Rock – Page 14 – Rock Salted

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.

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.

Faust – Faust

Faust – Faust Polydor 2310 142 (1971)

Goethe‘s Faust tells a myth that originated with the life of Simon Magus, a Gnostic who died in Rome while attempting to fly — at least one account indicating he “flew” with an intention to destroy his own body. The German rockers Faust had an approach not so very different from Simon Magus. Faust were more than willing to break from all the commercially viable music of the day. Screw the usual consequences. Isolating themselves in a converted schoolhouse in Wümme, the group recorded the album in three days to satisfy their record label. In doing so, Faust moved towards something confounding by conventional standards, but they did so with an offhand charm that is very special. Mechanized rhythms appear, then melt away. Melody is faint. They include snippets of other music (like The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” and The Rolling Stones‘ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”), with the opening segment of “Why Don’t You Eat Carrots” sounding like tuning in a radio to different channels (like Kurzwellen, Hymnen, “Program” from Silver Apples, or “Radio Play” from Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions) amid waves of static. The music unfolds at a lethargic pace. This stands in contrast to the industrial sounds the band makes. Industrial society is usually about efficiency, and that tends to mean speed and precision. That is sort of the crux of this (anti-)music: it has a contrarian way of turning music of an industrial age into almost pastoral collection of vague non sequiturs. The album self-consciously tries to be different (perhaps The Residents‘ Meet the Residents is a rare attempt to follow-up on this style of music). Faust’s later work is better, but this debut still stands as a defiant remnant of the tail end of the psychedelic era, when it seemed like the world could be reshaped in new and unexpected ways. If lots of the hippie stuff of the late 1960s got co-opted, Faust is one album that resists assimilation more than most. The packaging of this album also bears mention for its uniqueness: a clear vinyl record in a transparent sleeve showing a x-ray of a clenched fist (the word “faust” means “fist” in German), with a transparent lyric sheet. It captures well the spirit of the music it contains.

Little Feat – Dixie Chicken

Little Feat – Dixie Chicken Warner Bros. BS 2686 (1973)

All things considered, Dixie Chicken is probably the best place to start with Little Feat. The group’s sound was well defined by this point. The eccentric characters and stories of “Dixie Chicken” and “Fat Man in the Bathtub” sit well with the nice ballads “Roll Um Easy” and “Fool Yourself” and the increasingly boogie-rock oriented material like “Two Trains” and “Walkin’ All Night.” Lowell George, the group’s star and best songwriter, guitarist, and singer, was still a major force on this album, before he started to fade away from the spotlight in the coming years. From here, go back to the previous album Sailin’ Shoes, which is more eccentric and is even better, or, if the slicker, more boogie-oriented stuff is more to your liking, head for Little Feat’s next album Feats Don’t Fail Me Now.

When I was involved with college radio, there was a very explicit idea conveyed to everyone at the station that you needed to play music outside of what you could hear on typical commercial radio. Whenever classic rock or 1970s rock in general was mentioned, Little Feat was a common example of what was okay to play, as being a band generally overlooked. This always caught my attention, because in high school I had come across Little Feat and a few of their records that I had were favorites that I played over and over. Now, I don’t mean to imply that classic rock stations didn’t play Little Feat — I had heard “Dixie Chicken” on the radio before, on a rare occasion, but that was only when a station had some kind of marathon event where it played one song by every artist in its library. The basic point here is that Little Feat never quite clicked with a huge audience for whatever reason. But they clicked with me early on. Fast forward quite some time and I find myself still listening to and enjoying the music of Little Feat.

The Beach Boys – Smiley Smile

The Beach Boys – Smiley Smile Brother Records ST 9001 (1967)

This was the album that wasn’t SMiLE. After Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson set out to create the greatest album ever. His comic masterpiece was to be SMiLE. For an enormous list of reasons, that project was scrapped before it could be finished. Brian Wilson ended SMiLE (resurrecting it in 2011 with The SMiLE Sessions). But not before a select few had heard some outtakes and confirmed the project’s great promise.

The actual follow-up to Pet Sounds was Smiley Smile. Some of the material intended for SMiLE made its way to Smiley Smile by way of new recordings. Where SMiLE was to find humor in all existence, Smiley Smile made a concerted effort to under-produce the material from SMiLE to make it bleak and impenetrable. The constant tension makes it is obvious how the songs consciously departed from their origins.

This was the Beach Boys at their most experimental. Every song risks being unpopular. “Fall Breaks and Back to Winter (W. Woodpecker Symphony)” is quite amazing as a composition though, despite its references to a cartoon, it certainly would scare most small children. “Heroes and Villains” comes pieced together out of a number of disparate ideas (it was to be the centerpiece of SMiLE at 11 minutes or so). It still is one of the disc’s great achievements in recalling a failure to break the ties of good and evil.

“Good Vibrations” appears intact. It was previously released as a single, and simply found its way onto the next album. It is a classic. Physical vibrations (or drugs) give rise to sensation in the mind. The song addresses with unparalleled detail both the physical and mental as distinct but inseparable elements.

Paul McCartney even provides one of the most bizarre cameos you’ll ever encounter. “Vegetables” features a percussion track of McCartney and Brian Wilson chomping on celery. The song begins as a sparse, almost entirely vocal, track, then builds into a layered production that ends before it goes far. And don’t miss “Wonderful”!

Smiley Smile is both a triumphant vision and that vision’s own demise. Brian Wilson seemed a bit of a madman making it. It is the paradox at the heart of his efforts that make this so important. In a perverse way, people should thank Brian Wilson for destroying SMiLE. In destroying those recordings he established a continuing desire for everyone else to try themselves.

[For no reason, I’m providing an explanation of this review. I tried to make an obvious, but unstated, link between Brian Wilson and Antonin Artaud. The two were very similar, and this album in particular shows how Brian Wilson operated in the same way as Artaud. I did not mention all the songs on the album, initially to save space. But “She’s Goin’ Bald” is a daring use of cut-and-paste styles. I like it. The Beach Boys were mature artists who could now see their childhood behind them. Plus the Phil Spector wall of sound approach is largely gone, replaced with Brian Wilson’s own distinctive artistic approach that is much more benevolent. “Little Pad” is a very important song to understanding Smiley Smile, but I did not want to give everything away. But if you analogize Hawaii to paradise, then the situation is illuminated. “With Me Tonight” is as uncompromising a love song as you may ever hear. “Gettin’ Hungry” makes me think of Stockhausen, but I don’t know why.]

Caetano Veloso – Transa

Caetano Veloso – Transa Philips 6349 026 (1972)

Here is an album for which its greatest strength is a sense of indifference, with the most recognizable features resembling an aftertaste. Caetano Veloso seems distant on Transa. The music has lyrics that are ostensibly personal, but the music throws together many different styles, from different cultures and geographies, rather carelessly. This stands in contrast to Veloso’s own description. He considered it very deliberate, an album that reflected what he tried for. Veloso has named this as a personal favorite of his own work. This also frequently is named one of the best Brazilian rock albums.

The folk-rock of Richie Havens‘ Richard P. Havens, 1983 (1969) seems a fair comparison, though Veloso is inherently more musical in how quickly he shifts from one sound to the next and how disparate and diverse his influences are. Perhaps even Love‘s Forever Changes (1967) is a fair comparison too, if nothing else because of the sense of inward reflection and the confluence of disparate styles. But Transa is a more fluid mashup. For instance, the opener “You Don’t Know Me” suddenly shifts from a mellow guitar line to a quickened pace interrupted by a stark and haunting ascending chord progression lifted from Hendrix‘s “The Wind Cried Mary” on electric guitar, then back to the opening pace, then driven to more intense singing bolstered by propulsive drumming, then by the end of the song the rockish instrumentation is dominated by flamboyant acoustic guitar noodling that inverts the buildup, allowing the song to wrap up with staccato rhythms that blend all the instruments together with Caetano singing in his most didactic and dramatic tone like a deathly serious European chanson à texte or poezja śpiewana singer. The epic progression of the song is completely undersold, especially the way the very conclusion of the song seems to be an unresolved melodic figure, yet it is also the crux of how the song works.

You might say this is a completely existential album. Albert Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus” wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” For Camus, this meant embracing the absurd, unreasonable world, without any guarantee of meaning, and accepting the need for revolt, freedom, and passion in the face of absurdity. That is more or less what Caetano attempts here, privileging nothing and holding out no hope of any kind of transcendence. This is, ultimately, what separates Transa from Richie Havens, Love, or any of the hippie artists of the North Atlantic region. The song “Neolithic Man” has the lines “I’m in the silence that’s suddenly heard / After the passing of a car.” What is this nonsense! Indeed! This is an album that requires acceptance that Caetano will ramble on about listening to reggae music and what nine out of ten movie stars will make him do (answer: cry), then turn to bongos and kitschy bass lines on a song that is a dirge for his home state in Brazil — he casually asserts that any music, commercial or artistic, can be used to make any point, all without any overt claims to experimentation with form or content. Such acceptance does not come so easily. And so, Transa may not be immediately appealing. Yet it is an album for which an appreciation can grow. I still prefer Veloso’s second self-titled album (AKA Álbum branco) from 1969, but Transa is nonetheless another excellent platter.

The Walker Brothers – Nite Flights

The Walker Brothers – Nite Flights GTO GTLP 033 (1978)

What to make of this? The first four cuts are by Scott Walker, and they are pretty good — especially “The Electrician,” which is an unclassifiable melange of gothic classical, pop crooning, rock and more. The rest of the album borders on the unlistenable. Nothing balances out in the end.

Jim O’Rourke – Bad Timing

Jim O’Rourke – Bad Timing Drag City DC120 (1997)

If you followed what Jim O’Rourke was up to with Gastr del Sol, his fascination with John Fahey so evident on Bad Timing should come as no surprise. It’s a decent album, perhaps a bit bland. The thing is, why not just listen to a Fahey album instead? Anyway, O’Rourke would go on to bigger and better things in the next few years, particularly the magnificent Halfway to a Threeway and Insignificance.

New York Dolls – One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This

New York Dolls – One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This Roadrunner 168 618 045-2 (2006)

Can’t say this is likely to ever please me to the extent the album title implies. Now, I’m certainly not opposed the the idea of the New York Dolls reuniting with a drastically different lineup, decades later. In fact, I rather like Cause I Sez So (especially its title track and “Better Than You”) and Dancing Backward in High Heels. The secret to this band is undoubtedly David Johansen and his songwriting and vocal presence. Here the focus is a little nostalgic, with a sound updated but still rooted in that of the classic Dolls. I just prefer the change for the next studio outing, with its emphasis on a more mature and contemporary sound, complete with bolder attempts to take chances messing with the formulas old and new. And I much prefer the overtly pre-Dolls retro pop of Dancing Backward.