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Friday, September 29, 2006
Blood Meridian Is North of the Border, With A Low Body Count
What is it about these hip Vancouver bands that have the same propensity for inbreeding as hillbillies in Kentucky? It's not enough that the New Pornographers are a supergroup with multiple combos spiraling off into popspace, now we have Black Mountain bedding down with the Pink Mountaintops and getting belligerent and organized as the Black Mountain Army, of which Blood Meridian is spawn.
Matthew Camirand, who does the singing, and Josh Wells, who plays the drums, perform like feats in both Black Mountain and the Pink Mountaintops, but this is way different, especially on the lovely new album "Kick Up The Dust." Where Black Mountain swings from early Pere Ubu to the Seconal throb of Black Sabbath, and the Pink Mountaintops have the druggy charm of some Pacific Northwest version of L.A.'s Warlocks, Blood Meridian walks the line of a band like Whiskeytown, which is high praise -- nearly the highest.
Maybe it makes sense that this level of inbreeding produces Blood Meridian, for in the Cormac McCarthy masterwork of the same name, doesn't he ascribe about half the violence in the Wild West to the Scots-Irish squabbles in Kentucky simply moving on down the road? "Kick Up The Dust" has a low body count, but is still R rated, with its folky blues and Farfisa conjuring bohemian city dwellers with about the same entertainment options as their inspirations in Appalachia. I mean, there's a reason for Hillbilly inbreeding: there's not a whole lot else to do.
So I was originally curious about the band because I really like Black Mountain and thought the Pink Mountaintops' "Axis of Evol" was as clever as the Sonic Youth-inspired title, and in Uncut last year, they did a feature on the band wherein they 'fessed up to Cormac McCarthy's role as a catalyst. I thought their first album was too quiet, but then I really liked their "Soldiers of Christ" E.P., and that song is reprised on "Kick Up the Dust." You've heard it, of course, though the last time you did it was Kurt Cobain covering the Meat Puppets on that glorious "Unplugged" album. I mentioned Whiskeytown, because they really do remind me of them -- the same harkening of fog just rising off North Carolina mountains, with the silence punctured by a Telecaster twang. You'll hear strains of Beck and Shira Blustein'skeyboards invoke the Velvet Underground, and this is all fine company to keep. You'll have to take my word for it, since the album's not yet in the iTunes store, and whatever you do, don't play it loud with kids in the car. But if you want to enlist in the Black Mountain Army, and if you want to hear this year's finest album in a dying genre of artisanal craft that we used to call alt.country, the evening redness in the west starts here.
johnbuckley100 at 11:23:01 AM EDT
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Thursday, September 7, 2006
Radio Birdman!
The great lost band of the punk era played D.C. last night. Radio Birdman is back, after near silence for 28 years. Yeah, so maybe they look a little grizzled -- who among us isn't -- but they played like the '70s were yesterday and there is no tomorrow.
Consider their arrival here in the fabled summer of '78. Seymour Stein brought the album "Radios Appear" ashore on Sire Records, showcasing an Aussie band that played faster than the Ramones, tougher than the Stooges, and with underlying pop hooks that made them worthy of mention in the same breath as The Clash. They also had this great surf music undertow, exploiting Waikiki kitsch with songs like "Aloha Steve and Danno," which reprised the "Hawaii 5-0" theme. They had a great back story -- school kids in Australia can recite the tale of how Deniz Tek made his way from Detroit to Melbourne, grafting the guitar sounds of the Stooges and MC5 onto the nascent loudfastrules sensibility of his fellow Birdmen. "Radios Appear" had about 10 songs that sounded like hits on it, they did a spectacular cover of the 13th Floor Elevators' "You're Gonna Miss Me," and like the New York Dolls on their "Too Much Too Soon" tour, they had this sort of proto-political iconography -- a slightly tilted UFO logo that would today be at home in Darma Project refuse left on that island in "Lost."
And then they disappeared. Without playing a single gig in the States.
By the time that record hit our shores, the band had broken up.
But now they're back, and man, they still play faster than the Ramones. "Zeno Beach," released last month, sounds like a completely worthy successor to "Radios Appear" and is way better than their stillborn second album, "Living Eyes." So many reunion albums are leaden, or simply efforts to cash in. But "Zeno Beach" rocks like these guys are still in their twenties. They have a young new rhythm section, but the core of the band -- Deniz Tek, vocalist Rob Younger, rhythm guitarist Chris Masuak, and keyboard player Pip Hoyle -- play like they've been preserved in aspic, without any resemblance to dinosaurs.
Last night at the Black Cat, they started with "Burn My Eye," and "Do The Pop," and rather than having slowed down, they played them faster than a steroid-injected sprinter, tighter than a welded rivet. The uninitiated could not tell whether the superb new "Subterfuge" was of the same vintage as the ancient "Murder City Nights." They played the whole catalogue -- I mean everything old and everything new, which you can do, you know, when you play three-minute pop songs in two minutes flat. "The Man In The Golden Helmet" was a strange encore, and I wish they'd played "You're Gonna Miss Me," but it was nice to hear Rob Younger sing the Stooge's "Search and Destroy."
The back story on Deniz Tek is one of the great myths of rock. The guy went to Australia for med school and instead formed the greatest band in Australian rock. After becoming a doctor, he joined the US Navy as a flight surgeon, and his antics and flight handle -- Iceman -- became an inspiration for, yes, "Top Gun." And it's true that he is an emergency room doctor, part of the year, in Billings, Montana. But thank Heaven he has reformed Radio Birdman. These guys still have it. And their absence has been far too long.
If you're in a 100-mile zone of Manhattan, go see 'em at Irving Plaza tonight.
johnbuckley100 at 10:22:57 AM EDT
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Friday, June 30, 2006
Johnny Jenkins RIP
The AP reports this morning that Johnny Jenkins died yesterday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/30/arts/music/30jenkins.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
However, their reporting focuses on his discovery of Otis Redding and influence on Jimi Hendrix, and still leaves out his most important contribution as a musician -- one of the greatest R&B albums ever, "Ton Ton Macoute."
Now, discovering Otis is pretty important. But go search out "Ton Ton Macoute" -- named for the Haitian thugs who propped up the Duvaliar clan. Recorded in 1970, it blends members of the Allman Brothers Band with the great Muscle Shoals house band -- Spooner Oldhman, Roger Becket, Jimmy Johnson, et al. A year or two before, Dr. John had added voodoo kitsch to blues. But Johnny laid down tracks that were so profoundly fun in the way he wrapped Delta slide guitar (maybe Duane Allman's greatest recorded performance) around an earthier Southern ooze. Thirty-five years later, Oasis was sampling it just to prove they were hip enought to have heard it.
"Leaving Trunk," Muddy's "Rolling Stone," and "Bad News" are more conventional blues. But "Walk on Gilded Splinters" and "Blind Bats and Swamp Rats" still send a shiver coiling down the spine like a water moccasin.
Johnny's gone to meet his maker. Why don't you go to your music purveyor of choice and meet a guy whose greatest contribution wasn't even mentioned in his AP obit.
johnbuckley100 at 10:25:55 AM EDT
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Thursday, June 22, 2006
Luna's Greatest, Hits?
By the light of the silvery moon, beneath the headstone on which is carved, "Luna, 1992-2005, RIP," a hand emerges from the dirt with two, no three new offerings. There's a Luna compilation album, wisely, if inaccurately titled, "Best of Luna." There is a download-only compilation entitled "Lunafied," which wondrously collects in one place all of the songs by other artists that they covered over the years. And there's a new DVD called "Tell Me Do You Miss Me," which chronicles the final days of a great band that broke up just last year.
You couldn't call the best-of compilation a greatest hits album because, of course, Luna had no hits. That's the problem of being a critics' darling, a success on the club circuit, a brilliant band that married musicians from Galaxy 500, the Feelies, and the Chills, but with no clean commercial niche. You only get so far being described as the latest updating of the Velvet Underground and Television. And yet some of the problem was conceptual, and it's illustrated by the choice of songs on "Best of Luna."
Where are "Black Postcards," "The Alibi," "Freakin' and Peakin'?" Where are "We're Both Confused," or "Math Whiz?" Now, the easiest way to do a "Best of Luna" compilation would be to have just released "Penthouse," their iconic album from which four songs here are culled. But that would be lazy.
The real conceptual problem is illustrated by Dean Wareham's choice of "Moon Palace" to start the album. It's his favorite Luna song, which I suppose is his right to choose, since he, well, wrote the songs. But to lead with it gives you a sense of Luna as a fey, slightly precious band, and of course what was so great about them was the crunch of the guitars, the thrill of sonic pipe cleaners poking through neural pathways. At least it was for me. And for more than ten years, and approximately two shows per year, they were my favorite band.
"The Best of Luna" is a wonderful compilation, if you simply start it with "Friendly Advice," which is the fourth track. You can get to the first three tracks later, in good time. "Friendly Advice" had Sterling Morrison as a guest guitarist, and you know a band by the company it keeps. The other guest guitarist here is Tom Verlaine, who on "23Minutes In Brussels" plays the slowest guitar solo in the history of music. To have the guitarists from the VU and Television sit in, does kind of place them on the continuum. And yet to say that does so little justice to what a spectacular guitarist Dean Wareham is, what a pair of great drummers Stanley Demeski and Lee Wahl are. It so undercuts the delights of Sean Eden's second-lead guitar. It diminishes the accomplishments of, first, Justin Heyward and then Britta Phillips on bass.
The album "Lunafied" is a great delight, putting in place their covers of songs by the Talking Heads, Serge Gainsborough, the Dream Syndicate, Suicide, and the Velvets. Donovan's "Season of the Witch" was maybe the best thing about the movie "I Shot Andy Warhol." To hear Wire's "Outdoor Miner" after all these years is a hoot. If you are a Luna fan already, do not dawdle - go quickly to the iTunes Store and download "Lunafied."
And then there is the DVD, with footage from that final tour, the unwinding of a great band that played its last in snowy New York. If you were a Luna fan, you will love the DVD, and of course the song choice matches many of their true best songs that aren't on the compilation.
Luna waxed, and Luna waned. Thank your lucky stars they left us this moon dust. They will not soon be eclipsed.
johnbuckley100 at 1:43:08 PM EDT
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Monday, June 5, 2006
Thursday, May 25, 2006
The Band Currently Known As Irving Crashes The Party
I realize the Immigration Bill has passed the Senate. But how long must we citizens of the Elephant Six Collective put up with bands like Irving breaching our borders, releasing spectacular albums like "Death in the Garden, Blood in the Flowers," and thinking that just because, on any given song, they will do work that Beulah, Apples in Stereo, and Olivia Tremor Control refuse to do, we should just take it?
It's just plain wrong. The Elephant 6 Collective -- okay, so it's more than six bands right now, and OTC died a few years ago -- brought together a cheeky psychedelic pop sensibility with a hillbilly's penchant for breeding with first cousins. How precisely Elf Power relates to Neutral Milk Hotel is a mystery worthy of a far hipper Dan Brown. But there's no question that, when you hear one of the bands, you understand why they, and the others, are part of a "collective." Perhaps, or perhaps not, it all revolved around Robert Schneider, a chipper South African import -- an immigrant! -- who's the brains behind Apples In Stereo, the star of the Apples' video -- "Let's Go" -- that used to close episodes of The Powerpuff Girls -- which, come to think of it, was animated in Japan or South Korea or one of those countries that keep taking away the jobs of American baseball players -- and producer of that wonderful Beulah album, "When Your Heartstrings Break."
In fact, when I heard Irving on satellite radio, I thought, wow, the new Beulah album is out. But nope, even thought there's that kind of low-key, logical New Order-ish syncopation, they're a wholly different band. They're Olivia Tremor Control. No! They're the Apples. No! They're Irving! And they've illegally entered into sovereign Elephant Six land. Send 'em back!
So to confuse matters even more, they're touring with the Essex Green, who really are passport-carrying citizens of the Elephant Six Collective. Maybe the powers that be in Elephant Six World Headquarters ( http://www.elephant6.com/bands.html) could give them guest worker status, or something.
I love this record. I think "Situation" is one of the coolest songs I've heard this year. Like The Duke Spirit, this is a band with a bad name, but a great new album. "Irving" brings to mind Texas Stadium, a salesman in a polyester suit, or maybe a Neocon. Instead, these guys are a, well, cheeky psychedelic pop band from SoCal. Check out "Situation," or "Jen, Nothing Matters to Me." Do so quick, before they get busted and sent back to wherever it is they came from.
johnbuckley100 at 3:26:56 PM EDT
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Friday, May 5, 2006
The Alejandro Escoveda-John Cale Mashup
Alejandro Escovedo is a strange kind of perfectionist. When Lucinda Williams didn't like the vocals recorded for "Car Wheels On A Gravel Road," she spent, oh, five years in the studio re-recording them. Alejandro takes a different path: if he doesn't like the way a song turns out on one album, he just does it again on the next. Which is how we got a second version of "Guilty" on his album "Bourbonitis Blues," which blew away the version on "With These Hands."
On the just-released, John Cale-produced "The Boxing Mirror," we get new versions of three songs he's done before, and not all are better. Cale should have been Alejandro's ideal producer. After all, like Cale, he's capable of writing heartbreakingly beautiful ballads -- think "Buffalo Ballet" and "Pissed Off 3:00 A.M." as matched pairs. They both can play grungy, discordant rockers, so grimy you have to wash up afterwards. And Cale, like Alejandro, knows a thing or two about applying cellos not just to the pretty stuff, but to garage rock. Unfortunately, here he renders Alejandro and Chris Stamey's "One True Love," as a bland pudding (the Stamey version on the Alejandro tribute album "Por Vida" is best.) The one song Alejandro roused himself from his sickbed to record for "Por Vida" -- "Break This Time" -- still rocks nicely in its new take, but it loses that Tex-Mex spice, not to mention its "96 Tears" riff. For the first time, though, "Sacramento and Polk" sounds as good in recorded form as Alejandro and his "orchestra" play it on stage.
"The Boxing Mirror" should be a knockout moment for Alejandro. He's back, after a long fight with Hep C, following an even longer bout with the bottle -- a 15 rounder, apparently, though it was never apparent onstage. "Por Vida" nicely introduced him to a broader audience, and even if they only showed up to listen to Los Lonely Boys or Steve Earle sing Al's songs, the theory is they'd step up to buy this next one. For a while there, it was unclear whether there would be a next one, and thank Heaven he's recovered, in fine fettle, and back both performing and cutting disks.
"Have another drink on me/I've been empty since Arizona," starts things off with a reference to his collapse, three years back, following a show in Tucson. Here's where being a stranger in the strange land of sobriety is perfectly matched by Cale's spacy production. And we take off at a gallop with live-show staple "Dear Head on the Wall." Now, this is perfect, because the band, with its standard rock underpinnings to a cello section that gets down, is so recognizably the result of an Escovedo-Cale mashup. There are some really good softer moments, from the title track to "Notes on Air," which was written by Alejandro's new wife and his string section. Does this make it sound like the album doesn't rock? Oh, it does. And after a kitschy disco version of "Take Your Place," Alejandro mercifully does it again as a Stonesy rocker, saving us the wait til the next album, when he would have had to do it again.
He has a limited range as a singer, right, but he compensates by the emotional range of his songs, which runs as wide as the Rio Grande. Here, working with really Cale pays off. Cale's obviously one of the greatest singers in the history of rock, and the impact here is like having Albert Pujols coach a percentage hitter: the power goes way up.
I wish the record was stronger all the way through, because now is when one of America's unrecognized gems will have the brightest light shined on it, and it would be great if every facet sparkled. It doesn't, entirely. You wouldn't know from this alone that Alejandro gleams like something hidden in Harry Winston's vault.
But hey, Alejandro. One day at a time.
johnbuckley100 at 9:20:39 AM EDT
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Tuesday, May 2, 2006
Tom Verlaine's Fender Rebellion
Both of Tom Verlaine's new albums, the one he sings on and the one on which he lets his gi-tar do the talking, are vaguely identified in the liner notes as being produced "in and around New York" and "early in the new century."
Three fourths of the way through the last century, he shambled onstage with no such imprecision. Television recreated the interactions among two-guitar combos. How someone could simultaneously be so punk and still deliver long guitar solos is a paradox they're studying upstate at some dojo. The late Bob Quine could be both a perfect punk and a perfect punk rocker because the intensity of his solos played out in bursts of approximately 9 seconds. Verlaine, weirdly, has more in common with Jerry Garcia than Johnny Thunders. And of course he has nothing in common with Jerry Garcia. Another koan to ponder.
Hipsters in and around New York were incredulous when, early in the eighth decade of the last century, word spread that Warner Bros had let the recently solo-careering Verlaine spend upwards of $100k producing "Dreamtime," which may or may not be his greatest record. About the only element that overly-produced sledgehammer has in common with the delicate "Songs & Other Things" is Verlaine's multi-tracked and layered looping short bits of sound. He uses every club in the bag to escape all roughs and bunkers. Think of Jimi Hendrix in those final days, adding track after track to "First Rays of the New Rising Sun."
This is a decidedly low-budget affair. There's a fair amount of noodling, and it takes til the fifth song to get going. Ah, but a song like "From Her Fingers" packs the same kind of wallop as "Lindi-Lu" or "Breaking In My Heart." And you can hear him explore, over the course of 14 songs, everything from New Orleans syncopation to ragas. Did I say he has nothing in common with Jerry Garcia? Well, maybe. You'll boil it down to an essential eight songs or so. Eight songs! On an album today! That's value, man.
A long time ago, Verlaine visited my apartment to sit for an interview. I learned a lot that's not really available from the literature, as it were. He told me he had a twin brother who still lives in Delaware, or at least did then. And he told me that when he and Richard Hell founded Television, one of the things that drove them was a desire to bring Fenders back to primacy -- a rebellion against the clean sound of Gibson guitars. He thoroughly succeeded, with the twang of Fenders having powered back into vogue. In his fifties now, the sounds he produces are more delicate, and if you're not an aficionado -- oh yeah, he told me all about the flamenco guitarists and aficionados who sought them out -- then this isn't the place to start. Start at the beginning, and move forward. This isn't the end, but a most welcome return.
johnbuckley100 at 2:25:28 PM EDT
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Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Byron Coley, Richard Hell, and Thurston Moore Poetry Event
If you are a sentient being consuming oxygen somewhere in the the gravitational pull of Manhattan Island, how can you not attend the following event on May 3rd?:
Wednesday, 8:00pm
Ecstatic Peace Reading: Byron Coley, Richard
Hell, Jutta Koether & Thurston Moore (and
possibly a surprise reader or 2). Byron Coley
has been co-editor of Ecstatic Peace Poetry
Journal, is a renowned rock writer, and a
published poet. Richard Hell is a vanguard
poet and a songwriter/musician who made the
world exciting again. Jutta Koether is a
visual artist with work in the Whitney
Biennial 2006. Thurston Moore is the editor
of Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal and a member
of avant garde NYC rock 4tet Sonic Youth.
http://www.poetryproject.com
Housed in the landmark St. Mark's Church in
the center of New York City's East Village,
the Poetry Project offers three weekly
reading series, writing workshops, a
bimonthly Newsletter, an annual literary
magazine, The World, an Annual New Year's Day
Marathon Reading, tape and document archives,
and general support for poets. Founded in
1966, the Poetry Project is now one of the
premier forums for innovative poetry in the
United States. Here on our web site, you will
find our webzine Poets & Poems; The Tiny Press
Center, a resource center for small publishers
including essays by small publishers, contact
information, reviews, and more; excerpts from
our publications; membership information;
books and artwork for sale; links to other
poetry sites; and much more!
St. Mark's Church, 131 E. 10th St.,
New York, NY 10003
johnbuckley100 at 11:13:41 AM EDT
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Thursday, April 20, 2006
The Duke Spirit and Graham Coxon Albums Are Worth Your Hard-Earned Sheckels
This is a bad week to be a rock band called The Duke Spirit. Even in the best of time, it's a bad name for a great band, and these aren't the best of times to be associated with Duke's, um, spirit. Which is too bad, for the band that is, because their first album, "Cuts Across the Land," is spectacular, the best album I've heard this year, headed for the Tulip Frenzy Top 10 list, wondrous.
If I were the Pandora engine, after playing the title track, I'd be kicking up songs by PJ Harvey, X, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Velvet Underground, Mazzy Star. Almost everything is mid-tempo, and they're not exactly stand-up comics -- this is a serious band that lassoes your brain with pulsating bass lines and discordant sound shards, somehow conveying as much melody as texture. The two guitarists throw lightning bolts at each other, the singer sounds like she escaped from the Bush Tetras, and for the past month, every time I've turned my iPod on, I've been compelled to return.
Graham Coxon also has a fine new album out. Still only available as an import, "Love Travels At Illegal Speeds" is a half step down in pop craftsmanship from last year's Tulip Frenzy podium-placer "Happiness In Magazines." The same Johnny Ramone meets, well, Graham Coxon guitar buzz cuts through each song, but it takes a little while to get going.
Coxon is a talented boy, serving as his own backup band. Normally, these projects -- from John Fogerty to Prince -- founder on the inability of the polymath to play poly-rhythms. In other words, the drumming usually sucks. But damn if Blur's former guitarist and one of the two or three most influential musicians of the 1990s doesn't wallop a backbeat like he's Keith Moon or Paul Cook or something. If you're into straightahead second-generation punk, a nice combination of Blur and the Buzzcocks, this will get your heart beating faster than a beer bong of Red Bull.
And thus begins the countdown to next week's release of both of Tom Verlaine's first new albums in almost fifteen years...
johnbuckley100 at 11:54:15 AM EDT
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