Should It Stay or Should It Go?

Sound and the City

2008-11-30T17:39:00.004-05:00

Artists: Calexico; Giant Sand; Howe Gelb
Albums: Feast of Wire (Calexico); Glum, Chore of Enchantment, Cover Magazine (GS); Hisser (HG)
Source: Bought used (all but Hisser, which was a promo)

Just before the winter holidays of any given year, the record companies gear up for shopping season with a bunch of new box sets. This year, one of the sets is Love Train: The Sound of Philadelphia, a multi-disc box that brings together the Gamble & Huff sides that once defined "the sound" of that particular city.

It's strange to think that a place can have a sound. But Motown did its best to support the concept, creating a singular, recognizable sound that got matched up with the idea of "Detroit" (nevermind that the MC5, Stooges and even Ted Nugent could have an equal claim to the place). In the 80s there was an "Athens Sound" coming out of Georgia (which was mostly anyone who sounded kinda like R.E.M.), and lordy knows there was a "Seattle Sound" in the 90s.

But I think that those geographical sonics are often jointly temporal ones. Gamble & Huff nailed down a section of Philly in the 70s as much as Motown sounded like the Motor City the 60s and Sub Pop sounded like the Pacific Northwest circa 1992. Philadelphia doesn't sound like that in the late-oughts any more than Detroit or Seattle sound the same as they once did.

All of which makes Howe Gelb a bit of a curiosity. Starting in the mid-80s, Gelb has been making music that really sounds like the Arizona desert region he calls home. For the most part, Gelb records as the leader of Giant Sand (which for years featured the rhythm section of Joey Burns and John Convertino...who became the nucleus of Calexico), but regardless what moniker is on the cover, Gelb's music has this dusty, wide-open sound...one that's big enough that you can hear the coyotes and rattlers and tumbleweeds between the notes. Now, obviously this aural mood is mostly an exaggerated conception of how people think of America's Southwest - but even so,Gelb nails that conception and makes it real for the duration of each song.

I'm not 100% clear on how he does it, but there's obviously a science of sorts to it: Calexico, which is now a longstanding unit of its own, has the same sound-feeling in spades. Joey & John make their iteration a bit more cinematic and bring in more musical influences from around the world, but the desert dust still blows through the band's grooves. Gelb is unlikely to ever be celebrated as "The Berry Gordy of Arizona" or anything like that, but that may be largely because his sound-place isn't beholden to any particular era: Giant Sand, Calexico and Gelb's other stylistic progeny stand just far enough outside of a particular time to sound firmly planted in a specific place.

SISOSIG? While Gelb's sound is weirdly consistent across different band members, production styles and instrumentation, the quality of his releases is deeply erratic. Glum, which was part of his mid-90s grab at the Big Label Brass Ring, sounds a bit compromised and unfocused; Cover Magazine, which has a solid cover-song concept, is better but drags on a bit long without arriving at a solid reason for being. Both of these are pretty unnecessary, though I think only Glum deserves to be tossed (when Cover Mag grabs hold of a song by a like-minded spirit such as Neil Young, Nick Cave or Sonny Bono, it's often effective and affecting).

Chore of Enchantment and Feast of Wire, on the other hand, are career high points for Giant Sand and Calexico, respectively. Each is the sound of a band hitting every mark without looking down, and they both stand the test of as many spins as you'd care to to throw their way. I certainly like to play them loud & often.

Splitting the difference is Hisser. This odd little collection of half-formed Gelb solo recordings sounds like he just happened to hit play and record at the same time every now and then (which probably isn't too far from true). Some of these songs ended up in better, more fleshed-out version on subsequent Giant Sand discs, but most of these tunes and fragments are full of air, dust and flickering half-light. If all of these five discs sound just like the place they're from, Hisser is the one that ends up being the most succinct summation of the desert's natural music.

An Aside

2008-11-24T09:51:00.002-05:00

I've been out of SISOSIG? circulation for a little while (has it really been a month?). I'm on track to correct that soon - I, like, totally promise.

In the meantime, Idolator caught my eye with a good think piece on negative music criticism:
http://idolator.com/5097276/the-rainbow-connection-are-music-critics-too-tolerant

I pretty much agree with the writer wholeheartedly. And I'd add that in the instances where a critic does actually write and publish a negative review, the negativity itself can be a kind of positive subject (or maybe just a stunt). From my own background, I'm thinking of a negative review I once wrote of a Fugazi album (End Hits) that came from a place of genuine love for the band - I thoroughly dig/dug them, and so my pan was born of really, really wanting to like the album.

Cast a Shadow

2008-10-09T19:53:00.000-04:00

Artists: John Cale; Mo Tucker
Albums: Vintage Violence, Paris 1919, Guts, Wrong Way Up [with Brian Eno ] (JC); I Spent a Week There the Other Night (Mo)
Source: Bought used (WWU); bought new (all others)

History can be a burden. John Cale and Mo Tucker, each of whom has had a career in music nearly anyone could envy, nevertheless cannot make an album that doesn't stand in the shadow of history. They have bodies of work that range from good to excellent (the latter applying especially to Cale), yet every record they've ever made or ever will make is compared to the deathless work they did during the late 60s in the Velvet Underground.

It's been well more than a quarter century since the first VU LP was pressed with the peel-able Warhol cover; can you imagine having to stand in your own shadow for that long?

I'd think it's terribly frustrating, on the one hand. On the other, that ever-longer shadow is also the foot in the door for artists like these. Cale, at least, has a serious background in music and no doubt would have written & recorded music even if he'd never met Lou Reed. But it's equally likely that he'd have garnered less attention and collaborated with a lesser stock of fellow artists had it not been for that earlier breakthrough. And Mo, who'd been laid low, working at Wal-Mart, when she re-entered the fray of music making...well, it's pretty obvious that without the Velvets on her resume, she wouldn't be making records at all.

She must know it, too, because of these two ex-Undergrounders, she is far less shy about wrapping her arms around everyone's collective memories. Like each entry in her small catalogue of post-VU work, I Spent a Week There the Other Night doesn't shy away from the past - Mo dives in head-first. There's a Velvets cover ("I'm Waiting for the Man"), songs that sound like outtakes from the 3rd VU album ("Blue, All the Way to Canada" and "S.O.S.") and contributions from Lou Reed, Cale and Sterling Morrison (mostly separately, but also all at once on "I'm Not").

Tucker sees the shadow and understands its nature. Instead of trying to outrun it, she wraps herself in its comfortable cloth...and makes guileless, pretty wonderful music that always has the spirit of the Velvets in its loose grooves, even when the sound is more garage-y.

It's a smart strategy, but it would be easy to understand someone who wanted to assert themselves outside of the shadow's bounds. Cale, who only played on 2 VU albums (But, oh! What albums those 2 are!) has an audibly more difficult relationship with his past accomplishments. The four discs of his that I have are all over the place: pop so genteel its nearly shiny (Vintage Violence); rock rethought as chamber music (Paris 1919); twisted, dirty-ass rock & roll (Guts, which collects tracks from his 70s Island recordings); and ebullient electro-pop (Wrong Way Up, a thoroughly fab collaboration with Brian Eno). And those are just the ones I own - the rest of his catalog ranges from howling avant-rock to post-classical compositions and nearly everything in between.

Almost none of it sounds like the Velvets, yet in a way Cale's music is almost entirely reliant on the artistic freedoms he helped stake out as he began to cast his initial shadow. Would Phil Manzanera play guitar the way he does on Guts if he'd never heard White Light/White Heat? Would Cale even know Eno if the latter hadn't once been in thrall to the former's accomplishments?

Probably not. Which makes it a precarious balancing act, both outrunning the shadow and making sure you never get too far from it (witness Cale's periodic returns to re-collaborate with Reed over the years). Many artists privately fret over the fact that their fan-base is living on their past accomplishments - anyone from John Fogerty to Francis Ford Coppola can relate, surely - but it also must be gratifying to have those past accomplishments for an audience to hold dear. As Jonathan Richman put it when I once asked him if he gets tired of hearing requests for Modern Lovers songs every night: "It's flattering; those are my songs they want to hear."

SISOSIG? This is a straight flush of keepers. Cale's discs are always skillfully made (which is probably the best thing I can say about Vintage Violence), usually engaging, and sometimes there are flashes of brilliance like the balance of Paris 1919 and nearly every note on Guts. Oddly enough, the real star of the four might just be Wrong Way Up, which manages to be both catchy as the best bubblegum and deep as mid-period Talking Heads. While it was made nearly 2 decades ago, WWU sounds like a perfectly contemporary blueprint for the disc Eno made with David Byrne earlier this year.

Tucker's music shows far less skill and savvy than even the loosest of Cale's tracks...and may end up being better for it. She sounds like she's having the time of her life on every song, and it's hard not to have the same experience as a listener. Mo knows she's getting a hearing because of the shadow she casts from way back, but instead of coasting on reputation she sounds thrilled and determined to earn every moment of it.

This Just In

2008-10-05T17:37:00.001-04:00

Artist: The Breeders
Album: Mountain Battles
Source: Promo

It's hard not to have conflicted feelings about the Breeders at this point. On the one hand: well, this is Kim from the Pixies. And on that count alone, what's not to love?

But on the other end: this is a Breeders record, and that means its own thing, too. Pod and Last Splash are two primo, intoxicating examples of everything that was right and wonderful about "college rock" (in the era of Pod) and "alternative rock" (by the time Last Splash splashed down). By the time Title TK and this new one, Mountain Battles, came along...well, it was stilled called the Breeders, but now it was a different thing. Kim had gone through a long bout with her many demons, and it was not a clear victory on either end. She was still here and had a guitar in her hands, but clearly the demons had put some points on the board.

So despite my everloving allegiance to all things Pixies, I'd been satisfied to have this new one "only" as digital files. Because, truth be told, it's good but not great. And more than that, it sounds a bit beaten-down, lacking the triumphant roll of "Cannonball" or even the cocksure allure of "Iris."

Mountain Battles made it to The Beast anyway, courtesy of a promo copy Lee's wife, Jenn, got from work. And so now I have Kim's latest batch of draggy, druggy tunes on the stereo instead of just the iPod. I wish I could love it in a big way, but instead I'm hanging onto the small things that are there to like: the minimal thwak of "Bang On," the stoned repetition of "Overglazed," the nearly-old-school rocking on "Walk It Off," and the general ability of Kim Deal's voice and songwriting style to get under my skin. And that's enough, I suppose, to make the disc an unconflicted minor pleasure.

Moving On Up

2008-09-14T14:06:00.002-04:00

Artist: Uri Caine
Albums: Urlicht/Primal Light; The Sidewalks of New York; Plays Mozart; Moloch: Book of Angels Volume 6
Source: Promo (Urlicht & Sidewalks); gift (Mozart & Moloch)

It is not entirely accurate, but also essentially true, to say that I moved to New York City because of two musicians: Uri Caine and Jon Madof.

Nearly 9 gestational months had passed since losing my gig at the Philadelphia Weekly, and I was making a go at a handful of freelance gigs while looking for a new job. Nothing that seemed like the right direction was in view, so I kept plugging on. The City Paper assigned me to preview a show Uri Caine was playing at The Painted Bride, part of the tour for his mind/genre-bending album of Mahler adaptations, Urlicht/Primal Light. I'd interviewed Caine a few years early, was pretty familiar with his work, and the article was easy to pop out in 30 minutes or so. Plus, I got 2 spots on the guest list for the show.

Lee and I arrived early and hobnobbed a bit in the lobby. Jon Madof was there, another local musician I'd written about a few times. This was the very beginning of 2000, and Jon was a young, still-developing jazz guitarist who had caught my ear; the fact that he was also a fun guy to hang with and talk to made it even better to be a fan of his music. So when I saw him at the Bride, I looked forward to hearing the latest from him.

"I'm moving to Brooklyn," was the first thing he said. Brooklyn? Really? But, but...the scene, man. The Philly scene! Ah, nevermind...Lee had lived in Brooklyn a few years back, so they chatted about the fair borough and what it might be like to move on up to Kings County. Then it was showtime and we went to our seats.

Now, it's important to add here that Caine's music is, more often than not, incredibly complex. Even when he's playing in a straight(ish) piano-trio context or playing sideman in Dave Douglas' combo, he rarely treads the expected path. The compositions and execution are layered with unusual approaches and the friction that comes with banging seeming unlike ideas against each other. And the music he was playing that night--which took Mahler compositions and ran them through jazz (acoustic & electric), rock, funk, European folk and whatever else (plus the presence of a turntablist and chanting Cantor on many tracks). Just one solo, a lengthy violin excursion, sounded to Lee like, "the entire history of Western music." To say the least, Caine's music required focused and attentive listening.

Which I was happy to do, of course. It was a lot of work (gratifying work, but still), and every now and then I needed to let my mind relax and wander. And wander I did: What would it be like to live in Brooklyn? My father had been born there, his family there for a couple of generations. I'd visited pretty much my whole life, from early trips to my great-grandmother's apartment to more recent treks with Lee and JP. Philly had been my home base for half a decade or so...but to be honest, things were no longer really going my way there. No job and no appealing prospects; an intense relationship with Girl C that had just blown up (and hadn't really stopped doing its damage); friends who were starting to move away; and so on. I really only knew one person in NYC, JP, but I was up there often and even had subway tokens in my pocket. I moved in & out of Caine's intense, moving and brain-scrambling music all night, and by the end I had decided to look into the NYC option.

That was Sunday. Monday morning, I called JP and e-mailed a couple of NY contacts asking for tips about where I might look for New York jobs. I got a flood of replies, real actionable stuff, and spent Monday & Tuesday sending off resumes. I figured it was a start.

Wednesday I got a call back from a dot.com startup, DealTime. They asked me to come for an interview on Friday. I went, spent the day having a series of conversations that just clicked (including one with the department's VP, who it turned out had been my camp counselor when I was 10!). They offered me the job that day, with a salary roughly double of what I'd expected.

And that was it. Jon Madof (whose music I'll write about in more detail later) had planted the seed, and Uri Caine had created the circumstances to let it sprout. I took the job, I packed up the cat and moved on up to Brooklyn a month later.

SISOSIG? As mentioned above, Caine's music is knottily complex, but also sublimely pleasurable--it's never (well, rarely) so far out as to push you away. Instead, whether he's thinking about the classical canon in a post-modernist framework or just working out some harmonic moves on the keys, Caine's music invites you along for the ride, be it ever so twisty. Primal Light and Plays Mozart are both deep pleasures that never seem to stop opening up with each play. Moloch, part of the latest line of John Zorn/Masada projects, is fabulous solo piano that I'm still wrapping my head around. I wouldn't want to part with any of them, and also look forward to adding more of his straighter jazz dates to the collection.

Sidewalks of New York, on the other hand, is something I can pretty plainly say I will never listen to. More a bit of conceptual curating than an actual Uri Caine record, Sidewalks is a collection of old-timey tunes of/about old-timey New York that is simply too much from the head and not enough from the heart; Uri doesn't connect here, but instead has made something like a novelty record that was never all that novel. This one can go.

Teacher Man, Preacher Man

2008-09-07T17:20:00.001-04:00

Artist: Don Byron
Albums: Bug Music; Romance with the Unseen
Source: Bought used (Bug); promo (Romance)

Having a mid-June birthday was kind of a drag as a kid, since it fell just after school ended but before camp started. From K through 12, I never got to have the in-class birthday cupcakes, nor the extra canteen treats that a bunk would get for a camp birthday.

But I got mine once I was a bit older. Now, a Solstice birthday means I'm smack in the middle of Jazz Festival Season, and it's been working out in my favor for more years than the cupcakes ever would have. When the date rolls around each June, there's always a cool jazz gig to go to, and someone willing (or at least gently compelled) to take me. Happy Birthday to me!

There are people, however, that this doesn't always work out for: the family members, girlfriends and now wife who accompany me to these gigs. My jazz tastes start in the straight & narrow, but then meander forcefully away from the center. So while some years there's been a festival gig that was easy for my birthday patrons to swallow (Dave Brubeck & Bill Cosby, which the missus made it through just fine), just as often there's a show that clearly only I'm enjoying (sorry about the Marty Ehrlich & Myra Melford duo, Mom & Dad).

Oddly enough, one of the most successful of the Birthday Jazz Shows was a Don Byron appearance at Philadelphia's fest in the mid-90s. On paper, Don's a tough pill for the casual listener to swallow: playing the clarinet, an instrument that isn't often pushed front and center in post-bop jazz, he is a restless explorer who travels the paths of Klezmer, funk and many avenues of the avant-garde. Sometimes playfully melodic but just as often plangently noisy, Byron can't be pinned down to one sound or style, and as a result toils in fields that rarely catch the ears of the mainstream.

But the reason Byron could get my parents' toes tapping is that he adds an important role to his list of player, composer and bandleader: educator. No matter what context or concept he brings to the stage, Professor Byron always arrives with lessons to impart. He explains what he's up to, gives the audience some specific things to listen for ahead of a tune, and comes back at the end to explain a thing or two about what just went down. You could have never heard Byron's name or any of his albums, or even not be overly familiar with jazz in general, but a Don Byron gig invariably turns into a quick masterclass in the music you're about to hear.

So at the Philly gig, in support of the then-new Bug Music, Byron talked about how & why jazz made the crossover into cartoon soundtracks (the album is comprised entirely of music by Raymond Scott, Duke Ellington, et al, which had been used in cartoons) and even went so far as to explain which instruments would be audibly describing certain bits of cartoony action. When I saw Byron do a free gig at the World Financial Center years later, he was exploring the history of Sugar Hill Records with a large funk/hip-hop ensemble; the lessons that day included a backgrounder on the copious use of kazoos in the tunes, and an examination of the sociological effects of the label. When he was leading a quartet at the Jazz Standard a year or two ago, his notes from the stage about a particular moment in Lester Young's career made the unfamiliar music both familiar and familial.

It's hard to be a fan of Don Byron for any particular sound, or even a specific sensibility, since he's typically all over the map. But he's the opposite of Miles turning his back on the audience to solo into the electro-funk miasma - Byron faces front & center each time, the teacher man & preacher man for what can seem like the entire history of music. He's got a convoluted musical map in his catalog, but he makes sure that even someone forced to take me out for jazz on my birthday is able to come along for the ride.

SISOSIG? Byron's tendency toward constant motion makes it a little hard to settle into his body of work; just because you loved the last thing doesn't mean you'll dig the next one. Aside from some of the sideman dates I've got in The Beast, these two discs are the only Byron albums that I've actually acquired (instead of just hearing somewhere or experiencing at a show). Bug Music is a constant fave - it's both cartoony fun and deeply satisfying music. Plus it's got penguins on the cover, which makes Eileen happy.

Romance with the Unseen, on the other hand is one of the rare Byron discs is one of the few without a formal concept. It seems like he mostly had just assembled a band that excited him (the wonderful BillFrisell on guitar, Drew Gress playing rock-solid bass, and drummer extraordinaire Jack DeJohnette) and put it through the paces. The tunes include originals, more Duke, classic-era Herbie Hancock and even The Beatles. None of it is revelatory, no lessons are imparted, and not all of it quite catches fire...but on the other hand, I'd be loathe to part with anything featuring Frisell, and Romance is still a reliably satisfying listen.

Don't Take It Personally

2008-08-17T17:00:00.001-04:00

Artists: Butterglory; Matt Suggs
Albums: Crumble; Downed; Are You Building A Temple in Heaven?; Rat Tat Tat (BG). Golden Days Before They End (MS)
Source: Bought new (Crumble, Temple, Rat); bought used (Downed); promo (Golden Days)

It's almost always a bad idea to meet your heroes, because they'll inevitably disappoint you. Not because you idolized people who aren't worthy of the adulation; it's because heroes function as broad ideas, and it's a crash when they turn out to just be people. Just ask Colin Powell.

There's a kind of analogue when it comes to meeting people who make music that means something to you. It's easy to forget that making art is a kind of distilling process; the final product can create the illusion that the artist thinks/feels just like you do, but it's more likely that there's a starch barrier between the feelings embedded in the art and the actual person of the artist. In other words, the process of making the music can tease the deeper truth out of someone who is not always consciously connected to every nuance of it.

But what does all of this high-minded theorizin' have to do with Butterglory? When they started putting their scrappy little homemade pop-rock nuggets out on vinyl in the mid-90s (a series of singles collected on thebuzzily great Downed), it sounded like there was an entire level of artifice or two missing. The tunes on the full-length Crumble were a mix of cheap studio and cheaper 4-track recordings, but all of them were audibly touched by the hands of real people, an ordinary Joe & Josephine who had the same kind of sounds and thoughts and such whirling around in their heads that I did.

That they were able to convert those sounds into something I (and others) wanted to hear and buy and treasure made them just a little heroic...but not so much that they seemed untouchable. Singer/guitarist MattSuggs had glasses and clothes and ideas that seemed just like mine, which meant the tether connecting me to the music was short indeed.

Lee felt the same way. The slim booklet in the Crumble CD had a mailing address in it (not a PO Box like most bands had, but a real street addy in Visalia, CA!) and the invitation, "Write us." So he did.

And Debby Vander Wall, the drummer, wrote back. Lee wrote again. She wrote back.

Now, she and Suggs were an item, so this was really just music-driven pen-pallery, nothing more. Still, this bore out the feeling of a real human connection with Butterglory's music, and even as the latter albums started sounding slicker (a relative term here) and built by a full crew of band members, something as simple as knowing that the drummer kept up a friendlycorrespondence with my buddy made it even more fun to hear.

And then it happened: the band was coming to Philadelphia for a gig at Silk City and needed a place to crash. Lee offered my little South Philly trinity apartment (he didn't have to ask - he knew I'd be game). Soon it was set thatButterglory was going to rock us and then we'd hang out and now we were friends and wasn't this gonna be awesome?

Lee lugged an air mattress in from his mom's place in rural PA; JP came down from NYC and we bought a case or two of beer; everything was set. We went to the show, and the band was nothing short of delightful (not to mention the great sets by apre- Aeroplane Neutral Milk Hotel and the foxily hypnotic Odes). Then JP and I went back to my place to set things up and Lee would direct theButterglory van to the right place. Sweet!

No one reading this far has been fooled by the build-up...an hour and change later, Lee showed up solo. He'd had a drink with the band at the bar, during which they'd gotten a better offer: a suburban spot to park the equipment-filled van, and real beds to sleep in. So now we had a fridge full of food, more bottles ofYeungling than 3 guys really needed for a night, and a heaping portion of blown expectations.

And the moral is...well, it's kind of obvious and not really so profound. I still love listening to Butterglory (and also like Suggs' solo debut, though I can't claim to be a fan of his later work), but even though I'm smiling when the xylophone pops up during "She's Got theAkshun" I can't help thinking about how the actual people in this band disappointed me on a personal level.

I mean, I know they did the right thing, but that doesn't mean it didn't kill my Butterglory buzz in a deep way. I hadn't even really met them, either, but the result was the same: Butterglory changed from The Band That Loved Me to just a band I loved. Which was what they had been from the start, of course, but that's a kind of reality check that no one wants to get from their heroes.

SISOSIG? Fortunately, the music Butterglory made during its criminally short tenure didn't lose much luster over the Pen-Pal Incident. From the crackling sugar-rush of the singles (all of which I have on vinyl, too!) to theFeelies-ish sound they'd grown into by Rat Tat Tat, it's all pure joy. This is a band destined to be almost entirely forgotten in the long run, but that short-tether connection I felt to their music is likely to keep them firmly lodged in my noggin' for as long as I can imagine.

Just for Kicks

2008-08-03T20:05:00.001-04:00

Artists: William S. Burroughs; Jack Kevorkian; Leonard Nimoy; various artists
Albums: Dead City Radio (WSB); A Very Still Life (JK); Highly Illogical (LN); Rock the Vote: Public Service Announcements (v/a)
Source: Promos, except for Nimoy (from JP's collection)

Thumbing through any section of The Beast, I'll regularly come across stuff I love, discs I merely like, and a few that don't move me in too many ways. But I can pretty much get behind (or at least make an argument for) pretty much every piece I've got.

That said, there are a few bits of The Beast that are just there for a laugh. These four discs--which include a twisted Beat poet declaiming over so-so backdrops; Dr. Death trying his hand at some swingin' jazz; Mr. Spock rocking through the hits of the day; and the cream of the 90s Alternative Nation telling you to get up off your slacker ass and vote--have little or no musical value. And I will never listen to them (unless it's to make a visitor chuckle along with Nimoy's butchering of "Proud Mary"). But I will also never voluntarily part with them.

In a way, these CDs are kind of like party tricks. They're not a part of my regular life, and I have no real emotional connection to them (except for the Spock thing, which I bought as a gift for JP while I was in the UK), but they exist almost like little pre-fab performances that are ready to go at a moment's notice. If someone's looking through the racks to see what I'm packing, albums like these throw off quick little sparks that start a conversation (or at least get a laugh). I mean, how often do you get to hear Evan Dando, LL Cool J, Joey Ramone and Iggy Pop throw down on the value of casting a vote?

There's not much to say about crappy albums like these, and oddly enough they might be the ones that someone would be most likely to talk about. They're just for kicks, but some kinds of kicks are hard to beat.

SISOSIG? As spelled out above, these four have a role to play, and they play it honorably. In the case of Kevorkian & Rock the Vote, they alsomight be quite literally irreplaceable--I mean, how many of these could possibly be floating around out there? If you're ever over visiting The Beast & me, ask for these bits by name. I guarantee you'll enjoy them and then never, ever, under any circumstances want to hear them again.

Rite of Passage

2008-07-12T17:02:00.001-04:00

Artist: Burnt Sugar
Album: Not April in Paris
Source: Bought new

One of the best parts of discovering a brand-new band--one that is not just brand-new to you, but has only just flashed into existence--is that you know right where to begin. They have just put out their first recording(s), are playing in just a handful of venues and generally haven't had an unmanageable amount of ink spilled on their behalf. You are, more or less, present at the creation.

Much, much more difficult is entering the (l)ongoing flow of an established musical entity. One of Eileen's aunts has started requesting a sort of "jazz primer" for birthday and Xmas gifts, and I don't blame her for outsourcing the job--jazz has a ton of history with a massive collective back-catalog, and it can be intimidating to know where to dip one's toes into the stream.

And so it was that I'd heard a lot about Burnt Sugar, but had no idea how to go about locating the best entry point. The group's discography was not exactly massive (maybe a dozen discs altogether?), but with no fixed lineup and a rat-tat-tat of local gigs that morphed in scope and sound from one to the next, the group offered no obvious place to start. Like, if you want to try out Miles Davis or Patti Smith, you get Kind of Blue or Horses, respectively; if you want a "representative" instance of Nick Cave or the Grateful Dead or Richard Thompson, where do you turn?

Put simply, some music is so imposing, in one way or another, that it can passively bully you out of giving it a try.

Burnt Sugar's semi-obvious front door was The Rites, a recording I'd read about that planted the hook. From the best I could tell, it was a suite-like "conducted improvisation" that adapted Stravinsky to a nelectro-jazz-funk mien and featured Pete Cosey, a guitarist I'd heard sizzling through Miles' Agharta album. It was nearly impossible, from that description, to intuit what the thing would actually sound like, but it seemed like it would fit just right between my particular set of ears.

The problem was, The Rites was way hard to track down. Nothing on eBay. Amazon perpetually out of stock. Other Music on backorder whenever I dropped by. The disc wasn't a priority so I didn't try that hard to get it, but it still never seemed ready to walk up and join The Beast.

But here's the deeply irrational part: since I'd fixed on The Rites as my rite of passage into Burnt Sugar, I was reluctant to try anything else, lest I get the wrong impression or something. I didn't go to gigs. I didn't buy other discs the couple of times they were in my path. I know it didn't make any kind of real sense to act this way, but this is how I work sometimes.

But like all good revelations, it came to me as soon as I stopped looking for it. One night I walked down to Barbes, the fantabulous little bar/club that was just a few blocks away from my place in Park Slope. I didn't know what was playing, exactly; it was so nearby and had such good things programmed pretty reliably, that sometimes I'd just go when I needed a music fix.

That night, Greg Tate--the erstwhile leader/conductor of Burnt Sugar--was there to proctor a conducted improv featuring more than a dozen string players, including violinist Jenny Scheinman and bass-master Greg Cohen. It was, of course, nothing like "typical" Burnt Sugar (which is usually heavy with percussion, electric guitars and scattish vocals) but utterly transporting. Barbes' small back room floated a few feet off the ground for an hour or so, and it was clear that Tate was working a kind of magic that all of the musicians recognized as his particular brand of sorcery. It was not a Burnt Sugar show, but I had definitely heard Burnt Sugar in there.

Within a week I was at Other Music and picked up Not April in Paris, a self-released CD-R of a 2004 live gig in France that featured over a dozen Sugar folk on horns, drums, flutes, keys, vox and every other kind of music-maker. As I imagined, it defied categorization (or even, really, description), was nothing like the Barbes show...and also wasn't quite as fantastic. Maybe you had to be there as it unfolded?

Nevermind. Not April in Paris is still a singular bit of music in my collection that, most importantly, held the door open for more. I finally found The Rites on eMusic, and went with Debbie to a free outdoor Burnt Sugar gig at Lincoln Center (which, again, was entirely unlike all of the other Burnt offerings I'd managed to consume, being surprisingly hip-hop focused). I may not get any more, or might dip into another part of Tate's discography if it pops up in my path. But the important part is I'm in when it comes to Burnt Sugar, and once that kind of door is opened, you can walk through any number of other ones.

SISOSIG? It's certainly not easy listening, but Not April in Paris still stands as the only Burnt Sugar hard copy I've got, and as such stays. With its dense layering of sounds and fluid foundation, the disc is also something that's likely to expand with more listening over a longer period of time. It's hard to picture listening to this more than once a year or so, but equally hard to imagine that those annual spins won't be pretty rewarding.

This Just In

2008-07-08T21:23:00.001-04:00

Artist: Bonnie "Prince" Billy
Album: Lie Down in the Light
Source: Bought new

As I've mentioned previously, it's really never a bad time to invest in some new Will Oldham music. He seems more or less settled into his Bonnie persona, which is AOK by me--I'd say there's probably nothing finer in his body of work than the BPB's I See A Darkness.

Lie Down in the Light seems unlikely to change that ranking for me, but it's also probably heading for a spot close to the top. The last few Oldham discs I've heard had been stripping his sound down & back, laying only the darkest colors to a spare palette. That said, Lie Down sounds big and downright chipper, at least as far as that goes for the Bonnie One.

The opening track, "Easy Does It," starts off with a downcast lyric ("When there's just one thing I can do/Well you know I don't want to do it/When there's just one way to get through/Sometimes I don't want to go through with it") but I didn't really notice until I checked the booklet because Will sounds like he's singing through a shit-eating grin. (The artist photo on the back even shows Oldham with beams of pure white light shooting from his eyes.) Adding to the sunny vocal stance is the backing music, which producer Mark Nevers (a Lambchop man, who has brought along a few other 'Choppers to the session) has laid out with a subtle lushness. There's often a lot going on, with quiet violins and plinking percussion and harmony vox and such, but cobbled together in a way that's unobtrusive.

The whole disc is really quite beautiful, and Oldham even occasionally submits to the sunny sound with a happy song. "So Everyone" winds up with, "Now I want the world to see/Everybody look at me/I'm a good person and free/and she loves me." Sure, it's no "Shiny Happy People," but for this artist it's practically an ecstatic conniption.

The more I listen, the more little details are creeping out of the arrangements, which is making me want to listen more and more. Dammit Billy, you've done it to me again.

Measuring Up

2008-06-25T21:37:00.002-04:00

Artists: R.L. Burnside; Midnight Oil; The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Albums: Mr. Wizard (RLB); Scream in Blue Live (MO); Orange (JSBX)
Source: Promos (Wizard & Scream); bought new (Orange)

Of the three discs here, two have a very direct connection: On Mr. Wizard, old-school bluesman R.L. Burnside is backed up by the young blooz manqués of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion; the elder even served as a favorite live act for the JSBX kids. It makes perfect sense to discuss them together in a blues/rock continium mode.

So what're Aussie politco-punks Midnight Oil doing here? To put it bluntly, they share one important charachter flaw with Burnside and Spencer: they make their own records useless, pointless, irrelevant.

Basically, these three acts (and there are plenty more that could fit snugly beside them) put out records that make you want to come to their live shows. Once there, they perform with such intensity, warp the reality around them so profoundly, that the records never sound adequate again. In other words, I liked Orange enough that the JSBX made me never want to listen to Orange again.

For lots of powerful live bands, this isn't quite so deep a problem. Fugazi are probably one of the best bands I've ever seen, but the experience of seeing them live complements the records; same goes for Sonic Youth, the Lounge Lizards, Bill Frisell, Neil Young, and any number of other ace-high stage acts. But go see Midnight Oil perform, and they obliterate the studio jobs. Even though the one and only time I saw them perform was way back in high school, I still remember the palpable waves of energy that poured off the stage, making that already-enormous Oils mainman Peter Garrett seem inhumanly huge. Back in my room, cradling the gatefold LP of Diesel and Dust, the album no longer seemed to communicate the right way. I'd finally seen--really seen--what was inside this music, and now all I had was this thin slab of sound to go back to.

Anyone who's seen Spencer (especially) and Burnside (mostly) live will probably report something similar. The former creates an evening of primordial sound that goes far beyond the record's mere songs, and leaves you feeling shaken and bespoiled by the end; the latter has such a forceful personality on stage that somehow it's the between-song muttering (which pretty much consists of, "Well, well, well") that bring it home as much as the deep authenticity of his well-earned blues power.

And then the time passes, and what do you do? I saw JSBX a bunch more times, and was blown away at each and every show; not being familiar with the new album for any given tour turned out to be a meaningless detail. But now they don't tour regularly (maybe they even broke up?) and so that experience is both past and passed. The Oils kind of faded away after their mid-80s peak, and are long since broken up, so no more toe-curling rock power is due from them. And Burnside died in 2005, leaving his best moments floating around in the ether. All I've got left is these perfectly good, deeply appealing records that I see little point in listening to.

SISOSIG? It's true that these three artists killed so hard on stage that it killed the experience of their recorded material. But I'm also a bit wary of being too hasty here. Orange is on in the background as I type this, and it remains pretty flat to my ears. But I recently listened to Diesel and Dust for the first time in 15 years or so...and it sounded pretty good. No, not up to the level of the show I'd seen more than two decades back, but something was managing to catch my ear again. So as the experiences continue to recede, I suspect I may be able to hear this anew one day. Not anytime too soon in the still-fresh(ish) cases of Spencer & Burnside, but it's probably gonna take more than a few killer shows to deal a final blow to these weird blues.

Drink Me

2008-06-08T17:08:00.000-04:00

Artist: Burger/Ink
Album: [Las Vegas]
Source: Promo

At the moment that the debut Burger/Ink disc landed on my desk for review, I'd only had one serious encounter with electronic music. During a stint living in Scotland, some local buddies brought me to a late-era rave. This being 1995 or so, the thing was no longer an illegal, secretive dance party in the middle of nowhere, but an official/officious money-making cultural event in an established joint. The main draw was either The Orb or Orbital (I honestly can't remember which) and hours of fun were to be had by all.

And I do mean hours.

This thing went on for-freakin'-ever. I guess the first 3 hours or so were OK, but after that it dragged just a wee bit...nevermind that I didn't really have an ear for all-electronic music and I might possibly have been the only person in the entire cavernous expanse of the Barrowlands not floating on some sort of trip. Like any too-old/not-hip-enough person hearing rock or rap or whatever is outside of their frame of reference, it just all sounded exactly the same to me, hour after hour.

At one point, a Scottish friend asked me what I thought. I sagely opined that it was OK, but I was dying for someone, anyone, to play an instrument. "They are playing instruments," he said, pointing to the shaved-headed wonksters hunched over the racks of wires and switches and gadgets. "This is totally live!"

I thought he was either confused or just chemically touched, but I now see what he meant. It was a live show. From after sundown to just before sunup, these people were creating music not by creating the sounds themselves, but by manipulating and organizing them. When your main point of reference is hitting a drum once and hearing it make one thwok, the idea that a hard drive of existing sounds and geegaws of preordained pulses could be subject to the same sort of moment-to-moment impulses is one hell of a conceptual hurdle to leap over.

By now, I get it; it just took awhile. [Las Vegas] helped a bunch, if only because it showed up via the venerable Matador label. If those guys heard songs amongst the bleeps and blips, well then it stood to reason that I could figure out how to hear them, too. And yeah, the tracks are a little same-y (probably unintentionally) and thoroughly repetitive (totally on purpose). But a few spins pointed me towards the melodies, the structures...and most importantly, toward the craft. These nameless/faceless technicians were drawing from the same broad well as label-mates like Pavement and Guided By Voices; that guitars and choruses and humanistic imperfections weren't part of what they concocted didn't devalue the beverage. They were, like any other musicians, people who put forth a bottle labeled Drink Me, and promised a tiny bit of transformation of you gulped it down.

SISOSIG? In the decade-plus since I wrapped my behind-the-times mind around Burger/Ink, I've developed a decent ear for electronic music. In fact, I've found a lot of stuff that I like a whole lot more than [Las Vegas], from some of Darla's Bliss Out participants to the downright humanistic efforts of folks like RJD2 and Deadalus. But this one still sounds OK, and it was nice enough to hold the door open for the rest of its future(istic?) bretheren.

Are You Ready for the Country?

2008-05-22T21:23:00.001-04:00

Artists: Paul Burch & the WPA Ballclub; Lambchop
Albums: Blue Notes (PB); I Hope You're Sitting Down, What Another Man Spills, Nixon, Is a Woman, Tools in the Dryer
Source: Bought new (IHYSD); promo (all others)

It will come to no surprise to anyone who has spent 15 minutes with me that I love record stores. Actual record stores. It's kind of a lost art these days, but there's nothing quite like getting lost in the racks of a good ol' fashioned retail music outlet. I've spent hours in places and walked out with an armload of shiny new (or used) treasures...or sometimes with nothing more than just the light buzz of having taken in the sights, sounds and smells of all that delicious musical possibility.

The big downside of most record stores, though, is the genre system. Not every shop breaks down genres the same way (Other Music in NYC uses divisions like Out, Then and Psych/Prog to slice up its holdings), but they all do it. I guess it just wouldn't work to lay it all out in alphabetical order and let the public go spelunking through the mixed media...we need to have it divvied up into digestible portions for us, even if that means making a judgment call about whether all Bill Frisell releases qualify as jazz, or if Aretha Franklin should be in Rock or R&B.

While the genre map can be kind of helpful (otherwise you might not learn that The Bad Plus was jazz until you'd gotten home and unwrapped the package), it can also draw harsh borderlines that many music shoppers are loath to cross. I know I certainly kept my distance from the Country section in any shop, from Tower to Third Street Jazz and Rock, that would cordon off its Nashville-driven holdings. I mean, what did I want with those cowboy-hatted hillbillies, right? I was a righteous rocker (suspicious of Neil Young's country moves) and/or eclectic music snob...surely such snobbery exists to sweep aside baser forms like country music.

But just like it took certain noisy rock bands to bring Ornette and Trane records into my life, it was an odd bit of indie rock that made me ready for the country. Lambchop, a large collective of musicians who billed themselves as "Nashville's Most Fucked-Up Country & Western Band," popped out a strange platter in 1994 called I Hope You're Sitting Down (or Jack's Tulips, depending on which side of the CD's jewel case you looked at). Slide guitars, weepy acoustic balladry, Southern-fried vocals...it had all the trappings of country, but...well, like they said, it was kind of fucked-up. The liner notes credit one of the dozen or so players with "open-end wrenches," song titles include "Soaky in the Pooper" and "Let's Go Bowling," and one of the most beguiling songs has an emotion-laden lyric that goes, "She asked for some gum/He gave it to her."

What the hell?

It was easy to get sucked in to Lambchop's C&W world, because it was both totally familiar and utterly alien. They put on hypnotic shows where a stage full of people would make barely any noise [Side Note: one Lambchop appearance at a CMJ Merge Showcase had Yo La Tengo as the rhythm section; Superchunk's Mac on keys; and Neutral Milk Hotel's Julian on singing saw. Holy crap!]. And each record they released was more wonderful than the last, eventually adding R&B moves to the C&W base, more horns, more strings, more swing, more rock, more esoteric cover tunes, and more willful oddity.

If this was country music (and it kind of was, even if in a larger sense it clearly wasn't), then I wanted more. It quickly became OK to let other country seep into my ears. I began to hear it as a sort of regional, hillbillified blues music. And by the time Merge sent me a promo of Lambchop confederate Paul Burch's straight-up country record, Blue Notes, I was open to enjoying it.

Of course, now that I've learned to enjoy actual country music, most of my Lambchop records don't sound all that country to me. But they were the perfect gateway drug to the harder Nashville stuff, and it's thanks to Lambchop that I'm not afraid to wander into the Country section of the record store.

SISOSIG? Like children or pets, I love each of these Lambchop records equally but differently. If pressed, I'd have to say that What Another Man Spills is the first among equals here, with Nixon close behind. But I wouldn't want to part with any of these, nor the country tunes that have followed in their wake.

You Hadda Be There

2008-05-10T17:26:00.002-04:00

Artists: Built to Spill
Albums: There's Nothing Wrong With Love, The Normal Years, Keep It Like A Secret, Ancient Melodies From The Future
Source: Bought new (all)

There are few things as annoying as the Hadda Be There People. These are the folks with whom you share an affinity for a particular band or artist, yet they refuse to share a peer-level kinship with you because they heard said band/artist in a different era. Which, of course, is the only/correct era that could lead to proper appreciation.

On the surface this is just bullshit (and usually a particular brand: Sixties Bullshit). The idea is that if you listen to Blonde on Blonde or Beggar's Banquet in the here and now, you somehow can't hear it correctly. Nevermind that the fidelity of the CD remaster might be better, or that you (ie, me) might actually know more about Dylan than the interlocutor... Nope. No dice.

You hadda be there.

As someone who listens to lots of music way outside of my technical demographic (a large portion of The Beast could lead one to the conclusion that I'm an octogenarian African-American, rather than a GenX white guy), having my love of Miles or Neil or whomever dismissed because I wasn't in the audience at the Vanguard that one time in 1959 or de-seeding my bag in the gatefold of After The Goldrush really pisses me off. A lot.

On the other hand, I totally get it. I mean, is there a point in discovering Black Flag now, in the early Oughts? They weren't a "soundtrack to an era" or whatever reconstructed hippies like to think their youth's music meant, but Rollins and Ginn and Kira made music that reflected their time and place in a very specific way. You might dig TV Party just fine now, but I'd have to side with the Hadda Be Theres and say that there will be something taken away with Regan dead and buried instead of on the air from the Oval Office.

And even that is just a little ahead of my Prime Rocking Era (hence the total absence of Black Flag CDs in The Beast--though no shortage of other SST nuggets, I s'pose). But I was totally there for Built to Spill, man, and...well, I find myself wondering how a fresh pair of ears would take this stuff in.

Doug Martsch's music just kind of sounds like the soundtrack to a basic-cable original series called The Clinton Years. Way post-punk and a little bit post-Nirvana, teetering on the cusp of the Lo-Fi Revolutions and the ProTools Uprising, BTS records capture the freedom of the moment when you showed up to work in jeans and went home late with blurry vision and a pile of stock options. We were between wars (or so it seemed, at least), between recessions, and between the rise of the Alternative Nation and the collapse of the record industry.

BTS always tried hard to sound great, but never tried too hard to be cool. They aped prog-rock's extended guitar solos before that had become OK again, and managed to rock like mad without ever rising too much above mid-tempo. The songs often went nowhere in particular, but lyrics like, "I wanna see movies of my dreams" cut deep and swung wide. They referenced and covered codified Classic Rock unironically, smack dab in the middle of the High Ironic Age. The band even had beards before that was an indie-cool calling card.

And now...well, I can't help thinking I'm still hearing BTS in context. They sound like they don't care much what you think of them...which just happens to line up with a moment in time when it didn't matter much what I did or didn't do. They irresponsibly delivered to their major-label champions indie-rock tunes that clocked in the double digits (at a time when compact brevity was a general alt-rock rule), and it just so happened that I had no real responsibilities at the time, either. When Girl R asked me to kiss her during the long jams on Perfect Sound Forever (which is in my rack of vinyl, along with a few other bits of BTS missing from my CD holdings), it seemed to hardly matter that it was a terrible idea to say yes. And on Doug's guitar went, with no particular destination on the agenda.

To reduce all of that to something era-like, I guess BTS sounds like the mid-90s. Or, put another way: they were there at the time I was there for. And if you don't quite hear any of that in these records...well, you hadda be there.

SISOSIG? Will the Geezer Version of me think of Built to Spill as "the music of my youth"? That might be overstating it just a bit (or just a lot), but I do continue to have a timeline-based affection for these records. To be honest, Ancient Melodies is the one I reach for least (it pretty much sounds like Keep it Like a Secret, but with more short songs), but really I like all of these and still spin them all from time to time. And when it sometimes seems like the Bush Years will never, ever end, it is a breath of freshly backdated air to get to hear from a time before so many things slid so far downhill.

Like Falling In Love

2008-04-29T20:58:00.002-04:00

Artist: Bugskull
Albums: Snakland; Distracted Snowflake, Volume One; Distracted Snowflake, Volume Two
Source: Bought new (DSv1), bought used (Snak, DSv2)

Ask most people if they love music, and they'll probably answer in the affirmative. But I don't think most people really know what it means to love music; I think they're in like with music, but not in love.

Having a true love affair with a band is a lot like...well, it's a lot like really being in love. There's that head-spinning shock of the new when you bump into a new band, the sparks of recognition when the songs speak to you in that indescribable (yet totally recognizable) way. A song can cloud your thoughts for days, an intense show color the way you look at the rest of the world for awhile.

When you fall in love with a band, really fall in love, it changes you forever. And you never want it to end.

Therein lies one of the chronic heartbreakers of Music Love. Keeping a band together is tricky business; having just read Dean Wareham's autobiography, I can say it sounds like it can be harder than keeping a marriage afloat. And the alchemical drive that makes a person synthesize themselves as music is not a forever thing; sometimes they lose the spark or need to pay the bills or, for a host of reasons, just give up.

But more often than not, bands end (the Stones notwithstanding) and it can break your heart.

Bugskull was a band I kind of fell in love with, and now things are weird between us. I first heard Distracted Snowflake, Volume One in 1997, a year when I would listen to just about anything Darla Records put out. They essentially said, "Hey, meet my new friend. I think you guys will really hit it off."

And we did! We totally hooked up! DSv1 sounds like...kind of like nothing I'd heard before. It was instrumental, but had some vocals; had some electronics, but was audibly instrument-based; was rock music, but also a little dubby and oddly otherworldly; must've been home-recorded (and was still the style in '97), but had a clean, punchy sound. The opening track, "Icecream Daydream," has a bass line that still wanders into my head unbidden from time to time, and something about "Grand Canyon" mainlines directly to the heartstrings.

So I waited for Volume Two (which was good, but not quite as great as the first time), and dug into the back catalogue a bit. Bugskull popped up in magazines and on websites from time to time, dropped tracks onto compilations every now and then, and...

And then it stopped. I guess the band broke up. Or maybe it wasn't really a band (on both Snowflake volumes, it's pretty much all played by mainman Sean Byrne) and they guy just wasn't into it anymore. Either way, I not only never heard from Bugskull again, I never heard of them again. They'd never made much of a mark on the music scene, so their passing went unremarked upon. No articles charting the demise. No deluxe reissues. No reunion tours.

Nothing.

And that's how it goes sometimes when you're in love with music. A band or an album or a song can be so important to you, infiltrate you down to your toes, but it's often a fickle, one-way connection. And the breakup can change how the music sounds--maybe only a little, but enough to make a difference. I listen to Bugskull and...well, I miss the time we had together. I know they're never coming back, but at least we'll always have the music.

SISOSIG? It's hard to do a rational analysis in the midst of a relationship, but now I've got a little distance on the whole thing. Basically, DSv1 is still thoroughly awesome, and I listen to it a lot (even though it reminds me that Bugskull is gone, baby, gone); DSv2 isn't quite as good, but it's pretty OK and anyway it's part of a set.

Snakland, on the other hand, really isn't very good. Eileen stopped by while I was writing this, and Snakland was playing--"What the hell is this music?" she asked, and the missus had a point. That album finds Bugskull not yet fully formed (it's a good thing we didn't meet then!), and I really never listen to it. Snakland goes, but my beloved Snowflake is mine forever.

Narrative Arc

2008-04-27T16:30:00.001-04:00

Artists: Buffalo Tom; Cold Water Flat
Albums: s/t, Birdbrain, Let Me Come Over, Big Red Letter Day, Three Easy Pieces (BT); Listen (CWF)
Source: Bought new (BT, BB, BRLD, Listen); bought used (LMCO, 3EP)

One of the more infuriating/confounding aspects of any big political season is the degree to which we are all in thrall to the narrative arc. Political reporters are, like most writers of any stripe, storytellers; so they look for a story in the constant churn of information, misinformation and disinformation that surrounds the candidates and their surrogates. Once there's a good story (Gore fibs, Dubbya's not that bright, Kerry's too effete, etc.), they ride the narrative arc all the way...until the next one pops up.

It's often not that helpful (Gore lies more than GWB?), but the impulse in in all of us. After all, who doesn't like a good story? And if it can have both a constant through-line and some twists & turns, all the better.

That's one of the nice things about Buffalo Tom, a band that has been riding a nice narrative arc since the late 1980s. Listen to their records all in a row, and the sound changes/progresses quite a bit: the "Dinosaur Jr, Jr" guitar squalls of the first two records give way to cleaner, more crafted rock songs (electric and acoustic), which bend and pop within a variety of production styles. They can sound like the Stones or the Lemonheads or Dinosaur or Husker Du or Neil Young or...

Which is not to say that Buffalo Tom is inconsistent. In good narrative fashion, they have a tremendous through-line. Regardless of the sonic context, I'd recognize Bill Janovitz's singing and songwriting voice anywhere; the band, overall, locks together in a remarkably consistent way, too. Taken at a trot, the Buff Tom discography is a story with a progressive rising and falling action: the noisy debut storms out of the gate; Birdbrain consolidates their emerging strengths; Let Me Come Over is a stunning leap forward, sharpening all of the band's existing characteristics while adding a few more; Big Red Letter Day works to figure out how to harness the power of these progressions; and so on. By the time of last year's comeback LP, Three Easy Pieces, the long-dormant group is able to slide right back into the sound they've had all along, once again putting a few new tricks into play (howabout those dual Janovitz/Colbourn vox?)

Of course, the problem with the narrative arc is it seems to tell you something that might not, in the end, be true and/or helpful. I mean, is the sound of everything from Come Over the result of natural progressions of craft, or the pressures of their new (and bigger) label? Is the drawing down of the guitar noise a conscious reaction to the post-Nevermind scene, or just maturing rockers showing their age a bit?

I have no idea on any of these points, and who knows if the band members themselves know? But it's all a good story, and I hope they continue to add more chapters--I'll certainly keep following along.

SISOSIG? I've loved this band from the moment I heard Birdbrain at my college radio station in freshman year. Buffalo Tom manage the perfect mix of the audible emotional investment (which I'm always a sucker for) and the tight, energetic rocking that gets me going even when sitting still. Bill Janovitz is one hell of a songwriter, and I'd kill to know how he does what he does--the many nights my friend Matt and I worked on learning the Come Over songs on our guitars did little to distill Janovitz's considerable talents into anything I could work with. Once I hear any one of these songs I want to hear them all, and as such would be loathe to part with any.

Oh, and Cold Water Flat: a band put together by Bill's brother Paul. Whatever Bill's got, it must be at least partially genetic: if Buffalo Tom got ribbed for sounding like Dinosaur Jr, Jr, then Cold Water Flat is Buff Tom, Jr. I picked up Listen during one of my (many) deep Buffalo Tom periods (Bill plays on 1 or 2 tracks), and it's a somewhat nifty little disc. That said, only "Roll Me Over" really moves me anymore, so I think I'd be safe ripping that one and sending Listen along on its way.

Pure Joy

2008-04-03T20:39:00.001-04:00

Artists: Buena Vista Social Club; Rubén González
Albums: s/t (BVSC); Introducing... (RG)
Source: Promo (BVSC); bought new (RG)

I am not surprised by the fact that I am about to refer to High Fidelity to make a point about this music; rather, I'm kind of surprised it doesn't happen more often. (Really, if there's a more solid portrayal of the experience of loving music a little too much, please direct me to it!)

Anyway, the movie version of Hi-Fi opens with Rob musing on the possibility that exposure to your pop music might be more damaging to the young psyche than many of the more commonly ID'd culprits. The general levels of emotional devastation conveyed by most rock music are enough to put chinks in even the most solid personal armor, or at the very least create some weird ideas about how people relate to each other.

The long tail of broken hearts and warped personae becomes especially apparent when putting music like the Buena Vista Social Club on the stereo. Sure, some of this music is born out of hardship (the real kind, too; not that air-conditioned gypsy crap peddled by a lot of cushioned rockers), but the sound that comes out of the speakers is joy.

Pure joy.

These guys aren't just happy to be making music; they're thrilled down to the bottoms of their shoes (the shoes at least one member of the BVSC was shining for a living before Ry Cooder set up these sessions) and the joy is palpable, drenching every note. Nevermind that you don't understand the lyrics--the message behind every lyric is crystal-clear.

The sensation of hearing music like this typically makes me questions my general listening habits. Hearing Rubén González grin through the 88 teeth of his piano puts me right there with him, and that joy is restorative. Why not listen to stuff like this more often? Why go dark and/or noisy so often?

I'm not sure I have a good answer. I mean, this is not lightweight, disposable Happy Pop. These Cuban guys are masters of their indigenous music, and they're channeling history in some profound (but still blithely accessible) ways. I've got more bits o' The Beast that fit the bill for this kind of emotional deposit; the fact that I don't crave it more often probably says more about me than about the nature of music, though there is something in the latter that communicates the downsides more forcefully.

SISOSIG? The little blasts of sunshine poking through The Beast are not legion, so it makes sense to hold onto what I've got. Really, the BVSC disc is the primal document, with Rubén's solo turn sort of an addendum...but it's a solidly enjoyable side dish (the fact that Cooder described Gonzalez as, "a mix of Thelonious Monk and Felix the Cat" should be enough to sell anyone on the project). I also thoroughly recommend the PBS documentary about the making of the BVSC album; this Cuban story might just contain the single best example of the Jewish concept of a mitzvah, a good deed with a holy bent to it, as I've ever seen. It is, to be sure, joyous.

Why, Indeed?

2008-03-27T11:27:00.003-04:00

Why buy records? Or CDs? Patrick from Matador just wrote something that, I think, got it right on the money.

Making a Statement

2008-03-16T14:52:00.001-04:00

Artist: Ray Bryant
Album: Somewhere in France
Source: Promo

Thirteen tracks. A mix of original compositions and classic tunes. A little over an hour long. Recorded live on a particularly good night.

Viewed through those broad descriptors, Ray Bryant's Somewhere in France has an excellent chance of being nothing all that special, just another live disc in the jazz idiom. But this solo piano date winds up being something special indeed, and in fact quite rare: a single piece of work that ends up as a complete statement by the artist.

This idea of a "statement" can be a slippery one, and I'm not sure I'd be much help creating a workable definition. But you could do worse explaining the concept to someone by playing this record (which was part of an earlier group entry, but I want to talk about in more depth here). Wordlessly and sans accompaniment, Bryant opens with a rollicking rip through "Take the A Train" that instantly sets aside any memory of Ellington's big-band orchestration and instead makes the tune sound like its pouring out of Bryant and into the world for the very first time. Bryant has something to say here, and he manages to say it loud and clear, in such a way that leaves no corner unswept, no T uncrosssed.

The ineffability of this kind of full statement is sort of wondrous. The program itself is nothing particularly special, running from the familiar ("Django," Willow Weep for Me") to the much less so ("Slow Freight," Jungletown Jubilee"), and Bryant does little to illuminate them in his between-song patter. (In contrast with a solo-piano excursion from Keith Jarrett, there isn't that sense of instantaneous creation and discovery.) But when the applause dies down and Bryant's hands hit the keys, the logic is as hard to miss as it is difficult to wrap your arms around.

In a way, I suppose I'm jealous of Bryant. Who wouldn't want to have the chops to so deftly say one's piece like this? I write and write, nearly every day, for both money and fun, and I think I frequently hit the nail pretty squarely. But I'd hesitate to claim that anything I've written over the years has ever said it all on the topic at hand, left no questions lagging. I say what I can, turn it in on time (and/or hit Reply and Send in short-enough order) and tend to get the job done in a way that makes the right people happy. That's no small thing, to be sure (I can easily recall a time when I couldn't quite nail all that down), but it's also not quite anything too much larger. To put it another way, I feel like I am able to hit Rumsfeld's fabled "Known Knowns" and "Known Unknowns," but do not yet have the Bryant-like control of my craft and voice to discover the "Unknown Unknowns."

I could go on and on as Somewhere in France plays in the background, but as per the above paragraphs, you really just need to hear it, start to finish, "Take the A Train" to "Until It's Time for You to Go," to hear what the man has to say.

SISOSIG? For sheer pleasure alone, this is a keeper. The inherent totality of this piece places Bryant squarely in the camp of artists from whom I have no burning need to pick up more recordings, but I also would be sad to part with the one I have.

Speaking of "sad to part with," looking at this disc makes me want to make quick mention of the recent passing of Joel Dorn. I received this disc as a promo from his Label M, and its one of many from him that make The Beast a little bit fiercer. Dorn ended each of his liner notes with the sign-off, "Keep a light in the window," and it's impossible to argue that he failed in that very mission over the course of his lifetime.

Our Life Could Be Your Band

2008-02-16T14:00:00.001-05:00

Artists: Franklin Bruno; Nothing Painted Blue
Albums: A Bedroom Community (FB); Power Trips Down Lovers Lane, Placeholders, Emotional Discipline (NPB)
Source: Bought used (ABC, Placeholders); bought new (ED); promo (PTDLL)

One of the signature differences between rockers from the 60s/70s heyday and the post-punk nowadays is that the musicians are less likely to adopt the pose of the Golden God. Plant, Daltrey, Jagger, etc., were figures that the audience looked up to and/or aspired to be. Hot & cold running chicks, booze, drugs and whatever other debauchery was on tap...the audience didn't look up at the elevated stage and see themselves; they saw a fantasy of who they wanted to be at that moment.

Flash forward to anyone from Patti Smith to Kurt Cobain, and you had the rocker who seemed to aspire to be just like his or her audience. It creates an enormously changed dynamic between performer and audience, with the stage a lot closer to the floor, the curtain swept aside. D. Boon said his band could be your life, but the inverse was true, too.

Franklin Bruno is a singular exemplar of this contemporary rock pose. He is nobody's picture of a Golden God rocker: balding, a little pudgy, big glasses, and a vocabulary that does nothing to hide his day job as an academic. Instead of wailing about "giving you every inch of my love," Bruno writes an ode to a fetching meter maid with the lyric, "She's cherubic/She's seraphic/She's omniscient/When it comes to traffic" and wraps it in prickly new-wave-ish guitar squiggles.

If any of this sounds like I'm putting down Bruno (and/or his estimable band, Nothing Painted Blue), nothing could be further from the truth. As an overeducated "knowledge worker" who recoils at the idea of a gym membership, Bruno speaks to me and my ilk in a way that never fails to bring a smile. When Lee and I ran into him at a used bookstore the afternoon of a NPB gig, there was no entourage to push past and no artifice to cut through. The guy we got to chat with for a few minutes was the same guy who took the stage that night...which doesn't diminish the appeal of the artist since it more or less is the appeal.

Like wrapping your mind around a passage of David Foster Wallace prose, Bruno's hyper-literate songwriting style both sounds smart and makes you feel a little brainier as a listener. The topics of his songs revolve around relationships, sure, but in unusual ways that are so specific they make the idea of connecting to another person sound like a bewildering adventure. Those songs sit comfortably beside his other concerns, which range from office furniture ("Swivel Chair") and weather patterns ("El Niño") to unplanned pregnancy ("Another Child Bride") and creepy sleepovers ("Houseguest"). When the melodies and guitars and tightly rocking presentations wrap around songwriting this interesting, you end up with a stream of songs that hit several of the pleasure points at the same time and always address you straight in the eye, and not from the untouchable position of the high & mighty rock star.

SISOSIG? To the best of my knowledge NPB is no longer a going concern (Bruno's got a new band, The Human Hearts, that I need to look into more deeply), so I think this is the bulk of the band's catalogue (I'm missing 1 or 2 releases overall). Bruno's got a bunch more solo material, some of which I've got on seven-inches, and some of which I might someday want to get my hands on. But all told, Bruno's songs and style don't overlap much with other bands in The Beast and as such scratch very specific itches. I'm especially partial to the singles compilation (Emotional Discipline), but really there's nothing here that I don't get enormous pleasure from with every play.

The Loneliest Number

2008-01-27T15:56:00.000-05:00

Artists: Dave Brubeck Quartet; Eric Dolphy; Erroll Garner
Albums: Time Out (DBQ); Out to Lunch (ED); Concert by the Sea (EG)
Source: Bought new (DBQ, ED); gift (EG)

Jazz is an especially fertile field for the obsessive collector type. The idea of assembling a "core collection" would, in a conservative estimate, entail dozens upon dozens of purchases. Which is not to say other genres are too slight. Rather, if you're going to get the core catalogues of, say, Led Zeppelin and Patti Smith, you're talking about maybe 10 records; trying to do the same for Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk would require a small truck to haul it all home.

Accordingly, once I latch onto a jazz artist, the discs can start to pile up pretty seriously. Dave Douglas is still putting out records, and the two or three dozen discs of Miles' music still feels woefully incomplete. It can be a bit of a hazard, this collecting thing.

Which is why it's also nice to encounter artists like the three in question here: Dave Brubeck, Eric Dolphy and Erroll Garner. With each of these guys, I've got one - and only one - piece of their estimable catalogues...which is AOK by me. This is not to denigrate them as makers of musical statements. In fact, I really and totally dig all three of these discs.

But somehow, each one is just enough.

I find this reaction strangest with the Brubeck disc. This is one of those iconic platters, with actual, honest-to-goodness hits included ("Take Five" and "Blue Rondo a la Turk"). It would be easy to already be sick of some of these tunes before you've even heard the whole thing, but that's just not my experience of Time Out. Instead, I never get tired of it, from the watertight compositions to the band's icy-hot playing (especially the blue smoke that drifts out of Paul Desmond's sax). I love it every time, I reach for it often, and it doesn't make me feel like I need to have more in order to get the full picture.

Dolphy is a different case. In this instance, the thing is that I do have much, much more of his stuff: Eric Dolphy is a sideman on some of my favorite jazz dates: his recordings with Mingus, his tracks with Coltrane at the Village Vanguard, and certainly Oliver Nelson's The Blues and the Abstract Truth. I thoroughly dig Dolphy's playing...and the truth is that Out to Lunch, while perfectly enjoyable, is the least of The Beast's discs on which he appears. Like Time Out, this one is a pure pleasure to hear, and yet for this guy when I do want to hear more, it's his work with other people that gets me going. Some were born to lead, and Dolphy seems to have been dropped on Earth for a brief run of kicking other people's records into higher gear.

And then there's Erroll Garner. I'd never heard of him when my uncle gave me Concert by the Sea as a gift, and I was glad to make the pianist's acquaintance. Though it doesn't contain his best-known track ("Misty"), the 11 tunes it does have are all tightly melodic creations, well-played by Garner's trio. I don't reach for it too often, but when I do Concert by the Sea is always a pleasure. It's entirely satisfying, but doesn't make me curious to hear more. Having not known this was on offer, it continues to be a welcome (if originally unexpected) guest who knows how not to outstay that welcome.

SISOSIG? Though for a trio different reasons, all three of these are keepers. There's little danger of my Brubeck, Dolphy or Garner holdings increasing (though I suspect there are more of ED's sideman projects to acquire), but I'd be sad to see them decrease from their current counts of the loneliest number.

Man Vs. (Sex) Machine

2008-01-17T21:21:00.000-05:00

Artist: James Brown
Albums: Sex Machine; 20 All-Time Greatest Hits
Source: Bought new

Taking a look at Soul Brother #1 brings up two issues. The first is roughly the same thing I encountered when pondering my Beatles holdings: is it really possible that I have this paltry amount of James Brown in residence? I mean, this is a major dude, to put it lightly. I've heard Robert Chirstgau say that Mr. Excitement is the top musician he's encountered, in any idiom. I don't particularly agree, but I also don't really know how I'd go about refuting the claim.

In short, I just don't have enough James Brown. I mean, no Live at the Apollo? Or at least a semi-comprehensive box set ? C'mon, people.

But more importantly (and perhaps related to the Great James Brown Shortage) is the issue of personality. James Brown is the inventor of funk, the leader of one of the greatest R&B bands ever, the writer of several all-time classic songs...but he was also a wife-beater, a tyrannical boss, and a gun-toting cop-baiting drug-addled lunatic among other things.

To say that the man had some flaws would be putting it lightly. Eileen doesn't like me to play Brown's music in the car, specifically on the domestic-violence issue (though I notice she doesn't make me turn off those old Ike & Tina hits...). I explain his role in the civil rights movement and his many instances of positive social leadership, but she doesn't want to hear it: he is a Bad Man, and that extends all the way to the deepest of his deepest grooves.

I can kind of see where she's coming from...but I think I have to disagree with my lovely wife on this one. Sure, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business wasn't always the Best Guy Ever Off-Stage, but I have trouble using that as a measure of art. Jo-Jo Richman says, "Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole," but only because it (sort of) rhymes; Picasso was an asshole, and so were/are a lot of great artists. Should I stop watching Woody Allen movies because I don't dig the whole Soon-Yi episode? Should Wagner be banished from the concert halls for his anit-Semitic views? William Burroughs shot his wife playing "William Tell" (though in his defense, they were both massively zonked at the time) and Frank Zappa indulged in the groupies when away from his wife & kids, but I don't want to get rid of my copies of Naked Lunch or Hot Rats in protest.

In short, I don't know that it's fair to evaluate art using a Man (or Woman, Ms. Riefenstahl) vs. Artist equation. The creative output is the creative output, and for the most part needs to be evaluated as such. (In cases where the output is the person, e.g., Mein Kamph, I can see where this might not be the way to go.) James Brown was not always a role model, but I'm not going to him for advice on how to treat women--I want to hear the beat hit on the one, the bass slap out a groove, and Mr. Sex Machine himself ride that otherworldly voice atop some of the fiercest music ever committed.

SISOSIG? Personality issues aside, these are two tasty little discs. With a fella whose output varied so widely in quality for so many years, it can be a killer move to have a killer best-of collection. The 20 tracks on this one are all monsters, from the heard-it-too much tracks like "I Got You" and "Sex Machine" to the funk blasts of "Night Train" and "Say It Loud." Eileen may not allow this in the car, but it can't be beat for sheer quality. The other one, Sex Machine, I bought on the basis of the 12-minute title track, a live version of "Get Up I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine" that features Bootsy Collins on the staggeringly funky bass and James just barely int control of himself. That being track 1, the rest of the album has some trouble measuring up, but lordy does it ever try its best. By the time "Mother Popcorn" winds out its last groove, I'm often exhausted.

So these both stay, and as mentioned I really oughta pick up Live at the Apollo, and maybe look into the Star Time box. There's a lot of Brother James out there, and I should probably have some more in here!

Solo Flight

2007-12-31T14:23:00.000-05:00

Artist: Clifford Brown and Max Roach
Album: s/t
Source: Bought new

If you had to boil jazz down to one essential, crucial element, it would probably be the solos. Despite the importance of composition, arrangement, tone, harmony, etc., it's easy to argue that the moment when any jazz tune really comes into its own as a piece of musical art is during the solos. It's the instance of pure(ish) improvisation, the one-time-only moment when the individual artist gets to have his say.

In concert, this becomes indisputable. Even the most ferocious, locked-in band can be one-upped by a transcendent solo in a club. I've seen Ron Carter use his bass, on two separate occasions, to tell stories so full and deep that they left me shivering; at an Uri Caine concert in 2000, the violinist seemed to distill the entire history of Western music in an extended break; Greg Cohen took a solo during a Masada show at the 92nd Street Y that was so powerful, he voluntarily shook off his remaining solo slots for the rest of the set. The live setting allows you to watch the musician step forward and concentrate his (and your) attention on the unfolding construction of the solo. In the hands of the right person, it's the indisputable highlight of any jazz show, with the entire audience holding its collective breath before exploding into cheers.

On record, though, I find the solo to be a whole 'nother story. Every jazz disc is replete with improvised breaks; over the course of an album, pretty much every member of the band will get a moment, at least, and usually more. But I find it hard to focus on the solos contained in studio sessions.

For one thing, a lot of jazz production is, for better or worse, fairly flat. This isn't really a criticism - it's difficult to mix a bass player in a way that outshines a horn section, and usually it would make the record sound terrible. I can't imagine all of those Jazz Messengers records standing up over time if Art Blakey's drums were at the very front of every mix.

Then there's the even bigger problem: the solo is the same every time you listen. When a musician crafts a solo statement on the bandstand, you can feel the moment pouring out of them, through the instrument. And then it's gone. If you see the band again on another night, the solo will be different; the same song, performed by a different musician, will engender an altogether different break. On CD, you know what to expect. For all of their built-in thrills, the solos on Kind of Blue have been static for more than half a century. It doesn't mean they're bad in any way, just that they are a moment of improvisation that has been frozen in amber, slightly inanimate when compared to the moment of conception.

And so with jazz CDs, I more often find myself focused on the overall sound: the way the band plays together, the strengths of the compositions, the overall feelings of energy, motion, emotion. (Mingus stands up especially well to this kind of listening, and certainly Coltrane.) A lot of recordings that lean on the solos for their greatness sometimes fail to thrill me entirely; it's a problem I have with a lot of Charlie Parker cuts, where the magic is often confined to Bird's short explosion of brilliance in a 78-rpm setting, one that is so compact (and oft-imitated) that it doesn't always grab me the way I feel they should.

So it goes with Clifford Brown. Universally acknowledged as one of the master soloists of the hard-bop trumpet, I have to confess that this studio recording usually strikes me as not more than a collection of very good jazz tunes. The playing is tight as a drum (especially, of course, Max Roach's drumming), the tunes are solid melodies that are given bright harmonic treatment by the band, and the sound is clear and forceful. Who could argue with it?

And yet, I am somehow unmoved every time I listen, and I'm pretty sure it's the predominance of the solos. Brown solos often and at length. But it is easy to be taken unawares by these breaks, to let my attention wander in and out of the lines, or maybe shift to something Richie Powell is doing on piano. I'm not there (in a lot of ways), and it detracts from finding the power that I'm sure is in the disc. This album is filled with what are, no doubt, big majestic trees of solos, but I'm not quite able to construct a visible forest from them.

SISOSIG? This is another one that I'm hoping will pay off down the road. It might take a different Brown/Roach record to open my ears to their playing (maybe the one with Sonny Rollins taking over for Harold Land on sax?), and I remain hopeful that I will find a way to learn to better hear the art of the recorded solo. The short-lived Brown remains one of those "important" artists that I want to have as part of the core collection (Max, too, of course), which makes me want to keep him in the mix.

Social Networking

2007-12-15T16:56:00.000-05:00

Artists: Brokeback; Chicago Underground Duo; Eleventh Dream Day; Isotope 217; Tortoise
Albums: Field Recordings from the Cook County Water Table (BB); Synesthesia, Axis and Alignment (CU2); Prairie School Freakout/Wayne, Lived to Tell, Eighth (EDD); Utonian Automatic, Who Stole the I-Walkman? (I217); Millions Now Living Will Never Die, Standards, A Lazarus Taxon (Tortoise)
Source: Bought new (Millions, Standards, Lazarus); Bought used (Field Recordings, Prairie, Eighth); Promos (CU2, Isotope, Lived to Tell)

It sounds thoroughly unbelievable, but I totally swear that I only tried out online social networking because I had to. For work. My job at a college involves getting info in front of students, and my boss wanted to know more about this MySpace thing all the kids are always on about. So I signed up for MySpace and Facebook (while getting paid!) and gave them a whirl.

To be honest, I was thoroughly unimpressed. It seemed like elaborate online foreplay, with no actual (ahem) social penetration. I let my pages lie fallow and went back about my business. But the hype about the youths and their networking sites kept punching through the media filter, so I decided to examine them more thoroughly.

I came to two conclusions: 1) This was a serious waste of time; 2) This was fun!

In addition to linking up with current colleagues and buddies, I soon found myself connecting with people I hadn't talked to in years, decades. People from high school, summer camp, college, dot.com gigs...so many were out there, and I now had a convenient way to interface and catch up. It also made it easier to at least periodically touch base with NYC people, now that going out in the city had become more difficult. Facebook gets a rap for being a substitute for real interaction...but if there are people with whom you can't really have actual interaction, I'd say it's a step or two above letting them drift away completely.

What does all this have to do with the big ol' list of records at the top of the page? One of the cool things about the social networking sites is seeing how the people you know overlap, the cross-currents of experience, interests, geography, etc. Someone from camp went to college with someone I know from my improv theater; someone I went to college with is friends with a member of a band I like; someone from high school works a gig not too dissimilar from mine.

That sort of interconnectedness weaves and loops through all of these Chicago-based bands. Lots of cities have musically incestuous scenes, but the Windy City seems to have an exceptional level of cross-pollination. Brokeback is a solo project of Doug McCombs, who plays in Eleventh Dream Day and Tortoise; the Chicago Underground Duo records with Tortoise's John McEntire at Tortoise's studio, and half of the CU2 is on the Isotope records, along with a couple of Tortoise people; and so on. To be honest, I could have made this pile much, much larger if I'd pulled all of the discs that feature overlapping Chicago folk.

But it's not just a coincidence of geography or personnel that makes these connections notable. It's the way, like in a list of MySpace friends, that the networks overlap and the ways those overlapping networks affect the sounds. EDD loosened up and explored further out as McCombs brought his Tortoise chops back to the band. Tortoise worked with cut-and-paste production methods, a style that is the foundation of the CU2 discs. The moonlighters in Isotope brought guitarist Jeff Parker back with them to their more primary projects, and his sound and style profoundly changed those bands. Is the harsher guitar of Standards drawn from EDD? Maybe. Or perhaps it's another strand of the network making its presence felt/heard. Given the Facebook-like way that Chicago's musicians share ideas, spaces, personnel and sounds, it's less like a conscious effort to import/export these factors and more like a single social-musical web that continues to weave itself around and through the city's scene.

SISOSIG? Given the overlapping nature of the bands represented here, it's kind of hard to dig one and want to get rid of another. That said, the electro-jazz collages of the two CU2 discs don't always hit my ear just right...but I feel the need to be patient with them. Standards excited me right off the bat as noise-rock, then quickly grew stale, only to reappear to my ears as an entirely different (and more enjoyable) album of guitar-centered instrumentals; I'm currently going through the same process with the weightier Lazarus Taxon box. Same goes for the Isotope discs, which keep morphing with the shifting ways I'm able to hear them. With EDD and Tortoise sitting at the center of these ever-expanding networks, I think all of these records are ones that I want to keep connected to over time.

List Me Up

2007-12-11T15:58:00.000-05:00

One of the super-funnest things about being a paid music writer was being asked to compile End of Year/Best Of lists. If serious music fandom is like being a sports junkie, then this is as close as we get to compiling stats.

I went a number of post-pro years just compiling said lists in my head. Then last year, the Gawker people opened up a new poll through their Idolator site, and bloggers were welcome. Hooray!

Just because someone who isn't me might possibly care (and because lists are fun!), below is the list I compiled for the 2007 Idolator poll (here is last year's), along with the comments I submitted:

Favorite Albums of 2007:
1. The National, Boxer
2. New Pornographers, Challengers
3. El-P, I'll Sleep When You're Dead
4. Fred Anderson & Hamid Drake, From the River to the Ocean
5. Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
6. Erik Friedlander, Block Ice and Propane
7. Glenn Mercer, Wheels in Motion
8. Bottomless Pit, Hammer of the Gods
9. Okkervil River, The Stage Names
10. Chris Potter, Follow The Red Line - Live At The Village Vanguard

(The poll only allowed for 10 entries, but I also really really totally enjoyed Aesop Rock, None Shall Pass; Battles, s/t; Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha; Caribou, Andorra; Ron Carter, For Miles; Dalek, Abandoned Language; Tinariwen, Aman Iman)

Reissues:
1. Young Marble Giants, Colossal Youth
2. Sebadoh, III
3. Miles Davis, The Complete On the Corner Sessions
4. Bongos, Drums Along the Hudson
5. Wedding Present, Complete Peel Sessions 1986-2004

Artists of the Year:
1. Bruce Springsteen
2. The National
3. Arcade Fire
4. New Pornographers
5. Chris Potter

It's hard to tell if it was the music or just me, but 2007 was a year for a deeper personal connection to new music than I've had in awhile. Especially with the Arcade Fire and The National records, there seemed to be something almost embarrassingly emotional in the air. It was hard, with many of these records, not to have that teenage feeling that these artists knew something important about me and were singing right into my ear.

Admittedly, a lot of it is just me: the missus and me moved to our Adult House, and a New Pornographers album about grown-up love, doubts and transitions hit me where I (now) live. Glenn Mercer and Bottomless Pit brought key sounds from my Prime Rocking Years back, older and wiser and a little sadder; Fred Anderson/Hamid Drake and Erik Friedlander mined very personal experiences for instrumental music of the highest emotional order. Similarly, El-P's I'll Sleep When You're Dead is, I think, a top-flight album, but I also acknowledge that it might simply be that it sounds and feels more like the pre-G Funk hip-hop that I thought had gone forever and left me behind.

While I still think The National are the story of the year band-wise, The Boss was undoubtedly back in the corner office in 2007. I found Magic to be a good (not great) record, but just like Dylan last year, Bruce was very much present, accessible and bringing it to the people. He got out in front of personal and political messages which had a weight of authority that a band like, say, Wilco can't begin to approximate. That he's also managed to become the latest Acceptable Indie Touchstone (in the style of Brian Wilson, Lou Reed, Neil Young, etc.) at around the same time makes Mr. New Jersey a solid contender for Mr. 2007.

Non-Poll Postscript - I am more than a little blown away to see how many things on this list I do not own as physical media. The truckloads of articles and blog posts about the dying/evolving record industry struck me as a bit of overkill, but the fact that I went the new/non-traditional route on so many of these (including my #1 fave album of the year) sings pretty loudly.

Gone Too Far, Too Far Gone

2007-11-19T20:07:00.000-05:00

Artist: Bright
Albums: Bright, Blue Christian/Bliss Out v.12
Source: Bought used (s/t); bought new (Blue C.)

One of the ways The Man tries to scare kiddies away from even low-level drug use is the idea of the Gateway Drug. The idea being that even if it seems like smoking some pot every now and then is fairly harmless (and the science says it is pretty harmless, kids!), it's actually entirely sinister because that one joint is not an end unto itself. No, it's going to make you want to try something a little stronger, which will lead to something a little badder, and before long you'll be knocking over Quik-E-Marts to feed your hard-dope habit.

So stay away from the soft stuff, because you don't know where it will lead.

My general opinion is that this is alarmist horseshit...a position that my own experiences with record buying thoroughly refutes. See, once I hear something I like, well...I want more. But not just the same stuff, man - I want something that hits a little harder, is a little further out there. And I'll keep dancing from one Gateway CD to the next until, finally, I'm not even sure what I'm doing anymore.

Bright holds two slots in The Beast for no other reason than it's a further-out hit of some wicked stuff that had gotten my brain all abuzz. In the mid-90s, Philadelphia earned the nickname Psychedelphia, and with good reason: there was some intense modern psychedelic music wafting out the the City of Brotha-ly Love. From Asteroid #4 and Bardo Pond to Lenola and Transient Waves, there was head-spinning noise leaking out of every dark corner of the city.

It was great. I was hooked. Gimme more!

Soon, my visits to the Church of Latter-Day Psychedelia became more wanton, less discriminate. If something was supposed to pack a strong hit of droning guitars and drifting percussion, I was in. All I needed was little prodding.

So I read a review of a Bright album that described the group as "Ash Ra Temple meets Sun Ra." Now, normally, I would have noticed that this description hinged on the writer's ability to find two improv-heavy groups with "Ra" in their names. Red flag! But instead, all my Music Junkie ears heard was that this was some heavy shit.

And I guess it is, but there's nothing really to distinguish it from any other moderately heavy guitar-based psych of the era. Bright sounds like two guys with a bag of weed and a bunch of pedals who rolled tape. Which is not to dismiss it entirely - there is some reliably tasty crunch that Bright cranks out from time to time - but it doesn't rise to the level of Windy and Carl or the Photon Band, groups who took the psychedelic mantle and made something new(ish) and often remarkable out of it. Instead, Bright just kind of gives you a low-intensity buzz...better than having none at all, sure, but less nifty than the truly primo doses available from all the other six-stringed dealers.

SISOSIG? Bright's self-titled debut bears the hallmarks of musicians who are full of enthusiasm and talent, but aren't entirely sure what to do with it. I play this record from time to time, but immediately afterwards I'm at a loss to recall what any specific part of it sounded like. Blue Christian, cut just a year later, fares a bit better creatively, and spices the long instrumental jams with some occasional sax (and other instruments that are neither guitars nor drums). Seeing as Blue C. is also part of my Darla Bliss Out subscription series, I think it'll do as my occasional hit of Bright's mid-level pleasures...and the other one can be chalked up to a purchase made by a strung-out noise junkie.

Mac Attack!

2007-11-14T21:24:00.000-05:00

Artists: Bricks; Portastatic; Superchunk
Albums: A Microphone and a Box of Dirt (Bricks); I Hope Your Heart is not Brittle, Slow Note for a Sinking Ship, Hello Songs EP, The Nature of Sap, Looking for Leonard, The Perfect Little Door, The Summer of the Shark, Autumn Was a Lark, Bright Ideas, Ideas for Bright Ideas, Who Loves the Sun, Be Still Please, Some Small Things You Can't Defend (Portastatic); Superchunk, No Pocky for Kitty, On the Mouth, Foolish, Incidental Music, Here's Where the Strings Come In, The Laughter Guns, Indoor Living, Come Pick Me Up, Hello Hawk EP, Here's to Shutting Up, Cup of Sand, Clambakes Vols. 1-3 (Superchunk)
Source: Bought new, except for Microphone/Box of Dirt, Superchunk and On the Mouth (bought used); and Leonard, Little Door, Summer/Shark, Autumn/Lark, Indoor, Come Pick and Shutting Up (promos)

Conventional wisdom says there is no way to define "art," but I think the wisdom-people are wrong. Art: The result of any creative act that allows a member of the audience to know that s/he is not alone in their experience of the world. See? That wasn't so hard.

Music is one of the most spot-on exemplars of that definition, and one of the reasons is that it is easy to discern an individual person (or people) in the musical act, so that non-alone feeling has a weird sort of social aspect. In other words, we hear a song or piece of music and know, just know, that it was written especially for us, that the musician knows us so well.

Mac McCaughan, who fronts all of Bricks, Portastatic and Superchunk, is one of those musicians that you can feel like you know, or are somehow magically known by. Referred to as just "Mac" by anyone who digs what he does, there is something about his music and/or persona and/or presence that engenders the connection. Blessed with talent and seemingly free of pretension, Mac makes pop/rock music that connects like art.

Being a Mac Fan is not a flash-in-the-pan experience; glance up at the list of my Mac-based holdings, and you'll see what I mean (there's an equally thick list of vinyl). Don't imagine that there aren't plenty more people out there with a similar pile o' Mac. Why? Because Mac does the one thing that entertainers aren't really supposed to do: he grows up at roughly the pace of a human being.

I always joke that when you go to a Superchunk show, it's easy to tell how old any given song is: see how much the band's hands have to move on their instruments. A couple of chords in an easy sequence? Early 'Chunk, no doubt (albums #1 and 2, plus the first several singles). Maybe a handful, plus some short runs on the fretboard in-between? That would be mid-period (roughly On the Mouth through Here's Where the Strings Come In). Complex arrangements, time-signature shifts, plus maybe some keyboard flourishes? Anything from Indoor Living onward. The Portastatic discs follow the same arc, with the work becoming more sophisticated and mature as the release dates roll forward. (He kicks ass live throughout.)

But it's not just the music. The overall mood, the lyrics, the stage show...all of it grows up. The comp of Bricks tracks is young and uncertain (1988-90); No Pocky for Kitty (1991) is full of over-excited challenges to the world; Summer of the Shark (2003) is an affecting meditation on two people searching for each other in the wake of 9/11 (a far better reckoning of the event than The Rising, from Mac's hero The Boss). Now that Mac is married and has kids, that specific brand of contentment and the new attendant avenues of doubt and wonder are all over the most recent Portastatic discs. It's not just that I feel like I know Mac; the music makes it seems like I can better understand my own forward momentum by listening to how he processes his.

If you'd asked me a decade ago if I'd continue to get excited by Mac's music for the rest of my life, I would have cocked an ear to the noisy rush of early Superchunk and had my doubts. But from the domesticated pop and refined rock to the instrumental movie scores and jazzy experiments, it seems that as long as I keep getting older, Mac will be making music that grows up alongside me.

SISOSIG? Mac's music (along with a lot of the stuff he puts out through the label he co-runs with Superchunk bassist Laura Ballance, Merge) is some of my all-out favorite tunage. Some of these discs are more essential than others, and some have aged better or worse, but they're a body of work I can hear myself through. All of this stays, and there'll always be room in The Beast for whatever else Mac's got coming.

I Take it Back

2007-11-11T20:14:00.000-05:00

Artists: The Breeders; Pixies
Albums: Safari, Last Splash, title TK (Breeders); Surfer Rosa/Come on Pilgrim, Doolittle, Monkey Gone to Heaven EP, Debaser EP, Bossanova, Trompe le Monde, Alec Eiffel EP (Pixies)
Source: All bought new, except for title TK (bought used) and Safari & Debaser (from JP's collection)

It's a little difficult to write about the Pixies, because they're not entirely mine. As I wrote in a previous entry, "In most cases (including this one, probably) it would be an oversimplification to say that my friendship with JP was based on music." But, I should add that it would not be entirely inaccurate to say that our friendship was based on the Pixies.

Talking about and listening to the Pixies was our first point of contact, and an enduring part of how we related to each other. Y'know how men sometimes talk about a football team with each other? The way those guys feel like the QB is playing for them, that's how we felt about Back Francis, Kim Deal, Joey Santiago and Dave Lovering. We would discuss their recorded and real lives in detail. We would recite the little bits of between-song banter peppered throughout Surfer Rosa and the spiel that opens up "I've Been Tired." When Trompe le Monde came out, we went to the store that day, and dedicated that night's installment of our radio show to just that disc alone - playing each track and then discussing it at length. Inspired by the sports quiz in Diner, JP even subjected one of his girlfriends to a make-or-break round of Pixies Trivia.

I could tell a hundred more stories like those, plus more about Kim Deal's Breeders side project. Our devotion knew no bounds, and I think it reflected a lot of how we felt towards each other.

While Yo La Tengo eventually took over this role, it was largely because the Pixies had broken up. If they'd still been around, still recording, still playing live, I have no doubt that we'd have focused our devotion just as much (or more) on our Alpha Band.

So how do I hear Pixies and Breeders records now? Well, for starters: it ain't easy. But beyond that, I had to make a decision: would this music just be tied to someone/thing lost, or should I take it back? And if I wanted to, was that even possible?

I've lost a lot of music to memories. Songs that were tied to old girlfriends sometimes stop making into the CD player, more or less lost forever (or at least for awhile).

But I also have learned that it's possible to get them back. When things with Girl R imploded in the late 90s, it looked like she'd be taking one of my all-time favorite records with her. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel is one of the very best pieces of music, in any genre, that it's ever been my pleasure to hear. But the disc had gotten all tangled up with with Girl R, to the extent that it wouldn't have been out of place to give it up for lost.

I refused. I listened to it four, five times a day. I wrote about its merits for an audience of no one. I talked to people about it (no one quite as much as JP), and before long...I got it back. Sure, I'll occasionally think about Girl R when I take the Aeroplane out for a spin, but not too much.

So it's doable, at the very least. I tabled the issue vis-a-vis the Pixies until a couple of years ago, when the band got back together for a round of cash-in touring. I hadn't really gamed out how to deal with this - it had seemed like the group was pretty acrimoniously broken up for good. But hey, even rockers have kids and mortgages and such-like, so they tuned up the guitars and took the old songs out on the road.

(Quick non sequitur: By marrying Eileen, I was at this point tangentially related to the Pixies' lead guitarist. Joey is married to the sister of the wife of a cousin of Eileen's, which to me instantly made him Cousin Joey. I'm still working on seeing him at a "family event" in RI.)

What to do? Well, not going didn't seem like an option. Once I knew I'd do it, should I try to go with someone connected to JP? I decided against the kind of "tribute" approach (though it had served me well when The Magnetic Fields played all of 69 Love Songs at Lincoln Center a few months after he'd gone), turned down a backstage-pass offer from Cousin Joey's bro-in-law (too much, too much) and in the end just picked up some tickets with Concert Buddy Debbie. I made an effort to go in more with in-the-moment expectations than memories, and I think it worked out.

Actually, I know it did: the show blew me away, and I couldn't stop smiling for a week. It was briefly sad that JP wasn't at the concert with me, but I guess enough time has passed now. I was able to spend the majority of the show just rocking out, getting excited when they'd play the old songs we were all there to hear. Go figure: a band from the past puts on a show that is nakedly about reliving old, lost memories...and they end up doing something that brings me more into the present.

SISOSIG? This is sort of like asking, "Should the Book of Genesis stay in the Bible?" Every note of every one of these discs has deep meaning for me, past and present (and presumably future). I will keep these, replace them as needed, and add to them as required. I know at least one absent friend who would be very, very disappointed in me if I did otherwise.

My First Time

2007-10-27T20:06:00.000-04:00

Artists: David Bowie; Brian Eno
Albums: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (DB); Thursday Afternoon (BE)
Source: Bought new

For my 14th birthday, my parents bought me a CD player. That's a common enough occurrence these days, but this was a moment in the 1980s when the Compact Disc was brand new, something only audiophiles & early adopters had even heard of. Up until that moment, I'd had my little boom box and a Walkman for my already-sizable collection of cassettes, and I would play my few LPs on my folks' turntable. Everything seemed fine.

Suddenly, there was this new, unknown thing to deal with. Along with the player, I got a copy of an audiophile magazine like Stereo Review or something, and the cover story was about CD players...and the attendant CDs that went along with them.

Thus, the process began.

I did some reading, and prepared for a trip to the Cherry Hill Mall, where Sound Odyssey had a section of CDs - way in the back of the store, behind the vinyl and tapes. I'd brought along some allowance money to make the buy, and some ideas of what to get: probably a Beatles album (Sgt. Pepper's, maybe?), maybe London Calling or one of the Pink Floyd albums I'd yet to get on cassette.

But these were early days, and the pickings were slim. The Beatles were 5 years or so from making their debut in the new format; ditto for iconic acts like the Stones. The Floyd section was nearly bare, and since I'd never heard a CD, it didn't occur to me to upgrade one of the Talking Heads or Elvis Costello albums I already had.

There was a lot of weird stuff on offer, and much of it was beyond my ken. This was my entry into a new musical world, so the selection could not be made lightly - the discs I got had to matter in some way.

When I realize that it was my 14-year-old self that made the purchase, I'm kind of blown away that the two things I bought were Bowie's Ziggy Stardust album, and Eno's Thursday Afternoon. At an age when I really should have been picking up some of the hits of the day (maybe Synchronicity and Brothers in Arms, or something else from MTV's heavy rotation?), I ended up with a pair of discs that are kind of a microcosm of all of the many, many, many additions yet to come to The Baby Beast.

First Bowie. Put simply, Ziggy is iconic. The opening shot of a new kind of glam pop, the album was already a historical milestone. It had two hits everybody knew - "Ziggy Stardust" and "Suffragette City" - and a backstory that people who cared about such things (read: me) knew inside and out. It would have made more sense to pick up a best-of package like Changes, but I felt like I needed something more important, and this fit the bill.

Eno's disc went in the other direction, being an iconoclastic record that fit into the history yet to be made. Thursday Afternoon is a single, hour-long minimalist piece that Eno made specifically in response to the advent of CDs. Its length took advantage of the elongated playing time of the new medium (no need to fade out for a flip to Side Two), and the quiet, slow evolution of the music banked on the disc's non-existant surface noise. It was something with no discernable melody, no real "fun factor," but lots & lots to think about and discuss.

The third point is one I didn't even know at the time: more or less at random, I'd reunited a classic art-rock team. Bowie and Eno had made "important" music together in the past (really around the time I was born), but that was something I'd learn later.

Since this trip to the mall, I've essentially made the same trip over & over again...going to the record store looking to 1) build up my store of classic/important recordings; 2) dig into secret, eclectic musical worlds that ran parallel (but miles beneath) to the ones aboveground, in search of something new and momentous, or at least just good for a geeky bull session; 3) make connections, real or imagined, between seemingly disparate musical artifacts, looking for the deeper truths that would be revealed. I'm still hard at work on all 3 points.

SISOSIG? If only for personal historical reasons, I'd be loathe to part with either of these discs (though oddly enough, I've yet to buy any more Bowie or Eno in the CD format). I don't listen to Ziggy too often anymore...but that's pretty much due to how much I listened to it back in the day. When it was one of half a dozen discs I owned (i.e., Wish You Were Here and Fear of Music followed these 1st purchases by a few weeks), I listened to every nook and cranny of it. Eventually, it became part of my own musical/historical firmament; I still love it when I hear it, even if it isn't that often.

Thursday Afternoon, on the other hand, has become something I listen to more as time passes. Truth be told, it's subtle pleasures were kind of wasted on my teenage self - there isn't anything that could be considered "active" about the piece until 58 minutes in, when the low end drops out. When I was hearing more of myself in albums by The Clash and Husker Du, an elongated piece of minimal piano, composed visually on a grid, didn't really hit the right buttons too often. But as I've sought more moments of soli- and quietude in adult life, my ears have continually opened up to Eno's disc. It's not only a keeper for historical reasons, but for actively musical ones.

One and Only One

2007-10-23T21:58:00.000-04:00

Artist: Bowery Electric
Album: Lush Life
Source: Bought used

In these iTunes-centric times, much ink (real and virtual) has been spilled bemoaning the death of the album. The kids these days, say those in the know, these kids just don't want the full album experience. Download a track or two from Mr. Jobs and all is well.

I am, to no one's great surprise, an Album Guy. I like the entire experience, the hour or so of getting from track 1 to the run-out groove, the way the sequence of the whole shebang can take you on a little journey. When Radiohead blew the industry's collective mind with their sudden online release of In Rainbows, I think part of the deal was their attempt to preserve this experience. And I was right there with them.

But the thing is, Radiohead and the other Album Guys are only right part of the time. The rest of the time, The Kids know what the score is.

See, the trick with the album experience is that it's only worth going on about and preserving and such when groups can, you know, make a whole album. R.E.M. used to be able to do it, Pink Floyd were masters of it, and even newbies like The National have it down. Give guys like this an hour, and they'll give you a whole world.

But this is not a given, and iTunes has the 99-cent downloads to prove it. I first heard Bowery Electric when the track "Freedom Fighter" was on a compilation disc that came with some magazine. Good god was it ever good. A beat that jumped up and never stopped blasting off the launch pad, guitars that did all sorts of weird and wonderful things, and a sharply sweet vocal from Martha Schwnedener. I could not wait to hear the album.

I found Lush Life in the used bin at Other Music. Ten tracks, and a promise of 50 minutes that expanded on the promise of "Freedom Fighter" and filled in the spaces it suggested. Track 1, press play, sit back and take the trip.

But the plane got stuck on the tarmac. "Freedom Fighter" was still awesome...but what the hell was this boring crap gunking up the other 9 slots? Languid trip-hop that had come to the party after Tricky had taken everyone else home. Bleh. Score 1 for The Kids.

SISOSIG? I may have been too late to the download-one-song party to save me from Lush Life, but in the meantime I've become quite adept at selective ripping, thank you very much. "Freedom Fighter" stays on the hard drive, Lush Life goes on the junk pile.

Why? Because I Like It

2007-10-06T17:02:00.000-04:00

Artists: Bonnie "Prince" Billy; Will Oldham; Palace Music
Albums: I See A Darkness, Master and Everyone (BPB); Joya, Guarapero: Lost Blues 2 (WO); Viva Last Blues, Lost Blues and Other Songs (PM)
Source: Bought new (Master, Joya, Lost Blues 1 & 2); bought used (Darkness)

The act of writing about music is, when boiled down, a way of saying, "I can explain why I like or don't like something I listen to." It inserts an extra level of introspection into the process of listening, forcing you to both hear the music first-hand and have a sort of third-person remove in which you observe how you're listening.

This process is one I can do. I'm a little proud of it, too - it makes me feel a little like a doctor, who can see a bit deeper into the regular processes of the human body that are casually on display - though it also means it can take an extra effort to just listen to music casually, and take it in without pontificating on it.

The music of Will Oldham presents an unusual problem for me as an active listener. I've listened to his music in all it's various guises--Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Palace Songs, Palace, Will Oldham and Bonnie "Prince" Billy--and it somehow bypasses the explanatory muscles. The various names provide no clues (they are not each dedicated to a different mode, like Stephin Merritt's assorted identities that each match up with a specific way of making music) and there is not quite a direct chronological path (recording fidelity improves somewhat over time, but Oldham veers from acoustic to electric to solo to band and back again at will). There are antecedents to the kind of folk-based songs he writes, but they are only half-way helpful in grappling with the music at hand.

In short: I really like Oldham's music and keep buying more, but I can't say why.

This is frustrating. I'd like to say there's a strong emotional connection to the songs, but they are often written in an obscurantist style that seems to mean things that it doesn't. Sample lyric: " Now the sun's fading faster, we're ready to go/There's a skirt in the bedroom that's pleasantly low/And the loons on the moor, the fish in the flow/And my friends, my friends still will whisper hello" (from Viva Last Blues' "New Partner," one of my faves). Deep, huh? Well, sorta...but it doesn't exactly mean anything.

The music is often intimate (especially Master & Everyone, recorded so quiet & close you can hear Oldham breathing between verses), but it can also veer into loud, sub-Crazy Horse territory. The mood is typically dour, but don't tell that to Joya, which is fairly upbeat. Oldham's voice isn't particularly fantastic, though it is often pretty (especially on the Bonnie "Prince" Billy albums)...when it's not creaky and croaky and strained. And the sound is usually rustic, except when there are drum machines or processed noise brought into the mix.

Go figure.

So here I've spilled a few hundred words and said relatively little about why this works. And I could tap out a few hundred more without getting much closer.

The oddly simple conclusion is just: I like it. I'm confident Oldham's music is good, better than most, but my ability to explain why is strangely absent when any of these half-dozen discs are in the player. I have to remind myself to turn off the analytic filter in my ears, and just listen. You should, too.

SISOSIG? While I can't say precisely why I like Oldham's small army of himself, I'm quite sure that I do indeed like it. He's got music for nearly every mood, and it all stands up to repeated plays. There are new little details to ferret out of even the simplest arrangements, and the songs are often beguiling. It all stays, even if I don't really understand why.

Story Time

2007-09-04T20:41:00.000-04:00

Artist: Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
Albums: Moanin'; Paris Jam Session; Mosaic
Source: Bought used

When it comes to music, I'm a sucker for a good story. Sure, the tunes are important, but a compelling (and repeatable) storyline running through the tracks somehow makes it easier for me to sink my ear-teeth in.

One of the things that eased my entry into serious jazz-loving was the abundance of good stories. The Jim Crow tours, the defections to Europe, the ups & downs of drug-addled geniuses, the unforgettable moments on stages long gone...all of these narrative threads wove themselves into what I was hearing and made them stick in a way the music couldn't do all on its own.

Two of the most interesting storylines, in my oh-so-humble opinion, are the family trees that sprung from two of the most formidable talent magnets of all time. My sports-loving dad could hit all the statistic books he'd like, but Miles Davis and Art Blakey are the greatest scouts of their time. If you made a list of everyone who ever played with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers or Miles' estimable bands, then crossed off all the names that didn't turn into major jazz artists and band-leaders later on...well, you wouldn't need much more than a Post-It Note for what remained. And there'd be plenty of room left over, too.

I've only got three albums from Blakey's staggering, half-century long discography, but just look at the names: Lee Morgan and Benny Golson are on Moanin'; Wayne Shorter and Bud Powell play on the Paris Jam Session; and Freddie Hubbard, Curtis Fuller and Cedar Walton (plus Shorter again) are in the Mosaic band. And my holdings only run from 1958 - 1961, which is a small sliver of Art's time as a bandleader (late 50s to 1990, if you're keeping count). Over that longer span, he also counted everyone from Horace Silver to Wynton Marsalis as sideman.

It's a great story: an excellent drummer with an ear for talent that ensures that he's always surrounded by players and composers that keep him in the top ranks of an always-evolving music. A man who plucked nascent talent from the soil and nursed it into full bloom. It would even be easy to assume that Blakey was coasting on the talents of his players, but that would be drastically unfair to the man himself. Listening to him play (and lead) on these three discs shows a guy who was perfectly set up to be a mentor to some of the greatest talent around; in other words, the Jazz Messengers needed Blakey just as much as (and probably much more than) he needed them.

This was crystallized in my mind recently when Lee and I went to see former Messenger Cedar Walton play at a club in NYC. Walton's time with Blakey was a half-century in the past, but you wouldn't know it from listening to his quintet play: they sounded, first and foremost, like the most recent version of the Jazz Messengers (it would have been easy guess that the drummer was in charge). The rhythm was the alpha factor on the bandstand, and the rest of guys were falling into line around it. But not really falling - they were all soaring. All these years later, and Walton was a late-breaking chapter in Blakey's story.

SISOSIG? I'm often hesitant to pick up more Blakey records, but for kind of a short-sighted reason: my gut reflex is that his brand of hard bop isn't particularly innovative or ear-bending in any significant way...but listen to any of these three discs, and it's clear that ain't the point. This is jazz of the highest order, and one of Blakey's singular talents as a bandleader is to bring out the best in the players he hires. I am a dedicated fan of so many of the people who passed through the ranks of the Jazz Messengers, and the truth is I'd do well to track down more of the stellar performances recorded under Blakey's imprimatur...not to mention the deeply jazztastic drumming that he lays down each and every time the Messengers do their thing.

New Bop

2007-08-30T20:17:00.000-04:00

Artists: Jim Black; Dave Douglas
Albums: Alasnoaxis (JB); Live in Europe, Stargazer, Charms of the Night Sky, Convergence, Soul on Soul, A Thousand Evenings, Strange Liberation, Mountain Passages
Source: Bought used (Alasnoaxis, Stargazer, Charms, Convergence, Strange); Promo (Live, Thousand); Bought new (Soul, Mountain)

It's kind of accurate but essentially unfair to say that I came late to jazz. I'd heard it, here and there, all of my life, but I didn't really hear it until college, when Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane hit me right between rock and some new place. It wasn't long before Miles came into my sphere of influence, and soon I was consuming the music's history. Heck, I even took a Jazz History course for real college credit my senior year. (What a scam!)

But it was always history. Trane and Miles were dead by the time I heard them, along with most of the people that I was just hearing for the first time. It seemed infinitely more hip than classical music, but at its roots it was not much more of a living document. Even the guys who were still living, breathing and playing - Ornette, Sonny Rollins, the just-now-departed Max Roach - were playing in places that seemed beyond my 20-year-old self, either by dint of their price or exclusionary vibe.

I was a jazz fan, but mostly a history student.

When I moved to Philadelphia, I was able to turn this historical knowledge into some real-time writing assignments - there weren't a lot of other people my age who wanted to write about this music that, unlike the noisy rock on the scene, seemed to be for (and by) grown-ups. Suddenly, I was going out to hear new jazz music, by living musicians. Even though I was a font of information about the genre, this flood of new exposure kind of rocked me back on my heels.

No one living jazz musician rocked me back quite so far as Dave Douglas. My introduction to him came by way of the Live in Europe disc, which featured the trumpeter with his Tiny Bell Trio (guitarist Brad Shepik and drummer Jim Black). I was assigned to review it, and it's not much of an exaggeration to say that it changed the way I listened. This was, as clear as my ears could hear it, jazz...but it didn't sound like any of those dead guys I dig so much. The guitar player was clearly of the age to have grown up with rock music, too, and the sounds made by the band swung in the direction of Eastern Europe as often as Western Africa.

This was jazz I could have, could be a part of. The adventures that Miles went on, the risks he took with the music...I only got the results, the ideas that had long since been codified by history. But when Douglas took a risk, using his horn like an agile razor to slice up the history of all the music he knew, it hadn't yet been made 100% clear that he'd land on his feet.

In a short span of 5 years or so, I saw Douglas every chance I got. And like the punk-informed rock bands with whom I'd already felt an in-the-present connection, he didn't play in the stuffy jazz clubs - he played anywhere that would have him. I saw Tiny Bell in an art gallery (no amplification!) and a swing-dance club/restaurant. I saw Douglas with Masada at Penn's International House. I saw Douglas' Stargazer quintet outdoors at Lincoln center and indoors at Tonic. I took a date to Tonic for the Charms of the Night Sky band (which charmed me more than I charmed her). He played amazing music, he played with an intensity that spoke to me in a way that was one step up from even the best jazz history had to offer. Most importantly, perhaps, he played often and was accessible. I couldn't very well talk to Miles after listening to Milestones for the 50th time, but Dave was happy to chat for a minute after a gig.

My interest has hardly waned. It's been a decade since Live in Europe, and I still seek out the music Douglas and his compatriots make. The dozen or so of his albums I have (in various formats) contain at least half a dozen radically different instrumental and compositional configurations - from the straight-up(ish) band on Stargazer and Soul on Soul, to the deeply unconventional quartet (trumpet, viola, accordian and bass) on Charms of the Night Sky and A Thousand Evenings. Some of it is sparse, some dense, some beautiful and some willfully aggressive and discordant. I even picked up Jim Black's Alasnoaxis album simply on the merits of his association with Douglas - and while I was surprised by how rock-based the music was, I still heard that instrumental voice that was speaking my language.

SISOSIG? Of course, all of this stays, and there's more TK. In addition to this music in particular, Douglas helped open the door onto a whole world of modern, living, breathing jazz music, and I feel pretty deeply in his debt for making the introduction. Even now that I can afford the occasional trip to see an older living legend at the high-end venues, I get more sheer musical pleasure from seeing the emerging voices playing in the back of the smaller room. That Douglas has gone on to higher level of success (it's a little harder to see him play these days) without altering his music or compromising his approach is a little bit amazing to me, and he's taught me what too look/listen for in a new jazz musician: someone who understands the Marsalis-sanctioned version of the music's history, but evades its traps, instead using it as one of many arrows in a quiver of possible music.

What Comes After

2007-08-13T21:00:00.000-04:00

Artists: Barry Black; Crooked Fingers
Albums: Tragic Animal Stories (BB); Crooked Fingers (CF)
Source: Bought used (BB); promo (CF)

We expect weird, often contradictory things from our favorite bands. When they make music that is too different from what we expect, we'll often complain that they've strayed off the path. When they make a string of albums that seem to be the same thing over and over, we accuse the band of not trying something different.

Having dedicated fans must be kind of a pain in the ass, eh?

The Archers of Loaf were one of those bands that pretty much nailed the fine art of walking the fine line. Over half a dozen records in about as many years, they managed to solidly hold their center while also nipping at the outer edges - reaching just far enough from their core sound that it kept expanding, all the while making music that fit inside a recognizable aesthetic. So even when the inevitable pianos poked through the fuzzy guitars on All the Nation's Airports, it was still comfortably "Archers music" or some such thing. They kept it fresh while keeping it within the boundaries they'd defined on Icky Mettle.

But as Steve Wynn asked in a song he wrote years past the demise of his most famous band, The Dream Syndicate, what comes after? In the case of Archers lead singer and songwriter Eric Bachmann, he went way off the reservation when it came to non-Archers recording.

His first solo project, Barry Black, actually appeared contemporaneously with AOL's run. He made two BB records - a self-titled LP in 1995 and Tragic Animal Stories in '97 - that are weird, wonderful and wonderfully weird. And they sound nothing like Archers of Loaf. Often quiet instead of always noisy, instrumentally eclectic instead of guitar-centered, lyrical instrumentals instead of lyric-driven songs, each track on the Barry discs sounds like it was made by someone who would never listen to Archers of Loaf. Though if pressed, you could probably locate some sort of tonal center in the tunes that was buried in AOL tunes all along. If there's any analogue to this kind of ethno-musical indie rock, it might be the current group Beirut. But a decade ago, when the distorted, oddly-tuned guitar reigned supreme, it was kind of had to imagine where Bachmann was going with this.

When the Archers disbanded near the turn of the century, he went in even still yet another direction. Crooked Fingers was his next "band" (again, initially just him) and again it sounded nothing like the Archers. In fact, it kinda sounded like Neil Diamond. Seriously - listen to the self-titled debut, and the vocals, melodies and phrasing sound like they're coming from the Jazz Singer himself. But they were coming from our beloved Archer...and again, it was a bit disconcerting.

But over time, I guess I see where he was coming from. When you know what's expected of you, there's probably a limit to the thrill of easily fulfilling those expectations. And if you've got more going on in your head - in addition to Neil D, Crooked Fingers plays with some Tom Waits, some light Frippertronics and some oddly folky rhythms - then maybe a gradual curve in a new direction isn't enough. You have to pull over, put it in park, torch the Econoline van and hop on the motorcycle that you've been hiding from everyone.

SISOSIG? In the end, I still don't like Crooked Fingers as much as Archers of Loaf, but that probably isn't fair anyway. And on its own, Crooked Fingers is pretty cool. They lyrics and singing are more sophisticated than the insistent din of the Archers allowed for, and on subsequent albums Bachmann has added in strings, Spanish rhythms and all sorts of cool little sounds and ideas...in fact, Crooked Fingers has kind of become Barrry Black with vocals. All of which means I still enjoy the heck out of these two discs, and not just because they're Archers-related. They've become their own autonomous musical entities. This isn't just what came after a great, great band - they're two of several branches that have grown off the main root and are becoming their own thing, something that I'll look forward to hearing what comes next.

Geeking Out

2007-07-25T21:42:00.000-04:00

Artist: Black Sabbath
Album: Paranoid
Source: Bought used

There are two distinct types of conversations that Music Geeks have with each other: 1) The one-upping listing of stuff each has heard or bought, concerts seen, etc. 2) The heartfelt examination of an artist/album/concert, undertaken with a seriousness that would make peace-treaty negotiators blush.

As I've gotten on, I've done my best to avoid the former as much as humanly possible. For one, it's not really a conversation, per se; it's more like two or more people on parallel tracks that only seem to intersect. I'd argue that these people would be saying the same words even if no one was there. The fact that there's an audience/target for the list just makes the talker feel better about himself somehow. Having spent quite a bit of time with one particular guy who could pretty much only talk this way, I've tried to be conscientious about not subjecting others to my empty list-making.

The latter kind of conversation, however, is eminently worthwhile...even if a Non-Geek would be hard pressed to distinguish it from the other type. I've had hours upon hours of in-depth discussion on one band or another, mining the minutiae of a particular album or show until it was boiled down to some sort of essence that...well, that didn't really accomplish anything, I suppose. But that 30+ minutes that JP and I spent figuring out what color to assign to each layered guitar on Yo La Tengo's "Barnaby, Hardly Working" sure seemed, at the time, to be getting at something.

Since moving to NY several years ago, my diet of these conversations has been steadily decreasing. It's a combination of having fewer true Music Nerd friends, having more "other stuff" to do, having JP gone, and the fact that Eileen would rather sit in steely silence than discuss anything on the stereo in too much (or any, really) detail. So a little while back, when Mike (a Certified Music Geek) asked me to join his new Album of the Month Club (AOTMC), I jumped like a dolphin in a water park.

The idea of the AOTMC was deliciously simple: Mike and the participants would come up with a list of 12 albums that were discussion-worthy but not often discussed (at least not in the circles of indie-centric rockcritters). Each month, one member would write up an "introduction" to the album, and then the legion of nerds would engage in an e-mail discussion for a week or two. The next month, it would begin again.

I was stoked. I'd be getting my fix of geeking out, sort of like a book club for CD people that wouldn't require me to leave the comfort of my desk. And as a bonus, the list that was generated was introducing me to some artists and albums I'd never really dealt with before. For every Psychocandy or XTC disc that was already part of my world, there was and obscure Marvin Gaye album or this one, Paranoid, a classic in a genre (heavy metal) that I normally didn't give a rat's ass about.

So I started shopping for the first couple of discs on the list, hitting the used bins at Kim's and trolling Half.com for what I could find. The disc I was in charge of introducing, Captain Beefheart's Safe As Milk, wasn't in the rotation until November, so I was able to dive in head-first as a participant.

AOTMC started off strong, with interesting points of view on Drums & Wires and the Latin Playboys' self-titled debut. But it seemed to devolve quickly. There were some problems getting people to do their introductions on time. Then responses were sparse. The Silver Apples discussion got kind of nasty, and no one seemed to feel that Psychocandy merited all that much talk. I was still very much into it all, but I could feel it slipping away - what is the sound of one geek clapping? It sounds more like that list-maker, and less like the heady (if pointless) debate I'd gotten excited about.

Somewhere around month 5, Mike pulled the plug. I never got to dazzle my fellow dorks with my take on the good Captain's collaboration with Ry Cooder, and I had this copy of a Black Sabbath album that I never would have bought otherwise. I gave it a listen and, yeah, I liked it...but I never got the chance to talk to anyone about why I liked it, what it made me think and feel, never got to really get into it. And that strikes me as a damn shame.

Since then, I've often come up with ideas for similar schemes, but never carved out the time or energy to make any of them happen. I know there are other Music Geeks out there who are hungry for more of Conversation #2, but it gets harder and harder to make contact.

SISOSIG? I don't listen to Paranoid too often, and metal never really did it for me (maybe it was that summer at camp when the kid with the biggest radio played Master of Puppets non-stop for 2 months). But I do like it, and I understand it for the historical touchstone that it is. Ozzy, for better or worse, is an important reference point - even the Flaming Lips have taken to playing "War Pigs" recently - and I kind of feel like I need to have it around, just in case I need to go to it to clarify some sort of pointless point in my head/ears. Plus you never know when some fellow geeks will want to sit down and geek out about it.

Less Traveled

2007-07-15T18:32:00.000-04:00

Artists: Aaron Binder; The Jimmy Bruno Trio; Joey DeFrancesco; Eddie Green; Gary J. Hassay; The Landham Brothers; Nate Wiley and the Crowd Pleasers
Albums: This Side of Jazz (AB); Live at Birdland II (JB); Goodfellas (JD); This One's for You (EG); A Survivor's Smile (GJH); At Last (TLB); Friday, Saturday, Sunday (NW)
Source: Promos

There's that saying about the road less traveled. It's the kind of saying everyone will say to someone else, but rarely actually think about for themselves. When it's decision time, how often does the average person turn to a paraphrased (and usually misunderstood) line from Robert Frost?

But there's really something to it. When it was time to start making my way in the world, a lot of what I had in mind (writing, editing, publishing...that sort of thing) suggested that I take the very-traveled path. Go to New York, get one of those entry-level gigs, steel yourself for the rejection notices from editors (or the non-responsive silence, which is even worse) and get ready to have some roommates. I knew some people who were already on the road, and boy did they not sound too thrilled about it.

And then there was the less-traveled option. Go to Philly, which one doesn't necessarily associate with the vast empires of publishing, but which actually had a very healthy industry in medical publishing. Go to the smaller local newspapers, pitch my knowledge of jazz (I listened to much more rock and such, but there were lots of writers already staking out those beats) and get some bylines right off the bat. Oh, and no roommates - this less-traveled road was paved with higher salaries and lower rents.

I remember my first day of work in New York City, years later, when I found myself in Grand Central Station during the morning rush. All of the sudden, I was doing the obvious thing, the one everyone thought of. By then, I'd built up a few good things for myself, but it was still a bit of a shock to the system to find myself doing things the more-obvious way. The struggles for the bylines were steeper, new jobs were exponentially harder to come by, and in general anything that I had in mind already had a waiting list. Though I still stuck to the no roommates thing, until I married one.

All of the artists on these CDs are stops along my less-traveled road. When you're one of the jazz guys in a city that's a couple hours south of the jazz capital of the world, the local talent isn't even really the minor leagues. Some of the top jazz musicians, past and present, come from Philadelphia, but very few stay there. The ones who do are generally like these guys - rarely hurting for a local gig, and rarely moving beyond that. They are eager to do the interviews, happy to send the promo discs, thrilled when you ask to come to the gig. But the story doesn't often evolve - the next time they're playing in support of the next locally released album, my editor usually wouldn't want to assign the story, since there wasn't much new to report from the last time.

Only two names here jump out: Jimmy Bruno and Joey DeFranceso, two local cats who got to roar with the lions further up the Turnpike. The others...well, with the exception of Nate Wiley (who recently passed away) I couldn't even tell you if they were still playing, nevermind what they were playing. I'll occasionally see the name Landham in the session credits of a new jazz CD, but I don't even remember who Gary J. Hassay is - his CD looks self-released on an Allentown label, and there's actually a bent business card inside the disc's case, listing him as "Saxophonist and President, improvisationalmusicco, inc." And I remember being blown away by Eddie Green at the time, but I don't think anything really happened for him, either. Like the rest of them, Green was trying to take the oft-traveled path, and there were rows and rows of other piano players swinging along in front of him.

SISOSIG? These are the last of my Philly-scene jazz promo CDs (many, many others went in earlier purges), and I don't think there's much reason to hold onto them, with the exception of Bruno & DeFrancesco. The music on those two discs is as good - or better - than a lot of the other stuff I've got in a similar vein, and it makes the starting team reasonably often. And Nate Wiley is a sentimental favorite: the disc sounds like late nights at Bob & Barbara's, which is something that is still a kick to hear.

The rest...well, if I want to hear a piano trio, the truth is I'm just not ever going to reach for Eddie Green. Eric Dolphy once suggested that jazz was too much of a moment in time, and shouldn't be recorded - the moment is supposed to pass, and there's something unnatural about revisiting it again and again. The moment's passed for me with Binder, Green, Hassay and the Landhams, and I don't anticipate needing to travel along with them again.

That's Much Better

2007-07-02T21:22:00.000-04:00

After more than the anticipated number of months, The Beast is back. Unpacked, alphabetized, shelved (oh the shelves!), loved (oh, the love!). Once again, I can listen to anything that's running through my head, from A3 to Zappa and anything in between.

I've never been away from my record collection for quite this long (unless you count the year spent living abroad - and even then I had a few dozen discs on hand at all times) and it doesn't suit me. Let's never speak of this again.

On with the show...

Big Time

2007-05-31T21:46:00.000-04:00

Artists: Big Audio Dynamite; Big Brother and the Holding Company; Big Star
Albums: Tighten Up Vol. '88, Megatop Phoenix (BAD); Cheap Thrills (BB&THC); #1 Record/Radio City, A Little Big Star (BS)
Source: Bought new (both BAD; #1R/RC); bought used (BB&THC); promo (ALBS)

It's easy to like contemporary pop music. I don't mean that pop music from today, in mid-2007, is so delightfully easy on the ear that it goes down like hot buttered Elvis. No, I'm suggesting that in any given moment, the pop music of that moment just sounds right. For a better understanding of what I'm getting at, go listen to "I Ran (So Far Away)" by Flock of Seagulls right now, notice how silly the production and instrumentation sound, and then consider what a perfectly pleasant slice of pop-craft this was in 1982.

In taking a look at the small section of The Beast made up of bands that begin with "Big," it struck me that these three groups - Big Audio Dynamite, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Big Star - sort of perfectly triangulate the three destinies that pop music faces as it marches forward into the history of the future.

First, Big Audio Dynamite. When BAD hit the scene in 1985, it sounded like a pop revelation to my early-teen ears. Mick Jones, having been booted from The Clash (and consequently allowed to avoid the turgid embarrassment of Cut the Crap), had turned around and rethought what music could sound like. Here were poppy rock songs with hip-hop-ish rhythms, found-sound samples, and a worldly mash-up sensibility that was pretty much unlike anything kicking around the mainstream at the time. When I got the first two BAD records (which I own on vinyl and cassette, so they don't appear here), I was sure I was hearing the most futuristic rock music ever. BAD was review-proof for me: I would just buy the next one when it came out, and listen it into the ground.

Listen now. WTF? The pop sounds thin and, in places, a little trite. The beats sound like...well, they sound like they came from a British white guy with an old drum machine, which I guess they did. And the sounds effects are just kind of silly, and not always all that creative (tap-dance loops in "2000 Shoes"? Yeah, I get it). It's still enjoyable to listen to (though Megatop has a lot of filler in its faux-house soundscape), but hardly the revelation that it seemed like in the 80s. In other words, it was pop music of its time, and piling more time on top of it has not been kind.

On the other end is Big Star. I remember on a long trip in the early 90s playing #1 Record/Radio City for my friend Matt and asking him to guess what year it had been recorded. He was off by nearly 20 years: the sounds and songs on this disc felt both fresh and classic, and they still do more than a decade after that car ride. "September Gurls" was perfect pop in 1973, and it's perfect pop now. Very little in the production dates the sound too heavily, and the guitars/bass/drums instrumentation just places the music somewhere in the rock & roll era.

It also doesn't hurt that Big Star is an enduring influence on bands going forward into today. Nobody picked up the Big Audio torch in any noticeable way, which means there's no line of continuity leaning the sound forward. Big Star, on the other hand, can be heard in ways both big and small in the work of anyone from Paul Westerburg to Yo La Tengo to Cheap Trick to GBV to half the Elephant 6 stable. Big Star wasn't particularly of their time during their time, which makes their pop sound timely pretty much anytime.

I'd argue that Big Brother and the Holding Company essentially splits the difference between those two ends of pop-versus-time spectrum. Cheap Thrills was recorded in California in 1968, which is information that a blind, illiterate listener could provide about 10 seconds into the record. From the exten(sive/d)ed, lysergic guitar solos to Janis Joplin's psych-blues wailing to the R. Crumb cartoon cover art, this disc is a date-specific artifact of a moment in pop time, when this was simply one of the things that was going on. That it contains some stone-cold classics ("Piece of My Heart" and "Ball and Chain") helps keep it listenable, if not always relevant (though many of today's backwards-glancing jam bands bear clear marks of BB&THC in their sound-worlds). Cheap Thrills doesn't exist out of time like Big Star, but neither is it crippled by its sonic benchmarking the way BAD so clearly is.

SISOSIG? While I would certainly point to the pair of BAD discs as (ahem) the most bad things here, really Cheap Thrills is the one I hardly ever listen to. It's part of Columbia Records' criminally awful first wave of CD masters (they more or less transferred vinyl to the new, sonically detailed format) and as such is a poor-sounding copy of a kind of music I'm not particularly drawn to. I can appreciate it, sure, and I dig Janis' place in the pantheon, but it's a little bit like something I think I'm supposed to have rather than actually like. I'd say it can go, and maybe one day a better-sounding copy of it will make its way to me. I'd never think of parting with my guilty-pleasure BAD discs, though, not even the weak-link Megatop Phoenix. It's mostly a nostalgia trip, but who am I to fight off some perfectly good nostalgia? And Big Star goes nowhere, never - every note sounds better each time I hear them, and I like to hear them pretty often.

Dammit, Bevis

2007-05-27T16:43:00.000-04:00

Artist: The Bevis Frond
Albums: Miasma; Inner Marshland; Triptych; New River Head; Live at the Great American Music Hall, San Francisco; Valedictory Songs
Source: Promos (Miasma, Inner Marshland, Valedictory Songs); bought used (Triptych, New River Head, Live)

Most writing about music focuses squarely on quality, generally either "Is this any good?" or "Here are the reasons why this is good" (and yes, those are two different things). Less often addressed is quantity; i.e., "this may or may not be good, but either way do we need this much of it?" Some of the highest-quality artists are, not coincidentally, very reasonable when it comes to quantity--like the Beatles or Television--making it easy to be amazed by how good it is without being lost in how very, very much of it there is to swallow. Many people who like the Beatles will dig into most/all of the catalogue, whereas someone who likes the Rolling Stones may skip entire eras of the band's voluminous recorded history.

The Bevis Frond is definitely a band with a quantity problem. Between 1987 and 2004, British psych-rocker Nick Saloman has put out no fewer than 20 albums under the Bevis Frond moniker (and a few more collaborations with different names). Some are essentially solo albums, with Nick laying down his guitar-heavy statements piece by piece, and some are the product of a more-or-less steady band line-up. Nearly all feature Saloman's wonderfully melodic (usually) songwriting, head-shattering guitar prowess and knack for placing a modern edge on decidedly 60s/70s-era rock sentiments. Some of Bevis' 20 LPs are better than others, very few could fairly be called "bad," but an equal few are readily identifiable as "essential."

Artists from Jandek to Richard Thompson have presented their fans with the same problem: just how much of this can I reasonably be expected to own and listen to? An added layer of complication with Bevis is this fact that nearly every one of the band's discs contains at least one tune so good it begs for multiple plays and multiple cover versions (see the oft-covered "Lights are Changing" from the over-long Triptych album).

On the other hand, no rock collection should be without New River Head, Nick's long-playing opus from 1991. NRH manages to be all over the place and stylistically coherent, with nearly every track lodging deep into the brain. I heard the spacey "God Speed You to Earth" at a Frond concert a full 2 years before I tracked down a copy of NRH (it's since been reissued), but the tune and lyrics never left my head in the ensuing period.

There may be other Bevis pieces that are as good as NRH...but I'm not going in search of them. The Live in S.F. disc works as a good-enough career overview (the band also happens to be a killer live act), populated with many of the aforementioned great tracks from so-so albums. Get those two and you're pretty much set, but beware: there are 18 more you might be tempted to pick up in their wake.

SISOSIG? At six discs, I can't really be accused of having gone overboard on the Frond, yet I can't help but feel I've got too much. Truth be told, I almost never listen to the trio of early efforts, Miasma, Inner Marshland and Triptych; New River Head, Valedictory Songs and the live disc, on the other hand, still get frequent (and enthusiastic) plays. While the earlier three aren't really bad in any particular way, I don't think I'd be doing myself much of a disservice by ripping a few choice tunes from each and sending them out along their way.

Beware the Interview

2007-05-21T20:57:00.000-04:00

Artist: Bent Leg Fatima
Album: Bent Leg Fatima
Source: Promo

Before I started writing about music, I always assumed that interviewing musicians was the best part. You got to meet the artists that you dug, they'd spend time deep in conversation with you about their awesome music, and invariably they'd hand you a guitar and invite you to rock out with them.

But the reality is, more often than not, quite different. Nine times out of 10, you don't actually meet the artist at all--your article is going to be timed to promote an upcoming album and/or local tour date, so you talk to them on the phone, either from home or on the road ahead of their local appearance (with the advent of the internet and mobile hotspots, some bands started asking for e-mail questions). Because of this, they usually don't have that much time for you; if it's a pre-album press junket, it's even worse, as you get a strictly set number of minutes just after/just before other interviewers who just asked/will ask the same questions you've prepared. And only once did anyone ever ask me to play with them...in retrospect, I think the band was kind of messing with me.

Don't get me wrong--an interview can be kind of fun, and often you get some cool quotes and maybe even some interesting conversation (Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips was, unsurprisingly, a good talker and quite the conversationalist). There are also surprises: to date, the single best interview subject I've ever encountered was...Carrot Top. Yup, the annoying prop comic. Say what you will about The Top, but he gives good interview: he took the serious questions seriously, and goofed off like a pro when the funny Qs came around. Writing up the piece on him was far easier than, say, the Q&A I did with Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan, who is one of my all-time favorite artists, but kind of a difficult interview to be sure.

Bent Leg Fatima might stand as one of the single most disturbing interviews I've ever done. They were a small, local Philly group, so this one was in person, at the drummer's loft apartment in Northern Liberties. They were fairly new on the scene, and this self-titled long-player was their debut effort. They were largely unknown, which meant there was a lot to ask them about. Piece of cake.

I'm not sure how it happened, or if it was somehow my fault, but the members of BLF slowly and steadily broke down under my interrogation. They seemed both shocked and worried that I, a music writer sent from a local paper, would be asking them all these questions about themselves and their musical process. Little things set them off--I still remember asking one of them something to the effect of, "Did the record turn out the way you'd hoped?" and he went wide-eyed in panic. "I don't know," he spit out, and then started stammering and rambling about not having thought about goals and the final record being something other than what he'd thought would come from the process of entering a studio.

One after the other, they got flustered, a little antagonistic, then apologetic, until finally they were just kind of stepping all over the questions in an attempt to say something, anything, in response to my questions.

The fact that BLF didn't last too long did not come as an outright shock to me (though some of the band did evolve into Need New Body, which to the best of my knowledge is an ongoing concern). Maybe they were high, maybe it was an act, or maybe they genuinely got thrown off by even the dim glare of the light I was shining on them.

SISOSIG? Despite the picture I paint of Bent Leg Fatima as people/interview subjects, the record is actually pretty damn good. I remember the press release suggesting that it was "Beefheart-ian," but I don't hear too much of the good captain in these loose psych-rock grooves. It strikes me as the sound of a more aggressive, somewhat less sprawling Piper at the Gates of Dawn, with nice little fragments of melody bubbling in and out of a lysergic stew. I've not kept up with their latest incarnation, but this one is a mid-level keeper that will never re-wire my mind or any such thing, but is a perfectly enjoyable listen.

Realer Than Real

2007-05-14T20:41:00.000-04:00

Artist: Han Bennink
Albums: The Laughing Owl; Nerve Beats
Source: Promos

After many weeks (months?) of wandering in the wilderness of packing, moving, unpacking and all the attendant stresses and difficulties, I'm unfurling The Beast in its new lair. Our suburban home has a finished attic, which has been dubbed The Man Room. The Beast will live there, complete with some sort of customized storage. All music things are being moved to a place that will be a) out of Eileen's regular lines of sight, and b) under my total supervision.

One of the curious side effects of this whole process is that I've been without complete and absolute access to my record collection for as long as I can remember. I recently unpacked some of it (early sections of the alphabet, which went into a small cabinet--enough room to get up to the early Gs), but as the mood has struck me to listen to, say, Varnaline or Sonny Rollins, it was no dice. They were too deep into the alphabet, which meant they were too far gone.

Well, not entirely. I have listened to Sonny recently, because I've got a bunch of his stuff ripped onto my iPod. In fact, the last few months have shown me just how thoroughly I've adapted my listening habits to the digital age. Previous moves have forced me to cull a small selection of CDs that I'd make do with until the top-priority unpacking The Beast always received. This time, I had a broad and deep cross-section of stuff on my home and work hard drives, and even kept grabbing new stuff off of my delightful eMusic subscription.

I'd kept away from the downloading for a long, long time, feeling that somehow I wasn't "really" getting the music. But now I see that it's a totally different music buying/listening experience. No liner notes, minimal cover art, no real visual or physical aesthetic to go with the aural package. It's all sound, no vision. Not better or worse, necessarily, but patently different.

At this point, it's fair to say that I've gotten a few dozen albums and EPs this way. But the weird part is I don't feel like they're a "real" part of The Beast. Heck, I've already written about some artists (Arcade Fire; Nels Cline) where I've got more of their catalogue in MP3 format (all legal, mind you!), but I didn't write up those albums because I don't really have them. Nope, all I did was pay for them and listen to them at will, just like...well, like my real CDs, tapes and LPs.

In fact, if pressed I'd probably say that these Han Bennink discs are real, and the download of Neko Case's The Tigers Have Spoken isn't. Nevermind that I pretty much hate the Bennink albums; he's a European very-free-jazz percussionist who blurts out formless noise that's too much even for me to take. The reissue of his 1973 Nerve Beats is long tracks of solo nonsense (punctuated by an occasional scream), and The Laughing Owl is a more recent set of improvised guitar/drum duets with an axe-abuser from The Ex. I abhor these albums, much to the same degree that I adore Neko's live disc, but I still can't help but feel that Han is mine and Neko is not (oh Neko, you will be mine one day...).

Part of me expects to eventually evolve further on this issue, but more of me suspects (and, to be honest, hopes) that I'll remain somewhat luddite-ish on this. There's still something great about the object--something real--that simply gets lost when everything gets broken down into an invisible flow of zeros and ones.

SISOSIG? Two clunkers, for sure. When enough time goes by, I will usually put one of these in to try again, and it never gets any better; it just gets worse. I don't want to listen to this noise, some fairly artful calamity though it may be. Time's too short to waste on music that gives me no rewards; I'd rather listen to some of my "unreal" downloads.

Change Has Come

2007-03-26T11:54:00.000-04:00

It happened. We moved. I'm in the suburbs.

Holy crap.

That's the good news. The bad news is that, as feared, unpacking The Beast is a low-priority item in these first days. I haven't seen any of my CDs in about a week or so. I miss them. I hope they're doing OK.

To top it all off, I come across this blog post in my Google Reader this morning. Hits close to home, it does. The change has come, but how much changing will stand the No Regrets Test over time? Once I have my shelves up, it'll be something to ponder.

Please Hold...

2007-03-18T17:01:00.000-04:00

No updates will be on their way for a bit. The missus and me are moving - we've bought an honest-to-goodness house, in the suburbs and everything. The Beast, for the time being, has been tamed into a series of boxes and crates, ready to head to its new home.

And what a home it's gonna get! The third-floor (a fully finished attic) has been designated The Man Room, and will be a place for all things musical. Shelves will be built, wires will be run, comfortable furniture will be arranged, and I will have a place to both store and listen to my music...several flights of stairs away from Eileen's preferred distraction, the TV.

But it's going to take a little time. Right now I'm restricting my listening to what's on my iPod and/or hard drive, and that's going to have to suffice for a few short weeks. Technically, the new arrangement means I don't really have to get rid of anything anymore, what with space not being a particular concern (Lee said I should re-do the blog so it's about what to acquire...). I find the exercise worthwhile (or at least interesting) and am eager to get back to it.

Until then...it's all staying, and it's all going!

This Just In

2007-03-13T13:57:00.000-04:00

Artist: Arcade Fire
Album: Neon Bible
Source: Bought new

Damn, I miss this. A new band blows me away and I am driven - compelled, really - to order the new album. In the case of the Arcade Fire, I actually felt the overwhelming need to preorder the new one, so thoroughly was I rocked by the band at NYC's Judson Memorial Church. It just doesn't happen to me much anymore. (I've either grown too old for such things or too selective to fall for just any new release.)

When Neon Bible arrived from Merge (a full day after the official release date, but I forgive the label and the U.S. Postal Service) I got to tear it open, pop it in the CD player and listen to it already revved up for what I was going to hear.

Neon Bible did not disappoint.

The pre-release show was a definite asset: the Arcade Fire is an intensely visual band, and being able to envision what was going on behind the sounds took the songs and blew them out into 3D, even on the first listen. And the second. And so on.

It would have been easy to be disappointed, too. This disc got WAY too much pre-release media coverage, and I could already imagine having heard too much about the record to really hear it. But it didn't go that way, and some of the critical coverage even helped me listen more astutely. When a few too many critics mentioned a Springsteen vibe to Neon Bible, I had it pegged as either lazy press-release copying or Internet echo-chamber repetition. And yet, there it was, plain as day - not really the sound of the E Street Band so much as the visceral yearning in the performance, the struggle to connect a individualized experience to an everyday one. Lead singer Win Butler overreached on parts of nearly every track, something the young Boss understood intuitively.

The music, though, is more like the Z Street Band. It's all in there, from standard rock playing to exotic instrumentation to carefully structured counterpoint in the vocals. The Arcade Fire has absorbed the high points of the 80s - latter-era Clash, Talking Heads, Joy Division, peak-moment Cure, Eno/Lanois-driven U2, etc - and molded it into something both older and more modern than the sounds they're nicking. Bravo.

Read any year-end poll from 2006 and you'll hear a chorus of moaning, that it's just not easy to get excited about a lot of the newest music. Neon Bible is, early in '07, an answer to that challenge, and I hope there's more stuff in this league to come before the year closes out.

Sample and Hold

2007-03-04T22:46:00.000-05:00

Artist: Belly
Album: Star
Source: Bought new

One of the serious advantages the Interweb has brought to obsessive music buyers 'round the world is the ability to sample the goods before you buy the whole meal. While not quite like the vinyl-filled listening booths of old, a site like Amazon or eMusic lets you hear a snippet of the songs for free, to get a sense of whether or not you want to go whole hog. Only like Neil Young when he's playing acoustic? Dip into 30 seconds of the new tunes just to make sure he's not riding with Crazy Horse on this one. Prefer your electronic music sans vocals? Double-check that new Morr offering in half-minute slices to ensure there aren't any processed vox in the mix.

Before the modern, post-AOL era, though, it wasn't so easy. You could read the reviews, but like the man said: you can't get the sound from a story in a magazine (aimed at your average Music Nerd). You could get a personal recommendation, but those are so personal-taste driven that you couldn't always count on a slam dunk. More often than not, you just had to roll the dice on something new and see what came up.

Or you could be converted at a show. From the Lounge Lizards in '94 to the Mekons at CMJ to to a recent encounter with the Arcade Fire at Judson Church in NYC, there's nothing quite like that ear-bending, mind-altering concert to show you something you can't believe you'd been missing. It's a communal, Bacchanalian moment of personal transformation that puts a sound inside your head that never quite comes out again.

To my very great surprise, 90s alt-rock band Belly has turned out to be one of those bands...but I couldn't have told you so at the time. I was in the middle of a semester abroad at the University of Glasgow, and Belly was playing at the student union. I knew Tanya Donnely had been in the Throwing Muses (whom I'd never heard) and the Breeders (whom I most certainly had), and that was about as far as it went. But it was live music that required almost no effort to go to, and anyway I was taking all my courses pass/fail. Why not?

Why not, indeed. The show was...well, to be honest it was just pretty good. Tanya had good songs, a nice voice and looked damned nice on stage. The bass player was a woman with a muscle-T and a backwards baseball cap, who jumped around like she was in L7, not a group doing mostly dreamy, mid-tempo pop (Dorky Trivia Note: said bassist, Gail Greenwood, actually ended up subbing in L7 years later). And the other two guys were...the other two guys. Unremarkable, but they got the job done.

As is often my wont (especially then), the show was enough to inspire me to pick up the record. And Star was a lot like the show: entirely likable, with some parts ("Slow Dog," "Feed the Tree") more remarkable than others ("Untogether," "Witch"), which were just OK. I listened, probably played some tracks on my radio show once or twice, but largely forgot about it.

Not entirely, though. I pulled Star out from time to time, like a lot of my old records. And a couple of years ago...well, I finally had that moment, like a time-release delayed reaction from the show. Suddenly, Star sounded great. Each tune set up the next just so; the production pointed out little bits of ear candy that sweetened each treat; the instruments sang the songs in ways that complemented and extended Tanya's honey-kissed voice. Here I was, in my 30s, walking around New York unable to get songs from my 20s out of my head - not so odd, except I hadn't had these exact same songs in my head when I was in my 20s.

Go figure.

I wonder if Star is here to stay. I didn't love it when it was current and, in theory, more lovable (or perhaps just more fashionable, I suppose), so maybe it will fall from the sweet spot of my ear as time goes on. I think if I shopped for this now, the 30-second-sample way, I'd pass on it about 90 seconds in. But with 90 months or so for time and the songs and the whole thing to do its work, Belly turned a convenient concert into one that sent me shopping for a disc I'm glad I didn't miss.

SISOSIG? Luckily, I didn't start this project a few years ago, or Star would have hit the trash heap. Either the record was ahead of its time or I was just in the wrong moment to appreciate its considerable charms back in 1993. Either way, it's one I wouldn't want to be without.

Enough is Enough

2007-02-27T22:30:00.000-05:00

Artists: Beekeeper; Ida; K.
Albums: Beekeeper; Ten Small Paces, Insound Tour Support No. 11, Will You Find Me (Ida); K./Low split
Source: Promos (Beekeeper, Ten Small Paces, K./Low); Bought new (Insound, Will You Find Me)

It's not enough to just like a band or a record. If you're serious about this stuff - and lordy knows I'm not the only one who is (far too?) serious here - then liking something is just the first step on a long, usually (over)complicated journey.

Take Ida. In 1997, they put out an album called Ten Small Paces. I didn't know much about the band, but boy oh boy did I like this record. I loved it, played it daily for a while and tried to turn everyone on to it who came within earshot. It hit me in all the right places: beauty tempered by ragged edges, lilting songwriting balanced with smart covers (from a wide pool, in which swam Eno, Neil Young, Bill Monroe and the Secret Stars), a sound that was sexy and safe and private and extroverted and smooth and rough.

That should be enough. You take that CD, you've got 15 songs in a little under an hour, solid and wonderful and unlikely to wear out its welcome. Fantastic, right?

But it's not enough. I need to know more. So I research. I write reviews. I edge my way into being assigned interviews. I go to the shows. I track down limited singles pressed into handmade packaging. And the side projects...did I almost forget the side projects? Some of my favorite songs on Ten Small Paces, specifically "Fallen Arrow" and "Poor Dumb Bird," are written not by Ida's central Dan Littleton/Liz Mitchell axis, but by bassist Karla Schickele. Turns out she's got her own project, K. (she tells me in an interview that it is essential to include the period, every time), as well as a band with her brother, Beekeeper. So that becomes part of it, too.

So now that record I liked, one near-perfect little disc, is a small cottage industry of acquisition and trivia and listening and collecting. Of course, the totally not-funny funny part is that all of this stuff is pretty good, but there's nothing in the pile I like quite as much as TSP. Even the other Ida things I've picked up, while perfectly good, don't hit me quite like the one that started it all in the first place.

But somehow it's all that other stuff that gives the original item context. "This is the one I bought after." "This is the one by the bass player who wrote 'Fallen Arrow.'" "This is the one you can't find anymore." TSP serves as the unmoving center, but in the end it's kind of the only piece; with the exception of an occasional spin through Will You Find Me, it's the only one I really feel any motivation to listen to. But I'd argue that I hear it even better because of the small constellation of satellite objects orbiting the mothership, that somehow going so far beyond just liking the record made my love for it all the more complete.

SISOSIG? As much as I enjoyed digging around in the larger universe suggested by that first Ida disc, the cold hard truth is that neither Beekeeper nor K. really do all that much for me. There's something about Ida, and not just the band's component parts, that is pretty wonderful. I'd never consider ditching Ten Small Paces, and the other Ida discs are pretty nice, too (plus at least an album's worth of 7" vinyl floating around the apartment). But I don't think Beekeeper and K. are really keepers...or even necessary anymore - I can enjoy Ida all on its own. [That said: I did once buy a CD of children's songs recorded by married Ida couple Dan & Liz...I can definitely imagine wanting to venture out into that end of the Ida universe someday!]

Totally Not Thurston

2007-02-22T22:38:00.000-05:00

Artist: Beck
Albums: Mellow Gold; One Foot In the Grave; Stereopathetic Soul Manure; Odelay; Midnite Vultures; Guero
Source: Promo (MG); from JP (1Ft); Bought new (SSM, MV, Guero); Bought used (Odelay)

Right off the bat I thought Beck was great. The thing I wasn't so sure about was whether he existed or not. When "Loser" hit MTV and radio in 1994, all the sounds and images led me (and a few other people I know) to the conclusion that this "Beck" was a jokey Thurston Moore solo side-project. In fact, the only thing that finally convinced me that this was not the case was...well, one night they were on MTV together, side by side. Turned out Beck was way too short to be Thurston.

But forgive a guy for having conspiracy theories about Beck. He's been around--and accepted--long enough that it's easy to forget that when he hit the scene, a guy mashing up rock and folk and rap and blues and four-track noise was downright weird. "Loser" was catchy and mysterious all at once, so far removed from anything that was happening at the moment that it made more sense that an established boundary-smasher like Thurston was behind it, rather than an actual new talent.

I even kind of find myself wanting to use a word like "visionary" here, but in the end Beck undercuts himself too much to allow such a thing. For every bit of groundbreaking he's done (Odelay might, in fact, be the Dust Brothers production that trumps Paul's Boutique), there's a one-note joke like "Satan Gave Me a Taco" (from Stereopathetic Soul Manure) or the too-much-like-Prince-to-not-be-Prince vibe of Midnite Vultures. All of which, in their own very different ways, are deeply excellent and a lot of fun to listen to.

No, the thing about Beck is that he just might be a little too talented. The twisted folkie is just as convincing as the white-bread hip-hopper, and the bent party anthems are just as affecting as the soulful tunesmithing. Depending on where in the catalogue you drop in, you might think Beck is a false front for any number of artists: Thurston, Prince, the Beasties, Lou Barlow, Hank Williams' ghost...anyone whose sound is a little too established to always stay in their pigeonholes, but who's also a little too talented to just stay in one zone all the time.

All of which makes Beck a real keeper in the evolving narrative of popular music, and also makes him a little difficult to keep in your head--it's hard to exactly be "in the mood to listen to Beck" when that can mean pretty much any mood you're likely to have. But that also means Beck's kind of always right there for you, with all the flavors on tap and a loose-limbed tendency to mix up the colors.

SISOSIG? I kind of have the feeling that The Beck Story isn't even halfway through. Listening to these albums in chronological order is more disorienting than suggestive of any kind of arc. But that's also kind of what makes them so compelling--it's all in there, marching forward with wild abandon and a refusal to acknowledge the hegemony of genre--and it's all Beck at the same time. I keep hearing new stuff in a lot of these discs (not so much the very early recordings, when he had more limitations to yoke him) and expect to hear more still. I do, finally, believe in Beck and think these discs are all keepers.

Here, There, Everywhere

2007-02-19T17:01:00.000-05:00

Artists: The Beatles; John Lennon
Albums: Help!, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles); Plastic Ono Band (Lennon)
Source: Bought new

Well, this is a little embarrassing. After all these years insisting that I am Mr. Music Man, here I find myself with a paltry sprinkling of Beatles (and/or Beatles-related) recordings. I mean, this is the band that is more or less universally recognized as Patient Zero in the ongoing infection of the modern rock & roll virus, and I've got a smattering of their achievements. Isn't this some of the basic stuff that anyone, everyone - not just the music geeks - should be expected to own?

Which probably (partially) explains the dearth of The Beatles in The Beast. Really, how hard is it to hear songs by The Beatles, Wings/McCartney, Lennon, or any of the other tangents springing from the Fab Four core? Heck, even The Traveling Wilburys has a Beatle, and Ringo's got his All-Starr Band on the road in perpetuity.

These songs are here, there and everywhere. They are embedded in the culture, staples on radio and/or public music broadcasts, lyrics that are ready-to-quote, and are often go-to cover songs for bands who want the instant audience connection that comes with familiarity. You know them. I know them. My parents know them. Some young kid just discovering the transporting effects of the music knows them. And in the rush towards the next big technological change in music delivery and consumption, the central question is, over and over, "When will The Beatles be on iTunes?" Tomorrow may never know, yesterday may seem so far away, but there's a fairly good bet that there's a Beatles song playing somewhere right now. Just listen.

All of which means it can seem entirely reasonable to skip buying the music. If I want to hear songs from The Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society, I'm best off owning a copy (which I do), since the album is nearly perfect and entirely hit-less. But if I want to hear something from The White Album? I can either drop $23.99 (the list price on Amazon), or I can hear "Ob-la-Di Ob-la-Da" on the radio, "Blackbird" at some local open-mic, "Revolution" on a Nike commercial, "Helter Skelter" during a documentary about Manson, or "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"...well, I feel like I can just hear that one out there, in the common ether that seeps into the collective musical consciousness.

Which is a shame. Revolver is a great, great album, worth listening to often and all the way through. It's got fan faves ("Yellow Submarine," "Here, There and Everywhere"), great pop nuggets ("And Your Bird Can Sing," "Got to Get You Into My Life"), experimental wonders ("She Said, She Said," "Tomorrow Never Knows") and even "Eleanor Rigby," which is arguably all of the above. And that's only about half of the too-brief disc.

Much of the rest of the catalogue is just as rich, sometimes a little more so (or maybe a little less, like Let It Be) and always, every time, richly crafted and entirely captivating. There's a damn good reason that each new repackaging of the old songs moves off the shelves with startling speed and force, and it's not just Baby-Boomer nostalgia: discs like the 1 collection and the Love mash-up recirculate wonderful songs in new(ish) ways that can't help but hit the ear and tickle the pleasure centers.

SISOSIG?
Don't tell Eileen: This is another case of an artist for which I'm not only keeping it all, but I'm really gonna have to buy a whole heck of a lot more down the road. Do I really not own Rubber Soul, The White Album or Abbey Road? And wouldn't at least a best/greatest collection of Lennon's solo work be in order? There's talk that The Beatles, Inc. is readying sonically punched-up remasters of the whole catalogue, and while it pains me to spend too much of my modern-day music budget on oft-heard historical records, it may be time to beef up my wafer-thin slice of The Beatles' canon.

Every Everything

2007-02-13T22:37:00.000-05:00

Artists: Beat Happening; Galaxie 500
Albums: Crashing Through (BH); Galaxie 500 (G500); Peel Sessions (G500)
Source: Bought used (BH); bought new (G500 box); gift (Peel)

I want it all. Not just some of it, but all of it.

It's a refrain any serious music lover can hum a few bars of, and the age of the CD made it into a hit: CDs took up less shelf space and held more stuff than LPs, so box sets got bigger, badder and more complete. Suddenly, there was room for more than the Best Of in a multi-disc set; it could now be All Of, Every Everything. Comprehensive CD box sets have a built-in target audience, and that audience is guys like me.

Both of these boxes are from important but short-lived Amerindie bands that have compact catalogues but expansive influence: Beat Happening, the wide-eyed naifs of the Olympia, Washington scene; and Galaxie 500, the slow-rock Bostonians who rode a deceptively simple aping of the third Velvet Underground record into top-shelf name-check status to the many, many bands that followed in their wake.

But that's stuff you can read in the well-heeled booklets that come with boxes like these. This is about the boxes themselves, or rather the idea of them.

Why do you need a four-disc box of everything Galaxie 500 recorded? I'm not entirely sure: in their short lifespan they showed minimal growth, cutting three albums with a lot of sonic overlap and enough extra material to fill a fourth disc, semi-ironically titled Uncollected, that sounds a lot like the other three CDs. Don't get me wrong - I love this band, as well as the groups that the members formed later (Luna and Damon & Naomi), but logicially you should be able to get by with one, maybe two albums. Or maybe just the trio of studio efforts without any of the detritus.

Thing is, it don't work that way. You need all of this stuff; or should I say, I need all of this stuff. It's complete, see, and that counts for something. I'm not sure what, but it's there. Like the "Collect and Win!" games at McDonalds or on the backs of cereal boxes, these weighty multi-disc items are about more than the tracks contained within. It's the tidiness of having the whole story, sort of a novel that plays in stereo.

Same goes for Beat Happening. Sure, they evolved a bit (is that an actual bass guitar on their final effort, You Turn Me On?), and even the extras disc, Music to Climb the Apple Tree By (hey, they beat Galaxie in the titling department there), has some don't-miss gems on it. Truth be told, I don't really like listening to disc 1 all that much (it's a collection of early stuff that, to my ears, still has them finding their artfully wobbly feet) and I sometimes drift midway through Dreamy...but again, it's all here. The whole tale, soup to nuts, and it looks nifty with the tight spines lined up in the little box. Will I ever need to get any more Beat Happening? Nope - I've got the box, brother!

And that, right there, is where the "complete" box gets a little problematic. Like, see that Peel Sessions disc listed up there? Well, that came out after the complete set. And there's a live album, Copenhagen, that I only resist due to some good-sounding Galaxie bootlegs I already have. The same thing inevitably happens with nearly anyone's box set: someone, somewhere, digs up a little more than the previous "all," and then you need that, too. Even though you had everything you needed...at least until a lost tape turns up, or a clean recording of a legendary show, or a pristine and historically interesting set of demos, or if the artist recorded for more than one label...basically, they've got the Music Nerds by the short & curlies on this one. Buy the box, collect and win, but beware the simple fact that Every Everything will probably turn out to be Mostly Everything before long.

SISOSIG? But enough of my whining. The upside of the complete (or at least semi-comprehensive) box set is that it's got instant A-List status. I mean, who buys a box set by someone they don't dig, usually a whole hell of a lot? These things are for the fans, and despite the aforementioned procedural/historical difficulties, the average box set pays off in spades: both of these boxes are lovingly compiled, compellingly designed, deeply researched (more info for the Useless Trivia Files!) and filled end-to-end with music I want to go back to, again and again. Even the Peel disc - which kind of ruffled my feathers in a way, just for falling outside the box's purview - is a smile-heavy listen, with all that deliciously reverbed guitar splashing all over a set of icy originals and cool covers. I love my box sets, both for the sounds they house and the stories they tell...I want it all, and I'll keep wanting more.

Beauty and the Beasties

2007-01-23T22:01:00.000-05:00

Artist: Beastie Boys
Albums: Check Your Head; Gratitude EP, Ill Communication; Pass the Milk
Source: Promo (CYH; GEP); Bought new (CYH, IC, PTM)

When I started this project, one of my stated goals was, "to do more than get through it: I'm also going to get into it, think about these CDs and LPs and such, try to figure out why each one seems so hard to even consider putting up on eBay or (perish the thought) just throwing away." I was (and remain) sure that most of the 1,000+ albums that make up The Beast have meaning, whether it be something personal or on a larger scale.

So far, I have only somewhat remained true to that idea. For me, it's too easy to slip into Critic Mode, discussing the discs on an intellectual/historical/critical level, or maybe just geeking out about how very much I know about this stuff. And maybe that is what they mean to me, but I aspire to find something a fathom or two deeper down.

Oddly enough, if there is any single band/artist entry that is almost entirely wrought with personal meaning, it's the Beastie Boys, of all people. It's no coincidence that I thoroughly enjoy the work of enormously talented, white, Jewish rapper/punks. But if pressed, in the Beasties' heyday I would probably have claimed Public Enemy as my top rap group, and lordy knows they are not unimpeachably friendly to Whitey (or my particularly Semitic subset of Whitey). So it's not just critic-proof quality: the Beastie Boys mean something to me, going pretty far back.

In this case, they were an early reminder that my musical high-horse was not above donning a pair of blinkers. By 9th grade, I already fancied myself a budding Music Geek, digging deep into my issues of Rolling Stone and Spin, staying up late to hear the unheard music and committing it all to memory. I may not have delved as deeply as I would just a year or two later, but I was certainly one of the few kids in my class who knew the Talking Heads and the Clash with any depth. If you asked me, I was pretty damn cool, at least as far as this went.

Jim, on the other hand, was definitely not cool. He was small, way too quirky for a 15-year-old, and a Band Dork. We were in the school play together, and had to spend a lot of time in close quarters. I was not a Jim fan.

I was also not a fan of this "music" Jim was playing backstage. It was the early 80s, and hip-hop hadn't really made wide inroads to white-guy suburbia just yet. But here Jim was, playing not just the singles everyone kind of knew, but whole albums by Run-DMC, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. I didn't know what the hell this crap was, and I didn't want to. When the Beasties opened up for Madonna later that year (an act I was way too young to view through the filter of intellectual irony), it just confirmed that they were nothing I needed to know about. And they seemed to go away.

Well, color me wrong a few years later when I find myself a little older, a lot in college, and totally digging rap in general (this was the era of big, big albums by PE, De La Soul, Cypress Hill and numerous others) and the Beastie Boys in particular. My friend Chuck had Paul's Boutique, and I'd never heard anything quite like it, or quite so good. The drum machines and lack of instrumentation still rubbed me partially the wrong way, but there was no way to label this stuff as crap (sorry, Jim!).

By 1992, it would not be exaggeration to say that Check Your Head, the first Smashing Pumpkins album and Nirvana's Nevermind were the soundtrack to my life. Any reservations I had about hip-hop were shattered by CYH, which had these guys rapping like pros and playing instruments like punks. It was like they'd made a rap album just for me...or at least for guys like me.

Which brings me to my next point of personal meaning. I rarely listened to the Beasties alone. JP, Chuck, Don and many of the other people I hung around with in college loved these albums, too, and it seemed incontrovertible proof: if the records were made for guys like each of us, and all of us loved them, then we must be at least somewhat like each other. I've always bonded with people over music, but even so it strikes the 30-something version of me as sort of amazing that I used to sit around with buddies and listen to records together. I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss it a little.

Ill Communication was another moment of transition. I remember so clearly buying it right after graduation, popping into the car CD player for the ride back to college, where I was spending the summer in a kind of post-commencement suspended animation until my teaching job began in the fall. As always, the Beasties had changed a little (still some live instruments, but now mixed with a cleaner hip-hop sound and a grab at more non-traditional music sources, like Buddhist chants), and I was starting to realize that they were changing about as often as I was. Neither of us was able to keep up the pace of progress indefinitely, but for the moment it was a perfectly paced soundtrack.

Finally, you won't find Pass the Milk in any BB's discography, because it kind of doesn't exist. In 1999, the ever-progressive group saw the Web, liked it and wanted to have some fun. They let fans log into their Grand Royal site and create a custom CD of album tracks, b-sides and remixes. You could pick the songs, choose the order, type in a title and they'd mail you a custom CD, precisely to your specifications. So during one of JP's last few trips to visit me in Philadelphia (he'd get sicker soon, and then I'd move to NY), I set him up at my PC and, as a birthday present, bought him the Beastie Boys mix CD of his choosing. We spent a solid hour, maybe two, clicking through the tracks, discussing the relative merits of each at great depth, then trying and retrying and trying yet again to get the perfect mix in the perfect order. Once it was set, the business of the title took another 15 minutes or so. I don't remember which of us came up with Pass the Milk, but I know we both knew it was perfect once we did. It's an utterly fantastic, near-perfect memory of time spent with JP; since there aren't any new ones to come, moments like these mean a little more.

By the time the Beastie Boys made their next move, I had too and we'd suddenly diverged. Hello Nasty just didn't move me; I listened to it at work, maybe even reviewed it for AOL, but never bought it. Don't get me wrong - the record was fun and funky and all that, but considering the weight of significance I'd come to expect from the Beasties, fun just wasn't enough.

SISOSIG? Nothing here's going anywhere. In fact, this is my third copy of Check Your Head: my first was a promo, which was stolen out of my room (Don, was it you?), then the replacement was stolen out of my luggage on the way to Paris and I bought it again. Plus I've got it on vinyl. You think I dig this disc? You'd best believe it - it's my intention not to let it, or the rest of my Beasties discs, out of my sight. And dammit, I think it's about time I retired that tape-dubbed copy of Paul's Boutique and got myself the real thing...

Like a Rolling Stone

2007-01-17T11:09:00.001-05:00

db's
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

This has nothing to do with The Beast: I just had my very-first-ever piece for Rolling Stone posted on their website. It's a review of The db's first NYC gig in a quarter-century, and you can read it here.

Picking Up Good Vibrations

2007-01-09T22:12:00.000-05:00

Artists: The Beach Boys; Brian Wilson
Albums: Pet Sounds (BB), Good Vibrations (BB); Smile (BW)
Source: Bought new (PS, Smile); Gift (GV)

Over the holidays, my parents mentioned that they got a kick out of the entry where I somewhat-gently put them down for the near-total lack of m usical guidance they provided to me as a child. And they weren't mad - both Mom & Dad agreed that their Phoebe Snow LPs really hadn't given me a leg up in my quest to...well, whatever it is record nerds are after.

But just a few entries later I find myself needing to slightly amend my criticism of their musical parenting. For all their failings in providing me with the essentially useless information I came to crave, my folks did hoist the first sails on a voyage into the estimable canon of The Beach Boys. "They wrote about nothing but girls, cars and surfing," said my parents, and they were at least half right; the young me liked the simple, sunny sing-a-longs of girls/cars/surfing tunes like "Barbara Ann," "Little Deuce Coup" and "Surfin' U.S.A," but my older self has come to hear that Brian Wilson was using that deceptively simple trinity to sneak in creations that were really about a terrifyingly deep kind of love and a staggeringly wide kind of world.

It wasn't always so obvious, though. In the mid-90s, after grunge had fractured and crumbled under the weight of too many signing bonuses and one self-inflicted gunshot wound, the rock underground did what a lot of us do when the going gets tough: took a trip to warmer, sunnier climes. Stereolab, The High Lamas and pretty much the entire Elephant Six collective cracked open their copies of Pet Sounds to see what made it tick. Like the Velvet Underground and Black Sabbath of years previous, Wilson became the influence du jour, and soon everyone was seeing how many layers deep they could pile on the vocal harmonies.

The Wilson Ascendancy may have been brief and a little too slavishly worshipful, but it did the trick: I went back and gave the Boys a listen through my grown-up ears. To say that I fell a little in love with what I heard would be an understatement - was this really the same group I'd heard through the stereo in my parents' station wagon? The songs, the sounds, the whole package...it was easy to hear what Wilson meant by the phrase "teenage symphony to God." This was church music, deeply felt and reverent, that had been pumped full of sunlight, strapped to a surfboard and let loose in the oceanic heavens. Eileen melts a little when "God Only Knows" comes on, and on this musical topic we're in perfect sync.

SISOSIG? There's no need to discuss whether Pet Sounds stays or goes; with it's depth of quality, ease of enjoyment and Eileen-friendliness, it's practically the prototype for a "keeper." The Good Vibrations box set has a lot of fluff and excess baggage (I don't know that I've ever actually listened to discs 4 or 5), but it's also got all the important stuff. Since the early Beach Boys were first and foremost a singles band of uncommon power, I don't think there's much need to collect all the early albums when the important singles are all right here in one handy package - this is one of the rare instances where I can honestly say I've got all I'll ever need.

Finally, I've grouped Brian Wilson's latter-day completion of his abandoned Smile project here, though I don't really think of it as being of a piece with his Beach Boys work, nor does it really measure up in a lot of ways. But I'd argue that one shouldn't approach it that way: give Smile a listen as a piece of modern, cracked Americana alongside Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Neutral Milk Hotel and it's an entirely modern marvel, different from the classics from Wilson's past but a keeper for today.

The Grand Narrative

2006-11-27T20:53:00.000-05:00

Artists: Count Basie; Duke Ellington
Albums: America's #1 Band (CB); 16 Most Requested Songs (DE); The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts (DE); Ellington at Newport 1956 (DE); The Far East Suite (DE)
Source: Bought new (all)

In one of the grad-school courses I'm taking this semester, the instructor leans a great weight on the concept of The Grand Narrative (TGN): the idea that we experience and understand art as a big, codified story. This artist influenced this next artist; this movement followed that movement; every action exerts a sequentially causative influence on acts that follow.

It can be a bit much to swallow sometimes, but it also makes perfect sense. Art is studied retroactively and retrospectively as history, and history is largely an arrangement of people and events along a chronological line. It may be pat to say that Louis Armstrong led to Dizzy Gillespie led to Miles Davis, but it's also kind of true.

It's also true that when people lay out jazz history, lots of room is sketched on the line for Big Band. It matters historically and, while it may be out of vogue now, most of the cats who are in vogue have the Big Band TGN etched into their styles; whether they followed it, expanded it, or (re)acted against it, all roads still lead back to the orchestra. To understand Miles or Monk or Bird, or even Dave Douglas, Bill Charlap or Joe Lovano, you need to understand the Duke, the Count and their bands of merry men.

Or so TGN goes. And I generally go along with it. So I try. I bought Duke Ellington's 16 Most Requested Songs on sale at the Tower Records (R.I.P.) on South Street, and I listened; some of it sounded like old pop songs, and a lot of it just sounded old. When introducing my grandmother to the treasure trove of old recordings reissued on CD, I asked her to pick up The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts for me which, I knew from my TGN was important, because it had the debut of the "Black, Brown and Beige" suite; I listened, and it sounded muddy, trapped in the ancient microphones that were swarmed by the big ol' Ellington Orchestra.

Since I was having trouble getting past the old-timey sound quality of the early works, I went modernistic. The Far East Suite (which dating to 1966 is by a long shot the most contemporary thing listed in this entry) sounded great, and I groked it instantly; of course, once I read up on its place in TGN, it seems that the keepers of the historical flame decree this to be good, but unrepresentative of the Duke's "classic" work. I got the 2-disc, complete (and remastered) version of Duke's important comeback at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, and I used some birthday money to get a whopper of a 4-disc box that, I figured, would point the way to the court of Count Basie. After all, everyone said (and I believe them) that this is great stuff, that I need it.

They're right on one count: pop in any disc of the Basie box and it's just great. There's big band, small group, vocal, instrumental, studio, radio and live recordings, and they're all fantastic. They make me feel happy; they make Eileen dance. They have the depth of the post-bop and contemporary jazz I love, but without the sometimes oppressive darkness. I put them on, and I think, "I should listen to this all the time."

And yet. And yet.

And yet I don't listen to it all the time. I listen to the Count and the Duke pretty infrequently, if I'm going to be honest with myself. The big band I listen to most often is Dave Holland's, and that's a new, active unit that sounds more like a postmodern expansion of his small combo than it does anything on America's #1 Band. I eye these in The Beast, I tell myself, "I should..." and then I usually don't.

SISOSIG? But (and it's not until the judgmental part here that I come to the "but"), even though I don't listen often, I feel pretty sure that I will. Big band music is, I think, something I'm still growing into. My first reaction was that the music sounded too old, but I think the real problem is that I'm not yet old enough. There's an ancient youth in these recordings, and with time I relate to it a little more, then a little more. When I first discovered jazz in college, only the aggressors - Miles, Coltrane, Ornette, etc. - had something to say to me, and with time my ears opened, roughly in concert with my soul mellowing. It's still steeping, I think, and this music will be important...or, rather, its TGN importance will line up more snugly with my own TGN, and I'll feel important enough to hear what the Big Bands have to say to me.

Interlude: The Hits Hurt

2006-11-05T15:37:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note: A couple of days ago, I saw a steep, sharp increase in traffic to this blog. But it wasn't general traffic: it was people, lots of them, from all over the world, searching for "Jason DiEmilio" and hitting an archived entry about Jason's band/recording project, The Azusa Plane. Jason hasn't been actively recording for a number of years (which is why this was coming up on the 1st page of Google results), and I had a Music Geek-y reaction to the traffic: There must be a new Azsua Plane record!

Instead, it turned out Jason has passed away, and people were Googling for details. Damn.

In retrospect, I should have had the Sarah Vowell Reaction (she has an essay that recounts hearing a Randy Newman song on the radio, which led her to instantly conclude that Randy must have died), but I guess it's a fitting tribute to how good his records were (and what a nice guy Jason was) that my gut said that he was back doing his thing. Hope springs eternal, even in the face of long odds.

SISOSIG? I'd already made a decision to keep my Azusa Plane records (even the one I don't listen to that much), and this makes me sure. Jason was only 2 years older than I am, and knowing that his death was hastened by medical problems that left him unable to listen to music adds an extra note of melancholy that will be hard not to hear in his music from now on.

Coulda Been a Contender

2006-10-29T22:57:00.001-05:00

Gunbunnies
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artists: Basehead; Gunbunnies; The Hummingbirds
Albums: Play With Toys (BH); Paw Paw Patch (GB); loveBUZZ (THB)
Source: Promos

Podcasts are my new crush. I recently discovered them, and they are taking over a significant part of my daily subway listening, somewhat to the detriment of the time I normally set aside for music.

One of the (many) reasons I am having this new affair with podcasts is that they are bringing me back to an old flame: radio. I can listen to radio shows anytime I want, even in the underground, radio-wave-free privacy of the MTA. At this point, I am pretty much listening to WNYC's Soundcheck every day. Music Uber-Nerd John Schaefer talk to music people about music things, and even when it's something I'm not technically all that interested in, it's still pretty interesting to sit in on the semi-private chat.

This week, Schaefer talked with Mike McCready, who I thought was in Pearl Jam...but it turned out he was an executive at Platinum Blue. PB is a company that claims to have high-tech computer models that can analyze the sonics of a song and determine pretty damn accurately if it will be a hit. The program doesn't take into account things like lyrics, the artist's personality or any of that jazz - it's all about the technicalities of the sonics and how they line up with the DNA of proven hits.

Regardless of how creepy or useful or excellent Platinum Blue might be, it only addresses big-league hit songs. But what about the infinite layers of likes/dislikes below that stratum? These three parts of The Beast are, to my mind, proof that all the technological advances in the universe won't help make some music at least semi-popular: I have listened to these albums by Basehead, Gunbunnies and The Hummingbirds, but I know not too many other people have. To the best of my knowledge, none of the three groups still exist a decade-plus later (all 3 discs date from around 1990 or so) and I bet I won't run into the president of the Gunbunnies Society anytime soon.

But when I first heard them, I remember feeling, deep down inside some heat-seeking part of myself, that all of these bands were destined for at least semi-fame. Not Madison Square Garden/Giants Stadium popularity, but at least a Trocadero/Bowery Ballroom fan-base.

Boy was I wrong.

They never found the ears (or hearts, which might be more important). Maybe if they'd popped their little heads above ground in the era of MySpace and such they coulda been contenders, but as it is they slinked off with nary a ripple in the big ol' pond of rock. Why? It beats the bejeesus out of me. Basehead dropped in 1992, a peak period of hip-hip/indie rock crossover and came off like the Galaxie 500 of rap: slow, swirly, hazy beatscapes with cool samples and a laconic rapper with a twisted sense of humor. The songs had stories, layers of things for a pair of ears to latch onto and a unique point of view within a recognizable milieu. Or something like that. I knew one other guy in college who liked the disc, and I think the band did 1 or 2 more, but nothing ever took off.

Gunbunnies are even more mysterious. To the best of my knowledge Paw Paw Patch is both the band's debut and swan song. This disc has a reliably R.E.M.-ish aesthetic, complete with a Southern drawl in its melodic, jangly rock tunes. I'd argue that any of 10 songs here are potential anthems of a sort, and it even has the production stamp of Southern-rock maverick Jim Dickinson. I love the twists of phrase and rhythm in "Put a Tail on Your Kite," "Big Talk" pops into my head anytime there's talk of small talk, and the closer, "Drinking Days," could play near the end of any party you've ever been to. And yet, it never will.

Finally, The Hummingbirds. At the time (1989), this one had Breakout written all over it. Melodic pop-rock with alternately jangly/noisy guitars, sweet but aggressive male/female vocals, and even an antipodean heritage. loveBUZZ kinda had it all. But now, with a little distance, I guess I can see the point of the general indifference. Leadoff track "Blush" sets to disc off like a rocket, and the droney "House Taken Over" would fit comfortably on any of your better shoegazer records. But the whole thing goes on too long and meanders too much along the way. I guess sometime the general rock public knows what it's doing when it's not listening...

SISOSIG? None of these bands will be touring into town, there are no archival box sets or luxe & deluxe reissues forthcoming. These bands just didn't make it and that's all there is to it. But Basehead and Gunbunnies are, all these years later, still in semi-regular rotation and I actually think of them quite often, and fondly at that. They may not be popular with the other kids, but we're still good friends. The Hummingbirds, on the other hand, are good for 2 tunes that will pop up on MP3-shuffled playlists every now and then, and that's fine. loveBUZZ can go, but not before "Blush" and "House Taken Over" spend a few minutes in my CD-ripping program.

Patience Makes Perfect

2006-10-02T14:53:00.001-04:00

Bardo Pond
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: Bardo Pond
Album: Dilate
Source: Bought used

Here's a perfect example of the dilemma posed in my previous entry: I was patient with Bardo Pond, a band I initially didn't really care for, and it paid off.

Living in Philadelphia in the 90s, it was pretty hard for a music person to miss Bardo Pond. Arguably the flagship band of the so-called "Psychedelphia" scene, the Pond was everywhere: opening for touring bands, appearing on compilations, showing up at events. I must have seen them half a dozen separate times without even trying - they opened for Sonic Youth and Mo Tucker, played inside the Philadelphia Museum of Art during some event sponsored by my erstwhile employer, and were generally just present in the scene. In short, the Pound was unavoidable.

And, to my ears, unenjoyable. I just didn't dig them. Chris lent me some CDs, and I paid attention at the shows. In theory, they were a group I should have loved, with all the little things (stoned & dethroned distorto guitars, a kinda sexy-dirty singer who busted out a flute from time to time, a willingness to improvise way out beyond the edge of good sense) that make for a Good Band For Brian present and totally accounted for.

Still, no dice. But I didn't give up...these guys were blatantly standing in front of a door with a big ol' neon sign in front of it, beckoning me. Come to the Pond...Come to the Pond...

Then it happened. Bardo Pond was one of about 30 or so bands on the bill at Terrastock in Seattle, an occasional modern-psychedelic festival held by the good elves who run the Ptolemaic Terrascope mag. Chris and I jetted across the country to soak in all the guitar-damaged goodness. About halfway through the 2nd day, I steeled myself for even yet another underwhelming Bardo set...which, of course, completely blew my mind.

Maybe it was the festival. Maybe it was all the pot smoke in the air. Maybe it was new drummer Ed Farnsworth, who poured some serious rhythmic glue into the Pond. Whatever it was, it worked. After 45 minutes, the set was over WAY too soon, and I felt like some central lobes of my brain had just gone 10 rounds with a lysergic heavyweight. The key was turned, the door opened.

I picked up Dilate, and have a few other stray Bardo Pond pieces here & there. I don't necessarily need more (or at least not much more...sorry, Eileen), but Bardo Pond stands as an object lesson on why I hold onto discs that have more potential than kinetic energy stored up in the grooves.

SISOSIG? Dilate's a keeper, and to be honest I'm a little bummed I didn't manage to come around while I was still living in Psychedelphia proper. If I had been seeing the Pond once a month or so after the revelation...well, there's no telling how much stuff would be in this entry.

Golden Keys, Hidden Doors

2006-09-18T21:20:00.001-04:00

Patricia Barber
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: Patricia Barber
Albums: Modern Cool; Companion
Source: Promos

One question that I am often asked (usually by Eileen) is some variation on, “What the hell do you need all these damn CD’s for?” On its face, it’s an entirely reasonable question: with close to 2,000 albums at an average of about 30-40 minutes of music apiece, it would take about a month and a half of non-stop listening to go through all of them. And as anyone with more than one CD knows, sometimes you’re in the mood to hear certain things more than once in a 45-day period. Inevitably, there are discs that fall through the cracks.

So why keep them? Because, to some extent, I am utterly convinced that there’s gold in every single one of them thar hills. The problem is, I can’t always see the gold, or even reasonably identify the hill.

Take Patricia Barber. I’ve listened to these two CDs a few times each, and I am sure there’s something good, maybe even great going on here. The problem is…well, I’m not sure I hear it. Or at least I don’t hear it yet. I find her voice a bit odd. Her songwriting is definitely odd, as is her choice of covers (Sonny Bono’s “The Beat Goes On” and a slow-voodoo blues number? An ee cummings poem given a post-bop workout? And all of this is before her new disc, which is based on freakin’ Ovid!). The studio album, Modern Cool, might be a little too tight and studio-cooled; the live EP, Companion, may come off a little too loose and airy.

But…and but…

While my brain can’t compute it, something deeper down is starting to square the circle around Ms. Barber. I can’t hear it, but I know it.

So I inevitable hang on to discs like these, even as they close in on a decade of residence within The Beast. And I even get tempted to by more albums by the same artist, just on the off chance that the one I don’t yet have is the one that will unlock the ones I already own.

It’s madness, and it doesn’t even begin to properly answer Eileen’s question. But it also makes a kind of sense: the overall purpose of all this record collection (and I’m sure there is a purpose) is to keep turning the keys in secret locks, with the hope of gradually opening up doors behind which there are things of value. I don’t know what those things are, where the doors are, or which keys open them. But I know they’re there, and I’m skittish about trading away too many of the possibilities.

SISOSIG? All that being said, I don’t think I need both of these. Modern Cool only caught my eye because Dave Douglas plays trumpet on the session, and I’ve got plenty of better CDs that feature his playing. Companion, which is both shorter and a bit more accessible, gives me 7 tracks of whatever it is about Barber that I think I hear, and it’s probably enough to get me through the door…once I find it, that is.

Dancing in the Dark

2006-09-03T13:37:00.000-04:00

The Band
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artists: The Band; Robbie Robertson
Albums: The Band; The Best of the Band; The Last Waltz box set; Robbie Robertson
Source: Bought new

Almost all of my Music Buddies have one thing in common with each other, and oddly it’s not something I have in common with them: they tend to have a parent who put them on the path of musical adventurism at an early age. Lee’s folks had him listening to Miles and Beefheart pre-puberty; JP’s dad gave him a deep well of knowledge to drink from right off the bat; Debbie grew up in NYC with parents who took her to music at Lincoln Center and elsewhere at an early age. All eventually went on their own musical roads, but they got to hitch a ride for the first few miles.

My folks did plenty of good stuff for me growing up, but laying out the great mysteries of the musical universe was not one of them. Jim Croce, Judy Collins and John Denver were the records on the stereo growing up; the only jazz I remember seeing in the stacks was Chuck Mangione; they had some Beatles, but found Sgt. Pepper’s just a little too out there. Sure, I loved “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and “Grandma’s Feather Bed” as a kid, but that’s hardly the stuff of Music Geekdom 101.

So like Ragu, it must have just been in there somewhere. I remember listening to my first records and tapes almost obsessively. Nevermind that they were Billy Joel, the Village People and the J. Geils Band’s Freeze Frame – there was something important hidden in between the grooves, and I wanted to find it. And I wanted more.

With no Sacagawea at home to guide me, I had to set off on my own. Like most good things, the best of it happened in the dark. I had a small boombox, and at night I would put it between my bed and the wall, turn the volume up low and listen. Philly had two “rock” radio stations (as differentiated from Top 40), WMMR and WYSP, and they taught me. The Clash, Elvis Costello, the Stones, Pink Floyd, Led Zep, Talking Heads, Cream, Neil Young…it would come through the air into my dark bedroom and seep its way into me. In Scorcese’s recent Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home, Dylan talks about hearing a record as a kid and suddenly realizing that, “I was a different person now.”

I know exactly what he means.

And it was actually some of Dylan’s buddies that made the biggest impression on me in those junior-high nights. The Band was all over those late-night sets: “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Up on Cripple Creek” and others sounded like they were brand-new and a million years old. Al Gore got a lot of crap in the 2000 campaign when he cited “Cripple Creek” as his favorite song (mostly because of the “drunkard’s dream” lyric; it really should have been Dubbya’s tune, eh?), but I got it – he and Tipper had heard it together in the flush of young love, I bet, and the way Levon Helm sings, “If I spring a leak, she mends me” over Robbie Robertson’s out-of-time guitar made today into yesterday all over again. Heck, Bush should have gotten heat for not citing this song.

I ate up a lot of The Band in my early teens. I watched The Last Waltz over and over again. In my high-school-lay days, “Stage Fright” was a private anthem. I saw movies like After Hours just because Robbie Robertson had done the score. I still think that life is a carnival.

When Robertson put out his first solo album in 1987, I was all over it. The self-titled disc sounded nothing like The Band, but it still felt that way. My friend Don and I memorized every note of the record, and “Fallen Angel” still gets me a little choked up. It’s a record of deep earth tones shot through with bursts of bright blue, and it’s not quite like anything else I own. Like Springsteen, Robbie has some deep, deep understanding of the power of the music he’s playing; actually, it usually sounds like it’s playing him.

To be honest, I kind of miss discovering music the way I found The Band. When you’re in the dark, in the bottom of a bunk-bed set, with a tiny radio pressed against the wall, the music hits the edges of the darkness and it becomes the whole world. My Music Buddies might have been handed the map at an early age, but I got to draw my own path in the dark, realizing that the earth wasn’t flat through real experience rather than received wisdom.

SISOSIG? It’s a bunch of white guys playing in 4/4, but this is soul music in the deepest sense – it hits you way down and then stays there. The Band sounded kind of old in the 60s and just kept slipping further and further out of time. Some music grows old with you, but this is its own thing, with its own reason to hold onto it: The Band is music that you can grow toward, like a tree growing into the light, and it should be required for aging teenagers, presidential candidates and just about anyone else whose ears are connected to their deeper places.

Making Flippy-Floppy

2006-08-22T21:27:00.000-04:00

Ginger Baker
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: Ginger Baker
Albums: Going Back Home; Coward of the County
Source: Bought used

One of the (many) things that drove me crazy about the 2004 presidential campaign was the Flip-Flop. Through some very crafty rhetorical maneuvering, the ‘Publicans drew a bright line around the idea that if you ever changed, you were a bad person. (Nevermind that the entire platform of the religious right that was underwriting said campaign is to get other people to change long-held and deeply-felt beliefs.) On important matters like war, country and the future, one should (apparently) stick with whatever decisions one made a long, long time ago, regardless of what may have transpired within that time.

To a certain extent, people are the same way about their musicians. Everyone wants to see “growth” in the artist, even “maturity” if a guy or gal sticks around long enough. But if an artist actually changes…well, that’s usually a problem. From Dylan plugging in at Newport to LL Cool J or Nirvana accepting an invitation to be on MTV Unplugged, it can drive the purists nuts.

Sometimes the purists are right. Lou Reed, for example, has “grown” all over the place, trying on all sorts of characters and styles, instrumentation and recording techniques. But for all his creative spelunking, all of the really good records Velvet Lou has made in the last 40 years or so sound more or less the same. And how well did it work out when Bob Mould started making dance music? Just typing that sentence makes me a little sad.

But there are probably more instances where working out new muscles is the key to staying in the creative ballgame. Ginger Baker – the artist formerly known as The Drummer from Cream – will always be known as a rock drummer. It will be the 1st line in his obituary, and he no doubt knows it. So the idea that he was suddenly a jazz musician probably came as news approximately as welcome as Dylan finding Jesus.

Score one for the Growth Crowd, though. Ginger has turned out to be a jazz drummer not only of considerably ability, but one with a personal voice and slightly groundbreaking style. Instead of denying his rock chops on his jazz discs, Ginger makes them work together, letting the potential stylistic conflict work itself out as riveting musical tension. It ain’t fusion – it’s just damn good music.

Going Back Home is one that I picked up for the other 2 names on the package: Bill Frisell and Charlie Haden. I’ll listen to just about anything either of them plays on, and figured Ginger couldn’t fuck it up too badly with them around. But that’s not how it is here – Ginger is clearly, audibly the leader here, and the trio meshes like nobody’s business. It would take pages and pages to fully describe everything that’s good here – instead, just take my word and get the disc. I still play it all the time, and it always sounds fresh.

Coward of the County is another one I bought because of another name on the guest list. This time it was James Carter, a young sax player who had just blown me away at the Blue Note. I found this little gem that features his playing (along with Ron Miles, another Frisell associate) and…well, wouldn’t you know that it’s Ginger kicking ass again. This time it’s a large-ish jazz group, but the tunes, the playing, the arrangements and the goddamned GINGER are happening left and right.

The best part is that neither of them sound like Cream, or anything directly related to what the name “Ginger Baker” conjures up. Like Wilco ditching the alt-country or Coltrane leaving be-bop behind, Ginger takes the leap of faith in his own talent and artistic instincts, and flip-flops into some great records.

SISOSIG? If anything, I should probably be looking for more Ginger Baker discs. These are so comprehensively delightful that it not only makes me think highly of Baker, but validates the entire concept of an artist changing his palette, even when (or maybe especially when) he’s got a good thing going.

Share, and Share A Like

2006-08-07T22:43:00.000-04:00

Chet Baker
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artists: Chet Baker; Oscar Peterson
Albums: Let’s Get Lost: The Best of Chet Baker Sings; Oscar Peterson Trio + One; Oscar Peterson Live
Source: Bought new (CB & OPT+1); bought used (OPL)

It is a surprise to many people (myself not least among them) that I have married someone who isn’t a music person. Eileen is not particularly against music (though she has had some bad reactions to a few things I’ve put on the stereo – usually things like Sonic Youth or Bill Frisell which, I have to admit, may not be for everybody), but she also doesn’t really care too much about it. When we met, she didn’t have a stereo, and her small boombox was broken; the fairly decent CD collection had long ago been spirited into slim travel CD holders; and if given a choice, she’d opt to turn the TV on instead of the radio.

For the most part, this is just fine. We don’t get into tussles about which person’s choice of CD goes in the player, and there was no grand merging of The Beast with an equally sizable partner when Eileen moved in; that’s especially good, as I haven’t the foggiest notion where we would have put a Double-Geek collection. And given my track record with crazyrockchicks, being with a gal who doesn’t hear her own pain reflected in a Scrawl song or have her anger crystallized by a Sleater-Kinney album ain’t necessarily a bad thing.

The only place where it’s a small problem is concerts. Live music is maybe the main-est of my main things. I love the experience, and have long been happy to form parts of my social life around shows. The fact that my birthday is always at the same time as the JVC Jazz Festival means I never have to think too hard about what I want to do to celebrate – good food and live jazz, please (and the food is optional).

As I am with sports, Eileen is comprehensively uninterested in concerts. She feigned interest in a few near the beginning (including being game for a long Yo La Tengo show early in our relationship), but soon acted miserable at any concert we went to and opted out 99% of the time.

All of which is fine, except that I miss her at shows.

Well, maybe that’s not quite right. I miss sharing the wonderful experience with her, but it became pretty clear that it wasn’t so wonderful for her. So instead of both of us sharing the great music, we ended up sharing her displeasure at being there (even when forced by Birthday Rules, there’s no mistaking that she can’t wait for it to be over). Which means mostly no concerts for the two of us.

It’s not really a problem – I’ve got Concert Buddies, like Lee and Debbie and Mike, and truth be told I don’t have the time or energy to go to quite as many shows as I did back in the day. But it’s weird to have a night out with my friends and Eileen stays behind, sometimes just a few blocks away from the show – I more or less have to tell them that she stayed home by herself rather than join us. Of course, once the music starts, it’s all OK, and I usually get swept up by what brought me there in the first place. Still, I always kind of wish Eileen was there; or rather, that she wanted to be there.

I know I wouldn’t have to drag her to a Chet Baker show. The fact that he’s been dead since 1988 means it’s unlikely to happen, but a boy can dream, right? Let’s Get Lost is one of the few pieces of The Beast that Eileen has responded to spontaneously. I’ve been able to get her interest with a specific song or two on a mix CD, and she seemed to learn to like YLT’s “Our Way to Fall” when I picked it for our first wedding dance. But Chet is something where, unbidden, she got enthused about the whole CD, listening to the songs as each one unfolded, and eventually asking for it by name. I wouldn’t have picked his voice as such a winner for her, but then again these are 20 beautifully melancholy little gems that unfold over a languid hour; I guess it would be more of a surprise if someone didn’t respond to them.

It most certainly is as surprise, though, that she also digs Oscar Peterson. Sure, there’s a lot for me to love here – the smashingly fleet piano technique, the deep interplay of the band, Ray Brown’s out-of-this-world bass – but since Eileen claims to be bored by instrumental music in general, her love of this is a mystery to me. And I’ve tested for something flukey, putting OP on at different times, in different contexts, without saying anything. Each time she reacts, saying how much she likes it. Go figure.

So while I may not have married a Concert Buddy (and ducked a lifetime with a crazyrockchick), we still get to share some music together. Eileen sings along when I play the Magnetic Fields’ “Come Back From San Francisco” or the 6ths’ “San Diego Zoo” (both from a trip-specific CD I made for a vacation to San Diego), and will demand repeat plays of “Good Vibrations.” I try to put on things I think she’ll like when I can, and it’s still a little delight for me when Eileen enjoys a song or album along with me. As for the rest of the many-splendored musical delights that are so much a part of me and part of my life…well, I’ve got headphones, don’t I?

SISOSIG? Albums That Eileen Likes are, at this point, a precious commodity and must be preserved. I’m not getting rid of these, and in fact still hope to discover more CDs that might eventually enjoy the endangered-species-like protection of being music we can share together.

From a Land Down Under

2006-07-09T18:37:00.000-04:00

The Clean
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artists: Bailter Space; Alec Bathgate; The Chills; The Clean; David Kilgour; Chris Knox; Tall Dwarfs
Albums: Wammo (BS); Gold Lamé (AB); Submarine Bells (Chills): Unknown Country (Clean); Anthology (Clean); David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights (DK); Songs of You & Me (CK); Yes!! (CK); 3EPs (TD)
Source: Bought used (BS, Clean, DK, CK); bought new (Chills, TD)

Back in junior/high school, I scoffed at the kids who bought their clothes by the label. To my way of thinking, draping yourself in Calvin Klein or Benetton or something like that just showed a lack of imagination – where’s the personal stamp in picking something based only on the name on the label?

Noble thoughts, to be sure, but at the time I thoroughly missed the irony inherent in my own label-driven choices: if a band was on SST or Dischord, for example, what more did you need to know? Later on, I would rely on Teenbeat, Matador, Merge (and, retroactively, Blue Note, Prestige and Impulse) and other labels whose bands didn’t really sound alike, but had logos that might as well have been the music-nerd Good Housekeeping Seals of Approval.

In the mid-late 1980s, one of the labels of distinction was Flying Nun, run out of New Zealand. The sheer volume of amazing music that emerged from the antipodean nunnery seems barely plausible: The Clean (and all of its side projects), Chills, Straitjacket Fits, Tall Dwarfs, Verlaines etc. They didn’t all necessarily have a common sound (though it’s not unreasonable to wonder if the NZ Ministry of Education put the Velvet Underground on the national curriculum), but it was often pretty easy to pick the Flying Nun bands out in a blindfold test. There was a kind of just-polished rawness, melodies that tugged against the chugging music, and a willingness to experiment with (but not reject out of hand) the way a poppish-rock song should sound.

The Chills, Tall Dwarfs and Straitjacket Fits were my first introduction to the label, and I never really looked back; to this day, I can’t help thinking Leonard Cohen’s “So Long, Mariannne” sounds dreadfully weak up against SF’s reverby cover of the tune on Hail. The best part is how little it can sound like any of these bands is doing – Tall Dwarfs/Chris Knox/Alec Bathgate can sound willfully weird, but also like all of the Beatles at once, and no one would blame a pair of ears for just hearing a Velvety garage-pop band when listening to The Clean, but there’s something so endearing and, dare I say it, special about the band. “Point That Thing Somewhere Else” goes on for nearly six minutes, and I’ve never failed to be disappointed when it ends way too soon.

SISOSIG? This is a big pile, and there’s nothing to cut from The Beast here. Some of my favorites (Yo La Tengo, Mac McCaughn, et al) claim these bands as guiding lights, and there’s no doubting it. From Bailter Space’s swirling noise-pop to Submarine Bells’ almost heartbreakingly beautiful love songs (up to and including the couplet, “Effloresce and deliquesce/Carefree sparkling effervesce”), this is underground rock music of a singular distinction, and instead of thinking about getting rid of any, I really should be pledging to listen to it more regularly.

What Else?

2006-07-06T21:15:00.000-04:00

Derek Bailey
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artists: Derek Bailey; Peter Brötzmann
Albums: Play Backs (DB); Nipples (PB); Fuck de Boere (PB)
Source: Promo

It’s considered bad form to speak ill of the dead, especially the recently deceased, but I don’t think Derek Bailey would mind me saying that I am more than a little confounded by him. Same thing goes for Peter Brötzmann, though he is very much still alive. Both of them made/make noise-driven jazz of the very highest order, and both can be nearly impossible to listen to.

I have first-hand experience of both of those sides of Bailey. On two separate occasions I saw him play at Tonic: once, when he was centered by the ace rhythm section of Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Calvin Weston, Bailey’s seemingly counterintuitive string-scraping atonalities created an ugly beauty that bypassed the brain and went straight to somewhere far deeper; the other time, in duet with drummer Susie Ibarra, he was so abstractly unfocused that the semi-ordered tapping of rain on the club’s skylight (which was both musical and drowned out the music a bit) created an audible rush of coherent joy in the room.

In both instances, Bailey was being true to his singular muse, and that’s pretty much the highest compliment I can think to pay to an artist. Even when he wasn’t hitting, it was clear that Bailey was digging deep into something, and the fact that he was willing to fail makes the successes, to my mind, all the more laudable. In other words, anyone can learn to play a pretty note, and Bailey knew how to play them so well that he stripped them away and asked, “What else?” I suspect he didn’t find a fully satisfactory answer before his recent death in December 2005, and I’d also guess that he was just fine with that.

Brötzmann’s pretty much in the same camp, and the aggressively large ensembles he put together for Nipples and Fuck de Boere include a young Bailey on really, really noisy/atonal guitar. (Un)Popular wisdom says that 1968’s Machine Gun (recorded just before Nipples) is his magnum opus, but I really think I’m just fine with these two, thank you. Each disc features a bunch of forward/free-thinking musicians constantly and consistently going for it, which can either put you off balance or put you off your lunch. It’s even harder to digest than the Brötzmann/Sharrock/Laswell/Shannon Jackson group, Last Exit, which JP and I agreed was pretty much the most unlistenable noise we’d heard up to that point in 1992. We also agreed that its surface of unlistenability was part of the charm.

Context, then, becomes enormously important in music like this. Bailey’s context on Play Backs is more in line with the Tacuma/Weston show than the night with Ibarra and the rainstorm. Each track has a rhythm “back” created by a different artist, including indie rockers John Herndon and Bundy K. Brown; fellow experimental-noiseniks Henry Kaiser, Jim O’Rourke and John French; and even music critic Sasha Frere-Jones. Bailey then plays along with the backing track. Taking inspiration from a pre-recorded track that cannot, by its nature, bend to his whims. The results are fairly intriguing – noisy and often a little unhinged, but also interesting and occasionally enjoyable. It's music that speaks well of the inclination to sidestep beauty while also viewing the sublime with some skepticism – positions Bailey and Brötzmann stuck to with unflagging dedication.

SISOSIG? I think Play Backs and Nipples should stick around. I’ll admit that I don’t listen to them much, but I do dip in every now and then, and they fill a historical/collection niche that I suspect would be noticeable in their absence. Fuck de Boere is a live take of the tracks that would be studio-fied as Machine Gun, and at the risk of branding myself a bit of a troglodyte, I just don’t get it (or at least I get it less than the other disc). I can make the argument for having some of this kind of thing, but not a ton of it.

Precious Jewels

2006-06-27T21:33:00.000-04:00

Bahia Black
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artists: Bahia Black; Tin Machine
Albums: Ritual Beating System; Tin Machine
Source: Promo (BB); Bought new (TM)

In Noah Baumbach’s movie The Squid and the Whale, there’s a scene where Jeff Daniels is examining a copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. The album itself would be kind of innocuous, except that it’s a tape. Yeah, a cassette tape. That one detail solidly reinforces the part of the 80s the movie is set in, because lordy knows if it was set much later, m’man would be downer-rocking The Wall on CD.

I’m about the right age to have been there when CDs hit the scene with an unbelievable force – it was kind of like one minute LPs and tapes were the only option, and then next time you blinked the mall record store was pushing the vinyl into the corner to make room for more and more CDs.

Attendant with the arrival of the discs was the jewel case. It’s easy not to think about it (what Paul Lukas calls “inconspicuous consumption” in his excellent Beer Frame ‘zine), but also impossible to escape. If you buy a CD – especially in the first days, before anyone had come up with alternatives like the Digipak – you’re also buying the subtly ingenious jewel-case storage system.

What’s so great about them? Well, for one, they roughly mimic the shape of an LP (though on a drastically reduced scale) but also have easier-to-read spines than you get on a 12-inch.They hold the disc just barely off the surface of the inner tray, protecting the bottom from extra wear. And best of all, jewel cases are modular: their component parts are interchangeable and user-replaceable. In other words, if one part of the case breaks, no sweat – you can just snap the broken part out, and snap a new one in.

Now in theory, this modularity sounds like its all upside, no downside. That might be true for the casual CD buyer, but real Music Nerds know that this swappability creates a whole ‘nother semi-hassle. See, the parts of these cases do break. And you do need to replace them. But when you replace, say, the front-cover piece of a jewel box, you’re generally taking it from another one…which now has only the back piece and the inner tray left. So you have to hold onto that, for the time when another jewel case needs a new inner tray. And even then you’ve got a perfectly good back section, which you know you’re gonna need sooner or later, so let’s not even talk about getting rid of that just yet…

And on it goes. Soon there’s a kind of Jewel Case Chop Shop running in a corner of the apartment, dead space filled with not-quite-whole cases that are destined to be farmed out to other needy CDs before long. Anyone who says perfected cloning technology won’t lead to farm-growing people for spare organs is dead wrong; the seeds have been sown with jewel cases.

Part of my system, to try and save some room, was to have some “B-list” cases: CDs that I wanted to keep but wasn’t too crazy about, so I’d switch their solid parts with an “A-list” disc’s broken ones. That way, the net number of jewel cases in The Beast wouldn’t increase; instead, some would be downgraded until, say, I was throwing out a bunch of unneeded promo CDs (which I would pillage for jewel-case parts).

Bahia Black and Tin Machine were, for a long time, my top go-to CDs for pawning off broken parts. There were times when either or both of these discs wouldn’t have a single intact section of their cases: long cracks along the back, toothless holders on the tray, both swing arms snapped off the front. The discs and cover/tray art were all there, but the once-good cases had given their lives for a damaged Yo La Tengo or John Coltrane case.

SISOSIG?Over time, this mismatched pair would keep getting new cases; soon enough, those new cases would erode. Somehow, I’d ID’d these discs as placeholders, not deserving of top-tier storage materials.

But y’know what? They took the hits, bided their time, and now I can safely say these things are off the Disabled List. Bahia Black, which sounded too far out to me in 1999, now hits my ears straight on. I’ve grown to love Bill Laswell’s approach to how world and avant-garde sounds fit together (talk about modular), and the South American rhythms of Ritual Beating System wrap around the contributions by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Henry Threadgill and other right-on/out-there cats in a way I can’t really resist.

And Tin Machine? Turns out David Bowie was a little ahead of the curve once again – this record took some hits in 1989, with Bowie playing “band” with Soupy Sales’ kids (they’re TM’s rhythm section). But Reeves Gabrel’s distorto-freako guitar style anticipates how the Seattleites would co-opt Sonic Youth into harder, sludgier (and, yes, grungier) forms a half-decade later. The songs themselves are only 50/50, but the sound goes to 11.

Men at Work

2006-06-25T22:17:00.000-04:00

Bahamadia
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: Bahamadia
Album: Kollage
Source: Bought used

I’ve always been taught that having a job is an important, maybe the important thing. It’s no surprise – my dad is a headhunter, and his job of getting people jobs is what got me through my first 20 or so years. Jobs were the water of life, and there was never any reason to doubt that the hydrogen of labor and the oxygen of employment combined to make anything short of a necessity.

As such, I’ve never been without a job (except for 2 briefs periods when it really wasn’t my idea, thank you). There have been perks, for sure, including always having enough money for at least the food/shelter basics, and usually quite a bit more. Sure, there have been downsides, too (y’know: long bouts of tedium, the occasional run of soul-crushingness, that sort of thing), but in general I’ve been happy to have jobs and have even, it seems, been fashioning something in the way of a career.

But I’ve also learned that you can take your job too seriously and – yes, it’s true – work too hard. In the late 90s, I participated as a full-fledged member of the Internet Boom. I was there for the whole deal: long hours, no dress code, stock options, waves of layoffs and, most importantly, a sort of messianic faith in what we were doing. It was the other suckers who just had jobs; we were changing the world.

The particular corner of the world I was working on changing was in the Philadelphia office of a then-up-and-coming outfit known as America Online (which the swelling ranks of subscribers called AOL for short; that the company took on that moniker was just one early instance of the customer telling the company what its business was). I was there for a little under 2 years, but I worked a lifetime there. I woke up, logged on to check things and/or do some work; went to work, to do whatever bit of world-changing was on deck that day; then went home, where I would log on several times before bed, to check things and/or do some work. Sure, I went out and had fun and spent my Dot.com Dollars, but I knew I had to get to a PC before long, and was perpetually thinking about what was next. Which was everything.

This sort of thinking was encouraged by the creative guru at the top of our little digital hill, Boss R. He was smart, goofy, fun, endlessly creative and open-mindedly supportive of whatever his crew wanted to do; the worst an idea could do was fail, but we always learned something to apply to the next idea. To call the environment Boss R created heady would just expose how insufficient a word can be to describe something. Boss R kept a keg of Kool-Aid tapped in the office breakroom, and everyone was thrilled to drink deep.

I bought this CD as part of my Kool-Aid guzzling. I was responsible for the local music coverage, and that involved writing about Philly bands every week, in a variety of genres. We had a local record store – Third Street Jazz & Rock – that would supply me with what they had, but it wasn’t always enough. Content was king, and we always needed more. Bahamadia, a local female rapper, had put out Kollage almost a year earlier than I wrote about it, but since she’d gotten so little notice at the time, we figured no one would care; we just needed to get something up on the site. I found a used copy at another record store, plunked down a bit of my own cash (we had no expense accounts to speak of; the myth of the free-spending dot.com offices did not spread to all corners) and I’d filled the gap for that week. Next week would be a problem for next week, and that always seemed a long way off.

Most people say the Dot.Com Bubble burst in the wake of the stock-market corrections of 2000. My bubble burst in 1998; as with anything/everything, it was a girl that did the trick. I’d folded my life so far into work that I took up with Girl R, a lady I had so much in common with largely because we sat across from each other in the office and sat reverently at the feet of Boss R every day. It was, of course, a capitally bad idea – Girl R and I imploded with staggering speed and force, propelled by our own inadequacies and the ridiculousness of our situation (and egged on a bit by Boss R, who it seemed had a bit of a thing for her, too). The smoke didn’t fully clear until after I’d left town about 2 years later.

The foolish illusion of the job that would provide it all – money, creative satisfaction, ego-gratifying success, and even love/sex – fell away, pretty hard. I’ve had jobs since, and good ones, including a great one now, but I’m smart enough to keep a bit for myself each day. I work hard, feel gratified and try to earn my keep, but I know it’s just a job; there are always things more important (Eileen springs to mind) and sweeter-tasting to be had in my off-hours.

SISOSIG? It’s entirely possible that I haven’t listened to this since I bought it for work in 1997 or 98. I recall it being OK, but it’s got neither nostalgic value nor completeist necessity to recommend it. I hadn’t heard/heard of Bahamadia before then, certainly haven’t heard/heard of her since, and wish her well in her travels away from The Beast…

The Chef Recommends...

2006-06-19T20:33:00.000-04:00

The Bad Plus
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: The Bad Plus
Albums: These Are The Vistas; Give
Source: Bought used

I don’t take music recommendations from just anyone, because it’s too easy to be a casual fan. “Dude, I love this Jimmy Buffet song!” can be said (and meant) by anyone, but the person isn’t really listening to the music – they’re responding to a memory of hanging out in college or putting on a Hawaiian shirt at an outdoor concert, and, dude, we were all so wasted by the time he played “Margaritaville…”

But I don’t mean to pick on the Parrottheads, because I can be as guilty of sentimentalizing a record as anyone else. I mean to say that when it comes down to taking a recommendation, to putting down some money and investing some time on a band I’ve never heard before, there are only a few sources I’ll trust.

One of them is Jean, my friend JP’s dad. He has, without question, the largest, most comprehensive record collection I have ever seen; it makes The Beast look like an underdeveloped midget. It takes up a room in a fairly sizable house, and has long since spilled over the ample storage built into that room. There are LPs, EPs, CDs, singles and box sets of every stripe. I am confident that he has things he hasn’t listened to since before I was born; I’m also equally confident that he has at least some idea of what he’s got, right down to the last Thunderclap Newman LP. It really is a thing to behold.

I remember the first time I met Jean: It was Parents’ Weekend my sophomore year at college, and JP and I decided to get our folks together for some fine food at Kahn’s Mongolian Grill (where you pieced together your own bowl of food and they’d cook it right before your eyes!). All of the introductions were made, we sat down, and Jean turned to me: “I understand you’re into music.” Yes, I said, and then he asked pretty much the last question you’d expect from a just-introduced grown-up: “What’s your favorite Neil Young album?” Not, “What are you majoring in?” or “What’s good to eat here?”, but a sincere and probing query about Neil Young. I said it would be too hard to choose between Rust Never Sleeps and Tonight’s the Night. Jean nodded and said (and I’m not making this up), “Good. Those were the only two I was going to accept.”

Since then I’ve talked to Jean about records a lot, and with JP gone, he’s one of the few people I can have an entirely focused, deeply geeked-out conversation with about nothing at all but music. So when he told me that he’d picked up The Bad Plus’ These Are The Vistas and it was something I needed to hear, I didn’t even question it. Of course, he was right – it’s way-cool, real jazz made by a piano trio of guys who love rock music but don’t really play rock. They cover “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Iron Man,” but as part of a grand tradition of jazz borrowing melodies and harmonies from pop; more like Coltrane doing “My Favorite Things” or Miles digging into a hit show tune than the fakers the Bad Plus guys are sometimes thought to be. And anyway, it’s their original tunes that really make the records happen: big, complex, dynamic creatures that roar and purr and float and dive and turn on a dime, each only when it serves the song.
Give is more of the same, and I’m always a little surprised by how good these records are each time I put them on. I usually go for them when I’m in the mood for some up-tempo piano trio, but this ain’t no Oscar Peterson…it’s a whole ‘nother thing, and certainly worth recommending.

SISOSIG? Rock-solid keepers, from start to finish. One of the (many) nice things about The Bad Plus is that they hold a singular space in The Beast; they’re not quite like anything else I have, yet they’re very much a piece with things I dig. The band is young yet, so here’s hoping they get even better than this!

Swag Ahoy!

2006-06-01T22:33:00.000-04:00

Babes in Toyland
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: Babes in Toyland
Albums: The Peel Sessions; Live at the Academy
Source: Promos

Why do I have these albums? I don’t like Babes in Toyland, and it’s entirely possible that I’ve never listened to them all the way through (though the Peel Sessions disc is pretty short, so it stands to reason I’ve spun it to the end at least once).

The Beast is filled with artifacts like this: detritus of my years in college radio. Whenever I go to certain gigs – like, say, Paul Westerberg at the Bowery Ballroom a few years back – I joke that the bouncers should skip checking IDs and just ask everyone when their college-radio shows were. 80s and 90s college DJs are a recognizable type, as benchmarked by the music of their youth as the people who maintain that rock achieved perfection in 1974 (it’s a scientific fact). We’re musically and culturally open-minded, but only insofar as we know nothing will live up to the controlled chaos of the Replacements’ middle period, Robert Smith’s careful sadness or pretty much the entire SST catalogue.

Like many a Music Geek before me, I was a college radio DJ. JP and I had shows together nearly every semester (except for my 1st semester of freshman year, when I did “New Day Rising” from 6 – 8am on a weekday; and the 1st semester of my junior year, when I was about to leave for Scotland and JP was home getting chemotherapy) that tended to be the highlights of any given week. I also did a year as WHCL’s music director, which means I got a metric buttload of swag from the record companies and promoters, including these two discs.

In a way, it was even better than the Music Critic Years: we’d get free copies (sometimes more than one) of pretty much everything, and there was almost nothing I had to do in return – just a weekly report to the College Music Journal (CMJ) and periodic trips to restock the stacks at the station. Other than that, the music was mine to enjoy, and anything that didn’t need to go on the air went to feed the baby version of The Beast.

On the other hand, it meant there was almost no quality control. Babes in Toyland had a moment of post-Nirvana glory (split three ways with L7 and the Breeders), and I suppose they were OK. I was (and remain) rarely inspired to listen to them, never went to a gig, and couldn’t tell you what a single note on either of these discs sounds like. Well, except that the Babes are pretty loud and reasonably angry. But wasn’t everyone in the early 90s?

SISOSIG? Oh, sweet lordy, forgive me for taking up precious room in the apartment with these CDs. I own two versions of “Ripe” (and one of “Swamp Pussy”), for which there is no absolution. I shall sacrifice them on the riot grrrl altar and say 10 Courtney Loves and 40 Steve Albinis.

Putting a Face to the Name

2006-05-29T15:43:00.000-04:00

Azusa Plane
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: Azusa Plane
Albums: Tycho Magnetic Anomaly and the Full Consciousness of Hidden Harmony; America is Dreaming of Universal String Theory
Source: Promos

In the documentary Looking for a Thrill, musicians talk about the people and things that inspire them. James McNew (from Yo La Tengo), an excellent musician who is also a portly fellow, talks about going to see the Minutemen as a teen. Up until then, he’d always thought of rock musicians as looking (or maybe just being) a certain way. Up on a pedestal, clothed and coiffed just right, those about to rock earned their salutations by being bigger than life and rocking in a way that fit inside a certain set of defined expectations.

And then there was D. Boon. Short, fat, bad hair, wearing an old flannel shirt, and just rocking the place to death. He wasn’t what McNew expected from his rockers, and it showed him that he didn’t have to be thin or handsome or well-dressed or, really, anything in particular. Like the Minutemen said, “our band could be your life, real names will be proof.” They were real and regular guys, and knowing who they were didn’t matter if you knew what they did.

The first thing I knew about the Azusa Plane was what they did. Well, not “they” really – the band is essentially one guy, Jason DiEmilio. He lived out in the Philly ‘burbs, and in 1997 my editor at a local paper passed me a copy of Tycho Magnetic Anomaly and the Full Consciousness of Hidden Harmony, his debut CD, and 7” with an assignment for a review.

I listened. It sounded familiar, but not really like anything I’d heard before. It said “All sounds on this CD originated from a Fender guitar” on the disc’s packaging, and it was both entirely obvious that this was true and sort of unbelievable. This was not a “band” playing “songs” in any way that anyone would recognize: each long track (ranging between about 9 to 25 minutes apiece) meandered and flowed and built and collapsed in ways that suggested the motion and emotion of rock music without actually sticking to its form. Each moment was mysterious and cool and enticing; telling you that it was all done on a Fender got you no closer to figuring out how it was done. The guitar was just a machine that DiEmilio used to sculpt these soundscapes of music that was not quite rock, not quite psychedelic, not quite noise, but had hooks into all of the above and more.

I quickly became a fan. The Azusa Plane played live rarely (I only saw them once, years later, and DiEmilio put together a more standard “rock band” that made an entirely different kind of noise), but he did keep the mystery going with limited-edition singles and weird little releases here and there.

When I started writing about local music for AOL’s Philadelphia office, I decided to dig a little deeper into the Plane. Another full-length was out in 1998, America is Dreaming of Universal String Theory, this one a double disc on his own label, Colorful Clouds for Acoustics (if there’s one thing DiEmilio is most certainly not about, it’s concise titles). I wanted not to just do a review of the album, the thing he did, but a feature about who DiEmilio was. He was friendly and cooperative, and I put it together.

At an editorial meeting, I talked about the piece, and my coworker Todd started laughing. “Jason DiEmilio?” he asked, “I know him! He’s a skinny little kid who was a camera operator at the TV station I used to work at.” Todd went on to describe DiEmilio in all-too-human terms. This mysterious mystical musician in my mind was, in Todd’s description, a quiet, shy, skinny, somewhat geeky guy who did his work and then shut himself in his room back home to make his little recordings. Everything Todd (no fan of noisy/abstract music in the slightest) said lined up with the guy I’d talked to; but his point of view, the face Todd put to the name, was an entirely deflated version of Mr. Azusa Plane. I heard a seer pouring himself through a sleek Fender; Todd saw a music nerd who didn’t go out for beers and talk about sports after work.

It didn’t affect how I listened to the Azusa Plane records – I still find them subtly powerful, somehow always sounding different each time I listen – but it did change how I thought about DiEmilio, at least a little. He was just a regular guy like me (skinny, somewhat geeky; though I was never quiet nor shy), who did some stuff he liked and hoped other people liked it, too. He wasn’t sending his two stone tablets of guitar noise down from great heights, but from an apartment that was probably no different from anyone else’s in and around the city at the time. People who heard his music outside of the Philadelphia area, especially his overseas fans (the Plane had a following in Australia, home to Tycho’s record label, Camera Obscura) heard the music and just had that to judge it on, a somewhat different experience from having a face to put to the music, one that didn’t necessarily look like what they were hearing.

SISOSIG? Hey, I’m finally finished with the A’s! Sure, I’m not quite finished with the first of a couple dozen shelves…but it’s something. Anyway, these are both keepers. To the best of my knowledge, this represents the entirety of the Azusa Plane’s LP catalogue (he did a lot more with singles and EPs) and they’re quite unlike anything else in The Beast. I don’t like String Theory quite as much as Tycho, but as I said, these records always sound a little different each time, interacting with the mood, volume, speakers and whatever else factors in to such thrillingly unusual music.

Pictures at an Exhibition

2006-05-23T22:28:00.000-04:00

Ray Bryant
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artists: Roy Ayres; Ray Bryant; Al Cohn and Zoot Sims; Hank Crawford; Rahsaan Roland Kirk; Charles Lloyd; Pat Martino; Les McCann; David “Fathead” Newman; Woody Shaw; Sonny Stitt
Albums: Stoned Soul Picnic (Ayers); Somewhere in France (Bryant); “Live” at the Left Bank (Cohn/Sims); Memphis, Ray and a Touch of Moody (Crawford); Left Hook, Right Cross (Kirk); A Standing Eight (Kirk); Just Before Sunrise (Lloyd); Givin’ Away the Store (Martino, Shaw, Stitt); How’s Your Mother? (McCann); It’s Mister Fathead (Newman); Little Red’s Fantasy (Shaw); Just in Case You Forgot How Bad He Really Was (Stitt)
Source: Promos

Before I started working at an art school, I didn’t really know what a curator does. I’d been to plenty of museums and art galleries, and just sort of assumed that the artist makes the art, and then it gets shown. (It’s sort of like assuming that a musician writes a song, or a writer writes a book, and then…well, the album or published novel just sort of happens.)

In reality, the curator stands as the first line of defense between the artist and the public, applying a trained eye and a sort of developed taste to an exhibition, trying to ensure that the art of the walls makes some kind of sense. The curator can seek to elicit a certain reaction, communicate a particular point, educate, or just make the artist look his/her best.

Joel Dorn is a kind of musical curator. A producer of jazz, pop and R&B records in the 60s and 70s, he worked with everyone from Mingus to Midler, Roberta Flack to Cannonball Adderley. If anyone could be said to have the education and taste that are the curator’s calling card, it’s Dorn.

He was also a Philly guy, which meant when he started up his reissue label, 32 Jazz, I got assigned to interview him. For 32 Jazz, Dorn bought up a boatload of deleted titles from Atlantic’s immense 60s/70s back catalogue and began thoughtfully reintroducing them to the CD age. Each disc came in a distinct plastic jewel case, had all the original art and notes, plus a personal reflection from Dorn about the artist and the music within. Each note ended with an entreaty to “Keep a light in the window,” and a clear directive to enjoy what you were about to hear. He sent me a pile of promos before the interview, and kept me on his mailing list for quite a while after.

The stuff on 32J (and its successor, Label M) cut a wide swath through the famous (Ayers, Kirk), the semi-famous (Cohn & Sims), the semi-forgotten (Stitt, Martino) and some guys more or less lost to history (Bryant, Shaw). But as a curator, Dorn earns your trust with each disc – through a variety of styles and approaches, each disc Dorn rebirthed had something serious to recommend it. Bryant’s solo piano disc, Somewhere in France, is a small marvel; it’s easy to forget there’s not a full band playing as Ray tears through a program of standards and a couple originals. The double-disc sets from Crawford and Fathead (each plays on the other’s albums) make a solid case that they were as integral to Ray Charles’ sound as Brother Ray himself. And Sonny Stitt…he just cooks, playing Bird-ish jazz like he thought of it all on his own.

There’s also the small matter of the sidemen. Check through the notes on these discs, and there’s a parade of familiar names who were hired for the sessions. Ayres has Charles Tolliver, Gary Bartz and Ron Carter on Stoned Soul Picnic; Lloyd’s got Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette backing him up; Booby Hutcherson, Cedar Walton, Jimmy Cobb, Billy Higgins, Anthony Braxton, Paul Chambers, Kenny Garrett, Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson, Joey Baron and Marc Johnson all show up on tracks peppered among the other discs. It’s a treat to hear major guys playing inside someone else’s context, bringing the level way up while also subsuming themselves to the task at hand.

In this museum of jazz’s cutout past, Dorn is a meticulous and big-hearted curator, framing every lesser light in a way that makes him look like a prime Picasso. It’s a gift to be able to do what Dorn’s done here, and it’s a gift he gives to every listener who picks up one of his discs.

SISOSIG? There’s a big ol’ stack of discs on my desk right now, and they’re all keepers, every one. I don’t listen to some (like Kirk and Shaw) as much as others (Bryant, Martino, McCann), but I enjoy all of these. Like a masterwork on the walls of the Met, there’s probably more to see (or in this case, hear) over time, and all of these discs belong in the collection.

This Just In

2006-05-10T11:03:00.000-04:00

Alarm Will Sound
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: Alarm Will Sound
Album: Acoustica: Alarm Will Sound Performs Aphex Twin
Source: Prize

I am trying to get fewer CDs these days, but sometimes I can’t even help it. Cantaloupe Records (the modern classical label run by the Bang on a Can folks) had a survey in a recent edition of their e-newsletter, and I responded. Hey, they wanted some info, and I didn’t mind giving it. Total time invested: 2 minutes.

Then, a few weeks later, I get an e-mail back from them that my survey results were chosen at random as one of 5 “winning entries,” and I could have my pick of their catalogue. Really? Well, OK.

So I picked this CD, wherein more than a dozen musicians, playing everything from oboe and cello to curtain rod and duck call, tackle the songs of electronica pioneer The Aphex Twin from an acoustic POV. And dammit if the thing doesn’t work: the skittering beats are still there (this time, done by man rather than machine), along with the repetitive-but-evolving melodies and counterpoints, and the strange sounds. It doesn’t sound like electronic music or acoustic music, really, but a diggable bastard child of the two (though it’s worth noting that the pair of remixes at the end – wherein the acoustic translations of electronic sounds get reprocessed as electronica – might be the best tunes here).

I didn’t buy this record, or even try to buy this record, but I have it anyway, and I dig it for sure.

Don’t Believe the Hype (Except When You Want To)

2006-05-08T22:50:00.000-04:00

In C
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artists: Autoclave; Bang on a Can
Album: Autoclave; Terry Riley/In C
Source: Bought new

With magic, knowing how the trick is done not only ruins the fun, but it also removes the power of the act: you know it’s really a secret switch and a trap door making the bird disappear, which replaces the brief thrill of belief with the dull disappointment of easy knowledge.

The system by which musicians and/or record companies convince you to buy their product is a sort of magic trick, if not a very complicated one. The people selling the music get the people reviewing or writing about the music excited, who are then expected to flip their secret switches and transfer their excitement onto the record-buying public. The reviewer/writer gets excited in a few ways: sometimes he just genuinely likes the record, but even then there’s a craftily assembled press kit, a free copy of the album, maybe a cool promo item like a baseball cap or limited-edition something-or-other, probably free tickets to the show, and often an interview opportunity, which can be its own kind of excitement.

It’s a simple trick, and it works. Once enough of these people get at least a little excited, a low hum begins to build as writers for several magazines, newspapers, websites, etc, all start to project their excitement outward (read enough of them and you’ll start to see a few lines and tropes that everyone is clearly lifting right from the press release). Soon the record buyer has heard the Good News 10 times in a week, and before you know it he really, really wants to buy the new CD by a band he hasn’t thought about in awhile.

The amazing thing about this trick is that knowing how it’s done doesn’t make you immune to it. (This process recently put the idea in my head, if only briefly, of buying the new David Gilmour album, even though I don’t listen to the other 2 Gilmour records I already have and only a fraction of the Pink Floyd I loved as a depressive teen.) I’ve been a part of the machine, and I know how it works, but I still sometimes find it hard to not believe the hype.

This Autoclave record is something I still can’t believe I own. It’s a (very) short compilation of the singles & demos recorded by this (very) short-lived D.C. band, put out by capitol-scene avatars Dischord. The main draw is that it’s the first band of Mary Timony, later of indie-pop stars Helium. Now, I never listened to Autoclave during their 1990-91 existence; I did listen to Helium, and even saw them live once or twice, and never liked them. But when the machine revved up and the rabbit was repeatedly pulled out of the hat, I suddenly had to hear these early, pre-Helium recordings by Mary Timony. I don’t know why. But I bought it, and I liked it about as much as Helium, which is to say not very much. I think it’s kind of boring, if inoffensively so.

But the trick isn’t always malicious. One day at work, I was listening to NPR and John Schaeffer had minimalist composer Terry Riley on the show. Schaeffer is one of those perfect patsies, a professional music geek who gets excited about new records and does so in front of a microphone. He and Riley talked about how amazing Bang on a Can’s live recording of Riley’s classic piece “In C” was, and they played a clip on the radio. And you know what? They were right. It was amazing. I needed to hear more of it. Now. I immediately went to Barnes & Noble’s website, knowing that they had same-day delivery in Manhattan, and ordered In C. Later that day, it was brought to my office, and it still kind of blows my mind every time I listen to its one track, featuring a dozen musicians running through repeating explorations of a chord for 40 minutes. It’s easily the best piece of minimalist modern classical with electric guitar and glockenspiel that I own. Well, it’s the only, but it’s also a perfectly fluffy, two-eared rabbit, drawn flawlessly out of a hat held by a chain of magicians who smoothly conjured up just enough belief in the magic they were selling.

SISOSIG?: This one’s pretty easy: I never liked the Autoclave, and it only set me back $9 a decade ago. No loss in losing it. The Bang on a Can, though, is a keeper, and has already been a gateway drug to other modern classical, a nice new avenue of musical adventure.

Making the Scene

2006-05-04T22:21:00.000-04:00

Sonny Sixkiller
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artists: Ashtabula; Asteroid #4; Atom and His Package; Brother JT3; The Delta 72; Fingernail; Franklin; The Friggs; Jugden Mash; The Marinernine; The Lucys; Nerve Generator; Matt Pond PA; Sonny Sixkiller; Stinking Lizaveta; King Britt Presents Sylk 130; Vibrolux
Albums: River of Many Dead Fish (Ashtabula); Introducing…(A#4); A Society of People Named Elihu (A&HP); Way to Go (BJT3); The Soul of a New Machine (D72); So Backwards (Fingernail); Franklin (s/t); Rock Candy (Friggs); Snake Oil & Sippin’ Whiskey (JM); A Little Something from the Weatherman’s Perspective (M9); Anselmo (Lucys); This is 4-Track! (NG); Measure (MPPA); I’m in the Band (S6K); Slaughterhouse (SL); When the Funk Hits the Fan (KBPS130); Doomsday Rock (Vibrolux)
Source: Promos

On average, living in New York is better than living in Philadelphia. Sure, I miss shopping in the Italian Market, and Friday happy hour at Dirty Frank’s was a reliable pleasure. And don’t get me started on the space-to-rent ratio. But it was also sometimes stultifyingly small – the opportunities were limited, the ceiling on achievement seemingly low, and there was no way to avoid the person you wanted to duck for a few weeks.

There was one thing, however, that Philly beats NYC on hands down: the music scene. As in, there actually is one. A reasonably sized coterie of musicians and bands with modest aspirations and a chummy (though sometime also clubby) demeanor. In New York, the bands in “the scene” are chasing major-label contracts (this is where the major labels are, punk) and the sort of national/international exposure that is synonymous with local press here. Before I lived here, I used to complain how New Yorkers acted like their city was the center of the world; now I understand that this damn well is the center of the world, and people need to get over it.

But I digress. I liked the Philly scene. I knew the bands, could catch their action at the Khyber or Nick’s pretty regularly, and there were some bands with members who I was, if not friends with, certainly friendly. It was fun to shoot the shit with Art from The Photon Band, or joke about high school with Jay from Lenola. Then they’d put down their beers, take the stage and rock me just the way I liked it.

Which brings me to the reason behind the very large number of CDs in this entry. All of these were promos by local Philly bands. I got them because, as a Philadelphia Music Writer, one of the tasks at hand was to cover the scene. And it wasn’t usually a chore; it was often a pleasure. Some of the bands (not covered here) were so good that they became part of The Beast’s core – the aforementioned Photon Band & Lenola, plus Caterpillar, Strapping Fieldhands and others. It was fun to not only write about this music, but to know it, know how it fit into a larger picture, even if that larger picture wasn’t all that large in the end.

So I didn’t pay for any of these, and they were part of a glut of discs I felt obliged towards, if not always positively. Many of them are quite good: Ashtabula (a Strapping Fieldhands side project) is weirdly wonderful; Nerve Generator is tightly-wound pop that comes off like a new wave dBs; and anything the Original Sins’ Brother JT put his mind to (here, Way to Go and the Vibrolux disc) is always a loose-limbed lysergic treat.

Then there’s the stuff I have a sort of sentimental attachment to: the guys in the always-rockin’ Franklin were super-nice to me, and knowing them led to the cool coincidence of introducing Lee to their singer, Ralph, only to find out they’d been good buddies in high school; and Matt Pond was always fun to talk to at the bar during a show, the kind of guy who always had something to talk about, but was never a blatherer or a know-it-all (though reviews I’ve read all suggest Measure isn’t one of the top efforts of a guy with some excellent records).

Some of the memories are just weird: I got assigned to interview Adam DiAngelo, the guy behind Fingernail’s proto-IDM electronics, and it was the most depressing experience ever – he’d been kicked out of his mom’s house, then had been screwed over by a friend and had landed in this kind of flophouse apartment/hotel place that was kind of a halfway house for the thoroughly fucked. And Jesse Jameson, lead singer for The Lucys, flipped out and nearly shot himself to death just a few hours after I’d been hanging out with him at the Troc.

There’s also a lot of stuff here I never listen to. Atom & His Package is a single good-natured joke (tinny sequencer and squeaky vocals played as Ween-ish joke punk) that was funny right after college, but not so much anymore; Stinking Lizaveta is doomy prog-metal that would probably be popular now, but was way outside even the underground’s main seam then; The Marinernine is overly general drone that mostly gets by on the fact that M9 mainman Brian McTear is a solid part of the scene (and remains so to this day, as both producer and Bitter Bitter Weeks); and it’s very possible that I haven’t listened to the lame Palace rip-off of Jugden Mash since I reviewed it in 1997.

To the best of my knowledge, very few of these bands are part of the Philly scene anymore. Though I guess I really don’t know: I’ve now lived in NYC longer than I lived in Philadelphia, and it sure felt like I lived there a long time. But I’m out of touch with the place, and what would be the point, anyway? If you can’t hit a small local club and hang with the guys who are there to both see, be seen and be part of the scene, then you’re missing what’s good about having a local scene in the first place.

SISOSIG? I think there’s a bunch to cut here. Atom isn’t something I would want to spend my time listening to (even his synth & giggles cover of Fugazi’s “Waiting Room”), I've got two box sets of Nuggets that make The Friggs irrelevant, I’m never eager to hear Jugden Mash, Marinernine hurts my brain (and ears) when I put it on, Sonny Sixkiller is good pop-rock that isn’t quite as good as most of the other pop-rock I have (but dig that cover art!), and Lizaveta wasn’t something I really liked all that much in the first place.

The rest, though, ranges from solid to good to flat-out excellent. The Beast is stronger for having them, and they’re good reminders of a scene for which I was, to whatever extent, present.

The Best Thing Ever

2006-05-02T21:56:00.000-04:00

Arrested Development
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: Arrested Development
Album: 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of…
Source: Bought new (twice)

Cable TV has so many channels that, inevitably, the folks who have to fill the time often run out of filler. Since it’s expensive to make new TV shows, and seeing as there are so many TV shows that have already been made, it makes a kind of cruel sense to fill today’s TV time with yesterday’s shows. So pretty much everything I loved watching as a kid – from the A-Team and Battlestar Galactica to Happy Days and Mork & Mindy – is out there in TV land (and often on TV Land) somewhere.

That’s fantastically good news, until you actually sit down and watch the shows that used to be The Best Thing Ever in your 8-year-old mind. The A-Team kind of sucks (though please don’t tell Mr. T. I said so…), and the 80s-era Battlestar Galactica just uses the same short clips of special effects over and over (though the new one is so excellent it makes my mind melt a little). Even in the case of Happy Days, I can see what I liked about it without quite enjoying it as much now.

When Arrested Development’s first album came out in 1992, it was positively The Best Thing Ever. In a moment when hip-hop was boundlessly creative (De La Soul, Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and lots of others were at their undisputed peak then), this album sounded a piece with the times and also totally different from anything else out there. These guys put blues into hip-hip, a sunny kind of Sly and the Family Stone vibe without sounding backdated, and just great songs. The single, “Tennessee,” was a hit that deserved every moment of chart time.

I listened to this disc all the time. 3 Years… was in my CD player often and always sounded fresh. I liked it so much that when it got stolen out of my luggage on the way to Scotland my junior year of college (someone broke into my bags and picked out all the R&B and hip-hop discs, leaving the rock and pop behind…) I felt I needed to plunk down some more cash to buy it again, at VAT-fueled European prices, so as not to be without it. And we were together again, Arrested Development and I.

The Best Thing Ever sounds, almost 15 years later, only like A Very Good Thing. And it’s not just because I don’t listen to as much hip-hop anymore: when I put on, say, Check Your Head or Midnight Marauders, they still hit me and hit me hard. 3 Years… still sounds nice, but not as head-spinning as it once was. It’s like I can now see the lines the Fonz has to say were kind of cheesy, and while Happy Days is still a quality sit-com, it just doesn’t pack the same punch. “Tennessee” is fun to sing along to, but it’s a summer pop hit from another summer.

SISOSIG? This is kind of a split decision, but I think I’ll hold onto this one. It’s not a bad record – it’s actually very good, better than a lot of stuff I own. I think I’m holding it up against the harsh light of how great it sounded at the moment, when it was The Best Thing Ever, which is slightly obscuring how good it sounds now. And besides – I paid for it twice, so I’m still getting my money’s worth out of it.

All I Ever Wanted Was to be Your Spine

2006-04-24T21:38:00.000-04:00

Archers of Loaf
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: Archers of Loaf
Albums: Icky Mettle; Vee Vee; The Speed of Cattle; All the Nations Airports
Source: Bought used (IM); Bought new (VV, SOC); Promo (ATNA)

I’m finding it a little hard to believe that I’m about two months and 20 entries into this project and I’m not even finished with the A’s. Heck, I’m not even through the first shelf.

It’s also still hard to believe that I can’t show this project to my friend J.P. He would have loved it, but he’s been dead for more than five years now. It’s not something I’m necessarily angry about anymore; I’m often sad about it, but mostly I just think it’s absurd. He was 29, he was happy at work, about to get married and was in remission from Hodgkin’s Disease, a curable form of cancer. How does it make any sort of sense that he’s not alive right now? Like I said, it’s ridiculous.

In most cases (including this one, probably) it would be an oversimplification to say that my friendship with J.P. was based on music. But we first got started talking about the Pixies during my freshman year of college, and it was a conversation that never really stopped for the rest of the decade that I knew him. We talked about other things, had other interests that drew our attentions, but in the end music was the first, best way we knew each other. (Which also makes it hard to believe I got through 20 entries without mentioning him; the odds that I’d go through that many records not associated with him in some way would have struck me as pretty thin.)

The Archers of Loaf, like so many of the bands that I count among my favorites (and quite a few that I don’t), came to J.P. and me together. We were doing an episode of the college radio show that we did together for almost four years, and the band’s debut disc Icky Mettle was new in the station. Our first instinct, as always, was to look for a funny song title (the band already had a name that would be fun to say into the station’s microphones, so that was covered). We started with “Hate Paste,” which was loud and cool and pretty good, though not great. Then we got around to “Web in Front,” which was pretty much right on the money – “All I ever wanted was to be your spine” went the chorus, and who wouldn’t want to get behind that?

From there, we listened to more records, saw the band live, and they always delivered. But the pinnacle of our Archers experience came at a Yo La Tengo show at the Trocadero in Philly. We got there early and got to talking to the other geeks who were there to secure a solid spot in front (over to the left of the stage, where more of the action always took place). One guy pointed to J.P.’s Archers t-shirt and asked, “You like Archers of Loaf?” Thank goodness he didn’t give a snide reply like, “No, I’m wearing this shirt ironically,” because the guy’s next question was, “You want a free copy of their new album? I have a box of promo discs at home.”

Score. Ever the pal, J.P. handed over his mailing address along with a note that he needed two copies of All the Nations Airports – one for me, too. It’s the disc sitting on my desk right now, and while it’s a great album, it also reminds me how stupid, how utterly absurd it is that I can’t remind J.P. of this story right now. He loved telling it, and always painted the scene just like I remembered it: fun, plugged into the music, striking up a discussion about a band we loved.

And that’s that hardest part: I still have friends who like music, but it’s not the same. I really miss talking about it and hearing it and living through it with J.P., and there’s no one I’ll be able to be like that with again.

When we first heard this band, “All I ever wanted was to be your spine” sounded a note of defiant…well, defiant something. It was hard to tell, but the swirling guitar noise and Eric Bachmann’s stark vocal bark made it make sense. Ten years later, a bout of spinal meningitis hit J.P. during his final, last-ditch treatment for the cancer that killed him just a few months later. Shit, I would have been his spine right there and then, if it would have helped. Now I hear the line a little harder and sadder, but I also try to pogo around the room when the Archers come on, ignoring the sheer absurdity of being in my 30s and doing it without J.P.

SISOSIG? Not a chance of any of this going anywhere. One of the worst parts about J.P. being dead all of these years is that as time goes on, I don’t have any new memories of him. I need the ones like this.

Just Missed It

2006-04-17T22:47:00.000-04:00

Apples In Stereo
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: The Apples in Stereo
Albums: Tone Soul Evolution; Her Wallpaper Reverie
Source: Bought used (TSE); Bought new from the label (HWR)

It’s nearly the end of the second semester of my writing masters program, and I’m looking forward to having no classes for a few months (it may only be late April, but school’s almost out for summer!). I’m going part-time, which means I only take two courses a semester, unlike the other students who mostly take four.

By some cruel trick of scheduling and fate, during not one but both semesters this year, it seems I’ve neglected to take the really excellent courses. I hear the other folks talk about some class I’m not in, like Image and Belief or Writing II, and they all seem to agree that it’s that course, and not the one we’re sitting in during the conversation, that’s the one to take. I keep showing up, but am just missing out.

That’s sort of how I feel about The Apples in Stereo. By the time I showed up, the cool part of this Elephant 6 super-pop group was already over. Chris swears that the early singles are all a gas, and I have it on good authority that their debut LP, Fun Trick Noisemaker, lived up to all three parts of the title. And in the late 90s, nearly anything that reared its homemade head out of the E6 collective was something I wanted to at least give a listen to.

Tone Soul Evolution may only be the second official full-length album, but you can already hear the helium-infused air leaking out of the band. For every tune like “What’s the #?” which is about nothing at all and will stay in your head for a week if you’re not careful, there’s a half-baked piece of power pop like “Tin Pan Alley,” which only half-convincingly longs for a very specific time that probably never existed. It’s fun to hear, but it’s easy to have your attention wander at points – and it ain’t exactly an epically long record, so points off for having filler.

It’s nearly the opposite with Her Wallpaper Reverie, which is a short EP that is more like the old stuff but also newer. Essentially, it’s a compact reworking of Black Foliage, a great, sprawling double album that Head Apple Robert Schneider produced for his buddies The Olivia Tremor Control. Like that longer record, HWR lets layered pop songs rise out of odd and varied repetitions of an instrumental “theme,” each one alternately making way for the other, and before half an hour is up you’ve been hit with “Strawberryfire,” “Benefits of Lying (With Your Friend)” and…well, really I could just list all of the tracks. No one makes pop like this anymore, and really only the Elephant 6 guys ever did.

Beyond these, I skipped getting any other Apples records. Their time was clearly almost up, and before long they were officially defunct (that’s what happens when the singer and the drummer get married and then get divorced). Oh, and on the school front: I think I may have gotten a bead on which courses are the good ones for next semester…

SISOSIG? I’d feel like a fraud calling myself a Real Apples in Stereo Fan, but I do dig these discs. Wallpaper is a keeper without question, and there’s too much to recommend about Tone Soul to ditch it. Really, really good pop is harder to do than it looks (really, really hard I’d guess, based on the sheer amount of bad pop out there) and the Apples are as good a source for fun trick noisemaking as anything committed to tape.

Fabulous Prizes

2006-04-11T22:40:00.000-04:00

Sundial
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artists: Antony & the Johnsons; Massive Attack; Sundial
Albums: Hope There’s Someone EP; 100th Window; Acid Yantra
Source: Free w/subscription to Magnet

Shhhh…don’t tell anyone, but I don’t really dig reading Magnet all that much. I mean, I used to—back in ’96 or so, when Option (one of the very best music magazines ever) folded and Puncture was only picking up some of the slack, Magnet was the very best indie-rock mag to be had. The fact that it was published in my very own hometown made it even sweeter, or at least meant they’d cover local Philly acts like Lenola and the Photon Band. The other fact—that they didn’t accept my pitch(es) to write for them—actually didn’t matter much to me. They covered the music I liked, and did so with style.

Then a couple of things happened. First, I got to know some of their writers. Some of the guys (and they’re almost always guys in this kind of enterprise) were OK, but some really irked me. I made the acquaintance of one Magnet scribe at a music festival in NC, and he just rubbed me and my traveling companions the wrong way more times in 2 ½ days than you’d think possible. Before long, it was hard for me to read the magazine without “hearing” the personalities of the people I knew behind the words. Like with magic, once you know how the trick is done, it becomes a lot (or maybe just a little) less entertaining.

The other thing that happened is I stopped being super-duper into the music they covered. Maybe I grew up and/or old(ish), or the scene fractured a bit too much, or they lost the thread a little, or some combo of the above…no, wait.

It was me.

I moved on. A little bit, anyway. I simultaneously became harder to impress with loud, guitar-based pop/rock and stopped getting the promos in the mail. It became more work and more expense to hear more of what I cared just a little less about.

Which is where these CDs come in. When you subscribe to Magnet, you get a free disc, usually connected to a recent article. I guess they do an interview and score a box of promo discs to give away. Everybody wins.

Especially me. At this point, I subscribe when there’s a free disc I want. The year’s subscription is usually cheaper than buying the disc new; flipping through the magazine is still kind of fun (if not the experience it once was when it would guide my purchases and promo requests for the next month or two); and it still feels “free,” which gives me license to try something I’m not sure enough to buy outright. Sometimes I miss as much as a year’s worth of issues, just waiting for the right slate of promos to appear in their subscription ads. Sad? Maybe. But it gets the job done, and overall it still makes me a reasonable faithful subscriber.

A bunch of the free discs have totally worked out (they’ll come up in their own entries here) and some I hated so much that they’re long since gone. Then there are these three, all from different eras of my Magnet-tude. The Antony one I’m still kind of pissed about, but mostly I’m pissed at me: I saw it in the free-disc list, and instead of reading closely enough to notice that it was a 3-song EP (and not the full-length I Am A Bird Now album), picked it over some equally/more worthy discs. So I paid my full year’s nut and all I got in return was this lousy (well, actually, pretty good) short single.

The other two were antidotes to moments of curiosity. I’ve always wanted to like trip-hop more than I think I actually do, so I picked up the latest Massive Attack in 2003. It’s nice, though everyone now says it’s their worst one ever. And Sundial is from a moment in 1995 when I was edging further into the psych-rock abyss (hey, I lived in Psychedelphia!) and the long, acid-soaked distorto-guitar jams sounded like the way to go. Neither is really all that enjoyable now, but they served a purpose at the time. And they didn’t cost me a cent—unless you count the cost of the magazine I didn’t necessarily read all the way through.

SISOSIG? I think this one is pretty clear. Antony stays; I have a feeling I’m going to fully discover him one day, and until then this is a good place to get a foothold. 100th Window and Acid Yantra, on the other hand, are destined to go. I listened to both of them recently, and it’s hard to even remember what I liked in the first place (especially with Sundial—I’ve got a bunch of Bevis Frond records, which do the same job a million light years better). I got my money’s worth (*ahem*) from them, but they’ve outlived their usefulness, even as free gifts or fabulous prizes.

Just Good

2006-04-08T16:10:00.000-04:00

Fred Anderson
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artists: Fred Anderson Quartet; Robert Barry and Fred Anderson
Albums: The Milwaukee Tapes Vo. 1; Duets 2001
Source: Promos

The silliest thing about being a critic of anything is the main premise of the job: deciding if something is good or bad and then explaining why. I’m in an MFA program for Art Criticism and Writing, and after nearly the full first year, I’ve yet to hear anyone explain in a cogent way how (or, maybe more importantly, why) one does this. In my years as a music critic, I eventually got a to a place where I trusted my ears pretty well, but even then it was a more or less ridiculous process of translating what my ears heard/thought into an eloquent 200 words, with a star grade (some number out of 5) at the end.

These two discs are both live recordings and feature the tenor sax playing of Fred Anderson, but that’s really all they have in common. They’re from sessions nearly a quarter century apart (Milwaukee is an Atavistic reissue of a record from 1980; Duets is from 2001), with different band configurations (the early date is a quartet, featuring the still-active, still-amazing Hamid Drake on drums; the later one is, as the title implies, all duets with percussionist Robert Barry) and essentially different aesthetics (the younger Anderson is still an AACM firebrand; his older persona a self-assured master).

The one thing they do have in common is that they’re good. Just good. Which I don’t mean as some sort of backhanded compliment, implying that they miss the “great” bar by some distance or anything. Rather, when you put either of the discs on the stereo, it’s just easy to hear how good they are—a quality that is easier to hear than to explain. They’re a pleasure, even in the spots where the music is challenging, which is probably the bulk of the total playing time. But Anderson and whomever he’s playing with are locked in ‘round the clock, whether they’re belting blues, exploring tonal freedom or just hitting a solid groove. It bypasses the hard-thinking parts of your brain and goes right to the pleasure centers, though without being spoon-fed or too easy to be worth it. The music is just good, damn good, which is all records need to be sometimes.

SISOSIG? They’re good enough, they’re smart enough, and gosh-darn it, I like both of these discs. I’m sure these will never be desert-island favorites, but they’ll always be worth having (and keeping).

The Chattering Classes

2006-04-06T22:15:00.000-04:00

Animal Collective
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: Animal Collective
Album: Sung Tongs
Source: Bought used

One of the (many many many) downsides of the modern mass-media age is something that’s usually mislabeled as “too much information.” Everyone thinks we’re getting too much input, but the real problem is that we’re getting too much of the same input. If there’s a new movie coming out, you’ll not only read/see/hear a ton of interviews/reviews, but they’ll all be more or less the same. Artists don’t really get a wide variety of questions during all the interviews they do, and even the savviest person will start to give the same answers over and over.

The part where this bugs the record buyer in me is when I read/see/hear so much of the same thing about a new record that, before I’ve heard the record, I feel like I’ve heard it too much. I remember skipping Tortoise’s TNT because, even though I dug the hell out of their Millions… disc, by the time it was in stores I’d read versions of the same thing in Magnet, Puncture, The Village Voice, The Philadelphia Weekly and any number of websites and other media outlets. Never heard a note of the thing (still haven’t, too), and I was already sick of it.

This info glut nearly got me with Animal Collective. This was a band I read/saw/heard way too much about before being able to give them a proper hearing. The Other Music crowd was all atwitter about the band, and after a few albums way below the radar, Sung Tongs was the one that started to get lots of ink (real and virtual) from everyone from Pitchfork to Rolling Stone to (I swear) Time.

But I was determined not to miss this one, because all that media coverage – being essentially all the same – kept hitting a lot of notes that were theoretical music to my ears. The writers and pushers wanted to sell me this band, and the bait they dropped sure smelled good.

The disc didn’t disappoint, either (or even just get smothered by its own hype). Sung Tongs is weird and mysterious, while also being accessible enough to make sense a little after it hits your ear. It’s loose and structured, noisy and quiet, natural and oddly contrived. The rhythms and melodies and harmonies all do their own jobs and each other’s, and long tracks like “Visiting Friends” don’t fall apart any more than tight tunes like “Who Could Win a Rabbit” might meander a bit. Everything hangs together, and it’s not entirely clear how or why. But it makes you glad to give it a listen, every time, especially away from the chattering classes.

SISOSIG? This is a keeper, but I also think it’s “enough.” That is, I still read/see/hear about the band’s newer material, but right now I feel like this one does the job for anytime I’m in the singular Animal Collective Mood.

Lost in the Supermarket

2006-04-02T15:44:00.000-04:00

American Music Club
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: American Music Club
Albums: California, Everclear, Mercury, San Francisco, Love Songs for Patriots, 1984-1995, Come on Beautiful: The Songs of American Music Club
Source: All bought new, except for San Francisco, which was bought used

Despite some toe-dipping into the river of music downloads (the legal kind, mind you), there’s something about it that is deeply unsatisfying. Apart from the absence of an object, one that you can look at and hold in your hands, there’s also the great thrill of record shopping that iTunes and eMusic and the like are missing.

Simply put: I love the experience of being in a record store. Not even necessarily shopping, either; there are countless times I’ve browsed the racks of a good record store for an hour or more and left without buying a thing (my sincere apologies to the store owners). But I always learn so much from flipping through the racks. From the time I was able to get myself to a good record store (like Tunes and Record World in NJ; Utica’s The Last Unicorn in college; later Third Street Jazz, the Philly Record Exchange, Other Music and the Downtown Music Gallery) it was just a joy to walk around, doing a form of research, gleaning what I could from the song titles, release dates, album covers and personnel listed on the packaging. And don’t even get me started on the score of finding something amazing and long-sought buried in a cut-rate used bin.

As a result, I seem to not only have memories associated with the music on the various discs that make up The Beast, I also have lots of specific recollections associated with the moment when I actually shopped for and bought them. American Music Club was a band I’d heard a little bit about my freshman year of college (they got good write-ups for their Everclear album); by my senior year, I’d heard enough about AMC, it was now time to actually hear them. So, home on a break from school, I drove over to Tower Records in Cherry Hill to pick up the then-new Mercury.

I still have a perfect memory of holding the cardboard long-box in my hand (this was back when CDs were still sold in wasteful cardboard packaging so that record stores didn’t have to reconfigure their LP-sized racks) and looking up to see Girl M. She was my high-school girlfriend, my first grown-uppish relationship (well, as grown-up as you can be at 17) and one that had flamed out slowly at first, then crashed badly. All totally my fault, I might add; M was never anything but good to me, and I fumbled the transition to college badly. When she said she didn’t want to talk to me anymore, she was probably right.

Anyway, there she was and she said hello. I responded haltingly, not sure where we stood, and asked the small-talk, “How’ve you been?” question that one asks to acquaintances. She said something like, “A lot better now,” and gave signals that we were back on speaking terms again. We still are. She lives far away, with a great husband and a cute-as-a-button baby, and whenever we talk via e-mail or (occasionally) in person, it makes me glad. M is one of those people that I will always have an affection for and that I hope will always have some place in my life. That she was willing and able to forgive me for my youthful dumb-assness speaks to just one of her many good qualities.

I’m not sure if that meeting colored my reaction to AMC once I got the disc home, but I instantly fell for the band. Mark Eitzel’s songs and the contexts that the group provides are amazing; they have experiments that both fail (the self-referential pop-lunge of “Hello Amsterdam”) and only mildly succeed (Eitzel comes closer to making the “Johnny Mathis’ Feet” fantasia work than anyone has a right to), but so much of it is so right on. Try to listen to “Firefly,” “If I Had a Hammer” or pretty much every note of Everclear without feeling that this band is more than “the spokesmen for every tired thing.” They say more than either their words or notes would suggest, and their songs are sturdy enough to hold up to both time and the range of interpretations on the Come on Beautiful tribute album.

SISOSIG? While it seems I could probably cut some chaff from the two or three inches of shelf space my AMC collection takes up, truth be told these are some of my favorite records. If there’s a loser in the bunch, it’s probably their first-phase swansong San Francisco, but between the stellar cover of “California Dreaming” and the spot-on-ness of “What Holds the World Together” and “Fearless,” there’s still enough there to make it worthwhile.

High Fidelity

2006-03-27T21:38:00.000-05:00

AmAnSet
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: American Analog Set
Albums: From Our Living Room to Yours, Late One Sunday & the Following Morning, Promise of Love, Songs of Hurt & Healing, and Set Free
Source: Bought new (FOLRTY, LOS), bought from the band (POL, SF), record-store freebie (SOH&H)

If art imitates life, then more often than not my life seems to imitate Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. I still remember reading the book for the first time on a NJ beach, at first laughing along with the comedy before finally closing the book with a kind of fear: this was more or less a How To Operate Brian Manual. It wasn’t until much thought that I realized we were supposed to feel bad for Rob; I was pretty much just identifying with/rooting for him. It was kind of like how I felt at the end of most Woody Allen movies when I was young – each time, I was sure he’d end up happy, so I signed up for his team, and each time Woody was the one who was wallowing in some sort of despair by the end.

But it’s not all bad. Some High Fidelity moments are pretty damn good, including my introduction to the American Analog Set. Though this took place three years before the movie version came out in 2000, I got pulled into this wonderful group in a dead ringer for a scene in the film. At the end of a day during my mobilization at AOL’s Digital City Philadelphia, I went into one of my favorite haunts, the then-next-door Third Street Jazz and Rock.^* While browsing the racks, an amazingly hypnotic, gently melodic drone began playing. And it played some more. And some more. Finally, after several minutes, I went to the desk, asked the guy, “What the hell is that?” It was all nine minutes of “Magnificent Seventies,” and I wouldn’t be surprised if he dropped the disc in a bag and rang up From Our Living Room to Yours without even asking. When I saw the scene in High Fidelity where John Cusack consciously sucks in customers by putting the Beta Band on the sound system, I felt pretty sure that his Third Street Jazz counterpart had made me as an AmAnSet mark and reeled me in.

A double dose of thanks for doing so, too. Not only have I consistently enjoyed pretty much every AmAnSet tune I’ve heard since then, but they saved my sanity twice: Within a week after 9/11/01, the band had a gig at the Knit (one of the first after the attacks on the nearby, still-smoking WTC). Lee and I went, and their gentle, barely-there rocking lulled us into a sense of, if not safety, certainly some much-needed comfort. Fast forward to a couple of years later, when AmAnSet, who have now relocated from Austin to Brooklyn, are playing at Southpaw on my 31st birthday. The wife of one of the guys I invited dragged along her friend Eileen, suspecting she might be able to work a little matchmaking magic. We’re introduced, and my first, totally honest reaction to this lovely stranger is, “Oh, I’m sure we’ve met before.” And I meant it, too.

SISOSIG? As they say, "Fuhgeddaboudit." This stuff stays. It's repetitive, the evolution from disc to disc is minimal, and I love every note of it. After all the AmAnSet has done for me, I am in no position to turn them out into the cold.

*On a mostly unrelated note, I would be remiss if I did not briefly comment on Philadelphia’s wonderful and much-missed Third Street Jazz. In high school it was one of the first “real” record stores I ever encountered, and from then until the day it closed down in 1998, its rows of records, tapes and discs – along with its friendly and way-knowledgeable staff – made every trip there a pleasure and an education. Shit, Sun Ra himself used to drop off his homemade records there and nowhere else. If this sounds too much like a commercial for the joint, then I plead guilty to loving this brothel of musical pleasures and spending many of my dollars there almost immediately after having earned them.

Smells Like Team Spirit

2006-03-25T16:35:00.000-05:00

Believe
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: Scott Amendola Band; Gregg Bendian’s Interzone; Nels Cline
Albums: Believe (SAB); Myriad (GBI); Destroy All Nels Cline (NC)
Source: Bought used (SAB); promos (GBI & NC)

My dad is a sports nut. Not as extreme as some, to be sure (e.g., to the best of my knowledge he’s never painted his face in team colors and gone to a game), but his office is decorated with Brooklyn Dodgers and New York (football) Giants memorabilia, and he’s more apt to quote the wisdom of Vince Lombardi than, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Which is not to paint him as a meathead – my dad’s probably one of the smarter people I know – but rather to indicate that sports is, for him, the well of wisdom from which he often draws. (Kind of like music and/or The Simpsons for me.) As such, many of the lessons of my childhood included healthy doses of the idea of teamwork and its importance to the commonweal. (There was also “Perfect practice makes perfect,” his own improvement of “Practice makes perfect,” which I had to be a bit older to see the tautological implications of.) Individual achievement was important – witness his collection of baseball cards by present and future Hall of Famers – but in the end, if the team lost, the enterprise had come up empty.

Maybe it’s this team-spirit grounding that has made me into someone who places great importance on the line-up of musicians for any given band and/or record. For instance, I’m more likely to think of Miles Davis’ timeline by the members of his band than the style of music they played.

In the case(s) of these three discs, for each one it was all about the team. The common element is Nels Cline, a guitar player of deeply impressive originality and breadth of ability who appears on each of the albums. I’ve seen/heard this guy do everything from gentle jazz to improvisational freak-out to straight-up punk rock. He’s currently adding his skills to Wilco, and I’ve heard that the whole team’s game went up a notch when he donned the Wilco uniform. He’s got his guitar, his pedals and his talent; all he needs to know is the team context, and his imagination will run wild.

Believe, a session helmed by bandleader Scott Amendola, came to me through a well-timed recommendation: the Downtown Music Gallery’s weekly e-mail blast wrote it up the day after I’d seen violinist Jenny Scheinman play a stunning gig at Barbes that involved a room packed with string players, all working together in conducted improvisations. When I heard that she was on this record, along with Nels and Tortoise/Chicago Underground axe-man Jeff Parker, I knew what I needed to do. After a lucky bit of eBay’ing, I had this disc, and it quickly became a favorite; everyone I’ve played it for has loved it, and its experimental/melodic/loose/structured/jazz/rock sounds are in my ears pretty often.

The other two were more accidental. After writing up Atavistic’s “Unheard Music” series for Harp magazine, the label sent me all their stuff for a year or two; both Myriad and Destroy All were part of that sizable haul. Both are pretty good, too, but not for everyday use. I learned that for sure with Bendian’s disc: when a woman I was listlessly wooing by lending her CDs mentioned that she liked jazz with vibes in it, I foolishly made this one the next loaner. Sure, Bendian plays vibes, but they’re run through noisy pedals and an avant-garde sensibility, supported by Nels and his drummer brother Alex in full-on-intensity mode. She gave it back with a sour look on her face and a comment something like, “Um, it was a little much.” Needless to say, that was the end of the wooing.

But both discs are good for noisy-ish moods – they have structure and coherent personaes that are less violent than lots of noise can sometimes be, each creating different kinds of amp-driven washes of sound and rhythm. Plus, I know my boy Nels is part of the team, and I know that often makes the squad a winner.

SISOSIG? What kind of team player would I be if I knocked Nels off the squad? He’s a reliable scorer with a flexible game, who both supports the team and takes it to the hoop every time. (See Dad? Your sports metaphors were not entirely lost on me!)

This Just In

2006-03-25T16:06:00.000-05:00

Neko Case
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: Neko Case
Album: Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Source: Bought new

While it’s true that I’ve slowed my pace of buying new additions to The House That My CD Habit Built, I’m not going to be able to stop entirely. In the interest of semi-comprehensive semi-completeness, I figure I should make short mention of newly acquired discs. I just picked up Neko’s new one, and while it’s too soon to tell how deep it will burrow into my psyche, right now all indications are that Fox Confessor is going to be a long-time keeper. The title certainly helps: Especially since the publication of Victoria Renard’s deeply alluring nude photos of Ms. Case, “Fox” and “Neko Case” have had deep associations in my mind. Oh, and the music, songs and singing on this one are top-notch, too…

To the Tropics

2006-03-19T17:11:00.000-05:00

Ambitious Lovers
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: Ambitious Lovers; Arto Lindsay
Albums: Lust; Prize
Source: Bought used (Lust); Promo (Prize)

(Boring Technical Note: It’s rapidly dawning on me that, at this pace, I will get through the entire Beast sometime during President Chelsea Clinton’s 2nd term in office. As a result, anywhere I can speed things up a notch – like by putting both of these Arto-led bands in a single entry – I think I will.)

Lee’s girlfriend Jenn is part of a Mix-CD Club, by which members put together mixed discs for all the other members, one a month, for the sheer geeky fun of it. One thing she’s noticed is that, especially with the more hardcore Music Nerds involved, they tend to make mixes that follow what she calls “that intentionally-multigenre'd structure you probably know all too well from music aficionados.” In other words, everyone makes sure to show off the breadth of their eclecticism, even if truth be told, half of their favorite songs are by the Rolling Stones.

I am, to an extent, as guilty as the next geek – I’ve got a few things in the collection that are mostly just genre-specific investigations that I may not have fallen for entirely, but I am somewhat loathe to get rid of since I figure I “should” get it. In other words, for everyone who faithfully buys all of the Ethiopiques discs at Other Music, I bet there are more people who display them than listen to them.

One of the genres the aficionados never seems to miss is the Brazilian/Tropicalia that is all the rage amongst those in the know. Arto Lindsay, who came up in the extreme-noise wing of NYC’s No Wave scene (he bashed his guitar strings in DNA and the first version of the Lounge Lizards – Oh, the things I know!) went on to embrace his roots in Brazilian music in various ways. Both as a member of the Ambitious Lovers and under his own name, Arto makes Brazilian music that also has some Noo Yawk skronk and funk to it, making it just so.

Truth be told, I like both of these albums quite a bit: they’re rhythmically enticing in a way that, say Paul Simon’s ethnomusicological experiments rarely quite are, and the songs & melodies are generally pretty captivating. I’ve seen Arto do this stuff live, and it’s gently but decidedly enthralling.

And yet…(there was clearly an “And yet” coming, right?), how often do I find myself thinking, “What I could really go for now is some South American music, but filtered through a downtown experimentalist sensibility”? Not too often, I confess. But I think I want that to change – whenever I pull out records like these, or some of the scant Afrobeat I’ve got scattered here and there, it makes me really happy, and it feels like something I could grow (read: mature) into. Jenn’s looking to start a new mix-CD club that avoids the intentionally-multigenre'd structure, but maybe it’s a good thing to get a dose of those other genres more than I do.

SISOSIG? I have to admit that going in, I assumed these would be on the Go pile. But giving them a fresh listen and a good think, I think I’d be better served holding onto them. There may be a day when I’m not reaching for noisy pop quite as often (heaven forbid!), and records like these should do the trick nicely.

Completely Nostalgic

2006-03-15T22:56:00.000-05:00

Alloy Orchestra
Originally uploaded by bsglaser.

Artist: Alloy Orchestra
Album: Silents
Source: Promo

One of the reasons The Beast has swelled to its current size has to do with the fact that I am both somewhat of a completist AND a total sucker for nostalgia. I like putting all the pieces into the puzzle, and I'll be even more enthusiastic if the final product keys up a good memory.

As a result, it turns out I've been fooling myself a little about this disc. The Alloy Orchestra is a three-piece group that writes and performs original scores for old silent films. They use all sort of synthesizers and weird junk-percussion, all in the service of modernistic msuci that doesn't feel out of place with films like 1915's Lost World and the 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu.

On top of that, the keyboard player is Roger Miller, who is also one-third of Mission of Burma, a nearly perfect rock band with a great sound and a lot of patience. So this album not only brought back memories of great Alloy performances (like Lost World at the Philadelphia Film Festival, and Buster Keaton's super-excellent The General in Prospect Park - man oh man do I love silent films with live music), but it helps make my Mission of Burma collection just a tad more complete.

Except that it only barely does the former, and the latter not at all. Of the five short film scores included on Silents, I have seen exactly one (Lost World). So it's mostly memories of having seen the group, not any of these particular pieces.

And lo and behold, when I took this off the shelf...Roger Miller ain't on it, neither. Seems he took over for Caleb Sampson, the keyboardist on this disc. Not a note of Mr. Miller's, and very few notes I've seen along with the film.

SISOSIG? After reviewing the evidence, I'm afraid the jury has sentenced this one to death row. Not that I need the nostalgia and/or completist factors to enjoy the music, but the truth is this music is amazing with the films...and good, but not great, without it.