Music Notes
By 
I was super pumped to see Tropical Fuck Storm play in Somerville, Massachusetts recently. They are an Australian band that I guess splits the difference between punk and hard rock with a lot of noise in between. These are Australian punk veterans with Gareth Liddiard as the main lead singer, Fiona Kitschin on bass and vocals, Erica Dunn on guitar, keys, and vocals, and Lauren Hammel on drums. These are all long-time vets of the Aussie rock scene and so this is something of a supergroup from that scene. In any case, this is a good band. Their albums are a bit inconsistent, OK, but the best songs are always fantastic and they played a lot of them here. To hear “You Let My Tyres Down” live just hit the soul. This is pure, uncut rock and roll in the most awesome fashion. They rock, their fans rock, and they deliver big time live. This was a real fun show.
Man, D’Angelo died. Do I feel old? I do. Now, D’Angelo only had three albums over the years. He was a reculsive guy and fame did not agree with him. I didn’t always like his work either–he is in the “maybe don’t smoke so much weed” category of neo-soul that I feel sometimes leads to work so diffident and with the artist too far in the background which I am sure sounds good when everyone is high but doesn’t really hold up well when not. I really wanted to like his albums and never quite did. But there’s no denying his huge importance, despite the relatively small number of releases. And to lose him, jeepers. Lotta people remembering him.
Feeling less old here, John Lodge from The Moody Blues died. I don’t really have anything much nice to say about that band, so I guess I won’t. Some of Lodge’s songs were among the worst of the band though. So that’s something. He may have sang “I’m Just a Singer in a Rock and Roll Band” but the Moody Blues weren’t exactly rock and roll.
Ace Frehley of Kiss also died. Welp, Kiss was one terrible band.
We talked about Danny Thompson’s passing last week, but glad to see a nice obit from the Times show up eventually.
I have no idea when the last time I thought about MTV, but it feels like a real end of an era to find out it is shutting down its channels in Europe.
I’d take a music course at USC from Solange.
No, total disagree, we do not need more shitty musician biopics. Please, save us before the Bad Company biopic hits theaters in 2032.
Personally, what I think has silenced classical music in America is the aggressively boring programming and staid old white people audience. Sure, the cuts to NPR don’t help, but maybe there are bigger problems here.
I knew Alan Jackson was retiring and I didn’t care because his music is terrible, but I certainly am not happy to hear it is because of some weird disease that makes it hard to walk. Bummer.
This week’s playlist:
- Big Thief, UFOF
- Dave Rawlings Machine, Nashville Obsolete
- Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Dynamic Maximum Tension
- John Luther Adams, Become Ocean
- Henry Threadgill, Old Locks and Irregular Verbs
- Joseph Kabasele, Le Grand Kalle, disc 1
- Allen Toussaint, Life, Love, and Faith
- Nels Cline, Consentrik Quartet
- Die Spitz, Something to Consume
- Rodney Crowell, The Chicago Sessions
- Jerry Joseph, Istanbul/The Fog of War
- Grateful Dead, Hundred Year Hall
- Blood Lemon, Petite Deaths
- Father John Misty, I Love You Honeybear
- Kate Davis, Fish Bowl
- Connections, Midnight Run
- Mary Halvorson, About Ghosts
- Boygenius, self-titled
- Wednesday, Bleeds
- Merle Haggard, Live from Austin, ’78
- Maiya Blaney, A Room with a Door That Closes
- Fauxe, Ikhlas
- Lalalar, En Kötü Iyu Olur
- Kacey Chambers, Backbone
- Khan Jamal, Drum Dance to the Motherland
- Mourn, Ha Ha He
- Cracker, From Berkeley to Bakersfield, disc 2
- Cate Le Bon, Pompeii
- Sy Smith, Until We Meet Again
Album Reviews:
Alpaca Sports, Another Day
Bland indie pop from this Swedish band that is like Camera Obscura without any of the good songs and instead just channeling the middling twee of that band’s less successful tracks, but with significantly more weak singing and whiny affectations. I really hated this.
D
River Whyless, Monoflora
This Asheville band is one of these bands that is popular with millennials based on singing quite well together though maybe not singing about too much, a syndrome that produces acceptable but forgettable music where everyone feels good thanks to some empty music calories. And look, they really do sing well together. They play well and sound nice. But there’s too much influence from The Beach Boys on a lot of these types of bands–many of which dominate Newport Folk Festival in recent years–and other than the harmonies, what else do we really have here? So if you love harmonies, this is your band. If you need something with more heft, it’s not. They don’t suck, but again, it’s just empty calories for me.
C+
Japanese Breakfast, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)
Japanese Breakfast exploded after the release of Jubilee a few years ago, an electropop album that made her perhaps the most famous musician ever from my home of Eugene. She was always a multimedia type and then wrote a memoir that did well, though I haven’t read it. She’s finally back with a new album. It’s alright, but the problem is that she’s not a great enough songwriter to pull off the more low-fi method she uses here. It’s an album about romance and fame and while the former is universal, the latter is not and it does feel like a rich person’s album. That’s almost inevitable when someone explodes–their lives just change so much when real fame hits. But fame isn’t very interesting and neither are most of the songs on this album. I liked Jubilee pretty well as a synth-oriented fun album about emotional difficulties, but a folkier song about fame just doesn’t work as well sonically or lyrically. And hey, she has a duet with Jeff Bridges and The Dude is great, but is this really where someone needs to go in their musical journey? I’m not so sure. And the reviews were rightly a lot more mixed than for her previous work and this album has already pretty much disappeared from any public consciousness despite being released six months ago. The faster songs work the best I guess. But it’s a mediocre release.
B-
Early James, Medium Raw
James is a Birmingham-based folkie. That’s Alabama, not the UK. He got the attention of Dan Auerbach from Black Keys somewhere along the way, who wanted to produce James’ energetic blues-based folk music. This is at least their third collaboration. It works pretty well too. James is an intense guy. This is basically a recorded house concert of the sort that the blues guys did in the 60s, so many of which still resonate today. This guy sounds a bit like old blues guys and he plays a bit like old blues guys, but his lyrics are not that of old blues guys. He sounds like he has a touch of the lunacy to me, like “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” is a normal experience so let’s write a lot of songs like that.
B+
Rosali, Bite Down
Quite a good singer songwriter album with some really kick ass guitar work. There’s a good bit of bitterness in some of these lyrics and she has a real good rock and roll sound. Not breaking new ground, but good solid music in that well worn genre. The album doesn’t much repeat itself and so the songs stick out pretty well. Just flat out decent work.
B+
ONCEIM, Laminaire
ONCEIM is Orchestre de Nouvelles Créations, Expérimentations et Improvisations Musicales, a French free jazz big band. The reason this works is that it is not a noise fest. It’s an exercise in highly controlled chaos, a low fi version of free jazz where a lot is going on but in a much more regimented environment thanks to the compositions. In fact, the meaning of “free jazz” at this point has no meaning at all except that it doesn’t sound like something from the pre-Ornette era. This is rather a drone-based series of compositions that slowly build and build and the noise never really does become overwhelming. Much of it is quite beautiful.
A-
Sterling Drake, The Shape I’m In
Drake looks like the kind of guy who would maybe try to play up some of kind of raucous roots in his country, but in fact he’s a bit closer to someone like Gary Stewart, a warm-voiced man who sings about rural America because unlike a lot of other country musicians, actually is a rural guy who loves farming and grew up around it. Sure, we don’t per se need another version of “House of the Rising Sun” but what does need mean in this situation? It’s a song people have played forever for a reason. Again, “warm” is the operative word here and it’s maybe not a great album, but it’s a good one.
B
Margaret Glaspy, The Golden Heart Protector
I wasn’t immediately excited by an EP of covers, even though I like Glaspy quite a bit. Her great appeals are her attitude and her guitar. It’s hard to pull the former off with a cover album. But then she starts with The Magnetic Fields’ “The Book of Love” and so kills it and it is so much better than the original–which is not a bad version either! But my God, she just nails this song. Working with a bunch of friends, as well as her husband the badass guitarist Julian Lage, she does seven pretty excellent songs. Jeff Tweedy was said to about start crying when he heard her version of “Jesus Etc” and you can hear it here.
A-
Hermanos Guiterrez, Sonido Cosmico
This is nice music, but it really is fully 100% background music of a Mexican style. It’s nice. It’s relaxing. They’d be a great backing band. On its own, I find it a bit sleepy. So aesthetically, I’m left a bit bored, but I recognize why a lot of people would really like it. Not bad for having guests over.
B
Amanda Shires, Nobody’s Girl
As a fan of both of these artists, I am beyond fucking sick of the litigation of Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires’ relationship, both when it was happening and now that it is over. Both have released breakup albums, neither of them are very good. Isbell’s album is simply not very interesting, a transitional album as he moves on. It’s the album of the instigator of a breakup instead of the one it was instigated upon. So a less interesting story inherently, by and large. So I was looking forward to Shires’ album because I like her albums regardless of her relationship with Isbell. The best are quite good. But this one isn’t very good. There are two problems. First, she’s sad, which is fine, but because of that this is all midtempo ballad stuff and so it becomes boring pretty quickly musically. That’s too bad because she can really rock. And it’s not as if divorce can’t rock and roll–see “Shoot Out the Lights” and “Wall of Death” off Richard and Linda Thompson’s classic breakup album. But this does not. Worse, every song is extremely on the nose. Jason is a dick, she is devastated and she says this in the same way over and over and over again. Now, that all may well be true. But this does not make a good album.
C+
The Cadillac Three, The Years Go Fast
Friendly if not particularly distinguished arena-centric southern rock, released a couple of years ago. I like some of it for that friendliness–the singer can sound like a guy who would be fun to hang out in the backyard with a fire while he picked a few songs and you sang along (well not me, I don’t sing ever). On the other hand, this can be a bit drenched in cliche at times and whereas you can move above southern rock cliches, such as Drive By Truckers at the most profound, these guys don’t quite do it. Lyrically, it’s mostly relationship songs, sonically, again it’s arenaesque guitar rock. Which means it’s completely fine, but ultimately shruggish.
C+
As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.