Chumbawamba – Tubthumper

September 23, 1997 • Universal Music

This is totally going to date me, but anyway: As you may remember, "Tubthumping" was a huge radio hit in 1997 in the US. I was eight years old and thought (for some reason) that it was the greatest thing that I had ever heard; my parents then bought this album, which was the first CD I ever personally owned. (In a disgustingly-romantic coincidence, it's also the first CD my girlfriend ever owned.) And, like most of the one-hit-wonders of the '90s, the album is unfortunately mostly forgettable—but not for me, as a nice little slice of my childhood.

What most people probably wouldn't guess is that the album isn't full of cheesy dance-pop anthems. Sure, there are a couple other ones and they are equally silly and kind of dumb. But buried in the middle of the album there are some actually-good songs, notably "The Good Ship Lifestyle" (by far my favorite) and "I Want More". And just about every other track, while certainly flawed, have a few little bits and pieces that are worth listening to. Many songs have little intros or outros of wildly different genres or with neat samples, which go a surprisingly long way to keeping the listening experience more interesting.

Unfortunately, most of the songs really aren't very good. Maybe I'm too acclimated to all of it, but just about every track has some aspect (if not the whole thing) which is just a bit too cloying or silly. Maybe it's something you have to be in the right mood for; generally I'm not in the mood for this kind of dance-pop.

I won't say this is necessarily a good album, or one that people should listen to even if they were into "Tubthumping" back in the day. On the whole, it's not particularly noteworthy or even listenable. I'll still take two or three tracks, but that's not a very good percentage.

The Church, The Sharp Things

March 7, 2015 • The Grog Shop, Cleveland, Ohio

A trip up to Cleveland with the SO + her family, to finally go to a venue I almost went to ten years ago to see Isis (but didn't because I was a minor). It's actually a pretty nice place—at least, a step up (albeit a small one) from most of the dingy bars I go to in Columbus. I guess The Church is one of the most well-known acts I've seen in a long, long time, so it's somewhat fitting. Although they also sell out huge venues like the Opera House in Australia, so what do I know.

The Sharp Things

I'd never heard of this band before and after today I'll probably never think about them again. They're supposed to be some kind of big chamber pop / pop-rock group, but at this show there were just two guys, one on bass and one singing and on guitar or piano. They played incredibly generic pop ballads, I think; I barely remember because it was just so forgettable.

The Church

For a band who I really haven't heard much of (one album off-and-on a while ago) and a I was pleasantly surprised by this show. As I often forget, with concerts what matters usually isn't what you play but rather how you play it, and even though I'm pretty ambivalent about their studio work I thought the show was done very well. For a bunch of old dudes they actually do still rock sufficiently. I didn't recognize most of the songs they played (I knew three out of about fifteen) but most of them were still fun to watch in their own way. They tended to go off on extended post-psych jam sessions at the end of some songs which usually wound up working really well, though it sometimes seemed to clash with their poppier tunes a little. On the other hand the mix of styles, old and new, helped keep the long show from getting stale too fast (though I was ready to go home about five songs before they stopped, but I was pretty tired anyway). Some enjoyable banter from Steve Kilbey helped keep things light too. All in all, enjoyable stuff; I'm glad I went.

Ulver – Childhood's End

May 28, 2012 • Kscope

Either Ulver has transcended all of space-time or they've totally lost it; I'm not sure which. It seemed like they could do no wrong after releasing some of the greatest albums ever over the last nearly-twenty years or so, mastering everything from black metal to electronic to art rock to ambient. Since Wars of the Roses, though, they've been losing me. Childhood's End is an interesting new direction for the band but I don't know if I'm really feeling it.

For anyone who doesn't yet know, Childhood's End is a cover album; Ulver takes on various rock bands from the mid-'60s with a psychedelic pop feel. Given that neither '60s rock nor psych pop generally do much for me, it's hard for me to click with the music on this album. Garm's vocals are the only thing reminiscent of older Ulver—not that I wasn't expecting them to change their sound yet again, but the songs don't sound like Ulver songs in the same way you could tell that Wars of the Roses had Ulver songs (even if they weren't particularly good ones).

Not that Childhood's End is bad, though. Given the source material Ulver did quite a fine job crafting new sounds with it. Many tracks have a really nice ethereal quality to them—lots of reverb and background strings, of course—combined with a sort of folky aesthetic (comes with the '60s territory, I suppose). Sometimes it works and they pull out something really great (like "Where Is Yesterday" or "Can You Travel in the Dark Alone?"), but other songs are still a bit too silly or cheesy to warrant more than one listen ("Today" or "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night", among others). Fortunately most of the songs are pretty short, so the bad ones are over soon enough, but I still feel like a lot of the dumber ones should have been trimmed easily.

Even after a few listens I'm still a bit confused by this album. Ulver completionists will of course listen to it, but be forewarned that it's not the same band that you grew to love back with Bergtatt or Perdition City. As an introduction to obscure '60s rock, sure, this might be a good place to start, but I couldn't care less. Dad rockers (yeah I went there) might like it for sentimental reasons, but what dad rocker is going to listen to Ulver in the first place, let alone enjoy their covers more than the originals? And that doesn't really leave us anywhere. Sure, it's a fine album. They did a good job. But why bother?

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