This weekend a friend mentioned that Rufus Wainwright’s new album, Want One–specifically the orgiastically magnificent “Go or Go Ahead”–is the kind of music Radiohead should be doing. The Missus and I both agree, wholeheartedly. Hail to the Thief might have its moments, but Wainwright’s manically inventive production and lovely, exotic vocals eat that record alive. “Bolero,” the Brill Building, Brahms, and Britney Spears all find their way in there at one point or another (though Britney, fortunately, is just a one-off reference, not a musical inspiration). It’s tough to talk about individual songs for all that, though; this is an album that’s meant to be taken in as a whole. (That won’t stop me from picking “Oh What a World,” “I Don’t Know What It Is,” “Movies of Myself,” “Go or Go Ahead,” “Vibrate,” and “Beautiful Child” as the best orchestral rock songs since OK Computer, though.) This one’s a must, music fans.
Also picked up the Strokes’s Room on Fire. If that’s a fire, it’s a negative-four alarmer, man. Where’s the urgency? Compared to the first record, which had more hooks than the prop department for a revival of Peter Pan, this one, well, plods. Not plods, exactly–it just kinda putters along, with most every song consisting of slapped-together arrangements of different notes each played eight times in a row. On the other hand, it is growing on me. A couple of songs are obviously great, in the spirit of Is This It–this would be the very nervous sounding “Reptilia” and the album-closing “I Can’t Win”–and the two Cars homages are entertaining too. There’s a decent ballad in there as well, “Under Control,” which uses a “Moby Dick”-esque drum lick for good measure. It’s not as good as Is This It, the album it is inexplicably called a clone of by critic after critic, but it’s good nonetheless.
And that Outkast double el-pee is pretty good, too. I’ve never been as wild about Outkast as many people seem to be: sure, they’ve come up with amazing unclassifiable songs like “Bombs Over Baghdad,” and great hip-hop stuff like “So Fresh, So Clean,” but for all that you have to put up with a lot of meandering stuff that never gets off the ground and (the bane of modern-day hip-hop) skits galore. (And no one will ever be able to explain to me why “The Whole World” was recorded, much less released as a single off a greatest-hits package.) However, I’m pretty happy with Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. I think they work best if you really do listen to it as a double album and not just two records that came in the same case. There’s actually something of a flow, an expansion of ideas as the former gives way to the latter. And “Hey Ya!” is every bit as good as “B.O.B.”, possibly better, and “Prototype” doesn’t just peter out the way so many hip-hop songs do, for which I was profoundly grateful, and Big Boi’s “GhettoMusick” is just as weird as anything Andre 3000 came up with, which took me by surprise.
And there’s also Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism to talk about. I’ve only just gotten into Death Cab, thanks to lead singer Ben Gibbard’s wonderful emotronica side project the Postal Service, so I don’t have a whole lot to compare it to; but from what I’ve gathered from fans (and from a few listens to its predecessor, The Photo Album), Transatlanticism is a breakthrough. Ambitious and intimate in equal measure, each song is a lot more “song”-ish than previous efforts, there are surprisingly Beatleish/Lennonish moments, and it’s got a crescendoing 8-minute title song centerpiece that ends in a swelling chorus of “Come on.” I think it’s a beautiful album.