Music Notes
By 
I saw Leon Bridges with Charley Crockett and Reyna Tropical opening at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland last weekend. This was a pretty random show–I was in DC for a conference and contacted some friends and they asked if I wanted to go and I was like, uh, sure! Plus this was my first show at this venerable outdoor arena that combines brutalism and concert going to surprisingly effective results. This is the kind of show I would not usually go to, not because I wouldn’t want to see these artists. In fact, I’ve seen Reyna Tropical before, have really wanted to see Crockett, and have enjoyed Bridges’ albums enough that I wouldn’t mind seeing him. The issue is normally that it falls on the concert hierarchy as the kind of thing I would have totally seen in lesser music towns I’ve lived in such as Eugene and Albuquerque if they came through, but given all the things I can go to, it never quite measures up, not at the cost.
The show hit more or less how I thought it would. I love Reyna Tropical’s hipster queer Texan thing, her singing and her excellent guitar. She also talks about being a lesbian, like a lot. I mean I might expect that and of course wouldn’t care, except that it’s between every single song. Before her last song, she was like, “I want you all to be really clear about something. I’m a lesbian and I’m singing this for lesbians.” Yeah girl, we know that, you’ve said it 12 times already. This is like the Indigo Girls reminding the audience that they are lesbians before every song. The crowd knows it. This is nothing against her music of course, which remains cool as shit.
Charley Crockett was great. He and Bridges are friends. Their music isn’t massively dissimilar for a country guy and a soul crooner, but of course they are operating in generally disparate worlds. They are both Texans who rose through the busking world to make it big enough to play Merriweather together. Crockett is an interesting guy. He’s pure country, 70s style. He’s also a Black man who has a lot of Cajun and Jewish heritage as well. In other words, he’s doing something that people who look like him are not supposed to do. There’s been a Black country revival world, particularly around Rhiannon Giddens and friends, but that’s really more folk music than actual country. This is pure uncut country. His accent makes it work too. He’s also just a very good country songwriter and singer. His band is outstanding and he hits all the marks you want from a country show. This $10 Cowboy can flat out play. It was super.
Bridges is more fine live. The thing is that he’s such a retro guy that it takes an awful lot for me to get it over. His first album was pure mid-60s soul. It was nice and promising. He moved toward some psychedelic influences for his second album and I thought that was even more promising. But then he reverted in his third album and it’s just what he is–a mid 60s soul singer. The problem is that he’s a good enough singer, but he’s not a great singer. He does a whispering thing that sounds a bit like a Sade style and people do like it, but I’d argue it’s more fine than really grabbing. He’s less impressive within his genre than Crockett is within his, and not only because Crockett is demographically challenging traditional country fans. He’s a better vocalist, even though Bridges’ voice gets all the attention. He’s good and I’m glad he’s around. I don’t know if I’d see him again.
Big Ears 26 lineup had its big drop, though even more will be added later. Yeah, I think I will be there…And so should you. They are charging extra for the David Byrne and Robert Plant shows. The thing is, I’m not sure that I would see either of them against what is likely to be some of the competition at the same time. I’m less interested in seeing people because they are famous than I am in seeing the people making the best music right now. Sure, I’d like to see Plant sing live. Will I pay even more for it? I doubt it.
I hope you late 70s classic rock fans are surviving the death of Supertramp’s Rick Davies. What’s Bloody Well Right is that Supertramp was not a good band. Meanwhile, we lost two minor icons of the late 60s. The Turtles’ Mark Volman was a delightful oddball, that’s for sure. Then there’s Tom Shipley, famous for “One Toke Over the Line.” He…sure was famous for that song. That song is really most famous for the completely not getting it version on The Lawrence Welk Show, one of the great square moments in history.
Truly an incredible moment in America art.
The always interesting Lucrecia Dalt.
The South Asian sufi music based in New York. Sure, why not.
Yasmin Williams has bucked the trend of cancelling shows at Kennedy Center in protest of Trump’s takeover, based on the need for union workers there to have work. It’s a hard call, I can see both sides of this.
Having never seen Mitski live, I don’t know if a concert film would really pay off, but one is coming.
Celia Cruz would be 100 this fall.
Our friend Burning Ambulance has a list of 20 Soviet jazz albums you need to hear.
Mary Halvorson now has a monthly newsletter. I wish more jazz musicians did this.
Playlist for the last two weeks:
- Merle Haggard, Hag
- Ralph Stanley, Cry from the Cross
- Jerry Lee Lewis, Country Songs for City Folks
- Terry Allen, Lubbock (On Everything)
- Kirk Knuffke / Joe McPhee Quartet + 1, Keep the Dream Up
- Wussy, Ghosts
- X, Wild Gift
- Charley Crockett, $10 Cowboy
- Peter Rowan/Don Edwards, High Lonesome Cowboy
- Junior Brown, Semi Crazy
- Steve Earle, Guitar Town
- Stevie Wonder, Signed, Sealed, and Delivered
- Bobby Bare, Cowboys and Daddys
- Top Country Hits of the 1960s
- Sonny Sharrock, Seize the Rainbow
- Wussy, Left for Dead
- Steve Earle, Guitar Town
- Chris Gaffney, Loser’s Paradise
- Peter Rowan, Walls of Time
- Dudu Tassa & Johnny Greenwood, Jarak Qaribak
- Buck Owens, Complete Capitol Sessions, 1967-1975
- Zoh Amba/Chris Corsano/Bill Orcutt, The Flower School
- Sudan Archives, Natural Brown Prom Queen
- Sufjan Stevens, Carrie and Lowell
- Sonny Rollins, G-Man
- The Tubs, Cotton Crown
- Kacey Musgraves, Golden Hour
- Boygenius, The Record
- U.S. Girls, Heavy Light
- Sleaford Mods, Spare Ribs
- Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band, 21st Century Molam
- Horace Andy, Midnight Rocker
- Wet Ink Ensemble/Alex Mincek, Gollolalia/Lines on Black
- Bobby Hutcherson, Medina and Spiral
- Billy Bang Quintet with Frank Lowe, Above and Beyond: An Evening in Grand Rapids
- Bonnie Prince Billy, I See a Darkness
- Old 97s, Fight Songs
- The Magnetic Fields, Love at the Bottom of the Sea
- Margo Cliker, Valley of Heart’s Delight
- George Jones & Tammy Wynette, Golden Ring
- Wyndham Baird, After the Morning
- Mary Chapin Carpenter, Stones in the Road
- Zo!, Four Front
- No Thank You, Embroidered Foliage
- Hazel Dickens, By the Sweat of My Brow
- Johnny Paycheck, Someone to Give My Love To
- Mourn, self-titled
- Screaming Females, All at Once
- J. Pavone String Ensemble, Lost and Found
- Thomas Dollbaum, Wellswood
- Chris Stapleton, Starting Over
- Wet Leg, self-titled
- Johnny Cash, American Recordings II: Unchained
- Gary Stewart, Out of Hand
- Dim Lights, Thick Smoke and Hillbilly Music: 1960
- Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose
- Bob Dylan, Love and Theft
- Dolly Parton, Just Because I’m a Woman
- Sleater-Kinney, The Woods
- Richard Thompson, Watching the Dark, disc 3
- Peter Gabriel, Us
Album Reviews:
Wadada Leo Smith, Fire Illuminations
Wadada Leo Smith tends to work on the spare side of jazz, often with a lot of space between notes. It can be beautiful but requires some pretty intense listening. So it’s fun when he mixes it up with an electric band that can rock out pretty hard. That’s this 2023 album that includes Nels Cline, Brandon Ross, and Lamar Smith on guitar, Bill Laswell and Melvin Gibbs on bass, Hardedge on electronics, Mauro Refresco on percussion, and Pheeroan akLaff on drums. That’s…some kind of band.
The album itself is all groove with Wadada soloing over it. That’s super cool, though given who is around him, giving the guys more to do would have made this even better. But it’s a real appealing listen with some crossover potential.
A-
Jason Isbell, Foxes in the Snow
Isbell is one of my favorite artists and this album came out early in the year and, well, I needed a break from Isbell Discourse. He and Amanda Shires lived their marriage very publicly, all the way up to the nasty breakup. Fans were CONCERNED. I basically don’t care about his relationship. I don’t care whether he drinks or not either. I am not personally invested in the personal lives of musicians I like. So the discourse around the new album–GREATEST EVAH OR WORST EVAH????–was just too much for me to handle. So I decided to wait 6 months and give it a listen. After all, it’s just a fucking album, it doesn’t matter that much. And there are so many great singers and songwriters and guitarists out there every bit as good as Jason Isbell and they need love to.
That said, I finally decided to give it a shot. It’s a minor album but it’s fine. It really allows one to appreciate his underrated guitar picking. The songs are very straightforward storytelling type songs, but it’s the one album in his catalog where I don’t think there’s one really killer track. “Ride to Robert’s” is perhaps the closest. “True Believer” is a good one too. It’s less of a breakup album than you’d think, though he’s the one who left the relationship so it was easier to move on. Now, the first single from the new Amanda Shires album suggests a level of bitterness could match Shoot Out the Lights/Unrequited/Blood on the Tracks.
B
Missy Raines & Allegheny, Love & Trouble
Unfortunately, much of modern bluegrass has turned into bullshit wanking on instruments for 12 minutes. Songwriting is far less valued than it used to be. Instead instrumental virtuosity is what matters, but without much room to really change course, otherwise the “purists” get annoyed. And jam band purists are just as puritanical as those who think country music should never have moved beyond Jimmie Rodgers. But not everyone is doing this. Some are still writing real songs. Missy Raines is one of them. She happened to be playing bass the last time I saw Robbie Fulks and that was fun. So I figured I’d check out her new album. And it’s pretty solid. She’s not Bill Monroe, but she’s a damned fine bluegrass writer and bassist. There are some good covers here too. The album is square within the bluegrass world so of course there’s some nice solos, but at least they are 25 seconds and not 25 minutes. She’s not a great singer, but she’s an expressive one. It’s a nice album.
B
U.S. Girls, Scratch It
I am a big U.S. Girls fan, having seen Meg Remy move from sorta folkie to dance floor queen. She has managed to write political songs that work because they aren’t all earnest all the time and they aren’t acoustic guitar music. These are dance songs about the horrors of capitalism or environmental collapse. And increasingly, about motherhood now that she has twins of her own. In fact, there’s a song here about the time she and Patti Smith were the only two women performing that day at a musical festival and she really wanted to see Patti perform, but had to take care of kids instead. That’s still here and Meg Remy has made a slight change in this album, going a bit more Vegas-loungey, which more or less works for her. I did think this album was more fine than great, with a few too many songs I didn’t feel really popped. I appreciated Charlie McCoy being in the band and using his famous harmonica to good ends, though all the reviews talking about how this is a “Nashville” album because he’s on there seem to not spend a lot of time listening to Nashville music. Anyway, tere is a great song about drinking called “Emptying the Jimador.” Remy has talked before about how once she starts drinking during a day, she does not stop. I hear you Meg. The album is centered around “Bookends,” about the suicide of Power Trip frontman Riley Gale. I don’t know that band so this song didn’t move me particularly, but I did appreciate the ambition behind going so long. And that’s how I feel about this album generally–appreciate, not love. I could see growing into it.
B
Blood Lemon, Petite Deaths
I loved Blood Lemon’s first album. Three middle aged women from the Boise rock scene who love enormous riffage. So I was happy to see a second album, even if it 28 minutes or so is all with four new songs and a cover of Jessica Pratt’s “Mountain’r Lower.” They still love riffs. This is big guitar music and they sound great. Hard rock for not dummies. Rock forever.
A-
Loyle Carner, Hugo
There is so much astoundingly good and smart and political British hip-hop and this 2022 album is a great example of it. This is about growing up mixed race in London, the inability to afford to live there, racism, becoming a parent, his own issues, and basically life in all its own forms. He’s a slower rapper and values rhythm more than vocal pyrotechnics. It’s a jazz based production with a lot of piano as well as bass and drums. It just really works for me in every possible way. Like people ranging from Blood Orange to Dave to Slowthai, the level of political hip hop about Black identity in London simply is, in my view, the best in the world today, or at least that I have been exposed to.
A
Marilyn Crispell/Thommy Andersson/Michala Ostergaard-Nielsen, The Cave
A spare piano trio album by the famed pianist. It’s a solid introduction to her work, though I found nice more than as engaging as other works in her catalog. It’s an album of quiet textures, which given the Scandinavians in the rest of the group, makes a lot of sense. It’s not an ECM album, but it certainly be an ECM album. That has its good side and it has it somewhat limiting side.
B
Hotel Art, Elevator Music
An interesting album of low-fi slacker rock that also sounds a lot of like some very minor Beatles cuts, which is not an insult since a very minor Beatles song is a lot more than you can say about most bands. What that really means is melodic and charming, if not transcendent. Interesting, the lead “Raised on Television,” is a big rock and roll song but then the album quickly shifts to this Beatles-esque stuff. The singer is a guy named Boo Hewerdine who I haven’t heard of before, but he’s been a significant figure in the UK since the mid 80s and he sounds like a pro, that’s for sure. For me, this kind of thing has some limited upside, but if you threw it on in the car, I’d no objection.
B-
Maiya Blaney, A Room with a Door That Closes
Someone on Bandcamp described this as Mitski on ketamine and while I do not know what ketamine is like personally, it is in fact like Mitski in some sort of drugged out universe, with similar vocal patterns but with a voice farther back in a more psychedelic mix. But Blaney is a lot angrier than Mitski too and perhaps while less of the enigmatic presence that makes the latter a figure beloved by a generation of women in their 20s and early 30s, more approachable in some ways despite the greater noise with her music. This is one of these artists who throw the kitchen sink in with the musical influences–lots of club influences and indie rock of course, but this is more of an R&B album by temperament and attitude than anything else. A real interesting listen.
A-
Hyldon/Adrian Younge, Hyldon: JID 023
The latest in the now extensive Jazz is Dead series sees Ali Shaheed Muhammad leave, for at least this project, and leave Adrian Younge to work with the Brazilian vocalist Hyldon. This fascinating series can be a bit uneven, but has done a wonderful of bringing forgotten or never that popular figures in the jazz (writ very large) world to at least some level of spotlight. It’s like a lot of JID album–funky and short, but a worthy reintroduction to someone forgotten. At some point, it might make sense to bring some other producers in to mix this series up a bit, as there is a bit of diminishing returns that has less to do with the guests than the production.
B-
Haley Heynderickx, Seed of a Seed
I maintain that anyone who likes music and doesn’t think that music today is as good as that of the past just isn’t listening to current music. For folkies, Haley Heynderickx is just what I am talking about. She would totally have fit in the mid to late 60s folk scene and yet is not only doing music something like that 60 years later, but her approach and her lyrics are very much of the 2020s. This is a simply fantastic album. Picked like a John Fahey album and sung like a Joni Mitchell album is how I’d describe it, with lyrics that are both about anxiety and just kind of delightfully odd at times. She’s just a damn good songwriter and a damn good guitarist. What more do you want here?
A
Jessica Pavone, Lull
Brilliant modern classical and while I have never seen Pavone, this is the rare (first ever???) new music classical I’ve listened to where I’ve actually seen some of the musicians live, thanks to Bang on a Can’s Longplay Festival. It’s core is an octet with a couple of soloists on horns, including Nate Wooley, who I love from the jazz world. Like so many of the new music/free jazz world, Pavone rides the line between them anyway, working with artists who fall on either side of that wobbly fence. But this is not free jazz in any way. It’s very much minimalist tones with wonderful playing. I really need to see a live performance.
A
Willie Nelson, Oh What a Beautiful World
I happened to see Rodney Crowell play a show a couple of days after Willie’s album of his covers came out and it really blew his mind. I mean, what an honor. This is that album. The interesting thing about this stage in Willie’s career is that his voice is almost completely shot (I mean, at his age….) and yet it was always so expressive anyway that listening to him sing is still a really enjoyable experience. Meanwhile, the band is A+ and the quality control is much, much higher than it was in his heyday in the 70s, not to mention the (shudder) 80s. None of these many Willie albums from the last decade are exactly great but they are all tremendously solid and consistent. Meanwhile, one of his passions has become recording albums by his favorite songwriters, contemporary and going back to the mid 20th century. He still remains a man who wants to record music. And this isn’t some cheap album either–some of these are deep cuts, personal choices of his favorite songs and the ones that work for his voice at this point in his life. So while I wouldn’t mind hearing Willie cover “She’s Crazy for Leavin’,” him covering “Banks of Old Bandera” is a lot wiser choice at this point in his life.
B+
Anna St. Louis, In the Air
A decently enjoyable folkie-groove album not out of place in the world of Dusty Springfield or in the world of the Laurel Canyon era. There’s some pretty good choices made on the backing music that gives some of these songs more life than they might if they were just a person with an acoustic guitar. Since I listened to this so shortly after the Haley Heynderickx, I can say, no, this isn’t as good as that. But it’s a solid enough entry into the folk-pop genre, and if that works for you, check it out. Incidentally, she was part of David Berman’s last band, Purple Mountains, before he ended his own life. They don’t particularly feel like similar songwriters, though no one really wrote like Berman.
B-
Porridge Radio, Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me
Porridge Radio, a British band active for about a decade, has just broken up. This is their last full-length album, released late last year. Moody rock and roll. Sounds a bit like Torres in the angrier moments, with a voice that quivers with emotion. And I really love this anger. Dana Margolin is angry–about a breakup but about society as a whole–and she’ll let you know it with a voice that will make you step back. Of course this works because there’s a lot of quietude too that lets the anger build and then hit a big crescendo. Not all of it totally compels, but I liked this more than I thought I would at first.
B+
Aesop Rock, Integrated Tech Solutions
His raps can be a little silly–see the one about seeing Mr. T in a restaurant as a kid–but Aesop Rock is certainly skilled. He can whip out complex rhymes like few others. And hey, how many raps have you heard about the rappers favorite rivers? Even my home town Willamette River got a shoutout!
B+
Wet Leg, Moisturizer
So I’m seeing Wet Leg live tomorrow and I wanted to check out the new album first. I don’t know that there’s a “Chaise Lounge” here, but the album as a whole is probably better than the first. The overall songwriting has definitely taken a step forward, with a lot of good songs about the shittiness of trying to have a relationship or being asked out and all that, especially given the fluidity of gender identities these days, shared by the singer. It’s also now a real band and they sound pretty good too.
A-
Fogbank, Redacted
I don’t listen to a lot of hardcore punk for the same reason that I don’t listen to much metal–I don’t much care for the screaming vocals you can’t understand. But this at least avoids the histrionics and is just a good ol’yell off. If all you care about is the viscerality of hardcore, this is probably fine for you. But if you want something more with your screaming, I don’t know what it offers. Not unlistenable at least. Sometimes there is even a recognizable riff with the noise. I even made it through the whole album.
C+
Nels Cline, Consentrik Quartet
I saw Cline’s Consentrick Quartet at Big Ears last year and it blew my absolute mind. Was one of the last sets I saw and one of the best two or three of the weekend. Cline is known for many projects of course, probably in recent years more for playing with Wilco than anything else. But he is a jack of all guitar trades and his jazz work is superb too. This quartet includes three people who are total stalwarts of the modern jazz scene as well–Chris Lightcap on bass, Ingrid Laubrock on sax, and Tom Rainey on drums. Laubrock and Rainey are married and they have played together or separately with Lightcap on a lot of projects. So these are musicians who really know each other well. The album is extremely well-played, perhaps a bit more mellow than the live performance, but all these folks are such pros that everything they do is pretty close to gold.
A-
Julianna Riolino, All Blue
This is a really quite good country rock album from an artist I had not heard before. Excellent singer, real rock and roll sensibility, a lot more hammer to it than a lot of the alt-country world. Good band. A couple too many midtempo songs perhaps. Sounds like New Pornographers at times, she’s power pop enough to pull it off. Real promising artist here. I’d listen to this again.
B+
Jessi Colter, Edge of Forever
Jessi was a really talented country singer who gave up her career more or less when she became Waylon Jennings’ wife. And that was a full-time job right there. Since his death, she’s recorded a bit. This is her album from last year, with Margo Price all over it, both singing and producing. She did a gospel album some years ago that didn’t do much for me, but she still sounds pretty great here, especially for being in her 70s. She starts by adapting her old song “It’s All Over Now,” retitling it “Standing on the Edge of Forever,” combining some of the old verses with new material. A good familiar way to start that is also new. The rest of the album is basically worthy but minor, which is not an insult. She’s an older artist who had some pretty fair songs sitting around, Price encouraged her to record them, and she did and that’s great.
B-
As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.