Afternoon Freak (May 14th, 2018, Columbia, MO)

Grab-bag Day, for various and sundry reasons. The post title refers to the name of the newest band to be highlighted in Joyful Noise’s White Label Series, to which I subscribe. One album a month, in a 500-copy vinyl run, chosen and annotated by an already-established artist who believes it’s worthy of broader and deeper exposure. Afternoon Freak’s “The Blind Strut” is in the May spotlight:

Odd thing: the curator here is in the band, so he’s got a vested interest. He’s also named Mike Watt, and he’s on bass here in an instro combo with Danny Frankel on drums and Matt Mottel on various keyboards. I will always extend Watt encouragement and critical latitude; The Minutemen have been and always will be a guiding light for me, musically and philosophically–plus, a better dude cannot be found. Trouble is, I’ve yet to truly get with any of his solo ventures, though this comes close. Mottel seems to be the lead voice among the three, Watt plays with restraint, finds the groove, and pitches his ear closely, Frankel rides the grooves ably. The tracks are catchy, a tad repetitious–this kind of date puts pressure on someone to be very imaginative–and evocative of multiple possible influences (remember the instros on Second Edition?), but they are not an irritant upon the ear. Four tracks A-side that get where they’re going; three on the B that stretch out, if a bit monotonously. All of Joyful Noise’s White Label releases have been interesting; one’s been terrific, and one great. This one wouldn’t do badly thrown on a venue PA before a cool band’s gig.

If you’re a Scratch Perry fan and haven’t heard his work with Jah Lion on Colombia Colly, you have your weekly grail hunt. The physical media’s a little scarce, but let the above track from the album be a motivator for you–one of the all-time greatest Perry sound effects leading into a ghostly voice reaching back to Peggy Lee.

Sometimes I get an irresistible hankering for the work of Gene Pitney. For some folks, I imagine he’s the opposite of cool: straight-looking, corny-sounding, a persistent profferer of melodramatic pop, caught in an unfashionable time capsule. For me, he’s a gone kind of cool: hitmaker deluxe (16 in the Top 40), studio tinkerer (multi-tracking his own vocals and instruments on “I’m Gonna Love My Life Away”), writer of “Hello Mary Lou” and “He’s a Rebel,” ace Spector avatar (“Every Little Breath I Take”), early coverer of and sideman for the Glimmer Twins (“That Girl Belongs to Yesterday”), hit duet singer with none other than George Jones (“I’ve Got Five Dollars and It’s Saturday night), master of geography songs (“Mecca,” “24 Hours from Tulsa,” “Last Exit to Brooklyn”), poet of teen you-and-me-against-the-world (“Town Without Pity”). As Jerry Lee might say, “Top that, motherfucker!” Pitney might have said it himself–in Italian.

Tempted? A brief Pitney Playlist for ya:

Persistent profferer of melodramatic pop–with a difference, huh?

Short-shrift Division:

I received my copy of Offbeat! yesterday and noted some interesting new records being reviewed. Sometimes I suspect I am critically soft-minded in that I will like anything if it’s in a New Orleans or south Louisianan tradition. Sampling these records with Apple Music, I was able to reassure myself that I can exercise critical discretion. I’m violating a blog rule by writing about lukewarm creations, but I suppose I need to show I can do it for the record:

Chas Justus & The Jury–Pale (really pale), characterless, zestless, sterilized Western swing. Merely skilled playing and boring vocals.

Cha Wa: Spyboy–To scope in further, I truly thought there was no such thing as an enervating Mardi Gras Indian record. I was wrong. This is record suffers from having a very finely-tuned funk-field.

Keith Frank & The Soileau Zydeco Band: Return of the King–I am nutso for Frank’s “Haterz.” But his recent insistence on walking his zydeco into urban musical neighborhoods makes it less tough and contagious.

Big Sam’s Funky Nation: Songs in the Key of Funk, Volume 1–I am always seeing Sam’s gigs touted in Offbeat! (and hearing them recommended on ‘OZ when in NOLA myself). First sentence of the current review of this album includes the phrase “[t]he heavyweight champion of rocking, brassy, NOLA funk.” This wouldn’t make it out of Golden Gloves.

Ok, never again…

Heavy Makes Me Happy (April 24th, 2018, Columbia, Missouri)

Have you heard of the Mexican psych-metal band Apolo? Well, neither had I, until I received my most recent installment in Joyful Noise Recordings‘ so far very fruitful White Label Series. Each month, a different established artist, in April’s case Teri Gender Bender, of Le Butcherettes and Bosnian Rainbows fame, selects a recording they personally endorse. I am someone who’s very selective about where I send my music money–even though it may seem like I must go broke–but I felt this series was a great gamble. In a fantasy sense, I almost feel like an A&R rep is reporting to me with a fabulous find about which I know absolutely nothing, and that the rep’s expertise guarantees that at least I’m going to be interested. I’ve enjoyed the first three entries in the series–February’s release, Berry’s Everything, Compromised is even in my top 10 for the year–and Apolo’s Live in Stockholm is no exception. If you’re in the mood for some heavy but movin’-movin’-movin’ music, I’d give this album I try. What little psych-metal / -rock / -punk I’ve heard has tended to get mired in rather dated trippy-dippiness, bald-faced derivitiveness, and corny posing; if you consider the original inspirations for such bands, they themselves were the cream skimmed off the top of a mostly sour batch. Apolo plays with a difference. With a bite and intensity. Perhaps I should let Teri’s liner notes refine my own commentary (especially since the singing’s en Español, and she’s fluent and I’m not):

“Their music and lyricism is a representation of Mexico’s fiery youth, of an unsettled fight against corruption imposed by the brutal government that forever tries to attenuate hopelessness as a normality. The eerie, indigenous, mythical storytelling captured in the native tongue of our historically rich country expresses the various forms that light and love can morph into. Their growth has become undeniable because they persisted and turned their surroundings into metaphorical bullets loaded within their music”

Here’s a track from 2011 that might hammer the argument all the way home (note: they’ve gotten tougher in seven years):

The Joyful Noise Series is supposed to be subscription-only, but looks like you can buy it here. If you need some heaviness to make you happy, I’d prescribe it, because it worked for me.

In more heavy developments, Apolo’s assault led me to crave more riffage and fury, so I reached back into my past. There’s nothing like teaching middle school and discovering you have a musical jones in common with your kids, and in those days, the jones was Local H. “Bound for the Floor” and “Copacetic” had lit our fuses, but unlike me, they didn’t seem to obsessively follow folks’ careers–singles kids, pretty strictly. When Here Comes the Zoo came out in ’02, they were none the wiser, so I brought it with me one morning, and before long, we were all chanting, “We’re all defanged and declawed! / Creature-comforted!” We even had a running joke about Chinese pugs, and were a whisker away from being official arms of the band’s street team (Midwest rock and roller unity) before policy interfered. Anyway…those were the days, and I always thought this record was underrated:

At my age, I can only handle so much heavy, so after those two burners, I turned to another new recording I was tipped to by the mercurial jazz and metal scribe Phil Freemah of Burning Ambulance. After an hour of listening trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer improvising impressionistically over the grooves of none other than Sly & Robbie, I was not only in a perfect contemplative state for reading, but also I’d moved a new slab into my pantheon for this trip around the sun. Dig:

Fruitful Investigations (March 13th, 2018, Columbia, Missouri)

Once again, no narrative with which to surround these immersions–but I predict, based on the quality of these first-time listens, that narratives may be forthcoming.

South African rapper Yugen Blakrok is one of the few really interesting things about the Kendrick Lamar-curated Black Panther companion. I took a deeper dive into her 2013 debut, and one of the best things I can say about it is her mind-spray and fluid, fluent flow is gonna require I take an even deeper dive. She’s definitely got a seat in the Afro-Futurist spaceship; her rapping sounds to me like incantations; and she’s got a knack for joining abstractions with physical being–check this chunk from “Secrets of the Path,” one of many highlights:

What kinda ism is this?
We’re like light thru a prism before the schism is killed
In the prison of sleep…I keep rhyming through bars, lucid dreaming
Heard that love’s brighter from the outside, believe it
This morning when life woke up, I dove back down into slumber
Cuz in-between realities, there’s glitches when I stutter
Sleep-talking formula with in-breath
Exhale solutions, scientist in me is inbred
My language traps the tongue – caught in diction mazes lost for days – in hazy blazes
While fiery words transcend these mortal planes
My verbal play’s like smoke signals, home of the braves
And wild style thoughts can spray when the clouds spell riverclay
Psycho-analyst type in-between-the-lines reader
Deciphering codes beneath the eyelids as a dreamer
Diving deeper into abstract, non-conformity
My realest self’s created thru celestial artistry

Musically, Return of the Astro-Goth is just fine, though a bit of a static ground. This woman’s going to be much, much bigger, I think.

Saxophonist Evan Parker, almost 74, drummer Paul Lytton, freshly 71, and bassist Barry Guy, about to turn 71 himself, have long been friends, and for almost four decades a performing trio—the cream of British jazz improvisation. One thing I’ve noticed about the very best free performances is that it’s virtually impossible to determine the age of the performers. That idea is in play here: the reflexes, imagination, and ears of these men, surely aided by–yes–the profound familiarity of years, could be those of iconoclastic twenty-somethings looking took cut some old farts’ heads. ‘Cept these are the old farts, who long ago discovered a secret of life. As Parker says in the notes: “”Collective free improvisation is the utopian state arrived at in that other ‘little life,’ as the late John Stevens called the mental space of music making that happens when musicians of a like mind (birds of a feather) play freely together.” Like-minded. Yeah.

As I’ve mentioned a few times in previous posts, I’m subscribing to Joyful Noise Recordings’ “White Label Series,” in which established independent artists choose and curate overlooked albums from the very recent past for monthly vinyl release. March’s entry is one I’ve eagerly awaited; in fact, my motivation to subscribe to the project was largely due to sui generis rap MC Serengeti‘s involvement. I’ve long been a fan of the shape-shifting story-teller from Chicago, though much of his work is so gnomic, muted, depressive, and minimalistic that it not only demands sound-canceling headphone attention but can also, even then, defy parsing. The reason I mention that is Foreign & Domestic’s 2007 release, Your Mountain vs. My Iceberg, Serengeti’s “White Label” choice, shares those qualities. Is there such a subgenre as electro-twee? My first listen here tempts me to coin it. But I will be going back in when time permits.

Short-shrift Division:

Fans of Norman Whitfield, early Seventies protest-soul, and the Palmieri Brothers who haven’t heard this record need to change that fact. A landmark of post-assassination American pop that’s gotten too little attention–hell, I didn’t hear about it until a few years ago, and this stuff’s my meat and taters. With Eddie on piano and “theoretical arrangements,” Charlie on fascinating organ, luminaries like Pretty Purdie, Cornell Dupree, and Bruce Fowler in the musical mix, and the unsung Jimmy Norman on vocals. A taste:

Note: a great live album followed, which I wrote about last month!

Not THAT Thomas Jefferson! (February 23rd, 2018, Columbia, Missouri)

I love old-time New Orleans jazz records–that so many seem to and might actually have been recorded in an empty VFW hall is a charm I cannot resist–and I was pleasantly surprised earlier this week when those nice kids at Hitt Records gave me a copy of Thomas Jefferson’s If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight. Jefferson is one of the later-period greats of traditional NOLA trumpeting, and he sounds great on this record I’d never heard of (he’s an affecting singer, too); it was actually recorded at The Lord Napier in Surrey, England, and the set list features some warm surprises (“A Long Way to Tipperary”). One of the clerks, Taylor, had had a conversation with me about a similar record I’d found at the store, and said to me, “Y’know, I don’t know much about this stuff–I probably need to get caught up.” He must be wasting no time.

I have been the beneficiary of great generosity this week, and much of it hasn’t had to do with my birthday. My good friend Isaac, with whom I share a constant stream of wonderful music on a regular basis, alerted me to the release of a new record by Hailu Mergia, an Ethiopian pianist of considerable reknown. If you don’t think you need to hear Ethiopian piano-based music, sorry, but you do. Mergia’s Lala Belu combines fascinating searching melodies (Mariam Gebru, his fellow Ethiopian keyboardist, seems to have minted them) with striking, swirling accordian, dark-toned violin, and lightly funky drums. Here’s the whole record:

Finally…about my entry of 2/22/18? I’d mentioned Joyful Noise Recordings’ “White Label Series”? Well, I gave a deeper listen to one of those, the band Berry’s Everything, Compromised, and I think it’s major, one of the best releases of 2018. The album title’s an unfortunately accurate aspersion cast on the state of the nation, and for pop music political statements, especially in the indie rock vein, it’s remarkably subversive, witty, pointed, and weird. If you’re both pissed and bemused, you might want to pick it up if you can find it.

http://berrytheband.bandcamp.com/album/everything-compromised

Short-shrift Division:

More later, I am sure, on this one, but Superchunk’s new and mordant What A Time to Be Alive is also a real killer with a political edge–and does it rock out!

A Birthday Playlist (February 22nd, 2018, Columbia, Missouri)

I turned 56 yesterday, and I admit I was a bit too distracted to now be making any sense of what I listened to, which was plenty. So, after a few bits of news, I’ll just leave you with a playlist of the highlights.

Nicole and I had breakfast at Ernie’s, a diner which every visitor to Columbia should visit. Whatever blues satellite station they were tuned to was kickin’ my ass–we didn’t have Shazam handy, and the selections were stumping me, which, to be honest, isn’t easy for a blues satellite station to do. A sprightly blues version of “Old Chunk of Coal”? Hmmmm.

Perhaps one of the best presents I received was from Netflix, which announced a Roxanne Shante biopic set for a March 23rd release. I’m all about that, as she has long been a hero of mine; as she once put it herself, she gave birth to most of them MCs. Here’s the trailer, which looks mighty promising:

Also, I subscribed this year to a very interesting series of albums Joyful Noise Recordings is curating. The White Label Series sends subscribers an “undiscovered LP” each month; each LP has been chosen by an already-established artist (the presence of Serengeti, Mike Watt, and Aesop Rock convinced me to pony up) and is limited to a 500-copy run. I finally had time to listen to the first two White Label releases yesterday: Weirding Module’s A Newer Age (curated by Kid Millions, and including an apology to Italo Calvino!) and Berry’s Everything, Compromised (curated by Dale Nixon, who was initially transfixed by the band at an unamed dive bar in St. Louis). The former features some aggressive and zoinky noise which I kinda liked; the latter, which I wasn’t able to concentrate much on at first but came quickly back to, some very plaintive, literate, subversive (!!) and odd semi-pop music. I have to give them both more attention, but I really like the idea, especially since the liner notes require the curators to justify their choices, and since it forces me out of my comfort zone. Care to sample?