Monday, September 30, 2024
Friday, October 29, 2021
MARILYN MCCOO & BILLY DAVIS JR.: BLACKBIRD: LENNON-McCARTNEY ICONS (BMG)
What makes Blackbird bizarre is the attempt to pass it off as a Black Lives Matter soundtrack. The cover art surrounds the couple’s faces with names such as “Trayvon,” “Breonna,” “George,” “Emmett,” “Martin,” and “Malcolm,” implying connections that are tenuous at best, non-existent at worst, and misleading in either case. Strangest of all, the video for “Ticket to Ride” grafts the song onto Rosa Park’s Montgomery bus protest. Dedicating “The Fool on the Hill” to Maxine Waters would’ve been less of a stretch.
Sunday, October 24, 2021
BOB DYLAN: SPRINGTIME IN NEW YORK: THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 16 1980-1985 (Columbia/Legacy)
(A somewhat different version of this review appeared in WORLD magazine....)
What makes the five-disc Springtime in New York: The Bootleg Series Vol. 16 1980-1985 the most arbitrary of Columbia/Legacy’s Bob Dylan Bootleg Series installments to date is that what Dylan was doing in 1980 and ’81 had little to do with what he was doing in ’83, ’84, and ’85.
Making it more arbitrary yet is that, having exhausted his ability or desire to write and sing exclusively about Jesus, he ended up writing and singing about practically everything else, leaving fans with a pile of recordings never meant to endure public scrutiny through which to sift in search of inexplicably discarded gems.
And, Dylan’s being Dylan, they’ll find some.
How many they’ll find on Disc One depends on how much they enjoy Self Portrait. Like that odds-and-ends collection, these dozen tour-rehearsal recordings plus one Shot of Love outtake find Dylan revisiting songs from his own catalogue and debuting the impressive forbidden-love original “Let’s Keep It Between Us” while trying on traditional numbers and other people’s hits for size.
Some fit better than others. “To Ramona” blooms in a full-band context, “Mary of the Wild Moor” would’ve been at home on Good As I Been to You, and “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well” throws elbows. The songs originally made famous by Neil Diamond, Dion, Dave Mason, Little Willie John, and Michael Johnson, however, don’t fit at all.
The highlight of Disc Two’s Shot of Love outtakes isn’t an outtake at all but an alternate mix of “Lenny Bruce,” raising the question of why more such mixes, which have long been known to exist, weren’t included. (Maybe Sony’s saving them for a copyright-extending 50th-anniversary Shot of Love bundle in 2031.)
Also not bad: the “Willie and the Hand Jive” re-write “Price of Love,” the “Heart of Mine” B-side “Let It Be Me,” “Don’t Ever Take Yourself Away,” “Borrowed Time,” and “Is It Worth It?” (which probably got axed because of its resemblance to “Dead Man, Dead Man”—and because Dylan cracks up mid-song).
The pickings get slimmer on the last three discs as most of what they contain ended up on 1983’s Infidels and 1985’s Empire Burlesque with less arbitrary (that word again) lyrics, better production, or both. Even the Shadows in the Night-anticipating cover of Frank Sinatra’s’ “This Was My Love” suffers from Dylan’s not yet having learned to sing such material with the necessary sensitivity.
In fact, knowing how to sing even his own material had by 1985 become an issue. Four years shy of the evocative lower register that he’d unveil on Oh Mercy, he often defaulted to the kind of braying that ruins both Disc Five takes of “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky.”
But sometimes he made the braying work. (See “Straight A’s in Love.”) And sometimes he reined it in. On both the alternate “Blind Willie McTell” and the full-length “Death Is Not the End,” his voice and harmonica generate a calm in the face of doom that truly passes understanding.
Tuesday, March 2, 2021
Nick Lowe SXSW Interview, Pt. V (March 21, 1998)
I wanted to ask you about the album Nick Lowe and His Cowboy Outfit.
Oh, yeah. I love that album. Yeah, that wasn't a bad one. What was on that?
It had "Half a Boy and Half a Man."
Yeah.
"Maureen."
Oh, yeah.
And a quite incongruous song--but one of my favorites nevertheless--"L.A.F.S."
Oh, yeah (laughs).
That album got me back into you. Then, I was living in Seattle in '85, where KJET-AM had your redone "I Knew the Bride" in heavy rotation, further reigniting my interest in your music, which I'd lost track of from about 1980 to 1984. Did you ever do a video for that?
Yeah, we did. We did do a video for it, actually, and quite a sort of fancy video--in England, yeah. I never saw it. I think it was sort of in between two stools then because--it was too sort of--it was too old fashioned for MTV, and I'm not sure whether VH-1 had started then. So it never really got much play as I remember. It was quite a good video, quite a good one.
Back to "All Men Are Liars," I've often wondered what you think now about the Rick Astley verse.
I've felt very sorry about that. I really do. I really do regret saying that. At the time, I thought that [the Rick Astley song] was so awful. I just hated the sentiment of the thing. I know it's--I mean, maybe I was a little oversensitive, because you hear awful music all the time--"I'm never going to do anything horrible to you." I thought, "What? Can anybody sawllow this, that I'm never gonna do anything--?" Sorry, that was a lie. So, then, I thought, because it was a big hit at the time and it seemed as if Rick was on his way--he was gonna be churning this stuff out. But I regret it because I've since found out that, one, he's a very nice man--I've never met him, but they tell me he's an extremely nice man--and the other thing is that he's down on his luck a bit now. So I do feel rather bad about it because at the time I wrote it, he was huge and about to do more of it, so I thought he was a legitimate target.
Do you regret that in 1998 people may not follow the reference?
Oh, no. No, I'm kind of glad that they won't follow the reference actually. And that does happen more and more. I blithely make references about bands and artists from my generations to--I mean, obviously, you're younger than I am, but to some journalists I make these remarks, and I see their faces go creepy blank. You realize, "You've gotta get your references a little more up to date, my friend!" That's the way it goes.
What did you think of the John Hiatt song on Little Village, "Don't Think About Her When You're Trying to Drive"?
Oh, I thought that was a really good one. I like it quite a bit. Yeah, that's a really good one. And it was a funny thing, that, because--that Little Village thing--because when we did John Hiatt's record, obviously it was John Hiatt's record. He was in charge, he had the songs, and we were there to back him up. When you take away the front person and you have four people in there trying to create something, people are very reluctant to step forward somehow. If it's somebody's actual record, then obviously they are questioned and asked, "How do you want this? How do we play this?" You know. But when it's four individuals, all rather edgy about it, you come up with a kind of compromise. So John got, I think rather unfairly, got castigated for that thing because he sang so many of the tunes on it that people thought he was stepping forward and hogging the limelight, whereas in actual fact he was doing us all a favor by coming forward and saying, "Well, I'll do it. I'll jump in there." So it was unfair, that, I think.
You mentioned the way that old pop songs, like Cole Porter's, contained many subtle and sophisticated references. I wondered if when you wrote "Cruel to Be Kind" you were conscious of the phrase's Shakespearean roots.
No, I didn't know that it was a Shakespearean quote until people started saying to me, "Oh, what a brilliant thing you made up! 'You've gotta be cruel to be kind'!" And I started to say that it's a very well-known expression. Where I come from, people say it all the time, "You've gotta be cruel to be kind."
You didn't know it originated in Shakespeare?
I didn't know it was a Shakespearean quote. It was then that somebody said, "Well, it's actually from--" Whatever it is.
Hamlet.
Is it from Hamlet?
"I must be cruel only to be kind."
Brilliant. That sounds so much better though, doesn't it" (laughs)?
Thursday, June 25, 2020
ARCHERS OF LOAF: TOLSTOY'S LAST STAND
Originally published in B-Side (April/May 1994)
During my years of writing for B-Side magazine, the editors imposed several silly style rules. One was to refer to musicians by their first names. (Had they interviewed Dylan, they’d have written, “Bob bristles when asked for the millionth time to explain ‘Desolation Row’”). Another was never to write “said” or “says” in a direct-quotation tag, even though writing anything else usually causes readers to pay undue attention to the verbs.
During my years of writing for B-Side magazine, the editors imposed several silly style rules. One was to refer to musicians by their first names. (Had they interviewed Dylan, they’d have written, “Bob bristles when asked for the millionth time to explain ‘Desolation Row’”). Another was never to write “said” or “says” in a direct-quotation tag, even though writing anything else usually causes readers to pay undue attention to the verbs.
As originally published, the piece that follows adhered to those two rules. As slightly edited below, I’ve amended most of the quotation tags. I have not, however, changed the first-names approach because, oddly enough, it seems to work in this context. At any rate, I hope you enjoy what you’re about to read.
* * * * *
Those who track the movements of alternative music’s restless muse tell us that Chapel Hill, North Carolina, qualifies as one of several college towns in contention for the title of the “next Seattle” (a title formerly known as the “next Minneapolis” and the “next Athens”). These muse trackers cite as prime evidence Icky Mettle, the Alias Records debut of the sub-poppier-than-thou Chapel Hill racket makers Archers of Loaf, three of whom inaugurated their Christmas season by phoning this magazine from their manager’s house for a short winter’s chat and, simultaneously, watching Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer.
“Oh! Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer with Burl Ives is comin’ on!” exclaims Matt Gentling, the band’s bassist, in the middle of his fellow Archer Eric Johnson’s explanation of how he makes his guitar sound like an air-raid siren on the song “Hate Paste.”
“That’s that little noise thing that Eric made,” observes the drummer, Mark Price.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” says Eric. “It’s a delay peddle—”
“The claymation bit!” Matt interrupts.
“He wants to know about my brilliance, guys!” Eric objects.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” says Matt.
“O.K. What I do,” says Eric, “for the kids out there—”
“I want to be a dentist!” Matt interrupts again, mimicking the misfit elf on TV.
“—who reads this can take my advice ’cause I’m a guitar—”
“Wizard,” says Matt.
“—connoisseur,” says Eric.
“What were you saying about the drummer?” says Mark.
Matt cracks up. Eric tries again.
“What I was sayin’ is—”
“Shut up!” shouts Mark.
Matt cracks up again.
You get the idea. One would hardly mistake an interview with the Loaf for an episode of Firing Line. “We might as well go ahead and warn you that we always confuse interviewers,” says Eric (whom we shall henceforth refer to as “Eric J.” to avoid confusing him with the band’s lead-singing lyricist, Eric Bachmann). “We’re very sarcastic. Beware.”
Back to the air-raid-siren guitar sounds on “Hate Paste.”
“O.K.,” resumes Eric. “What you do is you take the delay time and turn it all the way down, and then you take the repetition and turn it all the way up.”
“Then you get a dual motor crossover,” adds Mark.
“What you get is a sub-divided matrix,” adds Matt.
“What happens,” says Eric J., “is it’s impossible to have no delay time in a repeat. So the peddle just starts, like, makin’ all this noise, and if you have a fresh battery in there—”
“It’ll cook,” says Matt.
“—it’ll start screamin’, and boy does that get me off!”
Matt cracks up again.
“Print that,” says Matt. “That’s a good quote.”
One should not assume from such banter that “Hate Paste” is the only Icky Mettle track to feature skronky guitar sounds. Indeed, all thirteen songs—from the catchy, previously-available-as-45s “Web in Front” and “Wrong” to the downright entropic “Fat” and “Backwash”—bulge with the shrieks of tortured amps. But just as essential are Eric Bachmann’s weird lyrics and the plaintively hoarse way that he shouts them in a sometimes vain attempt to be heard over the aforementioned guitars. It was, in fact, the coming together of the two Erics in late ’91 that launched the entire Loaf concept, giving the quartet’s on-again, off-again involvement in various combos going back to high school a splattery, post-punk shape.
Eric B.’s absence on this night precluded questions about what he means when he sings lines such as “All I ever wanted was to be your spine.” But Matt, Mark, and Eric J. have plenty to say about their frontman nevertheless, starting with the “intellectual” look lent him by his wire-rimmed glasses.
“It’s his Russian-novel reading,” says Matt.
“He’s really into reading Russian novels,” says Eric J.
“He has a big tattoo on his butt that says ‘Pain,’” says Mark.
“Yeah, exactly,” says Matt, “because that’s—”
“That’s what it’s all about,” says Mark.
The trio’s discussion then moves on to the topic of Eric B.’s lyrics, lyrics that, although Matt, Mark, and Eric J. did not feel at liberty to discuss them, they discussed anyway.
“Um, I mean, we hate them,” says Matt, “and you can tell him that.”
“We try to keep them all the way down in the mix,” says Mark.
“We’re looking for a new frontman,” says Matt, “so if you have any suggestions—”
How about Randy Bachman?
“From Bachman-Turner Overdrive? He’d be a frontman-and-a-half. You don’t happen to know his number, do you?”
Icky Mettle hit the stands on September 13, approximately six months after Archers of Loaf signed to Alias Records. The Alias A&R man John Wells heard the band’s first single, “Wrong” b/w “South Carolina” on the Stay Free label, and came to see the Archers play. Before long, they’d joined the Alias roster. And although it was recorded in March 1993, Icky Mettle still represents, according to Eric J. and Matt, what the band does onstage.
“We’ve evolved,” says Eric J., “but not very far.”
“We’ve evolved from one side to the other,” laughs Matt, “not necessarily up or down.”
“I think we’ve gotten better.”
“Like, we’ve gotten a million times better, I think. But as far as the songs that we’re recording now, it’s weird. We have a couple of singles about to come out, and those are a pretty even mix of brand-new songs and really old songs.”
Broaching the subject of Eric B.’s lyrics again, Matt manages an at least half-serious appraisal.
“I like his lyrics because they’re pretty open to interpretation. Usually, they mean something personal to him, but you can’t get too specific about them because they weren’t intended that way, I don’t think, unless maybe for his own use.
“‘Web in Front,’ however,” he says on second thought, “does refer to an obscure Russian novel.”
The other news about the Archers has to do with the seven-week tour that they completed just after Thanksgiving. It amounted to their most extensive jaunt ever. And while it provided plenty of thrills, it also provided monotony and exhaustion.
“The first two weeks felt like four weeks,” says Eric J., “and then the third week felt like a week-and-a-half. And then the fifth week felt like just a week. The seventh week felt like three weeks.”
“So in total,” Matt calculates, “it felt as if we were gone six months.”
And for those who still need a reason to trudge out and see the Loaf when they next hit the road in the spring, the following observation might serve as the ultimate motivator: They sound a lot like the Replacements probably did between Hootenanny and Let It Be.
“When I went to high school, they were like my personal messiahs,” Matt recalls. “I worshiped them. They’re like a significant portion of my life. Yeah, that’s cool as hell, man. I don’t mind being linked with them at all.”
Nor should those interested in the sound of the next Seattle mind being linked with Archers of Loaf, whether by concert ticket, CD player, or a love for Rudolph.
Tuesday, June 23, 2020
Monday, June 22, 2020
Friday, October 18, 2019
Tuesday, January 1, 2019
NINE UNPUBLISHED REVIEWS (OF MINE) FROM 2018
For one reason or another, the following 2018 reviews that I wrote for WORLD went unpublished. I present them here for your delectation.
43RD & EXCELLENCE
Aceyalone & DJ Fat Jack
“I’m old skool, so what?” announces Aceyalone at the outset, and he’s serious. There isn’t one of these 16 tracks that he couldn’t rap uncensored on network TV, and the music—yes, music—flows as smoothly as he does. How smoothly? “You do it, and you don’t think about it,” says a jazz interviewer in the context of discussing Coltrane (“Doing or Judging”). How old skool? Both “Saturday night, my name on the poster” and “Sunday morning, crab cakes, Mimosas” rhyme with “Love in my holster” (“Bang Bang”).
WILD MUSTANG SUITE
Charles Denler
The title of the second movement of this album’s title suite, “All Creation Breathes,” provides an apt metaphor for Denler’s expansive, windswept piano-and-orchestra music. Uncluttered enough to qualify as New Age but detailed enough to evoke the undomesticated grace of its equine subjects, it serves as a conduit for breath-like melodies that stop short of over-romanticizing by not lasting long enough to “over” anything. The average length of the 13 pieces: two minutes. The exception: an opening fanfare of which Elmer Bernstein would approve.
THE CHRISTMAS REVELS
The season’s most earthily festive offering comes courtesy of musicians billing themselves “San Francisco’s ambassadors of gypsy rock,” although they’re more “gypsy” than “rock,” what with fiddles, rudimentary percussion, the Hanukah tango “Ocho Kandelikas,” the alms-giving round “Christmas Is Coming,” and a lustily sung “Lord of the Dance” making mincemeat of commonplace decorum. Only “Sleigh Ride” and “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas” fail the revel test. Everything else—the carols, “Auld Lang Syne,” and John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas” included—feels freshly and vigorously hewn.
UN NIÑO NOS ES NAÇIDO
FOLKJUL II: A SWEDISH FOLK CHRISTMAS
Diego’s Umbrella & Friends
Joel Frederiksen, Ensemble Phoenix Munich
The 19 selections by at least 16 composers (the Anonymouses and questions regarding who composed the infectious “Ríu Ríu Chíu" complicate the math) flesh out the subtitle: “Christmas Music of Spain and Latin America from the 16th and 17th centuries.” The four-part singing, like the period-faithful instrumentation and the texts, is reverently solemn but not severely so—“Dadme albricias” practically gambols. For that matter,
portions of Bartomeu Càrceres’s 10-song medley “La Trulla” (which combines Christological precision with, believe it or not, bunion humor) do too.
Gunnar Idenstam, Ulrika Boden, Sandra Marteleur, S:t Jacobs Kammarkör
The metaphysically suggestive sonorities of nine of these 17 selections arise from the 28 dynamics-spanning voices of Stockholm’s S:t Jacobs Kammarkör and Gunnar Idenstam’s rumbling Allen Q350 digital organ. The metaphysicality of the changes of pace, whether sprightly or hushed, owes a good deal to the lithe expressiveness of Ulrika Boden’s voice and Sandra Marteleur’s violin. “In dulci jubilo” provides the melody most likely to be recognized by non-Swedes. The full-ensemble rendering of Martin Luther’s “Från himlens höjd” will leave even the garrulous speechless.
SOUL FLOWERS OF TITAN
Barrence Whitfield & the Savages
Peter Greenberg (guitar) and Phil Lenker (bass) continue to supply most of the originals. Together or apart, they account for one third of these raucous, headlong plunges into the heart and soul of rock and roll. Whitfield, meanwhile, remains more than happy to shout his way to their core and out again. That’s “out,” incidentally, as in “far out” if one is to take Greenberg/Lenker’s “Let’s Go to Mars” literally. Of the covers, the Willie Wright beats the Hank Ballard, and the Finley Brown beats them both.
SILENT NIGHT: EARLY CHRISTMAS MUSIC AND CAROLS
Hirundo Maris is an early-music/folk-music ensemble co led by Savall and Johansen, who get top billing because, in addition to playing harps (Savall) and the Hardanger fiddle and mandolin (Johansen), they do the singing (in multiple languages, no less). But while the purity of their voices makes an ideal vessel for lyrics celebrating the virgin birth of Christ, what most evokes the unigue mystery of the event is the sounds of their bandmates’ citterns, flutes, whistles, border pipes, mute cornetts, dobros, bells, claves, and ayoyotes.
Arianna Savall & Petter Udland Johansen, Hirundo Maris
ENCORE
Andrew W.K. is a one-man power-of-positive-thinking movement, accessorizing his power-metal career with motivational speaking and an advice column. But despite the simplicity of his message, it could use a glossary. By “party,” for instance, he means “Celebrate life.” By “devil,” he means anything negative that makes people stronger because it hasn’t killed them. “After all,” he says in one of the spoken interludes on his new album, You’re Not Alone (Sony), “these ups and downs aren’t here to hurt us. They’re here to thrill us, to make the rollercoaster ride of life even more interesting and spectacular.”
Deep? No, and utterly without grounding in any philosophical or theological framework as far as W.K. takes it. The thing is, he admits as much, even titling one new song “I Don’t Know Anything.” It’s this open-hearted simplicity that makes one want to root for him—and his music an ideal soundtrack for doing so.
ENCORE
Between the extremes of Mariolatry on the one hand and, for lack of a better term, “Mariphopbia” on the other is the honor due Mary by followers of her Son who would perfect their imitation of Him in all things, including His observance of the Fifth (in some traditions the Fourth) Commandment. It is in this spirit that many of the “Ave Maria”s, “Salve Regina”s, “Regina Coeli”s, and “Stabat Maters” were composed, and it’s that spirit that those compositions can fortify.
Available as 54 tracks on four CDs or as 61 downloadable mp3s, Warner Classics’ Radio Classique: Ave Maria—Les Plus Beaux Chants Sacres compiles performances circa 1961-2014 of works spanning every century from the 14th (the Llibre Vermell de Montserrat) to the 20th (Natalie Dessay singing Philippe Rombi, various choirs singing Rachmaninoff, Poulenc, Jolivet, and Davies). Over half of the texts derive from Luke 2:28 and 1:42. They’ve seldom sounded so rich for so long.
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