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Favorites of 2005 (so far):
Missy Elliott - "The Cookbook"
Stephen Malkmus - "Face the Truth"
Fiery Furnaces - "Rehearsing My Choir"
Fiery Furnaces - "EP"
Opeth - "Ghost Reveries"
Devendra Banhart - "Cripple Crow"
New Pornographers - "Twin Cinema"
M.I.A. - "Arular"
A-Frames - "Black Forest"
Fantomas - "Suspended Animation"
Ellen Allien - "Thrills"
Jennifer Gentle - "Valende"
Fast N Bulbous - "Pork Chop Blue Around the Rind"
"Believer Magazine 2005 Music Issue (included CD)"
Jason Forrest - "Lady Fantasy EP"
Best of 2004:
Blood Brothers - "Crimes"
Joanna Newsom - "The Milk Eyed Mender"
Devendra Banhart - "Rejoicing in the Hands" and "Nino Rojo"
M.I.A. and Diplo - "Piracy Funds Terrorism Vol. 1"
N.E.R.D. - "Fly or Die"
Magnetic Fields - "i"
Black Keys - "Rubber Factory"
Jason Forrest - "The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash"
Keren Ann - "Not Going Anywhere"
A.C. Newman - "The Slow Wonder"
Jewels & Binoculars Plays the Music of Bob Dylan - "Floater"
Air - "Talkie Walkie"
Lali Puna - "Faking the Books"
Fiery Furnaces - "Blueberry Boat"
Nellie McKay - "Get Away From Me"
The Streets - "A Grand Don't Come For Free"
Ghost - "Hypnotic Underworld"
Dave Douglas - "Strange Liberation"
Sonic Youth - "Sonic Nurse"
The Futureheads - s/t
Wolf Eyes - "Burned Mind"
Jenny Scheinman - "Shalagaster"
Pig Destroyer - "Terrifyer"
Jerry Granelli w/Rinde Eckert - "Sandhills Reunion"
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Wednesday, August 17, 2005
At some point earlier this year, I started listing my favorite albums of last year. I meant to keep going, but somehow got distracted. Anyway, here is one that I meant to write up earlier:
Blood Brothers - Crimes
This is one of the 2004 albums that I have played the most, and certainly in my top 3 of the year, if not my favorite. The critical consensus seems to be that their previous album, Burn Piano Island Burn was more aggressive and extreme and hence better, but this is my pick for their pinnacle to date. There is still plenty of dissonant screaming and crunchy proggy riffs, but there is also more of a sense for catchy melodies and popcraft - though a skewed sense of popcraft, to be sure. These guys sound like they've listened to everything from metal to punk to noise to indie pop to dub to hip hop - and somehow digested it all and disgorged it in the fetid swarming lump of this record. I don't know of any other band currently out there making songs like "Rats and Rats and Rats for Candy" (which starts off as bouncy funk pop and digresses through metal riffing and many progtastic rhythmic shifts as it tells its hermetic tale of lust and human-eating rats in the voices of Mr. Howell, Candy, and the rats themselves) or "My First Kiss at the Public Execution" (with its catchy chorus about budding romance at a public hanging). I think the thing that is most likely to put off potential listeners to this record are the vocals - which are over-the-top, snotty, oddly girlish, yet extremely abrasive. If you can get past that, you will discover a delightful record with a very original sense of songcraft and a great band backing it up.
- o. nate
Friday, July 22, 2005
The famously cranky ILM regular, Alex in NYC, now has his very own blog. Enjoy.
- o. nate
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
I hope that by now you have tuned into Kandia Crazy Horse's new regular bi-weekly column over on Stylus Magazine. Kandia has quickly become one of the sharpest and funniest voices writing regularly about music and pop-cultural matters on the Net. This week she takes aim at a grab-bag of pop-cultural offerings, from the Dukes of Hazzard soundtrack to the new Battlestar Galactica series on the Sci-Fi channel, and gets in some sharp observations on Nashville's neo-separatism and rock's cult of the untimely demise.
- o. nate
Monday, July 11, 2005
Nitsuh Abebe does the post-rock rhumba today over on Pitchfork in a very readable survey entitled "The Lost Generation". He traces that elusive, airy indie sound of the '90s through the early UK bands like Bark Psychosis and on to the Chicago bands like Tortoise and their fellow travellers. I found this article fascinating despite (or perhaps because of) my relative unfamiliarity with most of the bands he mentions.
- o. nate
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Thanks to JBR over at the Freezing Nuclear Bunker for inviting me to participate in the current game of music list-making making the blog rounds.
The first question is the total size of music files on my computer. The truth is that since my hard drive melted down a few months ago, I haven't made much progress in restocking my mp3s. My current total is 727MB, which is made up of 183 files.
The second question is the last CD that I bought. That's an easy one to answer: Missy Elliott's The Cookbook which I just picked up yesterday and is currently kicking my ass. And the song playing right now is...
...unsurprisingly, from Cookbook: "Meltdown". And the five songs that I've been listening to a lot lately are:
Brian Eno - "The True Wheel"
Stephen Malkmus - "Malediction"
Os Mutantes - "A Minha Menina"
Buzzcocks - "Everybody's Happy Nowadays"
and
Pet Shop Boys - "West End Girls"
ps - I guess I'm supposed to pass this on to someone. It seems that most of the blogs that I read have already done this one, but I'll send it over to The Other Side of Life although that site appears to be on sabbatical.
- o. nate
Saturday, July 2, 2005
Henry Threadgill's ZOOID, Jazz Gallery, July 1, 2005
This was my second time seeing ZOOID play at the Jazz Gallery.
The last time was a couple of years ago. They were every bit as
good as I remember them. This time I was especially tuned into
the drummer, Elliott Humberto Kavee (I love that name). He is
truly amazing. He kind of reminds me of Ronald Shannon
Jackson's work on Ornette Coleman's Dancing in Your Head
- that constantly-shifting, sort-of-rock, sort-of-breakbeat, hard-to-get-your-sea-legs, type of rolling, tumbling, jump up and bob your head, sort of drumming.
And you know that any drummer who can remind you of Jackson's work on that record is probably doing something right.
Kavee was truly a force of nature behind the traps tonight. I
swear that some of the beats he was playing, if you maybe sped
them up a little bit, wouldn't sound out of place on a hardcore
jungle record. He sounded nothing like the traditional
brush-centric jazz drummer - very modern and ruthless.
Techno-heads take note - there are people playing old-fashioned
traps who can do things you might have thought only a drum
machine could do.
Threadgill is a band-leader in the great manner of Captain
Beefheart or Sun Ra in that his band sounds radically different
on a molecular level from just about anybody else around. The
sound is re-thought and re-imagined from the ground up. I don't
know how he got his particular aesthetic to become second-nature
for these musicians - such that they play in the Threadgill
style almost as naturally as taking a breath - but I'd guess it
took a heck of a lot of practice and possibly some mind-control
techniques: you know, co-habitation, philosophical
indoctrination - guru stuff - the kind of heavy-duty psychic
energy that Ra and Beefheart laid on their bands back in the
day. It's probably fanciful of me to imagine the ZOOID band all
living in some big house somewhere and dropping acid and
practicing every day, but damn if they don't sound like they do.
So what is the Threadgill aesthetic? To my mind it's all about
the slow-burn and the lateral motion. Everything in
Threadgill's music will always zig and zag - rarely will
anything move anywhere in a straight line. There is constant
lateral motion. Sparks will fly and static electricity builds
but it's never entirely released - it's that unreleased tension
that moves the music forward.
ZOOID consists of drums, cello, guitar, tuba/trombone,
flute/sax, and oud. All the musicians tonight were in top form.
The guitarist in particular seemed to have the Threadgill style
down pat. Or maybe he has his own style which just happens to
fit in so well with the compositions that it seems like it's
actually Threadgill's style. I don't know. But he could
probably play a solo in his sleep which would zig and zag and do
the slow-burn build and release while never quite settling down
or resolving, and then he could wake up and play another one
that would do the same thing. The cellist and the trombonist
also got some nice soloing in. One nice thing about ZOOID is
that the soloists somehow manage to avoid the free jazz cliche
of signifying the climax by getting loud and hitting the high
notes. I wonder if this is something that Threadgill perhaps
beat out of them in that apocryphal band house. But since it
tends to be overused in improvisation, it's a welcome relief
that the band largely avoids it.
- o. nate
Monday, June 20, 2005
Joelle Leandre and India Cooke at Vision Festival X, June 19, 2005
Last night, I caught part of the final evening of this year's Vision Festival, NYC's very own free-jazz/dance/art fest, now in it's tenth installment. Although the major draw for me was the star-studded quartet of Matthew Shipp, Sabir Mateen, William Parker, and Han Bennink, who went on after midnight - the evening was stolen by the duo of Joelle Leandre and India Cooke. I was afraid I was going to miss the Cooke/Leandre duo since I didn't make it to the festival venue until about 9:30pm and they had been scheduled to go on at nine, but fortunately, things were running a bit behind schedule, and I got there just as the 8 o'clock set was finishing. Cooke is a SF-Bay Area based violinist whom I had seen play at Beanbenders in Oakland back in 1995 or so with Lisle Ellis. Surprisingly, this was her first time to play NYC. Leandre is a double-bass player from France, who uses the bow to get all kinds of interesting timbres and overtones from the strings of her instrument, and who also has a penchant for spontaneous vocalization. Although each of the musicians took a solo turn during their joint set, the best moments came when they played together. There seemed to be very good chemistry between them - a study in contrasts as Cooke smiled gleefully and Leandre squinted with deep concentration. Both punctuated their playing with occasional shouts and exclamations, though Leandre took the vocalization to a completely different level at times. What started as a few vocal interjections between notes - not unlike what many improvising jazz players might emit when in the midst of a heated solo (most commonly this is done by piano players and string instrument players, in my experience - it's difficult for horn players, for obvious reasons) - gradually grew into a performance of improvised vocalization that overshadowed the instruments themselves, until both Cooke and Leandre stopped playing altogether while Leandre continued ululating and muttering, though Cooke continued to rap out a rhythm with her knuckles on the back of her violin. Leandre has a strong voice that can reach to an almost operatic fullness and scale, but which she also employs in strange cackling, muttering, and nonsensical scat-singing. She seems delightfully unconcerned about how strange a figure she cuts on the stage - growling and babbling to herself like a deranged person - and the crowd was clearly engrossed. When both players returned to their instruments, the piece reached a climax of furious interaction - with Cooke's violin skittering over the top of Leandre's energetic strumming and bowing.
- o. nate
Monday, June 13, 2005
Victoriaville (cont.)
I haven't quite gotten around to writing up Day Three yet, but here are a couple of other Victoriaville reviews worth reading:
Review by Bruce of Downtown Music Gallery
John Kelman's review from AllAboutJazz.com
- o. nate
Sunday, June 5, 2005
FIMAV Report - 2005 - Day Two
We slept in fairly late on Day Two, so we didn't have time to grab anything more than a cup
of coffee before rushing to the first performance of the day, held in the Cinema Laurier.
The performance was a group led by Michel F. Cote, performing a piece called "Mecha Fixes
Clock". The music did remind me of the steady ticking and intricately meshing gears of a
clockwork mechanism. It was a mixture of electronic and acoustic instruments: including a
theremin, some contact-mic triggered samples, a turntable, as well as the more traditional
instruments. It was a mostly restrained, textural performance - sort of a calmative way to
start the day - though there was a more energetic section near the end, when the rhythm
became a bit more insistent and regular and the group approached almost a techno-dance type
sound.
There was an extra break after this show before the next show at 5, which gave Dan and I some
time to eat and have some very good coffee (cappucino, actually). The next performance was a
turntable duo of Philip Jeck and Janek Schaefer, or, as they referred to themselves, the "odd
couple". Jeck is a somewhat older sort of mad scientist type with unruly floating wisps of
hair, whereas Schaefer is a young hip looking guy who would not be out of place in a trendy
NYC bar. Although they had turntables set up on their table onstage, it didn't seem that
they used them very much. After surveying their equipment after the show, it appeared to me
that most of the sampled material was being read from a pair of Minidisc players before being
fed into an array of digital delay pedals and effects. The sound that they created was
massive. As I sat there listening to it, I had the mental image of entering into the texture
of a large dissonant chord, as for instance Jimi Hendrix might play with his teeth into a
towering bank of amplifiers. It was if we had been shrunk down to microscopic size and
entered into the swarming maelstrom of that one feedback-driven chord, such that every billow
and swirl of sound appeared to us as huge as a gathering stormcloud. Little fragments of
melody peeked out from the maelstrom occasionally, only to be swallowed up again in the
churning mass.
After the show we met up with William and Dave, who were quite pleased to have the use of our
backseat after having walked everywhere the previous day. We went to a bar in the middle of
town, near the cinema, to have a drink before the next show at 8.
The next show was one of the highlights of the festival, and one of the major draws for me to
attend in the first place: the first ever encounter between Anthony Braxton and Fred Frith
for a duo improv gig. Both are highly esteemed improvisors in their own right, and the
crowd's anticipation was high to see what they would do together. Would sparks fly? Would
they find some common ground, or would they struggle to develop any kind of synergy? All
bets are off in improvised shows of this nature.
As the set opened, Frith set in at once to developing a shifting bed of sound, deploying his
trademarked array of extended techniques, involving various unusual implements that he would
use to eke out unusual sounds from his guitar, which he held flat across his lap, like a
slide dobro or pedal steel. Many sax players would no doubt be intimidated at the prospect
of improvising over Frith's shifting textures, but Braxton's ability to immediately shift and
respond in sympathy with Frith's playing was uncanny. He would play winding, jumpy patterns
of notes, moving up and down the register of his instrument, seldom falling into any
recognizable scales, but somehow in a manner of harmony with the tonal areas that Frith was
exploring. He had three or four different reed instruments on stage with him, including alto
and soprano sax, and he would switch between them as he felt appropriate to the moment. It
was a breath-taking high-stakes performance, followed by an enthusiastic standing ovation
that seemed fairly unanimous. Of course, Braxton is a darling of the festival, and people
are naturally in a receptive mood whenever he takes the stage, but this was genuinely a
special performance. I hope it will be issued on the Victo label, because I would really
like to listen to it again.
The next show was the long-running Czech rock band, The Plastic People of the Universe, at
the Colisee (the largest venue, where the festival's opening performance had been held). I'd
heard of them before, but never actually heard them, and I found a lot to like in their
playing. They play a jazzy, bouncy sort of rock that owes something to Frank Zappa and the
Mothers of Invention. They grooved in an odd, off-beat sort of way. I was somewhat
surprised that there weren't more people dancing, but I guess it would be difficult with all
of the tables in the way. Most of the lyrics were in Czech. It would be interesting to see
a translation of the lyrics, but from the expressions and delivery of the vocalists it seemed
that the predominant tone was one of ironic bemusement.
The last show of the evening was the duo of Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori on electric harp and
laptop, respectively. I think that Mori's accomplishment in creating a unique and percussive
electronic drum machine sound shouldn't be underrated. She doesn't play regular rhythms, but
rather treats her instrument more the way that a free textural drummer would, building up a
percolating soundbed, with odd little noises whizzing through and popping out like little
bottle rockets or sparklers. Parkins also explored a wide range of sounds from her
instrument - from delicate plucking more in the manner of what the image of the harp usually
suggests, to thundering sturm und drang in the manner of Jimmy Page drawing a bow
across the strings of his electric guitar. By the time the last set ended it was already
quite late, but we repaired to the hotel bar anyway for another round. It was quite a
surreal experience to be sitting in a tiny hotel bar surrounded by such musical luminaries as
Thurston Moore, Braxton, various members of Wolf Eyes and the Plastic People of the Universe,
as well as a number of fans like ourselves. Braxton is actually quite friendly and we
managed to chat him up for a bit about his program at Wesleyan before heading off for some
much-needed sleep.
- o. nate
Monday, May 30, 2005
FIMAV Report - 2005 - Day One
This was my first time to attend the FIMAV festival in Victoriaville, Quebec, the once-yearly
confab of edgy improv, noise, free jazz, etc., now in its 22nd installment and going stronger
than ever. How it ever happened that so much musical weirdness would descend on this one
smallish, out-of-the-way, rural Canadian town is beyond me, yet it came to pass, and apparently
does regularly.
My confederate in arms for this year's event was none other than my consanguinary comrade,
Dan, and two new acquaintances, William and Dave. Dan and I arrived in Montreal on the first
day of the conference, a Thursday, and proceeded to wait five minutes for the bus before
deciding to rent a car instead, a propitious decision, as later events would indicate. The
drive from Montreal to Victoriaville is mainly flat and uneventful. Some cows and grain
silos were in evidence, but not much else. We stopped at a Tim Horton's (the Canadian
equivalent of Dunkin Donuts, except you can also get baked beans there).
After proceeding to the Victo Fest headquarters to claim our ticket packets, we headed to the
town's only hotel to catch a few much-needed Z's. After our nap, we were off to the opening
gig.
The first show featured a local Quebecian line-up, and it was held in a large converted hockey rink. The band was the
largest of the fest - including a local marching band (college or high school, I wasn't sure which), as well as
the large Quebecian ensemble Fanfares Pourpour. The musicians were deployed in
various positions around the arena, such that depending on where you were sitting you might
have a tuba blatting in your ear or the resounding concussion of a large drum. The piece was partially
composed, with specified sections for improvisation. There were some nice interactions - for
instance one sax blower approaching the stage while squirting out querulous notes, while
another blower on stage responded testily, as if unsure of his intentions. It was as if
language had been rendered into a more sonorous and plangent form. I considered it a
propitous introduction to the long weekend's events.
The next gig, held at the cozier Cinema Laurier, a converted movie theater, was Jerry
Granelli's "Sandhill Reunion". I will tell you right now that since the festival I have
ordered this disc from Amazon, so you can guess I am somewhat biased. Granelli is the
drummer, and there was another Granelli on bass, as well as some clarinets, guitar, cello, and a writer named Rinde Eckert who
did spoken word over the music. (My apologies for the lack of specific information, but the FIMAV website can be consulted for any missing particulars.) The words had to do with such issues as
what it means to be a man, a boy, a killer, an outlaw, a husband, a lover. Imagined dialogues with Billy the Kid,
interior monologues by men in the throes of mid-life crises, how it feels for a sheriff to kill a criminal -
such was the stuff of the spoken portion of the evening's entertainment. The music was
consummately professional and smooth - a subtle sort of country-jazz noir. Very
pleasant - like a road movie for the mind, as it was billed in the program.
Following that, we proceeded to the CEGEP, a converted college auditorium for the Nels Cline
Singers. I have had the pleasure to witness Mr. Cline many times, and tonight's performance
was not too far from what I would expect based on past encounters. He dedicated the
evening's performance to another performer in the festival, the celebrated guitar innovator
Fred Frith, whom he said had changed his view of music in the '70s, but though I detected
some of Frith's pre-occupation with the more unconventional sonic possibilities of the
instrument in Cline's playing, it seemed to me that a more apposite dedication for the
evening's festivities would have been the fire-breathing, fusion aerobatics of John
McLaughlin and co. Scott Amendola is a capable drummer, propelling the music forward with
the energy of a rock drummer, but maintaining the looseness and light-handed feel of a jazz
drummer. Cline was in fine form, deploying his digital delay pedals and stop-on-a-dime
reflexes to impressive effect. It was a very athletic performance, redolent of Coltrane in
his later years, though perhaps without the overlay of spiritual seriousness.
Three amazing shows, and that was only the first evening. There were still four more days,
and 21 more shows to go.
- o. nate
Friday, April 15, 2005
Well, I guess I've procrastinated on this 2004 end-of-the-year list long enough. By now I've kind of forgotten what my final ordering of the remaining albums was going to be, and I've also discovered a few more albums from last year that don't fit into the remaining number of slots. So instead of continuing the list with numbered entries, I'll just list the rest of the albums that I thought were among the best of 2004, with a short description of each:
Devendra Banhart - Rejoicing in the Hands
I listened to this again this morning. I hadn't played it for probably a couple of months. But if anything, it remains even better than I remember it. The voice bothered me at first, but I came around. Seeing him live helped. Affectation or no, he inhabits the voice as fully as any singer with a more normal sound could do. It is real, flesh-and-blood, not cartoon-like in the slightest. The songs are whisps, fragments, shards of folk song that can seem haphazard, yet they each seem to lead into a particular place. There is a kind of simplicity that is more difficult to achieve than complexity - think of the simplicity of a Mississippi John Hurt blues - and against all odds, Banhart seems to have a high hit-to-miss ratio. I would be remiss to not mention Nino Rojo - the follow-up album - as well. It has some songs as good as any on Rejoicing, but overall I think the flow and quality control on Rejoicing trumps it.
Joanna Newsom - Milk-Eyed Mender
Newsome has been lumped in with Devendra into the so-called "freak-folk" movement by some critics. Using the word "freak" to name something that sounds different of course requires little creativity or insight. But I usually don't get too worked up about names, so whatever people want to call it is okay by me. In any case, this album completely blows me away whenever I listen to it. Newsom's voice is another one that takes some getting used to. At first, the girlishness and near-cutesiness of it turned me off. But once I got past that, and started listening to the music, I was quickly converted. A singer who sounds like Shirley Temple meets Sara Carter may not be to every taste, but once you get to know the songs, that observation has a way of sounding superficial. The lyrics are down-to-earth yet celestial. They conjure back-country dirt roads yet they are unafraid to probe philosophy and the big questions. It doesn't seem possible that someone who sounds as young as Newsom does could have written such preternaturally wise lyrics, but she did. And who would ever have guessed that one of the most compelling albums of new music in 2004 would be played mainly on the harp?
N.E.R.D. - Fly or Die
I was surprised that I liked this album as much as I did. On the face of it, it seems like a bad career move for the geniuses behind the multi-platinum hit-making duo, the Neptunes. Why would a group that is at the pinnacle of success in a form which is simultaneously as overwhelmingly popular and formally innovative and progressive as chart hip-hop want to make an album with the likes of Good Charlotte and Lenny Kravitz, or even worse, an album that dares to sound like them? If there is a market today for Beatlesque funk-pop, you wouldn't know it from looking at the charts (with the possible exception of the once ubiquitous "Hey Ya"). So I'm guessing that Fly or Die must have been a labor of love. Sure, the lyrics may be corny at times, and Pharrell's vocal range may be limited, and the guys may not play all their instruments like the session pros which they could have surely afforded to hire, but this is as catchy and crafty a batch of tunes as any you didn't hear on the radio last year.
M.I.A. and Diplo - Piracy Funds Terrorism Vol. 1
I've heard two slightly different version of this floating around, so I'm not sure how many there are out there. The first one which I downloaded had an LL Cool J track which is replaced by another M.I.A. track on the other version which I bought in a store. On this mix-tape, M.I.A. and Diplo split the difference between dancehall and electro in an act of defiant multiculturalism that has the indie kids hopping planes to Brazil and the Bangles rapping over Timbaland style beats - with M.I.A.'s provocative terror-cheerleading providing a frisson of political danger to those who stop dancing long enough to listen to the lyrics.
Well, that's one installment for now. More are on the way. I promise.
- o. nate
Sunday, February 27, 2005
#9. Black Keys - Rubber Factory
It's hard to talk about the Black Keys without the obligatory White Stripes comparison. As if the similarity of two garage-punk-blues-rock guitar-drums duos wasn't enough, the Keys seem to have gone out of their way to invite comparisons by adopting a color-noun two-word moniker with obvious parallels to the better-known Detroit duo. Perhaps it's their idea of marketing. In any case, one can rest assured that, despite their lower sales figures, the Keys are indeed the more interesting band to listen to.
Or at least, I think they are. In order to know for certain, I would probably need to listen to a White Stripes album all the way through, which is not something that I have as yet done - though I have downloaded or otherwise heard many of their better known tunes. Don't get me wrong - I don't dislike the Stripes. I like some of their songs. I just don't go out of my way to listen to them. The Keys on the other hand, evoke a more visceral reaction from me.
I didn't much care for the songs I heard from their previous album, Thickfreakness, but on their new one, they seem to have learned to write great pop hooks in addition to their fondness for bluesy riffs and boogie-ready beats. The first song on the album, "When the Lights Go Out", is fairly snooze-worthy, but as soon as the big riff comes in on song number two, you know the fun has started. These guys know how to swing a beat, and they drop that riff and vocal line in there just so, with that certain je ne sais quoi that makes you want to start bobbing your head, tapping your toes, or gyrating in your chair. When the chorus comes in you want to sing along. The singer by the way has a great husky rock voice, with just the right amount of Midwestern twang (they're from Akron, Ohio).
If there's one area where the band could use a little improvement, I would submit that it's in the lyrics department. Clearly these guys have been listening to a lot of classic blues records, but somehow they have yet to master the art of telling an evocative story through a few scraps of ambiguous imagery. Instead it tends to often come out as blues lyrics by the numbers: a simple, honest emotion, perhaps, but not enough idiosyncratic detail to make us believe it. "Girl is On My Mind", for instance - okay we believe you, but please tell us something about her that we haven't already heard in a zillion other rock songs. Anyway, when the riffs are as good as they are here, I'm not one to quibble too much about generic lyrics.
- o. nate
Wednesday, February 9, 2005
#10. Keren Ann - Not Going Anywhere
Although Keren Ann grew up in France, and got her start as a
singer-songwriter in that country, she also speaks (and sings) perfect English,
so there was no natural impediment to her making the trans-Atlantic
crossing. She arrives on the shores of the Anglophone musical world via
the good ship, Blue Note - a vessel better known for ferrying the likes
of Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman in days of yore.
Yet it seems somehow fitting that Keren Ann would find a home on this
famous jazz label. Even though her music is not itself jazz, the
delicate and tasteful musical trappings that she is framed in on this album
remind one of the sorts of arrangements featured on albums by legendary
old-fogey-era singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole - which is
not to say that there's anything tame or bland about this album. The
emotional rawness of her lyrics can cut quickly and deeply. And to keep
things lively, there's even an electric-guitar-driven rocker called
"Sailor and Widow" which involves serial homicide.
Keren Ann's voice is pretty and wistful, and her songs are likewise
wistful and pretty. She can slay you with simple lines like, "Polly left
on Christmas Eve". You may not be sure who Polly is or exactly why
she's leaving, but in that moment, you damned well wish she would stay on,
at least until Christmas day. I mean, no one should have to leave on
Christmas Eve. It's just not right.
"Polly" really couldn't be any more poignant if we were to find out
that Polly had just been hit by a truck. Yet Keren Ann manages to achieve
this effect using only the barest slivers of information. When she
sings, "I never cried", we are tempted to do it for her. Somewhat
incongruously, a cheerful trumpet melody takes over in the second half of the
song, but at least it sounds Christmas-y, in keeping with the song's
setting.
"Seventeen" is another of the album's many lovely tunes. The song's
narrator invites us to consider the fleeting nature of youth: "Look at me
/ I'm only seventeen". Later she reflects: "By the time / You reach
your lemon-lime / I will love you till tomorrow / Then it will last a
year and a day / Maybe we're here to forget". The days run away from us,
and soon all we're left with is our memories, and the task of
un-remembering them.
There are many songs like this on the album: bittersweet fables of
time, loss, and love. Keren Ann conveys a surprising amount of
world-weariness for one so young. Her songs are heavy with the weight of life
lived and complexities experienced. Yet there is always a resiliency in
her demeanor that brings the listener to her side. Men will wish they
could take her out to dinner and make her laugh. Women will wish they
could sit down and have a nice long talk, get the inside scoop: What
really happened by that cathedral? Why did the widow do it? Did she have
any regrets?
We probably will never experience that long talk or that intimate
dinner with Keren Ann, but we do have albums like this one, that invite us
into a world of feeling that we don't wish to leave, at least until we
are kicked out.
- o. nate
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
#11. (tie) Dave Douglas's Strange Liberation and Jenny Scheinman's Shalagaster
Since I didn't hear Shalagaster until after New Year's, technically I shouldn't have even included it on this list, but since it's so good, I feel obliged to make an exception. To that end, I'll make this the token jazz slot on my list and force Dave Douglas's Strange Liberation to share its well-deserved berth.
Both of these are lovely, tasteful, musicianly albums that feature a ringer in the line-up - a guest star who sometimes threatens to upstage the name above the title: in Douglas's case it's the guitarist Bill Frisell, and in Scheinman's case, the pianist Myra Melford.
Douglas is a trumpeter who first came to my attention playing in John Zorn's Masada (i.e., the jazz quartet version - I would say the "original" Masada, but I believe that their was an earlier, unrecorded, short-lived, Douglas-less incarnation featuring Marc Ribot on guitar). Douglas still plays with Zorn in Masada from time to time, but he has by now firmly established himself as a leader in his own right - in fact, I would venture to say that his popularity and critical esteem in the jazz world exceeds Zorn's by now. (But Zorn has always been uncategorizable anyway - a neither-fish-nor-fowl outsider to any musical camp - so that's not to denigrate his work in the slightest.)
Strange Liberation is something of a composition showcase for Douglas. He wrote all of the tracks on here, and their range and craftsmanship are quite impressive. The genre that the album is most firmly rooted in is post-bebop jazz, but there are elements of blues, country, rock and other American styles. For instance, "Skeeter-ism" features a knotty melody that would have been worthy of Thelonious Monk, but when Frisell's solo comes in, he takes the song in an almost country direction. "Just Say This" is a breathtakingly poignant slow blues. On "Mountains from the Train", Frisell crafts an uncanny pointillistic accompaniment that just skirts the edge of dissonance and takes the atmospheric track in an unearthly direction. The solos of saxophonist Chris Potter and keyboardist Uri Caine are also resourceful and intelligent.
On Shalagaster, Scheinman also proves that she is no slouch in the composition department. And of course it never hurts to have friends like the gifted Melford, and the wily drummer, Kenny Wollesen. Scheinman's violin has a lovely, assured tone. As on Strange Liberation, no musician here screams, "Look at me I'm doing something weird", as too often happens on avant-garde jazz albums. Instead they coax shimmering and solidly idiomatic sounds from their instruments that contribute to the careful, steady work of building wonderful, evolving songs that usually don't end up where you'd expect them to, as long as you remember to pay attention. The album brings elements of klezmer, gypsy music and other world musics into the mix.
It's difficult to compare rock albums to jazz and vice versa, so the placement of these two albums on this rock-and-pop-dominated list is somewhat arbitrary, but without a doubt, these are two of the very best albums that I heard last year. This is especially great stuff to listen to when the thought of an insistent rock beat or the verbosity of words over the top of one's music seem oppressive and you want something that unfolds with a bit more dignity and sublety.
- o. nate
Saturday, December 18, 2004
#12. Air - Talkie Walkie
This album is very easy to listen to, but not that easy to write about. I find myself reaching for metaphors connoting lightness, sweetness, airiness and the like. Some images that I've considered to describe this album: "a shimmering day-glo confection", "a fluffy creme-filled eclair", "a summery Beatlesque daydream". In the end, it may be easier just to call it light, melodic, amorous pop, and leave it at that.
Although Talkie Walkie is an electronic studio creation, it has a very organic feel, with lots of sampled acoustic instruments (including some you wouldn't expect, like the banjo on "Biological"). In this respect, it reminds me of another notable release from this year, Lali Puna's Faking the Books. The Lali Puna rocks a bit harder, and its lyrics have more political bite, but it mines much the same vein of electronic-meets-acoustic-textures as the Air. It's just that the Air boys would rather sing about falling in love than offer critiques of capitalist society.
Talkie Walkie has a disarmingly easy symphonic sweep and grandeur that shows why the French duo have had success moonlighting as composers of film soundtracks and stage productions. The instrumental textures that they create are unusual and evocative, but they are also unflaggingly tasteful and melodic, so it's easy to overlook their inherent oddness.
- o. nate
Saturday, December 11, 2004
#13. Ghost - Hypnotic Underworld
Listening to this neo-psych-prog-folk album is a real time warp. It sounds like it could have been made in the early '70s. In fact the album that it most reminds me of is Amon Duul II's Wolf City (1973), which found the legendary krautrockers moving slightly away from their long-form improvisatory jams and towards a more accessible, shorter-song-form format. Ghost is not afraid of long-form jams though, as the first track on this album, which starts out with twenty minutes of wordless grooving, can attest.
The album starts out rather slowly, with a lot of space. A minimal, slow bass line, with percussive washes and flute, draws one into a meditative and hypnotic mental zone. Only after about twelve minutes does anything approaching a rock beat appear. This is a pretty daring way to open an album, but it works. You just have to surrender yourself to the album experience - it helps to close your eyes and pretend you're at a concert. Probably sparking up a doob could also contribute to the experience.
The only song that I have a hard time getting into is the one where the guy speaks in Japanese over a minimal musical background. I guess if I could speak Japaneses I might get more out of it. The album also features some great, catchy rockers - especially the one with the chorus that goes "Got to run, got to run", which sounds like a great lost psych classic, like something Love might have produced in their heyday.
While their style is a little retro, the band is undeniably good at what they do, and the songs are memorable. This is one is definitely a keeper.
- o. nate
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
#14. Wolf Eyes - Burned Mind
Is Wolf Eyes a noise band or a rock band? On Burned Mind, at least they seem to be more of a rock band. Though they use broken electronics as instruments and frequently allow their songs to arise or dissolve into formless swirls of sound, most of the tracks on Burned Mind seem to be based around somewhat familiar patterns that are more akin to the rhythm section of a metal band than to the open-ended experiments of a more formal noise band, such as Voice Crack. That, in addition to the screamed vocals and the Lovecraftian song titles ("Black Vomit", anyone?) and the album's appearance on Sub Pop, would seem to show the band, for this album at least, moving more decisively into a more accessible zone not far from other noise-metal-hardcore hybrids like Gravitar or the Melvins.
For an example of what an experimental noise band with a similar source of sonic material but a less accessible bent would sound like, I'd recommend checking out Voice Crack's 1982 album Knack On (recently reissued by Atavistic). Voice Crack are a now-defunct Swiss duo who pioneered the use of broken electronic devices as instruments, and produced a murky post-industrial soundscape which is not far from Wolf Eyes's more adventurous moments. A sample of that album can be downloaded here.
For an example of a band that is more strictly on the noise-metal side, without so much of the electronic experimentation, I would suggest Gravitar's Chinga Su Corazon (Charnel House, 1994). The wordless mumbling and swirls of feedback for instance on the sixth track of Burned Mind calls Gravitar to mind. It also sounds more than a bit like the Ween track "Mourning Glory" on Pure Guava (1992), which shows that Wolf Eyes have a sense of humor to go along with their angst and despair.
If you're interested in reading more about Wolf Eyes, I'd recommend tracking down the November issue of the Wire, which featured the band on the cover and a lengthy profile inside, with pictures of some of their cool gadgets.
- o. nate
Sunday, December 5, 2004
All right, for the next three weeks, we're going to be doing something a little different here on Face in the Crowd. That's right. Believe it or not, we are going to be posting regularly. And no, this is not just because ILX has been down for the past few days.
It's time for our big, bad end-o'-the-year round-up of all the greatness that was recorded music in the year 2004. We shall be counting down from #15 to #1 Face in the Crowd's favorite records of the year (and by record I mean album, regardless of what the Grammy's might say). And now, just to show that we're serious, we are going to dive right in with #15:
Top 15 Albums of 2004
#15. The Fiery Furnaces - Blueberry Boat
Now some of you avid readers of Face in the Crowd (that's irony, people, stay with me here) may be surprised to see the FF's fall to such a lowly spot on our list. After all, it was only one year ago that this brother and sister duo notched the #2 spot on our end-o'-year list with the still excellent Gallowsbird's Bark. However, we just weren't able to muster quite the same enthusiasm this time around. Now, it's not because the band is too popular now, or they've sold out, or they just rehashed the same ideas, or any of those other common reasons that bands might face the dreaded "sophomore slump". In fact, we at FITC (as always, the royal "we") are all in favor of bands rehashing ideas, provided that (1) the ideas were good in the first place, and (2) they rehash them convincingly. However, Blueberry Boat, far from being a rehash, contains a number of notable changes (dare I say progressions?): longer songs, more of the medleys that they favor in their live appearances, somewhat more pop and less blues, more ambitious lyrical aspirations, more verbosity in general, considerably fuller and more ornate arrangements, and so on.
The primary reason that I (from the safety of my ignorance) offer for these changes is a shift in the primary songwriting duties from Eleanor to Matthew. Or at least so I have been lead to believe from a band interview that I read somewhere (it may have been Pitchfork). That Matthew, the band's primary instrumentalist and more musically experienced member, would be responsible for a shift to more ambitious song structures and a different lyrical sensibility seems entirely plausible. Now I have nothing against a singer singing another band member's lyrics. It has been done many times by many different bands with varying results, and many times with great success - for instance, perhaps my favorite R.E.M. song "Don't Go Back to Rockville" which was written by Mike Mills but sung by Michael Stipe. The fact that Eleanor's delivery perhaps lacks a certain emotional resonance this time out has less to do with the fact that she's singing someone else's lyrics, and more to do with the fact that the lyrics just aren't that good. I mean songs about competing cell phone vendors in Damascus or wherever just aren't quite as clever as the band seems to think they are. This sort of ground has been covered quite thoroughly by "twee pop" bands like Of Montreal on their not-bad, Sgt. Pepperish The Gay Parade, and except for the fact that Eleanor's earnest, clear tone is somewhat preferable to Kevin Barnes's nasal whine, I see little reason to go over that ground again.
In any case, the album is still pretty good - after all 15th best of the year ain't nothing to sneeze at - and there are some fine moments, notably the literal shaggy-dog story of "My Dog Was Lost", where the concentrated rawness and inventive fire of Gallowsbird's reappears. All in all, this album's still worth hearing, even if you might find yourself going back to Gallowsbird's more often.
- o. nate
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