Kele's "Rise" and "Walk Tall"

When Bloc Party's debut LP, Silent Alarm, stormed US shores in 2005, I greeted our new British overlords with open arms. In fact, I greeted them with arms open, pupils dilated, jaws agape, stomach stirring, and some other anatomical reactions not suitable for sharing with you cheapskates who haven't signed up for OYL's Adults Only club (http://ohyoungbutnotyoungerthan21lions.blogspot.com). Matt Tong's opening drum salvo in "Like Eating Glass" is still one of my favorite musical moments of the decade, and I may have pounded out its rhythm on my steering wheel more often than any other track in the 2000's (always to the adoration of nubile women staring into my passenger window from their open-air Jeep, their hands moving quickly to their hearts as I meet their gaze for a fleeting moment, winking knowingly before gunning the engine of my 1998 Buick Century Custom and taking off at a crisp 12 mph to get to California Pizza Kitchen in time enough to pick up my Black Bean Tostito Taquito Pizza Ball -- yeah, I was that guy you saw). Catching the band on tour -- their first in the US -- for that album solidified my love, a bonding of nations not seen since Tony Blair's sleepovers with George W (S'mores in the Lincoln Bedroom, thanks Laura!).

This was not an uncommon reaction. People like that album! What's strange is that I may have liked its follow-up, 2007's A Weekend in the City, even more. People did not like that album! Too enamored of itself, the music too sweeping, Kele Okereke's lyrics too sentimental and his voice too thin to sound them convincingly, the guitars too Edge, man. I, on the other hand, am a sucker for the grand gesture. Weekend sounded to me like the work of a band suddenly faced with popularity beyond any level it had previously considered attainable, and a band who, seeing the heights they'd reached, was no longer satisfied to plumb the pleasant-but-shallow depths of "dancepunk" or Gang of Four-revivalism. Rather, Kele and co. made a Big Album, one trying for political commentary, for reflections on life in the 21st century urbis, all alienation and xenophobia and ennui. True, when you're looking to do anything with a word like urbis, lyrics like, "There was a sense of disappointment / when we left the mall" probably won't engender you much support among, you know, smart discerning people. Still, the urgency of the music, the band's ineffable sense of dynamism and melody managed to convince me that they had something to say. Yeah, wait a minute guys, the mall sucks!!

What's more, so do your racist neighbors and the easiness of drug-induced happiness vs. life-induced happiness and the difficulty of having to figure out your sexuality ever earlier in life just to keep pace. Bloc Party touches on all of those themes in Weekend, and when they do it with expertly timed snare hits and guitar solos and four-part harmonies, I'm in -- minimalist they are not, but sometimes you need some feelings painted out for you in broad, dripping strokes.

A lot of people just thought it was shitty, though.

2008's rush-released Intimacy fared even worse with the critics, almost universally dismissed as a blebby of ill-advised electro-experimentation. I'm mostly with them on that (save for killer b -sides [b-sides?!] "Your Visits Are Getting Shorter" and "Letter to My Son"). Much of the blame for that failure was laid at the feet of head-yelper Kele Okereke, whose heart-on-sleeve ambition and sentimentalism seemed to finally swallow him whole. Seeing the band on tour behind Intimacy (I'm nothing if not dedicated) was a sad show, Okereke posing on the monitors in rock star glory rather than jumping around unselfconsciously or grinning meekly behind his microphone. I left feeling sweaty and cheap, just like after that party your boyfriend threw last Friday in the Phi Kappa house to celebrate finishing his eleventh semester (the one where they played all those awesome songs from Silent Alarm, actually). Why, Kele! Why!

Hey, now he's putting out a solo album! It's called The Boxer, it's coming out June 22nd on Glassnote Records, it does not feature his last name, and it probably doesn't have any cameos from Matt Berninger. Also, it is terrible.

The tracks Kele's released on his blog are, anyway. You may have heard lead single, "Tenderoni" (also a favorite flavor of mine at CPK), at the gym. Here we have two more tracks, "Rise" and "Walk Tall". Both show the influence of producer XXXChange (something to do with Spank Rock), which is to say that both show the influence of someone who didn't tell Kele to curb the block rockin' beats and dust off his guitar.

I'm fine with Kele trying to sing (Weekend!) but without Tong's floor-tom or the rest of his band's angular (duh) guitars in the way, there's nothing to detract from the plain fact that he's not a crooner. That also means that Kele's lyrics are taking center stage and, well, shucks. I defy you to listen to the opening of "Rise," with its breathy inhalations and invocations to "come into the light... / raise those arms that once were broken," and not feel yourself blush and look around to make sure no one else heard that. I won't even get into the Katy Perry sound-a-like who crops up around the two-and-a-half minute mark. "Walk Tall" kicks off with some Bloc Party call-and-response vocalplay, before quickly deteriorating into Jock Jams-keyboard sludge.

It is, in short, a shame.

There's nothing to be done for lyrics like, "you are stronger / than you think." The reason why similarly rote lyrics worked on Weekend -- "let's drive to Brighton / on the weekend" -- was due to the band's earnestness and energy. The music raised the stakes into the stratosphere, so Kele's voice and words didn't have to. Here, without his band, the singer seems embarrassingly naked (though you might not think that's such a bad thing, judging from those press photos), gaudily off-key in nearly every sense of the word. Here's to hoping he's gotten it all of out his system.

--Corey

Frog Eyes's "A Flower in a Glove"

A lot of bands don't get the appreciation they deserve -- when was the last time you read a write-up about up-and-comers like LCD Soundsystem or The National? Who will pay attention to those guys, if not literally every blog and also this one! All right, a lot of times the blogosphere (barfosphere, sorry for the jargon) becomes something of an echo chamber. You may have noticed I never wrote about Bonobos pants until Pitchfork gave them a 9.7 and Best New Twill Fabric. Even global tastemakers like us here at OYL (hi, our reader in Iran the other week!) have trouble coming up with Totally Original Topics to Cover.

Still, when the hype machine gets a little sloppy and needs a cog greased (yuck, NSFW) or belt tightened (its belts are made of Panda Bear's old hackeysacks, braided together), I will be here to throw myself under the wheel. Let's all take a moment to appreciate that industrial metaphor, because it is working as efficiently as Henry Ford's first assembly line. All right? All right, back to business.

Frog Eyes have been one of the most consistent -- and consistently thrilling -- bands of the decade. They have all the ingredients for megasuperjam indie success. Canadian? Check. Idiosyncratic vocalist? Check. Singer married to a member of the band, so totally cute? Check. Spencer Krug connection? Big check. And yet, my conversations about Frog Eyes usually circle back to their famous friends, like Krug or Dan Bejar. My experiences with Frog Eyes the live juggernaut, destroyer of guitar strings and eardrums alike, have all involved seeing the band play to half-capacity crowds. What's the problem, here?

The answer is: I don't know, I don't have that problem! I love this band! Take this song, "A Flower in a Glove," the opening track from new album (and Dead Oceans debut), Paul's Tomb: A Triumph. The first thing any Frog Eyes devotee will notice is the length -- we've got a 9-minute epic here, reaffirming that Frog captain Carey Mercer is continuing to develop his (Krug-esque, yes) interest in long, multi-suite compositions. If you've not heard the band's last flagship song in this vein, 2007's "Bushels," please stop reading my moron blog post, put some pants on (or, actually, take some pants off -- the song's that good), and listen to a piece of music that over and over again reaffirms my belief in the power of, yes, rock 'n' roll.

Every article or review or blurb or Post-it about Frog Eyes spends roughly 90% of its space reporting on Carey Mercer's voice, and rightly so. It's an instrument unparalleled in its slice of the musical world -- the only comparison that comes to mind, a voice able to go seamlessly from guttural rumblings to razorthroated shouts to ethereal falsetto all in one song, is Isaac Brock. Even Brock, however, seems languorous, downright drenched in codeine (which, to be fair, he probably is) when compared to Mercer's manic, syllable-shredding, a-man-possessed utterances.

"A Flower in a Glove" wastes no time putting that voice to work. "You were always unnoticed!," Mercer howls over guitars drenched in reverb and stoned scuzz (we'll get to these soon), "you were always the flame that dies." His voice whoops and hisses, spitting out an introduction to a "bastard with a flat-top / singing, 'There's a flame that never, n-n-n-never dies!". Melanie Campbell, Mercer's wife, pounds away on her drumkit in her militaristic, downbeat-central fashion, consistently pummeling--

Hold on. I'm concerned that this is reading as a review of a metal band. I'm using a lot of Dio (R.I.P) endorsed adjectives. Frog Eyes is many things, but a metal band -- no. Yes, Mercer's lyrics often revolve around the fantastic, his fixation on all things mythological (another Paul's Tomb highlight features the refrain, "You don't need Cassandra / to gaze over the edge") in full force, here, as well. The music, though, is sweeping and melodic. Check out the 1:15-mark:

"You were always / a saint, / a flower in a glove, / a night made for the raising of your glass." Sure, you get the sense that Mercer's head is populated by men in chainmail, women with hair long enough to dangle out of castle keeps. But if all of this seems less than realistic, less than contemporary, thickly cinematic -- yes, it is. And the music is, too. Mercer sings that last line (and he's singing now, checking his volume) as Campbell slows the tempo and the guitars swirl behind him, reaching higher and higher on their necks in a stop-start, head-nodding groove. Frog Eyes has a sense of cinema, and their songs heave with drama. References to a modern-day King Lear later on in the album, anyone? They're there for the taking.

Paul's Tomb, anchored by "A Flower in a Glove," seems to me the most accessible path yet Mercer's given us into his nightmarish imagination, frightening but always swooning with a seasick sort of beauty. When he and his band bring things back up to a boil at 4:45 -- "the river is bad, / the river is cold" -- I'm ready to suit up and follow him on horseback to battle the Visigoths or the Normans or even just the kids on campus with bad haircuts who playfight with foam swords on the quad (please let us battle them). "How was the king?," Mercer asks amidst all this turmoil, "Was he sad, / was he cold?" I'd be more than happy to swear allegiance to him on any number of fog-swept heaths. "Put your hand on my face, / row away from the grief stricken man," he intones as the song fades into a wall of beautiful, chiming guitars (they are a guitar band now, more than ever), "put your trust in my fate." Yes, sir.

--Corey

Delorean's "Real Love"

I really wanted to write something about Delorean without mentioning the beach, especially because here's my swimsuit. I can spend roughly 7 1/2 minutes in direct sunlight without bursting into flames. Still, here's this YouTube track of Delorean's "Real Love," replete with beautiful beach scene. Rest assured, though, you don't have to listen to this track -- or any of Delorean's other summer soaked jams -- exclusively on white sand in your board shorts (you're still wearing those?!). In fact, I often listen to "Real Love" in my bed or while driving in my automobile. That's sort of the beauty of the music -- it can transport you to sunshine land without the dubious benefits of Vitamin D or melanoma.

I've been on board with Delorean (their name is a car, I am Professor Metaphor!) since they dropped the consistently banging Ayrton Senna EP last year. That oh-so-brief record was comprised of 4 (5 if you bought it on iTunes) concise, clean, almost saccharine electro-pop wonders (the exception being John Talabot's extended remix of megajam "Seasun," which many people pumped through their iPod docks more often than the original, but which I found too ambling, too sprawling to keep up with the song's super-tight build-and-release). Suffice to say, I was waiting for Delorean's newest full-length LP to drop like I've been waiting to get into the club (I've never been allowed into the club, but their record, Subiza, came out a few weeks ago and I was allowed to purchase it).

Subiza is a dream of an album, but it's less concerned with the conventional pop structures of Ayrton Senna. Rather, we get to bliss out to gorgeous melodies without quite the emphasis on shaking our hips. That might sound like a knock, but it's not. Subiza's still an eminently danceable record, but it's more layered, more complex than the songs that first hooked me on the band.

Case in point: "Real Love". Opening with some typically ethereal loops and hazy samples, mixed with pitch-shifted vocals (cherubim, anyone?), the song takes its time getting going. Delorean's letting you soak up the atmosphere, like (errr) rays of -- yeah, you get it. When Ekhi Lopetegi's vocals finally hit (and, you know, his range isn't quite that far from those pitch-shifted "ah-oh's" that started us off) and the beat picks up, my brain gets seriously saturated with dopamine. I'm talking bliss like when I was a kid and the sno-cone guy pulled up outside of my house. Serious shit, folks. The chorus's question, "Will we ever meet again, / will we ever?" injects just the right dosage of nostalgia and longing into the mix. After all, I haven't seen that sno-cone guy in over a decade, and summers for me now are more about avoiding the heat, wishing I could drive away from work and straight to the ocean and my pastel-colored beach house with all of my friends from the last fifteen years. At least I can put on this record, roll the windows down, and feel like I'm a little closer to hitting the road.

--Corey

Dagoberto Gilb's "Uncle Rock"

The New Yorker still publishes fiction, but they don't include a monocle to help you read it anymore (they had to stop including monocles in 1943 when President Roosevelt ordered them rationed and sent as gifts to a grateful England to get their minds off of the nightly blitzkrieg raids, two years after he ordered all The New Yorker's free top-hats sent over there, too -- read your history book, everyone!). They publish fiction weekly from up-and-comers like E.L. Doctorow and Joyce Carol Oates, and they also posthumously publish everything Roberto Bolaño ever wrote while sitting on the toilet or passing notes in third grade arithmetic class (look for next week's issue, featuring a real post-modern gem of a story, copies of Bolaño's receipts for his favorite diner in Barcelona, including signature and tips -- 15%, usually!).

This week, though, they're running Dagoberto Gilb's short story, "Uncle Rock". I love Dagoberto Gilb. Sometimes I sit on my bed and look plaintively through the window at the trees outside -- cherry blossoms, all, and all with their flowers now bloomed and dropped and blown away into dust by the wind -- and wonder why Dagoberto Gilb isn't the most famous writer in America right now. I had never heard of him until I had the fortune of attending the wonderful Squaw Valley Writers Workshop in the summer of 2009, where he sat on panels and read some of his work. I, like most of his audience, was blown away and spent much of the remainder of the conference bothering him and running into him at the Reno airport on the way home to make sure he knew to get the restraining order filled out on the plane to save time. This semester, I taught some stories from his phenomenal Woodcuts of Women, and I'd like to think I've converted a sizable percentage of Washington, DC metro-area youth into burgeoning Gilbians.

"Uncle Rock" seems to me vintage Gilb -- an exploration of the cultural tensions felt by a young Chicano, told in conversational and diamond-sharp prose. Check him out describing the procession of men who flirt with our protagonist's, Erick, mother:

"Friendly, he’d put his thick hands on the table as if he were touching water, and squat low, so that he was at sitting level, as though he were being so polite, and he’d smile, with coffee-and-tobacco-stained teeth. He might wear a bolo tie and speak in a drawl. Or he might have a tan uniform on, a company logo on the back, an oval name patch on the front. Or he’d be in a nothing-special work shirt, white or striped, with a couple of pens clipped onto the left side pocket, tucked into a pair of jeans or chinos that were morning-clean still, with a pair of scuffed work boots that laced up higher than regular shoes."

As if he were touching water! Dagoberto Gilb should write all the stories. Gilb's able to hit the voice of an eleven year-old boy with perfect pitch; Erick, upset at this parade of strange men, "drove a fork into a goopy American egg yolk and bled it into his American potatoes." Here, in a disarmingly simple sentence, Gilb does so much: gives us a crystalline image of the yolk breaking; describes its "goop" just like Erick would to his friend Albert; and subtly interjects a dose of the racial and cultural tension that drips through the story -- American egg yolk, American potatoes. Later, we see Erick -- with his Anglo name -- shrug off attempts from his mother's suitors to speak to him in English, assuming (incorrectly) that his reticence comes from a language divide. Gilb never reaches too far with these instances of underlining Erick's unarticulated confusion about where he fits in between his Mexican mother and her Hispanic comers-on. Rather, he gives us a lonely, sweethearted kid, one we understand and believe in, whether we've even ever seen a man in a bolo tie or not. By the story's (surprising, to me) end, Gilb's made for us a convincing and full-blooded human in three short pages.

In any case, it's a welcome departure from New Yorker stories about post-Ivy Leaguers flitting around at parties and looking at each others' necklines. Now, since the magazine's taken a break from running stories like that, they can look over my story about post-Ivy Leaguers flitting around at parties and looking at each others' necklines, which has been at their desks for eight months. Fingers crossed!

--Corey

Bonobos Pants, with Not Even One Monkey Joke

Hey, do you guys ever get busy living an actual analog life and neglect your burgeoning internet presence? It turns out that finishing a semester and grading papers takes up a lot of time (time reflected in my docking each of my students one letter grade for taking me away from you, the readers! C's for everyone!) OYL took the week off, but we are BACK! I promise you, literal dozen of readers, that this blogger (and that other blogger here) won't abandon you to the catacombs of the internet for such a length ever again. Wayne keeps up with his blog, and he's in prison!

Prison! Free Wayne, by the way.

But enough ballyhooing (although can you ever really get enough?). Let's talk about what you came here to talk about. Men's fashion! Do you male OYL readers ever tire of Megan blogging about beautiful floral necklaces? Do you feel left out, wishing that I would contribute some hypermasculine, beefy, McQueen (Steve, not Alexander)-style counterparts? Something smelling of football leather and Worcestershire?

Too bad! Pastels, suckers!


I say "suckers" not only to insult my readership (because I am a doctor of BUSINESS), but also to denote the material of this beautiful pant. This, of course, is seersucker. You could buy these (for yourself or for me -- first OYL fan to send me pants in the mail [preferably not used, this time] gets a shout-out on the blog, maybe!) at Bonobos, erudite producers of the garment. As Megan pointed out in her earlier Band of Outsiders post, people ("hipsters" is what I mean by "people," right? or is that the opposite?) are slathering on layers and layers of preppy style this year. Bonobos is at the crest of that trend, making -- as they put it -- men's pants that Gatsby himself could be seen in, whether languidly golfing or covering up a murder!

A southern man myself, I have a deep affinity for seersucker. The pastel colors Bonobos are running right now delight me in deep, unspeakable places -- the blue above is my favorite, but you can also score green, pink, or, for the less adventurous, browns. Slide on some Sperrys, knot yourself a Band of Outsiders skinny tie, and you're ready to begin the summer mating ritual in the city, or to get savagely mugged! If you're not quite ready to be borne back ceaselessly into the past (of the 1920s below the Mason-Dixon), Bonobos also makes khakis and dress pants in blues that pop or in grays more suitable for your quietly deadening office job.




I will say that the legs here aren't tapered quite enough to my liking, nor are the pants priced at what I'd comfortably call "affordable." The latter, at least, is due to Bonobos using old school, New York City sewed-and-pressed factory labor. I'm willing to trade fair wages for higher prices. What I really like about the company, though, is that they're doing the 2010s prep with tongues planted firmly in gin-soaked cheeks. They get it. It's fun to dress in pastels and in white Sperrys, but it's also just a little obnoxious. That's why I like it, anyway. They're not as self-important as Brooks Brothers, but not as Big Brand impersonal as J. Crew. Here's to highballs in the summer, I declay-uh.

--Corey