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Animation - Asiento (Rare Noise)
A concert remake of Miles Davis’s seminal fusion album Bitches Brew.
27 November 2011Fatal Ennui: Autumn Meditation
Occupying the middle ground between the more ethereal Brock Van Wey and the darker and dirtier Thomas Watkiss, this is an exceptional debut.
31 July 2010BT30 first night DJ sets
It was a great honor and a pleasure to be able to provide music before, between, and after the great bands that played the first night of the Big Takeover’s 30th Anniversary festival at Bell House. Here are my playlists, with the performing bands also listed to provide context.
20 June 2010Neil Young's Tonight's the Night Finally Released 35 Years Ago
Tonight’s the Night is ragged, bleak, weird. It must have come as a complete shock to label executives hoping for more mellow classics along the lines of “Heart of Gold.” It sat unreleased for two years.
9 June 2010Teenage Fanclub - Shadows (Merge)
Yes, Teenage Fanclub is incredibly consistent, but there’s a huge amount of sonic variety on this album; it’s easy to imagine the guys spending five years saying “how about if we add banjo here?”
2 June 2010Indignant Senility - Plays Wagner (Type)
The original material is practically irrelevant; what matters is that Maherr has crafted seductively dark and textured swathes of sound.
30 May 2010Peg Simone - Secrets from the Storm (Table of the Elements)
Simone recasts ancient blues songs by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy to create the epic opening track “Levee/1927.”
14 May 2010Koes Bersaudara - 1967 (Sublime Frequencies)
Rock is often called the music of rebellion, but rarely is it so true as here. Koes Bersaudara ended up in jail for three months in 1965 for playing Beatles songs in their concert sets.
6 May 2010Primitives Playing Bell House (Brooklyn, NY) This Saturday
Morrissey cited them as a favorite, but really, who doesn’t like them? Their 1988 debut album Lovely, with its hit single “Crash,” still sounds great, as does the follow-up, Pure. Lovely showed more musical range than much of the competition.
3 May 2010Johann Johannsson - and in the endless pause there came the sound of bees (Type)
This soundtrack for Marc Craste’s animated film Varmints is absolutely beautiful, of course, yet with an austere elegance and the occasional dissonant edge.
1 May 2010The Method Actors - This Is Still It: Early Recordings, London 1980-81 (Acute)
The fertility and innovation of the Athens, GA music scene in the late ’70s/early ’80s is legendary (B-52s, Pylon, Love Tractor, R.E.M.). Now, in the wake of DFA’s wonderful Pylon reissues, Acute, which has long had an interest in that period if not that locale, blesses us with more brilliant material from that time and place.
3 February 2010William Nowik: Pan Symphony in E Minor (Guerszen)
There’s a buzz about this 1974 album among collectors of vintage psychedelia and prog-rock; quite a rarity, the original LPs — only 200 pressed — were supposedly going for as much as $1000 in online auctions (the highest I saw was $800).
28 January 2010Magnetic Fields - Realism (Nonesuch)
This album was inspired by Merritt’s image of ’60s folk music – big-production folk with dazzlingly complex arrangements.
3 December 2009Tim Buckley - Live at the Folklore Center, NYC, March 6, 1967 (Tompkins Square)
A spectacularly intense yet intimate performance by a still-hungry young artist on the rise.
29 October 2009Thomas Watkiss - Ancestor Phase II: Machine - (The Seventh Media)
The music here is denser, heavily grounded in low drones; its thrums and buzzes are more genuinely industrial in tone than the Industrial genre ever was.
3 October 2009Castanets - Texas Rose, the Thaw & the Beasts (Asthmatic Kitty)
This album often suggests the feelings from a nerve stretched taut and sawed at. Don’t put this on for a comfortable listen; put it on for intense and disturbing catharsis.
24 September 2009Rain Machine - s/t (Anti)
Some of the songs here seem like folk disguised with electric guitar, beautiful and personal in their expression.
20 August 200924-Caret Black - Gone: The Promises of Yesterday (Numero)
This is soul offering little uplift (some hypnotic grooves and the momentum built from insistent repetition) but plentiful painful catharsis.
17 August 2009XTC - Drums and Wires (Virgin/Geffen)
Drums and Wires, released 30 years ago (August 17, 1979), initiated XTC Mark II.
15 August 2009Rashied Ali 1935-2009
Jazz drum great Rashied Ali died on Wednesday after a heart attack.
6 August 2009Jónsi & Alex - Riceboy Sleeps (XL)
The way the droning, slowly percolating textures are electronically treated is redolent of the fuzzy friendliness of laptop ambient, while the arc structures sound completely composed and their long, slow crescendos will sound familiar to post-rock fans, but with mirroring decrescendos instead of pounding climaxes.
10 July 2009Birdsongs of the Mesozoic - Dawn of the Cycads (Cuneiform)
They were basically a modern classical chamber group playing written music, but they played at rock clubs, and despite the unusual instrumentation Birdsongs rocked hard – in a looping, minimalist way.
4 July 2009Remembering the Greatest Speech in Baseball History
“Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.”
10 June 2009Sonic Youth - The Eternal (Matador)
SY has a great sound, and even when the lyrics are silly or lackadaisical, Lee and Thurston’s distinctive guitar timbres push all the right buttons. They invented this sound/style, and despite all the bands influenced by it over the past three decades, they’re still the best.
23 May 2009Van Morrison - Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl (Listen to the Lion/EMI)
Certainly the 40th anniversary of Astral Weeks deserved to be celebrated, but conceptually, it was a bit odd to present one of the most intimate albums in rock history at the Hollywood Bowl, capacity 17,376. But what could’ve been a disaster proved a triumph.
8 April 2009Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos
What’s great about the Nigeria 70 compilations is that they give us a fuller context in which to view the stars.
19 March 200923 Skidoo - Seven Songs; Urban Gamelan; Just Like Everybody (LTM)
One of the great post-punk bands, 23 Skidoo probably owes its relative obscurity (compared to pals Cabaret Voltaire) to its frequent and radical style-shifts.
28 February 2009Happy Birthday Charles Gayle
Here are six of my favorite Gayle albums. Most are imports, out of print, poorly distributed, or combinations of those states, but a look at Amazon shows that they can be found.
26 February 2009Mountains - Choral (Thrill Jockey)
On their fourth album together, KOEN HOLTKAMP and BRENDON ANDEREGG construct sonic landscapes that mix their anti-virtuoso/timbre-focused playing of musical instruments, field recordings, and electronic treatments.
30 January 2009Kazuko Shiraishi - My Floating Mother, City (New Directions)
Tonight (Friday 1/30, 6:30) Shiraishi will be at Japan Society, reading with Itaru and participating in a discussion moderated by Forrest Gander. Saturday afternoon at 2 she will be at the Bowery Poetry Club, again with Itaru, who is quite a wonderful and imaginative player; also reading will be Beat legend Ira Cohen, health permitting, and Steve Dalachinsky, who will furthermore pitch in with Shiraishi on the English/Japanese tandem parts. I will be there.
2 December 2008Neil Young - Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury House 1968 (Reprise)
Another year, another fine show from Neil Young’s archives. This one is compiled from two solo acoustic shows on consecutive nights in Ann Arbor, before his solo debut had been released.
11 November 2008Wilderness - (K)no(w)here (Jagjaguwar)
Nobody else has reimagined the basics of rock so drastically or so well in a long time.
1 November 2008Van Morrison - Astral Weeks (Warner Bros.)
I don’t often wish I were in Los Angeles, but if I could be there November 7-8 at the Hollywood Bowl, I would, because forty years after its November 1968 release, Van Morrison will be performing his album Astral Weeks with two of the musicians he recorded it with.
31 October 2008Steely Dan - Countdown to Ecstasy (MCA)
October 1973 (35 years ago) marked ABC’s last-ditch attempt to garner a hit for this album: They released the single “My Old School,” backed by “Pearl of the Quarter.” It didn’t work.
13 October 2008Kali Z. Fasteau/Kidd Jordan/Newman Taylor Baker - Live at the Kerava Jazz Festival (Flying Note)
Fasteau will be playing this Tuesday, October 14 at 10 PM at Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, NYC with Clif Jackson (bass), Ron McBee (percussion, berimbau), and guests. This is part of the monthly ESP-Disk series at BPC.
27 September 2008Jamie Davis - Vibe Over Perfection (Unity Music)
For male vocalists in pop music, it’s the tenors who get all the glory, but in jazz and much soul it’s the baritones, and when I saw this San Francisco-based veteran compared to JOE WILLIAMS and LOU RAWLS, I was eager to check him out.
21 September 2008Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson - s/t (Say Hey)
All of this supporting/surrounding lyrics of desolate debauchery, anomie, and despair, as though trying to turn “Holocaust” into party music.
30 July 2008The Heaters - The Great Lost Heaters Album (Salter)
Using a combination of the original session tapes, demos, and newly recorded parts, near the end of last year the band put out a version conforming to their own sound rather than their producers’. Three decades on, the classic underneath the bad production has been revealed, proving that the excitement they generated in their home base of Los Angeles was not mere hype.
16 July 2008Elliot Levin Trio - Bowery Poetry Club (NYC) – Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Levin, a grizzled veteran by now, has come to a distinctive style that, while certainly inspired by his predecessors’ work, is never obviously derivative of anyone in particular. Nor does it stand in one place; Levin is just as likely to play a melodic phrase as to unleash flying flurries of evolving patterns arpeggiated and/or scalar or soar into the altissimo register of his tenor in ecstatic exultation.
3 May 2008Ancestor – Phase I: Silence (The Seventh Media)
Part of a trilogy, this is darkwave ambient music, quiet but with serrated edges on its drones. There’s nothing new agey about this ambient, which makes for uneasy listening with its buzzing and clanking amid the drones and a glacial pace of movement that oozes foreboding.
22 April 2008M83 – Saturdays=Youth (Mute)
Yeah, the chiming guitars and chord progression of “Graveyard Girl” keep threatening to turn into “Money Changes Everything,” but that fits well with the ‘80s love on display throughout – usually much more synthpop, of course.
23 March 2008Black 47 - Iraq (United for Opportunity)
LARRY KIRWAN, the leader of Black 47, is no Toby Keith – he’s his diametrical opposite on the political spectrum – so this is no rah-rah “support our troops” tripe.
9 March 2008Bobby Hebb –That's All I Wanna Know (Tuition)
Hebb’s soft voice is as warm and charming as it was on “Sunny” back in ‘66, and the tasteful arrangements are smoothly authentic.
7 March 2008Dengue Fever - Venus on Earth (M80)
After listening to their great Escape from Dragon House practically every day for most of last summer, I wasn’t sure whether a new album could captivate as strongly, but after two plays this had its hooks in me.
12 February 2008British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music? (Rough Trade)
The fact that their evolution over three albums and various EPs has avoided repetition will be mourned by some who want only the familiar, but refreshingly enables them from becoming outdated.
22 January 2008Drive-By Truckers - Brighter Than Creation's Dark (New West)
The Truckers have long specialized in gritty portrayals of the New South’s sordid sides. A few titles such as “Daddy Needs a Drink,” “You and Your Crystal Meth,” and “A Ghost to Most” give an idea of the dirty soap operas that play out across this epic album, but the black humor – usually paired with a profound empathy – runs deep through most of the 19 songs.
8 January 2008WEA Is Shameless
It’s only January, but already we’ve got our first example of major label greed running out of control. Nonesuch, a division of WEA, has issued two versions of the soundtrack to Tim Burton’s film of Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, starring Johnny Depp in an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical of the same name. Consumers – and retailers – have an unpleasant choice to make.
12 December 2007Ike Turner 1931-2007
IKE TURNER died December 12, reportedly in his sleep. He was 76 years old. Was he a good man? Seems unlikely. Was he a good musician? Hell yeah. The man invented rock ‘n’ roll. Really.
8 December 2007Vashti Bunyan – Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind (DiCristina)
The delicacy of her music in this period is of a piece with her famous 1970 LP, and her voice is even more angelic.
30 November 2007Fix Tape Exchange
On the first Sunday of every month, Sound Fix Lounge behind the record store has a mix exchange. Here’s my mix for the December 2 exchange: “The Saddest Songs in the World.”
7 November 2007Hank Thompson – Vintage Collection (Capitol); At the Golden Nugget (Capitol)
Hank Thompson died Tuesday (11/6/07) of lung cancer. His combination of Honky Tonk singing and sentiments with Western Swing backing made him a country music superstar.
23 October 2007Pylon - Gyrate + (DFA)
A legendary post-punk band from Athens, GA, PYLON is more than just historically important (an obvious and frequently acknowledged influence on R.E.M., among others). This is great music, highly original at the time.
13 September 2007Film School - Hideout (Beggars Banquet)
The sound is a bit heavier, rhythms a bit stronger. That added heaviness is balanced, however, by the addition of female vocals.
8 September 2007The Sins of Pitchfork #1
Shouldn’t music critics know something about, you know, music?
7 August 2007La Otracina - Tonal Ellipse of the One (Holy Mountain)
La Otracina journeys back three decades to the days when interstellar explorers traveled on waves of guitar riffs, propelled through space and time by hard-hitting drum juggernauts.
4 August 2007The Pop Group - Y (Rhino/Warner U.K.)
This hugely underrated 1979 post-punk debut LP from Bristol, England’s ironically named The Pop Group appears for the third time on CD, having finally acquired a bonus track.
28 July 2007The Trees Community - The Christ Tree (Dark Holler/Hand Eye)
One of the stranger albums to reemerge in the freak-folk revival of psychedelic artifacts.
21 July 2007Universal Is Shameless
How did Universal Music Group celebrate the 40th anniversary of the July 17, 1967 death of John Coltrane? By continuing to milk his catalog for all it’s worth.
7 July 2007Bruce Haack - The Electric Lucifer (Omni)
One of the great outsider creations finally makes it to CD!
16 June 2007Vision Festival 12 schedule
Every year, this artist-curated avant-garde jazz festival offers the greatest concentration of outstanding performances in New York.
9 June 2007James Blackshaw - The Cloud of Unknowing (Tompkins Square)
On the four lengthy tracks, the effect is both hypnotic and transcendent. For variety, halfway through there’s the brief “Clouds Collapse,” a sparely constructed array of plucks and plinks that achieves a Zen-like intense focus on pure sound, the perfect palate cleanser.
26 May 2007The National – Boxer (Beggars Banquet)
All the thrumming tunefulness and enigmatic lyricism returns (the lyrics filled with even more foreboding and dread now), with some new twists.
25 May 2007Meg Baird – Dear Companion (Drag City)
Meg Baird of Espers has made a solo acoustic album in the vein of the traditional English folk that has been such a major ingredient in the sound of her band.
27 April 2007Bill Callahan - Woke on a Whaleheart (Drag City)
Smog mastermind Bill Callahan puts his name on this album for a reason. You can tell who it is, no question about that, but it doesn’t sound like Smog.
23 April 2007Melt-Banana - Bambi's Dilemma (A-Zap)
The band that almost makes Boredoms sound mellow by comparison returns with another aural assault, their first album of new material in four years – now with added theremin!
5 April 2007Tony Scott - Fingerpoppin': Complete Sessions 1954-55 (Fresh Sounds); Tony Scott & the Three Dicks: The Complete Milt Hinton and Osie Johnson Quartet Featuring Dick Katz, Dick Garcia and Dick Hyman (Lonehill Jazz)
Jazz/world music clarinetist/saxophonist TONY SCOTT died on March 28, and as so often happens, that prompted me to see what of his I had to listen to. It turned out that I had very little of his early recorded output, so I bought two recent compilations of his ‘50s material to do some belated catching up.
24 March 2007The Soul Searchers - Blow Your Whistle: Original Old School Breaks & Classic Funk Bombs (Vampi Soul)
Not only is this some of the best funk of the period, and historically important as the root source of what in a few years would become the Washington D.C. Go-Go scene, it includes one of the most heavily sampled breakbeats around, from the instrumental “Ashley’s Roachclip.”
13 March 2007Neil Young - Live at Massey Hall 1971 (Reprise)
It took 36 years for this to be officially released; it’s worth the wait.
16 February 2007Elliott Sharp – Cornelia St. Café (New York) – Thursday, February 1, 2007
What Sharp did was take Monkish attributes and emphasize them even further.
28 January 2007Glenn Branca: Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses (Atavistic)
This is an odd but fascinating compilation of three very disparate items. The title piece, for ten electric guitars and drums, is previously unreleased; a 31-minute Glenn Branca work from 1981 finally appearing is enough reason in itself to acquire this disc.
27 December 2006Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble - Drumdance to the Motherland (Eremite)
This is an engrossing set of spacey free improvisation, as much psychedelia as jazz, as African as it is Philadelphian.
16 December 2006Weather Report - Forecast: Tomorrow (Columbia Legacy)
If you’re holiday shopping for a box set to give to a jazz fan, consider this exemplary new compilation. Weather Report was one of the most influential electric jazz bands, setting fusion trends and then moving beyond them to set new ones.
7 December 2006Desperate Man Blues: Discovering the Roots of American Music (Dust-to-Digital)
“You can thank old time record collectors for the music that is left because the record companies didn’t give a damn about any of that stuff. They threw all the stampers out.”
2 December 2006Wire - Live at the Roxy, London - April 1st & 2nd 1977/Live at CBGB Theatre, New York - July 18th 1978 (Pink Flag)
The London shows (the same 17 songs on successive nights) find them in their most helter-skelter, confrontational punk vein as they play their first and second gigs as a quartet. In NYC the following year, most of the set comes from Chairs Missing.
29 November 2006The Slits with Green Milk from the Planet Orange, Genghis Tron, and The Apes - Knitting Factory (New York) - Wednesday, November 1, 2006
Slits shambolic, Green Milk schizo, Genghis Tron clever, Apes still rock
26 November 2006Blues Great Robert Lockwood Jr. Dies, Age 91
Guitarist Robert Lockwood Jr. was one of the greats of blues, though the general public never seemed to realize it.
19 November 2006Karen Dalton - In My Own Time (Light in the Attic)
The cracked majesty of her singing, sounding so raw and vulnerable yet actually imbued with subtle craft, recalls BILLIE HOLIDAY in her final years. An acquired taste for some, but for many there’s an immediate attraction.
13 November 2006Adam Rudolph's Go: Organic Orchestra - Tonic (New York) - Monday, October 16, 2006 (second set)
A segment of this Los Angeles ensemble journeyed cross-country to team with some of the elite members of NYC’s downtown improvisational scene.
10 November 2006The Glove - Blue Sunshine (Rhino)
When the album was originally released, Smith was only allowed to sing on two tracks. Now we get to hear his vocal demos of all 10 original tracks and an additional four songs, plus two instrumentals.
23 October 2006The Slits - Revenge of the Killer Slits (s.a.f.)
25 years after the Slits’ previous recording, original members ARI UP and TESSA POLLIT re-team for a three-song EP.
28 September 2006Alan Sparhawk - Solo Guitar (Silber)
Low guitarist delivers a collection of dark, frightening landscapes turned to sound, pushing listeners to really focus on the emotional, physical quality of timbre and the way it can create a sense of space – or, on occasion, a claustrophobic lack of space.
12 September 2006Richard Buckner - Meadow (Merge)
Buckner’s words are evocative yet enigmatic; he describes situations so specifically, at such a fine level of detail, that paradoxically their definable meaning cannot be pinned down—and yet, the mood is communicated perfectly through his world-weary singing.
28 August 2006Dr. John: Right Place, Right Time - Live at Tipitina's, Mardi Gras '89 (Skinji Brim/Hyena)
This souvenir from 17 years ago catches Dr. John in action at a beloved New Orleans nightclub. The ten-song program’s a nice mix of Rebennack-penned classics, New Orleans standards, and blues/R&B warhorses infused with Nawlins goodness.
15 August 2006Studio One Reissues [Part I]: Freddie McGregor, Delroy Wilson, and John Holt
This year, Heartbeat Records is marking “50 years of Jamaican music” by spiffing up its catalog of Clement S. Dodd’s many Studio One recordings with remastering, bonus tracks, and new compilations.
1 August 2006The Fruit Guys - "Blue"
The Fruit of the Loom parody “Blue” is so dead-on that it reveals the utterly formulaic nature of the style, capturing especially well the necessity for a high, plaintive, angst-ridden, frankly wimpy vocal.
14 July 2006All-Around Talent: R.I.P. Red Buttons 1919-2006
On Thursday, famed comedian and actor RED BUTTONS died in Los Angeles after a lengthy struggle with vascular disease. He was 87.
13 June 2006Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped (Geffen)
This is SONIC YOUTH’s third consecutive excellent album. They haven’t had a run that good since Evol/Sister/Daydream Nation.
10 June 2006Asobi Seksu - Citrus (Friendly Fire)
The shoegaze revival continues with this Brooklyn band’s sophomore release. If I’d been told that Asobi Seksu translated as “we love instrumental codas,” I’d’ve believed it.
1 June 2006Bobby Previte - The Coalition of the Willing (Ropeadope)
There’s an exceptional amount of style-hopping, from track to track and within pieces as well, and Charlie Hunter shifts his sound so often he sounds like three or four different guitarists.
25 May 2006Various Artists - Classic Labor Songs from Smithsonian Folkways (Smithsonian Folkways)
This 78-minute, 27-track compilation opens aptly with the classic “Joe Hill,” proclaiming that the Industrial Workers of the World leader’s spirit lives on, despite his execution.
17 May 2006Various Artists - Classic African-American Ballads (Smithsonian Folkways)
Mostly this sticks to the older, and musicologically primary, definition of ballad: a narrative song. These include some of the most famous American folk songs, and American characters: “Casey Jones,” “Staggerlee,” “Frankie and Johnny.”
24 April 2006Odyssey the Band - Back in Time (Pi)
It’s always a welcome event when JAMES “BLOOD” ULMER’s genre-twisting harmolodic trio reunites for a rare recording session.
17 April 2006Lou Rawls - The Best of: The Capitol Jazz & Blues Sessions (Capitol Jazz/EMI)
This can’t really be called a “Best Of” without including any of LOU RAWLS’s hits, nor can all of the tracks here be termed either jazz or blues. None of this matters, though, because there are three things that matter more…
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