Tuned In To Music

Annie Lennox - Live in Central Park is exacatly what it’s name implies, a free concert recorded live in New York’s Central Park in 1995.  The DVD presents concert footage that lasts for roughly an hour followed by some post-concert live camera bits that lead into three videos interspliced with interview segments.  The concert can be played with or without lyrics onscreen and the individual concert tracks can be selected and played either randomly or in the viewer’s preferred order.  Sound options are Dolby stereo or Dolby surround.  The stereo mix sends the left and right channels to both the front and rear speakers.

The concert is good but not great.  Lennox is a better than average songwriter and an extremely talented vocalist with an extraordinary voice.  She does not disappoint on Live in Central Park.  She tends toward songs of great emotional weight and she delivers them with the emotional power they deserve.  There are moments of real magic here where she takes the audience to that special place that only exceptional live music can realize.  Watching Lennox perform live it becomes instantly apparent that she is deeply synched to the groove.  She moves beautifully and you could drop the rhythm track out of the mix and “hear” it anyway just by watching her.  In this day of Pro Tooled divas who lip synch concerts amidst extravagant sets and pyrotechnics replete with by-the-numbers choreography designed to shake as much booty, cleavage and big hair as possible, it’s refreshing to see a woman dominate a stage and captivate an audience on nothing but her innate sense of rhythm and arresting ability to sing.  And not a costume change in sight. 

The concert’s main limitation is that it peaks before it ends which is what keeps it from being great.  It is also quite short with just about an hour of live footage.  A version of Lennox’s album Medusa released with bonus tracks from the Central Park concert contains one song from the gig, “Here comes the rain again”, that is not on the DVD so it seems the DVD presents an edited version of the concert.

Annie Lennox fans will almost certainly enjoy Live in Central Park and have probably already seen it.  It is also recommended to listeners who may not be as familiar with Lennox but who enjoy powerful talented female vocalists who can bring it live.  If you’re in the latter group, also consider Lennox’s terrific current album Songs of Mass Destruction.

They’re not from Scotland, they have nothing to do with law enforcement, they don’t do gospel music, and they’re not a choir.  They’re an indie pop group out of Chicago.  Aren’t they cute?  The CD booklet lists a zillion people but the main guy appears to be Elia Einhorn who produced the CD, designed the sleeve, and wrote all the tunes save one which he co-wrote with singer, cellist, bass player Ellen O’Hayer.  The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir  is the group’s first album.

The core members of the band are college grads with music degrees which is surprising given that the music on The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir  is fairly unremarkable.  Instrumentation is varied - bands like Arcade Fire appear to be an influence - but melodically, harmonically, rhythmically and structurally the songs are pretty ordinary.  Einhorn’s lyrics are more literate than standard pop fare, certainly, but are more or less par for the course for the indie pop niche the bands falls comfortably within.  Life appears to be have been something of a bummer for The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir as their nine songs have titles like “This world has no place for me”, “Obsessions”, “In hospital”, and “Broken front teeth”, and are concerned with subjects such as the devastation left in the wake of the death of a loved one, a relationship ending badly (big surprise there), anger at a stepfather who didn’t give enough attention, and an unloved outsider. 

If you’re a fan of miserabilist, multi-instrumentalist indie pop, you may find much to enjoy on The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir.  If not, give this one a pass and wait to see if the band can do something more original with their music educations the next time around.

Panic at the Disco came out of nowhere (well, the Las Vegas suburbs which is close enough to nowhere to count) to be one of the surprise successes of 2005.  Another young band doing emo, their first album, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, led to national and international tours as headliners and an MTV video award.  Now, three years later, here they are with their second album Pretty. Odd and it’s just about the last thing anyone expected.  Panic at the Disco are on their knees in the Temple of the Beatles.

Pretty. Odd opens with “We’re So Starving” which features vocalist and guitar player Brendan Urie singing “Oh how we’ve been so long / We’re so sorry we’ve been gone / We were busy writing songs for you” set to music that does everything it can possibly do to conjure Sgt. Peppers era Beatles.  They ape every aspect of Beatles music you can imagine.  French horns, backwards guitar, Beatletastic vocal harmonies, layered string quartets, Paul’s melodic bass, it’s all here.  With such blatant appropriation of the Beatles sounds and styles you’d think Pretty. Odd would come cross as a dreary rip off but just the opposite is true.  Rather than sound like jaded professionals who ran out of ideas and decided to copy the masters to squeeze out one more record, Panic at the Disco sound like young musicians who are having a ball with all the new ideas they recently discovered on those old Beatles records their parents kept around.  Although just about every aspect of many of the songs on Pretty. Odd  will be familiar to listeners who know their Beatles, the music sounds fresh and alive with the exhilaration of a new discovery.  It’s not only the kind of album that only a young band could make, it’s the kind of album that might induce cranky old fogies who are still living in the ’60s to pay some attention to the wealth of good music being made today.

As much as they are enthralled with the Fab Four, Panic at the Disco aren’t the Beatles and although they have done an admirable job capturing the style in a fresh way, they don’t have the breadth, depth and culture-stopping talent of the Beatles at their prime.  But then who does?  If you like melodic pop and especially if you like the Beatles, give Pretty. Odd a listen.  You’ll have a good time.

Chrome is the kind of album that can end a band’s career.  It’s so good, so very good, and yet it never attracted the attention or the sales that one would expect for an album this accomplished.  The band had to know how good it was and must have released it with great expectations.  Having those expectations dashed by a lukewarm reception can break a band’s spirit and their heart.  Catherine Wheel kept going releasing three more albums after Chrome but they never received the recognition they should have based on Chrome alone.  It’s a brilliant record.

Catherine Wheel are Rob Dickenson (guitars, vocals), Brian Futter (guitar), Dave Hawes (bass) and Neil Sims (drums).  Both Chrome and their debut album Ferment are squarely in the shoegazer genre and this may have been part of the problem.  “Shoegazer” was something of a pejoritive term coined by the UK music press for a group of bands that began to surface in the late 1980s that featured massive walls of guitar effects and feedback with vocals often unintelligible and buried deep in the mix.  Part of the ethos surrounding the music was a pronounced lack of interest in or respect for the established music press and the critics of publications like NME and Melody Maker reacted by deriding the music.  American audiences who weren’t reading the UK music press listened with more open ears and Catherine Wheel initially found more success in the US than the UK.  The UK press then castigated the band for abandoning their home audience for America.  There’s just no satisfying these guys.

Chrome features towering walls of guitar effects that make Phil Spectre’s trumpeted “wall of sound” sound like a puny thing in comparison.  Dickenson and Futter sound like an army of roaring, chiming, ringing guitar players.  One of the factors that set Catherine Wheel apart from many of their shoegaze contemporaries was that their music never abandoned harmony, melody and hooks in favor of raw guitar squall.  Their guitars are immense but they always work in service to the song.  They also have a way with discord that I don’t know if I’ve ever heard before.  The band will occasionally add a discordant guitar line to the mix but they have an uncanny way of embeding the line in a wall of guitar sound that modulates in tone in such a way that it provides a bridge between the discordant line and the melody line.  It’s as if they are providing a guided tour of how discord can arise from and be related to harmony.  It’s a very neat trick and it can serve the perpose of easing listeners who are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with discordant music into an appreciation of how dissonance can be made to work musically.

Chrome was originally released in 1993 and if the 20 year nostalgia cycle holds, shoegaze will be “rediscovered” sometime in the next 5 years.  Actually, shoegaze may have jumped the gun as we are already seeing bands labeled as nu-gaze that feature big walls of guitar sound.  Whenever it happens, perhaps Catherine Wheel will finally get the recognition they deserve for Chrome.  It’s one of that small handful of albums that I’ll return to perodically through the years.  If you like good songwriting and powerful guitars, check it out.

Britsh Sea Power, a quartet out of Brighton, sound like they yearn to be epic in a U2, Muse, Pink Floyd kind of way.  Big epic tunes, a haunting refrain of “We’re all in it / And we close our eyes” that begins and ends the album, massed string crescendos, big guitars, it’s all present and accounted for on Do You Like Rock Music?  Compared with the at-times fussy artiness of their critically acclaimed in the UK debut CD, The Decline of British Sea Power, released in 2003, it’s clear that British Sea Power are going for a wider audience with Do You Like Rock Music?  They try hard and most of the tracks are well done.  But for reasons I’m still not clear about, Do You Like Rock Music? just isn’t doing it for me. 

All of the external characteristics of a big epic rock album are here but there is something missing at the core.  Do You Like Rock Music?  just doesn’t rock.  It’s like a record made by by talented musicians and songwriters who are mimicking a style they don’t intuitively grasp.  This style of music should be arresting; it should demand your attention and compel you to listen.  I’ve listened to Do You Like Rock Music?  many, many times trying to figure out why it isn’t working for me and the best summation I can come up with is that the more I hear it, the easier it is to ignore.

Black Mountain is a five piece out of Vancouver, British Columbia featuring Stephan McBean (vocals, guitars), Matthew Camirand (bass), Jeremy Schmidt (keyboards), Amber Webber (vocals, percussion), and Joshua Wells (drums, percussion, keyboards).  McBean wrote the lyrics on all of the tracks on In the Future save one which was written by Webber.  In the Future is their second full length album and it has attracted a good deal of critical praise.  Listening to it makes me feel like the little kid who said “But, the emporer has no clothes”.

The music is a combination of Black Sabbath-style riffage and proggy/druggy/psycedelic rock.  In the Future opens on a promising note with “Stormy High” which rocks and roars and generally lives up to it’s name.  While the rest of the album has moments of excitement I find it gets very tedious very quickly.  McBean sings in a high register that is often reminiscent of Neil Young while Webber wails along with enough melisma for four vocalists.  At times the combination of their voices is electrifying but at others - too many others - it sounds like whining.  Too many tracks have plodding, dull rhythms and although the big heavy guitar riffs can be compelling, they’re also pretty simple and repeated way too many times.  The whole thing bogs down into a bludgeoning thud.

The main track on In the Future is “Bright Lights” which clocks in at 16:41 and is almost universally described as “epic”.  If repeating the same thing over and over again with little or no variation for minutes at a time is epic, than “Bright Lights” surely quaifies.  The lyrics begin with McBean saying “Bright light” five times followed by “Light bright” five times.  Then Webber says each phrase five times.  Then they trade off with McBean saying one phrase another five times and Webber finishing up with the other phrase repeated five more times.  I’m not making this up.  The accompanying music is about as interesting as the lyrics.  This sort of thing goes on for another 16 minutes with monster guitar riffs intruding (and being endlessly repeated) from time to time.

Listening to In The Future you get the idea that if they could shift their drug cocktail toward something with a little more zip and tune in to the fact that repeating the same thing umpteen times before you change it up is boring, Black Mountain could produce a killer album.  Maybe the next time.

Remember when R.E.M. were the cutting edge and people hung on every CD release to see what they would do next?  When their combination of jangle pop music and obscure, tortured lyrics seemed a little dangerous because they were breaking all the rules?  Well, those days are over and Accelerate isn’t going to bring them back.  However, it’s the most energetic and interesting CD they’ve released in quite some time.  They’re not what they were but they’re making some noise and they’re fun to listen to again.

Accelerate opens with a dynamite one-two punch with “Living Well is the Best Revenge” and “Man-Sized Wreath”.  Singer Michael Stipe is still lost in his self-absobed little world (he’s been having his picture taken with his head painted gold) and his lyrics are as obscure as ever but he’s singing with conviction again.  While the entire lyric of a song may be puzzling, he can spit out lines like “Living Well is the Best Revenge’s” “Baby I’m calling you on” or “Man-Sized Wreath’s”  “Kick it out on the dance floor / Like you just don’t care” with enough intensity and attitude that they become mini-anthems in themselves. 

Two of the real joys of Accelerate are Peter Bucks’s guitars and Mike Mills’ background vocals.  The guitars ring, chime and drive most of the tracks with muscle and hooks.  Mill’s vocals are usually deep in the mix but he has an uncanny ability to perfectly complement both Stipe’s lead vocals and Buck’s guitar.  It’s not always obvious but his singing is often the glue that holds a song together and turns an ordinary song into one you enjoy listening to again and again.

The energy ebbs and flows on Accelerate and some tracks sound as much like attempts to recapture past success as an attempt to come up with something new.  Nevertheless, fans of the R.E.M. of old are likely to celebrate Accelerate as a welcome return to form.

Dusty Rhodes and the River Band is a sextet out of Anaheim, California - which is just about the last thing they sound like.  I’m hard pressed to say what they do sound like, The Band with a sense of humor comes to mind.  Like The Band, Dusty Rhodes and the River Band are enamored of traditional forms of rural American music and their line up includes an accordian player (Dustin Apodaca), a banjo player (Edson Choi) and a violin and mandolin player (Andrea Babinski).  However focusing on this aspect of the group only captures part of what they’re about.  Although largely acoustic, their music also encompasses classic rock, some hints of prog rock, and more than a bit of Al Kooper style blues organ.  They’re all over the place.

The comparison with The Band falls further short if you pay attention to the lyrics and the manner in which the music is presented.  The Band were very serious about what they were doing to the point of being dour at times.  Dusty Rhodes and the River Band sound like they’re looking for a party.  The CD begins with a brief country string passage that opens with the first five notes of the melody from “Rock-A-Bye-Baby” which leads you to think you’re in for an hour of sleepy country music.  Uhh, . . . no.  First You Live is filled with bleary drinking songs, raucus sing alongs, and comedy lyrics. 

The music on First You Live is well played and although the lyrics are often clumsy, they are well fit to the music.  You have to love a band that sets a chorus like “I can’t wait to be free, no / I can’t wait to leave Tennessee” to a romping hoedown on “Leaving Tenessee”.  Although they rarely sacrifice musical chops for sarcasm in the music, the same can’t be said of the vocals.  Too often gravel-voiced vocals and cornpone accents are way overdone which can give the group the sound of a bunch of adolescents who are smugly secure in their knowledge that they are so much cooler than everybody else while everyone else wishes they would just hurry up and get on with the process of growing up.  It’s more of a minor annoyance than a major problem and there’s too much talent and too many good ideas in the group to keep you from listening to the band.

There aren’t any bands around that sound quite like Dusty Rhodes and the River Band and First You Live is a hoot.  If something like The Band in party mode sounds interesting to you, check them out.

Ojos de Brujo are a large band from Barcelona that perform a combination of nuevo flamenco, Gypsy, Indian, African, Caribbean, hip hop, rap, and more that I find utterly intoxicating.  Not only do they make music that I could, and often do, listen to all day, they completely control the packaging and production of their music on their own record label.  Rather than release CDs designed to squeeze every last dime out of the buying public they put out lavish productions that reflect their love of the music they make and their desire to share that music in as pleasurable a way as possible with the rest of us.  I love this band.

Following 1999’s Vengue and 2002’s Bari, Ojos de Brujo released their third album of new material, Techari, in 2006.  On December 22nd of the same year they performed the material from the album along with some new tunes at a gig in their home town of Barcelona.  Techari Live presents that concert in two formats, a CD and a DVD.  Although I very much enjoy the CD, I find it the less satisfying of the two.  As often happens in live performance a number of the songs from Techari are played at slightly faster tempos than they are on the studio album which results in the loss of some of the lilt and sway that can make Ojos de Brujo’s music so captivating.  Also, the intensity and power of a live performance from a nine member band augmented by two flamenco dancers and innumerable guests blasts away some of the nuance and subtelty that is present on the studio recordings.  Having said that, the live gig is expertly recorded and mixed so that all of those musical voices can be clearly heard and distinguished.  It’s a masterful recording.  And the band . . .  God in heaven, the band is amazing.

Watching the band perform can greatly enhance one’s appreciation and enjoyment of this music.  There are a lot of musicians working here, they are playing rhythms, counter rhythms, cross rhythms and polyrhythms that are dizzying in their complexity, and all of these guys can count.  The group is so tight they are beyond belief.  They’re playing within rhythmic structures that are so complex and so fast they’re almost impossible to figure out and yet the band will stop, turn and shift gears on a razor’s edge.  Being able to watch them is a great help in keeping track of who is playing what and in separating out the different rhythmic strands.  As if two percussion players, a drummer, a turntablist, and two flamenco guitarists all playing different rhythmic lines weren’t enough the band adds a pair of flamenco dancers for even more rhythmic goodness.  They do one number where spitfire rapper Maxwell Wright and flamenco dancer Susi Medina carry out a vocal-foot percussion dialogue that begins with them trading eights and shifts to trading fours and then twos at a speed and complexity that has to be seen and heard to be believed.  Another highlight is the duet between Ojos de Brujo’s spectacular vocalist Marina Abad and guest vocalist Martirio on “Todo Tiende”.  Those are two great moments but there are many, many more.  Time after time this band will stop you dead in your tracks and leave you awestruck.  These guys can really play.

Although the CD and DVD contain the same songs (for the most part, there are a couple of extra studio tracks on the CD) the sequencing is different on each which is a nice touch because they provide different listening experiences.  The DVD features surround sound but it is not recorded in either DVD-Audio or SACD.  In addition the DVD has a documentary on the making of “Techari”, a short on putting the gig together, and a collection of the videos they made for tunes on the album including the terrific video for “Sultanas de Merkaillo”.

As can be heard on the Barcelona Zona Bastarda compilation, Barcelona is currently the home of an exceptionally vibrant and creative music scene and Ojos de Brujo is one of its leaders.  They are are an extraordinary band that has put out one excellent album after another.  Techari Live is no exception and by also providing a visual record of the concert on DVD Ojos de Brujo gives us another way to enjoy their joy-infused and celebratory music.  Highly recommended.

Some CDs stay “In the Mix” list for a long time because I have to force myself to listen to them enough times to give them a fair review.  Others stay in the mix because we’re enjoying them so much we just can’t get them out of rotation.  “Out There” is of the second kind.  It’s a terrific disc.

The Heliocentrics are an eight piece band that sound like they’re led by drummer Malcolm Catto.  The music on “Out There” is instrumental with occasional brief spoken passages.  The album is supposed to capture some kind of trip into the cosmos and back - you know, out there - but the overarching structure is relatively unimportant to enjoyment of the album.  There is no simple way to describe the music in terms of genre because there really is no genre that captures it.  On “Out There” the Heliocentrics combine elements of funk, big band jazz, free jazz, fusion, psychedelia, Middle Eastern music and electronica into a mix that is so rich and varied and so well played that considerations of genre seem beside the point.  The album contains 20 tracks ranging from 0:16 to 5:26.  You never know what’s coming next but the arrangements are so adept and the band is so solidly synched on groove that even the more abstract and out there passages can be easily enjoyed by listeners who are unfamiliar, or perhaps uncomfortable, with free jazz.  There’s so much going on across this CD that you can listen to it every day for weeks and still pick up something new.

If the album has a weakness it’s that the relatively short running time for most of the tracks doesn’t give the band an opportunity to stretch out and examine the music a bit more.  More than a few moments go by that could serve as the basis for extended passages of exploration.  Of course “Out There” would then be more of a jazz album than an I-don’t-know-what-to-call-it album.  Maybe it’s better the way it is.

“Out There” is the Heliocentrics only album and there’s not much info out there about them.  The album may be a one-off from a group of studio musicians.  I sincerely hope not because if these guys can continue to make music like this, I’ll buy everything they put out on sight.  If they are a one shot and it sounds like this is the kind of music you might like, get the CD quick because it may not be easy to find in the future.  Sometimes you hear a CD and know you’re going to be pulling it out of the rack periodicaly for years to come.  In our house this is one of those CDs.   Recommended.

The Blakes are a trio composed of brothers Garnet (vocals, guitar) and Snow (vocals, bass) Keim and Bob Husak (drums).  They sound like what they are - three guys who’ve spent a lot of time on the road without money behind them who like to get laid.  “The Blakes” is their first album.

The CD opens with “Two Times” a down and dirty rock song yowled with the lazy malevolence of a snotty teenager who doesn’t give a fuck what you think and knows your daughter will do whatever he wants because he’s cool and you suck.  Every parent’s nightmare.  If this was all The Blakes were about it would get old fast but the band keeps changing it up while keeping the focus squarely on rock.  “Modern Man” sounds so much like an “Exile on Main St.” era Stones track that Mick Jagger could sue for copyright infringement.  The main difference is that The Blakes sound more dangerous than The Stones have for several decades.  There’s more than a hint of British Invasion style rock running throughout “The Blakes” but the band rarely sounds like they’re simply copying the older style.  It’s an influence, not a model.

The Blakes are the kind of band that is becoming harder to find as the years roll by.  As rock ages, and it’s old now, the billions spent and made and the decades of image marketing and have made it more and more difficult to just play rock pure and simple.  The Blakes pull it off.  They don’t sound like they’re trying to fit into some currently popular variant of rock and, with the exception of “Modern Man”, they don’t sound like they’re trying to be a band like (fill in classic rock band here).  They’re a basic rock band that knows how to kick ass.  No gimmicks, that’s it.  If that sounds like your thing, give these guys a listen

Good music, odd CD. Connie Price is the studio name of producer and multi-instumentalist Dan Ubick. When they first started to record, the Keystones were primarily Ubick and trumpet player Todd M. Simon with Ubick playing most of the instruments. On “Tell Me Something”, the band’s second full length CD, the Keystones are a full band of session musicians with Ubick restricting himself to drums, percussion and electric guitars.

“Tell Me Something”, like Galactic’s recent CD “From the Corner to the Block“, makes hip-hop out of a variety of MCs combined with musicians playing instruments rather than producers constucting music tracks out of samples. The music on “Tell Me Something” is strongly funk and R&B influenced, the arrangements are solid, and the band is tight. These guys could have stepped out on stage in a Soul Review in the ’70s and knocked the sudience dead. With Ubick focusing on drums, the Keystones, like Galactic, are drum oriented with clattering funk rhythms prominently anchoring the songs. This works well with MC driven music that puts the vocals up front. With an array of keyboards, a full horn section and a string quartet the Keystones provide a much fuller sound than Galactic who are doing it all with five guys. Also, Galactic shoots more for a live production of the multi-sound, layered sample approach to hip hop while the Keystones are focused more on soul-review style band arrangements. Both methods are successful in their different ways.

I found the MCs the weakest aspect of “Tell Me Something”. The vocals range from rhythmic rapid fire word rhyming to singing. For the most part it’s the same old same old which results in the music being much more intriguing than the vocals. Set against the more typical background of sampled and constructed beats the vocals might work better but when supported by these inventive and well played arrangements they come across as ordinary and uninteresting. You keep wanting the MCs to step up to the level of the musicians, or, if they can’t, to get out of the way.

What’s odd about the CD is that it includes two discs, the one I’ve described and a second that presents the same program with the vocals stripped out. Even though all of the tracks except two were arranged to support the MCs, which holds the horn section in particular in check, most of these songs are much more interesting to listen to without the vocals. The instrumental disc is the one we end up listening to most of the time. Why would the band give us the music-only CD in addition to the regular one? My first thought was that they are justifiably proud of the music and want the audience to hear it. But the audience can hear it as it was meant to be played on the vocal CD. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the band thought the vocals were more of a hinderance than a help and released the music-only disc so the audience could appreciate the band without the distraction of the vocals.

Whatever the reason for releasing two discs, the result is the best of both worlds for the listener. If you like the work being done by the MCs, it’s there for you to enjoy; if you think the arrangements and musicianship sound better when heard alone, you can listen to them with the vocals taken out. “Tell Me Something” works either way and can be enjoyed by listeners who like soul reviews, hip hop, or a combination of the two. It’s all good.

Jill Scott is a talented woman who has been attracting a good deal of critical paise for her singing, songwriting and acting since her first album “Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1″ was released in 2000.  Her third album in the series, “The Real Thing” has received more than its share of positive reviews.  I’m afraid I’m not hearing it.

“The Real Thing” is a collection of songs that sound less like an attempt to make music than a machine tooled product designed to fill the music slot in the lives of people who define themselves in terms of the brands of the clothes and shoes they wear, the handbags they carry, and the cosmetics they use.  “The Real Thing” sounds like a lifestyle accoutrement for the people whose understanding of human relationships comes from Oprah and Dr. Phil.  Musicianship and arrangments are pro-tooled settings for Scott’s often breathy and dramatically emotional sung / spoken lyrics.  It’s like something an ad agency whips up as auditory background for the product in a TV ad.

I’m clearly deaf to whatever charms “The Real Thing” might possess and just as clearly am not part of the audience the album was manufactured for.  If it sounds like you are part of this audience, the positive reviews the album has received in the music press are more likely to capture what you hear on the CD.  However, if you find that your tastes in music are more or less in agreement with mine, especially with regard to female vocalists like Annie Lennox, Alice Smith, Sharon Jones, or Amy Winehouse, avoid “The Real Thing”.

Minipop are well named.  They’re a quartet out of San Francisco that writes small jewel-like dream pop songs that each have the sound of having been burnished to a fine sheen before they were released to the general public.  “A New Hope” is their debut album.

If you think dream pop is all about twee cutesy-poo, “A New Hope” may surprise you.  Lead singer and lyricist Tricia Kanne has a hint of little-girl fragility in her voice but it is fully offset by the adult heft of her lyrics.  Her opening “Oh Matthew, do you know what you do? / You give me bruises / Oh Matthew, I don’t know what to do” over Velvet Underground-like guitar chords on “Ask Me A Question” is spooky.  And it gets spookier when the song leads to the rousing hooked chorus of “I like the way you are” and you realize Minipop’s guitar and keyboard player’s first name is Matthew.  It’s a great tune. 

The rest of the band also belie the twee image of dream pop with strong drumming from Lauren Grubb, varied and at times fuzzed out rhythm guitar from Matthew Swanson and solid, driving bass from Nick Forte.  Sure, they do mid- and down-tempo numbers but they also do well structured pop rock.  They also do hooks well and many of the songs on “A New Hope” worm their way into your head only to come out later to entertain you when you’re away from your music platform.  Several times after “A New Hope” came into the house I turned to something else after a couple of listens only to go back to it again when I found their songs kept coming back to mind.  Kanne’s multitracked vocals are what will likely attract initial attention but once you start to pay attention to the rest of the band you realize this is a tight ensemble with solid chops that does not lack for songwriting craft.

“A New Hope” won’t be for everyone but if you like well-written and well-played pop rock with a dreamy edge give Minipop a listen. 

With their debut album ”All Hour Cymbals” Yeasayer has accomplished something most bands never achieve - an album that is both rooted in popular music forms and has a sound and approach that is so unique they don’t sound like anyone else.  Their songs are rich with American, Middle Eastern, Indian and African influences and end up sounding like music that is native to a culture that doesn’t exist.  If “All Hour Cymbals” is any evidence, it should.

Yeasayer is a quartet composed of Chris Keating (guitar, vocals), Anand Wilder (keyboards, vocals), Ira Wolf Tuton (bass), and Luke Fasano (drums).  Listening to “All Hour Cymbals” it sounds like all, or at least some, of them are also accomplished at the mixing board as the music often has layer on layer of instruments, percussion and choir-like harmonies or chants.  Middle Eastern instruments, African rhythms, tribal chants, and soaring choirs weave in and out of the music in a polyrhythmic stew.  With all of these bits and pieces it should be a jumbled mess but it’s not.  The melding of this wide variety of influences is exquisite and the soundscape is kept clean and uncluttered.  Independently of their skill as musicians and songwriters, Yeasayer are masterful at putting it all together.  With everything that’s going on in these songs, they still sound natural and easy.  Organic.  It’s this seeming naturalness that makes the music sound so rooted as if it comes from a culture that has existed for eons. 

Yeasayer has been attracting a good deal of favorable attention and it remains to be seen whether the band can keep it together under the flood of positive press.  For right now, “All Hour Cymbals” is a superb example of why getting stuck listening to the music that was popular when you were young is a big mistake.  If you’re not paying attention to what’s going on now, you’re going to miss CDs like “All Hour Cymbals” and that would be unfortunate.  Albums like this don’t come along very often but when they do they make listening to all the variations on a theme you’ve heard too many times before worth it.  “All Hour Cymbals” is the kind of album people go back to time and again over the years.  Strongly recommended.

“U2 by U2″ is a biography of the band as told through segments taken from lengthy interviews with vocalist Bono, guitar player Edge, bass player Adam Clayton, drummer Larry Mullen Jr., and manager Paul McGuinness.  It’s a large format coffee-table size book that combines hundreds of pictures with extensive text.  The large format makes the book a pain in the ass to read, but that’s a minor quibble.  There’s a lot here for fans of the band.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, it’s pretty hard to deny that U2 are unlike any other rock band.  From the time they first got together in 1976 through their most recent album “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” they have have never rested on their laurels but have always tried to produce new music.  During the 1980s culminating with ’87’s “The Joshua Tree” they produced some of the most moving and uplifting music ever to come out of the rock genre.  Through the 1990s they changed it up by adding dance and electronica elements to their sound and in the process lost a significant portion of their fanbase.  With the turn of the new century they engineered something of a return to their earlier form and their popularity began to grow again.  They have stood as proud symbols of personal and public responsibility in a field noted for self-absorption and excess, have then succumbed to the self-absorption and excess of the rock-star life, and, in the person of Bono, have become deeply involved in the day-in, day-out struggle to bring aid to people who desperately need it in Africa.  Other celebrities talk the talk but U2 has walked the walk.  There is no other group in the world like them.  I thoroughly enjoyed returning to the recently released deluxe edition of “The Joshua Tree” and was absolutely thrilled by “U23D“.  With that recent history I really wanted to like “U2 By U2″.  But then I read it.

The book has several strengths.  Each of the four band members comes through as a distinct individual; by the time you finish, you have a pretty good idea who’s talking simply by reading what they have to say - you don’t need the name attached to the quote anymore.  Clayton sounds like an easy going and pleasant man who feels like he is along for the ride and is delighted to be so.  Mullen comes across as deeply pragmatic, rooted, and distrustful of new things.  He’s the guy who often shines the cold light of rationality on Bono’s extravagant flights of fancy.  Edge is mostly about the music.  U2 has sounded the different ways they have because the Edge has become interested in different kinds of music over the years and worked tirelessly to develop the effects he gets from his guitars and keyboards.  Bono comes through as something of a self-obsessed drama queen.  For him, everything is epic, nothing is ordinary, everything is symbolic, and it’s almost always all about Bono.  He’s also a great storyteller.  They all sound thoughtful and you often wish you could pursue the conversation further with each of them.

“U2 by U2″ is especially strong in its discussion of the music.  When they talk about their earliest years it’s striking how much they sound like any one of a million other groups of kids who got together to play music with the dream of becoming a band.  They started where all of us started.  For people who are interested in this sort of thing the most interesting part of the book is their discussion of how most of their recorded songs were created.  They rarely make music by either Edge or Bono coming in with a song that the others modify.  Instead much of their music seems to slowly come into form as bits and pieces from many sources aggregate, intermesh, break apart and recombine.  It comes across almost like an undirected organic process in which everyone contributes.  Much of this is fascinating.

So why did I end up being dissatisfied with the book?  U2 has marketed itself as a band that cuts through the bullshit and tells it like it is and “U2 by U2″ appears to have this quality.  However as I read more and more of the book it semed like I was getting less and less of a real sense of who these guys are and what this band is like.

A number of examples could be brought forth but one will do the job.  In the 1980s Bono visited El Salvador and reacted with outrage and righteous indignation over US involvement in supporting the terrorist regime that was running rampant in the country.  The result was songs like “Bullet the Blue Sky” and “Mothers of the Disappeared”.  In the 2000s the same Bono was prominently photographed palling around with US President George W. Bush who headed a US government conducting a disasterous war in Iraq and renditions of political prisoners to secret prisons in countries that do not abide by the Geneva Conventions for the purpose of torturing them for “information”.  The contrast is striking and one can’t help but wonder how Bono got from one place to the other.  As you read “U2 By U2″ it becomes clear that Bono is a thoughful man who is rarely content with accepting the easy answer to difficult or complex questions.  You would really like to hear what he has to say about the stark contrast between his actions in the 1980s and 2000s, not to defend or condemn, but simply to understand where he’s coming from.

The intersection of Bono, Bush, El Salvador and Iraq is addressed in “U2 By U2″ but not by Bono.  Other band members say that Bono’s activities raised some issues but that they trust Bono in political matters.  This is all well and good but it is hardly satisfying if you’re interested in what Bono thinks about all this.  Bono’s contribution to the topic is to report that Bush is a really funny guy who cracks good jokes and is “very personable in person”.  Other than to note that he and Bush have different opinions about Iraq, that’s it.  From a guy who can and does go on at length about how he feels about the smallest thing and how he is affected by anything going on in the world around him, this feels like a major cop out.  By having band members address the issue in a superficial manner while Bono remains silent, “U2 By U2″ gives the impression of forthrightness without the substance.

As I read more and more of “U2 By U2″ and felt the disconnect between the book and I growing ever wider I wondered what had happened.  What did I miss?  Where did I go wrong?  And then Paul McGuinness, U2’s manager, said something that provided the key that unlocked the book for me.  He was discussing the choice of tracks that would go on U2’s career retrospective album “Best Of 1990-2000″ when he said

The mythological aspects of a great band are something we’ve always been aware of, as I think The Beatles were and the Rolling Stones are.  I don’t think it’s surprising that U2 are protective of the way people regard them.

Reading “protective of the way people regard them” was like a light going on in a dark place.  Well, duh.  “U2 By U2″ is a very sophisticated exercise in impression management.  It’s a marketing ploy.  The book is a vastly more sophisticated 21st century variant of the “Mickey is a Taurus and his favorite color is blue” marketing fluff that filled liner notes for bubble-gum pop bands in the 1960s.  I suppose it was very naive of me to think a band like U2 would really lay it out in a book they wrote about themselves and so my disappointment that they didn’t should probably not be taken very seriously as a criticism of “U2 By U2″.  Still, it’s hard not to think that the band of 1987 would have stepped up and dealt with the heart of the matter rather than polishing their image.

“U2 By U2″ is filled with great stories, great pictures and a whole lot of interesting information about how most of the band’s songs were created.  Readers interested in what the band thinks about some of the political and musical aspects of their career that have proven to be controversial will have to look elsewhere.  If you like U2 and can accept the book as a marketing tool designed to protect their self-perceived status as a mythological band, you’ll probably enjoy “U2 By U2″ a great deal.  Bono has often been quoted as describing “Achtung Baby” as “the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree”.  Some people responded that it sounded more like four men running away from The Joshua Tree.  On the evidence provided by “U2 By U2″, they’re still running.

Hot Hot Heat is a four-piece out of British Columbia who had a series of successful EPs and albums on various indie labels before signing with Warner.  “Happines LTD.” is their second major label CD. 

The group began as one of the more noteworthy of the garage rock / new wave revisionst bands that flooded the market in the early 2000’s.  “Happiness LTD.” has its foundation in this style of music but the group sounds like they’re trying to reach beyond their early boundaries to embrace a wider musical palette.  “Outta Heart” and album closer “Waiting for Nothing” are ballads and, at least in the case of “Outta Heart” the band pulls it off.  The CD would not have suffered had they decided to leave “Waiting for Nothing” in the can.  “Good Day to Die” starts off with a drum intro that sounds like the lead in to one of the Phil Spector produced Crystals tunes and the song continues in that mode with layers of strings, percussion and handclaps.

While the moves into new territory are largely successful, the band’s greatest strength remains the bouncy, jagged, garage new wave music they have been doing since the beginning.  They are strong on melodic hooks and rhythmically infectious music.  It’s hard to liston to most of “Happiness LTD.” without moving and you find yourself singing their melody lines absent-mindedly at odd times.

Musically Hot Hot Heat is solid.  They’re both tight and inventive in the studio which is a powerful combination.  Many of the tunes have little added bits and treats like the backwards guitar that instantly invokes the Beatles on the fade out of “Harmonicas & Tambourines”.  Where they may have something of a weakness is in the vocals.  Singer and keyboard player Steve Bays is not a weak singer, not at all, but he sings in the adnoidal vocal style that is common among the new wave singers.  On “Happiness LTD.” it sounds like he is moving toward a richer more nuanced vocal style.  He may well get there but he’s not there yet and his voice is much more convincing when he’s bleating out “Frustration frustration / I hate this vacation” in “Give Up?” (a great tune) than he does when pouring out his lovesickness on the dreary “Waiting for Nothing”.

“Happiness LTD.” is a solid effort from a band that started strong and is moving to expand it’s musical compass.  Although it has its ups and downs, the album indicates they have what it takes to succeed and provides both enjoyment now and reason to look forward to their next offering.

Voice of the Seven Woods is a trio composed of Rick Tomlinson (guitar, sitar, oud, vocals, piano, percussion), Chris Walmsley (drums, percussion, piano) and Pete Hedley (electric bass, violin).  It looks like the CD was created through electronic communication with each musician adding their part seperately as all three are given recording credit from different locations.

 Much of the music on “Voice of the Seven Winds” is instrumental, acoustic, up-tempo, and faintly psychedically tinged, featuring Tomlinson’s work on guitar, oud or sitar.  There are two brief vocals by Tomlinson, who is not an accomplished singer.  He is, however, a very accomplished stringed instrument player.  His work is both technically adept and melodically and harmonically enjoyable.  A number of the tracks on “Voice of the Seven Winds” are drone or raga influenced and this style of playing can quickly become monotonous to listeners who are not familiar enough with it to appreciate variations that are often subtle.  Tomlinson largely avoids this problem through the use of guitar lines that are melodically varied and interesting.  His playing is also structured enough that it rarely sounds like technically advanced noodling.  “Return from Bzyantium” is especially nice.

If Voice of the Seven Winds did construct this album in seperate locations they did an awfully good job of it.  Drums, bass and guitar work together smoothly and harmoniously.  If they can sound this well-integrated and tight working at a distance, I would love to hear them play live after they’ve had a bit of time to practice playing in the same room together.

It took me awhile to warm up to “Voice of the Seven Winds” but once I did I found myself enjoying it more and more.  Listeners who like melodic yet adventuresome acoustic instrumental music played by adept musicians who are much more interested in the music they are making than in the marketing category used to sell it would do well to search out “Voice of the Seven Winds” and give it a listen.

VHS or Beta are a trio out of Louisville, Kentucky featuring Craig Pfunder on guitar, piano and vocals, Mark Palgy on bass, and Mark Guidry on drums.  They began playing dance punk with an emphasis on the dance.  “Bring on the Comets” is their third full length and marks a move toward more song-oriented music.

The band’s shift toward a different style of music is nicely captured by the first two tracks on the album.  CD opener “Euglama” is a brief intro that begins with a bass heavy dance groove that sounds like it was recorded underwater.  The riff grows into clarity with the addition of guitars while still keeping the basic dance beat and then sinks back to the underwated bass on the fade.  This takes a bit more than one minute.  Pause between tracks and along comes “Love in My Pocket” which opens with a minor variation on the “Euglama” riff played in the same rhymic pattern with crashing guitar chords.  It takes the riff in a completely different direction and is as fine an indication that a band is going to try to build new structures from their old base as I’ve heard in quite some time. 

On ”Bring on the Comets” VHS or Beta are exploring guitar-based alt rock with big vocal choruses and something of a 1980’s influence.  The dance aspect is fairly subdued and on some tracks is only noticeable as a more flowing groove in the drums than you would typically find in an alt-rock band.  Many of the songs on “Bring on the Comets” have bits and pieces that sound somewhat familiar like you’ve heard something almost like that somewhere else.  This isn’t too surprising for a band that’s trying to break out of an old groove into something new and hasn’t yet quite found their way.  It’s also not a bad thing as VHS or Beta have a talent for vocal and musical hooks that is worth cultivating as they work to find their own voice.  Pretty much everything on the album is enjoyable.

With “Bring on the Comets” VHS or Beta sounds like a band on the brink with no clear indication of which way they’ll go.  They could go back to the dance punk they started with, they could turn into the sap band of the month that lives to have its tunes played during emotional moments on TV shows that have an audience that buys ringtones, or they could take the path suggested on “Bring on the Comets” of melding riffalicious dance and hook-laden rock into a mix that is uniquely their own.  If they choose the latter, people will look back at “Bring on the Comets” and say “Listen, it started there.”

Michael Fakesch is one half of the German electronica duo Funkstorung (”radio interference”) who are probably best known outside the dance club world for their work with Bjork.  “Dos” is his second solo album.

“Dos” seems an odd album in many ways.  The CD is credited to Frakesch but it presents itself as a thoroughgoing collaboration between Frakesch and vocalist Taprikk Sweezee.  Not only does the title, “Dos”, take pains to point out that there are two creators here but the graphics on the elaborate CD packaging (a two headed dog, a head made from two faces etc.) emphasize that this is a collaborative effort.  Frakesch and Sweezee wrote or cowrote all the tracks and both are given programming and production credits.  It makes you wonder why the two of them didn’t give themselves a unique name or at least list the CD under both their names.

The music is bass-driven funk with electronic additions and overlays.  And here’s a second odd thing.  Much, although not all, of the music on “Dos” is very much in the style of Prince.  At first listen the combination of Frakesch’s electronics with the deep funk and extremely Prince-like vocals is intriguing.  However, Sweezee’s vocals are so Prince-like that after listening to the album a couple of times you begin to wonder whether he might have some identity issues .  Prince has made much more than his share of great music that has been and continues to be profoundly influential but this kind of obsessive mimicry is a little scary.  It sounds more like a fetish than an hommage.

Frakesch lays down exquisitely timed and layered electronic beats and flourishes.  His work is rich in variety from measure to measure as rhythms are often carried by different effects over time but it doesn’t sound cluttered.  His work on “Dos” is rich, clean and precise and it works very well. 

“Dos” also features real musicians in the form of a trio of drummers, bass and guitar players, a human beat musician and a trombonist.  Atypical for an electronic dance album, their contributions greatly enrich the CD.  There’s an unnamed hidden track, that combines Frakesch’s electronics with what sounds like musicians playing drums and bass and Helei Jansson’s trombone in what I think is the best bit on the album.  Too bad it’s so short and can’t be cued on the CD player.

Fans of very well executed club-oriented dance music with a heavy funk emphasis will probably enjoy “Dos”.  If you don’t like Prince, you won’t like this.  If you do you like Prince, you might wonder why anyone would bother with such a slavish vocal imitation but if you leave the vocals aside, there’s a wealth of good dance music here.  Come to think of it, maybe that’s why it’s listed as a Michael Frakesch album.