Reviews – Page 32 – Rock Salted

Ornette + Joachim Kühn – Colors: Live From Leipzig

Ornette + Joachim Kühn – Colors: Live From Leipzig Verve 314 537 789-2 (1997)

If there is a problem with Ornette Coleman’s later years, it is that the central question of “freedom” addressed by his music lost its immediacy. This is to say that the problem of a lack of freedom had an immanent character in the late 1950s and early 60s when he first rose to prominence, when racial segregation and so forth were the norm. But after the 1960s came to a close, and as Ornette became (perhaps grudgingly) accepted as an elder statesman of jazz. At this point wasn’t he “free” and the game over? This is to say the pursuit of freedom in “free jazz” doesn’t really mean much if the listening audience doesn’t recognize that pursuit juxtaposed with certain conditions of non-freedom. So the question becomes, yes he is free, why does that matter?

There was plenty of space for Ornette to pursue amusements from the 1980s onward. There was much more of a tendency for his later music to be meditations on very elemental but also very innocent pleasures. Songs like “Latin Genetics” (from In All Languages) come to mind here. But, that is also misleading. Because as time went on Ornette managed to use that approach to probe the banality of modernity. With mixed results, this lead to Virgin Beauty and Tone Dialing, though the approach started earlier (like “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” the theme song from a daytime TV show, on Soapsuds, Soapsuds). He was also doing comparisons between his musical ideas and established ones. So Tone Dialing included “Bach Prelude.” This was a more academic approach, perhaps, a kind of open dialog. But it also was a kind of scientific attitude of sorts that looked at the way his (arbitrary) methods emerge from the conditions around him and how other circumstances faced by others produce different, or even slightly similar methods.

Joachim Kühn is a pianist raised in the former East Germany (GDR). He had classical music training but turned to jazz when beginning his professional career. It is Kühn’s classical training and seeming affinity for the Second Viennese School‘s chromatic expressionism that makes him a rather perfect pairing with Ornette. The two players are able to meander endlessly, usually independently, but also with Kühn reacting to Coleman. There is plenty of space in these performances for reflection.

Coleman notoriously avoided working with pianists most of his career, to avoid locating a tonal center on the fixed keys of a piano. But late in that career, he kind of had nothing to prove, and in fact could prove that he was not bound to tonality best by working with a pianist anyway! Ornette still plays in his trademark way, with practically no vibrato and with lines that tend to sustain the high notes. There is little of the R&B influence of Ornette’s early recordings. No matter. These performances are wonderful.

The Beach Boys – L.A. (Light Album)

The Beach Boys – L.A. (Light Album) Caribou JZ 35752 (1979)

A small improvement over M.I.U. Album. The best stuff here, like “Good Timin’,” is actually not bad at all, but there is a very real danger that the Boys are going to soft rock you to sleep listening to this one. Plus, there are some serious duds here that can only induce cringes, like “Shortenin’ Bread” and the stab at disco “Here Comes the Night.”

The Beach Boys – Surf’s Up

The Beach Boys – Surf’s Up Brother RS 6453 (1971)

Surf’s Up is an odd little album but one containing some amazing Brian Wilson songs. A dark melancholy pervades the disc. “Surf’s Up,” with lyrics by Van Dyke Parks, is a holdover from the Smile period. It is a thrown together mishmash, like the whole album, but it has the spark of incorruptible genius hovering about its ordinary and vital emotions. “Surf’s Up” is a lost but confident stroll through a dream for good in the world. Parks’ surrealist lyrics (like “Laughs come hard/ in Auld Lang Syne” and “Surf’s Up/ umm-mmm umm-mmm umm-mmm/ aboard a tidal wave/ come about hard and join/ the young and often spring you gave”) help make Brian’s “Surf’s Up” about the best song The Beach Boys ever did. “’Til I Die” is another classic with a slightly more uncertain feeling. Actually, just the Brian Wilson songs that close the album make Surf’s Up essential for fans. Despite one dud rocker song and some questionable keyboard effects, the mellow satisfied quality pervading the album serves as a nice lead-in to the album’s powerful finish. It takes some dedication to appreciate what this album is, but with sometimes-strong contributions from various band members (e.g., “Long Promised Road”) it is worth the effort to find Surf’s Up and go beyond the group’s Sixties material.

Mark Hollis – Mark Hollis

Mark Hollis – Mark Hollis Polydor 537 688-2 (1998)

After the artistic triumphs (and commercial failures) of Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, Talk Talk disbanded. Many years later singer Mark Hollis released his first, and to date only, solo album, the self-titled Mark Hollis. This picks up exactly where Talk Talk left off, and it almost sounds like a very high fidelity demo for an unrealized Talk Talk album (that isn’t meant as a put down, rather to say these are more stripped down recordings). The songs are moody and nearly ambient. Yet, they are slightly more like distinct songs than on the last Talk Talk albums. More importantly, the performances are simpler, performed in a chamber setting with minimalist arrangements that give the impression of being performed live in the studio. The last two Talk Talk albums instead had (obviously) layered sounds assembled in the studio from bits and pieces of expansive recording sessions. And yet Hollis was quoted as saying, “This material isn’t suited to play live.” The opening “The Colour of Spring” is so sparse that only one or two instruments play at an given time. Hollis sings with his iconic delicate, high voice that almost seems frail and hollow if it didn’t also come across as so resilient and erudite. Five of the songs were co-written by producer Warne Livesey, and Phil Ramacon and Dominic Miler co-wrote other songs. Only one song was written solely by Hollis. There are many nods to mid-century classic jazz and Euro-classical music, albeit merely outlined as impressionistic thumbnail sketches. There is also a pervasive interest in perseverance and purity evinced by the songs. The performances are melancholic, with a cautiously hopeful urban twist on pastoralism; though the music is much more optimistic and tranquil than Laughing Stock. Anyone who fell in love with the late period Talk Talk recordings will definitely want to seek this out. Hollis largely retired from music after this album, so it is likely to be the last of its kind. That is too bad, really, because the world could use more music with this integrity.

M.I.A. – Arular

M.I.A. – Arular XL 05667 (2005)

M.I.A. (Missing In Action) makes damn good dance music. It’s the kind that could just as easily bounce off the walls of a club in Great Britain, Sri Lanka, or the U.S.A. Over rumbling, twitching bass, singer Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam ekes out her raps/vocals in short and choppy rhythms. But the real stars here are the producers. Huge drumbeats, sounding thicker than usual, and electronic bleeps blast through “Fire Fire.” The steel drums of “Bingo” create a startling and infectious mash up with synthesized sounds that approximate grating a power saw along a steel washboard. The sound is infectious without being fancy. If anything, the music borders on the jaggedly raw. These songs can, at any moment, sound like any folk music on the planet: dancehall ragga, seemingly ancient Southern bass hip-hop, or pretentious British IDM (so-called “intelligent dance music”). Throwing in IDM influences on cuts like “Galang” is just another way of expanding M.I.A.’s folk music influences. After all, IDM is folk music, just the kind that usually comes from middle class white kids.

Yeah, the lyrics are about terrorism, guns, governments, resistance, boys. But that was Earth(2005) — and also Earthy(2016). Honestly, these are ordinary topics. No big deal if you are alive and aware in the world today. Then again, Maya Arulpragasam is a refugee of the Sri Lankan civil war, and these words do reflect what she knows. The personal element is there, in the lyrics, but the album is more than that. This is ass-shakin’, fist-pumpin’ music. If you’re not moving — literally or figuratively — listening to this, something is broken but it isn’t anything on Arular.

“Galang” is one song not to miss. It’s a tract against pushers, authoritarians and jackasses everywhere. And it’s a practical tribute to that great unchampioned cause of worldwise, worldwide dancing togetherness. At least, man, you gotta get into the moment and just go with this music. Inside the beats, everything moves together. If only this philosophy could translate outside dancefloors, that would be something. It’s also an accomplishment to make it happen anywhere.

With all the artists who have hopped on retro electronic dance beats, it is refreshing to listen to Arular and find it hold up so well a decade later. This ruthlessly and unsentimentally plunders the past and puts those spoils and castoff debris to good and better use for a left/progressive political stance. There is a hint of kitsch, but this is at the same time beyond kitsch. Rarely do such approaches pull off the aggression and in-your-face attitude of Arular though. Little of what M.I.A. did later had the unsettling power of this album — though Matangi eight years later was a return to form (if somewhat of a commercial disappointment).

Tom Zé – Danç-Êh-Sá (Dança dos Herdeiros do Sacrifício) – O Fim da Canção: Ao Vivo

Tom Zé – Danç-Êh-Sá (Dança dos Herdeiros do Sacrifício) – O Fim da Canção: Ao Vivo Trama (2008)

The album title translates roughly to “Dance-eh-Sa (Dance of the Heirs of Sacrifice) – The End of Song: Live.” The individual songs are tributes to past revolutions, or failed attempts at revolution. Up to his usual tricks, like a modern Socrates, Zé seems to be trying to stimulate thinking about what revolutions mean in the present. Consider what Slavoj Žižek wrote in Trouble in Paradise (p. 143-44):

“permanent political engagement has a limited time-span: after a couple of weeks or, rarely, months, the majority disengages, and the problem is to safeguard the results of the uprising at this moment, when things return to normal. *** The battle has to be won here, in the domain of citizens’ passivity, when things return back to normal the morning after ecstatic revolts; it is (relatively) easy to have a big ecstatic spectacle of sublime unity, but how will ordinary people feel the difference in their daily lives? No wonder conservatives like to see sublime explosions from time to time — they remind people that nothing can really change, that things return to normal the day after.”

Is this not precisely what Zé is cultivating with this music — trying maintain an interest in a revolutionary spirit in a time of (relative) prosperity, with the big spectacle of revolution seemingly a thing of the past?

The songs use many onomatopoeic sounds, like “Atchim” (for sneezing) and “Uai” (for amazement). The effect is a kind of universality. These things don’t mean much of anything in particular. But in that respect they mean the same thing now as they did in the times of the revolutions that Zé pays tribute to. They also prevent this from being dour stuff. The performances are meant to have levity and playful humor.

This live recording is arguably better than the studio counterpart. The drums and guitar are a little harder and further forward in the mix. There are also fewer electronics and hip-hop references. Also, the best songs are sequenced first here. This perhaps is more of a second-tier Tom Zé album, but it’s still a good one.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Axis: Bold as Love

The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Axis: Bold as Love Track 613 003 (1967)

Often considered the weakest of the three Jimi Hendrix Experience studio albums, I happen to like this best. The album has a refined but still straightforward and guileless sound, heavy at times, but with plenty of rock ballads too; melodic, with a hard psychedelic edge. The themes are a little more humble, perhaps, and even more equivocal than brash stuff like “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” or “Foxy Lady.” Frankly, the studio experimentation of the follow-up Electric Ladyland obscures rather than augments what was best about Hendrix’s music in my opinion, and the eclecticism makes my attention wander. Hendrix was a great blues player, but sequencing lengthy blues tracks next to psychedelic rockers doesn’t work for me. Thankfully this album sidesteps much of that. There are no blues tracks here to grind the pace of the album to a halt. As a result this has more intimacy. Also, there is a mysticism and spirituality that binds most of the material together nicely. Before release, some of the master tapes were lost and had to be recreated from secondary sources (early takes dubbed to other media), which might have been a plus or minus, or both. This may not have as many well-known individual songs as other Hendrix albums — though it does have “Little Wing” and “Spanish Castle Magic.” But as a whole this is probably the most listenable front to back — the awesome debut Are You Experienced comes in right behind it though.

Neko Case & Her Boyfriends – Furnace Room Lullaby

Neko Case & Her Boyfriends – Furnace Room Lullaby Bloodshot BS 050 (2000)

Neko Case & Her Boyfriends’ second album Furnace Room Lullaby is a calculated take on country music that manages to be more than the sum of its parts. This is a real country album. But it only arrives at the realness of country music in a circuitous, even backwards way.

The album consciously stakes out a range encompassing crafted ballads (“South Tacoma Way,” “Porchlight”), sly waltz (“Thrice All American”), driving rockabilly (“Whip the Blankets,” “Mood to Burn Bridges”) and hazy lounge jazz (“No Need to Cry”). The album limps most of the way, with a kind of contrived indie rock vision of what country music is supposed to sound like, complete with all the clichés. That is the best part!

All sorts of country affectations are employed across the album, like slide guitar and fiddle, but most notably the rock-styled rhythms from the drums and Case’s countrified vocals that sound nothing like those of a southerner. She has a distinctive way of singing sustained, crescendo-ed notes in a dramatic way, often book-ended by clipped phrases with half-yodeled melisma, and also frequently bolstered with washes of legato keyboards or backing vocals. Yet, the album succeeds precisely because the illusion of authenticity fails. No matter what urban mannerism she laces through her country songs — the essence of insurgent (alt) country is using the devices of country music usually directed to rural audiences to appeal to urban middle-class audiences — something persists that seems to cut through those very mannerism. It is somewhat of a frequent occurrence that “rock” musicians make country music to tap into its supposed authenticity, at least implying that authenticity is lacking in rock music, but Furnace Room Lullaby preempts that by its obviously artificial performances. And, really, country music is a set of arbitrary and therefore artificial devices just as much as rock music. What emerges then is something else, an existential denial of all authenticity and a kind of triumph of crafted artifice that builds up an approximation of the idea of authenticity through non-authentic means. Is Case then simply pretending to be what she really is? This is a really intriguing way of staging what are songs — all excellent compositions mind you — mostly about personal identity forged in the crucibles of relationships, a hometown, and a trajectory of subtle but undeniable ambition. The underlying question that looms across the entire album is, “Who am I?” Case never ventures an affirmative answer, but keeps pondering that question over and over again.

Neko forges music from her Pacific Northwest roots with a cautious nostalgia. “South Tacoma Way” is the album’s epic story of loss. Of course themes of heartache and resignation come up is every song; some call it “country noir”. These songs make your problems seem either easier or shared. The highlight of the album may well be “Thrice All American,” about the city of Tacoma, Washington, Case’s adopted hometown and winner of the All-America City Award three times — but the song is also a waltz.

Neko Case & Her Boyfriends manage to combine all kinds of influences. It all works. At this stage of her career, before fully succumbing to the banality of indie rock, Neko was as brave as any singer-songwriter out there (though most of these songs were written with collaborators). She was okay with being a little like her heroines — Poison Ivy from The Cramps, etc. On “Guided By Wire” she tells of “those who’re singin’ my life back to me.” It is that binding of her identity to those who (circularly) give her meaning that raise the stakes here. There really is no “true” identity, just tentative links to people and places, many of them commonplace. Country music at its best always made that same point.

Recommended.

Neko Case – Blacklisted

Neko Case – Blacklisted Bloodshot BS 099 (2002)

Blacklisted is a dark album. It’s was a new direction Case is heading into, and she knew it. The loneliness of this new position is evident. There isn’t much musical idolatry here, though she keeps one eye fixed on the past. Her stories chronicle things witnesses and remembered, observed tidbits pulled together to form the songs.

Neko Case has changed quite a bit since Furnace Room Lullaby. Her songwriting is that much more isolated. Her sense of humor scarcely surfaces. A weariness seems to have taken hold long before the songs took shape. Now a passion for something timeless is her calling card.

The songs are a mixture of jagged lyrics and smooth sounds, with lyrics so ragged and blunt that listeners come away bruised. Case has moved into somewhat more traditional country arrangements performed with small, eclectic combos. Her lyrics, however, stand opposed to traditional subjects. Blacklisted eschews “heartbroken woman” themes. Her best outings, “Wish I Was the Moon” and “Ghost Writing” among them, are deeply personal. Yet even at her most confessional, her songs remain framed in the Americana she adores. This isn’t a new way to write music, but it’s a fresh approach for Neko. While still one to romanticize the ways of lonely scoundrels, she employs a different kind of drama than in the past. Of course, honesty isn’t always the best policy. The truth can border the mundane. So there’s a danger built into her craft. It would be nice to say she has the situation under control at all times. That isn’t the case. But it’s better to have Neko overexposed on record than obscured.

On Blacklisted, Neko’s delivery doesn’t have much immediacy. Still, she is reaching. But for what? Unfortunately this was the first step towards capitulation to the mundane and banal aspects of indie rock that would garner her more commercial success over the next 5-10 years. This one is medicore at best, and pales in comparison to Furnace Room Lullaby.

John Fahey – Vol 3: Dance of Death & Other Plantation Favorites

John Fahey – Vol 3: Dance of Death & Other Plantation Favorites Takoma C 1004 (1965)

As a guitarist John Fahey’s talents grew quickly in the early 1960s. Vol 3: Dance of Death & Other Plantation Favorites was definitely his most accomplished album to date (though later re-recordings of his first two albums are just as good). He was still operating in reach of the traditional blues, folk and country material he drew from. Excursions into the realm of tape manipulation, field recording overdubs, and experimental guitar techniques still lay in the future. But his trademark ability to take traditional forms and re-purpose them into something a little darker and more existential — by way of trying to play a “symphony” on a single steel string acoustic guitar — coalesced here. Surely one of the man’s best efforts. Worthy of plenty of spins.