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Rage Against the Machine

The Battle of Los Angeles

(Sony)

 Amazon

 Lala

I bought The Battle of Los Angeles from the used bin at Tower Records when I was a high school freshman. My local rock station (now defunct) had the album’s singles in hourly rotation, unfairly grouping them with contemporaries like Limp Bizkit and Korn in the nascent ‘rap-rock’ movement. As anyone familiar with their earlier albums knew, Rage Against the Machine were an established entity altogther different from the rising nu-metal stars of the time. They communicated a blatantly political message with ferocious guitars and provocative lyrics. The immediacy of their songs made me a believer then, and I anticipated feeling that same fire when revisited the songs now.

Ten years ago, Zack de la Rocha sang (or rapped) the words, “It has to start somewhere / It has to start some time / What better place than here? / What better time than now?” His words touched something deep in the American subconscious; this music was about more than nookie and Catholic school-girl uniforms. Shouting along with the chorus was not enough. Rage dared us to understand the words to their songs on a cerebral and emotional level, to research the causes they espoused, to form our own opinions and fight for what we believed was right.

An overwhelming sense of fatigue lingers when these songs play now. The world has been fighting for eight years. Between Iraq, Afghanistan, and major financial institutions, its supply of righteous anger is either spent or aimed in other directions. A Democrat is back in the White House, Mumia Abu-Jamal is still in jail, and the “vultures who thirst for blood and oil” have crushed the economy. We are in the same place we were when The Battle of Los Angeles came out. And while the world is certainly not the peaceful humanist utopia Rage Against the Machine envisioned, all the political messages bound inextricably to their music just seem exhausted.

I still nod and sing along to “Calm Like a Bomb” and get chills from the opening to “Born of a Broken Man”. But as the last squeal of “War Within a Breath” dies against my bedroom walls, I cannot help feeling relieved. I am too tired to be angry anymore. Theresa Dougherty

Fiona Apple

When the Pawn…

(Clean Slate/Epic)

 Amazon

 Lala

The title is the tip-off. Commonly reduced down to When the Pawn…, the full title weighs in at a hefty 90 words, a capriciously scrawled poem that is at once combative, ambitious, pretentious, and a little crazy—just like the album it represents. As a shot across the bow, a statement of intent, it is bold and brilliant, the perfect complement to what is contained within—and yet it still does not really adequately prepare one for the stunning suite of songs that Fiona Apple unleashed on her audacious sophomore album.

A stuttered, muffled electronic beat throbs momentarily before the opening track, “On the Bound”, lurches to life, lumbering along on a harsh syncopated beat and pounded-out piano line like some sort of obscene monster dragged up from a grave. The brutal verses give way to jazzy, string-drenched lushness in the chorus (channeling the Lynchian cool of Angelo Badalamenti), the music paralleling and complementing the lyrical wavering between vengeful fury and needful desperation. The song then trundles through its back end as an instrumental, weighed down by all sorts of ornate, extraneous instrumentation, before finally sputtering out in exhaustion. Pugilistic, desperate, paranoid, cocksure, and brawny, it is simply a stunning opener, and formally it sets the stage for everything that follows.

Though Apple showed flashes of brilliance on her uneven debut album Tidal,  I don’t think anyone expected such a severe and sharp uptick in quality—both in terms of songwriting and lyricism—as she displays on the 10 tracks of When the Pawn…. Disparate and even schizophrenic from song to song, and even within each track, there’s still a certain underlying uniformity to them all, a guiding intelligence that binds them all together, in exact sequence, by necessity. It all works perfectly and harmoniously when considered at a remove, even though at a ground level it always sounds like the album is going to simply fly apart.

Nowhere is this more evident than on standout “Fast as You Can”, a frantic blur of a song in which Apple’s vocals and piano continuously threaten to trip over themselves and collapse in hopeless entanglement. Racing and careening along manically, the song pulls up for a breather somewhere in the middle before charging through to a whirling end. It might be the most exciting thing she has ever recorded, and ended up being, understandably, the most popular single from the album.

From there, the album somehow ascends to an even higher peak with its closing three songs. Soaring up in a howl of spite and rage, “The Way Things Are” and “Get Gone” channel the old confessional/adolescent wounded-girl-on-piano clichés of Tidal into something profound and proud, hooks and lyrics honed to an excruciating venomous point that lays waste to everything in its path. And this makes the soothing closer, the smoky, jazzy torch song “I Know”, even more stunning when it drops. A tender ballad full of resignation and loss, it metes out acceptance without yielding to defeat, as defiant and strong as the fight put up in every other song on the album.

Special mention must be made here of Jon Brion’s brilliant production. He’s the centripetal yin to Apple’s centrifugal yang, holding the whole thing together even as it strains to pull itself apart. Weaving the songs together with musical embellishments, flourishes, and curlicues, directing the instrumentation to envelop and lift the songs to heights beyond what they were perhaps intended to reach, the rococo, carnivalesque soundscape that underpins everything is as much to his credit as it is to Apple’s. Not to discredit Apple at all—this is her album, defiantly so—but Brion’s production is so essential and totally integral to When the Pawn…‘s success that the album announced the arrival of his genius as much as it did Apple’s. Jake Meaney