Music Notes
By 
First, this is a good time to thank all those who gave a few pennies in our recent fundraising drive. Many thanks. While it is the blog’s 13th birthday, it was right around this time 6 years ago that I was brought on to ruin the site populated by centrists who thought this was the blog where they could be socially liberal and economically conservative. Seriously, that was pretty much the comment threads on my posts for the first year, until those people finally left. The whole experience has been good for me in many ways, including that Out of Sight would not have happened without it.
Now some music notes and a lot of album reviews.
I don’t have a strong opinion about Gregg Allman. Although I have some of the early live albums, the Allman Brothers is not a band I have thought much about in recent years. I certainly have nothing against them (although 44 minute jam songs are very tiresome, i.e., the entire second album of Live at Ludlow Garage). But listening to a few songs from their peak after Allman’s death, at its peak, that band worked very well. Moreover, while they were borrowing from black music as much as any other white rock band of that era, unlike the Stones or Led Zeppelin, Gregg Allman was always very open about his influences and didn’t try to steal credit from them.
Jimmie LaFave has died at the age of 61. He wasn’t my favorite of the Texas/Oklahoma country music scene, but he had a lot of good songs.
If you like to pair your metal listening with the appropriate beer, this could help you. Personally, I would just go with anything from TRVE out of Denver, the great black metal brewery there.
I’ve long felt that Sorcerer was a highly underrated album in Miles Davis’ canon. Now there is a font based on the song “Masqualero,” from that album.
20 years since Radiohead released O.K. Computer. We are all old.
So Roger Waters seems to have released a new album. Huh.
Now for an unusual number of album reviews that happened basically because I keep forgetting my external drive with all my music when I go to work for the day. Have to listen to something. Was a good opportunity to clear the deck of a lot of albums that I had been meaning to hear for awhile. Lemons into lemonade and the like.
Laura Gibson, La Grande
I really like Gibson’s recent album, Empire Builder. So I checked out this 2012 release, an album that is probably the only popular culture item named after or about La Grande, Oregon. The video below is even filmed there! La Grande may not be quite of the level of Empire Builder, an album that is a pretty sublime set of songs, but this is a solid singer-songwriter album. There are some great songs here and some songs I need to listen to again. I really liked the title track and Crow/Swallow. I will be listening to the whole album again as well.
B
Daddy Issues, Fuck Marry Kill
I saw Daddy Issues open for Tacocat in February. Loved them, almost as much as Tacocat. I thought this was just really solid girl band indie rock. So I finally checked out one of their albums. Fuck Marry Kill was released in 2015 and confirms everything I liked about Daddy Issues when I saw them live. Great vocals, punk sound with pop sensibility, songs about sex, with a chorus to “Riot Grrrl” of “Fuck me in the back seat, I’m so bored and you’re too cheap.” A very fun band. I will listen to this regularly.
A-
Rhiannon Giddens, Freedom Highway
This is really good stuff. Giddens, former singer with Carolina Chocolate Drops, was basically a cover artist, first of old-time black folk music and then, with her 2015 solo album, of a wider variety of 20th century music. I’ve always appreciated song interpreters as much as songwriters, whether Emmylou Harris or Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. We need more interpreters. But Giddens is writing more here. This album tells the story of the black freedom struggle. It begins with “At the Purchaser’s Option,” about the slave trade and then moves to “Julie” about a woman leaving her mistress after the Civil War. She then moves very quickly to the twentieth century, with a powerful cover of Joan Baez’s “Birmingham Sunday.” Not every song is so directly political or historical, but that’s the overall theme of the album, closing with The Staples’ “Freedom Highway.” Some of the love songs toward the end perhaps lag a bit, but if you want to say that Giddens’ songwriting is not yet that of Richard Farina or Pop Staples, that’s hardly an insult. Overall, this is a fine step forward for a tremendous talent.
A-
Willie Nelson, God’s Problem Child
After all these decades, Willie Nelson’s amazing voice is beginning to slip. That’s the first thing one notices on his new album. The second thing one notices is that this is a really good collection of songs. Not surprisingly, many of them are about aging and losing friends, including one song about all the internet rumors of his own demise and another about the death of his good friend Merle Haggard. Old men doing old men records is now an old genre and can sometimes be a little depressing as well as kind of dialing it in. But while Willie has certainly dialed in his share of recordings over the years, this is a pretty fine album without a real clunker at all and some really nice tracks. It’s a worthy contribution to his sizable catalog. Who knows if it will be his last album, although he is 84 and not in the greatest of health. But it may well be his last really worthy album. It’s certainly worth a listen.
B+
Ondatrópica, Baile Bucanero
Ondatrópica is more of a project than a band. It’s Mario Galeano of Frente Cumbiero and Will Holland, the British producer better known as Quantic, gathering a bunch of Colombian musicians and recording some songs. In this case, their second full album, they focused more on the English side of Colombian life, particularly the formerly English island of Providence Island, where much of this was recorded. This then brings in some English lyrics, including the opening song, which was a bit of a jolt from what I expected. This mashing of the many sounds of Colombia works pretty well. There’s no reason to evalutate the “authenticity” of such a project and who cares anyway. The only question is whether it is good and interesting music and in this case, these musicians certainly pass the test with a huge variety of sounds from over 30 musicians, playing in various combinations in the different songs.
B+
Shamir, Hope
Shamir’s first album, Ratchet, was an amazing, out of nowhere work of pop genius from a young Vegas kid. As he puts it himself, he was an unexpected pop star. And it kind of freaked him out. He’s been struggling with what to do next. So out of nowhere, he recently dropped a new album on Soundcloud. I was excited when I heard about it. But in describing it himself, he admits that he just threw it together over the weekend, had it mastered in a hour, and sent it out. And it feels that way. He avoids the dance hall sounds that made his previous work so great and tries more of a low-fi sound. That’s fine in principle, but it doesn’t really work. The songs have no pop too them and it’s just pretty forgettable. I completely respect an artist just trying to figure out their way. In the digital age though, that can lead to some unfortunate self-releases without someone saying, “maybe this needs more work.” Shamir is a promising and curious artist and I look forward to seeing where he goes next. But this isn’t successful.
C
Esperanza Spalding, Emily’s D+Evolution
Having heard Spalding on several albums of others, I figured I would check out her album released last year. I know many are more familiar with her work than I am, probably because she unexpectedly won a Best New Artist Grammy that everyone thought was supposed to go to Justin Bieber, leading the Grammies to change the rule, because, hey, it’s all about reinforcing the beliefs of 15 year old girls and not about who is actually the best new artist. She became instantly famous, performed for the Obamas, and it sort of freaked her out I guess. Anyway, she took a couple of years off before releasing this album last spring. It’s a good one. “Funk the Fear” is very catchy and there’s a lot of songs about freedom. I don’t know that this grabbed me and made me want to listen again and again, but I should give it a few more spins at least.
B+
The Lowest Pair, Fern Girl and Ice Man
I’ve heard about this band for awhile. But I was skeptical. A couple of banjo players from Olympia sounded like hipster faux-Americana, probably from Evergreen graduates, assuming people actually graduate from that school instead of becoming acid cases. But I was pleasantly surprised. I am of course a sucker for Americana if it’s well done. And this is indeed well done. Kendl Winter probably isn’t my favorite vocalist but especially when singing with her band partner Winter Lee, it works pretty well. I understand this is a fuller instrumentation than usual and it serves them well. The songs are fine, if not particularly amazing. This doesn’t travel far from standard rootsy Americana duos, but they do it well and it’s worth your time.
B+
Julia Holter, Have You in My Wilderness
Several years ago I picked up the album Ekstasis, by the composer and singer Julia Holter. It’s pretty ethereal and works fine, but never really grabbed me. I might listen to it once a year and if a song comes on in the shuffle, that’s cool. But I hadn’t thought too much about her since. But her 2015 album Have You in My Wilderness is a real step forward because she combines her composition training with more of a pop sensibility, making a relatively straightforward album that’s a little less in the clouds and a little more in the heart. “Lucette Stranded on the Island” is a near epic song. “Sea Calls Me Home” and “Betsy on the Roof” are excellent as well. Sometimes this does slip back toward the background, but mostly this album brings the listener inside an intimate space, even if it’s not always entirely clear what’s happening in the lyrics.
A-
The Coathangers, Nosebleed Weekend.
First, The Coathangers is an outstanding name for a girl punk band. The band itself is pretty good too, with catchy lyrics, lots of noise, and two very different vocalists, one of which sounds like she is singing with gravel in her mouth. This band started in Atlanta 10 years ago and finally found relative success with this album from last year. Now rock lifers, they keep on going and have a new EP coming out soon. “Dumb Baby” is fun, and you don’t get enough songs of women insulting men for their stupidity. “Nosebleed Weekend” and “Make It Right” stick in the mind, and overall, this is just a really solid album.
A-
Will Johnson, Hatteras Night, A Good Luck Charm
The former Centro-matic singer has been playing his various versions of Americana for a long time now and while I never got super into his old band, I did enjoy this sonically interesting set of pretty intimate songs that revolve people dealing with “situations of tension,” according to Johnson. Worth a listen.
B+
Finally, another thanks to a reader who purchased me a couple of gifts, including a new cast iron skillet and a collection of Elmore Leonard’s later novels. Again, it’s very kind when this happens and makes doing all this writing a little more fruitful.