Entries Tagged 'Music' ↓

I don’t know if Jim White has seen the devil (if you read the story included in his Wrong-Eyed Jesus liner notes he’s at least met someone pretty close) but he seems to write from the vantage of an existential crossroads. A place, in his world, where the path to righteousness and the folly of man converge. Jim’s gothic americana weaves rustic country, swampy blues and revved-up gospel into a plaintive and strange, honest and entrancing songwriting that gets better with each album.

Preview his new record (co-produced with Joe Pernice) at Luaka Bop, buy it, and then most certainly if you have the chance, go see him live. If nothing else, you’ll go home with an earful full of stories.

Melting ice caps, violent international conflicts, Hummers outside my window, oil slicks in the bay - the picture of 2007 as I look back was of a dissonant world. The records that fought their way to the fore sounded like allegories for this dystopian vision. Noisy, messy, strange but headspinningly beautiful. Interestingly, each of these highlighted albums feature Track 1’s that immediately enchant, bombard, envelop, and slay. Despite civilization’s blind march towards annihilation there was, for me, plenty of great music to celebrate. Here’s the best of it.

Radiohead In Rainbows
A wistful and spare (by their standards) record with a scrupulous, dynamic songcraft that soars above the one-trick pony newer, fitter, happier bands so overhyped today. Obliterates the stale taste left by Hail To The Thief while rubbing shoulders with the best of their catalog.

Panda Bear Person Pitch
Sonorous solo effort from Animal Collective member. Imagine Brian Wilson, post-”Surf’s Up”, battling depression and calming his nerves in a sensory deprivation tank, while chanting hymns over ethereal lo-fi Pet Sounds outtakes.

New Pornographers Challengers
A more reflective turn for one of our brightest pop confectioners. Carl’s melodies shine, as always, but instead of manic guitar and drums, many songs are constructed from evocative colors of banjo, mandolin, flute and strings, and sweetly weaving vocal harmonies.

Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Britt Daniel’s songwriting swaggers, while Jim Eno’s lean production and a flawless sequence of songs show why Spoon are auteurs in the art of the 30 minute pop record. Studio banter, guitar clicks, and palpable shifts of console faders are mixed in like clues to the craft of record-making. “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” with its literal echoes of Smokey Robinson and the Supremes, is nonetheless painted as only Spoon can and, like the rest of the album, is so good it’ll have you ga-ga-ga-ing like a blissed-out little babe.

Antibalas Security
Security blazes out of the speakers from the start with taut politically-charged afrobeat inspired by Fela Kuti. Killer stuff, but the latter half of the set still smolders with nuances of dub, electronica and Ethiopiques-jazz in a wide-spectrum sound (with John McEntire at the controls).

Caribou andorra
While I’m taken aback by the audacity of this one man chameleon, andorra hooked me from the first listen. Sounds as if the Nuggets box set exploded and Dan Snaith picked up the pieces along with other scraps of psychedelia, krautrock, and electropop.

Animal Collective Strawberry Jam
Animal Collective’s experimental tendencies may simply be born out of fearlessness. Strawberry Jam charts a new course from the skewed dream-pop of Feels into a range of compositions careening from psychedelic cartoon rave-ups to underwater carousel music to trance. Listen with intrepid ears and you’ll be richly rewarded.

Feist The Reminder
Loved her last record, but I wasn’t prepared for the kind of leap in songwriting or sheer imagination on this one (let alone the response to it). Leslie Feist’s singularly aching, mellifluous vocals still beguile, but this set of songs bear the elegance of Joni Mitchell with a smokey, earthy soul. Destined to be a classic.

Arcade Fire Neon Bible
The shift from 2005’s Funeral to Neon Bible is like the shift to color in the Wizard of Oz. Recorded in a church and featuring a gothic orchestration, this a cinematic album of technicolor sounds and dark imagery that is altogether fantastical, dreamy, and frightening. Win’s dour lyrics touch on crime, war, terrorism, christianity, and celebrity, including this refrain which could be my mantra for the last few years: “I don’t want to live in America no more…I don’t want to see it at my windowsill.”

Dirty Projectors Rise Above
Apparently re-imagined from memory, Rise Above completely re-contextualizes Black Flag’s Damaged as an art pop monster. David Longstreth sings soulful, throaty melismas over slippery west african guitar figures while the backup singer-sirens voices twine and enchant. With a nod to their forebear, the songs may suddenly devolve into crashing drums, delicious cacophony or Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. So punk rock.

And one more caught in between last year and this year

Peter Bjorn & John Writer’s Block
I didn’t have the actual release last year, but the domestic release seems old by now. No matter, it still charms my pants off (that’s a good thing). Perfectly demonstrating the Swedish penchant for pastiche, this is Everly Brothers Spector-ian folk shoegaze pop at its best and will have you whistling for days.

More Great Records From The Year

• The National Boxer
• Of Montreal Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
• Deerhunter Cryptograms
• Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings 100 Days, 100 Nights
  Sharon Jones can bust a groove in funk, soul, R&B, you name it
• Thurston Moore Trees Outside The Academy
• Deerhoof Friend Opportunity
• White Stripes Icky Thump
• Sea and Cake Everything
• Explosions in the Sky All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone
• Elliott Smith New Moon
• Joan As Police Woman Real Life
  
• Clientele God Save the Clientele
  
• Gruff Rhys Candylion
• Betty Davis s/t
  stanky!
• Nick Lowe At My Age

Half-hearted

• Wilco
• Beirut
• Band of Horses
• Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Where You Been All My Life (older stuff i got into this year)

• The Fugs
• Loudon Wainwright
• Harry Nilsson
• Fela Kuti
• Lee Hazlewood
• Luiz Bonfa
• Richard Hell & The Voidoids
• The Small Faces
• Traffic

By now the haunting and touching Annie Leibowitz photographs that formed John’s last photo shoot are very familiar to most. Less familiar to me was this set by Allen Tannenbaum.

I can’t really describe what it is about Tannenbaum’s photos but they have this color austerity that I find so perfectly redolent of films and photography of the early 1980’s. Films like After Hours and One From The Heart. In contrast to the striking Leibowitz image there’s a levity at work in these, yet there’s the same naked honesty, the same intimacy.

The parallel statements between the visual language in these photographs and the music John and Yoko had just finished on Double Fantasy is unmistakable. I look at them and find myself daydreaming about the person John might be if he were alive today; how he and Yoko would be ambassadors of a provocative and honest marriage of love and art. It’s inspiring.

Japancakes are an instrumental collective from Athens, Ga who made one of my favorite sleepy autumn records, a blissed-out chamber music meets Austin drone-pop affair with fluttering strings, flute and pedal steel. On their new record, out today, Japancakes cover the Cocteau Twins’ “Heaven or Las Vegas”, but what really blows my mind is learning that they’re going to release a cover of one of my favorite all-time records, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, come November.
The last time I was this blown out was when Petra covered Pete.

But these yammerin internets carry wind of another Athens native, Vic Chesnut, and another exciting musical collaboration. Vic headed up to Montreal (which I believe is Quebecian for “rock and roll hotbed“) and recorded an album with Guy Picciotto of Fugazi and members of Silver Mt Zion and Godspeed You Black Emperor. Now, I’m a big fan of these modern-day Fishtank-type collaborations: Low and the Dirty Three, Calexico and Iron & Wine, Tortoise and Will Oldham, etc. But I never would have anticipated a meeting like this and I can’t wait to hear the whole thing. A tour would be even wilder.

Street entertainment is part of what makes cities so fantastic to live in, to visit, to participate in. I remember back-flips on the subway in Manhattan, puppet shows in Paris; I distinctly recall the weird carnivalesque atmosphere of the Wharf, as a kid, walking by motionless figures on pedestals who were activated into motion by the drop of a coin into their can. Sure, a small town is apt to have its own brand of eccentric or two. And lord yes, there are those half-baked performances that just beg for a streetside gong. But I really love the unexpected serenades which play against the theater of the city street.

Arias on Maiden Lane. That killer jazz trio I caught outside Amoeba in Berkeley, banging out hard bop with a cardboard box kick drum and a broken hi-hat. Or fright-mystic raconteur Omer, stepping out of a doorway on Valencia St to scare rock the shit out of you.

One of my favorite buskers is a guy who seems to go by “T” or “Charles T”. I usually see him at the northernmost end of the Powell St station. His presence is striking: dark skin, white guitar, playing against the monolithic white pebbled surface of the station walls. It’s a bit like walking onto the set of THX 1138 and seeing Jesus. I say this because the man’s voice is a revelation. You can hear him long before and long after you see him playing. He has made this hall his studio and wrapped the corners of it with his voice. Where the plaintive soul of Al Green meets a meditative but slow-burning african guitar strum, T sings originals that will sincerely stop you in your tracks. That’s what his music always does to me.

I know there are far more troubling things to occupy my mind than bad music, but damn it if it doesn’t make me feel crestfallen to find a good band fall flat.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were uninspiring if not somnambulant live, but I loved their debut record. Their recent sophomore release, Some Loud Thunder, is to my ears virtually unlistenable. Any decent song or melody is obscured by muddy, over-modulated production. A thumb in yer eye, or ear, as it were. That Dave Friedmann, who has helmed some of my favorite records, sat in as producer on this is perplexing.

This Saturday I caught Brightblack Morning Light at the Great American. The floor was half-filled with kids sitting around like it was a knit-in. When the band came on, some of those in the crowd implored others to sit, but I don’t know how that would have helped. I wasn’t expecting anything mind-blowing - somehow I thought the molasses-groove southern soul would entrance instead of embalm. But the guitarist could hardly open his eyes to find the strings, so it was a lost cause.

Lastly, Wilco, a band that as the years go by I respect more than appreciate their music, offered a streaming online preview of their upcoming album (out May 15) over the weekend. A kindly gesture to those of us who as they said, “remember when they used to do that on the radio.” Very cool. I only went through it once and the first half sounded pleasant enough, but soon the songs devolved into the guitar and piano honky-skronk of A Ghost Is Born and then it was only a matter of time until the harmonizing guitar leads kicked in. And then what do you have?! Fucking prog. The only thing worse than prog is hearing it the second time around. Jeff, I’m glad you’re making music, but I liked it better when you were writing the bridge between Gram Parsons and ELO.

Thank Elvis, then, when a record comes out that reminds you why you’re even bothering with all this anyway. Arcade Fire released Neon Bible today and thanks to Merge, I’ve been enjoying the deluxe CD set all weekend. It may not have the immediate and incendiary power of Funeral but it’s a moving record that resonates more with each listen.

Band of Horses Everything All The Time
With ringing guitars and pedal steel, this impeccable debut builds upon the Northwest sound of bands like the Shins and Built To Spill, while borrowing a little twang and a heaping measure of reverb from My Morning Jacket. A record that you can flip from side to side over and over again.

Beirut Gulag Orkestar
Like picking up a balkan republic radio feed from past and present, simultaneously mixing traditional folk music, marching anthems, and casio arpeggios. Elegiac vocals slide over accordion, horns, ukulele, and shuffling percussion. This is the album most unlike anything else in your collection.

Camera Obscura Let’s Get Out Of This Country
Referencing polished songwriters like Lloyd Cole and Dory Previn, Let’s Get Out Of This Country shows a band flourishing from the folk-pop Belle & Sebastian homage of their last effort to an uptempo pop and white soul outfit. Their sound is rounded out too with plenty of strings, organ, and horns that never obscure the sweet and pretty songs.

Cat Power The Greatest
Out of all these albums I will probably still be listening to this in 50 years. Chan’s songwriting is elevated to a whole other plane here, channeling heartache and longing over Stax grooves and Steve Cropper riffs. She’s looking from the bottom of an empty bottle and singing like a darker, more bittersweet Dusty in Memphis but every bit as touching.

TV On The Radio Return To Cookie Mountain
Possibly beamed in from the same planet as Sun Ra though featuring a double-headed Peter Gabriel thrashing behind a fifty-foot drum kit and armed with guitars set for stun. A rock and roll monster both beautiful and frightening.

Joanna Newsom - Ys
Though we grew up in the same small town, there’s no bias here. Ys (’Yeez’) is a five song suite of inimitable craft that captivated me more with every listen. Collaborating with Van Dyke Parks to weave a rich string orchestration lithely around her beguiling pixie voice and harp, Newsom also utilizes the talents of Jim O’Rourke and Steve Albini to push her sound far beyond the whisper of The Milk-Eyed Mender.

Neko Case Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
Less the fox confessor than the mystical harpy, Neko’s swooping down to spook you with eerie laments that rip the flesh from your neck. On this album she’s inventing her own idiom, moving away from anything countrypolitan and into the dark Appalachian forests.

Nicolai Dunger Here’s My Song…
Seemed to fall under the radar of most everyone, this american release features Mercury Rev using every inch of the studio to support Dunger’s lovelorn, plaintive odes concerning ‘how we live this life of love and hurt’. Feels like a great 60’s singer-songwriter confessional album, but sounds timeless.

Sonic Youth Rather Ripped
Rather Ripped burns with the focused energy and supple melodicism of classic Wire, yet is resolutely the work of the Youth. Inventive 3 minute pop songs, including the Keith Richards-meets-Tom Verlaine sendup on opener ‘Reena’, make this unlike any other SY album and a pleasure to listen to.

Yo La Tengo I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass
The perfect answer to the question left behind by their last middling effort. Rocking, fun, exploratory, and melancholy - in all the right ways. Yo La spin their way through all the aisles of a record shop past doo wop, memphis horns, crackling guitar squall, Bacharach and the Kinks to create their most entertaining record since I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One.

Almost but not quite:
Hot Chip - The Warning
Bouncy and fun without sounding artificial. ‘And I Was A Boy From School’ was one of my favorite songs from the year
Tortoise & Bonnie Prince Billy - The Brave & The Bold
Seriously cool collaboration yields unique interpretations of eclectic covers ranging from Devo’s ‘That’s Pep’ to Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’.
Bob Dylan - Modern Times
Possibly sacrilege not to put Bob up there. It’s great, but not mind-alteringly so.
Brightblack Morning Light - s/t
Intoxicating slow-burning organ and guitar grooves for the early morning comedown

also
Calexico - Hits and misses while stretching out with a more straight-ahead sound
Concretes
Grandaddy - Their last, sadly. Grew on me.
Grizzly Bear
Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint

Stalwarts who fumbled
from fair to fairly awful (I’m looking at you, Wayne)
Belle & Sebastian
Beck
Pernice Brothers
Mogwai
Sparklehorse
Walkmen
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Flaming Lips

And one from 2004 that I missed
Feist - Let It Die
Lovely, outstanding. There’s a demo version of ‘Mushaboom’ out there that I love even better than the album version.

When every stale celebrity and their hanger-on mother/sister record a collection of vapid holiday classics it’s easy to forget that there are actually real gems out there.