PJ HARVEY
White Chalk
34 minutes long, almost entirely based on minimal piano figures (an instrument Harvey had only just learned to play). The music is wreathed in a chill feel of cold English country, and the lyrics are reminiscent of Sylvia Plath: “The Piano” has a Daddy rattling keys in the doorway, and a Mommy who is “trying to leave.” Throughout, you see Plath’s empty kitchen and gas stove. Harvey’s leads echo down long hallways, and there are ghosts on backup.

A creepy, insinuating little caprice of an album, tops in the 2007 genre of ethereal female folk-rock discoveries that included Cathy Davey’s Tales of Silversleeve, Carina Round’s Slow Motion Addict, and Stephanie Dosen’s A Lily for the Spectre.

RINGO STARR
Liverpool 8
You don’t have to love the Beatles to make it halfway through this, though it would help. But if you do love them, there’s no way you’ll find Ringo’s second consecutive non-embarrassment (after 1992’s Time Takes Time) empty of pleasure. That’s after you get past the title song, a guided tour of Fab nostalgia spots whose grope at grandeur is more than canceled out by a rack of execrable rhymes (“Played Butlin’s camp with my friend Ror-ree / It was good for him, it was great for me”). Rewatching the Anthology DVD a few weeks ago, I was struck again by Ringo’s modest wit, his forthrightness, his poise; “Liverpool 8” strikes me only as a measure of the unaccountable things people will do in the name of nostalgia. Destiny was calling, I just couldn’t stick around — it’s okay for someone writing on the Beatles to say that, but not the Beatle himself.

There is only one unredeemable song (“If it’s Love That You Want”); the rest nestle nicely enough into a comfort zone that is plush and narrow. Producer Dave Stewart can play a Beatles cliché just like ringing a bell: the record ripples with familiar Studio One touches — orchestra clamor, backwards talk, flanged vocals, sitars buzzing in a vacuum, elfin voices and odd squiggles in every vacant crack. As for Ringo’s singing, age works its wonders on even so indifferent an instrument as his: if his voice is no longer as jaunty as it was circa 1972, it has accrued a patina of yearning that sounds just right. (Or maybe he’s only yearning to hit the note.) Ringo handles the minimal demands without great strain; on a slightly more demanding song, like the pretty, pseudo-Mexican “Pasodobles” (echoing flamenco guitar solo and all), Stewart must mix Ringo’s vocal down, ever downward, until it is pretty much just another layer of sound.

So it’s a nice piece of work. Its force of artistry won’t shake the world or even topple a trashcan, but Liverpool 8 is probably every bit as good as it can be. Which is not the empty praise it might appear: can we say the same of the last albums by, oh I don’t know, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, or Paul McCartney?

OK GO
“Here it Goes Again”
This was discovered sometime last fall. Hipsters no doubt know something more about this band than do I, who am known in the nabe as the Anti-Hipster or the Hipster Killer. But as much as I love the video posted below — check it out, you won’t be sorry — I was surprised to find that the song itself, perfectly videoless, was logging heavy time in my iPod earphones as I strode the streets of my fair city. It has clever lyrics, a great pop tune, and a band dynamic tending to the harder edge of the early British Invasion spectrum. But what really lodges the damn delightful thing deep in your sound-hole is that off-key no or oh or oh no or whatever it is that punctuates the refrain like damp smacks on a cheap piece of tin. These boys have the feel of one-hit wonders, but what a hit, what a bang-on hit.



STRANDED — The Countdown (18)

CLEFTONES, “Heart and Soul” (Gee). Pure adolescent goodness, and it gets an extra point for adorning the sock-hop in American Graffiti. 1961.

JIMMY CLIFF, “Vietnam” (A&M). Sweet, sad, needful at the time, not so much now. 1970.
——. The Harder They Come (Mango). As a consumer, I was always peeved by the rip-off of repeating two tracks (“You Can Get it if You Really Want” and the title song). But other than that it’s utterly without flaw. Like a lot of people, I fell in love with reggae from this record. 1972.

COASTERS, Their Greatest Recordings — The Early Years (Atco). The Coasters’ great sides — written and produced by Leiber and Stoller, but brought to something bigger than life by the agile, gleeful voices of the singers themselves — were straight off the funny pages and the serial screen, full of radio melodrama and sitcom silliness. Their genius as a music-making collective was to discover how wonderful such things could be when taken out of their contexts and placed in that of a rock record, with caffeinated beats and a sax that always sounded like a junkman blowing his nose. They told the most absurd stories in the most absurd voices, traveled the globe on worn-out shoe leather, and chased golden idols and exotic femmes like a troupe of Indiana Joneses from the South Side of Chicago. Every time they turned around, they bumped into trouble; but their pluck and their humor got them through. From “Searchin’” to “Along Came Jones,” “Yakety Yak” to “Charlie Brown,” “Down in Mexico” to “Little Egypt,” from Cell Block #9 to Smokey Joe’s Cafe, this is great, great stuff, a treasury of American humor and bubbling stewpot of post-war pop culture. 1955-1961 / 1971.
——. “What About Us” / “Run Red Run” (Atco). In the years since Marcus noted these two sides in Mystery Train as encoded racial satire and revenge scenario (A-side a tragicomic tale of have and have-not, B-side a tall tale about a monkey turning tables on its master), it’s been impossible to hear them any other way. That’s perhaps because there is no other way to hear them; it’s perhaps because there is no need. “Run Red Run” in particular is a perfect little construction of fantasy and fear wrapped up as mere fable: Uncle Remus rocks out. Run, Red, Run, ‘cause he’s got your gun / And he’s aimin’ it at your head — boogedy, boogedy, boogedy! Nothing very funny about that. 1959.

EDDIE COCHRAN, “Summertime Blues” (Liberty). It’s hard to say which is finer about this affectionate piece of teen dissent — the perfect summertime sound of it, just slightly reverberant, as if it were echoing through the lot at Mel’s Drive-In; or the way this kid who knows his life isn’t actually that bad petitions both Congress and the United Nations to get behind his grievance. For a would-be anarchist-hedonist-punk, he seems to have paid attention in civics class. This is the kind of protest music I like best of all: rack it with “School Days” and “Dancing in the Street.” 1958.

COMMODORES, “Machine Gun” (Motown). One of those great ‘70s instrumentals you heard all the time on the radio and never caught the name of. (Others: “Love’s Theme,” “TSOP,” “Frankenstein.”) I like it, but it’s hard not to wince a bit at it today, if only because the musical mimics behind “That 70s Show” have so cleverly plundered push-button grooves like this for their between-scene interludes. 1974.

CONTOURS, “Do You Love Me” (Gordy). I seem to remember disliking this long before Dirty Dancing came along to render it officially and eternally unlistenable. Hard to say what’s not there, or what’s there and shouldn’t be: it’s got punch, delight, a certain glee factor. I ought to love it. I don’t. (Though it does get a half-point for bringing what may have been the first false fade to Top 40 radio. Does “Strawberry Fields” have some of its genesis here?) 1962.
——. “First I Look at the Purse” (Gordy). A witty Smokey Robinson number that was done up in more fervent style by J Geils Band on their first LP. (Though it does get a half-point for being a very early avatar of the pure Motown sound.) Sorry, Contours: looks like it’s the kiss-off. 1962.

EARPLUG
After today, I plan to post most of my Beatle-related jottings over at a new blog I’m building with some friends, which we call Hey Dullblog. It had its origin in the flurries of emails that used to fly between us when a new or unusual Beatle story came over the wires, or when one of us wanted to share a Fab enthusiasm with the others. Now we’re posting on our enthusiasms, giving links to Beatle stories, opinionizing ad hoc, commemorating meaningful anniversaries, stumping each other with our Never-Ending Beatles Trivia Quiz Challenge, etc. We’ve got dispatches coming from both coasts, and at least two boroughs of New York! And we’re only a couple of weeks old.

My friend and the blog’s administrator, Mike Gerber — author of the Barry Trotter parody series, as well as Freshman (2006), a novel about a “fictional” Ivy League university, so funny I urinated on the first Yale alumnus I saw — has just posted a brilliant rumination on the recent passing of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It contains some bold and convincing suggestions about the role that benign little fellow may have played at a troubled point in the history of the Beatles, and of one Beatle in particular.

Those who don’t like others to have opinions, let alone express them, should stay the fuck away, thank you very much. Everyone else, though, is most cordially invited.