Ted Leo & The Pharmacists

Even Heroes Have To Die is a fucking perfect summer jam

I heard one of this dude's albums after a lot of recommendations. Unfortunately, I thought it was

http://i.imgur.com/nATiR.jpg

which album? they're not all created equal imo

KInda helps if you dig chunky power pop chord progressions and not a great deal of variety. He's not innovative or hugely unique, but still very, very far from being a dud. The brutalist bricks is the only one I've heard and it's pretty solid.

Hearts of Oak, I think. xp

a lot of people liked 'hearts' but it took me forever to warm up to. i think 'tyranny' is the best and 'shake the sheets' excellent if a little too rigid. i don't know about 'bricks', he's starting to seem burnt-out. (on the one before that, too.)

yeah Hearts is kind of his breakthrough/most popular but imo it's one of his weakest.

huh

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/aimee-mann-and-ted-leo-join-forces-as-both-20130906

hm

I was just wondering what this dude's been up to. kinda worried his 'moment' (Bush II) might have passed; Bricks was solid, but Living remains such a sweeping, exhaustive catharsis that I wouldn't have blamed dude for calling it quits afterwards

(I also challops for Living as the best record -- it's got maybe 5 or 6 minutes of filler? in an hour+ of whip-smart socially conscious rock -- way more listenable than any Clash record in 2k14)

like, if you don't think that "CIA" & "The Toro and the Toreador" & "La Costa Brava" & "Colleen" are all, in their own way, career highlights, I don't even know what to say, except that you obviously never *needed* this music in the same desperate, trying-to-surface-for-an-instant-between-waves way that I did

i did cane 'costa brava' but i think the generally frayed and exhausted sound of the record made jess's review hit a little too close to the mark at the time for me

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10018-living-with-the-living/

course when i look back at mah private files and find that i couldn't scrape together 10 albums worth of records to make a year-end list for in 2007 or 2008, or just didn't have the enthusiasm, maybe it's just that i couldn't find enough to give me what i needed

whip-smart socially conscious rock

'bomb repeat' rubbed me the wrong way, i guess by then i lacked the patience i used to have for the disagreements and flaws one has with albums

I never got the "Bomb. Repeat. Bomb" hate... it's a little smug but I think that smugness is redeemed by openness elsewhere on the album, like the first verse of "Annunciation Day"

anyway my point is that, in spite of the extended outros & the momentum-killing cod-reggae & the contradictions?-what-contradictions, I don't think of it as an album that's "too long" because when I was listening to it obsessively (this actually didn't happen until 2011-12 btw), I cherished every moment I spent with it

I'm with Bernard, Living is a really great album. The conventional wisdom on his catalog, that that album was a letdown and the wildly inconsistent and poorly recorded Hearts Of Oak is his best, always bugged me.

They have a track "Milwaukee" that's on soundcloud

it seems to me like he's really gotten a bum deal in the cosmic scheme of things, if he had been doing this work more squarely in a period just before the pitchforkification/nprization/whatever of indie rock, when he would have been counted more as a punk and when the alt-punk-rock-counterculture tradition of critics had more clout, maybe the music-listener's-syllabus wisdom about him could have stabilized long enough to enter consensus (before there stopped being 'consensus').

A lengthy and excellent Stereogum feature profile on Ted Leo, answers all of the (harrowing) questions about what Ted Leo has been up to and what happened between the release of The Brutalist Bricks (March 2010!) and now:

http://www.stereogum.com/featured/ted-leo-is-like-you/

New album due shortly.

What a great piece, very much of a (well) piece with that recent Nick Cave profile. I had no idea about so much of this. I was so happy to chip in to the Kickstarter, because my limited dealings with Leo (a couple of interviews, a couple of friends in common) have been very positive. He seems like a super dude, and to know he's been carrying all this baggage around ...

That's a great feature. It sucks what a tough time he and his wife have had over the last few years. I love this guy and I'm so glad he's back.

Love Ted -- I've seen him play 4 or 5 times. I did get burned out on him after Shake the Sheets and never bothered with The Brutalist Bricks (which, after reading that piece, makes me regret it). Intrigued to check out the new album.

New one is really good so far! If there's any downside it's that the mix is weirdly muddy and I also really wish he had a bunch of extra money to pay some big name producer, like Justin Meldal-Johnsen, to polish up these great tunes and get him on the radio and/or radio equivalent.

The video for the first single from the new album is filling me with a ridiculous amount of joy right now.

https://youtu.be/ieNMITLhtVE

saw them last night (and as a bonus ran into Ted while he was buying lunch at the logan's circle WF earlier in the day, impromptu). I really like the saxophone addition! It's very Bruce. I was really glad to see his stage banter is as dry and hilarious as ever.

I find the album a bit of a slog unfortunately

Saw them when they stopped in Boston last week -- they played for a solid 2 and half hours. The highlight was definitely when Ted did a mini-set of solo stuff (but that might just have been because the sound person was so bad that all I could hear during the full band numbers was the bass and the floor tom). And I have to agree that his stage banter still slays.

The new album has really been growing on me. Not quite Hearts of Oak level greatness, but definitely the equal of Shake the Sheets or Brutalist Bricks.

Yeah, I've been enjoying the new album a lot too. William Weld In The 21st Century is just devastating.

Thinking of seeing him next month for the first time.