Various Artists: Classic Sounds of New Orleans

Various Artists
Classic Sounds of New Orleans
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Label: Smithsonian Folkways


Depending on a listener's opinion of old-time jazz and blues, Classic Sounds of New Orleans will either be tediously inaccessible or a small but essential piece in that big puzzle of America's musical past. It focuses on a single region's musical heritage for a relatively brief period, primarily from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, though many of its songs date much further back. Some of the tracks have dodgy sound quality - lo-fi years before bands deliberately tried to sound like they were recording from the depths of a flushing toilet - and don't necessarily lend themselves to a lifetime of repeated listening. Still other inclusions, like a shoeshine boy singing "Hambone" in the French Quarter, street musician Freddie L. Small providing a harmonica-only version of a jazz standard, street vendor Dora Bliggen shouting about blackberries and Baby Dodds simply drumming for a couple minutes, seem best served in a classroom setting or for gravely serious discussion among that bearded professorial set for whom Moses Asch remains a patron saint.

But the album is also audio archiving at its finest, again confirming Smithsonian Folkways' standing as one of the most trustworthy record labels in terms of musical preservation. Its packaging is stellar, if anyone cares about that type of stuff anymore, while the release's overall aesthetics are faithful to the styles and sounds of the New Orleans jazz and blues represented here. Its front cover is a reprint of Doc Paulin's Marching Band and the back cover is that of The First Kid Clayton Session; between those covers, period photos of musicians with nicknames like "Snooks" Eaglin and "Wolfman" Washington help put the listener in a Crescent City mindset. The liner notes written by Coppin State professor Robert H. Cataliotti contain background information about the origins of these recordings as well as a history of each track, are richly detailed and examine these songs from the perspective of how they fit into both African American culture and New Orleans folklore.

Classic Sounds should not be dismissed as purely a specialist's release or as something only to be studied with detachment. The bulk of the album is thoroughly enjoyable, especially in moments that capture New Orleans' buoyant and jubilant spirit, like the jazzy bounce of the Eureka Brass Band's "Just a Little While to Stay Here," the ragtime piano medley of H.J. Boiusseau's versions of "Take Your Big Leg Off Me/Easy Rider/Mama Don't 'Low No Music Playing Here" and the wildly mad horns and vocals Jimmy "Kid" Clayton and his band bring to "Jimmy's Blues" and "Corrine, Corrina." Other songs are far less joyous and pack an emotional wallop like only the best blues can, especially Doc Paulin's rendition of the spiritual funeral procession song "We Shall Walk Through the Streets of the City," the murder fantasy of "Careless Love ("I'll dig your grave/ I'll dig it with a silver spade") and the beware-of-stones-that-you-throw sentiment that Roosevelt Sykes brings to "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone." With its mournful vocals and simple guitar melody, Eaglin's interpretation of "Saint James Infirmary" also ranks as one of the album's more harrowing tracks, while Sister Dora Alexander's "Times Done Changed" expresses a dread for the present and a perhaps naive nostalgia for days long gone that could apply to nearly any generation.

In any collection like Classic Sounds of New Orleans, there will inevitably be some notable exclusions - "James Alley Blues" immediately comes to mind - but it's impossible to summarize an entire city's musical history on a single disc. Though all of the songs here have been previously released, they come from impossible-to-find albums and the broad overview that Classic Sounds provides is timely and welcome. Its appeal to a mass audience may be limited, and it's not an album that can easily be listened to start-to-finish, but it almost perfectly documents the key characteristics of New Orleans' diverse musical personality.

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.

Alasdair Roberts & Friends: Too Long In This Condition

Alasdair Roberts & Friends
Too Long In This Condition
Rating: 2.5/5.0
Label: Drag City



If ever there was a voice ready-made for singing folk ballads, it's Alasdair Roberts.' Roberts sings in a distinctly Scottish brogue; his voice sounds like it could well be from another musical era, one where a rose and a brier grow from young William and Barbara Allen's gravestones, criminals are hung from gibbets and the hair of a drowned girl is used for the strings of a fiddle that magically tells how her sister killed her. No Earthly Man (2005), a collection of traditional British and death ballads, was a natural fit for the musician, evoking those mystical and mysterious bygone days, even if the manner in which its songs were arranged squarely marked him as a contemporary folk singer.

All of which should make Too Long In This Condition - another collection of quaint old songs, plus one written by the musician's father - a brilliant release. Roberts is clearly comfortable with performing traditional music, as several of the songs included here have been part of his live shows in recent years, but familiarity and earnestness can have their drawbacks, and despite a mix of revered standards like "Barbara Allen" and "The Golden Vanity," as well as a few delightfully obscure inclusions like "Long Lankin," Too Long too often feels boring, mostly humorless and overly reverential. The versions of "Little Sir Hugh" and "The Lover's Ghost" in particular have all the characteristics of rotting museum pieces kept under glass; both songs are fairly cumbersome and plodding, lacking any real sense of vitality. Other songs are performed so goddamn seriously that they evoke images of coffeehouse folksingers the world over, with "What Put the Blood on Your Right Shoulder?" and "The Burning of Auchindoun" absolutely reeking of stone-faced and coldly sober sincerity. Roberts and his backing band treat these songs like sacred hymns, but this approach only presents a frustratingly reductionist view of these tunes.

The album does have its merits, though any real flashes of brilliance are rare. Too Long begins magnificently, as its first four songs - "The Daemon Lover," "Young Emily," "Long Lankin" and "The Two Sisters" - manage to sound ingrained in the past but also relevant for this decade. The album ends nicely as well: though the story that unravels in "Barbara Allen" can be construed as too melodramatic by modern listeners - who dies of a broken heart these days? - Roberts' version masterfully captures that song's ambiguity toward both William and the title character, both of whom are impetuous, tragic and maybe just a little bit stupid. The album also includes detailed liner notes about each song's provenance, as well as a bibliography/historiography of sorts, a handy guide for anyone interested in tracking down other versions of the songs included here.

It's no easy feat covering such songs that contain their own unique symbolism and mythology, as well as a propensity for fair maidens, bonnie lasses and the phrase "but for the love of thee." Roberts gives it his best effort on Too Long In This Condition but the results are scattershot and inconsistent. It's a nice enough release, but for someone as well-versed in these strange little tales as Roberts, expectations run high. More often than not those expectations aren't met, regardless of however well-suited the musician is for this content.

Perfume Genius: Learning

Perfume Genius
Learning
Rating: 3.5/5.0
Label: Matador


A reviewer can really feel like a prick for criticizing songs that are apparently as personal as those on Perfume Genius' debut LP, Learning. The man behind the band name is Mike Hadreas, whose hard-life biographical back story has already made the rounds in the indie press almost to the point where it's difficult to discern that dividing line between truth and clever PR. Though knowledge of Hadreas' background unarguably gives the album an added gravity and Learning has been hailed as an instant classic by some media members, such praise seems just a tad bit excessive. It's an affecting mood record whose themes of death, isolation and - just maybe - redemption will strike a chord with countless listeners, but it's weakened by a too-uniform sound and a few cumbersome individual tracks that detract from the album as a whole.

In photos, Hadreas appears gaunt, frail and bruised, which is also a fitting way to describe Learning's sound. Its 10 songs are only roughly sketched out and most often consist of lo-fi piano, organ and synthesizer, often in a minor key and held together by Hadreas' thin vocals. The album's stark sound is that of a man struggling to deal with some serious shit and that comes through in the songs; starting with the opening title track and continuing throughout, Hadreas sings like he's too weak to get the words out. He usually makes it though, offering listeners loaded-gun lines like "No one will hear all your crying/ Until you take your last breath." The album maintains this funereal tone for the bulk of its nearly 30 minutes, with only closing song "Never Did" suggesting even the faintest hint of acceptance or comfort.

Many of the album's primary concerns are familial, and references to fathers, mothers and sisters can be found in nearly every song. The recurring figure of Mary is encouraged to write to her brother "every night until he recovers," while the central image of "When" is that a woman holding her daughter in her arms. "Lookout, Lookout" plays out like a particularly dismissive elegy for someone who's presumably dead, as Hadreas says, "He will not be missed/ He didn't have a family to begin with." The portrait of the suicidal jumper and title character that emerges in "Mr. Petersen" - that of an older man who gives the narrator a Joy Division tape and lets him smoke weed in his truck "if I could convince him I loved him enough," as the narrator remembers - is ambiguous and can either be charitably viewed as paternalistic or something far more perverse.

Learning falters on occasion though, especially when Hadreas strays from the album's emphasis on minimalist arrangements and mostly discernible vocals. The hymn-like drone of "Gay Angels," as well as the submerged vocals of "No Problem" and "Perry," are atypical and distracting; for all of its lo-fi qualities, the album has all the markings of a traditional singer-songwriter release, where these songs only succeed when their content connects with the listener. These few flaws are enough to make Learning far less than the masterpiece it's been described as, but it is undoubtedly a disarming, introspective release filled with the types of raw emotions we usually keep to ourselves. Mike Hadreas makes these traumas public, giving us a glimpse into one man's struggles that aren't exactly pleasant to hear about but are also impossible to look away from.

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.

Playlist: Lambchop

Spectrum Culture (www.spectrumculture.com) is running a feature called Playlist, where we pick the "best" song from each of the band's album and write about it. Audio is also included. Go check it out. Here are my contributions:

"Moody Fucker" from Nine/Moody Fucker 7" (1993)

There are fuckers all over the Lambchop catalog, whether it's the little fuckers of "Smuckers" or in this case, the moody fucker from the song of the same name. And Tools in the Dryer is a fucker in its own right: consisting of various B-sides, remixes, live songs, demos and other curiosities from 1987 to 2000, the album is a strong contender for the band's least essential album (yes, even more so than Co-Lab). Indeed, picking a best song from this one was difficult, as much of Tools hasn't aged particularly well. That might sound like an out-of-place comment for a feature whose purpose is to celebrate a band's catalog, but Tools is for diehard fans only. And not too many of them, I'd argue.

So the nod goes to "Moody Fucker," though the band's cover of Vic Chesnutt's "Miss Prissy" runs a close second. Despite its lullaby-worthy arrangement and smoky horns, the song is anything but soothing. Wagner's unapologetically blunt lyrics serve the song well, as lines like "I don't want to cry no more/ How 'bout you" and "Now I'm pounding on the brink/ To be a moody fucker" can be read as mocking, insulting or just maybe a little bit remorseful. It also doesn't succumb to the excess of the lounge-music style that the band has occasionally embraced too affectionately throughout their albums. "Moody Fucker" is a diamond mixed in among a pile of shit, to be sure, but with any band as prolific as Lambchop, that type of thing is probably inevitable but also entirely forgivable.


"All Smiles and Mariachi" from How I Quit Smoking (1996)
What's exactly going on in "All Smiles and Mariachi?" Hell if I know, and Kurt Wagner's not saying either, as the vocalist over the years has revealed details about his songs only sparingly. Whatever its chain of events, the narrator clearly isn't enjoying his present situation, as he tunes his dinner companion out for over 20 minutes, spending the majority of his time, in a line that never ceases to make me chuckle, "Nodding and eating most of the chips." The narrator also drops something off at a house (who the hell knows what), scores donuts afterwards in a fit of euphoria and is happy to find his "services no longer required," whatever those were. It's like listening to a story from a drunkard or small child, only this is a story that never grows stale.

I might have boycotted this playlist - or at least made life hell for Spectrum Culture's editor-in-chief - had "All Smiles and Mariachi" not made the cut. Along with "Suzieju" and, in a pinch, "We Never Argue," it's one of the defining tracks on How I Quit Smoking, the band's 1996 sophomore and, arguably, best album. It contains everything great about early Lambchop: a skewed instrumental take on country music, quirky humor and abstract lyrics that could be read as poetic gibberish, deeply philosophical or maybe a little bit of both. Wagner's cadence and pacing are flawless, while the horns that close the song give it some added Mexicali flavor. All these pieces add up to a song that, while mostly incomprehensible, encapsulates why so many fans consider How I Quit Smoking the band's first masterpiece.


"The Gettysburg Address" from Treasure Chest of the Enemy (2002)
It's worth remembering that Abraham Lincoln reportedly considered his Gettysburg address a failure and was prone to bouts of intense introspection throughout his life. It's a character trait the protagonist of "Gettysburg Address" would likely appreciate. Appearing first on the tour-only CD-R Treasure Chest of the Enemy and again on 2006's odds-and-ends collection The Decline of Country and Western Civilization, Pt. 2, "Gettysburg Address" is defined by similar strands of self-doubt and brooding. Whatever historical parallels a listener might try to find here, the song works just as well on a contemporary level, as Wagner provides the type of little lyrical details - hacked-up phlegm, full ashtrays and a sad-sack guy taking out the trash and unable to keep the days straight - that are the hallmarks of a master storyteller.

Built around an opening guitar and piano arrangement and a middle section that adds pedal steel and strings, the song also features some of Wagner's most assured and clearly enunciated vocals. Anyone who complains that all Wagner does is croak and mumble should listen to this one, as his singing here is confident, especially in the song's last verse. "Gettysburg Address" can be read in various ways, whether as a song rooted in American history, a song about the creative process and how a work of art is viewed by its author vs. the public or just as a simple lament about someone's more desperate moments when one's flaws are magnified and the personal becomes almost unbearably public.

Interview with Cloud Speakers

Recently I was interviewed by music aggregator site www.cloudspeakers.com. Check out the link below:



http://blog.cloudspeakers.com/2010/06/interview-with-eric-dennis-spectrum-culture/

John Cunningham: 1998-2002

check out the real deal at spectrumculture.com.

John Cunningham

1998-2002

Rating: 4.0/5.0

Label: Ashmont


Few artists who work under the auspices of a label can rightly claim to toil in anonymity in this ultra-information age. Although some musicians remain unknown for a reason - they're excruciatingly awful - it's now far easier to at least find an audience, with a little bit of critical buzz and blogosphere hyperbole sometimes enough to turn a bedroom-tapes troubadour into a star (by indie standards, at least). Those quaint days of finding a good band that very few other people have actually heard of are increasingly becoming a thing of the past.

But music webzines and a seemingly infinite number of blogs haven't quite managed to eliminate the concept of the obscure artist entirely. Such is the case with John Cunningham, a British musician whom since 1989 has released a number of critically-celebrated albums that have been commercially ignored in both his homeland and in the United States. Cunningham sings in a voice that falls somewhere between Robert Wyatt and 1990s-period Elvis Costello and has an ability to capture the types of narrative details that make a song meaningful. He supports this voice with a baroque/chamber-pop style that is also sprinkled with elements of jazz and classical music, acknowledging the music that influenced him while also steering it in unpredictable directions. Such qualities usually make listeners take notice, yet for whatever reason notoriety has eluded the musician. It would be an exaggeration to say that Cunningham has a cult following in this country.

Here's hoping 1998-2002 corrects that. This compilation collects the musician's two strongest and most representative albums - Homeless House and Happy-Go-Unlucky - along with one bonus track onto a single disc, providing a perfect snapshot of Cunningham's music at its peak. Homeless House is a masterpiece, containing eight melodic songs of plainly-sung sadness that look to the past with a mixture of regret and disappointment and are immediately accessible and altogether absorbing. Its songs are mood pieces at their most expressive, leaning heavily towards the melancholic and mournful. These moods reveal themselves in a number of ways, whether it's in the acoustic guitar strums that open both "Public Information Song" and "Imitation Time," in the swaying horns and keyboards throughout the record or in how Cunningham delivers heavy lines - "Memories fade like rainfall after snow," "The frozen sky breaks at the edges," "Summertime was never mine" - with an unadorned clarity that gives his lyrics their edge.

If Happy-Go-Unlucky isn't as mesmerizing, it's only by a small margin. Far more ornate than Homeless House, it sporadically feels overly indebted to groups like the Beatles and Fairport Convention and consequently doesn't sound as unique or timeless as the masterwork that preceded it. Its differences from Homeless House are nevertheless striking, especially in the way Cunningham enunciates more clearly and how the songs more consistently rely on horns and organ as their backbone. It's also a brighter and at times more optimistic record, though that sound is deceptive, as the sentiments of "Losing Myself Too," "Way to Go" and "Take Your Time" sharply contrast with their saturated pop arrangements. It's a good album whose shimmer and spark complement Cunningham's voice well; its main sin is that it followed Cunningham's most focused and expertly executed work.

Occasionally even an innovative artist like John Cunningham slips through the commercial cracks, even at a modest indie level. 1998-2002 may or may not bring the musician the stateside recognition that has thus far missed him, but it does at least make his two best albums readily available to anyone interested in hearing them. Those who are already familiar with Cunningham's music know what makes Homeless House and Happy-Go-Unlucky so endearing: both are stellar efforts that pack an emotional punch and that deserve to be heard, regardless of how they've been criminally overlooked in the past.

Deer Tick: The Black Dirt Sessions

all this and more at spectrum culture.




John McCauley III's voice might alienate as many listeners as it draws in. A nasal, gutturally jagged thing that's scratchier than sandpaper and about as smooth as room temperature Natty Light, it's a textbook definition of an acquired musical taste. Anyone who's heard previous Deer Tick albums War Elephant and Born on Flag Day can attest to the uniqueness of McCauley's dusty, Americana-ready voice, as the songs from both albums either succeeded or failed based on whether the singer's vocals could carry them. Similarly, on The Black Dirt Sessions, the Deer Tick leader's voice doesn't caress songs; instead, it attacks them with very little subtlety and with little regard for technical proficiency. And with- like those first two albums- mixed results.

Such roughness sometimes complements McCauley's strand of alt-country and indie rock well on Black Dirt, making what might otherwise sound like an unremarkably safe and backwards-looking album worthy of attention. McCauley's vocals are at their most expressive on tracks like the elegiac piano ballads "Goodbye, Dear Friend" and "Christ Jesus," as well as "Twenty Miles," "The Sad Sun" and "When She Comes Home," all of which are sung with an obvious earnestness and again address McCauley's recurring preoccupation with distance, loneliness and mortality. While McCauley's singing is still the dominant aspect of Black Dirt, the lyrics are more insightful and less overtly monochromatic than those of both War Elephant and Born on Flag Day. McCauley's best lines - "raindrops like bullets on my fragile skin," "I built a kingdom on second chances" - add some complexity and ambiguity to what is, like too many of the genres that inform Black Dirt, largely a lyrically unambiguous release.

But McCauley's unconventional voice and a few great lines aren't enough to offset the album's flaws. The singer's gruffly energetic vocal approach kills a few songs; "Hand In My Hand" and "I Will Not Be Myself" are beaten into vocal submission, with McCauley absolutely obliterating the sonic textures the arrangements try to provide. Other songs, most noticeably album opener "Choir of Angels," "Blood Moon" and "Mange" - the last of which comes complete with a heinous shredding guitar debacle that mercilessly lasts far too long - lock into a similar mid-tempo pace that makes them repetitive and dull. At around 45 minutes, Black Dirt isn't particularly overlong, yet by its second half it starts to feel oppressively so, and certainly far longer than its actual running time.

For John McCauley, Black Dirt marks another respectable release, but it's impossible to shake that pesky feeling that we've heard most of it already, both in his previous Deer Tick albums as well as in the genres from which he now appears to be another in a long line of descendants. There's no shame in a musician playing to his strengths, and clearly three records and a couple of EPs into his career, McCauley knows what suits him best. That doesn't make for mesmerizing listening though, and much of Black Dirt substitutes convention and tradition for where even the smallest touch of risk-taking would count for quite a lot.

Villagers: Becoming a Jackal

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It's difficult to comfortably describe Becoming a Jackal. The album isn't particularly experimental but also doesn't sound like a retread of the singer-songwriter folk and full-band indie rock it recalls. Its production is clean, its arrangements precise and its vocals entirely audible, but its songs aren't likely to ever stumble their way onto commercial mainstream radio. It neither dwells in perpetual darkness nor bullshits that every little thing's gonna be alright. It whimpers as much as it barks and rumbles as much as whispers.

Villagers is fronted by Conor O'Brien, an Irish dude whose profile overseas has been steadily increasing thanks to a well-received album from previous band The Immediate as well as his solo Hollow Kind EP. Across the pond, overwhelmingly positive articles about the musician have made the rounds, with enamored critics euphorically comparing O'Brien to Conor Oberst (close), Elliott Smith (closer), Leonard Cohen (way off) and U2 (way, way off). Such praise is well-founded even if some of these comparisons are not, as Becoming a Jackal is one of 2010's best debut albums and an example of a record that works almost flawlessly from start to finish.

Jackal is defined by a remarkable consistency; written, co-produced and performed by O'Brien with the exception of strings and French horn, its songs sound like integral components of a unified whole, instead of 11 individual songs that just happen to live under one roof. This isn't to say that the songs feel overly similar; they don't, as each varies in both mood and execution. O'Brien interweaves guitar, strings, horns, keyboards and various other instruments throughout, with each song carrying its own distinct tone and pace, whether its in the gothic vision of "I Saw the Dead," the harrowing travelogue of "Home," the piss-off farewell of "Set the Tigers Free" or the nihilistic whirls of "That Day." In "Twenty-Seven Strangers," O'Brien even somehow manages to elevate an acoustic narrative about an exceptionally awful public transportation experience into a statement about life at its most repetitively mundane and our own inevitable worldly demise. With lo-fi becoming increasingly obnoxious as countless bands use technology to deliberately make their vocals unintelligible and their instruments more distorted than a Dylan and the Band Basement Tape - the musical equivalent of buying designer clothing that makes the wearer look like a Bowery bum - Jackal's bright production and emphasis on lyrical clarity come as a welcome relief.

O'Brien's vocals vary from song to song to good effect. On "The Meaning of the Ritual" and "To be Counted Among Men" he sings in a timidly fragile voice that meshes with the songs' sparse arrangements. His vocals seem to almost float on the air on "The Pact (I'll Be Your Fever)," but take on sinister undertones on the perilous "Ship of Promises." And then there's "Pieces;" perhaps the album's most enveloping track, it begins with a quivering falsetto and ends with O'Brien howling as strings rise and fall as the song unravels. The singer's vocals manage to hold together somewhat abstract songs that address epic topics - childhood, the past, memories, death and, of course, love - without ever becoming too fatalistic. A conflicting mixture of sincerity and disingenuousness worthy of Will Sheff offers some humor, with O'Brien reeling off earnestly poetic lines like, "True love feeds on absences/ Like pleasure feeds on pain" all while cautioning that he's "selling you my fears" and that he's just "spitting words/ But there's no meaning."

It's an artist's deceit though; there are meanings on Becoming a Jackal, lots of them, and they unfold in the simplest of ways, whether it's in the way O'Brien sings a phrase like "homely sense of disarray" or in how the arrangements emphasize each song's content. Jackal is reminiscent of numerous genres without sounding exactly like any of them; it's impossible to casually write it off as folk-pop or indie-pop or whatever else. All the usual critical clichés apply to O'Brien's record - phrases like "it warrants repeated listens" and "it reveals itself gradually" - and of course don't do justice to just how damn good this debut album truly is. Rare is the debut album that sounds like the work of an artist who's already mastered his craft, but Becoming a Jackal is exactly that.

Tame Impala: Innerspeaker

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Combine three musicians from the hinterlands of Perth with a mixing job from Flaming Lips cohort Dave Fridmann and you get Innerspeaker, a guitar-drenched, modern psychedelic album that is masterfully crafted and magnificently performed. It is also agonizingly dull, locking to an monotonously repetitive pattern and exhibiting vocals that too often feel incidental at best and irrelevant at worst. The debut full-length from Australian band Tame Impala, Innerspeaker is unarguably an audiophile's type of record and one whose techniques and apparent influences invite study and discovery. But as clichéd as this might sound, there's no heart here; the album emphasizes technical brilliance but coats that brilliance in a clinical and cold exterior that absolutely deadens whatever impact the songs might have had.

In their best moments Tame Impala find ways to incorporate a lot of the sounds your parents got high to without it feeling like thievery, melding these echoes of the 1960s past with hints of numerous genres that followed the demise of psychedelia part one. Listeners who fancy themselves music historians will likely have a field day rooting around in these songs for possible links to older bands; "It's Not Meant To Be," "Lucidity" and the instrumental "Jeremy's Storm" are logical starting points, as each song can realistically be said to contain traces of everything from vintage late 1960s psychedelic rock to shoegaze and 1980s indie. With its exceptionally balanced mix - Fridmann puts every layer of instrumentation at about the same level - Innerspeaker sounds epic on a good set of speakers, especially in the sonic explorations of "Desire Be Desire Go," "Expectation" and "The Bold Arrow of Time."

Few albums can skate by solely on sound though, and Innerspeaker isn't one of them. Its songs are excessively precise; lacking even the faintest suggestion of spontaneity, the album eventually sounds like one long, plodding single track, with only minor variations that offer no real sense of risk-taking or even simple variety. The album's latter half, from "Expectation" through closing track "I Don't Really Mind" in particular, bleeds together into an indistinguishable mass of guitar layers and supporting instrumentation. Kevin Parker's vocals do these songs no favors either, as they sometimes actually serve as a distraction and not an enhancement to these songs. While it's forgivable that his voice shares an uncanny similarity to John Lennon, Parker delivers most of his lines in the same deliberate, dreamy, half-intelligible cadence, an approach that quickly wears thin and makes the lyrics largely unimportant as the album's pace drags along.

Innerspeaker's songs are compositionally meticulous but also emotionless, and if an album can be described as professorial, it's this one. Whether by intention or through its own inherent shortcomings, Innerspeaker places musical form above lyrical content. This is nothing new in indie -practitioners like My Bloody Valentine and Sigur Rós have shown that it can be done properly - but it requires something unique in order to connect with an audience and to avoid being inaccessible just for the hell of it. Tame Impala fails to strike such a balance throughout this release, making Innerspeaker an album that tickles the ears but never really engages the mind.

Revisit: Elvis Costello - Mighty Like a Rose

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

Among Elvis Costello's fans and critics, Mighty Like a Rose is frequently considered one of the musician's lesser works, not quite as awful as Goodbye Cruel World and Punch the Clock but nowhere near his "supposedly irreproachable" late 1970s records, as Costello sarcastically remarked in the liner notes to Rose's Rhino reissue. In some ways this degraded standing is understandable, as the album contains several slight songs and a few others that are oddities at best. Contemporary reviews of Mighty Like a Rose were not favorable. Robert Christgau said that "...the good songs are overblown tragedies, the bad ones overblown trifles." Oddly enough, Christgau loved "Playboy to a Man" but hated "The Other Side of Summer." And there's your Dean of American Rock Critics for you. The New Musical Express complained that the albums was "willfully obscure and directionless...the music for the most part is self indulgent and sour, or lazy and glutinously sweet." Even Rolling Stone - by 1991 handing out inflated ratings at breakneck pace - panned the album: "vanished without a trace" is how that rag would later summarily dismiss the album in its Costello overview. As Costello toured in support of the album, many other myopic reviewers fixated on his heavily bearded face, exhibiting all the hallmarks of superficial and disposable rock journalism. Little wonder the album traditionally ranks very low in the Costello discography.

Yet time sometimes has a way of changing how we perceive an album and its place in an artist's canon. Mighty Like a Rose is a good example: the album's arrangements recall Costello's past work but also, and perhaps more interestingly for those who can't get past its weaker moments, hint at what the musician would attempt with varying degrees of success on his later 1990s albums. With their unconventional, swollen arrangements and use of instruments like "beaten things," "big stupid guitar," "industrial jack-ass" and "little foolish organ," songs like "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)" and "Invasion Hit Parade" now sound like a natural, if less cumbersome, progression from the experimentalism of Spike tracks like "This Town..." and "Miss Macbeth." The influence that classical music and orchestral-worthy ballads would exert on The Juliet Letters, GBH and All This Useless Beauty is hinted at in the keyboard melody of "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4" as well as the horns that dominate "Harpies Bizarre."

Despite the occasional bout of verbosity and the type of cutesy wordplay that detractors can't quite stomach, the album features some of Costello's best lyrics. Its lyrical tone is predominantly one of disgusted anger, with the singer painting an oppressively cynical view of the world. The Beach Boys send-up that Christgau loathed so much - "The Other Side of Summer" - is remarkably jaded, with its key images of the "Pop princess...Downtown shooting up" and the "Cardboard city and the unwanted birthday" standing in stark contrast to the song's candy-pop arrangement. Costello even throws in a thinly-veiled shot at John Lennon's hallowed "Imagine" for good measure. Similar in tone though far different in execution, the following songs - "Doomsday" and "How to Be Dumb" - continue Costello's ranting. "Doomsday" welcomes the end of the world amid assorted riff-raff worthy of James Ensor, with its jealous husband and the wife who "sleeps in the shirt of a late great country singer," parents cashing in on their child's "abduction" and, eh, a possible reference to Sting. "How to Be Dumb" is likewise laced with as much venom as anything from the musician's 1970s albums. Who cares if some of its shots are cheap and the song occasionally sounds like a harangue, commonly thought to be lobbed in the direction of Attractions bassist and Big Wheel pseudo-philosopher Bruce Thomas? The song still sounds like a vindictive and well-placed thumb to the eye.

No Elvis Costello album is complete without a few sordid love tales, and Mighty Like a Rose is no exception. The type of sleaziness that oozed from earlier songs like "Busy Bodies," "Possession" and "Satellite" is again reflected in the temptresses of "After the Fall" and "All Grown Up" and the scummy male of "Georgie and Her Rival." Though "After the Fall" is most notable for the mesmerizing Spanish guitar played by Tom Waits cohort Marc Ribot and "All Grown Up" finds Costello's vocals absolutely bludgeoning the song's genteel acoustic foundation, both songs are among Costello's most direct, foregoing his recurring tendency to cram too many words into impossible spaces in favor of simple lyrics that actually have room to breathe.

Certainly there are many other facets to Mighty Like a Rose that warrant consideration: its impressive list of contributors, the "agnostic prayer" of "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4," the record-scratching, long-gone lover of "So Like Candy," the absolute duds that are "Playboy to a Man" and "Sweet Pear." But mostly it's memorable for the musical risks it takes and how it hints at the subjects and styles Costello would revisit throughout the 1990s. It won't ever be regarded as one of the musician's undisputed masterpieces, but it combines enough of Costello at his most musically adventurous and lyrically savage to suggest it deserves a better standing than both critics and fans have historically given it. Those looking to understand the origins of Costello's 1990s albums should start here.

Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

by David Waldstreicher

Rating: 4.0/5.0

Publisher: Hill and Wang

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David Waldstreicher's Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification is that rare history book that offers an entirely new perspective on an exhaustively-documented period of American history. Waldstreicher, a professor of history at Temple University, is a reliably consistent writer in a crowded field; his previous books Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution and In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 both offered fresh insights into the colonial and post-revolutionary periods. His latest effort trumps both of these and is perhaps his finest work to date: thoroughly researched and forcefully argued, it is likely to become one of the key texts in any discussion of slavery's role in the early republic.

Waldstreicher's primary assertion is a controversial one: namely, that the Constitution as ratified in 1788 was a pro-slavery document that, with the concessions and compromises its creators made to increase the document's chances of ratification by the state conventions, protected Southern slaveholding interests while also ensuring that slavery became irreversibly linked to the economic and political structure of the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War. As uncomfortable as the book may make readers feel, Waldstreicher's argument is meticulously supported, as he offers ample evidence of how the slavery question was discussed, debated and, in some cases, avoided throughout the closed-door meetings that produced the Constitution in 1787.

He performs a delicate balancing act, acknowledging the difficulties the framers faced in drafting a document that could be palatable to North and South alike, but also showing how it enabled a powerful centralized government to embed slavery as part of a broader attempt to define the nature of sovereignty, property and political representation in the young country.

Waldstreicher also adeptly shows how slavery played a role in political discourse in the pre-revolution years as well as in the frequently contentious public debate that preceded ratification, offering an extensive overview of the cultural and political attitudes to slavery in the revolutionary period in a little over 150 pages. The book's final chapter is perhaps its best, as the author describes how objections over the Constitution fit within the broader tradition of political dissent in America. Though the framers eventually agreed to maintain a unified front in their support of the Constitution, especially as it was turned over to the states for ratification, Waldstreicher recounts how some leading politicians - some of whom can be seen as this country's earliest abolitionists - maintained significant reservations about how parts of the document contradicted the country's egalitarian ideals.

Slavery's Constitution isn't flawless, as it sometimes feels overly dense and at times excessively dry and professorial. Moreover, the author's final statement that "...slavery did not itself cause the Civil War. Slavery's Constitution did" is a loaded and overly-simplistic comment, with Waldstreicher ignoring later events that eventually led the country to war as well as reducing the complex question of the Civil War's inevitability to a statement seemingly designed to provoke readers. Still, in a deliberate, responsible manner, Waldstreicher demonstrates how slavery remained one of the primary obstacles for the framers and, ultimately, how their decision to couch the subject in evasive language ensured slavery's perpetuation.

Wounded Lion: Wounded Lion

Wounded Lion
Wounded Lion
Rating: 2.5/5.0
Label: In the Red


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I'll say this much for Wounded Lion: a garage-pop band do could far worse on its debut album than what the California quintet manages here. And indeed countless groups have, following a very simple formula to create a cover-your-ears-awful first effort: mix the tortured, modern poetry-fed, Moz-cribbing musings of twentysomething males with a handful of untouchable iconic influences mimicked to the point of silver-tongued thievery, and - poof - a crappy album destined for the bargain bin is born. For the most part, Wounded Lion steers clear of these pitfalls on this self-titled release, 12 songs wrapped in 30 brisk minutes of uncluttered and gimmick-free rock. There is already a modest buzz around the band across the internet - primarily due to a few singles and a live show that some bloggers have described in Bangs-worthy, gushing terms - and this record should keep that momentum going, however slightly.

For better or worse, much of Wounded Lion lends itself to an intense game of Which Bands Do These Songs Remind You Of? The group claims the Cramps, the Monks, the Move and the Kinks as inspirations, while press material cites the Clean, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Velvet Underground - of course, as by now even granny's church choir would cop to lifting from that band - as influences. It's easy to see why: songs like "Hunan Province" and "Creatures in the Cave" do in fact unfold like a pretty clever hybrid of those bands' best moments. Other songs feel instantly familiar without feeling like derivative theft; maybe it's an enormous coincidence, but Wounded Lion appears to cozily stand on the shoulders of giants. Mostly it works though: the first few lines of "Carol Cloud" approximate Flip Your Wig/New Day Rising-era Hüsker Dü, the vocals on "Black Sox" - barked out mostly in French - sound a lot like Pere Ubu frontman David Thomas and opening track "Hungry?" features a pair of vocalists who combine Thomas' bellow with David Byrne's vocal twitches.

What saves these songs from becoming little more than a group of guys pissing on hallowed ground is how well they alternate between seriousness and silliness. There is a menacing vagueness to "Hungry?" - the line "I think it's hungry" is repeated but we never find out what "it" is - while the primitive stomp and distortion of "Creatures in the Cave" accentuate a great line like "I'm in the cave/ With broken dreams." But mostly Wounded Lion is a fun listen whose lightheartedness is obvious, whether it's in the exaggerated country parody of "Crünchy Stars," the insidiously catchy wordplay of "Belt of Orion," the Coors Light product placement of "Silver Bullet" or the Star Wars nerd-out of "Degobah System," which blends a melody as hummable as any pop tune with some practical world advice for travelers in a galaxy far, far away: "If you're going to the Degobah system/ Get ready for some wild shit."

This reliance on fairly-elementary comedy does sometimes make Wounded Lion's tracks feel like novelty songs, and with its short running time, there's very little room for such filler. Still, there's enough variety here to suggest the band knows the difference between homage and blatant imitation and, even better, how to (almost) strike the right balance between oblique lyricism and a sense of humor numerous indie bands would be well-served to emulate.

Incredible String Band: Reissues

Incredible String Band

Incredible String Band, The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, Wee Tam and the Big Huge

Rating: 3.0/5.0, 2.0/5.0, 4.5/5.0, 4.0/5.0

Label: Fledg'ling


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Over 40 years after its initial release, nothing else sounds quite like The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. The Incredible String Band's 1968 masterpiece is still easily one of the most inventive and downright bizarre records of that, or any, decade, and its influence can still be seen in both the best and worst that modern indie has to offer; I'll leave it to the reader to determine which artists fall into each category. Not surprisingly, it's the centerpiece of a reissue campaign that also includes the group's first two records as well as Hangman's marginally inferior successor, all of which cement the ISB's place as one of the 1960s most ambitious, and adventurous, groups.

These reissues confirm the obvious: Hangman's remains the band's defining, and least accessible, work. It's a dizzying, difficult, wild-as-hell record that's not for the faint of heart, and I suspect it only even starts to make sense to a chemically-altered mind. In songs that reference mythological Greek monsters, witch apparel and similar topics, the band mixes mandolin, guitar and harmonica with a ton of other instruments that most of us couldn't pick out of a police lineup: oud, water harp, gimbri, chahana, pan pipe, dulcimer and sitar. "A Very Cellular Song" is still the band's undisputed singular moment, though "Waltz of the New Moon," "Mercy I Cry City," "Water Song" and "There Is a Green Crown" don't lag too far behind. Hangman's requires a certain degree of patience from the listener - indeed, it's surprising the group managed to achieve the level of mainstream success it did, however briefly - but it's an album that is never predictable, no matter how well a listener knows its songs.

The band's less-celebrated albums have aged pretty well and contain plenty of gems, even if they never quite reach the heights of Hangman's. From the ISB's self-titled debut, "October Song," "Dandelion Blues" and "Can't Keep Me Here" are charming and quirky, though most of the album is painfully sincere, daintily delicate to a fault and in thrall to the 1960s folk craze. Time has been the hardest on the unfortunately-titled and ill-conceived sophomore album The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, as large chunks of it now sound hopelessly dated and slight, though "The Mad Hatter's Song" and a few others do hint at the supremely strange folk-psych hybrid the band would master on Hangman's. The band's range had exploded by the time the double-LP Wee Tam and the Big Huge was released; prone to occasional bouts of over-indulgence and out-of-control experimentalism, individual tracks like "Job's Tears," "You Get Brighter," "Air," "Maya" and "Cousin Caterpillar" rank among the band's best moments.

For anyone who hasn't heard The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, its reissue is another opportunity to experience it in all its weirdness and to then evaluate whether a deeper dive into the ISB's other albums is desired. While the overall package is somewhat disappointing - no extras of any kind are included - the sound is noticeably improved, nostalgia-heavy liner notes from Robin Williamson, Mike Heron, Joe Boyd and Clive Palmer give a sense of the band's history and the packaging is snazzy. But ultimately it's the music that matters, and in that respect there's very little to gripe about here.

Wye Oak: My Neighbor/My Creator

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Wye Oak

My Neighbor/My Creator

Rating: 2.5/5.0

Label: Merge

My Neighbor/My Creator is a good example of why it's difficult to get overly fired up about many EPs; neither amazing nor abysmal, it's simply five decent songs long on execution and studio mastery, but short on innovation. Wye Oak's latest uncomfortably exists in some sort of bizarro middle ground for the Baltimore duo of Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack; it's neither a major step back from 2007's If Children nor a tiny improvement over 2009's mostly bland The Knot. It's just there; unobtrusive but also unremarkable, it's hard to imagine anyone but the band's most loyal fans meeting this release with anything more than an indifferent shrug and a few impossible-to-conceal yawns.

Don't get me wrong- My Neighbor/My Creator is a pleasant listen and there are certainly worse ways listeners can spend their time (here's one). The band's indie-folk-rock-dream-synth-pop-Yo La Tengo hybrid is again on display, augmented with some sweet, sweet sax, Wasner's vocals - which can sound as brittle as old bones, supremely confident or implicitly threatening - various studio wizardry and layers of percussion. "My Neighbor" is a rollicking opener, offering up an ear worm-worthy arrangement and vocals reminiscent of Neko Case, while the dodgy opening of "Emmylou" is almost saved by a dandy little harmonica workout later in the song. "My Creator" and "I Hope You Die" mix the duo's balladeer sensibilities with an apparent desire to use every gadget and gizmo in the studio; at the very least producers Chris and Mickey Freeland made their mark on these two tracks. Solid songs one and all, without a doubt, but none are particularly exceptional and feel increasingly hollow with repeated listens; frankly I can't imagine myself ever wanting to hear an album's worth of this stuff.

The album closes with a remix of The Knot's "That I Do," complete with various blips, bleeps, sirens and other sounds worthy of Ross Geller at his mini-keyboard and a rap that's more awkward than a morning-after walk of shame. It's a curiosity piece for the band's fans - and completely underwhelming save for its novelty value. Props to the band for moving outside their comfort zone on this track, and on other parts of this EP. Still, likably mediocre songs only count for so much; the music's got to have some spark and some kick in it, both of which are in short supply throughout My Neighbor/My Creator.

The National: High Violet

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The National

High Violet

Rating: 4.0/5.0

Label: 4AD


Perhaps to no one's surprise, most of High Violet is exceedingly sad. It's there in Matt Berninger's worn-down-and-weary baritone and in the drums, strings, keyboards and horns that underscore these songs and it's as sure as hell in the singer's resigned and somber lyrics. High Violet arrives with great expectations and some mainstream media attention for the Brooklyn-based National, but if the group had any doubts about matching the quality of its previous release, Boxer, they needn't have worried; though the album is somewhat of a refinement of the National's style and not any kind of dramatic departure, it's still a remarkable record that confirms the group's place as one of indie's eminent bands.

In recent interviews, Berninger stated that the group intended to make a catchy, fun record. It didn't take. Instead, High Violet plays like a near-50-minute ode to overwhelming, crushing bleakness, with most tracks unraveling like someone teetering on the verge of a full-on mental collapse. It is an album of sustained tension, as many songs - "England," "Anyone's Ghost" and the rumbling opener "Terrible Love" - threaten to explode but uncomfortably recede instead. The album's instrumentals are more aggressive than those from Boxer, but the types of outbursts that made songs like "Abel," "Slipping Husband" and the snarling mean-streaked "Available" so explosively cathartic are largely more restrained here. There is a sense of distance and isolation to the record's most affecting songs; in "Little Faith," Berninger tells of someone who's "stuck in New York/ And the rain's coming down," while in "Terrible Love," he evasively declares that "it takes an ocean not to break." These sentiments likewise creep into "England," where the narrator finds himself in a Los Angeles cathedral, lamenting "you must be somewhere in London/ You must be loving your life in the rain," as well as in "Anyone's Ghost" and its setting of "Manhattan valleys of the dead." Elsewhere, "Sorrow," "Lemonworld," "Afraid of Everyone" and "Runaway" cross panic and nervousness with more phobias and anxieties than one person should have to endure.

Very little throughout the album suggests resolution: going home "to Ohio in a swarm of bees" doesn't help - hometowns forget their native sons - and chemicals or coastal jaunts don't calm the mind either. Although such preoccupations are nothing new for the National's lyricist and earlier songs like "Watching You Well," "Patterns of Fairytales," "Daughters of the Soho Riots" and "Slow Show" all hit on similar themes, the writing is strong enough for listeners to forgive any redundancy with these older songs. There are some traces of dark humor ("I'll have my head in the oven so you'll know where I'll be") as well as hints of contentment or, at least, acceptance - "It's all been forgiven," Berninger sings on album closer "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks -" but such statements feel fleeting at best and are dwarfed by the album's predominantly mournful tone.

While Boxer casts its shadow over several songs - "Bloodbuzz Ohio" and "Runaway" wouldn't sound out of place there - High Violet is not the work of a band stuck in place. It brings with it a level of seriousness, maturity and honesty sometimes lacking from other indie bands' efforts. It speaks to anonymous internal struggles in a massive, indifferent world and our own muted responses in the face of such adversity, and does this without resorting to melodrama or cheap, bombastic, big-riff resolutions. It's debatable as to whether High Violet represents the National's best work to date - such arguments are exhausting anyway - but there is unarguably a gravity to both Berninger's voice and the band's musical sensibilities that carry the album. It's this combination that makes these songs so visceral and emotionally impacting.

Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War, by David Williams

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One of the most enduring images of the Civil War is that of the unified South, a tight-knit collection of ideologically like-minded citizens bound by a common cause and united in their political, economic and social beliefs. The only problem with this down-home, corn-pone, Old Virginny nostalgia that still holds sway in America is that it's total bullshit, as historian David Williams argues in far more academic terms in Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War.

Exhaustively researched, expertly written and drawing conclusions that challenge many conventionally accepted "truths" about the nature of the wartime South, Williams convincingly shows how the Confederacy essentially fought what he refers to as a "two-front" war: one against the Union army and another one against internal Southern anti-war activism. Each chapter systematically discusses a different form of this dissension, including soldiers refusing to enlist, deserting the Confederate army and, in numbers estimated at 500,000, actually fighting on the Union side; food riots and looting sparked by wealthy planters refusing to grow staple crops while soldiers and civilians starved; and the role both slaves and poor non-slaveholding whites played in challenging the Confederacy's slave-based economy and war effort. Central to Williams' depiction of a fractured South is class conflict, which he views as one of the key drivers that sparked such resistance from these states' have-nots. The author notes that the Southern delegates who voted for secession over the objections of the Southern majority came from the wealthy landowning and slave-holding class, while soldiers' letters frequently were filled with disillusion as they described the conflict as a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight."

Williams avoids the type of Great Man history that has long plagued Civil War research. What emerges is a portrait of the South that is more complex than previous scholarly accounts and pop culture have allowed, with the author suggesting that such sources have contributed to an overly simplistic and largely inaccurate image of the South during these war years. With the stories of social consciousness and opposition to minority rule it recounts and the staggering number of primary sources it utilizes, Bitterly Divided can be read as a study of how - to borrow a term Williams uses throughout the book - "common folk" shaped both the course of their daily lives as well as the war. It is similar to the method Williams followed in previous books A People's History of the Civil War and Plain Folk in a Rich Man's War, but more consistently revelatory and easily accessible for a general audience.

Some readers will undoubtedly view Williams' book as an attack on the South. It's not. Certainly it is a critique of the Confederacy - and, more specifically, the wealthy politicians and upper class that marched the South towards secession, with disastrous results - as well as the economic and social divisions that defined the South during the war and several decades after. If anything, Bitterly Divided is a repudiation of the lost cause mythology that reduces Civil War-era Southerners to racist caricatures and ignores the overwhelming evidence that the war remained unpopular among most Southerners. Along with Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering, it is one of the few recent Civil War books that places the war in a new context, offering readers with a view of the South that should dispel any remaining notions of a Confederacy whose policies enjoyed broad public support throughout the South.

Harlan T. Bobo: Sucker

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So it is actually possible to create decent songs about domesticity. Countless artists have tried gamely and failed miserably, subjecting listeners to the type of god-awful, weepy soap opera schmaltz heard on easy listening FM radio stations. Leave it to a fairly obscure Memphis musician to - almost - get it right. On Sucker, Harlan T. Bobo's third album, the artist keeps on the sunny side, offering up songs "mostly written while courting an adventurous woman" that absolutely spill over with optimism and contentment. Though it's a light, breezy release whose sound isn't particularly earth-shattering and whose darker moments are muted, in many ways this only adds to its charm. Sucker is simply likable and listenable, a brisk foray into the kinds of sentiments that can leave listeners reaching for the Pepto.

If 2007's I'm Your Man found Bobo agitated and twitchy - restless, on edge and sporting the type of vocal spasms that suggested an unhealthy amount of bottled up dissatisfaction and nervous energy - Sucker is more sedate and controlled. Though none of the sounds here will blow anyone's mind and everything is played quite conventionally, Bobo can't be accused of standing in place, as these songs tromp through a lot of musical ground. There's string-driven pop (opener "Sweet Life"), a bouncy piano tune ("Perfect Day") and a loosey-goosey country number ("Crazy with Loneliness"), as well as ragged attempts at punk ("Bad Boyfriends" and the F-bomb-dropping "Energy") and several stripped-down, primarily acoustic songs ("Errand Girl," "Drank" and "Mlle. Chatte"). Bobo's weathered voice complements the arrangements nicely; free of studio embellishments and clearly audible, it gives the album an organic and grizzled quality. To the artist's credit, no two songs sound even remotely similar; coupled with its scant, less than 30 minute running time, Sucker can't be accused of being overindulgent.

The lyrics favor straightforwardness and simplicity over obliqueness, perhaps to a fault. This approach usually succeeds, as "Old Man," "Selfish Life," and the half-English/half-French "Mlle. Chatte" prove that sometimes there's no need to muddy the lyrical waters just to make them look deep, while pseudo sea-shanty "Drank" is another highlight, with Bobo effectively mixing nostalgia with humor. Still, the album's major flaws rest in those unfortunate moments when Bobo reels off banally humdrum ponderings that sound ripped from the back pages of a novice songwriter. The man's in love, sure, but lines like "It's such a perfect day/ I'm not ashamed to be satisfied/ ...It's so nice not to be alone" and "If I could be with you when you're down/ If I could be more to you than a clown" are true nausea-inducing groaners that are tough to look past.

The story behind Sucker has a happy ending: Bobo eventually married the adventurous woman, and certainly the album sounds like an ode to fidelity, commitment and the rest of that romantic stuff. It won't kick-start a musical revolution or propel the musician into the mainstream, but this was probably never Bobo's goal. Sucker is a pleasing and varied - if unremarkable and innocuous - release from one of indie's less heralded and more unique artists. Hell, at the least it's a better stab at expressing connubial bliss than many big-name artists have managed.