CD Reviews

Spring Awakening, Refrigerator, The Shins

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Published: Jan 30, 2007

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In the new Broadway musical Spring Awakening, set in 1890s Germany, the teenage performers periodically whip out microphones to sing 21st-century rock anthems and power ballads. This conceit might have been a pretentious failure, but composer Duncan Sheik and librettist/lyricist Steven Sater have largely triumphed — in their hands, electric guitars disrupting a 19th-century German play mirror how adolescence is jolted by the first, unexpected stirrings of love and lust.

Based on the long-suppressed 1891 play by Frank Wedekind, Spring Awakening details the tragedy befalling teens who know either too much or too little about sex. The idealistic, broad-minded Melchior (Jonathan Groff) counsels his excitable friend Moritz (John Gallagher Jr.) on the facts of life while falling for the ignorant Wendla (Lea Michele); learning of a girlfriend's sexual abuse (the song "The Dark I Know Well"), she meekly asks Melchior to whip her. "O, I'm gonna be wounded," the two sing. "O, I'm gonna be your wound/ O, I'm gonna bruise you/ O, you're gonna be my bruise." There are scenes of individual and group masturbation, homosexual seduction, a back-alley abortion and suicide. We're a long way, in other words, from Disney's High School Musical.

Sheik and Sater wisely chose to make the score a succession of soliloquies and internal monologues, and the album's highlights include the boys' ensemble "The Bitch of Living" ("With nothing going on/ Just the bitch of living/ Asking: What went wrong?"), the girls' "Mama Who Bore Me" ("Mama, the weeping/ Mama, the angels/ No sleep in heaven, or Bethlehem") and the show-stopping anthem "Totally Fucked" — while it may be cheap to use the F-word to get applause, it's still an exhilarating, hard-driving rock song. The show's only jarring note is Sheik and Sater's attempt to impose an optimistic ending to the brutal story (i.e. the ghosts of the dead characters conveniently appear), but the closing song, "The Song of Purple Summer," is utterly first-rate. Finally, here's a Broadway rock score that wouldn't be out of place in most alt-rocker's concert sets.

Neither a campy, winking send-up of traditional Broadway (The Producers, The Drowsy Chaperone) nor a harmless jukebox musical (Movin' Out, Jersey Boys), Spring Awakening moves several steps beyond what Rent accomplished in the 1990s in its use of rock music to tell an age-old story. Here's hoping Sheik and Sater follow this up with half a dozen more.

—Andrew Milner

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If you've heard Refrigerator before, you'll be a little confused by time you get to the fourth song. "Where's the feedback? The noise?" And then you'll figure out that you haven't heard a note from anything that sports a plug and a cord. OK, that makes sense: no alternating current, no feedback. You keep listening, all the way to the end, and nothing ever plugs into a wall. Even without the guitar fuzz and electrically induced dissonance, though, you have no trouble recognizing Bottles of Make Up as a Refrigerator album. You'd know Allen Callaci's voice anywhere, straining against the melody and struggling to stay in time with the guitars, oozing sadness and loss so effortlessly it feels like you're listening in on a stranger telling his sob story to three fingers of Wild Turkey. Your head hangs through "Blank Cassettes," grieving by proxy. In "Sara Carter," you wince at the thought of "the husband who put the black in your eye." And you're puzzled by the ukulele in the standout track "I'm Nothing Without You" at first, but as the song details the way little, ordinary things can be so frustrating, so annoying when you're in pain, you get it.

—Matt Hotz

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And so the wait is over, at least in an official sense, and what have James Mercer and his sad jesters in The Shins given us for our patience? A chance to exercise that patience again. Wincing the Night Away, the so-long-awaited-it-hurt follow-up to the band's sweet-tart gem Chutes Too Narrow, is a slow burn to be sure, a glowing ember not so hot that you oughtn't touch it, but enough that you'll need to pass it between your palms before you're comfortable with it. Where Mercer and co.'s previous work was populated with hooks aplenty, however barbed and askew, Wincing is a slow, creepy record about rebirth, literally and figuratively. About identity and second skins and the shedding of both. It kicks off with the eerie marimba of "Sleeping Lessons," wherein Mercer implores us to imagine "a thousand different versions of yourself" and to essentially take shit from nobody. Wincing is a statement, musically — a muddier, less airy take on Oh, Inverted World; a foggier version of the spry guitarisms of Chutes. Lyrically, Mercer continues to dissect the murky mire of love and humanness. On "Turn on Me," the album's catchiest, darkest track, Mercer sings of a broken relationship — "But the stars are leaking out/ Like spittle from a cloud" — and pairs it with the more on-the-nose sentiment: "You always had to hold the reins/ But where I'm headed, you just don't know the way." The overall effect is almost Murakami otherworldly. In "Spilt Needles" Mercer, like some macabre Wile E. Coyote, falls into a hole he's painted. In the closing "A Comet Appears" he's "barely a vapor" and faces are carved off. One could surmise that we've waited three years for this album because Mercer was struggling. Which could be true. It would seem more accurate, though, to assume he's been plumbing depths. And Wincing is exhausted, gasping proof he's returned to the surface, if just barely.

—Brian Howard

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