What's the Bussard

Oh my goodness, what a couple of weeks. I've been abducted by a Chinatown bus driver, made famous by Style Weekly and spent a lot of time commuting between Richmond and D.C., where I'll be living real soon. So I have to apologize to the VCU student who wondered what I don't like about Melissa Ruggieri's writing (did I not make that clear?) and anyone who's tried to set something up with me over the past month. Things will be a lot more settled soon. In the meantime, here's a feature I paid some children in Kentucky 50 cents an hour to write.

Belle and Sebastian, The Life Pursuit

The Washington Post, February 8, 2006, Page C05

A Belle and Sebastian album usually requires some context. It is wonderful to report, then, that "The Life Pursuit" is a terrific pop album in its own right, and that it requires no preface, no back story.

Here's some anyway. The Scottish septet's first two records, "Tigermilk" and "If You're Feeling Sinister," both released in 1996, featured songs as audacious as they are delicate, full of sexual confusion, black humor and shoestring orchestrations. Belle and Sebastian's fans, many of whom harbor an attraction to those first records that's almost certainly illegal in Virginia, have pined for a threepeat ever since, through a dark period when singer-songwriter Stuart Murdoch's enthusiasm for yielding the microphone to band mates Stevie Jackson and Isobel Campbell led to increasingly rarer pop thrills.

But a couple of years ago, Campbell left for a solo career. Belle and Sebastian quit its record label, hired legendary producer Trevor Horn (Yes, Seal, Frankie Goes to Hollywood) and dropped all pretense that its fans were interested in the songwriting of any member except Murdoch.

The resulting "Dear Catastrophe Waitress," from 2004, marked a sharp new tack in Belle and Sebastian's already erratic course through pop music. The band had hardened from a ramshackle live act to a road-honed, even strapping rock machine. The combination of the group's newfound chops and Murdoch's delicate voice and some top-form songwriting was terrific, if a little jarring considering that he used to be able to drown out the drummer with a whisper.

"The Life Pursuit," the title of Belle and Sebastian's new record, seems to indicate that the most recent iteration of the band was no fluke. Yes, Murdoch still sings about fey pastimes such as making brass rubbings, but now his tremulous voice is backed by some rather meaty fuzz bass.

Belle and Sebastian recorded this album in Los Angeles, and there is a sunny mood to "The Life Pursuit" that contrasts nicely with the gray Glasgow days that Murdoch's blood has absorbed. "Funny Little Frog," which is a Top 20 single in Britain at the moment, is a peppy number about being in love, set to a Motownish beat, with hand claps and sweet backing vocals and a completely creepy chorus that slowly clues you in that Murdoch's narrator is a stalker: "You are my girl and you don't even know it," he says.

There's funk, growling T.Rex rip-offs and even a clavinet-driven number, "Song For Sunshine," that pays tribute to the Southern Cal rock era of American music. Belle and Sebastian is making some of the most adventurous music of its career, even though, as Murdoch recently mused in his online diary, "the music that I'll be known best for is probably past."

Ironic death narrowly averted

I keep my LPs in the guest room. It was one of those marriage-preservation compromises; I don't mind the arrangement for the most part. Today I couldn't remember whether I had a record I needed for a piece I'm writing, so I went in, couldn't find it, and then spent a few minutes thumbing through the shelves. "This would be a good time to take out some records I don't want anymore," I thought.

I went through two shelves of about 400 records each and winnowed out three discs. Then I picked up the four I'd pulled out to play and started out of the room.

Looking at the "F"s, I paused.

"I wonder if I've got too many Fall LPs," I thought.

I don't totally remember what happened next, other than that a second later there was a tremendous crash as the shelving unit spontaneously broke in two, smashing against (and breaking) the guest-room door, flinging LPs and Eggs master tapes all over the floor.

That moment of reflection means there was only one casualty today: The Sub Pop 200 box set (just the box, so my Cat Butt collection is still first-rate).

A few hours later, I fear I may have missed out on the perfect way to die.

P.O.D., Testify

The Washington Post, Wednesday, February 1, 2006, page C05

The music business has a gift for euphemism. "Collapsing from exhaustion," for instance, usually translates as "will soon be reciting his/her serenity prayer at a mind-blowingly expensive rehab clinic." Announcing that a band member has left because of "artistic differences" generally stands for "it was either can this jerk or go to jail for murder." And an album billed as a "return to form" always means "Help! Our last record tanked, and we really like our tour bus!"

"Testify," P.O.D.'s ninth album, is . . . a return to form. How long ago it must seem to the San Diego rap-rockers when their Top 40 single "Alive" assuaged some of the nation's hurt from 9/11 with a chorus so over the top in its optimism that it made survivor's guilt feel almost holy: "I feel so alive/For the very first time/I can't deny you."

But that song was about getting saved by God, not the New York Fire Department. And the album that bore it, "Satellite," arrived not just on Sept. 11, 2001, but also at the peak of commercial popularity for the fusion of hip-hop and hard rock called "nu metal." "Satellite" sold 3 million copies, and for a long time afterward P.O.D. was the best-selling rock band on Atlantic Records not named Led Zeppelin.

Then, after losing its original guitarist, Marcos Curiel, because of -- drum roll, please -- "artistic differences," P.O.D. followed with 2003's "Payable on Death" (the band's name when it toiled on the Christian metal circuit), which flopped.

For "Testify," P.O.D. brought in superproducer Glen Ballard (Alanis Morissette, Dave Matthews, Aerosmith) and is hedging its bets by working the album aggressively in the Christian-rock market -- which Christian bands that have achieved success in the mainstream usually treat like a poor relation.

So it's perhaps a little odd that the first voice you hear on the album opener, "Roots in Stereo," belongs to the reggae singer Matisyahu, who happens to be a Hasidic Jew. But P.O.D. has always been open to disparate influences spiritually as well as musically -- singer Sonny Sandoval is just as likely to praise Jah as Jesus, and the band has always stood out from its rap-metal peers by incorporating reggae, funk and even jazz flourishes.

Ballard encourages such eclecticism on "Testify," adding synthesizers and sleigh bells to make the band's choruses soar ever higher. "Sounds Like War" even incorporates an R&B-style chorus. But Ballard doesn't seem to have been able to push the band to likewise expand its lyrical scope. Sandoval can be terrific when it comes to noting the spiritual deficiencies of his peers, as on "Say Hello," but when it comes to his own, he far too often settles for muzzy cliches ("My soul still flies with broken wings").

Worse, "Goodbye for Now" features a rapped verse that's nearly identical to the one on P.O.D.'s 2002 hit "Youth of the Nation," with a chorus that makes it all too easy for the band's detractors: "When will we sing a new song?" Sandoval wonders.

Until he answers that question convincingly, P.O.D. may have to prepare for its audience, in music-biz terms, to grow ever "more selective."