A Downloader's Diary (37): April 4, 2014
by Michael Tatum
This month, A Downloader's Diary makes its grand splash onto
Odyshape waters. Most of these titles won't come as much of a
surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to the usual suspects,
though I seem to be the only one around here who adores the new
St. Vincent (well, let's say three-quarters adores). As for the even
holier St. Dan Willson, he deserves every scrap of praise this bit of
the interwebs can throw his way.
Bob Dylan in the '80s: Volume One (ATO) I would have
loved to have been a fly on the wall as producers Jesse Lauter and
Sean O'Brien pitched the concept for this unusual (and unusually
useful) tribute record to the Kennedy Center honoree. "So, you're
saying my records really sucked in the '80s? That I hooked up with
superstar producers that had no idea how to bring out the best in my
music? That my best songs from that period need salvaging -- by guys
with names like [*reads memo] Elvis Perkins and Langhorne Slim?
[*pauses pensively, strokes beard.] Okay, now wait a minute, you're
saying all of my albums in the '80s sucked? Even Shot of
Love?" Well, yes -- superstardom drained the life out of many a
great baby boomer rocker in that decade, but in Bob's defense, at the
very least one could counter Steve Winwood and Eric Clapton never came
up with a lyric in that time period as poignant as "A Sweetheart Like
You" or evocative as "Series of Dreams." Which is why snobs like us
need this compilation: to restore the Bard of Hibbing's poesy to the
one-take ethos of his salad days, via a motley crew of
semi-professionals for whom the one-take ethos still actually means
something. The two best songwriters -- Craig Finn and Deer Tick's John
J. McCauley -- are also, unsurprisingly, the two best
interpreters. The worst is Lucius, a band signed to M.I.A.'s Mom + Pop
imprint, who forget the point of this exercise is to liberate this
material from the Reagan Era, not saturate it in it. And the most
devilish is Built to Spill's "Jokerman," which in its original
incarnation on Infidels cursed The Great Communicator to suffer
a plague of locusts, but Doug Martsch turns into a cosmic joke
on/exposé of Mr. Tambourine Man himself. Well okay, except for that
part about Michelangelo carving out his features. A MINUS
Laura Cantrell: No Way There From Here (Thrift Shop
Recordings) Other than admiring her in an academic sense --
i.e. respecting her as the first woman to break the honky tonk glass
ceiling -- it's hard to fathom what Laura Cantrell specifically
idolizes in Kitty Wells, the honoree of Cantrell's 2011 Kitty Wells
Dresses. Wells effortlessly inhabits an "authenticity" that
Cantrell thankfully doesn't waste time emulating -- it's difficult
imagining Cantrell, whose aura and bell-like vocal timbre resemble the
pert music teacher you had a crush on in the first grade, voicing a
sentiment as piously bitter as Wells' acrimonious "Will Your Lawyer
Talk to God." Conversely, it's hard to envisage Wells pulling off a
modernist trope on the order of Cantrell's chirpy "All the Girls Are
Complicated": "They're still working out who they are." Yet
ultimately, what I think the forty-six year old Cantrell has absorbed
from Wells is a meticulous investment in her own personal vocal style
-- winning, disarming, even sexy -- that eluded her on her fussier
early albums, and finally she has the attractive tunes that make
attention to that kind of detail worth the risk. I'm not always
persuaded by Cantrell's perhaps willfully mild persona -- one of her
protagonists needs an "easy chair" to get over the hardships of a band
that didn't play her song, a bartender that watered down her drinks,
and a letter that never got a reply (not an e-mail you'll note -- too
urban), and I doubt Kitty Wells ever expressed her fondness for
"southern songs." Still, a great leap forward, though it begs the
question: assuming that's Cantrell's real-life record collection in
the CD booklet, why does she own two copies of Lambchop's How I
Quit Smoking? Hell, why does she own one?
A MINUS
Drive-By Truckers: English Oceans (ATO) Incredible
though it may seem, in the last decade-plus second banana Mike Cooley
has evolved from strong-change-of-pace to Keith Richards with lyrics:
in other words, not merely an equal, but deserving of star
billing. The Exile on Main Street-worthy opener "Shit Shots
Count" begins, "Put your cigarette out and get your hat back on/Don't
mix up which is which" and doesn't give up a witless couplet from
there. He follows that tour de force with one perspicacious
lowlife sketch after another: a kind warning from one redneck friend
to another to think twice about running off with his ex-wife ("She had
a bad tanning habit/She's like a talking leather couch"), a paean to a
long lost love rediscovered via online pornography, and a complex,
empathetic portrait of a father re-evaluating his uneventful life when
his only daughter gets hitched. In fact, Cooley's songs are so
overwhelmingly immediate in their impact at first you might think his
main man Patterson Hood may have missed a step. But after a dozen
spins I'm hard-pressed to single out any of Hood's contributions I
would sacrifice, from a biography of an "absolute piece of shit" of a
politician whose "own mama called him an SOB," to very different
portraits of two failing marriages, both distinguished by sympathetic
but needy husbands on the one hand and lonely housewives who want
something more than a lifetime of being a failed man's sounding board
on the other. And on the finale, Hood raises a glass to a fallen
friend, capturing a vivid Technicolor snapshot of the Grand Canyon so
evocatively beautiful that John Ford might raise his glass,
too. A
Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-95 (Strut) As a
high school freshman in 1986 my listening tastes were pretty narrow --
everything from the Beatles to XTC, with Prince and Earth, Wind, and
Fire the only black artists in my collection, and I was completely
oblivious to possibility that the Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls"
might be East End Boys in their finest drag. By 1995 I had for all
practical purposes become the cheerful omnivore that would eventually
write this column, but the contemporaneous output of Chicago-based
Dance Mania Records was completely out of my area of expertise -- in
fact, by that point I had never even stepped into a proper club,
unless you want to count West Hollywood's lesbian hotspot the Palms,
the kind of anachronism where an earnest request for Thelma Houston's
"Don't Leave Me This Way" wouldn't have gotten you laughed all the way
down Santa Monica Boulevard. By contrast, this collection of house,
ghetto house, acid house, and for all I know ghetto acid house
twelve-inches are far more obscure, built on gaudy beats and low-rent
hooks, and from my spot in the corner I say all the better for it. I
mean, you'd have to be a hayseed duck call magnate to have the power
to resist Hercules' sleazily addictive "7 Ways," a sort of gay disco
version of "The Hokey Pokey" ("First . . . visualize
the body in front of you . . .") which (as they say)
climaxes with "jacking" on the lucky dance partner of indeterminate
gender directly to your right. In my estimation, a camp classic, and
though not everything else is up to that level, the usual dancefloor
exhortations ("Don't try to fight it," "H-h-h-h-house nation," James
Brown whoops and grunts) keep the orgy lubed up for two indefatigably
exuberant discs. "Feel your motherfucking bass in my face?" "Bend over
bitch?" Well, only if you ask politely -- and take me out for surf
and turf first. Inspirational malapropism: "rhythmatically."
A MINUS
Hold Steady: Teeth Dreams (Razor & Tie) Inexorably,
boys and girls in America having a sad time together become middle
aged men and women still longing for connection -- not so much a
surprise in a duskily lit world of clubs and pubs in which the men let
the women know they're "interested" by dropping money for another
round of salted rims and frosted mugs. Craig Finn knows their
biographies like he's memorized the ins and outs of St. Paul
thoroughfares: the ex-girlfriend sleeping in a storage space by the
airport, the ex-gang member who can't keep away from his old mates
building a new playground in a bunker by the river, the drifter who
crashes every night at the Ambassador, which turns out not to be a
ritzy hotel but a cramped bar where they don't serve beer above a 3.2%
alcohol level. But while I can get behind the plaudit that Finn is one
of our great storytellers, this is also music, and this band has been
struggling with positioning themselves in this department since
keyboardist Franz Nicolay exited stage left -- his piano flourishes,
and I suspect his wordless sing-a-long hooks, provided the melodic
bits that grounded Finn's narratives musically. By contrast, Tad
Kubler's guitar parts are merely functional, like a sheet of carbon
paper scrolled into a beat-up Underwood waiting to be filled up with
words, rather than expressive or embellishing. These days, these
Minnesotans' musical satisfactions are more understated: a surprising
harmony vocal, an elegant piano part sneaking in through the back
door, the monotone wailing guitar underpinning the chorus of "The Only
One." Overwhelming exception: "Spinners," which explodes to life with
a tricky 3/4 time intro, rides a bracing tune interlocking with gorgeous
wordplay ("Flat champagne and inbound trains/Soft hands and phantom
pains"), and dazzles with two false endings before ceding Kubler a
coda to articulate in music what Finn has already accomplished in
words -- which, if I'm not mistaken, is the way this shit is supposed
to work. A MINUS
Kool and Kass: Coke Boys 5 (free download) My father
once chuckled to a family friend that I would laugh at anything
regardless of how asinine or nonsensical, proving the point by
delivering the phrases "brown socks" and "outside garages" in varying
cadences. So perhaps you shouldn't trust my bemused affection for this
slight little item, an insta-mixtape recorded by Kool AD and Kassa
Overall in Berlin, Germany on the 19th of February, 2014 and posted on
Bandcamp six days later. In fact, I myself fashioned a dis for it
before I even heard a single track: "Someone should tell Victor
Vazquez that Robert Altman often started with a pretty good script."
And wouldn't you know, like the merry jester he is Vazquez spoils it
all, not only by neglecting to reprise that "Altman/art, man" rhyme
he's dropped at least five or six times in half as many years, but by
sullying his wickedly droll sense of humor all over gleefully plebeian
backing tracks nicked from Young Thug, Wu-Tang, and Drake. The latter
in particular is subjected to a mercilessly fierce drubbing -- after
Vazquez dryly asks, "How come Drake say he 'started from the bottom'
but, um, he really didn't though?," the Toronto totem himself drops in
via Funkmaster Flex's radio show ("All the way from DeGrassi!"), which
then segues into a hysterical seven-minute parody of "Started from the
Bottom" in which nothing of consequence happens outside of the
protagonist peacefully napping in expensive hotels and on airplane
flights. The "coke" dealt in the title isn't Bernie's Gold Dust, which
I highly doubt has found its way into either of these nice boys' nasal
passages, but rather a metaphor for the sleazy DJs who haunt hip hop's
back alleys, with jacked beats and sloppy thirds lining their trench
coats like they were stolen Rolexes -- aside from the ultra-obvious
source material, purloined tags for Maybach Music and the
Trap-a-holics ("Trill! Trill!") pop up at random and repeatedly, as
does that hackneyed snippet "Damn son, where'd ya find this??"
I'd love that oaf Rick Ross to take a day off from posing to sue
Vazquez for all the Benjamins he and Kassa made off of invoking the
name of his fine outfit. But then Ross would have to admit he
downloaded it for $0.00 from Bandcamp like everyone
else. A MINUS
The Rough Guide to the Music of Mali (Second Edition) (World
Music Network) Though the French army eventually drove them out,
the fundamentalist ideologues who temporarily held power in Northern
Mali banned music not only as an expression of dissent but as
expression period. Though in the interim musicians responded to the
crisis with more powerful music than ever, it's sobering to absorb the
truth that nothing even remotely similar befell Bob Dylan in 1963 or
John Lydon in 1977. Recorded in a house in Bamako only a few hours
away from the worst action of a military coup, Bassekou Kouyate and
Ngoni Ba's must-own Jama Ko captures much of the urgency of the
moment, and this compilation nabs its opener, which invites
Christians, Muslims, and Animists to live together and join in the
dance, a notion which sounds quaint to you and me, but a suggestion in
their part of the world can get you killed. Reaching back fifteen
years before the coup, I wish the rest of this compilation lived up to
that song. Unlike other Rough Guide compilations, which either mine
hidden gems dug up by microindies or -- in the case of their own
recent The Rough Guide to the Best African Music You've Never
Heard -- play the shell game with artists from their recent
catalog, this record, by necessity, reaches out to labels not so
desperate for cash that they don't know a little something about
licensing, so this doesn't necessarily showcase the best tracks from
Fatoumata Diawara, Khaira Arby, or even Oumou Sangaré. On the other
hand, the killer cuts from assouf rockers Terakaft and bluesman
Vieux Farka Touré remind me how hard it is to stay current with this
music, even with artists you admire, and more importantly, the pacing
of compiler Daniel Rosenberg, which enlivens the tranquil/hypnotic by
alternating with the terse/hypnotic, guarantees the whole package
flows as one piece. And the closing instrumental benediction from Ali
Farka Touré & Toumani Diabate bids, without uttering a word, to go
with God as well as go in peace. A
Studio One Rocksteady (Soul Jazz) A veritable pebble of
a stepping stone between '60s ska and '70s reggae, lasting only for a
brief two years spanning roughly from early 1966 to mid-1968, there's
not much mystique surrounding this fascinating subgenre outside of
Jamaica -- for example, to my knowledge, there are no Orange County
college kids billing themselves exponents of "third-wave rocksteady."
But when singer/producer Derrick Harriot declares, "Ask any Jamaican
musician and they'll tell you the rocksteady days were the best days
of Jamaican music," you can hear why -- not only is it the point where
singers and musicians began to exert more control over what had been
mostly a producer's music, but at this juncture the music remained
predominantly secular, breezily focusing on love and romance rather
than jah and ganja. But Harriot's nostalgia contains another dimension
as well: this music arrived very soon after Jamaica's 1962
independence from Britain, when the prevailing tone was still
optimistic, before fiscal mismanagement worsened this tiny island's
already palpable class animus, so you can understand how rocksteady's
unblemished innocence might make it so precious to a Kingston native,
yet also understand why the music that proceeded it was so major --
why the world still has a fascination with Bob Marley rather than,
say, a proud pro like Alton Ellis. Sticking generally to well-known
artists (the Heptones, John Holt, Wailing Souls) while leaving more
obvious classics to Island's essential Tougher Than Tough box,
this uncovers some extraordinary gems, beginning with the Eternals'
gorgeous "Stars." But I'm struck by how often politics sneaks in
through the back door, like in John Holt's "Fancy Make Up," a "Back
Stabbers" or "Smiling Faces Sometimes" masquerading as a put down of
uppity wimmin, or Marcia Griffith's "My Ambition," a thinly-veiled
metaphor about how much harder Jamaican female artists have to work to
be respected than their bepenised counterparts. And then there's the
resplendent but completely unsentimental "Row Fisherman Row," which at
least partly explains why crime and class animus exist in the first
place: girls don't make passes at guys who fish for
basses. A MINUS
St. Vincent: St. Vincent (Republic) No lover of
ostentatiously arranged baroque pop no matter how hot the post-rock
guitar, I found myself so overwhelmed by this record's fat-bottomed
whomp that I went back to Annie Clark's 2011 Strange Mercy to
ponder what I might have missed. But though that record hit a little
deeper after the new one chipped away (really, jack-hammered at) at my
resistance, this one really constitutes a formal breakthrough. Partly
this can be explained by the tighter, pared-down band -- Bobby Sparks
on minimoog and Daniel Mintseris on synthesizer, two different
drummers, and, amazingly, no bass, though the elephantine riffs and
rhythms are so thick and sinewy you wouldn't have known that without
checking out the credits. But the rest can be attributed to the
auteur: last time she fled New York for Seattle because she claimed
suffering from "information overload" (I know, why couldn't she have
turned off Facebook and saved the money she would have spent on plane
fare?), a subject dealt with much more tersely on this album's
nightmarish "Huey Newton" than anything on Strange Mercy. This
time she celebrates her extroverted side with a "party record you
could play at a funeral," though you might want to shut Grandmother's
ears for the extended onanism metaphor "Birth in Reverse." Sometimes
the lyrics are too damn obfuscated to suit me -- the gorgeous hymn for
soul-searching "Prince Johnny," a gay friend who holds court with
friends and acolytes in bathroom stalls and wants to be "son of
someone," also contains a stanza in which he and Annie snort a piece
of the Berlin Wall. But that's a minor quibble with music this
gregarious, this satisfying -- the one in which Annie prefers her
mother's love to Jesus doesn't need any annotation at all. That
heaven-sent melody is enough. A MINUS
Withered Hand: New Gods (Slumberland) On his straight-up
classic 2011 debut Good News, Dan Willson surveyed the "drunk
and oversized" girls at Scotland's plus-sized-chicks-only Paradise
Club and asked himself whether or not Kurt Cobain died in vain. This
time around he nicks Nirvana's font for his cover art (Bodoni Extra
Bold Condensed, in case you're curious), muscles up the rock and roll
with a bunch of his buddies from the Scottish music scene, and
delivers eleven perfect meditations on love, mortality, and the
distinct possibility that the Creator might not give a toss about his
inability to manage himself emotionally on the road. That notion
occurs to him in his updated version of "Leavin' on a Jet Plane"
(replete with pteromerhanophobia, playing the slots in a Vegas airport
lobby, and realizing he's left his trusty pocket pussy at home), which
itself sets up a brilliant triptych about the touring life that
culminates in the breathtaking "California," which begins harmlessly
with "stopping for a burger at the In-n-Out" only to segue into a
frightening paean to withdrawal symptoms that I pray isn't drawn from
recent memory. Do the nods to The Gilded Palace of Sin and
White Light/White Heat indicate what to expect musically?
Hardly -- Willson's furry tenor makes Belle and Sebastian's Stuart
Murdoch sound like Roger Daltrey. But when he sings about "dancing to
the light of a dead star," he's not merely referring to white dwarfs
cooling millions of miles away, he's also bowing to Lou and Gram and
Kurt spinning on the turntable. With every ingratiating melody and
well-turned phrase as sparkling as the Pleiades over an Edinburgh
moor, here's hoping he can convince the world how beautiful the
barely-pushing-plain can be. A PLUS
Honorable Mentions
Eagulls: Eagulls (Partisan) Post-punk with so much
growing room here's hoping they don't implode before One of these
Nightingales and Ho-tern California ("Nerve Endings,"
"Tough Luck") **
Pharrell Williams: G I R L (Columbia) After a year of
slumming he finally gets to sell out under his own name ("Brand New,"
"Come and Get it Bae") **
Karim Baggili: Kali City (Homerecords.be) Whimsical
Belgian guitarist with Jordanian-Yugoslav roots picks up an oud,
straddles the line between traditional and postmodern, and proves
there was more wrong with Armik than synthesizers and a yuppie fanbase
("Down Town," "Kali City") **
Lydia Loveless: Somewhere Else (Bloodshot) You wonder
why you don't like this hard-drinking, dirty-talking alt-country chick
more -- and then Kirsty MacColl gives her a songwriting lesson ("Wine
Lips," "They Don't Know") **
Trash
Beck: Morning Phase (Capitol) Since this copy-cat sequel
to the arid, overrated Sea Change displays zero in the way of
emotional or artistic growth -- for crying out loud, each album begins
with the exact same open E major acoustic guitar strum -- it's about
time to ask ourselves why Beck Hansen has been such a pod person since
permanently giving up laffs in 2002. The reason is the dirty but open
secret no one has the temerity to come right out and discuss: the
artist's renewed commitment to the Church of Scientology. The slacker
of Mellow Gold couched meaning in metaphor, jokes,
obscurantism, the arbitrarily ironic -- all safe havens for a rootless
young man temporarily acting out against Mommy and Daddy. But as he
crawled back into Hubbard's cupboard, protected by handlers and unable
to intellectually access the wider world he's been cut off from since
childhood, his latter-day records come off as vacant and impassive
because he has become the person he was raised to be: a blank slate
with an eighth grade education, most of which has been in schools
associated with the church. I suppose on some level one might read
these songs as a desperate message in a bottle, as cris de
prison: "I'm so tired of being alone/These penitent walls are all
I've known/Songbird calling across the water/Inside my silent asylum,"
later capped off with allusions to "lies that will divide us both in
time." But regardless how emptily portentous, there are more
persuasive ways to express such sentiments. Like, I don't know,
renouncing Daddy's weepy string arrangements. C
Sisyphus: Sisyphus (Asthmatic Kitty) In which
Serengeti/Son Lux/Sufjan Stevens change their moniker from S/S/S to
Sisyphus, hopping from Serengeti's Anticon label to Sufjan's Asthmatic
Kitty in the process, and boy does that upset the balance of power --
this is less a sequel to their fine 2012 four-track EP Beak and
Claw than it is Stevens' failed 2010 electropop experiment The
Age of Adz, a development which probably won't even entice the
five or six bloggers who burbled euphorically about that record four
years ago. The music is less amorphous and more beatwise, which might
be good, except that it's constructed by two nerds who have absolutely
no feel for hip hop, the genre in which Serengeti has done all of his
best work, a stupidly obvious factoid I'm emphasizing if only because
the focus on almost all of the reviews for this record has been,
predictably, on Stevens, who I wish young white folks would just come
out and admit hasn't made a decent record since he left Illinois for
Alphaville. Worse still, this time 'Geti's lyrics are either more
abstruse ("Lion's Share," about two failed Chicago robbers) or more
generalized (the lame "Booty Call," which is about just guess),
neither approach of which does him any favors, outside of the
straightforward advice song "Calm it Down," which bemoans, among other
things, the failure of telegrams as a viable form of communication. I
suppose I'd be more despondent about all this if I didn't know
intuitively that 'Geti probably has another worthier project coming
down the proverbial chute -- maybe next week, posted in some obscure
section of the internet. Wish I could say the same thing for
Stevens. B MINUS
Angel Olsen: Burn Your Fire For No Witness
(Jagjaguwar) I'd rather listen to someone who titled their record
Don't Burn Your Fire For Anyone, and if you prefer Angel's
wording, perhaps you too gave your love a cherry that had no stone?
C PLUS
The Hotlier: Home, Like No Place Is There (Tiny
Engines) Emo-h, no more irritating indie rock subgenre is
there. C PLUS
Eleni Mandell: Let's Fly a Kite (Yep Roc) Well,
there's a title that saves me a review. C
Perfect Pussy: Say Yes to Love (Captured Tracks) As
far as I can tell, a concept record about a woman undergoing a
labiaplasty, wide awake and without anesthesia. C
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