It’s rare for me to go so crazy over a record from only four years ago that I already knew every inch of, but I think the killer encore versions of the two best songs on this LP, “The Legionnaire’s Lament” right into “A Cautionary Song,” which formed the absolutely killer closing moment of some monumental recent concerts (the first night of the two San Francisco Warfield shows and the Philadelphia Electric Factory show I saw a few weeks ago) just sparked this mania in me. Can’t stop listening to this. From “Leslie Anne Levine” to “July July!” (also a live highlight on their current tour), a good half of this LP is every bit as good as their recent two masterpieces, and from such overplaying, I’m starting to re-evalute the lesser material here.
It’s been years since I have been this happy with having a band on my cover. Not only do they look incredible on it (see for yourself on the home page), but they are very much the band of the moment for me, and this LP just seems to get better the more I play it—and I’ve long passed 60-70 plays. 2006’s LP of the year hands down, I should have put it #1 in the new issue.
He was so good playing our party in Brooklyn, I haven’t stopped listening to the tape of his show I made of him that afternoon and this wonderful solo LP the New Zealand star released that he was promoting there. My #2 pick this issue, it has really held up well to frequent plays, even if it takes a little while longer than his older MUTTON BIRDS stuff to appreciate.
Speaking of New Zealand, 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.
This is one of those cases where a burned CD of a band’s first four singles, a- and b-sides, beats the LP when it finally appears. Yet No Love Lost is still a great debut album from a stout new band. No question, its four best songs are its four previously released a-sides. As well, two missing b-sides are superior to the new songs (like the superb “Rainy Monday”). So, a few U.S. fans who still shell out for import singles may feel let down. But that’s an infinitesimal handful, and they’ll get over it. For everyone else, this LP bristles with energy and no-nonsense fortitude, from this East London (Walthamstow) foursome that are often compared to The Jam, Specials, Madness, Libertines (U.K.), and Ordinary Boys.
This could have been a shrill polemic, but evidence shows that Young is too smart, having done this well whenever his bile has risen. Instead, as with “Ohio” for RICHARD NIXON (with or without “soul”) and “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World” for GEORGE BUSH I, he’s delivered one of the greatest mainstream protest records since Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City.
It took me a lot more chances to warm up to this third EP from these Austin, Texas greats, as it worryingly loses some of the harder edges that enlivened their first two five-song EPs that together would make one of 2005-2006’s best albums. But they just have too many strengths in that superb singer/songwriter RAMESH SRIVASTAVA not to get to you eventually, and the second song, “Trouble” is as good as anything they’ve done previously.
Want to see what I looked like playing the drums in a punk rock band at age 19, January 2, 1982? Have a look at this. I’m slightly hard to see in the back with my dark Circle Jerks Group Sex tshirt (their only LP then), but man I/we are going fast on this video footage from the back sound board at the famous old Peppermint Lounge (they used to video everyone who played there). I remember the gig was with the great, absolutely furious HEART ATTACK, whose leader JESSE MALIN was 13 or 14 yet got to play gigs with us all the time!; and yes, he’s still going strong in music too! Man, was the stage high at the Pep, as you will see here. It was a good 5-6 feet off the ground. And it’s always good to see my old Even Worse bandmates, that was quite a band for the time.
Yes, it was our party, but when the artists start playing, it’s amazing how in a friendly party setting, the performances seem to mean all that much more, like it’s a community, among friends, instead of just a gig pushing product or something. The egos come down, the art comes up, and everyone hangs on to every word. McGlashan was just a knockout through and through. I’ve mentioned how many CDs he sold (23); everyone wanted to hear more of his solo stuff and his MUTTON BIRDS best of as soon as they heard him once. It was particularly interesting and affecting to hear him sing with only an acoustic guitar, man could he cut it and then some! Carr only did one BOO RADLEYS song, a wonderful “Lazarus,” but his backing band (including our own veteran scribe, former PILLS guitar man CORIN ASHLEY) played exquisite low fi versions of his BRAVE CAPTAIN stuff. Nice boyish voice Carr has, too, and he still writes lithe little pop tunes like he did so many times for the Boos. And Friedland has never sung better in a solo acoustic format, doing new songs from his/our new LP. And letting me sing two old/new ones was really a treat, thanks Mitch!
I’ve missed some of the former BEACH BOYS mastermind’s tours since the intitial 1999 comeback, but this was much the same as that rousing affar, at the very same majestic old theater he’d played seven years prior. Only this time his 10-piece band which still includes his superfans THE WONDERMINTS, and which still renders each and every little detail and part with sublime grace and harmonic heft, included AL JARDINE, making this the best Beach Boys show I’ve ever seen, and probably the best Beach Boys show since Brian cracked up 40 years ago and stopped playing regularly with them onstage. Becasue it included the whole of 1966’s Pet Sounds (I’d lamented missing the 2002 tour that had previously performed this masterpiece all the way through) and because the show’s older songs were played as if they were written and arranged for Pet Sounds (even radio favorites like “I Get Around” and “In My Room”), this was just incredible. Wilson himself is the weak point of the band, his voice straying off key and often challenged by the very flowing phrasing of his own songs. (He barks his way through songs he ought to sing.) And yet, whenever he pulled off a line just right, it just made it all that much the better that he was being backed by the symphonic thrust of so many guitars and orchestral instruments and an entire choir worth of voices. He still looks and acts uncomfortable up there, having never completely regained his full sanity from the drug use he destroyed his brain with and the heavy therapies he endured to restart it from scratch. Yet, he’s more like the conductor of his own orchestra now, one that performs his material, both in sound and in voice, like it was always meant to be heard. And after nearly three hours no one wanted this to end and to go home. “Love and Mercy” indeed.
