The Crusaders - Street Life

Back when I was a kind, my musical tastes were strangely much more diverse than now. One of the albums that I heard a million times over (I'm thinking I was 13?) was the Crusaders' Street Life. The Crusaders were a light soul/jazz/R&B fusion band who apparently have been around in some fashion or other since the early 1950s but they really hit it big in the 1970s when jazz fusion as a category made some big money. Their biggest hit was Street Life (1979) which featured guest singer Randy Crawford, who had (maybe still has) a fantastic R&B/jazz voice.

I don't know what it was about that album that I loved so much. Soon of course, I got all self-conscious and began to listen to soulless grown up music, but after so many years, I just got the album, and sure enough, the title track still for some reason reminded me of being 13. It's light, it's ebullient, it's not deep, but it somehow still packs a punch. Here is the 11 minute version:

Favorite Movies of 2014

13. The Trip To Italy (Dir.: Michael Winterbottom)

12. Big Hero 6 (Dir.: Don Hall & Chris Williams)

11. Live Die Repeat: Edge Of Tomorrow (Dir.: Doug Liman)

10. Lucy (Dir.: Luc Besson)

9. Birdman (Dir.: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)

8. Guardians Of The Galaxy (Dir.: James Gunn)

7. Gone Girl (Dir.: David Fincher)

6. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Dir.: Joe & Anthony Russo)

5. The LEGO Movie (Dir.: Phil Lord & Chris McKay)

4. X-Men: Days Of Future Past (Dir.: Bryan Singer)

3. Snowpiercer (Dir.: Joon-ho Bong)

2. We Are The Best! (Dir.: Lukas Moodysson)

1. Under The Skin (Dir.: Jonathan Glazer)

Total Fun

This has nothing to do with music but is pretty cool....

Favorite Albums of 2014, Part II

Favorite Albums of 2014, Part II

10. Luluc - Passerby: I don't know much about this Australian band, beyond the fact that it's a man and a woman. I think this is their second album. It's ghostly acoustic music. It's not terribly original and could have been made 50 years ago, but I've been coming back to it over and over. This is one of those things that reveals new things on repeated listens. You get a sense of their music on this song, "Reverie on Norfolk Street," which begins as a traditional folk lament but the words begin to pack an emotional punch as small details pile up, building entire stories out of small moments. The accompanying electric guitar has a touch of shoegaze but isn't obtrusive

9. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross - Gone Girl (soundtrack): I really liked the last two soundtracks these guys did (The Social Network and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) and this is no exception. (All three movies, of course, being David Fincher movies). It works as a total sound piece lasting about an hour-and-a-half, as kind of an ambient music to your day. Because it's a soundtrack, we get repeated motifs. And because it's minimalist, we get a lot of what sounds like the same musical figure repeated over and over. But that's part of its attraction, in that the soundtrack builds, like repeated folds in fabric, to its "thick" peak on the spectacular track, "Technically, Missing." Like much of Reznor's work these days, you can see callbacks to his earlier work (in this case, Nine Inch Nails' 1999 album The Fragile), but there are new textures bubbling up all over. Great stuff.

8. Tinariwen - Emmaar: As those of you read this blog know, I love Tinariwen, a band of (sort of) nomadic (and now, in exile) musicians from Mali who play Tuareg blues. They achieved a bit of success among Western fans with their 2004 album Ammasakoul. Likewise, their following album, Aman Iman: Water Is Life (2007) was superb, bridging an electric guitar-driven sound (known as assouf) rooted in West African music with sounds from American/British classic rock. I lost track of them for a while but this album is quite awesome, recorded apparently in the Mojave Desert in California. Key track: the fantastic "Chaghaybou."

7. Swans - To Be Kind: This is the third studio album by the Swans since Michael Gira re-started the band a few years ago. It is also the third one in a row to be quite good! Based around heavy minimalist grooves developed through months of jamming, To Be Kind sounds a bit different from its predecessor, The Seer (although it is just as long -- clocking in at about two hours). I sense a slight (and I say, very slight) sense of playfulness in the tracks, in the sense that on a track or two, they're exploring faster tempos, rather than the sludge they're usually known for. Consider "Oxygen," which actually sounds a bit like Captain Beefheart maxed out to 10. Like any recent Swans album, it requires a special commitment to listen. You need to play it loud and be in immersed in the sound and fury. But you will be rewarded.

6. Beck - Morning Phase: At least, temporarily, Beck appears to have abandoned his party aesthetic, in favor of earnest songs about life, love, and nature. These are intricately composed pop songs, produced with a soft glow around each. There has been much talk of this as a sequel to his earlier (absolutely brilliant) Sea Change (2002) and it does bear more than a passing similarity to that earlier album in tone, vocal stylings, and general vibe. The main opening song, "Morning," could easily be mistaken for the opener on Sea Change. But where Sea Change was full of resigned melancholia, this is slightly more ambiguous and even joyful at times. It's a strangely happy album although that's not necessarily what you'd get on first listen. But I listened to it a lot this year, especially on my long trips to the West Coast and back. Beautiful stuff.

5. Morrissey - World Peace Is None Of Your Business: I pretty much completely abandoned following Morrissey after Your Arsenal (1992) and in fact, barring a few songs here and there have not heard an entire Morrissey album since then. Until now. Encouraged by a friend, I listened to the whole thing. Then I went to see a Morrissey show. And something happened which I NEVER thought would happen again. I liked a Morrissey album. While this is nowhere near as good as Viva Hate (still the gold standard), it's a bit silly to expect anything that good. But it is pretty darn good. He's outgrown that bullshit rockabilly sound and the music on this is much more diverse and rich than one might expect, with musical authorship split between Boz Boorer and Jesse Tobias. No Johnny Marr, these guys, but they're not bad. Somehow they all lined up 12 pretty good songs in a row (plus at least 6 great b-sides). The lyrics are not cringeworthy, and sometimes actually funny. And his voice! Its still amazing -- even better than ever. The highlight on the album is the single "Istanbul," a fine song about the city that holds up as good as any song from the early solo years.

4. The War On Drugs - Lost In The Dream: This is the third album from this Philadelphia-based band which has gotten a lot of press this year. My first reaction hearing stuff from this album was that it sounds like mid-1980s classic rock, something that could be off of Bob Dylan's Empire Burlesque. Or worse, something from John Cougar Mellencamp or Tom Petty or Dire Straits (especially, Brothers In Arms). In other words, it was really off-putting because that's the exact kind of music I HATED at the time. Lots of keyboards, guitars and vocals with tons of reverb, classic rock moves, etc. But further inspection of the contents really changed my mind. Two things to consider: this music has a genuine emotional depth and I don't know why it does. Every time I hear it, it kind chokes me up. Second, the songs are intricately arranged and go into these kind of epic outros that are positively mesmerizing. In spirit (if not in actual style) they have that thing that the Feelies used to have -- playing the same chord sequence for 5 minutes until the listener has been taken to another dimension all together. Beauty in repetition. I haven't paid too much attention to the words but they seem to be about someone who is struggling, struggling just to be. The band's main architect is one Adam Granduciel who, it turns out, is someone who has had a lot of ups and downs. As an aside, another modern day classic rocker who I love, Kurt Vile, was a member of the War of Drugs until he went solo, which sort of makes sense now. The final song on this album -- actually not like any other song on it -- is "In Reverse."

3. Mogwai - Rave Tapes: Every year or so, Mogwai releases an album, and every time I think, hmmm, this time they're just gonna coast. And I read the reviews, and the reviews say, "Yup, they're just coasting at this point." And then I get the album, and I think, "Wow, this is good!." And so it is with Rave Tapes which is a lot like many recent Mogwai albums but also a bit different. I've begun to appreciate Mogwai's attempts to broaden their instrumental palette. On one song ("Remurdered") they actually have a weird house-music-y thing going on. Another song ("Repelish") has a spoken word text (about "Stairway to Heaven"!) over a heavy Mogwai background. There are a couple of super heavy Mogwai-by-numbers tracks that are weirdly awesome, and don't feel tired. The best track on the album is actually the first one, "Heard About You Last Night," a gorgeous and eerie soundtrack to ... I don't know, walking in the park alone at night? A bit romantic, but a bit scary? It distills all of Mogwai's recent styles into one awesome five-and-a-half minute track.

2. St. Vincent - St. Vincent: Everyone and their dog put this as one of their favorite albums this year. Maybe it's because she (Annie Clark) seems so utterly cool. Some musicians have this absolute cool about them, and she has it in spades. Fortunately, she combines cool with stunning good looks and what can only be described as a very unique musical vision. Her songs are pop songs in the way that Talking Heads songs were pop songs. They are a bit strange, emotionally distant, but clever observations about life. And they sound strange, but with good hooks and verses and choruses. If you've never heard a St. Vincent song, they all have a processed drum beat, a synthetic bass, a good synthesizer riff, and processed guitar. Yet, in spite of all that, she makes it sound like a live band. Her guitar chops are undeniable -- I've written before about that. This album (11 songs) is top to bottom to great. It's not too long and perfectly paced. The "hit song" is a catchy herky-kerky song called "Birth In Reverse" which is amazing in its economy, pacing, and strangeness. Yes, it sounds like if the Au Pairs met up and jammed with Gang of Four in 1981, but we are not here to grade originality. Although the album as a whole avoids earnestness or heatfelt emotional expression, a couple of the songs, "Prince Johnny" and the final song, "Severed Crossed Fingers" show little bits of warmth in the artifice. If we had a bit more of that, I think it could point the way to an even more interesting future for her?

1. Aphex Twin - Syro: So I have to admit that I was a bit afraid when I first heard that Aphex Twin was about to put out an album -- how could he possibly top anything after such a long hiatus? Turns out I was a bit misinformed. He's actually been releasing music under lots of aliases and random media for a while now. But the truth of the matter is that this was the first "proper" Aphex Twin album since Drukqs (2001). So yes, I suppose 13 years is a long time. In the nineties, Aphex Twin was pushing the envelope forward while others trailed in his wake. Could he (Richard James) still do that? Well, no, he's not at the leading edge of anything anymore but that doesn't matter. If electronic/digital music could have a life embedded in it, this is it. Syro is a complete statement, as good as any music I've heard in a long time, an hour of deceptively simple--in fact, quite complicated--electronic music. If his past couple of albums were willfully obscure and esoteric, even abrasive, for whatever reason, James has rounded off all the rough edges here and produced a beautiful album capable evoking a complete musical experience. The album moves from fairly conventional to more experimental until the final track, which is literally 5 minutes and 22 seconds of an (organic) piano melody played over and over again. A strange but fittingly appropriate way to end an album that draws all sorts of human emotion out of the bleepity bleeps of the digital world. Standout track includes the very first one.

Favorite Albums of 2014, Part I

My favorite albums of 2014, Part I

General observations:

- lots of electronic music
- the more traditional stuff is pretty mellow: pop songs, classic rock, guitar-based indie pop, etc.
- a few 'experimental' sound collage-type things

21. Mica Levi - Under The Skin (soundtrack): Mica Levi (who often uses the stage name Micachu) is a 26-year old English composer, singer, and musician based in England who has done quite a bit of experimental and pop music in a lot of different genres. This soundtrack, to one of of my favorite movies of the year, Under the Skin, is the most unsettling film soundtrack I've heard in a while. Evoking the sound of 1970s horror and sci-fi movies, she uses massive strings and slightly atonal harmony to communicate menace and foreboding very powerfully. Even if you've never seen the movie (which is extremely unsettling) this is amazing stuff. Not perhaps suitable for casual listening but certainly rewarding if you're in the right kind of mood. Listen to the sample track "Love."

20. Rodrigo Amarante - Cavalo: He is a Brazilian songwriter and singer who has been playing around in several pretty cool Brazilian bands for many years. Cavalo is his first solo album. The music is soft, float-y, sometimes barely there, sometimes uptempo, a bit of electronics, drums, here and there. Beautifully recorded, surprisingly eclectic organic music. A half-an-hour concert here.

19. FKA twigs - LP1: Another English singer who's a woman (she must be in her mid-20s) and is most famous among teenagers because she is the girlfriend of that guy from Twilight. But she has a pretty great pop sensibility. There's a little bit of Bat for Lashes in her but more synthetic pop, with some R&B thrown in. Apparently she likes Siouxsie & The Banshees but I don't see that at all. Good intelligent pop though. Sample track: "Water Me."

18. Pink Floyd - Endless River: Some critics have not been kind to this, most certainly the last album to be released by the band Pink Floyd. What it is, is basically soundscapes put together by guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason playing with their late compatriot (and keyboardist) Richard Wright during sessions for the 1994 album The Division Bell. Gilmour & Mason basically took outtakes from those sessions--with suitable embellishments--and created Endless River. I quite like it and honestly I did not expect to. I like it a lot, notwithstanding the terrible vocal track that ends the album. Certainly a dignified end to the Pink Floyd story and at times lovely. Sample track: "It's What We Do."

17. Caribou - Our Love: I've followed the career of Dan Snaith, electronic music artist extraordinaire, since the early 2000s (back when he was "Manitoba") through excellent albums such as Up In Flames (2003), The Milk of Human Kindness (2005), and Andorra (2007). He mines a kind of softness in the electronic beats he cooks up, part psychedelia, part euphoria, some melancholia, and full-on electronica. If before he was trying to merge Brian Wilson with (danceable) Aphex Twin, here he attains a kind of half awake, half asleep dream pop, just a little bit odd, yet undeniably dance music. Like all of his music, the video for the song "Our Love" is romantic but just a bit odd, even haunted, by the ghosts of past genres.

16. Peter Murphy - Lion: Probably not the hippest singer to like these days, but who knew Peter Murphy would ever make another album worth listening to? This sounds a bit like late period Sisters of Mercy, but you know, what redeems it is that Murphy had one of the best voices of the '80s post-punk, and he appears not to have lost any of his bite. And this album has a lot of bite. It weirdly kinda rocks. I'm not going to start wearing all black again anytime soon but it's nice to hear an old geezer come up with something good. Sample track: "Hang Up."

15. Arca - Xen: Arca is the stage name of a Venezuelan producer, DJ, electronic musician-type dude (actual name, Alejandro Ghersi) based in London who's been making some original music recently (while also producing stuff for Kanye West, FKA twigs, Bjork, etc.). This is the strangest music I've heard in a while. It's like he literally dismantled a fairly conventional pop song and then put together the music in the most unintuitive way possible. Nothing seems obvious. People have said that this is almost a new kind of musical genre, but I'm not so sure. There are obvious reference points (such as sci-fi film soundtracks, Bjork, Aphex Twin, even Kanye) but it also sounds like it dropped here from outer space. Sample track: "Xen."

14. Phantogram - Voices: The band is basically two people who live in New York and do electronic pop. It's very atmospheric, hook-laden, and wouldn't be out of place in the 1990s. In fact, the most obvious reference is the 1990s semi-shoegaze band Curve (remember them?). You run into Phantogram music a lot, without really knowing it's Phantogram--their music is on a lot of 1-hour drama shows (like, I think Revenge or Scandal and stuff like that). The new album is song after song of perfect electronic pop, no weak numbers, just a steady stream of good stuff, suitable for the Top 40, right between Depeche Mode and Florence + The Machine. This album would probably be much higher on my list but for the fact that I just started to listen to it only a month or so ago. There's a pretty good recent show on-line (ignore the idiot host). See here.

13. Interpol - El Pintor: Well, well, well, who'da thought? I kind of lost of track of Interpol for many years. They put out one of the greatest debut albums of all time (Turn On The Bright Lights), then slowly but inevitably sank into mediocrity. Now they're a 3-piece band (Paul Banks plays guitar, bass, and sings) and appear to have rediscovered the muse. It's not a classic album but it is a good one, where you don't have to skip over tracks. There's still that tremulous sense that even when you're in despair, at least you can be dressed well for it. Here they are doing "All the Rage Back Home" on Letterman.

12. Real Estate - Atlas: This is the kind of music that would have fit in very well with American "college rock" in the late 1980s. They sound a lot like bands at the time (see Dumptruck) who were trying to emulate R.E.M., taking stuff from classic '60s pop like the Byrds but updating it for the times.  Real Estate are a three-piece band from New Jersey (although I think they live in New York now). I've posted stuff by them before on this blog. They have produced a bunch of great sublime guitar-based songs, songs that remind me of being in college (in fact, remind me of the kind of songs I wrote back then). Slow, mellow, understated indie pop. Here they are doing "Talking Backwards."

11. Clark - Clark: Yet another electronic musician (full name: Chris Clark) on the Warp label who has been around for a while under a mind-bogglingly large number of guises. This is his first album actually under his own name. He's English but I think lives in Berlin now. The hipsters at Pitchfork say "[t]he world is ending, and Chris Clark is writing its soundtrack." I don't know if I believe that, but the album does feel like it's a soundtrack to things falling apart. It's basic techno dance music, but for a future that you know is gonna be much much less than you hoped it would be. The album itself is remarkably eclectic, moving from different sub-genres of techno, a bit of Aphex Twin here, a bit of Boards of Canada there. There are points where the album sounds really emotional, perhaps even a bit muzak-y, but it's all invested with real feeling. Apparently he made all this up in a barn in the English countryside. Check out this track "Unfurla."

Mark Linkous

Not to go off on a morbid bent here, but Mark Linkous died four years ago at the age of 47. It's hard for me to think of a musician death that hit me harder. I kind of never expected that. Anyway, so here are a couple of Sparklehorse songs.

The first is "See the Light" from Sparklehorse's album Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (2006).



The second is "Maria's Little Elbows," a song off Good Morning Spider (1998). There's a lovely and unexpected reference to the Velvet Underground's song "Candy Says" (from their self-titled 1968 album):

She said, "I've really come to hate my body
And all the things that it requires in this world."
I bet you're out there getting drunk, with all your friends
And it'll get you in the bathroom of a Texaco

Bled White

One of my favorite Elliott Smith songs, "Bled White," from the album XO (1998). Lovely arrangement, with piano, bass, guitar, and drums, all complementing each other, and all played by him.

"I'm never going to become what you became."

Elliott Smith - Waltz #2 (XO)

Elliott Smith died almost 11 years go. He was 34. I remember hearing about it, being shocked, saddened.

"She shows no emotion at all / Stares into space like a dead china doll."

Low

This is another repost, from March 4, 2010:

I saw the band Low a long time ago, opening for the Swans in Philadelphia back on January 26, 1997. They used to successfully capture that odd combination of ennui, navel gazing, loneliness, and melancholy ether that I would imagine my life being but never really was. If I tried hard enough, I would imagine that my life's banality hid some deeper meaning. This was, of course, self-deception on the grandest scale. But upon reflection, it's not so bad to think that way. And music is often my ticket to that self-deception.

Tonight I post two songs from Low, both of which I've posted before.

The first is a song called "Sunflower" which is possibly one of the most beautiful songs recorded in the last decade or two. I don't know what the song is about but it's a mini-story involving a death, a crime, and perhaps a betrayal. But it's also about a dream lost.

The lyrics are:

When they found your body
Giant X's on your eyes
With your half of the ransom
You bought some sweet, sweet, sweet
Sweet sunflowers
And gave them to the night

Underneath the star of David
A hundred years behind my eyes
And with my half of the ransom
I bought some sweet, sweet, sweet
Sweet sunflowers
And gave them to the night



The other song I'm posting is "Shame." The lyrics are:

A long time you waited
You thought it had abated
Shame of it all
The harm that it causes
Pours down like a faucet
Shame of it all



Tonight these two songs capture my mood.

Harmony Rockets - Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void

This is a repost from May 2008:

... Which brings me to Harmony Rockets, who released a single full-length CD in 1995 entitled Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void. The music on this CD consists of one single piece of music lasting 41 minutes and 40 seconds. One website calls it an "experimental album of epic proportions," and I would not disagree with that description. The band set up shop in a hotel in upstate New York and just played. They forgot about verses and choruses and beginnings and ends and scales and chords and keys and just kind of improvised some spacefreak music of magnificent proportions. Yet, there's some precedent for what they do: I detect bits and pieces of Sun Ra and even parts of the Velvet Underground's unreleased (at least in a studio version) "Melody Laughter."

But you don't have to know or care about that. How does it sound? For all of its so-called experimental nature, it actually sounds rather cordant (I know that's not a word, but I wish it was) and not at all cacophonic. The band--seven people--use guitars with massive effects, a rumbling bass, a saxophone that weaves in and out. A voice murmurs words and sentences for a while. It builds, it ebbs, at one point sounding like you're literally in the middle of a cyclone (in the key of C). The music slows down everything and puts your existence to total slow motion. Great to listen to while you're waiting for someone to show up. And the conclusion is like a reprieve, you feel the light sweat on your upper lip, as if you're just coming out of a dream. I highly recommend it for those who might be a little adventurous and have about an hour to kill late... late... very late at night.

Point of note for artifact fetishists: the original CD came in a beautiful package, with silver embossed writing on the cover. The CD also comes with a picture of the tape machine used to record the album. The liner notes say the following:

Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void was performed live at Rhinecliff Hotel by the group Harmony Rockets. It was recorded on a hand-held Arrivox-Tandberg 183 analog cassette recorder. Due in part to the out-dated [sic] nature (ancient by today's standards) of this machine and an inadequate P.A. system . . . periodic portions of the music undulate and appear to distort. . . . Thus, the sounds on this disc are unaltered, and remain true to the nature of the original performance.

An important point to make here is this: Harmony Rockets was basically a side-project of the much better-known band Mercury Rev who produced a bunch of great albums in the 1990s, including the classic Yerself Is Steam, one of the most insanely fantastic albums of that decade. Speaking of Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void, Jonathan Donahue, the lead singer of Mercury Rev, later noted, responding to an interviewer:

Donahue: It's mostly instrumental, but there's some vocals on the beginning of it, it's me singing. Basically, what it is, is most of Mercury Rev, that you see up there [on stage], were trying to kill a Friday night in the mountains, got really wasted and wandered down to a local Civil War bar. They needed an opening band, so we brought some old analog effects with us and some guitars and just whooped up whatever we were doing for, like, forty minutes and stopped. Somebody had a tape, figuring it was ya know, Mercury Rev, so they sorta recorded it shittily.
Interviewer: So, the entire album is live?

Donahue: Yeah, just made up on the spot. There's not a damn thing that was practiced ever, it just sort of happened, but it came out really nice. We like it, we were pretty surprised.

Looking up my trusty 1,088 page version of The Great Indie Discography (2nd ed), I see that Harmony Rockets released one other thing, an e.p.. That stuff is very very different from Paralyzed Mind: on the e.p. they cover "I've Got a Golden Ticket" from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and (of all things) Vangelis' "L'Apocalypse des Animaux." The music veers from disco to moody instrumentals. Not really worth tracking down.