Brown Recluse: Evening Tapestry

Brown Recluse
Evening Tapestry
Rating: 3.7/5.0
Label: Slumberland Records


It took Brown Recluse about five years since their formation to release their first full length - practically a lifetime in these days of home studios and computer programs that can turn almost any doof into a poor man's Steve Albini. A pair of brief-but-promising EPs, Black Sunday and The Soft Skin, hinted at what the Philadelphia-based band was capable of, generating a bit of local buzz while, between those releases, the group eventually expanded from the duo of Timothy Meskers and Mark Saddlemire to include several more members. Whether it's categorized as indie-pop, chamber-pop, dream-pop, psych-pop or whatever-pop, the group's debut effort, Evening Tapestry, is a wonderfully crafted, instrumentally layered album that suggests its long gestation period was well worth it.

Perhaps the record's most noticeable trait is that it doesn't exhibit any of the flaws sometimes associated with debut albums; there are no painfully juvenile lyrics, ignoble musical fuckups or streams of influence-imitating garbage. The care that went into making these songs sound a certain way is evident. Keyboards, Farfisa organ and trumpet are used liberally throughout; on opening track "Hobble To Your Tomb," they're set to a crawl and used to shape the song's fatalistic overtones, then sped up to a jaunty bounce on "Impressions of a City Morning" and "Golden Sun." Meskers' vocals practically float above the songs' arrangements, his voice frequently taking on a hazy, dreamlike quality, especially on "Statue Garden," "Wooden Fingers" and "At Last." Though Evening Tapestry's overarching style isn't exactly without precedent - shades of Stuart Murdoch sometimes creep into Meskers' delivery, and the way the instruments blend together are reminiscent of many things Elephant 6, especially the Olivia Tremor Control - the songs are quirky and catchy enough for that to be forgiven.

Though the album's overall vibe is primarily airy and breezy, its lyrics are quite the opposite. Tucked within these 11 pop songs are references to physical decay, "mangled flesh," bruises and bleeding - that's just the first track - as well as an arm cut on a fencepost and the resulting smears of blood. In other songs, Meskers' vocals focus heavily on weather systems and local geography, evoking an environment of city lights, taxies, summer rain and wind, crumbling statues and monuments, buses and nighttime descending on a hometown. It's a nice trick the way the singer's vocals contrast with the arrangements; indeed, this effect is so subtle that listeners might not realize they're hearing a pretty nihilistic song about being marched to a tomb until it's already lodged itself in the brain.

Evening Tapestry occasionally falters when its sound becomes too uniform - a nagging sense of redundancy lingers on both "Summer Showers" and "Paisley Tears" - but mostly it's a tight, concise album full of clever musical and lyrical ideas that are usually executed quite well without any indie pretensions or indulgences. The band took their time in releasing it, and for the better, but here's hoping the next full length comes along sooner than 2016.

The Rural Alberta Advantage: Departing

The Rural Alberta Advantage
Departing
Rating: 3.5/5.0
Label: Saddle Creek Records

Departing will sound immediately familiar to anyone who's heard Hometowns, the 2009 wounded-hearts-and-small-towns album from Canadian indie-folk trio the Rural Alberta Advantage. Lead singer and primary lyricist Nils Edenloff, offering the type of assessment that will shape how listeners and critics view the album for years, has described Departing as Hometowns' companion piece. He's not kidding, as even upon first listen the similarities are obvious, both in how the album sounds - acoustically-minded but occasionally explosive - and more so in the imagery that links the album to its predecessor: weather, ghosts, bones, Great White North geography, heartbreaks and promises of fidelity can be found throughout the record.

For listeners it's a simple equation: those who got hooked on the band via Hometowns will likely get hooked a little more with Departing, while dissenters - maybe those still wondering just where the bass is or who find Edenloff's nasal vocals too abrasive - probably won't be impressed. It's this latter group's loss, though, as throughout the album the RAA mostly succeed by following this tightly-honed blueprint. The band can be contemplative and fatalistic: ; on album opener "Two Lovers," acoustic guitar and a graceful melody accentuate the track's dark, death-obsessed exterior. It's a love song, of sorts, as Edenloff says, "And you will die and become a ghost/ And haunt me until my pulse also slows." Album closer "Good Night" is likewise restrained, the dual vocals of Edenloff and Amy Cole complementing the song's panoramic landscape and gentle percussion; it also has all the markings of a concert closer, if only the hipster indie crowd in the back by the bar just wouldn't talk so loud. As they did on Hometowns with "Luciana" and "The Dethbridge in Lethbridge," the RAA mix in several rock songs amidst all the folksy balladry; "Muscle Relaxants," "Stamp" and "Tornado '87" add muscle and volume to the album without making it any less cohesive.

It's not accurate to dismiss the album as a complete retread of Hometowns, however, as it does sporadically reveal a subtle evolution in the band's sound. Paul Banwatt's drumming is less up-front in the mix - though it's front-and-center on "Under the Knife" - an approach that makes the songs' instrumentation sound more balanced, if slightly less unique, on "The Breakup" and "Barnes' Yard." Edenloff's vocals are generally more refined and polished but still remain expressive and unconventional; as a singer he knows how to bend and phrase his words to wring out the emotions, particularly on "North Star" and "Coldest Days."

Departing's main drawback is that it's thematically repetitive: the album's first image is that of two lovers in an embrace - a recurring motif that was all over Hometowns and appears on at least four other songs this time around - while most of the album is also cluttered with references to beating hearts (not of the gothic variety) and all-conquering, capital-L Love. True, some artists have made careers out of constantly mining this topic, and no one seemed to mind when Bethany Cosentino wrote the same song 12 times on Crazy for You, but sometimes Edenloff's lyrics feel too narrow, too insular in their scope. Still, the album is highly listenable and as a continuation of Hometowns is usually spot on. The RAA don't break new musical ground on Departing, but it's a fine release from a band whose potential for crafting a masterpiece, and soon, is already apparent.

by Eric Dennis

Kurt Wagner and Cortney Tidwell present KORT: Invariable Heartache

Kurt Wagner and Cortney Tidwell present KORT
Invariable Heartache
Rating: 3.5/5.0
Label: City Slang

If all covers albums sounded this good, they'd likely lose their stigma of being vanity projects or the byproducts of a band just fucking around because it's clean out of new material. A collaboration between Lambchop's Kurt Wagner and singer-songwriter Cortney Tidwell under the cutely-dubbed KORT moniker, Invariable Heartache is a respectfully understated homage to the Nashville-based Chart Records label. For Tidwell, the songs are literally part of her family's history; her grandfather, Slim Williamson, ran the label, her father handled its A&R and her mother was part of the label's artist roster. For Wagner, it's a chance to sing homespun lyrics that aren't coated in ambiguity; enjoy the simplicity of something like, "I'm blue as a bluebird/ With no song to sing," because stuff like that doesn't come out of Wagner's mouth all that often.

Invariable Heartache very well could have been a train wreck, with Tidwell's personal connections to the label causing the album to come across as overly worshipful and Wagner's "unique" vocals making the songs sound like little more than the latest Lambchop record. But for the most part the wheels stay on and there are no disasters and very few missteps among the 12 songs. The album favors country music's depressive side - plenty of lonesome, boozy, desperate, lovesick, jilted and otherwise distraught lovers here - and it's on such ballads like "Incredibly Lonely," "Eyes Look Away" and "She Came Around Last Night" where the two singers' contrasting voices (hers is clean, pure and pitch-perfect; Wagner's is...not) mesh well together. Tidwell brings a wounded-country-heart believability to the several songs she solos on, especially "He's Only a Memory Away," "I Can't Sleep With You" and the album-closing, grand weeper "Who's Gonna Love Me Now," though her vocals on "Yours Forever" lay on the woe-is-me misery too thickly. The duo's timing and the album's pace are integral, as both artists sprinkle in up-tempo, cheerful and sometimes humorous moments, particularly on "Let's Think About Where We're Going" - where a man and woman each vow to basically forget about the other's sordid pasts, sexual perversions and rampant promiscuity - and "Penetration," whose somewhat-bizarre arrangement makes it the oddest song included. It is not, as some may have hoped, a Stooges cover.

One obvious advantage Tidwell and Wagner have in reworking the songs on Invariable Heartache is that none of them are standards. Aside from perhaps "Picking Wild Mountain Berries," which treasured icon/butt-of-the-joke Conway Twitty made semi-famous, very little here will be familiar to listeners whose interest in country music doesn't extend past the late greats or today's current plague of pickup-truck-and-whiskey poseurs. The songs' obscurity makes it easy for a listener to not have any preconceived notions about what they "should" sound like; knowledge of the source material isn't a prerequisite to enjoying the album either.

Invariable Heartache is simply a consistently strong selection of cover songs that speaks to the quality of the material Chart Records released throughout the 1960s. A little bit of legwork to track down the label's originals comes highly recommended.

Broken Records: Let Me Come Home

Broken Records
Let Me Come Home
Rating: 2.0/50
Label: 4AD




So what does over-the-top emotional pleading mixed with deadly serious earnestness sound like? A lot like Let Me Come Home, the latest album from Scottish band Broken Records. In much the same way as their debut effort Until the Earth Begins to Part, super-heavy feelings of dread and despair are laid on pretty thick in both Jamie Sutherland's vocals and the group's arena-ready instrumentals, but rarely are they remotely believable. That might sound a bit callous, as the group spends Home pouring its guts out and doing its damnedest to make its songs sound grave and important, but the record is too overblown and dramatic for its own good. If subtlety in music is your thing, best to stay away from this one.

A listener can often tell a lot about an album by its song titles; in Home's case, track names like "A Darkness Rises Up," "I Used To Dream" and "You Know You're Not Dead" make the record's intentions painfully obvious. It's dark out there in the cruel, cruel world, man, and Broken Records wants you to know it, song after song. Thus the lyrics speak of tired bodies, heavy hearts, hometown ghosts and the ubiquitous one true love. And that's just the first song. Elsewhere there are concerns about insomnia, unemployment, death, mental decline, various methods of burial and virtually all other topics reminiscent of a twentysomething intoxicated on existentialism. As a vocalist Sutherland is too often prone to bouts of grandiose theatricality; he sometimes sings in a falsetto on both "The Motorcycle Boy Reigns" and "You Know You're Not Dead" and bellows almost the rest of the time, particularly on "A Leaving Song" and "Modern Worksong." One is almost tempted to dismiss these exaggerated vocals as intentionally overdramatic, but clearly that wasn't the aim here. The arrangements aren't unique or varied enough to either fit with or compensate for Sutherland's vocal approach; instead, the band repeatedly opts for a mighty big indie rock sound and even bigger finishes that soon become predictable and tedious.

Now, the nice section. Good things happen when both Sutherland and the band reign in their excesses and show even the slightest bit of restraint. The bleakness of "Dia dos Namorados!" is plausible, as Sutherland asks to be buried in "the shallow soil/ The filth and grime." His vocals are measured and understated, while the song's arrangement is practically skeletal compared to most of Home. "I Used To Dream" ends not with a bang but with a whimper, and for the better; the song is wonderfully sparse and well-written, its keyboards and light touches of strings complementing Sutherland's almost-hushed vocals. But such moments are rare, and ultimately the album suffocates under the weight of its lyrical melodrama and musical indulgences.

On the strength of these two tracks as well as album closer "Home," it's possible that Broken Records might be capable of crafting a more nuanced, heartfelt record before long. The emotions in Home's songs just might be the real deal, but they're couched in so many layers of verbal and auditory bombast that the album too frequently comes across like an emotional basketcase crying fake tears while the world checks it out, yawns and then goes about its business.

Lucinda Williams: Sweet Old World

Revisit:
Lucinda Williams
Sweet Old World
1992


Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.

In the early 1990s, Lucinda Williams was a mostly unknown country-folk singer/songwriter, her self-titled 1988 album garnering enthusiastic reviews from critics and fellow musicians but only modest commercial attention. It took a damn-near-perfect album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998), to gain Williams a much larger fan base and establish her as one of music's leading lyricists. After Car Wheels, the singer faced a lifetime of critical hyperbole - even being inaccurately defined as the "female Bob Dylan" - and every album that followed would inevitably be judged against the mighty weight of that masterpiece.

All of which gives Sweet Old World a unique position in the musician's discography. It marks the final album in which Williams would be largely free of preconceived expectations from both critics and fans; it's also likely to be the last album in which the musician could work without facing comparisons to Car Wheels. It received consistently favorable reviews upon its release in 1992, though a complaint that continues to plague the artist - the amount of time it takes her to release a new record - can be found in some of these reviews. It's around the time of Sweet Old World that Williams gained a reputation as a truculent perfectionist in the studio; indeed, it would take another six years before its follow-up album was released.

The album is essentially split between tragic character studies - the one exception, "Little Angel, Little Brother," is commonly mistaken as a song about death, owing largely to its funereal arrangement and slow vocals - and relationship songs that emphasize specific details over grandiose, generalized statements about Love. In both cases the album is somewhat inconsistent, and pieces of it haven't aged particularly well. Still, Sweet Old World does contain two of Williams' finest written suicide songs: the title song and "Piñeola." Complete opposites in terms of execution - one is a tear-soaked ballad, the other mixes the blues with southern rock - both songs find Williams using specific images like the "sound of a midnight train," "dancing with no shoes," the cemetery in which Sonny is buried, a mourner dropping a "handful of dust" on a grave and parents removing blood-soaked sheets to make both songs and their sentiments tangible. We don't personally know the person or people she's singing about, but we almost feel like we do.

In a similar manner, both "Six Blocks Away" and "Memphis Pearl" are precise depictions of two people whose lives didn't turn out as they'd planned, though the subject of "Memphis Pearl" - a once-married and now presumably single mother whose eyes offer only a "vacant stare" - seems to be in a far more precarious situation than the lovesick fellow with the "regular job" and a "roof over his head and food to eat" in "Six Blocks Away." But Williams does occasionally falter. The lyrics to "He Never Got Enough Love" read like a bad Nebraska-era Springsteen parody, its central figure ultimately pulling his own Johnny 99 by shooting someone in a liquor store; the song's impact and believability are completely deadened by the excessively banal reason Williams gives for the man's actions (read the song title; if only it were that simple).

Sweet Old World is not purely dark, however. As she would on every album from Car Wheels to the present, Williams devotes plenty of disc space to that most frequent of song topics. The cynicism and dysfunction chronicled in her catalog starting with Car Wheels are mostly absent here, as she instead includes love songs that range from affectionate to raunchy. True there are some weepers - most notably "Sidewalks of the City," where Williams tracks someone's movements through a city of early afternoon boozers, bums and "crumbling buildings and graffiti" - but the love songs here are generally affectionate. There is an underlying sadness in the departure about to take place in "Something about What Happens When We Talk," but it's mixed with a bit of hope and nostalgia, while "Prove My Love" is a straightforward, unadorned song about fidelity and is notably free of Williams' sometimes-caustic tongue. Sometimes Sweet Old World is even a little dirty - on " Lines Around Your Eyes" and more so on "Hot Blood," a song of old folk music puns and sexual innuendo - but never do these songs approach the levels of bitterness and betrayal that would surface on Williams' later records.

Lucinda Williams was by no means a novice when she recorded Sweet Old World, but in retrospect it probably was the last time listeners didn't have preconceived notions about who she was or what her songs should sound like. Free of such expectations, Williams created an album that, though not perfect, has a number of remarkable songs and deserves some of the spotlight usually reserved for Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

Iron and Wine: Kiss Each Other Clean

Iron & Wine
Kiss Each Other Clean
Rating: 3.3/5.0
Label: Warner Bros.


Sam Beam has stated that he wanted Kiss Each Other Clean to sound like the radio-ready pop songs of the early '70s. That it does, at least sporadically; elsewhere, the album wanders in various directions, using synthesizer, horns, distorted vocals and various other studio effects. Parts of it even apparently owe a debt to jazz, blues and prog rock. It's unarguably the most atypical record Beam has released - even more so than 2007's The Shepherd's Dog - and it marks a major stylistic shift from the gentle folk with which Beam is most commonly associated. Quite simply, it damn near makes The Creek Drank the Cradle and Our Endless Numbered Days sound like the work of an entirely different musician.

Whether this new style fully succeeds is open to debate. Even after spending a few weeks listening to Kiss Each Other Clean, I can't decide whether it's a work of unpredictable brilliance or a disorganized mess. Probably it falls somewhere in between. There is a mesmerizing vocal and instrumental consistency to much of the album; like lyrical masterpiece "The Trapeze Swinger" before them, "Walking Far From Home," "Tree By the River," "Half Moon," "Godless Brother in Love" and "Glad Man Singing" make frequent use background vocals and harmonies to accentuate Beam's narratives. Equally striking is Beam's singing; absent are the whispery, breathy, sometimes frail vocals of the first two Sub Pop albums, replaced by a more muscular and assured vocal delivery. The imagery is still prototypical Beam - lots of references to the past, memories, religion, life and death - though at times it tends to be far more surreal than before; the nightmarish visions of opening track "Walking Far From Home" include bridges collapsing, birds falling from the sky, a car crash, a praying widow and a "millionaire pissing on the lawn."

It's that pesky, sometimes perplexing other half where fans' opinion will likely be divided. In a similar way that The Age of Adz found another previously folk-based musician strolling into weirder, electronic pastures, pieces of Kiss Each Other Clean easily rank as the most bizarre stuff Beam's put to tape. "Me and Lazarus" is perhaps the most consistent of this new breed of Beam song; its synth and stately saxophone give the song personality as Beam imaginatively recasts the biblical figure as a mad dancing punk. But that dubby/trippy approach soon wears thin and, worse, starts to sound a little bit like a lark or a novelty. "Monkeys Uptown" and "Rabbit Will Run" are synth-dripping affairs that sound artificial and too manufactured - the latter song also contains distracting amounts of heavy percussion - while the funky, slightly sleazy horn that opens "Big Burned Hand" is soon overshadowed by the song's overly distorted vocals. Unique songs one and all, certainly, though it's debatable as to whether many listeners will return to these songs that frequently.

The fact that Beam managed to release his least immediately accessible album on a major label is a nice bit of irony and, aside from those oh-so-smooth songs mentioned earlier, Kiss Each Other Clean is a difficult listen and hardly as warmly inviting as Iron & Wine's previous work. Still, Beam deserves credit for at least pushing his music in new directions, even if it occasionally leads to synth and sax-laden dead ends that, much like the wistful narrator of "Tree By the River," might make some listeners dreamily nostalgic for the past.

Five Years Later: Black Sheep Boy

Go check out Spectrum Culture's always-amazing Five Years Later feature for the full list. Go now men and women.


8. Okkervil River
Black Sheep Boy
[Jagjaguwar]

Black Sheep Boy established Okkervil River as one of indie's most emotionally-wrenching and literate bands, marking both a massive musical and lyrical leap forward for the group and especially frontman Will Sheff. A pseudo-concept album inspired in part by the Tim Hardin song of the same name, Black Sheep Boy wove connected themes and topics together from song to song, an approach the band would later utilize on both The Stage Names and The Stand Ins. It mixed roughly-strewn American indie rock with ballads whose darkness dripped from every line and note; both types still sound remarkable five years later.

The violent and tragic world that unfolds in Black Sheep Boy is still vivid and palpable today, with references to childhood abduction and possible molestation, tragically unrequited love and victims being led "up the hill in chains." Its arrangements are expansive and precise, played out via guitar, brass, strings, keyboards and other instruments, while Sheff's vocals heighten each song's impact. Sometimes he lulls us in gently, his slowly-drawn vocals on "A Stone" paced perfectly as perhaps the album's saddest song unfolds and recedes in lovesick despair. In other places Sheff violently spits out his words, most menacingly on the revenge-and-murder fantasy of "Black" and the explosive last few moments of penultimate track "So Come Back, I Am Waiting."

Whether it's described as an allegory or simply a series of inter-related songs, Black Sheep Boy will likely stand as one of the past decade's most enduring albums. Music can rarely comfortably be described as poetry, but the record is precisely that. The ghosts of poets and porn stars would eventually haunt Okkervil River's later work, but their origins can be found here, in stunning detail. - Eric Dennis

Honorable Mention: The Secret History, The World That Never Was

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Many critics couldn't even be bothered to review The World That Never Was. Their loss, as the Secret History's debut LP is an altogether brilliant piece of indie pop that combines intelligent lyricism with flawless musicianship. Refining both the style and narrative structure of the Desolation Town EP - also mostly ignored - the band produced a complex and mature record that deserved far more recognition that it received.

World's songs sound immediately familiar but never derivative, inviting but never too polished; its shimmering arrangements hint at influences ranging from '50s girl groups and '60s folk rock to glam rock and '80s British indie. The album frequently sounds buoyant and hopeful, as seen in the intricate harmonies of "Our Lady of Stalingrad" and in Lisa Ronson's pitch-perfect vocals on "Love Theme." Other songs are understated in the sense of tragedy they evoke; songs of mourning like "God Save the Runaways" and "Sex with Ghosts" move at a tempo best suited for a funeral. EP holdover "Our Lady of Palermo" is similar in both style and substance, the loneliness of its "pilgrimage to where God's never been" accented by Ronson's carefully-paced vocals, a martial drumbeat and rising strings.

Dubbed a "requiem for young monsters," World's subject matter is almost always dark, primarily consisting of runaways, travelers, transients, musicians, monsters and dead horror film icons usually dealing with everyday sad shit. Themes of distance and mortality emerge in a vast geography of ghettos, grottoes, European landmarks and all points in between, with Michael Grace, Jr. and Darren Amadio's lyrics - precise lines like, "They buried her there in the garden/ Behind the refinery" - contrasting with Ronson's bright vocals while reinforcing the album's desolate landscapes. It's fitting that one of the album's characters walks "on the shadowy side of the street." So for now The World That Never Was remains an undiscovered masterpiece, and while numerous worthy albums went under the radar this year, it'd be difficult to find one better than this debut from the Secret History

Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964

Bob Dylan
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964
Rating: 4.7/5.0
Label: Columbia

It's practically a tradition that each new Bob Dylan Bootleg Series release will be accompanied by complaints from Dylan freaks (sorry, "aficionados"). Though Dylan Fandom's response to The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 has been largely positive, some predictable grousing about how some classic performances still haven't seen the official light of day and how Columbia over-emphasizes the musician's 1960's work at the expense of his later stuff has surfaced. A quick perusal of Dylan message boards - proceed with extreme caution - also reveals gripes about the release's sound quality, packaging and track order.

Such dissension is difficult to understand, though, as archival releases don't get any better than The Witmark Demos. They have neither the luster nor the mythology of Dylan and the Hawks 1966 or Rolling Thunder 1975/1976, but these demos document a key piece of the 1960's Dylan puzzle, finding the musician moving past his Guthrie-aping days yet still before the "thin, wild, mercury music" of his mid-1960s electric trilogy. In the tradition of Dylan boots the title here is only partly accurate, as this set contains demos for both the Leeds and Witmark publishing houses, a technicality of course and one that doesn't detract in the slightest from the brilliance of the record's songs. These recordings are immediate as we hear Dylan occasionally flub lines and offer various comments about these songs; some of them are mere fragments, but the majority are fully formed and sometimes contain alternate lyrics to what would eventually be included on record.

Though the demos include plenty of the socio-political songs usually associated with early Dylan - "Blowin' In the Wind," "Ballad of Hollis Brown," "Masters of War," "Oxford Town," "John Brown, " among many others - they nevertheless suggest that the accepted image of the young Dylan as primarily a topical songwriter isn't entirely accurate. Of course Dylan initially embraced, and unarguably advanced, this depiction, framing himself as a folkie devotee of both Guthrie and mysteriously nicknamed socially-righteous bluesmen that most people hadn't heard of; still, the demos are indicative of an artist whose lyrical scope already extended far beyond sometimes too-simplistic topical ballads. For example, the demos include all varieties of love songs; there are subtly dismissive ones like "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Boots of Spanish Leather;" nostalgic, mournful ones like "Bob Dylan's Dream;" and occasionally tender ones like "Girl From the North Country" and "Tomorrow Is a Long Time." Humor and tragedy exist in equal measure; the acerbic bite of "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" and the pure silliness of "I Shall Be Free" contrast with the personal dramas of "Seven Curses" and "Ballad For a Friend" as well as the global ones of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," all in a manner that belies Dylan's young age at the time of these recordings.

Any serious Dylan fan will have heard some of these songs in various incarnations already, either via the debut 1991 Bootleg Series release or the plainly titled Witmark Years boot. Among such completists there may be a tendency to approach these demos from a too-academic perspective, whether it's in terms of Dylan's debt to archetypal American folk themes or his lyrical evolution; indeed, the poetic intricacies revealed in "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Mama, You Been On My Mind" are still striking. Such approaches are valid but unnecessary, as this newest Bootleg Series is simply fun to listen to and a perfect snapshot of a young artist with a pile of amazing songs to his name. With any artist whose volume of quality unreleased output surpasses his officially sanctioned material, it's impossible to satisfy everyone as the vaults are purged, but The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 is an essential Bob Dylan release and every bit as captivating as much of his best work.

Elvis Costello: National Ransom

Elvis Costello
National Ransom
Rating: 3.8/5.0
Label: Hear Music


What is there to say about Elvis Costello that hasn't already been said? For over 30 years, critical wits have described him in various too-clever ways; he's been the Angry Young Man, Buddy Holly on Acid and the Bearded Bard, laughable depictions that may have made for good press but still say very little about the musician or his music. His discography has likewise made a mockery of such depictions; while Costello's earliest albums tentatively placed him as a post-punker whose folk tendencies were obscured by his aggressive vocal delivery and the Attractions' manic pace, his last several albums, particularly The Delivery Man and Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, have incorporated elements of jazz, country and Americana.

So it's a guess as to what side of Costello will dominate each new album; during the lead-up to listening to National Ransom, one of Spectrum Culture's writers jokingly asked if I thought it would be Rocker Costello or Wimpy-Crooner Costello. It's actually a bit of both, though the rocking isn't as hard as it could be and the crooning isn't all that wussy. Recorded quickly and including songs that have been part of Costello's recent live shows, Ransom was produced by frequent cohort and former Coward Brother T-Bone Burnett. Featuring contributions from backing bands the Imposters and the Sugarcanes, Marc Ribot, Buddy Miller, Leon Russell, Vince Gill and formerly estranged bassist Bruce Thomas (wait, never mind), the album might be Costello's most musically varied, as it genre-jumps like an ADD-addled kid.

It's a scattershot approach that mostly works well. The self-titled album opener and "Five Small Words" are classic Costello rock songs, though the equally up-tempo "The Spell That You Cast" sounds to me like a bad Brutal Youth outtake; as fun as the song is, it tends to feel every bit as slight as something like "Playboy to a Man" or "Luxembourg." There are hints of jazz in "Jimmie Standing in the Rain," a song that contains some of the album's best lines ("forgotten man/ Indifferent nation") and, with its references to "slow coaches rolling o'er the moor" and a cowboy singer "mild and bitter from tuberculosis," is presumably about Jimmie Rodgers. Steel guitar features prominently on "I Lost You," "That's Not the Part of Him You're Leaving" and "Dr. Watson, I Presume," a trio of solid songs that owe a debt to Americana/country every bit as much as Almost Blue did before them. Costello was always a folk singer of sorts at heart - a fact obscured by his pissed-off persona, surly disposition and infamous fixation with exacting revenge through his lyrics - so it's fitting that unadorned and simply-arranged songs like "All These Strangers" and "Bullets for the New-Born King" offer National Ransom's most enduring moments. An acoustic assassin's lament that consists of only Costello and acoustic guitar, "Bullets" interweaves history and geography and contains some of the album's most evocative imagery and will likely age better than some of the album's genre-specific tracks.

Like most Costello albums, the writing is exceptional, with characters like a stage-door Josephine, charlatans and princes, privateers and brigands, a double-agent girl and disgraced priest heading for some unnamed border flittering in and out of these songs. Costello's occasional bouts of verbosity sometimes rear their wordy heads, and shades of North unfortunately creep in on "You Hung the Moon," a song about a dead soldier that's ultimately wrecked by Costello's exaggeratedly theatrical vocals and strings that are laid on pretty thick, but these spots are rare. If National Ransom was a debut album from an indie band with a bizarre name we'd all say it lacks focus and lives too much in the past. But with Costello such absence of uniformity somehow works, and his latest album again confirms that he's simply an expert musician who damn well knows what he's doing, witty critical characterizations be damned.

Rediscover: The Dashboard Saviors: Kitty

Rediscover:
The Dashboard Saviors
Kitty
1992



The Dashboard Saviors released three studio albums in four years - 1992's Kitty, 1993's Spinnin On Down and 1995's Love Sorrow Hatred Madness - before disbanding. Not that many people outside of Athens, GA noticed. The band was met with commercial and critical indifference throughout their brief career; a feature write-up in Rolling Stone's "New Faces" section in December 1992 was the closest the group ever came to sucking at the mainstream teat, and time has done little enhance the band's legacy. Perhaps the supreme insult, Saviors vocalist Todd McBride is better known for his connection to Vic Chesnutt than for his work with his own band: he played with Chesnutt in the La Di Das and also asked the musician to write a song with the line that opens "Isadora Duncan" on Little.

Produced by Peter Buck, Kitty remains an overlooked masterwork, with scratchy, sometimes slightly polished country-rock songs featuring McBride's nasal, reedy vocals and a core group (Michael Gibson on guitar, Rob Veal on bass and John Crist on drums) that does balladry and hard rock equally well. Scattered throughout are contributions from Buck, Mike Mills, John Keane, David Blackmon and Tim White, with Chesnutt providing occasional backing vocals. Much of the album consists of character studies of life in the small-town South; indeed, the shadow of what Chesnutt once described as "that most famous Georgia college town" - or at least how we perceive small towns - looms large over the record.

Its songs are those of everyday small-scale misery where there is nothing romantic about rural life. One would be hard-pressed to find a character more pitiful than the nameless protagonist - a one-time, and one assumes, anonymous musician - of country weeper "A Trailer's a Trailer." Its desolate images - a swig of warm beer, a baby crying above the buzzing of a window fan, a broken-down shitbox Dodge in the yard (of course), a pawned guitar, his inability to correctly sing a song he knows by heart - are accented by fiddle and pedal steel and all convey a seemingly hopeless situation. What prevents the song from being just another clichéd, booze-soaked honky tune are its narrative details: a faded bumper sticker of a shark in sunglasses that deadpans "Ain't life hard;" a domestic fight after "The Cosby Show;" a cigarette lit on a hot plate. By the end of the song the man doesn't have much to show for himself other than some hard-learned wisdom: "A dead end's a dead end/ And a trailer's a trailer/ Even if it's double wide."

Several of Kitty's other characters similarly lead lives on the skids. Images of restlessness and boredom mixed with loneliness are frequent. "Tracy's Calendar" describes the archetypal sad-eyed female, this one apparently with a mental or physical illness, while the disconcertingly jaunty arrangement of "Been Meaning To Do" belies the desperation experienced by someone who wakes up to "another morning in sunshine hell" and can only pathetically "count your blessings and . . . come up short." This type of ennui also defines "Town," a somber ballad that examines how two polar opposites react to the confines of their hometown; delinquent Johnny lights up a Salvation Army box by making a Molotov cocktail from a "Boone's Farm bottle and an Aerosmith T-shirt and some gas from his daddy's car," while "daddy's perfect girl" Julie meets a man with a "greasy frown" and ends up with a ripped dress and "tears in her eyes/ Little bruises on her thighs." They beg for Jesus to get them the hell out; we never find out how their stories end, and we probably don't want to.

"If you think I'm being cynical/ Well yeah, you're probably right," McBride sings on "Cabaret College," and he's not joking. The title act of "Consummation" brings nothing but sadness and is reduced to a series of post-deed excuses - "You'll blame the wine and I'll blame the weather" - while on the combative "Dropping" he rails against a woman who's "dropping your trousers without any shame." Even the album's rare moments of humor are coated in such cynicism. The rollicking "Drivin' Blind" describes a woman who's either got the world by the balls or is cold as hell as she mocks the narrator as nothing more than a "nickel a half dozen" - dude sheepishly agrees - and is unmoved by a man begging for food. The satirical "The Coach's Wife" is driven by White's raucous barroom piano as McBride's ramshackle vocals talk about the title figure, an absolute souse who drinks "gin with champagne chasers" and dreams of a career in politics. Even the album's most tender moments - the childhood remembrances of "G.I. Joe" - are offset by the fact that those simple days exist only in memory. It's fitting that the album ends with the fire-and-brimstone, and probably shady, radio evangelist of "Brother Shiloh Collins."

Available on iTunes but a complete bitch to track down an original copy of, it's likely that for the near future not too many new listeners will come around to Kitty. It's worth the effort to locate a copy though, and of all the great lost Southern rock operas that have come out of Athens, few are better crafted and more deserving of recognition than Kitty.

Tired Pony: The Place We Ran From

Tired Pony
The Place We Ran From
Rating: 2.0/5.0
Label: Mom + Pop


There is an undeniable whiff of novelty to an Irish musician recording a country and Americana-influenced album; of course, among others from across the pond, an Englishman called Costello has previously done a similar thing and pretty competently at that. Gary Lightbody, best known as the frontman for Snow Patrol, is far less adept at convincingly invoking the spirit of these genres throughout Tired Pony's debut album, The Place We Ran From, a record that plays out like a sopping wet, watered down imitation of the music it claims as its inspiration. There's plenty of sincerity here - not to mention no small amount of admiration for country and Americana - but there's also very little to suggest that Place is anything more than a middling, and dully predictable, foray into America's musical past.

On paper, the album should be barn-stormin' and shit-hot; in addition to Lightbody, Tired Pony includes Snow Patrol collaborators Troy Stewart, Iain Archer and Garret "Jacknife" Lee, Richard Colburn (Belle and Sebastian), Scott McCaughey (of Minus 5 and R.E.M. 2.0) and Peter Buck. The album also boasts contributions from M. Ward, Zooey Deschanel and Editors' Tom Smith. But like so many other supergroup efforts, the whole isn't very good and the parts aren't much better. To be fair there are a few standout moments: Buck's guitar work is masterful; Deschanel's vocals on "Get on the Road" are so good that they sound as if Lightbody wrote the tune with her in mind; Ward provides an appropriately hazy guitar line to "Held in the Arms of Your Words," a soft ballad with a ridiculously nonsensical title; Smith's singing lends an obvious sense of gravity and guilt to "The Good Book," a song of closed-down bars, lonely nights and half-empty glasses of booze. But that's also as close as Lightbody gets to writing a memorable Americana song, though occasionally his lyrics are almost evocative enough to offset the excessively banal arrangements, particularly on "Northwestern Skies," "Dead American Writers" and "The Deepest Ocean There Is."

Though there is no questioning the participants' sincerity in this project and it's clearly not a lark, this same earnestness makes these songs feel painfully straight-laced and stilted. It's collaborative, sure, but the amount of teamwork involved is largely irrelevant when the results are so meager, as in Archer's "I Am a Landslide," which is both exceedingly delicate and more than just a wee bit saccharine. Despite Lightbody's self-stated goal of writing a "twisted love-letter to the States," there is very little here that suggests the result is anything other than another example of formulaic country-infused music.The Place We Ran From ends with several minutes of feedback squall via "Pieces," a much-too-late attempt to apply some sharpness to the album's mostly blunted edges. Lightbody deserves credit for moving away from the personal narratives he churns out with Snow Patrol, but that's of little use here, and Place simply skims along the surface of Americana without really channeling any of its dark, mysterious landscape.

Sufjan Stevens: The Age of Adz

Sufjan Stevens
The Age of Adz
Rating: 2.3/5.0
Label: Asthmatic Kitty

For many artists there eventually comes an album that, by sheer virtue of how different it is from that musician's most "representative" work, splits fans into two opposing camps: those who love it and those who loathe it. For Sufjan Stevens, The Age of Adz is likely to be that album. Listeners still pawing their copies of Michigan and Illinois and clinging to that image of Stevens the Banjo Folkie in Angel Wings are gonna be in for a shock, as the record trades in his acoustic eclecticism for an electronic one heavy on beats, reverb, drum machines, assorted artificial sounds and compressed, echoed or otherwise treated vocals. In short, it's tailor-made for howls of indignation from at least one segment of the musician's fans.

What then of the actual content of Adz, putting aside whatever credit - or indie fandom dissension - Stevens will receive in so drastically breaking from Illinois' template? Anyone paying attention to Stevens' previous work shouldn't be entirely surprised by the record, as debut LP A Sun Came as well as parts of the All Delighted People EP hinted at the type of sounds that Adz fully embraces. Ultimately the album is inconsistent: at times ambitious and inventive, but more frequently self-indulgent, overlong and coldly technical. Stevens' electro-tinkering occasionally succeeds, especially in the sparseness of opening track "Futile Devices," the aural explorations of "Too Much," the title track and "I Walked" and the vocal belligerence of "I Want To Be Well," which finds the singer doing his best Thom Yorke impression and spitting out obscenity-laced lines.

At the same time self-editing is apparently not in Stevens' vernacular, and many songs stretch out far longer (and with far too much dicking around) than plenty of sober minds will be able to endure. Indeed Stevens apparently never met a five-minute running time he didn't like on Adz; over half the album eclipses that mark, while the sonic meanderings of songs like "Get Real Get Right," "Vesuvius" and closing track "Impossible Soul," itself 25 minutes long, become increasingly cluttered with repeated listens. The sense of breathing space that Stevens' songs had in the past is missing here, but what's perhaps more frustrating is that nearly every song has brilliant components - a lilting melody or poetic lyric about faith or death, among other topics - that eventually are overpowered by the song's glitch-laden exteriors.

Electronic dabbling frequently has a way of making songs feel distant and hollow, and The Age of Adz is no exception, its thick layers of gadgetry preventing some of its songs from making any type of lyrical connection with the listener. There will of course be a tendency to dismiss all criticism of the album as curmudgeonly reactionary or as a sign of someone stuck in the Illinois-Michigan past, but this is nothing more than an easy out for anyone wishing to downplay its flaws. Certainly there's no questioning the musician's willingness to defy stylistic boundaries - plenty of veteran indie bands could learn a thing or two from Stevens - but Adz all too often fails to reign in its electronic excesses. The result is an album that is too heavy on the artificial and too light on anything precise to compliment the artist's musical wanderlust.

Revisit: Richard Thompson: Rumor and Sigh

Revisit:
Richard Thompson
Rumor and Sigh
1991

Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.

Any discussion of Rumor and Sigh invariably starts with "1952 Vincent Black Lightning," generally considered by fans and critics alike to be Richard Thompson's defining song. Set to a traditional English melody and built around a simple folk structure, it tells the story of James Adie - young career criminal, wildly romantic, surprisingly poetic - and Red Molly - the archetypal idealized female, this time with red hair and clad in black leather. As is so often the way in folk music, their relationship seems fated to end tragically, and of course it does. In quick succession Adie gives her a ring, probably stolen, gets himself mortally shotgunned in the chest during a robbery attempt and from his deathbed hallucinates that he sees "angels on Ariels in leather and chrome/ Swooping down from heaven to carry me home" - Heaven's admission requirements are rather lenient in this case. He then gives Molly his motorcycle keys - folk motif/symbol alert! - as his final, dying gesture. It's as close to perfect as a song can get.

But there is much more to Rumor and Sigh than just "1952 Vincent Black Lightning." It is possibly Thompson's most consistent album since 1982's Shoot Out the Lights. Throughout the album its characters externalize a sense of fatalism and foreboding as they find both their relationships and lives in general going to absolute shit. The first order of business for the freshly paroled ex-con in "I Feel So Good" is to "break somebody's heart tonight," as Thompson sneeringly sings. The situation is reversed in both "Why Must I Plead" and "I Misunderstood; in the latter song the female wears the guise of the flirtatious temptress as she mind fucks the living hell of some schmuck: "I thought she was saying good luck/ She was saying goodbye" he mutters in confusion. Similarly, "Keep Your Distance" imagines the principal actors in some failed love story meeting again by chance. Any thoughts of reconciliation are dashed immediately by the male with a sour remark that stands as one of Thompson's most incisive: "Don't grasp my hand and say 'fate has brought you here today'/ Oh fate is only fooling with us, friend."

Several of Thompson's most effectively humorous songs at least temporarily take this edge off and serve as a nice respite from all the doomed and otherwise dysfunctional relationships that litter the record. Rumor and Sigh actually opens with such a song: "Read About Love" takes sexual incompetence as its subject, adding in just a bit of misogyny. The poor fool narrator doesn't get any sex ed proper; instead, he reads about "love" in smut magazines and a book "written by a doctor with a German name." When he can't perform he knows who to blame, and it's not himself: "So why don't you moan and sigh?/ And why do you sit there and cry?/ I do everything I'm supposed to do/ If something's wrong, then it must be you." A somewhat slight song in Thompson's catalog, "Don't Sit on My Jimmy Shands" pays homage to Scottish accordion player Jimmy Shand as well as vinyl records as the musician alternates between pieces of nostalgia ("This one's the Beltona brand/ Finest label in the land/ They don't make them like that anymore") and some lighthearted - by Rumor and Sigh's standards at least - barbs about someone's girth and propensity for inebriation. The perverse or bloody events that transpire in the absurdist drama "Psycho Street" - a man beating off on a train, a wife murdered and dissolved in acid - are so over the top and its actors so stupid that it's impossible not to find the song darkly humorous.

Though Mitchell Froom tends to be treated like a human punching back for his production work on Thompson's albums - most infamously on Daring Adventures - the production here is clean and provides just the right amount of polish to Thompson's mostly dour material. Songs like "You Dream Too Much" and "Mother Knows Best" haven't held up over time, but the majority of the album has, and it's probably Thompson's best effort of the 1990s. It might be heresy to argue that it trumps Shoot Out the Lights, but like that masterpiece, it's an album built around crumbling relationships that sounds as relevant in this century as it did in the last one. "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" rightly casts a large shadow over both Rumor and Sigh and Thompson's entire career; still, that shouldn't be at the expense of the other remarkable songs included on this album.

Concert Review: The National - The Pageant, St. Louis, 9/30/10

In June of 2007 the National played the Duck Room here in St. Louis, a drafty, windowless, duck-themed basement at this city's beloved Blueberry Hill burger joint. With its austerely gray atmosphere, it could easily be used to stage a performance of Endgame and generally caters to four types of artists: current indie bands on the rise; current indie bands treading water at best; once-mighty bands on a slow, pitiable decline; and Chuck Berry. There was no doubt at the time that the National belonged in that first category. Boxer had recently been released and was beginning to generate Album of the Year buzz, and plenty of people were quickly discovering that Alligator actually wasn't the group's debut LP.

A few years and another remarkable album later, this time High Violet, the National are unarguably one of indie's leading bands, feted in The New York Times, blessed with the Michael Stipe seal of approval and commonly described as being on the cusp of "mainstream" success, whatever that term means in today's mostly radio-less world. Though there was some pre-show pissing and moaning from at least one guy - few things in life compare to being cornered in a bathroom by someone ranting about the band playing a mid-sized club like the Pageant instead of a smaller, more personal venue - such griping is by now expected; every indie band whose listenership increases significantly will always have some myopic fans nostalgic for poorer days long gone.

The venues may have gotten larger, but the band's live show has still managed to retain its intimate, visceral quality even as it has become more polished. Such was the case with the group's most recent St. Louis performance, as the band drew from every LP except the oft-overlooked self-titled debut in their nearly 100-minute set. After a stately opening to "Runaway," most of the songs that followed were louder and longer than their album versions. The two-man horn section of Kyle Resnick and Ben Lanz and multi-instrumentalist Padma Newsome boosted the sound considerably and complemented the Dessner/Devendorf brothers' playing, with "Mistaken for Strangers" (dedicated to some dude named Ron), "Baby, We'll Be Fine," "Slow Show," "The Geese of Beverly Road" and "Fake Empire" all closing with full-bodied instrumental sections. "Available" was given a harsh treatment appropriate for its subject matter, with Berninger of course screaming the closing lyrics over squalls of guitar noise, before the band segued into the closing verse of fellow Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers track "Cardinal Song;" Berninger also punctuated "Bloodbuzz Ohio," "Squalor Victoria" and "Abel" with more yelling, precariously swinging the microphone stand in the air on that Alligator track. Elsewhere there was humorous stage banter about the singer's newest nickname - Dick Jagger - and his wife being/not being a cannibal, a bit of palatable guitar-rock-god preening as one or both of the Dessners stepped out for a short guitar solo, Berninger wandering around the stage and a few classically gloomy National moments via "Sorrow" and "London."

The band's encore was brief - three songs - but thrillingly wild. After a faithful version of "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks" that featured Newsome on violin, the band played the expected "Mr. November" - with Berninger roaming far from the stage, climbing on the railing, probably kicking a few drinks over, ending up in the pit and generally covering all corners of the Pageant except its parking lot - and ended with a blistering version of "Terrible Love," the singer standing on the railing nearest to the pit and screaming as anonymous hands either pawed at him or, more civilly, made sure he didn't fall off. Sure such antics are at least partly orchestrated and similar acts of showmanship will probably happen in the next city the band plays, but it was still cool as hell.

This ability to connect with an audience is what makes the National's live show so captivating; like their albums, in concert the band is able to sincerely express the types of everyday highs and lows to which anyone can relate. No surprise then that the night's atmosphere, sometimes something of a wild card given the Pageant's cookie-cutter aesthetics, was subdued but not catatonic, with most of the crowd intent on listening to the songs and not talking through them, the occasional catcalls about what Berninger was drinking notwithstanding. It was as flawless of a performance as I've seen; there were no lulls, deadweight songs or mailed-in efforts, and the guys all played like they were a young band fighting damn hard for an audience and not a marquee act who had the crowd in its pocket from the onset. There's no telling how many folks from that 2007 Duck Room show were in attendance, but if any of them skipped the National's latest stop here with the conviction that a band isn't worth following once its members aren't setting up their own gear, it's their loss. Certainly it's a difficult task to exceed beyond-lofty expectations, but that's exactly what the National did at the Pageant on this night.

by Eric Dennis

Interview: Bill Callahan

I interview Bill Callahan here:

http://spectrumculture.com/2010/09/interview-bill-callahan.html

LouFest 2010

Another Spectrum Culture writer and I attended this year's LouFest in St. Louis.

Take a read and enjoy the pictures here:

http://spectrumculture.com/2010/09/loufest-2010.html

Various Artists: Welcome Home/Diggin' the Universe: A Woodsist Compilation

Various Artists
Welcome Home/Diggin' the Universe: A Woodsist Compilation
Rating: 3.5/5.0
Label: Woodsist


The people behind the Woodsist label hope you still have a Walkman (if you're old) or a record player (if you're really old) stashed away somewhere, as the limited release Welcome Home/Diggin' the Universe: A Woodsist Compilation is available only on cassette and vinyl. While vinyl remains almost uniformly revered - with numerous artists still releasing their albums on the big disc - the cassette's legacy is more ambiguous. In some ways cassettes were unarguably awful: the sound was frequently shitty, goddamn if the ribbon didn't always somehow get eaten by a hungry tape deck and there were no aesthetics to speak of, as album covers that looked glorious on vinyl were mercilessly shrunk down to fit the cassette's rectangular shape.

But cassettes made that most sacred of musical artifacts - the mixtape - possible, and for this reason alone, they deserve some respect and a bit of wistful nostalgia. For those of us of a certain age, it didn't get much better than spending hours compiling that perfect batch of songs, either for personal use or for someone else. Relationships could be made or broken from the content of such a cassette mixtape. It was a serious endeavor, man, and it took serious effort; we didn't have the luxury of letting Amazon or iTunes Genius make recommendations for us. And we walked to school in the snow uphill both ways.

Welcome Home/Diggin' the Universe displays all the best traits of such cassette tapes, with 12 of its 13 songs exclusive to this compilation and almost every last one of them showing that the state of modern indie is still pretty damn good, for one label at least. The songs included here don't sound like oddities, one-offs or leftover scraps, not even the curious Grateful Dead and Cure cover songs from City Center and Skygreen Leopards, respectively. For the most part, the songs adhere to the lo-fi/punk-lite template with which Woodsist is most frequently associated, an approach that works especially well on Nuggets-recalling garage rock tracks like Run DMT's "Richard," White Fence's "The Love Between," the Fresh & Only's "Heel.Toe" and Nodzz's "Old Clothes." There are also some worthy anomalies: Alex Bleeker's "Gettin By" features an unadorned guitar jangle and breezy country-inflected vocals, while Ducktails closes the album with the brief acoustic instrumental "Sun Out My Window." As with any compilation, a few songs aren't quite up to par - the echoed vocals on Moon Duo's "A Little Way Different" quickly become tedious, while the vocals on Cause Co-Motion!'s "Over You" suggest the ghost of Joey Ramone was channeled for this song - but it's easy enough to forgive a few clunkers when so much good stuff surrounds them.

Welcome Home/Diggin' the Universe starts with "I'm Not Gone" by Woods, label founder Jeremy Earl's band. Certainly ownership has its privileges, but regardless, it's a fittingly auspicious start to a set of tunes that rarely disappoints. Though this release isn't on the same level as gold standards like Nuggets or even the recent Dark Was the Night - and there are some notable exclusions, most obviously Wavves and Real Estate - it serves as validation for Woodsist as a label and the solid talent roster it has built up. It also just might make some listeners long for those olden days when cassettes were like currency for many of us.

Blue Giant: Blue Giant

Blue Giant
Blue Giant
Rating: 2.5/5.0
Label: Vanguard Records

Blue Giant is a lot like a fairly respectable record store that plays pretty decent music that can be tolerated for about 30 minutes, before the charm of hearing songs that all sound innocuously familiar and ingrained in the past begin to grate on the nerves. Though this is a debut full-length release, it's not the work of beginners, as the band was founded by Anita and Kevin Robinson (Viva Voce) and Seth Lorinczi (the Golden Bears), with ex-members Chris Funk (the Decemberists) and Evan Railton (Swords), a solid pedigree that makes Blue Giant's underwhelming execution all the more surprising. With a few notable exceptions, the album feels like five musicians doing little more than mimicking the folk, country, bluegrass and 1970s classic rock - and all the negative connotations that last genre carries with it - to which the album is indebted.

Those few exceptions show the album could have fared much better. Anita Robinson sings a couple genuine weepers that are every bit as countrified as Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn or even Lucinda Williams; on "Lonely Girl," the singer tells the familiar story of a woman "thinking about that lucky break" that just might get her the hell out of her podunk, hickburg hometown. "Gone for Good," a duet sung by Kevin Robinson and guest musician Corin Tucker (Sleater-Kinney)- and not a Shins cover- is accented by twangy pedal steel guitar and a goin'-down-that-old-dusty-road vibe. A few songs turn up the volume and likewise succeed, particularly the banjo and harmonica-fueled "Blue Sunshine" - a tune apparently about a guy whose wife smacks him around - as well as "Clean the Clock," which starts the album off on a rollicking country rock note that most of what follows can't quite match.

The album tends to play out like a retread of the past a little too much though, both in sound and the cast of characters that miserably stumble across its canvas. There is a fair amount of over-indulgence in slight tracks like "Run Rabbit Run," "Wesley" and "The Game," all of which are ruined by electric guitar excess and inane lyrics like, "So we've been livin'/ But we are hardly alive/ We've been there for years/ And we have never arrived." "The Void Above the Sky" is framed as a classic country song but instead unravels like a bastard child of "Ghost Riders in the Sky" and the "Rawhide" theme song. Quintessential sad-sack figures seem to have been forcibly removed from the hard-luck American music playbook and dropped smack into the middle of the album, whether it's the poor wounded-in-love schmuck of "Target Heart" or the morose brooders of "When Will the Sun Shine?" and "Go On."

The lyrics don't help the cause either; though the Robinsons have a flair for an incisive turn of phrase, more often these lines veer heavily toward the banal and clichéd. Although these lyrics are never cluttered or flowery, they aren't exactly mind-blowing or original either: a listener can hear simplistic aphorisms like, "Your head is hot/ And your heart is cold/ The damage done is gonna take its toll" and "When it's over/ It's over" almost anywhere these days.

Five of the songs from Blue Giant previously appeared on the Target Heart EP, and though such recycling is understandable if the content is good enough to warrant it, that's not the case here. It's also not possible to write off the album as a handful of musicians just messing around, as its songs carry with them a certain degree of seriousness. Blue Giant is serviceable as a blend of American roots music, but very little distinguishes it from other records that mine that same territory. Listeners have heard this type of stuff before, and this album doesn't do much to suggest they need to hear it again.

Hamper McBee: The Good Old-Fashioned Way

Hamper McBee

The Good Old-Fashioned Way

Rating: 3.5/5.0

Label: Drag City



and while you're at it, why not go check out the Lambchop Playlist at spectrum culture? (www.spectrumculture.com)




According to Tennessee legend and his own self-mythologizing, at various points in life, Hamper McBee was a moonshiner, army man and carnival barker. He also reportedly worked as a mule driver, timber cutter and construction man. He drank a little bit and then drank a whole lot more, spoke in a down-home Southern drawl and had the type of facial hair that would make Franz Nicolay jealous. He was an amateur musician and consummate yarn-spinner whose rough edges perfectly captured the spirit and tone of the songs he'd play. He could have been a character from a Tom Waits song.

McBee's reputation as both an irreverent lyricist and an eccentric interpreter of songs has afforded him a modest cult following in the years following his death. That reputation is primarily tied to 1978's Raw Mash: Songs & Stories of Hamper McBee, an impossible-to-find and altogether-too-brief glimpse of the McBee mystique. That album has now been repackaged with a dozen or so previously unreleased tracks as The Good Old-Fashioned Way, which pretty much contains as much McBee as anyone could ever possibly need or - for those who aren't on board - want. It's a niche item to be sure, but for listeners who fancy themselves students of American, English or Irish folk music or who simply need another peculiar artist to complement their Baby Gramps, Daniel Johnston and Vic Chesnutt records, this reissue should suffice.

Among the many singers who have tackled traditional folk ballads, McBee's approach was unarguably unique; he sang unaccompanied by any instrumentation, his weathered voice sounding as dusty and boozy as anything you'd find on a Harry Smith anthology. None of the songs McBee covers on Way are particularly obscure - McBee favors standards like "Black Jack Davy," "Streets of Laredo," Jack of Diamonds," "John Hardy" and "Knoxville Girl" - but stripped of any instrumentation and propelled by McBee's ragged voice they are undeniably powerful and show just why there's nothing quite like these bizarre songs. The album closes with a previously unreleased version of "Dark as a Dungeon" - that famous miner's lament that has been covered by the likes of giants like Dylan, Cash, Louvin and Nelson - with McBee's brief version stripped to the bone and evoking the song's desperation and fatalism in a way those masters never quite did.

This sincerity and obvious appreciation for the past sits uneasily alongside McBee's absolute lack of political correctness or basic decorum. While McBee originals like "Jasper Jail" and "Wauhatchie Yards" fall neatly within folk's common motif of downtrodden, hard-luck protagonists, elsewhere McBee celebrates folk music's vulgar side. It's not quite Nick Cave absolutely obliterating the Stackalee ballad, but a few inclusions come close. He clearly gets a kick out of the crude "Sally Make Water" and the even cruder title song, and also offers a "damn limey" version of "Cabbage Head," complete with a cockney accent and no attempt at subtlety ("When I came home the other night drunk as I could be/ There's was a thing in your old thing where my old thing should be"). This blue material is augmented by several of the musician's profanity-laced monologues, where he talks about his frequent bouts of public drunkenness, how he'd swindle lovestruck boys out of their money when he worked in the carnival, what it's like to guzzle still mash and why he's glad he's an Episcopalian ("they believe in drinkin,' and hell I do too"). It's the type of stuff you don't talk about in polite company, but one gets the impression that McBee never really gave a damn about polite company.

Charles Wolfe's liner notes from the 1978 album are reprinted and the package's overall aesthetics are solid; for those wired a certain way, The Good Old-Fashioned Way is a music collector's dream, as it combines the intimacy of a home recording with the occasional coarseness of a treasured bootleg. This album is not for those who offend easily, and, coupled with an abrasive personality that some listeners could find grating, it's hard to imagine McBee appealing to a broad audience or getting much widespread attention. Still, I suppose stranger things in music have happened, and it doesn't get much stranger -and, at times at least, better - than Hamper McBee.