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Franz Ferdinand -
Tonight: Franz Ferdinand
Domino/Epic/Sony BMG |
These four dudes are writing the huge rock anthems of the twenty-first century. Over the top production (which is nothing out of the ordinary) added to ridiculous disco rock (which is really out of the ordinary) creates the convoluted mess that is Franz Ferdinand.
Music all over the place, that sass-packed vocal delivery that makes my skin crawl, and enough hipster charm that Tonight: Franz Ferdinand should really just make me want to pull my hair out.
As much as there are points of this record that do this (the first 20 seconds of this album, for instance), the majority has a catchyness that makes you unable to stop listening. Similar to how screaming babies make you want to put your head through a wall and speak in tongues at the same time, Franz Ferdinand have delivered something simultaneously skin grating and unbeatable. Great dance music. |
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Tuck & Patti -
I Remember You
T&P/Artist Garage/Fontana |
Dreamy wife & husband duo Tuck & Patti aren't doing anything original or different, just honest and personal. Acoustic guitar and beautiful, deep female vocals embody a richness to I Remember You that adds life and color to a rather drull style of music. Quiet, but not boring, this is for any in the mood for something soulful. |
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The All-American Rejects -
When The World Comes Down
Doghouse/Geffen/Interscope |
Say what you want about this band, they are truly great. The All-American Rejects seem to be genuinely overlooked for their pure genius catchy song-writing by most people of respectable opinions.
Yes, the band is about ten years too late to get the full appreciation they deserve, but it does not mean their appeal is any less there.
Opening track "I Wanna" is pure fun: one part late 90's pop-punk, one part loser rock, the band embodies what should be the direction of all rock music today.
***Best Album Of The Week***
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Eric Benet -
Love & Life
Friday/Reprise/Warner Bros. |
God-loving R&B from pop artist Eric Benet continues where Hurricane left off. A bit more on the funk side of the tracks, Love & Life rolls from track to track with ease and a serious sense of positivity.
His voice is incredible, like a more controlled and less ridiculous R. Kelly, and manages to move the music forward. This is a feat that so many musicians crash and burn when attempting. Run of the mill production, with beats that take a perfect position in the background, Love & Life is the r&b that we wish everyone was releasing. |
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Trouble Andrew -
Self-Titled
Capitol/Virgin/EMI |
I know nothing about this band, so I will give this the best I got. Trouble Andrew, post-punk in nature but pop in sound, is an electronic conglomeration of fast paced spouted lyrics, catchy synthesized melodies, and a serious hipster tone. Fun and poppy, this is a dance party waiting to happen.
***ARTIST TO WATCH!!!***
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Various Artists -
Putumayo Kids Presents: African Dreamland
Putumayo |
Putumayo's most recent effort of the "Dreamland" series, dedicated to releasing lullabyes and children's music from around the world, gives us African Dreamland.
As far as Putumayo goes, this is pretty standard; their standard is phenomenal. Every song is handpicked for its perfection, and it shows. Sounds and styles I have never heard before, like Chiwoniso's bell-ensemble which comes close to tear-jerking, makes the album perfect for all ages. Included on here are the legendary Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Toumani Diabate, and Samite, along with many others. |
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Various Artists -
Red House 25 Volume One
Red House |
Red House Records have been good to us over the years: consistently sending us some of the best folk out there right now and never letting us down.
This, as the album so subtly suggests, is their 25th anniversary collection. It includes all of their best (including, but not limited to: Eliza Gilkyson, Jorma Kaukonen, Greg Brown, Lucy Kaplansky, Guy Davis, and everyone else), and it all sounds like exactly what you would expect: country and blues laced folk that drives home the heritage of the genre we all love so much.
***LATE BUT GREAT***
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Volcano Suns -
All Night Lotus Party
Merge |
So this is one of those rare-gems that we get in at JSI Top 21: Volcano Suns, one of the follow up bands to indie-rock pioneers Mission of Burma. Taking on the, well, almost perfect sounds of Husker Du and The Hated, Volcano Suns are not quite post-punk or indie rock, or even rock and roll, but somewhere in-between it all. Lo-fi recording, amazing songs, lots of the same drum beat, and, honestly, some of the best vocals ever, this is an album that just about everyone needs to get. |
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Beat Union -
Disconnected
Science |
UK "pop-punk" band Beat Union is trying really hard. Really hard. And I feel bad that, despite the obvious effort on their part, that the music has turned out so annoying.
Their obvious influences, being Elvis Costello, maybe even some Green Day, works great in theory. Fantastic even. But it just doesn't work. Too heavily produced, missing the music genius-quality that made Costello as perfect as he was, and vocals that squeak way too much, Disconnected is a big disappointment, mostly because it should be so good.
***MIGHTY, MIGHTY!!***
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Yelle -
Pop-Up
Source ETC/Caroline/Capitol/EMI |
There is not a person on Earth who understands how happy this makes me. Stupidly poppy electronic music with "cute" female vocals laying a foundation of pure awesomeness.
Sung entirely in French, fluctuating between a healthy mix of genius melodies and almost aggressive rapping, Yelle is as good as it gets. A cuter version of Robyn, with more silly-but-still-perfect beats, Pop-Up should be owned by everyone. This is so good. |
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Randy Newman -
Harps and Angels
Nonesuch/Warner Music |
The Ball Street Journal is nothing different than E-40 has ever done. He has his identical delivery that he has in every song, the same style, same flow, and yeah, the same lyrical content. Most of it still doesn't make any sense, but that seems to be his jam. I've never cared much for the "hyphy" movement, and this doesn't change my mind.
***LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL!!***
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Michael Higgins -
The Moon and the Lady Dancing
Michael Higgins |
Smooth jazz to a T. Quiet and rolling through songs at the tempo of the tortoise, Higgins seems completely oblivious of the idea of the "hare".
Slow from beginning to end, and a bit on the self indulgent side (which is basically written into the genre), The Moon and the Lady Dancing is an album that you know from beginning to end before you pick it up. What I'm trying to say is, you already know if you like this or not. |
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Kris Kristofferson -
The Essential Kris Kristofferson DOUBLE CD
Legacy/Columbia/Sony BMG |
Solemn, depressing, and beautiful, Kris Kristofferson's songs will remain timeless until we are all long gone. Lyrically, he is unbeatable: his articulation of hopelessness is as perfect as I've ever heard.
With songwriting that fits the music, and even surpasses the words at points in terms of raw emotions, Kristofferson's best of album is a model for a perfect collection. "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down", "Me and Bobby McGee", and "Help Me Make It Through the Night" are my top three favorites from his collection, and are all on here. Two discs of beautiful folk. Get it while you can.
***POLITICAL ALBUM OF THE WEEK***
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The Prairie Cartel -
EP1/EP2
Self-Released |
I don't know why electro-trash keeps surfacing up as such hits, but somehow it never ends. The Prairie Cartel is better than most, so if you like this genre, I'd say dive headfirst into EP1/EP2.
For me, I could stick with Depeche Mode for the rest of my life and be happy. The Cartel definitely hold elements of the superior masterminds, but incorporate more of the contemporary sound that's surfacing which thrives on points that are as interesting as watching a snail run. Credit for playing "organic" electric instruments in a game that's forgotten them, EP1/EP2 is for those who wish the Rapture would keep releasing mediocre music. |
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Guitar Red -
Lightnin' In A Bottle
Backspace |
Jesus. This is all I've ever wanted. This is blues as perfectly articulated as history has ever given us. It's perfection, through and through.
Guitar Red, real name Billy Christian Walls, is 44, dealing with the hells that are life (alcoholism, drug addiction, heartache, and homelessness), and plays some of the most honest music I have ever heard in my life. Blues is not a genre that really diverges from its preset path, but somehow Lightnin' In A Bottle surpasses everything anyone could hope for. If you like blues, you actually just need to have this. Really. |
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Calhoun -
Falter Waver Cultivate
Many Happy Regrets/Artist Garage/Fontana |
Calhoun's Falter Waver Cultivate is one of the better pieces of alternative rock to surface. Like a more restrained Frog Eyes, the band has elements which bore me, but overall create strong texture and emotional buildup in music that is usually so devoid of both.
Interesting guitar playing, vocal melodies that don't make me want to stab myself, and more than a hint of bitter-sweet deprecation ("Apocalypse: A Love Story"), the album is superb for anyone wanting something new. |
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Gary Louris -
Vagabonds
Rykodisc |
Singer-songwriter styled country tracks from Louris are interesting at best. Obviously heartfelt, by the numbers music for any person who loves shaky vocals and dreary acoustic guitar playing. This is one of those releases which is good, but blends in with all the rest. |
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Gary Moore -
Bad For You Baby
Eagle |
Thin Lizzy lead guitar player Gary Moore's new life as a blues rocker consists of doing identical solo's but now overlaying a moving blues bass line. The music is surprisingly similar to his previous work, only separated by the repetition of short progressions and vocal melodies that are, well, signature only to blues.
Every song has out-of-control guitar work which hits like a hurricane, playing faster than most contemporary blues writers of today. I guess this would be great for either fans of hair-rock and blues-rock. Gary Moore tightropes a very thin line between the two.
"SO NICE, GOTTA DO IT UP TWICE"
(created by the original NYC D.J. Jocko, 1955)
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Kelly Richey -
Carry The Light
Sweet Lucy/Select-O-Hits |
Blues that does not rely on vocal melodies! Not always a good thing, but in this instance, this is perfect! Songs constructed with originality and talent, and a pair of female vocal chords that bursts a whole new sense of energy into the pure song craftsmanship, Carry The Light constitutes a model for what the blues should hold.
Lots of interesting lead lines, not just noodling, simplistic but straightforward lyrics, and production suited perfectly for this style, this is for electric-blues fans everywhere. |
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Josh Boyd and the V.I.P. Band -
Self-Titled
Self-Released |
When I say "rock and roll", I mean Jimi Hendrix rock and roll. Josh Boyd and the V.I.P. Band are, like, really late. Blues inspired rock and roll, heavy on the masturbatory guitar playing, and a ball of raw emotion, this first release from the Ohio trio runs like any album of this sort would: songs from beginning to end with that heir of pompous rock vibe that died quickly after Hendrix did. And with a portrait of Jay of "Jay and Silent Bob" fame on the cover, this could be for you. |
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Sugarland -
Love on the Inside
Lost Highway/Mercury Nashville/MCA Nashville/UMG |
Unfortunately annoying country rock. It has the Nashville sound, mixed with bad pop music and some of the worst country vocals I have heard in a long time. Love on the Inside is just poor taste. Soulless, pointless, and focused on the worst direction of country, I can't really think of much good to say about this. |
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Artist: Bruce Springsteen
Song: Johnny 99
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Well they closed down the auto plant in mahwah late that month
Ralph went out lookin for a job but he couldnt find none
He came home too drunk from mixin tanqueray and wine
He got a gun shot a night clerk now they callm johnny 99
Down in the part of town where when you hit a red light you dont stop
Johnnys wavin his gun around and threatenin to blow his top
When an off-duty cop snuck up on him from behind
Out in front of the club tip top they slapped the cuffs on johnny 99
Well the city supplied a public defender but the judge was mean john brown
He came into the courtroom and stared young johnny down
Well the evidence is clear gonna let the sentence son fit the crime
Prison for 98 and a year and well call it even johnny 99
A fist fight broke out in the courtroom they had to drag johnnys girl away
His mama stood up and shouted judge dont take my boy this way
Well son you got a statement youd like to make
Before the bailiff comes to forever take you away
Now judge I had debts no honest man could pay
The bank was holdin my mortgage and they were gonna take my house away
Now I aint sayin that makes me an innocent man
But it was more `n all this that put that gun in my hand
Well your honor I do believe Id be better off dead
So if you can take a mans life for the thoughts thats in his head
Then sit back in that chair and think it over judge one more time
And let `em shave off my hair and put me on that killin line
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Political Article:
The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders are Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution
By: Matt Taibbi
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It's over - we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline - a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history - some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).
So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial - we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck - bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."
Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.
Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town - and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.
People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'Žtat. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The crisis was the coup de gr‰ce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve - "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron - a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.
I. PATIENT ZERO
The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders - people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground - and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.
That guy - the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown - was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."
The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box.
The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or "tranche." They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating - meaning it has close to zero credit risk.
Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.
The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they were selling crap," says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years," says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts."
Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages - read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down - to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets - some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in.
Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of AIGFP in 2001. He was the favorite of Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the head of AIG, who admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither he nor his successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano did. According to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, Cassano basically told senior management, "You know insurance, I know investments, so you do what you do, and I'll do what I do - leave me alone." Given a free hand within the company, Cassano set out from his offices in London to sell a lucrative form of "insurance" to all those investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of choice was another new financial instrument known as a credit-default swap, or CDS.
The CDS was popularized by J.P. Morgan, in particular by a group of young, creative bankers who would later become known as the "Morgan Mafia," as many of them would go on to assume influential positions in the finance world. In 1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a resort in Boca Raton, Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help boost the bank's returns. One of their goals was to find a way to lend more money, while working around regulations that required them to keep a set amount of cash in reserve to back those loans. What they came up with was an early version of the credit-default swap.
In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job.
When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators - from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency - accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street.
What Cassano did was to transform the credit swaps that Morgan popularized into the world's largest bet on the housing boom. In theory, at least, there's nothing wrong with buying a CDS to insure your investments. Investors paid a premium to AIGFP, and in return the company promised to pick up the tab if the mortgage-backed CDOs went bust. But as Cassano went on a selling spree, the deals he made differed from traditional insurance in several significant ways. First, the party selling CDS protection didn't have to post any money upfront. When a $100 corporate bond is sold, for example, someone has to show 100 actual dollars. But when you sell a $100 CDS guarantee, you don't have to show a dime. So Cassano could sell investment banks billions in guarantees without having any single asset to back it up.
Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope - it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide.
In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of CDS protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime mortgage market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash on hand to cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need any reserves. So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained a highly unlikely proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it thought would never come.
Initially, at least, the revenues were enormous: AIGFP's returns went from $737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven years, the subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion; Cassano himself pocketed at least $280 million in compensation. Everyone made their money - and then it all went to shit.
READ MORE OF THIS ARTICLE AT WWW.COMMONDREAMS.ORG
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