Music Notes

I was fortunate enough to see The Messthestics with James Brandon Lewis at City Winery in Boston the other week. That’s not really my favorite space–I am not a big fan of either the jazz club vibe or the wine club vibe and the City Winery chain combines both of these things. But as it was the last time I saw these guys, it was a super show. The Messthetics are the Fugazi rhythm section plus the guitarist Anthony Pirog. I like them fine. But when you add the super saxophone of the soulful but deeply modern James Brandon Lewis and you have some very special jazz played with a ton of energy. It blew a lot of people’s minds. Probably a lot of the fans were really Fugazi fans and it was clear they weren’t quite used to something like this, but no Fugazi fan is going to shy away from some saxophone in their intense music and the atmosphere was overwhelmingly positive. Plus they closed with Sonny Sharrock’s “Once Upon a Time,” off his great, great Ask the Ages album, which so happens to be my favorite album ever made. They had played the last time I saw them too so I was glad to hear it in the set again. It’s a really fun show and you should check it out if you can.

A lot of tributes to the great Sonny Rollins. I am not a fan of Richard Brody’s film reviews generally, but I did like this discussion of Sonny. Unsurprisingly, Downbeat has a pretty thorough discussion.

People don’t often think of composers of the Middle Ages and here’s a review of a new book about the subject.

Texas Monthly had a big feature on Kacey Musgraves and that’s cool, though it was really more about her fashion and her being a Real Texan than her music per se. A bit more useful from a musical perspective was a bit by the guy who set up the first Spoon fanpage. I’m not even the biggest Spoon guy in the world, but it’s an interesting article on how important Telephono was for a lot of indie rock fans.

Last week, I talked about the New York Times list of Greatest Living American Songwriters. Gabriel Kahane goes after the entire enterprise, as it is a sign of the death of criticism:

Twenty years after the publication of Kelefa Sanneh’s landmark essay, “The Rap Against Rockism,” which, in popularizing the concept of poptimism in the United States, signaled a shift in coverage of popular music, the poptimists’ conquest is complete. But if the movement initially sought to lift up marginalized voices, it now serves, depressingly, to reinforce a culture dominated by algorithms and stream counts.

I have a number of friends who, understandably incensed by this state of affairs, expend a great deal of emotional energy being pissed off at Taylor Swift and the people who love her. But as I age, I just don’t have the energy to get exercised about the monoculture. I try to use my modest platform to lift up music I care about, and am grateful when others do the same. At the end of the day, what matters most to me is nurturing community, which, as I see it, is the only way out of our political hellscape.

In chasing national trends, the critics of the New York Times have forsaken their duty to animate and articulate, through their coverage, a community of artists. Some time ago, the paper shifted its focus—for ostensibly existential financial reasons—away from being a local paper and toward an identity as a national/international outlet. That’s all well and good, but it leaves a gaping hole in the ecology of the arts.

For my money, the “Greatest Living Songwriters” list was dumb clickbait which omitted an entire pantheon of irreplaceably brilliant songwriters. But the thing I most lament is the loss of a critical landscape in which you could open up the paper each morning and read six reviews of weird shows on the Lower East Side. Back then, critics were in the trenches seeking not only to discover the next big thing, but also to connect the dots between artists and micro cultures, rather than regurgitating, in greyish prose, the outputs of the Spotify algorithm.

I think this is fundamentally correct. I like Sanneh and I respect what he’s about. But it’s gone too far–just repeating the same talking points about the same artists isn’t just pointless, it’s boring. I do agree with Kahane that it’s more valuable to highlight artists you like than go too hard after this kind of stuff, but there’s no room for real criticism anymore. It’s just called “snobbery,” which people say is a bad thing when it is in fact a very good thing if it is combined with a populist mentality that “this thing is awesome and you should pay attention to it as opposed to listening to the same ol’shit yet again,” for example.

I hadn’t thought of the rapper Rob Base in many moons. But to think of him being dead at 59, well that’ll make any late 80s kid feel pretty old.

How John Coltrane changed rock music

Interview with the excellent drummer Jonathan Blake

The Belgian folk music scene

Why does Tokyo have so many record stores?

Is the Drake vs. Kendrick feud the end of Battle Rap? Seems unlikely to me.

Nate Chinen always has good recs on what to hear. Need to get to work here.

If you are like me, you are into understanding a bit about the behind the scenes mechanics of the music business, from details about country music contracts in the 60s to learning about how an engineer made this or that choice on an iconic album. So I liked this interview with Jason Isbell’s tour manager, who is all of 24 years old and has to manage a guy on tour like all the time with a lot of people in his crew. I once saw Brittany Howard play a festival in Alabama and my friend and I were wondering whether to stay for the encore. The show was great but you know, traffic and all. Her tour manager overhears us and was like, oh you need to stay for this. So we did. Even she was amazed; I overheard her on the phone after saying it was Howard’s best show in three years and let me tell you my friends, while I couldn’t compare to other shows since it was the first time I had seen her, let me just tell you that it was a very good decision to stick around.

OK….so I saw that Randy Travis is playing a show nearby. Now, I probably wouldn’t go under the best of circumstances. I have nothing against the man, but his style of country was never quite mine. But I was like, I thought he had aphasia after a stroke several years ago. Yes, this is true. So how is he touring? It turns out there’s another singer, Travis’ back up band, and Travis sits on stage and where he can, adds a word or two. Look, I feel for Travis very much. And I don’t doubt his band needs the money. But why would anyone pay for this? But shit, given all the terrible tribute bands out there, how much will people pay to pretend it’s 1973 while AI generated versions of Waters and Gilmour play Dark Side? It’s a sad world out there. Here’s my advice: listen to new music.

Playlist from the last two weeks:

1. Bill Callahan, Dream River
2. Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
3. Alejandro Escovedo, Room of Songs, disc 1
4. Mitski, The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We
5. Bonnie Prince Billy, Beware
6. Ennio Morricone, The Legendary Italian Westerns
7. Buck Owens, On the Bandstand
8. Wayne Shorter, Super Nova
9. Wayne Shorter, Adam’s Apple
10. Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come
11. Lorin Maazel: New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Adams: On The Transmigration Of Souls
12. Peter Gabriel, So
13. Don Rigsby, The Midnight Call
14. Bonnie Prince Billy, The Purple Bird
15. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, disc 2
16. Jerry Lee Lewis, County Songs for City Folks
17. Neil Young, Comes a Time
18. Merle Haggard, Branded Man
19. Tropical Fuck Storm, Braindrops
20. Sunflower Bean, Twentytwo in Blue
21. Bill Monroe, Live Recordings, 1956-1969
22. Peter Rowan and Don Edwards, High Lonesome Cowboy
23. William Parker, Double Sunrise over Neptune
24. Kris Davis Trio, Run the Gauntlet
25. Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Spinning Around the Sun
26. Pavement, Slanted & Enchanted
27. Grateful Dead, Dick’s Picks 1, disc 2
28. Jimme Rodgers, The Essential
29. Altun Gun, Ask
30. Mary Lattimore, At the Dam
31. Sunny War, Anarchist Gospel
32. Soccer Mommy, Sometimes Forever
33. Bill Callahan, Rough Travel for a Rare Thing
34. Jimmie Dale Gilmore, After Awhile
35. Mulatu Astatke, Afro-Latin Soul, Volumes 1 and 2
36. The Go Team, The Scene Between
37. African Pearls: Mali
38. Camper Van Beethoven & Eugene Chadbourne, Camper Van Chadbourne
39. Wolf Alice, My Love is Cool
40. John Prine, Bruised Orange
41. Jane Weaver, Modern Kosmology
42. Zo!, Four Front
43. REM, Document
44. Richard Buckner, Dents and Shells (2x)
45. Charley Crockett, $10 Cowboy
46. Neil Young, Harvest
47. Willie Nelson, Red Headed Stranger (2x)
48. Sir Douglas Quintet, Live in Austin
49. Wussy, Left for Dead
50. John Moreland, High on Tulsa Heat
51. Bonnie Prince Billy, Master and Everyone
52. Bill Frisell, Have a Little Faith
53. Paul Simon, Graceland
54. Fairport Convention, Unhalfbricking
55. Marty Robbins, El Paso City
56. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Kerouac’s Last Dream
57. Lilly Hiatt, Trinity Lane
58. The Whitmore Sisters, Ghost Stories
59. Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood & The Rajasthan Express, Junun,
60. Maybelle Carter, Queen of the Autoharp
61. Waxahatchee, Out in the Storm
62. Johnny Bush, Whiskey River
63. The Velvet Underground, VU with Nico
64. V/A, Touch My Heart – A Tribute To Johnny Paycheck
65. Curtis Mayfield, Back to the World
66. Julia Holter, Ekstasis
67. Jess Williamson, Time Ain’t Accidental
68. Drive By Truckers, Decoration Day
69. Old 97s, Twelfth
70. Willie Nelson, 16 Greatest Hits
71. John Hartford, Aereo-Plane
72. Jenny Don’t and the Spurs, Broken Hearted Blue
73. Feeble Little Horse, Girl with Fish
74. The Hold Steady, The Price of Progress
75. Connections, Midnight Run
76. Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Infernal Machines
77. Rhiannon Giddens, You’re the One
78. The Paranoid Style, For Executive Meeting
79. Miles Davis, Agharta
80. Hank Williams, The Unreleased Recordings, disc 2
81. Sleater-Kinney, Dig Me Out
82. Rilo Kiley, Under the Blacklight
83. Sudan Archives, Natural Brown Prom Queen

Album Reviews:

Tears Run Rings, Everything in the End

How much do you like 90s dream pop repeated today? I mean, I don’t mind, not really, but what really is the upside here, even if it is pretty well done like Tears Run Rings? The band only does an album every decade or so and maybe that’s a good thing to get enough decent songs to make it worthwhile. Which, by the way, worthwhile does describe this album just fine. So much meditative guitar. And look, it’s Gen X, we’ve all known everything is terrible since we were 20, getting old and preparing to die as Trump destroys America doesn’t exactly change the fundamental equation.

B

Terry Allen, Blood Sucking Maniacs

This is a gloriously strange album from the icon of “cosmic country.” Allen is a sculptor, country musician, and raconteur in his 80s, a brilliant if inconsistent artist, with two glorified brilliant albums in Juarez and Lubbock (On Everything), plenty of very good albums after that, some art/theater projects that would be better live than on album, and a lot of sculpture on top of that. Plus he has a book now. This is his family album that goes back to recordings of his mother and goes forward to the heartbeat of his great-grandson in the womb to have 5 generations of crazy people doing very Texas music. Not all of it quite gels, as might be inevitable on a project such as this, but it is all totally fascinating and worthy. Terry redoes his classic “Bloodlines,” his wife and muse Jo Harvey says a lullaby told to her by her grandmother, it’s basically a Texas flatlander story over a century. Maybe there’s better albums out there, but there aren’t any with more heart and spirit and love and respect for the past and, most importantly, for the future.

A-

Sunny War, Anarchist Gospel

Sunny War rules. She’s a great lyricist and she’s also such a killer guitarist. Like she absolutely shreds. I wish I had heard her 2023 album earlier, but I liked her 2025 album Armageddon in a Summer Dress (she has a thing for very good album titles) and am now working back. It was only here that I truly realized the quality of her rocking guitar going with her folk songs of freedom. Personal rather than collective, as is the norm in the 21st century, for good or bad and there’s both involved here. Here, she’s been in some shitty relationships and she wants out, not only physically but mentally, and so she writes a bunch of songs to free her mind and her body and freedom from pain is a lot more important than freedom from the 60s conformity or whatever, not that Funkadelic lied about your ass following.

A

Arlo Parks, Ambiguous Desire

OK, this is interesting. I’m not really a dance floor kind of guy, both because I am far too Lutheran to dance (it’s not just that I’m a bad dancer, which is objectively true, it’s that I am also feeling shame the entire time I do it or whatever it is I am doing), but I do appreciate quality writing and inspiration wherever it can be found in this horrible world. And these are really good songs, which makes almost any kind of music at least tolerable, if not outright palatable. Relationship songs, which are the best ones anyway. Parks is heavily influenced by LCD Soundsystem. The easiest way to make that connection is the sound, which sure, fine, but let’s not forget what that makes that band one of the best of the early 21st century are that these are real songs with real sentiment and stories in addition to being dance classics. Not sure Parks might be at that level. But maybe.

B+

Adrian Younge, Presents Something About April III

I know Younge from the largely successful and noble if a bit repetitive Jazz is Dead project with Ali Shaheed Muhammad, where they record living but mostly forgotten jazz and (increasingly) global music legends, making their music relevant with their own funky selves. This project shares the same interest in the global South and connecting culture and times. This is Younge’s third album in this project that rethinks Brazilian music and even Brazilian history through his jazz-soul-funk lens. He actually wrote the lyrics in Portuguese and has learned the language, such is his love of Brazil. It’s cool enough, but again, I think he works a bit too much in the same set of sound and production choices for me. Other than the orchestra and the vocals, Younge plays all the instruments. Not sure that’s the best choice, even as he can certainly do so.

B

Yaya Bey, Fidelity

I like Yaya Bey, despite a very sour performance at Big Ears 25 when she said that she didn’t feel like working that night. This is a solid modern soul release that almost makes up for that performance. This is a grief album, though I think there are too many of them these days, as our culture has become very self-indulgent about grief. But her father died and that’s a good reason to feel sad and have to process it. But it’s also not a strictly sad album. There’s a lot of humor here, just a sense that we are all going to die soon. Which is true, so why not enjoy the time we have. I’m still never going to quite be able to think about her without being reminded that she was so openly dismissive of working that night. Sure, but imagine if you had an actual job of making beautiful things. In any case, she sure can sing.

B+

Jose Gonazlez, Against the Dying of the Light

Gonzalez is definitely my favorite Swedish songwriter from Spanish descent who sings in English. At his best, I find him well picked soft songs to be pretty touching in an atmospheric way. This isn’t quite at that level, but it’s still a very fine release. I’ve had several opportunities to see him, he does tour a lot, but I’ve never pulled the trigger because the price seems high for what I expect. But I do find him a worthy recording artist and maybe I will do it one of these days before one of us drops dead. Against the Dying of Light indeed, though in the case the Dying of the Light is more political than actual death. What makes this perhaps more interesting is the clear influence of northern African guitar bands on Gonzalez’s picking, which does add to his sonic quality.

B+

Katie Gately, Fawn/Brute

This dense pop is kind of like if Jane Weaver was more experimental (though Weaver is hardly adverse to trying out new things). This is a very textured music about giving birth and being mother watching a daughter grow up, based on her own childbirth and then imaging what her daughter might do as she enters her teenage years. Gately is as much a producer as a writer or singer and shows here. Like a late-era Tom Waits album, there aren’t a lot of noises and textures that Gately won’t try. That she’s worked with Bjork in the past makes all the sense in the world when you find that out. Does it all work? OK, maybe some of it works fine rather than great, but it’s certainly a heck of a lot more interesting listen than most anything else you are going to hear these days. This will also benefit from additional listens, as one begins to understand just what is happening here. The storytelling could be a bit clearer at times, but it’s worthy at the very least.

B+

Dry Cleaning, Stumpwork

I happen to more or less like Dry Cleaning, but is spoken word over music really a band? I don’t know–Florence Shaw is surely a droll enough writer and she delivers the lyrics effectively enough and the band is post-punkish enough in an acceptable but not remarkable way. But this is really just spoken word…OK, so is The Hold Steady, but Craig Finn at least talks rhythmically and he is telling stories. This is more like an art project and the perspective is pure droll, if weird.

B for me but I’d accept lower from someone who does not enjoy the concept

Sissoko/Segal/Parisien/Peirani, Les Égarés

This is a really beautiful album. What this does is takes two duos and puts them together in a quartet, which can often be an interesting exercise, since there’s preexisting history between the two halves of the album. On one side, you have Ballaké Sissoko on the kora and Vincent Sega on the cello and on the other, you have Vincent Peirani on the accordion and Émile Parisien on the soprano sax. Right here, we have four instruments that you don’t often have in conversation with each other. And the kora does not make that an overly west African project here either, though of course those influences are here. It’s like these guys just have the world and its influences in them and channel as much as they can into new sounds. It’s what “boundary crossing” should sound like, even if I don’t like the entire idea of boundaries in music.

A

Garrett T. Capps, I Still Love San Antone

At the core of this album is that San Antonio is a great city. And that you like Breakfast Tacos with Satan, which is the first real song on this album. A song shared with the late great Augie Meyers and the still living great Peter Rowan. And there’s a song about how great HEB is, a Texas grocery store chain. It was definitely my favorite store in Texas. “SOS HEB” is asking the founder of HEB to buy up America since everything in this country is a fucking shitshow except for HEB. And if you live in Texas, you good and goddamn well believe that because it’s largely true’–“Housing for the homeless/keep all the chicken boneless”–I loled. Even if chicken wings good and damn well needs to have bones. Capps is not exactly a musical genius, but with this kind of writing in classic Texas fuckoff genre, you overcome a whatever voice. Capps advertises his album as “the most psychedelic Tex-Mex album of all time.” Ain’t arguing the point. Remember the Alamodome! “One time I went to the Alamodome and saw Rodman play/one time I took a date to the Alamodome and it got me laid” now that’s some motherfucking art. This may not be the best album I’ve heard recently, but it sure as hell is the one that made me the happiest.

B+

As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.