Death Cab for Cutie: “Codes and Keys”
My review of the new Death Cab for Cutie album is posted at CT. Can’t say that it really knocked my socks off, but the level of craft and the number of solid hooks make it a grower, and certainly a more satisfying record than Narrow Stairs.
My Morning Jacket: “Circuital”
My brief review of the new My Morning Jacket album, Circuital, is posted at CT. I note with interest– and, I confess, some surprise– that I seem to hold a minority view here, insofar as I think this album is less a return to form and more a step down from Evil Urges. That album was hardly perfect– in fact, parts of it were spectacularly wrong-headed– but I must say that I prefer epic failure to something as flat and seemingly aimless as this new record. Regardless, the My Morning Jacket of the last two or three albums is an entirely different band than the My Morning Jacket of old, and perhaps I’m still trying to figure out how best to appreciate them.
Film Break: “Kung Fu Panda 2″
More animals doing kung fu– but, surprisingly, a pretty fun little movie. My review of Kung Fu Panda 2 is posted at CT.
Dylan at 70: Ten Favorite Records
A list of ten favorite records seems a trivial service to render to a man who has given us– me– so much revelation, so much wisdom and inspiration. And here’s the kicker: It’s probably not all that interesting, either, as far as blog topics go. I don’t suppose anyone would approach a list like this honestly expecting Blonde on Blonde to be missing, or Empire Burlesque to assume a position over Blood on the Tracks, nor should they. The idea of canon is one that I’m innately skeptical of, but the established Dylan canon more or less makes sense, I think.
Nevertheless. I think my list of ten favorite Dylan albums– each one a game-changer for me, really– might include a surprise or two, at least for those who aren’t already well schooled in my Dylan fixations. More to the point, I think this is actually about as heartfelt an homage as I can pay the man. Ubiquitous though he may be on every list that’s ever been made of the all-time great albums, I still wonder if his capacities as a record-maker might be a bit underappreciated, at least when compared to his gifts as a songwriter. Not that I really think either of these things could ever be understated By the way: If you need any proof of the way Dylan revolutionized what an album could be, check the very worthwhile (essential, even) mono box set that released last year and listen to those seminal first eight albums in sequence. In four years time, everything changed– including Dylan himself– forever. Astonishing.
A final note: I thought about spicing up the list a little by throwing in a curveball selection from the Bootleg series, or something like Before the Flood, but quickly realized that to trade a proper album for something ancillary would be rather scandalous when dealing with a catalog as unassailable as this one. I mean, it’s not like I was having a hard time coming up with ten revelatory albums.
10. Time Out of Mind
Its heart is wrecked by the same sense of loss that pervaded Blood on the Tracks– only here, a much older Dylan is also wrestling with the angel of mortality; its language is that of the blues, a vernacular that stretches back to the very first Bob Dylan record and pointed forward to his current, pencil-mustachioed drifter incarnation; and in the arty sheen of Daniel Lanois, the album finds a style that’s actually far more sympathetic to its subject matter than it’s ever given credit for (and much more convincing than the Dylan/Lanois match-up on Oh Mercy, I think). “Standing in the Doorway” could be his saddest song ever, but the album’s spirit is ultimately a romantic one; how else does one explain a twenty-minute finale that looks up to the Highlands?
09. Another Side of Bob Dylan
I’ll say this about it: Of his early folk albums, Freewheelin’ is a towering giant, an album on which all the sides of Bob Dylan– his romantic side, his political side, and so on– cohabitate and even seem to feed off one another. I have not found another folk album to floor me like that one, with the scope of its imagination and the way it suggested (rightly so) that its auteur was capable of anything– not in Dylan’s catalog, not anywhere else. The albums that followed it sectioned off his vision, and, as such, are a little less striking. The Times They Are A-Changin’ took the politics, but this album– which I prefer– gets Dylan the romantic, Dylan the whimsical, Dylan the surreal. And honestly, that’s the side of Bob Dylan I tend to prefer.
08. Blood on the Tracks
An album so singular it spawned its own cliche; these days, anytime an artist records a work of luxurious sadness and pervasive heartache, it’s called his or her Blood on the Tracks. Naturally, Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks towers over everyone else’s. He makes some comments in Chronicles that suggest maybe this wasn’t intended to be the Divorce Album it’s always been considered, that perhaps reading it as straight autobiography is to fail in comprehending Dylan’s always-in-character sleight of hand, but I don’t think it matters. Melancholy has never been so exquisitely immersive.
07. John Wesley Harding
A curious case, this one; Dylan’s simplest, most austere album– painted in crisp black and white lines– remains his most elusive, his most inscrutable. But its sense of mystery isn’t impenetrable so much as it’s alluring– particularly since Dylan’s rustic poetry and Puritan myths not only form a sober-minded companion piece to The Basement Tapes, but also an outline he would later color in and flesh out with Love & Theft.
06. Bringing it All Back Home
Half electric and half acoustic it may be, but there’s no sense of Dylan hedging his bets here on this, the opening salvo of his hipster era; the acoustic numbers– anything but plainspoken– are, if anything, even more transcendentally absurd than the rock and roll numbers. But for all of the album’s celebrated surrealism, what continues to raise the roof for me is the personally expressiveness of these songs; it may be more imaginative than confessional but it is no less human or available because of it. There’s no need for Dylan to spell out the specifics for us to be swept up by the universal. Or to put it another way: You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
05. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
21 years old and already he was moving right down the line from the poignant philosophizing of “Blowin’ in the Wind” to the ravishing romance of “Girl from the North Country” to the bristling moral outrage of “Masters of War” and even– with a tip o’ the hat to Woody– into the cheerfully silly “Bob Dylan’s Blues.” I’ve wasted my life. This record is a cavalcade of perfect songs, one after the other, and not only are they perfect, they are bold; “Masters of War” is not an amorphous or self-congratulatory “protest song” but a song that takes a real stance and affirms truth and justice and the existence of absolute evil, and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” makes you feel heartbroken for the guy even though, in places, he’s kinda being a dick. Dylan would follow this album, just about a year later, with an album called Another Side, but this one comes about as close as any of ‘em to encompassing all the sides of Bob Dylan, and I think you could make a pretty strong case for this as the best album ever recorded, period.
04. Blonde on Blonde
From the best album ever recorded to the other best album ever recorded; this one’s dark and thick and wooly, a funhouse of sound more labyrinthine than anything Dylan ever recorded. This is the gloriously oversized culmination of his electric mayhem, the natural climax of his surrealist hipster era. It’s no wonder he followed it with a retreat back to simplicity– really, what else could he have done?
03. The Basement Tapes
Another album, like Blood on the Tracks, that has essentially become its own archetype; in my vocabulary, anyway, “Basement Tapes” has become shorthand for any music (and there isn’t much of it) that even comes close to approximating the kind of spontaneous joy captured in these sessions. The official release is, perhaps, a little misleading– Robbie Robertson sequenced the thing to make it play like he and the members of The Band were Dylan’s creative equals, which isn’t really the case– but no matter. This is the sound of Dylan drawing the tall tale characters and folk heroes of his youth into the roadhouse for a raucous set of hell-raising and myth-making.
02. Highway 61 Revisited
In which our hero discovers America, invents rock and roll, and translates the blues into the language of the modernists– or is it the other way around? That’s the thing with this one: It’s a stretch of road so long and winding it’s hard to tell where the journey really begins, whether the blues gather their strangeness from Dylan’s surrealist poetry or the lyrics are given weight by the broiling grit of their setting or some unfathomable combination of the two. Anyone claiming Dylan was a folksinger who merely “went electric” has clearly never heard this one; it’s pure punk rock.
01. “Love & Theft”
I really mean it.
Why should I have to choose between the rowdy myth-making of The Basement Tapes and the punkish mayhem of Highway 61? Or between the romance of Another Side and the tall-tale allegory of John Wesley Harding? Dylan contains multitudes, but this is the record that retraces the most of his crossed paths, blazing more than a few new trails along the way.
And while I acknowledge, quite happily, that Dylan recorded close to a dozen albums that carry more import– more of the weight of history– than this one, I refuse to believe he ever topped this set of endlessly complicated songs, equal parts world-weary fatalism and drifter romance, fire-and-brimstone preaching and Groucho Marx jokes. Following the wise-cracking doomsday riverboat ride of “High Water” with the old-timey soft-shoe whisper of “Moonlight,” on an album that also rambles between the apocalyptic puns and nightclub swing of “Summer Days” and the downright nasty grind of “Lonesome Day Blues”? As remarkable a run, and as dizzying a display of imagination, even as the whole spectrum of Freewheelin’, I think.
Levon Helm: “Ramble at the Ryman”
Lots to like about Levon Helm’s celebratory new live recording– actually, available as either an album or a concert DVD– but let’s start with the title itself. Just a few years ago Helm was recovering from major throat surgery, and it seemed doubtful that he’s ever be able to open his mouth and sing again. And what a loss that would have been: Helm is duly credited as one of rock’s most distinctive and soulful drummers but he is perhaps underappreciated as one of its very best singers, the man whose warmly craggy, rustic Arkansas voice gave many of The Band’s all-time classics their heart and their weight. Thank God he got his voice back– and now, has released a record with the word “ramble” in the title. A cheeky bit of triumphalism, perhaps, though I get the feeling that Helm’s attitude is mostly one of humble thankfulness.
Or at least, that’s how this album plays out. The title is actually not a reference to the fact that the man can still talk and sing– and quite well, actually– but rather is a nod to the spirited concerts he holds in his Woodstock studio, and, every now and again, uproots and shares with other parts of the country. This set, of course, was recorded in Nashville’s own holy temple of American roots music. The Ryman once housed the Grand Ol’ Opry. I once saw Tom Waits perform there, a carnival barker bathed in stained glass refraction; it was a thing to behold. And this Levon Helm show more than lives up to the sacredness of its famous stage. The weight of history is very much a part of these performances, though it’s nowhere near as weighty or sober-minded as all of that would suggest. It’s more like the sound of a living legend who doesn’t care much to be bogged down by that title or the feelings of self-importance it might denote; he’s rather cut loose and have a good time, and Ramble at the Ryman is certainly a hoot and a holler. More directly: It’s the party album of the year.
They are structured as revues, these Rambles– think of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder era, perhaps– and this set in particular is a star-studded affair, Helm anchoring his large touring band (complete with horns, and led by Bob’s own bandleader, Larry Campbell) and augmented by guest performers including Buddy Miller, Sheryl Crow, John Hiatt, and others. But to call them guest performers almost gives the wrong impression. They aren’t really featured soloists, though many of them do take solo vocal turns; rather, they blend in quite naturally to the organic give-and-take of these performances, trading off vocal duties just like members of the band. Their celebrity is not the selling point here. This disc is all about hearing them humbly and respectfully share the stage with a true master– someone they all clearly hold in high regard, and who is really in terrific voice here.
The record actually makes a nice capstone to the latter-day renaissance Helm has been enjoying; his two recent solo albums, Dirt Farmer and Electric Dirt, both won critical acclaim and even Grammys, and Ramble is very much in the same spirit, a collection of folksy American roots songs that blend originals and covers (in this case, there are some Dirt Farmer songs and also some Band staples). Helm gives a joyfully ramshackle, carefree take on The Band’s “Ophelia” for the album opener before dipping into a Chuck Berry tune, “Back to Memphis,” here done as a sort of horn-drenched R&B. His voice is too weak to carry the Dirt Farmer ballad “Anna Lee” on his own, but the choral effect– featuring support from female band members– is quite lovely, and I actually prefer the warmth of this version to the studio rendition. There is a slightly slowed-down “Rag Mama Rag” that is sort of a slinky jam, and an album highlight. The closing trifecta finds the band tearing the roof off of “The Shape I’m In,” “Chest Fever,” and, most of all, an electrifying sing-along version of “The Weight.”
Along the way, Buddy Miller gets to do a song he wrote with wife Julie and included on his own fine album United Universal House of Prayer; it’s called “Wide River to Cross,” and, again, I prefer the looser live version to its studio incarnation, I think. Sheryl Crow gets to do a very convincing, down-home folksy take on a Carter Family song (“No Depression in Heaven”), and blues man Little Sammy Davis sings and plays harmonica on a couple of enjoyable blues jams.
But again, the presence of different singers here doesn’t make this feel like some kind of stilted celebrity tribute concert; it’s just the sound of great musicians cutting loose on some great songs, celebrating the material and savoring one another’s company. The performances are spirited, the arrangements (by Campbell) unimpeachable; the upbeat numbers are decked out in full, brassy regalia, the quieter numbers given space to be warm and intimate. My only request: That this not be a glorious parting shot from Helm, but rather just one more entry in a late-career canon that will continue to grow and grow.
Moby: “Destroyed”
My review of the new– and alas, not terribly memorable– Moby album is posted at CT.
Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi: “Rome”
The Rome project– a collaborative endeavor between hip-hop and pop-inclined producer Danger Mouse and Italian composer Daniele Luppi– has been gestating for half a decade now, and I confess that the allure of this enterprise has held my attention for as long as I’ve known about it, both for the concept itself as well as for the talent involved. A modern-day homage to the great Italian film scores of the 60s and early 70s– those by Ennio Morricone in particular, of course– Rome never really had any choice but to be a rather audacious and one-of-a-kind record, at least by contemporary standards. Whether a triumph or a failure, one suspected, it would at least be a true original. So that the final project would, curiously, fall somewhere almost perfectly in between– as an album that isn’t good, bad, or ugly, but is, more than anything else, just not terribly interesting– is perhaps the worst and most unexpected fate that could have befallen it, but it is still an album with some merit, if only for the footnotes. And footnotes are fine: After all, Rome always was destined to be a quirky project, so I’m content to regard it as a curiosity more than anything else.
Where it falls flat is on the level of execution, I’m sorry to say. I think there was real promise to what Danger Mouse and Luppi were trying to do here; the concept of a soundtrack in search of a film is, as far as concepts go, a rich one, and it wrought nothing but greatness for Barry Adamson on his wonderful Back to the Cat record. Like that album, Rome is fervently concerned with creating atmosphere and mood– but unlike Adamson’s fine work, I don’t know that the architects of Rome ever quite land on the kinds of songs they need to make this thing stick. Actually, there are surprisingly few songs at all; the whole thing clocks in at 35 minutes, which is by no means an unreasonable album length, but it’s oddly compact for something that seems to scream for the epic treatment, and it’s especially puzzling when you consider that many songs are recycled as brief “interludes” between the more pop-oriented vocal numbers.
This feeling of slightness carries over from the record’s length to its very execution, which really never veers very far from the province of recreation. Danger Mouse and Luppi are clearly enamored of the sound and spirit of those old soundtracks, and they capture these things very precisely here, even enlisting a number of veteran Italian classical musicians to lend the proceedings some authenticity. But their work is strictly an homage– never an interpretation. Despite a few of Danger Mouse’s token bells and whistles, the thing never really comes to bear the image of its creators, and it tends to feel like a labor of love that’s rooted in nostalgia, or worse, academia. I say this, you understand, as someone who finds the lush swells of strings here to be positively romantic, the whining organ to be supremely expressive– I simply feel like these are sounds too steeped in familiarity.
But as I said, the tarnished allure of Rome as a concept doesn’t negate some lovely moments, which come, I am almost embarrassed to admit, from its two most famous and most glamorous contributors. I am a big fan of Norah Jones, and don’t care who knows it; from the beginning I felt her classification as a “jazz” artist was undue, as her music has always hearkened to a time when genre was just a matter of tone and spirit, when jazz and country and folk and blues all existed quite comfortably under the same big umbrella. She has a truly classic kind of voice, I think, and I am ever pleased to hear her lend it to projects that allow her sultriness to flourish in a new environment, as it does here. She sings on three songs here, and I am more than sufficiently swayed by her spirited performances on “Problem Queen” and “Black,” in particular; she delivers the lyrics with a sense of rhythm and momentum that makes them work as pop songs, and she bites into the words (equal parts poetry and kitsch, I would say) like a true believer. She sells Rome‘s sepia-tinted romance.
Jack White is actually a little less convincing, I think, at least on his first track here, “The Rose with the Broken Neck”– but then, that’s a flat song to begin with, one that lacks the kind of tension or shifting momentum to really work like the Jones numbers do. He delivers a great performance on “Two Against One,” though. White also has one of those timelessly appealing kinds of voices, and hearing him sing in this context– hardly the kind of minimal backing he tends to provide for himself– is something of great interest, especially in these dark, post-White Stripes days. He reportedly composed the words to “Two Against One” while driving one day, rattling off stream-of-consciousness thoughts into a tape recorded until he arrived at something that sounded good, and the result serves as a superb example of his gifts as a lyricist; he gets the importance of the sound of the words, of the cadence, and he conjures a sense of fatalism and near-despair that fits the cinematic scope of the record quite well.
If only the rest of it lived up to White’s sense of grandeur. Rome, for its numerous virtues, is really just a very small record, something that makes precious little sense given its concept and its five-year gestation. That hardly makes it a dud, but it is, I think, a bit of a missed opportunity.
Alela Diane: “Alela Diane and Wild Divine”
This review got lost in the shuffle there for a bit, but it’s really a pretty record and a definite win from an up-and-coming folksinger who deserves your attention. Full review at Stereo Subversion.
Man Man: “Life Fantastic”
Man Man is a profoundly weird band– and it’s not just that they’re weird, it’s that they’re weird in a way no other band is weird, at least no other band making a ruckus in 2011. They’re not stoners, at least as far as I’m aware. They’re not postmods, and they’re not hipsters. They’re not revivalists– thank Heavens– and their records share no common bonds with the glitchy electronics of so many of their peers. Man Man’s brand of weirdness is more like an old-fashioned spin on showmanship, the kind of theatrical panache that hearkens back to the days of vaudeville– to a time when “novelty” wasn’t another words for “gimmicks,” but rather was something any entertainer simply had to have in order to draw an audience.
In other words, the “weirdness” of Man Man is not for its own sake– not ever. It’s a way of drawing listeners in, getting them to peak inside the curtain sectioning off the band’s own personal Big Top spectacle. The circus metaphor is apt, actually– their live shows are flamboyantly Ringling Brothers-esque, and their love of repetition, rhyme, and alliteration (check the band members’ performing names: Honus Honus, Pow Wow, Chang Wang, and T. Moth) are suggestive of a carnival barker’s old-timey marquee. But if Man Man’s theatricality is about luring ‘em in, it’s also about misdirection– some sleight of hand to distract from just how dark and savage this music really is.
It’s never been darker or more savage than on Life Fantastic. Even the title is a smoke and mirrors. Its emphatic proclamation and archaic syntax suggest a tip of the fedora to an old-fashioned stage-and-screen kind of charisma, but beneath the title they’ve composed some of their most brutal and sinister lyrics yet; song titles like “Bangkok Necktie” and “Haute Tropique” sound like they could ever be the names of the goofiest B-movies ever or lyrics from a Tom Waits song circa the mid-1980′s, but there’s nothing particularly funny about the damaged introspection here, lyrics about broken hearts and drug addiction, stories of heartache and loss that often take a turn for the grotesque.
Speaking of Tom Waits, though, it should be mentioned that the darkness of singer/songwriter Honus Honus’ imagination seems only to fuel his band’s mayhem, and on Life Fantastic they sound once again like children run amok in Tom Waits’ junkyard– a junkyard in which nobody has had this much fun since Rain Dogs. And make no mistake– their shared fondness for Waits’ instrumental palette is as much a key to their allure as their flare for vaudeville; their music is about disparate textures, about eclectic percussive sounds, about antiquated song forms like the tango and the rumba, structures that provide Life Fantastic‘s songs with their skeleton even as they take some time to excavate from the surface-level mania and mayhem.
These old-fashioned formal devices are important, though, because they reveal what really gives Man Man’s music its resonance; this band isn’t merely devoted to a vintage conception of “novelty,” but also to a timeless attention to craft. That level of craftsmanship provides these songs with their thrust, their heart, and their power, and here it’s wielded with razor-sharp precision, thanks in part to the production assistance from Mike Mogis, the Bright Eyes/Monsters of Folk overseer whose work here helps trim the fat and reveal the contoured shape of Honus’ songs. And would you believe that, between the more focused songwriting and the controlled chaos of the production, Man Man has crafted what might be one of the year’s most aggressive and direct rock albums? That may be an odd thing to say about a group whose calling card has always been a theatrical artifice, but it’s nevertheless true, as Mogis helps album opener “Knuckle Down,” complete with its marimba-lead Wonka-vision breakdowns, become the most rocking, most physical track Man Man has ever recorded, while the sparser “Steak Knives” moves its tent from Tom Waits’ junkyard-circus era to the chamber-folk leanings of Real Gone‘s quieter numbers, and is both alluring and surprisingly moving in its spaciousness and intimacy.
But of course it would be wrong to suggest that a more focused Man Man is a less strange or singular one; if anything, their uniqueness is all the more potent in these more focused, concentrated bursts. This is probably as good a time as any to mention that the album contains a full-on surf-rock track called “Piranha Club”– because why not, I suppose? But not, this isn’t a kinder, gentler Man Man– just one in which their inner darkness and outward theatricality are stripped of excess and revealed to be inextricably tied. This one cuts to the bone– it’s a defiantly nimble balance of performance, art, and rock, and as such it’s the purest incarnation yet of Man Man’s twisted genius.
Booker T. Jones: “The Road from Memphis”
Note the title: This isn’t the road too Booker T.’s hometown, but the road from it– not a way back home but a travelogue of the journey that’s brought him to where he is, a way of consolidating the past and taking a clear-eyed survey of the present. In other words, it’s not what you think it is. An album from an artist now well into his 60′s– a living legend in latter-career renaissance– that bears the name of his city of birth might smack of nostalgia, but The Road from Memphis is never so easy. This is an album about the passage of time, one in which the artist tips his natty fedora to his roots but doesn’t romanticize them, one in which soul music is a term wide enough to encompass the Stax sound Jones helped create as well as the hip-hop and urban pop sounds of today.
He deserves an album like this. Jones really is a living legend, but he’s too seldom acknowledged as such, probably because he’s been content to spend most of his career as a sideman, a behind-the-scenes genius. In that way he’s like Memphis’ own equivalent of Allen Toussaint, and like Toussaint, he’s a guy who’s always shouldered the dignity and tradition inherent to black music idioms while never shying away from pushing forward. And as it happens, he’s doing some of the most vibrant work of his career right now, seemingly enjoying the chance to finally be in the spotlight: The Road from Memphis is simply the hippest, most streetwise album he’s ever made.
Jones works with only the best backup bands these days– one of the many perks of being a revered elder statesman and one of the principle architects of a movement– and won a Grammy for the fine work he did with Drive-by Truckers on Potato Hole. On this new record he’s got an even more sympathetic band– Philly’s own The Roots, or at least a small combo of Roots regulars, including guitarist Captain Kirk Douglas on guitar, Owen Biddle on bass, and ?uestlove on drums. Their work here is almost as important– and as exemplary– as Jones’ own; they bring the requisite humility for making this project work, content to lay down rock-solid grooves and never force their way into the spotlight. Simply put, they really cook; ?uesto, in particular, lays down some of the tightest beats of his life.
Jones himself, meanwhile, sounds like he’s increasingly inspired by the spirit of jazz; his playing here has a looseness and a fluidity that’s unlike anything we’ve ever heard from him. That said, he also remains ever open to new ideas, and the best moments on the album are those in which he and The Roots truly push each other into territories that are new for both parties. The cover songs are, perhaps, most indicative of this. Lauryn Hill’s “Everything is Everything” has as its foundation a poppin’ hip-hop beat; Jones’ organ vamping builds and builds into a towering work of sweaty Memphis R&B. It’s lively and urgent work from a man better known for his perpetual, unflappable cool and his more laid-back tempos. For something even more out-there and wonderful, check his reading of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” with plying so lyrical he might as well have just sung all the words; in this instance, he simply has his organ sing for him.
The brilliance of this record lies in the way it plays out like a journey– the journey of soul music, the journey of Booker T. Jones, and the journey from Memphis to New York. It’s an album about the passage of time, about things that change and things that stay the same, and Jones regards both with joy and acceptance. The album opener is an old-timey soul strut called “Walking Papers,” a song that perfectly captures the hope of new beginnings and the optimism of a new journey, a new chapter in life; honestly, it could have been recorded at basically any point in Jones’ career, but his joy for digging into these funky grooves hasn’t diminished one iota since the days of “Green Onions.” Mirroring that song’s joy is the album’s first vocal number, “Progress,” an R&B gem that glows with the hope of social change, acknowledging that there’s still a long way to go but celebrating how far we’ve come. Jim James gives a golden performance as the guest singer, and between this and his cameo on last year’s Roots album it’s not hard to understand why he’s become ?uestlove’s go-to guy when he needs a warm, soulful hook.
But the album is as much about place as it is time, and it offers a rich, subtle deployment of ideas about the nature of pride in one’s roots. Jones takes a rare vocal turn on the soulful, almost bluesy title song, perhaps the most special thing here; it’s an insider’s tour of Memphis, a secret map of the city that could only have been written by someone who spent his boyhood running a paper route through some of the city’s back alleys. The song is affectionate but not romantic, an easygoing celebration of one’s personal history and geography. The song’s complement is “Representing Memphis,” an intoxicating soul duet with spots for Sharon Jones and The National’s singer Matt Berninger. Here the singers celebrate hometown pride for its own sake; they love Memphis not because it’s a perfect city but because it is their city, a somewhat out-of-fashion idea that is offered with warmth and generosity here.
Fine as these songs are, I’m inclined to say that the heart of this record is in the instrumental numbers; teeming with the energy of the street and the comfort and ease of a great musician who still takes joy in his work, these tracks serve not only as effective pathways between the vocal touchstones but also as worthy destinations in their own right. And for all of ?uestlove’s talk about wanting this album to sound retro, it’s not really a throwback in its sound so much as it simply sounds very good and clean; the drummer’s beats have a crisp snap to them, while Jones’ organ has never been a warmer instrument. He and The Roots really cook here, and in this music you hear the younger musicians connect with tradition even as the veteran looks forward to new avenues and unforeseen possibilities. That’s what makes this record exciting, and one hopes very much that it’s not the culmination of a journey, but simply a continuation of it.
