, except that the Lawn seats aren't sheltered and are taken on a first-come, first-serve basis. There is no pit in the Pavilion, no intimacy anywhere, and not really any sound in the Lawn seats, which is where the three of us are sitting.

My frame of mind is this: I never saw Jane's Addiction, but I love and have canonized the two studio albums from 20 years ago. I think Jane's absolutely rawks and have been fired up for weeks to see them. As for Nine Inch Nails, I tuned out after The Downward Spiral. Nothing I've heard since that album has particularly interested me. I consulted SR, a great old friend and longtime devotee of the band in advance of the concert: what should I buy? SR's answer, as longtime devotee of Nine Inch Nails, was (and I paraphrase) pretty much everything (except for what I could get for free on the NIN website, and isn't Trent Reznor great for doing that, and so on). In anticipation of the show, I put Jane's in heavy rotation and blew off any plans I had to cram the last dozen years of Nine Inch Nails.

Part of this is that "my soul is black" can surely be meaningful to a person in a particular state of mind, but that state of mind is necessarily ephemeral. If it's not, then you're truly in a "downward spiral," and good luck to you. My state of mind these days is that things are generally good, and if and when they're not, I don't need an over-earnest faux-artiste (yeah: you, too, Win Butler) to articulate the sentiment for me. And so I was bracing myself to be curmudgeonly and irritable when Nine Inch Nails took the stage.

Four thick paragraphs of set-up — or maybe disclaimers or explanations I think I owe to folks I know like SR who think the world of Nine Inch Nails — and only now I'm getting to the show. So be it. You don't read these posts because you crave punchy prose. Curtains up! >

Trent Reznor has filled out. He doesn't look like a starved, patchy rat anymore. He has more of a Henry Rollins-crossed-with-thickness-of-middle-age body, and his (naturally) black clothes are well-tailored and well-cut. He has a nice, neatly-coiffed head of hair. His appearance gives the impression that any presentation of onstage chaos has been blocked out and planned weeks in advance. In short, Reznor is seething with competence, rather than passion. The band is a straight four-piece, with vocals, guitar, bass and drums, but there are pianos and keyboards scattered on the stage, too. And what we get is basically a straight-ahead rock performance, with the occasional interstitial segment of electronica.

The crowd's reaction to Nine Inch Nails' performance is, I think, telling. Most everyone in the Lawn seats is carrying on a conversation during songs. This speaks to Trent's inability to hold our attention, and also to the fact that the sound isn't traveling particularly well. The sound issue is important: what distinguishes Nine Inch Nails is sound and production values, and if you want to be specific, the dual gimmicks of stop-start and quiet-loud. When, from where you're sitting, "start" and "loud" aren't all that powerful, these gimmicks falter.

A live performance by a group like Nine Inch Nails is necessarily a dicey proposition, because what "art" we can fairly attribute to Nine Inch Nails lies in the carefully manicured production, the layering of dozens of tracks, the love and attention that Trent gives to every buzz and lilt that lands on a master tape. Contrast the often gag-worthy lyrics ("I built it up now I take it apart climbed up real high now fall down real far") and the guitar hooks, which are nothing special and are generally distinctive only for their weightiness and timbre. The problem here is that the live performance with the four-piece band relies on the vocals and the hooks. Urk.

So the crowd chatters and yawns, and on those brief occasions when vox and guitar give way to a brief spasm of Nine Inch Nails-style electronica, the crowd stirs and cheers the band. Worth noting, too, that I'm apparently not the only attendee who tuned out after Spiral. Whenever Trent dips deep into his back catalogue — for, say, "Gave Up," "Piggy, "March of the Pigs, or "Wish" — the crowd's enthusiasm level surges, only to fall back again when the band returns to this century's material. And what is more, I feel this, and maybe it's a matter of perception and bias more than anything, but I really do feel it: the band itself seems to kick it up about three notches when it plays these old songs. They attack the classics full-throttle, and generally to great effect, whereas the songs in between seem (again, at least to me) to be delivered with a kind of listlessness. Strange, I think, because usually it's the reverse: usually the band is all-too-enthusiastic about its new material, and it's apparent from the soulless rendition of the "old stuff" that they find it tiresome.

I find myself increasingly aggrieved over the selection of songs from the earlier (i.e., familiar) releases. What — no "Terrible Lie?" On what basis, Trent, do you decide to exclude "Terrible Lie?" And you ransack the Broken EP, and all you can find is "Wish" and "Gave Up?" Pfft. You'd have done more justice to Broken with "Suck," or even the "(You're So) Physical" cover. These choices are troubling to me.

And now it's time to discuss the blackness and anger. Some of it is well-cast, fine-tuned, and delivered from some interesting perspective: I've always admired the cyber-alienation theme of "The Becoming," and it's no coincidence that in the entirety of the set it is this song, which documents a soul-destroying mechanization of self, that best incorporates the band's signature electronic elements into the straight-ahead rock. "It won't give up/It wants me dead/God damn this noise inside my head" is especially catchy — the closest Reznor has approached (and will approach, based on what I've seen) to "Bow down before the one you serve/You're going to get what you deserve," lyrical heights he reached, tragically, in his first single, twenty years ago.

Twenty years is a long time to be serving up this blather about Blackness, and it's an aesthetic that, for the reasons I described above, doesn't lend itself to holding the same cohort of fans over the long haul — simply because the sentiment grows wearisome over time. Your best bet, then, if you're Trent, is to pick off successive generations of rock fans as they hit the Blackness Stage of Life, then set them free thereafter. If they don't come back, as the old bromide goes, they were never yours to begin with, and you can use the ensuing feelings of betrayal and loneliness to nourish the next album's Blackness.

At some point I wish out loud that Nine Inch Nails would play its cover of "Dead Souls," and this leads into a conversation with my friend KL about Joy Division. Well, not so much a conversation, because there is live music playing, I'm monologuing, and KL, as is his practice when he goes to concerts (even though it was not really necessary here), has installed earplugs to keep his ears from ringing afterward, so he probably hears only half of what I'm saying. Joy Division is, of course, the unattainable ideal for Nine Inch Nails. If they were contemporaries, I'd use the Mozart/Salieri analogy. Joy Division had the advantages of masterful instrumentation from creatively coequal bandmates, a brilliant producer in the studio in Martin Hannett, and genuinely nihilistic and soul-destroying lyrics. Joy Division's recordings were groundbreaking in their production values, and yet when all Hannett's bells and whistles were necessarily shunted aside for the band's live performances, the band was still able to deliver the goods with an intensity, an immediacy, a desperation and menace that Nine Inch Nails can only dream of having. KL nods in agreement. I can't say for sure he's not patronizing me (he is, himself, an insufferable rock critic), but I gather from his body language that he won't be taking up Nine Inch Nails' cause against Joy Division or anyone else after this show.

There comes a point where Trent Reznor means to introduce a song that is particularly important to him. He says he locked himself away by the ocean for a period of time, ostensibly to write songs, but, he says, "what I really wanted to do was kill myself." He has clearly crafted his presentation of the story to give it maximum rhetorical kick, but given the way he said these words, I don't doubt his sincerity. Trent winds his way through the rest of the story — he only managed to write one song during this lowest period, and it was "The Fragile." Then the band plays "The Fragile," which, to me, is hardly noteworthy or compelling. Not when, ever since my rant to KL ten minutes before, I have had "Dead Souls," "Atmosphere," Side B of Closer, and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" on my mind. This isn't fair, of course: Ian Curtis did commit suicide, and those songs are the very documentation of his downward spiral, which found depths Reznor, to his credit and great benefit, didn't reach. Reason #125, then, why I'm not being fair to Nine Inch Nails in this review.

And indeed, KL told me on the phone yesterday that Nine Inch Nails shouldn't be judged against Joy Division — it should be judged against its real musical progenitors, Psychic TV and Skinny Puppy (in his view). But I'm inclined to judge Nine Inch Nails against Joy Division for two reasons: (1) the high production values of their recordings (see above), and (2) their emphasis on interior terror (see below). Most of the "scary" acts in rock serve up a theatrical kind of "scary": Sabbath sings about the Devil; Gene Simmons spits blood; Alice Cooper is, well, Alice Cooper. Bauhaus, too, pointed to objects, images, legends in its efforts to frighten. The theatricality of metal and Goth is enjoyable. It's a horror show: if you're at all scared, you're scared smiling.

By contrast, Joy Division is the only band I can think of that is well and truly terrifying. I'm actually afraid of what could happen to me if I listen to them too much. If a child of mine got into Joy Division as a teenager, I would confiscate the recordings. And if you know me, that says something. What makes Joy Division so terrifying is that the terror is achieved by introspection. Joy Division doesn't point to something awful: it creates it. Ian Curtis found it in himself and committed it to tape, and the musical fit — the mood, the atmosphere — that his friends and bandmates provided for Curtis's lyrical compositions was uncanny. Nine Inch Nails has chosen to swear off Goth-style theatricality in favor of Joy Division-style interior terror. That's a very ambitious choice, and good for Trent for making it. After all, anybody can put on eye liner and bite a fake-blood capsule. The problem is that this higher prize is very, very hard to attain, and I don't think Trent Reznor has enough going for him to get there.

This is my very, very long way of saying that Nine Inch Nails did not move me. Not like they did when I was twenty years old in a general-admission pit in Cleveland, when the band was fronted by a mangy, probably strung-out industrial rocker clawing desperately at a living. Not like they did before he set forth his mission statement, which is to be 21st century America's Joy Division — as if that is even possible in this time and place, and for a one-man auteur who apparently has it together enough to book a tour of the nation's built-for-Buffett Comcast Center venues alongside Jane's Addiction. Nine Inch Nails has recorded some terrific songs. They should not try to be the band they're trying to be, because it's not working.

Jane's Addiction in the next post.

Some Thoughts on Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

PHUTATORIUS
WARNING: If you're not into lengthy dissertations on early '80s British electropop bands, STOP reading this post RIGHT NOW.


We take requests here at Feigned Outrage. We do it because it makes it all the more likely someone outside of the three of us is going to read a post. And — pow! — if a reader is actually going to request a post from the Some Thoughts On . . . Department, I have to deliver. And so, some thoughts on Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.
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First off: The Hardest Band Name To Type. Just brutal. Had to get that off my chest. Thank God for the acronym. On to substance:

OMD is the first band I ever really obsessed over. And putting aside the sundry Neil Diamond and Air Supply concerts I went to with my family, OMD is the first band I ever saw perform live. Depeche Mode was a close second, taking the stage just ninety minutes after OMD did, at the onetime Blossom Music Theater in Akron, Ohio, back in 1988. My Rock Snob destiny was foretold at this early age: this was my first concert, and my motivation in going was to see the opening act.

For my purposes here, I’m going to cover just a subset of the Manoeuvres’ oeuvre — the recordings from 1980’s self-titled debut through The Pacific Age, cuts from which era were selected for their 1988 Best of OMD compilation, which along with DM’s Speak & Spell were the first two albums I bought on compact disc. (Lots of firsts here for Phutatorius.)

This puts seven terrific albums in play, and when I think of them, my working thesis has to be that OMD’s gig (and probably its weakness, from a commercial standpoint) was its ability to swing wildly between extremes of avant-garde experimentalism and McCartney-esque pop artistry — and, at times, to strike a perfect balance between the two. It’s a bit of a short cut (though a useful one) to say the avant-garde came early and the pop songs came late, because early cuts were catchy (“Enola Gay,” “Telegraph”) and late-issue tracks downright weird (“Crush,” “The Dead Girls”). I tend to favor the albums in the middle — Architecture & Morality, Dazzle Ships, and Junk Culture, because their sound was more robust than on the pingy and minimalist earlier albums, and the later albums were inconsistent and at times just plain cheeseball.

(I’ll pause over Crush for a moment for nostalgia’s sake, and over The Pacific Age for the transcendent album cover (above) — rendered more than a few times in blue ink over pencil on my cut-from-grocery-bag textbook covers in 8th and 9th grade.)

Consider Dazzle Ships Track 2: “Genetic Engineering.” What was going on there? A typewriter sets the beat, leading in to a send-up of an ad jingle, two men and a woman, alternating touts: “Efficient — logical — effective — and practical! Using — our resources — to the best of — our ability!” This was Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier” fourteen years earlier. Then came guitars — a rarity for Messrs. McCluskey and Humphrey (though not the first time we’d heard them: they’d sprung guitars on us in “The New Stone Age” — A&M’s stunning opening track, which carried every bit as much menace and unease as something Nine Inch Nails might have recorded at their peak. But I'm digressing.). Then a Speak & Spell steps in to counter the upbeat promo voices. Baby! Mother! Hospital! Scissors! Creature! Judgment! Butcher! Engineer!

By now the whole Speak & Spell business might seem stale: sort of like The Road Warrior’s aesthetic. You have to take six pills and forget the hundred awful knock-offs that followed, so you can remember how groundbreaking the original was. So it is here: an evocative, impressionistic sequence of these eight select words, and now we can hear marching footsteps. Boots. Hints of creeping fascism, clearly, and only now the first verse. There’s a brilliant, catchy pop song to follow over the next three minutes. Genius. The sentiment was a bit overwrought, but the song was genius.



OMD did so much of this, and I'm sorely tempted to go on at length. There’s the song suite about Joan of Arc on A&M. Why? Don’t ask; don’t question McCluskey’s earnest vocals. What the hell is “ABC Auto-Industry,” and why is it so beautiful? Ditto “Romance of the Telescope” — what are these people talking about? And just when you think you might be overmatched by the arcane subject matter, the music's layered complexity, the synthesized choral tracks, the audio samples (done before it was cool) — just then they serve up something simple and sublime like “She’s Leaving” or “Never Turn Away,” the latter of which screamed for inclusion in the final boy-gets-girl scene of some John Hughes movie. Never mind “If You Leave,” the song that made these guys briefly famous. The quintessential ’80s teen movie song is “Never Turn Away,” whether or not it ever landed on a soundtrack.

I could go on about this band’s early cramped, Continental, Cold War aesthetic, and how, while their punk/post-punk contemporaries continued to serve up the same humdrum images of fallen empire and urban decay, OMD’s recordings were evocative in such a distinct and interesting way. You played the albums and you thought of trench warfare, legacy telecommunications, radar blips, battleships, abstract art (contrast punk’s Dadaism), cathedrals, Catholic martyrdom, and BBC news. I could go on about spending an entire summer vacation playing and re-playing “Love and Violence” in my car, and only letting up occasionally on the rewind button, when I realized the next track, “Hard Day,” was just as good. Talking up these two songs could lead me into a hundred or more words about McCluskey’s extraordinary voice (never mind Humphreys’s clunker of a larynx). But I’m self-editing now, so this is all you get.

That all this should have culminated in the godawful video for “(Forever) Live and Die” — there will be no embed here — and the hamhanded digressions about the U.S. civil rights movement (I’m thinking Crush’s “88 Seconds in Greenboro,” “Southern” on The Pacific Age), is I think, cause for some regret. And remember: I’ve ruled the last three albums out of this analysis completely. All this notwithstanding, let’s give OMD their props. I don’t think there was a better band going between 1981 and 1983; if there was, it was Bow Wow Wow, and it’s not fair to compare humans to superhumans.

Great (and Lame) Moments in Music Video; Some Thoughts on Duran Duran

PHUTATORIUS
Thank you, VH1 Classic — and you, too, TiVo, for the time-shifting — for serving up All-Time Top Ten's Duran Duran episode two nights ago. This is the province of the 35-year-old father of two: he's home on a Saturday night in front of the TV, and if he's lucky, he's found some nostalgia channel through which he might relive his youth. Shoot — VH1 has even arranged for the release of Original Six Veejay Mark Goodman from his climate-controlled storage facility to host the show.

And so, Duran Duran. My sister and I talked on the phone while I watched this — she was supporting "Hungry like the Wolf" for the #1 spot, whereas I favored "Rio." "Rio" won, but I'm not one for point-scoring. VH1 served up some terrific Double Duran nostalgia on the way up the ladder to The Song I Picked and My Sister Didn't. Some highlights:
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*Though it never occurred to me at the time, the video for "Wild Boys" was obviously a Road Warrior ripoff — they even dressed Simon LeBon up as Mad Max. That said, this one was clearly a costly, complicated undertaking, and I think the bit where Simon LeBon is strapped to the windmill that periodically turns him underwater, then past an open flame, has to qualify as a Great Music Video Moment.

*Likewise in "Hungry like the Wolf," when LeBon stands up in the café and throws the table over. "They show it twice," My HLTW-loving sister recalled to me over the phone, without the benefit of the programming in front of her. "It's so good they show it twice." Another Moment, surely. I remember a Saturday morning in Columbus, just before a Buckeyes game, when a friend of mine ended a heated game of euchre by throwing the kitchen table over. This might have started a fight, had he not rationalized away his rash action by declaring it was something he'd always wanted to do, since he saw it in "Hungry like the Wolf." This was an acceptable excuse. Some of us even admired the guy for it.

But the winner here is "Rio," and so it's the one we'll embed in the post.



"Rio" probably best captures what is so "on one hand/on the other" maddening about Duran Duran. Consider the head-on shot of the band on the yacht at 1:04. Few segments of music video are as simple and iconic. A shame, then, that this footage had to follow on the heels of that godawful bit where a crab clamps its claw down on one Duraner's toe.

In the end, I don't know what to make of Duran Duran. So many of these once-laughingstock early 80s bands have been rehabilitated in recent years. Indeed, some — like Bow Wow Wow — I will fight to the death to defend. Others simply retained their cool, perhaps because they weren't 100% made and destroyed by music video — they had street cred, and they only used MTV to take that last, awkward step into living rooms in the Midwest. Not so Duran Duran: video didn't supplement the band's career — it was an integral part of it. And maybe this is why I haven't made a priority of listening to them, even as I've gone through Adam Ant phases and Psych Furs phases and God knows what else: just listening to Duran Duran doesn't give you the complete picture.

It doesn't help that MTV itself has gone into the shitter over the past fifteen years. If you're going to put Duran Duran into the category of bands that flourished principally because of video, it's hard not to condemn them for the sins of the network, years later. It's hard not to see them as more Britney than Bow Wow Wow. It's not a fair knock, this guilt by MTV-association. But it's a knock that sticks.

Watch the videos. See if they don't deserve more credit than they get — and then see if you don't flinch at the prospect of personally extending them that credit. That's about where I am on Duran Duran.

MITHRIDATES
I have Duran^2 Rio on vinyl. That's right, English major, "Duran Duran" is not "Double Duran", it's "Duran Squared". Didn't they teach you any math in public school?

But to the point. Without the video, "Hungry Like the Wolf" is hands down the superior song. It's no contest at all. The moaning at the end is priceless.

And VH1 is internally inconsistent on the matter. On their 100 Greatest Videos list, Hungry Like the Wolf comes in at #31; Rio at #60. So score a point for Big Sister.

Gotta love these guys, though. From the Hungry Like the Wolf Wikipedia article:

According to the band, the Burger King company has repeatedly asked to use the song in its advertising since the year it came out, but Duran Duran has consistently refused.

PHUTATORIUS
Yes — I'd like to see VH1 pull itself together and show some consistency here. Their All-Time Top Ten "80s videos" episode included Hungry like the Wolf, which came in at #3 in the Duran Duran-only episode an hour earlier. By rights there should have been two other Duran Duran videos in the Top Ten. They need someone like Deloitte & Touche to certify these rankings.

I always thought Pizza Hut should have paid off Depeche Mode for the rights to lay down a "Your own . . . personal . . . pizza" vocal over "Personal Jesus." Never happened, though — and I can't imagine it was a question of "selling out." Think of all the heroin David Gahan could have bought with that money.

Some Thoughts on Echo & the Bunnymen

PHUTATORIUS
And now, from the How To Destroy the Blog Before It Ever Bloomed Department, I'm going to share some of my thoughts on Echo & the Bunnymen.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! you cry. Don't do it, Phutatorius! Vercingetorix is AWOL, Mithridates is absent WITH leave — on a two-week trip to India (we expect regular travel journal entries) — you're minding the store alone. There's absolutely no reason, at this point, for you to pester us with your overwrought musings on defunct 1980s wrong-side-of-mainstream British post-punk acts, the Stateside exposure of whom has been limited to soundtracks. For the love of God, Phutatorius, Blogger's post-label software won't even tolerate the band's ampersand!

Message received, Good Reader, and disregarded. It's E&tB Night here at Feigned Outrage. Bring the love, or take a hike. Here goes, then:

I'm going to challenge the orthodoxy here. I'm going to take the heretical position — at least in the mind of those of us who romanticize defunct 1980s British post-punk acts — that Echo & the Bunnymen probably weren't all that great a band. And, what's worse (and likely to get me flayed and fileted), Ian McCulloch was probably holding them back.

Dare I write these words? Dare I suggest that these Alt-Rock Elder Statesmen are more myth than substance? And how presumptuous is it for me, a mere sub-recognizable Internet Personality, to undermine E&tB's exotic, iconic frontman? Well, let's consider the evidence: let's play the records.

I'll be the first to admit that certain tracks are just gorgeous. "Crystal Days," "The Killing Moon," "Lips Like Sugar," "Bring on the Dancing Horses" — they're the complete package. Songwriting, instrumentation, lyrics, production: it's all there. When the Bunnymen were on, they were sublime. But they were never interesting. McCulloch's writings were modestly poetic. Sergeant's guitars were modestly psychedelic. These two were the core of the band. For crying out loud, the drummer, Pete de Freitas, replaced a drum machine (called Echo, by the way). He wasn't exactly breaking new ground.

(I don't mean to demean the memory of de Freitas, who died tragically in a motorcycle accident in 1989. This same de Freitas helped kick-start the Wild Swans' recording career, and for that he'll always have a soft spot in my heart.)

Contrast E&tB's contemporaries and greatest rivals in art rock, the Smiths. The Smiths were a no-frills four-piece, too. They wrote and recorded beautiful songs. They also had a signature sound and aesthetic, but these were distinctive and compelling. The Smiths had an artistic mission, and they took significant risks. Love him or hate him, Morrissey threw himself open for the world to see — and even if that wasn't his true self, he surely dreamed up and delivered a fascinating stage character. As terrific as some of the Bunnymen's work is, there's no edge there, no identity, no risk. Is it any coincidence that this band is best remembered in black and white, if not silhouette?

I have just two more bits of evidence to submit, before I hang McCulloch for these crimes. First, the band's cover of the Doors' "People Are Strange" for The Lost Boys soundtrack. Growing up in the time and place that I did, I heard the Bunnymen's version before I heard the original. I don't fault the Bunnymen for allowing the Doors to blow them away (although I regard the Doors as overrated, too). I fault them for doing nothing remotely interesting or interpretative with the song. It's a straight recording, without the organ. Second, I saw a reformed, reconstituted version of Echo & the Bunnymen play in Boston several years ago. They were touring with the Psychedelic Furs. The contrast between the two shows was striking. Echo was all smoke machines, dry ice, and back lighting. McCulloch appeared in silhouette the entire time (I wondered if he had been disfigured, or he didn't want fans to see his age lines). He barely moved as he sang. They were clearly trying to sell "lush soundscapes" and "mystique." I wasn't buying. The Psych Furs were triumphant. They seemed absolutely thrilled to be playing to a crowd of sleepy thirtysomething fans in the wee weeknight hours. The enthusiasm gap was dramatic, and it favored the Furs. The Bunnymen won on pretentiousness by a mile.

So that's my take on the band generally. On to McCulloch.

Now here's where I go completely off the reservation. I'm going to have to insist that Echo & the Bunnymen's best album is 1990's Reverberation — you know, the one the band recorded without Ian McCulloch. The one they recorded with a guy named Noel Burke (remember him?), the one that appears in AllMusic without a cover and is granted a non sequitur-ish 2.5 stars by the reviewer, notwithstanding his generally glowing writeup on the album?

As best I can figure it, the AllMusic writer docked the album points not on its merits, but because it differed from the rest of the Bunnymen's back catalog:

Reverberation would have been a great debut had Sergeant and bassist Les Pattinson decided to operate under a different moniker. Who knows if Sergeant thought McCulloch would someday return to the band, but it would have made more sense for these ten songs to have been released under a new band name, because whether one likes or dislikes this album, Echo & the Bunnymen doesn't exist without the distinctive voice of Ian McCulloch, and it seems rather unfair that Burke had to go up against the enigmatic legacy of McCulloch.

Hell, yeah, it was different. It was better. The band actually did something interesting with its sound. Rather than continue plodding along with his usual nondescript, half-psychedelic guitar, Sergeant — the band's creative leader at this point, surely — decided to go the whole hog. Maybe he was responding to the trippy trends of the day; maybe McCulloch's absence opened up greater possibilities. The first line of the first song, as it happens, is "My head is like an unblocked drain." Reverberation is not necessarily dignified: the flipside of "distinctive" is "gimmicky," after all. But what should rock 'n' roll be, if not gimmicky? Reverberation might have been the sort of product that was beneath McCulloch's dignity to release (at the same time he was serving up his own solo album, the two principle characteristics of which were adequacy and dignity), but it's the closest this band ever came to rocking.

Burke had his lyrical excesses. For example, I have no clue what it means "To counterfeit my salad days/And split the difference." But he more than makes up for this with "Let me take you/to the hell where all the freaks dwell." I would put the likes of "Enlighten Me," "Cut and Dried," and "Senseless" right up in the canon with the McCulloch-issue tracks I singled out earlier. No doubt about it. "Senseless" in particular, with its repeated, defiant refrain — "I will not wait/I will not see/The things you claim/Are lost on me" — shows more of Burke's soul than you're likely to find in all of McCulloch's work. McCulloch's poetics just seem so distant. By the end of the track, Burke is ranting: "All our voices out of tune/All our graveyards full too soon/All your money in the bank/How it festered, how it stank . . . Stupid, senseless, make it stop!" Maybe all that's too much and too silly. I think it's terrific.

Full disclosure: I may have some ingrained biases here, based on memory associations. Probably the single most traumatic moment of my adolescence came when I crashed my car in the parking lot of the Eastwood Mall, ten days after I got my driver's license. One of McCulloch's songs, "The Cutter," was playing in my tape deck at the point of impact. Whereas I distinctly remember playing tracks off Reverberation in my dorm room on the night I met my future wife — in fact, I may have forced her to listen to "Freaks Dwell" when we stopped by my room after leaving the dance.

Still, I think that if McCulloch weren't so closely identified with the band (and the centerpiece of its marketing), if his lack-of-aesthetic didn't carry quite so much momentum — and, most importantly, if Burke had stuck around — there was the potential here for an AC/DC-style reawakening, with McCulloch and Burke playing the roles of Bon Scott and Brian Johnson, respectively. McCulloch would have been fondly remembered, but Burke would have led the band to new heights. As it happened, and given the circumstances, the project was doomed to failure. It's just too bad that was the case. This band was better with Burke than it was with McCulloch.

UPDATE: I found the Reverberation album art on Amazon. Here it is in old-school CD "longbox" format.

Some Further Thoughts Re The Arcade Fire, and of the Importance of Irony in Rock Music

The recommendation I made below was sincere. The Arcade Fire is one of the best live acts I've seen in a while. But as much as I admire them, when the subject of this band comes up, I always feel as though I'm the least admiring fan in the room. Critics call them the second coming of U2 and Springsteen, their roster of celebrity supporters (the Edge, David Bowie) is impressive and apparently growing by the day. And as I say, wherever I go I feel like a bit of a heretic among The Converted.

I've wondered why this is, and I suppose it's because I'm a sort of heretic by nature. Naturally suspicious: "You say this is the best grilled cheese sandwich you've ever had. Why? Do you remember them all? When you can't account for all your sandwiches — and you certainly can't compare them under controlled conditions — would you stake your honor on so dubious a proposition?" And so on.

I'm pretty sure it was exactly this sort of heretical (maybe agnostic is a beter word) aspect of my character that drew me to rock music to begin with. There are so many repositories of sanctimony and earnest in the world. We create institutions of all kinds — nations, churches, ideologies, even sports teams — and we invest so much idealism in them. These institutions carry imperfections. They have to: they're the work of imperfect people. And when they inevitably rot, when they become corrupted and disappoint, we're torn to pieces. We get bitter.

Rock music, to me, lives outside that paradigm. Or it ought to. Because rock, more than any institution or art form (and let's call it what it is: an institutionalized art form), is founded on irony. Not so long ago Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a piece for The New Yorker in which he himself grappled with The Arcade Fire Problem. Frere-Jones concluded that The Arcade Fire is simply too white: his thesis is that the band has no soul because, well, it has no soul. Maybe he's getting at the same point I am, but I'd like to come at it from a different angle. Yes yes yes, the band is half-Texan and half-French Canadian. There's a lot of light reflecting on that stage, and not a lot of funk in their music. Maybe "blackness" or some derivative form of it is an important active ingredient of rock 'n' roll: I'll leave that to Sasha to hash out. My focus is on another such ingredient: irony. Irony makes rock not serious, and therefore worth taking seriously. Irony is the privilege of the young. It's a mark of sophistication, humility, and good humor. And The Arcade Fire don't have it.

Read this compilation of lyrics from Neon Bible, and tell me (1) if you could actually make it to the end without barfing, and (2) whether or not you did, if you agree with me that The Arcade Fire is comprised of 100% earnestness and 0% irony. This breakdown, if you can call it that (and I intended the double entendre), is just not suitable for a rock band. Let's have our cult leaders, our Dr. Phils, our Bolsheviks 100% earnest. But not our rock bands.

There's a time in life — as I wrote below, when you're around fourteen — when you're looking for conviction and depth of feeling, and the only medium you're in a position to explore is rock music. If you grew up in the 1980s, you found "answers" and "sympathy" in U2 and the Smiths. As you got older, you remember how ridiculous you were. You put those old Smiths albums back on, expecting to cringe in embarrassment, and you're pleasantly surprised because ten years later you're glandularly capable of identifying and appreciating Morrissey's irony. He meant every word of it, but he didn't mean any of it. As a result, the Smiths were geniuses.

U2 less so. The first half-dozen or so U2 albums, from Boy through Rattle & Hum, are so god-awful earnest that you have to be in a nostalgic mood to tolerate them. I'm not saying The Joshua Tree isn't a terrific album, or that "Sunday Bloody Sunday," performed live with the white flag at Red Rocks, wasn't brilliantly conceived and executed. But you just can't help looking at Bono (or yourself, as you sing along — "NO MORE! WIPE YOUR TEARS AWAY!") and seeing a complete naïf. To their credit, U2 recognized this and tried to correct it. They spent the 1990s recording "ironic" albums like Pop and Zooropa, and Bono began prancing around in gold lamé, with devil horns on his head. This was not brilliantly conceived and executed. As a result, U2, in my estimation, are not geniuses. You can't decide, mid-career, to add irony. You have to mix it in with some subtlety.

R.E.M. is an interesting example, because R.E.M., of course, cheated. R.E.M. recorded Top 40 pop songs with irony self-consciously written into the package — they even called one of the songs "Pop Song." So the record goes gold, and half the buyers like R.E.M. because it's catchy and upbeat, and the other half applaud R.E.M. for the great moment of satire. "Shiny Happy People" is the "My Name Is Earl" of pop music. R.E.M.'s doctrine was that they were earnest about being ironic. It was enough to tie you up into knots.

John Lennon, of course, was irony incarnate — the Primal Source From Which All Rock Irony Flowed Thereafter (although some will point to Elvis almost a decade earlier: note the smirk on his face as he did his signature hip-swiveling during "All Shook Up"). Lennon's mother lode of irony made him the perfect counterweight to McCartney's jaunty tunesmith character. Beatles? Genius. Punk rock was genrified irony. The bands of that era had the irony written into their DNA; they only had to conceive and execute, and those that did became signature rock 'n' roll acts. Compare the rock "street cred" of acts like the Pistols, the Clash, and the Damned to Yes, Genesis, and Rush: it's irony that made the difference.

I could go on at length, but I need to get back to The Arcade Fire. At some point, one or more of the hundred people in this band need to show me something — something that says they don't really mean to be taken as seriously as they are. It could be something as easy as a well-timed wink from Win or Regine. Or the drummer could get hammered and crash his car into a swimming pool. Or in an interview one of them could go off-message and declare that it's just a frickin' riot being a famous rock star. I just need something that will register the slightest bit on my irony-ometer. My worry is that so long as they have every fan, every critic, every rock band peer fawning over them like fourteen-year-olds, it's not going to happen.

And that's how I feel about The Arcade Fire.