Archives for category: rock and roll

King Crimson Returns! Vrooom! Thrak!

June 15, 2019 //

1994 Virgin

Just over ten years after the conclusion of the Three of a Perfect Pair tour, a new King Crimson release, featuring a six-man lineup, hit the streets, to much rejoicing. But back up. In 1993, Robert Fripp recorded and toured an excellent album with David Sylvian. Sylvian fronted new wave act Japan, after the demise of which he created some very cool, hard-to-classify downtempo solo albums. A Japan reunion in 1990, under the moniker Rain Tree Crow, did not fly. Robert Fripp had played on an earlier Sylvian solo album (Gone to Earth from 1986) and the new collaboration was successful. The band for the album featured bassist Trey Gunn and drummer Jerry Marotta. (Marotta and Fripp previously worked together on Peter Gabriel’s second solo album and Fripp’s Exposure.) Marotta, however, wasn’t able to tour the album. Enter session percussionist (an ex-Mr. Mister drummer) Pat Mastelotto. Check out this article in which Pat recounts flying to England from California on his own dime to audition for the gig.

At the conclusion of the Sylvian/Fripp tour, Fripp regrouped the King Crimson, augmenting the early 80s quartet of himself, Adrian Belew, Bill Bruford, and Tony Levin with Gunn and Mastelotto. The expanded lineup creates a more interesting sound for certain, though still most definitely Crimson. The first release of this line-up, the Vrooom EP introduces the new four-man rhythm section, an intriguing platform for the interplay of Belew’s and Fripp’s guitars.

Four of the six tracks would be reworked for the full LP release, Thrak. Cage and When I Say Stop, Continue only appear on Vrooom.

Despite the 10-year gap, there’s no grand departure from the earlier sound, save for a greater emphasis, I think, on the intense instrumentals. The 1981-84 quartet didn’t record anything new that had the sheer intensity of the songs Red, Fracture, or Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Pt II. Fripp made a return to this style in the songs Vrooom and Thrak, the latter forming the basis for many of the Thrak tour’s live improvisations. These sonic onslaughts are balanced with the ballad One Time and the funky Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream which can be seen as descendants of songs like Two Hands and Sleepless respectively.

The Thrak album expands on this balance of the noisy and the quiet. It also features two of KC’s most beautiful tracks, Walking On Air and the aforementioned One Time.

Vrooom opens the album, the arrangement from the EP now divided into two parts, the second bearing the unwieldy title Coda Marine 475. I’ve always been confused that the second song of an hour-long cycle has the word Coda in the title, but there you are. Dinosaur is something of a pop-metal hybrid, like Sleepless or Thela Hun Gingeet, I suppose. Straightforward(ish) lyrics from Belew, ‘I’m a dinosaur, somebody is digging my bones’ might be an attempt to head off judgement of what the band are doing 10 years after their last album, and 25 after their first. (Noting that this is the 50th year of KC, this might be premature.) The song has the sort of soft-loud dynamic that Kurt Cobain (just a few years before) said Nirvana nicked from the Pixies, but it’s also a microcosm of the album as a whole.

Next is the ballad Walking On Air. Belew’s plaintive alto weaves what might be a love song. It’s Crimson, so you can never tell, but it’s one of the two or three most beautiful songs in their catalogue.

The instrumental B’Boom follows. After a short introduction, percussionists Bruford and Mastelotto go head to head. This is the first time KC had had two percussionists since that brief period around the recording of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic and this kind of interplay in Crimson got lost again after this album until Fripp regrouped with three drummers in the front line. The song, at least in its title, brings us back to a long improv performed on the LTIA Tour at the Zoom Club called Z’Zoom. (Note that the Zoom Club gig also included two more improvisations: Zoom and Zoom Zoom which together run for over an hour. The band might be referring back to them in the tracks Vrooom and Vrooom Vrooom. I might have to delve back into that recording.)

The title track, an intense and difficult metal epic follows, oddly reflecting the progression on LTIA from The Talking Drum into Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part II. On the tour for this album, Thrak formed the basis for many extended improvisations. I’m not sure if I’ll delve into the Thrakattak album, which is comprised of several of these live improvs. I’ve tried before, but it’s an endurance test, sort of like listening to all four sides of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music without a break.

Thrak concluded side 1 on the cassette release which makes sense. The second half of the album is balanced as a suite between the two parts of Inner Garden, Radio I and Radio II, three pop songs, and the concluding iterations of Vrooom (Vrooom Vrooom and Vrooom Vrooom: Coda).

Inner Garden I and II, are short, nearly a cappella, vocals from Belew. The first leads into the very funky People, in which Trey and Tony battle out the bass line under a lyric that’s not too far removed from Foreigner’s Women. (‘People bowl, people rock, people pay to see two people box’ vs. ‘Women behind bars, women in fast cars, women in distress, see that woman with no dress.’ You be the judge)

Unlike Walking On Air, One Time is a little harder to grasp lyrically, but Adrian’s vocal is lovely and he doesn’t reach for anything beyond what the song calls for. It’s bookended by Radio I and Radio II which a reminiscent of the dissonant Ligeti pieces used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The vocal portion of the album concludes with Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream, another slice of funk. Listen, what I’m calling funk is probably unfair to both the funk genre and to KC’s progressive metal leanings. This song and People may simply be funky because the bottom end of the songs is emphasised whereas in other pieces on the album, the guitars take precedence. Lyrically, it’s a bit of a word salad, but it’s prog, so that too is okay.

The album concludes with Vrooom Vrooom, a restatement of the Vrooom theme, and Vrooom Vrooom Coda which takes the high end of Coda Marine 475 and turns it inside out. It’s a really odd piece to conclude the album on, but it’s as musically intriguing as just about anything else here.

As I often do when writing these reviews, I’ve listened to the album pretty constantly for the last several days and have become more and more impressed with both the compositions and with the composition of the album as balanced halves. As a CD listener, the balance of things was lost on me when the album came out. I can appreciate what the band were after, even though in the decade since Three of a Perfect Pair, the LP format had slipped away.

I give it four stars.

Next up: The ConstruKction of Light.

Tags Adrian Belew, Bill Bruford, David Sylvian, King Crimson, Pat Mastelotto, Robert Fripp, Sylvian/Fripp, Tony Levin, Trey Gunn

Categories 90s, Music, Rock, rock and roll

Where the Dark and the Light Mingle

February 20, 2019 //

Where the Dark and the Light Mingle, the debut album from San Francisco’s Gutter Swan, is a song cycle of covers from across what might be called the Americana tradition. Themes of yearning run through all of the tracks, tinged with the seduction and aftermath of indulgence.

The arrangements are deceptively simple. Loryn Barbeau employs the slightest twang in voice which suits the song choices well. Guitarist Steve Egelman pulls gorgeous melodies out of a six-string.

Wayside/Back in Time and Oxycontin Blues (and later in the album the medley of Carole King’s Way over Yonder and Joan Osborne’s Saint Theresa) delve into the desire to be back in a time before addiction took hold. Simple Man gives us just the heart of the rocker from Lynyrd Skynyrd debut album, transforming the plea for a child’s happiness almost into a prayer. Appropriate given the line, “All that you have is your soul.”

All that need be said of C’mon Billy is that Loryn and Steve do PJ Harvey proud.

The first of two Richard Buckner covers, Oscar Hummel, features another straightforwardly beautiful vocal that belies the violence of the lyrics of a lost traveler who mistakenly finds the home of his enemy. (A search reveals that the lyrics are from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, a collection that consists of stories told on headstones.)

This is followed by Beekeeper, a song possibly narrated by a less dead Oscar Hummel ‘You all say I’ve crossed a line, but the sad fact is I’ve lost my mind…All I want is to be left alone, tact from me is like blood from a stone.’

I’m not sure I have a favorite track on the album, but Vocal (supplied by Norwegians Madrugada) is the tale of a possible suicide to which Loryn brings these breathless phrases. Just listen to how she sings ‘Dare not walk through the liiiiight,’ in which light is both salvation and death, howled and then almost whispered as the song ends. *Shudder*

The headlong rush into desire and addiction is best expressed here by their approach to TV on the Radio’s Wolf Like Me. The harmonies in which our narrator is a (were?) wolf seducing red riding hood balance on some sweet fingerpicking. The faster pace on this song is a nice balance to Vocal’s near dirge-like pace.

Way over Yonder/Saint Theresa positions Saint Theresa, another song of an addicted hooker longing to be on the other side of whatever life is offering against a more ambiguous longing for a simple escape. Way down in the hollow is a long way from Way Over Yonder.

Where the Dark and the Light Mingle concludes with Richard Buckner’s Desire, in which our narrator is done with their last partner, having said too much and too drunkenly, ‘shot my insides out with grief and Mr. Kessler’ and just needs to hit the road. Fed up with life and death and lust and addiction, the road beckons.

Gutter Swan’s two members capture the gauntlet of life, death, love, need, and bit of the supernatural, and so many of the various ways we subvert and support these things. As a collection of songs that work individually, the album succeeds, but it excels as a story. Folk blues, country, singer/storyteller songs woven together. Using such disparate and desperate sources makes something far more compelling than the individual tracks.

Tags gutter swan, loryn barbeau, lynyrd skynyrd, madrugada, pj harvey, richard buckner, steve egelman, tv on the radio, where the dark and the light mingle

Categories Folk, Music, Rock, rock and roll

Oooh! A new Spiritualized album!

September 19, 2018 //

And Nothing Hurt – 2018
Oh, man. Have you heard the new Spiritualized album? Dang.

My opinion is that it’s the best work Jason Pierce has done since about 2003’s Amazing Grace. Mind you, the peak is still 1997’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. If our scale is 1-10, then Ladies and Gentlemen is a sold flawless 10 (a 14 or 15 in comparison to even the best albums out there, just not in terms of this band). That’s the gauge. Let it Come Down from 2001 and Amazing Grace come in at 8 or 9. The goal with the latter was to pull away from the excesses of the previous two. (Let It Come Down, for example, took four years and 115 musicians to record.)

2008’s Songs in A&E was recorded in the aftermath of Pierce’s near-death experience with pneumonia and respiratory failure, though mostly written before that. 2012’s Sweet Heart Sweet Light was mostly written on medication for liver disease and suffers, oddly, from both lyrical and arrangement-related excesses. Even still, these are both solid 7s on my Spiritualized scale.

But both are, in my opinion, fairly tame. The new album, however, nails all the best things about Spiritualized in one gorgeous package.

Now, this is the thing about Spiritualized – They (Pierce and whoever he ropes in when he’s ready to work) do a crazy amalgamation of soft balladry, krautrock-inspired drone, psychedelic space rock, and straight-up rock and roll. Sometimes in one song, but usually over the course of an album. And they’re not the only band that takes this kitchen sink approach – but they may be the only one these days to do it so successfully. They’re sort of like the Grateful Dead – the only band to put all these disparate pieces of rock and roll history together and make it work. Anyway, And Nothing Hurt is the return to form I’ve been waiting for. From the ambivalent sweetness of A Perfect Miracle through the nearly eight-minute rampage of The Morning After, to the gospel closing of Sail On Through. Thematically, there’s love, lust, abandonment, road tripping, and suicide, but what’s most touching is the combination of themes in single songs. A Perfect Miracle and I’m Your Man both combine the desire to love and be the best partner with admissions of both past and future failure threaded through. ‘I could be faithful, honest and true…but if you want wasted loaded, permanently folded…I’m your man.’

Here It Comes (The Road) Let’s Go sounds from the title and the opening twist of an AM radio knob like it should be a tale of an actual road trip, but it’s simply directions to a partner to drive ‘a couple of hours’ to visit where ‘we’ll get stoned all through the night’. Looking about on YouTube, it seems this song dates from the Sweet Heart Sweet Light tour on which it was performed in pretty much the same arrangement. Musically, it’s probably my favourite song on the album.

Let’s Dance builds from a slow piano figure as the narrator tries to convince a girl to dance as the bar they’re in is closing up, ‘The hour is getting late / They’re putting all the chairs away’, but ‘if they’ve got Big Star on the radio, they’ll let us stay’. Gotta love a Big Star reference. And this is another one that’s been gestating for a while. There’s a little viewed live video from 2013 with somewhat different lyrics.

And with On the Sunshine, the album kicks into a higher gear. Yeah, it’s another drug song (‘you can always fix tomorrow what you can’t pull off today’) but powered by organs and horns and without much of a bridge, it just barrels into your ears as sweet as can be.

And then Pierce pulls it all back with the lullaby Damaged. Lyrically, it’s Pierce’s narrator (again – this is a theme across many Spiritualized albums) laying the blame for his unhappiness on a lover who’s left, ‘Darlin’ I’m lost and I’m damaged / Over you,’ but the combination of piano, strings, and fuzzed guitar behind Pierce’s sadness bring all his pain to the fore.

But, then there’s the rocker, The Morning After. Of course, the rock and roll is subverted by the lyrical subject, another Jane (see Sweet Heart Sweet Light’s Hey Jane, for example) who decides her parents are the problem and decides to ‘hang herself up by the bathing pool’. Musically, it kicks right in with a Velvet Underground riff, to which a horn section is added and by the song’s midpoint, it’s moving into free jazz territory.

The album closes with two more slow pieces, The Prize and Sail on Through. The first of these is a lovely waltz in which our hero addresses his love over and over saying I don’t know if I should stay or go or if it’s too late to say goodbye. As is often the case, the objective listener is pretty sure the narrator isn’t himself a prize catch, but the intonation is so beautiful that it may not matter for a while. And in the end, Pierce brings it back to the opening with a direct admission that he doesn’t need the object he addresses:

I tell no lie, I tell the truth
You know I just don’t need to be with you
If I could hold it down
I would sail on through for you
If I weren’t loaded down
I would sail on through for you

There’s no more ambivalence, just resignation. Over the closing, notes, we hear the Morse code found on the cover for the album’s title. Having let go, nothing hurts anymore.

On the original issue of Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, the title track quoted Elvis Presley’s Can’t Help Falling In Love both lyrically and musically. The Presley estate objected and later pressings used a remix of the song without those references, though they’re restored on later pressings still. I mention this because the two-note phrase that opens A Perfect Miracle is also lifted from that song, a little gift for music geeks like yours truly who obviously live for that sort of thing.

Tags and nothing hurt, jason pierce, spiritualized

Categories rock and roll

See these eyes so red – David Bowie’s Let’s Dance

August 17, 2018 //

Of all David Bowie’s albums, Let’s Dance is one that’s had very little airplay in my headphones. Which might be a shame. I’ve been listening to it lately and trying to place myself in the shoes of someone giving it an honest listen in 1983. Fans had waited three years for a follow-up to Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, his last album for RCA which had spawned minor US hits in Fashion and Ashes to Ashes. In the meantime, MTV had launched and given some airtime to videos from his previous albums. I recall seeing the videos for those two songs and DJ from 1979’s Lodger. That said, the title track from Let’s Dance landed like a bomb on MTV, followed by Modern Love and China Girl. Those three songs and a reworked version of Cat People (Putting Out Fire), originally recorded for the closing credits of Paul Schrader’s film of the same name and released in March 1982, comprise half of the album’s eight tracks. A fourth single from the album, Without You, didn’t get much airplay and didn’t chart.

db-ld The problem, for me, is that by the time I listened the album in its entirety a few years after its release, those first three tracks had turned into background noise. Modern Love barely sounds like a Bowie song at all – the piano and horns driving the sound instead of the guitar, and lyrics that don’t seem to be about anything at all. The live video didn’t give a story to it. Mind you, that’s what was expected of 80s videos and even 35 years later, when I listen to the songs that did have story videos – China Girl and the title track – I still see the videos in my head. And by the time Modern Love was released as the third single in September, we’d spent the summer being bombarded with tracks two and three.

China Girl is a reworking of a song Bowie had written and produced with Iggy Pop seven years earlier and released on Pop’s The Idiot.

And then there’s the title track. I’ve heard those opening snares and Ah Ah Ahs hundreds of times and tried to feel that moaning ‘tremble like a floooow-ah’. But the album version is a different beast. Clocking in at seven and a half minutes (as opposed to the single/video at just over four), it takes the listener on a different journey. Dub elements which at the time were used to create club mixes sit right in the middle of the album mix and pull it into the fade out.

Without You relies on Bowie’s falsetto, and what sounds like plinking keyboards but is either Stevie Ray Vaughan or producer Nile Rodgers who shared guitar duties throughout. It doesn’t have the drive of the other songs on side A, but as a simple declaration of love it’s not without its merits.

Whereas side one has one song that’s not so well known to me, side two’s Ricochet, Criminal World, and Shake It are all tracks I’ve never listened to much.

Ricochet is proper weird Bowie. Sometimes, its underlying sax lines sound lifted from Low; elsewhere the song is much funkier. Lyrically, it seems to be addressing industrialization and fascism, some of those big themes that he’d explore in songs like Loving the Alien and Time Will Crawl later in the 80s. Moving on, Criminal World is a cover of a 1977 song by Peter Godwin’s band Metro – musically it fits with the rest of the album because Rodgers has arranged it (and the whole album, for that matter) to flow.

And then the album concludes with a throwaway piece of disco/funk called Shake It. Lyrically it doesn’t have much to say – the most interesting lines are ‘We’re the kind of people who can shake it if we’re feeling blue / When I’m feeling disconnected well I sure know what to do.’ In his catalogue, it seems most connected to the discofied John I’m Only Dancing (Again) released around the time of Young Americans. That’s not to say that it’s bad, just that it’s not worthwhile as a Bowie song.

My overall assessment is that it holds together or hold up not as a David Bowie album, but as a Nile Rogers or Chic album that just happens to have Bowie doing the singing and most of the words. Lyrically the album is half-baked and musically, it’s mostly disposable. According to interviews in a recent issue of Mojo, this is, on a certain level, what Bowie was after. At the height of New Romanticism, Bowie heard his own influence on new music and felt the current crop had drained the life from pop. Having not had a serious hit stateside in almost eight years (Fame), he made the leap, and spent the next six years barely involved, by his own admission, in his own music making at all.

Tags david bowie, mtv, new wave, nile rodgers

Categories 80s, Music, rock and roll

Joy Division, Peter Hook, and Youth

July 30, 2018 //

This past weekend included a listen to Joy Division’s Substance (1988) and continued reading of bassist Peter Hook’s Joy Division memoir Unknown Pleasures. I first heard Joy Division in 1987 when I went out record shopping with my friend Natalie. She and I had a lot of overlapping tastes, but she was a proper goth and I was just into the music. I knew a lot of Joy Division-adjacent stuff, but hadn’t heard anything by them. She recommended their second album, Closer. I was 20, living in San Francisco, and (as I would for several years) spent a lot of my time not processing my father’s death the previous year. I was hard to reach and generally hard to communicate with. The thing Joy_Division_Closer about Closer, and JD in general for me at the time – I knew a little of the history – I’d even seen New Order (the band formed out of the remains of Joy Division) perform. That would have been in 1985 at the Santa Monica Civic – hadn’t heard any of their music prior and the show was boring – listening to live recordings from that period now – yeah, they were a dull live act). I recall playing this album a lot that year, and feeling all kinds of despair associated with it, primarily because I knew of the untimely death of lead singer Ian Curtis. One of my flatmates at the time told me it was familiar and asked if he would have heard something else by the band. It’s possible, I probably told him, but this tastes and mine were quite different. Yeah, I listened intently to Closer, but I didn’t know (yet) their biggest hit, Love Will Tear Us Apart, which was a little weird. But this was before someone could send you an email saying ‘you’ll like this song’ and before you even read the next sentence, you could be listening to the song.

So, yeah, Lawrence probably had heard Joy Division before me, though hipster that I was, I was loath to admit it.

Anyway, Closer threw me into a funk that was hard to escape but I was compelled to listen to it more and more. I bought Substance the following year and found that I especially liked the post-punk stuff (Atmosphere, Love, Dead Souls, These Days), but really didn’t know what to make of the earlier, punkier tracks. Later I’d buy the Short Circuit compilation (which includes At a Later Date recorded when they were still a punk band called Warsaw) on the same day I purchased Iggy and the Stooges’ Metallic KO. The following week, a friend told me the apocryphal tale of Ian Curtis committing suicide on the eve of Joy Division’s first American tour because he believed they’d never make a record as good as Metallic KO. A cursory search indicates that Curtis played Iggy Pop’s The Idiot and watched a Herzog film before taking his own life at the age of 23. His epilepsy wasn’t a secret to those nearest him, though in the late 70s, people didn’t know so well how to be supportive of an epileptic friend.

Hook notes that everything Joy Division recorded was classic – something he credits to band chemistry, youth, and Curtis’ lyrical brilliance. With this in mind, I can probably say that everything JD recorded , especially after An Ideal For Living, supersedes everything on Metallic KO (much as that document of two late shows from the original incarnation of the Stooges, including their last show in 1974, is brilliant in its own twisted way). Whether JD’s work supersedes The Idiot, well that’s a bit subjective.

Later I would have a huge poster of the cover of Closer on my wall, next to a huge poster of the cover of Aladdin Sane. As usual, there’s no real conclusion to this story. Even the fact that I’m reading Hook’s memoir right now is a little random. I purchased it for the kindle months ago when it was probably on offer for 99p, about what it cost to see Joy Division open for the Buzzcocks in 1979. It simply came up when I was scrolling through to find what next to read.

Tags Closer, Iggy Pop, Joy Division, New Order, Peter Hook, Substance

Categories 70s, 80s, Music, Rock, rock and roll