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New and recent releases plus one crucial reissue.
After breaking through to a national audience with the gritty, distorted, fuzzy sounds of Return to Cookie Mountain, TVotR defies expectations with a stripped-down, electro’d-up album. That’s not to say they’ve gotten slick; there’s still plenty of grit, but it’s buzzing, throbbing, funky grit this time out. Yes, funky – check out “Crying” and especially “Golden Age.” Other highlights include the pretty, keyboard-hooked haunters “Family Tree” and “Love Dog,” the Afro-pop-tinged “Red Dress,” and the propulsive “Dancing Choose.” The band retains its love of off-kilter hooks and knack for anthemic songs that avoid any sense of self-indulgence, if anything honed even more sharply. Scene-spotters will note guest appearances by Antibalas and Katrina Ford of Celebration.
One of my favorite post-punk bands, Blurt filled one side of the 1980 two-LP compilation A Factory Quartet after having released just one single. The four tracks from that album lead off this CD, followed by the live album In Berlin (not released by Factory, but originally recorded for it), an album I not only love unconditionally, but also firmly believe is one of the most conceptually pure ever in its musical focus. Over stunningly simple guitar riffs (Ted Creese) and drumbeats (Jake Milton), Ted Milton squeals and squawks on alto saxophone and blurts (the band name was utterly appropriate) his absurdist poetry. It was inevitably compared to the Contortions, but whatever similarities there are – and mostly it’s probably that the average critic wasn’t used to hearing sax – for the comparison to work you must subtract James Chance’s bullshit and posing and any semblance of American R&B styles. This is a bit expensive as an import, but worth every penny.
Continuing their recent trend towards quieter and more intricately constructed records, Scotland’s finest rock instrumental band may not be breaking any new ground, but they’ve perfected their sound. There are enough of the old-style juggernauts that nobody can say they don’t rock; in particular, “The Precipice” builds magnificently. But “Thank You Space Expert” with its glockenspiel melody is absolutely gorgeous, so beautiful it makes me tear up.
A bit of a departure for Ray Raposa, this starts out in Loren Connors territory with an echoey, acidic solo guitar piece and on most subsequent tracks continues to feature droning yet coruscating guitar high in the mix, with Raposa’s vocals raspingly primal on the most sonically aggressive tracks, conversationally drawling on more ingratiating tracks, angelic on the gospel cover “I’ll Fly Away,” and – on that track’s exact opposite, “Shadow Valley” – eerily detached on the proclamation “long as I’ve lived I’ve wanted to die/long as I’ve loved you I’ve been saying goodbye/It’s okay to die.” Recorded in three weeks of desert isolation, then slightly ornamented later with overdubs, most notably Jana Hunter’s harmony vocals adding a slight suggestion of warmth, this is absolutely stark and utterly refreshing in its bold focus on timbre (downright avant-garde at times), totally disconcerting in its lyric about-faces and desolateness, an album that will take a while to absorb, possibly years, but seems certain to stand up to many repeat listens.
At this point I never have any preconceptions what HNIA will sound like, because they’ve had so many sounds. This 30-minute, four-song EP from 2007 opens with a cover of Sufjan Stevens’s “I Can See a Lot of Light in You” sounding like early (first three albums) HNIA minus the disjunctions, and two tracks later a song from that period, “There’s Something Between Us and He’s Changing My Words,” is remade. Now built over a drone, it’s much more sustained, not only in length (7:29 as opposed to 1:20) but in feeling; vocalist Andrea Francesca Morici (credited here as Andy FM) even sounds like original singer Karin Oliver. The long closing instrumental also drones, and chirps and jangles; it may explain the thanks to Alice Coltrane. I’d say that Warn Defever has his mojo back.
Ribot goes rock with his new power trio, so fans who’ve wanted more screaming guitar from him get their wish. After a brilliantly revamped punked-up cover of “Break on Through,” Ribot jets through – put “warped” in front of each following genre description – harmolodic funk, R&B, soundscape-accompanying-spoken-word (“When We Were Young and We Were Freaks,” spectacularly beautiful in its mix of calm undulations and skronk guitar), semi-electro counterpoint devolving into freakout then mutating into rock, a quietly beautiful instrumental ballad, another quiet ballad with a slight reggae tinge, Latinized disco-rock, a funny Beck parody, and so on. So there’s a degree of musical whiplash involved, but all tied together by his sparkling guitar work.
With as many styles as DiFranco has used, she’s still never made a record quite like this before. Half the tracks are flavored with synthesizer; even a mostly acoustic song such as “Way Tight” gets a bit of sweetening. On the other hand, both takes of the title track, reflecting her time in New Orleans, feature the Rebirth Brass Band, the reprise being the most N’awlins in sound. A lot of the arrangements recall the moody chamber rock of Evolve, but sometimes cheerier. In fact, DiFranco seems to be emerging somewhat from her period of darkness on this mix of political and personal songs. An artist as good and prolific as DiFranco will, at this point of her career, have trouble matching her best, but she’s still challenging and growing, and that keeps everything she does interesting and worth hearing.
Their fifth U.S. release is the first CD of new material from this Japanese psych-folk band since 2004. It finds them less folk, less psych, and more like very gentle, hypnotic sunshine pop; the psychedelic edge that remains comes from jagged electric guitar and the droning character of the songs. Oh, and what started out as a duo is now firmly a quintet. Enough categorizing. I would buy this just for the booklet with the English translations of the Japanese lyrics. Somebody here (I don’t know whether Shinji Shibayama or Masako Takeda write the words, or both) is one of the great poets of our time. “Premonition”: “Birds singing/End of evening/Arriving somewhere else/Drinking dew on the grass/Somewhere else/Drinking dew on the grass/Take me to the heaven/A bird carrying a seed/Signs of morning.” The dreamy music is like a bonus wrapping around the words.
When this album was recorded in 2006, the co-leaders had a combined 117 years of recording experience (Moody, born in 1925, recorded his first album in 1948; Jones, born in 1918, hit the studio as a leader in 1947). While their paths crossed a couple of times in the studio before this, Our Delight is their first full album together. It uses Moody’s regular quartet, but with Jones taking Renee Rosnes’s place at the piano. As usual with IPO, most of the material is familiar (the only exception being Moody’s “Darben the Red Foxx”), and there are no surprises in the playing, either, just the deep satisfaction of hearing two masters commune – including two nice duets, with Moody on tenor sax for “Body and Soul” and on flute for “Old Folks.”
This is some great sound sculpture. I didn’t notice a heavy beat from Wollesen at any point. O’Leary’s slippery guitar work (including E-Bow) recalls Bill Frisell and John Scofield’s tone but much more painterly in effect. And Saft, the vintage keyboard maven of the downtown N.Y.C. scene, finds his perfect project here. Vivid yet elusive, they have crafted an album that succeeds entirely on mood and sound, with some quirky melodies thrown in along the way. Outstanding!
