Real Life Rock (279 page)

6
Allo Darlin',
Allo Darlin'
(Fortuna Pop!)
Breathy, small-voice pop that makes a world of ease and nimbleness, leaping over tall buildings or anyway garden fences in a single bound. (“I've got no money to burn but I'm going to burn what I've got,” Elizabeth Morris sings in “Silver Dollars,” and you don't exactly believe her; “I know this band is awful but I like them an awful lot,” she goes on, and you absolutely do.) Funny, breezy, smart: references include Max von Sydow, Woody Allen, Johnny Cash, old “I'd Rather Fight Than Switch” cigarette ads, and Weezer, the latter to derisive laughter, which could be the most perfect moment here.

7
Allen Ruppersberg,
A Lecture on Houdini
(1973), in “Houdini: Art and Magic,” Jewish Museum, New York (October 29, 2010–March 27, 2011)
Easy to miss in this thrilling survey of the career and afterlife of the unforgotten escape artist is a small video cut into a large screen that's showing footage of Houdini hung upside down and freeing himself from a straitjacket. On the small screen, you see Ruppersberg in a straitjacket, seated at a desk, twisting
and stretching as he reads from a typescript of his own Houdini biography. Near the end, his efforts to wriggle loose become more desperate, and his reading more strangled, out of breath—and suddenly the real events he's describing are suspended. As each sentence takes you closer to the end, the feeling is that if Ruppersberg can somehow escape before he reaches the description of Houdini's death, Houdini won't die.

8–9
Carolina Chocolate Drops, “Sitting on Top of the World,” from
Things About Comin' My Way: A Tribute to the Music of the Mississippi Sheiks
(Black Hen, 2009) and
Dona Got a Ramblin' Mind
(Music Maker Relief Foundation, 2006)
Aren't tribute albums terrible? Yes, but with Rhiannon Giddens's fiddle keening so distantly in the background, you can imagine that the Chocolate Drops are slowing the Memphis combo's 1930 blues standard down almost to a stop as a way of slowing down the world, so they won't have to get off—just as, five years ago, on a first album that said hello to almost everyone in the old-timey neighborhood, from “ Little Sadie” to “Sally Ann,” “Tom Dula” to “Black-Eyed Daisy,” they nevertheless jumped the train of “Old Cat Died” as if the same thing would happen to them if they couldn't ride out of town on the rail of their own strings, so fast that moment to moment you can't tell Giddens's and Justin Robinson's fiddles from Dom Flemons's harmonica, which might be the whole point.

10
YOU CAN CHECK OUT ANYTIME YOU LIKE, BUT YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE
, headline,
Wall Street Journal
(January 4)
Over a picture of then-governor Jerry Brown with Linda Ronstadt and Glenn Frey of the Eagles, 1976, on the left, and Brown being sworn in as governor of California, 2011.

Thanks to Chris Ohman

MAY
2011

1
PJ Harvey,
Let England Shake
(Vagrant/Island/Def Jam)
It's shocking to realize that her first album appeared nineteen years ago. While from one record to the next radical leaps alternate with at least one step back, from
Dry
to
Rid of Me
to the quicksand of
4-Track Demos
, from
To Bring You My Love
to the bottomless
Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
to
Uh Huh Her
to
A Woman a Man Walked By
with longtime collaborator John Parish—never mind the bootleg
Blind Peggy Death
—her sound has traveled with such immediacy, such an insistence that what you're hearing is happening now, that notions of time, career, progress, or decline are meaningless.

Here her voice feels higher, damaged. The back-and-forth with Parish (guitar and percussion, saxophone and trombone) is more delicate than ever; notes feel as if they're reaching for each other and barely missing. But the deep-blues pessimism that has driven Harvey all along finds a field so stark you can't not picture it. The terrain the songs claim—a country used up, “damp filthiness of ages,” acres of corpses, “arms and legs were in the trees”—lets you imagine Harvey started out to create a soundtrack after the fact to
Children of Men
—the sounds coming out of her mouth feel like Clive Owen's face looked—and then decided to remake the whole picture instead. While ending one song with a line from “Summertime Blues.”

2
Kathleen Hanna, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Joe's Pub, New York (December 15, 2010, YouTube)
As she goes on at length with the story of how she named the song, which she later found herself stripping to—it's a stand-up routine, starting with graffiti on a fake teen-pregnancy center, graffiti on a bedroom wall, and then “one of those hangovers where you think that if you walk in the next room there could be a dead body in there?”—both glee and suspense take over the room. It's the suspense of someone describing how history was made, which is to say describing how it might not have been; it's the glee of having been in the right place at the right time, and for once saying exactly
the right thing. When Hanna finally begins to sing the song itself in her little-girl voice, and the hairs rise on the back of your neck, you can feel them one by one.

3
Low Anthem,
Smart Flesh
(Nonesuch)
A lot of people hear worry and trouble in Arcade Fire and the Decemberists, but all I find are bland, warming voices reassuring the listener that somebody cares. On their fourth album, this Providence quartet—whose Myspace profile lists its genre as “Comedy/Minimalist/Psychedelic,” which is as helpful as “Harry Reid/Patsy Cline/ Humphrey Bogart” might be—goes for the nihilism of real art: saying what you want to say without wondering if it's going to do anybody any good. “Boeing 737” opens with a flurry of thrilling noise and a tale so lacking in piety you start playing the movie it calls up before the first verse is half over. “I was in the air when the towers came down / In a bar on the 84th floor,” the singer says, like a drunk in another bar who's told this story so many times he actually believes it. But two tracks earlier, in “Ghost Woman Blues,” the singer has already convinced you that the ghost he saw in the cemetery wasn't a ghost at all, that both the woman and the song might be two hundred years old, and by now you're ready to believe anything.

4
Vladimir Putin, “Blueberry Hill” (December 11, 2010, YouTube)
Phil Bronstein,
San Francisco Chronicle
, January 10: “In front of a fawning crowd, including Hollywood celebrities, Putin charmingly sang ‘Blueberry Hill.' It reminded me of those Adolf and Eva home movies at Berchtesgaden, laughing and playing with their German shepherds.” Or, as Eva, a big Al Jolson fan, liked to do, dressing up in blackface.