I’m still mourning the 2002 demise of the great New Zealand popsters THE MUTTON BIRDS (may they reform someday!). But some of the sting has been diminished now, finally (after four years of his writing for Kiwi film and TV), with this rather great debut solo LP by the band’s leader, McGlashan. Bravo. Take ringing guitars, devastating melodies, breezy melancholy, a mild, pretty slide guitar or pedal steel solo, and supreme self-harmonies, and you’ve got a massive winner. Tired of music bereft of intelligence, sufficient human spirit, and tunes you can’t lose? McGlashan is a consistent wonder, and his rare LPs demand your dollar. And now you can see him unplugged at our upcoming Big Takeover afternoon 1 PM party/free show on Nov 11 at Sound Fix Record Store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, his only North American date, and he will be selling this CD and his Mutton Birds best of as well! Please come!
Leave it to this Portland, OR, bunch, led by prodigiously talented singer/songwriter COLIN MELOY, to make a sprawling, hour-long LP like this for their major-label debut! Once again, they do what they please, and it pleases. This LP is very different stylistically—almost willfully difficult—from their cohesive, zenith 2005 third LP, Picaresque, so initial plays may prove puzzling. But The Decemberists’ capacity to surprise and delight is apparently endless.
This is really the fifth ABLE TASMANS LP, their first since the Auckland, NZ band split following 1995’s Store in a Cool Place. Keyboardist GRAEME HUMPHREYS and singer PETER KEEN were their main songwriters. And yet, this is a fresh dimension, so maybe a new name was warranted. The Overflow is one of the deepest orchestral pop records you’ll hear this or any year. It sounds like someone took out a second mortgage to finance its recording, with its crescendoing strings, cooled down horns, even elegiac euphonium (from the above-mentioned DON MCGLASHAN!), and most of all, Humphreys’ dominating piano so sonorous, it’s like its little hammers are pounding your head.
That Cincinnati’s Libertines, led by the incomparable WALTER HODGE, were among the greatest rockin’ indie bands of the 1980s is a secret sadly known only by their home city and longtime Big Takeover readers. Amazingly, London’s later, much more famous Libertines are gone, having burned themselves out on drugs and the gossip pages, while, miraculously, the first Libertines are suddenly back, playing Ohio after 13 years!!! This seven-song EP of old stuff with one unreleased track is still a thicket of jangly guitars, often with punk’s primal drive, the best of the sort I’ve heard. Check out “Bad Memories Burn” from this on their MySpace page, and buy this EP at www.thelibertines.us as it’s not sold in stores. And if i don’t get to Ohio to see them soon I will kick myself for a week.
I didn’t care for New Zealand’s once-brilliant STRAITJACKET FITS’s 1993 third LP Blow after key second-man ANDREW BROUGH quit and took the band’s emphasis on melody with him. And since Brough wasn’t involved, I took no notice of the band’s brief kiwi reunion tour last year. But if you were great once, you can be again, and this music shows that 16 years after the wonderful Melt, Fits leader SHAYNE CARTER is again. This is his Dimmer’s third LP in their 12 years, but the first to return to his Fits glory of guitars to back his nervous, pleading voice.
Have we waited for this! Circa 1993, I played this Hoboken, NJ trio’s debut 7” “Dodger Blue” over and over, captured by its strange undercurrents and regretful longing (it’s also the only song to effectively use baseball as a metaphor for loss). Their 1994 album Tricycle followed, also excellent. (The hook was the lineage of bassist/leader BRENDA SAUTER, a post-1983 FEELIES member.) Finally, a damnable 12 years later, here is the second LP… and it’s even better!!!! Unlike Tricycle, you won’t need a while to discern the full depth of their interplay and extrapolations on simple chords as this recording is popping at the seams.
Someone let me know they’d just watched this on YouTube, as someone else I don’t know has kindly posted it. It’s my old (and now current again) band’s first video for our 1991 Land Falls LP, a track called “Layers” (hey, the enviromental theme of this song and video is looking quite ahead of the current curve right now when the rest of the world has finally acknowledged global warming like we did 15 years ago, I’d say!!!) and it was filmed just after New Years in January 1991 in absolutely freezing cold (I think it was 15-20 degrees that day) in the geodesic dome in Flushing Meadows Park outdoors one afternoon. It’s fun looking at what you looked like nearly 16 years ago, and I still remember watching this on MTV’s 120 Minutes a few times and being shocked we were on national TV, and my mother was home in California watching it, etc. etc. But mostly it brings back the long friendship I’ve had, and still have with MITCH FRIEDLAND and LARRY HEINEMANN, which I think you can clearly see even in these frigid conditions so long ago, with puffs of smoke coming out Mitch’s mouth, and my unusually short haircut and thin sweater not helping to keep the cold out of my head and chest while I banged the drums. (I tell you, whenever they said “cut” we went rushing for our winter coats like we’d been shot out of cannons.) We’ve finally finished our new LP we’ve been working on for ages—just mastered it this week in fact—likely titled From Now to OK. Now we need to find a label for it.
I saw this bill a dozen times in four states as a teenager from 1979-1981, a few of them taking place at CBGB, so naturally I thought this was a fitting way to say farewell to CBGB after going there for 28 years and playing there myself 33 times (it’s the subject of my editorial in the upcoming issue 59, in fact). Bad Brains’ singer H.R. seems like he’s not completely there mentally, same as last time I saw them ten years ago, and that’s a pity. Even with all four members in tact, they can’t be what they were with a stationary H.R., a smile painted on his face like he’s on medication, giving off love but no real energy otherwise, singing these hyper-fast songs. It’s bizarre. That said, the musical portion is still un-frickin-believeable, and on the songs where H.R. approximated the vocal the best, like “At the Movies,” and “Pay to Cum,” it felt for a moment every bit as blitzkreig powerful as in the old days. Wow. Stimulators still need a singer, having not found someone to replace the late, lamented PATRICK MACK, so my old friend and original 1980 EVEN WORSEbassist/bandmate NICK MARDEN just gamely shouts in his place. That said, it was good to hear these old songs again, and someday they too will get their due.
My second to last time going to CBGB was another band I’d seen there four or five times before, going back to 1981. As usual it’s MIKE PALM with two guys I don’t recognise playing songs that are over 20 years old, and I don’t care. The man has never gotten full credit for being one of the greatest songwriters in U.S. punk history on his first two LPs, and he’s also one of my favorite guitarists from that era as well, given all his surf influences even apart from their covers of DICK DALE, CHANTAYS, and BEL AIRS still happily performed alongside all their best old songs. Fantastic. Also a decent opening slot from Cape Cod’s This is Boston Not L.A. stalwarts THE FREEZE, though their tunes weren’t anywhere near as hooky.
