Author: Syd Fablo

Blind Boys of Alabama – Take the High Road

Take the High Road

Blind Boys of Alabama – Take the High Road Saguaro Road 26393-D (2011)

So, The Blind Boys (of Alabama) have been offering a pretty steady number of new albums, despite members being quite advanced in age.  It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to note that these recent albums have made liberal use of marketing gimmicks.  An album of pop covers–check!  Christmas album with guest spots–check!  An album recorded in New Orleans with brass bands–check!  So, here they’re at it again, this time it’s all about guest spots.  Those kinds of albums are usually quite dull, and this one is too.

Pharrell Williams – G I R L

G I R L

Pharrell Williams – G I R L Columbia 88843 05507 2 (2014)

Renowned music producer Pharrell Williams has been one of the most identifiable voices of American pop music in the preceding decade or so.  Recording as a solo artist, though, something is lacking most of the time.  The hit single “Happy” is here, and it is about 100 times better than anything else on G I R L.  It takes the positive energy of OutKast‘s “Hey Ya!” and applies a more laid-back vibe.  The thing is that happiness is for idiots.  The way Pharrell sings about it, the concept is nothing more than jouissance, that is, a death drive for excess enjoyment beyond simple plaisir (pleasure), which in the end leads to pain.  Or at least, so says psychoanalysis.  The rest of the songs have lame lyrics, and a tentative delivery that lacks music commitment from Pharrell.  The backing music is fine.  It isn’t innovative.  This guy has been doing this stuff for a decade.  But most feel like only sketches of songs not fully developed.  All together, it hardly gets beyond the hit single.  Pass on this, and stick just with “Happy.”

David Bowie – David Bowie [Space Oddity]

David Bowie

David Bowie – David Bowie Philips SBL 7912 (1969)

David Bowie’s career underwent something of a sea change between his debut and his sophomore album — curiously, both self-titled.  On the debut, he charted a path firmly in line with prim and proper British folk pop, albeit with an intelligent wit and alacrity.  For this, his second album, he switches sides and turns toward the counter-culture (just look at the changes in hairstyles on the album covers!), with a far more modern sound rooted in the folk-rock of Donovan and the like.  Yet this album is listenable only about once, with lots of stilted, half-formed songs and rather under-developed performances.  The hints of pure rock on “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed” and elsewhere proved to be the way forward for Bowie.  He would go further in that direction with his next effort, The Man Who Sold the World.

David Bowie – David Bowie

David Bowie

David Bowie – David Bowie Deram SML 1007 (1967)

A period piece, for sure.  But with its naïve, playful, tame approach to poppy British (very British) folk, it has a certain amount of charm.  These days, most listeners are Bowie fanatics wanting to puzzle at how his sophisticated sensibility can just barely peek out from behind this seemly impenetrable shell of conformist pop music.

Brandi Carlile – Bear Creek

Bear Creek

Brandi Carlile – Bear Creek Columbia 88691 96122 2 (2012)

This album is all over the place.  At least she got through the checklist of styles drawn up before recording this…  A good part of it resides in the same indie/alt-country territory as the likes of Neko Case and Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins. But it also swings over to the realm of synthetic indie pop a bit like Metric.  Oh, and more than that.  Her vocals have the same white girl singing like a black gospel/soul singer vibe that Amy Winehouse, Adele (whatever her last name is), Elton John and others have used.  “That Wasn’t Me” is the minor hit, and it’s good.  “Save Part of Yourself” works well too.  But much of this seems unable to offer anything on its own, instead burdened with having to cover as much territory as possible.  The biggest liability is how this was recorded, in a way that takes the edges out and remains non-committal.  Carlile might have some potential if a great producer took her in and guided her to stronger material and a sound of her own.

The Lone Ranger

The Lone Ranger

The Lone Ranger (2013)

Walt Disney Pictures

Director: Gore Verbinski

Main Cast: Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, William Fichtner

The Lone Ranger is a bit like taking every western movie you can think of and throwing it in a blender.  All the little tried and true formulae are called up.  The Searchers, Man of the West, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and especially Rango…  Even when this film is trying to steal from the best, it is done in the most ham-fisted way possible.  Granted, the costumes and such are great.  Still, the less said about this terrible film the better.

St. Paul & The Broken Bones – Half the City

Half the City

St. Paul & The Broken Bones – Half the City Single Lock SL 003 (2014)

Singer Paul Janeway (AKA St. Paul) has a voice a bit like Sam Moore (of Sam & Dave) or maybe even Al Green, and other southern soul singers of the past.  He and his group, The Broken Bones, have a retro soul sound.  This is something the likes of Lee Fields have mastered in recent years.  What this isn’t is “neo-soul” like that of Raphael Saadiq, Macy Gray, or Amy Winehouse, who apply a more modern sense of detachment and even cultivate an elitist camaraderie with supposed social misfits set aginst old fashioned arrangements and instrumentation, or the more progressive types who have tried to rethink some of the foundations of soul music and flirt with hip-hop elements, like Erykah Badu, D’Angelo and Lauryn Hill.  If the band’s web site press release is to be believed, Janeway grew up steeped in gospel music, not soul, rock and other secular music.  This would, in theory, position him in much the same place at the first generation soul singers, who drew from gospel more than anything else.  But Janeway also cites the showmanship of Tom Waits and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.  A grim, gothic edge like those secular rock music influences might be detected more in the guitar and drums than the vocals on Half the City.  But those reference points also hint at the likely audience for St. Paul & The Broken Bones.  This is music mostly for urban, affluent and educated people; a mostly white audience.  The retro stylings are for people with the time to reconsider the past, finding that the sophisticated edginess of old soul music gives voice to what is is relevant to their own contemporary experiences.  The pose a question of what authenticity means today.

The opener “I’m Torn Up” is a slow burn torch song with a horn section playing something not unlike Terence Trent D’Arby‘s mid-1990s UK hit “Holding on to You.”  D’Arby may not seem like the most “authentic” soul music reference point, even if he did make some convincingly good music in his day, but there are some similarities in the horn charts.

There is punchy guitar on the title track “Half the City.”  A little guitar distortion shows up at the very end of “Dixie Rothko.”  These are just elements of the music, juxtaposed to create a hint of more contemporary relevance.

Half The City keeps ahead of any claims of monotony.  There is a nice balance between more up-tempo numbers, and slower ballads.  And there is Janeway’s voice.  He’s a surprisingly good soul singer.  His vocal tone is just a bit sour, in a slightly higher register than some of the gruff and gravelly southern soul singers of the past–Sam Moore is definitely the closest comparison.  Janeway tries to shred his vocal chords at times, and while it occasionally seems like he needs a little more momentum to really do it, the mere process of trying is enough for the performances to succeed.

Retro music can sometimes be hollow.  As an approximation of something else, it can lack immediacy and vitality.  Not so with Half the City.  This is music that might adopt the styles of the past, but it mostly cruises by with a lot of energy, retaining a looseness that sidesteps the problems of stifling perfectionism.  Along with Lee Fields’ Faithful Man (2012), this is probably one of the most durable retro-soul albums of recent years.

Edward Bellamy – Looking Backward: 2000-1887

Looking Backward: 2000-1887

Edward Bellamy – Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (Houghton Mifflin, 1888)

The third bestselling book in the United States in the Nineteenth Century, Looking Backward is a novel about Julian West, a wealthy man living in Nineteenth Century Boston, falling into a trance for more than a century and waking up in a socialist utopian society in the year 2000.  The book is mostly a series of monologues in which the characters describe the new society.  There is a terrible romance subplot tacked on.  Basically, the writing is dreadful, taken on its own.  But this book captured the imagination of America as it industrialized.  The economist Thorstein Veblen cited this book as a key influence, and you might say that most of Veblen’s academic career was focused on establishing genuine economic theories that would move real-life society toward the utopian one outlined in Looking Backward.  Critiques of Bellamy’s vision are that while he presents a compelling economic utopia, he falls short of describing gender equality, for instance.  Still, as a description of a democratic society that fulfills the sort of ideals Jean-Jacques Rousseau outlined during the Enlightenment, this is one of the most positive.  This isn’t written as an attack on anybody, really, but as a description of how things could be so much better.  It aims to convince by showing the benefits of a non-capitalist economic system.  Bellamy also wrote a sequel Equality (1897).