Review: Yellow Moon Band, Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World

The Yellow Moon Band is a quartet that plays . . .  music.  People seem to be having a hard time figuring out just what kind of music they play.  “Entangled”, one of the tracks from Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, appears on the  A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding in Your Mind compilation which has led some to categorize their music as psychedelic prog.  However, “Entangled” also appears on Fred Deakin’s (one half of the electronic music duo Lemon Jelly) Nu Balearica collection which has led allmusic.com to label the Yellow Moon Band as an electronica group.  Others have labeled them as folk, funky or groovy.

Ok, so the listeners are having a hard time figuring it out.  What does the CD say?  Nothing.  The disk I received came in a fold-over cardboard holder with a sleeve for the CD in one side and a sleeve for the pamphlet in the other.  Got the CD but didn’t get a pamphlet and the cardboard sleeve has no info about the band or the music whatsoever other than that the band wrote the music.

So what kind of music do they play?  For starters, Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World is almost entirely instrumental.  There are a couple of vocals but they are not what the music is about.  The band sounds like two guitars, bass and drums (allmusic is completely off the mark labeling this as electronica).

As I listened to Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World again and again I was overwhelmed with the feeling that it was really reminding me of something but I couldn’t quite place it.  Then I had it.  The Yellow Moon Band reminds me of the original Allman Brothers without Duane Allman, without the orientation toward blues rock, and without the jamming.  wtf?  You take all that away and what’s left?

A lot when you think about it.  Duane Allman was such a brilliant and unique guitar player (when he was on) that no one, not even the Allmans without him, sound like the Allmans with him so the Yellow Moon Band is like every other band in the world in this regard.

What about the blues rock thing?  The Allmans often used blues rock structures to bookend their jams but once they cut loose the music went where it went without regard to genre conventions or limitations.  Remember these were the guys who turned Donovan’s “There is a Mountain” into a 20 minute masterwork.  Losing the blues rock increases the similarity between the Yellow Moon Band and the Allmans as often as not.

Losing the jamming may be a problem.  The Allmans’  improvisational jams were often superb.  The Yellow Moon Band may be able to jam like that as well but the evidence isn’t on Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World. Instead what we have are tight, focused full band work outs that sound like they may have begun as jams which were then then practiced, tightened up, and refined. Pure meat, no fat.

The end result is a CD filled with tight, muscular guitar led instrumentals.  There is a clear influence of late ’60s – early ’70s psychedelic music but the Yellow Moon Band never come across as imitating someone else.  They are their own band and they’re outstanding.  Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World is one of the best CDs I’ve heard this year and is very strongly recommended if you like first-rate guitar-driven rock.

Review: Glasvegas, Glasvegas

Scotland again.  I know I’ve wondered about this before, but really . . . wtf is going on in Scotland?  Glasvegas is a four piece (James Allan, singer/songwrite; Rab Allan, guitars; Paul Donoghue, bass; Caroline McKay, drums) out of Scotland.  They were first brought to widespread attention by music impressario and fellow Scot Allan McGee who also introduced the world to Primal Scream, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Teenage Fanclub, My Bloody Valentine and Oasis.  The tenuous Oasis connection and the knowledge that Glasvegas has been ecstatically proclaimed as The Next Big Thing by some of the more hysterical elements of the UK music press might lead some US listeners to ignore the band.  This would be a big mistake.

The first thing you notice about Glasvegas is the reverb which is laid on so thick it turns the air in the room into soup when the CD is playing.  Heavy reverb can be used to mask inadequacies in the musicians playing the music.  Whether this is the case with Glasvegas awaits an opportunity to hear the band in the clear.  The second thing you notice  is that the band, its producers and its engineers are deeply infatuated with both Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound production technique and the style of music he promoted with groups like the Crystals.  This is the likely source of the heavy-handed reverb as Spector employed the same approach.  The third thing you notice is how extraordinarily good much of this music is.

Glasvegas are a startingly ambitious band.  Many of their songs are anthemic and sung with deeply felt conviction.  “Daddy’s Gone”, ranked at #2 in NME’s list of best tracks of 2007, is a cry of pain from a boy whose father abandoned his family.  In the hands of a sensitive singer/songwriter this would come out as the kind treacly pap that makes the muscle and meat crowd laugh.  Allan makes it an arresting recognition of an opportunity that once lost is lost forever.  “Stabbed” is a spoken word piece about a thug on the losing end of a gang fight set to Beethoven’s “Moonlight” piano sonata.  It’s chilling.

“Flowers and Football Tops” is one of the stronger tracks on the album.  It’s sung from the point of view of a father who learns that his son is dead from the police who come to his house to give notice.  It channels Spector and the Crystals until it ends with a massively reverbed wall of guitar chords that accompanies James Allan singing the chorus of “You are my sunshine”.  After the final line – “How can they take my sunshine away” -  Rab Allan strums a fast chord accompanied by feedback, the ever-present reverb and, buried very deep in mix, roaring cries of pain and loss.  It’s searing and utterly convincing.  Bands with dreams of being more than run-of-the-mill rock stars might try something this ambitious on their their third or fourth album well after they have established themselves and built an audience.  Glasvegas brings it on as the first track on their debut album.

Glasvegas is one of the most striking debut albums I’ve heard in a while.  The band deals with emotional material without being sappy.  They’re big, they’re confident and they play with conviction.  Glasvegas sounds like an album where the band thought they had one chance and decided to lay it all on the line and go for broke.  They won.  So did we.

Review: Lila Downs, Shake Away

Shake Away is a pretty remarkable album, but then that isn’t really surprising when you take into account that Lila Downs is a pretty remarkable woman.  Her mother, a singer, is a Mixteca Indian from Mexico; her father, a professor of cinematography and art, is an American of Scottish/English descent from Minnesota.  She lived in Mexico and California as a child, spent two years in college studying opera and classical music, dropped out and became a Deadhead following the band around the country while making jewelry to support herself, dropped out of that and returned to college eventually graduating with degrees in anthropology and voice.  And that leaves out the immersion in jazz and learning to weave among other things.

Shake Away reflects the convoluted path of Downs’ life.  Tracks range from rock  to heavily Mesoamerican influenced pop with many stops and detours along the way.  She does both original compositions and covers including an amazing version of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman”.  Her deep and husky voice and spooky delivery turns the tune from one about the woman to one sung by the woman.  She sings in both English and Spanish and one song, Lucinda Williams’ “I Envy the Wind”, is presented in both Spanish and English versions.

Her core band includes drums, bass, percussion, guitars, brass, accordian and a varity of latin instruments.  Almost every track on the album is supplemented with additional musicians that fill out the horn section, provide more guitars and sing.  Among the more notable are jazz clarinetist Anat Cohen who plays on five tracks, Cafe Tacvba’s lead vocalist (calling himself Ixaya Mazatzin Tleytol this time around) who sings on “Perro Negro”, and La Mari de Chambao who does an outstanding duet with Downs on “Ojo de Culebra”.

In an excellent essay in Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor write about how the divisions that are typically imposed on popular music like rock, pop, country, blues and R&B are usually derived from the marketing concerns of the record industry and do not reflect the way musicians who are categorized with one of these labels often listen to or play music.  Downs work on Shake Away is an almost perfect example of this.  The album sounds like she ignored all convention and combined the many types of music she knows and enjoys sometimes across different tracks and sometimes within a single song.  Shake Away is a rich and rewarding album that is recommended for listeners with open ears, especially those who enjoy latin music.

Review: Girl Talk, Night Ripper

Girl Talk is DJ and remix artist Gregg Gillis.  Gillis garnered a good deal of popular media attention a year or so ago for his blatant use of clearly recognizable samples without regard to copyright in his remixes, his frenetic club shows which often involved him stripping to his underwear, and his obvious talent as a sample-based remixer.

Night Ripper unfolds as a nonstop combination of hip-hop and rap vocal samples combined with a wide variety of muscial underpinnings.  It’s a markedly mixed bag.  On the one hand is Gillis’ musical talent.  He is a masterful mash-up artist who is familiar with a fairly wide range of music.  The mix on Night Ripper is terrific.  Gillis uses samples that are long enough to be clearly recognizable and it’s not only fun hearing segments and riffs you know in unexpected places and combinations, but also enjoyable appreciating how well he puts it all together.

On the other hand is Night Ripper’s simplistic and often crass vocal content.  Many of the vocal samples feature the kind of crude sexual proclamations that are typical of a segment of hip hop but have come to stereotype and stigmatize the genre among people who don’t listen to very much of it.  The excuse that will be given is that this is party music so the emphasis on crass sex is appropriate.  If your idea of a party is getting down with some guys who chant “Head down, ass up, that’s the way we like to fuck” , you’ll be right at home here.  If you’re not still fourteen, it’s likely to come across as unrelentingly juvenile.

If Girl Talk had anything interesting to say, Night Ripper would be a great album.  As it is, you have terrific music combined with empty vocals that some listeners will find offensive.

Review: Kaiser Chiefs, “Off With Their Heads”

I finished my review of Kaiser Chiefs’ second album, Your Truly, Angry Mob, by writing that I was looking forward to their next CD.  Well, here it is and I’m finding that I’m enjoying “Off With Their Heads” even more than its predecessor.  The Chiefs are putting out state-of-the-art power-pop, new-new wave influenced rock.

Your Truly led off with mega-track “Ruby” which was not only the best thing on the album but  brought Kaiser Chiefs a host of new fans when it showed up on the original version of Guitar Hero.  “Ruby” sounded like a hit the first time it played and nothing on “Off With Their Heads” has this immediate impact.  However, the new album has a characteristic that is arguably even more important than an obvious hit single.  It sounds good the first time through and it’s a grower.  The more we listen to “Off With Their Heads” the more want to hear it.

Part of the reason Kaiser Chiefs music is so compelling is that they are masters of vocal hooks combined with driving, propulsive rhythms and good songwriting.  “Good Days Bad Days” with its loping bass-driven rhythm is a good example.  Out of nowhere I find myself singing “‘Cause you are / Descended from animals / And you are / Constructed of chemicals” from “Like It All Too Much” at odd times throughout the day.  And “Always Happens Like That” is so catchy it out to come with a warning label.

Another reason the Chiefs rock is that everyone in the band can play and Ricky Wilson (vocals), Andrew White (guitar), Nick Baines (keyboards), Simon Rix (bass) and Nick Hodgson (drums)  work very well together as a band.  If there are super-sized egos in the group, they are doing a good job of not letting them dominate the music.  They are also very well recorded.  Producers and engineers Mark Ronson and Eliot James give the band a sharp, clean sound with well defined and beautifully integated instruments and vocals.  “Off With Their Heads” sounds terrific on a quality sound system

“Off With Their Heads” is Kaiser Chiefs third album and each one has been better than the last.  I don’t know how long this can go on but where I was looking forward to their next album after Yours Truly, the one after “Off With Their Heads” will be an automatic purchase.  The Chiefs are on a roll (a Kaiser roll? . . .  lol).  Get ‘em while they’re hot.

Review: The Isley Brothers, It’s Your Thing The Story of the Isley Brothers

Spanning  four decades and two generations of brothers the Isley Brothers had a remarkable career.  Over the course of their professional life they did doo wop, soul, funk, disco and pop.  They recorded for Motown and formed their own record company.  Their version of “Twist and Shout” was turned into a massive hit when the Beatles did a very close copy.  They employed and recorded with a guitar player who called himself Jimmy James before he reverted to his given name and became world famous as Jimi Hendrix.  For quality, consistency and longevity, the Isleys are hard to beat.

It’s Your Thing is a three disc collection that does a fine job of covering their extended and varied career.  Each disc covers a chronlogically delimited segment of their output although the songs on each disc are not chronologically arranged.  This works very well as Disc 1 opens with a live buildup to their song “Shout” taken from a Yankee Stadium concert, the studio version of “Shout (Parts 1 and 2)” and a version of “Shout” recorded live from the TV show Shindig.  That sounds like a lot of “Shout” but it works very well.

Disc 1 covers 1957 to 1970.  Along with their well known hits “Shout” and “It’s Your Thing” it includes two tracks with Hendrix playing guitar.  ”Testify (Parts 1 and 2)” is a rave up soul shouter with the brothers mimicking well known soul singers of the era like James Brown, Jackie Wilson and Stevie Wonder in which Hendrix plays run-of-the mill backing guitar.  ”Move Over and Let Me Dance” is a revelation.  Not only is Henrix’s early guitar style unmistakeable but his vocal style is explicitly foreshadowed by whichever of the Isley’s is singing lead.

Disc 2 covers 1971 to 1975 and if all you know about the Isleys are their big crossover 1960’s hits, this CD will come as a big surprise.  Recording for their own T-Neck record label the Isleys produced a string of monster tracks during this brief 5 year period.  Ernie Isley joined the group in 1969 and his rock influenced guitar allowed them to rework their 1960’s hit “Who’s That Lady” into the funk-rock jam “That Lady (Parts 1 and 2)”.  The rock influence was also notable on their covers of Seals & Crofts’ “Summer Breeze”, James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” and Stephen Stills’ “Love the One You’re With” all of which are included here.  In addition to their genre crossing soul-rock hybrids the Isleys were knocking out funk anthems (“Fight the Power Parts 1 and 2″), straight up funk jams (“Lay Away”) and soul ballads (“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight”).  Of the three discs, this is the one that keeps finding it’s way back into our CD player.

Disc 3 covers 1976 to 1996.  During this period the Isleys did some disco, broke up and came back together again, and did more than their share of cheesy love ballads.  There are good tracks here but this 20 year period is clearly that of a band in decline from the exciting ’60s and the extraordinary early ’70s.

The collection comes with a booklet with the typical hyped-up lauditory essays and a well-done discography of the tracks included in the set.  Their are also interesting sections with musicians like Maurice White, Bobby Womack and Aaron Neville along with the various Isleys talking about their career.  Overall, the booklet is better than average.

It’s Your Thing does an excellent job of covering the Isley Brothers long and highly influential career.  If you’re looking for an Isley career retrospective, this is the one.

Review: Buddy Guy, Skin Deep

Sometime around 1990 Alligator Records put a promotional tour on the road headlined by Buddy Guy.  I caught the show in a rundown VFW that was called a “hall” but was more like a shack.  It was the kind of place where the bar had been been nailed together from 2×4’s and plywood, mismatched straightback chairs and scarred tables were scattered haphazardly about, and the “stage” was a small platform raised six inches off the floor against a side wall.  The place stank of old beer, stale sweat and dead ends.  

I forget who the opening act was.  Lucky Peterson and Kenny Neal combined to deliver a roaring second set that came within an eyelash of setting the place on fire.  When they finished the beer was fresh, the sweat was dripping and there was no end in sight.  The place was hotter than a motherfucker.  Guy was the headliner but it surely looked like Peterson and Neal had taken the crowd as high as it could go.

Guy’s band came on sometime around 1:00 am.  They were hard and tight but there was no Buddy Guy.  Okay, I thought, they’re using the opening where the band does a number and then they introduce the leader.  The opening number hit the break and Guy’s unmistakeable guitar came roaring from . . . from where?  He wasn’t on stage and there wasn’t any dressing room or curtain he could enter from.  Was he crouched down hiding behind one of the amps?  Nope.  People began looking around the club, was he in the crowd?  Nope.  Finally somebody found him.  The son of a bitch was out in the parking lot all by himself ripping off a raging guitar lead that ignited the bonfire that Peterson and Neal had laid.  People went berserk and spilled out the door.  Surrounded by screaming people Guy ramped it up higher.  It was incandescent.

Buddy Guy was 54 years old that night.  But that was then and this is now and now Buddy Guy is 72.  72 with a new record.  Can he still bring it?  Are you fucking kidding me?  He can bring it and take it back home again.  The idea of a 72 year old man singing I’m-a-stud songs seems ridiculous until you hear Guy on numbers like “Out in the Woods” and album opener “”Best Damn Fool”.  Then you think maybe it ain’t so ridiculous, you think maybe you better lock up your wives and daughters.  Guy doesn’t sound “good for his age”, he sounds dangerous.

Skin Deep has attracted attention because of the presence of a number of high profile guests like Robert Randolf, Eric Clapton, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks.  The guests fit seemlessly with Guy and his band and they all acquit themselves admirably but the story here is Buddy Guy.  He sings with the voice and conviction of a man a third his age and he can play guitar in circles around almost anyone on the planet.  This cat can play.  One of the nicer features of the CD’s packaging is that it lists the guitar Guy plays on each track so non-guitar playing listeners who may have heard about, say a ‘57 Strat or a ‘74 Telecaster can link the sound with the guitar.

This is a terrific album from a man who is a national treasure.  The title may be Skin Deep but Guy is coming from deep in the marrow and he’s just as exciting now as he was when he was a youngster playing out in the parking lot.

Review: Grupo Fantasma, Sonidos Gold

35 seconds in and you’ll know whether or not you’re going to like Sonidos Gold.  ”El Sabio Soy Yo”, the opening track starts with four bars of a huge and arresting funk drum vamp.  At 10 seconds a powerful soul-review horn section is laid over the drums for 8 bars. Grupo Fantasma then drives the whole thing to a rollicking cumbia at the 12 bar point.  It kills.  We were hooting, hollering and dancing the very first time we heard it and we haven’t stopped months later.

Grupo Fantasma is an Austin-based Latin big band that mixes funk, soul, cumbia, salsa, rumba and umpteen other latin rhythms in a high energy stew that never quits throughout Sonidos Gold.  They are also something of an oddity in the music business as they’ve built their reputation almost solely on word of mouth and incendiary live shows.  After selling thousands of CDs out of the back of their van during live gigs they were offered major label support.  They turned it down in order to retain full creative control of their music and how it’s packaged.  

Based on Sonidos Gold, it sounds like they made the right decision.  The album has been in constant rotation in our house for months; we just can’t seem to get it out of the CD player.  Typically an album is reviewed here after it drops out of the mix and finds it’s way to the storage rack.  Sonidos Gold is the exception to that rule.  I expect we’ll be listening to this one until another one of Grupo Fantasma’s albums comes into the house.  If you would like an introduction to Latin rhythms, Sonidos Gold would be a great choice as it combines these rhythms with what may be the more familiar soul and funk.  If you are a fan of powerful big band Latin music Sonidos Gold is highly recommended.  Good times.

Review: Robert Forster & Grant McLennan, Intermission

Robert Forster and Grant McLennan were the creative heart of the Go-Betweens, an Australian band known for their scintillating pop and alt rock.  The Go-Betweens released six strong and critically praised albums from 1982 to 1988 and then broke up.  They got back together in 2000 and continued producing beautiful and well written pop until McLennan passed away in his sleep from an apparent heart attack in 2006.  

From 1988 until they reunited in 2000, Forster and McLennan each released a series of solo albums.  Intermission is a two disc set, one devoted to each of the musicians, that collects tracks from these solo albums.  The tracks on each of their respective dics were chosen by Forster and McLennan.  The discs come packaged with a booklet that contains the lyrics for each song along with the musicians playing on each track.

Fans of the Go-Betweens who don’t have Forster and McLennan’s solo albums will especially enjoy Intermission.  The expert songcraft that defined the Go-Betweens is equally evident here.  Forster is the more adventuresome songwriter while, at least to my ears, McLennan is the better singer.  Together they were brilliant; apart they are each very good in their individual ways.  

If you are not familar with the work of Forster and McLennan I would recommend trying a Go-Betweens album before Intermission.  We have particularly enjoyed 2003’s Bright Yellow Bright Orange.  If you like what you hear you are in the wonderful position of either trying more Go-Betweens or listening to what Forster and McLennan each did on their own.  Either way you win.

Review: Various Artists, Summer of Love, 40th Anniversary

On September 2, 2007 a free concert was held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park celebrating the 40th anniversary of the so-called Summer of Love.  This CD/DVD collection is a record of that event.  With two CDs and 2 DVDs at a price less than $25 it is a very generous collection.  Whether or not it’s worth it’s low price will depend on how much the listener/viewer is willing to put up with in order to hear some well played music or perhaps wallow in nostalgia as the case may be.

The quality of playing on many of the tunes here is very high.  Whoever these people are (more on that later), many of them can really play.  As would be expected at a gig like this, songs tend to become extended jams and more often than not, the musicians tear the place up.  There’s more than enough good music here to justify buying the collection.

The vocals are another story.  Some are good, others are not.  Although every song on the collection is played or sung with great enthusiasm, there are several cases where notes the singer could hit in their youth are well beyond their current abilities.  There are also cases where the ability to sing in key is a distant memory.  If you can handle enthusiastic screeching, this won’t be a problem.

I started to watch the DVDs but quickly gave it up.  From the little I saw, the interviewer’s questions were beyond lame and the musicians often seemed embarrassed or annoyed by the whole staged interview process.  Maybe it gets better.

It’s hard to believe anyone could release anything with documentation this bad.  If you recognize a song, all well and good, if you don’t, you’re shit out of luck because nowhere is there a list of song titles.  I’m not making this up.  Each CD lists the bands in the order they appear but does not give the titles of the songs they play.  Also, there is no listing of the musicians who are playing in each band.  Given that more than a few of the original members of these bands have since passed away, it would be nice to know who was running around in 2007 playing under the band’s name.  

If you like the music of late 60’s San Francisco played loose, free and well, and you don’t much care who is playing it, there’s a lot here to like.  You will have to put up with some truly dreadful vocals and abysmal documentation but if it’s all about the music for you, it’s here.  If you’re attracted to the collection because of the names of the bands listed on the box, be careful.  There’s no telling who these people are and in some cases what you hear will be a major disappointment if you have fond memories of the original band.