I’ve been listening to Tommy Keene and in particular last year’s “Tommy Keene You Hear Me, Retrospective 1983-2009.” I have always leaned toward [1989 album] “Based on Happy Times” over [1986 album] “Songs From the Film.” The cello (!) riff alone on the title track, as I told said Mr Keene, ought to be sampled a la the Verve and made into a new song; and “Highwire Days,” with its trebly arpeggiated chords, is a nostalgia factory. But, nonetheless and all the same, you are saying
Look, Manlove, I’ve been swindled by this power pop thing before. Bad “happy” bands in their bright “happy” clothes and their Rickenbackers and I’m sick of it.
So just this then. Go on Spotify or whatever “cloud” thing you young people do these days and listen to one thing: Mr Keene’s “Astronomy.”
“Out in the winter night / We lie in the fields tonight . . .” People often ask me (not really; it’s a rhetorical device) what my being a “formalist” dedicated to “songwriting” really comes down to. Well, this is it. The diamond structure of this song, its roaring riff, its plangent bridge, its inner balance. Even the reverb on the vocals. It has to be one of the best pop-rock songs ever committed to vinyl. And it’s done in 1 minute, 27 seconds. My fucking God.
Follow that, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix.
MANLOVE
By the by, JK, “Astronomy” also leads off SHOWTUNES, the live T. Keene album I suddenly discovered a few years ago (it’d been out for quite a spell).
And what am I to make of the fact that “Astronomy” appears on the “rockist” debut, rather than the (only slightly) artier follow-up?
With a heater at my temple, I will always select what I consider Tommy’s true debut [by 3 years; tough waitin’ fer that MAJOR LABEL DEAL, as we and Silkworm both found!), the PLACES THAT ARE GONE ep.
That one I consider PERFECT!
By the way, I know he had a ca. 1982, D.C.-only, vinyl-only, debut LP, which is actually pretty good, if a little more U2-sounding (!) than it ideally shoulda been, but since Tommy has formally disavowed that ’un as juvenilia, I won’t be pedantic about it:
I do prefer SONGS FROM THE FILM to all subsequent TK albums, it’s true, but they’re ALL quite good, and that is a remarkable achievement in any vein o’ music. SFTF’s just the closest he ever came to his own platonic ideal (his own RUBBER SOUL and/or REVOLVER, I’d guess), probably because he got to work with Geoff Emerick, of Beatles and Floyd fame, who’d also produced Elvis C’s flat baroque IMPERIAL BEDROOM!
– Tom Kipp
Ah, progress! Now if we can just get Tom to pick up Game Theory and the Loud Family…
