Category: Music

An article in the Globe last week about composer William Bolcom’s new string octet, given its Boston premiere on Friday, spilled the beans about Bolcom’s new Symphony No. 8, commissioned by James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra and dedicated to the BSO and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. It’s a monumental work in four movements, a choral symphony that sets the prophetic poetry of William Blake (“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” “America: A Prophecy,” and “Jerusalem, or the New Albion” among others) into a four-movement symphonic poem. It’s a foreboding piece to learn, particularly for the chorus that has to memorize six to eight voice harmonies that are frequently in augmented sevenths and diminished ninths to each other.

But last night we ran through it for the first time for Maestro Levine, and it started to make sense. And the moments of great lyricism started to insinuate themselves into my skull. And I started to realize that part of coming to terms with this piece is coming to terms with Blake himself, which is no small task.

I feel, as a lone chorister facing the work, somewhat like one of Blake’s copper plates. Having received my acid bath I am ready to reveal his text in all its glory.

We will premiere the work at Symphony Hall next weekend and in New York at Carnegie Hall on Monday night. If my good friend Pes, whose undergrad thesis was a work on Blake that he etched into copper plates (!), is out there listening, you should come by. I’d love to hear what you think of Bolcom’s take on the visionary.

I had been meaning to post this for a while and finally got around to it. I couldn’t quite pull off a top 10 for 2007, but I did manage a top 12, and you can find it on Lists of Bests (where you can create your own list of “Best of 2007” and see how your tastes stack up against other LoB users).

My number one, unsurprisingly, was Radiohead’s In Rainbows, which stayed at the top of my playlist for a good three months—longer than any other album this year. Right behind it, of course, was Black Francis’s Bluefinger. And behind that? A few surprises. Marissa Nadler’s Bird on the Water totally pwned me the first time I heard it, and it’s one of the few albums I listened to twice in a row this year. Only a little weakness in some of the lyrics kept it out of the top 2. M.I.A.’s Kala, on the other hand, snuck past me when it came out; it took her KEXP in-studio appearance to get me to listen to it again, and now I’m hooked. And Feist’s The Reminder is a nice chocolate ice-cream of an album, in that it’s probably unhealthy how many times I spun it this year to enjoy its sweet pop hooks.

The rest of the list is probably unsurprising—Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, new records from Iron & Wine, the White Stripes, the Arcade Fire, and PJ Harvey. But two were kind of surprising to me personally. I didn’t expect Nick Cave’s side project Grinderman to be as much fun as it is, and I was totally blown away by Rickie Lee Jones’s rambling, honest, and deeply devotional Sermon on Exposition Boulevard—highly recommended for all, and a must listen if you’re a seminarian. (Ahem).

The only mix that I’ve ever done that started as a visual pun, coverflow contains a set of covers that hit some familiar ground and some unfamiliar items as well. It’s hard to do these right; my previous effort suffered from some lofi recordings and the same is true here. But there’s some fun stuff here. Particularly fun was sorting through the long hidden track at the end of Justin Rosolino’s first self published album to call out a few items that I feel are totally what covers are about.

Usual Suspects™: you’ll get this mix along with days that you choose to ignore.

I love the awful classical covers linked in this post (via). Not least of which the one that provides the spectacular thought that Die Walküre = breasts, or VW hubcaps, or breasts covered with VW hubcaps!

But I was especially pleased to see, on the Westminster Gold fansite, this particular number—which my sister actually gave me for Christmas!

Here’s one for the end of 2007: days that you choose to ignore, now posted at Art of the Mix (AOTM Mix ID 116837). I’m particularly proud of the first three or five transitions on this one; afterwards it gets a bit choppy.

Copies en route shortly to the usual suspects; contact me using the link below (on the site, if you’re reading this in a feedreader) if you want to be a usual suspect or haven’t been getting copies of my mixes already. Artwork also forthcoming…

On Wired today, a pair of brilliant David Byrne articles—one an interview with Thom Yorke about the business and about Radiohead’s new album; one by Byrne about the evolving nature of the music business. People used to say Brian Eno was the smartest guy in the business, and that may still be true, but Byrne shows himself to be the smartest guy who’s still relevant in this pair of articles.

The recorded extended excerpts from the Yorke interview are absolutely brilliant as well.

As I noted yesterday, last night was the opening of the Pops Christmas concert season. And you know what? It was a lot of fun—maybe the most fun I’ve had at one of these concerts in a long time. Part of it, of course, was Noah Van Neil (the Singing Fullback) and the crowd’s reaction to him (for the first time in the three years I’ve been doing these programs, the student guest soloist got a standing O!). But a big part of it was the repertoire. I mean, I don’t think that two years ago in the midst of the interminable set piece “The Snowman” that I could have imagined that we’d ever be singing Amahl or the Vaughn Williams Fantasia, but they were two substantial highlights of the program last night.

The biggest highlight is mentioned in the Boston Herald review of last night’s opening show, which calls our new “12 Days of Christmas” arrangement a highlight but doesn’t mention that it had the crowd on its feet, screaming, laughing, and clapping before we were actually on day 12. Yes, folks, we killed. Who’da thunk it? (Of course, we had a little help from the arrangement, which was well-nigh Schickele-worthy.)

It’s been a while since I checked in with many of my Seattle friends, so I received a positive surprise when I checked Tom Harpel’s Flickr site and found information about the new Onalaska album, You and the Fishermen. Released something like five years after To Sing for Nights, the new release came out in October and features final versions of some songs that have kicked around in demo form for years, plus some brand new stuff. I can’t wait to check it out.

Interesting debate going on between ComScore and Radiohead regarding the Comscore report that alleges that 62% of worldwide Radiohead downloaders paid nothing.

My thought: this is where selection bias potentially becomes a real problem for Comscore.

Comscore gets their metrics from a panel of Internet users who are recruited with a package of incentives—in the past, it was browsing acceleration and download monitoring. The user’s traffic is passed through a Comscore proxy server, monitored, and warehoused. Traffic is anonymized but indexed against demographic variables.

So the issue of how the data is collected is pretty unremarkable. If Comscore sees a transaction, it really happened. The larger question is: do people who volunteer to have their traffic sniffed represent the whole Internet? It seems pretty clear to me that they don’t, and in fact Comscore regularly adjusts the metrics they report from the panel to account for overall demographics (percentage of women, percentage of users from different geographic areas). But you can’t a priori adjust the numbers based on a worldwide count of Radiohead fans, or Radiohead fans who are comfortable downloading music. And that’s where I think there is a potential problem with the numbers. Comscore’s Andrew Lipsman says that their sample, 1000 people of whom several hundred downloaded the data, is representative. I say that’s true only if there was no selection bias in the sample to begin with, and Comscore hasn’t proven that.

The Blogcritics new release roundup for yesterday reports that David Byrne’s Knee Plays recording has finally been released on CD (though not, surprisingly, on MP3 or iTunes). I found an LP copy of the album a few years back and fell in love with the music. With eight extra tracks, and with the Dixieland brass meets spacey spoken word vibe of the original now in pristine digital sound, this is going to be a pretty good release to check out.

My favorite track on the release is probably “In the Future,” the original album closer:

In the future everyone will have the same haircut and the same clothes.
In the future everyone will be very fat from the starchy diet.
In the future everyone will be very thin from not having enough to eat.
In the future it will be next to impossible to tell girls from boys, even in bed.
In the future men will be ‘super masculine’ and women will be ‘ultra-feminine’.
In the future half of us will be ‘mentally ill’.
In the future there will be no religion or spirtualism of any sort.
In the future the ‘psychic arts’ will be put to practical use.
In the future we will not think that ‘nature’ is beautiful.
In the future the weather will always be the same.
In the future no one will fight with anyone else.
In the future there will be an atomic war.
In the future water will be expensive.
In the future all material items will be free.
In the future everyone’s house will be like a little fortress.
In the future everyone’s house will be a total entertainment center.

And that’s just the beginning. It’s fun to listen to the track and check off the items that have come true, 22 years later: starchy diet, starvation, mental illness, water crisis, home security, entertainment center… of course, Byrne cleverly hedges his bets by including diametrically opposed predictions throughout, so it’s easy to point to all the things he got right, and ignore the ones that were misses.

I will find it hard to say anything about In Rainbows that hasn’t already been said elsewhere. It’s an album that repays close listening and repeated attention, which is nice; there hasn’t really been another album quite like that that has crossed my path for a while. There are some familiar bits on it: I recall (back in the old, lawless days) Napstering a live concert performance of a song called “Big Ideas (Don’t Get Any),” which is very clearly the Neanderthal ancestor of “Nude.” But there is a lot that is fresh and wonderful, too.

I will probably be in In Rainbows for a bunch of listens. I have a flight south today that will be a good opportunity for me to disappear into it.

An exciting music day, to be sure. Yes, yes, In Rainbows is out. But so is a major chunk of George Harrison’s catalog, just out yesterday on iTunes. I’m listening to All Things Must Pass right now (a bargain at $9.99 for 28 tracks plus a movie!), and man is that a wonderful album. I can’t believe it took me this long to check out more than a few tracks from it.

I’m still waiting to hear the outcome of Radiohead’s grand experiment, like everyone else, I guess. But I can’t help but hope that their new immersion into digital music leads them to open up their stuff to other retailers. It would be nice to see them on the iTunes store again.

Oh, and for anyone who is counting, I think Apple Corps has run out of Beatles-related non-Beatles music to re-release digitally. Bets on when the last shoe will drop and the full catalog goes up?

One of the reasons I haven’t posted much this week is that I have spent a lot of time at Symphony Hall, getting ready for the first concert of the season with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. The program, an evening of compositions by Maurice Ravel, includes a complete performance of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, his brilliant ballet composed in response to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

For much of the work, the chorus has an atmospheric rather than a soloistic part; there is no text, for one thing, but rather humming and vocalizing with various vowels. But there is a section near the middle that woke me up in yesterday’s orchestra rehearsal: a fairly difficult section for chorus a cappella (mostly—there are a few punctuation points provided by the orchestra in places). In the chorus room the section was difficult and muddy. In the hall, on the other hand, with James Levine conducting and with the orchestra providing responses to our lines, it was a completely different beast, raising my hair and pricking my skin in a way that hasn’t happened musically in a very long time. If we can recreate half of what happened in yesterday’s rehearsal, the performances tomorrow and Saturday night should be quite special.

Nota bene: we’re also taking this show to Carnegie Hall on Monday night. So all of you New York-based readers (yes, Tin Man, I’m talking to you), come check us out.

Well, Simon Cowell wasn’t kidding when he told Paul Potts that he was going to make an album. It was June 17th when the former mobile phone salesman won Britain’s Got Talent by singing opera, melting just about everyone who saw him on TV or YouTube in the process (including myself). His album came out July 31st; that’s about six weeks after he won the competition, or maybe one week in the studio plus five weeks’ marketing lead time. The US release of the album occurred last week, and I downloaded it on the strength of his YouTube appearances.

The album is ominously entitled One Chance, presumably referring to his once in a lifetime shot that he took to win the competition. But in a real sense this is the make or break for Paul Potts the career singer. So what did he and Sony bring to the table?

My first impression is: this recording positions Paul in the pop-classical world, not the operatic world. If he wants to get to the Met, this recording doesn’t show that path. On the other hand, if he wants to sell a boatload of records, fill arenas, and appear with orchestras like the Boston Pops, then he’s definitely on the right track.

I have to assume, given the short timeframes, that Sony had more say over the material than Paul did, which perhaps explains the Italian language covers of “Time to Say Goodbye” and “You Raise Me Up,” the Spanish version of “My Way,” and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s execrable “Music of the Night.” Of course, the desire to have him “cross over” to the pop audience explains it too. Some of these are a little limp; my one thought after hearing “My Way” is that it is a mercy they didn’t ask him to sing “Wind Beneath My Wings” too.

But other cuts on the album—his make-or-break “Nessun Dorma,” the surprisingly effective Italian version of “Everybody Hurts,” “Caruso,” and the US-only bonus track “O Holy Night”—show promise in the arrangement and in the passion of his delivery. He is clearly a lyric tenor with strength rather than a true dramatic tenor, but his voice carries across multiple dynamic levels and octaves with relatively little strain. He is a little shy on one or two high notes, but given the compressed recording schedule this is perhaps to be expected.

I hope to goodness for Paul’s sake that this album does great things. It is currently #10 in Amazon’s overall music sales and #1 in Opera and Vocal and in Classical, so one can project that this might actually get Paul the exposure he deserves—and another recording session where he can get into some meatier material.

Who is Black Francis? And where has he been all these years?

The first question seems fatuous, the second coy. Even the 21 year old hipster who was still eating strained peas and filling diapers in 1987 when the Pixies released Come On Pilgrim knows that Black Francis was the frontman, resident UFOlogist, and tortured lead screamer for this most pivotal underground band that almost made it mainstream—opened for U2 during the Achtung Baby tour, for Chrissakes—before he broke the band up by fax.

And Black Francis hasn’t gone anywhere, despite the fact that there have been no releases on which that nom de plume played from 1991’s Trompe Le Monde to 2004’s “Bam Thwok.” That selfsame callow hipster knows that Black Francis became Frank Black when he went solo in 1993, and released a series of solid, if workmanlike, releases between the debut s/t and 2006’s Fast Man/Raider Man.

So much for the history. The questions remain: where has Black Francis been in Frank Black’s solo work for thirteen to fifteen long years? And who is Black Francis, as opposed to Frank Black, anyway? And, most pertinently to Tuesday’s full-length release Bluefinger, why is this the first release of Frank Black’s career to be credited to Black Francis? These are all related questions with one at their core: what is the Black Francis sound?

As I ask the question, I hear Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV, aka Frank Black, aka Black Francis, cough, then laugh dryly, then advise me to go f*cking die.

But there is something to the change of name, for sure. Or else this would have been the fifteenth release credited to Frank Black. So is this a change of soul? Or just of brand?

MBA voice over: The Black Francis brand stands for slicing up eyeballs, screaming, quiet loud quiet, being the band that inspired Nirvana, and being the most awesome band ever. The Frank Black brand stands for a workmanlike approach to rock and roll. Direct to two track. Country rock. Low sales. As he sang in “Chip Away Boy,” “I used to have some fun/Me and everyone/Now I’m just employed.”

And that may be all there is to it. Except.

Exhibit A: “Captain Pasty.” Mars attacking. Irregular meters. And that awesome growl-laugh that opens up the track. It will make your car go like nitrous, if you happen to be behind the wheel when you are listening

Exhibit B: “Tight Black Rubber,” with its Fugazi meets Nirvana bass + guitar duet settling into a Meat Puppets meets Velvets chugging rocker full of tension and bondage tropes.

Exhibit C: “Your Mouth Into Mine.” Could be a Frank Black song, except the spaces between the verses run over with Black Francis’s love-as-body-invasion imagery at a speed that feels at once relaxed and chemically enhanced. Love never sounded so much like theft.

Exhibit D: “You Can’t Break a Heart and Have It.” The one song on the album that provides a tight connection to the album’s supposed inspiration, transgressive druggie Dutch artist/musician Herman Brood, whose song this was before Black Francis made it his own.

Exhibit E: “Threshold Apprehension.” A romp through Pixies touchstones, from high pitched, screaming vocals to four-chord hooks to girlish spoken background vocals (courtesy Charles’s wife Violet Clark) to two of the finest couplets in post-Pixies rock: “Every little sh*t gotta find his salt lick/If I don’t find my babe I’m gonna be junk sick” and “Grand Marnier and a pocketful of speed/We did it all night til we started to bleed.” The hit single the Pixies should have had in the summer of 2007, showing up first as a bonus track on the best of compilation Frank Black 93-03. Your reviewer was stuck in traffic on the Mass Pike the first time he heard the song and nearly rear ended the car in front of him, so immediately propulsive was the impact of the song, and so hard was he laughing with the force of the bliss coming at him from six speakers.

Even in slacker moments an animus of tension and anger moves the record forward. “She Took All the Money”’s “shama lama ding dang” chorus is pushed forward by an irritable rhythm guitar, surprisingly sweet backing vocals from Violet Clark, and some impatient drumming that takes the song out on just the right dry note.

So: what makes it a Black Francis work? There are some descriptive touchstones—screaming, odd meters, UFOs, Lou Reed as Surrealist lyrics—that are ultimately insufficient to describe what’s going on here. What this is is nothing more than the rebirth of Charles Thompson, his musical juices revitalized by the 2004 tour with the Pixies. As he says in the publicity notes for the album, reunions “are bittersweet, and all of the rekindled foreplay of performing the old Black Francis songs never warmed to the full coitus of a reunion LP…I privately went back to the old stage name…almost as a joke. I couldn’t get the Pixies back into the studio, but I would transform into my alter ego of yesteryear.” And even if there is no Herman Brood revival as a result of this LP—Wikipedia can’t even be bothered to link to his artwork, and none of his music is available in the usual download sources—the transgressive junkie artist/musician/suicide deserves some posthumous credit for waking up Black Francis and sending him out screaming into the light of 2007.