Current Faves: The Clientele, Devon Sproule, Scissors for Lefty, The Traveling Wilbury’s
Some newly released (or about to be released) albums that have been floating my catamaran (perfect for summertime sailing): The Clientele – God Save the Clientele XTC. Crowded House. The Pernice Brothers. What that disparate group of musicians has in common is that they know how to write a perfect pop song. Add The Clientele to the list. 2005’s Strange Geometry was a classic of 3:00 a.m. mopery and regret, a pop symphony to lost love, complete with heavily reverbed guitars and weepy strings. The new one is just as good, albeit a little more varied. “The Garden at Night”... read more
Drawing Conclusions
True Story #1 – About ten years ago my wife Kate painted our living room walls. They were transformed from a sort of pathetic, washed-out beige to a vibrant cranberry or raspberry or other red(ish) fruit color. I am perhaps not the most clueful artistic person on the planet, so with some pride I noticed that the color of the walls had changed, and I complimented Kate on the great new look. That’s when she told me she had painted the walls two weeks previously. True Story #2 – It’s the night before the first day of school. My daughter... read more
Hungarian Rhapsody
The breathless press release described it thusly: “19 stomping selections by Hungarian jet-set fit-bit; Eastern Europe’s most vivacious sexual secret piles heavy psych/jazz/glam and funk onto a heaped spoonful dripping with the cream of the 70’s Hungarian rock scene.” “This could be good,” I thought. “Or at least interesting in a vaguely James Bond/Space Age Bachelor Pad way.” I confess that I’m not up on the ‘70s Hungarian rock scene, the Budapest beat, the Magyar musical milieu, none of it. So I don’t know this Sarolta Zalatnay, “Cini” to her apparent legions of fans in Debrecen and Miskolc.... read more
The Purple Prose of Poetic Publicists
I admit that I’m jaded. Every day the mailman drops off more music than I can possibly listen to, and each carefully packaged CD is accompanied by a breathless press release informing me that what I hold in my hands represents a seismic shift in musical history, that I as an individual and western civilization as we have known it are about to be shaken to the core, and that we will re-emerge as better, more enlightened human beings. In other words, I’m used to hype. So it takes something special, something—well, frankly bizarre—to make me sit up and take... read more
Old School Folkie Roundup—Ron Franklin and Fionn Regan
Nothing against the Iron and Wine’s and Jose Gonzalez’s of the world, but I prefer folkies who are a little more on the earthy side. If I want hushed and ethereal I’ll listen to Sigur Ros’s whalesongs, which I dearly love, and then walk around the ol’ corporate American cubicle farm singing “Eeeeuuuuu syyyy ohhh” and other inscrutable but mesmerizing things that deeply impress the IT infrastructure architecture workforce. The truth is that sometimes I just want the straightforward goods – sweet fingerpicking, gravel-voiced singers, and tales of love gone bad and ridin’ the rails and busking on the streets.... read more
Matthew Ryan
Nobody buys Matthew Ryan records. First, he has one of those nondescript names that nobody remembers (it would help not to have two first names. So go with a pseudonym, Matthew; I recommend Ryan Adams). Second, he looks like a plumber, not a rock star. Third, he has one of those raspy, gargle-with-Drano voices that sound offputting and corrosive to people weaned on Clay Aiken and Faith Hill. But he can sure write some great songs. He’s released six albums in the last ten years, and he’s getting better and better. His latest, called From a Late Night High Rise,... read more
The Book on Genesis
My memories of Genesis fans – the real, hardcore Genesis fans, circa Nursery Cryme, Selling England by the Pound and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway – are that they were more likely to be found in a dank basement playing Dungeons and Dragons and reading books about elves and dwarves than pursuing normal adolescent activities. This was Peter Gabriel’s Genesis – he of the winged Flying Nun headgear and the crazed, theatrical vocals – and his band followed suit, playing bizarre 20-minute prog rock suites about the apocalypse, spinning out impossibly knotty music even as the lyrics hearkened back... read more
Calvin College Concert Roundup
Last weekend I attended a music conference at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I served as a judge in an “American Idol"-like competition to spotlight previously unknown musicians/bands, attended some wonderful workshops, and took in several great concerts. Here’s who I saw: -- Anathallo—I don’ t know much about Anathallo. They were on a Paste sampler a while back, and I was underwhelmed. I haven’t heard any of their albums. But I quite enjoyed their performance at the conference. There were, at various points, about twenty people onstage, most of them members of the Central Michigan University brass... read more
Halleluiah and Other Casualties
Here’s the deal, boys and girls in America: the best rock ‘n roll band in the world these days is fronted by a barstool poet named Craig Finn, and he’s the heir to all the wide-eyed, wild-haired proclamations of outsiders and would-be Messiahs from Kerouac to Dylan to Springsteen to Bono. His band, The Hold Steady, plays AC/DC and Who power chords and Professor Roy Bittan piano riffs. Finn roams the stage, runs his fingers through his hair, and declaims half-spoken, half-sung visionary statements about addiction and Jesus, hopelessness and hope. They are little rock ‘n roll vignettes that... read more
Signposts Along the Road
With thanks to All Music Guide’s Thom Jurek, who knows a good prayer when he hears one. He’s heard two in the past couple months.) Here is a not-so-secret secret. I am a Christian, and I despise Contemporary Christian Music. Riddled with cliches, prone to drab loss/cross and grace/face rhymes, and safe as milk, these slick, soulless Infomercials for Christ are usually the last place I look for spiritual value. But I do look. And I do listen. And sometimes I find the ineffable and the transcendent in the strangest places: Van Morrison breaking free of language altogether... read more
Pullhair Rubeye
It was bound to happen. You give some kid the technology and the drugs, and eventually he’s going to release an album that is recorded backwards, every lysergic second of an interminable 32 minutes. That’s what Animal Collective singer/songwriter Avey Tare and wife Kria Brekken have done on Pullhair Rubeye. As if song titles like “Lay Lay Off, Faselam” weren’t inscrutable enough, Avey and Kria have fun speeding it up, slowing it down, putting it through a sonic blender, and then playing it all in reverse. And it all comes out as something like “Ishneh kooooshi elnaaaah aywaaaaah.” It... read more
A Plug for Calvin/A Plea for Britney
It will probably come as no great shock that I am not a Britney Spears fan. To my ears, she is a talentless hack famous for one and only one thing. To my eyes, she is, well, justifiably famous. And therein lies the American Dream and the American Nightmare. Somehow we have arrived at a peculiar moment in our culture in which image totally overpowers content and substance. And when the image includes beautiful bodies, drug and alcohol abuse, bizarre behavior, and nervous breakdowns in front of the camera, all the better. There are a few cultural outposts that still... read more
Hospital Vespers
I’ve been writing about a band called The Weakerthans for Paste. If you don’t know them, you should check them out. They play loud rock ‘n roll, and they have a lead singer/songwriter who sneers like a punk but who has the heart of a romantic poet. His name is John K. Samson, and I love his songs. I used to play one of his songs, called “Hospital Vespers,” around the time when my brother-in-law was dying of cancer. Samson’s songs used to be filled with F Bombs, little musical tantrums that got old pretty quickly. Then, impossibly, he... read more
Indie Roundup
Panda Bear – Person Pitch My insightful but historically challenged friend Jeremy tells me that Person Pitch sounds like The Beach Boys on LSD, which is an accurate enough assessment on one hand, but which ignores the fact that Brian Wilson spent years playing in the sandbox for a reason. Mr. Bear (real name Noah Lennox) is a member of acid-folk experimentalists The Animal Collective (naturally), and his second solo album is far removed from both his band’s catalogue and his lovely but downbeat solo debut Young Prayer. Here Lennox drags the Beach Boys chorales kicking and screaming through an... read more
Lucinda Williams—West
Let me get this out of the way at the start: in spite of what’s coming, I like Lucinda Williams. I love her music, which I’ve followed avidly since her late ‘70s blues albums on Smithsonian Folkways. I’ve seen her in concert several times. I don’t know her personally, but I wish her well. But she’s still made a near-stinker of a new album. I wish it wasn’t so. West, due out February 13th, is the latest in a series of gradually declining releases since 1998’s masterpiece Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. That album, redolent with sweat and dirt,... read more
Fountains of Wayne, Joe Craven, Milton and the Devils Party, Jon Rauhouse
Some new or about-to-be-released music that I’ve enjoyed of late … Fountains of Wayne – Traffic and Weather Fountains of Wayne frontmen Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood will remind you of the two smirking wiseacres who always sat in the back of the class during your high school years. They’re hip and they know it, they’re cynical, and they’re too clever for their own good. They rhyme “diner” and “Carl Reiner,” “law degree” and “Schenectedy,” “routine” and “Lichtenstein.” They find the ridiculous and surreal in every current cultural fad, and they pepper their lyrics with topical references that will be... read more
Last of the Breed
The album name overstates the case a little. Last time I checked the entertainment obituaries, George Jones, Ralph Stanley, and Charlie Louvin were still around (the octogenarian Charlie with a great new album, at that). So Last of the Breed, the title of the new 2-CD collaboration between Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and Ray Price isn’t entirely accurate. But why quibble? The fact is that these three grizzled amigos represent the best of a brand of country music that hasn’t really been in vogue since the Reagan administration, before Garth Brooks discovered wireless mics and Shania Twain figured out how... read more
Post-Rock Roundup—Yndi Halda and Six Parts Seven
I am a sucker for post-rock serenity and bombast—the slow, dirge-like buildups, followed by the cathartic payoffs where massed guitars create sonic tsunamis that wash away the winter snows that dominate the landscapes of these morose, deadly serious musicians. The three best-known bands who work this genre—Mogwai, Sigur Ros and Godspeed You! Black Emperor (formerly Godspeed You Black Emperor!; you know the winters are long when you find yourself playing with exclamation marks) have created a handful of masterpieces. Not surprisingly, they’ve inspired a horde of imitators, some very good (Explosions in the Sky, A Silver Mount Zion, Do Make... read more
America the Beautiful
I have a theory about bands with geographic names: there is an inverse relationship between quality of music and geographic expanse. Thus, the bands that are named after insignificant or modest geographic features (Okkervil River) are actually pretty good. But the music gets progressively worse as you move from small towns (Fountains of Wayne) to big cities (Boston), then states (Kansas), then countries (Japan). Eventually you end up with Asia, at which point you declare musical war and unilaterally nuke your iPod. By that logic, the band America should be fairly dismal. Maybe they were named after a country, and... read more
Graham Parker—Don’t Tell Columbus
Graham Parker hasn’t been an Angry Young Man for a long time now. Early on in his career he was lumped in with Elvis Costello. They both had the hipster glasses, the short, spiky hair, and the penchant for creating petulant, supremely literate diatribes against anything and everything. But sometime in the late ‘80s Graham Parker committed the unpardonable sin of all Angry Young Men: he got happy. He got married, settled down to domestic bliss, and started writing songs about his kids chasing butterflies. For those of you who may not have paid attention since, oh, 1979’s masterpiece Squeezing... read more
