Music Notes
By 
While I am in Mexico and am not really seeing much in the way of shows, I did have a live music experience last weekend. My wife is very much into Latin dancing. I am very much not. But it was her birthday, so I had to go. Oaxaca is very much not a center of salsa compared to New York or Miami or Santo Domingo or many other places. But it has a scene and a club. And here they have a pretty fair live band, made up I think of a combination of locals and some immigrants, mostly from Venezuela, not surprisingly. It’s a big band for a little stage–plenty of percussion, a lot of horns, some keys. While I do not dance except under extreme duress, I do appreciate seeing the band play. What I don’t get though is why the salsa dancing scene in the United States seems to have zero interest in live music at all. It’s not just that the events in Providence don’t have live music. It’s that the events in New York don’t have live music and that I find utterly inexplicable. She went to some event last year called the World Congress of Salsa or some such thing and even there, with professional dancers coming in from around the U.S. and Latin America, it was all recorded music. I very much get that dancing and listening to live music are two different activities, but they certainly can go together! And yet, recorded music does not only seem OK by most of the people in these scenes, but actually preferable. No risk of change there. It’s just a very weird to relate to music to me. In any case, this is something to lead off a Music Notes post.
This list of the best country albums of 1964 shocked me because I think even I’ve only heard two of them and even that’s because it defines country broadly. I have Another Side of Bob Dylan and Buck Owens’ Together Again/My Heart Skips a Beat, which is an unquestionably great album. I have most of Ray Price’s albums from this era, but Love Life is one of the exceptions. Certainly I know some of the songs off Loretta Lynn’s Before I’m Over You, but I don’t have that one either. It’s remarkable how deep one can go into country music and really have barely scratched the surface.
Speaking of great anniversary lists, Burning Ambulance has a Top 50 Jazz Albums from 1974, and like the country list above, in alphabetical order rather than a silly and pointless attempt at ranking. I was again surprised at how few of these albums I actually have. Howard once gave me a copy of Cecil Taylor’s Spring of Two Blue-Js and let me tell you, that’s a great fucking album. But most of the list consists of people by whom I own albums, some of which several albums, but not the particular album or albums they released in 1974. Kind of perplexing to me. I have many of Pharoah Sanders’s Impulse albums but not Love in Us All or Elevation. I own a lot of Sonny Rollins, including later Sonny, but not The Cutting Edge. Etc. Guess I have more work to do.
Bob Bryar of My Chemical Romance died at the age of 44. This was not a good band. I appreciated this bit from the obituary: When My Chemical Romance split with its drummer Matt Pelissier, the band asked Mr. Bryar to replace him, without ever hearing Mr. Bryar play, according to Billboard. Sounds like it too!
An interesting Times piece on how 70s bands transformed in the 80s using synths and drum machines. Most of the music I think is terrible, but you can’t deny the success the bands had, plus it wasn’t their fault that a terrible decade demanded terrible sounds in their pop.
The Avett Brothers had a Broadway music about a shipwreck? Color me shocked that it was a disaster closing in a month….
We are in the top albums list month of the year and it’s remarkable to me how big publications like the Times end up sounding like old Pitchfork lists and just pick the top pop albums of the year while if you want actual interesting lists that take the whole of the world of recorded music seriously, Bandcamp is 1000 times more useful.
This week’s playlist:
- Bruce Cockburn, Salt, Sun, and Time
- Drive By Truckers, Live at Plan 9, July 13, 2006
- Julia Jacklin, Crushing
- The Lost and Found, Third Time Around
- Amanda Shires, Down Fell the Doves
- Wussy, Wussy Duo
- Run the Jewels, RTJ4
- Mitski, Be the Cowboy
- Harriet Tubman, The Terror End of Beauty
- The Paranoid Style, Rolling Disclosure
- Robbie Fulks, Upland Stories
- Drive By Truckers, The New OK
- Dirty Laundry: The Soul of Black Country
- Speedy Ortiz, Rabbit Rabbit
- Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, Revelations
- Spring Heel Jack, Masses
- Dwight Yoakam, Hillbilly Deluxe
- Mon Laferte, 1940 Carmen
- Sonny Sharrock, Ask the Ages
- REM, Murmur
- U.S. Girls, Heavy Light
- Priests, Bodies and Control and Money and Power
- Husker Du, Zen Arcade
Album Reviews:
William Elliott Whitmore, Silently the Mind Breaks
Whitmore occupies that Steve Earle space of being a pretty straight forward singer songwriter about the working class and he does a good job of it. The way to describe Whitmore is just a very very solid songwriter with a warm voice and smart lyrics. Musically, it’s extremely straightforward. “Darkness Comes” is especially solid, a dying father giving his last advice to his boy.
B+
Camera Obscura, Look to the East Look to the West
Can’t say that I ever expected another Camera Obscura record. Plus TracyAnne Campbell’s work in other projects over the decade since the last album was pretty whatever. At its best, Camera Obscura produced some of the best indie-pop this century. “French Navy” and “The Sweetest Thing” off My Maudlin Career is one of the best 1-2 punches to start off an album ever. Those are two astounding and perfect songs. But sometimes, both on their earlier albums and on Desire Lines, the last album before Carey Lander died of cancer and the band decided it couldn’t go on, needed a real punch, like they needed conviction about something.
This is somewhere in the middle. It’s a completely decent album by middle aged indie folks. “We’re Going to Make It in a Man’s World” is a solid feminist track. Other songs hit fairly well too. There’s definitely no “French Navy” here, no, but these are decent tracks. I’d say like a lot of bands coming back after a long time, where they can please the fans, but maybe this isn’t really moving anything forward. Sure, that’s fine.
B–
Chuck Prophet, Wake the Dead
A Chuck Prophet cumbia album? Sure, why not. The long underrated California songwriter works with the cumbia band Quiensave? and is also a big comeback for him. Prophet nearly died last year. He had stage 4 lymphoma. But he beat it, at least for now. And he decided to do something he never had before. It works well! His laconic singing style fits into a cool as hell band as well as it does with straight ahead rock and roll or some Americana arrangement. Being California as all hell, Chuck got into Quienlove? after his recovery, when he’d drive to his favorite surfing spot in Santa Cruz. Chuck is still Chuck here though–this isn’t some weird fusion album. Being that, it means that it’s good but not perfect, as he probably isn’t quite a great enough songwriter for 11 or 12 bangers. But I am very much looking forward to seeing him in February.
A-
Jake Blount/Mali Obomsawin, Symbiont
Well, this isn’t something you’ve heard anything quite like before. Blount is one of the foundational members of the modern Black country movement. Based out of Providence, it’s utterly ridiculous that I have never seen him live, but it just hasn’t worked out. Obomsawin is an indigenous bassist who mostly works in the free jazz world. Here they come together for an album based in futurism and the hope for an uprising against a world indifferent toward climate change. Blount’s music comes across perhaps a bit stronger than Obomsawin, in part because free jazz is not exactly that conducive to what they are trying to do. But there are very jazz-oriented moments and her friend and sometime bandmate, the great cornet player Taylor Ho Bynum, shows up. This is of course an extremely political project and if you don’t care for the politics, you might not like the project. But give it a chance either way–the sound alone, including use of both Black and indigenous archival recordings makes it an absolutely fascinating album and one of my favorites of the year. This deeper dive on the album, including interviews with Blount and Obomsawin about the use of archives, is worth your time.
A
Jim Lauderdale, My Favorite Place
Who has a better country voice than Jim Lauderdale? It’s kind of perfect. Lauderdale is one of the most respected country voices in the last few decades, but while he’s everywhere, he’s never quite had the big commercial breakthrough you wish he’d have. I was supposed to finally see him last month, but then yet another Providence live music space closed a week beforehand. Ugh. The album sounds great, Lauderdale’s voice remains as strong as ever. The only thing I’d say here is that some of these songs aren’t quite up to the highest standard of his best albums. There’s a whole song about a strong tree that just….I mean, it’s a lot about a tree. But he’s just in a great place in his career and I am here for all of it.
B
The New Pornographers, Continue as a Guest
At this point, I am not sure that New Pornographers–that great project of A.C. Newman with Neko Case and others in assist–are really going to ever break new ground. Whiteout Conditions might be the last really great album they have. But what if they just had a bunch of solid albums of jubilant indie power pop that made you want to sing along? Wouldn’t that be OK? I’d say so.
B
Baby Rose, Slow Burn
This here is some red hot neo-soul R&B. This is my first exposure to Baby Rose, though I guess she did the closing song to Creed 3 so some of you who watch endless franchise movies might know her. But this little 6 song piece demonstrates a really remarkable singer, someone who had an interesting slur to her words that provides so much character that the vocal showoffs of the world just don’t have. I don’t know the Canadian production team of BADBADNOTGOOD, but evidently they are a big thing in the hip hop world. Well, whatever they are doing here works. This brings is all sorts of psychedelic elements that work great and, for that matter, are what took Brittany Howard’s career from good to great. Well, Baby Rose is pretty damn great too and I look forward to hearing more of her work.
A
As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.