Its been a while

Ok I haven't been keeping up with the new arrivals, so here are some that came in today.

Battles - Ice Cream [12'']

Boris - Attention Please

Tyler The Creator - Goblin

Yuck

Joseph's Picks Of The Week 5/20/11 - Bonnie 'Prince' Billy & The Cairo Gang and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy & The Cairo Gang

I’ll always recall my introduction to Will Oldham. On one of my frequent jaunts into the Capitol City along with friends, we found ourselves at Olsson’s Books and Records with the purpose of procuring recorded treats, and as I thumbed through the 7” stock I noticed the Palace Brothers’ debut 45 “The Ohio Riverboat Song”/”Drinking Woman”. Even though I’d seen him portray a teen preacher in the film MATEWAN, I had no clue who Will Oldham or Palace was at the time. But the disc was on Drag City, a label that was on quite a bit of an indie-rock roll at that moment with Pavement and Royal Trux in particular, so I impulsively picked up the single, thinking it was a smart gamble given the circumstances. And it was. Hell, back home that night I spun the disc something like a dozen times. Then the sun came up. That was the way of my life back then, and in some ways I miss it. But like many of us Will Oldham has come a long way since then, and the dude has been so damn prolific I haven’t been able to completely keep up with the flow of his vast thing. This is okay though, because I suspect that’s just how the cagey cat wants it. I’ve been listening to his stuff under the nom de plume Bonnie “Prince” Billy quite a bit lately however, and I keep coming back to last year’s outstanding LP with The Cairo Gang. Titled THE WONDER SHOW OF THE WORLD, it finds Oldham in deep synch with frequent collaborator Emmett Kelly, and while the sounds therein are not exactly what I’d call unexpected, the whole disc radiates with an inspired focus that lends it an air of distinction. It’s essentially a spare, at times melancholy folk record, but with some well applied distinguishing accents, the most notable maybe being a country-rock vibe. This is not unusual for Oldham, but here it feels (probably coincidentally) very late ‘60s/early-70s San Franciscan. Yeah, there’s a little bit of the stuff of Alexander “Skip” Spence’s masterpiece OAR in the grooves of this baby. And that’s not all. It might just be the stinging electric guitar touches on “Teach Me To Bear You”, but I can’t help but feel this LP hits upon some ideas that folks from Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service could’ve explored to fine effect right at the dawn of the 70s. Well, they didn’t. They both turned to crap instead. And who am I fooling, if the Airplane and Quicksilver had attempted something approximating THE WONDER SHOW OF THE WORLD, they likely would’ve blundered it up. Country-rock was seldom a successful genre in retrospect, most of the failure stemming from a desire to be laid-back or mellow instead of moody or tense or gritty. That’s one of the negative effects of too much marijuana. And anyway, WONDER SHOW isn’t country-rock. Again, it’s aptly described as folk, but it’s very personal; not introspective but emotionally and lyrically direct, and he strikes a fine balance between confessionals and a more broad sense of storytelling. Up-tempos are largely absent, percussion is spare and while there is some strum it takes a backseat to a substantially forlorn atmosphere. As such it’s a great late-night album, another thing it shares with OAR. And as “Merciless and Great” develops it starts feeling like some sorta lost demo from Clapton and Winwood circa the dissolution of Blind Faith. This is nice. But the biggest sum of this record’s total belongs to Will Oldham. The pleasant guitar and straightforward vocals of “The Sounds Are Always Begging” could be an early-‘70s pop single if the lyrics weren’t so eccentric. And that sense of oddness gently asserts itself all over this album as it does throughout Oldham’s work, a natural, unforced touch that never smacks of unearned, affected strangeness. The record’s centerpiece is “That’s What Our Love Is”, a casually unwinding yet crisp passage of acoustic gliding that blossoms into a fine, soaring conclusion. So as I said the guy’s made great strides since that first single. His sound back then was kind of a harbinger of the soon to explode New Weird American Underground, but he grew from that pretty quickly, joining his Drag City cohorts Bill Callahan and the sadly missing in action (at least musically) David Berman as a beacon of ingenuity in the contemporary singer-songwriter context. Sometimes Oldham’s a little bit country, at other moments he’s rocking, and he’s often experimental and open to the input of others. But he’s always Will Oldham, as unique and talented an individual as anybody currently on the scene, and with a resolve that should find him at the forefront of musical affairs for quite some time.

One way of approaching the ever mounting plethora of recorded music is by looking at the long form and the short form, with LPs/CDs inhabiting one side of the spectrum and EPs/7”s/isolated tracks defining the other. Many performers used to be very clearly defined and marketed as “album” artists or “singles” bands for instance, and even now with the ability of the consumer to purchase individual tracks and to blend them into the randomness of digital shuffle mode, this is still very much how contemporary music is contextualized. Back in the heyday of this sorta thing, when a band was equally adept at recording great albums and crafting killer singles, they still inspired different approaches to fandom; if a listener’s favorite documents by The Rolling Stones are AFTERMATH or EXILE ON MAIN STREET then they are assuredly an album person, but if the HOT ROCKS comps are the main doorway into Stones-ian appreciation it can be surmised that those under its sway are lovers of the short form. Over the last few decades the commercial possibilities of the short form has diminished considerably. From my perspective, with the exception of the occasional hip-hop or R&B entry, the singles charts and contempo commercial radio are largely a wasteland. I trace this problem back to the 1970s, but that’s no great revelation. Punk tried to fix the problem, but people weren’t ready. I digress. The short form is still alive and well, always has been in fact, but its days of chart supremacy are largely over. Needless to say, no more Motown, Stax ain’t never coming back, and the time when a transistor radio swinging from a bike’s handle bars could crackle out an hour or more of new music without stumbling over a bum tune is long gone. But I’m not complaining since, again, the short form is still with us, it’s just shifted in the placement in the musical landscape. It’s now well utilized by smaller, sometimes unabashedly underground acts. Hell, right now there are more limited edition 7”s of neo-garage-punk grunt in the racks than I can shake my moneymaker at. Larger, bigger selling artists or bands also use the short form; Arcade Fire’s first release was a self issued EP for instance. But while there are more 7”s and EPs produced in any recent year than one person could ever keep track of, very few current bands excel at both the long form and the short form. One that does would be The Decemberists, but their discography’s not that prolific. Another that does is Will Oldham, and he’s a guy with copious releases under his impressive looking belt, many long and even more short, a somewhat confounding list of EPs, 7”s and comp tracks that I’ll probably never all get to hear. Oh, well. I have heard one of his newest entries into the short form sweepstakes, that being the ISLAND BROTHERS 10” with the Cairo Gang, and it’s very special. Where WONDER SHOW OF THE WORLD gives me a definite feeling of Ye Olde San Fran in its touches of country-rock applied to a folkish template, the A side title cut of this is straight-up full band (great piano) country-rocking, the mixture of Oldham’s and Angel Olsen’s vocals recalling the sublime blend of Gram and Emmylou, with the instrumentation landing right in the heart of Texas. Yes, it’s a stomper, but it also holds a more meditative midsection that shows he’s not just aping the old stuff. Guest trumpet by smoking Chicago jazz guy Rob Mazurek is extremely well employed, and the whole track is a joy from beginning to end. The flip, “New Wonder” is quite different. After a dozen or so listens, it reminds me of an early cut from Todd Rundgren if he’d been raised in the rural south. It’s a grand little statement and coupled with the A side shows the ease of Oldham’s short form mastery. Where many folks corral songs onto 7”s and EPs that are essentially leftovers, stuff that didn’t fit into the scheme of full-length albums, I’ve never gotten that impression from Oldham. ISLAND BROTHERS stands proudly alone, in no way a bone tossed to the desires of completists. And on a final note, this EP is a benefit for the fine people of Haiti, the proceeds going to Edge Outreach, a program serving to bring potable water to the people of that nation. With recent environmental catastrophes at home, it can be easy to forget or sideline the needs of those outside our borders such as the Haitian (or Japanese) people. But in this case I think identifying and assisting the plight of the global community (and yes indeed, this includes those requiring help right here at home) can help inspire us away from the far less constructive environment of our Government’s petty squabbles over money and the endless downward spiral of identity politics. ISLAND BROTHERS appeals to the better side of our nature, a testament to the potential of art to give and to heal and to strengthen, and from the amazing color cover photos of New York Times shutterbug Damon Winter to the excellent sounds spiraled into its grooves, it’s an inspiring total package. Kudos to Will Oldham, The Cairo Gang and Drag City for a job well done.



Joseph's Picks Of The Week 5/13/11 - Twig Harper & Daniel Higgs and John Coltrane

The facility for collaboration is an attribute that some artists have in spades, while others thrive on a more solitary relationship between themselves and their chosen mode of creation. It can be fairly accurately stated that musicians are generally more inclined to the collaborative, while painters and writers tend to be less receptive to the environment of give-and-take and mutually conceived ideas. Naturally, there are exceptions, and one interesting wrinkle is when an artist is fluent in the language of numerous forms. Take for example musician, writer and visual artist Daniel Higgs. Starting in the early 1980’s with the offbeat rock band Reptile House, Baltimorean Higgs began staking out a strikingly unique and increasingly surreal sound world, a sphere that while weighted at the beginning toward group strategies of post-hardcore invention, most notably with his amazing subsequent band Lungfish, has been increasingly consumed of late by more abstract, individualist areas of sonic experimentation. Lungfish released ten albums on Dischord, more than any other band on that label’s roster, but the last was the excellent FERAL HYMNS in 2005, and Higgs’ prolific documentation of his fascinating outward-bound growth as a solo musician has joined with his abilities as poet and painter to thrust him into position as the current underground’s reigning troubadour/mystic/bard. His bent and attractively confounding strains of primitive folk, most of it recorded directly to cassette, made it fairly easy to chart his progression from collaborator to solitary operator, and that was fine and even dandy to boot. But then last year came CLAIRAUDIENCE FELLOWSHIP OMPHALOS/BALTIMORE, an LP documenting the fruitful pairing of Higgs with fellow Charm City-resident James Twig Harper. It’s a stumping, slippery, demanding yet inviting combination of spoken text (Higgs) and expansive sound (Harper) that adds up to one of the most stirring audio experiences I’ve had in quite a while. I shouldn’t have expected anything less. The name Twig Harper has been on my radar screen for something like a decade. Nautical Almanac, his group/duo with Carly Ptak first started making rumblings in the second half of the ‘90s as part of the noise/New Weird underground, joining a dense thicket of names like Wolf Eyes, No Neck Blues Band, Prurient, 16 Bitch Pile Up, and To Live And Shave In LA in spewing out an unceasing stream of limited run and often hand assembled releases that sat in stark contrast to the prevailing mode of smooth, professional normalcy. Nautical Almanac held elements, especially early on, of Wolf Eyes-style caustic brutality, but they also had flashes of everything from older names like Sun City Girls and Caroliner to contemporaries Sunburned Hand Of The Man. The one time I was lucky enough to see them live, specifically Inauguration Night of George Bush’s second foul term, January 2004 at the “Noise Against Fascism” cavalcade of protest and racket held in DC’s nightclub Black Cat, Nautical Almanac were an eclectic if brief tour de force, landing somewhere between free-rock at its most rhythmic and a far less defined area of extra-musical performance theatricality expressed through physical motion. This is to say they put down their instruments and danced in a way that surely had Sun Ra smiling from his perch far above. Since 2005 Harper has been doing it largely as a solo artist as well, and CLAIRAUDIENCE shows him to be in stellar form. This meeting of two formidable minds presents recitations by Higgs that have been sonically enhanced and tweaked by Harper after the fact. This distance between the principals places the record at odds from the majority of post-Beat-era albums that present poetical readers in tandem with musical accompaniment. Instead of music as a beatific reaction in real time, an essentially jazz-like impulse, here the tendency is for contemplative distance, with Harper presenting different ideas for individual tracks, the results methodical instead of intuitive. On “Number One” Harper cranks out waves of noise residue, layers it with chimes, and then falls back, letting the voice enter the mix so he can subtly modulate it, giving Higgs’ words a scratchy underwater grumble. “Number Two” appears as something quite opposite, bringing a nagging, droning keyboard flourish and waves of electronic additives to a mild yet insistent repeated line from Higgs, and then quickly, it’s over. “Number Three” shifts into the mode of rumpled up sound collage, as spacious and unconcerned with linear focus as anything from the early pre-dance industrial underground. Instead, Harper’s treatment snakes around and deepens Higgs’ images and ideas, commenting upon the language with varying degrees of premeditated intention. “Number Four” gives us a twisting array of abstract loops and squiggles and as the track develops Higgs is deftly submerged until he sounds like an imagined hallucinatory voice heard while lingering beside a buzzing, never resting machine. “Number Five” feels rather exotic. It’s a bit like listening to a Nonesuch Explorer LP after smoking up some primo hash while a roommate recites incantations from a religion of his own invention. As welcome sleep arrives, the sound slowly fades. Good times. “Number Six”, the last on the LP, is also the subtlest, Harper adding only miniscule accents under the words. Instead, he captures bits of Higgs’ voice, speeding it up and slowing it down and molding it into fluctuating levels of audio decay before it too slips into silence. With the LP comes a free download ticket offering an extra twelve minute track of Harper screwing around with a two word phrase like he’s one of those long gone lab-coat clad college funded electronic composers whose work would turn up on albums from the Vox Turnabout label. What a great use of grant money. Those were truly the days. Make no mistake, CLAIRAUDIENCE FELLOWSHIP OMPHALOS/BALTIMORE is intense, at times difficult, and it’s probably best approached in attentive solitude. This puts it in sharp contrast to other poetical work both with and without music, from Charles Bukowski’s HOSTAGE to Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s recordings with The Cellar Jazz Quartet to assorted stuff from Jack Kerouac. Those examples are very much about group experience, suitable for absorbing with a few friends or a room full of strangers. CLAIRAUDIENCE does have stylistic predecessors, and the one that’s springing to mind at the moment is Kenneth Patchen’s work with John Cage on THE CITY WEARS A SLOUCH HAT. While very different in mood and structure (HAT is in fact a radio play from ’42), the two share a similar strategy. But where the writing/figure of Daniel Higgs was once compared favorably to Patchen’s deep precedent, he’s now very much his own man. Frankly, he’s entered a stripped down spiritual dimension that leaves me unable to draw comparisons. I think it’ll require years to figure it all out, and this masterful LP will likely provide a key.

I’m generally in favor of artistic canons, but one of the problems with the idea is how they can shape a skewed perspective on the historical development of the forms they reference. Take the jazz canon, for example. While it’s admirable and fairly necessary to gather a group of defining recordings that sit above the music’s truly huge discographical evolution, it seems to me that one problem with designating a selection of albums as “must-hear” or “definitive” is that they can become a sort of “Jazz For Dummies” primer, a way for busy folks to feel knowledgeable on a voluminous, unconquerable topic so they won’t get left out of the discussion at social functions, a Cliff’s Notes for the socially adept’s perceived cultural mastery. Is that snide? Yeah, it is. But fuck it, I’m that kind of mood today. Hopefully less snide is my issue with the jazz canon tilting history toward a group of heavyweight masterpieces that’s quite antithetical to what the jazz experience really is. When serious jazz heads speak of the greatness of Blue Note, they aren’t just speaking of the canonical stuff like Monk’s early recordings, Sonny Rollins’ A NIGHT AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD, Eric Dolphy’s OUT TO LUNCH or Andrew Hill’s POINT OF DEPARTURE. We’re also speaking about the achievements of less celebrated names and the essential gifts they bring to the table: the vast leadership roles of Hank Mobley or Donald Byrd, the under-recorded obscurities of Tina Brooks or Sonny Red, the sincere oddity of George Braith’s stritch and the tossed-off warmth of Ike Quebec’s jukebox 45s. If art is the transmutation of a tangible part of the personalities that create it, then the masterpiece-ification of jazz can foster a stilted relationship between listener and records. It’s kind of like being friends with nothing but geniuses. That’s certainly preferable to being surrounded by mouth-breathers I would think, but I also suspect that being the dumbest (or uh, least smart) person in the room would take its toll after a while. Heh. Now, John Coltrane was a genius, and his enshrinement in the halls of jazz canon-hood is secure. But there’s not simply one indisputable canon approved by the gods of infinite selection, and any group of classic recordings that neglects 1957’s BLUE TRAIN is faulty at the core. Many career summations of Trane spotlight his early work with Miles and Monk, but leave out his pre-GIANT STEPS leadership roles. This is largely because those dates, with BLUE TRAIN being the best of the bunch, are far less assertively groundbreaking than his subsequent work for Atlantic or Impulse. Sure, Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” technique was something new under the sun (and therefore controversial at the time), but it was largely applied to a workaday if elevated approach to post-bop sessioneering. Yes, GIANT STEPS is an unimpeachable masterwork, but I must admit that I’ve always felt closer to BLUE TRAIN, partly because it feels like the perfect expression of his early development before his advancement to the status of rapid-fire instigator of constantly broken ground. As great as STEPS is, I often can’t shake the feeling that it’s a temporary jump for Coltrane on his way to the Classic Quartet where he consistently swung for the fences and bombed the bleachers with waves of improvisational invention. In a sense, BLUE TRAIN can feel in league with the stately, deeply traditional side of Coltrane’s later work found on BALLADS or his collabs with Duke Ellington or vocalist Johnny Hartman. But then again, it’s very much its own thing. BLUE TRAIN does clearly establish its leader’s faultless ear for talent. It was notably the first recording where Trane picked all the players, and he knowingly assembled one of the best bands of the period. Lee Morgan’s gorgeous post-bop trumpet just glistens and Curtis Fuller’s trombone work is the perfect combination of smooth and tough. Perpetually underrated pianist Kenny Drew is as forcefully elegant as any keyboardist from the period, Wynton Kelly, Red Garland and Sonny Clark included, and the crack rhythm team of bassist Paul Chambers (“Mr. P.C.”) and drummer Philly Joe Jones prove why they are arguably the finest rhythmic duo of the era. The group comes together so seamlessly, so casual yet engaged with the material at hand, that it’s a joyful experience from beginning to end. The opening title track is justifiably famous, a sumptuous blend of elevated blues structure and top flight soloing, the kind of tune that gets employed on movie soundtracks as a sort of emotional shorthand, cluing the viewer in to the specificity of a scenario without having to write a line of dialogue or non-verbal action in service of exposition. But BLUE TRAIN is so much more. In contrast to PRESTIGE 7105, Coltrane’s first record as a leader from May of ’57, the difference is startling. That debut is a fine collection of tunes that add up to an excellent whole, but BLUE TRAIN, recorded in September of the same year, presents a strikingly advanced sense of thematic unity. The tracks, four Coltrane originals and one standard (Jerome Kern’s “I’m Old Fashioned”), are linked together so brilliantly into a cohesive artistic statement that the vibrancy of the whole is undiminished over fifty years later. “Locomotion” is a dynamo of up-tempo post-bop language, and “Lazy Bird” concludes the record with the expert panache of a seasoned club band leaving the stage after a batch of tunes well played. In fact, one of the LP’s best qualities is how the songs gather a unified power that’s very much like a short live set. I should here acknowledge that BLUE TRAIN often does get praised as the flawless if non-grandiose statement that is its lasting achievement. It isn’t in any way a criminally under heard record or a document from a neglected master. But at this late date, the album’s greatness can be undervalued or overlooked in an attempt at summarizing historical context. I’m simply hoping that the uninitiated won’t miss its vast, endlessly enriching rewards.