Alejandro Escovedo: “Street Songs of Love”
My review of Street Songs of Love, the new album from Alejandro Escovedo, is posted today at CT. I’m afraid the review doesn’t capture just how stellar I think this album is; I’ve been an Escovedo fan for years now and this is immediately my favorite of his works. It’s certainly his best-sounding album, an unfussy, no-frills rock and roll set that’s tough, lean, and to the point; there’s no extra adornment here, just a top-notch band kicking up a mighty ruckus, with keyboards and harmony singers providing some additional dimension. Escovedo pulls out all the stops, from raging punk menace to glam-rock strut to heartland power chords. And what better way for Escovedo to celebrate his rock and roll abandon than with a collection of streetwise rock songs that celebrate love as both a destructive and a redemptive force?
Elizabeth Shepherd: “Heavy Falls the Night”
If Elizabeth Shepherd comes out of the gate with a slight disadvantage, it’s strictly incidental: She’s a female singer/songwriter who plays piano and might casually be referred to as “jazzy”—and in a post-Norah Jones world, certain comparisons are inevitable. But the similarities exist only on paper. Shepherd and Jones may start from the same foundation but they come at it from two totally different angles, and Shepherd’s Heavy Falls the Night is an album of such elegance and sophistication that it rather quietly but confidently asserts itself as the superior to anything Jones or any of her peers have yet released.
That’s not a small achievement—Jones is no hack, with four fine studio albums under her belt—but consider this: When she debuted with Come Away with Me, her success came in large part because she was perceived to be a little too pop for jazz, and a little too jazz for pop. Shepherd double dips: Her album is truer to jazz roots than anything Jones has made, but it’s also purer in its pop sensibilities.
Maybe it’s because everything she has came to her second-hand; Shepherd grew up in a fairly conservative household where the only music allowed was instrumental, sacred, and Anne Murray. Her album comes with references to the Salvation Army, and one assumes that’s where Shepherd eventually pursued much of her independent music education, mining dusty old bins of jazz and folk, soft rock and cabaret. She’s taken everything she knows from stuff that’s used, perhaps even a tad worn out—but she’s fashioned them into something her own, and it sounds astonishingly fresh.
The second-hand vibe permeates the album. This is the sound of an artist with limited resources but unlimited resourcefulness, a woman who takes a small and simple instrumental palette and creates a record that is rich in romance and beauty, sensuality and giddy joy, everything enlivened by the fathomless reaches of her stellar songcraft and her instincts for timeless, elegant record-making, as classy and graceful as the chic image on the album’s cover.
“What Else” opens the album and introduced both its sonic palette and its deceptive simplicity. There’s nothing on the track save for the human voice, an upright bass, minimal percussion, and Shepherd’s electric piano, steely and cool where Jones’ acoustic piano is warm and easy to embrace. But Shepherd is no cabaret crooner, something she wastes no time in making clear; she’s equally interested in jazz, funk, and pop, and this cool strutting number riffs on Elton John’s “Your Song” but takes the conceit in another direction; where Bernie Taupin’s lyric had a certain naivete, Shepherd’s is a little bit sassy, and a little bit pissed off.
“The Taking” is something else altogether—a seedy, Beat-style swagger that channels The Heart of Saturday Night through Barry Adamson’s steamy city underbelly. But it isn’t a song about a night of decadence; it’s a memorial to all the women who blazed the trail for a class act like Shepherd to find success in her own independence, and it’s got attitude to spare. When Shepherd does go looking for the heart of a Saturday night, it’s on the title track, a slow and spare song where the romance positively drips from both the lyric and the small ensemble of vocalists—to say nothing of the gloriously sonorous upright bass.
Shepherd is a cool customer, and if her songs are steeped in human emotion and real vulnerability, she’s careful to avoid out-and-out confessional territory, preferring to express herself through her rich craft and pop savvy. And she does have pop instincts to kill for—“Seven Bucks,” her Salvation Army story, is a funky little pop song that sounds totally out of time—but she’s also, at times, seemingly boundless in both her curiosity and her ability; one imagines that she could bang out an album of quiet, jazzy folk songs in her sleep, but instead she dips into live-on-the-floor electronica on “High,” stirring soul jazz, and, at the album’s end, a tip of the hat to Anne Murray in the form of “Danny’s Song”—here turned from treacle into a folk song of simple elegance and heart. It’s another second-hand find that Shepherd makes her own—and thus a flawless way to conclude an album that takes ideas we’ve heard before and takes them in a direction we’ve never been.
Herbie Hancock: “The Imagine Project”
Sure, Herbie Hancock is one of the world’s most famous jazz musicians– but he’s found some of his greatest success, both artistically and commercially, through his salacious flirtations with pop music. For many fans, his warm, cartoony music from Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert series remains some of his most spirited and enduring work, while “Watermelon Man”– arguably his biggest, most famous song– happens to be a crossover hit, owing as much to funk and rock as to conventional jazz. And of course, there was The Joni Letters, an album that crossed the threshold into pop more audaciously than any other he’s made, both in its reworking of Joni Mitchell songs and in its star-studded roster of familiar pop vocalists. Naturally, it won a Grammy for Album of the Year.
Hancock follows that record with The Imagine Project, an album that is more star-studded, more pop-oriented, and more Grammy-bait accessible than the one that came before it. The roster is bloated into a guest list that includes everyone from Pink to John Legend, from Seal to Dave Matthews. The songs come from the likes of John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Peter Gabriel. And as if that weren’t enough, there’s the concept: As its title indicates, The Imagine Project isn’t a casual album or a mere collection of songs but a very deliberate, thematically rigid affair that’s designed to be a major statement; recorded over an extended stretch of times in studios around the world, the record is Hancock’s manifesto of pop music’s ability to bridge cultural divides and bring people together, a tribute to the power of Song to unite and to overcome differences.
A record like this could, in theory, be pretty awesome; Hancock brought grace and regality to his Joni album, and long before that he spent years kicking around with Miles Davis, whose late-period work hinted at a pop-embracing direction like this one. Moreover, he’s got the chops to bring sophistication to the land of pop, and a dash of much-needed frivolity to jazz. But this isn’t the way to do it: Far from frivolous, The Imagine Project is an overburdened and overthought album that frequently suppresses the myriad talents on display under the weight of the auteur’s own hubris and undoubtedly good intentions.
The Joni album and his wonderful Gershwin’s World showed that Hancock could bring a deft touch to conceptually-heavy albums like this one, but here his touch is anything but light: The album opens with its statement of purpose, a reworking of the John Lennon song that gives the album its name, played here as a big, “We are the World”-style anthem of unity with a slowed-down, melodramatic opening and unbearably overwrought vocals from Pink and Seal; it eventually mutates into a generically “ethnic” beat that India.Arie can’t quite redeem with her comparatively understated vocal. Lennon’s poetry is transformed into a touchy-feely, why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along weeper that threatens to topple the album under its own gravitas just one song into its hour-plus run time, and things only ease up a little in the next song, a cover of “Don’t Give Up” in which John Legend does a fine impression of Peter Gabriel but Pink once again overdoes it, and the whole thing reeks of self-importance and faux-solemnity.
These songs are, if nothing else, ambitious, but in all the wrong ways: They hammer their message home instead of letting the songs speak for themselves and the music go where it will, and worse, they feel like a studied bid for another Grammy statuette, the Joni Letters formula puffed up with a touch of vaguely inspiring humanism. But what’s really off about them is that many of the songs that follow demonstrate how well this album could have worked if Hancock had made it more about playfulness, allowing different cultures and traditions to interact with each other instead of forcing a cliched message through hammy musical gestures and over-the-top theatrics. The non-English songs are all endearing, probably because they provide a break (for us English-speakers, anyway) from the preachiness of some of the other tracks, but there are other winners as well. Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks unite for a scorching, gospel/blues take on “Space Captain,” a number that’s brimming with natural charm and easy-going soulfulness, things the opening tracks are in desperate need of. Rapper K’Naan riffs on Bob Marley’s “Exodus” over a killer Malian beat, and Lisa Hannigan gives a quirky, personal reading of “The Times They Are A-Changing’” with the Chieftans as her backing band; it deserves to be listed among the great renditions of that song if for no other reason than it actually sounds fresh and new. Hancock anchors the project with his piano, and he is at once a gracious host to his guests and, when called for, a dynamite showman.
But those qualities are to be expected from Herbie Hancock; what’s surprising is how mixed the quality of the songs are, how crass the concept feels, how formulaic the album’s construction can seem. The album is noble in intent and ambitious in its scope, and that– combined with a handful of really excellent tracks– makes it worthy; that one of jazz’s most curious artists, a man who can make pop/jazz fusion sound so natural, ended up with an album that sounds so forced? That’s a little disappointing.
Film Break: “Grown Ups”
My review of the new movie Grown Ups is posted at CT Movies. As you can probably guess, at least if you’ve seen the trailers or read any of the advance reviews, it’s a pretty big stinker. I chose the above still in honor of the luminous Maya Rudolph, who is probably the best part of the movie.
On a related note, I know I haven’t written much about film this year, and that’s simply because I haven’t had the time or the opportunity. But in the next few days, I plan on posting a quick run-through of my favorite films of the year so far, by way of catch-up. Hint: Grown Ups will not be on it.
The Mynabirds: “What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood”
Upon its release, the debut album from The Mynabirds received a rave review from Christianity Today — not just a good review, but a perfect, five-star score. Not long thereafter, the album received an 8.0 out of 10 from the indie tastemakers at Pitchfork. Individually, both of these scores might accurately be termed pretty darn good — especially for a new band who released their first record with relatively little hype preceding it — but taken together, it’s something of a coup; who else this side of Sufjan Stevens has garnered such glowing accolades from these two, wildly different critical organizations?
It seems almost baffling at first — and then you here the music. The Mynabirds, voiced by singer/songwriter Laura Burhenn, and produced by indie stalwart Richard Swift, take their name from a quasi-legendary, early ’60s group that featured a then-unknown Neil Young finding inspiration in old gospel and early R&B music. They never released an album, and at this point, they basically don’t need to; Burhenn channels the spirit that you can pretty much imagine flowing through such a group, and What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood is an album of magical contradictions. It is at once sepia-toned and in-the-moment, sounding like it could find its place in a church or a dingy, edge-of-town bar.
Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.
The Roots: “How I Got Over”
The Bush years were tough on almost everyone, but The Roots seemed to take it particularly hard. They released a groove-oriented, relatively dance-able album called The Tipping Point in 2004, but since then everything they’ve recorded has been jet-black, fueled by righteous indignation, militant political anger, and a suffocating sense of dread. Game Theory, in 2006, was a revised political manifesto in the Public Enemy model, a Black Planet for a new generation; its vision was so bleak and so brutally vast that it spilled over into another album, the even angrier Rising Down.
But things have gotten better, both politically and professionally, and The Roots are loosening up. How I Got Over is their first album of the Obama years but also their first since scoring their gig on Jimmy Fallon, a brilliant and probably fairly lucrative career move that is alluded to only once on the new album. Fans wondered how the Late Night shift would affect the group’s studio output, and thankfully the answer is not too much, at least not directly: Smartly, they’ve envisioned this new record in the greater context of hip-hop past and present, and within the context of The Roots’ back catalog– not in the context of their gig with NBC.
Which is to say, the album never feels like a spin-off of “Freestylin’ with the Roots,” the Fallon segment where the band gets to show off their incredible chops by writing off-the-cuff songs in styles selected by the host. In some ways, it’s almost the opposite: The album does showcase their amazing musicianship, but not in the flashy terms of extended solos or boundless eclecticism. Rather, this is a triumph– and that’s not at all hyperbole– of focus, clarity, and restraint. There are some brief instrumental interludes and a couple of bonus tracks, but the meat of the album is an astonishing slim nine songs, all of them fairly direct and fat-free. The record is sequenced as a statement, a unified piece of music with distinct acts and interludes serving to mark the shifts in focus, themes unfolding over the duration and coming to a stirring conclusion. There’s virtually no dead space here, with the songs melting into one another. In other words, it’s all of a piece. It’s a capitol-A Album that’s meant to be listened to in one sitting.
Other things have changed, too. It is, without any question or hesitation on my part, the best sounding Roots album ever, and the story there is in how ?uestlove got over his control issues. The group’s virtuoso drummer and bandleader is in a league of his own, and his gifts are unimpeachable; that said, his perfectionist instincts have hampered the last few Roots albums more and more, resulting in a sound that has sometimes been too stuffy or studied. Here he gave control over to some outside engineers, and the sound of the recording is warm, live, spontaneous, and clear. Of course, it was probably ?uest’s idea to record it live on the floor, and the band chemistry is half of what makes the album so inviting.
Certainly, it isn’t as harsh as Rising Down, nor as claustrophobic as Game Theory; every Roots album has an instrument that seems to define it, and here it’s an acoustic piano– warm and organic, not at all like the steely synths of the last couple of albums, or even the languid jazz tones of their earlier work. The whole album seems somehow to spring forth from that piano sound; ?uest’s drumming has never had this kind of raw crispness to it, but if his beats are that give the album both its heartbeat and its hip-hop, the hooks here are often on the soulful, bluesy tip, sung by singers of beautifully human grit and gravitas. And then there’s the title song– ?uestlove’s insistent beat is enveloped by what sounds like a church organ, and MC Black Thought switches from rhyming to a wonderfully soulful sung performance. Jimmy Fallon’s “Freestylin’” bit affords the Roots a chance to branch out; this is the sound of The Roots digging deep.
And in more ways than one. Everything about the album– its level of focus, its unified construction, its acoustic warmth– indicate a level of soul-searching, and Black Thought delivers. How I Got Over is a statement every bit as much as Game Theory was, but it’s not what you’d call a political album; it’s an intently personal one, an introspective one, an album of self-reckoning, anxiety colliding with romance, of hard-fought, streetwise wisdom that’s tough and sensitive all at once. It’s an album about coming to a crossroads, and about growing older. Game Theory belonged to a rich tradition of political rap; How I Got Over is basically unprecedented in its exploration, by a group of such longevity, of what it means to grow up and move on.
It’s a journey, and it begins with “Walk Alone,” a song of solitude and struggle that smartly takes thematic cues from the blues and casts them in existential terms here; a climax comes early in an updated version of Monsters of Folk‘s “Dear God,” less a cover than a re-imagining that riffs on the original Jim James vocal hook but lets it collide with a beastly, robust rap from Black Though. It’s spooky and soulful, but what lingers is its theological urgency: Black Thought doesn’t hold back in his pleading for answers from the Almighty, and the effect is soul-stirring stuff, righteous rap that balances anger and compassion and frames the whole record as something devastatingly serious and profound.
There is a lot of taking stock of the self here, particularly on “Now or Never,” a quieter song that starts with whispering desperation but ends with the flint of hope. That segues into the title cut, which the band debuted over a year ago on Late Night. It takes on new meaning in the context of the full album: It’s the most political song here, but its references to street life are less about political action on a grand scale than on a personal one, a battle cry against apathy and a stone rejection of street cynicism. And that’s the end of the album’s first half; a brief instrumental break ushers in the light-on-its-feet, flute-adorned soul of “The Day,” a song that ?uestlove tweeted to be a “feel good classic in the making.” It isn’t hard to see why: It’s an honest but optimistic song about trying, about courage, about hope, about facing a new day dead on. It’s followed by a couple of rousing numbers that answer the band’s cries for passion and perseverance with a voice of triumph: “Right On” is self-confident (and based around a Joanna Newsom sample; would you believe that ?uest makes her sound as funky as Erykah Badu?), but “Doin’ It Again,” based around a John Legend tune, is almost braggado. Black Thought is in battle-rap mode here, but in the context of How I Got Over, it’s less empty street fronting and more the well-deserved anthem of a survivor– a champion.
And he is a champion. Black Thought takes a beating in some circles for lacking charisma as an MC, an accusation that has less to do with his own lack of flare and more to do with so many other rappers relying on gimmicks. Here he is arguably more magnetic than ever before, and it’s on the back of a performance that’s soulful and smart, verbally nimble but always with grit and humanity in his voice. He earns a champion’s song, and he gets one in “The Fire,” which The Roots wrote for the Olympics ceremony and which concludes the album proper with a final nod to resiliance. It’s a song about passion, and it comes with a beat that’s genuinely rousing– a call to action, ending an album of introspection.
Well, sort of: Technically, there are two more songs, but they’re wisely sectioned off by another interlude and kept out of the main beef of the record, not because they’re bad but because they don’t fit, musically or lyrically; they’re essentially hard-hitting, testosterone-fueled cuts for the group (?uest and Though in particular) to indulge in their old-school hip-hop aggression. That they’re here at all only proves that The Roots know how to have a good time; that they’re edited out of the album proper shows how smart they’ve become with their record-making. And this from a group that has long been one of the world’s coolest bands, but has never been captured particularly well on record. That changes here: How I Got Over is a bold and beautiful record. It’s a new standard for smart, organic hip-hop, and an unprecedented achievement in its introspection and its sophistication. Far from dulling them, Late Night seems to have honed their instincts and brough them focus. They’ve scaled back some of the darkness of their recent output but lost none of the seriousness with which they take what they do, and they’ve come up with their most killer– and meaningful– album yet.
Wovenhand: “The Threshingfloor”
I’m not sure you can talk about David Eugene Edwards’ music without talking about his theology. It’s not because he makes quote-unquote Christian music — really, it’s because he transcends it. Since he began performing as Wovenhand, Edwards has settled into a cozy niche on the farthest possible fringe of Jesus music, but back in his days fronting 16 Horsepower, he always found more support in forward-thinking Americana and alt-country circles than in CCM proper. No surprise there, since his songs sound more like murder ballads or gothic horror stories than praise choruses. Where a lot of Christian popular music amounts only to so much spiritually-minded feel-goodery, Edwards’ music will put the fear of God into you — literally.
His intensity reveals a lot about what he believes. I’m not sure that I could place him in any specific theological or denominational camp, but I do know this: He’s a fundamentalist, in the least politically-charged sense of the term. He believes the Bible is true. He believes God is a holy God, and perfectly capable of judgment and wrath. He sings about God’s awful grace, God’s sovereignty, and God’s often painful acts of providence. I’ll bet he’s a Calvinist.
Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.
Cyndi Lauper: “Memphis Blues”
My review of Cyndi Lauper’s Memphis Blues is posted today at CT. Yes, it’s a blues album– with guest spots for B.B. King, Allen Toussaint, Johnny Lang, and others.
Robert Randolph and the Family Band: “We Walk This Road”
My five-star review of We Walk This Road, the much-delayed but totally worth-it new album from Robert Randolph and his Family Band, is posted at CT. As I’ve already mentioned, I think Randolph’s pairing with producer T-Bone Burnett yields inspiring results; Burnett focuses Randolph’s sound, moving him away from more jam-oriented performances and into more straight-ahead gospel/rock fusion, with heavy doses of blues and funk. Randolph, for his part, keeps things burning with passion and fervor, never letting Burnett’s sound become too sleepy. The whole thing is just killer from top to bottom.
Jason Moran: “Ten”
There are many reasons to appreciate 21st century jazz provacateurs like Robert Glasper and Trombone Shorty, not the least of which is the stark contrast in which they stand beside the more traditionally-minded guys. Take a pianist like Glapser, whose work with the Experiment marries jazz to hip-hop and funk traditions in a way that makes him both a student of Herbie Hancock and a contemporary of guys like ?uestlove. Or take Shorty, whose bangin’ Backatown record takes jazz to the street in the rockin’est Mardi Gras parade you’ve ever heard. These are guys who start with jazz and then look outward — and I love them for it.
But then you’ve got a guy like Jason Moran — a pianist and composer whose views on jazz are less flashy, but no less forward-thinking. As a result, his music doesn’t come with any ?uestlove cameos, nor is he likely to win a guest spot on an HBO series like Shorty has. Instead, he’s a go-to guy for understated singer/songwriters like Joe Henry, and he’s won enough respect in jazz circles — solely for his mad musical skills and complex vision as a composer — that he’s now celebrating 10 years with his trio the Bangwagon, on a new recording succinctly titled Ten.
Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.
