The drone and rush of Spacemen 3 was
dark, dirty fun. Like the Jesus and Mary Chain they brought a dash of
demi-monde cool to the synth-pop Eighties. When they broke up, guitarist Jason
Pierce initiated a new project called Spiritualized, a band who didn’t reject
Spacemen’s ethos, but certainly gave it grander dimensions.
Pierce has woven strands of Velvet
Underground ‘rush and
on my run’ thrust,
lysergic propulsion (think 13th Floor Elevators, and yes, even Pink
Floyd), the epic pop pretensions of Phil Spector, and American gospel sounds
throughout Spiritualized’s twenty-year history. The band’s apotheosis, Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in
Space, a classic statement of Pierce’s vision was released in 1997.
Subsequent releases have to varying degrees retreated from or refined that
classic. Good records, all of them in my estimation, but nothing stunning
After 2008’s Songs in A and E, Pierce revisited Ladies and Gentleman, mounting extravagant live productions of the
album. Immersed in his own classic and moved by audience response, Pierce
determined that any new release from Spiritualized had to meet that standard. With
Sweet Heart Sweet Light his mission
is accomplished. It embraces Ladies and
Gentlemen, but deepens and matures its sensibility.
Where some of the band’s recordings
hid behind a patina of noise and attitude, Sweet
Heart is transparently detailed, achieving a clarity of pop production that
would flatter halcyon period Beach Boys or the Beatles circa Magical Mystery Tour.
With Pierce undergoing chemotherapy
as treatment for liver disease, most of the basic tracks for Sweet Heart were
cut in his home studio with a core quartet of Pierce, guitarist/bassist Tony
Foster, keyboardist Tom Edwards, and drummer Kevin Bales. Pierce then convened
sessions in Iceland (for orchestration) and Los Angeles (backing vocals).
Every music lover has
moments of revelation. I still recall vividly the first time I heard the
Animals riveting (yes, it was riveting – I know it’s the critical cliché to end
all critical clichés, and I don’t care) take on the American folk chestnut
“House of the Rising Sun.” It was playing on the car radio. I made my mom leave
the car running as we pulled into a parking space in front of my bro’s jewelry
store in downtown Lawrence.
Never in my sweet, short life had I heard anything like it. I was a pre-teen. My
exposure to black music was limited to Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte;
suffice to say Charley Patton wasn’t playing on WHB. The Animals’ singer, Eric
Burdon, was from Newcastle,
England, but
that voice, and its amazing conviction and intensity stemmed from his adoration
of the American blues tradition. I didn’t even know it yet, but I was hooked.
The mise en scene of
“House of the Rising Sun” was New
Orleans. When you’re a white bread kid in the sixth
grade from Kansas your impressions of New Orleans came from Al Hirt and Pete
Fountain (okay, Louis Armstrong might cross your radar occasionally, but almost
as a novelty). That’s what you saw on television. No knock on those dudes, but
they represented a commercialized, somewhat sanitized version of the music of New Orleans. That sound
occasionally seeped into the pop mainstream of the Sixties. Fats Domino may
have been past his chart prime, but songs like “Iko Iko” by the Dixie Cups and
the odd hit from Lee Dorsey (especially “Working in a Coal Mine”) gave a hint
what was cooking in the Big Easy. Aaron Neville had a hit with “Tell It Like It
Is” but its rhythm n’ blues sound was not especially Nawlins-centric.
For me, another
revelatory moment was the first time I heard Dr. John – on a short-lived Kansas City underground FM
station called KCJC. The tune was “Mama Roux” if I recall correctly. I’d never
heard anything quite like it. Heck, most of America hadn’t. The gumbo of
styles, representative of New Orleans,
that became available to anyone receptive to it in the Seventies, was still
underground culturally in 1968. The Meters first album didn’t drop until 1969.
Professor Longhair, after recording for several labels in the Fifties with
marginal commercial results, was working as a janitor throughout most of the
Sixties. The aforementioned chart hits by Dorsey, Neville and the Dixie Cups
only hinted at what was going on in the diverse neighborhoods of the Crescent City.
Dr. John, the Night
Tripper was a persona created by a Los Angeles
based New Orleans
ex-pat named Mac Rebennack. Rebennack had played on many recordings as a very
young man in New Orleans.
He moved on to Los Angeles
where he was a go-to session man between 1963 and 1968.
As Dr. John,
Rebennack combined the full simmering roux of New Orleans sounds (sanctified church music
and Saturday night grind) and mixed them shrewdly and affectingly with the
psychedelic wail of the emerging counterculture. Three similarly themed albums
cementing the Dr. John cult followed the debut record (Dr. John, the Night Tripper - the album that included “Mama Roux”).
Rebennack followed those first four releases with Gumbo, an excellent session that paid homage to hometown piano
heroes like Professor Longhair and James Booker, produced by fellow New Orleans legend, Allen
Toussaint.
Over the last
thirty-some years the Dr. has kept active. As a solo artist he’s responsible
for twenty-eight albums. Not bad for a guy who hasn’t had a hit in forty years
(1973’s “Right Place,
Wrong Time”) and who fought a junk habit until the late Eighties, as I
understand it. There’s good music throughout that twenty-eight record catalog;
but nothing quite as unique or captivating as those early records – until Locked Down.
“Chains of Love” is a song title. I know that there are
songs by Ryan Adams and Erasure by that title. I could be wrong, but I’m
guessing that the naming of Vancouver’s Chains of Love had nothing to do with
either of those.
On the other hand the phrase ‘chains of love’ is repeated
frequently in the song “Chains,” written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King. It was a pretty big hit in 1962 for the Cookies. And, oh
yeah, some group called the Beatles covered it on their debut album. From
listening to the Chains of Love I would guess that they’ve heard Goffin and
King’s tune. The girl-group sounds of the Sixties are an oft-present
influence on today’s younger musicians. And why not - it was insanely catchy,
melodic music, and while it sometimes reflected more demure and submissive
feminine postures, it was in its very presentation and power assertively
female. As such it has become a vital resource for many young women musicians
fifty years removed from the sound’s beginnings.
Perhaps most remarkable about the Chains of Love sound is
that it is a modernization of the girl-group idiom without a specific agenda.
Where La Sera and Frankie Rose dive back into Fifties Patti Page-isms, the Dum
Dum Girls pursue an Eighties noise-punk sheen, and Cults incorporate beat box,
machine music, all Chains of Love do is sound like a rock band – a rock band
with a glorified demo for an album called Strange
Grey Days. The rough recording quality is not without charm, although
it does shortchange the band’s most potent asset, singer Nathalia Pizarro in
the mix. But even in that it succeeds in exuding a real band ethos instead of
placing Pizarro apart from or ahead of the band.
In 1969, the critical consensus was that
in order for Janis Joplin to ascend to the blues-soul pantheon she needed to
ditch the idiosyncratic, psychedelic blues of the Big Brother and the Holding
Company. All well and good, except that with a backing band, rather than a
band, her sound was generic, creating a mismatch with her more dramatically
personal qualities. The Sixties rock chops of Chains of Love are evident from
the “Time of the Season” drop beat, syncopated kick off of “He’s Leaving (with
me).” Here, the production ethos reminds of Tim Presley’s band White Fence -
all Sixties homage, but part bedroom d.i.y. nonchalance. Striking as Pizarro's
near- (Ronnie) Spectorian pipes are, she sounds, and Chains of Love sound most
striking when she harmonizes with guitarist Rebecca Marie Law Gray. Between
them they evoke the full complement of Sixties female vocalists, from icons like Mary Weiss to
thrilling one-hit wonders like Diane Renay. They’re sweetly aggressive on the
declarative “All the Time,” guitarist (and producer) Felix Fung spinning off a
stinging solo worthy of vintage Mike Bloomfield, as the band rages shades of
Blondie and the Attractions.
The Men are men (well, you never know) from Brooklyn. And unlike your average twenty-somethings from Gotham’s most populous borough they don’t sound like lapsed graduate students trying to justify their career choice to their parents by claiming their new album is a master’s thesis on some obscure aesthetic strategy. Shit, no. They sound like a damned rock band. This is rock as bedrock – elemental, dedicated to the proposition that every dumb ass that queried “is rock dead?” should be hit with a sledgehammer - as if Little Richard could ever die. I’ve heard Leave Home (yes, borrowed from the Ramones, paragons of college rock sophistication). I haven’t heard their earliest music. Their new album Open Your Heart represents gravitation toward what the average rock fan might call listenable. Take that, hipsters!
But really, they don’t sound like they give two shits. Which always makes for great rock and roll. Ya think the Stones agonized over how Beggars Banquet would be received by an audience taught to anticipate lysergic spew? Hell, no. And by God, Open Your Heart is a sort of Beggars for a generation raised on racket. Oh, I’ve heard little college-rocker journalists bring up Husker Du and Black Flag and SST and Homestead and Dischord labels and whatever else. I guess. But mostly I hear the swirling missionary positions of everyone from the Stooges to Jane’s Addiction (and a certain kinship with Icarus Line). And of course the noise monkey grooving of everyone from Spaceman 3 to Sonic Youth to - I dunno, the Swans?
Scott Severin knocked around the New York music scene for years, somehow winding up in Omaha sometime in the past decade. I don’t pretend to know his biography, but if his music is any indication he’s a grown up punk rocker with plenty of Clash, Dylan, Ochs, Waits, Cave, Zevon, Springsteen (his words, actually) in his collection. He recorded a forty-something debut called Unknown Rider upon settling in Omaha, a record I’ve yet to hear. Scott and I were introduced through a mutual friend and I asked him to send a copy of his second release Birdhouse Obbligato when it became available.
Glad I did. Severin’s work honors his mentors and most of it merits same breath mention. “Birdhouse” (the song, but not quite title track) has a Weill-ian menace that reminds me of Steve Wynn’s “My Old Haunts.” Actually, there’s a more general kinship between Severin’s work and Wynn’s. Severin’s delivery has the incantatory rhythms of Allen Ginsberg, but his vocal timbre and range remind me of Eric Anderson (think “I Shall Go Unbounded” more than “Blue River”), something in his enunciation too. “ And “Birdhouse’s” ‘sins that even Satan don’t allow’ suggests Nick Cave’s netherworld.
In the faded romance chronicle of “The Edge is Gone” and on ‘I Won’t Get on the Plane” I hear something of Richard Hell’s Kentucky by way of Lower East Side drawl. “Plane” and “I Don’t Know” would also sound right at home in the revived New York Dolls repertoire, especially the latter with it’s jaded Stones drive. “Even Jesus” links the Christian savior with Everyman, suggesting that like Johnny Thunders “even Jesus was born to lose.”
The enigma that is John Wesley Coleman III … ah, never mind. Enigma, my ass. I don’t know that much about the guy, that’s all. Let’s see, he’s from Texas. He plays in a band called the Golden Boys – don’t know much about them either. He records for the Memphis mavericks at the Goner Records label and had a previous album on the label called The Bad Lady Goes to Jail. I have it. It’s pretty good. But I don’t remember all that much about it … too. Got it on the shelf, where records that I like go (unlike the ones that suck). But I’m going to remember his new record a lot better. It’s called The Last Donkey Show and I’ll remember it because I like it more. I’ve been listening to it a lot. And because I’m writing this damn review.
Coleman is a rock ‘n’ roll junkman. His mind works like a radio receiver that gets random transmissions from the last five decades of rock and country music. Recorded in Oakland, CA and Coleman’s native Texas, Donkey Show is produced by Greg Ashley of the Gris Gris, who’s worked with bands like the Impediments and is clearly Coleman’s kindred spirit.
Coleman is expressive, poetic in a junkman’s way – mostly he comes up with an idea or an image and lets it roll. It works. “There’s a woman looking for me in the dark; she won’t leave me alone” he sings on “My Grave.” It’s sung to a tune that borrows a tad from Roky Erickson’s “Starry Eyes” with an arrangement that calls to mind the Sir Douglas Quintet, Swingin’ Medallions and the Attractions. Coleman likes the sublime sounds of vintage electric keyboards like the Farfisa and Vox Continental, sounds at once majestic and cheesy. That sound predominates on the title cut and “Virgin Mary Queen.” The former kicks off with a ‘dearly beloved’ organ intro, turning into prom-rock with a Ringo back beat, Coleman singing like a charbroiled Peter Perrett; on “Virgin” Coleman engages his inner Iggy, but mixes him with a touch of Kris Kristofferson. With its Flannery O’Connor ambience “Virgin” sounds like the aural equivalent of a William Eggleston photograph, full of that mysterious mix of the banal and the incredible that characterizes the southern American psychic landscape.
Peter Case of the Plimsouls never cared much for the power-pop label. And while the Plimsouls were contemporaries with bands lumped into the punk category the band never self-identified as punk. Of course among their late Seventies/early Eighties peers in the Los Angeles scene there were bands as diverse as X, the Zeros, the Dils, the Germs, and the Alley Cats – all of whom were categorized as punk, only begging the question: what is punk anyway? And its corollary: who cares?
After a decade that spewed forth everything from prog-rock to Malibu singer-songwriters to disco, all the above were rock ‘n’ roll bands. Their shared commitment was to high-energy performance and direct, concise songs. And if energy and succinct songs were the criteria, few bands did it better than the Plimsouls. Their sub-genre inspirations ranged from Merseybeat to rhythm ‘n’ blues to freak-beat. I suppose they got the power-pop label laid on them because they had raw drive (power) and they didn’t sound like unskilled, unschooled half-asses (pop). So, there you go.
They had all the classic elements necessary for rock stardom (songs, looks, etc.), except the Seventies shifted that celestial alignment (see prog-rock, Malibu, disco …) forever. The dream of a universal rock language, the one that cemented the popularity and the legacies of everyone from the Beatle and Stones to the Kinks and the Who had already collapsed into a tower of FM-babble by the time that Big Star, the Flamin’ Groovies and the New York Dolls had all (relatively speaking) flopped.
People who don’t think like critics sometimes assail them for their obsessions with comparison and reference. They make a point, a marginal one, but a point. If the search for a box to put an artist’s work in sabotages the ability or desire to hear the work itself for what it is – Houston, we have a problem. As someone whose mind works critically my beef is more with people with cloth ears who make facile comparisons based on limited experience, shitty taste or received information … so there. I also don't think the wrestling between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses requires a winner, just a good match.
Okay, that preface was provoked by my experience with Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose, the debut full-length album from a twenty-one year old artist from Newcastle, England named Beth Jeans Houghton. She and her band the Hooves of Destiny make music that forces you to hear it on its own terms. Comparisons I’ve read of Houghton’s music to artists like Nico and Laura Marling left me wondering if I was listening to the same record. Houghton's soprano, by turns breathy, piercing, sweet is an altogether different instrument compared to Nico or Marling's altos. Nor are her songwriting and arranging tendencies especially similar. Another frequent comparison, to Joni Mitchell, makes some sense. And that presented a bit of a conundrum because I’m not much of Joni Mitchell fan, and I really enjoy YTCN. Proving only that art I’m not nuts about can inspire art I dig.
The palette of Me Oh My, the debut from Cate Le Bon, was stark and to the point. Its appealing, if rudimentary, production values allowed the songs to speak for themselves, and they ranged from the whimsical (“Sad Sad Feet”) to the apocalyptic (“Terror of the Man”). For her follow up, Cryk, the Welsh born singer-songwriter adds layers of instrumental texture and embellishment, making her austere and sturdy songs even more transfixing. Ultimately, though, it’s her sheer self-possession as a singer that makes it hard to divert your attention, rather like the aural equivalent of not being able to take your figurative eyes off of someone.
Much has been made of the Nico influence, so let’s consider that. First, Le Bon’s vocal range is higher; her dynamic range more extreme, and her reliance on and comfort with harmonization are greater (including plenty of self-harmonization). Where the comparison works is with respect to a shared melancholy affect, a certain precise diction (rooted in English perhaps being a second language – Le Bon is also a Welsh speaker), and a tendency to enter and accent just behind the beat. The specter of the Velvet Underground also extends to Le Bon’s musical sensibility. It’s the sound of loud, bright guitars and dissonant keyboards parts, as well as a certain rhythmic lurch, you can hear it in the galloping syncopation of the album’s opening track “Falcon Eyed,” with its “Sister Ray” lurch.
But this is a post-Velvet vision distinctly informed by Le Bon’s roots in Welsh music and culture (and after all, John Cale was a fellow Welshman). Her art just sounds rooted in the Welsh culture. You’d almost have to have visited Wales to understand. It’s something to do with their mixture of hospitality and reserve, welcoming and insularity, the way some greet you warmly in English one moment only to switch languages conspicuously when entering conversation with a nearby friend. I love the Welsh. Part of my bloodline is Welsh. It’s a fascinating place, and some of the best Welsh artists (Super Furry Animals, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci … Cate Le Bon) have a natural Welsh aura that somehow conveys the country’s curious cross between the connected and the remote. Le Bon first came to prominence as Gruff Rhys’s collaborator on the Neon Neon project. Recorded in Wales and featuring an all, or almost all, Welsh cast, including Meilyr Jones and Gwion Llewellyn from the excellent, if little known, band Race Horses, Cyrk is a distillation of that national sensibility, told through the eyes of a very individual and bohemian female artist.
Howler sounds a little – okay, a lot – like the Strokes. And the Strokes sounded like late period Velvet Underground mixed with a roughhewn take on Television. I got news for ya; this is how influence works. Bands cut their teeth on other bands. Strangely enough, they resemble those bands. But if a band exerts too much influence or sustains too much popularity this makes hipsters uncomfortable, so they tend not to like bands that betray such influences. Oh, you know, it all makes the music too common for them. Fine and dandy – until you realize that it was the same mentality that consigned the Beatle embracing Big Star to the margins while the so-called underground celebrated Jethro Tull and Yes. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
On their Rough Trade debut America Give Up Minneapolis’s Howler go with their Is This It inspiration and personalize it with salacious aplomb. Nineteen year-old singer Jordan Gatesmith shifts personae, engaging an Iggy –informed aggression, Julian Casablancas’s slur-shout, Jim Reid’s behind the beat croon, and Bradford Cox’s sleepy drawl. Guitarist Ian Nygaard has the Valensi-Hammond, Reid Brothers, and Johnny Ramone style sheet under control. Kids are pretty deft.
Aged between nineteen and twenty-four, Howler isn’t knocking you over with fully realized genius. But that’s not really the point. Even the insouciant supernova that was the Fab Four took two years to get to Rubber Soul, three to Revolver (okay, that was pretty amazing). But the point is – enjoy what these kids have done already instead of anticipating either the full flowering of their artistic glory or the dull repetition of formula. Get Zen, baby, live in the moment. And at this moment Howler have assembled a thirty-two minute collection of short, sharp, rockin’ tunes.
Their inspirations, beyond the obvious Strokes similarities, include the Jesus and Mary Chain (really pronounced on “Back to the Grave” and “Too Much Blood”), Sonic Youth in certain (a)tonalities, Deerhunter, and a dash of “old school” that reflects Echo and the Bunnymen’s mythic mock-pomp-pop. Throw in a little Stooges anima, really strong on “Pythagorean Theorem,” which also features a nifty stripped-down break with guitars that suggest a Gun Club or Cramps record lurking on the band’s IPod, and you've got the basic picture.
“America” is a weird little parable with references to shotgun weddings and John Wayne, and a “my darling, it’s all over now” refrain that seems to speak directly to the subject of the song. “Told You Once” kicks off with a hard acoustic rhythm, evoking Dramarama’s “The Next Time” and bringing the Beach Boys harmonies. “Back of Your Neck” is a hipster teen slice of life with Cars-styled stop-start rhythms and a guitar break straight out of the Plugz’ acid-surf guitar music on the Repo Man soundtrack.
