Me First and the Gimme Gimmes – Take A Break
Me First And The Gimme Gimmes don’t release their albums often enough for me. And this is one of their best ones yet. For those who haven’t heard me wax rhapsodic about the Gimmes before, they’re an all-star aggregation of members from other punk bands such as NOFX who gather to deliver a vicious kidney punch to much-deserving radio staples from the 60s, 70s and 80s – and it seems like the latter era is where Take A Break gets its inspiration. The Gimmes once again ride the volume, and their musical skills, up to “11” on the knob, proving that they can actually sing and they can actually play. Something else they can do is be funny as hell, as proven by the masterful touch of adding the Three Stooges’ “hello, hello, hello… hello!” harmony gag to the tail end of Lionel Richie’s ballad “Hello” (a song I used to dread hearing on the radio, though I love this reading of it). Other targets include “Where Do Broken Hearts Go?”, Whitney Houston’s “Save The Best For Last”, and…it’s as if the guys read my mind and plucked out a perfect songlist of tunes with whom I’ve held a grudge for a decade and a half.
So what’s next for the Gimmes? Hopefully an album within the next 12 months, and hopefully an album that drags some of country music’s most hackneyed hits, kicking and screaming, into the Gimmes’ unique punk stylings. Oh, how I can wish for both of those things. If the guys want to tour again in the meantime, however, and play somewhere close enough for me to see the show, I can see letting them have two years instead of just one.
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- Where Do Broken Hearts Go (2:32)
- Hello (2:20)
- End Of The Road (3:02)
- Ain’t No Sunshine (1:46)
- Nothing Compares 2 U (2:41)
- Crazy (3:10)
- Isn’t She Lovely (2:27)
- I Believe I Can Fly (3:03)
- Oh Girl (2:00)
- I’ll Be There (2:09)
- Mona Lisa (2:52)
- Save The Best For Last (2:07)
- Natural Woman (2:37)
Released by: Fat Wreck Chords
Release date: 2003
Total running time: 32:46
Hailing from Georgia, Paul Melancon is working on carving himself a nice little niche in indie power pop circles. And to listen to Camera Obscura is to discover why he’s earning that respect – Melancon is obviously a student of the Beatles and Brian Wilson, wistful melodies and vocal harmonies, and densely wordy songwriting. The song that drew me to this album is an unabashed valentine to Melancon’s personal pop pedigree, a song in which the singer yearns to “be just like Jeff Lynne.” That proclamation in itself would be enough to get my attention, but this song is easily the high point of the album as it effortlessly appropriates many of the ELO frontman’s trademark licks – call-and-respond backing vocals, stratospheric synth glissandos, a guitar riff that tastes just a little like “Sweet Talkin’ Woman”, and real live strings. If someone was going to pay a musical tribute to Lynne, I can’t think of a better way – and yet the song is playful too, trading on Lynne’s reputation as a studio-bound recluse and hinting that the person singing the song, by trying too hard to be like his hero, is headed for a ruined relationship.
You may know him as Lennier or Will Robinson or that creepy kid who cropped up again after 40 years in the Twilight Zone, but Bill Mumy’s also a more than capable musician, as demonstrated by this early solo effort.
It’s a pity that Bill Mumy isn’t the musical superstar he deserves to be. I applaud his acting talents, and I’ve always enjoyed them, but sometimes I think his screen fame has shafted him when it comes to getting his music taken seriously. Just about any Bill Mumy album will help you recover from the notion that every actor’s musical ambitions must necessarily culminate in a disaster of Golden Throats proportions. I highly recommend this one to you.
Some people seem to take inordinate delight in downplaying Paul McCartney’s contributions to pop music, especially in his post-Beatles years. But I ask you: who can listen to “Coming Up”, “My Love” or “No More Lonely Nights” and say that Paul was past his prime when he coined these tunes? Forever doomed to be widely regarded as the cute, irreverent half of the Lennon/McCartney songwriting powerhouse, McCartney has always been capable of putting that perception to rest with his ballads. (C’mon, we are talking about the man chiefly responsible for “Hey Jude” and “Yesterday”.) Now, there are some tracks on here that do a lot to give McCartney’s solo portfolio that “cute, irreverent” label (I’m thinking “Band On The Run” and especially “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey” – a song that some people refer to as “Hands Across The Water” – here), and a few that seem to go a bit far in trying to correct that perception (“Live And Let Die”) – but criticism of the lyrics aside, I still like just about everything on this collection.
“What’s this?” I asked. “A Paul McCartney tribute album benefitting cancer charities and featuring the Finn Brothers? Sign me up!”
John Mayer’s Room For Squares ranks as one of my most fortunate musical finds; Mayer opened for former Toad The Wet Sprocket frontman Glen Phillips on a recent acoustic tour, and shortly after Philadelphia radio station WXPN started rather heavy airplay of the album’s first single, “No Such Thing”. I eventually decided to buy the CD, and now I’m hooked. The guitar line and percussion do a great job carrying the basic melodies, whether they’re slower, somewhat dreamy tunes like “Your Body Is a Wonderland” and “City Love” or more energetic songs such as “Love Song For No One” and “No Such Thing”. Meyer then builds around those melodies with organs, pianos, violins and other instrumentation to create a sound that’s very light but still rich enough to engage the listener. He can use a few notes to perfectly capture a particular emotion, and let that emotion color the rest of the song. “3×5” is a song about a traveler whose experiences reconnect him to the world, and the simple fragment that connects the verses seems to sum up the gravity of such a moment.
Wow, it’s finally happened – Paul McCartney, whose last project I really dug was 1997’s Flaming Pie, has been dragged into the 90s. Not a bad trick, considering that this album was released in 2001.
When some of the tracks on the two volumes of ELO BBC recordings – Live At The BBC and The BBC Sessions – were exactly the same as the final versions that appeared on their albums, I had a few trepidations about picking up yet another BBC Sessions album. As it turns out, The Move: The BBC Sessions features some dandy rarities I’d never heard before, most of them taking the form of cover songs that haven’t appeared on previous collections.
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes are almost miracle workers in my book. How could they actually make me like that miserably depressing Terry Jack tune “Seasons In The Sun”? By covering it in their own bizarre punk style – they’re all able musicians, the Gimmes, but at times they play the song just badly enough that it’s a redeeming trait. But their latest album – once again clocking in at a measley (and expensive) half-hour only – proves that they can, indeed, play the hell out of something if they so choose. And they’ve once again chosen the oldies, sticking to the 60s and early 70s so familiar to me from my own oldies radio experience. I love the music of this era – and the Gimmes attack it with aplomb, actually delivering well-played and at times almost reverent (note I said “almost”) covers of these tunes.
A bit of a surprising discovery, this is actually the soundtrack of a National Geographic-sponsored IMAX documentary film, and it’s the product of the same team that re-arranged orchestral versions of George Harrison and Jeff Lynne tunes from Harrison’s Cloud Nine to serve as the musical backdrop of an Imax film about scaling Everest.