Archive for the ‘Record reviews’ Category

More fun than I deserve

Posted: March 6, 2016 in music, Record reviews
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Electric
The Cult
1987

When I was younger I wanted to find a band that rocked as hard as AC/DC but that didn’t view women as subhuman breeding stock. A band that was as heavy as Led Zeppelin minus all the mystical claptrap. I don’t know if this band has ever existed (I’m open to your recommendations), but I do know that there are albums that qualify. One is Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991). Another is my subject this evening.

Southern Death Cult was formed in 1981 by four boys from Yorkshire. By 2012, when they released their 40,000th comeback record, Choice of Weapon, 23 boys had worn the uniform. The only constants were Ian Astbury (vocals) and Billy Duffy (guitar). Ian and Billy were goths with a taste for metal and a fixation on North American Indians. Sure, why not.

Southern Death Cult gradually phased out the goth and the Indians and the Southern and the Death. (Why would you mess with a name as venomous as Southern Death Cult?) For their third album, they corralled a new producer, Rick Rubin, a man who eats transformation for breakfast, and with his help they broke the chains of gravity with their magnum opus, Electric.

What we have here are songs that embody the one thing we love about AC/DC – mindless butt-shaking – with the one thing we love about Led Zep – guitar solos that pull 4 or 5 G’s. There’s no moody-teenager philosophizing, no misogyny, no Middle Earth, and no intelligence. This album rocks like 12 Republican governors running for president inside a cement mixer.

Tracks 4 through 8, the heart of the order, hit harder than a brass knuckle barn dance. “Bad Fun” has so many layers, it’s as if somebody cloned every dork in Yes and suctioned them into a Yugo. The guitar solos – all of the guitar solos – are awesome because they all sound like metal guitar solo gibberish. Were The Cult subversive or satirical? There’s no way to tell. I don’t care. I love this shit.

An homage to “I Am the Walrus” or plain old drug abuse?
And yet Electric is also one of the funniest albums ever recorded. The lyrics have been brilliantly deconstructed and rebuilt, often with no translatable meaning, as in this unrhymed couplet from “Aphrodisiac Jacket” (a song that sounds like Cream has a brain tumor):

Sittin’ on a mountain looking at the sun
Plastic fantastic lobster telephone

In “Bad Fun,” a song that mixes atomic bombs, “fancy clothes,” and “ghetto stars” without telling you why, the boys break into a chorus about a woman alone with her personal assistant:

Spirit like a rumblin’ train
Spirit of the thunderin’ rain
Vibrations got you on the run
Electric child on bad fun

You can’t not laugh when Ian rolls his r’s or when they swing into their insightful commentary on intimate relationships, “Love Removal Machine,” a song my wife claims she has never heard and yet her life runs along just fine. You can’t not laugh when Billy lights this candle with another solo he checked out from the library, or when the band chants PEACE. DOG. PEACE. DOG. PEACE. DOG. on a song that’s called – let me see, what was it? I knew it a moment ago – yes, I have it: “Peace Dog.”

The only poor choice on this disc was covering “Born to Be Wild” at two-thirds the speed of Steppenwolf. If you’re headin’ down the highway and people on the sidewalk are passing you than you’re not born to be wild or even mischievous.

On The Cult’s previous release, Love (1985), you can hear the transition to a harder rock sound, but it was not until Electric that these ex-goths achieved nirvana. Oh right, “Nirvana” is a song on Love. “When the music is loud, we all get down,” Ian sings. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Postscript courtesy of the concert listings at PortlandMercury.com:
AC/DC, Tuesday, Feb. 2, Tacoma Dome
“The band isn’t playing Portland tonight – apparently we’re not good enough – but it’s probably worth the drive to Tacoma. Because, you know, they might die soon.”

 

King me

Posted: February 19, 2016 in music, Record reviews
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I can’t bid adieu to Scotland without bringing to your attention the Scotch influence on one of the world’s most popular games.

Not golf, Mr. Spock. Checkers.

The modern history of the game we North Americans call checkers began a thousand years ago on the Iberian Peninsula, where the Moors (the illegal immigrants of that era) and the Spanish (who wanted to build a wall and make the Moors pay for it) spent centuries fighting over which of them would one day oppress the Basques.

The Moors had brought with them a board game they called el-quirkat. The Spanish called it alquerque (pronounced like Albuquerque, minus the third and fourth letters). You played with a 12-man army and captured by jumping. The board was divided into 64 squares as plain as graph paper. The pieces sat on the intersections, not within the squares.

The Spanish passed alquerque to the French, who colored in half the squares and moved the pieces off the intersections. Now all they needed was a new name.

Back up a minute
When chess came to Europe from the Middle East, it had no queen. It had a counselor (in Persian, the fers) who moved one square at a time and captured by jumping. When the Europeans were handed checkers, they already had chess, and the checkers men moved like the fers, so they called checkers ferses. As soon as they did they agreed it was a dumb name.

Also, people were stealing ferses from chess sets and using them for the men in checkers. Nothing makes a chess player angrier than hunting around for a coin or a bobbin or a Monopoly token to stand in for a missing chess piece. That’s like using somebody’s sweater for second base.

Sometime in the 1300s or 1400s, the Europeans fired the counselor from chess and hired the queen – in French, the dame. The French extended this transformation to checkers. Now instead of 12 fers you had 12 queens. When a queen reached the last rank in this new form of checkers, she became a he – a king. He was then paid 25% more.

The French took one look at all those broads on the board and renamed the game dames. This name followed the game as it spread across Europe; in Turkey, for example, checkers is called dama.

The English say no to the European Union
The English refer to checkers as draughts, pronounced “drafts.” But in some rural parts of England, the name draughts took a long time to catch on. People in those areas called it checkers because of the checkered board. This includes the Pilgrims, who landed on Plymouth Rock carrying the Mayflower Compact and institutional racism. Oh, and a checkers set.

What about the Scots, then?
Hold your tartans, laddie, I’m getting there. The Scots got checkers not from their enemies, the English, but from their employers, the Dutch. Many Scotsmen served in Dutch armies in the 1600s. The Dutch called checkers damen. The kilted mercenaries who brought it home called it dams.

The first book written in English on checkers was published in 1756. Somebody smuggled a samizdat copy into Scotland, where it created a sensation (and deep-sixed the name “dams”). For the next hundred years, the Scots owned checkers, bitches. They were still producing world champions in the 1920s.

The Scots also named most of the opening systems. In chess, you have the Queen’s Gambit, the King’s Indian, and the Sicilian Defense. In checkers, there’s the Edinburgh, the Glasgow, and the Bonnie Dundee, as well as the Will-o-the-Wisp, the Laird & the Lady, and the Ayrshire Lassie.

Today, the ultimate checkers player is a computer from Canada, and the game may in fact have been solved. But you’ll never separate the Scotch from the checkers.

Thus ends my tour of all things Scottish. As my ancestor William Wallace cried in Braveheart, Alba gu bràth! (Gaelic for “It’s your turn. Would you move already?”)

Random Pick of the Day
Jimmy Witherspoon, The Concerts
1989
Combines Jimmy Witherspoon at the Monterey Jazz Festival (1960) and At the Renaissance with the Gerry Mulligan & Ben Webster Quintet (1959)

Two live sets from Checker Records artist Jimmy Witherspoon, though neither set was released on Checker and this comp appeared on yet another label. These records are a good look at genres of music (blues, R&B, jazz) that were fading from the pop mainstream.

On the first eight tracks, recorded in an outdoor space where it’s difficult to hear the crowd, the blues shouter holds your attention even as he holds back on the shouting. He delivers a slow “C.C. Rider” that makes you listen as if you’ve never heard this before.

Tracks 9-15 were recorded indoors, and we have the pleasure of hearing the man full-blast with some major-league jazzmen behind him. Witherspoon, having spent the evening singing about dicey women and trouble in general, introduces a special guest: “For the first time in her life, one of the greatest persons in my life is in here tonight to hear me sing. My mother. Let’s give her a big hand.” He then ignites a soulful version of “Ain’t Nobody’s Business.” Was he sending Mom a message or was it just next on the set list? Maybe it was the family theme song.

Pack Jimmy Witherspoon, The Concerts for a long car trip.

 

England forever, Scotland a wee bit longer

Posted: February 7, 2016 in music, Record reviews
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Weightlifting cover

Weightlifting
The Trashcan Sinatras
2004

In 1999, I edited a magazine for software company called Visio. One of my columnists was Dave, our Chief Technical Evangelist. Dave was a software maestro and the champion of all things Scottish. “Aye, Steve, it’s a hildy, wildy day, but I’ll wager there’ll be a glent o’ sunsheen yet,” he’d say before ducking into his office. It looked like he was refighting Culloden in there.

Dave kept trying to sneak his Broad Scots dialect into articles on such Scots-friendly topics as using Visio to automate Excel spreadsheets. One of his vocabulary words was “Slàinte!,” a traditional greeting that I believe means “Slammin’!” This behavior might’ve fooled another editor, but not me, because guess what? I’m a Scot.

Not everyone knows this. For many years I didn’t know this. Then one day when I was skylarking in Edinburgh, I happened to pass a souvenir shop. The employee stationed outside asked me, “Sir! What’s yer family name?” When I told him he cried, “Lad, if yer name is Bieler, that means yer an Aberdeen!”

I’m a smart tourist, and I realize I could’ve told him I was Ho Chi Minh or Salvatore Bazooka and he would’ve told me I was a Campbell or a MacDougall, but his Star Fleet engineer’s accent was convincing and anyway my wife and I had recently seen an awesome staging of Macbeth. Before you could say “Something wicked this way comes” I was proudly wrapped in a scarf woven in my Aberdeen clan colors. (But I said no to the kilt, the vest, the big old shorts, and the condoms.)

Until it’s time to go a-roamin’ in the gloamin’, then, I’ll keep enjoying my Scottish music an a’that. I’ve already written about Dire Straits, Donovan, and Simple Minds. There are plenty more to go, from Average White Band to The Waterboys. (Bay City Rollers? That’s takin’ the low road to Loch Lomond, laddie.) Before I get to today’s topic, here are a few of the early milestones, or perhaps roadblocks, of Scottish popular music.

Most scholars agree, especially after enough blended malt whisky, that the Scots came to world attention in 1967 with Lulu’s super explosive smash hit explosion “To Sir with Love.” I was moved by “To Sir” when I was 12, but today the only thing that catches my jaded attention is that it was produced by John Paul Jones. A year later, Jones became the bass player for Led Zeppelin.

In 1971, Middle of the Road took revenge for the Highland Clearances when they released “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.” Yes, all those sword-swinging Scotsmen fighting in the mud on Outlander evolved into “Where’s your momma gone, little baby bird?” Though I find this song about as appealing as someone paving my breakfast with a layer of haggis, I will always give this band some slack because their singer, Susan Carr, may have had the best legs in Scotland.

Maggie Bell is a Scottish soul singer who could mix shades of Tina Turner, Bonnie Raitt, Marianne Faithfull, and Joe Cocker into one groovy cocktail. Sadly, her material was never as good as her voice. Her debut album, Queen of the Night (1974), gave her her sole hit in the USA: a calypso-inspired version of Eric Clapton’s “After Midnight.” I don’t know how this happened because this is the one song on the disc that isn’t a vocal showcase. She deserved better. I’d yell my Clan Aberdeen battle cry here, but I took an oath to use it solely against our blood enemies, Clan Coldplay.

Bagpipes! You thought I’d forget. I once attended a bagpipe recital. Every bagpiper onstage had won at least 10 awards (every FN one of which was announced), though no two bagpipers seemed to have attended the same competition. From this I learned that bagpipers, journalists, and third-graders all receive awards for everything they do.

Toss that funky caber, white boy
Now we come to The Trashcan Sinatras, Glaswegians who have the most stupendous band name in the history of Scotland. I just scoured the Wikipedia page that lists every Scottish band since Mary, Queen of Scots (rhythm guitar and mouth harp) and the Trashies’ only competition comes from The Blow Monkeys, Teenage Fanclub, and Shitdisco.

The lassie in the office next to mine is a highly placed officer in the international Trashcan cult. To preserve her identity I’ll call her Lorna. “We Trashcan Sinatras listeners take our affiliations very seriously,” Lorna wrote in an email. “Are you one of us?”

It’s a shame for a good Scotsman to admit it, but I’m not up on me Trashcans. Lorna recommended that I begin with the band’s fourth album, Weightlifting. This was their comeback; they recorded it after a gap of eight years. Weightlifting is a sly, melodic companion that rocks when it feels like it (“Welcome Back”) but mostly chills.

“Not everyone can handle their intricate, ethereal smoothness,” Lorna informed me, and she’s right. Weighlifting is too laid-back for me, though I did find the title track interesting. Plus the album cover is actually worth framing. If you like The BoDeans or (in their lighter moments) Big Head Todd & The Monsters, I think you’ll enjoy The Trashcan Sinatras.

Goodbye just now, honest men and bonnie lasses, and one day we’ll take up another aspect of my ethnic heritage: Norwegian death metal. Until then…Slàinte!

Bonus: Here’s Middle of the Road, 30 years later.

 

 

The stars look very different today

Posted: January 11, 2016 in music, Record reviews
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David Bowie is dead. Why didn’t the world stand still?

In 1976, I bought a Bowie album called Station to Station. It doesn’t matter what kind of music Bowie made on Station to Station or how it fits into his life’s work or that it marked the end of this phase and the beginning of that phase. It doesn’t matter if you, Dear Reader, played it once and ran away. It doesn’t even matter if you’ve never heard of it.

What does matter is that I found this record and that as soon as the needle hit the wax it jumped into my soul. It tilted my brain. It stares unblinking from my eyes. As Bowie sang on another record, “Never no turning back.” I like to think that we all have a song or a book or a movie or a painting or a sculpture or a play that did that to us…if we were lucky.

In all the years I’ve been playing Station to Station, never have I thought, “Not this again.”

I never met the man, saw him in concert, or had any contact with him outside of his music. I have no cool stories to share. But today at work I played 35 of his songs and from time to time I looked out the window as the clouds closed in and broke up and closed in and wondered what kind of person am I in the alternative universe where there was no Bowie.

I’m glad I live over here.

Goodbye, David Bowie. Put on your red shoes and dance the blues!

Comets caught in the gravitational grip of Donna Summer

Posted: May 21, 2015 in music, Record reviews
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The women I’m discussing this evening all came from jazz, soul, R&B, and gospel to try their luck in disco. As singers, they were well above average. Gloria Gaynor, Thelma Houston, and Patti LaBelle had the biggest voices; Candi Staton and Loleatta Holloway were the most subtle. You could’ve hired any of them to sing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” and loved the results.

Forgive me for omitting Anita Ward (“Ring My Bell”) if she was one of your favorites. If she was, why are you reading this blog?

Commercially, the move into disco was a smart decision. Even The Grateful Dead tried it. Artistically, it didn’t always work. The Grateful Dead shouldn’t have tried it. The material the women in this post had to work with was uneven, and most of the lesser numbers and even some of the bigger ones are forever bogged down in the ’70s.

What follows is my idea of the best of the best. I may not like some of them, but I respect all of them.

Freda Payne
Band of Gold
1970
The sophisticated Payne recorded jazz and R&B ballads in the 1960s. These are collected on Early Essentials (2011) if you want to explore them. I don’t. Her voice and arrangements are not for me. I’ll say more about that when I get to Dionne Warwick in my next post.

Payne’s commercial breakthrough, “Band of Gold,” was a monster smash that was beaten into the collective unconscious of an unwilling humanity by one billion plays on AM radio. I didn’t have to listen to it for this review because I recall it at the cellular level. Despite my mixed feelings for “Band of Gold” (I can never decide if I hate it or despise it), I give Payne credit for invading what was for her alien territory (pop, disco, and soul) and with this album beating everyone at their own game. Plus she looked smashing in her bikini on the cover of Reaching Out (1973) and in her gardening outfit on the cover of Payne & Pleasure (1974).

Gloria Gaynor
Never Can Say Goodbye
1975
Love Tracks
1979
Never Can Say Goodbye is famous for having three songs on one side with no breaks between them. It may have been the first LP designed for djs. The songs are “Honey Bear,” “Never Can Say Goodbye,” and “Reach Out (I’ll Be There).” The transitions are clumsy. DJs in clubs had already invented fading out and fading in, but the record companies were still catching up. The three songs are about 19 minutes, which is long enough for me to wander out of the off-leash area and dig up somebody’s garden.

“Honey Bear” exists solely to build excitement for “Never Can Say Goodbye.” “Never” is terrific, except for the horns, which are disconnected from the rest of the song, as if Gaynor’s producer had hired Chicago but locked them up in another room. Chicago should always be locked up in another room. “Reach Out (I’ll Be There)” is not bad, but the drums are totally annoying. Listening to this version is like trying to eat lunch and read your book at the park while a FedEx cargo plane flies overhead every 45 seconds.

“Never Can Say Goodbye” was a hit for The Jackson 5 in 1971. The song was infectious, but Michael Jackson was 13 and sounded like it. Isaac Hayes turned “Never” into an emotional slow dance. I could do without the male chorus he brought along. Gaynor’s bright, brassy voice and the dance-tempo beat and the 4-minute radio edit are what I want to hear.

Cover of a Cover of a Cover Alert #1: The Communards did a spectacular job with “Never Can Say Goodbye” on Red (1987). The singer is Jimmy Somerville, whose interstellar soprano you can hear in the movie Pride (about the gay groups that helped the striking miners in the U.K.) when they get to the scene in the disco.

Gaynor’s Love Tracks unleashed the female battle anthem “I Will Survive.” The original vinyl is enshrined in the Smithsonian and protected by an eternal flame and an honor guard. The album also gave us a minor disco classic called “Anybody Wanna Party?” There are 300 words in this song and 60 are “Anybody wanna party.” I’m in the wrong line of work.

Thelma Houston
Any Way You Like It
1976
Houston went to #1 with her version of Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes’ “Don’t Leave Me This Way.” The original (with Teddy Pendergrass ripping his heart out and throwing it down and stomping on it until he died) was a phenomenon in 1975, but Houston, who could belt one out like Tina Turner, established her own place in musical history with her reimagining of the song.

Cover of a Cover of a Cover Alert #2: The Communards tackled this one on their debut, Communards (1986), and once again triumphed.

The album cover of Thelma Houston’s debut, Sunshower (1969), is one of the most pleasing yellows I’ve ever been pleased by.

Candi Staton
Young Hearts Run Free
1976
“Young Hearts Run Free,” a song that writer David Crawford based on Staton’s life at the time, went all the way to 20 on Billboard’s Hot 100. I don’t care for the music, as I feel I’ve heard it a hot 100 times before, but the lyrics are more mature than anything you’d expect on a disco record:

What’s the sense in sharing, this one and only life

Ending up, just another lost and lonely wife

You count up the years, and they will be filled with tears

Love only breaks up, to start over again

You’ll get the babies, but you won’t have your man

While he is busy loving, every woman that he can

The poor woman was stuck with Shaft!

Staton came out of the gospel scene, adapted to a tumultuous musical landscape, and scored numerous hits in the 1980s and ’90s. One of them, “You Got the Love” (no relation to the “You Got the Love” I’m about to describe), is a 1986 example of electronic dance music that has some serious wistfulness going on.

Maxine Nightingale
You Got the Love
1976
Lead Me On
1979
Nightingale, who is English, is the only non-U.S. citizen in my survey, but as I announced upfront I’m a provincial slob from the USA. USA! USA!

This lady has a good voice, but she struggles to be heard against all the musicians on her debut. There’s a great guitar break in “You Got the Love”; the guitarist faces the same hurdle and doesn’t clear it. I like the song, but the original, by Rufus with Chaka Khan, is the better choice.

“Right Back Where We Started From” hit the #2 spot on the Billboard Hot 100. You can also find it on the soundtrack of the Paul Newman hockey movie Slap Shot. It resembles Jean Knight’s “Mr. Big Stuff” in that it sounds like music composed for kids. The beat is one-two, one-two with plenty of handclaps. The piano line is simple, but when it falls away near the end you miss it.

On the cover of her debut, You Got the Love, Nightingale is photographed in jeans and a T-shirt waiting on a bench with her guitar. Looks like an early Bill Withers cover. On the cover of Lead Me On, she’s leaning against a wall in tight pants and a tube top while a tiger inspects her derrière. Not like a Bill Withers cover. The leaden “Lead Me On” was an inexplicable hit. I assume people bought it because they needed help falling asleep.

Evelyn “Champagne” King
Smooth Talk
1977
King was only 17 (but already hitting the champagne?) when she recorded Smooth Talk. “Shame” peaked at #9; it was popular in clubs because it was fast and long (6 minutes). It’s the only disco song I know with a starring part for a sax. King doesn’t spend a lot of time singing, making this a distant ancestor of EDM. This hit and the rest of the album have been reduced in stature with the passage of time.

Patti LaBelle
Patti Labelle
1977
Tasty
1978
It’s Alright with Me
1979
In the early ’60s, Patti LaBelle founded the band Labelle with Sarah Dash and Nona Hendryx. Actually, she founded more than one band and went through several name changes, but let’s call them all Labelle. Patti, Sarah, and Nona worked hard, toured incessantly, and by 1971 were opening for The Who.

(Their version of “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” on their 1972 album Moon Shadow, is competent. They can rock. Their version of “If I Can’t Have You” on the same disc has an edge of hysteria I usually only hear from Queen. In fact, much of their work in the early ’70s sounds like Aretha Franklin taking hits off a helium tank.)

Labelle became famous in 1974 when they released “Lady Marmalade.” That’s the “voulez-vous couchez avec moi (ce soir)?” song. I don’t know why it’s always referred to as a disco classic, as even in 1974 it was too slow to dance to. Plus it’s super annoying. France should’ve recalled their ambassador.

Patti LaBelle went off on her own in the ’70s. She has been singing, touring, recording, and delighting her army of fans ever since. This is not a cause I’ve ever enlisted in, but in the spirit of fairness I’ll name one passable song from each of these records:

Patti LaBelle: “Funky Music”
Tasty: “Save the Last Dance for Me” (original by The Drifters)
It’s Alright with Me: “It’s Alright with Me”

Nona Hendryx went off an experimental trip that I’ve only read about. I’ll track her down one of these days.

Loleatta Holloway
Love Sensation (1980)
Here’s how I listen to music for this blog:

  1. I play the album on a CD. I want the original sequence, the cover art, and the liner notes.
  2. I play the album on Rhapsody.
  3. I play somebody else’s CD. Do I still have your CD? Well too bad, you still have mine!
  4. I play whatever I can find on YouTube.
  5. By this time I’m sick of the whole thing, but if I have any energy left I’ll try Spotify or Pandora.
  6. I go to the library.

You be surprised how some albums resist this formula.

For this reason I’m including Love Sensation, even though it’s from another decade, as it’s the only one of Loleatta Holloway’s albums I’ve heard from A to Z. “Love Sensation” was a club sensation, but I guess clubs have changed in 35 years because when I listened to it just now I didn’t feel like throwing my hands in the air like I just don’t care. The album is not distinctive, despite her voice.

It should be noted that “Loleatta Holloway” is the perfect searchable name.

One thing I’ve learned from these disco divas is how long a record company was willing to wait, in the ’60s and ’70s, for an artist to become commercially viable. They were all given years to develop. Does the music business still work this way?

That’s it for disco. Tomorrow we fire our retro rockets and begin our descent from Diva Week!

 

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