Category: Music

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.

Fury points to a new (old) way to get old music onto new formats: the PlusDeck 2C, a cassette deck in a 5.25″ PC drive form factor. It’s Windows only and would make more sense as a USB (2.0) drive, but for those of us that are stuck with some music that is only on cassette it’s not bad.

I found another solution, too, which I actually ordered: the now relatively venerable Griffin iMic. This is a USB connection on one side, standard audio in jacks that can accept either line-level input from phonographs or normal output from another audio device, like a cassette deck, on the other. This means that I can get copies of some of that obscure vinyl in digital format, finally. I’m thinking that parts of the spoken word record of Kemp Malone reading Beowulf is a good first start (though perhaps not all four hours). The bad news, of course, is that the iMic is so venerable it is starting to be unavailable, so grab it at Amazon while you can, even with a four to six week lead time.

I was going to write an obituary to Ali Farka Touré, the amazing Mali guitarist, farmer, and village leader who passed away last month (and whose death is just being made public this week). I was beaten to it by a friend in the radio industry who wrote: “Malian musician Ali Farke Toure has died. I play his music a lot at the station, which is how I was introduced to him. It sucks that this great musician played for so many years and I had to actually go work at a radio station to learn about him. We should have two moments of silence: one, for the passing of Farke Toure, and another, for the humungous blinders that shut America off from most world music.”

I feel the same way and feel as though I’m part of the problem. I’ve known of Touré’s music for at least ten years, since the 1994 release of his Grammy-winning collaboration with Ry Cooder, Talking Timbuktu. But I haven’t proselytized him the way I have other musicians like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or Youssou N’Dour, or even Kathryn Tickell. I haven’t even put his music on a mix.

There is a great remembrance of Touré on Blogcritics today which gives some impressions of the man himself; well worth reading.

Harp Magazine: The True Confessions of Neko Case. Great article about the production of Neko’s latest, long-awaited Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, which dropped today. More once I get a chance to actually listen to the album.

At Art of the Mix: Sting Sundries. This one goes back a ways: 18 years, to be exact.

I was just getting started in pop music and was discovering the wonder of the b-side. Since I only listened to a handful of artists and since Sting’s 1987 release “…Nothing like the Sun” was in the process of rocking my world, I was seeking out Sting singles for the b-sides. I found two: the 12″ vinyl of “We’ll Be Together” and the CD3 of “Englishman in New York.” I subsequently went crazy trying to figure out how to get the CD3 to play so I could tape it. You could buy an adapter to make it a 5” disc, but the adapter wouldn’t work in my parents’ CD player so I had to beg friends to let me see if it would play in theirs. I finally managed to tape the songs and in my infinite wisdom sold the CD3 some years later. At least I still have the vinyl.

I filled half a 60 minute tape with Sting rarities and shared it with Fury, who filled the other side with Dream of the Blue Turtles era b-sides and cuts from the Eberhard Schoener album Video Magic. I was hooked. I still have the tape.

Fast forward: many b-sides and the Internet later, I’m still missing five of the songs on the original tape in digital form but decided to release an updated version anyway with some newer rarities added in, including prototype cuts from Strontium 90, the band in which Sting met Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland, and a 1978 single from Sting with a backing band called the Radioactors. For those missing five songs, including the ten-minute version of “Up From the Skies” recorded in the studio with Gil Evans’ band, I’ll have to keep looking.

So much to write about and so little time! I’ll update about Lisa’s new car later, but for now here’s a completely indecipherable list of what’s on my iPod today:

1. Stafrænn Hákon, “Tætir rækju” (Skvettir edik á ref)
2. Anonymous 4, “A mundi domina” (A Star in the East)
3. David Byrne, “U.B. Jesus” (Look Into the Eyeball)
4. Loretta Lynn, “Little Red Shoes” (Van Lear Rose)
5. The Breeders, “Mad Lucas” (Last Splash)
6. Jane’s Addiction, “Up the Beach” (Nothing’s Shocking)
7. Vic Gammon, “Bring Us In Good Ale” (The Tale of Ale)
8. Peter Gabriel, “Stigmata” (Passion)
9. Pavement, “Starlings of the Slipstream” (Brighten the Corners)
10. Grandaddy, “Gentle Spike Resort” (Concrete Dunes)

Here we go again, with a journey down the twisty little roads of my iPod:

1. Sloan E-52s, “Son of a Preacher Man” (2001-2002)
2. Yo La Tengo, “Autumn Sweater (Remix by Kevin Shields)” (A Smattering of Outtakes and Rarities)
3. Billy Bragg and Wilco, “Ingrid Bergman” (Mermaid Avenue)
4. Steve Reich Ensemble, “City Life III ‘It’s been a honeymoon – Can’t take no mo’” (City Life)
5. Tom Waits, “Lost in the Harbor” (Alice)
6. Elvis Costello and the London Symphony Orchestra, “Tormentress” (Il Sogno)
7. Pulp with the Swingle Singers, “My Body May Die” (Randall and Hopkirk Soundtrack)
8. Early Music Ensemble of London, “Christe, Qui Lux Es” (Guilliame de Machaut), Music of the Gothic Era)
9. Run-DMC, “My Adidas” (Raising Hell)
10. Cat Power, “Back of Your Head” (Moon Pix)

This is why pressing Shuffle on any musical device I own is a little dangerous.

I pressed play on the new Arab Strap and was immediately transported—to the standout track on the last Reindeer Section album, a song called “Whodunnit.” Surprising? Not really. The guest vocalist on that track, which was a prickly pear among the mannered (and wonderful) songs from Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody’s Scots supergroup, was Aidan Moffat, the vocalist for Scots band Arab Strap. And once you hear Moffat, you never forget.

As on that release, with The Last Romance it’s that voice that hits you first, that unmistakable Scots slur that lies somewhere between Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas after a bender. Moffat has one of the great distinct voices in indie music right now, on first listen a mix of mumble, weird Scots, and hangover-perfect enunciation. The great part is that in spite of the apparent defects, Moffat is a master of delivery, with impeccable phrasing, emotionally expressive diction, and a well-concealed melodic sense that leaves the songs stuck in your head long after they’ve stopped playing.

Of course, the other half of Arab Strap, multi-instrumentalist Malcolm Middleton, has a lot to do with the memorableness of the songs. Songscapes as bleak as anything in Mogwai or 1980s-era The Cure drift around Moffat’s woozy vocals in the desperately driving “If There’s No Hope for Us,” the opening depressive waltz “Stink,” or the bitter rocker “Speed Date.”

But the record isn’t one-note simple. The cautious optimism of “Don’t Ask Me to Dance” has the scope of a Peter Gabriel uptempo ballad with lyrics that could be by Johnny Cash, while the acoustic “Confessions of a Big Brother” is positively tender even through the bitter confessions of the narrator’s failings. And “There Is No Ending” is a fine ending indeed, complete with major key, a horn section, and one of the greatest declarations of love ever: “If you can love my growing gut/My rotten teeth and greying hair/Then I can guarantee I’ll do/The same as long as you can bear.”

It’s early in 2006, but this is definitely one of the top releases of the year.

Also published on Blogcritics.