The 2011 Countdown Continues with No. 18, Steve Cropper

Continuing today, and culminating with REVERBERATIONS number one album of the year on December 31st (if my math is right), we’ll be counting down the top twenty-five records of 2011. I’m referring to this countdown as Twenty-five Faves because I have no pretenses about telling you what’s “best.” Sure, I think my taste is better than yours. But nobody died and made me Lester Bangs. And Lester could be arrogant, but I kind of think he would come down on the favorite side of the fave/best dichotomy. His criticism was nothing if not personal.

I've reviewed the majority of these selections. In the event that I have I'll simply recycle the original reviews, sometimes with a little new commentary. If it's a selection I haven't reviewed previously, I will dash off a new, brief, introductory review just for perspective.

Since Steve Cropper's Dedicated (429 Records)isn't an album I've reviewed previously, here's a new review:

That the 5 Royales have yet to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is silliness bordering on the shameful. Instead, they are principally remembered by true rhythm ‘n’ blues aficionados. Oh, people know their songs – “Dedicated to the One I Love,” covered by the Shirelles and the Mamas and Papas; “Think,” reworked by James Brown; “Tell the Truth” popularized by Ray Charles are but a few examples. And they were their songs; the majority of them composed by Lowman “Pete” Pauling, somewhat unusual for rhythm ‘n’ blues artists of their time. Not just a fine songwriter, Pauling was an innovative guitarist, whose seamless switching between steady, staccato rhythm comps and sharp blues leads was an inspiration to many younger players. Among them was Steve Cropper. 

The 2011 Countdown Continues with No. 19, Dum Dum Girls

Continuing today, and culminating with REVERBERATIONS number one album of the year on December 31st (if my math is right), we’ll be counting down the top twenty-five records of 2011. I’m referring to this countdown as Twenty-five Faves because I have no pretenses about telling you what’s “best.” Sure, I think my taste is better than yours. But nobody died and made me Lester Bangs. And Lester could be arrogant, but I kind of think he would come down on the favorite side of the fave/best dichotomy. His criticism was nothing if not personal.

I've reviewed the majority of these selections. In the event that I have I'll simply recycle the original reviews, sometimes with a little new commentary. If it's a selection I haven't reviewed previously, I will dash off a new, brief, introductory review just for perspective.

 Here's a link to my previous review of the Dum Dum Girls Only in Dreams:

http://stevemahoot.blogspot.com/2011/10/dum-dum-girls-only-in-dreams-sub-pop.html

Joining:

25. Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring for my Halo (Matador)
24. Fountains of Wayne - Sky Full of Holes (Yep Roc)
23. Bass Drum of Death - GB City (Fat Possum)
22. Coathangers - Larceny and Old Lace (Suicide Squeeze)
21. Meg Baird - Seasons on Earth (Drag City)

20. White Fence - Is Growing Faith (Woodsist)

The 2011 Countdown Continues with No. 20, White Fence

 Continuing today, and culminating with REVERBERATIONS number one album of the year on December 31st (if my math is right), we’ll be counting down the top twenty-five records of 2011. I’m referring to this countdown as Twenty-five Faves because I have no pretenses about telling you what’s “best.” Sure, I think my taste is better than yours. But nobody died and made me Lester Bangs. And Lester could be arrogant, but I kind of think he would come down on the favorite side of the fave/best dichotomy. His criticism was nothing if not personal.

I've reviewed the majority of these selections. In the event that I have I'll simply recycle the original reviews, sometimes with a little new commentary. If it's a selection I haven't reviewed previously, I will dash off a new, brief, introductory review just for perspective.

Here's a link to my previous review of White Fence's Is Growing Faith:

http://stevemahoot.blogspot.com/2011/05/white-fence-white-fence-is-growing.html

Joining:

25. Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring for my Halo (Matador)
24. Fountains of Wayne - Sky Full of Holes (Yep Roc)
23. Bass Drum of Death - GB City (Fat Possum)
22. Coathangers - Larceny and Old Lace (Suicide Squeeze)
21. Meg Baird - Seasons on Earth (Drag City)

The 2011 Countdown Continues with No. 21, Meg Baird

Fans of music bubbling up from the indie-folk underground first became acquainted with Meg Baird as primary vocalist for the Espers. The Philadelphia ensemble is one of those bands that critics twist themselves in knots trying to categorize. While their sources are traditional, they put their own distinct spin, just as some of their inspirations – The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention and Pentangle  - did in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Of course writers and listeners struggled then to categorize the music of those bands; and they didn’t even have psych-folk or freak-folk to throw around yet. 

The Espers cover a lot of ground (psychedelia, shoegaze and Middle Eastern influences, as well as the full range of folk idioms). As a solo artist, Meg Baird steers a little narrower course on her new, second album Seasons on Earth. Conceptually, she betrays the sensibility of her generation when it comes to vocals and their place in the mix; where Joni Mitchell or other singers of her generation might have given pop prominence to vocals, Baird gives her guitar equal value. The results can vary from mesmerizing (it does lend a trance-like, live performance presence to these tracks) to maddening (sometimes it’s really hard to discern the lyrics). 

The 2011 Countdown Continues with No. 22, The Coathangers

Continuing today, and culminating with REVERBERATIONS number one album of the year on December 31st (if my math is right), we’ll be counting down the top twenty-five records of 2011. I’m referring to this countdown as Twenty-five Faves because I have no pretenses about telling you what’s “best.” Sure, I think my taste is better than yours. But nobody died and made me Lester Bangs. And Lester could be arrogant, but I kind of think he would come down on the favorite side of the fave/best dichotomy. His criticism was nothing if not personal.

I've reviewed the majority of these selections. In the event that I have I'll simply recycle the original reviews, sometimes with a little new commentary. If it's a selection I haven't reviewed previously, I will dash off a new, brief, introductory review just for perspective.

At No. 22 it's the Coathangers. Here's a link to my review of Larceny and Old Lace:


http://stevemahoot.blogspot.com/2011/06/coathangers-larceny-old-lace-suicide.html

The 2011 Countdown Continues with No. 23, Bass Drum of Death

Continuing today, and culminating with REVERBERATIONS number one album of the year on December 31^st (if my math is right), we’ll be counting down the top twenty-five records of 2011. I’m referring to this countdown as Twenty-five Faves because I have no pretenses about telling you what’s “best.” Sure, I think my taste is better than yours. But nobody died and made me Lester Bangs. And Lester could be arrogant, but I kind of think he would come down on the favorite side of the fave/best dichotomy. His criticism was nothing if not personal.

I've reviewed the majority of these selections. In the event that I have I'll simply recycle the original reviews, sometimes with a little new commentary. If it's a selection I haven't reviewed previously, I will dash off a new, brief, introductory review just for perspective.

 

This year, like most in recent memory, saw the release of several scraggly-ass garage-grunge-punk-pop records (hyphens, no charge) - new releases from mainstays like Ty Segall, newcomers like Hanni El Khatib, download only entries from fixtures such as Reigning Sound and King Khan (a sign, albeit an ironic one, of the times) – heck, the admittedly loosely construed genre even spew forth reissues and anthologies from the Reatards, Lost Sounds and the aforesaid Mr. Segall, a sure sign of, uh, maturity.

All of them were pretty good, but none resonated from bang one to final decay as records like Reigning Sounds’ Time Bomb High School or King Khan and BBQ Show’s debut had in years past. For me the best representatives of the idiom are those records that have an appeal that preaches beyond the converted. In 2011, one album has kept insinuating itself, despite my initial dismissal; that album is GB City the distortion-saturated opus from Oxford, Mississippi’s Bass Drum of Death on Fat Possum Records.

The 2011 Countdown continues with Fountains of Wayne at No. 24

 

Continuing today, and culminating with REVERBERATIONS number one album of the year on December 31^st (if my math is right), we’ll be counting down the top twenty-five records of 2011. I’m referring to this countdown as Twenty-five Faves because I have no pretenses about telling you what’s “best.” Sure, I think my taste is better than yours. But nobody died and made me Lester Bangs. And Lester could be arrogant, but I kind of think he would come down on the favorite side of the fave/best dichotomy. His criticism was nothing if not personal. 

 

I've reviewed the majority of these selections. In the event that I have I'll simply recycle the original reviews, sometimes with a little new commentary. If it's a selection I haven't reviewed previously, I will dash off a new, brief, introductory review just for perspective.

Here's a link to my review of "Sky Full of Holes" by Fountains of Wayne:

http://stevemahoot.blogspot.com/2011/08/fountains-of-wayne-sky-full-of-holes.html 

 

The 2011 Countdown begins with Kurt Vile at No. 25

Starting today, and culminating with REVERBERATIONS number one album of the year on December 31^st (if my math is right), we’ll be counting down the top twenty-five records of 2011. I’m referring to this countdown as Twenty-five Faves because I have no pretenses about telling you what’s “best.” Sure, I think my taste is better than yours. But nobody died and made me Lester Bangs. And Lester could be arrogant, but I kind of think he would come down on the favorite side of the fave/best dichotomy. His criticism was nothing if not personal.

I've reviewed the majority of these selections. In the event that I have I'll simply recycle the original reviews, sometimes with a little new commentary. If it's a selection I haven't reviewed previously, I will dash off a new, brief, introductory review just for perspective.

 

My introduction to Kurt Vile was as Adam Granduciel’s chief cohort on Wagonwheel Blues a quietly mesmerizing album by Granduciel’s band War on Drugs. With lush guitar atmospheres that straddled genres and generations, Wagonwheel Blues had vocals that sounded like a mixture of Neil Young and Jason Pierce (Spaceman 3). The songs were good enough to emerge from the fog of the music, but sometimes you didn’t care if they did.

Rolling Stones - Some Girls (Deluxe Edition)/(Republic)

A broad critical consensus has emerged that 1978’s Some Girls was the last great Rolling Stones album. A case can be made. Sure, the Stones have done spotty work for the last, oh, thirty-five years. But Tattoo You – that was pretty good. Personally, I thought Undercover was underrated. And their last record A Bigger Bang from 2005 was about 2/3 great. But back to Some Girls. Yeah, it’s really good. The relative mediocrity of the three studio releases between the venerated Exile on Main Street and Some Girls (Goat’s Head Soup, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Black and Blue) left a still sizeable and devout Stones fan base ready for love. Some of those fans could have given a rat’s ass about punk rock. Others, however, moved by the racket that had blown out of New York and London during the (Sucking in the) Seventies, had a sense that the back to basics blood and guts of punk had thrown down to the Rolling Stones.

The Stones knew it. Mick Jagger in particular has always been, for better or worse, extremely sensitive to trends. Central to the energy behind the hard, fast and rockin’ tracks on Some Girls was Jagger’s own rhythm guitar playing. More square, less syncopated than Keith Richard’s playing, Jagger’s assertive guitar gave the album much of its foursquare thrust.

But wait, I don’t really want to review Some Girls. Been done. In summary, I think it’s terrific, but maybe rated too highly, and primarily by a lot of the same folks who have an unnecessarily dim view of the Stones’ subsequent output. What I really want to talk about is disc two of the deluxe edition of Some Girls.

Thee Oh Sees - carrion crawler/the dream ep (In The Red)

 

Ah, it’s sweet really. The noise generation is meeting me half-way. I remember back in 2003 when a young pal tried to introduce me to Pink & Brown. I try to keep an open mind. Really, I do. My shelves are full of records and discs with music that the average listener would call noise. But I always viewed noise as something that best served as energy and expression tools for … I dunno, songs? From the MC5 to Sonic Youth the racket was seasoning and juicing to rock ‘n’ roll. So, all this Pink & Brown, Lightning Bolt shit left me perplexed. I love a racket, but this was a new kind of racket – primitive, artless, tuneless. Meh. Was I missing something?

Well, the answer is: a) not really and b) maybe a little something.

Which leads us to our man John Dwyer, he’s the prolific force behind Pink & Brown, the Coachwhips, Hospitals, and most recently Thee Oh Sees (among others). The Coachwhips wanted to be the Oblivians but were without the limited skills and lyric sensibility required for such homage. But they were better than Pink & Brown. The Hospitals? I never listened to them enough to have much of an opinion. When I heard Dwyer had yet another band - this one called Thee Oh Sees, I approached them with trepidation.

But from the beginning I kinda liked what I heard. In addition to the annals of noise racket, Dwyer seemed to have absorbed lessons from psychedelia (the kind with spaces between the noises) as well as the urgent, fuzz-toned rhythms of the bands that were featured on Crypt Records Back from the Grave compilations. Thee Oh Sees release something new every four months (okay, close to it). Seriously, they’ve put out about thirteen records in seven years (under various monikers, relying on TOS for the last four or so years), depending on what you count and who’s counting. The band’s latest offering carrion crawler/the dream EP (lower case is theirs’) is an arresting synthesis of the various strains that run through the band’s music, especially a combination of Help’s psycho-trips and Castlemania’s Cali-garage-pop, music that sounded touched by San Francisco garage peers like Ty Segall and the Fresh and Onlys.