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I saw two shows last week, breaking a long drought. Two more this week too, but I will discuss those next week. The previous two were interesting to me in that one was by an artist much more beloved but the other veteran act was just so far superior live. The…
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I saw two shows last week, breaking a long drought. Two more this week too, but I will discuss those next week. The previous two were interesting to me in that one was by an artist much more beloved but the other veteran act was just so far superior live.
The beloved figure was Kim Gordon, who I saw at the Paradise in Boston. Now, I had seen her before at a New Yorker festival and it was fun and I thought a second round of it would be enjoyable too. But really, it was just OK. With the thrill of finally seeing her for the first time not there and the venue/crowd less exciting, it kind of dragged at times. I mean, she’s really just talking with a rhythm-based band behind her. She’s not doing anything really but that. She plucks a couple of guitar notes from time to time. She’s certainly not going to lower herself to talking to the crowd. I don’t mind the Kim solo albums at all. The first one I really like and listen to quite a bit. But this really works better recorded than live. And really, a lot of music is like that and it’s OK. A band called Voyeur opened, which I liked but was very on the nose–it sounded like tuneful Sonic Youth, like Sonic Nurse era.
I had never seen Drivin N Cryin. Kevin Kinney’s band has been around forever, with their one big hit in 1991 with “Fly Me Courageous” and then just a lifetime of rock and roll since, influencing so many bands and feeding the musicians around Kinney into other bands, most notably Sadler Vaden as Jason Isbell’s lead guitarist. He played at the Alchemy in Providence, a small space and one of the few in the city. It was nice to go to a show in Rhode Island, I can tell you that. Kinney doesn’t have a real strong voice. He’s not a transformative figure in rock and roll. He also fucking rocked it live. I mean, this was a very fun show. I was surprised how many of their songs I knew. There’s also just something about rock and roll bands doing rock and roll music with a lot of guitars that is super fun to see live. I see a lot of live music and I try to see a wide variety. Some is more theatrical (a lot of the Latin American music for example), some works live because it’s amazing jazz which is just something to see. Sometimes though, bands are good but don’t necessarily work that well live. That’s especially true of electronic music because, well, live music is also a visual art and there’s nothing much going on. A band like Drivin N Cryin is just great live music. I enjoyed the hell out of it.
Laid Back Country Picker was the main opener for DNC, which is a pretty fun retro rockabilly act that is a little silly but there’s an awful lot of guitar and it’s easy to enjoy that. A local country band called Jake Hunsinger & the Rock Bottom Band started the night and was totally solid, would happily see them again in a local joint.
News and Notes
Anne Carson on seeing Rosalía live. All the shrieking would bug me.
A fun review of a new book on indie rock between 84 and 94. I haven’t read the book, but such a thing allows a writer to just talk about what they like too. I was reminded how I have never really been into a shoegaze band. All the dreamy stuff, it just never did much for me. I like a lot more US bands from that era than British bands.
Speaking of Canada, the guitar pop bands of the Maritimes.
A David Murray playlist--a top 5 living jazz musician right there
Of course Dolly Parton’s heirs are fighting over the estate.
The Best Country Albums of 1976
I never really got Oasis–I was at the wrong point in my life to pay attention when they were huge and what I knew was mostly the Gallagher boys punching each other. But I was in London when they did their Wembley shows last year and it was madness, even on the streets. It was a national celebration of the band. There’s now a documentary.
Two musicians died this week that I haven’t heard of but who both seem important. That I wouldn’t know the British/Ghanaian hip hop artist Sway Dasafo doesn’t really surprise me, though he seems like a cool guy. The death of the punk musician Cheetah Chrome though reminded me of just how little I really know about punk.
Album Reviews:
Vampire Weekend, Only God Was Above Us
I’ve always had a mixed relationship to this band and I was amazed at how terribly bland Father of the Bride was upon its release in 2019. The man who got his career combining Afrobeat guitars into preppy indie rock and whose father in law was Quincy Jones could release an album this aggressively white dad rock? So I held off on their 2024 release for quite awhile, but given that I enjoyed the first album even if hating their obvious Ivy League shit and who found the second album interesting for its engagement in core questions of Judaism, I figured, why not?
The first thing to note is that the African influences are back, heavily on the opener, “Ice Cream Piano.” And I can see why the reviews were so positive–it really does have a lot in common with that first album. On the other hand, it’s pretty repetitive with that first album. Had the band just decided that was their sound and wrote songs around it, that’d be one thing, but it’s hard to not see this as a band rapidly declining in relevance making a bit of a desperate reach back to the good old days. The thing is though, that’s OK if it works and this mostly does work.
B+
Christian Lee Hutson, Paradise, Pop. 10
On first listen, I really didn’t care for the indifference of this performance, but on the second listen, I did feel like Hutson was doing something at least slightly interesting. He’s not a bad songwriter after all, but the arrangements are too fluttery, to the point where I find it distracting. It’s very Phoebe Bridgers–who unsurprisingly produced this album. Sometimes with this generation of sad sack singer-songwriters, I want to grab them and just tell them to be pissed off every now and then and show that you are pissed off. So it just kind of meditates around bummer, lyrically and musically.
B-
Margaret Glaspy, I Am Both
This is definitely one of my favorite albums of the year. When Emotions and Math came out 10 years ago, I was blown away–who was this woman with the great guitar and enormous attitude? I was so excited by this album. But after a nice EP, the second album sucked–it was a pop move with bad production that took away the guitar and the attitude and blanded it all out. Bummer. She took a little time after that, but after a good third album and then a knockout EP of covers last year, with I Am Both, Glaspy shows that not only is she a good guitarist for singer-songwriter music (her husband is Julian Lage, who is genuinely an astounding guitarist, so it’s hard not to compare them, but that’s unfair), but that her songwriting is now at the Joni Mitchell level if we are comparing across time and genre.
“Michigan” is just a fantastic song, one of the best I’ve heard in a long time. “Martin Luther King” at first doesn’t work quite as well because he’s a subject that is almost too big for a new song, especially from a white liberal, but she applies King’s message to personal relationships, which is really much more her subject than politics and somehow this seems really profound. No one really understands each other in Glaspy songs, but then no one really understands each other in real life either. “It seems if you’re a diamond in the dark/You’re going to need to carry something sharp.” Well, that seems right for life. These songs are just so well-turned, so thoughtful, so advanced. This is first rate songwriting and I say that without hyperbole. And while you might not believe me, Christgau just gave this album one of his exceptionally rare A+ grades. He’s getting a little softer in his old age, but still, that’s the level of work were are talking about here. Astounding.
A
Kronos Quartet, Glorious Mahalia
How does a group like Kronos Quartet honor the civil rights movement. I wouldn’t call it a “pop” move to make music over the spoken words of Mahalia Jackson (in an old interview with Studs Terkel) and MLK’s close advisor Clarence Jones, but perhaps it takes advantage of us a bit. Who doesn’t want to hear these amazing people speak? Well, most Kronos fans would anyway, it’s a liberal group. But not only are the words powerful, the music complements it rather than overwhelms. It’s not cloying or cynical at all. It’s just a different way to cast art, building real connects between past and present. I wonder what Mahalia would think of this? Well, I liked it anyway.
A
Frail Body, Artificial Bouquet
Screamy but nothing but screamy. Like much of metal, I just don’t get it. If you need catharsis, I understand. Sometimes I need catharsis too. But the appeal of this is totally lost on me. At the end, I’d like to be able to understand a lyric or two. I also personally find the guitar work in almost all metal to be pretty cliched–the riffs are just so similar to me. It’s genre music. That’s totally fine. I like country and I know metal fans who think it all sounds the same and is cliched. And that might be true. But some genres appeal to us and others don’t for one reason for another. Doesn’t mean that what I like is good music and what I don’t like is bad music. It just means that something appeals to me and something else doesn’t. And that’s OK.
C
The Tubs, Hard Life
The Tubs’ frontman Owen Williams still sounds like Full House-era Richard Thompson fronting a post-punk band and that’s exactly what this is. If that sounds appealing to you, then you need to hear The Tubs. They aren’t exactly breaking new ground here–this band is what it is–but stories about youngish men fucking up their relationships and drinking too much in the pubs are timeless subgenres, especially in British rock. Some fiddle added to this album, which does expand the sonic palette in useful ways and keeps things fresh. It’s not amazing, but it’s a solid release by a solid rock and roll band. That happens to have a frontman sounding like Richard Thompson with a post-punk band.
A-
Why Bother?, You Are Part of the Experiment
A little synth punk EP from a Midwestern band that reminds us that being from the Midwest seems to kind of suck but if you can turn that anger into music, you can do something pretty OK with it.
B
Angela Autumn, Believer
The latest by the country-folk singer with a name where I wonder if it is stage or real came highly recommended to me and I am glad I listened. Evidently, she’s moved from a bluegrass singer into something much more complicated, seeking to escape boxes that, let’s face it, can be pretty limiting. There’s a bluegrass influence here in the sense that she plays banjo on a lot of songs, even in clawhammer style on some (pre-Earl Scruggs for those who don’t know that term). But when that comes up, it’s around lots of effects, bass, keys, and other hallmarks of the modern musical world. Her voice is a little odd, but somehow works really well for me. She’s taking so many influences, old and new, and making them her own, doing whatever she wants with them, which is what one should do. She’s a believer alright.
A-
MJ Lenderman, Boat Songs
This is the album that made people think Lenderman should be bigger than second banana in Wednesday. Lenderman reminds me so much of Jay Farrar. He should have been around in the late 90s. But I don’t always think that’s a great thing. He’s a good songwriter and he’s such a perfect slacker guitar rocker. This works better on album than live, in my opinion. The problem is that, like Farrar, he doesn’t have the voice to pull this off. That leaves him a bit one track–the music has to slow down for him to be heard, which gets annoying live, even though the band can totally rock when he’s not singing, as it does on this 2022 album. I like it, but I can already see the sharp limitations on what Lenderman can do. Especially in comparison with his force of nature ex and ex-band partner Karly Hartzmann, who turns Wednesday into one of the best live bands I have ever seen and can do effectively whatever she wants with her voice. He’s more popular because people like slackers. But she’s the real artist.
B+
Joan Armatrading, Consequences
Despite trying, I’ve never been a fan of Armatrading, who has never connected with me musically or lyrically, but what I really don’t get here is the 1985-era production on a folk singer album from 2021. I’ve never liked the production on her albums and I assume it’s her choices to some extent since this critique follows her through time. I’m just never going to get what she’s about.
C
Horsegirl, Phonetics On and On
I’ve probably said this before, but Horsegirl sounds like a female-led punk project from about 1981. I mean, it really sounds like that, not something influence by it. But I don’t know, while straight nostalgia trips don’t often do much more me, I like them quite a bit. They don’t sound like college students either, even though at the very least, two of the three were when this album came out last year. Austere minimalist pop punk may or may not be your choice. But sometimes it’s mine and I might as well choose Horsegirl to represent it.
A-
Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, Cut You Where You Was
I couldn’t hear more than two tracks of this latest Threadgill project; again a major problem of contemporary jazz labels is their fear of streaming sites. Is anyone listening to Henry Threadgill not still buying albums? I mean, some are, OK, but that some is small because the total listening is also small. So I probably have this a tick below where it would sit if I could hear the whole thing, but if you can’t listen, you can’t listen. This is one of Threadgill’s projects where he actually plays–often he just gets the bands together. Here, he is with
Of course nothing from this is on YouTube, so he’s a previous version of Zooid playing. He’s on alto and flute, Liberty Ellman is playing acoustic guitar, Jose Davila is on tuba and trombone, Christopher Hoffman is on cello, and Elliot Humberto Kavee is the drummer. Seems pretty cool. I especially love the tuba–you don’t hear it much anymore in jazz because the bass is a far more flexible instrument, but there are certain sounds you can only get with the tuba and it sounds nice here. Threadgill plays a lot of flute too, which I also appreciate. These seem like good to excellent compositions. I will probably buy the album. I’d probably be more likely to if I could hear the whole thing though.
B+
Vinicius Cantuaria, Psychedelic Rio
I first became aware of Cantuaria on Bill Frisell’s Intercontinentals in 2003. his world music project. He had nice vocals and guitar there and I’ve occasionally run across him since, but haven’t paid enough attention. Here, he plays his jazzy take on Brazilian sounds with what he calls a power trio, but with power perhaps not what it means in the US definition. My take on much Brazilian music is that it is variations upon a theme and that differences are more subtle than obvious to an outsider, except for real weirdos like Tom Zé. So this is nice, absolutely, a worthy addition to the beautiful world of Brazilian music. To stand out, I think it needs to do a bit more, but Cantuaria is certainly a talented guy.
B+
Fib, Heavy Lifting
Solid straight ahead indie rock from this Philly band. Unlike the title, it’s not a heavy lift to hear it. It’s like a lot of indie rock–big 70s and 80s and even some 90s influences, a bit of jagged guitar, catchy enough lyrics, but it’s also too like a lot of indie rock. It’s solid enough, might be fun to see live, but not memorable.
B-
Ken Pomeroy, Tonight’s News
A new EP from this Cherokee singer who so blew people away with her Cruel Joke album from last year. She just wants to play her favorite songs and she does–Gillian Welch’s “Look at Miss Ohio,” Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee,” John Denver’s “This Old Guitar” (who I don’t think much about at all, but I can see why one would like this song), Jackson Browne’s “Late for the Sky,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Sentimental Lady.” I think “Bound to Rain” is an original. A nice album, not one that is going to change your life, but as a quick follow up EP, nothing wrong with it at all. She’s just a very nice singer.
B+
As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.
drivin n cryin, kim gordon, music notes