Syd Fablo – Page 188

D’Angelo and The Vanguard – Black Messiah

D’Angelo and The Vanguard – Black Messiah RCA 88875-05655-2 (2014)

D’Angelo’s long-awaited follow-up to Voodoo, one of the finest albums to be found anywhere in the period around the turn of the century, turns out to be well worth the wait. His direct yet obscure falsetto voice is still intact. Black Messiah is both a highly original work that advances a new soul milieu

There is a strong classic Prince vibe on a lot of the album (“Back to the Future (Part I),” “1000 Deaths,” “The Charade,” “Ain’t That Easy”) — a light, funky, guitar-driven sound that is smooth and unsettling at the same time with precocious vocals that mask real determination. Prince wasn’t involved, but he was rumored to have been working with D’Angelo years earlier on recording sessions that either never materialized or indirectly morphed into Black Messiah over an extended period of time. The sheer density and layered structure of the recordings, the product of a lot of tinkering, also recalls Sly & The Family Stone‘s There’s a Riot Goin’ On. But aside from similarities and influences, D’Angelo’s music still has a voice of its own. There is a lot of room for slower stuff. There is time for reflection. The atmosphere the sounds fit best is a comfortable, dimly lit room filled with friends and acquaintances, telling stories and having conversations that stretch out into the night about whatever topics strike them, sometimes with determined passion, sometimes with relaxed good humor, holding witness together and getting lost outside time.

The opener “Ain’t That Easy” has a guitar playing accented upbeats, like Jamaican ska, and a diffuse fabric of sound from which melody seems to emerge as a lingering byproduct. The song, like many on Black Messiah, seems to deny a star turn to D’Angelo or any other performer. There aren’t solos. There isn’t any focal point. In the liner notes, D’Angelo explains his motivation for naming the album Black Messiah, and his explanation is surprising. It fits the structure of “Ain’t That Easy.” He says,

“It’s about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen. It’s not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them. *** Black Messiah is not one man. It’s a feeling that, collectively, we are all that leader.”

These sentiments showed up again during D’Angelo’s appearance as a musical guest on a popular late night comedy TV following the release of the album. Members of his band wore “Black Lives Matter” and “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirts, while D’Angelo appeared wearing a “hoodie” sweatshirt (and playing a rhinestone-encrusted guitar). He may have played some of the least compelling individual songs from Black Messiah but he made the politics explicit — more explicit than on the album.

On “Prayer,” there is an anthemic guitar riff. It is one of the catchiest hooks on the entire album. But D’Angelo doesn’t just give the listener that riff. It is paired with an ominous glockenspiel that echos and reverberates across the guitar riff, less pronounced than the guitar, but relentlessly present. It is a counterweight to whatever sense of forward propulsion that guitar riff suggests, the same way Newtonian physics says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The glockenspiel has a church-y tone, a reference to religion just as the title is “Prayer.” This is the sort of thing that separates this music from so much others. It is not wholly unique (take for instance “Herod 2014” from Scott Walker + Sunn O)))‘s Soused). Still, it’s a daring move. Unlike the hit “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” from his last album Voodoo, with its consonant movement along a common melody, there is always so much happening simultaneously on the songs of Black Messiah that the very idea of a listener being able to devote attention to a singular aspect of the music is rendered problematic.

Black Messiah is mature sounding soul music. Many soul “love” songs are so crass as to make one wince. D’Angelo is ready to talk politics, religion, and yes, love, taking a chance to broach subjects that risk being impolite. This may not quite be a match for Voodoo, but little is, and this one is still well worth plenty of listens.

David Bowie – Hunky Dory

David Bowie – Hunky Dory RCA Victor SF 8244 (1971)

Hunky Dory is the album where Bowie started to really show some promise. There are a lot of classic songs: “Changes,” “Oh! You Pretty Things,” “Life on Mars?,” “Queen Bitch.” With “Eight Line Poem” (and even “The Bewlay Brothers”) he manages to channel The Velvet Underground‘s Loaded, but pushes the Velvets’ underground rock toward something a little more pop friendly. However, Bowie keeps one foot firmly planted in routine British folk-rock for much of the middle part of the album and it becomes tiresome quickly. Ziggy Stardust twisted the folk sensibilities a bit more, by adding rock opera to the mix. In a more straightforward folk-rock setting he is underwhelming. This is a very decent album, but don’t believe the claims it is Bowie’s best.

Isaac William Martin – Rich People’s Movements

Isaac William Martin – Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent (Oxford University Press 2013)

A sociological history of the co-option of progressive protest tactics (originally developed to advance the interests of the poor) in support of tax policies that favor the rich. The title references the classic by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1977). The premise sounds almost ridiculous, but Isaac Martin makes an interesting case. His account seems fairly balanced, and for the most part seems reliably complete. If there is a weak spot, it falls on the more recent efforts. Martin doesn’t seem to provide enough context for why politicians suddenly capitulated to the same sorts of demands that had been made for decades, and he doesn’t necessarily treat all political parties equally. It is a small quibble in an otherwise interesting and well-researched book. This is a more thoroughly-researched and neutral academic treatment of a topic that has been addressed in other books like Thomas Frank‘s Pity the Billionaire (2012) and Paul Street and Anthony DiMaggio‘s Crashing the Tea Party (2011).

Beck – Mellow Gold

Beck – Mellow Gold DGC DGCD-24634 (1994)

I can see why people love this, and love Beck. But I don’t love this album. From my first listen I found it mediocre, and 20 years on it doesn’t particularly impress me. There are two good songs: “Loser” and “Beercan”. In fact, “Loser” is great. The rest? Well, you can certainly look at this as an achievement in eclecticism. Immediately following the rock/hip-hop hybrid that is the opener “Loser,” Beck turns to a sort of rudimentary Bob Dylan parody in “Pay No Mind (Snoozer)”. Elsewhere, he’s channeling The Beastie Boys. And he hits other points in between. The eclecticism is sort of amusing. But Beck isn’t a very strong lyricist at this stage. But that isn’t why this album was popular. Aside from the hit “Loser,” this manages to make good use of the studio to make weak songs sound a hell of a lot more interesting than they should. But also this album was something of a signifier of a larger trend when the “big boys” at major labels were willing to acknowledge and promote music that was a lot more juvenile than what they normally promoted. Make no mistake, Beck was quite juvenile in ’94. This was the same era that produced movies like Clerks (1994), catering to kinda immature teenagers who didn’t usually see a whole lot of widely available (read: non-underground) entertainment directed toward them. Beck was able to ride that wave, and he is sort of a poster child for that phenomenon of the “alternative rock” era, the dopier, funnier counterpart to the serious “artiste” figures like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana.

Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire – Thrills

Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire – Thrills Rykodisk RCD 10397 (1998)

This album is disgraceful. It’s a totally disingenuous attempt to mimic old music simply for it’s “otherness”. At the same time, it has a certain energy, and songs like “Some of These Days” are just great compositions to begin with. So, this isn’t totally unlistenable. But why bother when the genuine article is available out there?

The Bells of Joy – The Collection: 1951-1954

The Bells of Joy – The Collection: 1951-1954 Acrobat ACMCD4207 (2005)

Rough around the edges, surely, but the original lineup of The Bells of Joy had talent and an immense amount of potential. They were semi-pros, holding down regular jobs and choosing not to travel the country on the “gospel highway”. Touring probably would have done them a lot of good, polishing off some of the rough edges heard on some of these early recordings for the Peacock label. It was actually just one of the original members, A.C. Littlefield, who went on a national tour, taking with him the group The Southern Tones, who performed as The Bells of Joy while the rest of the original Bells of Joy waited back home in Austin, Texas. The group was reformed numerous times in later years, mixing new and original members.

The group’s sole hit of the 1951-1954 period was “Let’s Talk About Jesus”. Many people only know them through that one song. But the group had more good music in them. Indeed, this particular album closes with eight songs that were originally unreleased–released much later on Let’s Talk About Jesus. Some of those unreleased songs, like the very syncopated “Fare Ye Well” and the super smooth “The Lord and I”, are superior to many of the tracks that saw proper release, including some particularly weak B-sides, proving yet again that gospel labels of the 1950s often did not do a very good job recognizing what they had on their hands.

In their early days, The Bells of Joy sometimes aped the styles of other groups. “Since Jesus Changed This Heart of Mine” sounds a lot like The Soul Stirrers with Sam Cooke. Yet The Bells of Joy had a somewhat warmer, down-home appeal. They did not have singers of quite the caliber of the very top gospel groups of the day. But songs like 1953’s “Leak in This Old Building”, with a style similar to The Blind Boys of Mississippi with the great Archie Brownlee, are superb anyway. There is a vulnerability in the early Bells of Joy material that is quite unique, and something that would become a staple of R&B, doo-wop and soul more so than gospel. Those new to gospel might not immediately appreciate this sometimes uneven set, but fans of the genre may be pleasantly surprised by what this relatively obscure group had to offer.

A final note: this set has good sound quality, something not always found on these Acrobat gospel collections.

Alex Chilton – Top 30

Alex Chilton – Top 30 Last Call 3021082 (1997)

Alex Chilton, you’re my hero.

Les Claypool – Of Whales and Woe

Les Claypool – Of Whales and Woe Prawn Song 0011 (2006)

This solo offering from Les Claypool has a lot in common with nearly any Bootsy Collins album you might choose. It’s a collection of meandering jams, noodling around heavy bass riffs that just sort of repeat ad infinitum. The instrumentation leans toward, well, exotica, employed merely for novelty effect. But what places the album above the ramblings of an overly-ambitous local band are the stellar production values. I don’t mean to slam this album. It’s enjoyable to a degree. But I don’t expect to give this more than one listen.

Black Flag – My War

Black Flag – My War SST 023 (1984)

So much ANGST!!!!! Fans divide over the legacy of the mighty Black Flag. Pioneers of the 1970s and 80s California underground, they went through personnel changes and stylistics shifts through the years.

On the one hand, you have those who say “Stop after The First Four Years.” Those were the early hardcore years. Black Flag played fast, loud and snotty. They were often pretty funny too. Vocalists Keith Morris and then Chavo Pederast took the mic in the early years. The thing about those early days was that the Flag was very balanced. Founding guitarist Greg Ginn was the reclusive introvert, the enigmatic wizard behind the band’s totally unique approach to punk rock. Hey, maybe the music should matter more than the clothes! Confrontational and contrarian, the band leavened those elements with the wild, lackadaisical efforts of the vocalists, singing blunt lyrics so often drenched with monochromatic irony. Bassist Chuck Dukowski, the outgoing, confrontational clown of the band, was in some respects the polar opposite of Ginn. All together, they came up with a few devastating recordings of the likes of “Nervous Breakdown” and “Jealous Again”. Not everybody got the jokes, like “White Minority.” But fuck those people, seriously. You could see the Flag as an extension of punk. They were just the new product of a different central California culture.

When Dez Cadena took over vocals for a while, something kind of changed. Cadena was a pretty weak vocalist. He belted out a kind of gutteral howl. That was about all he could do though. The band was still kind of funny (“Louie, Louie”), but they kind of took on a more serious overtone too. They were growing, but they suffered from growing pains.

Then you have the Rollins years. Henry Rollins came along, by chance almost, mid-tour while Black Flag played the East Coast, and filled the void on vocals after Cadena focused on playing guitar. Rollins came to an established band as a fan, a kid no less. Rollins brought a much deeper vocal palate to bear. Yeah, sure, it was all angst, but it was a deeper and more nuanced range of angst than the previous vocalists could deliver. There is no shortage of Henry-haters. Was he pretentious? Maybe. He started off as just a ball of pure enthusiasm. As he grew older, a macho streak developed and he inserted a lot of “poetry” into the music. But for a time he was just performing the songs written and developed by the existing band, for the most part. My War was the second full-length album from the Henry-era band. The first with Henry was Damaged, which was and remains the band’s greatest achievement. It’s a bombshell. Great songs are everywhere and it never lets up, mostly fast and furious but with the fiercely sludgy closer “Damaged I” like a brick wall at the end of the line.

After all sorts of legal hassles surrounding the release of Damaged, and two of the band members doing a little jail time for surreptitiously releasing Everything Went Black against a court order in the unruly aftermath. But by 1984 the band was clear of its legal troubles enough to release new records again, and they did so with no less than four full-length albums that year. My War was the first of the new crop. It opens with the departed (er, booted) Dukowski’s title track, a seething cauldron of paranoia and rage, followed by the driving “Can’t Decide” coupled with another Dukowski number “I Love You” plus “Forever Time” and “The Swinging Man,” providing a relatively brisk pace for the first side of the LP. Side two just grinds to almost a halt with the achingly slooooow “Nothing Left Inside.” What, “Damaged I” no fluke? Hell no. This was the new sound of Black Flag. The second side of the album continues to ooze forward and the same crushingly slow amble. Henry hits his stride with curdling screams. All through the record he thrashes about and rips apart every bit of the lyrics, which are usually pretty blunt. Yet he manages to convey that there is something deeper to what seems so simple and crude. He does a lot with very little. He had a lot of charisma. Greg Ginn plays like crazy. He’s also on bass under the alias Dale Nixon.

The “early years” crowd often points to My War as the nadir of the band. Many can’t stand it. Others look at it as simply flawed. But there are also a lot of real, dedicated Black Flag fans out there (this writer included) who come to this album more than the others. It’s got the most extreme elements of of what Black Flag had to offer all in one place. There aren’t the funny songs, but you can listen to those too, just elsewhere!

My War can be summed up in a sentence, by RateYourMusic reviewer bnoring, “Side one slaps you, while side two drowns you.”

The fragile mix in place for My War didn’t last all that long. It was only a few years later that the slightly older Rollins kind of withdrew from his involvement within the band’s interpersonal matrix and Ginn got distracted running the then rapidly expanding SST Records label. It did hold together here, though, well enough.

Black Flag might be said to represent the best of what punk ever had to offer. They were inclusive yet confrontational, they drew in influences that seemed the antithesis of what “simple” punk rock was allegedly about (hippie rock like The Grateful Dead and modern jazz). Through sheer determination they built up a following on their own, from nothing at all. My War was a kind of transformation that kept the brilliance of their music alive by rethinking its makeup. Sure, there were inklings early on that Black Flag took inspiration from the likes of Black Sabbath, but the context for how that was expressed radically changed in 1984. If Black Flag once prided themselves on playing more intricate music than typical three-chord punk, then playing at a pace so achingly slow you cannot ignore it is a new angle. In a way, it put the concept behind the music in the forefront. Years later, the band was more insular, not so much rethinking its purpose but trying to refine it in a reductionist sense. They still rocked but it kind of wound down. Glory in the wonderful, liberating and fleeting possibilities that My War presented every time you listen. Maybe Black Flag didn’t carry the torch themselves later on. Others did. But what shouldn’t be forgotten is that others wouldn’t have carried it so far or with such purpose without Black Flag being there already. Part of that was because Black Flag refused to give their fans what they expected. That kind of willful alienation is often at the heart of something special. This is sinister motivational music.

Black Flag – The Complete 1982 Demos Plus More!

Black Flag – The Complete 1982 Demos Plus More! Manson 003 (1996)

When fans talk about Black Flag and long for the early years, I kind of tune out. Don’t get me wrong, the early years produced some great music (“Nervous Breakdown,” “Jealous Again,” etc.). But for me, Damaged and the slew of 1984 albums represented the band at its peak. Damaged, My War and Live ’84 are my favorites, and among the best rock the 1980s had to offer, in my opinion. The bootleg The Complete 1982 Demos Plus More! presents recordings from the time when everything went black, and legal issues prevented them from releasing any recordings (Greg Ginn tried, in fact, but ended up in jail briefly for doing so). These are lo-fi demos, no doubt. But there are things to like. For instance, it helps that there are no stupid, uh, “sound effects” on “Slip It In”, but it would still sound better as an instrumental. The tempos aren’t nearly as lethargic and sludgy as on My War, which makes this somewhat more forgettable and generic sounding. Henry Rollins‘ singing is much less effective here than on the studio recordings that saw formal release. So, to sum up my feelings about this, I would have to say that if you took my favorite Black Flag albums and took away many of my favorite aspects, you would end up with something like this. To me, that’s a dumb proposition, but I’m still glad to hear more Flag so I won’t complain too loudly.