Author: brendanmstewart

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The Listening Post: March 2012

Spring comes early, bringing much in the way of change.

  • Born Under A Bad Sign—Albert King. The first Stax LP by Albert King is really a compilation of his earlier singles. It’s also one of the great blues albums of all time. From the indisputable classics of “Born Under A Bad Sign” and “Crosscut Saw”, both perennials of bar bands everywhere, to lesser-known but equally compelling songs like “Personal Manager” and “As The Years Go Passing By” Born Under A Bad Sign is the sound of one of the great bluesmen at his peak. One listen and it’s immediately clear how much debt Eric Clapton owes to King. The debt is so deep that it would be easy to mistake almost any one of King’s tight, high wire leads for Clapton’s solos on the Disraeli Gears album. King is a deep, rich singer, and his stinging guitar work can be heard in almost all subsequent electric blues. When you combine this with the fact that his backing band on the album is Booker T & The MGs, one of the greatest, most sympathetic, bands in rock history, you’ve got a combination of blues and soul that can’t be beat. It is soul that is the secret ingredient here, replacing the grit and howls of traditional blues with a texture that makes these songs stand out in a crowd. Many of the songs here have been covered to death, but these are the versions that will last. Cream’s version of “Born Under A Bad Sign,” or Free’s version of “The Hunter” may be more well-known, but these are the timeless originals that will still be here long after the covers have faded.
    Grade: A+
  • Sloe Gin—Joe Bonamassa. Most blues performers are eager to flaunt their intimate knowledge of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf. With good reason, I might add. Joe Bonamassa is something of an exception. He’s far more beholden to Cream, Free, and the British Blues Boom of the 1960s than he is to the founding fathers of blues. Bonamassa is a blues-rocker, the likes of which we really don’t see much anymore. As a performer, he’s considerably better than latecomers like the pedestrian Kenny Wayne Shepherd and the execrable Jonny Lang. However, he’s also not the 21st century’s Great White Hope for blues. Stevie Ray Vaughan, he’s not. What Bonamassa is, is a decent, if somewhat sterile, singer and virtuoso guitarist who is completely besotted with late-1960s blues rock. Sloe Gin suffers from the same malady that affects too many albums in the CD era—it’s too long. That problem can be solved by eliminating the eight plus minutes of the title track, a go-nowhere cover of a song once recorded by Tim Curry (!). Minus that particular time suck, Sloe Gin is a rock-ribbed exercise in simulated British blues, of a type not heard since the heyday of Rory Gallagher. In fact, if there’s a single guitarist whom Bonamassa most closely resembles, it’s Gallagher. Like the celebrated Irish guitarist, Bonamassa mixes his hard electric blues rock with acoustic guitar workouts. Perhaps somewhat ironically, it is these acoustic tracks the provide many of the highlights of this album. “Around The Bend” features magnificent finger-picking and a vocal that comes as close as anything he sings to true soulfulness. “Jelly Roll” is a fine, funky take of a song by John Martyn. “Richmond” is truly beautiful, mixing light acoustic picking with subtle accompaniment. “India” is an acoustic/electric raga that Michael Bloomfield would be proud of, and a track that owes some debt to Mountain’s “For My Friend” in its alternation of gentility and ferocity. It is these acoustic tracks that add flavor and texture to the album and that elevate it to a higher level. There are some great electric workouts, like “Ballpeen Hammer”, “Another Kind Of Love”, and the blistering “Black Night” and the balance of the album is smartly chosen songs played with lots of fire. Bonamassa may be lacking in some authenticity, but so were the majority of British bluesers that he calls his influences. But for those (like me) who complain that nobody’s making music like Cream, Blodwyn Pig, Led Zeppelin, or Free anymore…well, Joe Bonamassa is proof that such music still exists.
    Grade: B+
  • Other Worlds (EP)—Screaming Trees. Even the best bands have to start somewhere. Screaming Trees started in 1985 with this 6-track EP, which is very much a product of the times. Far from the dark, swirly, guitar-heavy crush of their later albums, Other Worlds is nearly a tribute to Chronic Town-era R.E.M. It’s practically a parallel universe version of the début EP from Athens’s finest, right down to the herky-jerky rhythms that border on danceable, high vocals (good Lord, is that really Mark Lanegan singing?), and subtle lyrical psychedelicisms. Other Worlds doesn’t hold up as well as Chronic Town, mainly because R.E.M. emerged as a mature band with a distinct sound while Screaming Trees are still searching for their sound at this point. But “The Turning” (a different version of which would show up on their début LP, Clairvoyance, in 1986) and “Now Your Mind Is Next To Mine” (great title, that) are excellent examples of the early Trees sound, while “Like I Said”, “Pictures In My Mind”, and “Other Worlds” are very good. Only “Barriers” is lackluster. Screaming Trees did some great work later in their career, but this is the sound of a young band having fun and trying to figure out their path. Very good on the merits, but hardly essential listening.
    Grade: B
  • Live On Ten Legs—Pearl Jam. I have never seen Pearl Jam in concert, though I’ve seen all the films, videos, etc. They are an astoundingly good live band, maybe the best since the prime of The Who. As players, they are some of the best in rock music today. Matt Chamberlin is a ferociously good drummer, and Mike McCready doesn’t get anywhere near the recognition he deserves as a guitar player. Add in Jeff Ament’s bass, Boom Gaspar’s keyboards, and Stone Gossard’s rhythm guitar and you’re talking about a level of musicianship that most bands would kill for. And then there’s Eddie Vedder who brings a raw level of excitement and passion to his performances that remind you of Roger Daltrey. Vedder is not the stadium showman, à la Mick Jagger, Robert Plant, or Freddie Mercury. It’s abundantly clear that Vedder’s idol is Daltrey, whose powerhouse vocals and intense, contained sense of impending violence was like a bonfire on the Who’s stages. Live on Ten Legs is the band’s second live album, not counting the dozens (hundreds?) of “official” bootlegs they released as tour souvenirs in a successful effort to beat bootleggers at their own game. This album is not as feral as 1998’s Live On Two Legs, but it’s close. It gathers highlights from their 2003-2010 tours, and takes pains not to overlap any songs with the earlier album. What that means is that some of their live showstoppers like “Even Flow”, “Black”, and “Do The Evolution” are not here. But it also means that “Alive”, “State Of Love And Trust”, “Rearviewmirror”, “Jeremy”, and “Yellow Ledbetter” finally get an official live release. There are also two cover songs: Joe Strummer’s “Arms Aloft” works perfectly since there is a lot of similarity between Strummer’s music and Pearl Jam’s. Less successful is an attempt at “Public Image” featuring Vedder trying his best to mimic John Lydon’s snotty vocal delivery. It’s not a bad attempt, but it doesn’t really work. Pearl Jam and Public Image, Ltd. are very different bands. Similarly, a lengthy jam on “Porch” serves only to sap the power from the song. There are other flaws: the version of “Yellow Ledbetter” is surprisingly ramshackle, and “Jeremy” suffers from overexposure…even the band sounds like they don’t really want to hear it. On the other end of the spectrum, “World Wide Suicide”, “Love and Trust”, “Alive”, “Animal”, and “Unthought Known” are amazing, surpassing the studio versions in almost every instance. Mike McCready really shines on “Nothing As It Seems”. There is also a great version of “I Am Mine”, one of the most tuneful Pearl Jam songs ever recorded, and a song that deserved to be a huge hit single, but was released at a time when Pearl Jam’s star was receding. The album is a notch below Live on Two Legs, but it is conclusive proof that Pearl Jam is still one of the most incendiary live acts in the world.
    Grade: A
  • After The Flood: Live From The Grand Forks Prom June 28, 1998—Soul Asylum. The Minneapolis band doesn’t get enough credit. They were so much more than “Runaway Train.” They had the good fortune of sticking around long enough to come through the door that Nirvana opened, unlike their real peers (and betters) The Replacements and Husker Du. Fortunately for Soul Asylum, their writing and playing peaked just at the time when alternative rock was becoming mainstream, and their hard-edged melodies were suddenly radio-friendly. Sure the awful video for “Runaway Train” was built for heavy consciousness raising rotation on MTV, but they actually found a few kids from that video, so all sins are forgiven. Besides, it was a truly great song until MTV beat it into your head every hour on the hour. In 1998, a huge flood hit Grand Forks, ND, destroying much of the town. As the waters receded, area high schools had a collective prom in an Air Force hangar that had been used as a refugee center. The prom band was Soul Asylum, which is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard since my brother’s high school class pooled their prom money and instead staged a concert by Edgar Winter’s White Trash. If you know the studio albums, there’s not much on here that you haven’t already heard in versions that are equally good or even better. Soul Asylum has always had a reputation of being a great live band, and it’s abundantly clear that they’re having a good time here. The songs are tight, loud, and bursting with exuberance. What elevates the album are the cover songs. The opener is a ferocious version of Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” and the set closes with the all-time great prom song “To Sir, With Love” and a fantastic version of “Rhinestone Cowboy.” In between they work in a stellar version of “The Tracks of My Tears,” and a poignant “I Can See Clearly Now”. One can only imagine what the teachers and parents thought of their kids’ prom band covering Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” inserting the F-word into “Rhinestone Cowboy,” and declaring that “suits are a pain in the ass.” But it’s Soul Asylum, and you can take the Minneapolis guttersnipes out of the gutter, but you can’t take the gutter out of the guttersnipes. This is a really solid album, with great cover songs, and well-played, well-chosen originals. The only misstep is not going further back in their repertoire, at least to some of the great tracks from their Hang Time album, but that strikes me as likely a record company decision.
    Grade: B+

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The Listening Post: February 2012

  • De Nova—The Redwalls. The cover of De Nova tells you all you really need to know. The cover, featuring the band and a strange symbol is a sly homage to the classic second album by Traffic. The Redwalls are an unapologetic classic rock throwback band. In spirit they’re like The Grip Weeds, but while that band focuses their sound on a Byrds/Who mashup, the real touchstone for The Redwalls is the power pop bands of the early 1970s, especially Badfinger and The Raspberries. There’s nothing original here; the album sounds like a compilation of lost tracks from the great power pop bands. But that’s okay. While originality isn’t their claim to fame, who wouldn’t want to hear a great lost Badfinger album? Hooks and catchy choruses abound, the playing is uniformly excellent, and sometimes the songs are really great, especially the slower songs like “Thank You”, “Build A Bridge”, and “Hung Up On The Way I’m Feeling”. There are a few lesser compositions that play all the right notes but sound less than inspired (“Love Her”, “On My Way”, “Front Page”, and “How The Story Goes”) and the high-energy closing track, “Rock & Roll” is about as creative as its title. Still, listening to De Nova is like listening to a great rock radio station in 1974, and that’s not a bad thing at all.
    Grade: B
  • Rocket To Russia—The Ramones. There have been attempts in the past to compile a “Best of” the brudders from Queens, but those attempts were destined to fail. The simple relentlessness of the Ramones would drive most listeners insane after 40 minutes. The Ramones are best appreciated in their early albums, especially the first four. Each of them clocks in at less than 33 minutes; there’s simply no time to get bored. Of these four, Rocket To Russia is the longest, featuring fourteen songs in a pummeling 32 minutes. It was also their first attempt at growing up…sort of: there was an actual ballad on the album, the excellent “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow”. At their heart, The Ramones were totally in thrall to the early days of rock and roll. On Russia they do a blistering, yet loving, cover of Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Wanna Dance?” and The Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird”. But this is still a Ramones record, where cretins hop at Rockaway Beach, where Sheena’s a punk rocker, where teenagers are lobotomized by DDT, and where a happy family gulps down Thorazine. It’s all great, great fun. A half hour of prime Ramones is almost impossible to resist: they’re like the Archies, but sped up and full of steroids. Great, dumb, fun.
    Grade: A
  • After Bathing At Baxter’s—Jefferson Airplane. Take six talented musicians and singers, fill them with psychedelic drugs, pour them into a recording studio with an unlimited budget and time, no adult supervision, and what do you get? The third Jefferson Airplane album. First, the good: the band’s innate talents are enough to get them over the finish line for much of the first part of the album. “The Ballad Of You, Me, And Pooneil” has some bizarre lyrics but the song is about folk singer Fred Neil, who was a bizarre guy. Still, there’s a great vocal attack from Grace Slick and Marty Balin, and Jack Casady starts to step up on bass. “Young Girl Sunday Blues”, the great “Martha”, “Wild Thyme (H)”, and the frenetic “The Last Wall Of The Castle” are all very good. None of them, except “Martha”, compare favorably the songs on the previous album, the classic Surrealistic Pillow, but they’re still worthy additions to the Airplane canon. The rest of the album is far more problematic. “Rejoyce” is an okay piano tune that has what may well be the zenith of hippie solipsism in the line “I’d rather my country die for me.” “Watch Her Ride” and “Two Heads” are a little beefier musically, but are held down by uninspired playing and dated psychedelic lyrics. The combination of “Won’t You Try/Saturday Afternoon” starts promisingly with the “Won’t You Try” section but collapses into boredom once “Saturday Afternoon” rolls around. Worst of all are “A Small Package Of Value Will Come To You, Shortly”, a mercifully brief sound collage, and the atrocious jam “Spare Chaynge”, which is ten minutes of your life you will never get back. Those two songs make up almost 25% of the album, a mortal blow from which it can never recover. What hurts Baxter’s the most is the lack of songs from the Airplane’s best songwriter, Marty Balin, who co-wrote only “Martha”. Too much of the rest falls victim to Grace Slick and Paul Kantner at their most pretentious.
    Grade: C+
  • More Fun In The New World—X. The fourth album by Los Angeles’s best punk cum rockabilly band, X, is a triumph on almost every level. The last album produced by Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, More Fun In The New World is the album that X always wanted to make. The furious punk rock attack of their début album is still there in the form of barn burners like “Make The Music Go Bang”, “Devil Doll”, “Painting The Town Blue”, and “I See Red” but the album also features change-ups like the radio-friendly “The New World” and “True Love”, the pop catchiness of “Poor Girl”, the tone poem “I Will Not Think Bad Thoughts”, and even a cover of “Breathless” that falls short of Jerry Lee Lewis’s hit but still allows the band to indulge in their love of pre-Beatles rock ‘n’ roll and rockabilly. Oddest of all is the album closer, “True Love, Pt. 2” a white boy funk song that uses “True Love” as a starting point and that beats the Talking Heads at their own game. It gives the band a chance to pay tribute to some of their favorite songs, from “Be Bop A Lula” to “Land of 1000 Dances” to “Mother Popcorn” to “One Nation Under A Groove”. It also references songs as disparate as “Skip To M’Lou”, “I Been Working On The Railroad” and, surprisingly (and hilariously) Ram Jam’s “Black Betty”. It’s completely infectious and probably would have sounded great on the dance floors of 1983 America. Throughout these thirteen songs the band is as tight as Lana Turner’s sweaters, and the Slick/Balin-inspired vocal attack of John Doe and Exene Cervenka is relentless. Whether More Fun In The New World, or even X in general, should really be classified as punk is open for debate. What is settled is that when they were at their best, this was a great band with great albums. There’s not a bad track on this.
    Grade: A+

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The Doors: A Lifetime Spent Listening To Five Mean Years, by Greil Marcus

In the Afterword to this slim book, Greil Marcus says that the book was a lot of fun to write. I’m sure it was, but it wasn’t a lot of fun to read.

The book is not an analysis of the music of the Doors, nor is it a biography, nor is it a review. It is a deeply personal examination of a select group of songs or, in some cases, performances.

Sometimes the examination doesn’t even cover the entire song. For example, the chapter on “Strange Days” is about the first seven seconds of the song. Marcus maintains that Ray Manzarek’s brief keyboard introduction holds everything the Doors were striving to do…and that the remaining minutes of the song are psychedelic drivel.

Other chapters are so cryptic they defy a description. From the chapter on “My Eyes Have Seen You”:

Another staircase: Tenochtitlan, to the top, in a sprint, then looking down as the fireworks begin.

That is the entire chapter: a mysterious reference to the Aztec capital and, I assume, the stairs leading to the top of the sacrificial altars. But maybe not. I don’t know. Whatever, the sentence provides no real glimpse into the song.

Then there are chapters that have almost nothing to do with the song. There is a lengthy chapter on “Twentieth Century Fox” that is little more than a reminiscence of Marcus’s time spent at a Pop Art exhibit in Paris.

It’s frequently confusing. Marcus writes in a prose that borders on hallucinatory. The opening chapter about “L.A. Woman” steps to the gates of surreal. And yet, Marcus often succeeds at capturing the spirit of the Doors through his prose. A dry examination of the Doors—focusing on what the keyboards were doing, or how John Densmore modified a salsa beat for a particular song, or how Jim Morrison’s voice was recorded—can be fascinating. Just watch the Classic Albums DVD of The Doors for a really interesting look at how the particulars of the music came together. But what Marcus appears to be shooting for here is to have his prose match the anarchic spirit of the band: this is written language that gets arrested onstage, that exposes itself, that flies so high on LSD you think it can never come down, that stops in the middle of what you’re reading and takes off in a new, different direction. This is not expository prose, this is the textual equivalent of a Doors concert.

Of course, Doors concerts were notoriously iffy affairs. When they were on target, the Doors were incredible. When Morrison wasn’t too drunk and/or high, the Doors made magic. But then there were the nights like in Miami, when Morrison was reduced to a drunken cartoon whipping out Mr. Mojo Fallin’ (or pretending to) and berating his audience as a bunch of slaves. Marcus unfortunately succeeds in approximating those nights, as well.

The chapter on “Twentieth Century Fox” is the longest in the book, and torture to get through. The chapter on “L.A. Woman” is little more than a book review of the Thomas Pynchon novel Inherent Vice. He writes of the “cocktail jazz” version of “Queen Of The Highway” as if he were a Beat writer in a jazz club, imagining an alternate history where the Doors are the Ray Manzarek Quartet, waiting for the opportunity to play with Chet Baker. All very yada-yada-yada, and says nothing about the song. At least, nothing that someone who isn’t Greil Marcus can appreciate.

There are some excellent chapters, though, where the style of writing catches the reader and gives the same sort of head rush that great music can provide. “Take It As It Comes” gives weight to a great, largely forgotten, song. An examination of a performance of “The End” from the Singer Bowl in 1968 clearly shows the tension between band and audience, as the crowd was already trying to reduce the band to the single of “Light My Fire”. There is even a chapter (“The Doors In The So-Called Sixties”) that gives an appreciative view of Oliver Stone’s over-the-top movie, The Doors. My memory of that movie is not a good one—too many naked Indians, too much precious self-referential dialogue—but Marcus makes me want to see it again.

What comes through loud and clear, and what I find the strangest part of the book, is that Marcus doesn’t really seem to like the Doors. He’s clearly a fan of the first album, but little that follows it. He even writes of “the hundreds of times” he listened to the first album and “the few” times he played the others. He shows absolute contempt for Waiting For The Sun and The Soft Parade (whose opening track is ridiculed as “‘Tell All The People’—not to buy this album!”), and finds little good to say about even such classic albums as Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman. The subtitle of the book is “A Lifetime Listening To Five Mean Years” but it’s obvious that most of that lifetime was spent listening to one 11-song album. It makes one wonder why he even wrote the book. Clearly the Doors mean a lot to him, but for all of his rapid-fire non-sequiturs and kaleidoscopic prose, the reader is left wondering why he holds them so close to his life.

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The Listening Post: November 2011–January 2012

Life interferes with blogging sometimes. Hence the lateness. But music still provides the soundtrack.

  • Feeling You Up—Truly. Where on Earth did this album come from? Oh, Seattle. Truly was a very late-entry into the Seattle sweepstakes. While they formed in 1990 and released a couple of singles on Sub-Pop, their first album didn’t see light until 1995 after Cobain had killed himself and the pop-punk of Green Day was ruling the alternative airwaves. But Truly had a pedigree: the bass player was Hiro Yamamoto who was part of the original Soundgarden, and the drummer was Mark Pickerel, who played with Screaming Trees. And yet, the album sounds nothing like what you would expect. Far from the crushing weight of Soundgarden or the molten psychedelia of Screaming Trees, Feeling You Up is a densely textured dreamscape of an album. The songs slide and glide, swirling like a thick fog. There’s an almost Stone Roses-ish quality to some of this, minus the annoying pretensions to dance music. There’s no shortage of rock on the album, but the heavier moments are heavy in a 1960s way, not in a grunge/punk way. The production throughout is stellar, with every instrument and sound effect clearly jumping out of the speaker. Songs like “(Intro)/Public Access Girls”, “Wait ‘Til The Night”, “EM7”, “Come Hither”, and “Leatherette Tears” feature strong melodies backed by music that is both heavy and trippy. Only the title song, a boring instrumental, falls flat. Feeling You Up sounds like nothing else from 1997, and holds up beautifully all these years later.
    Grade: A
  • Up On The Sun—Meat Puppets. The third album from Arizona’s Meat Puppets is where they found the sound that would carry them through the rest of the decade. Meat Puppets was all LSD-addled hardcore dirge, and Meat Puppets II had great songs but paper-thin production. But Up On The Sun carries both tunes and excellent production. The elegantly wasted country-rock the band called its own is in full flower here. There are no songs on this album that are less than good, solid listens, and much of it either approaches or achieves greatness. Even the tossed-off songs, like “Maiden’s Milk” with its insane whistling melody, “Hot Pink”, and “Seal Whales”, are a reminder that bands simply can’t get away with stuff like this anymore. The indie labels of the 1980s, like SST for whom the Meat Puppets recorded, allowed bands much more leeway, and on albums like Up On The Sun it allowed those bands to create works that hung together as a cohesive whole. While “Maiden’s Milk” might draw confused reactions if it were to pop up on an iPod playlist, it fits perfectly after the opening track and before the excellent “Away.” There was a sound to these records, with even the weak parts providing texture. The strongest tracks (“Animal Kingdom”, “Swimming Ground”, “Buckethead”, “Too Real”, “Enchanted Forest”, and “Creator”) are among the finest tracks the Puppets ever recorded, equaling or surpassing the classic triptych of “Lake Of Fire”, “Plateau”, and “Oh Me” (not coincidentally the three songs Nirvana covered on Unplugged) from Meat Puppets II. Meat Puppets recorded better albums later. With a couple of exceptions this band got better as time went on, but this is the album where they first successfully blended country with punk and psychedelia. It’s the cornerstone that later albums like Mirage and Huevos built upon.
    Grade: B+
  • Safe As Milk—Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band. An early exposure to Beefheart’s notoriously difficult Trout Mask Replica put me off the Captain for a long time. I’m still not sure I’m ready to swim with the Trout again, but Safe As Milk, the début album from the Magic Band, has gone a long way to convincing me to give Trout another chance. Safe As Milk is generally considered Beefheart’s most immediately accessible album but it’s still bizarre enough to draw puzzled glances from most listeners. Beefheart is a blues aficionado, and he mixes Howlin’ Wolf with early Frank Zappa and the avant-garde to craft a mutant strain of blues that is unlike anything else. Beefheart’s vocal range is simply astounding, and confounding. He sings like a real soul man on tracks like the fantastic “Yellow Brick Road” then growls like a feral beast on others like “Electricity” and “Plastic Factory”, his vocals sounding like Howlin’ Wolf with a sore throat. It’s difficult to believe both voices come from the same man. The surrealism of the lyrics (song titles give a clue: “Zig Zag Wanderer”, “Abba Zaba”, “Sure Nuff ‘N Yes I Do”) and the off-kilter, Zappa-inspired arrangements (the opening of “Autumn’s Child” could have been lifted directly from Freak Out) make this a challenging listen, but it is more than worth the effort. This is blues and pop music, dressed in psychedelic and avant-garde finery. On repeated listens, great melodies start to emerge and the band, led by a young guitar virtuoso named Ry Cooder, is more muscular and musical than Zappa’s Mothers. A classic.
    Grade: A+
  • Numb—Hammerbox. Released in the same year as Nirvana’s In Utero, Pearl Jam’s Vs., and Smashing Pumpkins’s Siamese Dream, Seattle rockers Hammerbox simply didn’t stand a chance. Which is too bad, because Numb is a good, rocking album with two tracks that belong on any anthology of the Northwest rock scene: the ferocious “Hole” and the grunge ballad “When 3 Is 2”. The rest of the album falls short of the standard set by those two songs, but none of it is bad and songs like “Hed”, “No”, “Outside”, “Trip”, and “Simple Passing” are very good. The musicianship is excellent throughout, and Carrie Akre’s a vocal powerhouse. The album’s a bit uneven, with several tracks mired in a sort of generic “grunge” sound, but when it’s good it’s very good.
    Grade: B
  • Dry As A Bone—Green River. Before Pearl Jam, there was Mother Love Bone. Before Mother Love Bone, and before Mudhoney, there was Green River, named after the notorious serial killer that haunted Washington and the Northwest. Green River was the boot camp for Mudhoney’s Mark Arm and Steve Turner and Mother Love Bone’s/Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard. Formed today, this would constitute a grunge rock supergroup, but back in the mid-1980s it was just the first outlet for musicians who would later become famous. The fact is, the desire for Green River’s work to be a lost, neglected gem—like a rudimentary Temple Of The Dog—meets reality. There are some good moments on Dry As A Bone—”Searchin'” and a scorching version of Bowie’s “Queen Bitch”—but the album itself is flat. Green River lacks all the elements that make Mudhoney and Pearl Jam superior outfits: melody, lyrics, tunes. This is flailing sub-Sabbath riffing. As a historical document, it’s interesting in the same way that hearing a young Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker playing in The Graham Bond Organization is interesting. But these players would get a little older, refine their talents, and produce better work than this. Dry As A Bone does not sound like the work of a band. It sounds like musicians trying to find their way.
    Grade: C-
  • Some Girls (Deluxe Edition)—The Rolling Stones. Please, oh please, let the next deluxe re-release be Beggars’ Banquet… Following last year’s deluxe reissue of Exile On Main Street, the Stones have now put out a 2-disc version of Some Girls. This is actually a better example of a deluxe edition than Exile. The second disc has no songs that otherwise appear on the album. This has the effect of making it a new, lost album from a period when the Stones were doing truly great work. While the bonus disc is not as strong as the original album, it is still an excellent batch of songs, ranging from the hilarious skewering of Claudine Longet, the French singer and wife of Andy Williams who beat the rap for murdering her boyfriend, Spider Sabich (“Claudine”), to the simple piano/vocal of “Petrol Blues”. Along the way there are country influences (“Do You Really Think I Care” and a cover of the Hank Williams song “You Win Again”), traditional blues (“Keep Up Blues”) and the reggae lilt of “Don’t Be A Stranger,” and even a raunchy, comic, update of “Stray Cat Blues” (“So Young”). The New York influence that permeated the original 1978 album is also there, with references to the city, the subways, and even the specificity of “the D train.” What is not here is the disco influence that gave the world “Miss You” but, considering the near-travesty of 1980’s Emotional Rescue album, perhaps that’s for the better. Keith sings the ballad “We Had It All” with great tenderness, and they romp through a cover of “Tallahassee Lassie.” The twelve extra tracks constitute a strong album that would have been a worthy successor to Some Girls and, while it’s easy to see why a track like “Claudine” was shelved (the subject was already dated by 1978, and the lyrics may well have touched off a libel lawsuit), it’s difficult to understand why these gems were left on the cutting room floor.
    Grade: A+ (original album)
    Grade: A- (bonus tracks)
  • Clear Spot—Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band. “Mr. Zoot Horn Rollo, hit that long lunar note and let it floooooooooooooat,” says Captain Beefheart as guitarist Rollo does just that, using a slide to ride a single note for all it’s worth in “Big-Eyed Beans From Venus”. It’s a pretty good summation of what you get with Beefheart: a bit of surrealism (what is a “lunar” note?), great musicianship, avant-garde lyrics. 1972’s Clear Spot is more mutant blues, and as accessible as 1967’s Safe As Milk. The arrangements are more straightforward, even as some of the lyrics become a little more outre (what is one to make of “Big-Eyed Beans From Venus”?). Clear Spot seems to me to be the best entry point for anyone interested in Beefheart’s career. The music blends blues with soul and rock, while Beefheart’s vocals once again range from the sublime (“Too Much Time”) to the ridiculous (the aforementioned “Big-Eyed Beans”). Along the way, there are a few missteps like “Circumstances” and the spoken word piece “Golden Birdies”. But those missteps are offset by tough blues rock tunes (“Crazy Little Thing”, “Long Necked Bottles”, “Nowadays A Woman’s Just Got To Hit A Man”) and songs that are just flat-out beautiful (“My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains”, “Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles”). Beefheart’s voice is an acquired taste, like Howlin’ Wolf’s, but at the end of the day it is a simply extraordinary instrument. Clear Spot is not quite as good as Safe As Milk, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great album.
    Grade: A
  • Parallel Lines—Blondie. Thanks to the disco crossover “Heart Of Glass” and the tough rockers “One Way Or Another” and “Hanging On The Telephone” there was no escaping Blondie’s Parallel Lines in 1978. The edited version of “Glass” (it cut the words “pain in the ass”) was all over AM radio, and “Another” and “Telephone” were all over FM. Blondie was so ubiquitous at this time that I never bothered to investigate the album, even though I liked the singles. In fact, those singles were so prevalent that even now, 34 years later, I can only hear them so many times before I reach for the “skip” button. Fortunately, there is much else to like about Parallel Lines. Blondie shared a love of early 60s pop music with some of the other NYC punk bands, but while the New York Dolls camped up their “girl group” tributes (“When I say I’m in love you best believe I’m in love L-U-V”) and the Ramones absorbed the hooks and melodies of bubblegum music and regurgitated them at 100 MPH, Blondie pays tribute to that era with unabashed sincerity (listen to their version of “Denise” from the Plastic Letters album). Which means that for all the hype of Blondie being a “punk” band from the hallowed halls of CBGB’s, Parallel Lines is a pretty straightforward pop album. Drummer Clem Burke adds power to the pop, and a song like “Fade Away And Radiate” is both musically challenging and lyrically interesting. But Debbie Harry’s sultry delivery ties almost every track back to groups like the Ronettes of the Shangri-Las. The singles from the album are the best songs here, matched by a few tracks but never surpassed, but overall this is a very good album.
    Grade: B+
  • More Songs About Buildings And Food—Talking Heads. The first album from Talking Heads, ’77, was brilliant. This album, their second, is as consistent as its predecessor, but only hits the same heights three times: the last two songs, a hit version of Al Green’s “Take Me To The River” and “The Big Country”, stand taller than the nine songs that lead up to them and “I’m Not In Love” features a herky-jerky rhythm and stop/start chorus that makes the song endlessly listenable. That doesn’t mean the rest is bad, only that those three songs are amazing. The other eight tracks are uniformly excellent, making this an album with no truly weak spots. If the album suffers at all it’s only because it sounds very similar to ’77, and the first album will always get the nod over the second when both albums are cut from the same cloth. Where the album succeeds in besting their début is in the musicianship and production. ’77 was largely David Byrne’s show, but here the Heads sound more like a band of equals.
    Grade: A
  • Black Session—Grant Lee Buffalo. One of my Top Concerts of All Time was the alternative rock also-rans Grant Lee Buffalo at Irving Plaza, in 1998 when they were touring behind their final album, Jubilee. Black Session is a bootleg recording from what appears to be French radio. The sound quality is excellent, despite the occasional between-song intrusion from a French DJ, whose only recognizable words (to me) are Grant-Lee Phillips, Paul Kimble, Joey Peters, and, strangely, Kurt Cobain. The show dates from the Fuzzy era, circa 1993, and goes through that album’s highlights: “The Shining Hour,” “Jupiter and Teardrop,” “Fuzzy,” “America Snoring,” “The Hook,” and “Soft Wolf Tread.” There’s also a solid run-through of the as-yet-unreleased “Demon Called Deception,” a quick take on the theme to the movie Deliverance, and an unreleased track called “Stockton”. With the exception of “Stockton,” a song that is wrapped in its own pretensions and has understandably never been officially released, the live recordings here breathe fire into the studio versions and, in most cases, surpass them. The drums snap harder, the bass throbs with more intensity, the guitar wildly swings between intricate 12-string picking and harsh distortion. Grant-Lee Phillips, one of the best singers of the day, howls throughout as if his life depended on it. It’s a stark reminder of what live rock music is supposed to sound like, and casts a large shadow over Phillips’s post-band career as a balladeering acoustic troubadour. “Stockton” is a bummer of a closing song, but the ferocious version of “Fuzzy” that precedes it is more than enough to forgive all sins.
    Grade: A

by

The Listening Post: October 2011

Finally, Autumn.

  • On Fyre—Lyres. The 1984 début album from Lyres is a superior collection of organ-heavy retro garage rock. Band leader Jeff Connolly is completely enamored with 1960s Nuggets-style music, but comes off as a genuine practitioner of the craft and not a mere copycat. On Fyre features songs that qualify as genuine garage rock classics as surely as anything by the Music Machine, the Standells, or the Chocolate Watchband. “Help You Ann,” “Don’t Give It Up Now,” “She Pays The Rent,” “I Really Want You Right Now,” and “You’ve Been Wrong” are all original compositions that sound like they’ve time traveled from 1966. Covers of two Kinks songs—”Love Me Till The Sun Shines” and “Tired Of Waiting For You”—are faithful and fantastic. On “Love Me Till The Sun Shines” it’s downright spooky how much Connolly’s voice has the same tone and timbre as Dave Davies, who sang the original. The album stumbles a bit with “I’m Telling You Girl,” which mangles a Kinks-style riff and lacks anything resembling a tune. “Not Like The Other One” and “Someone Who’ll Treat You Right Now” are okay album tracks, but well below the high standards set by the rest of the album.
    Grade: A
  • Army Of Anyone—Army Of Anyone. Call them “Audioserf.” It’s amazing what a difference one band member can make. Army of Anyone was the second attempt by Stone Temple Pilots to replace the notoriously unreliable Scott Weiland. The first, Talk Show, released a surprisingly good album that played up the poppier side of STP. Army Of Anyone, with Filter vocalist Richard Patrick replacing Weiland and Ray Luzier taking over for Eric Kretz behind the drums, accents the heavier side of STP. As the drummer, Luzier is excellent, superior to Kretz. But while Patrick has a great voice, he’s simply not Scott Weiland. The secret weapons of STP are Weiland’s melodies and the way his voice weaves into the music. Weiland’s voice complements the music, riding with it. Patrick seems determined to bludgeon the listener with bombast, even as he comes close to getting Weiland’s extraordinary sense of melody. There’s nothing wrong with the quality of his voice, but his style is overwrought. Almost every chorus sounds like he’s about to launch into Filter’s signature tune “Hey Man, Nice Shot.” There’s some great stuff on this album: “Father Figure” is the proto-metal sound they seem to be shooting for throughout, but it’s the only song where every piece locks together perfectly. “A Better Place,” “Non Stop” and “Disappear” are almost as good. “This Wasn’t Supposed To Happen” is strongly reminiscent of the softer side of Stone Temple Pilots, mainly because Patrick tones down the histrionics and concentrates on the melody. It’s no surprise that it’s the track where he sounds most like Weiland. The rest of the album falls below that level. None of it is bad, but there isn’t much remarkable about any of it either. It’s likely that this was a one-off collaboration, since the DeLeo brothers have reunited with Weiland and Kretz. In a way, that’s too bad. The album is good, but there is great potential here. It reminds me of the first STP album, Core, in that sense. Whether Army of Anyone would have followed this with something as majestic as STP’s Purple is anyone’s guess, but the talent was there.
    Grade: B-
  • Last Words: The Final Recordings—Screaming Trees. Seattle’s best unknown band has a reputation of being grunge also-rans, but they were so much more than that. The albums Sweet Oblivion and Dust are every bit as good as more famous albums from Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains. The Trees broke up in the late 90s, a few years after their last and best album, Dust. Singer Mark Lanegan went on to concentrate on his solo career, and the rest of the band drifted into obscurity. Now comes Last Words, a collection of tracks the Trees had recorded for the followup album to Dust, but had never released. This is not a rarities collection, but really an unreleased album that’s been sitting in the can since 1999. Had it been released at that time it’s difficult to see how it would have been viewed as anything less than a letdown after Dust, but all these years later it comes as a nice reminder of how great a band they could be. What mars the album is that it sounds somehow unfinished. There’s a solid skeleton of great songs, and a lot of meat on the bones, but what’s lacking are finishing touches. Songs like “Crawlspace,” and “Tomorrow Changes” are good, but sound more like solo Lanegan than full-fledged Trees songs. Much of the rest sound like outtakes of songs from Dust. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because Dust was so great. “Revelator,” “Black Rose Way,” and “Anita Grey” sound the most finished and are the best tracks on the album. The rest of the album is very good, but lacks the power of earlier songs like “Nearly Lost You” or “Witness.” The result is an album that would have been truly great if they had just done a few more takes, maybe added a few more overdubs, or tweaked the writing a bit.
    Grade: B+
  • Pleased To Meet Me (Deluxe Edition)—The Replacements. The best band that never happened hit their songwriting peak with 1987’s Pleased To Meet Me, an album that perfectly combined thrashy punk rock, power pop, and acoustic tenderness. The march of progress the Replacements were on reached its culmination here, with all due respect to the masterpieces that preceded it, Let It Be and Tim. The only flaw of Pleased To Meet Me was the production that put a shiny gloss on the record and smoothed out the drunken charm of the earlier albums. Tracks like the lovely acoustic ballad “Skyway” suffer the most from the production. Rather than sounding like a troubadour with an acoustic guitar, “Skyway” practically glistens and it detracts from the desired effect. The Replacements were many things but this was the first time they could be called “smooth.” Fortunately the eleven bonus songs on the Deluxe Edition are, with the exception of “Cool Water,” the sound of the scruffy ‘Mats near and dear to the hearts of fans. There are three songs in the bonus tracks that appear on the album: a studio demo of “Valentine,” what sounds like a run-through of “Alex Chilton” and an early pass at “Can’t Hardly Wait.” None of these come anywhere near the quality of the official releases, but all are fascinating. “Alex Chilton” and “Valentine” sound like outtakes from the rough, brilliant Let It Be. There are brutally ragged versions of “Route 66” and “Tossin’ ‘N’ Turnin'” that give a sense of the anarchic heart of the band, and the studio demos of “Birthday Gal,” “Bundle Up,” “Photo” and “Kick It In” are loose and fun, though it’s also clear that these songs are not as good as the ones that ended up on the finished album. None of the bonus tracks are really essential, though all are worthwhile, and the alternate versions of the album tracks give a tantalizing glimpse into how much greater this incredible album might have been with a little less shine and a little more ragged glory.
    Original album grade: A+
    Bonus tracks grade: B+