Music Notes

This week’s big music news for me is seeing The Gibson Brothers at the Narrows Center in Fall River, Massachusetts. I’d listened to these guys for about 20 years, particularly their albums from that period., I sort of lost track of their releases, but still enjoyed what I heard. While one does not think of upstate New York as a center of bluegrass music, in fact the experiences of growing up on a farm in a super rural area can be a pretty universal thing within country music and northern New York is pretty rough. They sing a lot of songs about this–like a lot of good bluegrass songwriting, there’s a good bit of nostalgia and sadness about the decline of rural America. They are a good act too–they are funny guys and nice guys by all accounts. They also sing so, so, so well together. I had not heard the term “blood harmony” until I listened to Tyler Mahan Coe explain in The Louvin Brothers episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones, but it fits here. They are good singers–sure–but when they sing together, there’s a whole other thing going on here.

I also have to address something that comes up in comments now and then–the idea that bluegrass is not country music is some galaxy brained stuff. It absolutely 100% is country music. I think what is happening here is that people don’t like country because of its politics and do like the jam band music that some bluegrass turned into. Whether some of David Grisman or Bela Fleck are really playing bluegrass on some of their more experimental recordings is a kind of sterile debate. I don’t know. It’s certainly bluegrass inflected, but I’m not sure that the traditionalists of bluegrass necessarily see it that way. On the other hand, the traditionalists in bluegrass tend to be artistically extremely conservative which has hurt that music. Anyway, I’m not real interested in enforcing musical boundaries though we can debate the point. But to claim that bluegrass isn’t country literally makes no sense. It’s OK to just say, I like this kind of country music! It doesn’t mean you are going to vote Republican!

In any case, I didn’t know a ton of the songs they played because they mostly played newer ones, but they did play “The Railroad Line” which is a long favorite of mine.

Interviewing musicians and other artists about what Ornette Coleman means to them is a great idea and this Times piece on it is fun. It’s part of a larger series the Times is doing every now and again to promote jazz. Cool.

Can’t as say I was familiar with Lavender Country, a gay country band that released an album back in 1973, but the founder died and I wanted to note that.

This week’s playlist, short because it was mostly a shuffle week at home:

1. Dolly Parton, Just Because I’m a Woman
2. The Postal Service, Give Up
3. Waxahatchee, Ivy Tripp
4. Wussy, Funeral Dress II
5. Robert Earl Keen, Walking Distance
6. Patterson Hood, Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance
7. The Meters, Look Ka Py-Py
8. Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Braver Newer World
9. Joanna Newsom, Ys
10. Taylor Ho Bynum/Benoit Delbecq/Tomas Fujiwara/Mary Halvorson, Illegal Crowns
11. John Zorn, The Big Gundown
12. Billy Bang, Outline No. 12
13. Eels, Blinking Lights, disc 1
14. Marika Hackman, Any Human Friend
15. Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted
16. Neko Case, Blacklisted
17. Mitski, Laurel Hell
18. Cat Power, You Are Free
19. Case/lang/Veirs, self-titled
20. Charlie Parker, South of the Border
21. Wussy, What Heaven is Like
22. PJ Harvey, Let England Shake
23. V/A, Queens of Fado
24. Mount Moriah, Miracle Temple
25. Silver Jews, Starlite Walker
26. Leonard Cohen, Songs of Leonard Cohen
27. Bill Callahan, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle
28. Tom Russell, Rose of the San Joaquin
29. Morgan Wade, Reckless
30. Living Colour, Stain
31. Ray Wylie Hubbard, Crusade of the Restless Knights
32. The Libertines, Up the Bracket
33. Fairport Convention, Unhalfbricking
34. Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
35. Alejandro Escovedo, Room of Songs, disc 1
36. Merle Haggard, Down Every Road, disc 3
37. The Paranoid Style, A Goddamn Impossible Way of Life
38. Traffic, John Barleycorn Must Die
39. Matthew Shipp, The Piano Equation
40. Tom Waits, Rain Dogs

Album Reviews:

Binker and Moses, Escape the Flames

The interplay between these guys is incredible. In fact, this is one of the best duo jazz performances I’ve heard in a long time. These guys are in the London scene–Binker a sax player and Moses a drummer–and they’ve been recording together as a duo since 2015. This is just hot–red hot–jazz. It’s slightly on the free side, but not too crazy, and it is the kind of improvisation that made people love jazz. I’d check this out right away if I were you.

A

Gerald Cleaver, Griots

Not an album I need to hear again, but one I have a lot of respect for. Cleaver is one of the leading jazz drummers today, often working on the free jazz side of things. But he’s a Detroit guy and is deeply enmeshed in the history of his city’s pop music too. He’s started making electronic albums on the side influenced by Detroit artists. It’s fascinating to hear a leading jazz drummer take his talents to a completely different form of music, but one that keeps the improvisation and technique required in his day job. In the world of electronic music, this is pretty fascinating. I don’t particularly care for electronic music all that much. But at the very least, this is worth a single listen.

B+

Cate Le Bon, Pompeii

There’s something about the musician approaching middle age who maybe hasn’t ever gotten super big but is successful enough to keep going and hungry enough to keep trying. I find a lot of my favorite musicians these days fall into this category. They have the life experience to write good lyrics and they have the decades of sound experience to know how to use the sonic palette rather than fall into cliché or just go to the pop standard of the moment.

Cate Le Bon really fits this category for me. As she approaches 40, she releases this fantastic indie pop album that manages to plumb the depths of loneliness while creating a danceable sound that brings in old-school synthesizers in a subtle way to provide just enough of that groove to keep you going. Then you have the occasional sax and just a good beat generally from the production. It makes for a really fine release, one of my favorites I’ve heard in 2022. If you are a fan of Jane Weaver, I think you’d like this a lot. It was my album purchase for the week.

A

Allison Krauss and Robert Plant, Raise the Roof

I have a ton of respect for Robert Plant. Out of all the huge stars of the late 60s and early 70s rock bands, how many of them are even still trying, not to mention moving in new directions? Townshend and Daltrey embarrass themselves singing about hoping to die before they get old, the living members of Pink Floyd do little (except for Waters stanning for Putin), Robbie Robertson has basically done nothing of interest since The Band broke up, Clapton hasn’t done anything interesting since 1974 if not 1970, etc., etc. But Plant, he just plugs away, doing his North African/Middle Eastern thing, doing his rock, doing his folk thing. Moreover, other than that period in the late 90s when he and Page got back together, he’s avoided the money-making nostalgia touring. And if we were in the mid-70s, who would have thought it would be Robert Goddamn Plant of all the big rock stars that would be the one continuing to move forward? Peter Gabriel has too of course and that’s an interesting journey of its own, even if he isn’t working too much anymore. But there aren’t too many others and at least Gabriel was always seeking to move in new directions.

Now, I respect more than love his work with Alison Krauss. They are both super talented. And they work pretty well together. But I always thought Krauss relied a bit too much on singing pretty and needed an edge to her music that she’s never had and working with Plant doesn’t really bring this out. In fact, he moves in her direction far more than the other way around, which again is credit to him–both of them really even if I have some minor reservations. And this is pretty clearly for a very specific demographic of older people who like both and like some nice singing and want some good background music for their dinner parties that isn’t going to interfere too much. This does all of that. It’s just not my personal favorite type of thing. But the musicians, the backing band (including Bill Frisell and Marc Ribot among others) and the T-Bone Burnett production certainly make this a solid album, regardless of whether it hits all your buttons. And the mostly covers works pretty well, though it helps to be pretty knowledgeable of the British folk artists of the 60s and 70s here as they cover Anne Briggs and Bert Jansch and others from this scene, as well as blues artists from the old days.

Also, fun cover of Lucinda’s “Can’t Let Go,” which is not the only time this song has been done by bluegrass-oriented artists, as I have a Larry Cordle and Lonesome Standard Time version of this sung by one of Cordle’s sidewomen at the time. In fact, this is a Randy Weeks song that Lucinda covered before he ever came out with a solo album, so however you want to classify this is up to you I guess.

B

Claire Cronin, Big Dread Moon

The unremittingly slowness of these songs make them hard to dig into at first, but over time, the slow jams pick up a little bit, the viola becomes more apparent in the mix, and your interest picks up. I would say this is more interesting than a lot of the emoting women in the indie scene these days such as Julien Baker or Sharon Van Etten–they are fine, but this is a step above them in arrangement and execution.

B

The Tallest Man on Earth, I Love You, It’s a Fever Dream

Solid 2019 album from the now veteran Swedish songwriter who sings in English. He still sounds nasally like early Dylan and he still writes songs filled with rural imagery combined with relationship difficulties. But I enjoy his work and even the albums do tend to blend together a bit, this certainly is as worthy as the rest. He’s hardly the only singer-songwriter in this conundrum. I mean, every Greg Brown record sounds the same but I still listen to those too.

B+

Demi Lovato, Holy Fvck

I feel if Bojack Horseman was a real person and a pop singer, his album would be a lot like this. Lovato has been open about her many problems with drugs and this is basically what the songs are about. But sometimes, the confessions just sound like another marketing tool to sell a vision of herself, the kind of insular LA product produced by people with more much interest in keeping stars addicted so they can stay in the headlines than they do in leading these people to some sort of mental health. So yeah, this album basically feels like a Bojack television confession. Or maybe more accurately, it’s what Bojack would have produced for Sarah Lynn.

To be fair here, Lovato can do hard rock pretty well. But this felt pretty empty to me.

C

As always, this is an open thread of all things music and art and none things politics and especially not the elections.