#so many artists (not just pop artists but rock artists as well!) employ too much repetition

[hiroki-moriuchi]

MY FIRST STORY release new song "アンビシャス" (Ambitious)

[thisaintascenereviews]

Capstan - The Mosaic

Seeing a band grow before your eyes, let alone a relatively young one, is such a cool feeling. I don’t mean that in the “I knew who this band was before they got big” kind of way, but in a way to say that you witnessed an evolution of an artist or band. I feel this way with the Florida band Capstan, especially hearing their first two albums. I loved their last album, Separate, from 2021, but I didn’t listen to it until 2022. They started off as a generic post-hardcore band, only to move into a progressive rock, pop-punk, post-hardcore, and math-rock band. Separate was an album that had a lot of sounds running through it, but it shared a few common threads to tie it all together. Albums with a smorgasbord of sounds tend to become an overwhelming mess, let alone a slog to sit through for how unfocused they can be. That album was only 37 minutes, too, so it was a very quick listen but it was also a unique listen.

That’s why it pains me to say that the follow-up, The Mosaic, is the opposite. Capstan is still a very unique band, but this new album is very long, bloated, messy, and just plain overwhelming at times. I had no idea this album was even coming out until I saw it this past Friday, but I figured I’d check it out, just because there wasn’t much else coming out. I’ve listened to this thing a few times, and I wish I liked this a lot more, because there are a lot of things to really enjoy, but this album is more frustrating than anything at all. There are things that are great about it, but also things that I don’t like at least, ultimately pushing me back from enjoying this. This album is so messy when it comes to its sound, it’s almost a complete turnoff. This band has a unique sound, even more so now, but they throw out so many things, and nothing flows that well, or feels like it fits, versus just seeing what sticks. I can appreciate that to an extent, but this album is over an hour long.

I also just don’t quite think every song, as well as every sound, these guys employ here works extremely well. You have the standard progressive pop-punk thing they were mainly doing on the last album with some metalcore and mathcore riffs, but they try their hand at nu-metal, 80s pop (one of the couple songs has Broadside’s Ollie Baxxter on it, and he sounds great), folk-pop, and some other strange detours that don’t add anything to it. There’s a point where they utilize trap-metal, and I’ll be frank — it sounds bad. I think this is a case of doing whatever ideas they had, and ultimately seeing what they could do with them, because this thing feels self-indulgent beyond belief.

I applaud the creativity, but Separate was such a cool album because it stuck to a unique sound and didn’t try to be so much at once, let alone some of those ideas not sticking the landing. I think part of that is vocalist Anthony DeMario doesn’t have that great of a voice, at least for certain styles of music. When they operate the lane of pop-punk, and metalcore, his work is solid and it’s quite good, but when he tries to go for a more impressive range or style that requires more of a range, such as pop or folk, it just doesn’t sound good. His screams, if he is the one screaming, aren’t that great, either. They’re fine, but even on their last album, I thought the harsher moments were the least interesting stuff.

I wish I liked this more, because there is a lot to like, and there is a good album in here that’s focused, shorter, and more interesting, but some of these ideas needed to stay in their heads. I guess it’s cool that fellow progressive pop-punk and metalcore band Belmont appears on a track, and they dropped a new album a couple months back, but I didn’t care for that one, either, kind of opposite reasons. That album was too boring, because they were doing the same thing they did on their last album, just in a more refined way, whereas this is a more expansive version of what Capstan did on their last album. It’s worth a listen, especially if you’re a fan, but this is truly a mixed bag that I ultimately respect more than I like. I like parts of it, but as a whole, this album kind of ain’t it, Chief.

[old1ddude]

Poppy Styles

For the purposes of this post, I’m defining pop as a genre (which is a neutral category encompassing both great and crap music) and poppy as music in some way compromised, so as to be more “radio friendly” and in line with popular trends.

On HS1, I believe Harry intentionally bucked trends.  Many consider “Sign of the Times” to be a pop ballad (and I would say a rock, or pop/rock ballad) but I don’t think anyone would accuse it of being poppy.  Likewise, “Two Ghosts,” “Sweet Creature” and “Kiwi” are anything but poppy.  Likewise, the other tracks on HS1 (the non-singles) lack poppy devices, or attributes. 

When he made Fine Line, I believe Harry (perhaps out of ambition, but more likely due to outside pressures, such as his label) conceded to making his singles poppy.  Harry doesn’t make crap music, but how does one make wholesome food appeal to those with McDonald's taste?  Well, you can take perfectly good food and add things, such as loads of high fructose corn syrup, copious hydrogenated oil and excessive salt.  With music, you can add some kind of a catchy hook, even if it becomes irritating over time.  Many cheap sounds/effects can be added to music to imitate other songs which are currently getting people hooked.

Now, there are certain poppy attributes which I find more appealing (just as I find certain junk foods hard to resist) and certain ones which I can not stand in the current day’s iteration of poppy-ness.  I enjoy “Golden” and “Watermelon Sugar,” but there is nothing substantial to either of the songs and they do have some cheesy synth parts which seem calculated to fit trendy sensibilities.  “Adore You” and “Lights Up” are meaty, well crafted songs, but they have been produced and the instruments arranged/chosen in such a way as to sugar them up.  Electronic vocal effects (some much more subtle than others) are an extremely easy way to poppify an otherwise solid song.  “Falling” is a solid ballad, although doesn’t stand up to heavy, repeated listening (in my not so humble opinion.)  The ostinato piano part (a short melody or pattern that is constantly repeated) serves as a sort of poppy hook.  Harry’s vocal for “Falling” is powerful and moving, but the very thing that “hooks you” that ostinato piano, is what gets old about the song, if you listen too much.  I very much enjoy “Treat People With Kindness,” but it’s undeniable that there is some poppy production involved -- especially the vocal effects in the “All we ever want is automatic” section.  I don’t see poppy-ness employed in the non-singles of Fine Line.  One could argue that “Sunflower v. 6″ employs certain poppy elements, but I don’t believe that was Harry’s intent and the song seems almost experimental in many ways.

“As it Was” is a very solid, consequential song -- at least the equal to “Lights Up” in that regard.  However, the synth tone strikes me as very poppy and cheesy -- it sounds like something you might hear on radio Disney.  Harry’s voice sounds as if he’s a long way off, or in the bottom of a barrel, which enhances the idea that this is a conversation happening inside his mind --  unfortunately, his voice also sounds a bit unnatural (electronically modified) which really is a crime when you consider the instrument he commands.  The “lightning-fast internet” section has a very heavy auto-tune effect, which is extremely poppy and I find it particularly obnoxious, appalling and contrary to every sound principal of artistic merit. 

I’m very curious to find out if poppy-ness is confined to the singles on “Harry’s House.”  If so, I will only be able to conclude that it is a compromise and concession to the commercial pressures on his career.

[d-criss-news]

Nine Songs: Darren Criss

When Disney, Phantom Planet and Mr Hudson collide: Glee star, Emmy and Golden Globe winner and musician Darren Criss talks Andrew Wright through the pivotal songs in his life and the unexpected ways they found him.

“When we are younger, our gateway drugs to a lot of popular things don’t come from the sexiest of places. It’s up to you how proactive you want to be with your curiosity from there, and how far down the rabbit hole you want to go, if you go down at all.”

Choosing the songs that define you is a tricky business to say the least, especially when the power of song has provided an ongoing soundtrack to your life. “When you’re as avid a music consumer as musical artists are, trying to pin down Nine Songs is difficult,” Darren Criss laughs. So much so, his final choices only really crystallise as our conversation draws to its close. “It’s hard for me not to see the value and joy in literally everything,” he explains. “The curse of the creative person is that your ideas and your interests always move way faster than your body can execute.”

Criss is a creative par excellence. As well as his Emmy and Golden Globe winning performance in The Assassination of Gianni Versace, where he played serial killer Andrew Cunanan, to his upcoming role in Muppets Haunted Mansion Halloween special as The Caretaker, he’s also a prolific musician. Criss enjoyed a decadent musical consumption since childhood, so “this was a bit of an archaeological dig,” he admits. As such, everything from jazz standards, to 808s, punk rock, ‘90s teen pop, and musical numbers are excavated in the course of our extemporaneous journey through the music he loves.

Equally on his mind is how to go about approaching the task of creating his Nine Songs, full stop. “The interesting social experiment is: Are my answers going to be songs that actually shaped my life and were formative to me as an artist? Are they songs that were formative to me as a human being? Or am I picking songs that I think represent who I am to people that do not know me? All three of those things aren’t necessarily the same thing.”

He reaches a conclusion of sorts. “For the purposes of making some kind of decision, I’m gonna lean less into trying to look cool to your very cool readership, and more into the literal, ‘What made me think about music in a different way? And hit me in a very emotional way?’ I think that’s probably the healthiest route.”

Embracing the accessibility that characterises Criss’ picks - or at times the initial touchpoints that led him to them - are something he vacillates over during our chat. “I’ve seen a lot of other people’s Nine Songs and they’re super cool. It’s like Leonard Cohen B-sides and old opera records and stuff. I’m gonna be pretty honest with the pop culture zeitgeist of how I grew up but explain why there is so much value in those moments.” His contemplation continues into the next day, Criss’s publicist passes on his regrets at being tentative to admit how he encountered one of his song choices via the Shrek soundtrack.

A yearning to reinterpret accessibility and the value attached to it drives Criss, however. He tells me that a festival performance that applied the anarchic verve of punk rock to a more refined Great American Songbook number remoulded his perception of music entirely. His love of the fusion of these two genres in particular symbolises the salient musical backdrops of his childhood - the guitar bands he played in with friends, and his musical theatre endeavours that led him to Broadway and multiple Ryan Murphy juggernauts, including his breakthrough playing Blaine Anderson in Glee.

Criss employs these contrasting musical lexicons, and other areas in between, on Masquerade, his new EP. Comprising five stand-alone “character-driven” singles, it sees Criss donning different musical personas. “I’m leaning into people that might know me as an actor,” he explains. “Because if actors can do Shakespeare, romantic comedy, and then do a horror movie and wear a prosthetic nose and a wig, I didn’t understand why I couldn’t just do that with music.” The song “walk of shame” draws on jazz-standard chords interlaced with hip-hop production, “i can’t dance” looks to new-wave, and “for a night like this” is the product of Criss’ goal to create the ultimate end-of-the-night crowd-pleaser for a new-year bash, wedding or bar mitzvah. “This is all of the parts of me as a lifelong fan of these genres, trying my hand at servicing the pieces of them that I love.”

“I really love all styles of music and understanding what makes them unique and special and what makes them really pop. There are so many things that really make things sing - for lack of a better verb - and I like acknowledging those things and celebrating those things.”

“So, let’s begin. I have runners up and shit, and I have artists, I don’t just have the songs, so we might have to pick them as we go.”

“Part of Your World” by Jodi Benson

“When people read this, they’ll go ‘That’s cute, he likes Disney songs’, but it’s more profound than that. Some of the most formative pieces of music to hit me at a very early age would have been any of the songs that were coming from ‘The Disney renaissance.’ The early-mid ‘90s explosion of The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Beauty and The Beast.

"One of the through lines between the three of those musicals was Howard Ashman, who is one of my all-time heroes. Dramaturg, songwriter - he really was the voice behind what made those songs great. I have always loved Howard’s lyrical sensibility and also Alan Menken, his partner who wrote these songs with him. There was a musical structure to a lot of the songs which I would unconsciously pick up in my own songwriting, not just musically, but the idea that not only did somebody make these songs, but they wrote them for a story.

“There’s a clip of Howard Ashman vocal directing Jodi Benson, who was the original voice of Ariel. It’s a wonderful example of his genius, where not only was he songwriting but he was storytelling in the way he would tell her how to perform it, and you can really see the song coming to life in that clip. That’s when you cross the street from ‘It’s a song’ to ‘This is an experience.’

"There are certain ingredients that are required to elevate music that goes beyond just a nice melody, a beautiful orchestration and a good voice. There are things that are required to really give a performance a characterisation, context and a vulnerability, that he architects in real-time with Jodi Benson. You see that what he’s doing is what makes the record so special, and that’s something that’s always been inspiring to me.”

“MMMBop” by Hanson

“I think my love of Hanson was because some people didn’t like it, so I was like ‘Fuck you, I like this, how do you feel about it?’ But this is difficult for me, because you know, I’m speaking to The Line of Best Fit and we’re trying to be cool! Although, do you know what’s cool? Being accessible! Writing a pop hit when you are 10 years old. Being in a band with your brothers and you’re all below the age of 15, you have a record contract where you are writing, producing and performing songs that are doing well.

“I was 10 years old when their first album Middle of Nowhere came out, and I remember reading somewhere that there were these kids that had a record. At the time, I was playing guitar and I was writing songs, but in my mind I was a kid, and that was it. I couldn’t be on the radio; you had to be a grown up to do this.

"This was the first time where I realised ‘Holy shit, kids can do stuff!’ It’s the value of seeing yourself in the media - that’s a whole other conversation to talk about - but there’s an immense value in feeling like there’s a piece of you out in the zeitgeist and doing well because it’s encouraging. You go, ‘Holy shit, maybe I can do this as well.'

“When you see children doing things, you’re ‘Wow, this is so cute and fabulous’, but then when you actually look at it you go, ‘This is miles above what most people in this age group are capable of,’ and that’s all I saw, because I was in the same age group and I was so inspired by that. This whole album was really a turning point for me, where I was like, ‘I can do this, I can do music too, because these guys can.'

“Ooh La La” by Faces

“This song really blew my mind. It became my own theme. It’s that ‘Make your heart sing’, nostalgic moment when you’re a teenager, driving in the car listening to it, playing guitar with your friends and you’re singing “I wish that I knew what I know now / When I was younger.” You’re like, ‘because I’m an adult now, I’m 15-years-old. If I only knew what I know now.’

“I was doing theatre from a young age and I was part of a young conservatory called A.C.T. in San Francisco. By way of somebody who knew somebody, I had an audition for a movie. As a kid not being near New York or Los Angeles it was really exciting, and this audition was for a film called ‘Max Fischer’, which would become the movie Rushmore, which would become one of my favourite movies of all time by the now very distinguished Wes Anderson.

“Separate from my own objective love of Wes Anderson, when this movie came out I was just around the age of getting into my own sort of identity with music, but also movies - indie movies - and trying to assert who I was. So, I see this movie Rushmore and I love it. I love the soundtrack, I love it so much, it’s one of my favourite albums ever. This song is the end sequence, and the way it made me feel - the vocals on it, I could play it on guitar and it was part of a cool movie - it really represented a lot in my life.

“And because of the acting thing, and Rushmore being great - it’s about this kid in high-school who's misunderstood but has his own agenda - everything about it was just so fucking cool to me. To this day, I cite that song as one of my favourite records of all time.”

“Recently Distressed” by Phantom Planet

“A guy that really formed the way I would sing and write songs is Alex Greenwald, the frontman of Phantom Planet. I went to see Phantom Planet because I loved Rushmore and I found out that Jason Schwartzman [who had been cast as Max Fischer] was also the drummer for a band called Phantom Planet.

"So, when I saw their name on the bill I went, but I didn't know their music. I was barely 14, but their set blew my mind. It was Rock and Roll, but I loved Alex Greenwald’s voice. I loved everything, and I would follow their career from there. I always tell people that my voice is a combination of me trying to be Alex Greenwald, Paul McCartney and Rufus Wainwright, but failing. Alex was incredibly formative for me.

“One of their biggest records was a little while after I first saw them, which was the song for The O.C., "California." That was more of an Elvis Costello thing, and they employed a lot of stuff that sounded to me like The Beatles and a lot of ‘60s mod/pop-rock. But later they would employ things from Fugazi, Radiohead and harder shit, and that eclecticism, again, only accelerated my love for Phantom Planet.

“Recently Distressed” is from their 1998 album Phantom Planet Is Missing. This was a cool rock song that employed these George [Harrison] and Paul [McCartney] background vocals and included all of the things that I loved. It was harder but melodic and employed minor 4th chords and more complicated chords than I was used to. I had grown up with power chords - which are very Gregorian - on a lot of alt. punk rock, like Green Day or Nirvana, and if Kurt Cobain was using power chords then that’s how I was playing guitar. Hearing this music was like ‘Oh, I’m using full chords, not sevenths, minor 4th chords, diminished chords’, shit that I would learn to use more and more.

“When you haven’t experienced much, anything that gives a hint towards possibility, even though it’s probably always been there, you’re like, ‘I like this, I’ve always kind of liked this, but it’s very encouraging to hear somebody else do it and it’s gonna make me reconsider my possibilities.’ That was literally the moment that my power chords turned into full barre chords.”

“Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk” by Rufus Wainwright

“I forgot the other day how I got into Rufus Wainwright, because all of this stuff I was getting into quite young. It’s like when I talk to 11-13 year olds, it’s funny to think that this was when I was really starting to build my musical identity. But then I remembered, and I didn’t want to say because I didn’t want to sound uncool, because he is such a revered artist who exists in a much cooler place than what I’m about to say.

“I loved soundtracks and I would always buy soundtracks for movies that had cool playlists. I had the Shrek soundtrack, and there’s a cover of Leonard Cohen’s seminal “Hallelujah” that Rufus does and he smashes it, and I’m like, ‘Who the fuck is Rufus Wainwright? What a beautiful voice.’ Then I saw that he was going to be at the Virgin Megastore in San Francisco one week, so I go and he’s there promoting his new album Poses. I remember I didn’t have enough money to buy the album that day, so I had him sign my sneaker and I saved that shoe.

“The first song on Poses was “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk”, which is a very dark and reflective song about his own battles with addiction, but he’s singing it over this really beautiful, whimsical song that has a lot of really great wordplay. I always love when artists, especially lyricists, can encapsulate an idea with not exactly what they’re talking about. The song’s called “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk”, it’s not called “Addiction”. Its talking about things that he craved and how that’s representative of other things that he’s gone through. There was a sophistication and elegance to that that I really gravitated towards, that I didn’t possess but wanted to shoot for. So when I saw him, that was a big one for me and he would also continue to influence me later in my life.

“I’ve become friends with Rufus since. I’ve performed with him and we’ve made records together, which is crazy. His songwriting was very complex and punk-rock, but he had this classic cabaret voice, the kind of voice that I don’t have. I was fascinated that there was somebody that could write this really dark material but have such elegance on top of it. He was virtuosic on the piano, which I thought was very cool because musicianship is always the thing that gets me going the most about artists.

“You know what? People say, ‘Don’t meet your heroes.' I completely disagree. Chase the living fuck out of your heroes. I’ve spent a lifetime doing so, it’s made me a better artist, and I’ve sometimes got to meet them and work with them. I’ve worked on music with Alex Greenwald of Phantom Planet. I’ve performed with Hanson. I’ve performed those Disney songs with Alan Menken at The Hollywood Bowl.

"This is all because there are people that I love who I have put on my vision board, and the things that they have done are the things that are bringing me to them. So it is nuts, but at the same time you’re like, ‘Well, what else did you think would happen?’ They did stuff that some part of me connected with, so obviously there’s a magnetic pull towards that person.

“Rufus Wainwright is one of my absolute favourite artists of all time and like I said, me trying to sing like him and failing is a big part of my own journey as an artist.”

“3x5” by John Mayer

“John Mayer’s another guy that came around when I was 15. I heard a song of his on a middle-of-the-night, singer/songwriter college radio show. This is where I used to get music. You would listen to these carefully curated playlists that you wouldn’t be able to hear anywhere else, and the host played “No Such Thing”, a new song by this young kid who had just dropped out of Berklee College of Music - John Mayer.

“I’m listening to this song and I’m like, ‘Not only is this guitar playing really interesting, but the lyrical value and everything that is going on here ticks all the boxes.' It was jazz, but it was pop. And he did something that all these other guys and girls I’ve mentioned did. They made something very unique and very accessible.

“I immediately went out to buy this album, Room For Squares, and I listened to it over and over again. It was an album that was really formative for me. "3x5” is a really beautiful song that employs a lot of chord structures and melodies that blew my fucking mind at the time, and it made me wish that I could write songs like that.

“That album was a huge turning point in the way I played the guitar, because it was the first time in my life where I would look up tabs. Up until this point in my life, if I heard a song I could play it instantly. It was like a party trick, I would get how it worked if I heard it, because most of the songs I would hear on the radio - especially those that involved a guitar - were [centred around] power chords. And now I’m hearing all of these ninth chords and thirteenths, and I’m like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ So I’d have to look up tabs.

“I think any young artist can attest to this - when you try and learn other people’s shit, it’s the best tool for educating yourself. Playing other people’s music really helps you lock in what your own style is. Trying to learn these songs - and sometimes pulling it off and sometimes not - really changed the way that my hands moved around the guitar and considered chords and voicings that I’d never really thought of.

“There’s another tie to musical theatre here, where I remember seeing Audra McDonald, who is a very venerated theatre actor, and she did a cabaret. If you’re familiar with cabaret culture, it’s more about performing the story of the songs – ‘Life is a cabaret’. She did a John Mayer song because she thought it was from a musical theatre show, and I was so tickled by this, because I was like ‘Yeah, if you really think about it, I don’t think he knows this and I don’t think his fan base even thinks about this, but there’s a number of his songs that feel very theatrical in the way that the lyrics play with each other and the way the chords move’.

"When I saw this I thought, ‘That is why I like John Mayer’, because yes, he’s an amazing guitar player, but he’s also a really strong songwriter.”

“Cabaret” by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes

“Also, around this time growing up in San Francisco, as a guitar player playing music with your buddies, the number one thing that you play is punk rock. There are different parts of the spectrum of punk rock, there's the NOFX, Swingin’ Utters, like real punk, punk. And then there’s the pop-punk thing that was happening at the same time, which was also equally influential - blink-182 and Green Day.

“Fat Mike was the frontman of NOFX. I loved NOFX, and Me First and the Gimme Gimmes were a supergroup of different members from different punk bands, of which Fat Mike was one of the main architects. They would cover songs and turn them into punk rock songs. They have an album of hits from the ‘60s, and they also have an album called Me First and the Gimme Gimmes: Are a Drag, and that record is just a tonne of musical theatre covers that are done through punk rock.

“That was completely in line with everything I loved at this time of my life but didn’t really know how to articulate. I loved punk rock but I also really loved musical theatre. Not only the performative element of it, but there was a real musicality to musical theatre that wasn’t as present in some of the other shit that was popular at the time, just harmonically, or where chords would go. There was a sophistication I loved that seemed to not exist in punk rock.

“Then hearing Fat Mike at The Warped Tour going ‘Alright, which one of you Motherfuckers loves Julie Andrews?’ and hearing a mixed bag of reactions, because people were ‘What? I was not expecting that from you, sir?’ And then they start playing “My Favourite Things”, a classic Rodgers and Hammerstein song which is very accessible, but sophisticated nonetheless. And I am just living. I’m like, ‘This has got the attitude and simplicity of punk rock, but the sophistication of a beautiful song.’

“That was the first time in my life where I went, ‘It’s just all music. All these categories and boxes are completely arbitrary.’ So I thought, ‘I can do that.' I was playing power chords in punk bands but I realised that you can take chords and make them into other rhythms and voicings and have the same song. I could take a punk song and make it jazz. I could take a jazz song and make it country. So, quite providentially, I would end up on Glee, where they took popular songs and would sometimes do their own versions.

“By that point, I had been doing this my whole life. The first time this ever became a possibility for me was seeing Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, and that way of thinking about music and genre. I’ve put that into Masquerade, and it’s all born from that moment of ‘Oh my God, nothing has to be one thing. It’s just about how you look at it.'

“Cabaret” is from a pretty famous musical that I would’ve probably heard about later in life, but I first heard that song as a punk song and then I went back and heard the original. It doesn’t matter how these things happen, the inspiration happens and then you can go from there. But Me First and The Gimme Gimmes were a huge gateway drug and I play “Cabaret” now every year at my festival. That’s why the festival is called Elsie Fest, because it covers the song.”

“Modern Nature” by Sondre Lerche

“One of the great joys of being a younger brother is that you get to inherit the music of your elders. My brother and I were both really proactive consumers of music, so we would share stuff with each other all the time. But then he would come home from college, which is like coming home from a music festival essentially, right? He was in a new time zone with new people, so he’d bring home these mix CDs that he’d made from people that he’d heard about, and he brings home this guy named Sondre Lerche.

“Hearing this guy blew my mind, because he also was using jazz chords and drawing on musical theatre. Musical theatre’s a massive category, so I can’t just say that musical theatre sounds like one thing, but when I say this, I’m referring to The American Songbook, the jazz standard songbook. “Modern Nature” was a duet that I would go on to play many times with one of my oldest musical collaborators, Charlene Kaye. When we got to college and we both found out that we loved this guy.

“There was a much more whimsical way to how he wrote these songs. And what’s crazy is that loving this guy meant that we also loved Rufus Wainwright, that we also loved these other artists. But Sondre was the first time I considered that I loved that type of music, but I didn’t know that you could be a singer/songwriter and put out music that sounded like it.

“I don’t know if ‘twee’ is the right word to use, but with “Modern Nature” there was a playfulness about it, and again, a musicality that I really gravitated towards. There is a through line - there was a sophistication that was accessible, and me trying to learn those songs did make me rethink the way that I was writing music. The structures were weird and different and I liked that.

“To this day, I find myself writing songs that I think might be difficult for people to ingest, because they’re a little too left of centre, and I realise that I’m trying to write like Sondre Lerche, or I’m unconsciously just copying him.”

“Everything Happens to Me” by Mr Hudson & The Library

“I was in an H&M in Stockholm when I was 21, and I heard this really cool groove and the lyric was “Why must I always play the clown?” It was sung with a really thick British accent, had an 808 feel on it, and lyrically it had an attitude. Who would say something that sounds so like you’re in a Gilbert & Sullivan musical, but it feels hard? It was cool.

“I went home and looked this up and it was off the record A Tale of Two Cities by Mr Hudson and the Library, which would really, really fuck me up. I bought the album immediately because I loved this song. I had to order it on the internet because I couldn’t find it. It was doing well in England and he was on the festival circuit in the early-mid 2000s, but the first song on the album was a musical theatre cover with 808s.

“It was a pared-down, sort of a hip-hop version of “On The Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady, and I’m like ‘No fucking way, this guy gets where my head is.’ I’d thought about punk rock musical theatre, but I never thought about 808s and 909s scoring these beautiful songs. I go down the track list and he has “Everything Happens to Me”, which is another very famous standard, and he had this really cool, what we would now call chill-hop, ‘study beats’ version of this song. I was like, ‘This is it. This guy gets that good music is good music and you can reinterpret it to offer it as a new song.’

“I would later become great friends with Mr Hudson. I got to meet him years later when I was with Columbia Records, and they said to me ‘Who do you want to meet?’ He was at the top of my list. I went to London and we’ve been friends ever since and have created all kinds of music together.

“He told me a story where Tyler the Creator went up to him once at Coachella and said, ‘Oh man, “Everything Happens To Me”, that’s like my song.’ We both wondered if Tyler the Creator knew that it was a Chet Baker cover. And we were thinking how cool it is that you can offer these songs to a new audience through a different lens. Tyler’s a smart guy, he’s very cultured, and I’m sure he did know. But it’s more the idea that if someone experienced this song and didn’t know that it was a cover, and this is like the first time they ever get to experience it.

“Mr Hudson would go on to do his own thing with Kanye and was on 808s & Heartbreak and has had his own career. I think “Supernova” was a hit in the UK, it didn’t really cross over here to The States, but before that moment for him, that Mr Hudson and The Library album changed my life. People use that phrase willy-nilly, but this literally was a turning point in my life. It all had to do with the same thing that happened with these other songs, where I saw someone do what I always wanted to do but didn’t really know how to pull off. Where he had this fusing of old songs delivered through a contemporary lens, but also laced it with his own original material that also employed the things that made that old songwriting interesting.

“It’s like changing the font of a great essay but finding the font and figuring out that that font is its own art form. He really displayed that marvellously on this.”

The Masquerade EP is out now

[rushingheadlong]

POP IN THE SUPERMARKET

Conveyer rock - is it all a hype? Colin Irwin looks at pre-packed pop and talks to the men behind new bands Queen (left) and Merlin

Hype. An ugly, unpleasant word frequently recurring in rock circles. 

Up in the boardroom of a vast record company the fat cigar brigade are scratching heads. Binn and Batman have come up with another surefire hit and they want somebody fresh to market it. They ponder a few names and finally decide on one with slight but clear sexual connotations - suggestively camp. 

Name settled, they work on the people who will be in this new band. They might be able to find a ready-made group to fit the bill but better to mould their own. There's a singer who has been around for a few years. 

He's not great but he knows how to throw himself around a stage, has a hairy chest and can hit the high notes. Give him a new name and he'll do. Somebody knows a lead guitarist who can play a bit and looks good. They can advertise for the others. 

They'll work out a sensational stage act, rig them up in some flash gear, buy them the best equipment and arrange a string of appearances in some influential venues. Plunge a few thousand quid in launching them with advertising and posters and "They'll be the biggest thing since sliced bread," chief fat cigar tells his underlings. 

Session musicians are employed to record the single and being a Binn and Batman special the radio stations label it "chart bound" and play it twenty five times a day. Seeing the glossy photos in the bop mags the kids gather up their pennies and buy it. 

VOILA, stars are born - or manufactured. An extreme form of hype. 

There's also a cliché commonly used in the business about people who have been around for many years and finally make it. It's called talent-will-out. An idealist phrase but there is still a popular belief that if a band is truly talented enough it will win through in the end. 

Yet even the greatest band in the world need a bit of pushing in the first place. When a record becomes a hit it's not always that easy to distinguish between hype and talent-will-out.

If a record company spends astronomical sums of money promoting a band, is it hype? Or is it a legitimate and necessary weapon in the music business? The argument is that the BBC's ever-tightening playlist and the effects on the industry of the three-day week have made it harder than ever for a new group to make it - talent or no. Without a big money machine behind it there isn't a hope. 

The situation is illustrated by two energetic new bands, who both look like breaking. 

Big money has been spent on Queen and Merlin, who have had new singles released during the last month. 

Queen's record, "Seven Seas Of Rhye," is already moving swiftly up the chart, while Merlin's "Let Me Put My Spell On You," is doing well enough to suggest it might follow suit. 

There is no suggestion that either band is a manufactured or manipulated product in the sense of the Monkees. They play the music on their own records entirely themselves and they are both hard at work on the road. 

Yet the question arises as to whether they would be doing quite so well without the resources of big companies behind them. 

In the case of Queen it's Trident Audio Productions and EMI and for Merlin it's Cookaway Productions and CBS.

The one common factor is that money and backing has been provided because the companies have a solid, unshakeable belief in the artists they are promoting. They are indignant about any suggestion of a put-on or that there has been any attempt to con the public. 

Listen to Merlin's producer Roger Greenaway for half-an-hour and there is no doubting his faith in their ability. "They are going to break, I know they are. I'm convinced the record will be a hit."

Nobody's saying exactly how much it has cost to launch either band. "Over a period of months between £5,000 and £10,000" has been spent on marketing Queen by EMI while the figure for Merlin is even vaguer. "A bit, but not a vast amount. Not a fortune by any means."

"Seven Seas Of Rhye" is Queen's second single and was recorded as part of the album "Queen 2" which has just been released. Things started to move for them about a year ago when they recorded their first album for Trident, who have a distribution contract with EMI. 

An advance was paid to them to help with the immediate costs of putting them on the road. 

Review copies of the album - about 400 of them - were sent out to everyone who might conceivably have any influence on the record buying public, from discos to the national press. Copies were personally distributed to radio and TV producers and extensive advertising space was bought in the trade papers. 

The launch for Queen was more concentrated than most artist are entitled to expect. 

Trident were completely behind them from the start and found them their American producer Jack Nelson. EMI promotions men Ronnie Fowler and John Bagnall decided they had a product with an exceptional chance of success and they went all out to exploit it to the full. 

Says Fowler: "Every record we release we work to a pattern of promotion. When I went round with the album it was normal procedure. It becomes un-normal when people start phoning you - that's when you put more effort into it."

Bagnall adds: "It became obvious after a week or so that it wasn't standard promotion that was necessary. We did a more complete promotion job than usual on Queen because we thought they were going to make it.

"They're all good-looking guys and I did a round of teeny papers and all the girls in the office swooned over them. Brian, the lead guitarist, had made his own guitar and a couple of the nationals picked up on that. It was good, gossipy stuff."

Queen's publicity machine was working from all angles because they were also getting external promotion from Tony Brainsby's promotion office. 

He had been involved with them from the time they had been trying to get record producers interested. The intensity of it all paid off when they were invited to do a spot on the Old Grey Whistle Test. Radio Luxembourg latched upon the single "Keep Yourself Alive" and played it regularly. 

Their first tour, supporting Mott the Hoople, got the full works. Local press was saturated with releases about this new band which was shortly coming to their town, elaborate displays were arranged at the front of the house on the night of the concert, local disc-jockeys were informed, and window displays were made in about 200 local record shops. 

"Trident and EMI committed themselves right from the start to this band, to make sure they had a PA which was better than other bands had and to make sure they had the right clothes. Some of their outfits cost £150 each," said Bagnall. "Spending money on a band isn't hype. It wasn't being flash or extravagant for the sake of building an image. It was making sure that everything else was as good as their music."

Not so far removed from the attitude towards Merlin, although it has been on a smaller scale in this case. 

The first Merlin tour, still underway, is rigorous. They are playing ballrooms and colleges all over the country on a lengthy round. 

An ambitious project for a new, unknown band, but it has already been successful in that it has launched them as a name people now know. A full-page advertisement was bought in the MM. That's the sort of treatment you might get if you're Bowie, or Ferry, or even Mick Ronson. But Merlin?

They have only been in existence in their present form since last May. 

They emerged as a result of discussions between Alan Love and Derek Chick about the possibility of forming a band with definite commercial appeal and a glamorous stage act. The idea reached fruition via a band called Madrigal, who had for some time been working the same circuit as Mud before "Crazy" broke for them. 

Madrigal disbanded but reformed with the same drummer and bass player, and Love as singer and Chick as manager. A couple more young musicians were found to join them and Chick started the usual hustling to get them going. 

In due course they came to the attention of Cookaway, and Roger Greenaway was hastily summoned to take a look at them. He had already seen Madrigal and when he saw the new model he immediately saw a big future for them. 

Greenaway says: "I'd been looking for a group of this type for three years - a young under-20s group who can present a good act. There's a lot more showmanship attached to bands now. I wanted an act with a slightly different approach. I was in New York producing the Drifters and I came back especially to hear them."

He quickly took them into a studio to see how they reacted there and among the tracks they recorded was "Let Me Put My Spell On You" which had been written by Greenaway in collaboration with Tony Macaulay. Like Queen, the best equipment and some fancy costumes were bought for them and the launching process was put into operation. 

My own experience of the Merlin project was a couple of weeks ago at Reading Top Rank - a bizarre mixture of precocious boppers, ageing teds, and stern-looking heavies. 

Posters and pictures of the group were plastered all over the place and by the time they eventually appeared late in the evening you had been informed quite thoroughly that Merlin had made a record called "Let Me Put My Spell On You."

Greenaway says of Love: "He's got star quality and he's a great charmer. The guitar player Jamie Moses has got a terrific potential too. I've worked with Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones but for me this guy at 18 is a better player than Jimmy Page was at the same age. He's the sort of player guys can follow - like Jet Harris - he had an incredible following with the guys."

He likens the Merlin launch to a military operation. The career of the group has been minutely planned since October. Accepting that it is almost impossible to get airplay for a new band on the BBC they decided the best way to break them was through a solid mass of live dates. 

The dates were booked, once again the best equipment, including a light show, was bought for them, and distinctive stage costumes especially designed. 

"By the time the tour has ended they will be a really tight band. We are getting support in the regions and you can break a record if you can get regional radio stations and disco plays. I believe this record is a hit and the signs are there. This is a ten-year job as far as I'm concerned."

Not that big money backing is any guarantee of success. 

One of the biggest projects of this type was the launching of young Darren Burn as Britain's answer to Donny Osmond. To their eternal credit the record-buying public didn't apparently want an answer to Mr Osmond and the campaign failed. 

The pop supermarket is not a new trend. The attractively packaged mass-produced record has been a part of the industry for a long time. The early releases of Love Affair, White Plains and Edison Lighthouse for example spring to mind. 

The whole thing is justified for the makers by the fact that they still become hits, thus proving there is a demand for made-to-order records. If the public is willing - or gullible enough - to pay 50p for music created in the boardroom. Well it must be OK.

The Merlin single is blatantly, unashamedly aimed at being a big hit - that seems to have been the one criterion in making it. It has all the ingredients and as the whole thing has been done with concentrated professionalism it will probably be a hit. 

Back to Roger Greenaway: "I don't want to present this as a Monkees type of image. It's not a manufactured group in any way - these guys have all been in other bands. 

"What Merlin are about is success - reaching people. It's so wrong for opposing people to criticise. If Chinn and Chapman go out to reach a particular market at the thing they do best, and they reach them, then they're doing their job. They've filled a gap.

"When this record happens it'll be called hype but we haven't hyped anybody. Not a vast amount of money has been spent on them. It would be silly to have a tour like this without some sort of advertising. All the money that has been spent on them so far has been towards getting them on the road. 

"It's expensive but it's minimal if you think of it as a along term thing."

It may be unfair to associate Queen with the pop supermarket. The group themselves were apprehensive about appearing on Top Of The Pops and the prospect of a hit record. 

They have always regarded themselves as an album band and were concerned about being connected with the chart groups. The fact remains that they have been on the receiving end of a giant campaign to create a best-selling single and album. 

The first album had sold far better than they had anticipated and there was great excitement around Trident and EMI as the second one was being made. Manager Jack Nelson came in virtually every day to play new tracks as they were completed and many discussions followed on which one should be released as a single. 

A special meeting was held between Bagnall, Fowler, marketing manager Paul Watts and a few others to discuss the approach to the release of "Queen 2."

"We talked about the possibility of boxing the album, and other various publicity and posters needed to produce an album we were convinced was going to be one of the biggest of the year. We set a high target for it. 'Seven Seas' isn't a housewives' record so with the daily shows like Edmonds, Blackburn and Hamilton, there's no chance of getting it played, we knew that from the start. But the weekend shows - Rosko, Henry, and D.L.T. - they all flipped over it. I took the records round personally because I felt so strongly about it."

The prime plug, however, is Top Of The Pops. If a record gets exposure on that there is a more than even chance that it will become a hit. He played it to the show's Robin Nash and a couple of days later Nash phoned him and asked him where Queen were. Later he rang back and invited Queen to do a session. 

The band weren't too sure whether they wanted to do it but eventually agreed although even then they didn't know until the last minute whether it would be used because they were half expecting a David Bowie film to arrive and take it's place. But in the end Queen were shown and "Seven Seas Of Rhye" moved dramatically from there. 

"A lot of people have invested an awful lot of time and money in this band but not as a hype," says Bagnall. "The only truth in the music business is that if a band isn't good, no amount of money will get them to make it."

Greenaway may be right that Merlin are one of the most exciting bands to merge since the Beatles. Fowler might be right that Queen are one of the best since the Who. But big business still remains one of the sadder aspects of the music industry today. 

----------

Huge thanks to the anon who brought this to my attention, since I’ve been looking for a copy of this article for ages now! 

Credit for the original scans goes to @Chrised90751298 over on twitter, though I stitched it back together into a single image for ease of posting over there. Open the image in a new tab to see the full-size version!

[gunterfan1992]

Episode Review: ‘Obsidian’ (Distant Lands, Ep. 2)

Airdate: November 19, 2020

Story by: Jack Pendarvis, and Kate Tsang, Adam Muto, & Hanna K. Nyström

Storyboarded by: Hanna K Nyström, Anna Syvertsson, Iggy Craig, Mickey Quinn, Maya Petersen, James Campbell, & Ashlyn Anstee

Directed by: Miki Brewster (supervising), Sandra Lee (art)

Of all the many colorful characters in Adventure Time perhaps none has a more elaborate backstory than Marceline the Vampire Queen. In many ways, Marceline really was the writers’ gold goose, engendering complex story after complex story. By the time the series ended, the vampire’s life had in more ways than one been woven into the very fabric of the show’s mythology.

But because I am a Marceline fanboy—whose zeal for her majesty is rivaled perhaps only by Glassboy himself—I always felt like the show could have done even more with her backstory; I mean, when the series finale aired, there were still plenty of questions that had yet to be answered (What happened to her mom? What is Simon going to do now that he’s “cured”? How did Marcy and Bubblegum meet? Were they romantically involved before the events of the main series? How did it all go south?). Nevertheless, when "Island Song” played for the last time at the end of “Come Along with Me,” I forced myself to push aside this minor, fannish grievance and applaud the show for writing such an excellent character. I didn’t need for every last detail of her life to be explicitly shown on screen. I was happy.

But then, about a year ago, news dropped that one of the Distant Lands specials would really delve into the history of Marceline and Bubblegum’s relationship. In an instant, I tossed my stoic “I-am-satisified-with-what-I-received” mentality right out the window. We were going to get another Marceline episode, and it was going to dive back into her elaborate backstory!?! I could barely contain my excitement as I waited for the episode to drop.

Well, was my excitement worth it? Or was “Obsidian” a big ol’ let down—a tragic victim to grandiose expectations that were never meant to be fulfilled?

I’m quite happy to say that not only was “Obsidian” a remarkable special in its own right, but it is arguably one of the strongest episodes of Adventure Time, period.

The plot of this episode is fairly standard, as far as Adventure Time episodes go: Glassboy (a new character voiced by Michaela Dietz, the voice of Amethyst from Steven Universe) accidentally sets a giant fire monster named Molto Larvo loose on the Glass Kingdom, and Marceline and Bubblegum—who we learn have been living their best cottagecore life together in Marcy’s cavehouse—are forced to save the day. But the series’ writers take this otherwise quotidian adventure idea—a story which, at least on paper, could have easily fit in during any of the show’s many seasons—and employ it as something of a Trojan Horse, using it as a pretense to delve into both Marcy’s traumatic childhood and her and Bubblegum’s romantic history. And, boy, is it a ride!

With regard to the former story thread, the audience learns that sometime after the Mushroom Bomb detonated, Marceline and her mother, Elise (voiced this time not by Rebecca Sugar, but by actress Erica Luttrell, who played Sapphire in Steven Universe), roamed the wastelands in search of shelter; after Marceline’s mother came down with some sort of sickness, she sent Marceline to be on her own. Elise was hoping that this would spare Marcy the trauma of seeing her mother die before her very eyes, but due to some communication issues, Marceline never learned what became of her mother. As such, Marceline began blaming herself for “leaving” her mom to die in the wreckage of the world. This plot thread is perhaps one of the bleakest that Adventure Time has ever explored, and the show does it masterfully, balancing the darkness (e.g., Marceline’s mother coughing up blood) with bright spots of comedy (e.g., the "wazzup” dog) that never feel distasteful.

Likewise, when it comes to the story thread about Marcy and Bubblegum’s romantic history, the special does not hold back. We get to see “Bubbline” at its best and its worst. I have a feeling that the word “fan service” is going to be used by a lot of folks when talking about this episode. As the AV Club writer William Hughes notes, this word is usually hurled around like a pejorative, but it aptly describes the appeal of “Obsidian”. After all, this episode really is “fan service at its finest”—not only does it give the ravenous shippers the story tidbits that they have so long to see (e.g., the moment Marcy gave Bubblegum her rock shirt, Bubbline’s epic break-up), but—and this is very important—it does so in a way that is fundamentally meaningful. “Obsidian” does not feel self-indulgent, unnecessary, or pandering. On the contrary, it is overflowing with deep emotion that allows us to better understand how Bubblegum and Marceline really feel about one another. Sure, over the centuries that the two gals have bummed around Ooo, they have bickered and fought, but deep down, their love is passionate. In many ways, it is like the titular obsidian, which means that nothing short of an enchanted diamond pickax is strong enough to break Bubbline apart for good.

(It’s also quite nice that after seasons and seasons of tip-toeing around the question of Marceline and Bubblegum’s sexuality, “Obsidian” can explicitly focus on their life together, showing the two characters cuddling, kissing, and dancing. In terms of LGBTQ+ representation, it’s a huge leap forward, and I’m so happy that Adventure Time has had a part to play in normalizing queer relationships!)

Marceline episodes almost always featured a catchy diddy, but "Obsidian” really cranks things up to 11 by featuring a whole bevy of catchy songs, several of which are perhaps among the show’s strongest. The first right banger, “It’s Funny,” is the song that plays over the special’s credits. With a grunge-meets-riot grrrl feels, this track really sets the tone for the episode, signaling to the audience that we’re in for, as Lumpy Space Princess once put it, some “drama bombs.” The next standout is “Woke Up,” a brutally honest diss track that Marceline used both to contain Molto Larvo and break up with Princess Bubblegum centuries prior to the start of this episode. This song was written by pop rocker Zuzu, and it—as the kids say—slaps. Layers of fuzzed-out guitar and digitally processed vocals are used expertly to sell Marceline’s emotions and convey how, on the surface, she’s delighted to no longer be under Bubblegum’s romantic spell... even if her heart may not be so sure.

But arguably, the musical jewel of the entire special is “Monster,” a somber ballad that Marceline sings to Bubblegum when they find themselves trapped in the collapsing furnace and are facing what they believe is certain death. Written by indie pop artist Half Shy, this song is, in many ways, something of the inverse of “Woke Up”: soft, happy, and filled to the brim with a sort of love that few are lucky to receive and even fewer can honestly express. Not only does “Monster” finally cement Marceline’s real, visceral love for Bubblegum in song form (remember: almost every prior Bubbline song was either indirect or delivered by an angsty, heartbroken Marceline), but it also “tames” Molto Larvo, allowing him to metamorphose into a strange but harmless cat-butterfly critter. Just like “Come Along with Me,” “Obsidian” proves that the power of love and music will save us in the end—if not physically, then at least emotionally.

Regarding the production-side of things, there’s a lot of praise to doll out. First off, the look and style of “Obsidian” is gorgeous. While “BMO” opted to experiment somewhat with the classic Adventure Time art style, trading cel shading for an almost watercolor feel, “Obsidian” echoes the aesthetic of the original series. That said, there’s an undeniable animation bump—likely courtesy of that sweet, sweet HBO money—that lets Ooo and its denizens shine in all their glory. You can tell that Adam Muto, art director Sandra Lee, supervising director Miki Brewster, and all the members of the production staff really went above and beyond the call of duty. The episode's soundtrack, composed by Amanda Jones, as deserves a shout-out. Jones did an excellent job mixing the chiptune style of the original series with a bass-heavy rock sound that highlights Marceline’s starring role. Bravo!

As another production aside, I should point out that CN/HBO’s decision to make these specials each 44 minutes was the right call. The 11 minute format of the original series often left something to be desired when it came to plot development, as many an important episode was forced to end somewhat prematurely due to time constraints; conversely, the 8-episode miniseries format that the show experimented with during its latter days sometimes felt like too much time (Stakes, Islands, and Elements all had whole episodes that felt like nothing more than the show treading water). The length of “Obsidian”, however, was just right, giving us plenty of time to take in what was happening without ever feeling like it was dragging.

A final aspect of this episode that is worth mention is its many call-backs to previous episodes and characters. “BMO” was mostly a self-contained story that, due to its nature as a prequel in space, really couldn’t reference the Land of Ooo without feeling forced. “Obsidian,” however, throws in everything and the kitchen sink (Adventure Time superfan and all-around cool person Jagm has collected most of them here for those of you who want to see everything laid out nicely). Stand-outs for me include Choose Goose (someone who we really haven’t seen since season five) smuggling sketchy products into the Candy Kingdom, post-Ice King Simon trying his hand at open mic nights, Bronwyn as an adventurous hero, and Finn the (Adult!) Human complete with beard and scars! Of note, Jake does not appear in this episode, except as a tattoo on Finn’s chest. Many in the fandom are now speculating that the events of “Obsidian” take place after our beloved shapeshifting dog’s death. Oh say it ain’t so! Perhaps we’ll learn more in “Together Again.”

Mushroom War Evidence: Unlike “BMO,” which directly referenced the Mushroom War and its fallout (both literally and figuratively), this episode returned to the show’s roots by featuring gobs of explicit hints in throw-away lines or elaborate background pieces. Honestly, there is far too many to list here in a pithy paragraph, but some major references include: the reveal that the Glass Kingdom, like the Fire Kingdom, was created by ‘magic’ blaze from the heavens (almost certainly a nuke); the fact that Marceline and her mother wandered for a time in the debris-filled wastelands following the apocalypse; and the reveal that Marceline spent at least part of her childhood holed up in a bomb shelter surrounded by the bones of myriad dead humans. Honestly, while references to the Mushroom War have always been sad footnotes to an otherwise cheery show; in this episode, however, the references are very graphic, illustrating the sorrow and horror of mutagenic war.

Final Grade: As I said earlier, I’m a Marcy fanboy, so I’m horrible biased, but I don’t care. This episode rocked. Q.E.D.

[thekillerssluts]

Will Butler explains how his Harvard degree developed into his second solo album

“Yeah, it’s terrifying,” Will Butler says, pondering how it feels to be releasing music away from the umbrella of Arcade Fire.

“It’s the classic thing about all writers,” he continues. “The creative process makes them wanna puke the whole time they’re writing something, then they read something back and it makes them feel worse, then a year later they read it and think ‘yeah, it’s okay’. It’s a glorious experience, but it really makes your stomach hurt.”

On the one hand Will Butler is well accustomed to this writing process, being a multi-instrumentalist in the Canadian indie-rock band fronted by brother Win - Arcade Fire. But on his own terms, it’s an entirely new process. Butler’s second solo album Generations arrives five years after his debut Policy, a collection that rattled with a ramshackle charm and what he describes now as a ‘consciously very unproduced’ sound. Arcade Fire wound down from their Everything Now tour in September 2018, leaving Butler with the last two years of playtime. Most musicians, particularly those accustomed to big album cycles, set aside their downtime for family or other musical projects. Somehow Butler’s managed to do both while also completing a masters degree in Public Policy at Harvard.

“I went to school for a variety of reasons but there was an artistic side to it too,” he says. “I have always tried to let music and lyrics emerge from the world that I’m in; you fertilise the soil and see what grows. It was a way to better understand where we are, how we got here and what's going on. You know, ‘where am I from? What's going to happen?’” Both of these questions explored in his degree are used as fuel for Generations.

It’s easy to imagine an album by somebody who’s just pursued a Public Policy MSt to form in reams of political commentary, probably set to an acoustic guitar. However, Butler instead engages character portraits soundtracked by a broad range of thrilling sonics. Opener “Outta Here” is shrouded by a monstrous bass that lurks beneath the depths of the instrumentation before bursting out midway through. “Got enough things on my plate without you talking about my salvation,” he screams.

While the cage-rattling “Bethlehem” is mania underpinned by a thrashing guitar and bubbling synths that help lift the track to boiling point.While there’s no current world leaders namechecked or any on-the-nose political commentary across the LP, the angst of its contents is instantly tangible, backed by the intellect of somebody who’s spent the past few years studying the ins and outs of government processes. A perfect combination, you could say.

This fuel was partly discovered through Butler reconnecting with the music that defined his teenage years: namely Bjork, The Clash and Eurythmics. While these influences certainly slip into frame across Generations, they were paired with something of an unlikely muse: “I got into this habit of listening to every single song on the Spotify Top 50 every six weeks,” Butler explains. “So many of them are horrible, terrifying and just awful but there’s something inspiring about how god damn avant garde the shittiest pop music is now. Just completely divorced from any sense of reality - it’s just layers upon layers upon layers - it’s amazing. It’s like Marcel Duchamp making a pop hit every single song.”

We turn from current music to current events. Navigating Covid-19 with his wife and three kids in their home of Brooklyn, a majority of 2020 has been caught up in family time for Butler. “The summer’s been easier because everybody’s outside, whereas in spring it was like ‘it’s family time because we have to lock our doors as there's a plague outside.’” While being surrounded by the trappings of lockdown since his second solo album Generations was completed in March, the album itself wriggles with the spirit of live instrumentation, which at this point seems like some sort of relic from a bygone era."I think eventually rediscovering this album back in the live setting would be amazing - we’re a really great live band, it’s a shame to not be in front of people."

The source of this energy can be traced back to the way the songs came together; they were forged and finessed at a series of shows in the early stages of the project. “It just raises the stakes. You can tell how good or how dumb a lyric is when you sing it in front of a hundred people,” he reflects. “It’s like ‘are you embarrassed because what you’re saying is true?’ or ‘is it just embarrassing?’ It’s a good refiner for that stuff. I think eventually rediscovering this album back in the live setting would be amazing - we’re a really great live band, it’s a shame to not be in front of people.”

Like his day job in Arcade Fire, Butler’s solo live group is something of a family affair - both his wife and sister-in-law feature in the band, alongside Broadway's West Side Story star, and the student of the legendary Fela Kuti drummer, Tony Allen. Together this eclectic mix of musicians conjures an infectious spirit through the raw combination of thundering synths and pedal-to-the-metal instrumentation; an apt concoction indeed for lyrics that are attempting to unhatch the bamboozling questions that surround our current times.

The timing for Butler’s decision to study Public Policy couldn’t have been more perfect, with his course starting in the Fall of 2016. “I was at Harvard for the election which was a really bizarre time to be in a government school, but it was great to be in a space for unpacking questions like ‘my god, how did we get here?!’” he reflects, with a note of mockery in the bright voice.

“I had a course taught by a professor named Leah Wright Rigueur. The class was essentially on race in America but with an eye towards policy. The class explored what was going to happen in terms of race under the next president. The second to last week was about Hilary Clinton and the last week was about Donald Trump. We read riot reports - Ferguson in 2015, Baltimore in 2016, the Detroit uprisings in the ‘60s and Chicago in 1919 - it's certainly helping me understand the last 5 years, you know. Just to be in that context was very lucky.”

As we’ve seen with statues being toppled, privileges being checked and lyrics of national anthems being interrogated in recent months, history is a complex, labyrinthine subject to navigate requiring both ruthless self-scrutiny and a commitment to the long-haul in order to correct things. The concept of Generations shoots from the same hip employing character portraits to engage in the broader picture.

The writing, at times, is beamed from a place of disconnect (“had enough of bad news / had enough of your generation”), from a place of conscious disengagement (“I’m not talking because I don’t feel like lying / if you stay silent you can walk on in silence”) and from a place of honest self-assessment (“I was born rich / three quarters protestant / connections at Harvard and a wonderful work ethic”).

“I’m rooted in history to a fault,” he says. “My great grandfather was the last son of a Mormon pioneer who’d gone West after being kicked out of America by mob violence. He wanted to be a musician which was crazy - he got 6 months in a conservatory in Chicago before his first child was born. He always felt like he could have been a genius, he could of been writing operas but he was teaching music in like tiny western towns and he had all these kids and he made them be a family band and they were driving around the American west before there were roads in the deserts - literally just driving through the desert! He would go to these small towns and get arrested for trying to skip bills and just live this wild existence.”

Butler’s grandma, meanwhile, was just a child at this point. She went on to become a jazz singer with her sisters and married the guitar player Alvino Rey. “The fact that me and my brother are musicians is no coincidence,” he smiles. “It’s not like I decided to be a musician, it’s down to decisions that were made at the end of the 19th century that have very clearly impacted where I am today. The musical side of it is very beautiful, it is super uncomplicated and a total joy to have a tradition of music in our family...but also in the American context - which is the only context I know - it's also these very thorny inheritances from the 19th century and beyond that influence why my life is like it is.

“For me it’s like, ‘I made my money because my grandpa was a small business owner’ or ‘my grandpa was a boat builder and got a pretty good contract in WW2 and was able to send his kids to college’. Both of which are so unpoetic and unromantic but it is an important thing to talk about, that's a personal political thing to talk about; there's horrifying and beautiful aspects there.”

The lament of “I’m gonna die in a hospital surrounded by strangers who keep saying they’re my kids” on “Not Gonna Die” could well be croaked by somebody on the tail end of a life lived on the American Dream. At times, Butler plays the characters off against each other, like on “Surrender,” which chronicles two flawed characters going back and forth played by Butler’s lead vocals and his female backing singers that undermine his memory; “I remember we were walking” is cut up with the shrug of “I dunno” and “maybe so”. “I found having the backing voices there gave me something to play with,” he explains. “Either something threatening to the main character or something affirming to the main character, just providing another point of view.”

Elsewhere, “I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know” explores the feeling of being unsuitably equipped to unravel the complexities that surrounds us day-to-day. “The basic emotion of that song is very much ‘I don’t know what I can do’ which is an emotion we all have,” he ponders. “There’s also the notion that follows that, like ‘maybe don’t even tell me what to do because it’s going to be too overwhelming to even do anything’.”

Some of these portraits materialised in the aftershows Butler began hosting while on Arcade Fire’s Everything Now tour which found him instigating conversations and talks by local councilman, politicians and activists on local issues. “On some of the good nights of the aftershow town halls, you’d feel that switch away from despair and into action,” he says smiling. “The step between despair and action is possible, that sentiment isn’t spelled out lyrically on the record but it’s definitely there spiritually.”

“I learned anew what a treasure it is to have people in a room. Getting humans in a room can be absurd. And we were having from 5,000 to 15,000 people in a room every night, most of them local. I’m very comfortable with art for art’s sake; I think art is super important and it’s great people can like music that's not political. It was sort of like ‘well we’re here and I know a lot of you are thinking about the world and you’re thinking about what a shit show everything is. You want to know what we can do and I also want to know what we can do!’ So I put on these after shows.”"The dream lineup would be to have a local activist and a local politician talking about a local issue because that’s the easiest way to make concrete change."

Butler would find a suitable location near the Arcade Fire gig through venue owners who were often connected to the local music and comedy scenes to host these events. “The dream lineup would be to have a local activist and a local politician talking about a local issue because that’s the easiest way to make concrete change. Arguably, the most important way is through the city council and state government. The New York state government is in Albany, New York. The shit that happens in Albany is all super important so I wanted to highlight that and equip people with some concrete levers to pull.

“In Tampa we had people who were organizing against felon disenfranchisement, like if you’ve been convicted of a felon you couldn’t vote in Florida, and something absurd like 22% of black men in Florida couldn’t vote and there were people organising to change that - this was in 2018 - and you could just see people being like ‘holy shit, I didn't even know this was happening!’

“These were not topics I’m an expert in - it’s like these are things that are happening. The thought was trying to engage, I’m sad to not be doing something similar this Fall, I mean what a time it would have been to go around America.”

Understandably the looming 2020 election is on Butler’s radar. “It doesn't feel good,” he sighs. “I’ve never had any ability to predict, like 2 weeks from now the world could be completely different from what it is today. There was always a one-in-a-billion chance of the apocalypse and now it's like a one-in-a-million chance which is a thousand times more likely but also unlikely. It’s going to be a real slog in the next couple of years on a policy side, like getting to a place where people don’t die for stupid reasons, I’m not even talking about the coronavirus necessarily just like policy in general. Who knows, it could be great but it seems like it's going to be a slog.”

There’s a moment on the closing track “Fine”, a stream-of-consciousness, Randy Newman-style saloon waltz, where Butler hits the nail on the head. “George [Washington], he turned to camera 3, he looked right at me and said...I know that freedom falters when it’s built with human hands”. It’s one of the many lyrical gems that surface throughout the record but one that chimes with an undeniable truth. It’s the same eloquence that breaks through as he touches on the broad ranging subjects in our conversation, always with a bright cadence despite the gloom that hangs over some of the topics.

The live show is without a doubt Arcade Fire’s bread and butter. While Butler questions how realistic the notion of getting people in packed rooms in the near future is, he reveals the group are making movements on LP6. “Arcade Fire is constantly thinking about things and demoing, it's hard to work across the internet but at some point we’ll get together. It probably won’t be much longer than our usual album cycle,” he says.

You only have to pick out one random Arcade Fire performance on YouTube to see Butler’s innate passion bursting out, whether it’s early performances that found him and Richard Reed Parry adorning motorbike helmets annihilating each other with drumsticks to the 1-2-3 beat of “Neighbourhood #2 (Laika)” or the roaring “woah-ohs” that ascend in the anthem of “Wake Up” every night on tour. It’s an energy that burns bright throughout our conversation and across Generations.

https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/features/interviews/arcade-fires-will-butler-new-solo-record-generations

[dustedmagazine]

Dusted Mid-Year Exchange, Part 1: Activity to Jeff Parker

Irreversible Entanglements

Six years ago, newly moved to Tumblr, we looked for a fresh take on the mid-year best-of list idea, partly to be contrary, partly because some of us had no interest in writing about the same records over and over again. After some discussion — well, a lot of discussion — we decided to turn our mid-year feature into a sort of secret Santa exchange. We’d each nominate two records and each review two records, but, here’s the kicker, they wouldn’t be the same records. We’d trade with our fellow writers, and if it meant that we had to listen to music way out of our comfort zone, so be it.

Since then we’ve had smooth exchanges and rough ones – last year’s was especially testy, but what can you do with such an opinionated bunch—but it’s become a favorite annual event. This year was no different, except that no one was truly revolted by their assignments.

Unlike some years, there was no clear dominant pick, though Six Organs, James Elkington, Makaya McCraven/Gil Scott-Heron, Cable Ties and Irreversible Entanglements all got multiple votes.

We’ll split our individual album write-ups into two posts. Today’s covers records by artists from Activity to Jeff Parker. We’ll get to the rest of the alphabet tomorrow. On the third and final day, we’ll post writers’ lists. Participants included Tobias Carroll, Tim Clarke, Justin Cober-Lake, Andrew Forell, Ray Garraty, Jennifer Kelly, Arthur Krumins, Patrick Masterson, Ian Mathers, Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw and Derek Taylor.

Activity — Unmask Whoever

Who picked it? Tim Clarke

Did we review it? Yes, Tim said, “This music strains at the leash, held tightly in check by the motorik rhythms, while gaseous synths seek to permeate all corners of the soundscape.”

Ray Garraty’s take:

You wouldn’t know that it is a debut album, but then it’s a super band, so that doesn’t count. Vocalist Travis Johnson’s delivery reminds you a symbolist poet reciting some lines from his notebook, neither singing nor reading. Despite referring to violence in song titles and lyrics, this music is as far from violent as it can be. It’s too self-conscious to even carry symbolic violence but when on ‘Earth Angel’ the vocalist with the hook “I wanna fuck around” almost breaks into a scream, it turns into a whisper instead. It’s these small details that unmask the outfit’s postmodern disguise and show that Activity is the real deal, not a half-baked pastiche.

Decoy with Joe McPhee — AC/DC (OtoRoku)

Who picked it? Derek Taylor.

Did we review it? Yes, Derek said, “Decoy is a working group and a heady amalgam that recalls a dream fusion of Atlantis-era Sun Ra, Keith Jarrett’s marathon electric stand with Miles at the Cellar Door, and Larry Young circa his Blue Note moonshot Contrasts, while still relentlessly retaining its own flight plan.”

Jennifer Kelly’s take:

Wow. “A/C” is impressive enough with its wild unfurlings of trumpet and sax, its woozy meditations in bowed and plucked stand-up bass, its incendiary organ bursts, all rooted in jazz, but touching on the hot, experimental outposts of rock and soul and R&B, too. But the second side, “D/C,” is even more exciting, as the tumult of sounds gets more fevered and McPhee breaks out in song. Who can blame him? You want to join in. It’s a mind-bending swirl that boils up and over the edges, heady, excessive and exhilarating. So glad I got to hear this, Derek, and it reinforces the benefits of trading favorites, i.e. finding music that is way out of your normal circuit but, even so, exactly what you need.  

 Sandy Ewen — You Win (Gilgongo)

You Win by Sandy Ewen

Who picked it? Bill Meyer

Did we review it? No.

Andrew Forell’s take:

Experimental guitarist Sandy Ewen appears as much concerned with space as sound. On You Win, she treats her instrument as pure object to explore the minutiae of its potential. Patterns emerge like communications from distant galaxies or the gradual shift and warp of old buildings. The 5 tracks scrape and rumble as occasionally identifiable guitar sounds — feedback hum, plucked strings — flicker from the mix. Best heard through headphones, You Win demands concentration lest one misses the nuanced denaturing and subversion of Ewen’s work, which is as fascinating as it is challenging.  

Fake Laugh — Dining Alone (State 51 Conspiracy)

Fake Laugh · Ever Imagine

Who picked it? Tim Clarke

Did we review it? Yes Tim said, “These sharp, funny, warm-hearted songs are immediately endearing, yet shot through with bracingly sour ingredients.” 

Andrew Forell’s take:

Dining Alone, Kamran Khan’s latest album as Fake Laugh, is a collection of pastel Day-Glo bedroom pop songs that breeze by leaving barely a hair ruffled in their wake. Khan has an ear for a melody, a wistfully pleasant voice and a talent for arrangement that make this album an enjoyable listen but there is a nagging feeling that he is holding something back. Tracks like the finely wrought “A Memory” and Supertramp update “The Empty Party” stand out but Dining Alone feels like an intermediate step on which Khan tries out ideas and seeks a way forward although there is enough here to be optimistic about what might come next.

 Field Works — Ultrasonic (Temporary Residence)

Ultrasonic by Field Works

Who picked it? Justin Cober-Lake

Did we review it? Yes, in a May Dust, Tim Clarke wrote that “Stuart Hyatt’s latest compilation in the Field Works series is an absolute beauty — and timely given it’s being released during a pandemic whose origins may be linked to bats.” 

Derek Taylor’s take:

Most of the listening that I do in the service of reviewing music revolves around discerning who’s, what’s and how’s. Those sorts of taxonomic identifications feel superfluous, not to mention futile when navigating the music on Ultrasonic. Sources I mistook as aquatic (“Dusk Tempi,” “Echo Affinity,” “Music for a Room with Vaulted Ceiling,” and “Indiana Blindfold”) are subterranean, specifically the echolocation emissions of bats. Harp and piano sounds dapple “Silver Secrets” and “Sodalis” as instrumental signposts, but they’re outliers in a program that feels largely electronic and beyond the scope of scrupulous inventory.  

The closest, if admittedly antiquated, genre descriptors I have for these ecology-minded creations are ambient and new age. A seraphic, celestial quality suffuses most of them with sweeping washes of tonal color layering over more definable rhythms and progressions. The combination curiously reminds me of a distant temporal relic that served as childhood gateway to this sort of territory, my father’s vinyl edition of Ray Lynch’s Deep Breakfast. It’s another feeble attempt at a compass point and evidence of how difficult it can be to escape the ingrained habits that influence personal musical consumption.

The Giving Shapes — Earth Leaps Up (Elsewhere)

Who recommended it? Arthur Krumins

Did we review it? Yes. Arthur said, “You feel like you’re being carried into a dream, familiar yet strange.”

Ian Mathers’ take:

There’s just something nice about a record where, a few minutes after putting it on, your partner suddenly remarks “you know, this is very calming”. It’s not that the work of Robyn Jacob (voice, piano) and Elisa Thorn (voice, harp) is soporific or somehow uninvolving, more that there’s a somehow centered kind of deliberateness with which they approach these songs that feels oddly reassuring. The way their voices often echo lines (or slightly altered lines) back at one another can feel vaguely Stereolab-ish, but rather than the coolly pulsing, layered grooves (and transient noise bursts) of that outfit, the simplicity of the arrangements here feels direct and clean and often comforting. But it’s the type of comfort that lets you see the difficulty you’re trying to tackle head-on, not the comfort that swaddles you away from having to deal with the world. It’s more bracing than lulling, in other words, and frequently beautiful at that.

  Irreversible Entanglements — Who Sent You? (Don Giovanni/International Anthem)

Who recommended it? Andrew Forell.

Did we review it? Yes. Andrew Forell wrote, “Who Sent You? is an extraordinary statement lyrically and musically.”

Bill Meyer’s take:

I’m inclined to agree with Andrew Forell. When I first encountered the vocal-focused free jazz of Irreversible Entanglements in 2018, I was more taken by the band’s focused exchanges of energy onstage than I was by their self-titled debut LP as a listening experience. But its successor steps up their already powerful game by easing up just a bit. They’ve let more air and variety into the surging rhythms and interweaving horn lines, opening up space for vocalist Camae Ayewa’s words to land with even more impact and staying power. Ayewa, who also records as Moor Mother, is more of a poetic declaimer than a singer or rapper, and her expressions of cultural memory and existential survival in the face of remorseless racism and economic terrorism boom over the music’s ebb and flow with inspiring authority. While her words are always applicable, this record sounds like it was made to be heard in a time of plague and revolt; when people ask in years to come what record sounds like the middle of 2020 felt, a lot of people will hold up Who Sent You?

  The Jacka — Murder Weapon (The Artist / EMPIRE)

Who recommended it? Ray Garraty

Did we review it? Yes. Ray Garraty said, “this album confirms Jacka’s status among the greatest fallen soldiers of hip hop.”

Tim Clarke’s take:

Despite being a posthumous release whose title refers to the artist’s tragic death by shooting back in 2015, Murder Weapon by Bay Area rapper The Jacka is a surprisingly cohesive listening experience, largely thanks to the lush palette of old-school samples employed on many of these tracks. From the aching strings on early highlight “Walk Away” via the swinging funk of “Can’t Go Home” to the children’s choir on “We Outside,” there’s a warmth and humanity to this sad story that honors the artist’s memory.

 Ka — Descendants of Cain (Iron Works)

Who picked it? Ray Garraty

Did we review it? Yes, Ray said, “Descendants of Cain, Ka’s seventh album combines the epic bleakness of the Old Testament with Brownsville’s hopelessness.”

Tobias Carroll’s take:

Shamefully, this is my first exposure to the music of MC and producer Ka; it’s his sixth album overall, and I’ve got some catching up to do. For an album with a title and cover art that could just as easily fit on a doom metal album, what surprised me was how focused this all was. The album flows beautifully, with music that fits somewhere between sinuous soul and the art-damaged Americana heard on, say, Matmos’s The West — with a handful of cinematic samples topping it off. It’s a perfect match for Ka’s voice, which manages to be textured and beatifically smooth all at once. Some albums paint a picture for the listener; this one is wholly immersive.

Matt LaJoie — Everlasting Spring

Everlasting Spring by Matt LaJoie

Who picked it? Tobias Carroll

Did we review it? No

Ray Garraty’s take:

Matt LaJoie’s technical verbosity is on the spot here, as all the man-made sounds can be mistaken for something Nature produced out of its vast resources. Everlasting Spring is like a small water spring which flows and flows but can’t eventually flow into a river, being forever condemned to be just this spring. Everlasting Spring lasts almost for an hour (if we count a bonus track), and it’s six minutes for every string LaJoie’s guitar has. Not many men can admire nature for that long. The whole album has that New Age-ish feel, when you can start listening to it from any track, and nothing will change in your views on it.

Maybe it does give a good mimesis of what spring sounds like but we still need a change of weather from time to time.

 Mamaleek — Come & See (The Flenser)

Come and See by Mamaleek

Who recommended it? Jonathan Shaw

Did we review it? Yes. Jonathan said, “Their dominant textures are still harsh and confrontational, vocals are still howled and shouted. But there are riffs. There are melodic structures.”

Justin Cober-Lake's take:

As black metal, Mamaleek would hold their own, but there's a persistent work to stretch boundaries here. Come & See keeps a core mix of sludge and anger, but the group's inventiveness keeps the album consistently surprising. The group finds brighter tones than anticipated, even while moving away from metal more toward alt-rock at times, and post-rock at others, and generally finding expressions that require a hyphen. An occasional breakdown touches on jazz or finds its roots in rock 'n' roll. “Cabrini-Green” functions like a suite — track the movements and break the track into its separate pieces — even as it avoids a sort of linear sequence. “Elsewhere” (and, indeed, much of the album) turns out a demented history of hardcore. The record probably won't find much of an audience outside of the metal scene, but listening past the obvious trappings reveals a wealth of influences and a complexity that makes for intriguing listening across genre strictures.

 Jeff Parker — Suite for Max Brown (International Anthem)

Suite for Max Brown by Jeff Parker

Who picked it? Arthur Krumins

Did we review it? Yes. Arthur said, “Following the looped, electronic and eclectic New Breed, Jeff Parker’s latest album expands into an even greater range of off-kilter sonic experiments.”

Tobias Carroll’s take:

Before this year, my knowledge of Jeff Parker’s music came largely from his work with Tortoise. And that’s far from a bad thing; Tortoise is a fine band. But hearing Parker push further into the realm of jazz with Suite for Max Brown is its own form of delight, where precisely-played melodies meet instrumental virtuosity. It’s an eminently listenable album, and one where I’m still noticing new moments of subtle beauty in the mix.

[letterboxd]

Satisfied?

We examine what Letterboxd reviews of Hamilton reveal about the musical’s cultural currency in 2020.

In this absolutely insane year, when our love of movies feels helpless in the face of pandemic-induced economic collapse, some extremely good decisions are being made on behalf of audiences. Studio Ghibli on streaming platforms. Virtual screenings to support art house cinemas. Free streaming of many important films about Black experience. And: Disney+ releasing the filmed version of Hamilton: An American Musical—recorded at the Richard Rodgers Theater in 2016 with most of its original Broadway cast—a year ahead of schedule, on Independence Day weekend.

“Superlative pop art,” writes Wesley of the filmed musical. “Hamilton wears its influences and themes on its sleeve, and it’s all the better for it. Lin-Manuel Miranda and his team employ an unlikely cocktail of not only hip-hop and showtunes, but also jazz (‘What’d I Miss?’), British-Invasion pop-rock (‘You’ll Be Back’), folk music (‘Dear Theodosia’) and Shakespeare (‘Take a Break’) in service of developing an impressively vast array of themes. This is a testament to the power of writing, an immigrant narrative, a cautionary tale about ambition, a tragic family drama, and a reevaluation of who decides the narrative of history.”

2016 may only be a half-decade ago, but it feels like an eon in American political years. With theaters dark and America’s long record of racism under urgent scrutiny, the complex smash-hit lands back in the spotlight at an interesting time. Is Hamilton “the most offensive cultural artefact of the last decade”, as Lee writes? Or “timeless and wholly of the moment”, as Tom suggests? The answer, according to a deep read of your Letterboxd reviews, is “all of the above”.

First things first: why now?

Sophie has a theory:

“Disney executive: Hey we’re losing a lot of money because our parks are closed. How do we start making money again?

Other Disney executive: It might be nice, it might be nice… to get Hamilton on our side.”

Sure, business. Still, it’s historically unprecedented that a Broadway show of this caliber (a record-setting sixteen Tony nominations, eleven wins, plus a Grammy and a Pulitzer) would be filmed and released to the public while it’s still, in a Covid-free universe, capable of filling theaters every night. Will people stay away when Broadway reopens because they’re all Disney+’d out?

No chance, reckons Erika. “I’d still kill to see Hamilton live with any cast… I get why producers are afraid that these videos might hurt ticket sales, but I’m fucking ready to buy a ticket and fly to NY one day just to see as many shows as I can after watching this.”

Not every musical fan has the resources to travel, often waiting years for a touring version to come near their hometown. And even if you do live in a town with Hamilton, the ticket price is beyond many; a daily lottery the only way some of us get to go. So Holly-Beth speaks for many when she writes: “I entered the Hamilton lottery every day for almost two years but I never got to be in the room where it happens… however, this 4K recording of the original cast will do very nicely for now! Finally getting to see the context and performances after obsessing over the music for years was so, so satisfying.”

“Finally” is a common theme. Sydnie writes, “I love this musical with every fiber of my body and it was an extraordinary experience finally getting to watch it in Australia”. Flogic: “To finally be able to put the intended visuals to a soundtrack that I’ve had on repeat for such a long time: goosebumps for 160 minutes.” Newt Potter: “Now I fully understand people’s love for this masterpiece of a musical!”

I’ve got a small query for you.

Where’s the motherfucking swearing? Unsurprisingly, Disney+ comes with some limitations. For Hamilton, it’s the loss of a perfectly placed F-word.

“I know Disney is ‘too pure’ to let a couple of ‘fucks’ slip by,” writes Fernando, “but come on, it’s kind of distracting having the sound go out completely when they sing the very satisfying ‘Southern Motherfucking Democratic Republicans!’ line.”

Will agrees: “Disney cutting ‘motherfucking’ from ‘Washington on Your Side’ felt like sacrilege akin to Mickey Mouse taking an eyebrow pencil to the Mona Lisa.”

Nevertheless, sings Allison:

“Even tho Disney stripped the story of its f***s, Don’t think for a moment that it sucks.”

(Yes, she has a vegan alert for Hamilton.)

Does it throw away its shot?

The crew filmed two regular shows in front of live audiences, with additional audience-less sessions for a dolly, crane and Steadicam to capture specific numbers. The vast majority of you are satisfied. “It’s the most engaging and expertly crafted life filming I’ve seen since Stop Making Sense,” writes ArtPig. “The film does an incredible job of placing you right in the action. It feels like the best seat you could get in the theater. You can see the sweat and spit.”

“Translates perfectly onto the small screen,” agrees Ollie. “There’s a level of intimacy that feels hard to replicate in any other filmed production. We see those close ups, the passion and gusto behind every actor’s performance.”

“Shockingly cinematic for something filmed on such a small stage,” is Technerd’s succinct summary, while Paul praises director Thomas Kail: “He knows when to back away along with moving nearer when appropriate, and the choices always serve to govern the power and stamina of the performances.”

Though cast members’ voices were recorded on individual audio tracks, Noah had a few quibbles with the sound quality. “Some of the audio capture is off in the recording, sometimes voices being too soft or too loud. It’s not immersion breaking, but it is noticeable enough to irk me a little in pivotal moments. Some of the shot composition doesn’t fully work either. Of course nothing is going to be as good as seeing it in person.”

Robert, recalling another recent cinematic escapade of musical theater, lets his poetry do the talking:

“This will do for now until the true movie’s made, Though if Hooper directs, there’ll be an angry tirade.”

I think your pants look hot.

Hamilton fans have their cast favorites, but something about being able to see Jonathan Groff’s spittle and Leslie Odom Jr’s scowls in 4K has you losing it all over again. Several specific shout-outs we enjoyed:

“Daveed Diggs the Legend! Go watch Blindspotting (2018), it’s one of the best movies ever!” —Kyle

“It’s hard to believe anyone will ever top Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr. I already loved him from the original cast recording, but seeing his full performance in all its glory was just godly.” —Erika

“Thankful that it was made possible for me to view with such clarity the phenomenon that is Renée Elise Goldsberry and spectacular Phillipa Soo.” —Thea

“Daveed Diggs was electrifying and Jonathan Groff was absolutely hilarious. If they interacted together the stage would’ve combusted from the sheer will of their talent.” —Nick

This is not a game.

On one hand, the release of Hamilton is sweet relief for music theater nerds riding out the pandemic. A generation of kids knows every word by heart, rapping (this version of) American history like it’s no thing. On the other, the Obama-era musical already feels behind-the-times, even for many Hamilton lovers, and the filmed version has brought that into sharp focus.

“I listened to the OG cast album about 50 times when it came out, the production is about as good as I’d always hoped,” writes Josh. “Since then however there’s been a very important and broader reckoning with the failures of neoliberalism and the Obama years ([from] which this has to be the most emblematic piece of art) and for me personally a drifting further to the left that has resulted in a very different relationship with the material. So my feelings today are a bit more complicated.”

“Hamilton is extremely non-committal about its politics,” writes Sting. “It doesn’t examine much of what Hamilton dictated besides ‘he wants complete financial control of the country’ (which would sound like a fucking supervillain in any other context, including reality).”

That lack of political commitment, reckons Morgan, is what helped Hamilton as a musical become so popular: “It’s fun. It’s catchy. It interweaves trendy and socially relevant artistic tools to infer a subversive subtext, while simultaneously sanitizing and, at times, flat out fabricating the historical narrative and downplaying the brutality of the true origin story, for the sake of appeasing those in power. Classic Bill Shakespeare stuff.”

History has its eyes on you.

Much criticism lies with the fundamental storytelling decision to make a modern ruckus about America’s Founding Fathers, the men (including Alexander Hamilton) who in the late eighteenth century united the thirteen colonies and co-wrote the Constitution. Undisputed titans of history, they also have blood on their hands, and HoneyRose writes that the musical “glorifies these men, and paints them as self-sacrificing heroes, and honestly normalizes and validates slavery, as well as the behavior of slave owners.”

Stevie, who saw the Broadway production as well as the filmed version, confesses: “I’ve tried (I’ve really tried) to understand what makes people lose their minds over this but I’m still completely baffled by the hype… These were horrible men and a romanticism of them through song and dance just seems entirely misguided.”

Sean is not convinced that Hamilton is a hagiography. “I can’t imagine anyone watching all of this and thinking it paints a portrait of the Founding Fathers as anything other than childish, greedy, venal and self-aggrandizing.” Wesley agrees: “I don’t think Hamilton is trying to be a history lesson, so much as a lesson about how we think about history. It’s a compelling human story told in a revolutionary way.”

That “revolutionary way” is the musical’s central conceit: that of a cast-of-color playing the white founding fathers as they bumble towards independence. Journalist Jamelle Bouie, who regards the musical as “fun, exciting, innovative and, at points, genuinely moving,” wrestles with the “celebratory narrative in which the Framers are men to admire without reservation. Through its casting, it invites audiences of color to take ownership of that narrative, as if they should want to take ownership of a narrative that white-washes the history of the revolution under the guise of inclusion.”

It’s complicated for Matt, too: “It’s widely agreed upon that the show encapsulates the Obama era better than anything, how it coddles white liberals with a post-racial vision of history in a superficial sense, overlooking the insidious and oppressive systems that they benefit from (hearing the audience clap to ‘Immigrants, we get the job done’ unsettled me). Of course hopefully its legacy will be that it opened up more Broadway roles for POC. But I really think that the show doesn’t make Broadway more appealing and accessible to POC, it just makes hip hop more accessible to white people, a launching pad of course to listening to Watsky or something.

“No hate though to anyone that’s completely in love with this, it’s definitely worth seeing despite any hang ups.”

I wanna build something that’s gonna outlive me.

The story doesn’t end, just because the music does. Kai_Kenn has a suggestion: “I have been a part of discussions that dissect the culture that created Hamilton, as well as the culture that Hamilton created, and whether or not Hamilton appropriately addresses the modern issues [that] the cult following proposes it does.

“This is an ongoing discussion that I am trying to be an active listener in and, if you consider yourself to be a conscientious consumer of art, you should too.”

Noah is on board with that: “Reflecting on the past and focusing on the future are not two mutually exclusive actions. Both are a must, regardless of who you are or what you do. A five-star experience in a four-and-a-half-star film. I think that’s just fine.”

Related content

Want to see more of the key cast? Watch Daveed Diggs in ‘Blindspotting’; Renée Elise Goldsberry in ‘Waves’, Jonathan Groff repeat his role as Kristoff in ‘Frozen 2’, Lin-Manuel Miranda in ‘Mary Poppins Returns’, Leslie Odom Jr. in ‘Harriet’, Phillipa Soo in the forthcoming ‘Broken Hearts Gallery’, Christopher Jackson in the forthcoming ‘In The Heights’, Jasmine Cephas Jones in ‘The Photograph’, Okiereriete Onaodowan in ‘A Quiet Place II’ and Anthony Ramos in ‘Monsters and Men’ and ‘A Star is Born’.

Ways to support the Black Lives Matter movement

Official Black Lives Matter’s Resources

Teenagers that have ‘Hamilton’ stuff on their bedroom walls

Films where they mention ‘Hamilton’

[tisthenightofthewitch]

Ghost’s Tobias Forge talks about being sued by Nameless Ghouls, spurned by the Vatican and immortalized in plastic effigy

When it comes to Swedish bands, Americans tend to think of pop icons like ABBA, black metal acts like Bathory, or the odd alt-rock band like The Cardigans, after which we stop thinking about them at all.But that was before the band Ghost began its slow yet inevitable ascent. Hailing from Linköping, a city in Sweden known for its ornate cathedrals, the bandmembers concealed their secret identities beneath elaborate costumery, a time-tested tradition fostered by bands like Kiss and The Residents. 

Occupying centerstage was Papa Emeritus, a skull-faced character fond of ghoulish corpse paint, a high-pointed hat and ornate papal vestments decorated with upside-down crosses. Standing stock-still at the microphone, his face frozen in a miserable scowl, the singer appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be hovering at death’s door or just beyond it. His bandmates, unceremoniously referred to as “Nameless Ghouls,” wore hooded robes and black masks, a look that soon began showing up at European cosplay conventions.

While this combination of corpse-paint, national origin and grinding guitar riffs led some critics to liken their sound to Swedish death metal, the keyboard-heavy liturgical vibe of Ghost’s early music arguably owed more to classic Pink Floyd.

That’s especially true of “Secular Haze,” the breakthrough single from their 2013 sophomore album Infestissumam. Following its release, the band put out the Dave Grohl-produced If You Have Ghost, a five-song covers EP that includes the Roky Erickson song of the same name, as well as renditions of Depeche Mode’s “Waiting for the Night” and, appropriately enough, ABBA’s “Like a Marionette.”

But 2013 also had its share of disappointments, including the ascension of Pope Francis, who was elected on the fifth ballot, thwarting Papa’s hard-fought and highly publicized campaign for the position.

The rest is history, of a sort. Following a series of European dates with Metallica, Ghost are now embarking on an arena tour of their own that will include an Oct. 1 concert headlining the Broadmoor World Arena. Their single “Cirice” won the 2016 Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance, while their most recent album Prequelle and its single “Rats” were respectively nominated in this year’s Best Rock Album and Best Rock Song categories.

Along the way, the band has gone through a succession of Pope characters —  Papa Emeritus I, Papa Emeritus II, and Papa Emeritus III — who have since been replaced by the far more kinetic Cardinal Copia, who has more of a mafioso image and hyperactive stage presence. All four frontman roles have been played by Tobias Forge, whose identity was outed two years ago when four former Nameless Ghouls filed a since-dismissed lawsuit alleging unpaid wages.

Ghost have also undertaken a series of musical transitions that became especially obvious with last year’s Prequelle, a concept album that employs the 14th-century black plague as an allegory for our current troubles. While Forge hasn’t fully abandoned his band’s past sound, tracks like “Rats” veer toward the ’70s arena-rock sound of Def Leppard, Foreigner, and even Journey, with whom the band toured last year.

In the following interview, Forge holds forth on a wide array of subjects, including litigious ex-Ghouls, the Swedish anti-vaccine movement and his alter-ego’s forthcoming immortalization — alongside legendary artists like Prince and Jean-Michel Basquiat — as a Funko Pop! figurine.

Indy: Let’s begin by talking about the concept behind your most recent album. It opens with that really creepy version of “Ring Around the Rosie, ” which is always a good way to start an album about the bubonic plague. Was there any specific reason why you chose that theme at this particular point in history?

Tobias Forge: Well, I think there are important lessons to be learned from all chapters of history. The plague was an epidemic that wiped out half of Europe, and, we can assume, traumatized the Asian population as well. And back then, people in general were uneducated, they were superstitious, they were religious, they believed in hocus-pocus. So it must have literally felt like the end of the world was just going to happen tomorrow. And that is always an interesting concept. Because we know now that it was not the end of the world. You know, mankind persevered. So while I believe in environmental issues, and that there are a lot of things that can be done in order to make the world a better place, I also think there’s not as much doom and gloom as it may appear.

So what would you say are the lessons we can learn from that period?

I guess the most simple and most obvious one is that we can debate forever — all day and night — about what happens after we’re dead. But I can promise you that we do not know. We can hope for there to be an afterlife, or 72 virgins, or whatever else is on your wishlist. But there’s no way of knowing. And anyone who tells you that they know, they are lying because they want something from you, or they want you to believe in something. And so I think your time and your energy will be better spent trying to embrace life instead of being wary of death. Because life is fragile, and you don’t know if you’ll have another one.

And then there’s this myriad of human instincts that comes into play when apocalypse is near, and one of them is who’s to blame for this, that, and the other. Back in the plague days, as I said, there was this predominance of religious people who believed in hocus-pocus and were pretty uneducated and pretty fucking dumb. They believed that female sexuality was to blame for essentially God abandoning mankind. So while you had people dying off in droves, you also had these people killing women because they were good-looking or, in one way or another, enticed some sort of sexual arousal. And that was obviously the work of the devil, and while they were alive, they would interfere with the survival of mankind. But unfortunately, those kind of very uneducated and outright stupid people are still well-represented in the world, and it’s very important that we address that.

Since you’ve researched and written about all this, I’m curious what you think about your country’s decision, back in March, to ban mandatory vaccinations.

Oh, that’s a good question, but I don’t really have a good answer. But I do think that there is a dichotomy between what the population might need, and what a pharmaceutical company needs for its own benefit. I’m trying not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but about 10 years ago, there was an outbreak of a flu, and companies would have entire offices vaccinated. And, on first glance, it’s like, “That’s great how society and all these bosses and corporations came together.” And I’m aware that the number of people that actually came down with it was not that many. So was that because of this shot, or was it because maybe the threat wasn’t as great as they were saying it was? Because, more often than not, there’s an economic incentive somewhere for someone. But not being a biologist nor a chemist, I don’t know anything about stuff like that. So, as I said, I don’t have a straight answer.

On a happier note, Funko’s Papa Emeritus II doll came out last month…

Yes, speaking of monetaries. [Laughs.]

That’s right. And I have to say, I’m really impressed by how realistic it is, especially in the way it just stands there and doesn’t do anything. How does it feel to be immortalized in that way?

I don’t really see it as that. I mean, when I sort of regard anything that we have done, even a photo, I don’t necessarily think of it as me being in that photo. I’m just sort of detached from the character on the visual side, which is to my benefit, actually. I’m way too vain, so I would have had a problem if it was my face that we were working with. So having the sort of official visuals of Ghost is actually quite liberating.

I understand that you started out playing in punk and death metal bands. Was Ghost the first time that you got to indulge your pre-The Wall Pink Floyd side?

No, I have played non-death metal in other bands before. But when Ghost started taking shape, I think I just found a way to write songs that sort of tick both boxes — one box being melodic pop-rock, or whatever it is, and the other being sort of metal. It felt playful, and it felt intuitive and progressive, for lack of a more fitting word. Whereas in the past, it’s like the metal bands were metal, and the rock bands were rock, and they didn’t combine the two. So I definitely found it more effective, and way more fun, to do something in between. Your stage presence is way more kinetic these days, although pretty much anything is more kinetic than standing in front of a microphone and scaring people. But you’re reaching the point now where the choreography in a video like “Rats” is borderline Michael Jackson. Is that the result of having more personal confidence these days?

Yeah, I would definitely say that. There are critics of the band who feel that the less animated version in the beginning was better and more ominous, and that we should still be embracing that. But a lot of the cryptic nature of Papa I was due to being constrained by the costume and the size of the stage.

And now we’re playing bigger places, where there’s way more ground to cover and there isn’t a single cord onstage that you can trip on, so of course you have to move around, right? I mean, if we were onstage now for two hours with that sort of unanimated version we were doing back in 2011, people would be demanding their money back. It’s just part of growing. You can see the same thing if you look at a clip of the Rolling Stones from 1964. Mick Jagger is Mick Jagger, but he’s definitely not the Mick Jagger that you see in 1969 or 1972. It takes time to build that confidence and find your own way of moving around.

I know you campaigned really hard for the pope’s job back in 2013. And I think a lot of your fans were really disappointed when the smoke came up the chimney and it turned out you didn’t get it. Do you think that your losing out to Pope Francis was the result of Vatican corruption?

Sure, most things going on there are because of corruption anyway. So I’m sure that was one of them. Or it might also have been my lack of faith — or my lack monetary means at the time — that prohibited my exaltation within the ranks of the Vatican.

And finally, I have a question about that lawsuit. Do you think that if you’d given names to your Nameless Ghouls, they would have been less vindictive?

You mean, if I’d given them names instead of making them completely anonymous? Probably, I guess. It’s hard to say. Because with most people that are drawn to the performance stage, you do so with a certain inclination to be seen and appreciated. So maybe if our positions were reversed, I would have felt the same way. Until seven or eight years ago, I really wanted to be famous, so my idea of being in a band was definitely different from what it turned out to be.

I’ve been in charge and working on this full-time, nonstop, for 10 years. Other people in Ghost would work a few hours every day, and then, during the four months between tours when I was making a record, they weren’t really doing anything that had to do with Ghost. And since I was representing the band at all of the meetings, I was getting pats on the back and feeling like what I was doing was good. Whereas, if you had nothing to do with the day-to-day stuff, you maybe didn’t get the pat on the back that you needed in order to feel fulfilled in life. So, you know, maybe if they had gotten their name on there, and could at least be recognized in the street, maybe that would have changed things. But on the other hand, I’ve played with others who didn’t give a shit about that happening.

COLORADO SPRINGS INDEPENDENT

[interesting-blog-name]

LOOSE REVIEWS (It Looks Sad., Pablo’s Paintings, Vancouver Sleep Clinic, Steve Lacy)

Just a bunch of very quick, very throwaway reviews that I put together while I’m writing the Björk discography post (I’m currently at Vespertine, so this shit is gonna take a while). Mostly slightly underground bands, all very short projects and one of them don’t even have a project, but you should check them out. Anyway.

It Looks Sad. – Songs For Quarantine

Not much to say about this. It is a 9-minute EP, obviously not meant to be taken as a serious, ambitious release, but it’s from a band I wanted to check out: It Looks Sad.. They’re categorized as emo, but their style reminds the listener a lot more of shoegaze and dream pop, at least from what I’ve heard by them (right now, this and Drool, which fits cozily in my Summer playlist).

If you want some moody music for the quarantine (if it’s still going on by the time I post this) and you don’t care if the songs sound like they were recorded in an underwater cave, then go ahead and listen to this I guess. It’s average as fuck but whatever, that’s the point.

 WORST TO BEST: Eyes, Love, Waves, Bug

 bedroom music/10

“*insert shoegaze mumbling here*”

 It Looks Sad. - Kaiju

2015 EP. Two tracks, one sucks and the other is tolerable. Like I really don’t know what the fuck the singer was trying to do with Creature, he’s hollering all over the place, and the delivery would be more at home in maybe some poorly-recorded punk song, but the instrumental is nothing like that, as it’s pretty much indie-rock 101; not to mention the lyrics, which are the blandest broken-hearted songwriting I’ve heard yet, probably. I now understand how truly emo they were.

For Nagoya, I can at least say the hook is pretty cool, but that’s it really. I guess I’m grateful they changed their style.

 2.45/10

“Best friend this is terrible. You know it’s inevitable. I hope you come back, I hope he comes back.”

 Pablo’s Paintings

Just wanted to give a shoutout to the underground Leeds, Yorkshire band Pablo’s Paintings. I had listened to Lizard a long while ago, and loved it, so I decided to check out the rest of their stuff today (May 25th), and it’s very solid. The track You’ve Got A Long Way To Go draws heavily from a psychedelic influence, while Paint’s Gone Dry and So Long (All Your Friends) sound like something The Beatles would maybe write.

I guess you could call them formulaic, but their mixing and distinct sound are all pretty good for a band that hasn’t gotten a song with over 2000 streams on Spotify. Their songs can be a little to bubblegum-ish, such as So Long (All Your Friends) which doesn’t really stand out as many others, but for the most part, they deliver. Can I Draw You Something? has a slight edge to it, in comparison, but still sporting cute lyrics about just drawing for someone, and Ghost In The Machine has a great progression to it, and a very cool cover art to accompany it. It’s clear the band has a taste for visual arts, from the lyrics to the band’s name.

In short, they do have a long way to go, and I hope they release an album soon, considering all but two of their Spotify singles were from last year; I’d be the first to listen to it.

 WORST TO BEST: So Long (All Your Friends), Paint’s Gone Dry, You’ve Got A Long Way To Go, Can I Draw You Something?, Lizard, Ghost In The Machine

 good band check them out/10

“I draw these lines and take them for a walk. I find that I say things better when I don’t need to talk”

 Vancouver Sleep Clinic – Winter

Contrary to the name, the band Vancouver Sleep Clinic is from Australia. Led by ambient singer (a term I didn’t know existed until today) Tim Bettinson, from my understanding, the band have partly built their audience by reeling people into the music by putting having the songs feature in TV shows and movies and whatnot, since there’s a hefty list of times their songs have appeared in this type of media on their Wikipedia page. I decided to listen to Winter because I discovered Stakes from the fact that the $uicideboy$ sampled it on the song Sold My Soul To Satan Waiting In Line At The Mall, and liked it a lot. The EP as a whole, however, not nearly as much.

To start off with the main problem I have with Winter, the tracks are all the same. Seriously, I cannot distinguish one from the other; all the songs are soaked in reverb and mainly center around simple acoustic guitar chords and generic pianos, mixed with Tim’s head voice and sometimes the dumb decision to include a synthesized drumming track, like in Vapour, where the fast-paced hi-hats sound so out of place and clip so badly in your ears, it sounds like your earphones are having a mini seizure, but not in a cool way. Meanwhile in Flaws, there’s this unnecessary, wack finger-snapping that makes it sound like I’m listening to some techno song with around 3000 views on YouTube (I do like his backing vocals in the track though).

At its best, tracks like the opener, Collapse, offer an actually powerful passage, in that song’s case, the hook breakdown, where the 808 drum patterns are actually very welcome, and the synths under it are very beautiful and harmonize really well. The final track, Rebirth, also attempts a grand breakdown of sorts, but falls flat because the song is so unnecessarily stretched out and weirdly segmented, and it’s so unexpected: the song is a slow piano/guitar ballad as usual, and then, around 3 minutes in, after the song fades out almost entirely and tricks you into thinking it ended, the drum kicks start rising and all of a sudden there’s... something? I don’t even know what instruments are playing apart from the  superimposed drums and what I think is an electric guitar, because it sounds like god knows what, an overheating computer mixed with some shrieking sound, which I assume is the guitar, way off in the background. And then Tim sings a last verse and the song suddenly ceases to exist. Same thing happens with the shortest track here, (Aftermath), consisting of 4 lines, your average piano and strings, and of course, the reverb. It builds up an epic instrumental, and after the brief singing section, just ends. No further instrumental work, just woosh. It’s gone.

I will give credit to Tim’s verses. Even though they’re always delivered with the same intonation, his lyrics are alright, and at least in Stakes, he employs some backing vocals that really make the track, and the hook is magnificent. They tend to blend into one another, with constant themes being metaphors for words he should have or regrets saying, the cold (obviously, given the EP title), sometimes drowning/large bodies of water, and of course, all tracks are about melancholy and heartbreak. But in some parts of the EP, his verses really do feel like some alright poetry, such as the awkward last verse in Rebirth (“I’m starting again, tearing my flesh, stripped to the bone, the all that I’ve grown. Leaving behind, breathe like a child. It’s taken the winter to find who I am”) or the already mentioned beautiful hook in Stakes. In most of the songs, however, I find his themes to be too repetitive and, I wouldn’t say uninspired, but run-of-the-mill.

So overall, the EP doesn’t amount to much. All the tracks attempt to go this emotional route, but they’re very repetitive, and that numbs them and robs them of their emotion a lot. Listen to it if you want to relax, or maybe even sleep to it if you want to take their name literally.

 WORST TO BEST: Vapour, Flaws, (Aftermath), Rebirth, Collapse, Stakes

 4/10

“I sunk in oceans blue, now they’re all frozen over. I should have took your hand, we should have crossed the border.”

 Steve Lacy – Steve Lacy’s Demo

Member of The Internet, singer-songwriter, guitarist, bassist, drummer and producer Steve Lacy is an artist I’ve wanted to check out for a while. I have at some point in my life heard his song Looks, off this demo, but thankfully I forgot how it went so I can check it out again. It’s gonna be a quick listen and review, but I’m curious (and while looking him up I found out he won a Grammy with Kendrick’s DAMN., for producing, backing vocals and songwriting, so that’s cool, congrats Steve).

Right away, I’ll just mention this project is very lo-fi. As in, the drums and his voice are poorly mixed. I’ll give it a little bit of a pass because this man played all the instruments in here and I appreciate the fuck out of that, but anyway. You can tell right at the first track that singing isn’t Steve’s forte, at least in this album, at this time. The hook in that song is just bad, the good part are the instruments, the guitar riffs and the very dynamic bassline, plus the fun little bongos. However, just like all songs here except Dark Red, this is waaaaaaaay too short. It has two short hooks, the verse, and that’s it. The songwriting, I feel, is one of Steve’s more substantial talents; this song I just mentioned is mainly about how a relationship can’t progress because the two involved don’t like much about each other apart from their looks, and Ryd is all about taking a girl to your backseat, but even though these themes are very simplistic, Steve fleshes them out into something more interesting and melodically rich. In Ryd, his smooth vocals surf over the sunny riffs, but what takes away from it are the weirdly mixed drums, as they sound like they’re playing way louder than they should be. The track is groovy though.

The most focused song here, Dark Red, tells the story of a man who’s worried his girl might leave him soon. The instrumentals are nothing special, very basic, and same with the vocals, even though they’re more rooted and solid in this song. The next song, Thangs, emphasizes its bass way more than other songs, but once again, Steve’s voice is not pleasing to listen to, specifically his high-pitched backing vocals, they’re awful. The lyrics are the most basic here, and this song just goes by without leaving any impact after ending pretty abruptly.

Haterlovin is weird. The vocals are way too low, but I like how they differentiate themselves by not going the melodic route, instead Steve chooses to rap them, and his flow in the verse is impressive, but at the same time the hook is way too repetitive for the song to work, and even though it’s nice he switched up and focused the track on the drums, it still leaves it pretty bare.

To close it up, Some brings some promise, with a pretty funky bassline and hook, but then ends out of nowhere and starts a hidden track, Snaily, which I admit has nice falsetto vocals from Steve, but I don’t know why I couldn’t be a separate track. Overall, the album isn’t great, but I appreciate how organic and talented Steve is. Throughout the songs, his creativity is pretty noticeable, so I can’t hate his efforts, but unfortunately his ideas don’t find the right light to shine here.

 WORST TO BEST: Thangs, Haterlovin, Looks, Some, Dark Red, Ryd

 4.5/10

“Next thing I know she was feeling on me, and I was in the M double-O D when she said park my car down the backstreet”

[djdavidbonobo]

Raices & Resistance: The Liner Notes

             Raices & Resistance: The Brown Sounds of L.A. 2000-2010

     There are sometimes fortuitous moments when the spotlight on music falls in just the right place at just the right time: New Orleans during the 1920s, San Francisco in the Age of Aquarius, or Seattle in the Grunge Era. Each moment different, but equally a watershed. Then, there are also the times and places where the seeds of genius are budding all around, but those pioneers of the day are ahead of their time, or they simply don’t get the financial or promotional watering that they need to flourish. Think of New York’s Jazz scene during WWII, or the American pioneers of Punk Rock in the early 70’s. Those eras are the ones that are most akin to what happened in L.A.’s Latin music scene of the 2000s. 

     At the end of the 90’s, Ozomatli had gained much deserved recognition with the release of their eponymously titled debut album in 1998, and it seemed as if the spotlight was about to fall on the Latin music community right when it was in the beginning of a renaissance. Yet, when the new millennium came, times were tough everywhere, and nowhere could this be more clearly seen than in the music industry. Internet platforms like Napster made free online music downloads ready for the masses, and caused the industry’s near collapse. MySpace emerged as the first social media platform for new musicians to connect with audiences, but it lacked the reach of today’s YouTube and Facebook. As the L.A. Times noted in 2004, “Major multinational labels, struggling with an economic downturn, are reluctant to invest what it takes to break new acts, especially in a genre (like Latin Alternative) that gets little airplay and needs significant label support.” 

     By the 20teens, things were looking very different as the music industry had reinvented itself (albeit with missing limbs and less money in the bank), and it had again turned its eye toward the L.A. Latino music community with Grammys handed out to Quetzal and La Santa Cecilia. The buzz of L.A.’s Latin talent was spreading to audiences in the U.S.’s Spanish speaking communities, so as the economy began to resurge, bands were having an easier time with self-marketing, tours, and album sales.

     So who was there during this creative explosion of L.A.’s Latin music community of the 2000s? And what were the common threads running through this musical tapestry? These are important elements to consider when creating a title for this compilation, and the diversity of the scene made this a difficult task. Not all of the artists were rock. Most sang in both English and Spanish. A couple of them only sang in Spanish. Most had roots in local community oriented civil rights activism, but not all. Hmmm. Simple, yet complex. Despite the eclectic range of all these artists combined, they were (or still are) a close knit group of musicians: a musical community. For example, I don’t know all of them personally, but I know that there is no more than one degree of separation between me and any of the artists on this compilation.

     There were community centers and connections like the L.A.C.E.R. after school arts program where many of the artists on this compilation worked and met. There was Tia Chucha’s, Smoke N Mirrors, S.P.A.R.C., Casa 0101, KillRadio.Org, KPFK and others. The abuelita of them all? Self-Help Graphics. These cultural centers gave a platform for artists in the community, and deserve credit for fostering the incredible music that continues to emerge from the Latin community. The EZLN movement in Chiapas was still fresh in peoples’ minds in the 2000s, and it fostered things, too. It was a revolutionary inspiration in the face of the post 911 America when gentrification began to sweep through the eastside of L.A., and The South Central Farmers were forced off their land to make way for so called “progress.” Bush was president, the country went to war under false pretenses, and we forged a spirit of resistance for new immigrants, Indigenous peoples, urban gardening, art, love, peace, and understanding. Some things change. Some don’t.

     By the 20teens, in the wake of the creative explosion that happened during the 2000s, came a time when the spotlight came back around to this same community with Grammys given to Quetzal and La Santa Cecilia. Latin Electronica game to be included under the larger category of Global Bass. The rise of Subsuelo also came, along with the rising careers of artists like Captain Planet, Rafi El, Buyepongo, Las Cafeteras, The Boogaloo Assassins, and more. My ultimate hope is that we can all see the debt owed to these pioneers of the 2000s, and that we never forget their musical legacy. With 60 million Latinos living in the United States in 2020, the audience for this music ain’t going no where!

     Note: I know some of you out there will be disappointed in the selections I made, and that’s okay. We can only see things from our own perspective and the experiences that inform it., These are the artists that I experienced, and this is just a sampling of some of my favorite songs. If Menoman or Mark Torres did this, you’d probably get a totally different angle. Also, know that I did my best to research all of the artists and tracks listed here, but sometimes that information was not available. In those instances, I had to employ my imperfect memory. You can post a comment to let me know corrections that should be made, or share out who think I should have also included (but remember, only artists with releases during the 2000s). 

Agave Ocotillo (Fósforo - Even The Sun 2005): The trio consisted of three high school friends that grew up in the San Fernando Valley. Proving themselves to be beyond the scope of their peers in both musical and lyrical range, Fósforó penned their sound as Punky Reggae Jungle. Playing with rhythms such as Reggae, Jungle, Drum-n-Bass, Cumbia, Rock and more, vocalist/songwriter Rafi B. of Argentinian and Israeli descent, also sang in English, Spanish and Hebrew. Fósforo would forge an alliance with L.A.’s other Latin Electronica pioneers: Mezklah. Rafi B. would later become DJ/Producer Rafi El for the Dutty Artz label while Cesar Ventura would become a percussionist for the Fania label’s Boogaloo Assassins. The song featured here is a poetic homage to the enduring strength of “La Raza.”

Crazy Baldheads (Quinto Sol - Barrio Roots 2003): The name “Quinto Sol” is Spanish for the “fifth sun,” and it is a reference to the Aztec myth of creation and destruction. The band got their start in 1994, but Barrio Roots was their first full-length album release. Quinto Sol has intimately connected themselves to the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, and they have used Roots Reggae as a vehicle to delve into their own Meztizo roots. Their latest album, Spirits of the Martyrs, was released in 2014.

Chango AraÑa (Mezklah - Spider Monkey 2005): Making their stage debut in 2000, Mezklah emerged as the first Latin Electronica band in North America. Borrowing music from around the globe, singer/songwriter Angel Garcia and guitarist Greg Hernandez forged a sound that was Spanish/Bilingual, but completely different from their contemporaries. They crafted bass heavy electronic rhythms to fuse Cuban Son, Reggae, Drum-n-Bass, Blues, Hard Rock, Psychedelia, Cumbia and more into tightly structured and hook filled socially conscious pop songs ready for the dancefloor. In 2004, they were nominated by L.A. Weekly as the city’s best World Music/Recombinant Artist, and in 2005, they won L.A.’s Battle of The Bands. After one album and an EP, as well as tours in Mexico and the Southwest, Europe and Japan, Mezklah disbanded in 2010. They announced their reformation on KPTZ 91.9 FM in December, 2019. A new album is expected in 2020.

Cumbia de la Flor (East L.A. Sabor Factory - Party At Louie’s 2002): Headed up by frontman Ricky Ray Rivera, the trajectory of East L.A. Sabor Factory was straight up when they first appeared on the scene 1999, but unfortunately, their momentum didn’t carry them far enough. They changed their name after the release of Party At Louie’s, and broke apart shortly thereafter. This track captures the danceable high energy of the band and was a crowd favorite when they played live, but doesn’t feature Rivera’s bilingual rapping. In 2007, Rivera would go on to release a solo album titled Neighborhood Fame.

Nada Mio Es Fake (Los Abandoned - Mix Tape 2006):  No other artist arising in L.A.’s bilingual music community seemed like such a clear bet to wear the glass slipper of success as Los Abandoned. They were sharing the stage with the likes of Café Tacuba, The Breeders, Julieta Venegas, Molotov, and Aterciopelados, and they signed with Neil Young’s Vapor Records in 2005. They released a Christmas single and two EPs before releasing Mix Tape as their first full length album in 2006. The critics loved them, their songs were catchy (the pop song I’m featuring here was not even one of their released singles), and they had a sexy singer. Vocalist Lady P. (Pilar Diaz of Chilean descent) was the primary creative force behind Los Abandoned, and just as their success was in full bloom, she called it quits in 2007. Lady P. has since released two solo albums under the name Maria del Pilar.

Trouble In My Soul (Mexican Dubwiser - Revolution Radio 2010): Before becoming a superstar DJ/Producer duo with Kinky’s Ulises Lozano, Marcelo Tijerina was solo stepping on L.A. as a transplant from Montery Mexico’s Avanzada Regio music scene. This version of the Trouble In My Soul single features San Francisco DJ/Producer Romanowski.

Luna Negra (Olmeca w/Los Cojolites - Self Release 2005): Olmeca should be recognized as one of the hardest working music artists in the Chicano music scene. Placing himself in the same corner as Hip-Hop elder KRS-One, he identifies himself as a music artist, activist, and scholar. In 1999, he joined L.A. band Slowrider. After their 2003 album Historias En Revisión, he stepped out as a solo artist. He has gone on release several albums (including 2019’s Define), toured universities as a guest lecturer, and he is currently faculty at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in the Interdisciplinary Gender and Ethnic Studies Department. Los Cojolites are a Son Jarocho group from the Mexican state of Veracruz that is often noted for their candid social commentary.

Jarocho Elegua (Quetzal - Sing The Real 2002): Formed by guitarist Quetzal Flores in 1992, the band Quetzal released their eponymously titled debut album in 1998 after vocalist Martha Gonzalez joined the band. Continually fusing social activism with music, Quetzal has received accolades from the world of scholars and activists, as well as receiving the 2013 Grammy for Best Latin Pop, Rock, or Urban Album for their release of Imaginaries.

No Me Te Pido Mas (Domingo Siete - Quitate La Mascara 2005): Martha Gonzalez is not the only one in her family to possess musical talent. Her brother Gabriel Tenorio did just fine for himself as the singer/song-writer/guitarist for Domingo Siete. They toured Europe, they shared the stage with Los Lobos, Cheryl Crow, & Ozomatli, and they released two full length albums. Dame might have been the single that Gabriel would want me to highlight, but this one was always my favorite.

Cuenten Lo (Pe Ere - Demo Collaboration w/producer Rafi Benjamin of Fósforó 2006): Pe Ere was most often seen performing as a duo with Pantera. The two were immigrants from Nigaragua with a passion for Reggaeton. Pe Ere demonstrated great stage presence during his time in the scene, and this song reflects that he was not afraid to try new innovative sounds, but his run was too short. Where are you now, P.R.?

La Sirena (Beatriz Torres - La Sirena E.P. 2002): Produced by her soon to be husband, Angel Garcia of Mezklah fame, this song and E.P. reflect a vibrant new take on Trip-Hop from a Chicana perspective. Torres’ performances incorporated both poetry and performance art. She took the stage across L.A. opening for Mezklah and Fósforó, and she toured Mexico with Mezklah and DJ David BoNobO in 2003. She retired from performing in 2004 with the birth of her first child.

Pa La Paloma (Alquimia Remixed by David BoNobO - Single 2005): Alquimia was a band out of Bogotá, Colombia that featured singer Janio Coronado (he would go on to sing for Sidestepper). DJ/Producer David BoNobO has played parties in Cuba, toured Mexico in 2003, and held residencies in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2005, and 2008. He also shared the stage with the following artists on this compilation: Beatriz Torres, Fitter, Fósforó, Go Betty Go, Mexican Dubwiser, Mezkalah, Olmeca, Pe Ere, Quetzal, Very Be Careful, and Xochisoneros. This song was his first venture into the realm of producing and remixing. How BoNobO, a white guy transplanted to L.A. from Portland, came to be part of this scene is still a matter of great contention and debate.

Celosa feat. Locos Por Juana (Palenke Soultribe - Oro 2009): Palenke Soultribe transplanted to L.A. in 2006 from Bogotá, Colombia. The group initially consisted of producer/bassist Juan Diego Borda and keyboardist/producer Andres “Popa” Erazo, but grew to include a rotating list of musicians collaborating with them as a collective. This track displays one of several connections Miami’s Locos Por Juana made with Angelinos during the 2000s. 

Warriors feat. Will.I.Am - BEP Remix (Burning Star - Eponymous 2003): Upon the release of their debut album, Burning Star said they aimed to “utilize art as a tool for the reconstruction of the community through the participation of community based programs,” and they had the talent and work ethic to back up such an ambitious statement. At one point in time, you could find a vinyl Burning Star sticker on the light post of every intersection or crosswalk in the city of L.A. Despite their hard effort & amazing line-up of musicians, the flame burned out after just one album. Bassist Emilio Saenz went on to play with the Boogaloo Assassins, Drummer Cisco Huete later played drums for Monte Carlo 76, percussionist Gerry Morales went to Spain to study Flamenco guitar and became a featured artist at Subsuelo, Joshua Alvarez did some collaborative work with Black Eyed Peas, and vocalist/keyboardist Quincy McCary has gone on to work with the likes of Quetzal, Bitbull, Mayer Hawthorne, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and Jack White. In 2019, McCrary released a solo debut under the name Qemistry.

Street Signs (Ozomatli - Street Signs 2004): Street Signs was the title song from Ozomatli’s third studio album, and it followed the success of Embracing The Chaos, the one that earned them the Grammy Award for Best Latin Rock/Alternative Album. Their first studio release came in 1998, and it featured rapper Charli 2na and DJ Cut Chemist, and it put L.A.’s  Latin music scene back on the map internationally. Since then, they have very much been the leaders of the pack. Their eighth studio album Non-Stop: Mexico to Jamaica was produced by Sly & Robbie and released in 2017.

The Garage (Monte Carlo 76 - Marisa 2008): Birthed in 2003 from the remains of keyboardist Gomez Comes Alive and guitarist Jeremy Keller’s former group Slowrider, Monte Carlo 76 painted vignettes of growing up in East L.A. with their lyrics. Behind that was a musical tipping of the hat to classic 70’s Chicano Rock that never sounded retro. Completing two albums during their run with the help of producers Martha Gonzalez and Quetzal Flores of the band Quetzal, Monte Carlo 76 garnered them a L.A. Weekly Music Awards nomination for Best Latin Alternative Band.

The Coconut Tree (Fitter - Through The Green Jungles of Plenty… 2009): Fitter found success and acclaim in El Salvador, the nation their families came from, despite the fact that they were hard to classify. A fiercely innovative rock band, they took frequent influence from Dub Reggae and African music. Guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Wilfredo Mendez was noted for having electrified a traditional folkloric guitar from El Salvador to produce new sounds that had never been heard. They collaborated with Fósforó’s Rafi B., and released two albums in the 2000s. Unfortunately, things came to an end for them when Mendez suffered impairments to his speech and motor skills due to a benign tumor in his brain in 2012. 

Haves And Have Nots (Aztlan Underground - Single 2000): Having roots in East L.A.’s hardcore punk scene of the 1980’s, Aztlan was championed by Rage Against the Machine’s Zack De La Rocha when they released their debut album, Decolonize, in 1995. By the 2000s, they were like the scene’s thundering elders reminding newbies of the need to stay socially conscious with their music through lending their voice to numerous community events such as the Farce of July, and the second protest concert in support of The South Central Farmers. They’ve released three albums and played Mexico, Canada, Australia and Spain. They released the single Black Lives Matter in 2019.

No Hay Perdon (Go Betty Go - Nothing Is More 2005): Formed in Glendale in 2005, this all female group proved that they could rock hard while also being able to compose more melodic ballads. They joined the Vans Warped tour in 2004 and 2005. The track highlighted here features the vocals of Nicolette Vilar who left the band in 2006 and rejoined them in 2012. Their third studio release came in the form of an EP titled Reboot in 2015.

El Hospital (Very Be Careful - Escape Room 2010): They may have started up in NYC in 1997, but this band belongs to L.A. While the style they play is traditional Vallento, they are often credited as the L.A. band that made Cumbia hip again. Formed by brothers Ricardo and Arturo Guzman after being inspired by a trip to visit family in Colombia, the group is comprised of five friends who grew up within blocks of each other, plus the Guzman’s aunt Deicy to helps cover the songwriting duties. Releasing their first full length album in 2001, the VBC have gone on to release seven albums to date. They’ve played the giant Fuji Rock Festival in Japan, and the reknowned Glastonbury Festival in England. Their music may be acoustic, but their shows are rawkus bawdy, and filled with Punk attitude.

El Caballito (Xochisoneros - El Caiman 2003): Formed by musician and anthropologist Hector Marquez and musicologist Efren Luna, Xochisoneros brought a flavor to the scene that was more Mexican and less Angelino. Crafting traditional songs in the styles of Son Huasteco, Son Jarocho, Son Cubano, and Colombian Cumbia, they almost exclusively played community or protest events as they used their musical platform for social justice, and to help to show that Mexico has its place in the lexicon of Carribean music. La Marisol of the Grammy Award winning band La Santa Cecilia was a student of Marquez, and she would join the group while she was still in high school. That was an education that you could not put a price on!

[brishu]

Almost Everyone

My daughters were introduced to the music of the Backstreet Boys by camp counselors, so their only context for hearing some of their bigger hits (and they have an astonishing number of very big hits) was the enthusiasm of people about 10 years older than them. No anti-boyband snark, no snobbery that looks askance at performers who don’t play instruments. They began asking for specific songs to be added to their music players, and even requested “As Long As You Love Me” at my dearest friend’s daughter’s Bat Mitzvah party. To them, the Backstreet Boys were as much a part of the pop canon as Elvis, only still out there performing.

Their response to the BSB’s seemed to be purely musical. It’s possible that they got high on secondhand boyband fumes, since their counselors’ enthusiasm was surely fueled by the gangbusters marketing campaign designed to make millions of kids fall in love with AJ, Brian, Nick, Howie and Kevin, which is probably even harder to pull off than it sounds. But as much as I’d like to, I can’t discount the quality of the music either. And if I’m shocked that five cute boys who first performed together in 1993 just hung another Number 1 album on the Billboard charts (which apparently also still exist), maybe it’s my shock that should be shocking. I also envied the girls their ready embrace of songs they liked without subjecting them to the battery of artistic litmus tests their sonically dyspeptic father does. 

The psychotherapeutic industry seems built upon the distinction between gentle and brutal. If you make the same, relatively harmless mistake repeatedly, steps toward correction are fine, but ease up on the internal machete. If you are too prone to lying to maintain valuable relationships or hold down a job, stop treating your dishonesty like fine china, you goddamn schlemiel. OK, I’m not a psychological expert but one of the things I’ve been working on in therapy is retaining a consistent striving for improvement while loosening an attachment to self-flagellation. So, occasional desire to make my children happy aside, was it a well-earned moment of transcendence or a mere boot to my own aesthetics that led me to sneak off to the Barclays Center to buy a trio of Backstreet Boys tickets while the girls were in Hebrew school?

I didn’t tell them about the tickets for several months, but ultimately I worried that surprising them on the day of the concert would pressure them to evince unnatural levels of appreciation for their loving father’s amazing gesture, so about two weeks before the show, I gave them a heads up. 

Another chronic difficulty I have is ordering food from people whose first language is not English. I don’t think it makes me Steve King to cling to the generalization that they never take me seriously when I say I want it spicy. So on the day of the concert I ordered Thai food and asked them to make it “extra, extra, extra spicy please.” In retrospect that was at least one “extra” too many. But by the time we had dinner before the show, I forgot about lunch and slathered everything I ate with hot sauce, which I believe contributed to my need of a bathroom that undermined my plan to arrive at the Barclays Center by 7:30 so we could get through the security line before the show started at 8.

I had looked up the setlists from Chicago and Detroit and noted that they opened the show with a song called “Everyone”, which I thought was the one where they’re like “Everybaaaah-day! Rock your baaaah-day!”, which in my self-conferred Masters in Backstreetology seemed like the only appropriate opener so I really, really didn’t want the girls to miss it, which brought on a sustained castigation of why I prioritized capsaicin over keeping promises I’d silently (and inaccurately) made to my children. 

We got into the arena at about 8:12 and, hearing noise emanating from the stage, rushed up several flights of stairs to our seats. That’s when we learned that there was an opening act named Baylee Littrell (it wasn’t until the next morning that I learned he was Brian Littrell’s 16 year-old son). What we caught of his set assuaged whatever guilt I felt about what we missed, but I did appreciate that he played with actual bass, guitar and drums (plus keyboards, horns and back-up vocals that could not be seen onstage). We looked him up on Spotify to see how many plays his songs had gotten and determined that the one with more than 300,000 would be the closer. Do you know how many great bands would harm the elderly for 30,000 plays??? Fruit & Flowers only have two songs over 20k. Look ‘em up, they rule. Anyway, we were right. It was a song called Boxes and apparently the girl Baylee loves checks off all 22 of them. 

I have shadowy memories of watching the Backstreet Boys’ debut on Saturday Night Live with this perfectly synced dance involving chairs that they may or may not have stacked at one point during their number. At the time I was appalled by them, but proud of myself for being sophisticated enough to label their performance Fosse-esque. Harboring the incorrect assumptions that “Everyone” was the song I thought it was, and that their act had not evolved in the 20 years since I saw them on SNL, I tried to share in the excitement of the folks around me. Our neighbors were a very attractive young man and woman who kept apologizing when they passed us to get to the aisle. I tried not to eavesdrop but I did hear the young man extol his therapist to his friend (somehow it was clear they weren’t a couple). Just before the show started the young woman asked if I was the fan bringing my kids along or vice versa. I said it was mainly the kids but I was stoked too. She said that she and her friend had caught the band in Vegas and it was so amazing that they had to go again in Brooklyn and don’t mind her when she sang along to every lyric, even the new ones. Our conversation ended abruptly when the lights went down and she joined the collective “WHOO!” volleying stageward. 

As though in response, the stage started to open with almost unbearable slowness, suspense mounting as aperture expanded to maw, and I realized that I am unable to experience a reveal like that without hearkening back to one of the earliest and most vivid aural memories I have- the hinges creaking at the beginning of the Monster Mash. On angled video screens, band members appeared, one by one, in slow motion. The way they fingered their hat brim or rolled their shoulders made me laugh very hard. My neighbor to my left nodded approvingly, the kids to my right briefly emancipated themselves. Finally the tectonic shifting ended and there, on a platform so receded that I thought they should be called the Backstage Boys, were five guys who had been crushing it for 26 fucking years.

My neighbor said, “They can’t really dance anymore but they can still sing!”

“Everyone” is not the song I thought it was.

The first concert our kids ever attended was Los Lobos in Prospect Park. Our younger daughter was 10 months old and happy anywhere that had popsicles. Our older daughter was nearly 3 and for months she would ask to hear more Los Lobos. I don’t think she recognized anything from the concert, she just wanted to be reminded of the special experience of live, loud music and how happy it made the people around her (including her dad), and our living room stereo system was the best portal for that. Los Lobos’ most popular non-fucking-La Bamba-song is Cancion del Mariachi, coming in at 15,898,494 plays. Nothing else cracks a million. 

This was their first time seeing a bigtime pop act, and though they only knew about 5 of the 30 songs performed, they were rapt for the entire show. Except when the band talked to the audience, which they did in a sort of schematic where every member got his five-minute lovefest with the audience while the other guys changed outfits. They were all some variation on how much love they felt in the room (it was pretty palpable), how much gratitude they felt to the fans for the longevity of their career, and how pleased they were to be Number 1 yet again. Oh and that music was important too. I don’t mean to demean their commitment to music. All five of them can sing quite well, they harmonize together beautifully (even though I’m pretty sure vocal enhancements were employed without remorse) and you can’t sing the same song over and over again for more than 20 years without losing it unless the song is half-decent. But without getting too grumpy about it, I neither could nor wanted to suppress a flare of anger that so many serious musicians are poor while these cutie pies are all multi-millionaires. I don’t know what the ultimate size of the music market is, and it was hardly revelatory to note that these guys’ share was not in line with the quality of their musical production, but I felt like I had to take my own tiny stand, to stand up for musicians less slickly managed, artists less adept at navigating A&R social hierarchies, bands whose universality is not predicated on cultural touchstones manufactured by MTV. Obviously, nobody buys a concert ticket in the hope that they’ll get scolded at the show. Another thing people try to avoid at concerts is taking a dump. And so more acutely than ever, my self-righteousness was supplanted by regret for that extra extra.

I thought about asking my neighbors to watch the kids, and even to make the joke “And don’t let them vape!” but opted not to because I didn’t want to suggest that I had a problem with their vaping (such is my social density that I tuned out all of their apologia and was so grateful for their friendliness that I just wanted them to like me, never realizing that maybe, just maybe they might really want me to like them too). So I just told the kids to stay put and made my way to the can. And I daresay BSB fans are as nice in private as they are out in the arena. I base this conjecture on my bathroom experience where, unlike most concerts I attend, I was able to tend to my digestive needs without feeling like I had to contort myself to avoid somebody else’s excrement. It shouldn’t be surprising that more banal music begets more polite behavior, hell even Plato cautioned against exposing certain segments of society to more inflammatory musical scales. But maybe all that bougie antisepticism is just proof of how truly un-punk Mr. Stand-Taker really is.

Returned to the seats where the kids looked sleepy. I told them they shouldn’t feel any pressure to stay for the whole show, which looked like it was going to end after 11. They looked at me like I’d just told them I was donating their college fund to Trump 2020. 

One of them said, “Just because we’re not dancing and screaming doesn’t mean we aren’t having an amazing time, Dad.”

OK then.

So that song I got confused about is actually called “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back).” I pretended like I knew that the whole time and was pretty sure I got away with it. Then one of the girls said, “I thought you said they opened with this song.” And with no remorse whatsoever I said, “Yeah, that was in Florida.” Why I needed them to think I knew what I was talking about is almost a less interesting question than why I also lied about what states preceded New York on the DNA Worldwide Tour. 

There were more costume changes, more banter with adoring fans, more grinding reconfiguration of the stage, more neon mike stands shifting color in unison, something that probably seemed high tech in 1999, and more hits, at least four up-tempo numbers before they went into their big treacly ballad about which way they want it, which nobody can convince me isn’t about the supposed horrors of anal sex. Our neighbors checked and sure enough, both kids knew every word. A singalong ensued. Then I encouraged departure but the kids insisted on staying in case there was more. There was more. 

In fact, all five guys came out for what I guess was an encore wearing Nets jerseys. Knowing what a rabid Nets fan I am, both kids felt vindicated for insisting we stick around. And then they actually knew the second, and final song of the evening and were so exhilarated by the whole thing that they wanted to walk all the way home. But it was 11:15 and I’d been up since 4:30 and I was not above projecting my fatigue onto them so we took the subway one stop. We had gotten out quickly enough that the train was not packed with other BSBers or whatever their fans are called. And again, if we strip away the petty concern of my daughters’ happiness, was I glad we went to a Backstreet Boys Concert? Well, one kid said “That would have been awesome even if the band didn’t sing any songs. The lights were just so great!” So cool. I just spent the better part of a week’s pay on the magic of strobes that kept me up way past my bedtime. And two very happy daughters. And very pleasant interactions with attractive strangers. And a few moments of infectious beats and melodies. And the nicest shit I’ve ever taken at a concert. Would I do it again, even with smarter lunch ordering? Without hesitation.

By the way, this was written while listening to Face Stabber, the newest Thee Oh Sees album. It’s fucking awesome. They’re playing a club in a few weeks than can hold about 800 people.

[brokenbuttonsmusic]

Eleni Mandell: L.A. Singer-Songwriter with Smoky Chrissie Hynde Vocals and a flair for Tom Waits’ Influenced Experimentation

This post is a near- transcript of the Broken Buttons: Buried Treasure Music podcast (episode 5, side A). Here you’ll find the narration from the segment featuring the L.A. singer-songwriter, Eleni Mandell, along with links, videos, photos and references for the episode.

Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple, Anchor or Mixcloud.

Have you ever bought the wrong record? Like, you intended to buy something that sounded like one thing and you accidentally grab something that sounds very different. 

I don’t know if this happens anymore, but I believe it was quite common years ago. Imagine hearing an artist on the radio and being blown away. You go to the record store, find the plastic divider with the name of whom you’re looking for, but you can’t remember the name of the album, or even the song. Remember, you don’t have a tiny computer in your pocket. You’re too nervous to ask the store clerk for fear of looking stupid. So you roll the dice. 

“I know it was someone called Neil Young, but there are a thousand Neil Young records here.”

“Hey, this pink one looks cool.”

That exact scenario didn’t happen to me, but that album, Neil Young’s Everybody’s Rockin’, happened to be the most played Neil Young album in my house growing up, so for years I thought Neil Young was a rockabilly revival act. In reality, that was one of several oddball records Young released during a tumultuous period with his record label to fulfill his contract demands. I still love that record. 

Eleni Mandell did live out the scenario of buying the wrong record though. She shared the story during a segment of the show Bullseye with Jessie Thorn, where she describes seeing Tom Waits on MTV late at night—back when MTV still cared about music. It was either 120 minutes or IRS’ The Cutting Edge. This would have been around 1984 or 1985, so right around the time of Wait’s masterpiece Rain Dogs. When she went to the record store though, she picked up the 1976 Tom Waits’ Asylum release, Small Change instead. Now Small Change is still a great Tom Waits album, but it sounds nothing like the drastically reimagined sound and musical approach he had begun to employ starting with 1983’s Swordfishtrombones. Something Tom Waits called his “junkyard orchestral deviation.” The spare, off-kilter percussion. Moaning trombones and muted trumpets. Marimba. Plenty of marimba. Experimental instruments mixed in everywhere. Megaphones and CB radios. Trash can lids. 

This is the sound Eleni was looking for. 

Instead she got lush strings. Delicate piano. Cinematic swells and a melancholy wail. 

She got this.

Still awesome, but not the same. She credits the experience with changing her life. She grew to love both sides of the Tom Waits coin. The jazzy piano man in the smoky, whiskey-drenched nightclub and the eclectic, experimental carnival barker that she had her first encounter with on late night MTV. 

You can hear that deep appreciation and influence for the full Tom Waits spectrum injected and swirling through Eleni Mandell’s own spectacular catalog that spans more than 20 years now. 

She’s got plenty of experimental Waits, especially in her early catalog. 

And quite a bit of the jazzy nightclub vibe.

There’s also plenty of folk-y Eleni mixed in, and even some country.

You’ll notice that Eleni’s voice doesn’t sound like Tom Waits though. Did you notice that? It’s less of a deep, gravelly howl and more of rich Chrissie Hynde croon. Spin compared her to Chrissie Hynde and PJ Harvey. Rolling Stone compared her captivating melodies and witty lyricism to early Elvis Costello. 

While she doesn’t have the Tom Waits’ wail, she does specialize in his particular brand of character song-study. Like this first song we’re going to hear. The first track off of Eleni Mandell’s second album Thrill. Released in the year 2000. This is Pauline. 

Pauline, from Eleni Mandell’s second record, Thrill. So how did this remarkably unique singer-songwriter get her start and pull together so many interesting influences to create the sound we just heard.

Eleni grew up in the Sherman Oaks region of the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles. She started playing music when she was just 5, beginning with the violin and then piano. Eleni didn’t love playing either, but continued to take lessons until she was thirteen. She remembers wanting to learn to write songs early on, but didn’t have the first idea of how to approach it, especially on violin. She jumped from violin and piano to guitar as a teenager. Her parents exposed her to a variety of musical styles. Her mom would take her to musicals and her dad, a serious record collector, played her Hoagy Carmichael and plenty of jazz standards. She loved the Beatles and remembers Diana Ross making an early impression. 

Another early life changing moment came when she discovered the Los Angeles punk band X.

X were huge in LA, and their first album (called Los Angeles) was the first record Eleni ever owned. Or maybe the first she asked to own. The first record she was ever given was Shaun Cassidy’s greatest hits for her 4th birthday. The first she ever purchased with her own money was X’s third release, Under the Big Black Sun. She tells a story of when she was out record shopping at a place called Aron’s Records, located on Melrose, and to her utter befuddlement came face to face with John Doe, lead singer of X. He was shopping for records too. She quickly snapped up a copy of the band’s third album and asked John to sign it. He did. She still has the signed album, which reads “Yours” complete with a big X “-John Doe.” That was the last autograph she ever asked for. It was not, however, the last time her path would cross with that of the band X. 

When she was a little bit older, she met Chuck E. Weiss, songwriter, rock n’ roller, beat poet and peculiar Tom Waits associate. Also the subject of the song, Chuck E.’s in Love.

Yes, that Chuck E. Weiss. Waits was in a relationship with Rickie Lee Jones. Waits, Jones and Weiss all lived at the seedy Tropicana Motel in Los Angeles. One day Weiss up and left out of nowhere. Some time later Chuck E. called the apartment where Jones and Waits were living. He explained to Waits that he had moved to Denver because he had fallen in love with a cousin there. Waits hung up the phone and announced to Jones, “Check E.’s in love. Rickie Lee Jones liked that so much that she it turned it into the song we just heard. 

Who is this episode about again? Oh, right. Eleni Mandell. Anyway, Eleni Mandell met THAT Chuck E. Weiss when she was not yet 21. Still, she had a friend who was able to get her into The Central, a Sunset Strip club that would later become The Viper Room. This would’ve been around 1990. Weiss was playing there every Monday. 

Here’s how the write up on Eleni’s original website describes her first encounter with Weiss.

“The first time she ever saw Chuck E. Weiss perform, he walked right up to her and smiled like a cross between The Cheshire Cat and an escaped mental patient. She met him a month later at Musso and Frank’s.”

Eleni says she was at the famous Hollywood restaurant and recognized Weiss. She worked up the courage to approach him and told him how much she loved his show. He asked if she wanted to accompany him to meet up with a friend at Canter’s Deli. She agreed. When they settled into one of the landmark eaterys iconic red, vinyl booths in walked her hero. Tom Waits. What a night. Tom asked Chuck how he and Eleni had met. 

“Hebrew school,” he declared. 

Here’s a tune from Eleni’s debut album, Wishbone, released in 1999. This is Sylvia. 

From Eleni Mandell’s first album, Wishbone, that was Sylvia. 

Under Chuck E. Weiss’ mentorship, produced by Jon Brion and self-financed by Mandell, Wishbone, as well as her next several records, received strong reviews and drew comparisons to Waits and PJ Harvey in style. 

Before Weiss mentored Mandell, he hired her as a door person at his club. She said he would test her to see how tough a door person she was by trying to grab money out of her hand. Weiss would continue to mentor Eleni over the years and they’re still friends to this day. 

For her fourth album, Mandell shook things up by diving into traditional country. A mix of covers and originals, 2003’s Country For True Lovers is an exciting update to her sound. And one of her life changing moments came full circle. Weiss introduced her to former X guitarist Tony Gilkyson, who produced the project. She also stacked the sessions with all star players, including Nels Cline from Wilco, and another X hero, drummer D.J. Bonebreak. 

Eleni continued to mix and mesh genres on her next release, 2004’s Afternoon. 

From the No Depression review of that album:

“Last years Country For True Lovers found Los Angeles chanteuse Eleni Mandell turning her sights on twang rather than her previous more PJ Harvey-oriented material, and she received plenty of critical acclaim in the process, sharing the LA Weekly 2003 songwriter of the year award with the late Elliot Smith.”

“On Afternoon, her fifth album, Mandell combines her love of various genres, including country, pop, jazz and rock, to stunning effect. Produced by Joshua Grange, who also lends his considerable talents on guitar, pedal steel, Hammond organ and piano, Afternoon mostly takes the slow and sexy approach. I’ve Been Fooled and Can’t You See Im Soulful give Mandell the chance to show off her breathy but passionate alto, which can devastate in a heartbeat.”

“Mandell does rock out from time to time, as on Easy On Your Way Out, which has a grungy Elvis Costello-gets-on-with-Liz Phair feel to it. I wanna be your afternoon/I want you coming back for more, Mandell sings on the sorta fun/sorta sad title song.”

She can also write catchy singles. Like this song from Afternoon, “Let’s Drive Away.”

That was Let’s Drive Away from Eleni Mandell’s fifth album, Afternoon, released in 2004. That song was also featured on the TV show, Weeds.

And here comes the challenging part of covering an artist like Eleni Mandell, who’s put out consistently solid albums for over two decades. There’s not enough time to feature all the good stuff she’s produced, but trust me, over her eleven albums, she always delivers. From the diverse shifting sounds of Artificial Fire [play clip] to the smooth and breezy Dark Lights Up [play clip], Eleni whirls a magical combination of jazz, folk, pop, country and rock, with just enough experimental twists to keep everything fresh. 

She’s also branched out from her solo artist gig to release two albums with her band The Grabs. The Grabs allows her to exercise more of her pop side and features Eleni on vocals, Blondie bassist Nigel Harrison, and Silversun Pickups’ drummer Elvira Gonzalez. 

And, she’s also released records with the Andrews Sisters inspired supergroup, The Living Sisters, with Inara George, Alex Lilly and Becky Stark.

I’d recommend checking out all of this. 

So now that we’ve established that the Eleni Mandell road is paved with the goods, let’s skip ahead to focus on her most recent album: 2019’s Wake Up Again.

Here’s what Eleni and her website have to say about the latest release: 

“For two years or thereabouts,” Mandell says, “I taught songwriting at two colleges and a women’s prison.”

The prison gig came about via Jail Guitar Doors, the organization founded by Wayne Kramer, guitarist of the vaunted Detroit band MC5, in partnership with English musician Billy Bragg. “I don’t know why exactly I was drawn to that work,” Mandell says. “But I had a family member who had been in prison in the 1940s. He wasn’t around when I was growing up, but that sort of fascinated me and I was always curious about what kind of person disappears and what kind of person commits crimes — what are they thinking?”

Working with the inmates also provided many epiphanies for her as a person, and proved fertile for her as an artist, as captured in the 11 songs on this album, her 11th studio release. In many ways it’s the culmination and fulfillment of all the strengths as a writer and performer going back to her start under the tutelage of Chuck E. Weiss, Tom Waits and other top chroniclers of people in the shadows.

“I really enjoyed it,” she says. “I was inspired by the stories, and surprised by the laughter I heard there. And I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was, by how many different kinds of people were there: teachers, lawyers, nurses, and also people who grew up in poverty.”

Here’s a song about one of the woman she met during those songwriting classes she taught. This is Evelyn.

Evelyn from Eleni Mandell’s most recent album, Wake Up Again. Another great addition to her expansive, impressive catalog. The album is filled with rich character studies and deeply personal self-examinations.

Her early Tom Waits inspiration continues to ignite and propel her, even after 11 albums. Only now she can call Tom a longtime friend. 

And she went from obsessive punk rock X fan to counting a member of X as a member of her own band. What a cool, thrilling ride she’s had so far. Eleni Mandell. 

References and other stuff:

Eleni interview with Luxury Wagers

Eleni interview with Mr. Bonzai

Eleni interview with Tyler Pollard on Timeline

The bio from Eleni’s current website has a great write up on her most recent album and I quote from it in the episode.

No Depression review of Afternoon that I quote in the episode

Here is the original bio from Eleni’s old website that is now archived. I also quote from this

Eleni has been featured on NPR segments over the years. I did not use anything directly from these, but they are good and informative

Pop Matter review of Dark Lights Up

Good L.A. Times article about Eleni teaching songwriting to female inmates and her latest album

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume 6, Number 6

Whatever happens, Bobby Conn will always be fabulous

Greetings from the never-ending sameness! It must be Friday since we’re doing a Dust, but we are not exactly sure which Friday and, indeed, which day of the week comes after that. We have not had a haircut in a while, and we’re wearing the most comfortable, least fashionable things we own, but we have not quite given up, because, you see, we’re still listening to music. Here are short missives from our respective quarantines, covering experimental psych, fey orchestral pop, slow rolling sine waves, disco-glittering satire, solitary black metal and assorted other musical manifestations. Contributors included Bill Meyer, Andrew Forell, Jennifer Kelly, Jonathan Shaw and Michael Rosenstein.

Eric Arn & Jasmine Pender — Hydromancy (Feeding Tube)

hydromancy by eric arn & jasmine pender

Hydromancy is the ancient practice of divining the gods’ intentions by staring for long periods into a pool of water. Eric Arn, an American guitarist who has been based in Austria for the last decade and a half, seems to have picked up at least one message from the cosmos, and he is acting upon it. Feeding Tube Records is his home. Hydromancy is his third release on the label, and like its two predecessors, it carves out a unique zone within a large and ever-spreading field of inquiry. Arn’s spent time playing psychedelic rock, free improvisation and solo acoustic explorations, and worked with players from Texas, New England and Vienna. This time he’s partnered with an English cellist, Jasmine Pender, on two side-long ponderances of resonance. The title is apt; the musicians seem to be regarding the surface of their sound, first letting ripples and reflections guide them, but ultimately peering beneath the surface into darker, persistent currents.

Bill Meyer

ARTHUR — Hair of the Dog (Honeymoon)

On his sophomore album, Philadelphia songwriter ARTHUR disguises ruminations on addiction, anxiety, pain and paranoia in summery cloaks of experimental pop. The combination of whimsy and woe is nothing new, but it’s a fine balance. In Hair of the Dog, complex arrangements surround naïve-sounding melodies, hinting at inner turmoil.  

The album incorporates whispers of disco in “No Tengo,” a low key Caleb Giles rap interlude on “Something Sweet,” swinging 1960s horns on “William Penn Island” and a choir of children on “You Are Mine.” The magpie eclecticism holds together beneath a voice that can err on the side of mannered. It is most effective when direct and unadorned as on “Simple Song” where a woozy waltz and detuned guitar bridge underline the poignancy of the lyrics: “In a couple of years/You lose a couple of friends/You lose yourself and you start over again/I don’t have patience/All that I know is addiction.” There is a lot to like here even if at times ARTHUR treads too hard on the path of whimsy.

Andrew Forell

Gaudenz Badrutt — Ganglions (Aussenraum)

Ganglions by Gaudenz Badrutt

“Connect” is the not the first words that 2020 is going to wear out, but it’s in the running. Veteran Swiss electronic musician Gudenz Badrutt could not have foreseen the present situation when he was making this LP, but it speaks to at least one aspect of it. Perhaps the barrages of commercials dropping the word “connect” by corporations interested in currying your subconscious good will has you pondering the networks by which that state is accomplished and sustained. Badrutt’s music is assembled from sine waves and feedback systems, which he layers and interrupts to make sound that flickers and surges like an audio rendering of your nervous system in various states of load-carrying and overload. Listen closely, and you can ponder your place within the system. But if you’re sick of thinking, feeling, and awareness, turn this shit up and it will blot out whatever offends you.

Bill Meyer

  Nat Baldwin — Autonomia I: Body Without Organs (Shinkoyo)

AUTONOMIA I: Body Without Organs by Nat Baldwin

Nat Baldwin is a published novelist as well as a singer and double bassist with several solo records and a long-time stint is a member of the Dirty Projectors on his cv. His versatility does not come at the expense of focus; indeed, Autonomia I (so named because there’s a second, cassette-only volume) show that he knows how to get a lot out of a particular idea. This LP was inspired by a broken bow, which he employs (sometimes in concert with an intact one) on five of the LP’s seven tracks. When one of your tools is unreliable, you have to be ready to scramble, and there are moments when it sounds like he’s trying to recover from or get ahead of his implement’s waywardness. But those also sound like moments of opportunity; whether he’s exploring rattle of a loose part against his bass’s body or using that bow to obtain non-prescribed tensions from his strings, he organizes his instrument’s unusual sounds into quick-moving, provocatively shaped constellations of sound.

Bill Meyer

Bonifrate—Mundo Encoberto (Self-released)

Mundo Encoberto by Bonifrate

Pedro Bonifrate is one-half of the Brazilian psych outfit Guaxe, this solo album (according to Google translate “overcast world”) springs from the same trippy, laid-back but multi-instrumented roots. Lush like the rainforest that surrounds him, playful and full of bright colors, this eight-part composition unfolds in the manner of a particularly vivid dream. “Parte 1” mutates freely over its 11 minute duration, stirring to life in a rush of strings, slipping into beach-y mildly hallucinogenic balladry, trying on a bit of Syd Barret-ish whimsy, crescendoing in clangorous guitar overload. Hard to say if Bonifrate played all the instruments, but the album has an idiosyncratic euphoria, as if it were lifted in one piece from the vivid contours of one person’s mushroom trip.

Jennifer Kelly

 Bobby Conn — Recovery (Tapete)

“It’s a disaster, the one we’ve been waiting for for years, and now we get to see how this thing ends,” croons the one-and-only Bobby Conn in his glam-shuddering, disco-sleek tenor, and sure, 2020 in a nutshell, got it in one, congrats! Who’d have thought that Conn’s arch, satiric performance art could be a form of comfort here at the end of the world? Who’s have supposed his stylized excesses would seem not an iota too much? Conn, as ever, is sharp and topical, pondering all the oppressed sub-groups left out of the “Good Old Days,” (against a swaggering Phil Spector beat), mourning the xxx-rated theaters put out of business by Pornhub in “Bijou,” skewering big data’s intrusions in the synth-operatic glories of “Disposable Future.” But what’s always separated Conn from mere satirists is the elaborate, over-the-top quality of the music he makes. “Recovery” with its scatted bassline, its frenetic syncopation, its funk precision—it all works as music way before you start to chuckle at the lyrics. Conn is as much a character in the long-running graphic novel that plays in his head as a bandleader, but don’t underestimate the bandleader. There’s art underneath all that eyeliner.

Jennifer Kelly

Curanderos — Raven’s Head (Null Zøne)

Raven's Head by Curanderos

If you’re looking for something to cure what ails you in these uncertain times, Raven’s Head might be your balm. You won’t need a prescription, since the tradition of shamanistic healing precedes the AMA, and the particular configuration of healers here — John and Michael Gibbons of Bardo Pond + Scott Verrastro of Kohoutek — models a cooperative approach that more conventional leadership would do well to emulate. The combination of personalities also tips you off to what to expect. Verrastro is a colorist, using the metal parts of his drum kit to keep the listener aware of the dimensions surrounding the listening space, but he also provides just enough forward momentum to keep the music moving at a fogbank-rolling pace. The Gibbons match liquid lead and coarse riff with practiced ease; they’ve spent a lot of time in such cloudy spaces, and they breathe deeply of the inspirational atmosphere.

Bill Meyer

Discovery Zone — Remote Control (Mansions and Millions)

Remote Control by Discovery Zone

“Sophia Again” is a sci-fi mini-story, presenting the conversation between an AI creature and her creator, talking about the self, the meaning of life and the joy of connection, as bubbling arcs of synthesizer sounds jet off into the ether. It is, perhaps, the most literally futuristic of the cuts on this gleaming, synth-centric album, though the whole thing is polished to an other worldly, not quite natural glow. JJ Weihl, the artist behind Discovery Zone, also works in Fenster, a Berlin-based psychedelic pop band of a similarly polished, dance-referring (but not dance) aesthetic. Here, she works solo in luminous abstractions of crystal clear sound. The pleasure comes in the purity and beauty of voices, synths, drum beats, which sound like Sophia might have made them while learning to be human; they are a little too perfect to be wholly man-made.

Jennifer Kelly

 Esoctrilihum — Eternity of Shaog (I, Voidhanger)

Eternity Of Shaog by ESOCTRILIHUM

An epic of esoteric demonology from Ashtâghul’s one-man black metal project Esoctrilihum, Eternity of Shaog presents as ten songs, most of which bear titles like “Exh-Enî Söph (First Passage: Exiled from Sanity)” and “Amenthlys (5th Passage: Through the Yth-Whtu Seal).” One gets the sense that there is a cosmology being built—but even Google has a tough time tracking the references to the many, many Eastern mythic systems in the repertoire. The provisionally good news is that Eternity of Shaog is a bit less musically spastic than its predecessor, The Telluric Ashes of the Ö Vrth Immemorial Gods, an even longer record released just last year. Say what you will, Ashtâghul is prolific. On this new record, you get his signature combination of black metal speed and snarl and an ambitiously (that’s the kind word) proggy compositional sense. The transitions this time around are less violent, the riffs are pretty good and plentiful synths build out to lush soundscapes. The musical textures are rich, but the bad vibes dominate. It’s hard to say what malign presences you’ll be summoning into your home if you play this stuff as loud as seems intended. Maybe keep some holy water handy.

Jonathan Shaw

Fire-Toolz — Rainbow Bridge (Hausu Mountain)

Rainbow Bridge by Fire-Toolz

As Fire-Toolz composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist, Angel Marcloid conjures mosaics from such disparate elements that one wonders how the music hangs together. Yet what at first seems like a chaotic, fractured farrago coalesces into a cohesive picture of her world that simultaneously bewilders and awes. Catholic in source and meticulous in construction Rainbow Bridge is an uncompromising and often stunning dash through Marcloid’s mind. Treated vocals that evoke death metal or JG Thirwell at his most outré, passages of twinkling synth and arena guitar, elements of 1980s Japanese ambient music, fusion jazz and Chiptune slot together like Jenga blocks that wobble but never quite collapse.

Marcloid’s project of musical excavation, reclamation and transformation perhaps mirrors her experience as a non-binary transgender person and the atomization of many tracks on Rainbow Bridge read as a meditation on the contingency of identity and the struggle for place within/outside social constructs that define acceptability and “taste”. On the other hand, sit back, push play and prepare to drift along with the ambient flow then be jolted from reverie by glitch and noise. Much like the world really.

Andrew Forell       

 Jacaszek — Music for Film (Ghostly)

Music for Film by Jacaszek

Music for Film collects the Polish composer Jacaszek’s scores for three movies — the 2019 documentary He Dreams of Giants, the 2008 project Golgota wrocławska and the 2017 film November. Haunted, evocative, disquieting and gorgeous, these ten soundscapes infuse the sounds of electronics, strings and samples with dread. “The Iron Bridge” turns sampled voices and slow throbs of cello into dance with death and memory, while “Liina” picks up eerie vibrations just out of focus, like a camera accidentally recording a ghost. “Dance” hurls electric bolts of tremulous sound—they sizzle with aftertones—then picks out a morose melody in plucked strings. All is dark, subdued, ominous but velvety, sensually smooth. Not having seen the films, I can’t guess the subject matter, but let’s assume there’s no laugh track.

Jennifer Kelly  

 Kontrabassduo Studer-Frey — Zeit (Leo)

Double bassists Peter K Frey and Daniel Studer has spent the better part of the 21st century performing as a duo, but they don’t seem to have felt pressured to rush out a recording documenting their music. This CD includes selections from 2004, 2007, and 2018 that were made at home, in concert, and in the studio. But despite the variety of sources and occasions, this album feels quite cohesive, which is a testament to integrity of their partnership. They rarely play similarly at any given moment, but their contrasting techniques and frequency ranges evince a balance makes even the tracks with contributions by clarinetist Jürg Frey and cellist Alfred Zimmerlin feel like the work of one massive, multi-bodied bass.

Bill Meyer

 Marlin’s Dreaming — Quotidian (Self-Released)

Quotidian by Marlin's Dreaming

The trick of putting soft, flickery voices in front of raging guitars is not a new one, but it’s still worth trying, especially as well as Marlin’s Dreaming does on “Outward Crying.” This sweeping, soaring, but fundamentally introspective tune blasts and blares in a sensitive way, the guitar noise parting like drapes for the singer’s disconsolate confession that he’s leaving this town. The town in question is Auckland, New Zealand, and you can certainly make connections to antipodal fuzz icons, especially the Verlaines. Yet there’s a bit of romantic swoon here in cuts like “Sink or Swim,” which links Marlin’s Dreaming’s diffident lo-fi pop with the baroque gestures of Roxy Music. This is the band’s second album and rather poised given their short history. Marlin’s Dreaming out loud in soft colors and blistering fuzz, and it’s a good one.

Jennifer Kelly

 Christian Rønn & Aram Shelton—Multiring (Astral Spirits)

Multiring by Christian Rønn & Aram Shelton

Some musicians stake their claim within a particular locale, and others tour the world. Alto saxophonist Aram Shelton’s done a bit of both. You could say he’s a serial resident; over the past couple decades he’s been based in Chicago, Oakland, Copenhagen, and now, Budapest. But his recording history lags behind him. His latest release is a cassette recorded in April 2018, and it stands apart from anything he’s done to date. Credit for that lies partly with his choice of partner, Danish keyboardist Christian Rønn. Rønn’s instrument here is a Wurlitzer electric piano, augmented with effects that play up its reverberant qualities, but played without much reference to the way people used to play the thing when it was omnipresent in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of nailing down a groove, Rønn posts reverberant signposts that Shelton can snake through or lays out undulating surfaces that the saxophonist can sail over. Either way, Shelton plays with a darker and softer tone than has been his wont in the past, casting a pall of eerie foreboding over this gradually evolving music.

Bill Meyer

Snekkestad / Guy / Fernandez — The Swiftest Traveller (Trost)

The Swiftest Traveler by Snekkestad / Guy / Fernandez

Englishman double bassist Barry Guy (b. 1947) has been shuttling between free and composed musical zones for over half a century, longer than the similarly versatile Scandinavian reeds and brass multi-threat Torben Snekkestad (b. 1973) has been alive. Catalan pianist Agusti Fernández (b. 1954) traverses similar terrain. And all three shift fluidly between conventional virtuosity and astutely applied extended techniques. The trio’s rapport is so strong that one supposes that however the album got its title, it wasn’t the result of some musical contest. They’re builders, not destroyers. Still, the rapidity with which these three musicians move from event to event is undeniable. Sparse stasis morphs into quick runs up and down the keyboard; a dense, high-velocity onslaught transforms into intricate, three-part counterpoint. The quickness with which the music changes and the completeness that it expresses from moment to moment make this a very satisfying performance.

Bill Meyer  

 Various Artists — Quilted Flowers: 1940s Albanian & Epirot Recordings from the Balkan Label (Canary Recordings)

Quilted Flowers: 1940s Albanian & Epirot Recordings from the Balkan Label by Canary Records

The word “Balkanized” has the dubious distinction of having acquired extra-regional meaning, to the point where it now signifies a whole divided into smaller, mutually hostile regions. But some of the Balkan musicians who moved to New York City pulled together to play on each other’s gigs and recordings. The Albanian multi-instrumentalist, Ajdan Asllan, who ran the Balkan record label, partnered with musicians from Greece and Bulgaria on both a musical and business level, and kept the company running into the LP age. This collection pulls 11 sides of instrumental and vocal music that originated on his home turf, but if your ears have previously pricked up in response to rural music from Greece or Anatolia, you will want to hear this stuff. A pair of clarinets or a violin usually carry the melodies, sometimes chased by sharp-pitched vocals that spread out in ragged but lusty unison, and always carried by unevenly accented rhythms articulated by vigorously strummed stringed instruments.

Bill Meyer

 Otomo Yoshihide & Chris Pitsiokos — Live in Florence (Astral Spirits)

Live in Florence by Otomo Yoshihide & Chris Pitsiokos

Live in Florence documents a meeting between Otomo Yoshihide on guitar and turntables and Chris Pitsiokos on alto sax and electronics at the Tempo Reale Festival in Florence, Italy. This was the final date of a six-day European tour by the duo, and they’re primed from the first crackled sputters and blasts. The two thrive on these sorts of boundary-crushing forays and their seven short improvisations careen along with frenetic, brawny energy. The two deploy jump-cut pacing and shredded attacks from piercing overtones and feedback to frayed overblown sax and turntable crackle to manically angular reed lines and searing electronic bursts to chafed sax amplifications and thundering rumbles. Even on pieces where they start things out a bit more subdued, the two quickly ratchet up the intensity with torrid, barely-controlled vigor. There’s a slight respite on the sixth piece, with Otomo’s chiming guitar harmonics laying a resonant field for Pitsiokos’s breathy chirps and bent tones but even here, they arc to waves of feedback and skirling reed fusillades by the end. The final piece starts with shattered electronics and spitting reeds and mounts into bellowing din, exploding to the finish of the exhilarating 37-minute set.

Michael Rosenstein

[sole-cuore-amore-e-droga]

Tel Aviv 2019: Straight outta Latvia to Eurovision with a cinematic French rendez-vous

Supernova with their strict-on decision to only focus on all that’s radiofriendly this year went to hell for me. I mean, I like me some pop tunes, but not those that are purposefully marketed to be enjoyed by the massive sheeps of the Eurofandom who usually fall for those songs by Michael James Down, Will Taylor, even Ylva & Linda... because at the end of the day they’re all just shallow and pointless outside the ESC bubble.

Well the best they could do is to accept some different winds out of nowhere! And so they did when the audition stage hit place and we guys got to witness the 33 shortlisted tunes for this year, among which of them are loudly and proudly different - like “Alligator” and “Grow��, which I did not fathom but I was also raging for their not qualification for - more precisely “Alligator” which was way more outstanding of those two I mentioned. The guys that performed that song were fun, their performance choice was fun, they could have totally rocked on Supernova... but alas.

In fact not that many alternative songs made it to the final down-to-16 cut! There might have been a couple of those that sound nothing a radio would play unless it’s not playing pop on its purpose (Laime Pilnīga’s ”Awe” comes to mind right away), but in the end of the day, not many of those survived and we were graced with some... choices, like letting Samanta Tina waste herself on a cocky-ass tune with terrible chorus rhyme-scheme and unbearable charisma and putting through the most Eirodziesma-like mess-fest with the Beaver guy on top of it. Honey I like you in costume but... not in this emploi.

I don’t blame them though, as one of non-blatant-pop tunes conquered the Latvian hearts for this year. These next Latvian people in Laura Rizzotto’s succession are collectively named Carousel and their song is “That Night”.

It sets a romantic mood throughout, like we all are reliving this magical last date - it was in a restaurant, the candles were lit, the restaurant looked vintage with bordeaux satin tablecloth on the table, and the couple is having a smooth evening... until the love runs out to the probably cold and rainy streets and the other half of the couple starts longing for one's love. That's all I can imagine with this.

So yeah, I really like this! It's got lovely instrumentation that doesn't need all the over the top instruments - just guitar, simple drums, etc.; the noir flair is distinct on here and that's not bad on here; this is just a simple and soft song that you too could play in your own restaurants when all the lovely couples have romantic dinners and sip wine. And in some kind of a French movie, too (with the lead role being a curly redhead artiste with striped sweater, looking for love in Paris (because it’s so romantic in there honhonhon). I'm not sure if the revamp touched upon this one little problem I noticed but the problem kinda seems to be that the chorus repeats. A lot. And verses are way too short that they could be easily forgotten against the 4th and 5th time one would be hearing the "lo-o-o-o-ove, where? Are? You?" line, and then lulled into sleep at how peacefully relaxing it is. Which is indeed of a problem because repetition has quite a bit of a negative effect on people. Yes, it gets the song onto your brain more easily, but the repetition drives people insane too. Just like it was suspected for “Story of My Life” (Belarus 2017) on its original version to be unable to be ‘stood’ - after the 2nd chorus, the rest of the song just went like “hey hey hayayayaho” until the end. Naviband fixed the problem by throwing in another vocal onomatopoeia in a form of the song bridge and I loved them for it, even if there still were too many “hey hey hey”s at the end, haha.

Final conclusion? Yep, issa good entry, and if anything it’s helluva underrated. Say what you want about it being “boring”, to me it’s somewhat fresh and exciting, because the melodies are pleasant, the instrumentation is top notch and Sabīne’s vocals are relaxing. Delightful starry night music, oh yes, thanks a lot for it, Carousel, I’m taking it.

Obviously, after they won Supernova, there was a lowkey uprising from fans who were dead certain on wanting Edgars Kreilis or Markus Riva to win, eek. Honeys, honeys. I do like those two as well, BUT for a bit of a mess that Supernova 2019 was with some of their decisions to include, I think it’s for the better they finally let themselves go lighthearted over it all rather than blatant tryhard to sound radio for the masses just cuz the NF wanted. Just forgive Carousel for winning, okay? Okay. ^_^

Approval factor: Definite yes from me, because why wouldn’t I rate it a yes. Yay brotherland!

Follow-up factor: For me personally this is miles better than Laura Rizzotto's last year's melodrama. Overall I think it just flows nice and is a delightful addition to the Latvian collection.

Qualification factor: This I cannot think about all too often but I am not sure if they'd... stand a chance anymore? I'd use to think it did, but that was weeks before supposedly much stronger entries rushed in, squeezing Latvia into an uncomfortable position. But I really hope it's just charming enough to kind of get through. Sort of. A little bit. I'm positive about it happening, but not that much. And a lot of older audiences might love it enough to vote it, too.

NATIONAL FINAL BONUS

I admit that I got way too heated about hearing Supernova’s new approach to selecting entries, but in the end it turned out that I didn’t need to worry all that much in the first place - some of those alternative entries we got were very nice (or at least the entries out of the standart overbearing radio-pop norm), both in their actual auditions (this time they were on an actual stage in front of a jury instead of the listeners pick-pocketing the submissions themselves) AND among the actual picks. But what else is there to be note-worthy in this year’s edition of this show?

• Well, among of the auditionees there were those too-weird-ass bands/artists (some of them I mentioned), and you saw me mention the “Alligator” song to you beforehand, which is done by an ambitious project ATOM.LV (so did I mention “Grow" by Waterflower and her show is worth mentioning as well <3 Those flowers in her hair, the hair color, the makeup, her overall image (it’s like Jamie-Lee upgraded) and the dance moves are ADORABLE <3333 but the song is... hmm... :c). And I’ll repeat myself - those guys rocked! I may have not been a massive fan of this but I can at least commend them - they had a good song structure going on, a clear message (alligators from the stars *catchy trumpet fanfare part* trying to probably conquer the world, yeah!) and an outrageous tribal image with that facepaint on! Awh hell yeah! Who wouldn't want THAT through the live shows??? Ah, only the Latvian juries ofc. (And me because I never got the appeal of this but I sure felt sad for 'em kids hoping and wishing for them through :x)

• Thank Goodness I had my faves through - all hail Double Faced Eels! They're the little legendary pop band who went all their way to compete in some Youtube contest and have had sung with Bebe Rexha as the prize for winning it almost 1,5 years ago :o Believe it or not but I have heard of them way before their Sulernova stint - I got introduced to them through a friend, known on Tumblr as Soupgeist. :3 And I don't regret stanning a name I know, as "Fire", their entry in this year's 'Nova, was a pop-rock banger with some electro in! Granted the vocaliat might've had some troubles singing live but he still pulled it off nicely in the finals, with that energy coming out on top! Yeah yeah, uguns. 🔥

• Like I mentioned earlier, there were people rooting for other favourites this year so heavily, and that annoyed the hell out of me, because I thought that Eurofans have some sort of evolving tastes that accept more than just pretty pop boys/girls with not-so-special songs? Well, I mentioned that Eurofans’ targets were Edgars Kreilis and Markus Riva. The latter felt so attacked about him trying to achieve his representation dream over and over he even tweeted about it once... well I did like his song “You Make Me So Crazy”, but I found it a little too overrated with the fans. So I did Edgars, but his song was way catchier and had way more personality than being a club track, I tell ya. Why would his song be renamed from “Fire” (yes, he partially shared a song title with that Double Faced Eels’s song!) to “Cherry Absinthe”, anyway? It gives it a bit more of an exciting feeling, tbh. ^_^ So I ended up rooting for him a little bit more out of the two ‘pretty’ pop boys, if I had to accept one of those kind of winners that everyone wanted (like everyone wanted just either yesyes or The Middletonz for Hungary this year).

• There were a lot of other nice chosen songs too that I would’ve loved to discuss, but I just can’t not mention the Riga’s Beaver as one of the more memorable moments here. I did write earlier in this that I was disappointed though. Not because of the beaver being out of costume and coming at us as a young-to-middle-aged stunning lad, but because the Beaver-entry, “Tautasdziesma”, was a “Supernova”-times cluster-mess. I think of this as a charity music medley-parody of some sorts, and that doesn’t bode with me well, and sometimes I like parodies, like the one Klemen Slakonja (aka the guy who portrayed Putin for a musical number once) did in his country’s NF in 2012 (that he hosted) was fairly nice (although a bit too much), but... ehhh... at least the men are fine and their costumes were dandy.

• Let’s not forget that those auditions had this one glorious thing going on during the performances - we saw shots of the jurors judging all of the 33 shortlisted acts with... rather less-than-enthusiastic looks, and man oh man were they fabulously done with this shit <3333

if that’s not a big indicator of them being too dead inside to be judging anything that day, then idk what is...

Anyway, I am finished with this review also, and I’m happy about it! I don’t think I can move any of this at a more quicker pace (seriously, I have to do so many more even during rehearsals!!!), but I am still trying to do my best. Good luck to the Carousel quartet and may they not flop in May! To hell with the naysayers sweeties, you’ll do just fine x ✨