"Sometimes, a song will reveal itself to you. When it does, you know it. And sometimes a song can reveal itself to you in different ways over and over again. I think that's part of why I collect music. Because when a song does reveal itself to you, it is a physical and spiritual joy." Amen, sister and/or brother. Those words are from an Olympia, WA regional music/art/drugs/ethics magazine called Nuts!, issue #4 (pictured), and after first reading those words a couple months ago, I've had at least, I don't know, a hundred more songs reveal themselves to me, after a lifetime-thus-far of, I don't know, hundreds of thousands? Some are brand new discoveries, songs heard for the first time. Others are relatively recent acquaintances, heard for the fifth or tenth time, and sometimes even a childhood classic will reveal itself to me for the 100th time. I don't even have to be listening to a song for it to reveal itself to me, because by now a veritable Spotify-like catalog of thousands of songs can reveal themselves to me, even when I'm not listening to them, and haven't listened to them in years, because they're all stored on a "cloud" somewhere deep in inner space. These are basically the only things that Blastitude is ever about.
TO WIT:
Today (which was August 5, 2012 . . . it takes me way too long to write anything these days -- ed.) the Mess Hall Free Store was open and were making available a stack of beat-up 1970s LPs that were actually occasionally decent. I grabbed two by Roberta Flack, her exquisite 1969 debut First Take and, from 1973, her biggest-selling album Killing Me Softly. A lot of First Take has a nice, hushed, spiritually overtoned atmosphere, and you already know what it sounds like because you've heard "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," thanks to a popular fictional DJ and thousands of popular non-fictional DJs following his lead. The whole album is recorded like that hit single was; simple piano folk/soul tunes given sparse but accomplished jazz arrangements by a guitar/bass/drums combo that includes Ron Carter. There are also tastefully deployed horn and string arrangements that sweeten the tunes up a bit, and belie the title, although the aforementioned big hit is one of the sparser songs on here, almost sounding like a really good early Jefferson Airplane ballad. Dare I even say that Pentangle is also a valid reference point, not to mention prime early-mid Tim Buckley albums like Happy/Sad? On that note, both of these Flack albums have a great Leonard Cohen cover -- a suitably exquisite "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye" on First Take, and an album-closing 9-minute prog-folk version of "Suzanne" on Killing Me Softly. I can also see 1970s Roberta Flack, like her contemporaries the Pointer Sisters, as a straight-up kinder and gentler version of the titan Nina Simone. Flack's music is intelligent in its own right, it's just not as fiercely intelligent as Simone's. She also doesn't play piano nearly as incredibly (or fiercely) as Simone, or sing as heroically, but she does play piano in a way that frames her own soft vocals beautifully. If we're talking about the all-time pantheon of creative artists, and you asked me which one I would nominate first, it would be the titan Nina without any hesitation. But as far as putting on an LP while lazing at home on an exquisite summertime Sunday afternoon like this one, I would go for Roberta 9 times out of 10. Okay, 4 out of 5. Aaaaaand now for a TOTAL-SUBJECT-CHANGE CODA: the Free Store also had Meltzer's Whore Just Like The Rest anthology! I grabbed it, ready to rush it home, and then my conscience reminded me, Hey Larry, we've already got a lovingly taken-care-of copy sitting on our shelf at home, which we really should take down and look at more often, so duh, leave this copy here for some other tuned-in soul to take advantage of. Thanks, conscience.
I'm surprised it took me this long to learn about (or actually remember learning about) Robert Crotty. He was a guy from New Haven, Connecticut who played the blues, and was a big influence on Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille when they lived there. Last week (actually July 11th! -- ed.), Connors and Langille visited Columbia University's WKCR-FM and played three hours of the music that had influenced and inspired them throughout their entire lives. They started the show with three tunes by Crotty (including one where Crotty and Connors play together), and I was immediately blown away, especially by the first one, a stone cold lonesome "T.B. Blues." From the internet I learned a little more about Crotty, that he lived in New Haven all his life, and had recently passed away in 2011, at age 57. The "T.B. Blues" recording was made in the 1980s, and it was released on a vinyl LP called Robert Crotty Blues (pictured) in 1989, on Connors and Langille's own St. Joan record label. There's a copy on ebay right now for $480.00 if you want to "buy it now." (Actually it's now $510.00 with some "previously $600" tomfoolery that wasn't there before.) I'm tempted to buy it now, at least whenever "T.B. Blues" is playing. I'm not going to, but I've certainly already spent that much on things that are far less spiritually enriching. I love what Langille says about Crotty after the three songs play: "He had a way of singing as though he was completely invisible. He never threw his persona around. He didn't smear himself over the songs. He just let the songs come right through him." Hopefully you can still listen to the full 3-hour show at this link: http://soundcloud.com/northernspyrecs/loren-connors-suzanne-langille.
New Frank Ocean album is pretty unreal. It took a couple listens, but man is it ever sinking in. Now, almost every single line is coming off as effortlessly literate, engagingly curious, always catchy as hell, sung with constant mellifluous melodies, ridiculous hooks, Mr. Ocean tossing aside satirical aphorisms, observational slices of lives, conversational quotes and mash-ups (is that "Real Love" by Mary J. Blige, or Anita Baker, or both at once, being referenced over the top of a "Bennie & the Jets" bounce??), and it all gets deeper and richer as it goes. For example, tracks 7 ("Super Rich Kids," the bouncy number I just described) and 15 ("Pink Matter") each feature a celebrity guest rap verse, by Earl Sweatshirt and Andre 3000 respectively. Not only are the two cuts staggered equally in the album sequencing, but both rappers use a similar downbeat tone, with a formidable poetic gravity and playful melancholy that masterfully echo Ocean's. And, in between those two cuts, at track ten, is the afro-futurist progged-out psychedelic 10-minute triangle-generation synth-funk of "Pyramids," a long brooding number in which Ocean parallels the story of a present-day hotel sex worker with that of an ancient Egyptian queen, all finally coming to rest on a bed of gorgeous electric guitar soul music by.... John Mayer?? I could go on.
And speaking of Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future, Kelan Phil Cohran has always been a favorite around here, and not just because he played trumpet and more with Sun Ra in the early 1960s, but because he's played his own brilliant celestial jazz music here in Chicago ever since, still doing it at age 85. I've also previously written about how some of his grown-up sons have a band together called Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, and right now I'm writing about how they've all gotten together with their father to record and release an album of new material, a double LP for the Honest Jon's label, self-titled Kelan Philip Cohran & The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. When I first put it on, as with Hypnotic Brass Ensemble's recent recordings on their own, I have to get used to sparkly clean production (it's okay, it sounds good, I'm just more used to grime than sparkle), and I also have to get used to funky heavy bass lines being played not by strings but by a tuba, because playing a tuba is a strangely antiquated art in this electronic era. But really, it only takes a couple minutes before I start to fall in deep, pulled in not even by the unstoppable grooves (check out Side C's "Spin") so much as all of those sweet rich melancholy deep horn solos, wending their way over the low rhythms, chorus after chorus after chorus, trumpets, trombones, that tuba too, beautiful ancient singing improvisations that remind me of the sea-spray horn solos of Jamaican ska, early Miles Davis, militant 70s funk, so many voices, so much history, but still futuristic and celestial. (Kelan Phil's bowed string overtones are always good for that, just as much on this LP's "Ancestral" as they were back in 1960 on Sun Ra's Angels and Demons at Play.)
7-INCH ROUNDUP??
Gonna try to do an extremely overdue 7-inch round-up all of a sudden, right here in the middle of this weblog post. The reason I'm finally doing this is because all of a sudden I have four brand new or new-ish (released in 2012, okay?) 7-inches on my desk, sitting on top of a way-too-big stack that I've been neglecting for years. (No, seriously, since 2008 or so.) Two of the new ones were sent in for review, and the other two I purchased for myself. In the former category, we've got a record by Limbs Bin, co-released by the Familiar Combatants and Tickled Meat labels. Limbs Bin is described
in an accompanying note as a "Western Mass noise dude." I would call it power electronics, in that it's a guy screaming and yelling along with noise and drum machine. I don't consider myself especially qualified to talk about power electronics, because I try not to listen to it very much. It's just too much extremity. I find it hard to listen to vocals and songwriting that are always pushed to the exact same breaking point. That said, this stuff sounds pretty ripping to me. Maybe just because it's been awhile. The vocals are rather samey but the music is somewhat varied. Really wish it said if the speed was 33 or 45 somewhere in the
otherwise rather elaborate package (nice b&w graphics, fold-out
sleeve). Sounds better on 45.
Now I'm listening to another new weird punkoid 7-inch, this time by a group called The Telephone Callers, I think from Ann Arbor, Michigan. I seem to remember these guys putting out a tape that I kinda liked in a brief noisy smudge-blast pop kinda way. That was back in like 2009 and this 7-inch could've been from around then too . . . hard to tell as it's not even on Discogs. It starts out much more loungy than the band I remember, with sparse Ribot-esque skronk guitar going against piano, then they do a brief little rave-up which must be the next song, which goes into an actual extended drum solo, which goes into what sounds like a really broken attempt at a yacht-rock song that I think goes on for almost 5 minutes that are not not proggy. Side B has three more songs and doesn't even seem as focused as Side A, but has another busted-prog centerpiece track, this one more of a dazed ballad that, I have to admit, makes me think of Supreme Dicks at their most bummed-out. Piano figures prominently, but this a far cry from the elegant contemporary piano rock of, say, Blues Control or Colossal Yes. This music sounds ugly and the record looks terrible, but I'm still considering the two long songs on here for the "KBD 2000" comp(s) that I'm currently bootlegging in my head.
Speaking of that KBD 2000 comp, a couple or four years ago a band from Florida called Blast and the Detergents sent me a weird CD that actually stood out somewhat from this crowded 21st Century pack of what literally seems like hundreds of post-post-punk DIY bands. It was rumbly and foggy minor-key blast-furnace punk that sounded like a youthful updating of certain conceptual aspects of Mission of Burma and Pere Ubu. They have two songs on this split 7-inch from 2010, co-released by the Scotch Tapes and No Clear Records labels, and they are as good as anything on the CD, especially the first one, which is called "Minimalism, D'uh." The band on the other side of the record, Ghost Hospital, have also sent in material before, and I always thought it was decent, but wasn't sure how to write about it. Slightly cutesy nerd garage? Well, with the two songs they have on this split, they're like the nerd who at the end of the movie puts on a cool jacket and trades his nerd glasses for cool shades. Tougher riffs, tougher backbeats, more reverb, more laid back, cooler vocals. Most improved award!
Wow, the "21st Century post-post-punk" styles continue as I dig through these 7-inches from the last 2-4 years, the latest example being VNC, who I think are from L.A., or at least Southern California. Their name stands for Vienna Noise Choir, but their song "Harm Guitar" isn't some sort of noise guitar mess, it's a spiky rolling pop new wave anglo aggro number, more of that Burma gospel, if a little scragglier and scruffier. It's a good tune, and I especially like how the song kind of ends halfway through and gets taken over by a solo guitar playing a long outro of shard-like electric-church arpeggios. The other side of this split single is by someone called The Moore Brothers, and, wow, it's something completely different in that it basically sounds like a light attempt to emulate Crosby, Stills & Nash. Absolutely nothing punk about it, not even remotely post-. One of the rare ballads where I can say more irony might've made it better. This record is from 2010, and it's on the Brick Factory label.
Here's a split 7-inch between Infinite Light and Vibracathedral Orchestra, both from Britain, released in 2009 on the Krayon label, also from Britain. Vibracathedral kick a nice nervy bounce with glistening hover-drone and space-blues guitar licks, and after all they are one of the best British underground rock bands of the last 15 years. Excellent singles band, too. Infinite Light side is my fave though, not so much for the first half of loud and invigorated but semi-monochromatic psych guitar ecstaticitude (apparently the lineup is Barry Dean and Mick Flower on guitars with Pete Nolan on drums, not bad), but for the last half, which is a rather glorious duet between the actual musical melodic guitar playing of I think Infinite Light himself, who I think is Barry Dean, and a mysterious uncredited lady singer. Move over Sandy Denny and tell Jacqui McShee the news! (Wow, I'm reading about this section on the Krayon website, and not only does it not reveal the name of the lady singer, it just says the word "falsetto," which makes me think this track is Barry Dean, or another non-female male vocalist, singing along with his guitar playing. Listening to it again . . . and yep, it could be a dude! More like Jacqui McHE, am I right?)
Another sign of how behind I am at reviewing records, I feel like a couple years ago I actually rough-drafted, and maybe even published, a review of the next record, at least once. I know I've listened to it, at least once. It's a split between Tiger Hatchery and Wasteland Jazz Unit, on the Gilgongo label. Both groups consistently rip in respective hardcore free jazz styles, THC coming at it, still, somehow, with post-bop as a starting point, which makes it very exciting . . . I just saw them do this in front of 240 drunken revelers last week [Aug. 7, 2012 . . . incredible free Monday night show at the Empty Bottle with ONO -- ed.] and the crowd was way into it. WJU, on the other hand, come at it with no bop at all, entirely in a post-Borbetomagus scorched-earth style. I've never seen them do it live, but I would like to someday.
NEW ARRIVALS, OLD ARRIVALS, VINYL, MP3s, STREAMS, ETC. (CONT.):
BLOWHOLE Killing Noise LP (ZABRISKIE POINT)
BLOWHOLE Gathering LP (GIARDIA/FUSETRON/CARBURETOR)
SHADOW RING/BLOWHOLE/BUNNY BRAINS/TOWER RECORDINGS Cock Displacement EP 7" (SUPERLUX)
I've been digging through old zines and pulled out Muckraker #5 with its extensive (complete?) Blowhole
discography, as annotated by the band's two principle members, Jeph
Jerman and Patrick Barber. If you happened to be reading a lot of
noise/underground/experimental zines at a certain time in the early/mid
1990s, you'll remember this band being featured or reviewed in every
single one of them, at least once. In fact, how many Blowhole records do
you still have, or did you have at one point? I think I made it up to
four, and I still have three, according to what I just pulled off of the
shelf. Killing Noise always appealed to me because it was billed
as a Jimi Hendrix tribute/covers album, and indeed it is, though very
free with the source material, each side featuring a good 10 to 15
minutes of seemingly anti-Hendrixian table-top noise/ambient solo
guitar, which on side two is extensively backwards masked... ah, backwards
masking... there's the Hendrixian connection (slight return). When the
actual cover versions do come, they are completely messed-up, ragged,
punked-out, and also seem to have absolutely nothing to do with
Hendrix's music, except for the lyrics. Oh yeah, and there's a couple
snippets from interviews with Jimi spliced in too. I actually love this
album. In part because of how much I've always loved Hendrix, but
I've heard plenty of Hendrix tributes and covers that were lame as hell, essentially
cocktail lounge bands playing blues standards, total noise reduction.
This one gets the noise part right! "Wind Cries Mary" particularly shreds. Right next to Killing Noise was Blowhole's Gathering LP, so I pulled that one out too. (Free Metal,
my other Blowhole LP, I remember you being a straight guitar/drums duo free-jazz freakout LP and I'll
pull you out another time.) I'm pretty sure I only listened to Gathering
once after buying it for 4 bucks at Amoeba in San Fran well over a
decade ago. What can I say, I'm a sucker for hand-painted covers, and I
also liked the labels it was on, Giarda being the record label wing of
the same publishing house that did the aforementioned Muckraker
zine, and surely you've met Fusetron by now... both labels originally
from Minneapolis, by the way... I do remember this
being Blowhole at their jazziest, which is still pretty anti-jazz, some
sort of full-band hard-swinging free-blowin' concussion bop. At the time
I bought this, which was like 1999, I was ready to take a breather from current avant-garde jazz after getting deeply into it for the previous 5 years or so. In 2012 it holds
up pretty good and fits nicely into a
since-discovered Mutant Garbage Jazz aesthetic. (Dig around this page for a little more info, or at least a record review written while I was discovering it.) AND, speaking of old zines, I would be absolutely remiss if I didn't mention the Cock Displacement
#1 zine and 7" vinyl EP that are still lurking around from a road
purchase circa 1999, because it was released in 1996 and indeed has a
Blowhole track on it (charmingly billed as The Blowhole), in this case a
very nice subdued and silence-flirting percussion improvisation . . .
in fact each of the four artists seem to turn in particularly nice
improvisations, all of them instrumental, with the exception of the
Bunny Brains, who take up 5/6th's of Side B with one of their Dan Bunny
dirge songs from a post-Flipper universe, followed with a sly
semicelestial coda jam by The Tower Recordings that's really only about a
minute long. The real news is the opening track, a great piece by the
Shadow Ring from their early synth period, when Tim Goss had just joined the band. GHOSTWRITERS Music From No-Man's Land 12" (ZERO RECORDS). Every 5 or 6 years I get blown away by the synthesizer music of Charles Cohen. Last time it was in the mid-2000s, when he seemed to show up on a few improvised music CDs, though the only one I remember for sure is a great duo album with Ed Wilcox that I'm gonna dig out and listen to later tonight. (P.S. I also dug out another good and obscure CD, a 2006 collaboration Cohen did with Yanni Papadopoulos of Stinking Lizaveta under the name Planet Y. You can buy MP3s at Thrill Jockey!) This time around, it's the discovery-via-blogosphere of a two-man early-80s synth-pop-industrial group he was in called the Ghostwriters. Honestly these are just great cold-synth punk instrumentals.
NEIL YOUNG Chrome Dreams (UNRELEASED). Any
opinionated conversation trying to designate the most stoned
recording of all time would have to at least consider "Will To Love" by Neil
Young, with copious bonus points for 1) the central singer-as-fish metaphor and 2) audible
fireplace crackle. The track was slated for a then-announced upcoming Neil
album called Chrome Dreams, but got shelved in favor of the rather muddled American Stars & Bars, which at least did feature the two greatest Chrome Dreams tracks, "Will To Love" and all-time Crazy Horse dirge classic "Like a Hurricane." In fact, I think that, even though Stars & Bars has far fewer great songs on it than the loaded Chrome Dreams,
it somehow works better as an album. The iffy sequencing actually sets up
those two classic songs very well... even the cover art and the title
work better in this regard. That's Neil for you,
the sharp inconsistencies growing strange chemistries....
NEIL YOUNG Americana CD (REPRISE). Speaking of which . . . talk about a sharp inconsistency that is yet still growing strange chemistries . . . Crazy Horse get back together in late 2011 or early 2012, offer a pretty awesome 37-minute instrumental warmup jam on neilyoung.com, and then record a brand new album . . . consisting entirely of old common domain folk songs like "Clementine" and "Oh Susannah" and even an a capella version of "Get A Job"?? A lot of people were grumbling about the concept, and I'll agree that it's a bit of a head-scratcher. Nonetheless, this is an interesting record. The songs don't blow you away, but they draw you in, which makes you sing along and think about things. The band plays it a little strange, completely forgoing their wind-tunnel extendo-dirging style, for shorter electric folk miniatures that they almost seem to play with a coy stutter-step. YouTube evidence of their subsequent and currently ongoing tour reveals only one song from Americana along with plenty of wind-tunnel extendo-dirging, including a 26-minute song called "Walk Like A Giant" that Holy Mountain astutely compared to an American Fushitsusha. These songs are going to be on an imminent new triple LP called Psychedelic Pill, and Americana will probably be completely forgotten. (UPDATE 10/21/12: Just saw Neil Young & Crazy Horse play live at the United Center in Chicago just last week and it was so, so good. I mentioned it on twitter already, but I learned so much from that show. I learned that Crazy Horse build a cave, and Neil is the cave-painter. It can also be heard as actual Big Sky Music, with Molina & Talbot creating the Earth and Tectonics while Young & Sampedro create the Sky and Heavy Weather. Also, they played precisely 0 songs from Americana, and among the new batch of songs Young has written for Crazy Horse are at least three absolute late-period masterpieces, particularly "Ramada Inn," as well as the aforementioned "Walk Like A Giant" and a piano ballad called "Singer Without A Song" that sounded like it could've come right off of After the Gold Rush.) (UPDATE 12/9/2012: Psychedelic Pill has been out for awhile, and I've listened to it about 50 times on Spotify, because I can't bear to spend $85 or whatever on the vinyl. I think it's easily the best Crazy Horse album since Rust Never Sleeps. I even like the classically cornpone Neil numbers "Born In Ontario" and "Twisted Road." And, my favorite song isn't even "Ramada Inn" or "Walk Like A Giant," it's the absolutely sublime and funny 27-minute opener "Driftin' Back.")
GROUPER Violet Replacement (UNRELEASED?).
These MP3s showed up in my iTunes... I guess I downloaded them from
somewhere... sorry, I know that's not cool, but don't worry, because nowadays there's about 5000 fewer share blogs and
Mediafire is emptier than a derelict shopping mall. Either way, Discogs is telling me that this was a 2-track CDR on Grouper's own Yellow
Electric label. 51-minute ambient pieces are rarely what I
choose to throw on the stereo, and as much as I think I would prefer to
listen to Ms. Harris sing, these Violet Replacement pieces are
absolutely
deep and gorgeous. They take the heavy pressure that so distinctly
marked the A I A albums, and, if anything, slightly increase it. (And speaking of Discogs, one of these CDRs has sold for $180 on there so I don't feel bad about downloading it at all.)
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