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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Heavy’s Great Vengeance and Furious Fire sounds like it creeped out of a twisted and demented alternate reality of blues, soul and R&B.  It’s a very strange – and very good – CD.  Album opener “Brukpocket’s Lament” is a slow, almost glacial, blues built on a simple two-note descending bass riff with a vocal from another planet.  When the vocalist sings “I’m startin’ to talk like I’m mentally ill” you believe him.  It’s a dark and disturbing way to start an album and it works brilliantly.  The very first song knocks the listener askew, demolishes preconceptions and sets you up perfectly for the set of music that follows.

The Heavy are a five-piece out of Bath, England composed of Dan Taylor (guitars), Kelvin Swaby (vocals), Hannah Collins (keyboards), Chris Ellul (drums) and Spencer Page (bass).  Their music is hard to describe.  Clearly based in the blues, R&B and soul of times past they often use dirty guitars and clattering percussion and have an uncanny ability to make compelling music based on viscous rhythms that would sound like tedious sludge in the hands of almost any other band.  Great Vengeance and Furious Fire is shot through with the static and sound snippets of AM radio stations beamed from no town you’ve ever visited, the scratch and pop of old vinyl LPs and vocals that sometimes sound like they were recorded through a busted amp.  It feels like you put the CD in the player and opened a portal to a time and place that sounds like America of the 50’s through the 70’s except much more dangerous.  The last song, “Who Needs the Sunshine”, ends with several seconds of vinyl rotation scratch from which a twinkling, skipping piano slowly emerges and a vocal ballader from the late ’50s early ’60s sings “Forever my darling . . .” the first half of a couplet that never completes as the record goes silent.  It’s exquisitely creepy.

All of this could sound like a one-off novelty record if The Heavy didn’t do it so well.  Their vision is warped but they have a solid grasp of the music they mine for inspiration.  Great Vengeance and Furious Fire is very strange but it’s also very good music.  I don’t know if it’s the sort of thing everyone will enjoy but I’ll be standing in line at the CD store the day they release their next album.

Bob Mould has had a long, varied and rich musical career.  He broke out with the influential post-punk band Husker Du that was one of the defining alt rock bands of the ’80s.  When Husker Du split up he released solo albums in the guises of both a sensitive singer/songwriter and a guitar rocker.  He then disappeared for awhile before returning with a new interest in electronic music.  He has been DJing in my town of Washington DC for awhile and has released at least one dance-oriented album.  With District Line he returns to guitar-based rock and shows no signs whatsoever of coming anywhere close to creative stagnation. 

With the exception of drummer Brendan Canty and cellist Amy Domingues, Mould plays all the instruments on District Line along with writing all the songs.  The CD falls into the small category of albums that addresses human relationships from an adult perspective (Mould is in his mid-40s) without coming across like a twenty-something trying to sound all grown up or a middle-aged loser straining to hold on to his youth.  Mould is simply a talented musician and songwriter who continues to make vital music.

The music on District Line is driven primarily by Mould’s strong guitar and Canty’s muscular and varied drumming.  Electronics are used to nice effect as accents and flavoring (as on “Shelter Me” for one example) without being prominently featured.  On the evidence provided here, Mould’s personal life has not been so good lately as many of these songs are concerned with the difficulties of maintaining – and ending – long term relationships.  “Again and Again” is a particularly good example.  Over a rolling melodic hook Mould sings “I never found the trust I needed from you / Everything you did was making me wonder / My biggest mistake was taking you back / Again and again.”  If you’ve been there, you can hear that he has too.  It’s like a dagger in the heart.

District Line is adult rock of the best kind, sung from an adult perspective without attempting to fit into the musical straightjacket of what the record company suits think adults want to hear.  It’s just a good rock record and that’s just fine.

The Summer of Love, The Hits of 1967 is a two CD +  one DVD collection released by Time-Life to comemorate what was an extraordinary year in music.  The DVD is entitled “My Generation” which is Part 6 of Time-Life’s 10 DVD The History of Rock ‘N’ Roll set.  The CDs are labeled AM and FM and are supposed to capture the different types of music being played on the two radio formats at the time.  The collection comes with a booklet that contains an introduction by Jorma Kaukonen the lead guitar player for Jefferson Airplane and fluff paragraphs on each of the songs included on the two CDs.  As a set devoted to the music of 1967, there’s good news and bad news here.

The good news is that the collection contains a lot of good music that people who were into rock and pop music at the time will remember and enjoy.  Although the set is called “The Summer of Love”, it doesn’t focus on either the San Francisco music scene or tracks released in the summer.    Anything released in 1967 is fair game.  (See the Tuned In To Music podcasts on 1960’s San Francisco Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 for a more thorough coverage of the SF music scene.)  The AM set includes often collected songs such as “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” (Scott McKenzie), “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (Procol Harem), and “Happy Together” (The Turtles) along with some less common, and therfore more enjoyable to hear again tunes like “Talk Talk” (The Music Machine), “Sunday Will Never Be the Same” (Spanky and Our Gang), and “Little Bit o’ Soul” (The Music Explosion).  Other tracks on the AM disc include “Darling Be Home Soon” (The Lovin’ Spoonful, a personal favorite), “Creeque Alley” (The Mamas and the Papas), “Gimme Some Lovin’” (The Spencer Davis Group) and “Let’s Live for Today” (The Grass Roots). 

Splitting the collection into AM and FM discs was a good idea in that it was around this time that FM radio became a home for exciting music programming that featured album cuts and few if any ads.  As you would expect, the FM disc is more varied but it’s also more hit or miss.  Among the hits are “I Feel Free” (Cream), “Friday on My Mind” (The Easybeats), “(We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet” (The Blues Magoos) and “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” (The Byrds).  Among the misses are “It’s a Happening Thing” (The Peanut Butter Conspiracy) and ”Paper Sun” (Traffic, a miss considering the great ”Dear Mr. Fantasy” is on the same album).  In general, the FM disc is a disappointment as many of the tracks such as “Somebody To Love” (Jefferson Airplane’s biggest selling single) and “Brown Eyed Girl” (Van Morrison) should have been on the AM disc or that cuts like “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” (Vanilla Fudge) are presented in the sub 3 minute radio version rather than the 7+ minute version that was regularly played on FM stations at the time.

The bad news comes when you realize the extraordinary music that was released in 1967 that is not included in the collection.  It is almost certainly the case that legal barriers prevented the inclusion of almost all of this music.  Still, when you take into account what is missing, The Summer of Love, The Hits of 1967  looks weak indeed.

Soul music and R&B are particularly poorly represented.  We get “Reflections” (Diana Ross and the Supremes) and “I Was Made to Love Her” (Stevie Wonder).  Which sound fine until you realize that Aretha Franklin released “Respect”, “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman”, “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You”, and “Chain of Fools” all in 1967.  In addition, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” (Gladys Knight and the Pips), “Funky Broadway ” (Wilson Pickett), “I Second That Emotion” (Smokey Robinson and the Miracles), “Soul Man” (Sam & Dave), “Tramp” (Otis Redding and Carla Thomas) and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough (Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell) all came out in 1967.

Other genres of music don’t fare any better.  On the AM side of the equation 1967 saw the release of a number of important singles that are not in the set including “Ode to Billie Joe” (Bobbie Gentry), “The Beat Goes On” (Sonny & Cher), and “Groovin’” (The Young Rascals) among many, many others.  And, of course, there’s that 800 lb gorilla we haven’t mentioned.  The Beatles released “Penny Lane”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “All You Need is Love” and “Hello, Goodbye” as singles in 1967.  Yikes!

When you look at albums, the omissions in The Summer of Love, The Hits of 1967 become even more apparent.  1967 saw the release of debut albums from The Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, Buffalo Springfield (“For What It’s Worth”), David Bowie and The Doors (“Light My Fire”).  The Doors and Buffalo Springfield also released their second albums in 1967.  Other important and unrepresented 1967 albums include Disraeli Gears (Cream), Forever Changes (Love), and Days of Future Passed (The Moody Blues).

All of this pales into insignificance , however, when you realize that three of the most influential albums of the modern era were released in 1967 and none of them are represented on The Summer of Love, The Hits of 1967 .  In 1967 we were treated to Jimi Hendrix’s debut album Are You Experienced? (as well as his second, Axis Bold as Love), the Velvet Underground and Nico’s self-titled debut album and perhaps the most important of them all, The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  All those iconic singles and Sgt. Pepper’s?  The Beatles alone made 1967 a watershed year.

We found the DVD mildly interesting.  It focuses more on the American counterculture symbolized by the term “Summer of Love” than the CDs and, although shallow, it attempts to provide some social and political context for the music.  There is some brief but great footage of Jimi Hendrix.  You can also watch Keith Richards throw a TV off of a hotel balcony as a stunt for the camera and Pete Townsend be a belligerent whiny asshole if that’s the kind of thing that turns you on.  I don’t expect I’ll watch it a second time.

1967 may well have been the most extraordinary year for recorded music of all time and it’s hard to fault The Summer of Love, The Hits of 1967  for not doing it justice.  Even if you were able to get all of the necessary releases, there’s no way this unbelievable year could be effectively surveyed on a two disc collection.  The Time-Life set is likely to have the most appeal to listeners who were listening to AM and FM radio at the time and who will find almost every track in the collection familiar.  Listeners who were not there and want to hear what was current in 1967 would do better to seek out the material that isn’t in the set.  I’m not an “oldies” listener who is mired in the music that was current when I was young, there’s too much good music coming out every year for that.  However, to this day, I return to many of the songs and albums of 1967 on a semi-regular basis.  But almost all of the ones I return to are the ones left out of The Summer of Love, The Hits of 1967 .

The worlds of rock and dance music have been coming together of late.  Dance has led the way and releases from Daft Punk, Justice, Digitalism and the groups heard on the Rock the Disco collections (Vol.1 and Vol. 2) rocketed 2007 into the dance stratosphere.  Movement has been slower on the rock side but it’s happening with !!! being a notable practitioner.  Ghostland Observatory are another band that approach the dance-rock fusion from the rock side.  They’re a duo out of Austin Texas composed of Aaron Behrens (vocals and guitar) and Thomas Ross Turner (drums, keyboards).  Robotique Majestique is their third album.

With one notable exception, Robotique Majestique welds most of the trappings of dance music to a fundamentally rock base.  Digitally constructed beats, layered production, synth effects and keyboards zooming in and out, it’s all there.  So far so good.  However the exception is a pretty important one.  Robotique Majestique is notably lacking in groove.  The rhythms are dull and plodding and the tempos are off.  Turner bashes away in monotonous, clunky tempos that bludgeon the listener.  This is a major problem because dance music is first and last about groove.  Dance music has to make you want to get up and move, Robotique Majestique makes you want to get up and put something else on the CD player.  Ghostland Observatory took the sound of dance music but left out the dance. 

Behrens’ vocal style doesn’t help matters.  He adopts the screeching falsetto that was popular among the hair-do bands of old.  This style is popular with some listeners who won’t mind it.  To me he too often sounds like a shrill 12 year old girl having a temper tantrum.

Listening to Robotique Majestique over and over again trying to find something good to say about it leads to the conclusion that this is dance-oriented music made by people who can’t dance.

Lyrics Born is a Japanese-American MC out of San Francisco who has made a modest career out of going his own way in the face of hip-hop convention.  Rather than team up with a producer who creates beats in the studio, Lyrics Born plays with a band.  His tunes also place a heavy emphasis on singing and most of his guest artists are singers rather than rappers.

In some respects Everywhere at Once is the polar opposite of the Roots’ Rising Down reviewed in the previous post.  Lyrics Born is deeply into funk and R&B and in terms of musicianship his band is leagues beyond the members of Roots.  Everywhere at Once is also better recorded than Rising Down which makes listening to it a more pleasant experience at the basic sonic level.  On the other hand, the Roots challenge their listeners with thoughtful observations on American social, political and economic life while Lyrics Born doesn’t have much of interest to say.  Most of his raps are about his latest infatuation or how proud he is of overcoming whatever he thinks he’s overcme to be as wonderful as he thinks he is.   Everywhere at Once also includes two tedious skits and if you’re really out of shape you can burn some extra calories racing to the CD changer to skip past them whenever they come on. 

Everywhere at Once shines musically.  First song “Don’t Change” rides on a funk groove that is so solid that it’s almost imposible to sit still while it plays.  Lyrics Born also has a deep feel for this music so the rhythm of his rap is tight with the groove.  It’s a an outstanding track.  The rest of the album presents a survey of ’80s and late ’70s funk and R&B.   “Cakewalk” combines a Cameo bassline with an Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson chorus.  Another good track and those are only two of many.  Lyrics Born has a first-rate funk band with Uriah Duffy a standout on bass. 

If you like funk and R&B melded with hip-hop Everywhere at Once is more than worth a listen.  In fact, it’s a good album to use to introduce people to hip-hop who don’t know very much about it and say they don’t like it, but who enjoy funk.  If you want challenging and thoughful lyrical content you’ll have to look elsewhere but if you want to dance and have a good time, it’s here.

The Roots are a rap group out of Philadelphia with a reputation for ignoring rap cliches and going their own way.  Long before it was popular they made music by playing their own instruments instead of relying on samples as was the standard practice in most rap and hip hop.  Rising Down, their ninth album, has received a good deal of critical praise as a thoughtful tract on politics, social and economic inequality and, of course, racism.

Whatever its worth as social commentary Rising Down has a significant flaw.  It’s unpleasant to listen to.  The CD opens with a very bad live recording of two people having an argument that immediately descends into almost unitelligible shouting and screaming.  It may be making an important point but it’s so unpleasant that it’s easier to just skip over it and start with track two.  The recording quality throughout the album is not very good.  “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction)” is an interesting case in point.  Black Thought’s vocal is either so badly recorded or recorded with such extreme effects processing that it sounds like shit on good equipment.  Again, the temptation is to just skip the track rather than suffer through the ugly sound.  Listening on high quality headphones through a computer is another story.  The vocal sounds fine because the system can’t reproduce the unpleasant frequencies that can be heard on a better system.  The target audience for this music is more likely to be listening through earbuds so the crappy recording is not likely to be an issue but it’s foolish to send a message you want people to hear in a format that that may lead people to turn you off when the alternative of competent recording is available.

Roots may play their own instruments but they don’t do very much with them.  Track after track features an unrelenting and simple drum and bass track with little snippets of embellishment here and there.  The tracks are sufficiently different but each one tends to be monotonous. 

One of the enjoyable characteristics of rap music is that it can take some time for the lyrics to become clear.  Rapid-fire delivery, atypical prosidy and mixing the vocal deep in the music tracks can produce a situation where the message slowly becomes clear over repeated listens.  The beats hook interest in the early stages and the track continues to provide a sense of discovery as the meaning comes together.  This slow growth can be enhanced when the message asks the listener to think about social and political issues instead of the drivel of self promotion favored by popular hip-hop titans.  In order for this to work, however, you have to want to listen to the CD multiple times.  The poor recording and bland musical accompanyment on Rising Down don’t encourage further listening which is a shame because Roots have important things to say.

These criticisms are not likely to present problems for the committed rap fan who is practiced at trading musical for lyrical content and patient with the time it may take to draw the lyrics out.  People who listen to rap rarely or occasionally are less likely to stick with Rising Down long enough to think about the issues discussed on the CD.  This raises a question for Roots and and anyone else who has something important to say that they would like other people to consider.  You can preach to the choir and constrain your ideas to the limited audience that’s familiar and comfortable with your means of presentation or you can embed your rap in a musical context that encourages people outside the rap niche to listen to what you have to say.

Plants and Animalsare hard to categorize.  They hail from Montreal and, like many of the bands from that city such as Arcade Fire and Malajube, they ignore musical genre in favor of playing whatever type of music suits the needs of the song.  Parc Avenue opens with a warbly falsetto accompanied by solo piano that leads you to think you might have mistakenly bought an album by another self-absorbed singer-songwriter who thinks his insecurities typify the human condition.  However, the song quickly morphs into a multi-instrument, vocal choir driven anthem.  When the second song opens with a big-sky western lope that has almost nothing in common with the song you just heard you know you’re in for a wild ride.

At one point or another over the course of Parc Avenue we get wah-wah guiter leads, whistleing, exuberant jump-rope chants a la’ the Go! Team, string, brass and reed sections and several choirs.  No matter where a song starts, it ends someplace different.  Although instrumentation can change radically, Animals and Plants seem to have a fondness for propulsive driving jams ( “Feedback in the Fields”, “Mercy”, “Guru”) and they do them well.  They also like big choruses sung by a lot of people. 

Plants and Animals’ wide range of musical styles has its drawbacks.  The band doesn’t have a clearly defined sound that makes them instantly identifiable.  More damaging is that at times the variety seeems forced as if the goal is more to stick something in the song that’s different than to make coherent music.  In addition their varied sonic palatte puts high demands on their sound engineers and at times the recording is muddy and cluttered.

Plants and Animals’ reach exceeds their grasp but if a band’s going to make a mistake, that’s a good one to make.  They’re not trying to be another one just like the other on that moved lots of units at Best Buy last month and they’re not endlessly exploring a tiny space where they feel comfortable.  They’re exuberant and fearless.  Not everything works but listening to them try out this and that is never less than interesting.  If you’ve got open ears and don’t demand consistency of style in an album, you might well like Parc Avenue .

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.

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.

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.