The Year (So Far) in Singles
I tend to think about music in terms of albums– which, I freely admit, makes me a bit of a dinosaur in the iTunes era. My year-end (and year-half-over, etc.) lists have always been of full LPs, never of individual tracks. That’s largely because it’s just too darn hard to keep track of individual cuts, much less rank them, but in light of some recent, high-profile single releases by the likes of Arcade Fire and The Roots, I feel oddly inspired to celebrate my ten favorite singles of the year so far. If you’ve got iTunes credits to spare, check ‘em out. And by all means, share your own picks in the comments section.
1. The Black Keys, “Tighten Up”
2. Josh Ritter, “Change of Time”
3. The Roots, “Dear God 2.0″
4. Elizabeth Cook, “El Camino”
5. The Tallest Man on Earth, “King of Spain”
6. Spoon, “I Saw the Light”
7. Peter Wolf, “Tragedy”
8. Gorillaz, “Stylo”
9. Janelle Monae, “Tightrope”
10. Big Boi, “Shutterbug”
Paul Weller: “Wake Up the Nation”
Paul Weller is angry again– and thank God. Just listen to him spit piss and vinegar on the title track of his new album, Wake Up the Nation, wagging his 52-year-old finger at the likes of Facebook and cell phones. God bless him, he somehow makes it work; along with Graham Parker, Ian Hunter, and Elvis Costello, Weller is one of rock’s greatest cranky old men. That he hasn’t sounded this angry in quite some time has been, generally speaking, a detriment to his music, which has, in large patches of his post-Style Council career, been characterized by a certain, workmanlike sturdiness rather than true inspiration.
But in his rekindled anger he seems to have recaptured his spirit of adventure. Make no mistake: Wake Up the Nation is righteously pissed off, but it’s not a technophobe’s lament at the evils of the social networking era– though I suppose there is some of that in the lyrics. Nor is it the album of a political revolutionary, though it was released on the eve of a big election in Weller’s native UK– and once again, politics are not totally outside the album’s sphere of awareness. But what Weller’s railing against here, it seems to me, is a more general spirit of complacency– the sort of complacency that might tell a 52-year old rock icon that his days of boldness and speaker-rattling musical innovation are well behind him, best left to the younger generation. Weller gets the last laugh: Not only is his new album a bigger badass than nearly anything recently released by his peers, but it’s more vibrant and thrillingly cantankerous than just about anything to come from the upstarts, either.
To be fair, Weller does not draw inspiration solely from some well of pent-up anger, nor is Nation a comeback album, strictly speaking; it’s more like the second phase of an artistic second wind, following on the heels of 2008′s mesmerizing, sprawling double album 22 Dreams. That album wasn’t angry at all: It was reflective, pastoral, impressionistic. Wake Up the Nation draws from the same creative well, and indeed recalls that album in its freewheeling energy and stylistic boundlessness, but in other ways it’s the exact opposite. It’s noisy, chaotic, more about studio clatter than wide-open spaces. And it’s as compact as the last album was expansive; its sixteen cuts whiz by at light speed, generally clocking in around the two-minute mark and piling on top of one another with the sort of momentum that suggests an extraordinary burst of in-studio inspiration.
And its use of the studio as a launching pad makes the album a bit of an oddity. Some musicians are inspired by live performance, but fail to capture that energy in the enclosed spaces of a recording studio. Weller isn’t one of them. He explores the studio’s endless possibilities here and enjoys the recording process as an opportunity for spirited improvisation; his lyrics were mostly written on the fly, and the chaotic arrangements suggest a singer and a studio band who aren’t hard at work, but busy at play.
This kind of record emanates a certain hipness, but Weller is in full ownership of his status as a rock and roll dinosaur– a purveyor of so-called “dad rock” whose love of tradition has given him the reputation of a bit of a fuddy-duddy. Even 22 Dreams, in all its ramshackle brilliance, was dismissed in some circles for its adherence to classicist rock, folk, soul, and jazz templates– never mind the energy and furious vision with which Weller strung them together. No one will be able to ignore the blistering sonic mischief of Wake Up the Nation, an album that implicitly reclaims the artistic validity of an older generation of rockers. Weller still loves old-timey rock and roll idioms– he’s still restless, still inspired to be a part of the first generation to truly be raised on rock– but this album is his waving of a giant middle finger in the face of anyone who thinks traditional rock forms have exhausted their intrigue. Witness how he constructs pure electric mayhem around what’s basically a Little Richard bopper in “Moonshine,” or how he weaves together British psychedelia with Bowie-esque weirdness in “Andromeda.” Witness how “No Tears to Cry,” basically an old-school soul ballad, sparkles with mysterious depth. (Also note how one Richard Hawley is recruited to play guitar on the latter track!)
But if Wake Up the Nation is an album about tradition and its continued vitality, it’s also an album about the personal. It’s the old Dylan trick of taking a familiar form and making it into a vehicle of personal expression, something exemplified nowhere as well as on “Trees,” a five-part suite crammed into a couple of minutes that runs from psychedelia into New Orleans R&B and tells the story– in five miniature character studies– of his late father’s final days in a rest home. It’s personal, impressionistic, and deeply spiritual. Elsewhere, there’s “Find the Torch, Burn the Plans,” Weller’s most shamelessly anthemic cut in a while, which could be a call to political revolution or a manifesto for Weller’s own forward-thinking music.
Indeed, Weller is looking backward and forward at the same time here, a trait seen in his invitation to such collaborators as Kevin Shields and his old Jam buddy Bruce Foxton. The latter shows up to play bass in “Fast Car Slow Traffic,” a cut that’s significant for Weller’s patching things up with Foxton but also for its lyric. The song is seemingly about exactly what it says in its title, and at face value you could take it as another instance of Weller in old codger mode. I tend to think of it as a metaphor for the album; among his peers and his younger competition alike, Weller is a fast car stuck in slow traffic, moving at a breakneck creative pace even as everyone around him seems, by comparison, to be hardly moving at all.
The Black Keys: “Brothers”
Sometimes, the mentor becomes the mentoree. It isn’t blasphemous to say that Dylan copped a lot of his blues chops from guys like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf—indeed, if his first few albums were modeled after the Woody Guthrie blueprint, latter-day records are equally indebted to the electric blues masters—but what’s talked about less is how Dylan went on to be an inspiration of sorts for those old pros—though, admittedly, it was against their will. Dylan famously went electric in 1964, infusing his folky persona with all the mayhem and frenzy of garage rock, and it wasn’t but a few years later that Waters and Wolf were doing something much the same, releasing—at the behest of their label bosses—albums that snaked their blues leanings through the smoke and mirrors of then-popular psychedelic effects and Hendrix-style guitar meltdowns. Albums like Water’s Electric Mud, or This is Howlin’ Wolf’s New Album.
They sold okay, but blues purists tend to consider them as abominations, and fifty years after the fact, nobody talks about ‘em much. That makes them strange inspirations for a new Black Keys album, but it seems to be their inspiration nonetheless—and not just because Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney’s Brothers lifts the template of that Howlin’ Wolf album for its text-heavy, matter-of-fact album art. Are they still a blues band? Well, yeah. But the increasingly-hip duo is less about warts-and-all blasts of bluesy, in-the-garage fury as they are crafting an album that celebrates sound as much as song, that clothes their blues muscle in weird cinematic effects and flourishes of psychadelia.
It really isn’t that surprising, or unnatural; even ignoring the fact that these guys are clearly students of the blues, and that dipping into this oft-ignored patch of blue history is an organic progression, fans have long known that the Black Keys have never really been as monochromatic as their color-coded name and two-man set-up would suggest. There was Auerbach’s solo album, of course, with its hints of country and folk and pop, as well as the album they made with Danger Mouse, the glossed-up Attack & Release, to say nothing of their oddball hip-hop detour as Blakroc. All of this suggests that the Black Keys have musical interests well beyond the realm of traditional two-man blues set-ups or garage rock in the White Stripes mold, and Brothers is the natural culmination of their experimentation with new colors and sounds—every bit as sound-oriented as Attack & Release, as varied as Auerbach’s Keep it Hid, and as grimy and gutbucket-dirty as the cheerfully vulgar Blakroc.
Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.
How to take a good song and make it great
Generally speaking, I try to avoid posting YouTube videos or streaming MP3s here– there’s any number of other blogs where you can find that kind of thing, so why would you want to come looking for it here?– but I can’t help but comment on the new single from The Roots, from their forthcoming How I Got Over album. The song was originally recorded last year by the Monsters of Folk– you can hear their version in the video above– and the Roots men were clearly rather taken with it when the MoF stopped by to perform the song on Jimmy Fallon; they’ve updated it, but I almost wouldn’t call it a cover so much as a re-imagining, a mash-up of the original MoF track with a killer, politically- and theologically-aware rap track from Black Thought. It’s a marriage of the original tune with a streetwise new anthem from the Roots crew, and it ups both the darkness and the urgency of the original. The effect is a radical makeover– the original song teased at theological vigor, but the Roots confront it head-on. Their track positively blazes with both compassion and righteous anger, and its zeal for finding divine answers seems genuine.
In other words: It’s a pretty killer update. You can hear it here.
New Release Round-Up, Indie Dancefloor Edition: Janelle Monae, LCD Soundsystem
Let me take just a moment to offer a few quick comments about a pair of records that released last week to considerable fanfare; these are not my usual long-winded reviews, partly because I haven’t fully wrapped my head around either of these albums and partly because they’ve already been written about so much elsewhere that I’m not sure how much insight I could add, but, because they rank among the most talked-about and blogged-about releases of the year, and because I am enjoying both of them very much, I don’t want to let them pass by totally unrecognized.
The two albums in question are The ArchAndroid– by R&B upstart Janelle Monae– and This is Happening, Album #3 by James Murphy, aka LCD Soundsystem, whose Sound of Silver was one of the last decade’s most universally heralded indie classics. Both albums are, to some extent, made for (and about) the dancefloor, and both albums are going over quite well in indie rock circles. Both albums are also very different from one another and, in their own ways, quite impressive.
Monae first. Her ArchAndroid comes with several handy, built-in reference points: She’s currently touring with Erykah Badu, with whom she shares a rather kooky and eccentric view of what soul and R&B music entail, and her album features a spot for Big Boi, which makes sense given how Stankonia‘s molten energy and electric thump seem to fuel parts of this album. More than anyone else, though, I’m reminded of Prince– specifically, the Purple One in all the rambling, ramshackle glory of a record like Sign O’ the Times via the arty structuring of Parade, wherein Monae’s songs veer wildly off the beaten path without ever derailing the album or slowing its momentum, swinging furiously from funk to rock, from hip-hop to European folk, all with the theatrical spin of a Broadway geek and the natural sophistication of a studious composer. What has garnered Monae’s album so much attention is its wide-ranging eclecticism, but what makes it so easy to love is how effortless and graceful it all seems.
That’s particularly surprising given its high-concept structure as a song cycle loosely based around the early sci-fi landmark film Metropolis– just the kind of cinematic focal point that one could imagine inspiring a Prince album, only to be basically discarded once the songs begin to tell their own story, which is somewhat the case with The ArchAndroid, a piece that does make some references to its sci-fi origins but mostly exists on its own terms as its own story, a set of songs that kinda-sorta revolve around themes of self-discovery and, in its second act, the search for love. It’s broad and archetypal in a way that leaves room for plenty of flights of fancy on Monae’s part but occasionally leaves the record feeling like its flash and glamor are in service of themes that are simply stretched too thin here; then again, I’m content calling the album style for style’s sake, and on those terms it’s quite a feast.
LCD’s album, on the other hand, leaves no room for such quibbles; it’s less flashy than The ArchAndroid but arguably more sophisticated, and certainly more contemplative. Actually, it’s rather ingenious, and causes me to rethink some things I’ve written here in the past; I have, at various points, set up a dichotomy between irony on the one hand and sincerity on the other, but This is Happening reveals that dichotomy to be false, as its sense of irony is in service of real honesty. James Murphy is a perpetual hipster, and he writes in sarcastic digs and quips, but what’s amazing about this album is how that hipster jargon translates into a raw and genuine account of– basically– an indie mid-life crisis, a realization that all the sizzle of the dancefloor is ultimately hollow and unfulfilling, that hipster detachment is a form of suicide. Within this context, even the rude frat-boy anthem “Drunk Girls” becomes somewhat existential, and, even in its irony, it’s surprisingly earnest.
The music itself is surprising, albeit in a different way. Murphy has always had the reputation of a sort of indie/dance version of David Byrne, a record-collecting music junkie who turns his music-nerd credentials into hipster chic; with This is Happening, the extent to which Murphy burrows into his stacks of vinyl and incorporates dissimilar elements into his dancefloor-ready constructions is rather astonishing, especially when you consider that, as dance-able and trance-like as this music is, this is basically his most rock-oriented album yet, an album that keeps its pulse in tune with a club-ready beat even as it drifts further and further away from typical dance constructions and into instrumentation and songwriting tropes that are really a lot more in tune with classic art-rock– specifically Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, which casts a shadow over this whole album but never engulfs it, if only because the influences are so many and so thoroughly integrated into Murphy’s own aesthetic.
And if that all sounds a little stuffy and academic, I’ll sign off by noting that, with both of these albums, what keeps me coming back is ultimately just how much fun they are– how they burn through so many high-concept ideas yet remain, in the end, simply joyous to listen to.
Bettye LaVette: “Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook”
Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: No, Bettye LaVette’s Interpretations isn’t an entirely natural fit for her– nor is it an entirely satisfying album, not be a long shot– but it isn’t for the reasons you’d expect.
Start with the album titles. LaVette– an unsung soul veteran who had a minor hit or two in the sixties, then disappeared from the radar for decades– made a shocking late-career comeback in 2005, with the able help of Joe Henry and an album called I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, followed two years later with a knockout, modern soul masterpiece called The Scene of the Crime, this time aided by the Drive-by Truckers. Both albums were broiling with grit and soul– but of course they were: As their titles indicated, they were a fiery statement of intent and a sassy retelling of the singer’s own story, respectively. Never mind that the first was an all-covers affair, and that the second featured only one LaVette writing credit; she’s always been a soul singer in the classic tradition of song interpretation, bending songs at will to tell her own story.
Yes, interpretation– the very thing that her latest record claims to be right from the get-go. So don’t be alarmed by the rest of the title; that LaVette pulls these songs from the likes of the Beatles and Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Who, is, at this point, no major worry; anyone who heard the way she injected Dolly Parton’s “Little Sparrow” with raw blues vigor or transformed Elton John’s “Talking Old Soldiers” into a soul-rattling stare into mortality’s eye, knows that she can do basically anything she wants, with whatever material she wants. So yes– this is an album of British rock standards, but they’re performed as only Bettye LaVette can perform them. Sometimes, that means recasting them in her own musical vocabulary– like turning “The Word” into sassy, brassy funk– and sometimes, it means drawing from these classic rockers the heart and soul of her own story; witness how she turns “All My Love” into a sweet, almost maternal declaration of fidelity, or how she transforms “Salt of the Earth” into a streetwise take on working class blues.
The concept, then, is hardly beyond LaVette’s considerable grasp; so why does the album sound like it lacks even half the muscle of The Scene of the Crime, or the purposefulness of My Own Hell? It isn’t quite that she doesn’t have the mighty roadhouse wallop of the Drive-by Truckers, or the soulful precision of Henry’s session players, to back her, but that isn’t far from the mark. The real trouble with the album is illuminated by its final cut, a live take on The Who’s “Love Reign O’er Me,” taken from her show-stopping performance at the Kennedy Center Honors. It’s not a bad song by any means– actually, it’s one of the best things here– but in it lies the seed of calculation that keeps Interpretations from ever quite leaving the ground; it was this performance that served as the impetus for making this recording, and for LaVette choosing to work with producers Rob Mathes and Michael Stevens– the duo who produced the Kennedy Center event.
To say that they’re no Joe Henry or Patterson Hood is both to state the obvious and to be perhaps a bit unfair, for the problem isn’t that they lack talent; the problem is that they produce this album in much the same way they may have approached producing a star-studded, televised performance– namely, with a lot of gloss, the one thing LaVette’s music could do without. And so the performances here, while fine on LaVette’s end, are riddled with the kinds of streamlined, middle-of-the-road cliches that make it sound like a soul/adult-contemporary hybrid from the 1980s, complete with schmaltzy canned strings and horns and backing vocals that cross the line from tasteful adornment into out-and-out overproduction.
What this means is that there’s more than a little tension on this album, and not in a good way, as LaVette sings her ass off to make these songs her own even as she’s trapped in an environment that’s doggedly faceless and impersonal. That the album is never anything less than pleasant is solely a reflection on the singer’s own mighty superpowers– how could the sound of LaVette tackling “Maybe I’m Amazed” possibly be anything less than mesmerizing?– but Interpretations nevertheless remains an odditiy: A rather weak Bettye LaVette album that somehow does nothing to diminish the powers of the artist herself.
Jamie Lidell: “Compass”
Until now, nearly every album Jamie Lidell made may as well have been dubbed, well, Another Side of Jamie Lidell; with Compass, he’s finally made a work that’s oriented toward every component of his personality, all at the same time. Lidell the electronic maverick, maestro of glitches and freaky studiocraft, meets Lidell the blue-eyed soul master, and the line between his production work and his persona as a powerhouse crooner in the classic vein isn’t blurred so much as ignored altogether: An album like Multiply might suggest the sure hand of an electronic whizkid, and Jim that of a singer who learned his instrument from copping the soul masters of old, but Compass feels like his true soul opus– the work not of a persona but a human being, one whose heart lies both on his sleeve and in his studio.
Calling it a soul album might be a bit misleading, though, if only because it’s such a different beast from Jim, which was a fine album even if it was a bit self-conscious in aping a vintage sound and establishing Lidell as a much warmer performer than his earliest production work may have suggested. There’s nothing retro about Compass, which doesn’t resemble any old-school soul performers so much as it suggests a modern-day Prince record for the hipster set– an album of loose electricity that’s bound together by the sheer forward momentum of Lidell’s imagination and his dedication to his craft, an album where crunching rockers collide with slow jams, desert folk ballads with Revolution-styled funk. What makes it work is how it appeals to both sides of Lidell’s muse in equal measure; much of its joy comes from the small, simple pleasures of his studiocraft– and indeed, it’s as great a sonic curiosity as just about anything in indie rock right now– but its heart comes from Lidell’s own, which is poured out here into his most direct, personal songwriting yet.
And so Compass becomes something rather odd and wonderful indeed– a heart-on-sleeve confessional record that keeps raw emotion at the fore but also has its eye on creative mischief and play, which keeps it from becoming wearisome or self-serious. It’s an unlikely marriage that Lidell establishes in the first song; “Completely Exposed” is a soul belter that takes place at a pivotal moment in a relationship, with the singer confessing that a lover has left his true self “completely exposed.” It’s a sort of manifesto for the album itself– Lidell does indeed leave himself emotionally exposed here– but the earnestness of the lyric is offset by the playfulness of the arrangement, which clatters around with his typical arsenal of studio effects and a wickedly warped fuzz bass, as tangible a delight as anything on the album.
And for the rest of the album, Lidell has it both ways, balancing his newfound introspection with his knack for experimentation; the result is a magical mess of an album, brimming with energy and spunk. And talk about showing us a few more sides of Jamie Lidell! Standout track “I Wanna Be Your Telephone” reveals a songwriter who learned a thing of two from Prince’s playbook of delightfully over-the-top sexual innuendo, and who knows that personal songwriting doesn’t have to be devoid of humor. “Your Sweet Boom” provides some idea of what a traditional R&B album would sound like if it was recorded by Tom Waits, while “She Needs Me” works as a straightforwardly romantic slow jam without losing that twinkle of play in the arrangement. “Big Drift” sees the scale tipping toward out and out studio tinkering, but “Compass” is a mesmerizing, shape-shifting folk song that stands as Lidell’s finest moment yet.
Oh, and by the way: As anyone who paid attention to the album’s pre-release publicity campaign already knows, Lidell is joined in the studio by the likes of Feist, Beck, and members of Grizzly Bear and Wilco. Their presence is basically impossible to discern here, but that’s not a complaint: That they blend in to the joyful ruckus on display here simply shows how wildly energetic the creative spirit is here, and that they don’t steal the spotlight from Lidell reaffirms that this is indeed his album– an exploration not just of his fascinations and his peculiar gifts, but a rather beguiling and completely enjoyable look into his heart and soul, as well.
Natalie Merchant: “Leave Your Sleep”
Natalie Merchant draws upon a nursery rhyme for the title of Leave Your Sleep, and in the context of the album, it feels like a warm invitation– a summons to leave the earthly confines of the mundane and to escape into a world of whimsy and imagination, which Leave Your Sleep certainly is. Those might seem like odd words to use in describing an album by Merchant– one of pop music’s most studious and bookish figures– but it is nevertheless appropriate here; indeed, given that this project is both inspired by and dedicated to the singer’s daughter, it isn’t at all figurative to say that Merchant has tapped into a certain childlike spirit, one that enlivens this expansive project– which puts children’s poetry, much of it from the Victorian era, to music that spans the globe and countless traditions, and encompasses two discs and an accompanying book– and elevates it above its academic origins. Actually, the spirit of this album is quite fitting, being less about study than of play, with Merchant sounding like she’s genuinely losing herself in these poems, enjoying creativity for its own sake, to the extent that she savors even nonsense syllables– because, after all, nonsense can often be fuel for the imagination– and allows the unifying themes of childhood and a love of fanciful poetry to provide the album’s structure even as individual songs veer wildly from traditional Chinese music to Irish sea shanties, from Dixieland swing to orchestral pop, and collaborations with everyone from the Klezmatics to Medeski, Martin and Wood. Do all of the musical conceits stem logically from the poems they’re matched with? Not at all, but that almost seems to be the point; Leave Your Sleep isn’t about drawing scholarly connections so much as it is about letting the imagination run free, making it a celebration of music, poetry, and play, and an album about childhood that’s revelatory for grown-ups, as well.
Trombone Shorty: “Backatown”
And then, seemingly out of the blue, Troy Andrews was everywhere. In 2010 alone, the 24-year-old horn master from the Big Easy, who performs with his Orleans Avenue band as Trombone Shorty, won a recurring role on HBO’s Nawlins-set series Treme, even as he continued to pop up in supporting slots for fellow Crescent City acts like Galactic and released his own national debut as a bandleader, the tremendously soulful and energetic Backatown. That would surely qualify as a busy year for anybody– and it’s not even halfway over!– but to say that Shorty’s stock is abruptly on the rise would be to miss the larger picture. Really, Andrews has been a prolific musician literally since he was a kid– he became a bandleader at age six– and he’s been a New Orleans stalwart for years now. Meanwhile, the profile of the city itself– and, crucially, its music– really has been on the rise; if Treme is all about a city struggling to its feet in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the recent musical outpourings from New Orelans have been more about a spirit of resolve, endurance, and celebration– a spirit that runs through recent, high-watermark albums like Allen Toussaint’s historically-minded The Bright Mississippi and Galactic’s futuristic Ya-Ka-May, to say nothing of Andrews’ new record.
By the way: Toussaint appears on one cut from Backatown, just as he did on Ya-Ka-May, and while he doesn’t lend vocal support here like he did on that album, he does get credit as songwriter and pianist; the track in question is a cover of his classic “On Your Way Down,” a tune that was most famously performed by Little Feat but has also been recorded by Toussaint himself and, in 2006, by Toussaint and Elvis Costello. Andrews’ version dances circles around all the others; it’s a loose, funky groove, Toussaint’s piano lines and what sounds like a flute flirting with a dynamite, in-the-pocket rhythm that makes past incarnations of the song sound leaden by comparison. It’s a fairly radical reinvention of a beloved tune, but Toussaint’s presence here seems to signify his approval.
It’s also the perfect entry point for an album that swings, struts, swaggers, and never once strays from its irresistible groove. The other songs are all Andrews originals, but they’re likely to be standards some day. Some are vocal performances, many are instrumentals, and all are rather unclassifiable fusions of funk, soul, R&B, rock, and yes, some jazz– though calling this a New Orleans jazz album would be a bit of a misnomer. Really, it’s tough, streetwise pop music in the best sense of the term– the music of the corner, vibrant and alive, owing less to traditional notions of jazz than to New Orleans line music, the kind of thing you’d hear coming down the way from a Mardi Gras parade or from an impromptu jam session on the streets.
Which is to say, of course, that the music has its roots in tradition, but not the tradition of history books– a tradition that’s still evolving, still alive and in the moment, which Backatown certainly is. The album is named after a neighborhood in the Treme area, the oldest black community in the nation, which shows that Andrews is mindful of his roots, but if he’s respectful of where this music comes from, he’s not beholden to it, sounding much more interested in where it’s going. The set was produced by Ben Ellison of Galactic, and while it’s got some of the trappings of a music hall, the attitude seems to come more from hip-hop, and the sound that results is endlessly groovy and crackling with vitality and urgency.
Highlights? Just pick one. The songs with big-name guest performers are likely to get the most attention, not just the Toussaint cover but also the appearance of Lenny Kravitz’ guitar work on “Something Beautiful,” a sort of neo-soul number by way of rock balladry, as well as a duet between Andrews and Marc Broussard on the rock-oriented “Right to Complain.” But the instrumental numbers provide the album’s real meat– whether it’s the monstrous funk opener “Hurricane Season,” a sort of New Orleans march for the P-Funk set, or the metallic rock of “Suburbia.” These are deft works of celebratory, forward-thinking fusion, the music of the corner meeting the music of the hall, popular music made by a guy whose definition of the term is big enough to incorporate hip-hop and funk and jazz as mere matters of inflection, not separate entities that belong on separate streets. Backatown is profound musical integration, an inclusive and exciting set from a bandleader who, at 24, can already be called visionary.
Elizabeth Cook: “Welder”
Nashville malcontent Elizabeth Cook calls her new album Welder, a title she explains by noting that a welder is someone who fuses together different, separate elements into something united and whole. It’s a fitting image for Cook, a rising star whose seemingly split personas unite to form one of country music’s most interesting and complex figures– and who brings every side of her muse to bear on Welder more than on any previous album. This, after all, is a woman who hosts a country music program on Sirius Radio, and who still sings regularly at the Grand Old Opry; she’s also a woman whose last album, Balls, was simply too daring and unconventional for Nashville to embrace, leading it to be sounding rejected by country stations all over.
I can’t imagine Welder making any more of an impact on the radio, at least not the mainstream stations; the thing with Cook, though, is that while some artists simply seem incapable of being anything other than doggedly idiosyncratic, she makes it pretty evident that she could be a big country music star if she really wanted to. She’s got the chops, both as a singer and a songwriter, and she’s got the production pedigree behind her; Balls was produced by Rodney Crowell, and this one by Don Was. But what’s more than that, Cook has an understanding of country music past and present that she floats across this album, effortlessly and teasingly, as if to taunt the Nashville machine by showing how huge she could be if she were only willing to play by their rules.
Certainly, Nashville wouldn’t find anything to complain about with the high-and-lonesome boogie of “All the Time”– except, perhaps, for its lack of polish, its roots in traditional mountain music and bluegrass idioms more than anything resembling mainstream, pop-inflected country. Still, the melody and lyric are indelible, as is the harmony vocal from one Buddy Miller. There’s also “I’ll Never Know,” a country-soul weeper with Dwight Yoakam, and a cover of Frankie Miller’s hillbilly-gospel tune “Blackland Farmer.” Cook’s late mother wrote “I’m Beginning to Forget,” a swaying break-up ballad that really could be a fit for an artist more willing to step into Nashville’s box and roll over.
And then there’s “Girlfriend Tonight.” This is a tune that at first resembles everything that’s big on country radio right now, unitl you realize just how better at it Cook is than anyone else. One would almost call it sentimental, but the emotion is earned; it’s a ballad that hinges on a bit of wordplay, but rather than being corny or cutesy, the song is quietly devastating. The narrator is singing to her man about not feeling sexy or physically attractive, and the sleight of hand comes when we find that she’s actually his wife– but she wants to be his “girlfriend tonight,” a recipient of romance and sexual desire. There is an element of nostalgia here, but also sharply-penned lyrics that bypass psychoanalysis and go straight to the song’s emotional core. It’s terrific.
And so is the rest of the album– the stuff that’s a lot harder to pin to country music standards. The immediate standout is “El Camino,” a deadpan talking blues set over a Stonesy riff and a boogie-woogie beat that has little to do with where Nashville is in 2010. It’s a hilarious song about a pervy redneck cruising for chicks, and he finds himself on the receiving end of some brutal sarcasm from Cook. The song’s companion piece is the strutting “Rock and Roll Man,” a song that pulls off the neat trick of depicting a total loser while showing– honestly– why some women might be attracted to him. Cook isn’t one of them, though, and, again, her perceptive eye for detail enlivens the song with devilish wit.
On paper these sound like novelty songs, almost, except they’re so keenly observed– and so smartly dressed in vintage country and rock traditions– that they are nothing if not evidence of Cook’s remarkable songwriting ability. The same could be said of the jokey little honky tonk number “Snake in the Bed,” a song that might be slight were it not so fun; in a different league altogether, though, are a pair of shattering, personal ballads whose titles tell you everything you need to know: “Heroin Addict Sister” and “Mama’s Funeral.” Here, the album finds its beating heart, and Cook reveals herself to be miles ahead of all the other country music women whose rough-and-tumble personas eventually dissolve into schtick. She’s the real deal, something that these two wrenching songs makes perfectly evident.
If there’s any criticism to be found here, it’s that Cook stretches her eclecticism too far on a cover of Hem’s “Not California,” a fine performance that simply seems out of place here; but hey, when’s the last time a country album stumbled because it showed too much ambition? What’s important here is that Elizabeth Cook stands way out from the pack as a country singer and songwriter of restless creativity and feisty spirit; her more aggressive moments resemble Miranda Lambert and her already-classic Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but Cook delivers something even more complex and fully-realized, something that never seems like a persona or a shtick, but simply the work of a real, honest, endlessly complicated woman with a story to tell, and the talent to tell it in spades.
