Author: brendanmstewart

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The Ruen Brothers: Ten Paces

Ten Paces by The Ruen Brothers

Imagine, if you will, an old black and white Western film set in John Ford’s treasured Monument Valley, directed by Sergio Leone, starring the cast of The Maltese Falcon. Now imagine the film has a pop/rock soundtrack instead of the usual Ennio Morricone music. This Twilight Zone spin on the old Westerns, combining them with Bogart’s cynical but honest gumshoe, Mary Astor’s femme fatale, and Sydney Greenstreet’s villainous “Fat Man”, gets its soundtrack courtesy of the Rues Brothers, an Americana duo from England.

The lightly picked guitar and the sound of ricocheting gunshots that open “Slow Draw” may grab the listener’s attention, but it’s the rich Roy Orbison-meets-David Byrne vocals of Henry Stansall that provides the deep hook of the music’s appeal. For Ten Paces, their third album, the brothers dive deep into the atmosphere of the odd combination of Western and film noir. The result is a song cycle that has a musical theme, and lyrical allusions, to another time and place. But just because it’s odd doesn’t mean it isn’t good, and Ten Paces is a very good collection of songs.

There is no plot or real concept to the record. This isn’t Tommy or Quadrophenia. It’s a hushed, mostly acoustic, somewhat downbeat affair with a cohesive sound that is not like anything else on the radio today. The Western feel to the music grounds the album in American country and folk but the songs themselves fit comfortably in neither genre. The album is classified as “Singer/Songwriter” in Apple Music, but there’s a little too much rock involved for that to be completely true. It’s impossible to imagine James Taylor singing “Hi-Yo”, a song about the search for gold that evokes the blood, sweat, and tears of the prospectors living in the hope that prosperity is right around the corner.

The imagery of gold appears again in “Silver to Gold” a love song that uses the titular phrase as a metaphor for a blooming relationship. These lyrical nods to the Western, often in conventional songs about love and loss, abound. A noose and hanging appears in the mid-tempo shuffle “The Fear”. Gunfight metaphors provide the lyrical hooks to the superb opener “Slow Draw”, “Bullet Blues” and “The Good Surely Die”.

“Is this a desert dream/Or a story in the West” Stansall sings on “Don’t Know What’s Come Over You”, a song of broken love with a pounding beat and a brief, out-of-place but still effective, synthesizer solo. Native American drums and the image of imprisonment highlight “Free As The Birds”. Only the closing track, “Long Road” is completely devoid of these nods and winks and is grounded in the present with its lyrics about turning on the radio and starting up the engine. But even here, the music keeps the connection with the rest of the songs alive with its subtle touches of pedal steel and acoustic guitars from Rupert Stansall.

Ten Paces is a return to form for the Ruen Brothers, an odd step in the opposite direction from Ultramodern, their previous album that tried to sound like its title with drum machines, processed vocals, and generally less-than-inspired songwriting. It’s a strong successor to their debut album All My Shades Of Blue, even if it’s lacking that album’s rockier tracks. This album deserves wider recognition than it has received, but when your music sits in another time and place obscurity is to be expected, if still lamented.

Grade: A

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Hollywood: The Oral History, by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson

Hollywood An Oral History by Jeanine Bsinger and Sam WassonI’ve been looking for a good history of the movie industry for a long time now, which makes Jeanine Basinger’s and Sam Wasson’s 2023 release Hollywood: The Oral History all that much more frustrating.

The book is excellent for what it is. Oral histories are as difficult to compile as they are easy to read, and the effort that Basinger and Wasson put in is Herculean. They scoured primarily the American Film Institute’s series of interviews with the movers and shakers of Hollywood. Everyone is accounted for here from studio heads to writers to producers to directors to stars to crew. As they tell their stories, a rough history of the movies takes shape. Unfortunately almost 800 pages later that’s what you’re left with…a rough history of the movies told from specific, and sometimes contradictory, points of view. Over 400 people are represented in the book so the story can get a little scattershot at times.

What this book is extraordinarily good at is providing a detailed look at how movies are made. From concept to script to screen, the journey of a film is explained in detail. Mysteries are solved, such as “What does a producer actually do?” The moguls, people like Irving Thalberg, Jack Warner and Sam Goldwyn, are also discussed at some length by people who knew and worked with them. This oral history approach brings the famous names of Hollywood to life in a way that a more conventional history might not have.

The evolution and dissolution of the studio system takes up the first half of the book, before giving way to the “New Hollywood” when the Hays Code was abandoned and filmmakers approached their jobs with newfound freedom. That freedom ushered in a lot of gratuitous nudity and violence but also enabled the moviemakers with the ability to make personal artistic statements in a way not seen since Orson Welles made Citizen Kane. The ending of Bonnie and Clyde, one of the first films from the New Hollywood, could never have been made during the studio system (one of the reasons it was so shocking in 1967) but it still has the power to shake the viewer almost 60 years later. From the studio system only the shower scene in Psycho compares, and that contained no shots of the knife piercing Janet Leigh’s skin.

The New Hollywood is deservedly discussed at some length, including the rise of the blockbuster films, led by Jaws. The tentpoles of the era are The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, and Star Wars and all receive their due respect. Most other films are glossed over or mentioned in passing despite their influence on the cinema. While directors like Peter Bogdanovich are quoted extensively, there’s virtually nothing in the book about The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, or What’s Up, Doc? and less to connect him to those movies. Stanley Kubrick gets a bit more respect, but not much. Even Martin Scorsese string of influential 70’s movies get a superficial treatment.

The book is basically the point of view of the studios. There is a great deal of talk about how Jaws opened in a record number of theaters, how it became the first summer blockbuster film, and how much money it made. There is very little, if any, discussion about the content of the film. If you were to read the book without being familiar with the movie, there would be no context whatsoever with the words on the page.

And this is the most frustrating part of the book. In the beginning there is a list of all of the designated narrators of the story, along with their role. So you get names like “Steven Spielberg, director” but there is nothing at all to tell the reader what films Spielberg actually directed. There is no filmography in the book so there is no way to connect the narrators with the final work that they did. More than once I had to go to IMDB to find out just who the narrators actually were. The director Allan Dwan is quoted at some length in the book but it wasn’t until I went to IMDB before I realized that he’d directed Brewster’s Millions and The Sands of Iwo Jima. Similarly, there is no sense of when the interviews were given. Some of them are decades old.  Directors will wax poetic about the good old days and the problems with movies in the current age, but there is no clue whatsoever about when the good old days were or when the current age is. When discussing movies in the present tense, it’s helpful to know when the present is.

A similar frustration is the lack of an index. It is historical malpractice to write an extensive, 800 page survey history of a time and place without including an index. So if you want to know the opinion of the Hollywood movers and shakers about Monroe, Marilyn (not a good opinion at all), you just need to remember in which chapter and pages those observations reside. It makes going back to fact check some of my opinions here impossible.

On the negative side, there is also the lack of pictures. How does one compile an oral history of moving pictures without including any pictures? It’s another missed opportunity for Basinger and Wasson. Perhaps they were worried that the inclusion of pictures, filmographies, and an index would pad an already overstuffed book, but it would be better to have a 900 page book with context than an 800 page without.

Finally, this is something of a whitewashed history. Hollywood’s notorious reputation of being a place where decadence and debauchery are not just accepted but expected, is nowhere to be found. There is no cocaine blizzard in the studios during the 1970s. There’s no casting couch or #MeToo movement. There are not even any closeted homosexuals married to beautiful starlets. No affairs, no divorce, no alcoholism, no mental breakdowns. Hollywood earned this reputation and not just recently. Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust was written in 1940 and the hedonistic reputation of the city as both the maker and breaker of dreams was already set in stone.

Hollywood: The Oral History is a compelling and at times fascinating book. Unfortunately it is not the whole story and what is there is presented without much context. As such it is Hollywood 101. Deep dives into the history of the movies exist, but they are more likely to be focused on specific eras or filmmakers (e.g., Peter Biskind’s authoritative history of the New Hollywood in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls). An oral history may be the right approach for a history of such an unwieldy subject, but Basinger and Wasson fall several feet short of the mark.

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Vintage Trouble: Heavy Hymnal

Vintage Trouble Heavy HymnalIn the world of streaming music it’s virtually impossible for a band to break through into the public consciousness. Artists nowadays hope that their songs will be licensed to a commercial, or a video game, or a movie. Satellite radio exists, of course, but with so many stations to choose from, bands easily get lost in the shuffle. Today, albums are no longer the coin of the realm. The single has returned. Albums are still being made but that almost seems like a tradition more than an expression of artistry. The sad truth is that unless you’re selling (and streaming) in Taylor Swift-like numbers, a band today can’t make much (if any) money based on record sales. Money must be earned on the road, playing large and small clubs and theaters to a hopefully packed house.

In my mind this sets up an unfortunate conflict between the entertainers (the guys jumping around on stage singing their hearts out) and the artists (the guys sitting in a small room agonizing over which chord should come next in the song they’re writing). There’s just no money in artistry these days.

So it is that Vintage Trouble, a band that released their first record way back in 2011, took twelve full years by the time they got to their third album. For context, that’s as long as the Beatles entire career from their skiffle days until their breakup. Sadly, it also appears to be the last Vintage Trouble album, as the band announced that they are “on hiatus” in early 2024. While “on hiatus” can mean many things, their website has essentially shut down with only a message that they are pursuing individual and family endeavors. “We’ll miss you for sure. May we all continue as friends and supporters of one another” sounds a lot more conclusive than “See you soon!”

It’s a shame that this band was forced by the times to spend so much more effort on the road than in the studio. They released only three proper albums (a fourth, Juke Joint Gems, was collected from old recordings and released only digitally), so in the wake of their dissolution we have only a few records to fall back on. Equally sad, their final album, Heavy Hymnal, may be their best, pointing to a bright future that is no more.

More than their previous albums, The Bomb Shelter Sessions and 1 Hopeful Road, this is an album that feels like they’ve got something to say. From the machine gun rapid fire rapping of opener “Who I Am” to the Marvin Gaye-inspired closer “Repeating History” the album is by turns defiant and melancholy, sometimes within the same song. But regardless of the lyrical themes, every song has an infectious groove guaranteed to get you moving. Like all the best soul albums, Heavy Hymnal flows like a party from the boisterous opening salvo of “Who I Am” and “You Already Know” (which features two molten metal guitar solos from Nalle Colt) to the reflective closing of “Shinin'” and “Repeating History” with its mournful guitar solo that evokes Eddie Hazel’s legendary turn on Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain”.

There are torch songs for slow dancers, like “Not The One,” and the beautiful “The Love That Once Lingered” but the accent here, more than on their previous albums, is on get-your-hands-in-the-air bangers. Elsewhere, the band channels Prince channeling Stevie Wonder (“Baby, What You Do”), explores dance rhythms (“Feeling On”), and even merges a slinky funk groove with power pop (“Shinin'”).

Vintage Trouble was a band with talent to burn. They approached their music fearlessly and in their time delivered three of the best soul/funk albums ever recorded. Their albums stand as testament to a love for music of many different genres. While at their core they were a soul band, they also touched on rap, rhythm and blues, dance music, and rock and roll. In this era of girl pop, streaming, and iTunes, they deserved better.

Grade: A

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Hot Wired Guitar: The Life of Jeff Beck, by Martin Power

Hot Wired Guitar Life Jeff BeckThere’s an old joke in music circles: If you want to drive a Jeff Beck fan crazy, ask him to name a good Jeff Beck album. There’s a soupçon of truth in that joke but, in fact, it’s easy to name a good Jeff Beck album. Or even a great one. It’s just as easy to name an album that is loaded with unbelievably great guitar playing but that still falls far short of the mark. Beck is nothing if not maddening.

Martin Power’s 2014 biography of the now late guitarist borders on hagiography at times, though it never quite succumbs. What is crystal clear is that Power considers Beck the greatest guitar player who ever lived, with the possible exception of Jimi Hendrix. And who’s to say that he’s wrong? Far more inventive than Clapton, Page, Allman, Vaughan and so many others, Beck has been lighting up the ears of guitar freaks and, maybe more importantly, other guitar players since he first burst onto the scene with the Yardbirds in 1965. His early experiments with feedback pre-dated Hendrix’s mastery over it while his lightning runs and otherworldly tremolo use set him up as a breed apart from his predecessor in the Yardbirds (Clapton) and his friend/successor (Page). The Yardbirds are known as the band that served as the minor leagues for Cream and Led Zeppelin, but the band’s best material, by far, was when Beck shook the strings. It’s really not even close. With Clapton the band was a fairly standard white blues band out of London, albeit one with a fiery guitar player. With Page the band was a spent force creatively until they broke up and the guitarist recruited three new players to fill the void. With Beck the band was frenetic and wild, incorporating sounds (like feedback) and tone (like Beck’s imitation of a sitar on “Heart Full of Soul”) that existed outside of the main music scene of the day.

Hot Wired Guitar focuses strongly on Beck’s career from his teenage years with The Tridents through the Yardbirds, the Jeff Beck Group, his brief dalliance with Vanilla Fudge’s Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, and his solo career. It’s a well-written, excellent resource for the guitar player’s work, including the million and one guest spots he’s done with everyone from Stevie Wonder to Kelly Clarkson. A discography in the back of the book is a nice summary of Beck’s travels over a fifty-year career, and very handy if you want to stream his many guest appearances (who knew it was Jeff Beck providing the lead guitar work on Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer”? Not me).

Martin Power has clear favorites from the Beck discography, as his album by album reviews attest, and they’re the usual suspects: the Yardbirds’ Roger the Engineer, the Jeff Beck Group’s masterpiece Truth, the all-instrumental jazz fusion of Blow By Blow. The only album that Power criticizes as an album is 1985’s Flash, an attempt to get a hit record by pairing Beck up with a singer for the first time since 1972. Glossy, overproduced, and light on songs, Flash was a definite misfire despite a few good songs (an an excellent pairing, and near hit single, with his former lead singer Rod Stewart on “People Get Ready”). But other than Flash, Power focuses on Beck’s playing rather than the albums as a whole. So while Wired and There And Back, two more jazz fusion albums that are far less interesting than Blow By Blow, get criticized as being somewhat lacking, Power focuses on riffs and solos within the songs and in this area Beck could do no wrong. It is actually true that those albums, and most of his post-Blow By Blow efforts, do not measure up to what came before but the guitar playing is never less than brilliant. Long after Eric Clapton started playing it safe and Jimmy Page had all but retired, Beck was as playful, inventive, and incendiary as he ever was. Unique among musicians from that generation, Beck never rested on his laurels or settled into complacency. There is no sense of “heard it before” when discussing Jeff Beck.

Where Power fails in the book is the scant treatment he gives to the man himself. There is some talk about Beck’s prowess among the groupies in his time with the Yardbirds, but otherwise there’s no exploration of the man’s actual existence outside of his playing (and, later, his love of working on vintage cars). There’s no mention of drug use for example, and I don’t know whether that’s because Beck didn’t partake or because the author chose not to present him in a bad light. There’s a little bit of drinking, but not much and it seems never to have been a problem for the guitarist. One can write a book about a straight arrow, but there needs to be something in his life that’s of interest other than being a musician and a mechanic. Power discusses how mercurial Beck could be, dropping out of tours a few days into them, changing his mind about albums, recording, shows, and band members, but never really gets into what that meant for the people who surrounded him. The book is more about the life of a musician than that of a flesh-and-blood human being, and that’s a missed opportunity. Jeff Beck has always been an enigma. After reading Hot Wired Guitar, he’s still an enigma.

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Smashing Pumpkins: Aghori Mhori Mei

Alghori Mhori Mei

In some ways I feel bad for Billy Corgan. The man is following his muse wherever it takes him, but the places he’s going are very different than the places where he established his stardom. His last album, ATUM, is a synthesizer-heavy, triple disc, concept album about space. Or something. He sold it as a sequel to the albums Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and Machina/The Machines of God, explaining in a 33-part podcast that the main character in ATUM, Shiny, was Zero on Mellon Collie (not a concept album) and Glass on Machina (also not a recognizable concept album). Man, that’s a lot of Billy Corgan to digest. The problem for Corgan is that, except for his instantly recognizable vocals, the album swapped out the heavy guitars of his heyday in favor of washes of synthesizer and didn’t sound anything like the alternative rock masterpieces of Gish or Siamese Dream. The fact that ATUM followed three previous albums that were increasingly reliant on synths was not good news to fans of the old band. This was at a time when he had reunited most of the original band but seemed to be running as fast as he could in the opposite direction of their original sound. His primary audience largely forgot about the band, relegating them to warm feelings of nostalgia. New audiences are hard to come by these days in the age of streaming.

Now Corgan has responded to the pleas of his old audience and released an album that sounds like it would have fit very comfortably on the radio in 1994. On Aghori Mhori Mei, the twin guitar attack of Corgan and James Iha is back, and Jimmy Chamberlin has been turned loose to attack his drum kit once again. The album sounds loose and freewheeling, released from the confines of synths and click tracks. This is a band that is once again firing on all cylinders.

Which isn’t to say that the album is as good as their work from 1990 to 1995, only that it sounds of a piece. The Pumpkins in that golden era of alternative rock were one of the brightest stars in the galaxy, fusing bone-pulverizing riffs and dreamy psych-pop, releasing some of the best singles and albums of the decade. Aghori Mhori Mei is not Siamese Dream Part Two. It is, however, an excellent return to form.

Lyrically this may be the most cryptic Pumpkins album. As if the title of the collection wasn’t enough, song names include “Edin”, “Sighommi”, “999”, “Goeth the Fall”, “Sicarus”. The final track, “Murnau”, is apparently named after F.W. Murnau, the director of the original silent movie Nosferatu. What the lyrics have to do with the director, or his films is a mystery to me. There’s also reference made to Corgan’s interest in Hinduism, with the title word “Aghori” meaning a devotee of Shiva, and “Sicarus” containing the plea “Kali, let’s touch beyonds with us” and “Kali of dawn satnam shri ram” which translates to something George Harrison might have understood. Who really cares when the song has a terrific guitar solo and a cool stun gun riff that heralds the chorus? Not me. I learned in the 1990s to just go with Corgan’s lyrical flow. And what’s a “labyrinth milk syringe” (“Pentagrams”)?

Musically it’s all here, as if preserved in amber from the outtakes of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Riffs abound (“Edin”, “Pentagrams”, “Sighommi”, the brutal “War Dreams of Itself”, “Sicarus”), there’s slower, sludgy tracks (“999”), and floaty ballads (“Pentecost”, “Who Goes There?”, “Goeth the Fall”, “Murnau”).

Corgan is not the only star of this show. While it’s impossible to differentiate Corgan’s guitar leads from James Iha’s, Jimmy Chamberlin’s drums stand out from the distortion. Rolling, tumbling, and crashing like a tsunami on the shore, Chamberlin proves again that he’s one of rock’s greatest drummers ever. On the previous Pumpkins albums he sounded restrained, held in check by the synthesizers. On Monuments to an Elegy he was briefly replaced by the ham-fisted Tommy Lee, who can’t even pronounce the word “subtlety”. On Aghori he’s back and completely fired up, clearly thrilled to be rocking with abandon again.

In an interview with Kerrang this past July, Corgan announced this album and said that “old-school fans will be happy, for once”. It is, in a way, a sad comment. It makes one feel that this triumph of an album is just a throwaway to Corgan, something to get the “old-school fans” off his back so he can go back to space operas and synth-pop. It would be a shame if that were the case. The next album will tell, I suppose, but for now it’s a pleasure hearing two great guitarists and one great drummer turned loose.

Grade: A-