A Slight Delay

I keep wondering when summer will start this year. I know that on the calendar it starts on June 21, same as every other year. The problem is, that’s not when summer starts for me.

For quite a while now, I’ve always pegged the start of summer to a single auspicious occasion. The bloom of a particular flower, perhaps, or the song of some bird? Oh, no, that’s far too pedestrian. The only thing that will do (for me, anyway) is the first warm day that I hear “The Boys Are Back In Town” by Thin Lizzy on the radio.

And it has to be the radio. No CD’s or MP3’s. That would be cheating, since I own “Dedication” on disc, and ripped the song to MP3 long ago. So it has to be the radio. It’s a bit of a crap shoot–sort of like figuring out springtime by a groundhog, for instance–but when you get those goosebumps when Phil Lynott sings… That is a summer day, and a damn good one, at that.

CAN: Anthology
Okay, unabashed geek time. I like progressive rock. Not all of it–you will never hear me debating the merits of Ozric Tentacles versus Spock’s Beard versus Dream Theater, for instance–but I will admit a soft spot for stuff from about 1968-78, in all its bombastic glory. Yes? Yes. King Crimson? Of course. Genesis, with or without Peter Gabriel? Natch. And throw in–among others–some Eno, 801, Roxy Music, Seru Giran… well, you get the picture.

But there’s a problem with a lot of Prog: it sounds too much like Whitney Houston. (more…)

Good post by Archangel over at www.crackteam.org (which you can read here) on the Billboard Hot 100. I think that I can safely say, without blowing Agent Archangel’s cover, that he and I are the same age, grew up listening to a lot of the same music, and have musical tastes that overlap in a lot of areas.

Anyway, after reading the post, I mosied (moseyed? Whilom haven mosey?) over to the Hot 100 myself, had a gander, and a cow while I was at it. Am I getting old, or is Archangel right in asking if it’s all shit? (more…)

A couple of years ago, when I picked up White Limousine by Duncan Sheik, I was surprised to find that it came with a DVD packed with .WAV files, and Ableton Lite. Anyone who wanted to could remix any of the album’s songs, leaving aside for the moment the fact that when one hears the word “remix,” Mr. Sheik’s name isn’t usually the first that leaps to mind.

But I digress. Many artists put up isolated tracks from their tunes in order that fans can do what they please with them. 808 State comes to mind, as do the tracks David Byrne and Brian Eno put on a dedicated site around the time that “My Life In The Bush of Ghosts” was re-released. Other artists, such as Bill Laswell, David Torn and Martin Atkins, have released sample sets for Cakewalk, ACID, and other DAWs. This was the first time, though, that I’d seen someone put up the whole kit n’ kaboodle, with the disc, and at a reasonable price.

A few years on, we have a followup. Trent Reznor has offered the backing tracks from his music before, but with Y34RZ3R0R3MIX3D / [CD/DVD Combo] he’s put out an LP’s worth of remixes, and the individual backing tracks for each. Not only are the remixes themselves of a much higher quality than he’s done in some time, the samples (and the entirety of his new album, Ghosts I-IV) have been released under a Creative Commons license, which should go some way toward encouraging some creative responses to his music. Here’s hoping that other artists follow suit.

The dynamic duo are back. That would not, in this case, be Batman and Robin, but rather Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green (though I’m sure they’ve donned tights at one point or another).

The Odd Couple literally picks up where their last album, St. Elsewhere, left off, with the sound of a film projector. From there, it proceeds to build on the racket made on the first disc.

The title aside, this isn’t such an odd coupling. The results this time out are far more consistent, in part because both musicians seem to have settled into a groove, and also because they both stick to what they do best. Brian Burton (that’s Danger Mouse, to you) brings the same trickster sensibility that livened up “The Grey Album” and the Gorillaz (among others), giving a postmodern twist to some decidedly retro-sounding soul; sometimes it seems like shades of Stax, and at others a vaguely paranoid Paul Weller.

Cee-Lo Green (I get the feeling that only his mom called him Thomas Callaway), meantime, still can’t decide between dark and light, joy and pain, or sacred and profane, so it all goes into the pot. As with the best of his work (both solo and with Goodie Mob), his lyrics are more cryptic than cut-and-dried. Rather than setting up a series of easy dichotomies, he realizes that these “opposites,” often as not, are two sides of the same coin.

I won’t belabor the album track by track, nor will I try to pin down its genre. I’ll simply suggest that you listen to it, loudly and often. “Run” (the first single) and “Going On” will sound great on your car stereo or local dancefloor, while “Who Will Save My Soul” will give you goosebumps (think of a certain soul elder statesman that shares Cee-Lo’s last name). If you’re expecting the second coming of “St. Elsewhere,” you’ll probably be disappointed; if you approach it with ears and mind open, though, it’s one hell of an album.

Mike Doughty, Golden Delicious. ATO Records.

Anyone that’s been in “the business” long enough, whether it’s music, art, literature, or anything else creative, gets it sooner or later: someone’s going to tell them, either face to face or in print, that they liked them better when they [fill in the blank].  By that measure, Mike Doughty has arrived.

Golden Delicious doesn’t immediately sound like Soul Coughing, nor does it sound entirely like any of the singer’s previous solo efforts, Skittish/Rockity Roll, or even his “proper” ATO debut, Haughty Melodic. And for that, he’s taken a bit of a beating. Some of the critics, it seems, liked him better when he’d slipped his moorings/was still addicted to drugs/still sounded like the bastard stepchild of Roni Size and Billy Strayhorn.

Tough.

Yes, on the surface, this is a much sunnier album. It doesn’t have the drum n’ bass flourishes and bent atmospherics that characterized Soul Coughing, and it’s certainly more polished than his earlier solo offerings. And that, to my ears anyway, ain’t necessarily a bad thing. (more…)

When Killing Joke bassist Paul Raven went to the Great Gig in the Sky on October 20, 2007, a number of Joke fans–myself included–wondered what would be next for the band. Raven’s bass sound anchored the band through some of its best material, including the recent Killing Joke (2003) and Hosannas From The Basements of Hell (2006); his were clearly some big shoes to fill.

 The solution, it seems, was to go back to the beginning. The original lineup–Jaz Coleman, Geordie Walker, Martin “Youth” Glover, and “Big Paul” Ferguson–are back together for the first time since 1982. (more…)

I’ve set out to write this thing about half a dozen times now, and I keep stalling. This afternoon, I was listening to a mixed CD of tunes by Passing Strange co-creator/narrator Stew and his band, The Negro Problem, and things started (kinda hesitantly) to come together.

Stew’s music, both in its gentler “Afro-baroque” guise (as Stew) and its more rock-oriented guise (as The Negro Problem) has always consisted of intimate, closely-observed vignettes. They’re character sketches of people who, no matter how screwy they may seem, are immediately familiar. We all know, or have known, these people.

Therein lies what works best about Passing Strange. Sure, the character of Youth is an Everyman character, and many of the play’s other characters are composites of some kind or another. The thing is that a lot of writers, both in song and on stage, confuse “everyman” with “lowest common denominator.” They remove all the identifying characteristics, and whitewash all the uniqueness, out of their characters, so that what you’re left with is less a flesh-and-blood human being and more like a horoscope: a blank slate onto which you can project your own dreams, insecurities, paranoia, nostalgia, whatever. These are some very specific people, and not just a series of “types” who’ve stumbled onstage.

The music doesn’t hurt, either. On the whole, Passing Strange feels like you’ve wandered into a rock concert and a Broadway show broke out. A lot of ink has been spilled (and more, no doubt, will be) about how this play so gleefully breaks down boundaries; I tend to disagree. From very early on (TNP’s 1997 offering, Post Minstrel Syndrome) it’s clear that Stew doesn’t so much demolish the boundaries as ignore them. He realizes, I think, that—like the concept of “The Real” that provides Strange’s backdrop—these boundaries (rock “versus” R&B, James Brown “versus” Arthur Lee, Kurt Weill “versus” Einsturzende Neubaten) are just constructs. Music’s just… well, music. There’s nothing inherently incompatible in any of it. So punk segues to soul, “My Little Red Book” and “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” have equal earworm time with shades of Sondheim and industrial. The musical draws a handful of its tunes from past efforts, their lyrics changed slightly to better fit the action onstage. Two songs are lifted from The Negro Problem’s albums including the show’s opener, “We Might Play All Night,” (reworked from “Out Now”) and “Come Down Now,” which in its current incarnation deserves to be a hit single. Stew’s solo efforts also yield some material; “Arlington Hill” and “Must’ve Been High” come from “The Naked Dutch Painter,” while “Love Like That” first showed up on “Something Deeper Than These Changes.” But, unlike the rash of “Jukebox Musicals” that mix an artist’s back catalog with a handful of dancers and a thin plot (Mama Mia!, Xanadu, Movin’ Out, and The Times They Are A-Changin’  all come to mind), this looks, feels, and plays different.See, if this isn’t your typical Broadway musical, it also shouldn’t somehow be relegated to “black theater.” Sure, it’s written and acted by people who happen to be (to cop a phrase from Curtis Mayfield) darker than blue… but it’s as thematically universal as it is stylistically varied. And, unlike Rent, to use just one example, it’s not trying to be anything other than what it is. It doesn’t worry about whether it’s Broadway enough, rock enough, black enough, or whether it’s going to make the white folks in the orchestra seats uneasy. For two-and-a-half hours, it’s nothing other than its own bad self. (more…)