Music Diary 2012: Tuesday, May 8

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Tuesday May 8, 2012
 
My Tuesday journal for Nick Southall’s MusicDiary2012–and I was remiss yesterday to link back to Nick’s site. Here ‘Tis: http://sickmouthy.com/
 
Today, like yesterday, was all music listened to during and for work.
 
Johnny Paycheck – She’s All I Got
Johnny Paycheck – Someone to Give My Love To
Johnny Paycheck – The Feminine Touch
Johnny Paycheck – 11 Months & 29 Days
Johnny Paycheck –Colorado Kool-Aid
Johnny Paycheck – Georgia in a Jug
Johnny Paycheck – Me & The IRS
Johnny Paycheck – Friend, Lover, Wife
Johnny Paycheck – Fifteen Beers
Johnny Paycheck – Gone At Last
Ink Spots—If I Didn’t Care
The Cats & The Fiddle—I Miss You So
The Mills Brothers—Till Then
The 5 Red Caps—I Learned a Lesson, I’ll Never Forget
Deek Watson & His Brown Dots—Sentimental Reasons
Dusty Brooks & His Four Tones—Play Jackpot
The Golden Gate Quartet—Atom and Evil
The Delta Rhythm Boys—Just A-Sittin’ and A-Rockin
The Jubalaires—I Know
The Basin Street Boys—I Sold My Heart to the Junk Man
The Cats N Jammer Three—I Cover the Waterfront
The Melody Masters—MyBaby
The Four Aces—I Wonder, I Wonder, I Wonder, Pt 2
The Four Vagabonds—PS I Love You
The Ravens—Ol Man River
Bill Johnson and His Musical Notes—Don’t You Think I Oughta Know
The Five Bars—I’m All Dressed Up With a Broken Heart
The Scamps—Solitude
The Big Three Trio—After Awhile
The Orioles—It’s Too Soon to Know
The Deep River Boys—Recess in Heaven
The Rockets—Loch Lomond
The Dixieaires—Go Long
The Four Blues—IT Takes a Long Tall Brown Skinned Gal
The Four Tunes—You’re Heartless
The Charioteers—A Kiss and A Rose
The Four Knights—Wrapped Up in a Dream
The Syncopators—River Stay Away from My Door
The Robins—If It’s So Baby
The Shadows—I’ve Been A Fool
Dog Police—Dog Police
Tenacious D—Rize of the Fenix
Tenacious D—Low Hangin’ Fruit
Tenacious D—Classical Teacher
Tenacious D—Senorita
Tenacious D—Deth Starr
Tenacious D—Roadie
Tenacious D—Flutes & Trombones
Tenacious D—The Ballad of Hollywood Jack and Rage Kage
Tenacious D—Throw Down
Tenacious D—Rock is Dead
Tenacious D—They Fucked Our Asses
Tenacious D—To Be The Best
Tenacious D—39
Dee Snider—The Ballad of Sweeney Todd
Dee Snider—Big Spender (featuring Cyndi Lauper)
Dee Snider – Luck Be a Lady Tonight (featuring Clay Aiken)
Adam Lambert – Trespassing
Adam Lambert — Cuckoo
Adam Lambert – Shady
Adam Lambert – Never Close Our Eeys
Adam Lambert – Kickin’ In
Adam Lambert – Naked Love
Adam Lambert – Pop That Lock
Adam Lambert – Better Than I Know Myself
Adam Lambert – Broken English
Adam Lambert – Underneath
Adam Lambert – Chokehold
Adam Lambert – Outlaws of Love
Gaz Coombes—Bombs
Gaz Coombes—Hot Fruit
Gaz Coombes—Whore
Gaz Coombes—Sub Divider
Gaz Coombes—Universal Cinema
Gaz Coombes—Simulator
Gaz Coombes—White Noise
Gaz Coombes—Fanfare
Gaz Coombes—Break the Silence
Gaz Coombes—Daydream on a Street Corner
Gaz Coombes—Sleeping Giant
PJ Harvey—Meet Ze Monsta
PJ Harvey—Meet Ze Monsta
Dr Feelgood—All Through The City (live)
Small Faces—Itchycoo Park
Small Faces—Green Circles
T Rex—There Was a Time/Raw Ramp
Tompall Glaser & The Glaser Brothers—What Is a Woman What Is A Man
Tompall Glaser & The Glaser Brothers—Help Me Make It Through The Night
Tompall Glaser & The Glaser Brothers—A Girl I Used To Know
Tompall Glaser & The Glaser Brothers—Bye Bye Love
Tompall Glaser & The Glaser Brothers—Me and Bobby McGee
Tompall Glaser & The Glaser Brothers—Snowbird
Tompall Glaser & The Glaser Brothers—That’s When I Love You The Most
Tompall Glaser & The Glaser Brothers—Stand Beside Me
Tompall Glaser & The Glaser Brothers—I See His Love All Over You
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Music Diary 2012: Monday, May 7

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

I’m participating in Nick Southall’s Music Diary 2012 this year.

Here are the songs I listened to on Monday May 7, 2012

  
Shampoo—We’re in Trouble
Sleeper— Inbetweener
Mercury Rev—Young Man’s Stride
Amps—Tipp City
Aimee Mann—That’s Just What You Are
Cornershop—Lessons Learned from Rocky I-Rocky III
Bluetones—Are You Blue Or Are You Blind
Liz Phair – Whip-Smart
Animal Collective—Honeycomb
Animal Collective—Gotham
Black Crowes—Gone
Adam Ant—Place in the Country
PJ Harvey—Meet Ze Monsta
Garbage—Vow
Rancid—Roots Radical
PJ Harvey—Meet Ze Monsta
PJ Harvey—Meet Ze Monsta
Whale – Hobo Humpin Slobo Babe
Adam Lambert – Music Again
Adam Lambert – Trespassing
Adam Lambert — Cuckoo
Adam Lambert – Shady
Adam Lambert – Never Close Our Eeys
Adam Lambert – Kickin’ In
Adam Lambert – Naked Love
Adam Lambert – Pop That Lock
Adam Lambert – Better Than I Know Myself
Adam Lambert – Broken English
Adam Lambert – Underneath
Adam Lambert – Chokehold
Adam Lambert – Outlaws of Love
Cornershop—What Did the Hippie Have In His Bag?
Cornershop—Who’s Gonna Lite It Up?
Cornershop—Non-Stop Radio
Cornershop—Solid Gold
Cornershop—Beacon Radio 303
Cornershop—Milkin’ It
Cornershop—Concrete, Concrete
Cornershop—Something Makes You Feel Like
Cornershop—Inspector Bamba Singh’s Lament
Cornershop—Dedicated
Cornershop—What Did The Hippie Have In His Bag? (The High Slung Satchel)
Cornershop—First Wog on the Moon
Clyde McPhatter—Lover Please
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RIP MCA: A Tribute to Adam Yauch & The Beastie Boys

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

More than most groups the Beastie Boys seemed like a gang. It was all for one and one for all, the Beasties presenting a united front, speaking their own code, turning private jokes into public pranks. Unlike the Ramones or the Strokes, they weren’t a gang dressed in the same uniform, they were three distinct personalities who shared a worldview, one cultivated in New York but reaching far beyond those borders. There was Adam Horowitz, a.k.a. King Ad-Rock, the whiny-voiced imp who never stopped smirking. There was Michael Diamond, a.k.a. Mike D, often acting as the straight man sliding his rhymes and asides under the radar. And there was Adam Yauch, a.k.a. MCA, whose gravelly snarl possessed a visceral force unmatched by his Beastie brothers.

Where Ad-Rock and Mike D pranced like class clowns, MCA brought danger to the Beastie Boys. His prematurely hoarse rasp and persistent stubble gave the impression that he was a genuine thug, capable of living out every ludicrous fairy tale on their 1986 debut Licensed To Ill. Given the chance, he’d crash your party, all soused in Budweiser, ready to fight or fuck depending on who answered the door. He had enough violence and sex to compensate for his companions; he was the Super Id in a trio who happily embraced their basest impulses. Yauch may have been acting a part but he sold it brilliantly, so much so that it never was quite clear whether the full-frontal metallic assault of Licensed To Ill was intended as satire or celebration. All these years later, after all the explanations, disavowals and apologies that the Beasties and Yauch in particular made for these loutish early days, Licensed To Ill still sounds furious; like Jerry Lee Lewis’s Sun recordings or the Clash’s first album, it retains its primal roar, it still grabs by the throat and doesn’t let go.
 
That enduring power and Yauch’s crucial role in its creation may be the reason he worked so hard to separate himself from the teeming adolescent urges of Licensed To Ill. The distancing started early, beginning with the visionary second album Paul’s Boutique, a kaleidoscopic record that sounded nothing like the debut. Tucked away underneath the thick haze of samples was Yauch first hinting at his evolving spirituality on “A Year And A Day.” He cloaked that confessional through a distorted mic. It wasn’t until 1994, when the Beasties had weathered the utter failure of Paul’s Boutique —few who call it their favorite album now bought it at the time, fewer still bought it then and liked it—and mounted an unexpected comeback in 1992 with Check Your Head, that he had the confidence to be sincere, offering an apology for the group’s early sexism via a verse on “Sure Shot” and concluding Ill Communication with a sequence of songs making his Buddhism plain. For the rest of his life—a life that was cut short far too early by cancer on May 4, 2012, when he was just 47 years old—Adam Yauch never disguised his intents again, working steadily as an artist and social activist through his nonprofit organization Milarepa Fund. Although his philanthropy began with a splash via the Tibetan Freedom Concerts of the late ‘90s, much of this work flew under the radar, just as his work as a filmmaker through his Oscilloscope Laboratories did.
 
He may have spent the last decade of his life working quietly—Beastie Boys released only three albums in the new millennium, one of them an instrumental LP that garnered little attention despite winning a Grammy—but their influence is so pervasive it seems as if they never went into hibernation. Citing their influence on either the mookish rap-rock of Y2K or Eminem is correct but reductive as the Beasties legacy extends far beyond the parameters of white-boy rap…or beyond the self-satisfied provocations of Odd Future, for that matter. As the first crew of MCs to top the Billboard charts, they brought hip hop crashing into the mainstream and they acted as ambassadors of the culture, bringing Public Enemy onto their first national tour, their last few albums functioning as an education on the old-school crews they and their Def Jam crew swept aside. During rap’s Golden Age, few expanded the sonic horizons of the music through Paul’s Boutique, an album that flat-out tanked upon its release in 1989 but slowly seeped its way into pop culture at large. It’s no great stretch to say that Paul’s Boutique is ground zero for ‘90s pop culture or even the hyperactive, cross-linked culture we have today. Musicians always steal from the past to make music for the present but the Beasties stitched together existing sounds to create something entirely new, something that scanned as retro but played fresh. And it wasn’t just a sound, it was a sensibility where all pop culture—disco, kung fu, punk, Jaws, platform shoes and pimp hats, classic rock, rap, TV police shows, Blaxploitation—existed on the same plane. This was not far afield from Licensed To Ill, which had the theme for Green Acres spliced in between heavy Zeppelin and Sabbath samples, but Paul’s Boutique confirmed that this was a world-view, one fueled by omnivorous tastes and insatiable curiosity.
  
Beastie Boys never relied on samples so heavily again—and neither did anyone else, as legal restrictions became too great—but they explored this aesthetic in greater detail throughout their purple patch in the ‘90s. Picking up instruments again, they touched upon their hardcore punk roots but spent more time mining gritty funk as a trio augmented by keyboardist Money Mark. This is the sound they debuted on Check Your Head and, truly, this is where all of their interests came into play: old school hip-hop, hardcore punk, soul-jazz, funk, hard rock. Over the next two albums—1994’s Ill Communication and 1998’s Hello Nasty—the Beasties continued to expand, their interests fueling an entire empire called Grand Royal. Through the record label and magazine of that name, the Beasties championed all manners of downtown bohemia and junk culture, never drawing a distinction between either extreme. Perhaps few of the artists had hits—Luscious Jackson, featuring early Beastie drummer Kate Schellenbach, was the only artist who had a record that genuinely crossed over—but the reach of Grand Royal was large, as evidenced by how the magazine popularized the term mullet for the hairstyle that was business in front and party in back. Grand Royal celebrated the ‘70s and early ‘80s, digging deep to find pop culture trends and phenomena that never received due credit, pushing them into the mainstream. It was a labor of love that wound up establishing hipness via crate digging, establishing that the past was inextricable from the present.
  
It was the birth of mash-up culture, an aesthetic that has extended far beyond that now musty definition. We live in an age where anybody who is immersed in pop culture now dives into the past, often championing oddities for the sake of obscurities. But the Beasties were never like that. Sure, they had their odd cult favorites but they never got stuck on snobbery, there always was a palpable enthusiastic joy for the music they celebrated. So much is happening on any Beastie Boys album, so many sounds and styles rubbing up against each other, that the group always suggested that the world was greater than your imagination. Within their music, there was always something to discover. It could be something as small as finally realizing that sample on “High Plains Drifter” is from the Eagles’ “These Shoes” or it could be something grander, like discovering jazz organist Groove Holmes through an album track on Check Your Head. Personally, the Beasties were a gateway to the Blue Note LPs of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the ones where Hank Mobley, the Three Sounds, Jimmy Smith, Grant Green and Lou Donaldson stopped playing hard bop and started laying down groove. Listening to these Blue Note albums in the mid-‘90s, the connection between this old soul-jazz and the Beasties’ current music was clear and it opened up more worlds for me as a music lover. The Beasties always added new sounds to the mix—there’s tropicalia and Lee Scratch Perry on Hello Nasty, salutes to Lee Dorsey on Ill Communication—and when this music was taken in conjunction with the articles in Grand Royal or the videos Yauch directed under his nom de plume Nathaniel Hornblower, they created a boundless interconnected universe filled with surprise and humor, all grounded by a spirituality that was felt without being pushed.
 
It’s not a secret that Yauch was the most explicitly religious Beastie, acting as a quiet yet tireless advocate for Buddhism, but he also embodied the group’s interdisciplinary creativity. Horowitz and Diamond busied themselves with other creative endeavors but Yauch pursued a serious career in film, first directing music videos and then branching out to the 2006 Beastie Boys concert film Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That and a 2008 basketball documentary Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot. Those full-lengths were released through his Oscilloscope Laboratories, which has evolved into a major player in the indie film market, earning Oscar nominations for their 2009 release The Messenger. This was the major new work of Yauch’s final decade, a time when the Beasties downshifted, spending more time with their families as they entered middle age. Their last three albums—2004’s New York love letter To The Five Boroughs, the instrumental funk LP The Mix Up in 2007, last year’s Hot Sauce Committee, Part Two—found the group working familiar territory that nevertheless showed more imagination than most bands because the Beasties’ worldview always overflowed with ideas. But these albums—and Hot Sauce Committee in particular—also exuded the warmth of camaraderie; this was the work of old war buddies whose bond will remain strong to the end of their life.
 
Sadly, Yauch did not live past middle age. Listening to Hot Sauce Committee, where the group is so comfortable in their skin, accepting their past and their age with no apologies, it’s hard not to imagine how they would have sounded some twenty years down the road, trading old stories and perhaps looking like the three geezers strolling on the cover of The Sounds Of Science. It was not to be. Yet what Yauch achieved with the Beastie Boys is so great and so lasting that it’s hard to not look in wonder at his life and wart. With their albums and with Grand Royal, the Beastie Boys created their own universe from parts of our own. What they found within our culture was louder and funnier than what was really there—it was romanticized and funkified, it was better than reality. And an artist cannot hope for a better legacy than that. 
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Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr Take Nostalgic History Tours in 2012

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

The last time Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr released albums within weeks of each other it was in 1978, when Wings were one of the biggest bands in the world and Ringo was deep into disco. Some 34 years later, chart success is still likely for Paul McCartney—his fame is too great, as is his hunger to have his new wares heard—but Ringo has long fallen into a happy nice of his own, appealing to lifelong Beatles fans of any age. Ringo is in a state of perpetual nostalgia, reliving the glory days of the Fab Four and wishing peace & love for all, but his rose-colored glasses are not vintage, they’re expensive and modern, bearing all the hallmarks of the year they were minted. So, Ringo’s gleaming sentimentality on Ringo 2012 is not markedly different than it was on 2010’s Y Not or 2008’s Liverpool 8 (and so on and so forth), but such familiarity is neither a blessing or a curse: Ringo’s happy to be doing what he’s doing and that good can be infectious, although the level of infection depends entirely on your tolerance for Starr’s predictable good cheer. McCartney is also trading in nostalgia on Kisses On The Bottom, a collection of prewar standards that the Beatle loves so much he sometimes own the copyrights. Ringo may have beat him to the punch, breaking free of the Beatles by recording a bunch of songs for his mum in 1970, but Paul is a bit classier and clever about the whole thing, hiring Diana Krall’s band and vocal producer Tommy LiPuma to give him a bit of intimate swing. McCartney’s voice isn’t quite as nimble as it used to be nor as it needs to be for some of these songs but he, as always, powers through by virtue of his charm. His dexterity with sentimentality finds a proper showcase here and by choosing a loving faithfulness over reinvention Paul guarantees that Kisses On The Bottom is sweet, pleasant and ever so slightly slight.

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Leonard Cohen: Old Skin For Old Ideas

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Odds are long that Old Ideas will be the last album Leonard Cohen makes. Assuming it’d take him eight years to finish another one—the span of time separating this and its predecessor, 2004’s Dear Heather—he’d be 85, which is awfully old to be bothered with this business of pop music. Then again, Cohen never seemed to exist within the realm of pop or rock or even folk music, he always was an other, not so much flaunting the rules as disregarding them entirely. What mattered to Cohen was the text. Cohen began singing at the ripe age of 33, correctly betting he’d receive greater recognition and riches as a singer/songwriter, and he never had music in his bones the way that, say, Bob Dylan did. His allegiance always was to the words and during the golden age of the major labels he was surrounded by big-league producers—Bob Johnston, Phil Spector—that gave him warmth even when the setting was spare but as studio musicians were swapped for synths sometimes in the ‘80s, the balance became lopsided and his productions wound up insouciant. On Old Ideas, this indifference is almost charming and it’s all due to his age; the cheap cleanliness isn’t there for expedience or laziness, it’s the suit that fits him best. Unlike, say, Dylan who thrives upon mess and spontaneity, Cohen is orderly: every word has its place, with every sound supporting the word. Grooves and grit are not for him, these pristine instrumentations are his milieu for they do not distract from Cohen’s fathomless groan. Bearing considerable signs of the erosion of age, this weathering adds resonance to the text in a way the transparent arrangements do not and considering the gravity of the songs, this sign of life is needed. Mortality is on his mind as it has been for several years now and he doesn’t avoid although there’s surely traces of mordant humor threaded through the songs. All momentum derives from Cohen’s delivery and his grave intonations are powerfully alive even if the music is not lively. The aural antiseptic starkness tends to underscore death’s slow march forward; he’s not fighting against the dying of the light, he’s not rushing forward to embrace the end but he’s accepted that it’s coming and he’ll just sit and wait doing things as he’s always done, wringing as much humor and pathos as he can while he can.

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The Inevitable Reunion of Guided By Voices

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Was it ever a possibility that Guided By Voices would not mount a reunion? They may not have achieved commercial success on the level of label-mates Pavement—who themselves hardly scaled crossover peaks—but they retained a large, loving audience who followed GBV through many harsh valleys and, more importantly, ringleader Robert Pollard shakes off stasis as if he were allergic. He may have tired of GBV, either as a gang or a brand, but as sure as the earth rounds the sun he was bound to once again find Guided By Voices alluring. And so through a mix of divine province and mundane nostalgia, Pollard collared his long-estranged partners from the ‘90s – there are four other members but the only one with indie-rock fame of his own is Tobin Sprout—for a gig at Matador’s 21st Anniversary celebration in Las Vegas, the reunion then spilling over into a tour and, now, an album called Let’s Go Eat The Factory.
This being Pollard, a man who released six albums in the calendar year of 2011, he’s not content with one measly reunion record. GBV has already polished off a second, Class Clown Spots A UFO currently slated for a May release, and is working on a third which very well could be written and recorded this coming week, perhaps simultaneously. Such is Pollard’s charm and curse: the music comes to him so easily he hardly seems to labor. Often this unfettered parade of music serves as testament to his inherent genius—he has so much music in him it can’t help but bleed out, so the argument goes—but his incessant output undercuts whatever mystic melodic gifts he may possess. His productivity is prodigious but his bag of tricks is shallow, he inevitably splices Beatles, Who, Yes, Genesis and R.E.M. into collages that always shift yet are always familiar. He benefits from a band, particularly if they’re drinking buddies. He needs a gang, somebody to float the next round, somebody to prop him up when he slips off the barstool.
And so, Let’s Go Eat The Factory is better than, say, much of the Fading Captain series, or the two solo albums he released in 2011, but it may not be better than Boston Spaceships which had a similar momentum but lacked the comforting brace of nostalgia. Its lineage to the career-making Bee Thousand is clear, so any Gen Xer that dropped out sometime after Alien Lanes – once the budgets escalated but not quite in an equivalent ratio to the band’s audience – will feel right at home but anybody that dropped in on Pollard on occasion during those 16 some years (did the classic lineup really only spend two years in the heat of a spotlight?) will find Let’s Go Eat The Factory distressingly rote. Pollard sticks to his old playbook, leading the Sprout-goosed lineup through 21 songs that often struggle to reach the two minute mark yet often seem longer because due to his aural ADD. Melodic fragments and flattened guitar riffs compete for attention with warped psychedelic remnants, all intriguing at first but the magic is shopworn, his songs neither sounding unearthed nor. He’s not reinvigorated by his old friends, he’s telling tired stories and elaborating on forgotten lies, bending the truth, milking the moment until it brings along the next round of Budweiser.
But should we have expected anything else? There’s always been an element of a carny barker to Robert Pollard that I don’t entirely trust. His whole game is a high-wire act, a showy distraction to camouflage his hollow core. GBV songs don’t stick they evaporate, hooks that seem indelible merge into the mist some 90 seconds after the songs begin. He has a knack for evocative passing phrases but unlike his idol Michael Stipe, he never bothers to stich these images into either a faux narrative nor does he escalate the drama; they just hang, neither floating or sinking, never developing, just thrown away to make room for the next sound coming down the pike. Pollard’s music always plays like a first draft. Some ideas perhaps should have been abandoned yet many are intriguing and could have been compelling if he had been bothered to do a second pass. But Pollard doesn’t edit or write, he just spews: he’s a songwriter as blogger, jotting down every passing fancy, never spending the time to strengthen his thought. If Pollard didn’t have a natural inclination toward melody and didn’t possess good taste, he’d be easier to dismiss, but he can toss off a hook that reminds legions of misfits of things they also love. But it’s not just a shared taste that resonates, it’s wish fulfillment: Pollard is living out their dreams for his diehards, a messiah for middleclass schlubs this world over.

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Bruce Springsteen Takes Care Of His Own

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

A new Bruce Springsteen single is treated like an event because it’s presented as an event. Arriving hard on the heels of reports that Wrecking Ball will be the Boss’s “angriest” record, “We Take Care Of Our Own” doesn’t bristle upon its own rage yet it’s a rallying call, populist in its sentiment and vague enough in its chorus to court hazy misinterpretations. Some of that haziness is deliberate, particularly in how the chorus could be co-opted by those the Boss criticizes, a double-edge that pushed “Born in the USA” into the hearts of Reagan Democrats but “We Take Care Of Our Own” doesn’t quite belong to its moment despite Springsteen’s gingerly embrace of Occupy. Maybe it’s how he uses a synthesizer patch from 1984, maybe it’s the unwitting recycling of a Flock Of Seagulls hook, maybe it’s how it feels like the title was in place far in place of the rest of the song but the machinations driving “We Take Care Of Our Own” are all too apparent, something that hampers its impact but hearing Bruce work hard inspires a degree of admiration. He wasn’t exactly coasting with Working On A Dream but he seemed to tap every nutrient from his collaboration with Brendan O’Brien, so hearing the self-conscious thunder of the rhythms is galvanizing, just like how the absence of Clarence Clemons is affecting; there are wide open spaces he was meant to fill, left blank and wanting. Pieces are in place, shapes are apparent but the picture is hazy: he’s writing toward an ideal, wearing the crown of a protest singer too heavily. The times may warrant one but “We Take Care Of Our Own” suggests Springsteen would be better writing once again from his heart, not his mind.

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Reissue Shuffle: Alex Chilton, Roy Wood, Dick Curless

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

As the end of January approaches, three reissues have spent more time on my iTunes than normal. First is a holdover from last year: Roy Wood’s Music Book, a hand-selected stroll through his bewildering backpages, so frustratingly close to being a definitive overview that its shortcoming are all the more maddening. Sure, it certainly seems that licensing restrictions have kept him from including full-fledged Move recordings but did he really have to favor Status Quo’s leaden cover of “I Can Hear The Grass Grow” over his own? Well, yes, he did: he’s not so attached to the past that he needs to own it, he prefers the fractures and refractions apparent in these covers. Apart from underscoring the inherent oddness in Wood’s taste, they don’t say much about the artist, nor do they provide a good context, they merely illustrate how difficult Roy is to love because he’ll never give you everything you want. But he comes close: Music Book has more of his best in two-discs than most previous comps, so that makes it a representative overview even if it’s hard to call it a great introduction.
Alex Chilton also never was easy to love. Unlike Wood, who just seemed oblivious of his audience, Chilton cultivated a clear disdain for some of his fans, particularly the ones who placed Big Star above any of his other work. Free Again: the “1970” Sessions comes from a time where he was unencumbered by his cult, when he was just hungry to strike out on his own. Breaking free of the Box Tops in secret, he started to find his sea legs at the nascent Ardent Studios, indulging his love of British Invasion, hard R&B, delicate folk and ugly rock & roll as he was developing his own distinctive voice. At its prettiest, this points the way to Big Star but as a whole, it appears as the catalyst for what he did after Third, when he was happier with mess than perfection, spent more time singing soul than pop. All this makes it historically interesting but Free Again is special because the music still crackles with vitality. Chilton is free to follow his muse wherever it takes him and this music retains the excitement of discovery.
Unlike either Roy Wood or Alex Chilton, Dick Curless never seemed conscious of his artistry. More than Johnny Cash, who was his only peer in intimidating baritone physicality, Curless just seemed to <I>exist</I>, singing songs about the perils of the road because that is what he lived. Naturally, this is something of a myth: Curless drove trucks in the Korean war, long before he started singing professionally, but his casual virility lent gravitas to his songs of traveling, suggesting that he absorbed every travail in his tunes. That assurance was part of his appeal but another wonderful thing about Curless’ recordings is that because he never was a truly big star, he adapted to his times out of necessity—if he didn’t, the contracts may have dried up. So, he’d touch upon the cinematic sweep of late ‘60s progressive country and would get down and dirty, even sleazy, in the ‘70s, singing about jukeboxes and strippers. Most of this is on Omni’s new greatly expanded reissue of 1968’s The Long Lonesome Road, the first CD that wasn’t a big Bear Family box since Razor & Tie’s 1998 hits disc Drag Em Off The Interstate. There’s overlap between the two titles but many of these songs haven’t shown up on CD outside those Bear Family boxes so this disc offers an embarrassment of truck driving country: richer than Red Simpson, who hewed a little closely to the Bakersfield borders, this is varied, funny and resonant, some of the best (relatively) obscure country of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

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Swinging with the Little Willies

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Every time I listen to the Little Willies – which is rarely anytime outside of their release week, I must admit —I’m surprised how the group hits a sweet spot for me. Never an overly enthusiastic advocate of Norah Jones, nor the biggest proponent of swinging country covers toward a jazz beat considerably smoother than Western Swing, the group’s two albums are nonetheless comfort music for me: songs I never tire of performed with warmth but not too much reverence. Their métier is knowing retro, a stylized spin on the past designed for the present, but the group never winks and is never lazy even when they take it easy. There’s no marked difference between the new For The Good Times and their 2006 debut apart from just the slightest hint of increased humor and relaxation, which may not be enough for a swinging Saturday night but it could serve as soundtrack to a lively Sunday morning.

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Once More Into The Zoo Station: U2′s Super Deluxe Achtung Baby

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

That Achtung Baby receives a grander 20th Anniversary tribute than The Joshua Tree did four years back is due entirely to vagaries of the record industry, both in the old millennium and the new. Back in 2007, deluxe single-album reissues had yet to explode into ludicrously lavish luxury items; now, LP-sized boxes housing scarves (as in Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here Immersion Box) and sunglasses (featured in the Uber Deluxe Achtung) are commonplace. The market may exist for these high-ticket items but Achtung Baby is also easier to expand than The Joshua Tree because it existed during the peak era of CD singles, when each single—and there were five from the album, nearly half of its tracks—had at least two B-sides, sometimes much more thanks to U2’s embrace of rave, Madchester, anything the could conceivably be tagged as dance in the early ‘90s, a shift that lead to so many remixes they swallow up two of the six CDs in the Super Deluxe Set. Such a heavy footprint naturally is hard to ignore within the context of this box and, digging through all the material on the Super Deluxe set, what’s striking is how Achtung Baby does lend itself well to such elasticity; compared to all of its 90s peers, the band is buttoned-up—there’s no swing in their rhythms, they march forward on a rigid, rigorous beat—leaving all the adventure in the texture, which does mean remixers can step in and re-work the material in engaging, if not necessarily startling, ways. Certainly, the sheer dense sound of Achtung Baby winds up as U2’s cleanest break from the po-faced Americana worship of Rattle & Hum, something that remains effective two decades later, but the band’s embrace of irony, much ballyhooed at the time, seems almost non-existent in 2011. Without Bono’s grinning personas of The Fly and MacPhisto eating up column inches during U2’s never-ending Zoo tours of ’92 and ’93, what’s left is the music, which, like all of U2’s albums, has absolutely no sense of irony and the band’s mythologizing the era via the David Guggenheim-directed making-of documentary From The Sky Down hammers home how even the band’s smallest moves are crafted with their signature combination of cheerfully high self-regard and naked sincerity. What’s different about U2 during the Achtung Baby era—nearly a half-decade encompassing its messier, sometimes more exciting, sequel Zooropa, now packaged as part of the big box—is that the group created its own world, cobbling together visual and aural elements borrowed from their peers and the past, embracing artifice as a way to speak to higher truths, favoring chilly Eurodiscos to American roadhouse dives. It was a world that spilled over outside of its 12-track origin so it winds up being an ideal album for a ridiculously large expansion: there are so many sounds and visuals it is possible, to borrow a term from Pink Floyd, to immerse yourself within Achtung Baby at this grand scale.

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