For a while there I was attempting to post a bit of music every weekend, or at least most weekends. I’d like to resume that, although I’m sure I won’t be consistent. But anyway, here’s one.
I think it was back in the ‘80s sometime when my friend Robert sent me a tape that included this song and some others by Bob Franke. I wasn’t all that taken with his music in general, and never investigated him any further, but the line “There’s a hole in the middle of the prettiest life” really stayed with me, and I’d venture a guess that over the intervening years no more than a few weeks have ever passed without my thinking of it. And listening to it now I see that the lyrics are even better than I remembered. I really should buy one of his cds.
The video is just a bit amusing, because at least as seen here Franke’s dress and general vibe are more reminiscent of a businessman than of a folk singer; he looks more like someone you’d discuss insurance with than someone you’d listen to in a bar. But that just goes to show that we shouldn’t be too quick to judge by appearances.
The lyrics are very important; you can read them here.
I reviewed (favorably) the Tom Baker Quartet’s first album, Look What I Found, last year here. I’ve been listening to their second album, SAVE, off and on for a couple of months now, and on the whole I like it even better. My taste for unstructured music is limited, and most of SAVE is more conventional than Look What I Found; it’s somewhat more tuneful and less abstract.
Even in its more accessible manifestations, though, TBQ’s music is not easily categorized. As Jesse Canterbury, the clarinetist in the group, pointed out to me, they resemble a jazz group in many ways, and yet they really don’t play jazz. Even when a jazz-like structure is used, there are few bluesy moments, and the rhythms are not especially jazzy for the most part (though you feel like the rhythm section is very capable of playing jazz). The clarinet solo in “Bit by Bitt,” for instance, sounds to me like it owes more to early 20th century Vienna than to Kansas City or Chicago. (There is one bona fide jazz tune here, by Bill Evans no less: the beautiful “Time Remembered.”)
However one decides to categorize this music, I really like it. One comparison that occurs to me is the instrumental music of Frank Zappa, which is very 20th Century Modern without being squarely in that tradition, and which likewise borrows from jazz and rock without fitting those categories, either. There’s also a whimsical, possibly absurdist, quality that reminds me of Zappa.
My favorite tracks here are the ones composed by Tom Baker. Besides being engagingly tuneful, they have some really terrific clarinet and guitar solos. The tracks which are credited to the entire group seem to be group improvisations, and are generally quiet and without distinctive rhythm, so they come across more as sort of textural interludes between the more distinctive pieces, not unpleasant but not especially memorable (though I think there are some technically difficult things going on).
Here is a sort of commercial for the band which will give you an idea of what they’re all about.
And here is a live performance of perhaps my favorite tune from SAVE, “Under the Jaguar Sun”:
Here is the group’s official web site, where you can hear and download a complete track from SAVE and one from Look What I Found. (And you womenfolk who may not be all that interested in the music but like babies should also take a look.)
Deal Hudson, shopping for headphones, introduces the clerk to classical music. It’s touching, and a good indicator of why this music will never die as long as there are people capable of playing it and listening to it.
From Terry Teachout, here’s a nice short appreciation of Johnny Mercer (actually from a longer piece which is not online). It was only ten or fifteen years ago (fairly recently for someone my age), and thanks to my old friend Robert, that I came to appreciate the classic American songwriters—Cole Porter et.al. Many of my favorite songs in that genre are those for which Mercer wrote the lyrics. Look at that list in Teachout’s piece; there are a lot of masterpieces there. Here’s one that knocks me out.
I admit that I’ve always had a soft spot for Andy Williams.
Here are the lyrics; a kind of poetry, indeed:
The days of wine and roses laugh and run away like a child at play through a meadow land toward a closing door a door marked “nevermore” that wasn’t there before
The lonely night discloses just a passing breeze filled with memories Of the golden smile that introduced me to the days of wine and roses and you
The title phrase, as you may know, is from Ernest Dowson. Its dreamy fatalism was not Dowson’s last word on life and death; he died young, but not before entering the Catholic Church.
Clare recently introduced me to this terrific folk group, and their album Shaken By A Low Sound is my current favorite music. They can be described very broadly as bluegrass, but with a twist, and their repertoire includes very un-bluegrass folk material such as Robert Johnson’s “Come On In My Kitchen.” The singer sounds somewhat like Allison Krauss—she has a relatively soft, unstrained, breathy voice, not traditionally country at all, but very beautiful and expressive. The instrumentation includes a cello—and on this album at least, no guitar. They don’t really venture all that far from traditional folk styles, but yet their approach is strikingly distinctive. Here is a live performance of a song from Shaken By A Low Sound, “Ain’t No Grave”:
Aside from her marvelous singing, I love the singer’s unpretentious and down-to-earth stage manner. There are a number of live clips on YouTube, and it appears that dressing oddly was a constant with the cellist. Clare tells me he has now left the band, which must have been a great loss, but they are continuing. You can hear samples from the album here. They have one or two others that I haven’t heard. I find it hard to imagine anyone who likes American folk music not being really taken with this.
I got in the car yesterday and turned on the radio, which was tuned to the local public radio station, and heard someone talking about Mike Seeger. Gradually it dawned on me that the speaker was using the past tense, and that I was listening to an obituary. When I got home I looked around on the web and saw no mention of Seeger’s death until I went to his Wikipedia entry: he died of cancer this past Friday night.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the media at large don’t find him worthy of notice. But I do. Mike Seeger was, I think, the most substantial musician of the Seeger family. Pete has been important more as an organizer and discoverer and promotoer. (Mike was also less tiresomely propagandistic.) I’ve never really heard that much of his work, and yet it has had an influence on me. When I was a teenager and discovering real folk music, moving from groups like Peter, Paul, and Mary and The Highwaymen to the artists who lay behind them, I was given, by my Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Libby who had an interest in this music very atypical for the time and place, a four-disc folk music anthology issued by the Vanguard label. At the time Vanguard was the home of some of the top folk and quasi-folk artists, and there was a lot of wonderful music in that box. Much of it became part of my soul, including two tracks by Mike Seeger, “Little Moses” and “Young McAfee on the Gallows.” I didn’t like them at first. They were too rough and stark. They didn’t sound like what I thought of as folk music but more like what sophisticated people called hillbilly music, which I thought I didn’t like. But of course hillbilly music was folk music. Those two tracks grew on me, and I came to love them.
For some reason I’ve never gotten around to hearing more of Seeger’s music. Among those reasons, I suppose, are that it’s never been widely available, but perhaps more important was the fact that I tended to bypass people like him, who came to this music from outside its native time, place, and culture, and to go for the originals.
But I think that may be unfair to Mike Seeger, because I don’t think he was merely an imitator. He let himself be shaped by the music, and in turn shaped it, so that his work became not just an imitation but a continuation. That is a sort of hypothesis, based on my memory of what those two tracks actually sounded like—I’ve not listened to that anthology for some years—and of what others have said about his work. I believe I will test the hypothesis and buy something by him.
At any rate, I thank and honor this man who made the living preservation of this music his life’s work.
Here is one of the few obituaries I’ve seen; it gives a good overview of his life and of what he meant to American folk music. I’d like to see that film about the New Lost City Ramblers.
Here he is singing that standby of pop-folk, Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train”; notice how subtly different the phrasing is from the more slicked-up sort of thing most of us have heard.
That’s Bob Dylan’s paradoxical yet perfect description of Roscoe Holcomb’s sound. You keep thinking his phrasing can’t possibly work, that the song is about to fall apart completely (the vocal, anyway—the guitar or banjo is always steady as a rock) but somehow he pulls it together and it works.
Here’s “Darlin’ Corey,” which is sort of an Appalachian standard, and the strangeness might be more apparent if you’re familiar with the song. I love this stuff.
Here he is on tv with Pete Seeger:
I’m afraid Seeger is an unrepentant Communist, but his love for real American music and the people who make it is genuine and that’s got to count for something. Maybe he’s an idiot, politically speaking, but I really don’t think there’s malice in him. I certainly have a sense of gratitude to him, remembering how I lay in bed on a Sunday night ca. 1963 listening to a folk music show coming to my little Alabama crossroads from WLS in Chicago, hundreds of miles away, hearing Seeger singing Tom Paxton’s “Ramblin’ Boy” and feeling an intense need to hear more of this strange stuff called “folk music.”
Holcomb would have been in his 50s when the appearance with Seeger was taped. By our standards he looks a lot older, doesn’t he? He had a pretty hard life. You can read more about him here.
The Incredible String Band: The Circle Is Unbroken
I’m about to leave town for a couple of days, and will probably not be online much, if at all. I was working on something about Ascension Day which I had wanted to post before I left, but it kept growing, and I’m out of time. So, just because it bothers me to go that long without posting something—what if everybody gets bored and never reads my blog again and I’m just out here talking into empty cyberspace?—here is a bit of music for the weekend. This is one of those songs by the ISB that haunted me during the dark years of my youth.
And though it doesn’t haunt me in exactly the same way, because I understand more about what, and whom, it points to, I think it moves me even more.
Scattered we were when the long night was breaking But in bright morning converse again.
Amazon has posted this list. I would expect that the number one pick would be a great surprise to most people; it was to me. I do think it’s a great album, but greatest? Well, not really.
More than that, I was beginning to mutter with outrage that only two albums by John Coltrane are on the list, until I noted the editors’ proviso that they tried to limit themselves to one album per artist, and Coltrane still got two, so I guess that’s okay.
Jazz is not my favorite music—I listen to more rock, classical, and folk—so I’m not familiar with the majority of titles here. I have to think this is a rather strange selection, though. Some of it doesn’t seem to really qualify as jazz—I like Astrud Gilberto and Madeleine Peyroux, but their work included here isn’t jazz. Or, if you’re going to count them as jazz, how could you possibly not include Sinatra? And I wouldn’t have picked “Blue Trane” over “Giant Steps.”
Well, music geeks can’t resist these lists and the pointless arguments that follow, and the list could be useful as a guide to exploration. And, speaking of Ornette Coleman, I wrote about him a while back, here.
Luther Allison, ”Watching You,“ also known as ”Cherry Red Wine“: If you don’t stop drinking that bad wine, baby, even the grass that grows on your grave will be cherry red.
I’m not sending a message to anyone, I just like the song. In fact it’s a good drinking song. It’s a little over ten minutes long.
As he tells the story, in 1971 composer Gavin Bryars was fooling around with a tape loop of an old tramp singing a fragment of a hymn, “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.”
When I copied the loop onto the continuous reel in Leicester, I left the door of the recording studio open (it opened onto one of the large painting studios) while I went downstairs to get a cup of coffee. When I came back I found the normally lively room unnaturally subdued. People were moving about much more slowly than usual, and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping.
Later he wrote a quietly evolving instrumental accompaniment for the loop. The original 1975 version was tailored to fit one side of an LP and was about 25 minutes long. In 1993 Bryars reworked it for CD, resulting in a 74-minute version. For this recording he also added the voice of Tom Waits. The above is an excerpt from it.
I’ve always wondered about those people who were quietly weeping: where are they now?
(Quotation from the liner notes of the 1993 version.)
So I poured myself a drink and went down to the bay a little while ago to watch the sun set, something I haven’t done for several months—when the days are short it’s harder to find the time. I was immediately sorry that I hadn’t taken my camera, as there was a heron sitting on a piling, and the sunset, which started out tame, grew spectacular. But of course if I’d had the camera I would have been busy trying unsuccessfully to capture what I was seeing, and wouldn’t have really seen it.
At one point there was an opening in the clouds in the west, revealing a deep blue-green patch, fringed with glowing orange-pink cloud. A couple of jets (who knows how far away?) flew across this opening, leaving flaming orange-pink contrails. I looked away for a minute, watching birds, and when I looked back the airplanes were gone, the contrails breaking up and the glow fading. I thought about this song. Steve Forbert, “I Blinked Once,” 4:15.
And of course soon enough the whole sunset was over and it was getting dark. That was half an hour ago and already the memory is fragmented and imprecise. Is it possible that when we forget something it’s gone forever? Even if we remember it, that’s not the same as having it. This is a hard thought to bear.
Two of my favorites: “Alison,” from Souvlaki, with a rather nice somewhat ’60s-nostalgic video; where are the girls of yesteryear? (3:34):
“Waves,” from Just For a Day—no video, just the album cover. This would be a candidate for my favorite Slowdive song. It seems to be about death, forgiveness, and salvation (5:54):
The lyrics are beautiful but a bit worrisome:
Leaving all my sins I turn away Like soaring birds I watch my sorrows play
That’s lovely, but then:
Don’t you know I’ve left and gone away You’re knocking on the door I closed today
That could be taken as a reference to suicide. If it is, then I must say, for the record: to take one’s own life can never make “everything look brighter” or “soothe the pain away.” It can only lead further from the light.
Ok, one more. This one, “Avalyn,” is an instrumental, and although pleasant is not all that good, but I’m including it for the rather striking message at the beginning of the video (5:28):
I’m going to be out of town and away from computers for most of the weekend. So when you want a hit of LoDW, you can listen to and watch these over and over again instead of reading some balderdash from me. They say a lot of what I want to say but can’t, anyway. (Of course you may well have come here for the comments anyway, right?) I’m indebted to my friend Daniel for introducing me to this band some years ago. He included a few of their songs on a mixtape, and since then I think I’ve managed to get hold of pretty much everything they ever released.
I would like to try to describe the way the best of their music makes me feel, but I wouldn't be able to. The closest thing is something we’ve discussed here several times, what C. S. Lewis called Joy but which is better described as an almost unbearable yearning.
I picked these two partly because the videos actually complement the music. Wish they were sharper. Here’s “Shine” (5:20):
I’m not, in general, a fan of the poppy Christian-themed music known sometimes as contemporary christian music (CCM) or praise-and-worship music. I do tend to like it better than the Catholic Glory and Praise or Gather sort of thing, which falls into some queasy-making place between The Kingston Trio and Broadway. CCM/P&W tends to be closer to rock—to be rock, quite often—and I prefer that; if we’re going to have Christian music that appropriates the emotive power of popular music, why try to be all dainty about it?
There are only two songs here, but I have multiple performances of each because I wasn’t entirely pleased with any of them. I don’t much like (in fact I mostly dislike) the actual video part of the videos below: Bible verses and the kind of sentimental Christian art that makes me simultaneously cringe and feel slightly guilty about cringing—after all, it’s done with the best possible intentions. Anyway, consider moving another window over the videos after you start them, and just listening to the music.
This is the kind of music we have at the Sunday evening Mass which my wife and I attend at our local parish. (We stopped driving over to Mobile to the cathedral when gas prices went through the roof last year, and, since we are definitely not morning people, we like having Mass at the end of the day.) Some months ago the choir sang a song which had the flavor of the old Protestant hymns I grew up with in the Methodist Church. But there were touches in the words here and there that made me think it was contemporary. With the aid of the Internet I soon found that it was the work of a contemporary British Christian artist, Stuart Townend.
Here is the song as performed by the American Christian rock group Skillet. The video consists only of Bible verses (these are Evangelicals, you know) (4:12):
Here it is performed by the composer, in a more elaborate arrangement (3:14):
The next song is one that just knocked me out some years ago when the choir sang it at Mass. I thought the opening phrases might be some sort of folk tune, but as far as I know the song is completely the work of one writer, Annie Herring. Here it is, performed by the composer in a very elaborate arrangement, with excellent sound, but with maybe the most sentimental video (5:23):
Here it is in a live performance by what I take to be a semi-professional group: a bit rough around the edges, but effective (5:25):
Lastly, here’s a nice acappella arrangement, marred by the overly loud spoken intro and outro added, apparently, by the guy who posted the video (2:45):
Jazz has never been the genre of music that interests me most—it’s third or fourth behind rock/pop, classical, and maybe folk. But I do like the best of it, particularly from the roughly twenty-year period of 1950-1970. And John Coltrane’s music has always had a particular fascination for me that I can’t quite explain. That fascination is currently being revived by my reading of this book, a Christmas present from Jesse Canterbury (see sidebar):
A few nights ago I read the chapter that’s mostly devoted to one of Coltrane’s landmarks, his reworking of a show tune that even the most casual jazz listener knows: “My Favorite Things.” That of course sent me back to the recording, which I now appreciate and love even more.
I remember one Saturday morning in 1969 or 1970, a warm day with the windows of my apartment open, when I played this, and the guy who lived across the alley was so intrigued that he came over to find out what it was. Later, having bought a copy of the LP for himself he thanked me, as well he should have. But Coltrane more, of course.
Here’s a live version. The sound is not very good, making the soprano sax sound more quacky than it should, but it’s still a thrilling performance to me. This is the classic quartet—Coltrane, McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, Jimmy Garrison on bass, plus Eric Dolphy on flute.
So great has my liking for Coltrane’s music become that I’m considering selling the dozen or so cds that I have and buying the two gigantic boxed sets of all his recordings on the Atlantic and Impulse labels, which comprise most of his mature work.
Van Morrison has released a recent live performance of his masterpiece, Astral Weeks. I read about this at cnb’s blog the other day, and thought, “Why? It can’t possibly have the magic of the original.” Well, you can watch a video of it here and make up your own mind. If you care. This is an album that affects some people profoundly and leaves others cold. I’m one of the former.
I don’t think this new performance is as good as the 40-year-old original, but it still gets me. It still produces in me, as it did when I was 21, the agonized yearning that we’ve talked about here and that is sweeter than most pleasures. It’s so powerful that I rarely listen to it. I can’t explain it; perhaps you have to be a person to whom regret comes naturally.
And we shall walk and talk In gardens all misty wet with rain
I wouldn’t want to have to pick a favorite Christmas carol, but if I had to, I think this would be it. I think part of its appeal is the combination of the minor-key melody and lively good cheer—quite boisterous, in some performances. It’s very English and conjures all those wintry English Christmas associations that we Americans tend to love: holly, snow, and all the rest.
I’ve just spent an hour or so searching YouTube for a performance to include here. I couldn’t find my favorite, which is Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band’s, from my favorite Christmas album, A Tapestry of Carols (that’s a link to the eMusic page, where you can hear samples). One of the things I was looking for was a performance that includes all the verses. I didn’t find that, either. But here’s a good one, by the King’s College Choir (3:35):
And here, for something with a different flavor, more comparable to Maddy Prior’s, is Loreena McKennit’s version, featuring her characteristic Middle Eastern-flavored instrumentation. I have mixed feelings about her voice: it’s very good, but a bit...I don’t know, over-emotive or something. Still, this is very nice (6:49):
This is the third, and maybe last, of my investigations into classic punk. (The phrase itself is amusing, as the aging of a youth fad always is.) As I noted in the other two installments, on The Ramones and The Minutemen, I was not drawn to the whole punk vibe when it was new (I was in my late 20s at the time). And I’m still not. But I like this album, or at least about half of it.
If there was any pretense at the time of its release (1979) that this was just a group of untrained kids doing what comes naturally, I hope it was laughed at, because it’s plainly ridiculous. These guys are real musicians, and it shows. I don’t usually pay much attention to the drums in rock music, but I can’t help noticing that this is a really good drummer. Most of the songs here are top-notch lively impassioned catchy rock-and-roll. The title track is an absolute killer, by far the best thing on the album in my opinion.
This was originally a double LP, and to my taste there’s too much of it; of the 19 songs, at least half a dozen don’t do much for me, and most of those are on what would have been the second disk of the original release, assuming that the CD preserves the original song order. I think there’s a terrific 40-minute album in here. In general I don’t find their lyrics very interesting, so the album wouldn’t land near the top of my personal chart. But it’s good stuff. And anybody who wants to put the title song in their list of the top 50 or so greatest-ever rock singles would get no argument from me.
I was surprise to find that I recognized the last cut, “Train in Vain.” I had heard it on the radio without knowing its name or realizing it was The Clash, without thinking of it as anything very out of the ordinary. Outside the context of the album it just seems like a pretty good pop song, which makes me think that if this was punk, then punk was less a matter of specific musical values than of style and attitude.
I wonder if it was some natural quirk or a deliberate mannerism that made Joe Strummer often sing as if his tongue were anesthetized.
I haven’t done much listening this week since Tuesday afternoon when I listened to Mahler’s 2nd. So, since I’ve been on the subject of Mahler, I’m going to cheat a little and pull a comment on his 1st from an old Sunday Night Journal. I was writing about a concert I’d attended and I had this to say about the symphony:
This was as enthralling a musical experience as I’ve ever had. It had been so long since I’d heard the symphony that it sounded fresh, and I found it to be even better than I remembered. Mahler originally saw the work as depicting an artist’s innocent exuberance, rejection, disillusionment, suffering, and rebirth, but I hear something else. From my vantage point in the early 21st century I hear this late 19th century work as a prophecy of what the next hundred years would bring. The third movement in particular, Frere Jacques transmuted into a funeral march that turns slightly deranged as it goes on, seemed a window opening onto the distant vista of Germany’s impending madness. And the putative triumph of the fourth movement seemed overwrought and unsound, a victory likely to prove temporary.
You can read the entire post here; it’s mainly a tribute to the Mobile Symphony and other small orchestras. I always recommend this symphony to anyone who doesn’t know Mahler, because it’s of a manageable length and very melodic (the opening is magical to me). However, the discussion here of the 2nd indicated that my view is not shared by everyone.
Amiina is the group of four young women who comprise the string section for Sigur Rós in their Heima concerts, and I think on some of their studio recordings as well. Having discovered from the credits of Heima that they are a musical unit in their own right, I went looking for more information and discovered this wonderful album. If you’ve seen Heima and liked what you saw of them there, you’ll like this; it’s very much in keeping with their contributions to Sigur Rós. It’s not rock music at all, but quiet, subtle instrumental music played on a variety of instruments; the occasional vocals are wordless.
The album cover is an excellent indicator of what you hear:
There’s something about this music that strikes me as what young women should be, young women a little past girlhood, no longer high-strung and flighty, but not yet into, or not far into, the heavy responsibilities and inevitable suffering of marriage and motherhood. It’s pretty, modest, gentle, quiet, pensive, sweet, inward, a little whimsical. It makes me see a quiet and sunny kitchen, with a handful of wild flowers in a brightly painted mug on the windowsill.
Here is the eMusic page; as usual, if you like the samples, you’ll like the whole album. I especially recommend the 2nd track, “Rugla.” I have no idea what any of the titles mean.
Music of the Week: Various Artists - Mariachi Music of Mexico
Based on snippets heard here and there, I’ve wanted for some time to hear some genuine mariachi music. There’s a ton of it on eMusic—a search for “mariachi” turns up 153 artists and 117 albums, and that would catch only titles that actually included the word—but I had no way of knowing what was good. Where folk music is concerned, my taste tends toward the rougher and less polished—in general, the more it’s slicked up, the more it loses its flavor. This album caught my eye first because of its cover. It looked just old enough and low-budget enough to be authentic. When I noticed that it was distributed by Smithsonian Folkways, I really got interested. Then the samples convinced me to download the whole thing. Good move, as it turned out.
In the tradition of the Folkways label, these are field recordings of a sort, from the early ‘50s. I don’t know anything about mariachi in general, so I’ll just say this is great stuff. It’s not polished at all—the violins are often a bit off-key, and the sound quality is mediocre—but it’s not crude, either; I’m still trying to get my head around some of the rhythms. It has in common with reggae an infectious high-spirited quality, sort of an automatic mood-brightener. One Friday night a few weeks ago I was feeling rather low and found that a few tracks from this album combined with a few sips of bourbon was a wonderful cure.
Listen to the sample of the first track here. Â If you don’t like it, this music is not for you. If you do, you’ll enjoy the whole album. You can hear a different set of samples and read the fascinating liner notes here, as well as order a cd if you don’t do mp3s.
I’ll mention in passing that the world owes a huge debt to Folkways Records. Read more about its history and work here.
Your first reaction to the phrase “Heavy metal cello” might be to laugh; it sounds as if it would just be a stunt. Apocalyptica is four Finnish cellists, and I wonder if maybe their rock experimentation started out as something of a stunt, as their first album was a set of Metallica covers. But what they’ve done is much more than that; it’s a potent and versatile sound, unlike anything else I know. A friend of mine put me on to the group a month or two ago and I got this self-titled album from eMusic. I can’t say it’s a great album overall, but I keep coming back to it because what I like in it I like very much.
Start with the basic sound. If the first thing you heard was one of their hard rock uptempo songs like the first track here, “Life Burns!,” and you weren’t listening closely, you might think you were just hearing heavy electric guitars playing power chords. But there’s something different about this sound, sort of a rich deep growl, that’s very powerful. And most of the tracks combine this with the warm singing natural tone of the cello, to sometimes very beautiful effect.
I like at least half the tracks here a great deal, especially the melancholy ballads like “Bittersweet” and “Farewell.” What’s missing is a fully-developed artistic identity. This is almost all instrumental music, and pop music is a partly verbal art: it needs words and voices. The vocals here are very ordinary, sort of a generic and lackluster hard rock style; I like “Bittersweet” in spite of the vocals, not because of them. With a really gifted songwriter and singer, this group could do something really important.
Here’s an instrumental version of “Bittersweet” that really showcases their sound. It’s 5:25 long and doesn’t get heavy until about 3:50. Although you don’t hear it on this track, they’re capable of some impressive virtuoso “shredding” as practiced by guitar players like Joe Satriani.
Music of the Week: Music from the Hearts of Space - Shadowplay
Ok, I’m going to confess a guilty pleasure, because I really ought to give these folks a bit of publicity, at least, for all the enjoyment they’ve given me over the years. The guilty pleasure is what’s variously called ambient or space music, or, more bluntly, background music—except that it isn’t only background music, because if it’s good it can keep your attention if you wish to give it.
In Brian Eno’s famous definition, “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” That (like many things that look simple) is harder to accomplish than one might think. (Here is the Wikipedia article if this is new to you and you want to know more.)
Music from the Hearts of Space (I always cringe a bit when I say that) is an hour-long weekly radio program that specializes in this kind of music. I’ve been listening to (and recording) their broadcasts for years. This week’s is especially good. It’s called Shadowplay and is a collection of mostly cello-and-piano-based chamber compositions; here’s the playlist. There is really some good music here, instrumental works that don’t fit any standard category.
So if it’s good music, why do I call this a guilty pleasure? Well, there is a certain California/New Age smarm and hokum about the program (hearts of space?!?). And the concept of ambient music is kind of hard to defend. And a lot of the music presented is, well, not going to be of permanent interest. But the show’s repertoire ranges from electronic science-fictiony “soundscapes” to folk music to very substantial contemporary classical works: for instance, one broadcast was dedicated almost exclusively to an hour of music from Arvo Part’s monumental Kanon Pokajonen. A final word on the repertoire, which will be enough said for those who know: ECM appears frequently.
You can sign up to listen to the weekly program online on Sundays at no cost, or for three dollars a month you can hear the weekly broadcast whenever and as often as you like during that week. (And, um...if you’re just a bit knowledgeable you can figure out a way to record them.) There are other plans that give you access to their entire library.
So: I’m posting this at 2pm USA Central time on Sunday; depending on where you are, there’s still time for you to go to the site, register, and hear Shadowplay, assuming you have a high-speed Internet connection.
Music of the Week: Delius - On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring
Many years ago, roughly 1970, I had an LP that included this and several more of Delius’s more familiar orchestral works. Although I thought the music somewhat bland and shapeless, I came to like it, but more as a sort of tranquilizer than as music properly speaking; it was very peaceful and for twenty minutes or so took me away from the very stressful life I was leading to a much nicer place, a place of green pastoral beauty and running streams.
Somewhere in that chaotic period the LP got away from me, and I don’t think I heard Delius again until recently, when, in a bout of nostalgia, I got this collection from eMusic. So far I haven’t gotten past the first piece, because I keep wanting to hear it again. What absolutely beautiful music—a pure, open sweetness to which the title is perfectly suited (although I admit I’ve never heard a cuckoo). You can hear it in this audio-only YouTube clip:
If you haven’t heard it before, it may not grab you right away, but give it a chance.
I’m concerned that some people may not be obeying my order following my advice to rent the Heima DVD. So here’s a clip from it featuring one of the band’s most immediately appealing songs.
The pronunciation of Sigur Rós seems to be, very roughly: “seeger,” as in Bob Seeger, “rohss”—“o” as in “rose”, “s” as in “toss.” According to the Wikipedia article on the band it means “victory rose,” and is the name of the singer’s baby sister, who was born on the day the band was formed. That tells you something about them: this is not your average rock band, and not even your average indie band.
This is a documentary which opens with these words:
Summer 2006: Having toured the world over, Sigur Ros return home to play a series of free, unannounced concerts in Iceland.
The title means “at home.” The format is pretty simple: images of Iceland and its people interspersed with performances from the concerts and conversations with the band members.
The visuals of Iceland are stunningly beautiful. My wife’s interest in pop music is about as close to zero as it can be without being totally non-existent; measured on a hospital monitor, it would be pronounced dead. (And yes, it is pretty funny that we’re married, but it just goes to show…something or other.) But she watched this with me because she was interested in seeing the pictures of Iceland. Part way through she said “Let’s move there.” Really, it’s that beautiful.
If you haven’t heard any of their music: it consists mostly of long, slow, mysterious compositions that usually start quietly and build to crescendos, sometimes quite noisy ones. They may sound similar to each other on first hearing, but they do grow on you. There are some truly enchanted melodies, perhaps made more so by the singing, which is mostly a single very high-pitched male voice (I guess a lot of it is falsetto). I don’t have any idea what the lyrics are about, as they’re all either in Icelandic or an invented nonsense language called Vonlenska, or Hopelandic. For all I know they could just be singing “oh baby I love you so” over and over again, but the effect is enigmatic.
I don’t want to go on too long here; I only want to recommend this very strongly. But I can’t leave without saying something about the whole atmosphere of the thing. It couldn’t be more different from the phoniness, vulgarity, conventional hipsterism (or simple stupidity, depending on the band), drugginess, and so forth that accompany most rock bands. The concerts are held in all sorts of venues, outdoors and in, and are attended by crowds of the most ordinary-seeming people: yes, there are the young people with green hair, nose rings, etc., but also whole families—middle-aged parents, children, old people. And for the most part the music is something in which they can all find something to enjoy. Some of the most beautiful images in the film are of the faces of people in the audience. And Sigur Rós themselves are almost freakishly unpretentious in conversation; they seem like genuinely decent people without big egos or the generally adversarial stance to the world of ordinary people that so often afflicts artists all across the spectrum. In concert they seem utterly focused on the music; there’s none of the bogus extravagant posing that makes many bands unwatchable to me.
In sum: do yourself a favor and find this. There is a second disk, by the way, which I haven’t seen yet, which I think is straight concert footage. Also by the way, the strings are provided by a string quartet called Amiina, who seem to be interesting in their own right.
Here’s the trailer, which gives you a pretty good taste of what to expect (3:54):
And here is a rather remarkable video. I’m only providing the link, because you need to read the info (click “more info&rdquo to the right of the video box). I don’t entirely understand the story, but…well, like I said, this is not your average rock band. You’ll need a bit of time, as the video is over nine minutes long.
No, I’m not going to make this a regular feature. I just happened to think about this song and found it on YouTube. There’s no actual video, so don’t bother watching, just listen. If you like this, don’t go looking for the album expecting to hear more of the same, as the rest of it sounds completely different. The song is based on Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano, which I read long ago and have been wanting to re-read: Jack Bruce, “The Consul at Sunset,” from Harmony Row. (4:13)
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a pretty depressing week. In an attempt to escape I’m indulging myself in a bit of sentimental nostalgia, which I here share with you. It’s a little over two minutes long. Don’t adjust the volume until you’ve gotten past the screaming girls at the beginning.
The album on which this song appeared, Catch the Wind, was probably among the first dozen or so records I ever bought.
This song is from one of my very favorite pop music albums, Vienna by Ultravox (1980). In general I hate music videos, and rarely watch one all the way through; if I want to hear the music, I look at something else while the video plays. But I rather like this one. There are places and stories in my imagination that look a lot like the street scenes here (not the interior scenes, especially). (Romantic? Who, me?)
I found two distinct versions on YouTube, one in mixed color and black-and-white:
And one in more or less black-and-white throughout which may just be a very murky version of the color one:
I would prefer it entirely in black-and-white, if it were really sharp. But you can see a lot more in the first one.
Leonard Cohen was born in 1934, and considering not just the productive life but the physical life of most popular music performers, it’s a little surprising that he was still active in 2001, at the age of 66, when this album was made. It’s even more surprising that he was still doing great work, at least if you think of him primarily as a songwriter, and as a songwriter primarily a lyricist. His singing is down to a sort of mannerism, and he gets even more help than usual from the sighing female voices with which he’s always adorned his music. But there are several songs here that I’d rank with his best, and not a single bad one. Perhaps his gift has fallen off somewhat, as his singing partner, Sharon Robinson, is given co-writing credit, but the lyrics are classic Cohen, so I would guess that Robinson’s contribution was more musical than lyrical.
The album has a mild weakness: the arrangements, also credited to Sharon Robinson. They’re simple and tasteful, which is all to the good, but too slick; the instrumentation is bland and synthetic-sounding, giving the album an inorganic feel which doesn’t suit Cohen’s voice or the songs. That aside, though, anyone who likes Cohen’s older work should not think that this late work can be safely passed over. The standout songs for me are “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” “Love Itself,” “Alexandra Leaving,” and “By the Rivers Dark.” The rivers referred to in the last one are those of Babylon, and the song should be heard with reference to Psalm 137, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”
“Love Itself” is reminiscent of St. John of the Cross. The speaker is having some sort of mystical experience, bathed in holy light and love, but then:
I’ll try to say a little more Love went on and on Until it found an open door Then love itself, Love itself was gone.
By the way: Music of the Week is going on a six-week leave of absence: I’m giving up pop music for Lent. I plan to give a thorough hearing to several classical works of a religious nature, starting with Elgar’s Dream of Gerontion, and will probably discuss them here, but don’t want to commit myself to a regular schedule.
For most of this album you’re hearing one voice and two guitars, sometimes only one. There’s a second voice singing harmony on the choruses; there’s a banjo on one track, and a faint drum, or maybe just a foot stomping, on another. To hold a listener’s attention for the better part of an hour with these limited resources requires some really fine songs. And this album delivers: it’s just a few songs short of greatness. The overall pace is slow, the tone melancholy, and it was a very justifiable decision to throw in a couple of more up-tempo songs for variety. But to my taste those two (“Red Clay Halo” and “I Wanna Sing That Rock and Roll”) just don’t measure up; they come across as throw-aways.
The others vary from very good to great, including the best song about Elvis Presley I’ve ever heard (“Elvis Presley Blues”), a striking two-part meditation on certain great events and (one gathers) a couple of private ones that have occurred on April 14 (“Ruination Day”), and, most improbably, a song lasting almost fifteen minutes which tells no story and is fairly repetitive musically but nevertheless never gets tiresome for me. Welch’s voice is wonderful without being outstanding, if that makes sense: I mean that it isn’t striking, like Emmy Lou Harris’s, or spectacular, like Patty Griffin’s, but it’s perfect for what she does—warm and relaxed and just slightly countrified, which is pretty strange for someone who grew up in Los Angeles as the child of two television writers.
If you read these little reviews regularly you know I place a high value on lyrics, and these hooked me from the very first verse:
Darling remember When you come to me I’m the pretender And not what I’m supposed to be But who could know if I’m a traitor? Time’s a revelator.
I assume Welch wrote the lyrics, but the songs are credited to Welch and her collaborator David Rawlings, who is also the provider of the other voice and guitar, making one wonder if crediting the album to Welch alone is quite accurate. But that’s their business. You can listen to samples here.
Karen Dalton is sometimes described as a cult artist, and it was apparently a pretty small cult for many years, as I’m fairly familiar with pop music but as far as I can remember I had never heard her name until a couple of years ago. She was a ‘60s folksinger who issued two albums in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and then was lost to drugs and alcohol until her death in 1993. She’s become more widely known lately with people like Joanna Newsom praising her and citing her odd vocal style as an influence.
This is the second of those two albums. Judging by it, I would rank her near the top of the list of great singers with unbeautiful voices, up there with people like Dylan in his prime. She’s often compared to Billie Holiday, with good reason, but her voice is very different, sounding more a product of a rural white culture than an urban black one, and considerably rougher, sounding just a little like a crow at times. But like Holiday, she seems to consider the written melody and rhythm of the song as no more than suggestions, a rough sketch rather than a blueprint, and she somehow makes it work.
The version of the old folkie standard “Katy Cruel” on this album is astonishing, and several other tracks are equally good. But there are really only four or five songs here that I wouldn’t want to be without. Someone thought it would be a good idea for her to try soul classics like “When A Man Loves A Woman,” and although her supernaturally weird phrasing makes them interesting the tracks don’t really succeed as complete works. She’s at her best with more rural blues and country material and minimal acoustic instrumentation—banjo and fiddle, say, or just a guitar, like this (not on the album):
On the other hand, though, the first track here gives a tantalizing hint of what might have been a sort of female Astral Weeks. You can hear 30-second samples from the album at the eMusic page.
Ok, I’m a little late in recognizing this album; almost forty-two years late, to be exact. But now, finally, I understand why it’s so highly regarded by so many people—for instance, Paul McCartney.
A few words about my reasons for taking so long to get around to it: first, I never much cared for the Beach Boys in their ‘60s heyday. Although I wouldn’t have known to put it this way at the age of sixteen or so, their early stuff struck me as a bleached-out imitation of Chuck Berry and others. In particular I didn’t much like their vocals, which struck me as thin and whiny. Of course I mostly heard them on AM radio through tiny speakers, and that made it worse.
And second, they seemed the acme of commercial pop at a time when I disdained it. There was a brief period when I was a bit of a folk music snob looking down on rock altogether, and even after I got over that it was the more adventurous music that attracted me: the British Invasion, American folk-rock like the Lovin’ Spoonful, and of course Dylan’s new rock-oriented work. The Beach Boys were just top-40 music, loved by the cool kids at school, of whom I was not one, and that didn’t help, either. I didn’t hate the group, but they were just something I heard on the radio and didn’t take seriously. Pet Sounds came out the year I graduated from high school, and I do remember a friend who was a fan saying it was something special. But I wasn’t interested.
Well, it was my loss. This is, just as critics have been saying for decades, a masterpiece, one of the ‘60s landmarks that unquestionably deserves its prominence not for any sociological or cultural reason but because it’s really, really fine music. From first note to last it’s as inventive as anything the Beatles ever did, though without their counter-cultural poses. And it’s all the better for that, because it’s a picture of the heart of a young man presented with no big axes to grind and no big message beyond the struggle to grow up. I had a friend in high school named Carolyn who started crying when “Caroline No” came on the radio one summer day when several of us were riding around. I thought she was being a bit melodramatic at the time, but looking back on her, and hearing the song now, as if for the first time, she was right to weep; it’s an absolutely beautiful and heart-breaking song, capturing the first youthful experience of loss about as well as it ever has been.
Speaking of hearing things for the first time: Pet Sounds was available only in mono or phony stereo for many years. In 1999 Brian Wilson worked with an engineer to produce a real stereo mix which can be found on a CD containing both versions. I strongly recommend it. The stereo version has been a revelation to me. I had always thought of songs like “God Only Knows” as having a muddy, over-crowded, and indistinct sound. In the new mix all is spacious and clear and detailed, as if a very dirty window has been cleaned. I can say truthfully that I had never really heard the Beach Boys before.
I tend to be impatient with talk of lost American innocence, but in certain limited contexts there’s something to it. Wouldn’t it be nice if Brian Wilson had not fallen prey to whatever combination of drugs and mental illness it was that kept him from continuing to develop the gift that brought us Pet Sounds?
This is a revisiting of the themes and some of the songs of the ‘60s civil rights movement by one of the greats of gospel music. In the abstract that idea strikes me as one that, however well-intentioned, could prove a little dull, but the combination of Mavis Staples’ voice and Ry Cooder’s production and playing have resulted in something that keeps my attention for every one of its sixty minutes, then leaves me wanting to hear it again.. The arrangements are spacious and bluesy, with big drums, a lot of great guitar and mandolin playing, and rich backing vocals provided by the likes of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Since I’ve resolved to keep these weekly reviews short, I’ll send you over to AMG for a fuller description. I don’t always agree with their reviews but I’m totally on board with this one. I’m betting that you will move when you listen to “99 ½”, even if you’re sitting down.
Any musical quibbles I might have here are exactly that, and not worth mentioning. But there is one problem. As a Southerner old enough to remember segregation, I find these memoirs of the civil rights struggle deeply moving, especially in light of its victories. But there seems to be an implication here, especially in the spoken sections of a couple of tracks, that nothing fundamental has changed, and that the problem faced today by the black community is still, above all, that the white community is holding them down. I almost wish that were true; it might be a more tractable problem.
But I’ll leave that topic for another day, and just add a big amen to what Staples writes in the liner notes: “Well, I tell you—we need a change now more than ever, and I'm turning to the church again for strength.”
Continuing my investigation of punk classics, I arrive at this collection of 43 songs averaging something less than two minutes each in length, some under a minute. Aside from the brevity of the songs, the punk-ness here seems more a matter of attitude than sound. Musically, they remind me of something else—two somethings, actually: an artist and a style. The artist is Captain Beefheart; the style is math-rock.
As with Beefheart, the “songs” are bursts of often-intricate instrumental activity overlaid with fairly tuneless vocal lines, but without the Captain’s bizarre charisma and skill in the latter department. The result is more interesting than it sounds, mainly because the Minutemen have some very impressive instrumental chops—that’s where the math-rock parallel comes in, and in fact one of the songs refers to the Minutemen’s music as “scientist rock.” Frankly, the short songs are a good idea, because most of them would become tiresome if they went on much longer. Lyrically the band leans heavily on vaguely political ranting about the oppressiveness of American life, but they do it with a certain amount of humor that makes it, again, less dull than it might be.
I’m afraid I can’t go much further in the way of praise than “interesting,” though. There’s just not much here that touches me at any deep level. I stuck to my self-imposed requirement of listening to it three reasonably attentive times before committing myself to an opinion, but although I enjoyed the album it’s entirely possible that I may never listen to it again. Or at least not the whole thing: I’ll probably go back to a few nuggets, like “Take 5, D.,” a very funny recitation of what appears to be a note from a landlord (or landlady). Or “Maybe Partying Will Help”:
As I look over this beautiful land I can’t help but realize that I am alone… Maybe partying will help.
Samples at the eMusic page; you can actually hear a 30-second sample of a 46-second song.
This is a very good album, and I feel slightly churlish for not liking it more than I do. Solas is an Irish group that, at least on this album, does a sort of pop/Celtic crossover thing in the tradition of Clannad. And I’d predict that anyone who likes Clannad will like Solas. The level of musicianship here is extremely high, and any reservation I have about it has more to do with me than with the band: Celtic music is just not my favorite style. A few jigs and reels go a long way with me, which is not exactly reasonable, since I can listen to the blues, a more monotonous form, all night long.
Like Clannad, Solas has a female lead singer. I’m not extremely enthusiastic about her, but, again, I think that’s more a matter of my personal taste than any defect on her part: her voice is technically flawless and fits the band’s style and the material very well; it’s just, to my taste, somewhat on the pale side.
I’d be more enthusiastic if I liked all the material as well as I do the two or three songs that knock me out. Chief among these is the first track, which is the one containing the phrase which is the album’s title: a cover of the Jesse Colin Young classic “Darkness, Darkness.” It’s a great song, and this arrangement is at least as good as, and maybe better than, the Youngbloods’ original. If you don’t know this song, you probably should. There are also covers of songs by Nick Drake (“Clothes of Sand”) and Tom Waits (“Georgia Lee”), which are good although maybe not quite as striking as the originals (although those who can’t take Waits’s growl may prefer this version). There’s a relatively obscure Dylan song, “Dignity,” which in my opinion deserves its relative obscurity, but the band does as well by it as anyone could. There are two intriguing songs by a young writer named Antje Duvekot which maybe show more promise than achievement but are definitely worth hearing.
If you aren’t familiar with Solas but like Clannad and others in that vein, by all means check them out. You can hear thirty-second samples at the album’s eMusic page.
UPDATE:I left out a step in the directions to the samples at the official Delerium site: click on the link I gave, then click on “Discography” to see the album cover thumbnails.
This is an album of which I’ve grown pretty fond and which I never would have heard if not for eMusic’s free daily download, which I rarely miss. I think it was the first track, “Angelicus,” which was the daily freebie a few months ago, and which led me to try a couple more tracks, and then to get the rest of the album. It’s also an instance of my continuing seduction (for lack of a better word) by the female voice. Everything here is a variant of one basic technique: lavish female vocals (except for a boy soprano on one or two tracks) over mid-tempo mostly electronic arrangements. It’s almost a synth-pop or even dance-club kind of sound, which may, on the face of it, not seem very appealing—at least, it wouldn’t to me. But it’s better than that description makes it sound.
The vocals, provided by several different singers, are terrific, ranging from classical heavenly-angelic-ethereal (with soprano allelujas, for instance), to warm and sensual. The songs are very strong melodically, some of them really haunting (e.g. “The Way You Want It to Be”)—and in addition to good tunes, they even have some lyrical substance. The effect is sometimes closer to a much less eccentric Cocteau Twins or Dead Can Dance than to dance music. I make no claim of greatness for it, but I’ve gotten pretty attached to it.
You hear samples of a minute or so here—Nuages is the album in the upper-right corner of the thumbnails—click on it to get a track listing. The eMusic page is here, but the 30-second samples aren’t nearly as helpful because they don’t get past the instrumental intro. If you can’t play the Flash samples at the first location, try tracks 1, 3, 8, and 11 on the eMusic page.
When it was released in 1968, I read some reviews that praised Song Cycle as a revolutionary masterpiece and Van Dyke Parks as a genius— this Rolling Stone review appears to have been contemporary, and gives you a good idea of the reception I remember. But it didn’t sell very well, which came as no surprise to anyone who heard it. In fact, considering how much it must have cost to make, it’s amazing that it ever saw the light of day, and, I suppose, a tribute to the adventurousness of some record companies at the time. I seem to recall having to look for a while to find a copy, and after listening to it a few times thought, “Well, that’s interesting,” and as far as I can remember never listened to it again until a few weeks ago, when Parks’s beautiful arrangements on Joanna Newsom’s Ys prompted me to dig out my old LP of Song Cycle, clean it up, and digitize it.
The result is that I’ve heard it as if for the first time. Yet my basic opinion is more or less the same as it was almost forty years ago: interesting. It’s more interesting than I gave it credit for at the time, partly because the recorded sound isn’t that good, at least on this LP, and there’s a lot of important detail that I would have missed in hearing it on my little portable stereo. It’s a sort of brilliant pastiche of American musical styles, and technically on a level far above most pop music, but it leaves me thinking that it’s more brilliant than profound. The lyrics are a problem, consisting of Joycean wordplay that for the most part doesn’t really add up to much:
Cracks in the heat and then caught by the wheel catch the country store feel for the hackamore crew view the crackerbare coterie standing by. One line bred randyrand and too few wretched meals.
Whatever. Ultimately it seems light, much of it merely playful. But really, it’s worth hearing; I can’t think of anything else in its class. I imagine there’s a remastered CD version around that does more justice to its complexity and nuance.
Bob Marley & The Wailers: The Complete Upsetter Singles 1970-1972
I’m actually talking about the first volume of this two-disk set here; the second disk seems to be dub versions—mostly-instrumental “remixes,” as they would be called today—of some of the songs on the first disk. (Since eMusic charges per song, I’ve downloaded only the first disk.)
This material pre-dates the Island records heyday of Marley and the Wailers. In fact, as best I can tell from a little bit of reading on AMG and Wikipedia, it was probably originally credited only to The Wailers. It’s simpler and cruder and not as well recorded as the Island stuff, but in some ways I like it better. The Island sound is slicker, thicker, more complex, maybe overall a bit slower, with more varied instrumentation. I’ve read that it was consciously aimed at the rock audience in England and the U.S. But although albums like Natty Dread are indisputable classics, I miss in them a certain lilt and lightness. And besides, I tend to like music that’s a little rough around the edges. These tracks are definitely that. This is reggae of the sort produced by artists who did not, at least at the time, become big stars outside Jamaica; it’s the sound you hear on much of the classic reggae anthology, The Harder They Come. In other words, it’s about as irresistible as pop music gets, if you ask me. Of course it has the weird mixture of hedonism, eccentric religion, and politics that characterized reggae at the time. Watch out—when you listen to the music, it can all begin to seem plausible.
Patty Griffin can do everything. She has one of the best voices in popular music, going with apparent effortlessness from a fully sung whisper to a bluesy croon to a roof-lifting shout to a Dolly Parton warble. If she chose to specialize in blues or country or rock, she’d be in the first rank of the genre; instead she pulls them all into her own style (which generally gets her lumped into the “singer-songwriter” category, but that doesn’t begin to describe her). And she’s not one of those sad songbirds gifted with a tremendous physical talent but little or no artistic sense. She’s a gifted writer, and I’ve deliberately left the prefix “song-“ off that word. Popular music is almost as much a lyrical art as a musical one, and like a good poet or novelist she has a deep and powerful artistic vision, and the judgment to shape it effectively.
This is the fourth of her studio albums. Unusually for me, I’ve heard them in the order they were released, and I think this is the best (there’s one more, Children Running Through, that I haven’t heard yet). I might have to make room for it on my desert island list. Even more than was the case with its predecessor, 1000 Kisses, everything seems important and in its proper place, so that the lesser songs like “The Rowing Song” still seem as if they should be here, and right where they are. I’m not going to say much about the emotional territory the album covers; you really have to hear it. Like the two Emmylou Harris albums I was raving about a few weeks ago, this one reaches way down. I don’t even want to name standout tracks, except to say that if you can listen to “Mother of God” without getting choked up you’re tougher than I am.
I spent a little while looking for a YouTube clip to serve as an introduction for those who haven’t heard her, and didn’t find anything from this album that really shows what her voice can do—all I could find were concert clips with terrible sound. But here’s the opening track. It’s pretty straightforward musically, and unrepresentative in that it’s the most up-tempo song on a generally meditative album, but the sound is decent and the lyrics are a good indication of the album’s general theme: the dream may be impossible, but she isn’t giving up on it.
Several full songs at MySpace, though none from this album.
By the way, I have trouble believing that she grew up in Maine. This is not what I would expect music from New England to sound like. I would have bet heavily that she was a southerner.
(And thanks to Robert for introducing me to her music.)
For reasons not known to me this group is called “Swans,” not “The Swans.” I had heard of them here and there, usually described in terms such as “dark,” “scary,” “aggressive,” “noisy,” and so forth: terms which don’t exactly attract me but make me curious. I wouldn’t have gone to much trouble or expense to seek them out, but a few years ago when cassettes were disappearing from the stores I picked this out of a bin of two-dollar items, expecting to discard it after a few listens.
Rather to my surprise, I found not the noise and screaming I expected but a fairly gentle, almost folk-rock sort of sound. Both musically and lyrically this music falls somewhere in the general area of Nick Cave’s more reflective side and Leonard Cohen. Principal singer and mastermind Michael Gira has a deep baritone voice much like Cave’s in its quieter moments. The songs are excellent, with (again) comparisons to Cave and Cohen brought to mind by the combination of melancholy, free-floating mysticism, and a sort of broadly erotic component, in which woman appears as an archetype of the mysterious (e.g. “Mona Lisa, Mother Earth”). The voice of female singer Jarboe on several tracks emphasizes the masculine-feminine dynamic; she sings a really beautiful cover of Steve Winwood’s “Can’t Find My Way Home.” My only real complaint is that the emotional trajectory of the lyrics is downward, from the first (and possibly best) track, “The River That Runs With Love Won’t Run Dry,” to the last, despairing song “God D**n the Sun,” a candidate for the “skip” button if only to prevent that refrain from resonating in one’s head when the album is over.
According to the very negative (1.5 stars!) AMG review, the group was not happy with this album, considering it too toned-down or too polished or something. That review suggests that someone who likes this album might not care for their others, so I don’t know that I’ll seek out anything else by them, but I rather like this one. I would, however, strongly dis-recommend it to anyone who is actually tempted by despair.
I pretty much skipped punk rock in its day. What little I saw and heard of it didn’t much appeal to me—both the sound and the marketing imagery suggested flat, dull, monotonous. I didn’t even hear the Sex Pistols until sometime in the late ‘80s, when a younger co-worker lent me Never Mind the Bollocks. “I think you’re going to find this a bit of a letdown,” he said. “I guess it was something new at the time but now it just sort of sounds like bad heavy metal.” Yep.
But now and then someone tells me there really was something to the whole thing, and of course it became a major part of the pop music culture. So I’ve been trying to give myself a little education in the punk classics, and it doesn’t get much more punk and more classic than this album.
I can certainly see why, at a time when pompous and over-elaborate progressive rock shared the spotlight with dull country-folk rock (stigmatized for me by the term “mellow”) and vacant disco, the idea of going back to three chords and a cloud of dust (to borrow a football image) was both appealing and in fact needed. And I’m all for the do-it-yourself aspect of the punk movement, for encouraging people to make their own music without waiting to be spoon-fed by the radio (although of course the effect was mostly to have them spoon-fed by a different set of fashionable people, but that’s another story).
But I just don’t really like this album that much. I do get the joke, I think. I know the stupidity is deliberate. And it’s fun in small doses—four or five of these fourteen songs are extremely catchy and would be great to hear in the middle of a mix of more substantial stuff.
But there’s too much irony in it. It might seem strange to say that the problem with the Ramones is that they’re too artsy, but it’s true. The Ramones is almost a sort of conceptual art (starting with the stage names), less music than a statement about music, and a curiously flat one. The musical and emotional range is so deliberately limited that it begins to feel oppressive. This is a very short album (about 29 minutes), but I find it difficult to listen to the whole thing at once; to hear more than four or five songs in a row gives me a sense of unpleasant constriction.
I’ve read more than one tribute to the Ramones that goes on about how they restored rock-and-roll to its position in some extra-musical project, usually an incoherent desire for cultural revolution, which in turn is what rock-and-roll is “really about.” (Example from the liner notes of the Ramones anthology I’ve been listening to: “The four short lines of ‘Commando’…in one absurdist swoop obliterated the religio-jingoistic cold warspeak of the day.”)
Wrong. It’s about music, and the obscure rockers of the ‘50s and ‘60s who were claimed as inspiration for punk were making the best music of which they were capable, not dumbing themselves down as some sort of cultural statement. “96 Tears” may have been dumb but it wasn’t ironic. Although this music deliberately imitates certain aspects of the garage-rock sound that appeared in the mid-‘60s, its flattened emotional quality is totally different, and in that respect more truly a testimony to the atmosphere of the mid-‘70s than it was probably meant to be.
But I admit it probably would have been fun to be at this gig (CBGBs, 1977):
Although this song always leaves me wanting to hear “I Fought the Law.”
I came across this album in my search for something in the symphonic/gothic metal genre as good as Tristania’s Illumination. I haven’t found it, but this one is rather striking.
Griefshire could just as well be classified as progressive rock, and in fact I can imagine that if the heavy guitars were lightened up it might even be possible to believe that it’s a product of the 1970s. Moreover, it’s what used to be called a “concept album”—a collection of songs on a single theme and, in this case, a narrative. The narrative is only implied in the songs; to get the whole story you have to read this explication (note: link is to a PDF file which loads slowly).
It’s an ambitious work, and that’s one reason why it stands out for me in relation to some others which are artistically comparable. I wouldn’t be able to argue if someone described it as pretentious and excessive, but I have a certain admiration for the grand effort even when it falls short. Like a lot of prog-rock, it’s more interesting than affecting, but it’s quite interesting.
The narrative involves a couple of brothers, a woman they both love, and a sort of spiritual quest which ends in disaster. It’s full of promising references to eternal truth and redemption and salvation, but these seem to be resolved in a conventionally vague psychological package of answers found within etc. The disappointing final song, which seems to promise some sort of transcendence, delivers only a decidedly trivial-sounding promise of “a new decade of solutions,” which sounds like a commercial.
The major weakness, and it’s a big one, is in the lyrics, which are talky and discursive, too often talking about emotions rather than summoning them. Maybe some allowance should be made for the fact that the band’s native language is not English (it’s German—they’re from Liechtenstein); still, they chose to write in English. Two songs are, for no obvious reason, in German, and to my ears they work better, but maybe that’s because I’m at best sub-literate in German. They certainly sound good: German might be a better standard language for heavy metal than English.
So the album is far from being an entire success, but—here comes that word again—it’s consistently interesting. And there’s an extra-musical aspect that makes it more so. The narrative and the lyrics are the work of the band’s very fine lead vocalist, Sabine Dünser. A couple of days after she finished recording the vocals for Griefshire, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died the next day, still in her twenties. Given the obvious sincerity of the spiritual search evidenced by the lyrics, a Christian can’t help but speculate: did God take her because she was at her nearest approach to him, more open than she would ever be? Not a question that can be answered, of course, but one wonders, and hopes.
You can hear thirty-second samples of the album at eMusic.
Emmylou Harris: Wrecking Ball; Red Dirt Girl; Stumble Into Grace
As everybody knows, Emmylou Harris came to prominence in the 1970s as a vocalist and band leader who primarily interpreted other people’s work in a country-rock style. Her work in that vein is extremely good, and I’ve always loved her voice, but as a style country and country-rock are not my favorites, so I didn’t follow her work closely and for many years only knew it through a couple of albums, such as the exquisite Roses in the Snow (1980). In later years, through the ‘80s and most of the ‘90s, I assumed she had settled into a pattern along the lines of other artists who were primarily vocalists (say, Linda Ronstadt or Rod Stewart), doing more or less the same thing she always had. It was not until sometime in the late ‘90s when my friend Daniel Nichols sent me a tape that included several songs from Wrecking Ball that I realized she was developing into something far more than a gifted performer.
I’m trying to keep these weekly reviews brief, so I’ll get to the point: with the three albums named above Emmylou Harris has created a body of work that in its combination of beauty and profundity is the equal of anything anyone has ever done in American popular music. The best tracks here are as good as anything by Dylan, Cohen, Waits, Springsteen, or any other of the bardic singer-songwriters of the past forty-plus years one could name. Let me emphasize that: anything by any of them. I suppose one could quibble mildly with that judgment by pointing out how important the producer’s work is in creating the haunting mysterious atmospheres which fill these recordings—Daniel Lanois’s influence is certainly obvious and huge on Wrecking Ball—but they don’t all have the same producer, so we have to assume that Harris is ultimately responsible. Nor does she write all the songs, but clearly hers is the vision that chooses and shapes them.
The term “cosmic American music” was coined ca. 1970 by Gram Parsons, who seems to have been a sort of guru for Harris as well as her tragically lost love (I’ve assumed that he is the subject of the gorgeous and heartbreaking “Michaelangelo” from Red Dirt Girl). It was left to Harris, carrying on alone after Parsons’ early death, to bring the idea to fulfillment in a way that I don’t suppose they could have imagined in the early ‘70s. There could be no more apt description of this music, although it may not give you much of a clue as to how it actually sounds. For that, you need to listen. I included Wrecking Ball in my desert island list a few weeks back, but probably any or all of these three albums would qualify. Possibly Red Dirt Girl would be the best place to start, as it includes “The Pearl,” which would be in the running for the best song from the three and contains the lines:
If there’s no heaven What’s this hunger for?
That question might serve as an epigraph for all three albums: they’re filled with an intense and even desperate yearning, sometimes spiritual, sometimes erotic-romantic, sometimes both. I’m tempted to quote more of that lyric but you really need to hear it sung.
For biographical and career information, here is Emmylou Harris’s page at All Music, and here is Gram Parsons’s.
