Music – Page 40 – Rock Salted

The Senior Dagar Brothers – Bihag Kamboji Malkosh

The Senior Dagar Brothers – Bihag Kamboji Malkosh: Calcutta 1955 Raga Records RAGA-221AB (2000)

This release is flawed only in the manner of its recording. As a live release, and an old one at that, there are some background noises audible and one of the brothers coughs repeatedly during the performance. “Raga Malkosh” is only heard for the first 25 minutes, and apparently the rest of the performance was not recorded. Fortunately, those things are only occasional annoyances and shouldn’t keep anyone away from this music. The performance itself is fantastic. I can’t tell the two brothers (Aminuddin Khan Dagar and Moinuddin Khan Dagar) apart on this record, but I’ve heard people comment that they trade off vocals in different pitch ranges so as to extend their collective range. These are morning ragas, so for best effect they should be heard in the morning. Fans of this should be sure to check out Pandit Pran Nath too.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Live Seeds

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Live Seeds Mute CDSTUMM122 (1993)

Live Seeds, like most offerings from Nick Cave’s middle period, is an uneven affair. “Ship Song”, “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry”, “From Her to Eternity” and “New Morning” are all fantastic, but elsewhere Cave and company lean far too heavily on his songwriting to do all the heavy lifting. In a way, that saps all the energy out of the songs. Maybe it’s a common trick artists use to regroup during a live set. But that doesn’t help the album at all.

In short, Live Seeds is an improvement over some of Cave’s previous few studio albums, but it pales in comparison to his earliest solo albums and the best material he produced about a decade later.

Johnny Cash – The Mystery of Life

Johnny Cash – The Mystery of Life Mercury 848 051-2 (1991)

By the early 1990s, it seemed like the world had given up on Johnny Cash. Well, at least his record labels had all given up on him. In an autobiography, he later claimed Mercury pressed only 500 copies of The Mystery of Life (Cash mistakenly called it The Meaning of Life), though it did scrape the bottom of the country charts. That’s a shame, because Cash was clearly interested in recording. His vocals sound clear and impassioned in a way that was totally lacking on most of his recordings from the late 1970s through just about all of the 1980s. If Water From the Wells of Home was supposed to be his comeback, then it says something that this album is a step up. It’s no winner. It’s still a rather middling affair. Producer “Cowboy” Jack Clement burdens this with heavy-handed production values that make all the instruments sound synthetic and artificial. But on top of Cash’s strong vocals, the band plays well enough (if you can look past the way they are recorded). Although the standard narrative is that Cash’s career was on the skids for decades before Rick Rubin revived it with American Recordings, this album is worth a look for fans to see that Cash was still in good form as a singer, but was always held back by everything else dumped into his records and a lack of promotion. That is to say Rick Rubin didn’t change much when he came along, he just recorded Cash without the other clutter and otherwise let Cash himself do basically exactly what he was doing here — particularly for Unchained — and actually promoted him. This one’s an interesting curio for those who’ve already heard Cash’s more acclaimed efforts and want to go back and fill-in some of the gaps to round out the picture.

Ryan Adams – 1989

Ryan Adams – 1989 Pax Am PAX-AM 057 (2015)

Ryan Adams covers Taylor Swift‘s entire album 1989. The basic sound here is the increasingly slick 1970s rock flavored alt country that Adams has favored on recent studio albums. That is fine, unto itself. But if there was anything to like about Swift’s original album it certainly wasn’t the douchebag narcissism and malevolent mythologizing that sustained its songwriting. So Adams keeps that part and jettisons the rest. It kind of would have been more interesting if Adams had written new lyrics and sung them over the same music as Swift’s album. But Adams tends not to have good ideas like that.

Sole – Live From Rome

Sole – Live From Rome anticon. ABR 0048 CD (2005)

Righteous indignation.

This is a much more overtly political album than Sole’s previous — and probably best — album Selling Live Water. It isn’t nearly as successful. Though there are good intentions everywhere on this disc, the music/beats aren’t always compelling. I saw Sole live touring on this album, and he had a live band with him. Frankly, many of the songs sounded better with the live band (the title “Live From Rome” alludes to the fall of the Roman Empire as a parallel to or hope for the fall of the American Empire; this is not a live recording). The thundering “Dumb This Down” is probably the best here, but “Cheap Entertainment” is sort of subtly infectious. Almost everything here is decent, but newcomers should start elsewhere.

Cecil Taylor – Live in the Black Forest

Cecil Taylor – Live in the Black Forest MPS 0068.220 (1979)

One of many live Cecil Taylor recordings from the 1970s, Live in the Black Forest was recorded less than two weeks prior to One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye with the same Cecil Taylor Unit band. Frankly, this is not as good as some of the others of that era. There are two side-long tracks. “Sperichill on Calling” is great, with an especially strong showing from Ramsey Ameen on violin, and generally more separation between the players. “The Eel Pot” on side one is fine, but the sometimes unrelentingly chaotic performance kind of runs together after a while. If the entire recording is analogized to a debate, then “The Eel Pot” is a bit combative, and “Sperichill on Calling” has more sympathetic goading and expansion of argument. While listeners can’t really go wrong with any Taylor recordings of this era, Live in the Black Forest might be reserved until after some of the others.

Mavis Staples – Have a Little Faith

Mavis Staples – Have a Little Faith Alligator ALCD 4899 (2004)

Mavis Staples had something of a late career resurgence with a number of well-received recordings. Have a Little Faith came just before that resurgence. While she sings well (of course!), the album as a whole is dull. The songs frequently employ slick formula and cliches as if they are impressive, without any self-awareness or irony. There is simply too much to take away from Mavis’ voice. Pass on this and proceed to what came next, the warm and endearing We’ll Never Turn Back.

Neil Young – Chrome Dreams II

Neil Young – Chrome Dreams II Reprise 936 249 917-2 (2007)

A very eclectic album without being uneven. You get a real sampling of almost all aspects of Young’s music, from mellow country-rock to angry rockers. This was the sequel (of sorts) to the unreleased 1977 album Chrome Dreams. The highlight is “Ordinary People.” Operating in Bruce Springsteen mode, Young really delivers on a working man’s epic. It was dug up from the archives (from the This Note’s for You era) for this release. The only problem at this point is that younger listeners may have no context for a song about factory workers losing jobs. The song was from just after the first wave of the neoliberal assault on working America, wresting power and wealth away from industry and average folks (labor) to be placed in the hands of the Capital class and the FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate). The first assault was against unions (key in the auto industry), shifting election funding toward purely business sources, with corporate raiders (like in the popular movies Wall Street and Pretty Woman) pillaging assets and pensions, and in adjusting tax codes to drastically reduce taxes on the rich and drastically reducing payments toward programs that benefited the poor and middle class. The second wave of the neoliberal assault would be completed in a few years, with “free trade” agreements eliminating the possibility that domestic industry could be viable any longer, instead shifting focus to currency speculation that pillaged foreign central banks and with labor arbitrage “offshoring” jobs to distant locations with pauper labor. So Chrome Dreams II comes during the “post-industrial” era of the USA. Most factory jobs are long gone, so there haven’t been any to lose in a while. Its ambitions are futile now, but Young’s “Ordinary People” narrative still resonates with conviction the heartbreak and sadness and grim determination that transcends changed circumstance — today the narrative would be about a Midwest Methland where the factory is long gone and rural methamphetamine labs open up amid the whirlwind of lives and local economies circling the drain. In the end Chrome Dreams II proves that Neil Young is a more honest and genuine rock and roller than just about anybody else out there. Here’s to lost causes like that.

Jackie-O Motherfucker – Change

Jackie-O Motherfucker – Change Textile TCD 02 (2002)

Jackie-O Motherfucker’s (JOMF’s) approach to music is syncretic. Percussive elements draw out and expand other sounds lurking in guitars and other noisemakers. The sounds are distantly familiar, but they now seem to slowly rise to a conscious level. Once a part of the music has made itself felt, JOMF move on. The progression is slow. It is also steady. JOMF pull together folk, ragas, turntablism, jazz, blues, rock. Actually, they do a good job summing up their many influences. They look upon those influences as raw material for new combinations and presentations. This is a strange and friendly mélange of urban and rural elements. Part of the so-called “free folk” movement, this is vaguely like psychedelic jam band music but far less prone to showiness and guitar wankery than that label suggests.

Change is a very good album. Part of what makes it so good is that each song elaborates its themes. Solos and impressive technical feats aren’t the attraction; the shifting, almost pastoral musical landscape is. This takes attention away from the individual band members. The album offers the chance experience the concepts through many perspectives. The result is big; you have to step back to take it all in. Change is an opportunity to consider where you are, in relation, then to ask if you are ready for whatever comes next. Because whatever music has in store tomorrow, it will have to be different. JOMF have covered a lot of territory, and for anyone to retrace any of their steps would be too boring. And deep under the guitars that sound like sitars, the mumbled vocals, and the saxophone that makes its humble appearances, JOMF have a positive outlook as to where things are headed. Attention: Now leaving the terrordome.

Sole – Selling Live Water

Sole – Selling Live Water anticon. ABR 0026 CD (2003)

Selling Live Water is hip-hop that can’t take for granted that it is hip-hop at all. It is music made to engage an audience and provoke critical thought. Hip-hop is just a convenient form that it adopts. Sole pursues his music with a fervor that concedes nothing but complete, honest commitment to his agenda. The most appealing part of this is the self-reflexive aspect. Hip-hop has been around long enough now that a more complex look at the genre itself is due. Sole contorts traditions with no hesitation.

On “Da Baddest Poet,” Sole admits how he isn’t smart enough for any techniques other than hip-hop. The necessity of his place amidst hip-hop culture means he really is making some sort of contribution to it. Sole is just trying to keep hip-hop as good as it was, and promised to be, in the age of “conscious hip-hop”, just… different. He says, “in the immortal words of Ice-T/ shoulda killed me last year/ but in the mere mortal words of me . . . ” There is humility here that is quite the opposite of the materialistic, misogynistic, violent subject matter promoted most heavily in the genre, combined with an awareness that Sole is tilting toward something else.

“Shoot the Messenger” goes off with “I never learned to kill for oil/ but then again I never learned to sit still/ and probably never will.” “Respect pt. 3” even seems to be a little anarchistic. There are politics all over this album — not in the sense of passing news, but in the sense of a commitment to bottom-up social transformation away from corruption and domination (Sole has noted that material on the album was inspired by Howard Zinn‘s A People’s History of the United States).

Sole is a good lyricist though he has only a passable delivery, something still impressive given what Sole does. His lyrics are very busy, giving him the difficult task of fitting it all in. He is either silent or in vocal bombardment mode. What turns out to make it work is the jokey attitude — full of gags and purposeful contradictions. By some manner of calculation he is aware of precisely how much ferocity separates his mind and his voice. Even though his rhythms don’t stretch and his dynamics are flat, deadly words still ooze from each of Selling Live Water’s cuts. Nonetheless, he steps up for some more impressive vocal rhythms, shifts and drawls on “Salt on Everything.”

The anticon collective producers on board (Alias, Odd Nosdam, Telephone Jim Jesus) cultivate a sort of blurred, hazy melange of oversaturated sounds, while keeping to a sense of syncopated rhythm. The beats contribute to the bleary feeling of being overwhelmed by media and the numbing spectacle of mass culture. This complements Sole’s way of rapping that often seems like shouting out as many words as possible without planning his delivery beforehand.

Sole makes good on the idea of personal hip-hop. He may not have expansive vocal talents to rely on, but he has still made some great music here. To appreciate Selling Live Water, a listener must accept that important statements can be made without access to large resources or authorization by the powerful, without being a supplicant or sycophant, by anybody who puts in the effort. If you reject those premises, then realize that this is an album made against what you believe.