Drive-by Truckers: “The Fine Print”
The Drive-by Truckers have always been a band particularly cinematic in their focus. They’ve referenced John Ford in their songs, and they shoot their own Southern rock epics in sweeping, colorful Panavision. They’re also very prolific. It makes sense, then, that eventually, to bide some time between one opus and the next, they’d release a batch of bonus material and deleted scenes.
That’s what The Fine Print is. Think of it as the second disc in a DVD set, the one with all the supplemental material that explains or enhances the feature film. It’s not a story in its own right, but the Truckers have been weaving a story throughout their entire career, and it’s been good enough that they’ve earned our interest in this material, left – until now — on the cutting room floor.
Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.
Stanley Clarke: “Jazz in the Garden”
On Jazz in the Garden, bassist Stanley Clarke is a man standing outside the normal, linear flow of time. Seriously: The debut outing for his new Stanley Clarke trio finds the bandleader in a rare and enviable position, surveying the entire train of his career as though he were an outsider, enough distance between the watcher and the object of his observation that he seems to have the past and the future in his field of vision, both at the same time.
In other words: Jazz in the Garden is much better than its cocktail-hour title. This isn’t lite jazz to be played while serving appetizers. This is the kind of jazz made by an artist who’s been studying the medium for a long time, and has amassed so great a familiarity with the form that he’s able to sculpt it at will. It’s the album where a long and prolific career pays huge dividends, for it is effortless and imaginative in ways that suggest a rich sense of history and craft, and a passion to see the music evolve still further.
Its very nature as trio-based acoustic jazz is a change-up for Clarke, who has spent most of the past several years working in electric jazz and jazz-fusion media, most critically in the reformed band Return to Forever. Unlike that music, Jazz in the Garden is down-to-earth and accessible to the point that it’s positively mainstream– or at least as mainstream as jazz can be in 2009. As a bandleader, Clarke looks to the history of jazz– in which he himself plays a notable role– not as an object of reverence of awe, but as a tool for forging a new jazz idiom for the present, a jazz that’s vibrant and alive and standing on the shoulders of tradition, not in its shadow.
The very makeup of his combo is indicative of this: He’s joined by his long-time colleague, veteran drummer Lenny White, as well as a young prodigy from Japan, Hiromi Uehara. Their interplay is dazzling, but what also makes the album excellent is how Clarke allows the material to reflect the traditions and personalities of the three musicians. There are a few jazz standards here– “Someday My Prince Will Come” and “Take the Coltrane,” to name two– that are played with vigor and creativity, sounding fresh even though Clarke and White have both been playing those tunes for decades. Meanwhile, “Sakura Sakura” is a Japanese folk song, performed here with modal jazz inflection; it’s a nod not only to Uehara’s heritage and the stylistic flavor that she brings to the group, but also to Clarke’s understanding of jazz as folk art, meant to be imagined and interpreted in a plurality of ways.
But there are songs that point to the future, as well– or at least celebrate the present. Clarke’s original “Paradigm Shift” opens the set, and is noted to be a musical reflection on the election of Barack Obama. Its composition is wonderfully evocative: It begins with a cartoony bounce that reflects pure, giddy joy, before moving into a modal section that reflects, vividly, an arduous and at times downright bewildering campaign season. It’s a song born in traditional jazz but played with zest and zeal that are completely of the moment, and it’s also, one imagines, a deeply meaningful cut for Clarke personally, who has released his fair share of politically-motivated protest music in the past.
Clarke creates harmony where lesser leaders would only find conflict. How thrilling it is to hear the impish energy of Uehara– who contributes a couple of spirited compositions of her own– in the same setting as the stalwart talents of Clarke and White, and how liberally the three players quote from classic jazz to create a language of their own. (Even Uehara, the relative newcomer, dazzles with how effortlessly she invokes Thelonius Monk, then peels off into Herbie Hancock territory.) And while the album riffs on time and culture, history and tradition, what ultimately makes it such a delight is simply the sound of the band locking together and settling into a groove. Jazz in the Garden is a uniformly excellent album that proves just how handsomely attention to craft can pay off, and for its passion and imagination, it’s easily one of the best jazz albums in recent memory.
Paul Burch: “Still Your Man”
Whatever the reason– be it a function of postmodernity, or simply a result of an increasingly fractured music industry– genre has an object of ever-burgeoning, or at least awareness, within most any circles of music critics or fans. The music that stirs the most excitement, it seems, is that which blends the most distinct genres most seamlessly, or that plays with stylistic conventions most cleverly. Or perhaps that’s just the easiest way to talk about it: Genre signifiers act as convenient shorthand for discussing music that has its foots in several different camps at once, or none at all.
Paul Burch does us all one better. He’s not a hipster, but a romantic; not a postmodernist, but someone out of time altogether. Since the late 1990s, he’s been making albums that are hopelessly likable and tragically underheard, music charming enough to win over the most jaded of listeners but modest enough that’s perennially drowned out by the flashier stuff. But Burch remains a true original, and the triumphant title of his seventh album, Still Your Man, serves as a fine self-review: His gifts have been steadfast and true, and his new collection delivers on a decade’s worth of promise– it’s an album that tops anything he’s ever done without veering too far from the rest of his canon.
He still sounds like a man without an era: A honky-tonker who loves rhythm and blues, a parlor crooner with rockabilly swagger, a bluesman who knows how to rumba. Everything on Still Your Man sounds like it could have been written before the Beatles, and yet the recordings are so intimate and the writing so organic that it doesn’t sound like a museum piece, either: It’s a thoroughly modern record made without regard for what being “modern” might actually mean. And it is, from top to bottom, a delight– the kind of album that I wouldn’t recommend to fans of a particular genre, but simply to anyone who appreciates great singing and songwriting, no matter what guise it comes in.
Burch is a honey-voiced crooner with an uncanny knack for separating sincerity from sentimentality: He eschews irony and forsakes cleverness, but his earnestness feels tough and lived-in, the product of someone who’s loved and lost but still ultimately believes in the power of romance. And that’s sort of what Still Your Man is about– romance and devotion at various stages, love in its many forms.
The songs sound impossibly timeless, and their simplicity is profound: The way Burch moves from the knowing, wizened love of “Like a Train” to the fluttering buzz of early infatuation in “Little Bells” defines effortlessness and grace. “Honey Blue” is a simple love ditty that your great-grandparents might have danced to– assuming your great-grandparents picked up Latin stations on their radio– and “Still Your Man” mines the history of lovers, both real and literary, for humor and insight. But in a way, Burch tricks us with songs like these: After luring us in with songs of such simple elegance and easy delights, he moves into material that’s a bit weightier, such as the standout “Ballad of Henry & Jimmy,” a storytelling marvel that doesn’t recall Dylan so much as the balladeers who inspired him, caressing on gender and cultural manners but focusing, as ever, on love and romance.
By the way, I love that the woman Burch is dancing with on the album cover is not a supermodel– she’s lovely, without question, but she also looks like a real person. It’s fitting, for an album as unconcerned with artifice as this one is. Still Your Man is the work of an artist marked by the greatest humility, as everything here is in service of the song, not the ego. The album was recorded live in the studio, and everything is warm and intimate; the writing, meanwhile, is often very funny and at times clever, but only when cleverness is called for. More than anything, it’s reverent toward its subject and respectful of its listener, speaking of love in adoring terms but not sentimentalizing it. “Vena Amore” speaks of loneliness, but does so with romantic hopefulness. “Lead Me On,” meanwhile, is a simply stunning declaration of devotion– of a love that burns bright and true in spite of, but not in ignorance of, hardship and uncertainty.
Some will say that music like this is antiquated, or worse, that it’s retro, but no: Burch isn’t peddling nostalgia for some hypothetical Golden Age of music, he’s simply making great music the same way great music has always been made– with humility and passion, and everything in service of Song and Story. Great singing and songwriting do not belong to any particular era, nor will they ever go out of style. For all of Burch’s stylistic shifting, what the album ultimately proves is that all American music is essentially soul music– and that after more than a decade in the game, Burch is still our man, and he’s only now hitting his peak.
Debating Matisyahu
In the latest installment of Stereo Subversion’s “Internal Debate” series, Matisyahu’s new album Light goes under the microscope. I took part in this one, and my own response to the album is completely unimpressed: In a nutshell, the album is a garish, soulless makeover into the very worst kind of mainstream hip-hop. Here’s my mini-review blurb:
I don’t blame Matisyahu for no longer wanting to be pigeonholed as the guy who makes reggae with a Hassidic twist; I just wish he hadn’t thrown out the twist with the reggae. His latest, simply called Light, isn’t a facelift so much as a neutering, re-imagining Matisyahu as a purveyor of gaudy boom-bap rap and generic, overpolished pop. I guess he pulls it off okay, but why did he ever want to? With generically spiritual lyrics in tow, these tracks will be coming to a ringtone near you.
I’m reminded, once again, of an old Bob Dylan quote, which I’ve quoted in many a review and again seems appropriate here: It’s pretty good for what it is; it’s just that what it is isn’t very good.
Landmarks: The Year 2001
In my recap of the year 2000, I said that I had a tough time, that December, picking my favorite record from the preceeding twelve months. That happens sometimes. But it didn’t in 2001, a year that was, and is, completely owned by a single album, at least in my mind.
My favorite album of 2001– then, now, and always– is Bob Dylan‘s Love & Theft, an absolute monster of an album: An outrageously funny and poetically complex album on which Dylan plows through the entire history of American song with joyful abandon, and cracks knock-knock jokes and silly puns about the end of the world. This is the album by which all other comebacks should be measured– and make no mistake, as great as Time Out of Mind was, this is where Dylan truly regains the full range of his powers. In fact, he outdoes himself in terms of sheer confidence, energy, and cackling wit. Moreover, this album was my gateway drug into what I’ll reluctantly call Americana– specifically, the blues, country, swing, pre-war parlor songs, the works.
As wide a shadow as that album casts over 2001, there was actually a plethora of rich and remarkable records from that year. Two of my favorites represent extreme musical makeovers: Over the Rhine‘s Films for Radio and Sam Phillips‘ Fan Dance. On the former, the Ohio duo– best-known for their quiet, intimate brand of folk– dressed up their sound in bright, vibrant Technicolor, and the result is an enticingly varied and full-bodied pop album that adorns their intimacy in new ways, but does nothing to dilute it. The latter, meanwhile, represents Sam Phillips‘ shift from electric pop to a more folksy, acoustic sound: It’s an album of intimate performances in which the joys come from the sounds of the instruments and the mysteries born in Phillips’ lyrics.
Joe Henry, meanwhile, released the first of what would become a magnificent four-album run in the 2000s: Scar isn’t quite on the same level of excellence as the albums that followed– and in some ways, I think Blood from Stars takes the Scar aesthetic and improves upon it dramatically– but it’s a thrilling album nevertheless. It begins Henry‘s fascination with the dark back alleys of American song, though where Dylan’s album is spirited and rough around the edges, Henry’s is carefully-orchestrated, chilly and cool. “Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation” might still be his finest song.
On the country-rock front, Buddy and Julie Miller released their excellent, self-titled joint album, which remains a joy to this day. It’s a spirited and heartfelt album that runs the gamut, both musically and lyrically, ranging from traditional country to Stonesy rock, from heartache to sexy flirtation.
2001 was also the year of my favorite White Stripes album– or at least, my favorite for today. It’s hard to choose, but I lean toward White Blood Cells as the perfect distillation of their curious genius, encompassing country and blues, garage rock and bubblegum pop.
Gillian Welch and her long-time cohort, David Rawlings, on the heels of a giant popularity boost from the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, released their meditative, reflective folk album Time (The Revelator)– and album so stark and simple that I confess it took a few years before I really caught the fever for it, but its poetry and steady strumming eventually cast their spell on me.
Of course, Radiohead released their follow-up to Kid A, an album that was, at the time, unfairly written off as Kid A‘s lesser, younger brother. But time has revealed it to be much more than a collection of unused songs, or an uninspired sequel: It’s got a character all its own, and its construction speaks of a vision well beyond simply unloadind a batch of B-sides. Sonically, it’s as rich and intoxicating as anything they’ve done.
A few other standouts: Ron Sexsmith teamed with producer Steve Earle for his ragged, country-tinged Blue Boy; Pulp‘s swan song, the lush and beautiful We Love Life, proved to be their best work since Different Class; Nick Lowe released his smooth-talking, late-night seduction album, The Convincer; Spoon created a template they would later perfect on Girls Can Tell; Dolly Parton returned to her roots for the very fine Little Sparrow; and Loudon Wainwright III made what may be his most personal album ever, Last Man on Earth.
That was 2001 for me; what are the records that stood out to you?
Arctic Monkeys: “Humbug”
Things have always moved fast for Arctic Monkeys. Their story, for those not in the know, goes something like this: They recorded a debut album, were instantaneously hailed as one of the greatest British bands ever, toured, cranked out another album, toured some more, and so on. The forward momentum of their career has been mirrored in the manic energy of their music; on album #2, Favourite Worst Nightmare, songs sped by at a blazing speed, spinning off in every which direction and suggesting a band that could follow their muse down any number of paths.
The path they’ve chosen: Slowing things down. But in a good way. Humbug arrives two years after Nightmare– a normal turnaround by most standards, but an extended hiatus for the Monkeys– and its pace is slowed dramatically. Not because they’ve gotten soft, but because they’ve gotten confident. Since their songs don’t rush by in such a flash, we can hear just how good their craft has grown. They get dark, even sinister, and a bit theatrical. They play with texture, making this the first Arctic Monkeys album on which you can actually pick up on more sonic details, buried in the mix, the more you play it. They distill their snarky wordplay into something focused and cohesive, and also a bit disturbing, though still very funny.
This is what the Arctic Monkeys sound like as grown-ups, their musical adolescence now firmly a thing of the past. Favourite Worst Nightmare was a record made by a band who loved rock and roll, and loved playing with it and absorbing it in all its many forms; it suggested that they could inherit the throne of just about any British band they wanted. On Humbug, they decide to settle for nothing less than being the Arctic Monkeys: This is the album where they forge a sound that is undeniably theirs and no one else’s.
Which is not to say there aren’t familiar touchstones, or that they didn’t have help along the way. Queen of the Stone Age Josh Homme produced the album, and his greatest triumph is in not making Arctic Monkeys sound like Queens of the Stone Age. Instead, he adds depth and dimension to the recordings– high harmonies floating above the songs, hand percussion gently shaking in the background. And he gives them room to stretch out: Though it’s only ten songs, Humbug covers more ground than either of their past LPs.
It’s expansive. This isn’t music that goes for the quick knockout, but music that unfolds, revealing layers of drama and humor, of twisted menace. And it is menacing: It has almost as much in common with Alex Turner’s Last Shadow Puppets project as with previous Monkeys albums. They probably owe a lot to Homme on this one; the mysterious desert mystic excels at nothing if not creating and sustaining a particular mood, and there’s a hushed spookiness to this record that makes all of it– the moments of kinetic rock, the moments of pure beauty– a bit ghastly and unsettling.
But for music so evocative and impressionistic, it’s important to note that the Artcic Monkeys haven’t lost their way as rock stars; they’ve simply gained perspective as showmen. The tempos are slower, but the firepower hasn’t diminished. Drummer Matt Helders is their secret weapon: His propulsive timekeeping keeps the menace rooted in rock and roll, and a streak of anarchy in even the slower songs. The band still has a penchant for angular riffs, and, on “Pretty Visitors,” they remind us of their uncannily youthful ability to fly completely off the handle.
Alex Turner continues his evolution from bratty rockstar into sinister crooner and Nick Cave acolyte: He’s a minstrel of lust and obsession, writing vivid and surreal songs of perverse desire and demented longing. He has a knock for wordplay, but he doesn’t just write in puns, like a young Elvis Costello; his is the fractured language of desperation, and he sings each word with relish, not spitting them out but controlling his delivery like a great performer. He still indulges his annoying tendency to spell out words in his songs (“Dangerous Animals”), but otherwise he writes in bizarre innuendos (“My Propeller”), grim tall tales (“Crying Lightning”), and ominous melodrama (“The Jeweller’s Hands”). On “Cornerstone,” his bent passion for a women grows so great that he starts seeing her everywhere, and insisting on calling other women by her name. Turner sells it with bleak humor and provocative malice; we know it’s sick, but we can’t turn away.
That’s a key to Humbug: It’s dark, but alluringly so. Its menace is tempered with humor, its demons excised through the sheer thunder and lightning of the drums and the guitars. It’s a sustained performance– not just a collection of songs– and it’s a fairly masterful one, at that: The point at which the Arctic Monkeys come into their own.
Mute Math: “Armistice”
By this time a lot of folks have forgotten that New Orleans quartet Mute Math rose from the ashes of Earthsuit, a short-lived Christian rock band that was actually pretty great. Released in the same year as landmarks like Kid A and Stankonia, Earthsuit’s lone studio album didn’t exactly revolutionize the entire face of music, but, by Christian rock standards, it might as well have; the music was not just relentlessly eclectic, drawing from hip-hop and rock and classic R&B, but it combined those elements in fresh ways and married them to lyrics that studiously avoided clichés, rendering them the exceedingly rare Christian band that was able to express their faith—and their music—with real originality.
In other words, Earthsuit did a lot of things very well. Mute Math, on the other hand, does exactly two things very well – splitting the difference between murky electronics and hooky, heart-on-sleeve pop. They’re led by Paul Meany, who played keys and sang in Earthsuit, and they’ve dramatically pared down the eclecticism of that former incarnation. There’s no hip-hop here – just skittering, nervous electro-beats. Reggae and R&B are jettisoned, as well, in favor of a sound indebted to ’80s art-rock icons U2, Peter Gabriel, and Talking Heads. The band, in a nustshell, then, is this: a careful balancing act between arena-swelling grandeur and the hazy avant-garde.
Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.
Joe Henry: Release-Day Round-Up
A few of my readers have already asked me: Is Blood from Stars the best Joe Henry album yet?
My short answer is yes, it probably is, at least insofar as it’s his most fully-realized and integrated musical vision, the album that finds him at the peak of his powers as a producer, a singer, a songwriter, and an arranger. It is, in other words, the record that best combines everything that’s great about Joe Henry, the quintessential Joe Henry release– to the extent that you could ever pare down his canon to a single album.
That does not mean that it’s my favorite Joe Henry album. For me, Tiny Voices will probably always be the one that means the most to me, for mostly subjective and personal reasons. But I’m comfortable calling it the best album I’ve heard this year by a longshot– and in fact, the best album I’ve heard in five or six years.
I’m glad to see that I’m not alone. My friend Andy Whitman wrote a spectacularly great review for Paste:
When we last heard from Henry on 2007′s Civilians, he was warily surveying the eroding legacy of America, a big, blustering nation that seemed to have lost its way. But the weighty themes were wedded to some of the starkest, most minimal music of his career, as if he didn’t want the lyrical urgency to be drowned out by the sonic whirlwind. In contrast, Blood From Stars shows off Henry’s most personal, intimate songwriting, but this time out he’s backed by a hyperactive band and a full horn section, by turns soothing and cacophonous.
…
Henry is working deep within the blues tradition on these songs, but these are blues that have been more informed by Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes than by Robert Johnson or Son House. Henry hangs his tunes on the blues framework, but the sounds and words are more reminiscent of the Cotton Club and the Harlem Renaissance. “The Man I Keep Hid,” the opening track, is typical, with its sonic hints of Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-oo” and its poetic, confessional tropes. “Somebody used my mouth and laughed out loud,” he marvels midway through, and it’s a wondrous, telling line that will speak to anyone who has ever experienced the shock that greets the wounding remark that seems to emerge, unbidden, from the murky, subterranean depths of the human soul. It’s one of many lyrical delights on the album.
…
I’m tempted to call it a stone cold masterpiece, but there’s nothing cold about it. It’s a big, open-hearted, warm paean to the hazards and triumphs of love, human and divine. There’s no use separating the two, Joe Henry seems to be telling us. The human is illumined by the flickering light of something better and outside ourselves, and the divine is given substance and form by messy, redemptive relationships. It’s the truest album I’ve heard this year, and the best.
Andrew Gilstrap is impressed, as well.
Thankfully, Blood from Stars offers comfort in that it’s not only perhaps the best Joe Henry record yet, but also one that takes us to yet another place we didn’t expect to go.
Steven Wine celebrates Henry’s craft.
Henry’s a marvelous writer of song.. and Blood rivals his best work. It laments a world where “the stars have gone astray,”"true revelation is a thug” and “reason is traded for rhyme.”
Such sentiments are attached to music that mitigates the gloom, the way the blues can. Henry borrows from that genre, and jazz as well. A Grammy-winning producer, he throws in clangs, crashes, squeals and other spasms of odd noise.
The quirky rhythm of the record is crucial, too. Songs punch and jab and run together. Drums thunder. Henry breathes in the middle of vocal phrases. The result is exhilarating.
Andy Gill says the album is “a fascinating, sometimes harrowing journey to a dark and surprisingly foreign place, which, after years of cosy familiarity, somehow manages to make the blues seem strange again.” Furthermore:
For his own 12th album, Henry has turned his attention to the blues, but managed to avoid most of the common clichés which hang around the genre like cheap perfume. There’s nothing here about Chicago, or the Mississippi delta, or packing your leaving trunk and going off to sell your soul to the devil down at the crossroads. Instead, that sense of discomfiture with one’s lot is expressed in images which, though newly minted, are of the kind that flourished in old folk and blues songs. “I’m going to dig my well from the bottom to the top,” he sings in “Bellwether”, “I’m going to change my name until it rings a bell” – both brilliantly evoking the acute disconnection with the way things are.
Likewise, there’s no trace either of the standard 12-bar format. Instead, the album opens with a haunting piano prelude, after which Henry simply presents his musicians with the material and lets them arrive at the songs’ natural forms. And since his musicians include the likes of master guitarist Marc Ribot, legendary session bassist David Piltch and Jay Bellerose, perhaps the most inventively expressive drummer working today, those forms are both instinctive and ingenious. “Channel” seems to solidify from a cloud of instrumental hints, in the manner of a Daniel Lanois production, while Bellerose alone brings “Death to the Storm” alive through terrifying, earth-shaking drum rolls like rolling thunder.
I’ll round up any other noteworthy reviews that trickle in this week.
Film Break: “Ponyo”
Whether you’re a fan of Hayao Miyazaki, world cinema, animation, or simply great storytelling, Ponyo is a movie you need to see. Visually, it’s A-grade Miyazaki; story-wise, I’d give it a solid B. Read my further comments over at CT Movies.
Derek Webb: “Stockholm Syndrome”
Is Derek Webb a poet or a prophet? Or perhaps just a provocateur? Six years after he launched his solo career, it’s still a little hard to tell sometimes; I’m willing to say that it’s probably a combination of all three, but I’m becoming increasingly cynical about just how balanced the equation is.
Webb got his start with the Christian folk group Caedmon’s Call, a band he helped found and nurture into a fixture of the contemporary Christian music scene, arguably as artistically vital and vibrant as any group to come out of that industry in the last 10 to 15 years. So when Webb said he was leaving to explore different creative avenues, it was a bit of a shocker, but the artist assured us that his differences with Caedmon’s were not personal, or even musical; his decision to leave the pack has more to do with the content of his songs than with the creative angle per se.
We didn’t realize it at the time, but, looking back, it’s hard not to see that gesture as a defining one for Webb, who, five full-lengths into his career, seems to care less and less about the music and more and more about the message.
Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.
