Top 10 New Releases
In 2006 I wrote about the 1982 LP Fields (originally released by Plexus), “with everything early-’80s NY being hip right now, a reissue would be welcome.” Here it is, finally, along with their 1981 Aquamarine EP and a bunch of bonus tracks. The Individuals were Glenn Morrow (later of Rage to Live, and founder/owner of Bar/None Records), Janet and Doug Wygal (later of, naturally, The Wygals), and Jon Light Klages (who made an underrated solo album). They should’ve been stars; their angular, occasionally dissonant indie-rock still sounds great. The “hit” was “Dancing with My Eighty Wives,” but this is the sort of album where fans love pretty much every track and each is distinctive. Anybody who dug the Pylon reissue should check this out too.
The DVD is a making-of documentary about Boxer, and honestly I don’t care about that sort of thing. The real meat is the 12-song EP (EP? I remember when 12 songs was a full-length album). It collects a few new songs (one including Sufjan Stevens), B-sides, outtakes, demos, and live stuff; some has been previously released, but it’s good to have it collected in one place, and only the most fanatical collectors would have most of it. The band’s trademark sound emerges intact and compelling, more intimate in tone, of course, on the demos. There’s intensity on every track, but the energy really picks up at the end with the concert material. A melancholic cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Mansion on the Hill,” complete with plangent cello, builds masterfully, “Fake Empire” gets a big boost from a horn section, and “About Today” crescendos with a My Bloody Valentine-esque wall of guitar. Ignore that misguided Pitchfork review, this is a must-have for all National fans.
Twenty years on, they still kick ass, seeming reinvigorated for the past few years. Mark Arm’s trademark smart-ass lyrics are at their best (with occasional forays into serious darkness). His witty wordplay on the opening track, “I’m Now,” manages within the space of a few lines to reference Robert Johnson (“the black light was my baby and the strobe light was my mind”) (perhaps via the Rolling Stones), Captain Beefheart (“the past made no sense, the future looks tense”), and The Beverly Hillbillies. Does it rock? As viciously and rawly as they have in a long time, from start to finish, with no letup. The horns heard on the past couple of albums are gone, perhaps exiled because Steve Turner has come up with a batch of fuzz-riffs so brutal and monumental that nothing else is needed beyond the solid beats of Dan Peters and the fat bass of Guy Maddison. Grunge lives!
Nirvana had the breakout hit, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden had the major label success (and sales), but it was Mudhoney that was the heart and soul of grunge. To do a two-CD deluxe edition of a six-song EP may seem odd; what we really have here is a comprehensive look at Mudhoney’s first year. Disc one has the epochal “Touch Me I’m Sick”/“Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More” single, Superfuzz Bigmuff, the “You Got It”/“Burn It Clean” single, Dicks and Bette Midler covers from the Superfuzz session that showed up on various SubPop compilations, three demos, and one outlier, a July 1989 cover of Sonic Youth’s “Halloween” for a split single. Disc two has a pair of short 1988 concerts. We hear “Mudride” four times and a few other songs three times, but I’m not complaining!
A two-CD set topping 139 minutes, this contains the January 23, 1978 concert at the Teatro Cilak in Milan, Italy. Of course, there’s plenty of live Sun Ra available, but what makes this special is that it’s not his big-band Arkestra, just him (keyboards), John Gilmore (tenor sax, drums), Michael Ray (trumpet), Luqman Ali (drums), and occasionally singer/dancer June Tyson. And as sax fans and Ra followers know, any setting that gives Gilmore lots of room to blow is to be treasured. Gilmore is one of the great tenor soloists in jazz history, but because he devoted his talents to Ra’s band for most of four decades instead of pursuing the stardom he could easily have earned, his place in the sax pantheon is know only to cognoscenti. I think all of this material came out on various LPs, mostly rare; to have it all available in one place is wonderful, and even at import price it’s a relative bargain.
At first my reaction was “ho-hum, more post-punk revivalists,” but there are so many unusual touches that this is not more angularity-by-numbers. Sometimes it’s a little like Akron/Family chanting Franz Ferdinand songs, sometimes it’s more like the Rapture playing TV on the Radio. There are quirky horn charts, and the twirling, percussive guitar lines sometimes sound like they were transcribed from African 45s (say, Thomas Mapfumo’s chimurenga), or, when drenched in effects (“Red Socks Pugie”), like shoegazers dropped into the middle of a disco-punk-ska party band. There are two bonus tracks to attract fans who already have the English edition.
Nigeria Rock Special: Psychedelic Afro-Rock & Fuzz Funk in 1970s Nigeria (Sound Way)
The third Nigerian compilation from Sound Way this year is another winner. Most of the time there are elements of highlife or Afrobeat in the sound, but the guitarists tend to favor rockish styles and there’s lots of heavy, swirling organ fattening the sound. There’s a track here by Elcado that sounds like a cross between Santana, Traffic, and the Grateful Dead, Mono Mono’s instrumental “Kenimania” conjures up the Allman Brothers, and the guitarist of Original Wings sounds like he’d listened to Wes Montgomery, but the rhythm sections of these bands groove a lot deeper than their Western counterparts.
This is not an improvement on The Decemberists, from whose repertoire most of the songs come (two supplemented with allusions to old songs by Fleetwood Mac and Morrissey). But no matter how much intricate production and arranging is lost by stripping those songs down to just Decemberists leader Meloy’s voice and acoustic guitar, the songs still entertain, and the increased intimacy makes it an interesting tradeoff. And there is one previously unreleased song here, the charming “Wonder” (I’m not counting the snippet of “Dracula’s Daughter,” his self-proclaimed “worst song I’ve ever written”). At first it seemed like there were more, but research revealed them to be songs from EPs, but they do offer a welcome change-of-pace sprinkling of unfamiliar material (unless you’re a Decemberists completist). Plus there’s plenty of Meloy’s dry wit on display in between songs. Essential? No. Endearing? Absolutely.
Even more low-key than usual for Bragg, this one might slip under the radar, which would be a loss. Given a few listens, it’s subtly infectious. The energy level may be set at “mellow,” even with band backing, but the lyrics reside at “passionate,” whether political or personal – or both. It’s not an album for red states, that’s for sure. It’s no shock that he’s opposed to the Iraq War (“Sing Their Souls Back Home”) and tightening government control (“O Freedom”), but he mostly manages to pull it off without sounding pedantic. On the two-CD deluxe edition, he gets back to his solo roots by performing the whole album by himself on disc two.
