Category: Music

So in spite of the random 10 I still have “Et Oedipus irrumpere, irrumpere et pulsare, et pulsare, et pulsare, et Oedipus pulsare, pulsare, ululare!” ringing in my ears from last night’s concert—that of course being the narrative when Oedipus batters down the door of his wife Jocasta’s room and sees she’s hanged herself, cause, y’know, she’s just found out she’s also his mom.

Anyway.

• Sigur Rós, “Mea Blóanasir” (Takk…)
• London Chamber Orchestra (James MacMillan, composer), “Eli, eli, lama sabachthani” (Seven Last Words)
• Daniel Lanois, “Fisherman’s Daughter” (Acadie)
• Mission of Burma, “Nancy Reagan’s Head” (There’s a Time and Place to Punctuate)
• Yo La Tengo, “Autumn Sweater (Kevin Shields remix)” (A Smattering of Outtakes and Rarities)
• Prince, “Goodbye” (Crystal Ball)
• Bobby Bare, “I Am An Island” (The Moon Was Bare)
• Danger Doom, “No Names” (The Mouse and the Mask)
• Prince, “Call My Name” (Musicology)
• Elvis Costello, “Shallow Grave” (Costello and Nieve: Live at the Troubadour, LA)

You know it’s been a long hard week when the Random 10 is my first post since Wednesday night. Someday, on the Final Reckoning, I hope I’ll get an extra day of eternal bliss in exchange for the day I had yesterday.

Anyway, the music:

1. Alberta Adams, “Remember” (Chess Blues)
2. Choir of St. John’s College (John Tavener, composer), “Song for Athene” (Christmas Proclamation)
3. Petra Haden, “Our Love Was” (The Who Sell Out)
4. Lou Ann Burton, “Shake Your Hips” (The Oxford American Southern Music Sampler, 2005)
5. Bill Cosby, “Oops!” (I Started Out As A Child)
6. The Velvet Underground, “Foggy Notion” (Peel Slowly and See)
7. Shirley Horn, “Fever” (The Main Ingredient)
8. Solomon Burke, “Diamond In Your Mind” (Don’t Give Up On Me)
9. The Dramatics, “Get Up and Get Down” (Dead Presidents Soundtrack)
10. Billy Jones & Ernest Hare, “Barney Google” (Edison Diamond Disc)

One last note: these are the random tunes playing in my iPod, but the tune playing in my head is Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion”:

Oh little darlin’ of mine
I just can’t believe it’s so
And though it seems strange to say
I’ve never been laid so low
In such a mysterious way
And the course of a lifetime runs
Over and over again

But I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
When the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away

Special bonus: the connection between “Mother and Child Reunion” and Chinese cuisine.

On the train back to Boston with my coworker yesterday, I was looking over the sheet music for our next TFC concert when my coworker asked about my next performance. I told him, “The first week in May we‘ll be doing Stravinsky’s Œdipus Rex.”

“Cool,” he said. “I’ll have to bring my daughter. She’s thirteen and taking voice lessons. She’d love it.”

Ah, I thought. But will she—or you—love the story? It’s such a nice story too—just in time for Mother’s Day.

The music, though, is absolutely astonishing. Stravinsky wrote some of the most amazingly inventive, sinuous melody lines for this work, which sports a libretto by Jean Cocteau. I think my personal favorite is the herky-jerky chromaticism of the passage where Œdipus batters down the door, kills his mother/wife, and puts out his own eyes. The music, if you’re not careful, sounds a little like a circus act. Last night in practice it sounded like the arrival of the Furies: after a couple of rehearsals John Oliver’s intensity kicked up a notch and he urged us deeper into the meaning of the music, and the results were unsettlingly good. I am looking forward to hearing the orchestration next week.

Of course, the question is, can I in conscience recommend the piece to my co-worker? I guess I’ll have to do what I would want him to do for me when I have a kid: send him the synopsis and a pointer to some of the music and let him make up his own mind.

Quick update today. We drove all afternoon down to Lisa’s parents, including one seven-mile stretch around Newark that took about an hour. So needless to say I’m a bit mad at mechanical objects, am seeing red, have no desire to push a shopping trolley, and spent a good part of the afternoon seeing primary colors, mostly a red mix.

Ba-dum-psch.

1. Beth Orton, “Shopping Trolley” (Comfort of Strangers)
2. Woody Allen, “Mechanical Objects” (Woody Allen: Standup Comic)
3. Sundays, “24 Hours” (Blind)
4. Minus the Bear, “Fulfill the Dream” (Menos Il Oso)
5. The Cure, “Primary (Red Mix)” (Close to Me [EP])
6. Frank Sinatra, “Half as Lovely (Twice as True)” (The Capitol Singles)
7. The Stills, “Allison Krausse” (Logic Will Break Your Heart)
8. Blind Lemon Jefferson, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (Anthology of American Folk Music)
9. The White Stripes, “Forever for Her (Is Over For Me)” (Get Behind Me Satan)
10. Bob Dylan, “Walls of Red Wing” (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3)

This week’s list has a repeat, the CYHSY track (which is included according to the rules of the meme), but the rest is the usual pleasant all-over-the-map assortment. Well, mostly pleasant: once the novelty of hearing Alex Chilton’s once-great Box Tops cover Blondie’s “Call Me” wears off, you’re left with a halfhearted cover that neither illuminates the original nor says anything good about the talents of the cover artist.

Fortunately the Dock Boggs and Blind Lemon Jefferson tracks kind of balance out that track. Happy Friday, y’all.

1. Maria Callas, “O madre mia, nell’isola fatale” (La Giaconda)
2. Spacek, “Eve” (Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) Soundtrack)
3. Sufjan Stevens, “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts” (Illinoise)
4. Daniel Lanois, “Rockets” (Rockets)
5. The Box Tops, “Call Me” (When Pigs Fly)
6. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, “Is This Love?” (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)
7. Dock Boggs, “Harvey Logan” (Dock Boggs: His Folkways Years)
8. Blind Lemon Jefferson, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (Anthology of American Folk Music)
9. Radiohead, “Subterranean Homesick Alien” (OK Computer)
10. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “The Curse of Millhaven” (Murder Ballads)

Mission of Burma’s plan to do a slow leak to fans of the songs from their forthcoming The Obliterati—as one song a week for eight weeks, each song released on vinyl and CD—has been tripped up twice. First, the band was overwhelmed by demand and sold out of all 500 copies in two days. Second, production problems derailed the original plans to leak one song a week. Instead, the band shipped the CD portion of the limited edition, now called “There’s a Time and Place to Punctuate,” this week, with the vinyl version to follow. The CDs were waiting for me last night when I got home from the airport, so while I was stuck in traffic this morning I listened to them in the car.

The songs are tight as ever, maybe tighter; none of the eight clock in at more than five minutes, and only one breaks the four minute mark. The band continues to evolve their sound, too; while the wall of guitars, frantic tempos, earnest screaming vocals, and tape manipulation are all familiar from previous outings, they sound fresh here thanks in part to some strong melodic writing from Clint Conley and rhythmic and melodic experimentation from Roger Miller and Peter Prescott. The strongest track of the lot, Miller’s “Careening with Conviction,” rocks out like rocking out was just invented yesterday, and Conley’s set-closing “Nancy Reagan’s Head” pulses with dark wit and angular guitar work.

On top of all this, Mission of Burma have put up an official site for the forthcoming album (due next month) that features a front-and-center wiki for fans to post their own information about the band and the recording. It also features an on-by-default music player which will selectively release all eight songs from the set over the next few weeks, so you can get the full experience.

I’ll be out of town for the first three days of next week, and the work is piling up against that hulking wall in my schedule like sand on a seawall. Funny how most Fridays feel like that these days. The most frustrating thing about it is the feeling, in spite of GTD, that things are falling through the cracks, and that “to dos” are coming in faster than I can write them down—much less work the pile down.

Today’s Random 10:

1. Violent Femmes, “Add It Up” (Add It Up (1981-1993))
2. Lou Reed, “Why Can’t I Be Good” (Faraway So Close!)
3. Sufjan Stevens, “Black Hawk War, or How To Demolish An Entire Civilization” (Illinoise)
4. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, “I Wish I Was a Mole In The Ground” (Anthology of American Folk Music)
5. Uncle Tupelo, “New Madrid” (Anodyne)
6. Vladimir Ashkenazy, “La Mer, I. De l’aube à midi sur la mer” (Debussy: La Mer, Nocturnes)
7. Gemma Hayes, “4:35 a.m.” (4:35 a.m. EP)
8. Jody Reynolds, “Endless Sleep” (the Peel Box)
9. Suzanne Vega, “World Before Columbus” (Nine Objects of Desire)
10. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, “Is This Love?” (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)

What a great show. I’ve been on a Neko contact high all morning. It’s such a different experience to go to a small venue to see an artist who is genuine and unpretentious—plus has one of the biggest voices around.

Neko’s setlist was heavy on recent songs up front, with quite a few from her new album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and was rounded out by a few tracks from Blacklisted (including a superb “Deep Red Bells” and a haunting “I’ll Be Around”) and a handful of well chosen covers, including her version of “Wayfaring Stranger” (which appears on her live recording The Tigers Have Spoken) and a Buffy Ste. Marie cover whose title I didn’t quite catch. In between songs she and the band traded quips about life on the road (Neko: “I caught a whiff of myself just there and missed a chord. I don’t think I’ve ever smelled as bad in my whole life! I smell like … a salmon!”) and generally yucked it up onstage.

Points of improvement? Well, her band was competent and genuinely sparked in a few places, such as the encore numbers, but they’re no Calexico (with whose members Neko has cut the last few albums). An exception was the divine Kelly Hogan, a formidable singer in her own right, who backed up Neko on vocals. Another issue with the earlier part of the set was the nature of the songs on the new album. On record they feel like a driving collection of compressed vignettes that hang together wonderfully. On stage the songs felt short and detached from each other. The band was tight, maybe too tight—a little more room to play around with the structure of the songs and grow them a little would probably be a good thing.

But these are minor quibbles in what was ultimately a great evening. The opening act, Martha Wainright, was good too—quite funny, very salty, and another wonderful voice. Vocally she reminded me a little of Hope Sandoval, only with a broader range of high notes and with better pitch.

And that Neko contact high? I got to meet her after the show. As she signed my copy of her available-only-at-gigs Canadian Amp EP, I told her how much “Deep Red Bells” and Blacklisted in general had meant to me, and walked away happy as … a salmon, I suppose. She’s smaller in person than she looks on stage, but friendly and genuine even after playing a two hour set… and teching her own guitars on stage prior to the start of the show.

The plus side of being stuck in the JetBlue terminal at JFK on a layover between Buffalo and Boston is free wifi. The downside, of course, is being stuck in JFK.

With that, this week’s random 10:

1. Pulp, “Like a Friend” (This is Hardcore)
2. Prince, “Goodbye” (Crystal Ball)
3. Eva Osinska, “Polonaise brilliante in C major, Op. 3: Introduction (Chopin: Trio, Polonaise)
4. Dntel, “Why I’m So Unhappy” (Life is Full of Possibilities)
5. Elliott Smith, “In the Lost and Found (Hanky Bach)” (Figure 8)
6. M.I.A., “Sunshowers” (Arular)
7. Beth Orton, “Conceived” (Comfort of Strangers)
8. Radiohead, “Sail to the Moon (Brush the Cobwebs Out of the Sky)” (Hail to the Thief)
9. Drive-By Truckers, “Puttin’ People on the Moon” (The Dirty South)
10. Sigur Rós, “Takk…” (Takk…)

Sez here that, following on the heels of the Talking Heads reissues (which have been spectacular, btw, at least the first four albums), another early ’80s David Byrne masterpiece is getting loving reissue treatment, with a twist. Byrne’s collaboration with Brian Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was a significant milestone, if not an out and out first, for all sorts of practices that are in wide use today, including sampling, found vocals, and crosses between world music and guitar pop. But the album and the extra tracks (though no “Qu’ran”) are only part of the coolness: As part of the reissue, downloadable multitrack masters will be made available for two of the songs and licensed under Creative Commons for remixing purposes.

The remix site isn’t live yet, so it’s anyone’s guess for what will go up there. I’m hoping for “Help Me Somebody” and “Moonlight in Glory,” though I’d be very very happy to get a chance to remix “The Jezebel Spirit.” Hopefully they’ll have the remix site up before the 11th, when the album officially drops.

Via BoingBoing, who link to a bootleg of the missing track “Qu’ran” (which I downloaded in the good bad old days of Napster and which I would gladly pay money to get in a higher bitrate version).

(Oh: my life with this album? Got it a few months after graduating and got hooked. It made its way onto one of the best mix tapes I ever made, and I was so hooked on it that I was prone to quoting some of the found words while I was out with friends, who then of course looked at me like I was nuts. Which I was. I was in the Bush of Ghosts. I still haven’t found anything quite like it. Moby’s Play, while not without its good points, is a pale shadow by comparison.)

I have a long drive ahead of me this afternoon, heading down for one of several annual Brackbill family gatherings; I’ve documented the summer picnics a few times over the years on this blog. It’s in Lancaster County, PA, where it smells strongly of cow—the Amish believe in natural fertilizer and the fields are full of it this time of year.

I refilled my iPod last night in preparation for the drive, so I hope there won’t be too many repeats from previous weeks. But you never know.

1. Billy Bragg and Wilco, “Ingrid Bergman” (Mermaid Avenue)
2. Mark Four, “I’m Leaving” (from the Peel Box)
3. Sinéad O’Connor, “You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart” (In the Name of the Father Soundtrack)
4. Doves, “The Sulphur Man” (The Last Broadcast)
5. Doves, “Pounding” (The Last Broadcast)
6. Robert Johnson, “32-20 Blues” (The Complete Recordings)
7. Shannon Worrell, “Shoot the Elephant” (The Moviegoer)
8. Mogwai, “Auto Rock” (Mr. Beast)
9. Dntel, “Last Songs” (Life is Full of Possibilities)
10. Sigur Rós, “Takk…” (Takk…)

Don’t know how I missed this one, but DRM-free download service eMusic has quietly added vast swatches of the Harmonia Mundi catalog, including Anonymous 4, Theatre of Voices (including their sublime Arvo Pärt collection De Profundis), the Baltic Voices compilations (including a Górecki composition I’ve never heard)…

Oh man. Good good stuff. If you have a jones for modern “classical” vocal music and you haven’t signed up for eMusic yet, it might be worth your while just for these recordings alone.

And for something completely different: Exit Music: Songs with Radio Heads, the compilation containing the R&B reworking of “Just” that I pointed to earlier, has also dropped (and is also available at eMusic). And the tracks I’ve heard so far, including a supremely jazzy take on “High and Dry” which is now my favorite track from the comp so far and a somber “Blow Out,” are superb. Good music day all around, I think.

John Cale is one of a handful of lesser known legends in music today. A founding member of the Velvet Underground, then a year later forced out of the group as the first professional victim of Lou Reed’s prodigious temper, he went on to a career as a producer (Nico, the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Patti Smith’s Horses, Jennifer Warnes, Squeeze, the Happy Mondays, Jesus Lizard, the Mediæval Bæbes’ Undredtide) and guest musician (with appearances on albums by Nick Drake, Brian Eno, Gordon Gano, the Replacements, Super Furry Animals), as well as a prolific solo career (23 full length albums since 1970, plus 17 released and 15 unreleased movie soundtracks). The most consistent thing about Cale’s work is its unpredictability; as you might guess by looking at his producer or guest credits, his musical tastes span a wide range of genres, with the result that picking up a new John Cale record can be a little like rolling the dice. 1996’s Walking on Locusts was largely straight-ahead country-inflected pop with a few weird exceptions like “Crazy Egypt,” but 2003’s HoboSapiens is all over the map with its sounds and influences and reflects Cale’s fascination with ProTools.

All of which is to say that when I put Cale’s latest record blackAcetate into my CD player and then had to doublecheck to be sure that I wasn’t listening to Big Star, I wasn’t surprised. The lead-off track, “Outta the Bag,” features Cale’s rarely-heard falsetto over chugging horns and rhythm section, and sounds as though Cale spent a lot of time in Memphis during the session. “In a Flood” is a slowly smoldering evocation of the late summer Mississippi that sounds as if the early Cowboy Junkies were in the next studio. And “Gravel Drive” is a balladic evocation of domestic loss that is majestic in its sweep. The arrangements on most of the songs are a lot more organic than on the cut-and-paste HoboSapiens: there’s even some Prince-inflected funk on “Hush.” The common thread stitching the album together is Cale’s magnificent Welsh voice.

Not everything works on the album; “Sold-Motel” is a fairly uninspired rocker. “Woman” plays a rhythmic albeit tuneless verse over thin drum loops against a guitar-driven chorus with no real unity between the two parts. “Wasteland” is a frustrating ambient inflected tune that has some promising moments in the arrangement but doesn’t earn the grand climax it builds to at the end. But these are minor quibbles compared to the quality of the other tracks. On balance blackAcetate is a worthy addition to the Cale discography, an album that takes risks that more often than not pay off in spades.

 

Also posted at BlogCritics.

So titled because for months, ever since losing my iTunes statistics, I have been steadily working my way back through listening to my entire collection, a process that will take years. I’ve gone about it in two ways, first listening to all my mixes in order, secondly using a set of smart playlists. The most significant of the latter is my “Never Played” playlist, which selects 400 unplayed tunes at random from my library for the iPod (400 was experimentally about the right number to fit the playlist, which might include a large percentage of losslessly ripped songs, onto the iPod and still have room for other content). And the 400 “blows” because I will continue to see numbers like “now playing 21 of 400,” “now playing 16 of 400,” etc. until the library is all listened to. To mix a rarely stirred metaphor, I feel like Sisyphus even thinking about it.

Choosing the “Shuffle Songs” menu option on the iPod, which shuffles through the entire iPod, is kind of a relief. Of course the only time I do this is on Fridays, but it’s a nice reprieve nonetheless.

1. Sufjan Stevens, “Come On! Feel the Illinoise! Part One: The World&rdsquo; Columbian Exposition; Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream” (Illinoise)
2. Sheldon Allman, “Schizophrenic Baby” (Folk Songs for the 21st Century)
3. Doves, “Words” (The Last Broadcast)
4. The White Stripes, “Fell In Love With a Girl” (via the Peel Box)
5. John Cale, “Reading My Mind” (Hobosapiens)
6. Mission of Burma, “He Is/She Is” (Peking Spring)
7. PINE*am, “Gymnopedie 0.1” (EP)
8. Dntel, “Last Songs” (Life is Full of Possibilities)
9. Tori Amos, “Parasol” (The Beekeeper)
10. Radiohead, “Fog” (Knives Out EP)

What a bizarre assemblage. The Sheldon Allman track is the worst kind of novelty, a catchy one. The John Cale track includes about a minute of vituperative Italian dialogue over motorcycle noise. The PINE*am track is some sort of clanking electronica track with wispy female vocals over it, and bears no resemblance to the Satie composition by the same name. There are also some serious songs, mostly owing to the Doves and Dntel albums finally surfacing on eMusic.

But “Fog.” Hmm. Might have to do something with this song.

Following my cryptic note from Tuesday, a quick confirmation that the new Neko album is in fact the most amazing thing to happen to me musically in many weeks, both because of Neko’s consistently astonishing artistic evolution and the peerless keyboard work of the Band’s Garth Hudson.

I just got tickets for her show April 5 at the Roxy. Should be a good time.