New 8tracks playlist – Albums Of The Year 2010
I’ve now downloaded and listened to my penultimate eMusic set for the year, so given that I won’t have enough time to absorb next month’s in time to make a reasonable judgement, I thought I’d do my Albums Of The Year now. If nothing else doing it this year will give some googlejuice to the post, which will in turn hopefully bring some attention to these artists, many of whom are very obscure.
My criteria for this are simple – the album goes on here if either I’ve obsessed over it and listened to it repeatedly (even if I didn’t think it was very good at first) or if I’ve not listened to it as much but have listened enough to know it will one day be a favourite.
The only album to be released this year that I haven’t listened to but think I might include is Joanna Newsom’s new one. It’s not on eMusic, and I use that for pretty much all my new music these days. I’ll get it one day.
I’ve created an 8tracks.com playlist, containing my two favourite tracks from each of these albums (8tracks is a legit streaming service and pays royalties) here . Take a listen and let me know what you think, and if you like them I’ve included links to the eMusic pages for most of the albums.
EDIT Didn’t embed properly, but you can get to it here.
1) Kristian Hoffman – Fop (emusic link)
Kristian Hoffman’s last album, &, which I wrote about here, is a very strong candidate for best album of the last decade, and while I’m not sure Fop is of quite that quality, it’s definitely the album of the year.
Hoffman writes about religion, politics, sexuality and the intersections of the three from the perspective of a gay, liberal (in the USian sense) sceptic, but manages to avoid polemic – there’s nothing as strident and obvious as Dear God or Tramp The Dirt Down. Rather, he’s one of the most subtle, moving lyricists I know of.
Those two songs are not chosen at random though – Hoffman is a unique talent, but XTC and Elvis Costello are two of the reference points I would point to to give some idea of his music. The others, though, would be Queen, ELO, Sparks, The Kinks, 20s revivalists like Janet Klein, Rufus Wainwright, Candypants (and the rest of that LA powerpop set of musicians, especially the Wondermints), Corn Mo, Van Dyke Parks, Stephen Sondheim, Abbey Road era Beatles…
Basically if you like witty lyrics, a glam feel, a sense of fun, intricate arrangements and strong melodies, that manages to do bombast while still showing restraint where necessary, buy Fop – straight after you buy &.
The two songs I’ve chosen from Fop are Imaginary Friend, which starts out as a foxtrot with fairly accurate 20s-style instrumentation before going into a gigantic Queen big ballad chorus, about the solace that can be gained from religion even when the religion in question is controlled by people with less than benign motives. Hey Little Jesus on the other hand is a fantastic strutting rocker, a 50s pastiche melody (with more than a touch of Stupid Cupid to it) about the crucifixion, from the perspective of someone taunting Jesus, with a wonderful arrangement, far more subtle than it first sounds (a harpsichord, hammond organ and steel guitar solo, just for starters, and the string part is wonderfully detailed).
2) Blake Jones & The Trike Shop – The Underground Garden (emusic link)
Some might accuse me of bias here, because Blake is a friend of mine, and guested on my last EP. He’s also, though, a wonderfully talented songwriter and performer who gave the single most impressive live performance I’ve ever seen when he and the band played the Love Apple Cafe in Bradford to an audience of less than ten paying customers but still played an hour of everything from Zappa pastiche to a performance of Harlem Nocturne on the theremin. His songwriting is astounding, reminiscent of Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney and Harry Nilsson – but *ACTUALLY* reminiscent of them, not just copying their musical and lyrical tics in a pale imitation. Rather, he’s doing the same thing as them. While the two selections I’ve chosen here don’t show it, as well, his music is also remarkably varied, showing influences as varied as Dick Dale, Frank Zappa, old horror films and the Beach Boys, often in the same song.
Sing Along is my personal favourite of the songs on the new album – the lines “sometimes I wonder why my friends they all still play guitar/It’s not like they’re in line to be rock stars/There must be some kind of belief in a better world/Where we can strum and smile and get the girl” got to me especially. And Christmas Sale is a nice attack on the people who complain about the “War On Christmas” – “Your money don’t say feed the poor/And your courthouse won’t say blessed are the merciful/And your fences don’t say love your neighbour now/But you’re mad ’cause Macy’s won’t call it a Christmas sale…”
3) The Asphalt Orchestra – Asphalt Orchestra (emusic link)
The Asphalt Orchestra are a marching band from New York, but one that plays fiendishly complex jazz and art-rock covers. Their debut album features pieces by Stew & Heidi Rodewald, Charles Mingus, Bjork, Frank Zappa and Goran Bregović among others, and they just recorded a single with David Byrne. They make very good skronking noises indeed.
The two tracks I’ve chosen here are Zomby Woof, a cover of the Zappa track from Over-Nite Sensation, and Carlton, a specially composed piece by Stew & Heidi of the Negro Problem (which is how I first heard about them), which sounds like TV theme music, but in a good way (Tilt will know what I mean).
4) Imagined Village – Empire And Love (emusic link)
The Imagined Village are a ‘supergroup’ of sorts, a loose collective of musicians brought together by Simon Emerson of Afro-Celt Sound System in an attempt to reinterpret the English folk tradition in a way that incorporates elements of all the different cultures in the UK today – partly as a gigantic “fuck you” to Dickibegyourpardonnick Griffin, who tried to link traditional folk to the Bastard Nazi Party. (Incidentally, apparently Dickibegyourpardonnick is in hospital at the moment, with suspected kidney stones. Apparently they can be very painful…).
Their first album, a few years ago, was interesting but suffered from too many cooks – it featured Paul Weller, Billy Bragg, Benjamin Zephaniah… basically everyone who anyone who read the Guardian in the 80s likes, and so was a bit amorphous. This one, on the other hand, while still featuring a large backing band with English and Indian traditional instruments mixed with electronic music, limits the vocals to folkies Martin & Eliza Carthy and Chris Wood.
The two songs I’ve chosen here are Space Girl, an old Ewan MacColl song about the dangers of copping off with a spaceman, and Scarborough Fair.
5) Roky Erickson – True Love Cast Out All Evil (emusic)
This was the real surprise here. For those who don’t know, Roky Erickson was the leader of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, a seminal mid-60s psych-rock group, but was arrested for marijuana possession, took an insanity plea, and unfortunately, because of the state of psychiatric medicine in the late 60s, became severely mentally ill. His music since then has had moments of power, but has been for the most part best judged as ‘outsider music’.
This new album, though… it’s still clearly the work of an ill man, but for the first time in decades he’s working with musicians who are sympathetic to his songs, and a producer who knows what he’s doing. The result is something close to Skip Spence’s Oar, The Beach Boys Love You, or Syd Barret’s early solo work, rather than to Wesley Willis or someone. Still the work of a fractured psyche, but one with the tools to express himself properly.
The two songs I’ve chosen are the first two from the album. Devotional Number One is deliberately recorded in the style of a field recording, and features the best vocals I’ve ever heard from Erickson. The organ coming in on the line “Jesus is not a hallucinogenic mushroom” sends shivers down my spine. Ain’t Blues Too Sad is a short alt-country song, and the difference in vocals is astounding – Erickson sounds like a totally different singer here, but an equally good one. And anyone with any knowledge of his personal history will be moved to tears by the line “Electricity hammered me through my head, til nothin’ at all is backward instead”.
This is raw, harsh music, borne out of immense torment, but still beautiful.
6) Al Jardine – A Postcard From California
I wrote about this here, but in brief this is a Beach Boys reunion album in all but name, featuring the full band on one track and Brian WIlson and David Marks on several, and better than any Beach Boys album since 1979′s LA (Light Album). That still doesn’t make it great, but it’s surprising what a grower this one is – a lovely, pleasant, relaxing album, that has absolutely no ambitions other than to be nice background music, but fulfils that ambition admirably.
The two tracks I’ve chosen are Looking Down The Coast, the most interesting song on the album, if overproduced – a miniature suite originally dating back to the late 70s, and a remake of Jardine’s old Beach Boys song California Saga, done as a duet with Neil Young, and also featuring Crosby & Stills, Jardine’s son Matt, and a sampled Brian Wilson. They’re probably the most representative tracks from the album, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
7) Eliza Carthy & Norma Waterson – Gift (emusic)
Emusic lists this as being an Eliza Carthy solo album, but it’s definitely a mother-and-daughter collaboration – Emusic just seem to randomly label albums by the members of the Waterson/Carthy family, but that’s fine, because they’re all worth getting. Singer Norma Waterson and her daughter, vocalist/fiddler Eliza Carthy are two of the greatest interpreters of traditional English music alive, though they occasionally venture into other territory.
While this album is mostly folk, the two tracks I’ve chosen aren’t. The first is a medley of the 20s song Ukulele Lady and the old Amen Corner song If Paradise Is Half As Nice, while the second, Prairie Lullaby, is a solo vocal by Eliza Carthy backed by Martin Simpson on banjo. When I say this version stacks up well against the versions by Jimmie Rodgers and Mike Nesmith, you’ll know what high esteem I hold it in.
8) Brian Wilson – Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin
I wrote about this here and my opinion pretty much stands – this is a fundamentally flawed album. But it’s a fundamentally flawed album by one of the great creative forces of modern popular music, interpreting music by one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century.
Of the two tracks I’ve chosen here, I’ve Got Plenty O’ Nothin’ is a showcase for Paul Mertens, Wilson’s principal collaborator on the album, who provides the various lead harmonica parts. But the clanking, banjo-driven arrangement calls back both to Wilson’s own Smile and to the ‘hot jazz’ early arrangement of Rhapsody In Blue, and makes this easily the most successful track on the album. Someone To Watch Over Me, on the other hand, is the most ‘Wilsonesque’ track – while one can, again, question how much input he had into the arrangement (which sounds like someone trying to be Brian Wilson, rather than like Brian Wilson), the subject matter is so close to Wilson’s other work that this still sounds the most heartfelt track on the album.
9) Jeremy Messersmith – The Reluctant Graveyard (pay-what-you-like download)
I only discovered Messersmith this year, but my wife’s known about him for ages – he’s from her home state, Minnesota, and very popular on their NPR affiliate. He seems to be popular in ‘geek’ circles too – he seems to have done a song about Star Wars or something, and gets webcomic artists to design his T-shirts. Don’t let that put you off, though, there’s some genuinely good stuff here. Unfortunately, all the comparisons I can come up with are people like Elliot Smith or the Eels, and he’s not really very like that either. I don’t want to put people off, so just listen.
The two songs I’ve chosen here are John Dillinger’s Eyes, a Big Star-esque powerpop song about John Dillinger, and John The Determinist, a chamber-pop song about determinism, with a nice string backing (obviously going for an Eleanor Rigby feel).
10) Mark Bacino – Queen’s English (emusic)
This is actually the kind of music I criticised earlier, in that this album sounds exactly like a Harry Nilsson album. I could honestly believe that Bacino has never heard an album other than Pandemonium Shadow Show, Aerial Ballet and maybe, maybe, Nilsson sings Newman. Maybe.
But the music sounds so exactly like those albums that it’s hardly fair to criticise him for it – because I like Nilsson, and this really is like having another prime-era Nilsson album.
Of the two songs I’ve chosen here, Happy sounds like a Harry Nilsson song, while Middle Town is the least Nilssonesque song on the album, sounding closer to Squeeze or Marshall Crenshaw.
Bubbling under – Thom Hell – All Good Things (sounds like 70s soft rock crossed with the Beach Boys – for fans of ELO and LA-period BBs, but a little derivative) Heaven Is Whenever – The Hold Steady (they’re missing Franz Nicolay’s keyboards), Apples In Stereo – Travellers In Time And Space (sounds like every other Apples In Stereo album, which means it’s great but breaking no new ground). Belle & Sebastian Write About Love (sounds like every other Belle & Sebastian album, which means it’s pretty good but breaking no new ground)
Albums You Should Own: Watertown, Frank Sinatra
If ever I’m asked why I think hipsters are wankers, Watertown is exhibit one.
Watertown is an album whose good qualities are absolutely self-evident. Anyone with ears – and I do mean anyone – would have to admit this is a very good album. In terms of thematic unity, quality, and feel, this site easily with the first four Scott Walker solo albums, Pet Sounds, Astral Weeks and the first couple of Leonard Cohen albums. While it was never a hit, it’s not like Sinatra is a horribly obscure artist, and so by rights this should, at the very least, be one of those albums that get ‘rediscovered’ by that weird coalition of hipsters and Mojo-reading dadrock lovers that brought Nick Drake, Big Star and Pacific Ocean Blue out of obscurity.
But the difference is that all the music I’ve mentioned above is essentially juvenile, and therefore ‘cool’. The concerns of, say, Pet Sounds, magnificent as it is, are those of a teenager – does she really love me? How can I balance what I want with what my parents say? Do I really love her? And teenage angst is cool and romantic.
Even Sinatra’s own earlier work – say Sings For Only The Lonely, no matter how downbeat, are the loneliness of a rinky-dink, shooby-dooby-doo swell kinda guy man about town, sat depressed in a New York bar at midnight with his suit disheveled and his tie hanging loose telling the barman about the one who got away.So they’re OK.
They’re safe.
Watertown on the other hand is different. It’s a concept album, like many of Sinatra’s early albums, but this is a specially-composed song cycle, and it’s told from the point of view of a middle-aged divorcé trying to bring up his two kids as a single parent in a small town, reflecting on his wife’s adultery, constantly reliving the last moments of his marriage, and trying to find a way to make it not have happened.
Where’s the fun in that?!
Actually, before I continue, I’m going to put in a Spoiler warning, because this album does have a plot, and a twist in the tale, and all those kind of things, and it really is best experienced without knowing much more about it. If you haven’t heard the album before, and you have any respect for my opinions whatsoever, go and buy it. The CD is out of print and is apparently selling for sixty quid on Amazon UK (but I’m not selling mine), but Amazon US has it for sale as MP3s for $9.99 (you could save nine cents if you wanted by not bothering with inessential CD bonus track Lady Day). Go and buy it, and listen to it, now.
Then do like I just had to, having listened to that album once already while writing this, and have a little cry on the shoulder of your spouse or closest approximation thereto.
Finished? Eyes dry? Then I’m going to start talking through this track by track. I’ll be talking mostly about the lyrics, but the music (by Bob Gaudio, produced and arranged by Gaudio and Charles Calello) is absolutely astonishing. Gaudio was the principal composer for the Four Seasons, and you can definitely imagine that other Italian-American Frankie singing these melodies, but he keeps carefully within Sinatra’s notoriously limited range, allowing Sinatra to do what he did best, just act the role in that gorgeous voice.
In fact, the album Watertown resembles most in this respect is Macarthur Park, Jimmy Webb’s suite of songs for the similarly-limited Richard Harris – but of course Harris didn’t have Sinatra’s voice, or his musical sensibilities, and while Webb’s songs were great, they were nothing compared to these. And Sinatra here has the advantage that every track here is sung from the point of view of the same character – it’s one half-hour monologue, not a series of sketches.
Gaudio and Calello also do a marvellous job of orchestrating the album as a whole, with leitmotifs recurring throughout – the high, slightly out of tune piano chords, the drums emulating the rhythm of the train – giving the whole album a unified theme like no other album in popular music outside possibly Smile.
The lyrics, meanwhile, were by Jake Holmes – a very strange figure from whom Led Zeppelin stole Dazed And Confused, and who later wrote the Be Who You Can Be In The Army jingle, but who had just finished collaborating with Gaudio on another astonishing album, the Four Seasons’ Genuine Imitation Life Gazette, which I wrote about here. Astonishingly, Holmes was only thirty – younger than me – when he wrote these astonishingly mature lyrics.
The album itself was (like that other great narrative concept album Arthur by The Kinks) originally intended to have a TV special attached to it which never materialised, and the opening track, Watertown, is clearly the music for the opening credits. Starting hesitantly, with a slightly out-of-time bass, we get a portrait of a small town from a distance, slowly zooming in (and it’s so cinematic I can see precisely the shots in my head, and I’m not a visual person) on one man standing alone in a train station.
The only song on the album not sung from the perspective of our narrator, this is the establishing shot before the main story starts, but even here, the narrator’s voice breaks in, and is singing to someone – “It’s gonna be a lonely place/without the look of your familiar face”, and immediately after we get hints that maybe the narrator isn’t to be trusted (“But who can say it’s not that way?”) before woodwinds, bass and arpeggiated guitar take us out over a train sound that is, in context, much sadder than the one at the end of Caroline, No.
Goodbye (She Quietly Says) is a wonderfully sparse, distanced description of a relationship breaking up (“Just two always-strangers avoid each other’s eyes/One still make-believing, one still telling lies/She tells me that I’m not to blame but when I ask the reason why/She reaches out across the table, looks at me and quietly says ‘goodbye’”).
I’ve read some interpretations of this song which suggest the woman in it is actually dying, not just leaving our narrator (which puts a whole new spin on the last song) but it’s too mundane for that. It’s the ‘always-strangers’ that gets me, here. The narrator, who is never named, clearly adores his wife Elizabeth beyond all reason, but doesn’t actually know her at all.
For A While is, in the context of this album, almost a cheerful song – “Lost another day, turned another way/With a laugh, a kind hello/Some small talk with those I know/I forget that I’m not over you for a while”. Musically, this sounds quite a lot like some of the waltzes Brian Wilson was doing around the same time, like Time To Get Alone – all light and breezy. Sinatra genuinely sounds like he means lines like “Days go by with no empty feeling/until I remember you’re gone”. It’s also the first song to be addressed, as most of the album is, directly to his lost love (incidentally, if you *do* want to argue that she’s dead rather than just having left him, this is an important point – the song about her leaving is told abstractly, not to her as a listener. Possibly because our narrator doesn’t want to face knowing that she knows it’s not true?)
Michael And Peter is a letter to Elizabeth about their two children (“Michael is you/he has your face/he still has your eyes/remember?/Peter is me/’cept when he smiles/And if you look/at them both for a while/you can see/they are you/they are me”) and about the mundane details of everyday life (“I think the house could use some paint/you know your mother’s such a saint/she takes the boys whenever she can/she sure needs a man” – and what does THAT say about the relationship, that the mother-in-law is still helping out her son-in-law, while her daughter is God knows where?). Constantly skirting around the problems he’s having, we still have hints that something’s not right in this narration “As far as anyone can tell, the sun will rise tomorrow”, “You’ll never believe how much they’re growing”, “Guess that’s all the news I’ve got today/Least that’s all the news that I can say”
I Would Be In Love Anyway is one of the most conventional songs on the album. The main message is that even though their marriage has ended, it was worth it (“If I lived the past over/saw today from yesterday/I would be in love anyway”) and once again we have the recurring themes of the lack of communication between them, the narrator’s unreliability and general inability to talk (“Though you’ll never be with me/And there are no words to say/I would be in love anyway”).
The thing I’m not getting across here is that this is, by this point, a fully-rounded character, who isn’t even aware of everything he’s telling us – “If I knew then, what I know now/I don’t believe I’d ever change, somehow”. Yes, he’s saying that he’d still love her – that he *DOES* still love her – no matter what, but he’s also saying *he won’t ever change and has never changed*. She changed, and grew up, and he didn’t. And the poor man doesn’t even realise it.
Elizabeth is just a fairly standard song of lost love sung to the person lost, one of the comparatively weaker songs on the album, although the narrator’s view of his wife as a fantasy, a dream, and the utter lack of detail about her other than her name, is telling. And “Dressed in memories/you are what you used to be” is simultaneously beautiful and creepy as hell.
On the other hand What A Funny Girl (You Used To Be) says *far* more about his wife’s character. “You always had a thousand things to do/Getting so involved in something new/Always some new recipe, the kitchen always looked like World War Three/What a funny girl you used to be”. “You’d fall for lines so easily, whatever they were selling, you’d buy three”. Suddenly, for the first time on the album, the ex-wife is a character, and we can see that someone so full of life and energy could never, ever have stayed with someone so fundamentally conservative (not to mention patronising – he almost sounds more like her father than her lover. This is especially worrying when you factor in the lines a few songs earlier about how her mother ‘needs a man’). He’d never understood that the things he loved most about her were precisely those things that meant they could never stay together.
What’s Now Is Now is… Christ, this is just the most astonishingly upsetting song ever. “Some day I know you’re gonna find/Just one mistake is not enough to change my mind/What’s now is now and I’ll forget what happened then/I know it all and we can still begin again”. The song is all about him forgiving her for her adultery – and assuming that the reason she’s left is just because she thinks he won’t forgive her, or that she thinks the people around will disapprove. He thinks she’s *run away from him*, rather than having grown away from him. The turning point of the song: “Now that you know how much I understand/You have no reason to be gone”.He’s talking about how much he understands, how much he knows, but he doesn’t have a clue. The poor, poor man…
She Says… and he’s actually got a letter back from her. And she says she’s coming home! So why is the song all minor chords, and why do we have a creepy chorus of small children singing “so she says” at the end of each verse?
The Train And we’re back where we started. “And now the sun has broken through, it looks like it will stay/Just can’t have you coming home on such a rainy day”. “This time around you’ll want to stay/Cause I’ve had so many nights to find a way” “Pretty soon I’ll be close to you and it will be so good/We’ll talk about the part of you I never understood” Just like at the beginning, he’s waiting at the train station. This is where we came in.
Except… when we came in, it was the morning. And now “the kids are coming home from school”.
And “I wrote so many times and more/but the letters still are lying in my drawer”.
He’s been standing there in the rain all day, waiting for her, because of a reply he got to a letter he never sent…
the passengers for Allentown are gone
the train is slowly moving on
but I can’t see you any place
And I know for sure I’d recognise your faceAnd I know for sure I’d recognise your face…
And the album ends there, with the train pulling out in the fade.
And now, after having listened to that album three times during the writing of this, I’m going to have to dissolve into a quivering mass of sobs. Goodnight…
Albums You Should Own: Hard Workin’ Man: The Jack Nitzsche Story Vol 2
Normally when I write these ‘albums you should own’, I’m writing about an album by a performer. Today is rather different – I’m discussing a compilation album featuring performers as diverse as Bobby Vee, Captain Beefheart, Miles Davis and the Monkees. Nonetheless, there is an overall artistic voice to the album, but it’s not a performer, or even a songwriter or producer (although he does take on all those roles at various points during the album) – it’s the arranger, Jack Nitzsche.
The job of the arranger, like that of the professional songwriter, is very much a dying art in these days of the self-contained band, and many people reading this will have no idea what an arranger does, so a brief explanation is in order. An arranger is someone who takes a song and works out what instrument will play what part. This may sound like a trivial job, but in fact it’s the single most important step in the progression from a song to a finished record. Every time you have heard an instrument playing something other than the simple vocal melody or strummed chords to a song, what you’ve heard is the work of an arranger – either a formal arranger, or (more usually these days) a producer or band member taking on that role. An arranger will come up with a bass-line, string parts, decide when the music should build and when it should fall off, decide when there should be a solitary flugelhorn and when there should be a barrage of electric guitars.
Many of the best arrangers in the last few decades have doubled as producers – like George Martin or Brian Wilson or Quincy Jones – and the job of arranger as a separate job is mostly a historical one, with most of the most accomplished arrangers (like, say, Nelson Riddle or Fletcher Henderson) having their success in the big band era. Jack Nitzsche is one of the few arrangers who made a very successful career in the rock era. While he did other work, both as a performer (having a hit with the instrumental The Lonely Surfer ) and as a composer of film scores (he wrote the music for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest among others) as well as being an occasional member of Crazy Horse, Nitzsche’s main claim to fame was as an arranger, working with artists such as Neil Young, The Tubes, the Neville Brothers and others.
But he’s best known for, in essence, being Phil Spector. Nitzsche arranged almost every hit record Spector produced (with the exception of the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, which was done in a deliberate imitation of NItzsche’s style when Nitzsche couldn’t fit it into his schedule) and he, not Spector, was responsible for the ‘Spector sound’. While Spector produced some fine records after stopping working with Nitzsche (such as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Leonard Cohen’s Death Of A Ladies Man) none of them had the ‘Spector sound’. Nitzsche, by contrast, was able to make ‘Phil Spector’ records with or without Spector, as well as having the ability to create great records in other styles.
This stylistic variation is evident in the first two songs in this compilation. The opener, Hard Workin’ Man, is a song written by Nitzsche and Ry Cooder and performed by Captain Beefheart for a film soundtrack. Essentially a rewrite of Mannish Boy but in the style of Howlin’ Wolf rather than Muddy Waters, it’s a metrically distended driving blues driven by percussion like hammers on metal, and shows that even the slickest LA session musicians can make ‘authentic’ Chess-style Chicago blues if directed by an arranger who understands the genre. This is then followed by Nitzsche’s own Surf Finger, an instrumental that is very much in the style that Brian Wilson would use a few years later for the Pet Sounds instrumentals, all reverbed guitar and echoing percussion.
Much of the rest of the album is in the ‘Spector’ style, some of it (such as the Righteous Brothers’ magnificent Just Once In My Life, a good contender for most powerful single of all time) actually made with Spector, but much done in collaboration with others. Some of these tracks will be familiar, like Merry Clayton’s It’s In His Kiss or Frankie Laine’s I’m Gonna Be Strong, both oldies staples to this day. But others are revelatory. Baby I’m So Glad It’s Raining by the Satisfactions (a song so rare it had to be mastered for this release from a crackly acetate) is a magnificent over-the-top grandiose ballad of the type the Ronettes were known for , building from a quiet arpeggiated guitar/harpsichord in the verses through the bridge to a chorus which sounds like every instrument in the world is there. As Long As You’re Here by Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin’ Spoonful sounds like the Spoonful turned up to eleven, with jew’s harp solos and gigantic overblown arrangements reminiscent of The Modern Folk Quartet (Spector’s attempt to create his own Lovin’ Spoonful soundalike band). And Don’t Touch Me There by art-punk band The Tubes is just magnificent, Nitzsche pastiching himself absolutely deadpan while the band sing:
The smell of burning leather as we hold each other tight
As our rivets rub together crashing sparks into the night
This moment of forever, darling if you really care
Don’t touch me there
There are also a couple of examples of the country-rock that Nitzsche became known for in the 70s, including the original of I Don’t Wanna Talk About It by Crazy Horse (later a hit in a soundalike version by Rod Stewart). The best of these is a version of Neil Young’s Buffalo Springfield song Mr Soul by the Everly Brothers, arranged in the style that Nitzsche would later use for Young’s first solo album. Slowed right down, with wailing soulful female backing vocals, steel guitar, wood block percussion and picked mandolins, it’s a magnificent example of the arranger’s art.
On top of that there are a few songs, like the Monkees’ Porpoise Song and the Turtles’ You Know What I Mean that are classics of sixties bubblegum pop, and a few oddball tracks like a collaboration between John Lee Hooker and Miles Davis.
Not everything on the album works, but the highlights are so stunningly good that this compilation is one of my all-time favourite albums. On top of that, anyone listening to it will be able to hear the common threads that run throughout Nitzsche’s work, no matter what the genre and no matter who the performer or ostensible producer, and will get a better idea of what an arranger does, and the importance of good arrangements to a good record, and may get an idea of what is missing from a lot of substandard records.
Albums You Should Own – I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times
This week’s Albums You Should Own is hamstrung a little by my presence in the US. I haven’t brought the vast majority of my record collection with me, for obvious reasons, and I don’t like writing these things without re-listening to the album in question. So this one is going to be about a less obscure album than the last few, but a good one – Brian Wilson’s I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.
In 1995 Brian Wilson was considered even by his most ardent fans to be a washed-up failure. Since the Beach Boys’ eponymous album of ten years earlier, his musical output had consisted of one pretty-good solo album in 1988, an unreleased and not-very-good follow-up, a couple of terrible singles and a single track on the Beach Boys’ Still Cruisin’ album, all of these more than six years earlier.
But rather astonishingly 1995 was to be the biggest turning point in Wilson’s career since 1966. To start with, MOJO magazine voted Pet Sounds the greatest album of all time, causing one of those occasional resurgences in the album’s profile that happens every few years. There was also a general wave of popularity for id-60s pop music at the time, caused partly by the Britpop boom in the UK and partly by the release of the Beatles’ Anthology series. So the time was ripe for a comeback. But rather startlingly, unlike the earlier ‘Brian is back’ campaigns, this time Brian actually did come back.
The end of 1995 saw two new albums from Brian Wilson. While neither contained any new Wilson songs, that was still more than the previous decade had seen. One of these albums, Orange Crate Art, his collaboration with Van Dyke Parks, I’ve dealt with in an earlier post. The other, however, while breaking no new artistic ground, is a rather lovely introduction to Wilson’s work.
In the mid-90s Don Was was busy trying to work with every legend of rock music he could. He produced the Rolling Stones’ Stripped, a Jerry Lee Lewis comeback attempt, and while he couldn’t do the Beatles, he did the next best thing and produced the Backbeat soundtrack. So it was probably inevitable that he would try to work with Brian Wilson. The result was a black & white documentary, I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, designed to show non-fans why musicians so often refer to Wilson as a genius.
Unfortunately, the soundtrack album for some reason misses the three best musical moments from the film, all intimate round-the-piano performances. One is Wilson and Parks sat at the piano together performing Orange Crate Art, but the really special performances are Brian at the piano with his brother Carl (also of the Beach Boys) and mother Audree, singing God Only Knows and In My Room (heartbreakingly, both brother and mother would be dead in a little over two years from the film’s release).
What is released, however, is essentially that most 90s of artifacts the Unplugged album. While these aren’t actual live performances, they’re ‘as live’ – Brian overdubbed his lead vocals onto otherwise straight live cuts. The arrangements are subtly different from the originals – more ‘commercial’. The interesting edges have been smoothed off, and a glossy AOR sheen applied, that makes the music much less compelling for those like myself who are as interested in Wilson’s unique arranging skills as they are in his songwriting. While there’s nothing as actively distasteful as the arrangements on Wilson’s 1998 Imagination album, there’s nothing at all striking about them either – everything’s acoustic guitar, piano, drums, and not much else.
But there’s still the songwriting, and the vocals. Wilson’s vocals here are strained – he’s not been a ‘good singer’ since the late 60s – but that’s not really the point. What he is, is someone who believes in the song he’s singing like no-one else. He can communicate the feeling in a song better than any other vocalist I can think of.
And the songs are impeccably chosen. Almost hit-free, they’re instead chosen from the very best songs he’s ever written, and this short album does manage to do what Was wanted, to explain why Brian Wilson is a genius.
The album opens with Meant For You, originally from 1968′s Friends, a little 51-second piece of beauty, before going into This Whole World. This Whole World is the greatest pop single that was never a hit. In under two minutes the song sums up everything positive about pop music, with a dazzling, extraordinary race through almost every key and harmonic ambiguity imaginable, never settling on one tonal centre for more than a bar or two. Just gorgeous.
The rest of the album continues like this, going through obscure Beach Boys classics like Let The Wind Blow (from 1967′s Wild Honey album) and Wonderful (a collaboration with Van Dyke Parks from the Smile album which may well be the most perfect song ever written), as well as remakes of the two best songs from his first solo album. But the best thing on it is a song that wasn’t recorded for this album, but 19 years earlier.
Still I Dream Of It was from a bunch of songs written during the time of the Beach Boys Love You album, and originally intended for the unreleased album Adult Child. A full studio version from 1977 had been released on the Good Vibrations box set a few years earlier, but the version on here was Brian’s solo piano demo.
Written during a time when Wilson’s mental illness was at its worst, but his compositional ability was still as good as ever, Still I Dream Of It is the howl of pain of a scared little boy crying for his mother, and for a world that makes sense, but filtered through the sensibilities of a man with an absolute command of music. The lyrics are almost incoherent – Wilson never being the most verbally articulate of men at the best of times – but heartbreaking in their implications:
Time for supper now, day’s been hard and I’m so tired I feel like eating now
Smell the kitchen now, hear the maid whistle a tune my thoughts are fleeting now
Still I dream of it, of the happy day when I can say I’ve fallen in love
And it haunts me so, like a dream that’s somehow linked to all the stars aboveYoung and beautiful, like a tree that’s just been planted I’ve found life today
I’ve made mistakes today, will I ever learn the lessons that all come my way?
Still I dream of it, of that happy day when I can say I’ve fallen in love
And it haunts me so, like a dream that’s somehow linked to all the stars aboveA little while ago, my mother told me Jesus loved the world
And if that’s true then why hasn’t he helped me to find a girl, and find my world?
Til then I’m just a dreamerI’m convinced of it, the hypnosis of our minds can take us far away
It’s so easy now, to see someone up there high in heaven’s here to stay
Still I dream of it, of the happy day when I can say I’ve fallen in love
And it haunts me so, like a dream that’s somehow linked to all the stars above.
Hearing these lyrics, both childlike and childish, sung by a man who was at the time in his early thirties but sounded more like someone in his late 60s, with a voice prematurely ravaged by alcohol and cigarettes, recorded on a crackly old cassette, is one of the most emotionally intense musical experiences I’ve ever had. And getting just a couple of minutes of the pure, unfiltered power of this music makes you grateful for the gloss and sheen and emotional distance that comes from the more ‘professional’ sounding tracks surrounding it.
Brian Wilson’s music communicates to me like no-one else’s does, and if you’ve yet to understand why the man who’s best known for I Get Around and Surfin’ USA commands any respect at all, you could do a lot worse than tracking down this album or the film for which it is a soundtrack.
Albums You Should Own : The Naked Dutch Painter
Mark ‘Stew’ Stewart has become a Broadway sensation over the last year – the musical Passing Strange, for which he wrote the book and lyrics, and the music for which he co-wrote with longtime collaborator Heidi Rodewald, has won him a Tony award for best book, and it’s going to be filmed soon by Spike Lee. He’s famous among other constituencies, as well – my eleven-year-old niece loves Gary Come Home, the song he wrote for SpongeBob Squarepants.
But even as recently as three years ago he was unknown enough that he would every so often write songs on commission – he’d put an offer up on his website and then write and record custom songs for anyone who wanted them, as birthday or Christmas presents or whatever. I had one written for my wife for our wedding, and I can honestly say it’s one of the best things he’s ever written.
And while Stew is now fairly well-known, his earlier work is still unknown. The three albums he did with his band The Negro Problem (Joys And Concerns, Welcome Black and Post-Minstrel Syndrome) are all out of print and command prices of £50+ on Amazon – a shame as TNP are a *great* band, also featuring Probyn Gregory of the Wondermints and Lisa Jenio of Candypants. Their material ranged from Ken (a song about the problems of being a gay Ken doll (“the people at Mattel/the home that I call hell/are somewhat baffled by my queer proclivities”) ) to beautiful ballads like Come Down Now, to a note-perfect cover of MacArthur Park, but one in which the crack rather than the cake has been left out in the rain.
However, it was as a solo artist I first became aware of him – as the support act to Arthur Lee and Love (at the time Lee’s touring ‘Love’ were Baby Lemonade, another band from the same LA powerpop scene as the Wondermints and TNP). At what would have already been an astonishing gig (the first time I saw Lee live, and he was simply superb – I also saw Brian Wilson that same week, doing a fifty song set, and got a backstage pass to that one. Best week for gigs of my life), for possibly the only time an unknown-to-me support act overshadowed the headline. Stew and Heidi performed songs from TNP and Stew’s first two solo albums, and were just extraordinary.
Thankfully, Stew’s three solo albums (Guest Host, The Naked Dutch Painter and Something Deeper Than These Changes) are all still in print (and available from eMusic – a site which I will keep plugging until every reader of this blog is a member, because it’s fantastic), and with luck those albums will get increased exposure now that Passing Strange is a hit – several of the highlights of the musical are reworked versions of older songs. There’s not a bad song on any of them, but probably the best album – both as an album and as an introduction to Stew’s music – is The Naked Dutch Painter.
I feel rather anxious about writing a review of Stew’s music, partly because I know there’s a lot going on in his lyrics that I’m not getting (a lot of his lyrics are very culturally-specific, and he can also be quite an oblique writer), and also because he’s both more articulate than I am and very caustic about reviewers – even positive ones – who don’t get it. I just hope that either he never sees this or I *do* get it.
The Naked Dutch Painter is a more-or-less live album, including some of Stew’s great between-song chatter (“I’ve been wondering… why is there only one photo of Che Guevara? Why isn’t there a photo of him, like at some kid’s birthday party, snorting milk out of his nose?”). The live-ish nature means that it has neither the college-rock production of the other two Stew solo albums, nor the baroque pop complexities of the Negro Problem music, but rather a loose-but-sophisticated sound that makes me think of piano bars (there’s a lot of piano on the album) or people like Stephen Sondheim.
Every song is good, but to my mind the two highlights are The Drug Suite and the title track.
The Drug Suite, as the name might suggest, is actually three songs linked by the common theme of drugs. The first song, I Must Have Been High is a gorgeous ballad with minimal instrumentation – mostly just piano and what sounds like a melodica:
Wasn’t that me in the electric chair?
And isn’t it true I spent two days there?
See my friend’s folks they were out of town,
So we bought a sheet and we all got down
And every song sounded like an angel’s choir
My edges were rounded, I had wings of fire
Soaring through the sky, I must have been high
Sitting on the balcony watching the rail rust
Slipping through my fingers like angel dust
The lyrics are both hilarious (“Didn’t we vow to live in a tree while staring at static on the TV?/And when she said ‘I am a bird’ I hung on tight and drank every word”) and at times beautiful – the line about angel dust is one of those “I wish *I’d* thought of that” lines.
I’m Not On A Drug, the second song in the suite, is one of my very favourite of Stew’s songs, as it describes a situation I’ve been in all too often – being the only person at a party who is completely sober and straight. “I know this is a happening party and I don’t want to make you yawn my darling, but I’m not on a drug.I didn’t want to tell ‘cos you might tease me – I really wish I was right now believe me”. With its staccato piano chords and skittering violin, this sounds like something Noel Coward might have performed were he feeling rather daring.
Arlington Hill, the last part of the drug suite, is apparently a description of Stew’s first acid trip, and it sounds musically very like a gentler version of Strawberry Fields (in fact, what it sounds *exactly* like is Darian Sahanaja’s reworking of Wonderful in the style of Strawberry Fields for the soundtrack of David Leaf’s documentary about Smile, Beautiful Dreamer). This points to another thing about Stew – while I’ve been talking mostly about his lyrics (and they are some of the wittiest, cleverest lyrics I’ve heard from any songwriter active in my lifetime), he apparently writes music-first, which I personally find astonishing. His music is always both interesting and catchy (while firmly rooted in traditional song structures – Stew very much regards himself as a craftsman rather than some tortured artist racked by the muse) and perfectly fitted to the lyrics – given the relative complexity of his lyrics and the simplicity of the music (not a criticism in any way of it – as three-minute pop songs go Stew’s are among the best) I would have thought that writing the lyrics first would be much easier.
The album finishes (apart from two hidden tracks) with the title track, which combines one of the best melodies of the album (accompanied by Stew’s own guitar, prominent for almost the first time on the album) with a great story that deserves to be posted in full:
The naked Dutch painter in the kitchen does not want to fuck you
She’s got seventeen boyfriends and an eight o’clock class to get to
She’s smoking hash all night with some coffee amaretto
She’s asking stupid questions ’bout my groovy black ghetto
And the naked Dutch painter in the kitchen does not want to fuck youThe naked Dutch painter in your bed does not want to sleep with you
She just feels like being naked you don’t think that you can take with her next to you
She says “Gandhi used to sleep between two naked women”
But you’re not the Mahatma that’s a whole ‘nother religion
And the naked Dutch painter in the bed does not want to sleep with youThe naked Dutch painter in the morning does not want to need you
She missed her eight o’clock class ’cause she couldn’t get her ass up off of you
So you walk along the Rhine and jump back in the sack
If this is how they do it then you’re never going back
And the naked Dutch painter in the morning does not want to need youThe naked Dutch painter in the gallery does not want to love you
She’s throwing fluoresecent paint accompanied by a Mingus tape that she stole from you
It’s performance art porno under trippy black light
She left with her professor, he can stretch her canvas tight
And the naked Dutch painter in the gallery does not want to love youThe naked Dutch painter in his arms does not want to see you
You are drunk and you are sore, you busted down professor’s door yet he feels for you
So a wicked joint is rolled and it mellows out your head
But you’re not feeling too bold when he invites you into bed
While the naked dutch painter in his arms does not want to see youSo now you’re on your own in a freezing pay phone around daybreak
You’re feeling so shitty that you’re calling Culver City just to bellyache
But there’s nobody home except your answering machine
So you write a stupid poem about the freaky shit you’ve seen
Like the naked Dutch painter in the morning sky who hovers above youThe naked Dutch painter at your door says she finally loves you
But she said “I’ll see you later” when she saw another naked painter sitting in the kitchen with you
Well she seemed a little shattered then she got a little pissed
When she saw that you were flattered by the fact that you’d be missed
While the naked Dutch painter at your door says…
(ha ha)
All Stew’s albums deserve a much wider audience, and after The Naked Dutch Painter I recommend Joys & Concerns, the second (and to my mind best) Negro Problem album. Unfortunately, on Amazon a ‘new’ copy goes for $299 , but you can probably pick up a second hand copy significantly cheaper (or torrent it, given that it’s been out of print for many years – but if you do, make sure you buy it if it goes back into print. This is music worth paying for…)
Albums You Should Own – “&” by Kristian Hoffman
Sorry for the lack of posts recently – I’ve had a touch of post-viral depression. I *will* spend all next week posting about Batman along with my usual posts though. (The couple of weeks after will be light again though as I’ll be visiting the in-laws in the land of dial-up). So expect two posts tomorrow – Batman and Big Finish.
& by Kristian Hoffman is one of those albums that everyone who hears it loves, but which flies under the radar. On the very few occasions I’ve spoken about it to anyone who’s heard it, they’ve always said “Wow, I love that album, but I don’t know anyone else who’s heard it!”
Hoffman is someone who’s been on the fringes of success for decades – he was in the obscure art-punk band the Mumps in the 70s, and since then has worked with everyone from Rufus Wainwright to Carolyn Edwards – and &, his third ‘solo’ album, is actually an album of duets that pulls collaborators from throughout the world of interesting music. Hoffman’s style is closest to the glam-punk of 70s Sparks, but he also has elements of powerpop, prog-pop of the ELO/Wings variety and a healthy helping of pre-rock pop. Possibly the easiest way to describe his music is to imagine Sondheim or Cole Porter as produced by Jeff Lynne, and while & is his third album it feels in many ways like a first album – it’s a collection of songs written over several decades, Anyone But You, for one, dating back to the 1970s.
The list of collaborators on the album could easily double as a list of the most interesting still-working musicians alive in 2002 (when the album was released) – Stew, Darian Sahanaja of the Wondermints, Russel Mael of Sparks, Van Dyke Parks, Rufus Wainwright – combined with some choices that one could see as being chosen for camp value ( Maria McKee, El Vez (“The Mexican Elvis”), Paul ‘Pee Wee Herman’ Rubens) but who actually all turn in performances every bit as good as the more critically acclaimed performers.
From the opening “Gimme Some Lovin’” riff of Devil May Care, with Hoffman affecting an almost Dylanesque nasal voice (very different from the rest of the album) doubled by Russel Mael’s vibrato falsetto and backed by crunchy Big Star guitars, it’s obvious that this is going to be a musically interesting album, but it’s when that song gets to the middle eight that Hofmann’s real songwriting strengths start to show, with the line “Some postulate reward if you should mortify the flesh”.
Hoffman is one of the most articulate lyricists I’ve heard in years, with a huge working vocabulary and a wicked sense of humour. The album is just full of quotable lines – “Devil may care but I am disinclined to lend belief/to any square who spends his time bemoaning just how brief it is”, “It’s like a hideous chorus by the post-Mary Wilson Supremes”, “We sensed by scent that this brief sentiment was overripe”, “No sex in heaven – where do I sign?”, “This passion play was engineered, but when the mutant sheep appeared,”.
I’m more of a music person than a lyric person, so when even *I* am quoting huge chunks of the lyrics you know they’re special, but the music more than matches them. Get It RIght This Time, for example, has a first verse that could come from one of Noel Coward’s better musicals, all sparse strings and elegance, before going into a big musical-theatre chorus. The second verse then duplicates the arrangement of the first, but with Abba-esque piano, before we have two instrumental variations of the melody, one a perfect baroque pastiche, all piccolo trumpet and harpsichord, the other shredding 80s hair-metal guitar, before a return to the chorus and a final “Little Help From My Friends” tag. But none of this is in quotes, it just feels like the natural place for the music to go.
The album’s full of things like that, and even the less musically ambitious material is still well worth a listen. Anyone But You, with Stew and Heidi of the Negro Problem, for example, is one of only four or five guitar-based pop songs recorded in the last decade to be worth a damn.
And while the album is nothing so gauche as a ‘concept album’ (except in the sense that every song is a collaboration) there are themes that recur over and over again. Religion comes up in almost every song – obviously in song titles like God If Any Only Knows, No Sex In Heaven and Devil May Care, but also in lines like “Scarecrow, those who seek metaphor compare/Scarecrow, that other man left hanging there/But it seems to me/That comes too easily” and the whole of Anyone But You. There’s also a carnality to the lyrics, and an examination of sexuality and what sexuality means in modern life, and especially what it means to be gay – Scarecrow, the song just quoted, is about the murder of Mathew Shephard, a gay man murdered in Wyoming by homophobic fuckwits ten years ago, and is a haunting counterbalance to the more upbeat lines like “gonna put the ‘oo’ in the human condition” that predominate.
The best song by far is the ballad Sex In Heaven, one of the best ballads I’ve heard in years, whose lyrics deserve quoting in full:
It’s heaven sent, this miracle soprano you employ
That makes an angel of a boy, earthbound.
My soul took wing upon the sound.
I guess I still can’t face the implications of this gift.
There’s something pagan in the lift — airborne.
And why should soul from flesh be torn?That’s what it costs to buy a note so pure and high
and so divine: no sex in heaven.
The bottom line: no sex in heaven. Where do I sign?Then came the man whose eyes professed the love that we had sought;
a love that’s never to be caught or held.
Some ancient pact can’t be dispelled. What’s the surprise?
The storied sacrifice is often told: that this perfection must be cold,
and hard — where once we joined by scalpel scarred.What gimpy God aflame with jealous rage decreed that you
Like him must be unwhole; allowed to yearn?
But if the need that you profess is once returned,
You slap it down! (If I should ask, and I always ask.)I guess I still can’t help the sickened impulse to admire
the score that this castrati choir translates
that soothes as it emasculates.
What amazes me about this album is that it’s one of the *very* few albums I’ve heard in recent years where *everything* is well-crafted. The songs are absolutely superb – they remind me of Elvis Costello at his best or a less grating Randy Newman, oblique and intelligent with lines echoing and commenting on each other (for example in Revert To Type there’s a line about “the island of Dr Morose”, which is quite a good pun in itself, but is also an echo of the ‘mutant sheep’ earlier in the song), the arrangements are imaginative, ranging over almost every form of popular music from Sparks to Cole Porter to the Beach Boys, and the performances are stunning (my favourite is Stew’s full-throated roar on Anyone But You, but there’s not a bad performance on there).
& can be bought on CD and MP3 from CDBaby, or downloaded from eMusic. His first two solo albums, and a compilation of the Mumps’ 70s recordings, are also available from the same sources and well worth getting, but this is his masterpiece. He’s apparently also working on an album produced by Nick Walusko from the Wondermints, which I can’t wait to hear…
Albums You Should Own – Xmas Present Edition
As we are now at the start of Advent I thought I’d supply a set of Christmas music that’s a little out of the ordinary. This is partly in memory of my friend Pete Fenelon, who died a month or so ago and did this last year – some of the tracks here were on his compilation.
I’m not a very Christmassey person, generally, but nor do I ever want to be a killjoy, and so there’s a tension in these songs between the traditional “Isn’t Christmas great?” and the non-traditional “Bah, humbug” – sometimes even in the individual song. I’ve tried where possible to choose songs that people won’t be familiar with – the whole point of this list is that much as I love Wizzard and Slade and the Ronettes and Bing Crosby, I expect to wish to massacre everyone in sight if I hear them from about a week from now. However, some of the songs will undoubtedly be familiar to some of you, if only because there’s a difference between what was a hit in the US and what in the UK.
Our Prayer by Dave Gregory, the former XTC guitarist, is a cover of (part of) a wordless a capella track by the Beach Boys, from Remoulds, an album he made of note-for-note cover versions of 60s pop songs. I’ve included it even though it’s not strictly a Christmas song because it’s got the right kind of feel for this, and also because it leads beautifully into…
It’s Cliched To Be Cynical At Christmas by Half Man Half Biscuit. While, as I said before, I’m not the most festive of people, I find this song a valuable reminder not to inflict my curmudgeonly misanthropy on everyone else, and at least try to get into ‘the festive spirit’. I also have it on good authority (from my friend Tilt, who interviewed him for his radio show) that this is in fact Father Christmas’ favourite Christmas record of all time.
Fairytale Of New York by The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl is a Christmas perennial over here, but I’ve been told it’s barely heard in the US, hence its inclusion here. This is a shame, as nothing is quite as cheery as the cognitive dissonance of walking round Tesco or Woolworths (RIP) and hearing “You’re a bum, you’re a punk, you’re an old slut on junk, lying there almost dead on that drip in that bed/You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot, happy Christmas me arse I pray God it’s our last” over the tannoy. There is a certain breed of tedious poseur who refers to this as ‘the only good Christmas song ever’ – while this is absolute nonsense, the song itself is quite beautiful, and far more romantic and life-affirming than the lyric I quoted suggests. Just a beautiful, gorgeous song.
Sugar Wassail is by Waterson:Carthy. The Waterson/Carthy clan have for nearly 50 years been at the forefront of traditional English folk music – pushing the music forward and incorporating new influences while stlll ensuring that the music they play is an honest representation of the traditions that inspire them, and also while being genuinely enjoyable music. This is from their album Holy Heathens and the Green Man, a collection of mostly winter/Christmas themed traditional music which can be downloaded from eMusic.
Joy To The World by Brian Wilson is a recording from his ‘second comeback’ ten years ago that was made available as a free download from his website, and more recently was included as a bonus track on his 2005 album What I Really Want For Christmas. You can tell that he hadn’t sung much for a few years – he’s neither got the purity of his youthful voice nor the assured but limited range of today – but this still sends shivers down my spine.
Remember Bethlehem by Jake Thackray is one of the first songs Thackray ever wrote – he actually wrote it as a carol for the school where he was teaching, and the finished studio version included a school choir. One of the things I love about Thackray’s music is his Yorkshire bluntness – even his religious music (and Thackray was a deeply religious man) has the same real world love of humanity with all its smells and warts as Chaucer or the York mystery plays. This is a demo version, from disc four of the wonderful Jake In A Box box set, which I reviewed here (still one of my favourite pieces of my own writing) if you want to know more about Jake…
I Want A Girl For Christmas by The Knickerbockers is just a fun bit of pop music from the band who did Lies, possibly the best Beatles soundalike record ever. Here, the lead singer is clearly still trying to be John Lennon, but the rest of the band can’t decide if they’re the Beach Boys or the Four Seasons. There’s a couple of wonderful little a capella breaks here. It’s not a great lost classic or anything, but it’s a nice song (it’s available on eMusic).
Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis by Tom Waits is one of the most depressing songs to feature Christmas as a subject, and very far from festive. On the other hand, it’s a great song, and also I include it because I’ll be spending at least part of the Christmas period in Minneapolis, en route to the tiny Minnesota town where my in-laws live… This is from Blue Valentines, one of the best of Waits’ early beatnik period, just before he went into his Beefheart-by-way-of-Kurt-Weill mode.
What Child Is This by Mahalia Jackson is just a stunning performance. I’m sure you’ve all heard it, but it’s wonderful anyway…
The Happiest Time Of The Year by Candypants is a Christmas single produced by Darian Sahanaja of the Wondermints, which has been available for download most years from Candypants’ MySpace page. Candypants are one of my very favourite bands of the moment, and I can’t wait for the new material Lisa is apparently working on.
Morning Christmas by Dennis Wilson is a typical piece of late Dennis Wilson, all bass harmonica, gruff vocals and ARP string synthesiser. Recorded for an aborted Beach Boys Christmas album in the late 70s, it was eventually released on the Beach Boys’ Ultimate Christmas CD in 1999. It’s very much of a piece with his brother’s Joy To The World, actually.
A Christmas Carol by Tom Lehrer is on because everyone needs a bit of Tom Lehrer. I was going to include I’m Spending Hanukkah In Santa Monica, but this is far better. It’s from the box set The Remains Of Tom Lehrer
Christmas Day by Squeeze is an interesting attempt at something that doesn’t quite come off, but is still worth a listen.
Tinsel and String by Neil Innes is a lovely, tongue-in-cheek take on the normal sort of Christmas music by one of the finest songwriters alive today. For those who don’t know, Innes was the principal songwriter with the Bonzo Dog Band, co-wrote several songs with the Monty Python team and appeared with them on stage and in their films, and was the songwriter for The Rutles, in which he played Ron Nasty. When he’s on form, he’s as good a songwriter as anyone, and if he’d stuck to ‘serious’ music and not indulged his tremendous comic talent he’d probably be regarded as another Paul McCartney or Ray Davies. This was downloaded from his website, which has tons of MP3s and RealAudio files of his work.
Christmas In Suburbia by Martin Newell is from the album The Greatest Living Englishman (which is available from eMusic), which was produced by Andy Partridge of XTC, who also played many of the instruments. As a result the album bears at least as much resemblance to Skylarking or the Dukes Of Stratosphear album (the instrumental figure here seems distantly related to the melody of Vanishing Girl) as it does to Newell’s work with the Cleaners From Venus – but that is, of course, no bad thing. I just wish Newell didn’t pronounce the ‘t’ in Christmas…
Jesus Christ by Big Star is one of those songs you should already own. But just in case, here it is… from the classic Sister Lovers.
Baby It’s Cold Outside by Ray Charles and Betty Carter (from the Ray Charles and Betty Carter album) is the only version of this song – don’t give me your Bing Crosbys or Dean Martins or Tom Joneses, this is the *only* version worth owning. Until recently, I never understood why this was a ‘Christmas’ song, but Brad Hicks put forward a good case in a two-part blog post that this was a ‘date rape Christmas carol’. Which it is, at least in some versions, but Betty Carter sounds far from unwilling here…
Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming by Pete Seeger (from the album Traditional Christmas Carols, another one available from eMusic) is a lovely banjo-and-vocal version of the hymn.
In The Bleak Midwinter by Bert Jansch is included mostly because it follows very well from the previous track. I’m a big fan of Jansch, but the production on here is too wet, and the song doesn’t sound bleak enough. But it’s a nice version, and a good closer to the collection proper.
However, as you can fit a *little* more onto a CD, I’ve included two more tracks…
Santa Claus Has Got The AIDS This Year by Tiny Tim may be the most offensive track ever recorded – “He won’t be singing out ‘ho ho ho ho’/But he’ll be crying out ‘no, no, no, no!’” . When Tim realised how badly everyone had taken the song, he tried to claim it was about the slimming bar Ayds, but the lyrics (and the fact that the B-side of the single was called She Left Me WIth The Herpes) tell a different story.
And there’s a final little message from Andy Partridge, wishing everyone a psychedelic Christmas…
Albums You Should Own – Del And The Boys
I know exactly at what moment I tired of irony in my music for good. It was in 2006, at a small festival of acoustic music, and I was watching Hayseed Dixie.
I’d quite enjoyed their album, which consisted of bluegrass-tinged performances of hard rock songs, especially those of AC/DC, and thought for a joke band they were quite fun, but I found their live performance horrifying. While they were quite reasonable musically, their entire act was based around mocking ‘rednecks’ (in other words, working class people), performing in dungarees and essentially acting like Cletus from The Simpsons.
This wouldn’t have been so bad had I not seen the Del McCoury band earlier that day. Del McCoury is one of the bluegrass greats, and one of the two or three people who originated the type of music they were mocking, and the difference in the performance was staggering. The Del McCoury band were polite, well-spoken (with strong Kentucky accents, but still well-spoken), dressed in very formal suits, and very disciplined and dignified. It was rather like watching Paul Robeson and then seeing a blackface minstrel show immediately afterwards, and it left me feeling rather soiled – Hayseed Dixie weren’t even a caricature, they were a caricature of an inaccurate stereotype.
Luckily, McCoury himself gave a much better performance, and gained at least one fan that day, and since then I’ve picked up a couple of his albums, of which my favourite is Del and the Boys.
I know many people automatically dismiss country music – and with good reason, as anything that has appeared on US country radio for at least 35 years is the worst kind of pabulum. I’d rather be boiled alive in a vat of my own excrement than ever listen to an album by Shania Twain or Doug Supernaw or their ilk. But real country music – the tradition that runs from Jimmie Rogers through Hank Williams and Bill Monroe to Johnny Cash to Steve Earle, the anti-authoritarian, blues-based, folk music of the rural poor – that music is as good as anything out there. (Jon Swift recently posted a satirical ‘handy guide to pro- and anti-American things’ which had Hank Williams Sr in the anti-American column and Hank Jr in pro-American. That pretty much sums it up).
The Del McCoury band are a family – McCoury and two of his sons make up three-quarters of the band – and they stick very much to ‘traditional’ bluegrass (traditional in quotes because the form is only about 60 years old). The line-up has no rhythm section, consisting of guitar, mandolin, banjo and violin, and the harmonies (which are superb) are all high, keening bluegrass harmonies. But within that traditional sound, there’s a wealth of different possibilities which the band remain open to.
The first song on the album is a testament to that – a cover of Richard Thompson’s classic 1952 Vincent Black Lightning with Thompson’s rippling guitar arpeggios turned into furious mandolin picking. The song’s done entirely straight (apart from changing the destination to which ‘they did ride’ from Box Hill to Knoxville), and it’s an adventurous choice for a country band, but it works perfectly in this style.
Much of the album’s subject matter is more traditional country-music fare – it’s bad when your dad’s dead, it’s also bad when the woman you love cheats on you, it’s not much good when you’re alone and heartbroken, it’s lonesome when you’re far away from Kentucky and that bluegrass home of yours, and Jesus is better than a life of sin and debauchery. But the difference is that unlike much commercial country music, these songs don’t appear to have been written in order to appeal to a demographic, but from the heart.
The religious songs, for example, aren’t the insipid pap memorably parodied in South Park’s last funny episode a few years back (“I want you Jesus, baby/Why you cryin’ Jesus baby?”) but are very strong songs. All Aboard is a blazingly fast, almost screamed, exhortation, a combination of those two country music staples the gospel song and the train song (“And the train keeps rollin’/And the world keeps turning/All aboard/everybody’s gotta get on board”).
The strongest song by far on the album though is another of the religious songs, Recovering Pharisee. This song is almost unique in American popular Christian music (at least that I’ve heard – it’s far from my favourite genre, as you might imagine) in actually dealing with the hypocrisy of the singer:
I’m a Pharisee in recovery
With new eyes I can see the great sinner in me
It’s the way of my human heart to confess other people’s sins
Reluctant to accept my part and the deeper problem within
Whether you agree with American revivalist religion or not – and I don’t think anyone will be hugely surprised that I don’t – it’s encouraging to hear someone trying intelligently to deal with the idea of failing to live up to their own moral standards, rather than just judging other people.
The highlight of the album is probably the instrumental Goldbrickin’, which is a roaringly fast showcase for the band’s picking and fiddling skills, and without the vocals it’s apparent how close this music is to traditional English folk music – that track could easily be on an album by Waterson: Carthy or a similar trad-folk band.
This music is definitely traditional country music, and definitely deals with traditional country-song concerns, but it’s from the heart, and played by musicians with tremendous skill and enthusiasm, and I can recommend the album to absolutely everyone.
Albums You Should Own – The Four Seasons: Genuine Imitation Life Gazette
I’m not a fan of the Four Seasons, generally. This may come as a surprise to some of you, because of my love of the Beach Boys’ music, but while the two bands share some superficial similarities (mostly in that both were vocal harmony groups with falsetto leads), they were in fact very different bands. The Beach Boys used a much wider musical palette, combining elements from Gershwin, the Four Freshmen, Phil Spector, Bach, Bacharach and Chuck Berry, while for the most part the Four Seasons seemed limited to Dion-esque white-boy doo-wop, but with a four-on-the-floor Motown beat rather than the swing time of songs like The Wanderer.
To make matters worse, Frankie Valli’s falsetto is, frankly, horrible. Where Brian Wilson had a sweet, pure, full tone, Valli’s was thin and nasal, and he often had pitching problems – if you listen to him carefully, you can often hear that he flats the note then swoops up to hit the correct one.
But Bob Gaudio, one of the backing vocalists in the band, and co-writer with producer Bob Crewe of most of the band’s biggest hits, was quite an accomplished composer when he was allowed out of the formula the band got into. And with lyricist Jake Holmes he wrote two of the very best albums ever recorded. I wrote a little about Watertown by Frank Sinatra last week, but Genuine Imitation Life Gazette, the album the two wrote for the Four Seasons, is, if anything even better. It’s also even less widely known – it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.
Right from the start, this album, from 1969, sounds nothing like the doo-wop/Motown hybrid of their hits. Starting with a fanfare, opening track American Crucifixion Resurrection sets the tone for much of the rest of the album:
Unbound slaves stand outside the gate
With lengths of broken chain they wait
Empty stomachs filled with hate
No-one told the heads of state, the Prince of peace is sleeping late
Who will wait on the lords and ladies, who will cry when they lose their crowns?
Sleeping through the years of error, waking in a reign of terror
Conceptually, the album is something like the Monkees’ Head – a band who had been pure pop stretching out into something very different – but musically it’s far more interesting. The closest comparisons I can think of are Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle and Scott Walker’s early solo work – all Hollywood orchestrations, oblique, vaguely unsettling lyrics, and unconventional song structures. American Crucifixion Resurrection, for example, is nearly seven minutes long, and ranges from atonal orchestrations to extremely fast honky-tonk piano and back again.
Mrs Stately’s Garden is the closest thing to the normal Four Seasons sound, sounding like it could easily fit on the Turtles’ Turtle Soup (another album I need to deal with here). Lyrically, it’s quite biting, reporting the conversation of a few old ladies over tea, discussing the suicide of a young girl:
saltines and jasmine tea in Mrs Stately’s Garden
…
There has even been talk of a child (Well, the Millers have always been wild, poor thing).
…
The boy that she’d been seeing moved to Watertown…
Do you think he knew what she had done? My boy Roger would never have run…
…
I don’t think we should see Marge Miller any more… you can’t mingle with people like that (get up Alice, you’re crushing my hat), poor thing
Look Up, Look Over, from its melody could almost be a Barry Manilow song or something equally treacly, but the production, sparse and empty and funereal, sounds almost like some of the Velvet Underground’s more downbeat music, like Ride Into The Sun. A minor track, but quite interesting.
Something’s On Her Mind sounds like something off the Zombies’ Odessey And Oracle, a happy, cheerful uptempo pop song, but with strange honky-tonk piano with tons of tape wobble put on it.
Saturday’s Father on the other hand is just about the saddest song ever written – a song about a father visiting his children after a divorce, it’s the clearest pointer on this album to the themes of Watertown:
He’ll take them to a puppet show, the little one can’t wait to go
Today is father’s day.See them always smiling for what games to play
Fun to have a daddy every Saturday
Like with much of the album, it’s not so much the lyrics as the orchestrations – the album has a curiously flat production so I can’t make out individual instruments, but it sounds like a mixture of harmonium and accordions and honky tonk piano. Almost everything on this album is ever-so-slightly out of tune – everything’s a discord, nothing feels right or comfortable at all. It’s slick and full orchestration, but with beats dropped and tempos changing almost at random. Lots of the orchestration sounds like early Mothers Of Invention albums – all thin, reedy discords.
Wall Street Village Day is one of the more normal sounding songs on the album, sounding vaguely Jimmy Webb.
Genuine Imitation Life is trying a bit too hard to be ‘psychedelic’, with lyrics like “Chameleons changing colours while a crocodile crys/People rubbing elbows but never touching eyes/Taking off their mask, revealing still another guise”, a piano introduction that seems to owe a little to Hurdy Gurdy Man and an ending ripped off from Hey Jude. It feels very much like the Monkees’ Porpoise Song, another piece of forced psychedelia from this time period, but is nowhere near as good as the Monkees’ song (which manages to overcome its silliness), Probably the weakest song on the album by a long way.
Idaho is irritating me right now, because it has the exact same melody as an old standard by someone like Stephen Foster, but I can’t for the life of me think what it is. Sung in near-unison over the same bassline as Heroes & Villains, this could quite easily have fit on the Beach Boys’ Smile.
Wonder What You’ll Be reminds me of After Hours musically, with a little bit of Frank Zappa’s America Drinks thrown in. A jazz flavoured crooner, with chord changes that go all over the place and drums that sound like they’re sampled.
Soul Of A Woman, the final track, goes from a Neil Diamond-esque ballad into uptempo sections that sound like the Four Tops into big swooping Hollywood orchestration almost at random. It’s far too long at seven minutes thirteen seconds, but it’s still a fascinating closer.
I’ve not really done justice to this album – it’s a profoundly strange record, and bears almost no relation to anything else in the Four Seasons’ catalogue. If you can imagine a combination of the Mothers’ Absolutely Free, the Kinks’ Arthur, the second Velvet Underground album, Scott 3, Pet Sounds, Song Cycle, and the best of Andy Williams, listened to through a couple of tin cans on string, then you might just about be able to imagine it.
The album can be heard at last.fm, and you should really listen to it – especially if you’re one of the apparently growing number who love Watertown, this album’s younger sibling.
Albums You Should Own: Candypants by Candypants
Before I begin, to those who’ve come here looking for comics content, I’m currently in the middle of a big post about Batman, RIP, and another one on The Kingdom, but I’m afraid the probably won’t get finished for a day or two. It’s been a more-than-usually busy week for me, but I’ve got a long weekend off and I’m hoping to get a lot posted. In the meantime, here’s a music post.
I generally loathe ‘social networking’ sites, being as I am a grumpy curmudgeon who prizes content over form and has few real friends. But my band, The National Pep (currently on an extended hiatus, but you really should listen to our music – or, preferably, buy it) did set up a MySpace account a few years ago, and that had one unanticipated benefit – I discovered tons of new music through one single page on MySpace (which appears now to be defunct), the “Brian Wilson’s Band’s Colleagues” page.
Some of my favourite music of the late 90s/early 2000s came from a very small, interconnected, group of bands all based in LA. The Wondermints made wonderful powerpop records that sound like an imaginary Elvis Costello/Burt Bacharach collaboration (rather than like the rather underwhelming actual collaboration that those two had when they were both significantly past their prime). The Negro Problem (and, solo, their lead singer Stew) recorded baroque pop masterpieces with hilarious and touching lyrics, while Baby Lemonade made Cheap Trick/Queen style guitar pop.
However, that musical scene seems to have peaked around 2002, partly because they came to the attention of their musical heroes – the Wondermints have been the core of Brian Wilson’s band for ten years now, and consequently haven’t made much music of their own, while Baby Lemonade toured as Arthur Lee’s backing band until Lee’s death, and now rather sadly tour as a tribute band. (Stew, on the other hand, who was/is the strongest songwriter of the bunch by a long way, has gone on to write and perform in the Tony award winning musical Passing Strange).
But those three bands were just the most prominent members of a huge, thriving scene around the same time. There must have been something in the water in LA about ten years ago, because there were/are a *huge* number of good bands, often featuring many of the same people (multi-instrumentalist Probyn Gregory and percussionist Nelson Bragg must be in thirty bands between them). The Now People, The Mello Cads, Cosmo Topper, Chewy Marble… I’d heard *of* many of these bands, but until they were linked on one MySpace page with easily accessible sound files, I had no idea how good they were. I also subscribed to eMusic at that time, so I was able to actually get hold of many of the albums. At least three of the best albums I’ve listened to in the last year (Kristian Hoffman’s &, the Now People’s Last Great Twentieth Century Love Affair and Candypants by Candypants) were ones I discovered through that site, along with a lot of merely ‘very good’ music. Of those three, & is probably the best, but Candypants is my favourite.
The first track I heard by Candypants is a non-album single, Nerdy Boys, which is still one of my very favourite singles of all time. Over a sixties-sounding hammond riff, the lead singer, Lisa Jenio (also the flautist in The Negro Problem and lead singer of The Stool Pigeons, who made two excellent albums of punked-up Merseybeat covers), sings the chorus:
Just four little eyes and I’m weak in the knees
I wanna live his junior high fantasies
Just one giant brain, I’m his collectible toy
I’m just a sucker for a nerdy boy
The funniest thing on the record is the ‘sexy’ spoken outro, with lines like “No, I don’t think your butt is pasty… it reminds me of the sands of … Tattooine”; but what made me fall in love with the record was one verse:
He thinks DNA is pretty
CGI makes him giddy
He’ll only listen to the mono version of Surf City
Which is not only a rather acutely observed line (rather than just using lazy ‘nerd’ cliches) but also contains a reference that practically nobody would get (the chorus to Proto-Pretty, the Wondermints’ debut single, starts “The DNA is pretty”) but that works well in context. That alone was enough to make me download (legally, it’s on eMusic) the band’s eponymous album (which I just noticed clicking through was released eight years ago today).
Musically, the album is mostly bubblegum pop by way of punk – there’s a lot of guitar stompers and hammond organ – but there’s quite a lot of variation, with songs like Cherry Picker sounding more like Roger Nichols style soft pop. Most of it’s insanely catchy, equal parts Blondie, the Zombies and the Monkees, but the real attraction is Jenio’s lyrics and vocals.
A lot of the songs are, in one way or another, about sex (as one might imagine from someone who is, or claims to be, an ex-editor of Barely Legal (not a periodical with which I am familiar – I imagine it is to do with interesting loopholes that have arisen in recent litigation? )) but Jenio is one of the very few female singer/songwriters who sing about sex as something fun, rather than as a means of titillating male listeners. Songs like Beat Head, Mandelay and Dishy are far sexier than almost any other music I’ve heard, because they’re clearly sung by someone who is ‘sex-positive’ (horrible term but I can’t think of a better one), but intelligent, in control, and witty as hell.
Jenio’s lyrics cover a lot of different styles, from fairly typical love songs (Fake It and Slayer, actually probably the two strongest songs on the album) to pure fun like the guitar stomper I Want A Pony:
Mom I wanna be an astronaut, buy me a rocket ship so I can sail to Mars
I don’t wanna fly an Apollo, buy me the Enterprise or I don’t wanna go
Mom I wanna be the president, buy me votes, pay my rent
Or maybe writing novels would be fun, mommy hire a novelist to write me oneMom I wanna be a movie queen, buy me the cover of Premiere magazine
I’m way funnier than Jay Leno, buy me a motorcycle and a TV show
Can a model win a Nobel Prize? Buy me brains, liposuck my thighs
Hurry hurry I don’t have all day, if you love me mommy you’ll do what I say
Pony up!I want a pony
I want a pony
I want a pony
I want a pony
Now!
Other than this one album, Candypants have only released two singles, the aforementioned Nerdy Boys (on a compilation called All Right, Let’s Hear It For The Girls which is also on eMusic) and a Christmas single The Happiest Time Of The Year produced by the Wondermints’ Darian Sahanaja (which they usually put up for download from their myspace page around Xmas every year). But this small output (so far – the band are still active and I’ve had some brief email conversations with Lisa which suggest she’s planning to record more soon) doesn’t have a single duff track in the lot.
(Quick warning if you plan to download the album from eMusic though – the CD had 14 very short silent tracks before the last hidden track. All 14 of those are on the version on eMusic, which means unless you download the tracks separately you’ll be paying a lot for silence…)
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