Jandek – Put My Dream on This Planet

Put My Dream on This Planet

JandekPut My Dream on This Planet Corwood 0767 (2000)


No one probably expected Jandek to release an a cappella album.  But then again no one expected Jandek to still exist by the year 2000, still anonymously selling albums out of a post office box.  All signs point to a lot of this being recorded on a dictaphone.  “I Need Your Life” adds to the intrigue with some rhythmic embellishment made possible by cutting out the sound on the recording periodically — a counterpart to Steve Reich‘s legendary “Come Out” perhaps.  “It’s Your House” references the debut of The Units (a/k/a Jandek) with repeated intonations of “I’m ready for the house.”  The vocals at times use little affected gimmicks that do liven this up quite a bit.  If you expect this to be a tedious affair, think again.  It’s anything but that.  Of course, this assumes that the listener is grounded in the nature of what Jandek so often does with atonal blues.  Basically, Jandek achieves here just with voice what was achieved on the early quintessentially Jandek-ian acoustic guitar albums.

Swan Silvertones – Singing in My Soul

Singing in My Soul

Swan SilvertonesSinging in My Soul Vee-Jay LP 5006 (1960)


For those not in the know, The Swan Silvertones were a long-lived gospel group — one of the best.  Their second LP, Singing in My Soul, is perhaps their very best.  The group had already been around for more than two decades when they made the album, an existence that pre-dated the album format era.  Their early days involved radio performances (no recordings of those performances have been released).  They then recorded a host of singles for the King label in the 1940s, which were mostly a cappella, with occasional acoustic guitar accompaniment.  The group complained that the record label forced them to play up a kind of hillbilly, folky sound.  Into the 1950s, they recorded “hard” gospel for Specialty records.  All the Specialty sides are essential.  The group sang searing leads, balanced with ravaged screams and driving tempos.  Lead singer Claude Jeter made pioneering use of his falsetto range, seemlessly jumping between his natural range and his falsetto.

When the group moved to Vee-Jay records in the late 1950s — where almost all of the top gospel acts of the day recorded — there was a profound shift in their music.  Instrumental accompaniment was much more pronounced, and varied.  Vocals remained the focus.  But there were new opportunities for interplay between vocal and non-vocal sonorities.  On record they were paired with some of the finest session players around (in particular, the jazz group MJT+3), with credentials from outside the gospel world, because Vee-Jay was also active making successful recordings in other genres like blues and jazz.

Vee-Jay was a significant independent record label in its day, and was notable for being an African-American owned and operated company when Jim Crow segregation laws were still prevalent.  It maintained a measure of dominance in the African-American market until overtaken by Motown, and Vee-Jay’s eventual bankruptcy due to financial mismanagement in 1966.  Though, it should be noted, the label’s biggest commercial successes came not from black acts but from white acts like The Four Seasons and licensed state-side re-issues of recordings by The Beatles.  Vivian Carter Bracken, one of the label’s owners, was a radio DJ first in Chicago and then in Indiana.  Her knowledge and connections, not to mention her exposure on radio broadcasts, seemed to give her an edge identifying new talent and understanding commercial markets for music.  Scores of major musical artists made their first commercially successful recordings for the label.

The opener on Singing in My Soul is the traditional “Swing Low.”  The first sounds are from an electric guitar (from Linwood Hargrove), slowly playing two dissonant, descending chords.  Louis Johnson, who joined the group about five years earlier, is the first singer heard, and he is sermonizing rather than singing as such, recanting a nostalgic tale about supposedly hearing about the lyrics of the song from “an old gray-haired lady” many years ago, presumably in childhood.  A vocal harmony is introduced, with slow, wordless “wooos” filling out the space behind Johnson.  Claude Jeter comes in next.  He goes immediately to his falsetto range.  He dips into his natural range briefly, only to swoop immediately back up to his falsetto.  Some lightly brushed percussion on a cymbal (from Walter Perkins), and a faintly plucked acoustic bass enter in too (from Bob Cranshaw).  As all this builds, there is a bluesy, jazzy approach to the instrumental accompaniment, though except for Jeter’s vocals everything stays respectfully in the background.  There is actually a lot happening, with six or seven performers backing Jeter at the same time, yet the song still provides a sense of space and openness.

The next song, “Move Somewhere,” again opens with Louis Johnson.  This time, though, he’s actually singing.  His range is much lower and, frankly, narrower than Jeter’s, with a gravelly texture that is accentuated with slightly cracking, subdued screams used for emphasis.  This song picks up the tempo.  The full drum kit is used to provide syncopation.  Meanwhile, the vocal harmonies introduce words, and the guitar continues in what seem like improvised blues/jazz riffs not far off from West Coast cool jazz of the latter part of the 1950s.

By the third song, “Lord Today,” Claude Jeter’s opening lead is ready to fully open up.  His finesse in going from a robust use of his natural tenor range, with more limited, precise and dramatic forays into falsetto puts superb technical skill into play in the most friendly, welcoming way possible.  Louis Johnson enters and he is now wound up to a more fevered pitch, pushing against the steady tempo of a rhythm section that is providing more forceful beats.

The first part of the album lacks any prominent contributions from the great Paul Owens.  This changes somewhat in the middle and latter part of the album. Owen’s biggest chance to shine is on the closer “Stand Up and Testify.”  The presence of a jazz trio kind of takes away opportunities for Owens to showcase his style of singing influenced by what was then fairly contemporary and modern vocal jazz.  But he gets to do some of that in at least in that one song.

The group’s classic “Trouble In My Way” is re-recorded here with a brand new arrangement that manages to impress even with a completely different sound.  Owens gets some time out front here, along with Louis Johnson.  The backing vocals adopt something approaching New Orleans second-line music (with echos of “Jesus on the Main Line”).  The guitar strums steadily in nearly a fury, setting aside the jazzy chords for the first time to play in a more incongruous folk music style.

As usual, baritone singer John H. Myles and bass singer William Connor stay pretty much out of the spotlight.  What is more unusual, though, is that the group’s most talented arranger, Myles, isn’t felt so strongly on this album as on others.  The jazz trio providing instrumental accompaniment is given relatively free reign to create a lightly improvised foundation, and the most of the backing vocals are straightforward call-and-response stuff.  More complicated vocal treatments do come on the title track, with the instrumentalists holding back a bit more and the singers providing a more layers that more somewhat more independently, with solos from Jeter very nearly taking the role of the responses to the calls from the other singers.

“Near the Cross, Pt. 2” might well be a live recording.  The instrumentalists can barely be heard, and there are shouts and handclaps that might be from an audience.  Along with “Rock My Soul,” it raises the intensity and energy level of the album and helps provide a more a more varied song sequence.

This is my favorite Swan Silvertones full-length album.  While it somewhat paradoxically gives over a lot of attention to the instrumental accompaniment, and the vocal arrangements are rather more straightforward than elsewhere, this holds together so well I can’t help but want to listen to it more frequently than most of the group’s original albums.  It has a consistency of sound, yet it still maintains a kind of looseness and leaves room to sprinkle through it a variety of attitudes, tempos and phrasings that prevent stagnation down any single stylistic avenue.  It may lack any individual standout songs, but the sum ends up being greater than its parts.  The Swan Silvertones are definitely number one on my list of “greatest bands no one seems to have heard of”.  Listen in!

PJ Harvey – Rid of Me | Review

Rid of Me

PJ HarveyRid of Me Island CID 8002 / 514 696-2 (1993)


The “grunge” rock movement was all about raw, loud, provocative sounds.  When PJ Harvey released Rid of Me, as the style peaked in popularity, she recognized that dramatic effects could draw out the force of loud, distorted power chords by contrasting them against other things.  This was her most aggressive sounding album.  Yet the opener, the title track, begins with whispered vocals, muted guitar chords, and barely audible percussion before unleashing her distorted guitar and cry of “Don’t you don’t you wish you never never met her?,” first in a short burst, then completely unrestrained, like great beasts that struggle against their bridles and finally let themselves loose.

“50 Ft. Queenie” and “Me-Jane” are just knockout punches.  These were different sorts of empowerment anthems.  “50 Ft. Queenie” positions the protagonist as “king of the world” and rather than being some kind of dream, this is the sort of song that is going to make her (yes, her) the androgynous king of the world through raw power.  This song roars.  At the same time it mocks the male libidinal quest for dominance, while also entertaining the idea of a countercultural revolution to seize control in the name of a new order.  It undermines the patriarchal claims to power by making the crude assertions of male sexuality like “I’m 20 inches long” in a way — shouted out by a woman — that robs them of their authenticity.  “Me-Jane” is another one of those songs that Harvey does so well.  It takes the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan and Jane Porter characters, and converts Jane from a “damsel in distress” to the wise and thinking one suffering through Tarzan’s interminable chest-pounding and pointless screaming.  PJ sings almost like she’s screaming too.  But it’s the aural equivalent of rolling her eyes in contempt.

Provocative producer/recording engineer Steve Albini is on board.  He gives this album a charismatic sound.  Some love it; others hate it.  The drums are indistinct, but loud, very loud.  They present a low, pummeling rumble, like a photograph carefully kept just barely out of focus even in the central field of view.  They sound like someone pounding away on something, the most literalist approach to what the drums are all about!  The guitar, and PJ’s vocals are also given the same treatment.  The bass is similarly indistinct, but without any of the loudness — what is normally the source of driving power in a lot of punk rock is here inverted, or, subverted, just like the gender roles addressed by the lyrics of numerous songs.  “Rub ‘Til It Bleeds,” one of the heaviest songs on the first half of the album, exemplifies how the bass mostly provides noisy texture, rather than a rhythmic heartbeat.  All together, this approach puts a number of the band’s individual elements or sounds on a more equal footing than is usually permitted.  There is little room for any individual to assume the spotlight.  Not even PJ’s vocals or guitar get special, preferential treatment.  This is the hard rock equivalent of the sort of anarchistic “harmolodics” found on Ornette Coleman’s 1970s and 80s albums like Science Fiction and Of Human Feelings.  For those who hated Albini’s production, demos of many of the songs were later released (4-Track Demos).

While PJ may have instinctively used a more bluesy foundation than what lay in Albini’s radical punk inclinations, the end results on Rid of Me perfectly encapsulate a sense of confrontation.  It seems to perfectly fit the songwriting.  None of the instruments get to assume their socially predestined roles.  What helps separate this album from the ignorant clamor of something that just goes out as fast and loud as possible right from the start is not just that the clamor is juxtaposed with moments that regroup and coil up to await a springing attack, which it does magnificently, but also that the clamor and attack is a mass of seeming contradictions in and of itself.  The drums, the guitar, the vocals have incongruous sonorities.  And yet, they still come together to make a powerful statement inseparably bound up in a singular if slightly murky sonic fabric.  This is close to the best of what “grunge” rock had to offer.  It was a burst of something that cut against the grain.  It was arresting.  But it did that with an awareness of the past, and sense of its place in a line of failed attempts and counterrevolutions.  This is why a cover of Dylan‘s “Highway 61 Revisited” makes sense here, as a link to the countercultural tradition of the 1960s, even if the performance doesn’t live up to the standards of the rest of the album.

Rid of Me had a leg up on much of the other “grunge” rock because its sense of purpose was fundamentally more dangerous.  It was a sledgehammer.  But it was a sledgehammer flying about in the midst of bystanders put suddenly on edge.  While hindsight has shown that “grunge”, and any other movements in the same direction, failed to reach a tipping point to sustain their objectives, as the support for touring and mass media airplay were withdrawn after a few years, even decades later this music sounds as fresh and empowering as the day it was released.

Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea | Review

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Neutral Milk HotelIn the Aeroplane Over the Sea Merge MRG136CD (1998)


In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is one of the defining albums of “indie rock” in the late 1990s.  It came along after the “grunge” and “alternative rock” moments had passed, and major labels were sort of finished trying to foster anything deeper than manufactured dance pop.  The music relies upon eclecticism.  Although there is a recurrent use of acoustic guitar in a driving folk-rock kind of manner, most of the songs use instrumentation uncommon in “rock” music: accordion, bowed saw, a horn section.  The vocals also develop what was the most recognizable feature in the genre of indie “twee” pop, in the form of off-key, slightly nasal and almost whiny delivery.  When the horns play, they also adopt the mannerisms of the vocals.  They play asynchronously, adding some dissonance and beats to the harmonies.  Although these are carefully crafted affectations, they all add up to something childlike.  This was its defining characteristic.  Many of these song lyrics are about children or childhood.  Putting all this into some kind of context, it was a retreat from dominant culture, to a world of sheltered authenticity and innocence.  It made perfect sense viewed in hindsight.  In the United States, the “baby boom” generation was busy ensuring that the pains of dwindling economic prospects in a globalized world of “outsourcing” fell disproportionately on younger generations and that the benefits of economic bubbles flowed to them rather than to youth as well (the coming housing bubble is a classic example, pricing the young out of home ownership).  Why wouldn’t young adults look back fondly at childhood, when the promise of a standard of living equal to their parents’ generation seemed credible?  In a directly analogous way, in Die Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] Freud wrote about how dreams of nakedness without shame staged the fulfillment of a wish to return to childhood innocence.  This is what warbled, untutored “twee” singing (without shame) is about.  So In the Aeroplane pines and yearns in its isolated, self-created world within a world, never really expressing something affirmative other than to distance itself and disavow the surrounding circumstances.  This is exactly what the opener, “King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1” is about (“When you were young you were the king of carrot flowers . . . And from above you how I sank into your soul / Into that secret place where no one dares to go”).  Without drums, the sense of isolation is accentuated.  And “Two-Headed Boy,” referring to a kind of freak in a glass jar, marvels at a wondrously monstrous reality separated from the regular world.  When the music seems so fragile that it might fall apart at any second, it rests on fear that just that sort of fracture might happen.  This is sort of a self-defeating approach, because it ends up being kind of complicit in the sorts of things it tries to stand morally apart from.  But, at the same time, it at least represented a recognition that the course was wrong. But that was, in a way, the only achievement.  There are still not many recorded “confessions of a beautiful soul” as evocative as this.

Cannonball Adderly – The Black Messiah

The Black Messiah

Cannonball AdderlyThe Black Messiah Capitol SWBO-846 (1972)


Live jazz fusion album from mainstay of the hard bop era, Cannonball Adderly.  It is refreshing to hear him moving into new areas and adopting a variety of rock influences.  He is joined by a lot of Miles Davis alumni, and no doubt this style of fusion strongly resembles what Davis’ groups were doing up through this period — particularly Nat Adderly‘s playing on cornet (esp. “The Chocolate Nuisance”).  Lee Morgan‘s last recordings would also make a good reference point.  It’s an easygoing record.  If it ends up being a restatement of what others had already mapped out in the fusion era, it remains an excellent summary.  It is just plain likeable. George Duke on keyboards in particular sounds great, even if again he sounds like any number of keyboardists from Davis’ groups.  The main drawback is the prominence of long narrations by Cannonball, which are eloquent but dry, and stretch this to double-album length.  Unlike, say, Rashaan Roland Kirk‘s Bright Moments, there is little showmanship and theatricality in the narrations, making them less of an attraction.

The Swan Silvertones – Walk With Me Lord

Walk With Me Lord

The Swan SilvertonesWalk With Me Lord HOB HBX-2112 (1970)


A live album recorded July 4, 1969 at the Baptist House of Prayer in New York City.  The sound is soul-inflected.  This would be the last album The Swan Silvertones recorded with longtime member Paul Owens — his feature “What About You” (renamed “What About Me”) appears early on.  It would be wrong to focus on any individual songs here, though, because this album is more importantly a document of a live performance that is really more than the sum of its parts.  There is a lot of talking and sermonizing in between songs, and “Pass Me Not” is more like “testifying” set to music than a proper song.  Often times the sermonizing segues to the song proper.  Clearly a great deal of practice is reflected in how the group transitions between different songs across the program.  What all this captures on record is the way the group could work up a crowd through multifaceted performance techniques.  And this crowd was clearly enthusiastic about the performance.  Gospel music may have been seeing a steep decline in popularity at this time.  But you wouldn’t guess it from the searing vocals of lead singer Louis Johnson.  This is a good one from the later years of one of the most important groups in gospel.

The Swan Silvertones – There’s Not a Friend Like Jesus

There's Not a Friend Like Jesus

The Swan SilvertonesThere’s Not a Friend Like Jesus Savoy SL-14505 (1979)


Stylistically, There’s Not a Friend Like Jesus (or simply Not a Friend as the back of the album jacket states) is a fairly typical late-period Swan Silvertones album.  The instrumental backing is polished, though the underlying material is too bland for that to matter.  There is surprisingly little singing here.  Louis Johnson is at the front, with only minimal backing vocals.  But Johnson often sermonizes without truly singing.  That makes this a somewhat disappointing album, even with reduced expectations that take into account the generally unambitious nature of the era of the Swans’ career that produced it.  It’s also a bad sign that this is the only Swan Silvertones album to feature an extended electric guitar solo.  This may earn the distinction of being the very worst Swan Silvertones album.

Apparently none of The Swan Silvertones’ recordings for Savoy Records have been released on CD.  But the original LPs are relatively easy to come by for reasonable prices, as the Savoy period is the least interesting of the group’s long career and there are plenty of people out there willing to give up their discs.  The same can’t be said for the group’s earliest material for the King, Specialty and Vee-Jay record labels, almost all of which is readily available on CD.  Material for HOB Records has seen only limited re-release on CD, mostly by way of shoddy “best of” sets and not full-album reissues.  The HOB material is good enough in quality and hard enough to come by that prices for vinyl tend to be a bit high, and the CD compilations often aren’t worthwhile due to being so incomplete.