mr. christgau (yeah yeah, I know) on emmylou harris' breakthrough "pieces of sky"-- dispensing his typical bullshit but also I think perfectly encapsulating why I kind of fucking hate emmylou harris (sorry!):
Pieces of the Sky [Reprise, 1974]
Abetted by Brian Ahern, who would have been wise to add some Anne Murray schlock, Harris shows off a pristine earnestness that has nothing to do with what is most likable about country music and everything to do with what is most suspect in "folk." Presumably, Gram Parsons was tough enough to discourage this tendency or play against it, but as a solo mannerism it doesn't even ensure clear enunciation: I swear the chorus of the best song here sounds like it begins: "I will rub my asshole/In the bosom of Abraham." C+
more here
(spotted via wonderful stwof fyi)
I think my favorite emmylou stuff is still her two albums as The Trio w/dolly and linda ronstadt (maybe just because I really like the other two?)
and this one is so good jeez
finally, here's linda as a buxom lass singing a classic waylon song on the johnny cash show. I was just watching this on the dvd best of which includes a v. nice anecdote about this performance, courtesy johnny's former hairstylist who relates
“at rehearsal june noticed that linda didn’t have any panties on so she came running back to the dressing room, ‘somebody get down the street and buy her some bloomers, she’s out there showing herself!’ when linda was told she would have to wear underwear she was very upset. she said, ‘I sing better bare-butted' and june cc of course says "not in front of my Johnny!”
haha ok
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Friday, January 9, 2009
Terry Allen, on "Radio Memories and Other Things"
Dig the famous West Texas singer-songwriter, sculptor and uh I guess radio-playwright discussing the Magic of Radio:
"I know that there was another radio station later on when I was in high school, out of Oklahoma City. It was KOMA and they had a radio contest that kind of beamed out as far as their station beamed, and I can't remember the nature of the contest but if you won you got two weeks completely paid round trip tickets, all expenses paid, anywhere you wanted to go in the world. So this was a huge contest. And I remember that when they announced the winner -- the guy that won was somewhere in Oklahoma I think -- he wanted to go to Salt Lake City!
I also remember -- and this is god's truth! -- after Wolfman Jack there was a preacher that came on, I can't remember his name, but he sold ah...in this kind of staggered version... starting with Bible place markers through all kinds of little gadgets and doodads and holy articles, starting out with like a quarter right up to a fifty dollar gold embossed red letter edition Bible. But he actually advertised selling autographed pictures of Jesus Christ that were direct from the Holy Land, and he told the story that one of his congregation was in the Holy Land and had in this holy spot come across this stack of 8 x 10 glossies with Jesus's signature on them, and had brought them back and had asked them to be (sold). There was a note evidently with the photographs asking the photographs to be sold over the air to raise money for the spreading of the Lord's word."
more here
here's him singin his maybe most famous song (robert earl keen does it, ya know):
"I know that there was another radio station later on when I was in high school, out of Oklahoma City. It was KOMA and they had a radio contest that kind of beamed out as far as their station beamed, and I can't remember the nature of the contest but if you won you got two weeks completely paid round trip tickets, all expenses paid, anywhere you wanted to go in the world. So this was a huge contest. And I remember that when they announced the winner -- the guy that won was somewhere in Oklahoma I think -- he wanted to go to Salt Lake City!
I also remember -- and this is god's truth! -- after Wolfman Jack there was a preacher that came on, I can't remember his name, but he sold ah...in this kind of staggered version... starting with Bible place markers through all kinds of little gadgets and doodads and holy articles, starting out with like a quarter right up to a fifty dollar gold embossed red letter edition Bible. But he actually advertised selling autographed pictures of Jesus Christ that were direct from the Holy Land, and he told the story that one of his congregation was in the Holy Land and had in this holy spot come across this stack of 8 x 10 glossies with Jesus's signature on them, and had brought them back and had asked them to be (sold). There was a note evidently with the photographs asking the photographs to be sold over the air to raise money for the spreading of the Lord's word."
more here
here's him singin his maybe most famous song (robert earl keen does it, ya know):
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
R.I.P. Ron Asheton, 1948-2009
"Famed rock-and-roll guitarist and longtime Ann Arbor resident Ronald "Ron" Asheton was found dead in his home on the city's west side this morning, police said. Asheton, 60, was an original member of The Stooges, a garage-rock band headlined by Iggy Pop and formed in Ann Arbor in 1967."Obituary
Sunday, January 4, 2009
oh you know reviews and stuff
LUCINDA WILLIAMS - LITTLE HONEY
this album is medium appaling. I have grown to like it better than I did when we first received it but that does not say so much, since once i was medium-appalled (now bored?).
ms. williams has mostly ditched the trappings of country/blues pastiche she once clung to on her critically-acclaimed 90's recs (not necessarily a bad thing, folks!). moreso the loss of her famed perfectionist impulses, I think.
she fails to imbue the cliches she employs with some poetic rearrangement, nudge wink irony or at least some happy earnest resigned embrace. what was once endearing or clever now looks lazy, I guess. there's some alright stuff amidst plodding jammers--
single "real love:" L does for cocksout rockers what she did for strummy weepers (the real love she speaks of is the rocker lifestyle - "standin up behind an electric guitar) as does "little rock star" though I could really have done without that flanger guitar chorus (really!).
and what the hell happened to her voice? flat, nasal spit delivery kills many of these attempts at love songs, torch songs, and lounge soul slow-dancers. her admittedly-affected sanging used to serve some utilitarian function, I think (emotive, ya know), but now it's just something to get past, ignore.
"circles and x's" is good, "tears of joy" is not ("I'll be your woman...you be my king").
It makes me happy that she chooses to use the trad blues honey innuendo for the album title and song "honey bee" and I appreciate the extremes to which she stretches the thin metaphor ("I'm so glad you stung me/now I got your honey/all over my tummy") but it's a shame she chose to articulate it with an unlistenable screamy shouty pounder.
she stills sounds the most at home on the two or three country-rockers included--
esp. "well well well" in which ms. williams actually sounds like she's having fun. also I really like this song (recommended!), a callnresponse oldtimey gem featuring charlie louvin and jim lauderdale.
"jailhouse tears" should work similarly, except that elvis costello as guest star duet pardner kind of sucks (sorry, cannot stand the man's garbled brit-croon).
"heaven blues" minimal callnresponse gospel stomper is an embarassing piece of one-dimensional genre affectation (sad to admit, coming as it is from a woman who once recorded albums of this kind of stuff).
GREG COPELAND - DIANA AND JAMES
"I'm not the only one who's been masquerading/you can walk down fuck-up road, clear to Eden"
here's another album we've had for quite awhile that I'm just getting around to reviewing. it's a tough one to pin down-- murky, meandering story-songs with whispered vocals don't always grab at ya--but there's definitely something I found immediately compelling about it all--
ok, so greg is jackson browne's high school best friend. browne produced his debut way back some 30 years ago or so but nobody noticed and g fell into obscurity, gave up on music until I guess something changed. this album is released on some bitty label start-up run by browne but I think otherwise he has no involvement this time around, probably for the best.
the album is probably some sort of story-suite or something (over my head, of course)--at least there's some thematic and narrative threads here (I'm pretty sure "I am the one"s narrator is the killer in "muddy water"s murder ballad murder, or at least the internet tells me so).
many of the tunes are grounded in a half-hearted romantic optimism - lookin' for love despite the high stakes, pervading sense of despair, what have you.
"who you gonna love," is lonely and desperate lyrically -- "there's nobody here in this little house gonna keep you warm/your guardian angel's just sitting around, watching you toss and turn"-- but the regal piano/organ/guitar hook girds the tune with an anthemic poppiness.
the female duet vocals that accompany the cheerier love songs do wonders for their tunefulness and catchiness, given copeland's old man gruff, half-spoken nod toward smokythroated soul.
probably the notsosecret hero of this record is producer greg leisz, famed A-list session stringman, who plays on all these tracks, plays lap steel, tenor guitar, mandola, mandocello, weissenborn, other things I haven't of... leisz grounds the album is a rustic rootsiness similar to the clean folkpop sound of the npr sub-bluegrass set, but somehow weirder and warmer and hookier and doomier--slooow reverby pianos, organ, bass, strumming, plucking and bowing (minimal percussion).
the two gregs play with or comment on country song conventions without going the ballsy alt route or the over-reverent one (and without making the album sound anything like a country album).
in "typical," copeland sing-speaks:
typical three-day day
and a three-chord song
if it wasn’t for this
I’d be screaming in tongues
and the love light shines
sparkling on razor wire
typical budweiser words
typical steel guitar
coupled with 2 minutes of intro/outro pedal steel and I know it sounds gimmicky and over-clever, but the playing totally sells it (I would listen to leisz kill on steel without the conceit of any song structure, of course).
"a woman & a man" starts off as some rangy groovin folk-rocker with tremelo guitar chords and copeland's on some deep thoughts spoken shit - "there it is again/LA's buzzin like a busted amp/and I think of you.." but then the chorus kicks in, the drummer makes a quick-switch to a C&W two-step, enter fiddles and duet vox (and of course, now we know, this is a love song) and he sings: "pick up your gibson and play/go fall in love and don't stop."
anyway, good album. I like it.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND TRAILS
this album is medium appaling. I have grown to like it better than I did when we first received it but that does not say so much, since once i was medium-appalled (now bored?).
ms. williams has mostly ditched the trappings of country/blues pastiche she once clung to on her critically-acclaimed 90's recs (not necessarily a bad thing, folks!). moreso the loss of her famed perfectionist impulses, I think.
she fails to imbue the cliches she employs with some poetic rearrangement, nudge wink irony or at least some happy earnest resigned embrace. what was once endearing or clever now looks lazy, I guess. there's some alright stuff amidst plodding jammers--
single "real love:" L does for cocksout rockers what she did for strummy weepers (the real love she speaks of is the rocker lifestyle - "standin up behind an electric guitar) as does "little rock star" though I could really have done without that flanger guitar chorus (really!).
and what the hell happened to her voice? flat, nasal spit delivery kills many of these attempts at love songs, torch songs, and lounge soul slow-dancers. her admittedly-affected sanging used to serve some utilitarian function, I think (emotive, ya know), but now it's just something to get past, ignore.
"circles and x's" is good, "tears of joy" is not ("I'll be your woman...you be my king").
It makes me happy that she chooses to use the trad blues honey innuendo for the album title and song "honey bee" and I appreciate the extremes to which she stretches the thin metaphor ("I'm so glad you stung me/now I got your honey/all over my tummy") but it's a shame she chose to articulate it with an unlistenable screamy shouty pounder.
she stills sounds the most at home on the two or three country-rockers included--
esp. "well well well" in which ms. williams actually sounds like she's having fun. also I really like this song (recommended!), a callnresponse oldtimey gem featuring charlie louvin and jim lauderdale.
"jailhouse tears" should work similarly, except that elvis costello as guest star duet pardner kind of sucks (sorry, cannot stand the man's garbled brit-croon).
"heaven blues" minimal callnresponse gospel stomper is an embarassing piece of one-dimensional genre affectation (sad to admit, coming as it is from a woman who once recorded albums of this kind of stuff).
GREG COPELAND - DIANA AND JAMES
"I'm not the only one who's been masquerading/you can walk down fuck-up road, clear to Eden"
here's another album we've had for quite awhile that I'm just getting around to reviewing. it's a tough one to pin down-- murky, meandering story-songs with whispered vocals don't always grab at ya--but there's definitely something I found immediately compelling about it all--
ok, so greg is jackson browne's high school best friend. browne produced his debut way back some 30 years ago or so but nobody noticed and g fell into obscurity, gave up on music until I guess something changed. this album is released on some bitty label start-up run by browne but I think otherwise he has no involvement this time around, probably for the best.
the album is probably some sort of story-suite or something (over my head, of course)--at least there's some thematic and narrative threads here (I'm pretty sure "I am the one"s narrator is the killer in "muddy water"s murder ballad murder, or at least the internet tells me so).
many of the tunes are grounded in a half-hearted romantic optimism - lookin' for love despite the high stakes, pervading sense of despair, what have you.
"who you gonna love," is lonely and desperate lyrically -- "there's nobody here in this little house gonna keep you warm/your guardian angel's just sitting around, watching you toss and turn"-- but the regal piano/organ/guitar hook girds the tune with an anthemic poppiness.
the female duet vocals that accompany the cheerier love songs do wonders for their tunefulness and catchiness, given copeland's old man gruff, half-spoken nod toward smokythroated soul.
probably the notsosecret hero of this record is producer greg leisz, famed A-list session stringman, who plays on all these tracks, plays lap steel, tenor guitar, mandola, mandocello, weissenborn, other things I haven't of... leisz grounds the album is a rustic rootsiness similar to the clean folkpop sound of the npr sub-bluegrass set, but somehow weirder and warmer and hookier and doomier--slooow reverby pianos, organ, bass, strumming, plucking and bowing (minimal percussion).
the two gregs play with or comment on country song conventions without going the ballsy alt route or the over-reverent one (and without making the album sound anything like a country album).
in "typical," copeland sing-speaks:
typical three-day day
and a three-chord song
if it wasn’t for this
I’d be screaming in tongues
and the love light shines
sparkling on razor wire
typical budweiser words
typical steel guitar
coupled with 2 minutes of intro/outro pedal steel and I know it sounds gimmicky and over-clever, but the playing totally sells it (I would listen to leisz kill on steel without the conceit of any song structure, of course).
"a woman & a man" starts off as some rangy groovin folk-rocker with tremelo guitar chords and copeland's on some deep thoughts spoken shit - "there it is again/LA's buzzin like a busted amp/and I think of you.." but then the chorus kicks in, the drummer makes a quick-switch to a C&W two-step, enter fiddles and duet vox (and of course, now we know, this is a love song) and he sings: "pick up your gibson and play/go fall in love and don't stop."
anyway, good album. I like it.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND TRAILS
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Damn, another list...
List, List, List...here we go, 2008. Lotsa of jams (in no order):Thee Oh Sees - The Master's Bedroom Is Worth Spending a Night In, Thee Hounds of Foggy Notion (CD/DVD), Peanut Butter Oven EP
I'll be the first to admit, I'm a John Dwyer (Coachwhips, Pink and Brown, Yikes) fanboy. Luckily his newest band, Thee Oh Sees, remain prolific. Three great releases in one year.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre - My Bloody Underground
Just like the title suggests, the Brian Jonestown Massacre unapologetically combined their My Bloody Valentine and Velvet Underground influences and we get another great psychedelic LP. Worth the four year wait?
The Fall - Imperial Wax Solvent
Since The Fall basically release and album every year, they will always be on my list. They are the most consistent band of all time. This, their twenty-something-th release, still delivers.
The Black Angels - Directions To See a Ghost, Black Angel Exit EP
More awesome Texas neo-psychedelia. Nothing has changed with this band and that's a good thing.
Times New Viking - Rip It Off
I think everyone enjoyed this abrasive lo-fi as shit pop music.
Sic Alps - U.S. EZ
Noisy San Francisco experimental garage rock that can't be beat.
Group Inerane - Guitars From Agadez (Music of Niger)
Sublime Frequencies delivers the goods as usual. I think they describe it best: "Group Inerane is the now sound of the Tuareg Guitar Revolution sweeping across the Sahara Desert and inspired by the rebel musicians that started this music as a political weapon used to communicate from the Libyan Refugee camps in the 1980s and 1990s"
Dead Meadow - Old Growth
Heavy pot music.
Awesome Color - Electric Aborigines
The young 21st century Stooges. I think their first album was better but this certainly is a band to keep watching.
Reissues/Not New:
The Clean - Compilation
A classic reissued on vinyl.
Pavement - Brighten The Corners: Nicene Creedence Edition
Another great issue of the continued spiffy Pavement remasters. I especially enjoyed the many Pavement psych-jams and covers included on the second disc, including covers of Faust and the Fall.
King Khan and The Shrines - The Supreme Genius of King Khan and the Shrines
Big-band doo-wop garage rock? Awesome. This collects the best of their past material in one nice package.
Wooden Shjips - Volume 1
Modern kraut-rock jams. This release collects all their hard to find/limited edition early vinyl releases.
Flat Duo Jets - Two Headed Cow
Various live material from the past collected for the new documentary of the same name. Loud fuzzy Link Wray jams.
Sun City Girls - You're Never Alone With A Cigarette
"Recorded in July of 1988 during the sessions that produced Sun City Girl's most popular recording, these nine tracks represent the other half of songs which were originally prepared as a 2-LP demo version of 'Torch of the Mystics' for Placebo Records in 1989."
Henry Flynt (with C.C. Hennix) - Dharma Warriors
Totality of liner notes: "Recorded to boombox Woodstock, New York 1983." Two more lengthy "celestial rockabilly" jams that no one but Henry Flynt can deliver. Keep these archival releases coming...
--Klax
Monday, December 22, 2008
My Year Of Music, 2008
Ah, the holiday season, when we all dream of sugarplums (whatever those are) and the music critic's thoughts turn to compiling year-end lists. I always feel sort of funny about doing a best-of list for the year, since I have mixed feelings about best-of lists in general. First of all, it's part of America's obsession with list making, which is so well known that even criticizing America's obsession with list making has become a cliche. The other thing I don't like about year end top ten type lists is that it suggests that the year is this discrete, objective entity, in which the same music is experienced by everyone equally. I think this idea of the experience of one year that is shared by everyone is especially invalid for music. Sometimes, the "album of the year" for me is not an album released that year, but an album that I hadn't gotten around to listening to until that year. My album of the year for 2007, for example, was probably Wolf Parade's "Apologies To The Queen Mary", released in '05. My album of the year for 2006 was probably "Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)", by the Wu-Tang Clan, released in 1993. Most of the music listening a person does during the year is catch-up, not just new releases. What's more, I tend to miss a lot of the year's big releases, for a variety of reasons. I would have liked to have spent more time with Beach House and The Dutchess and The Duke, but I just never got their albums. On the other hand, critics are raving about TV On The Radio's Dear Science, but TV On The Radio just has never done anything for me. I heard a few cuts off the album, but it sounded like the same ol' same ol', and I never felt compelled to give it too much time. My friend Sam thinks I'm History's Greatest Monster for not loving Fleet Foxes, but even though I gave it the old college try (heh heh), I just am not well disposed towards toothless, airy indie-folk harmonies. And though folks loved Hot Chip's release this year, I will stick to the opinion voiced in my original review of that album for KWUR: overwhelmingly mediocre. Yes, even "Ready For The Floor". And ugh, am I done with Vampire Weekend. Which is to say that I did listen to that album a whole lot. And I got so sick and tired of it. The music is still somewhat interesting, but I got to the point where I decided that I could no longer hear the line "coffee on your kaffiyeh" again.
So instead of trying to pick out the absolute best albums of the objective year in music experienced by everyone, I'm just going to try and take you through a long, meandering tour of my year in music. Before I do that, however, I have to note one great release that really dominated my listening during the winter of '07, even though it was technically released in '08. Pattern Is Movement's All Together is not just a great album, but a unique musical experience. The combination of the simple production, the use of various homemade-sounding electronic loops, and the soaring and swaying vocal harmonies on this album gives it a peculiar feeling of intimacy, with the raw emotional content of reading a middle schooler's diary. It's an album that really sounds like nothing else out there right now.
Overall, didn't care much for this year in music, the new releases, anyway. A lot of mediocre stuff, dud albums: here, I am chiefly thinking of Of Montreal's new album, but I was also disappointed, unlike most critics, by Wolf Parade's new release, which I thought lacked the vitality and the pop craftsmanship of Apologies To The Queen Mary. Everything this year sounded bored with itself, dead-ended. I really didn't care for the set of airy, Fleet Foxes sounding stuff, with the exception of Beach House, or a lot of the noisier stuff, which didn't do a whole lot to distinguish itself from older noise. A lot of it sounded overly derivative to me, and a lot sounded escapist, totally detached from the year in which it was made, dangerously distant from increasingly troubled times.
The winter and spring of '08 sounded like We Brave Bee Stings And All by Thao and The Get Down Stay Down and Rabbit Habits by Man Man. Thao Nguyen succeeded in crafting the perfect winter album, the warmest sounding CD this side of vinyl. Beautiful, lyric-centered, simple pop songs anchored by Nguyen's distinct voice, rich and resonant as an old violin. You put this record on, and you feel no hurry to go anywhere; things are basically ok, and if you wait a while, they'll get better. Rabbit Habits dominated my spring this year, and it's probably my pick for best album of the year. I've noticed that a lot of music listeners and music critics don't share my rabid enthusiasm for Man Man, and honestly, I can't understand it. If Man Man is my blind critical obsession, so be it, but I will champion this band until they start recording Nashville covers of Christmas songs with Britney Spears and Zac Efron (in which case, I will describe the resulting album as a "rare misstep that deserves a second listen"). First of all, the sheer virtuosity of this band has to be noted. Not that virtuosity itself makes Man Man a great band, but it's a joy to listen to a Man Man song and guess at the inventive instrumentation (Is that a marimba? Are those kazoos?). When you combine the inventive sound with a bluesy pop sensibility and a soulful, all out delivery, you get an album that somehow sounds both experimental and warmly human, like a homemade appliance. It says something about this album that it has, in my opinion of course, one of the most fun, most party songs of the year ("Mister Jung Stuffed") and one of the most moving songs of the year ("Whalebones"). I can think of no other album this year that I would describe as a masterpiece, but this is a masterpiece in the very literal sense of the word: masters of their craft carefully constructing a piece in which no time, no note is wasted, a piece that sticks in your head for a long time after.
The summer for me meant listening to a lot of hip-hop. I had a boring, stay-at-home job, and I decided to kill time by listening to Jay-Z's entire discography, along with a lot of Biggie and Nas. Well, surprising nobody, it turns out that this Jay-Z fellow is pretty good. I personally prefer Jay-Z to Nas, and not just because of a geographical affinity (I too, am a Brooklynite). Nas' insistence on the romantic conception of the artist, opposed to the market, gets boring. But there's something really brilliant, interesting and subversive about Jay-Z's embrace of the ultra-capitalist conception of rapper-as-producer/rap-as-commodity. For my money, his best albums are "The Blueprint", "Reasonable Doubt", "Life and Times: Vol 3", "The Black Album" and "In My Lifetime". Again, not exactly a critical coup, but my opinion, for what it's worth.
As for the new stuff, I have to say, Tha Carter III at least grabbed my attention. It's a tremendously interesting (in this case, read: peculiar) sounding album. Lil' Wayne's rhymes range from inspired to lazily waiting for syllables to match up. Lil' Wayne's flow is also noteworthy: a petulant, adolescent hazy wheeze that might explain his appeal to similarly high, immature suburban teens. But bottom line, when Wayne's hot, he's hot. See: "Mr. Carter", or the downright amazing "Dr. Carter".
The album of the summer for me, hands down was Mates Of State's Re-Arrange Us. I once played the title song (according to I-Tunes, one of my top ten played this year) for our music director, Daniel Burton saying "This is everything you could possibly want in a song". A lot of critics have picked on this album (and Mates Of State in general) for hitting all the same old pop notes and being too sappy. Maybe, but that's sort of the point: an unbridled pop jouissance, that includes every great pop song tendency. Sing-along vocals, ABBA-like call and response and harmonies, lovely lyrics, great, driving piano lines and that good ol' call and response, this album has basically everything I like about pop music.
Although I personally didn't get to spend too much time with this album, I'd hate to overlook The Bake Sale by The Cool Kids. This album might be the most fun album ever made, just genuinely playful and cheerful. Dig the amazing deconstruction of hip-hop on "What Up Man". It's a wonder, in this age of the vocoder, to see how the spare production and goofy lyrics here add up to a great album. These guys are just having a blast, making it look easy and letting you join in.
I spent a great deal of time this fall with The Menahan Street Band's debut release, Make The Road By Walking. I don't know how they did it, but somehow, they captured a soulful Brooklyn summer night and put it on record. It's a joy to listen to this record. Once again, Daptone's got some of the best musicians anywhere, and they lay down some prime funk, but it's also just a rare, happy record. It kinda sounds like the day after election day this year felt.
The album of the end of the year, and an easy runner up to Rabbit Habits, is A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night by Love Is All. This album is my favorite kind of pop: twisted, angular, sounding as if it were an alternate universe version of mainstream pop. Josephine Olausson's voice is an eccentric, no wave sounding kind of voice, and the songs are fast, fun, and just plain crazy catchy. These songs, weird as they are, get stuck in your head. They become like a dream you remember as reality.
Those are my albums. But there are also quite a few songs that I dug, even if I wasn't crazy about the album as a whole. Call 'em honorable mentions, if you will:
Chad VanGaalen's album, Soft Airplane, is pretty swell, but the song "Willow Tree" is a freakin' masterpiece. The echoing, high vocals, the simple lyrics, laid over a casual banjo line, are piercing and haunting.
I thought The Walkmen's new album, You And Me was pretty disappointing, but "In The New Year", with that lethal seven note decrescendo and the marvelous drum swells, is the kind of song that feels like it could change lives.
Again, great song on an otherwise disappointing album: "Language City" by Wolf Parade. This is the kind of song I loved on Apologies To The Queen Mary: multi-part masterpieces, downright brilliant piano, pounding drums and vocals, a song that sounds so naturally pop that it seems grown rather than written, delivered in a heart-stopping, breathless manner that never fails to prompt a sing-along.
The Watson Twins have some of the best voices around, and when they're given time to really pound out a song, like on the ballad "Old Ways", you get something absolutely worth listening to.
I know, I know, I'm a sucker for the bombastic stuff, but you gotta give it up for the big chorus on "Waving Flags" by British Sea Power. I hear the whole album is good, but I haven't really gotten a chance to listen to it.
At the risk of getting attacked by my own DJs (heck, my own exec staff), I have to say that I generally found No Age's album uninteresting, with the exception of the song "Teen Creeps", one of those Replacements-sounding noisy punk numbers that remind you what it was like when you were in high school, angsty and loud, a fist in the air number.
I really got into The Dutchess and The Duke's Simon-and-Garfunkel-like punky acoustic number, "Strangers". If someone would be good enough to lend me the album, I'd be much obliged.
And some old-school numbers that caught my ear:
"Fool, Fool, Fool" Barbara Acklin - Definitely the best song I played on my show, Hippocleides Doesn't Care, this year. An infectiously simple wood block beat and walking bass, soulful back-up singers and Barbara Acklin's unbelievably big voice. This song makes you just plain happy to be alive, which is kinda strange, since it's about dating an asshole.
"She's Gone, Gone, Gone", Lefty Frizzell - Zak, our folk director, got me listening to this classic. Boy, I love those strings and that aching twang. I'd like to see that make it back into pop music, fuck, even country music.
"Harlan County", Jim Ford - Another gem recommended by Zak. Jim Ford was a country/soul guy who wrote a bunch of songs for Aretha Franklin and Bobby Womack. This song really has it all: country guitar, horns, insistent drums, a charming, almost hokey old school song structure, and Jim Ford's desperate, psych-soul era vocals.
That was my year in music. Not great, but it had its moments. Hope you had a good year in music, and I'm looking forward to a great one in '09.
So instead of trying to pick out the absolute best albums of the objective year in music experienced by everyone, I'm just going to try and take you through a long, meandering tour of my year in music. Before I do that, however, I have to note one great release that really dominated my listening during the winter of '07, even though it was technically released in '08. Pattern Is Movement's All Together is not just a great album, but a unique musical experience. The combination of the simple production, the use of various homemade-sounding electronic loops, and the soaring and swaying vocal harmonies on this album gives it a peculiar feeling of intimacy, with the raw emotional content of reading a middle schooler's diary. It's an album that really sounds like nothing else out there right now.
Overall, didn't care much for this year in music, the new releases, anyway. A lot of mediocre stuff, dud albums: here, I am chiefly thinking of Of Montreal's new album, but I was also disappointed, unlike most critics, by Wolf Parade's new release, which I thought lacked the vitality and the pop craftsmanship of Apologies To The Queen Mary. Everything this year sounded bored with itself, dead-ended. I really didn't care for the set of airy, Fleet Foxes sounding stuff, with the exception of Beach House, or a lot of the noisier stuff, which didn't do a whole lot to distinguish itself from older noise. A lot of it sounded overly derivative to me, and a lot sounded escapist, totally detached from the year in which it was made, dangerously distant from increasingly troubled times.
The winter and spring of '08 sounded like We Brave Bee Stings And All by Thao and The Get Down Stay Down and Rabbit Habits by Man Man. Thao Nguyen succeeded in crafting the perfect winter album, the warmest sounding CD this side of vinyl. Beautiful, lyric-centered, simple pop songs anchored by Nguyen's distinct voice, rich and resonant as an old violin. You put this record on, and you feel no hurry to go anywhere; things are basically ok, and if you wait a while, they'll get better. Rabbit Habits dominated my spring this year, and it's probably my pick for best album of the year. I've noticed that a lot of music listeners and music critics don't share my rabid enthusiasm for Man Man, and honestly, I can't understand it. If Man Man is my blind critical obsession, so be it, but I will champion this band until they start recording Nashville covers of Christmas songs with Britney Spears and Zac Efron (in which case, I will describe the resulting album as a "rare misstep that deserves a second listen"). First of all, the sheer virtuosity of this band has to be noted. Not that virtuosity itself makes Man Man a great band, but it's a joy to listen to a Man Man song and guess at the inventive instrumentation (Is that a marimba? Are those kazoos?). When you combine the inventive sound with a bluesy pop sensibility and a soulful, all out delivery, you get an album that somehow sounds both experimental and warmly human, like a homemade appliance. It says something about this album that it has, in my opinion of course, one of the most fun, most party songs of the year ("Mister Jung Stuffed") and one of the most moving songs of the year ("Whalebones"). I can think of no other album this year that I would describe as a masterpiece, but this is a masterpiece in the very literal sense of the word: masters of their craft carefully constructing a piece in which no time, no note is wasted, a piece that sticks in your head for a long time after.
The summer for me meant listening to a lot of hip-hop. I had a boring, stay-at-home job, and I decided to kill time by listening to Jay-Z's entire discography, along with a lot of Biggie and Nas. Well, surprising nobody, it turns out that this Jay-Z fellow is pretty good. I personally prefer Jay-Z to Nas, and not just because of a geographical affinity (I too, am a Brooklynite). Nas' insistence on the romantic conception of the artist, opposed to the market, gets boring. But there's something really brilliant, interesting and subversive about Jay-Z's embrace of the ultra-capitalist conception of rapper-as-producer/rap-as-commodity. For my money, his best albums are "The Blueprint", "Reasonable Doubt", "Life and Times: Vol 3", "The Black Album" and "In My Lifetime". Again, not exactly a critical coup, but my opinion, for what it's worth.
As for the new stuff, I have to say, Tha Carter III at least grabbed my attention. It's a tremendously interesting (in this case, read: peculiar) sounding album. Lil' Wayne's rhymes range from inspired to lazily waiting for syllables to match up. Lil' Wayne's flow is also noteworthy: a petulant, adolescent hazy wheeze that might explain his appeal to similarly high, immature suburban teens. But bottom line, when Wayne's hot, he's hot. See: "Mr. Carter", or the downright amazing "Dr. Carter".
The album of the summer for me, hands down was Mates Of State's Re-Arrange Us. I once played the title song (according to I-Tunes, one of my top ten played this year) for our music director, Daniel Burton saying "This is everything you could possibly want in a song". A lot of critics have picked on this album (and Mates Of State in general) for hitting all the same old pop notes and being too sappy. Maybe, but that's sort of the point: an unbridled pop jouissance, that includes every great pop song tendency. Sing-along vocals, ABBA-like call and response and harmonies, lovely lyrics, great, driving piano lines and that good ol' call and response, this album has basically everything I like about pop music.
Although I personally didn't get to spend too much time with this album, I'd hate to overlook The Bake Sale by The Cool Kids. This album might be the most fun album ever made, just genuinely playful and cheerful. Dig the amazing deconstruction of hip-hop on "What Up Man". It's a wonder, in this age of the vocoder, to see how the spare production and goofy lyrics here add up to a great album. These guys are just having a blast, making it look easy and letting you join in.
I spent a great deal of time this fall with The Menahan Street Band's debut release, Make The Road By Walking. I don't know how they did it, but somehow, they captured a soulful Brooklyn summer night and put it on record. It's a joy to listen to this record. Once again, Daptone's got some of the best musicians anywhere, and they lay down some prime funk, but it's also just a rare, happy record. It kinda sounds like the day after election day this year felt.
The album of the end of the year, and an easy runner up to Rabbit Habits, is A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night by Love Is All. This album is my favorite kind of pop: twisted, angular, sounding as if it were an alternate universe version of mainstream pop. Josephine Olausson's voice is an eccentric, no wave sounding kind of voice, and the songs are fast, fun, and just plain crazy catchy. These songs, weird as they are, get stuck in your head. They become like a dream you remember as reality.
Those are my albums. But there are also quite a few songs that I dug, even if I wasn't crazy about the album as a whole. Call 'em honorable mentions, if you will:
Chad VanGaalen's album, Soft Airplane, is pretty swell, but the song "Willow Tree" is a freakin' masterpiece. The echoing, high vocals, the simple lyrics, laid over a casual banjo line, are piercing and haunting.
I thought The Walkmen's new album, You And Me was pretty disappointing, but "In The New Year", with that lethal seven note decrescendo and the marvelous drum swells, is the kind of song that feels like it could change lives.
Again, great song on an otherwise disappointing album: "Language City" by Wolf Parade. This is the kind of song I loved on Apologies To The Queen Mary: multi-part masterpieces, downright brilliant piano, pounding drums and vocals, a song that sounds so naturally pop that it seems grown rather than written, delivered in a heart-stopping, breathless manner that never fails to prompt a sing-along.
The Watson Twins have some of the best voices around, and when they're given time to really pound out a song, like on the ballad "Old Ways", you get something absolutely worth listening to.
I know, I know, I'm a sucker for the bombastic stuff, but you gotta give it up for the big chorus on "Waving Flags" by British Sea Power. I hear the whole album is good, but I haven't really gotten a chance to listen to it.
At the risk of getting attacked by my own DJs (heck, my own exec staff), I have to say that I generally found No Age's album uninteresting, with the exception of the song "Teen Creeps", one of those Replacements-sounding noisy punk numbers that remind you what it was like when you were in high school, angsty and loud, a fist in the air number.
I really got into The Dutchess and The Duke's Simon-and-Garfunkel-like punky acoustic number, "Strangers". If someone would be good enough to lend me the album, I'd be much obliged.
And some old-school numbers that caught my ear:
"Fool, Fool, Fool" Barbara Acklin - Definitely the best song I played on my show, Hippocleides Doesn't Care, this year. An infectiously simple wood block beat and walking bass, soulful back-up singers and Barbara Acklin's unbelievably big voice. This song makes you just plain happy to be alive, which is kinda strange, since it's about dating an asshole.
"She's Gone, Gone, Gone", Lefty Frizzell - Zak, our folk director, got me listening to this classic. Boy, I love those strings and that aching twang. I'd like to see that make it back into pop music, fuck, even country music.
"Harlan County", Jim Ford - Another gem recommended by Zak. Jim Ford was a country/soul guy who wrote a bunch of songs for Aretha Franklin and Bobby Womack. This song really has it all: country guitar, horns, insistent drums, a charming, almost hokey old school song structure, and Jim Ford's desperate, psych-soul era vocals.
That was my year in music. Not great, but it had its moments. Hope you had a good year in music, and I'm looking forward to a great one in '09.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
R.I.P. Dock Ellis, 1945-2008
"Dock Ellis, who infamously claimed he pitched a no-hitter for Pittsburgh under the influence of LSD and later fiercely spoke out against drug and alcohol addiction, died Friday. He was 63."
Obituary
NPR Interview from March 2008, "An LSD No-No"
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