Review: Various Artists, Brazilian Beats Boxset

Usually when you buy a CD and it’s not what you thought it was going to be it’s a huge disappointment.  That’s especially true when the CD is a boxset that contains more of the unexpected and costs more than a single disc.  For some reason I thought the Brazilian Beats Boxset was a collection that surveyed Brazilian music from the club-oriented dance music of contemporary Rio to more traditional forms of music.  Brazilian music is known for its rhythmic variety and sophistication and I was hoping the collection would provide examples along with a hefty booklet that would allow me to identify which rhythm was which.  I don’t know where I got this idea but it’s not at all accurate which didn’t turn out to be such a bad thing at all.

Brazilian Beats is the name given to a series of eight CDs of Brazilian club music.  The series was compiled and released by the Mr. Bongo label out of Brighton England and the boxset simply collects all eight discs in one package.  The accompanying booklet gives track listing, copyright info, and reproduces the pictures on the carboard sleeves containing each of the disks.  It’s minimal to the point of insulting. 

The saving grace here is the music.  Based on what you hear on any one of these discs the cliub scene in Rio is exceptionally varied.  House, disco, funk, jazz, techno, lounge, marching band and a dozen other influences can be heard here.  Throughout it all there is an emphasis on sophisticated rhythm and even when some of the lounge tunes lay on the cheese you can usually drill down to an interesting rhythm track. 

I don’t know why anyone would need eight discs of this music but I have to say that having it in the house has been a delight.  Buying the boxset was a mistake that it turns out I’m very glad to have made.  I believe each of the disks can be bought individually and listeners who like rhythmic Latin dance music might want to sample the series with the purchase of a single disk.  Any of the disks will do and whichever one you buy will give you at least a track or two that is different from anything you’ll find on any of the others.  If you really like the single disk, think about getting the collection next because picking up all eight discs in the boxset costs substantially less than purchasing each disc alone. 

While the music on Brazilian Beats may often serve as background music, it is the kind of background music that is rich, varied and often takes you away from whatever it is you were doing for a round of sultry dancing.  And that’s never a bad thing.   

Review: We Are Wolves, Total Magique

We Are Wolves come out of Montreal along with Arcade Fire, The Dears, Wolf Parade, and Malajube among others.  Although they share part of their name with Wolf Parade and a label with Malajube they don’t sound like any of them.  Whether or not you think this is a good thing will depend on how much you enjoy dance punk with yelping chanting where the vocals usually go.  No matter what you think of We Are Wolves, what’s going on in Montreal?  So many varied bands producing such interesting varieties of music.

We Are Wolves is a trio that features analog synths, grimy guitars and those yowling vocals in the service of simplistic riff driven dance punk.  They have a good grasp of simple four/four rhythms, the power of riff reps and energy.  Harmony and melody are only vaguely grasped.  Much of this music is going to sound very familiar to listeners familiar with the CBGB scene that produced the Ramones, the East Village’s No Wave bands or the first wave of punk led by the Sex Pistols out of the UK.  The last track on the CD, “Total Solide”, sounds like they got hold of a Daft Punk CD and said “Hey, we can do that too!”  It provides a nice break from the insistent  hammering that has gone before but at this point in their development it’s pretty much a weak Daft Punk imitation.  If they stick with this style of music that may change.

One thing We Are Wolves does well is energy.  These tracks are played with a drive and enthusiasm that are infectious even if not very original.  Listeners who like to pogo while the band makes a racket and haven’t gotten around to tuning back to those “old” dance punk and Death Disco scenes may well find a lot here that sounds fresh and if you liked those genres you may be delighted to hear a new band taking up the flag again. 

Review: The Raconteurs, Consolers of the Lonely

When film companies don’t make a movie available for review before release it’s a sure sign the movie sucks so hard they don’t want the critics to spread the word before they can fleece the suckers for at least something over the opening weekend.  With this in mind I was dismayed when the Raconteurs released  Consolers of the Lonely within a week of announcing they were even working on a second album.  The CD was out before anyone had a chance to listen to it and I thought it was going to be terrible.  Wrong again. 

The Raconteurs are something of an all-star band composed of critical darlings Jack White (guitars, vocals, synthesizer) and Brendan Benson (vocals, guitar, keyboards) and indie stalwarts Jack Lawrence (bass, vocals) and Patrick Keeler (drums, percussion).  All-star bands are usually cesspits of ego and pomp but if any of that’s going on with The Raconteurs it doesn’t come through on Consolers of the Lonely.  This is a very good band composed of four guys who not only play well but play well together.  The range of different types of music they cover is impressive and all four of them make equal contributions to its success.  Hard to ask for much more than that.

The title track opens the album with four bars of a lurching blues-rock guitar riff that is met with a drum rhythm played at a slightly faster tempo that seems to clash with the guitar.  The new tempo drives the song until they bring the guitar riff back and meld the two together after a verse or two.  It’s an arresting and very effective way to begin an album and it serves as a good indication of what’s coming.  These guys are going to mix it up both in terms of the variety of music they play and in the inventive ways they juxtapose rhythms, riffs and musical styles.  “The Switch and the Spur” is a widescreen, big sky western of a song.  “Top Yourself” is a stanky blues driven by a killer rhythm shift.  “Many Shades of Black” is a horn-driven R&B number.  “Pull This Blanket Off” sounds something like Exile on Main St era Stones.  And so it goes, each track presents something new and the more you listen, you more nuance you hear in the carefully layered instruments and vocals. 

Not everything works, at least not to my ears.  “Salute Your Solution” is about three minutes of run of the mill rock with obnoxious caterwauling vocals.  It’s also the first single released from the album which would seem to indicate that although I really like their album I’m not really in tune with the band.

A raconteur is a skilled storyteller and if we equate telling stories with playing different types of music, The Raconteurs take their name seriously.  We are in the hands of a group of skilled musicians here who are intent on telling us a series of interesting and very different stories.  If you like inventive rock that is very well played, give Consolers of the Lonely some time. 

Review: Various Artists, Back to Mine, Krafty Kuts

What do club DJs listen to when they get back home after the gig?  Providing an answer to that question is the idea behind the long running Back to Mine series of mix CDs.  Krafty Kuts (Martin Reaves) is an up and coming UK DJ and his Back to Mine is the 28th volume in the series. 

The set combines 18 segments of hip hop, funk, acid jazz, and various types of dance music into a mix that Krafty Kuts says was intended to “stand the test of time”.  As you would expect from a club DJ, the transitions between songs are often well done with the move from Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth’s “They Reminisce Over You” to the Incredible Bongo Band’s cover of “In-A-Gadda-D-Vida” being especially nice.  The set opens with “Pork Pie Stride” by obscure acid jazz group the Sharpshooters which is a terrific find.  If the mix had continued in the vein of fine and generally forgotten tracks like this it would have been a stone cold winner.  Unfortunately too many of the tunes in the mix such as Paul Hardcastle’s “Rain Forest”, Tyrone Brunson’s “The Smurf” and Nu Shooz’s “I Can’t Wait” are so familiar and so over used that they lend the entire set a feeling of been-there, done-that, tired-of-it.

Mix tapes tend to be more fun to put together than to listen to afterwards and often appeal more to the person who made them than to the listener.  The notes Krafty Kuts provides for this set indicate he put time and effort into the mix and the result has been a collection that holds both meaning and importance for him.  For the listener, on the other hand, it comes across as just another mix tape. 

Review: Modern Skirts, Catalogue of Generous Men

Every once in a while an album comes along that seems to slot so tightly into where you’re at that you listen to it endlessly and it comes to define a particular period in your life.  The three Buffalo Springfield albums did that for me in the late ’60s.  Modern Skirts’ Catalogue of Generous Men did it again in 2006.  It didn’t start out that way.  When I first put the CD on I thought “OK, heartfelt indie pop, not really my cup of tea.”  But I kept it in rotation and somewhere around the fifth or sixth time around it started to take hold.  Once it sunk its hooks in – and Modern Skirts know hooks – it never let go.

Modern Skirts is a quartet out of Athens Georgia composed of Jay Gulley (vocals, guitar), Jojo Glidewell (piano, guitar, vocals), Philip Brantley (guitar, bass, vocals) and John Swint (drums, percussion).  Gulley’s vocals and Glidewell’s piano are often featured but the band uses a rich instrumental palette and Glidewell takes lead vocals on “City Lights”.  Modern Skirts are so masterful at melody, harmony and song construction it’s difficult to believe Catalogue of Generous Men is a first album.  The contrapuntal three part harmonies of “Tonight Before You Were Sleeping” are lovely and exquisite.  “September Song” lilts with an easy sway that perfectly captures the soft days of late summer.  “Save Me” is sung with such raw emotion that it can be hard to listen to even when you’ve heard it a hundred times before.  “My Lost Soprano” is built on a barrelhouse piano that works so well you wish Glidewell would do more of it.  Almost every song on the album sounds fully realized. 

Catalogue of Generous Men was released independently and may be hard to find but it’s more than worth the effort.  Mike Mills, the bass player in a somewhat less obscure Athens band called R.E.M., turned on to Modern Skirts and brought them to Europe to open for some of R.E.M.’s shows this summer and they’re scheduled to play a set before Duke Spirit this Saturday, June 28, at Glastonbury - what I wouldn’t give to be able to fly to the UK for that gig! – so the band’s visibility may be on the rise.  They also have a new album scheduled for release late this summer.  If you are a fan of indie pop give Modern Skirts a listen.  Or, if you’re like me and don’t get it right away, give them time to work their magic because this is a band that has the magic.  We’ve listened to Catalogue of Generous Men hundreds of times and more and its never gotten old.  It’s a brilliant album.

Review, moe., Sticks and Stones

moe. has reached an enviable place in the music industry.  They do what they do, they do it very well, they have a large enough following to keep on making music, they’re not about to set the world on fire and become the next U2, and it sounds like they’re perfectly happy with all of it.  The result has been a series of good albums that hold solid appeal for their fanbase and which provide good entry points for new listeners who enjoy the kind of music they play.

What moe. does is play guitar rock.  Their origin as a jam band is evident in both the variety of music they play and the high level of musicianship with which they play it.  The variety keeps their albums interesting while the musicianship makes them worthwhile. 

Sticks and Stones opens with “Cathedral” that has a vocal chorus that sounds so much like the Modern Skirts that I have to believe moe. spent time with the Skirts terrific album Catalogue of Generous Men.  Later in the album we get “202″ which opens with a descending marimba, rhythm guitar and percussion vamp that sounds straight out of the Frank Zappa catalog.  “All Roads Lead to Home” opens with the kind of rhythm guitar riff that Keith Richards regularly produces for the Rolling Stones.  Modern Skirts, Frank Zappa, and the Stones represent a pretty wide range of musical influences but moe. handle it all with ease.  

In a review of their prior album, Conch, I opined that moe.s weak spot was vocals.  Oops.  Turns out I was pretty far off base with that one as Sticks and Stones has both strong lead vocals and fine harmony work. 

moe. is a highly talented guitar based band who posess open ears and serious skills.  They’ve been playing together a long time and have reached a point where they value music over fame.  It’s a winning combination and if you like guitar-based rock and haven’t heard them play, give the band a listen.  You may find a group you’ll be happy to return to again and again.

Review: Various Artists, Masterpiece Created by Francois K

Francois Kevorkian has the chops.  In spades.  As told in Love Saves the Day he moved from France to New York in 1975 at the age of 21 with the hope that he could further his career as a drummer.  With no money he looked in the Village Voice for the most expensive apartment he could find whose owner was looking for a roommate.  He reasoned that anyone who could afford an expensive crib would be willing to give him a room in exchange for taking care of the place.  He ended up calling George Freeman who wouldn’t share the apartment but offered to give Kevorkian a gig as a drummer in a dance club Freeman owned called The Galaxy which was one of the hot underground dance clubs that gave birth to what became commercialized as disco.  Freeman’s idea was that Kevorkian would play live drums accompanying the tracks the club’s DJ was spinning.  The DJ was the now-legendary Walter Gibbons who was especially adept at drum, rhythm and tempo mixing.  He also hated the idea of having to work with a live drummer so he kept throwing sharp and unexpected rhythm changes at Kevorkian so the drummer would fuck up and get fired.  Kevorkian held his own and went on to a decades long career as a DJ, A&R man, remixer, producer, mixer, and recording studio  and record label owner.  In 2005 he was inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame as both a DJ and a remixer.

When the Ministry of Sound decided to institute a Masterpiece series of collections of dance music by important and influential DJs they turned to Kevorkian for the inaugural set.  The result is this three CD collection.  Each disc contains over 70 minutes of uninterrupted music that Kevorkian has dedicated to different cities.  Naples focuses on Electro, Manchester on Techno, and Tokyo on House. 

Maybe it’s his roots as a drummer or maybe it’s his long experience in the field but Kevorkian avoids the problems that turn so many DJ compilations into exercises in tedium.  First, he doesn’t fall into the trap of simply stringing a bunch of tempo-matched samples together and overlaying the whole thing with a numbing four-on-the-floor disco beat.  Kevorkian hews to a steady pulse but he plays with multiple rhythms and shifts the four up and down in the mix in ways that produce excitement rather than boredom.  He also avoids the problem common to DJ-produced music of letting a riff go on much too long.  This may work on the dancefloor but it quickly leads to disinterest when the music is playing on CD and the listener is doing something other than dancing.  Kevorkian is constantly mixing it up with electronic effects, polyrhythmic percussion, and shifting rhythm patterns.  As a result Masterpiece is one of the best DJ mixes I’ve yet come across.  That doesn’t mean that some of the music in the collection doesn’t fade into the background rather easily at times, it does, but more often than not Kevorkian will reclaim your attention and put some strut in your butt as you go about doing whatever it is you’re doing while the CD plays.

Kevorkian favors a more laid back style than dance music artists like Daft Punk or Justice but he has a deep understanding of rhythm, groove and pacing which makes Masterpiece a rich and rewarding set of music.  If Ministry of Sound continues on with the Masterpiece series, the next artists they tap are going to have a difficult time meeting the standards Kevorkian has laid down in his Masterpiece

Review: Ray Davies, Workingman’s Cafe

Paul McCartney once envisioned himself at 64 as a bit of a dodderer who would require needing and feeding.  Ray Davies, who is 64, is just as likely to skewer your comfortable and self-satisfied world view as he did when he was 24.  Davies, the main creative driving force behind the Kinks, has been more or less silent for a long time.  The last Kinks album appeared on a small indie label in 1994, he released a solo album in 1998, and then no albums until 2006’s Other People’s Lives.  Now, just two years later we get Workingman’s Cafe and based on what we hear here Davies’ absence has been our loss.  Davies has long had a reputation as a first-rate songwriter and a wry and often insightful social critic.  He hasn’t lost any of that.  Workingman’s Cafe is filled with well written songs and pointed social commentary. 

Our previous review of Damien Dempsey’s Seize the Day makes for an interesting comparison with Workingman’s Cafe.  Both Dempsey and Davies write songs that point out social and economic problems in the world around us.  Both are excellent songwriters with Dempsey having the edge in striking lyrics and Davies the better at pure songwriting craft.  Where Dempsey’s music is often fueled by righteous anger, Davies’ tends toward sarcasm and wit.  Dempsey is a young man who is impatient for change; Davies is considerably older and although he wants change and argues pointedly for it, he is more resigned to the state of the world.  Dempsey tends to defend groups that are consistently shit on by the privileged while Davies tends to point out the downsides of wider social and cultural changes.  Davies has had a reputation for yearning for the good old days in the UK since the Kinks 1968 album The VIllage Green Preservation Society and that attitude is present in Workingman’s Cafe’s title track where he looks for a workman’s diner in a world of internet cafes.  Although I don’t know, I’m guessing that when Dempsey thinks of the “good old days” in the UK he thinks of the centuries of atrocities committed by the British against the Irish.  Bit of a difference there.

Several songs on Workingman’s Cafe are concerned with the effects of globalization.  Album opener “Vietnam Cowboys” addresses the movement of manufacturing jobs from the US to slave-wage factories in Asia in juxtaposition with the spread of American pop culture over the rest of the world.  It’s a great song.   ”Hymn for a New Age” and “Peace in Our Time” are powerful cries for a change from the incessant war and cold-eyed greed that characterize so much government and corporate policy.  When Davies turns from the social to the personal he doesn’t wallow in the type of self absorption that leads so many singer-songwriters to elevate their mundane personal problems to the level of epic statements about the human condition.  In “The Morphine Song” Davies sings about his experiences in hospital after he was shot pursuing a mugger in New Orleans.  It’s a strikingly original song with a vocal hook that sinks in and refuses to let go.

I hope Workingman’s Cafe signals a return to more frequent releases from Davies who has as much to say as he did back in the day when every new Kinks album was eagerly awaited.  He’s a great songwriter and Workingman’s Cafe is a very good album.  Very nice to have him back.

Review: Damien Dempsey, Seize the Day

Let me get this out of the way up front – I think Damien Dempsey is great.  Not just good, not just brilliant.  Great.  Singing the praises of his album Live at the Olympia was the motivation for starting this blog and I still think it’s flat out, hands down, the best live album I’ve ever heard.  The interplay between Dempsey and an enormous loving audience on that album is incandescent.  I’ve also heard him play in a tiny venue before an audience of maybe 10 people and I was enthralled.  I’m a fan and have virtually no ability to objectively evaluate Seize the Day.  Be forewarned.

Dempsey’s first album, They Don’t Teach This Shit in School, was very much the work of a young and not quite ready for prime time musician.  So much more the surprise, then, when his second album, Seize the Day, was released three years later.  His song writing has fully matured, he is in absolute control of his material, and he sings and plays with a conviction that is riveting.  Dempsey comes from working class Dublin and he has a profound and deeply felt sense of outrage at the injustices suffered by the underprivileged.  In many of his songs he condemns this injustice with forceful, powerful and often poetic lyrics.  On “Celtic Tiger” he excoriates the greed that has accompanied Ireland’s recent economic renaissance and has left so many of the the working class or rural Irish behind.  On “Ghosts of Overdoses” he starkly illuminates the devastation wrought by drugs among the urban poor.  The song includes the couplet “And the ghosts of overdoses / Replaced the ghosts of tuberculosis” which Dempsey delivers like a dagger to the heart and which is as succinct a description of the plight of the urban poor at the beginning and end of the 20th century as you are likely to find anywhere.  Seize the Day is filled with moments like this as are all of Dempsey’s albums to date.

In combination with social injustice, Dempsey also has a profound sense of the ways living in a world where people expect the worst of you can drive you down to defeat.  Album opener “Negative Vibes” is a moving song about a person striving to maintain equilibrium in a demeaning world.  Seize the Day also includes the studio version of the rousing “It’s All Good” which receives an astonishing rendition on Live at the Olympia.

Dempsey is markedly influenced by traditional Irish protest music but he is also very stongly influenced by rock, hip hop, and, to a lesser extent, electronic music.  It’s a heady and powerful mix that in Dempsey’s hands comes out as a unique and compelling form of music.

Damo, as he is known at home, is one of Ireland’s most popular musicians and has won numerous Irish music awards.  One source of his popularity is that his lyrics make natural use of the history and slang of his homeland and he makes no attempt to sing with the neutral accent usually adopted by Irish singers in an effort to appeal to UK or US audiences.  Listeners unfamiliar with Irish history or contemporary Irish vernacular may find some lyrics confusing but the CD booklet contains a helpful glossary. 

Seize the Day is a terrific album that is strongly recommended for people who enjoy powerful music, exceptionally fine songwriting, and an uncompromising rejection of social injustice in all its forms.  You will fall in love with many of these songs and will then be blown away even more when you hear them performed Live at the Olympia.

Review: Common, Electric Circus

Electric Circus is a good example of one of hip hop’s problems.  The beats and effects layered on the tracks are inventive and often atypical.  Common’s rhymes are smart and thoughtful.  There’s an uncommonly wide range of music contained in the CD’s 13 tracks.  So, what’s the problem?  Well, that is the problem.  Electric Circus realizes some of the vast potential in hip hop at the expense of failing to fall into the tired old ruts that characterize the more popular sub genres of this type of music.  Common doesn’t give you phony gangsta posturing, ostentatious displays of slavery to the brand name, ludicrous self aggrandizement, or tawdry hedonism.  The result was that many hip hop aficionados who are weded to the commercial forms of the music rejected Electric Circus as not street enough.

“New Wave” nails the problem perfectly.  Produced by ?ueslove and James Poyser it calls out the hip hop performers who play the thug stereotype for money and juxtaposes a powerful syncopated hip hop beat with an airy, melodic segment sung by Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and asks “How could a nigger be so scared of change?”  Apparently the answer to that question is very easily as a segment of the hip hop audience ridiculed the track for Sadier’s contribution because she’s like, you know, white.  And French.  And it’s different.  “New Wave” is a terrific track and the melding of Sadier and hip hop is exquisite but it’s too far beyond the pale for the 50 Cent audience.  Closed ears are deaf.

Electric Circus has also been criticized for having too many guest artists which some think dilutes Common’s contribution.  In addition to Sadier, ?uestlove and Poyser the guests include Mary J. Blige, the Neptunes, Bilal, Sonny of P.O.D., Pharrell Williams, Cee-Lo and more.  I don’t know if all of these guests are a problem or not.  They contribute to the wide variety of music heard on Electric Circus and the album’s variety is one of the things I like about it.

Electric Circus is the kind of album you can listen to a hundred times and still discover bits and pieces you didn’t notice before.  It takes a long time to get old.  It also stands as a good example of how inventive and interesting hip hop can be.  In one sense hip hop is like just about every other kind of popular music.  Beneath the unimaginative and commercially successful crap there’s a wealth of exciting music.  Electric Circus is a good album to play for your friends who say they don’t like hip hop but who are capable of listening with open ears.