Music Notes
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A brief music notes, just to get our mind off politics.
Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours just turned 40. Here’s a ranking of the songs on the album. Putting “Don’t Stop” last is the correct call. The whole ranking is basically right.
Pop Matters ranked the best post-punk albums. Have it with your thoughts.
Album Reviews:
Dale Watson, Live at the Big T Roadhouse: Chicken S#!+ Bingo Sunday
Watson is one of the finest practitioners of old-school country music in the land. He’s a man right out of the 1960s and 1970s style, with electric guitar and outlaw feel, with lots of songs about trucking, heartbreak, drinking, and the other classic topics of that era. He’s an excellent vocalist and a solid guitarist. He’s also an Austin institution who I used to see quite a bit when I lived there. His Live in London album is an outstanding live country album. So I was excited by this follow up. But, well, it has an interesting theme. See, Watson hosts these occasional gatherings called Chicken Shit Bingo Sunday. He plays a show. And he has a chicken. The chicken walks around on a wooden board with numbered squares. The audience puts in guesses on the square where the chicken will take a shit. And if they win, they win some money.
So the album is pretty typical of a Dale Watson show, with the additional of this oddity. But the oddity is pretty odd. And it does distract from the album. The songs themselves are of his usual classic quality, both his own songs, a couple of Haggard covers, and a couple of other covers. But it’s not exactly something you are going to listen to very often. And that limits its appeal.
B-
Gary Lucas’ Fleischerei (Featuring Sarah Stiles), Music from Max Fleischer’s Cartoons.
Gary Lucas, who became known as Captain Beefheart’s guitarist and who has went on to have a fascinating career of noise, jazz, and soundtrack albums, created a band to recreate Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop soundtrack. Sarah Stiles, a Broadway singer, plays the Betty Boop character. The arrangements are appropriately Jazz Age but with a modern tinge. This might sound kind of uninteresting to many of you, but it actually works pretty well. Stiles’ voice is appropriately childlike for the part, which might annoy me usually, but she’s really good at it. Plus one forgets that these lyrics were all about sex, making them pretty fun. The musicians are pretty fantastic. Plus “Barnacle Bill” in context of a Popeye cartoon is pretty tough to beat.
B+
Julianna Barwick, Will
This is a lovely listen. And yet “lovely” isn’t quite the unfettered compliment that it might seem. It does share the same problem as a lot of ambient music, which is that I get sleepy listening to it. Yet her voice is great and the arrangements, well, lovely. How much you like this depends on your genre preferences.
B
Venezuela 70: Cosmic Visions of a Latin American Earth
This is an absolutely outstanding compilation of Venezuelan rock from the 70s. Containing a huge variety of music in its 16 songs with sounds I have never heard before, this was some extremely original work. Some of it is propulsive Latin sounds, some of it is weird electronic stuff, all of it is fantastic.
A
Wadada Leo Smith, America’s National Parks
The legendary trumpeter and AACM founder decided to rethink the meaning of a national park as the National Park Service turned 100. After watching the Ken Burns series, he was dissatisfied.
The idea that Ken Burns explored in that documentary was that the grandeur of nature was like a religion or a cathedral,” Smith says. “I reject that image because the natural phenomenon in creation, just like man and stars and light and water, is all one thing, just a diffusion of energy. My focus is on the spiritual and psychological dimensions of the idea of setting aside reserves for common property of the American citizens.”
This doesn’t per se make very much sense to the average reader, but then the spirituality of jazz musicians is often this way. With Anthony Davis on piano, Ashley Walters on cello, John Lindberg on bass, and Pheeroan akLaff on drums and recorded at the absolutely lovely Firehouse 12 in New Haven (I travel there to see a couple of shows a year and it’s a great space), this is a fascinating concept and a very good album. Taking traditional national parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone, but also what Smith thinks a national park could be (song titles include “The Mississippi River: Dark and Deep Dreams Flow the River – a National Memorial Park c. 5000 BC”), he makes his own contribute to the intellectual and cultural product of the American landscape. His work tends to combine experimental jazz with a deep immersion in the classical tradition, creating soundscapes that are both heavily compositional and envelope-pushing. A very interesting work.
A-
As always, an open thread for all things music, or whatever so long as there are no politics.