Suicide had a singular electronic sound back when electronic sounds were fairly rare. What made the music work, however, wasn’t so much their sound as fact of the New York and rock ‘n’ roll attitude they brought to it. In this trancy music there are echoes of Phil Spector and the Everlys and the NY Dolls, harmonies from the Brill Building and of course the long shadow of the Velvet Underground.
Then, some many years later, Bruce Springsteen himself saw fit to do his own version with the E Street Band, which turns it from a loving back alley incantation to an epic inspirational hymn, something Pete Seeger could probably get behind.
Oh my goodness, this is a gorgeous tune. The Thing are Swedish jazz dudes. Neneh is the daughter of jazz giant Don Cherry. But Neneh is famous for making one of the great pop/dance/alt/fuckingfantastic albums of the late 80s. Called Raw Like Sushi, we will visit it at a later date.
Dream Baby Dream is a song by the 70s punk/no NY rockers Suicide, and, well, it was the tune from 2012 I probably played most in 2013.
A while back I wrote about the Faces, noting when Rod Stewart became the lead singer of the band.
Peter commented that one of the strengths of Stewart was that of a storyteller, and if you listen to some of Rod the Mod’s early stuff, like Gasoline Alley and Every Picture Tells a Story, Don’t It, you will hear that Peter is more than correct.
Well, at birthdays and holidays, I like to burn mix discs (I guess they used to be called mix tapes, back in the days of cassettes) for my niece Lindsay (who also burns said discs for me).
This way she can keep me up to date on the likes of bands like Starfucker and Deerhunter, and I can make sure she has Miles Davis, Cracker, and Bill Frisell on her shuffle.
I made Linds an Xmas disc last week, and since I have worn thin the number of artists I wanted to turn her onto, I noticed there is no shortage of great songs I can dig up.
So, this disc I focused on just that: deadly songs, some of which made the list by virtue of that strong storytelling. And, for my money, Lucinda Williams is as good as it gets at painting said visual picture with words. And, her song Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, from album of same title, is my favorite said example.
It made Lindsay’s Xmas playlist, but here it is for your New Year’s Day ears.
This performance is in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. For about a month the microphone was set up in the atrium with the piano and people were invited to play or say anything. There was a placard saying that the piece was by Yoko Ono.
When I was there I went up to the microphone tentatively and grunted out a few sounds, but the space is too big, filled with too many people, to feel comfortable to me, and I quickly moved on. During the rest of our visit, however, we could hear people singing and groaning and screaming echoing through the modern MOMA’s clean white spaces.
Clearly Yoko has her own ideas about how to perform in this space. Have a happy new year!
I listened to this band because they derived their name from the fantastically weird and talented and interesting harpist Joanna Newsom. I’m sure that’s what they wanted, but it’s hard to see what the connection is. Newsom, from the Bay Area (her uncle used to be mayor of San Francisco) is an alt-harpist, a master of long form storytelling suffused with lyrical whimsy, surreal autobiography and pinpoint musical control. Gruesome, from Wales, features pounding hyperactive drums, many layers of guitars, other sounds and reverb, and oddly reticent (undermixed) yet attractively authoritative vocals (with impossible to discern lyrics).
At low volume, like if you’re working, it sounds a mess, but crank it up and you’ll wish you were in the club hearing them do this live. And the whole album is this way (check out their cover of Galaxie 500’s Tugboat).
To my mind, one of the most perfect of pop songs because of it’s infectious beat and rhythm changes, a singalong melody, and a brilliant first person voice that captures innocence, desire, self-consciousness and rebellion, all in a chewy piece of minimalist cotton candy.
A footnote in England’s Great Train Robbery, he was engaged to hire a train engineer to move the train forward to the unloading point and he hired an old guy named Pops who didn’t know how to operate the train, Biggs was captured because his fingerprint was found in the hideout on a catsup bottle. Biggs was also responsible for coshing the train’s original engineer on the head, and then forcing him to move the train forward himself while bleeding. The engineer died six years later, having never completely recovered.
A couple years later Biggs broke out of jail, and later ended up in Brazil, making money by hosting British tourists in his home for dinner. Which somehow led to a connection with Julian Temple, who was making his documentary the Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, the story of the Sex Pistols from Malcolm McLaren’s perspective. Great Train Roberry = Great R’n’R Swindle, leads to this (with Biggs on Vocals, Cook and Jones doing what they do, and apparently a random exiled Nazi playing bass):
It only seems appropriate that I should dedicate the final SotW for 2013 to a song that was one of the best of the year. It is “Song for Zula” from Phosphorescent’s terrific album Muchacho. (Phosphorescent is the creative outlet for Matthew Houck.)
I was first introduced to the “band” through the terrific LA based music blog Rollo & Grady (www.rollogrady.com). (It’s a great resource for anyone interested in keeping current on emerging bands in the indie rock scene.) Every Phosphorescent song they’ve featured over the years has appealed to me. So I was very excited to learn that a new album, Muchacho, was dropping this year.
And a fine album it is. No, it doesn’t have radio friendly “hits.” No, the songs won’t garner millions of YouTube viewings. No, the album won’t sell hundreds of thousands of CDs. But it is a very well-conceived and executed album in the traditional sense. Not exactly a “concept” album, but still a collection of songs that hang together with a common theme – in this case a break up. Is it possible Houck can express anything new to this universal, but well worn, experience? The answer is a resounding YES.
“Song for Zula” is a beautiful example of the gravity of the songs on Muchacho.
The lyrics have a majestic beauty missing from most of today’s pop music.
You see, the moon is bright in that treetop night
I see the shadows that we cast in the cold, clean light
My feet are gold. My heart is white
And we race out on the desert plains all night
See, honey, I am not some broken thing
I do not lay here in the dark waiting for thee
No my heart is gold. My feet are light
And I am racing out on the desert plains all night
It has the atmospherics and soaring dynamic that Daniel Lanois contributed to U2’s “With or Without You.” You will hear it from the opening notes of the intro. Houck has a thin, fragile voice that compliments this song perfectly. It conveys his sadness and resignation with subtle intimacy.
Best wishes for a happy new year. I can’t wait to share more great music with you in 2014.
A friend of Gene’s on Facebook got me thinking today of my 10 albums that easily came to mind that stuck with me, and most of those I thought of were classic disks from the 60s and 70s. As they should be. Two others were a little less obvious: Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen’s Lost in the Ozone and The Mekons Fear and Whiskey, both great albums by bands that are central to my listening life. That got me to nine.
But No. 10 was hard. There were scores of records from the 60s and 70s that qualified, but I didn’t want just oldies. And I could have chose lots of classic artists’ later work, or albums by 90s artists like Pavement, the Pixies, Nirvana, Hole, that I loved at the time. But as I thought about it I thought they all echoed the earlier choices. What, I asked myself, have I been listening to in the new century that has stuck with me?
The answer came down to four artists: John Legend (soul crooner love man), Stars (arty rock band), Jens Lekman (international electronic singer songwriter) and Nellie McKay (neo cabaret political activist).
These are not rock bands, though all turn it up at times. But what I love about all of them is that they have made great music that pumps the heart and strokes the head, is filled with beauty and ideas, and I’ve wanted to play over and over again. Of them, Nellie McKay is the boldest. She’s a fierce animal rights activist, has been staunchly involved with trying to limit Columbia University’s illegal use of eminent domain to expand its holdings in Morningside Heights (where Nellie grew up), and her records are full of incredible jazz, rap and pop arrangements and songs full of lyrics. Whip smart lyics. She is, of course, cabaret first and foremost.
This clip is pure corn, but it is withering corn, satire that Randy Newman wishes he could pull off (just like the pink ensemble, I’m sure). Some might see this as light, especially given the View’s awful hucksterism, but when I look in Nellie’s eyes I see Johnny Rotten’s. I’m pretty sure that’s what she sees too.
Watched Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha tonight. Gerwig is both insufferably cute and overwhelmingly charming, in a story that is a tribute to her commitment as a writer and actor to her vision of life as a melding of grace and grit. Here it’s filtered through the lens of French movies of the early sixties, notably those of Francois Truffaut, which starred Jean Pierre Leaud playing Truffaut’s alter ego. Frances Ha Gerwig seems to play her own alter ego in a similar style.
In tribute to the Nouvelle Vague, Frances takes and impetuous trip to Paris when she is offered a pied a terre in the Sixth Arrondissement. The montagey staging of her visit is punctuated by Hot Chocolate’s fantastic “Everyone’s A Winner,” which is featured tonight to a much different purpose. Bon soir.
