Review: Ladytron, Velocifero

Ladytron is an interesting band.  The group is made up of Mira Aroyo who sings, Reuben Wu and Daniel Hunt who play keyboards and Helen Marnie who both sings and plays keyboards.  Hunt and Wu are from Liverpool, Marnie is from Glasgow, Scotland and Aroyo hails from Sofia, Bulgaria.  They attracted a lot of attention with 2002’s “Seventeen” from Light & Magic.  Velocifero is their fourth studio album.

The first impression you get from Ladytron is that they do dance pop driven by analog synths.  Kind of an 80s thing.  It doesn’t take Velocifero long, however, to demonstrate that Ladytron are much more than a Human League wannabe band.  Their sound is thick and more than a little dark.  The three keyboard players meld layer upon layer of electronic loops, effects and instruments into a rich stew.  This is dance music with heft. 

Bands that make electronic music often find themselves caught up on the Scylla of loops that repeat too often or crashing and sinking under the Charybdis of too many instruments and effects piled one atop the other.  Ladytron avoids both traps which is remarkable when you consider that there are three electronic musicians playing.  There sound is full and deep without being cluttered.  They also compose and play with both confidence and a high level of mastery over their instruments.  Ladytron does both live music and DJ gigs and their control of their software and electronics is masterful.  Their music is so polished it gleams. 

Ladytron’s music occupies a strange place that’s somewhere between pop songcraft and dance music.  On the one hand, their songwriting skills are well beyond those of the typical band making electronic dance music although they have some way to go to reach the level of musicians who are all about the craft of writing songs.  On the other hand they have a grasp of groove, beat and rhythm that is out of reach of many song writers.  It’s a difficult musical space to occupy and some of their songs work better than others.  It’s also a unique musical space.  They don’t sound like other bands, but I expect music critics will come to say that other bands sound like them. 

Imagine glossy black leather, polished silver chrome, gleaming black enamel, sleek, powerful, locked into a solid groove without breaking a sweat.  That’s Ladytron.  If it sounds intriguing, check Velocifero out.

Review: ZZ Top, Chrome, Smoke & BBQ

Chrome, Smoke & BBQ is a four-CD set that chronicles the career of Texas blues-rockers ZZ Top.  It opens with three tracks from guitar player Billy Gibons’ pre-Top band The Moving Sidewalks which are much better than you’d think.  Both sides of their first single “Miller’s Farm” and “Salt Lick” follow.  The collection closes with five “medium rare” tracks that include a Spanish version of “Francine”, a live version of “Cheap Sunglasses” and several remixes. The 8+ minute remix of their cover of Elvis’s cheese plate “Viva Las Vegas” is especailly good.  In between are generous selections from their albums from 1970’s ZZ Top’s First Album to 1990’s Recycler“. 

In addition to Gibbons, ZZ Top included Dusty Hill on bass and Frank Beard on drums.  Their deeply blues influenced brand of arena rock is instantly identifiable to anyone who was listening to mainstream rock in the 70s and 80s.  Gibbons is a much better than average guitar player and virtually every song in the set includes solid, and often outstanding, riff rock guitar.  Beard and Hill are not playing at the same level but they are an exceptionally tight rhythm section.  While they rarely shine, they virtually never produce anything less than rock solid support that provides the perfect accompanyment for Gibbons’ guitar. 

The set includes a hefty booklet with the usual laudatory essays and tons-o-pics of the band.  It also includes track-by-track comments from all three members of the band which will probably be of great interest to fans of the group.  There’s also a flip book of pictures that does their spinning fuzzy guitars thing and the cool-zoom-to-go hand business that were iconic elements of their 80s videos.  Again, fans of the band will love it.

Listening to all four of these discs leads to two conclusions.  First, ZZ Top were an uncommonly solid band who produced  a lot of consistently high-quality music for a long time.  There are 80 tracks here and very few of them are filler.  Not many bands could put out a set like this

The second conclusion that creeps into consciousness and refuses to go away is that ZZ Top were a band that was pretty much satisfied with “good enough” and who never found the motivation to drive beyond their comfort level.  It’s striking how many of these songs end in a fade out which is often the sign of an inability or unwillingness to put out the effort to write a song with a clear beginning, middle and end.  Virtually all of the music on Chrome, Smoke & BBQ is good and very little of it is really good.  They formed with the idea of being a power trio but when you compare them to trios like Cream or the initial incarnation of Gov’t Mule, they simply aren’t in the same class as musicians.  Gibbons is the possible exception but over the life of the band he never really pushed to get to that next level and bring his bandmates with him. 

Given the somewhat narrow range of their music and the high level of consistency with which they played, four discs is more ZZ Top than the casual listener is likely to want or need.  There are several one or two disc greatest hits collections that will fill the bill.  Serious fans of the band will love Chrome, Smoke & BBQ if they don’t already have most of this music in their collections.

Review: Various Artists, Grand 12-Inches Vol. 3

The Grand 12-Inch series (currently at 5 volumes) collects dance music from the 70s and 80s in the 12″ versions that were specially mixed for club play.  Each of the first three volumes collects 40 tracks spread over four discs.  After reviewing Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 and spending the past several weeks enjoying Vol. 3 I’m prepared to say that these discs are the best collections of this kind of music I’ve heard.  It’s no contest, nothing else even comes close.

The sets are put together by Ben Liebrand a Dutch DJ, remixer, and producer who both knows and cares about this music.  Not only has he taken the time to search out these hard to find versions, the tracks he gives us are taken directly from the master recordings.  That means we are not only getting a wealth of good music, we are getting music that, in many cases, sounds spectacular.  In producing music that is designed to sound good when played back in compressed formats through iPod earbuds the industry has been using drastic compression so that music will sound uniformly loud.  The result is music with almost no dynamic range that sounds flat and lifeless when played on anything like a decent sound system.  Compression was not used so heavily in the 70s and 80s so the music sounds much deeper and richer.  Combine this with Liebrand’s inisistence on using the master recordings and you get exceptionally fine sound on many of these tracks.  Crank the volume on these numbers and they sound spectacular. 

In most cases the difference between the radio version and the 12″ club version is the latter’s extended break.  Sometimes an extended break would be adapted for the beginning or end of a tune but no matter where they put it in the tune, it was the break that made the 12″ versions so exciting on the dancefloor.  There are so many excellent examples on Vol. 3 that listing them all would come close to listing all forty tracks on the collection.  The Reddings’s “The Awakening” opens with a bass solo that’s like a master class in slap bass.  “I’m Not Gonna Let You Go” features a kick ass break with Colonel Abrams singing a duet with himself in stereo.  I believe the 11+ minute version of M.F.S.B.’s era-defining “Love is the Message” is the Tom Moulton mix.  The 13+ minute extended outro with skit on “Cruisin’ the Streets” by Boys Town Gang is not for people who are offended by, uhh, “alternative” lifestyles. lol  Some other notable tracks include a disco version of Herbie Hancock’s “Tell Everybody”, a 10+ minute live version of the Commodores “Brick House”, Janis Ian’s “Fly Too High” produced by Giorgio Moroder, parts 1 and 2 of The Chaplin Band’s “Madmen’s Discotheque, and much much more.

My only disappointment with Vol. 3 is that the Shelter DJ mix of Earth Wind & Fire’s “Fantasy” won’t play on my main CD transport because of a manufacturing flaw.  It’s a quality control problem at the pressing plant, not a fault of the collection and it’s only one song . . .  But still, it’s a really good song and the volumes in the Grand 12″ series are too expensive to buy a new set just to replace one song.  The series are only available in the US as imports and they’re expensive.  This will likely be a problem for some listeners but the quantity and very high quality of sound reproduction of the music you get easily makes each of the first three volumes worth the cost.  Can’t afford to buy two of them to replace one song, however, which is a bummer because I really like “Fantasy”.

If you like 70s and 80s dance music Grand 12-Inches Vol. 3 is highly recommended.  While cut-down radio versions of some of these songs can be easy to find, the 12″ versions often are not.  You won’t find more of them gathered in one place and reproduced with such brilliant sound as you will find on the volumes in this series.

Review: Kula Shaker, Strange Folk

Kula Shaker burst on the music scene in 1996 when their album K debuted at #1 on the UK charts.  They briefly burned brightly and then flamed out.  Band leader Crispian Mills (son of actress Hayley Mills) announced that they would be the biggest band in the world before the century ended.  Instead he went on a spiritual pilgrimage to India, the band released a second album that didn’t live up to expectations, and the group split up.  Now they’re back.

In their initial incarnation Kula Shaker played an amalgam of 60’s psychedelic pop and Indian music.  Strange Folk retains the interest in psychedelic pop but tones down the Indian influences.   The album is a decidedly mixed bag of musical styles.  Opening tracks “Out on the Highway” and “Second Sight” are both big rock numbers with the 60’s influence most prominent on “Second Sight”.  “Song of Love/Narayana” is a mercifully brief bit of noodling overlaid with a heavily processed spoken vocal that I’m guessing is supposed to be deep but comes across as artsty-fartsy inanity.  “Hurricane Season” is Crispian Mills pretending he’s Bob Dylan.  “Great Dictator of the Free World” is an anti-Bush song that sees Mills singing a chorus of “I’m a dick / I’m a dick / I’m a dictator of the free world” in his best sissy warbling alto.  It’s hilarious.  “Persephone” is sing-song, acoustic folk.  It’s dreadful.  “6ft Down Blues” is a dirty rock blues with a vocal that doesn’t have half the grit it needs to pull the song off.  And so it goes.  Stange Folk indeed.

Strange Folk is a wild set that includes music that ranges from good to terrible.  Fans of the original group will be interested to hear what they’re up to now.  If you go with this one be prepared for a wide range of both musical styles and quality.  Nice cover art though.

Review: The Black Angels, Directions to See a Ghost

There are six musicians in The Black Angels.  Among the six there are five bass players, three drummers, and three guitar players.  They also provide vocals, percussion, rogue sitar, organ, vox jaguar and drone machine.  If you think about it, the emphasis on bass guitar and drums provides a pretty good clue about what kind of music you’re going to hear on Directions to See a Ghost – heavy and grinding, drone and pulse.  And that’s what you get.

it’s easy to make fun of this kind of music.  “ZOMG! a chord change!”  “That was a nice album.  Do they know a different song?”  However, if you pay attention to Directions to See a Ghost you quickly realize the people making the jokes aren’t really listening.  The Black Angels are really good at this and there’s a lot more going on in their music than initially meets the ear.  Just as people who drilled down through the feedback on the early Jesus and Mary Chain albums found a band in love with pop and rock, listening through the grit and roar of the Angel’s guitars and basses will find a band that has a tight grip on raga rock and rhythmic power. 

Many bands who play this type of music rely heavily, sometimes exclusively, on ebb and flow arrangements and the much over-used quiet-loud dynamic.  The Black Angels have almost no interest in this approach and their music is the better for it.  On their best songs they favor propulsive rhythms that drive both their music and the listener forward.  Embedded in the storm are guitar and organ riffs and vamps that catch the ear and hook the interest.  In most cases the vocals are buried so deep in the mix that they serve more as an added texture than as a means of conveying information.  The Black Angels are noisy but they make a noise that is based on an understanding of harmony, harmonious noise if you will.  Their music almost never descends into squall and noise for it’s own sake and when they use feedback and dischord they usually bury it in the mix so that it flavors rather than dominates the music.  The more you listen to Directions to See a Ghost the more you come to realize these guys really know what they’re doing and they really do it well.

Not everything works.  When they bring the tempo too far down, as they do on “Vikings”, the result is a dreary dirge that can’t end soon enough.  Great name, not such a good song.  “Vikings” is the exception, however, and for the most part Directions to See a Ghost is a very good album made by a band at the top of their game.

Review: The Quarter After, Changes Near

For awhile I thought I was the only one.  When the Byrds burst on the scene with their version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” I was enthralled and thought folk rock was an exciting new kind of music.  Roger McGuinn’s 12-string Rickenbacker!  And those vocals!  Heaven.  I had recently tuned in to John Coltrane so I was right there with them when the Byrds released “Eight Miles High”.  But then came the turn to country music under the influence of bluegrass-playing bassist Chris Hillman and new addition Gram Parsons culminating in Sweetheart of the Rodeo.  That album is widely cited and admired as one of the foundations of country rock but all I could think was “what happened to these guys?”  What had happened was that the combination of changing personnel and an uncommonly open eared set of core musicians had moved in a direction I wasn’t prepared to follow.  I just never could get into the “pure” country stuff and the more traditional it got, the less interest it held for me.  The Byrds’ country rock is held in very high esteem today and as I read the ever-growing adulation of Gram Parsons and the reverent tones with which Sweetheart is discussed in the music press I began to think I was alone in preferring the early band’s music. Apparently not.

As far as I can tell The Quarter After’s Changes Near is the album the Byrds would have made if the original group had stayed together after Turn! Turn! Turn! and kept Hillman’s country leanings in check.  The band has perfectly nailed the Byrds’ folk rock and psychedelic rock sound.  And I mean perfectly.  The raga-influenced drone rock, the hints of 1960’s-era jazz, the superb vocal harmonies and that signature Rickenbacker 12-string sound are all there.  Of the twelve tracks on the album, one (“Counting the Score”) does the country thing and although a pedal steel shows up here and there on other tracks, the rest of the album is devoted to the original Byrds sound and styles of music.

Often when a band turns to the music of their forebears for inspiration they end up making pale copies of the original music.  That’s not the case here.  The Quarter After don’t sound so much like they’re copying the Byrds as picking up the ball where the Byrds dropped it and carrying on.  Although Changes Near has numerous moments when I felt the hair on the back of their neck rise from the precision with which The Quarter After captures the Byrds, I never felt like this was just a band copying somebody else. 

Maybe it’s because I loved the early Byrds and have always felt that they abandoned their unique music long before they had exhausted its possibilities that I’ve enjoyed Changes Near so much.  If Sweetheart of the Rodeo is your favorite Byrds album you may find little of interest in The Quarter After’s music.  But if you really like those first three Byrds albums do not miss Changes Near.  It’s terrific.

Review: On Stage at World Cafe Live: Jennifer Glass & Daniella Cotton

This is more of a warning than a review.  The reason it’s not a review is that the sound quality of this DVD is so bad we couldn’t stand to listen to it and you can’t really review something you haven’t seen or heard. The disc opens with Jennifer Glass, a singer I haven’t heard before, but we went straight to the Daniella Cotton segment thinking we’d go back and listen to Glass later.  Didn’t happen.  No matter how bad I think something is I’ll try and listen at least several times before I write a review but we got midway through Cotton’s second song and decided we couldn’t stand to listen to any more.  Cotton’s voice, as heard on her album Rare Child, is extraordinary.  On this DVD it sounds like she’s singing through a large-diameter metal pipe that’s about a block away.  The lead guitar is waaaay too high in the mix so that it drowns out almost everything else.  The bass is inaudible most of the time.  The drums are fairly well recorded but the mix is so bad it doesn’t matter.  Strictly amateur night at in the recording booth.

The problem isn’t our sound system which is a fairly good one and is kept in line with electronic room correction and regular speaker balancing using an SPL meter.  The problem is that Cotton’s set is so poorly recorded that the DVD is best avoided.  Cotton is too good, much too good, to be listened to like this.

Review: The Ting Tings, We Started Nothing

The Ting Tings are an indie pop dance duo composed of Jules De Martino (drums, guitar vocals) and Katie White (vocals, guitar, bass drum) out of Manchester England.  We Started Nothing, their first album, was a huge hit in the UK this past spring largely on the strength of knock-out single “That’s Not My Name”.  Every once in awhile a song comes along that’s so right that it ends up defining a particular place and time.  “That’s Not My Name” is one of those songs.  Infectious, memorable and with a million dollar hook, it’s the kind of song radio bands sell their souls for.

Nothing else on We Started Nothing is as good but that says more about how well “That’s Not My Name” hits the bullseye than it does about the quality of the rest of the album.  The Ting Tings songs owe more than a little to the schoolyard chants that have entertained jump-rope skipping girls for decades.  White’s vocals tend to be of the sing-song, melodically spoken variety.  When they work, they work well, however an entire CD of this stuff can get tiring and when De Martino’s rhythms don’t carry the song the result can as annoying as the stridently voiced girls next door who won’t give it a rest. 

Songs like “Shut Up and Let Me Go”, “Great DJ”, ”We “Walk” and the title track indicate that The Ting Tings have the potential to be more than a one hit wonder.  However, right now the row they’re furrowing is a bit too narrow.  If you’ve heard more of this than you really want in ten songs, a second album that’s more of the same isn’t going to cut it.  They’ve got one really great song and a couple more good ones.  It’ll be interesting to see if they can expand on the formula enough to develop a career.

Review: Danielia Cotton, Rare Child

Danielia Cotton is the honest to god, turn you out, no shit, rock your world, 100% real deal.  Truth.  She has a voice that brings the rain, excellent pitch, a strong sense of harmony, and above average songwriting skills.  She also has more balls on an off day than a decade’s worth of hairdo boys who flaunt their package, bleat in a girly falsetto, and wear makeup (you know who I’m talking about). She also rocks and kicks ass while she’s at it.

Cotton grew up in a fatherless home in a small New Jersey town.  Her mother sang jazz and gospel and rose to become head of accounting at the Houghton-Mifflin Publishing Company.  Without a college degree.  Sounds like Danielia isn’t the only one in the Cotton family with balls.  At the age of 12 Danielia joined her Mom in a gospel group and the glorious gospel tradition of passionate, powerful singing combined with finely tuned harmonies and solid vocal chops is evident in both her singing and songwriting.  Throughout the album you can hear the gospel and jazz background along with some country but the primary genre she draws on is rock.

Cotton sings lead and handles most of the backup vocals on the album.  She also plays acoustic guitar and wrote or cowrote the lyrics and music for all of the songs on Rare Child save one.  Her musical cowriter Kareem Devlin plays electric guitar in her band and his fret work is an essential element of the group’s big rock sound. 

The band is good, the songs are good, but the thing that vaults Rare Child to the top of the playlist is Cotton’s voice and singing ability.  I’ve heard her compared to everyone from Billie Holiday to Janis Joplin but the influence I hear the most strongly in this album is Bonnie Raitt.  Raitt has a stronger blues influence where Cotton leans more toward rock but if you’re going to be a woman who lays down raw guitar-driven rock you could hardly have a better influence than Raitt.   Cotton sings with the same swagger and confidence as Raitt but, again, the difference is the voice.  Raitt has a great voice; Cotton has a voice like an act of God.  You turn Rare Child up and Cotton will strip the paint off your walls.  She not only has power, she has control and that’s a combination that’s very hard to beat.

Not every song on Rare Child works but the ones that do like the title track, “Testify” and the outstanding opening cut “Make U Move” are so good it’s easy to get past the occasional lapse.  As powerful as her voice is, the more you listen to Rare Child the more you get the feeling she hasn’t really let this beast out yet.  The good news is that Rare Child is an excellent album.  The better news is that Cotton doesn’t sound like she’s reached her peak yet.

Rare Child opens with the lyrics “Cause I’m a little black girl / Who’ll rock your world / So come move with me.”  Which just about nails it.  Truth.

Review: Jim Noir, Jim Noir

The stories have been told many times about how the Beatles and the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson were driving each other to new heights of creativity as they listened to each other’s records in the mid ’60s.  The results were Sgt. Peppers and Pet Sounds, two era-defining albums.  Of late it has become common for bands to draw from both sources for inspiration and Beach Boys styled vocal harmonies or Sgt Pepper’s type instrumentation can be found from bands as diverse as Cafe Tacuba, Panic at the Disco, and Dr. Dog. 

Enter Jim Noir.  Noir is what would happen if you put Sgt. Pepper’s era Beatles, the Beach Boys and any number of ’60s and’70s psychedlic pop bands in a blender and pureed them into a smooth and tasty blend.  Where other bands do songs in the style of the Beatles, Noir is so saturated with his sources that he sounds more like he is drawing on the same wellsprings of inspiration as Pepper’s era McCartney, for example, than using the earlier music as a model.  This is all the more remarkable when you consider that Noir was born 12 years after the Beatles split up in 1970.

Noir makes this work because first and foremost he crafts pop tunes brilliantly.  He is a superior songwriter and arranger who is also adept at bringing modern musical technology to bear in creating his expertly crafted pop gems.  The song structures and vocal stylings and harmonies are modern examples of ’60s psychedelic pop but the songs are often saturated with current-day electronics.  He frequently uses layers upon layers of instruments, effects, and vocals but he meshes them so well that his songs never sound like a cluttered hodge-podge. 

Now take into account that Noir does all of this himself.  Noir wrote and arranged all the tunes, he sings all the lead and harmony vocals and plays all the instruments, and he recorded the album.  Jim Noir is a one man show produced by one astonishngly talented man.

Jim Noir is Noir’s second full length album following 2006’s Tower of Love.  Both albums present the same type of music with Jim Noir being the slightly more polished of the two.  Noir is unique in his talents and in his ability to so clearly evoke an earlier era while producing new and original music.  If you are a fan of ’60s psychedelic pop you do not want to miss Jim Noir.