Review: Various Artists, Discovered: A Collection of Daft Punk Samples

Discovered is just what the subtitle says it is – a collection of 12 tracks that Daft Punk used as sampling sources when they built their songs.  For each song you get copyright info and the Daft Punk track that used the sample.  I would have loved to have read something from Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo or Thomas Bangalter about why they chose to use these particular elements from these particular songs but there is no commentary of any kind included with the CD.  You get the tunes and not much more.

The collection opens with Breakwater’s “Release the Beast” from which Daft Punk took the signature riff for “Robot Rock”.  At first it’s disheartening to hear that an instantly recognizable Daft Punk riff was lifted from someone else.  Once you get over that, however, you realize just how good Daft Punk are at taking bits of other people’s music and turning them into something that blows the original out of the water.  It makes you wonder if the original artists are going to hear what Daft Punk did with their music and be bummed that they had the music and did so much less with it than Daft Punk was able to do.

For the most part Discovered is a collection of run-of-the-mill disco and funk that is likely to be of minimal interest to Daft Punk fans and no interest at all to anyone else.  There are some A-list artists here such as Sister Sledge (“Il Macquillage Lady” sampled in “Aerodynamic”), Chaka Khan (“Fate” sampled in “Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust”) and Little Anthony and the Imperials (“Can You Imagine” sampled in “Crescendolls”) but these selections are far from their best work.  “Release the Beast” is a pretty good dance track, everything else is just so-so.  Hearing George Duke’s “I Love You More” (sampled in “Digital  Love”) made me wonder for the umpteenth time how the keyboard player that played such a central role in Frank Zappa’s amazing track “Inca Roads” could have ended up doing this kind of empty, ready-for-the-elevator music.

If you’re a rabid Daft Punk fan who has to have everything that has anything to do with the group, you’ll want this CD.  Everyone else would be better served by skipping it in favor of a Daft Punk album.  Their spectacular Live 2007 comes to mind.

Review: Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip-Hop Hustler

Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip-Hop Hustler (QRS) explores the relationship between the violent and often out-of-control drug scene of the 1980s and the increasingly popular and influential hip-hop scene of the 1990s in southeast Queens.  The book is based extensively on court and government documents and interviews with many people involved in the story including most of the major players and Brown comes to conclusions that are largely at odds with the urban-heroic mythology promoted in the hip-hop world.

Brown begins his analysis with a brief description of the socio-economic differences among the neighborhoods in southeast Queens in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Around this time a fractured drug scene mainly made up of independent, small time hustlers began to coalesce into several large scale, more-or-less-organized drug gangs.  Among the major players in these gangs were Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols and his lieutenant Howard “Pappy” Mason, Kenneth “Supreme” or “‘Preme”, McGriff and his nephew Gerald “Prince” Miller and Thomas “Tony Montana” Mickens.  Through the 1980s, and more so after the introduction of crack in mid decade, the gangs became increasingly violent, ostentatious and arrogant culminating in the assassination of NYC policeman Edward Byrne who was sitting in a patrol car as part of NYPD’s round the clock surveillance of the home of a local resident whose house had been unsuccessfully fire bombed by drug hustlers unhappy with his frequent complaints to police about his block having become an open air crack market.

The killing attracted national attention, the police cracked down, and both the leaders and many of the low-level hustlers in the large drug organizations ended up dead or in jail.  While all of this was going on a number of kids who were either too young, too smart, too soft or too fearful to live the deadly life of the street were growing up and idolizing the drug hustlers who dominated their neighborhoods.  Some of these kids got into hip-hop which, at the time, was more about kids dancing and having a good time than it was about making money and selling image.  As the ’80s moved into the ’90s, the hip-hop players who desperately wanted the street cred that their lives had not earned found common cause with the hustlers who had the cred and who were retreating from a street life which had become too costly to pursue because of the increased likelihood of arrest and conviction, or of becoming the victim of random, senseless violence.  Association with hustlers who ruled the streets back in the day gave the hip-hoppers what they pretended was real street cred while the hustlers found a new and safer way to make money.

Some of the hip-hop people that Brown brings into the story are Def Jam impressario Russell Simmons, RUN-DMC’s Joseph “Run” Simmons, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels and Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell, Murder Inc.’s Irv Lorenzo and his brother Chris, Jay-Z, Tupac Shakur and 50 Cent.  Virtually all of these people had little or no real life experience as the gangsta hustlers they portray in their public roles in the music world.  Those few who did, such as 50 Cent, are much too young to have been important participants in the ’80s drug-lord world that is celebrated in their music.  These guys are seen as image mongers nostalgic for a world they were never part of and trying to gain credibility by associating with the street hustlers who were. 

Brown tells a convincing story in part because his narrative is so well documented and in part because he does not take sides and has no interest in judging the hustlers, the rappers or the police.  So much writing about hip-hop is drenched with the kind of bombastic self-mythologizing that characterizes a large part of the music that it is both a pleasure and a relief to read an author who clearly enjoys the music but who also takes a clear-eyed view of the business.

The hustlers revered by the rappers killed people for money and control of the lucrative drug trade.  The people in the music business shoot each other over juvenile spats of the kind you’re likely to find on junior high Facebook pages in an attempt to enhance their image as tough guys.  It’s hard to read about this without thinking that many of the icons of the hip-hop world are almost as sad, small and pathetic as the suburban kids who idolize them and make them rich.  If you’re a hip-hop fanboy who thinks Tupac Shakur is a cultural hero, you’re probably not going to enjoy QRS.  However, if you like hip-hop and are interested more in the way it is than in the way they like to pretend it is, QRS is likely to be an enjoyable and informative read.

Review: Annie Lennox – Live in Central Park

Annie Lennox – Live in Central Park is exactly 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.

Review: The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir

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.

Review: Panic at the Disco, Pretty. Odd

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.

Review: Catherine Wheel, Chrome

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.

Review: British Sea Power, Do You Like Rock Music?

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.

Review: Black Mountain, In the Future

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.

Review: R.E.M., Accelerate

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.

Review: Dusty Rhodes and the River Band, First You Live

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.