Category: Music

The first time I ever heard Iron & Wine, I was on the bridge over Lake Washington heading from Seattle into the forested eastern shore of the lake. It was about 10 o’clock at night, and a voice that sounded like it might have come from a century ago was coming over KEXP’s airwaves. I got off the road, rolled down my windows, and listened to the song (“Upwards Over the Mountain” from The Creek Drank the Cradle) as a chill went down my spine. As I heard the rest of that first album and then the 2004 follow-up, I was still taken by the hushed intimacy, but I started to wonder if the other shoe would drop, or if the band would, like the Cowboy Junkies, keep making the same record over and over again for ten years. Iron & Wine’s new EP, Woman King, which hits the streets on February 22, happily answers no: this is a welcome evolution in Iron & Wine’s sound.

Like the Talking Heads in their live concert movie Stop Making Sense, Sam Beam has slowly added instruments and layers to Iron & Wine’s sound over the course of two albums and two or three EPs. The most recent EP, Woman King, adds fiddles, and even an electric guitar to the mix, while keeping the delicate vocal harmonies and gentle melodies that have been the bedrock of Beam’s sound.

That’s where the similarities end to Beam’s previous work. The lyrics, while focused tightly on women, cover a wide thematic ground. “Woman King” imagines the title character as an apocalyptic warrior, the Biblical (“Jezebel”) to impossible couplings and doomed relationships (“Evening on the Ground (Lilith’s Song)”).

The biggest difference, though, is the driving spirit. In fact, “Evening on the Ground,” with its driving rhythm and dueling fiddle and electric guitar, is positively aggressive—not an adjective that you’d apply to any earlier I&W releases. Other songs are actually playful—an observation Beam himself made in an interview for Splendid Magazine conducted while the record was being made. If The Creek Drank the Cradle was a lullaby and Plug Award winner Our Endless Numbered Days a ballad, Woman King is a swinging dance across a sawdust floor with a once-taciturn partner. Beam’s songwriting continues to astonish with intimacy and newfound confrontation, and the broader sonic and lyrical palette that this release displays shows him to be a master who’s still growing. If this is the EP, I can’t wait to hear the next album.

This review was originally posted at BlogCritics.

This has been sitting as an open tab in NetNewsWire for so long, it’s got a new design since the first time I opened it. What Goes On – The Beatles Anomalies List is a listing of all the apparent goofs, flubbed notes, patches, studio chatter, etc. that can be heard in every recorded Beatles song. Nice place to come check if you’re losing your hearing, or that really is someone belching during “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).”

Salon launched Audiofile yesterday, the new MP3 blog of their music critic Thomas Bartlett (and the replacement for the Wednesday Morning Download). Nice bonus feature of every MP3 the feature has pointed to since it was the WMD.

Note: I’m a Salon subscriber, and I don’t know whether these features are generally accessible with a day pass; apologies if they aren’t accessible.

Metafilter: The Master R.I.P.. Great soul jazz organist Jimmy Smith, whose work has touched you through the Beasties’ whole-hog sample of his 1972 song “Root Down,” died February 8. I’ve been sitting on a review of the concert album that came from; looks like I sadly need to expand it to a retrospective. Other coverage: Billboard, MTV.com, Business Wire, BET, BlogCritics.

Boston.com: INXS reality show beckons: Slide over here, audition. So remind me: why am I busting my butt interviewing with every software company in the greater Boston area when I could be standing in line at the Middle East to audition for “Rock Star” and replace Michael Hutchence in INXS?

Oh yeah: because I have a voice…but no stage presence. Another dream dashed.

A few noteworthy developments in digital music this morning. First, one that I failed to note from last week: Beck has released a new EP, called “Hell Yes.” It’s odd, but I don’t really like him coming back to this style after seeing what he can do in more traditional forms on Sea Change. Or maybe I’m just getting too old to do the Beck nonsense groove. Or maybe he is.

On a better note, a rare Elliott Smith EP, the UK release of “Speed Trials” featuring that song, an alternate version of “Angeles,” and “I Don’t Think I’m Ever Gonna Figure It Out,” is available from iTunes today.

Also in the iTunes store: looks like Warner is finally making their part of the Elvis Costello discography available, starting with the oddly brilliant Spike and the oddly uneven Mighty Like a Rose.

And in the interests of free downloads (and old news that I’m just getting around to finding out about), there’s a free 13-track compilation from Universal Motown in the iTunes store. So far pretty straightforward listening, but I’m excited about the Scissor Sisters track (if not the Michael McDonald one).

There are starting to be some interesting back catalog additions to the iTunes store, too, including some of the K Records stuff that was added to eMusic last week; some key Miranda Sex Garden albums; a classic Ofra Haza album; and a bunch of original and posthumously released Tim Buckley recordings.

Speaking of free, I didn’t get to go to the Low show this weekend in Somerville, but Bradley’s Almanac did, and he has an excellent review (plus samples!) at his blog. He’s got a good selection of other concert recordings too…

Finally, the music blog rundown: it looks like Doveman is shuttering the Wednesday Morning Download column for Salon in favor of a coming-soon-now actual music blog. And 3Hive is doing some really good music blog work.

I haven’t written about eMusic for a while, but this week I’m feeling much more charitable about the service. Chuffed, even. Because while for several months I’ve been filling my 40 download a month quota by digging through the Fantasy Records back catalog (not that that’s bad, but honestly it gets monotonous after a while to hear only really good jazz!), this week I checked and was thrilled to see a bunch of releases from Ryko had been added to the service. Including, thank you very much, Mission of Burma’s Vs., some early Replacements, and the entirety of Frank Zappa’s recorded works. Now if they’d just put up the early Elvis Costello releases, which as far as I can tell aren’t on any of the download services yet, my bliss would be complete.

It also looks like K Records, the oddly brilliant Olympia label, has been added, meaning that a bunch of Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Dub Narcotic Sound System, and Halo Benders albums are available, as well as Beck’s brilliantly lo-fi folky One Foot in the Grave.

The best part, of course, is that 40 tracks for $9.95 a month is about four times cheaper than buying the albums on iTunes (and the downloads are 128 to 192 bit MP3s), and buying a booster pack of downloads is an equivalent bargain. The only challenge will be pacing myself.

Ed Harcourt wants to be tough but he can’t help it—his heart is right out there on his sleeve. His new album, Strangers, is just now getting its US release after several months of worldwide availability (see an earlier Blogcritics review by one of our Italiian correspondents), and it’s the evidence that our Ed is a softie—it’s an album full of shimmering gentle love songs with an occasional hard rocking ringer thrown in.

That’s not to say that he doesn’t have a sharp edge to his tongue. He gets off some good one-liners to the tenderest of his melodies, “This One’s For You,” including the fine “I’d wear you on my arm like a brand new scar.” (Try that one as a pick up line sometimes.) Sometimes it works, as in “This One’s for You”; sometimes the images get a little thick, as in “Loneliness.”

Harcourt apparently isn’t totally comfortable with the intimacy he offers on songs like “Something to Live For.” The listener is ultimately kept at bay by gestures like the rocking “The Storm is Coming,” which is a fine song but seems out of place here, and the bitter “Only Happy When You’re High,” a US-release only bonus track. Maybe Harcourt’s getting the rocking out of his system on other projects like his new band Wild Boar will lead to a less hedged performance on his next album. I’ll be listening.

This post originally appeared on BlogCritics.

I feel a bit odd just now, as though I’m part of the machine or something. Here’s why:

1. Go to the Sub Pop home page, which currently offers a link to a site for the new Low recording.
2. Click on the Low splash page.
3. Click on the link in the navigation that says “>S>P info page.”
4. Scroll down the list of reviews for the new album, and click on the one that says “Blogcritics review of ‘The Great Destroyer.’”

And there you’ll find me. Guess I’m really part of the star making machinery now.

Everyone’s favorite men’s renaissance a cappella group, the Suspicious Cheese Lords, will be on Washington DC classical station WETA on Sunday night, doing the “Millennium of Music” program hosted by Robert Aubry Davis. The station has a streaming audio feed (Real or Windows Media Player only, unfortunately) so you can preview parts of their amazing new disc of previously unrecorded works of Ludwig Senfl. Set your tuners for 10 PM; it should be a really good show.

Low’s music has always rewarded careful listening, and its tempos have famously permitted it. Having been lumped in with the slowcore movement for their beautiful and glacial music, the band’s name conjures memories of songs that move with geological speed. But it’s reductionist to think of them as slowcore; the other ingredients in their musical mix—including memorable melodic lines, a sure sense of timbre and atmosphere, drones, the haunting vocal harmonies of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, the anchoring bass of Zak Sally, and an underappreciated sense of humor that has led them to cover songs by the Misfits and Journey (as documented on last year’s b-sides compilation, A Lifetime of Temporary Relief)—are the real musical arrows in Low’s quiver. And, with the tempos positively frantic by the standards of past performances on Long Division, those arrows find their mark in The Great Destroyer.

The album merits a song-by-song review, if only because the band’s musical experimentation causes them to stretch in many different directions at once. The album opener (“Monkey”) starts with a wave of fuzzed out bass, and the bass and guitar stay snarling at the front of the mix throughout. “California” is, by contrast, a slice of sunny pop with memorable harmonies and an oddly hooky chorus (“You had to sell the farm/And go to California where it’s warm”). The song falters a bit as it pulls the energy back in the last bridge, turning what would otherwise be a perfect single into just a great song. The same style plus a dash of guitar line a la U2’s the Edge, informs “Just Stand Back” a little later in the album, and is deconstructed with distorted vocals, odd stereo placements, hand claps, and crunching guitar lines on “Step.”

“Everybody’s Song” is menacing, embracing an abrasive guitar riff (oddly reminiscent of the one from Sun Kil Moon’s “Lily and Parrots”) and angry minor-third vocal harmonies over some seriously pounding bass drums. By contrast, “Silver Rider” sounds like old Low circa Things We Lost in the Fire—pleasant and maybe necessary after the preceding three tracks.

Then there’s “On the Edge Of.” The song sounds like the band was listening to a bunch of old Neil Young records—it has that same crazed/pining dichotomy to its structure and to the sound, and the lead guitar hook paired to Sparhawk’s high thin tenor conjure visions of Freedom. The same contrast informs “Pissing,” “Broadway (So Many People),“ and “When I Go Deaf,” which sounds less like a melding of “Low’s varied styles together into a single song” (as Sub Pop writes in the promotional blurb for the album) than a manifesto that declares that beautiful delicate vocal lines and aggressive guitar solos needn’t live in separate worlds. The closer, “Walk into the Sea,” explores the same territory by foregrounding Mimi Parker’s drumming against the delicate melody line.

The album isn’t as much of a departure for the group as it is a needed evolution. Their last album, Trust, sounded constrained by their slow-drone formula and laid bare a few too many of their influences. The Great Destroyer opens up some promising new directions for the band. It also promises that they will follow more than a few of them in albums to come, which is the best news of all.

Originally posted at Blogcritics.

New York Times: Smithsonian’s Song Catalog Is Available for Sale Online. Unfortunately, it’s at MSN Music, not the iTunes Music Store. Interesting choice, given the percentage of the Mac market who would be interested in Folkways recordings who are now locked out of purchasing them online (at least through September). Since the other major library of American and world field recordings, the Alan Lomax collection, is only available on iTunes, I guess this is really going to turn into a DRM technology battle.

It is hard to remember sometimes, from the perspective of early 2005, that many choral masterworks whose existence we take for granted are relatively new to the recorded repertoire. Bach’s B Minor Mass and Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem were first recorded in their entirety by Robert Shaw for RCA Victor in 1947, nearly a full half-century after sound recordings became commercially available, and works like Berlioz’s Messe Solenelle were available only as imported recordings until the Washington Cathedral Choral Society’s North American premiere recording of the work in the early 1990s. But many more composers are mostly or entirely unrecorded, particularly the numerous choral composers of the Renaissance.

This rich unrecorded choral world is rapidly becoming the specialty of Washington, DC’s resident male early music a cappella group, the Suspicious Cheese Lords. Following their first CD, which featured unrecorded works of Elzear Genet (aka Carpentras), the Cheese Lords return with Missa L’homme armé, an ambitious program of premiere recordings from the works of Ludwig Senfl (whose name means mustard in German).

Senfl, who was a musical contemporary of Carpentras, Juan del Encina, and other better known Renaissance composers, was the court composer for Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, but faded into relative obscurity following Maximilian’s death, and remained in the employ of Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria until his own death in 1543. He left behind an enormous amount of music, including over 100 mass settings. For this recording, the Cheese Lords selected Senfl’s parody mass on the popular tune L’homme armé, several motets, and Senfl’s vast (and incomplete) Te Deum, which Cheese Lord collaborator and Library of Congress researcher Michael Donaldson completed by adding an altus line in accordance with known performance practices of the time.

The performances this time around are stellar. The ensemble has grown in sonority and maturity since their debut release, and the blend and solo lines are superb. This is a highly recommended recording from an even more highly recommended live ensemble.

(And it’s been almost five years since I sang with them, so you can take that as a reasonably objective opinion.)

DCist: WHFS, R.I.P.. Infinity Broadcasting changed the format of the venerable “alternative rock” station (which had in recent years largely shifted focus, to what DCist appropriately calls “aggro rock”) to a Spanish language station. This leaves the DC area with no alternative rock stations at all.

I should be surprised but I’m not. First they came for the classical stations, then the jazz stations, then for the college indie stations…

New mix posted: i’d be an unmade bed. Also available at the iTunes Music Store. I tried to go uptempo with this one, and the only problem was that I had too many tunes and too few threads pulling them together. Hopefully the final version overcame at least the second challenge.