Basement Jaxx
Crazy Itch Radio
Astralwerks
originally published October 25, 2006
There's no reason to think that this is a widely shared perception, but Basement Jaxx and Daft Punk have always seemed like the Beatles and Stones of fin de siècle dance music. Daft Punk was comprised of ex-rockers who wore robot suits and operated at a cool, reserved distance, carefully selecting their source material and looping it into transcendence; the denizens of Basement Jaxx were inclusive, loose-limbed dance partisans who threw everything in at once. So it would seem to be a sort of victory that Daft Punk's new album Human After All, a pure distillation of its aesthetic, was widely considered a dud, but sadly Basement Jaxx has produced a similar kind of album, with only slightly better results.
There are great tracks here. "Hush Boy," a sort of sequel to the track "Oh My Gosh," is just the right kind of ridiculous, and "Hey U" successfully introduces gypsy elements to a sort of samba stomp. But overall, it seems to miss the kind of discrete genre-hopping that the group's last album Kish Kash fluidly engaged in, sounding more like a stew that might bubble up different chunks from time to time, but with any particular spoonful being roughly the same as another. Maybe it's just that the predominant style is a throwback to '90s house, an all-too-logical direction for the Jaxx, whereas its strength has always been a relentless forward drive enlivened with unexpected throwbacks. (And let's not get into the title.) It's a step back for both the robots and our heroes, but maybe something good will come of it.
Judah Johnson
Be Where I Be
Flameshovel
originally published October 25, 2006
Judah Johnson singer Daniel Johnson belies the entire aesthetic vision of this record on the second track, “ Little Sounds,” when he sings, “Ooh, child it won’t get easier / it won’t get brighter.” This de-turning of The Five Stairsteps' 1970 hit “Ooh Child” is akin to the mocking/ horrific take on The Youngbloods 1967 flop but 1969 hit, “Get Together” Nirvana member Krist Novoselic placed before the track “Territorial Pissings” in 1991. However, whereas Novoselic’s brutalization was characteristic of Generation X attempting to distance itself from the self-indulgent simplicity of hippie idealism, Johnson’s cut-and-paste lyricism is less cynical and simply sad.
With a musical palette heavy on dreamily looped samples and synthesizers alongside the traditional guitar-bass-drums element, Judah Johnson allows the music to do much of its emotional bidding. Adeptly plumbing areas explored by '90s-era U2 on “Little Sounds” and “Seeing Things,” the band turns soaring guitar lines into hymns of internal analysis. The irony of this music’s ability to turn very private moments into public discourse without seeming indecent is testament to its ability to strike a common emotional chord.
Interspersed throughout Be Where I Be are very short pieces of blippy computer and synthesized sounds. Purposefully, they serve a function other than filler. Reminding me of nothing so much as the automated sounds one finds in an airport people-moving device, they literally take the listener from one scene to another. They are constructed such that each interlude precedes, specifically, the track after it.
After playing this several times, I began to wonder if I was really connecting with something, or if Judah Johnson was pulling my leg with this album. Was I attributing to the band a level of depth that was undeserved? It doesn’t matter. Although I believe my instincts to be correct, it is not necessary for the listener to be entirely tuned in to an artist's purpose. For as much as music is a communicator of artistic intention, it's also very much an end-use medium. The sad, resigned comfort I find in Be Where I Be is plenty enough for me.
Of Legend
Of Legend
Independent Release
originally published October 25, 2006
Among the current crop of Athens hardcore bands, Of Legend stands as the least fashion-minded. And while hardcore punk has long been an arena in which it's difficult for any band to distinguish itself, Of Legend may well, based on this new recording, be the underdog that winds up being one of our scene's more serious hardcore contenders.
Of Legend - musically very much in line with the heavier side of Agnostic Front and Boston’s Blood For Blood - utilizes a slight metal disposition for the purposes of augmenting an already muscular sound, rather than, as happens with many bands, running down a musical laundry list of effects and riffs. The songs run a short gamut between fast and pummeling to slower and gut-pulling, and often span this divide within the space of a single song. Given the current trend of hardcore bands placing melodic breakdowns in the middle of a song, Of Legend significantly never slows things down in order to give an emotional or aural break, but rather to emphasize what may have been missed during the faster parts. The band utilizes this process to particularly good effect on “ All Is Not Lost,” “Dawn of Retribution” and “Roll Hard.”
There are other times on Of Legend where the band simply rocks straight out and the slowing is kept to a minimum. The tracks "We Are The Structure” and “Behold The Pale Horse,” in particular, exhibit a visceral fluency in the hardcore language.
Of Legend seems to be very aware of itself and its place within the current hardcore milieu. The band's "working-class hardcore" is purposeful and seeks only to define itself in relation to itself, and never as a reaction to other bands or current sounds. This is why Of Legend can share the bill with any of Athens' current hardcore/ metal bands and what prevails is camaraderie rather than competition.
Meat Loaf
Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose
Virgin
originally published October 25, 2006
Since the release of its first volume in 1977, Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell series has stood as a concept so ridiculously grand that it far surpasses the already overwhelming pomp typically associated with the rock opera. Though apparently now water under the bridge, it doesn’t speak well that the third - and apparently final - volume in the series was prefaced by a copyright lawsuit involving Loaf and principle Bat songwriter/ composer Jim Steinman. Another red flag is raised by the opening title track, on which the grinding nü-metal guitars and pummeling drums might make one do a double take to make sure a Slipknot CD wasn’t mislabeled and inserted by mistake. That is, until the urgent Viking vocals kick in and, sure enough, it’s the Loaf - but not your daddy’s longhaired, puffy-shirt version.
Much of the success of the original Bat album can be attributed to its outlandish take on Jersey and Detroit rock, its pristine analog production and - though hinged on the near 10-minute “Paradise By the Dashboard Light - its concise brevity. With Bat III clocking in at more than an hour and hinging on an over-emoted version of “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now,” a song already jettisoned into adult-contemporary hell by Celine Dion (though penned by Steinman for the first Bat), we’re presented with an unfortunate case of too few sharp hooks in the belfry.
The album does, however, show familiar signs of Loaf-style electricity, like the nostalgic “Bad For Good” and a brief appearance by frequent duet partner Patti Russo. Elsewhere, Meat Loaf enlists other guests, such as Steve Vai, Nikki Sixx and Queen’s Brian May for cameo support, while Desmond Child’s monolithic, pyro-ready production never really wraps itself around the rougher corners of the husky Fight Club costar. Bat Out of Hell III is a big show, indeed, but one with too little of the energetic brand of white-boy soul and hammy showmanship that made the first and much of the second volume both guilty pleasures and rewarding treats.
Four Tet
Remixes
Domino
originally published October 25, 2006
The remix collection. How inevitable. How typical. How unnecessary. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, but it's extremely difficult to find an artist who can remix an album's worth of cuts that draw my attention repeatedly. The only remixers I look forward to hearing are the DFA. It's typically not enough to merely enjoy the remixer's original work.
Case in point: I am genuinely a Four Tet fan. Pause is one of my favorite electronic albums, and I love the improvised work Kieran Hebden's done recently with legendary jazz drummer Steve Reid. Hebden and Caribou's Dan Snaith have changed laptop music for the better in recent years. But the new Remixes is atypical of the aforementioned problems. There are great reworkings, there are forgettable reworkings, and only a couple are fantastic enough to keep me inserting the disc. Hebden's blender work on Radiohead's "Scatterbrain" is almost as kick-ass as the original, which was one of the best tracks on Hail to the Thief. But it was already released as a b-side track three years ago, so this is merely a revisiting. Madvillain's "Money Folder" gets a too-hectic facelift that doesn't fit the mellow drawl of the original's context, even with MF Doom's relatively energetic flow on the track. Beth Orton's "Carmella" is extended far too long (even if Hebden did produce her last album).
Wisely, Domino decided to include a second disc of Four Tet tracks remixed by others. Of these, Battles' reworking of "A Joy" is most successful. More of the combined 24 tracks rule than suck, but it's hard to recommend unless you're a super-cool deejay eager to hone your own mixing skills by examining that of others.
Benoît Pioulard
Précis
Kranky
originally published October 25, 2006
My favorite thing about Benoît Pioulard is his real name: Thomas Meluch. A 21-year-old from Michigan, he's crafted a lovely little pop album with enough brilliantly molded electronic and abstract edges to land him on the high-end experimental label Kranky. But the sheer genius of his pseudonym shouldn't distract from the joy of his debut album Précis.
The basic formula Meluch uses is this: begin each song with glitchy guitar scraping or pretty ambient noodling of some sort, then after just a few seconds, abruptly shift into shimmering pop and/or folk like an android Elliott Smith or less ADD-addled Warren Defever of His Name is Alive. And it's an almost entirely successful formula. Opener "Guerre de Sept Ans" psyches you out with three minutes of rapidly picked guitar and building texture, then "Together & Down" jars you out of the zone, as beautiful wispy vocals whisper over strummed guitar. The track ends with a cascade of bell sounds, then "Ext. Leslie Park" unfolds with a brief drone before acoustic guitar drops in for a near-ballad of breathtaking singer-songwriterness. Thus follow 12 more tracks that never wear out their welcome during a crisp 37 minutes.
My only beef is that some of the transitions and interludes are intriguing enough for me to softly curse when the pop takes over mere seconds into a track. But that's a minor complaint. This is great stuff, just one step behind Kranky's other "folk" artist Boduf Songs.
Hisato Higuchi
Dialogue
Family Vineyard
originally published October 25, 2006
In a number of interviews, Acid Mothers Temple guitarist Kawabata Makoto has remarked that Japanese listeners can approach American musical exports only as alienated objects - questions of authenticity don’t exist because the music is divorced from its original context as soon as it crosses the Pacific. Maybe this explains why Japanese artists like Tetuzi Akiyama and Keiji Haino have been able to discover such bizarre sounds within the blues idiom, an aesthetic fraught with problems of race and audience for us Yanks.
But then Tokyo-based avant-garde guitarist Hisato Higuchi complicates that picture. On his third album, Dialogue, the first to see release in the United States, this puppeteer-turned-musician wrings pathos from weightless clean electric guitar strums and coos in wavering tones, like Jandek singing a lullaby. In other words, he channels the blues’ emotional essence. His brittle, spare arrangements won’t be confused with folk anthologist Harry Smith’s field recordings, but his scales and bent notes are derived from the very culture Smith documents. So think of the haunting moans in “Breath #2,” not as self-indulgent clatter, but as the stuff of a ghost story passed down from forgotten generations. Imagine droning downer “Mitsumeau Sekai Ni,” not as art film accompaniment, but as a front porch lament in slo-mo.
Still having difficulty thinking of the Mississippi Delta’s folk art as a continually transforming, transnational form? Then listen to Higuchi against depressive indie types like Xiu Xiu and hear how Dialogue reaches for something older, something more fundamental.
Art Grider
Original Works of Art
Independent Release
originally published October 25, 2006
Local sax man Art Grider honks, wheezes and wails all over this, his cheekily-titled debut album, while an enlisted band of locals brings up the rear. Grider specializes in what could be referred to as extremely funky jazz fusion that calls upon the spirits of influential biggies like Stan Getz, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.
Grider's bellowing tenor sax is joined by guitarists Greg Clinton and Michael Westbrook, bassist Chris Enghauser, pianist Tracy Reynolds, organist Pat Strawser and drummer Chris Wood. The eclectic backing band - Wood is the drummer for Southern rap/ rock band Rehab, Reynolds is the music minister at Grace Emmanuel Baptist Church and Westbrook is a jazz studies major at Georgia State - suits Grider's style well from the slick fusion of "ZJAM" to the Strawser-penned exploration "Sea of Dreams."
Grider, also familiar as a longtime UGA biochem professor, has been making music for some time, mostly with church bands and occasional sit-ins with local groups. Original Works of Art shows the man also knows his abstract jazz and tightly-wound funk like big carbon knows the two little oxygens, gloriously extended notes and all.
Califone
Roots & Crowns
Thrill Jockey
originally published October 25, 2006
Long before the music press latched on to every last cassette-only release that avant-folkies like Six Organs of Admittance and Wooden Wand could cough out, Califone was filtering the sounds of America’s backporches through the most daring chunks of wide and varied record collections, imagining delirious collaborations between Dock Boggs, Faust and King Sunny Ade as far back as 1998.
As the band releases its seventh full-length, it’s easy to take Califone’s pan-generic innovations for granted, especially since Roots & Crowns differs little from the rest of the group's catalogue. Don’t make the mistake of leaving this one to the diehards, though: while Califone hasn’t made any astonishing leaps forward, it has created its most refined work yet. “Spider’s House” should take at least 10 listens to unpeel, dousing an incisive pop hook in eerie prepared piano, slurred horns and layers of tiptoeing percussion. In “The Eye You Lost in the Crusades,” Tim Rutili’s dreamspeak transports us further than ever before, invoking As I Lay Dying (“Emptying yourself for sleep”) and wading through brush fires, bleeding rivers, and fields of “Ethiopian bones.” The album’s most sublime moment, however, is one that feels at first like a misstep. Scraps of scathing, metallic guitar slice through an earthy mélange of traditional African percussion during “Pink and Sour,” but the band soon melds these clashing textures together effectively, proving once again what Califone’s music has so often demonstrated: that folk music is as much a space for artifice and the surreal as for authenticity and the organic.
Colleen et Les Boîtes à La Musique
Colleen et Les Boîtes à La Musique
Leaf
originally published October 25, 2006
Parisienne Cecile Schott, AKA Colleen and now on the London-based Leaf label, is finally making imprints on the American music scene with the new disc Colleen et Les Boîtes à La Musique. Created with digital enhancements, the entire album, except for the multimedia last track "I'll Read You A Story," is composed entirely from tinkling music boxes.
The album begins with "John Levers the Ratchet," a 30-second track that emulates the winding noise of a music box, signifying the mark of a peculiar style. "What is a Componium, Pt. 2" is a heavy symphonic layering of harp chords, proceeded by a very broken, rusty and creepy version of “Pop Goes the Weasel.” “I’ll Read You A Story,” a track that originally appeared on her terrific earlier album Golden Morning Breaks, gently dances on the seams of syncopated rhythms, sometimes tortured, sometimes playful.
Beautifully circuitous and strangely introspective, with a bold disregard of definable structure, Schott’s work paints landscapes of dark childhood fantasy. Colleen et Les Boîtes à La Musique could easily stand in for the soundtrack to a Brothers Grimm fairy tale or a Roald Dahl story.
Dirt Reynolds
The Georgia Bulldog
New South
originally published October 25, 2006
One of the easiest things to warm to about the rap scene is the community present there. Occasionally, this can lead to tribalism of the bad sort, as a community is defined in opposition to others, which, if you’re not careful, can lead to conflict of various sorts. Mostly what it means, though, is that the strong emphasis on roots and place, as well as keeping it real, means that everyone who achieves some degree of success tries to reach down and bring friends along. This can lead to innumerable weak guest spots on records from dudes you’ve never heard of, but Dirt Reynolds has at least the potential to transcend merely being another posse member.
Signed to Bubba Sparxxx’s New South label, Dirt is better known locally as Duddy Ken, or Ken Richardson, a Cedar Shoals graduate and local record producer. The Georgia Bulldog is a mixtape, not an official album, and I guess the idea is that, among the 26 (!) tracks, you’ll find something you like, but it sure is a lot to wade through, even peppered with the “Georgia!” “Bulldogs!” chant that the sides of Sanford alternate on game days, and a bit of Larry Munson (I think it’s from the Tennessee game when the students stormed the field and took down the goalposts).
It’s also hard to tell when most of DJ K.O.'s beats are nicked from elsewhere, but Ken’s sound seems a bit more traditionally crunk than Bubba’s crazy quilt of other Southern influences. His vocals are comparable, though, with a similar combo of drawl and hurry-up. “Momentarily,” from the local(ish) Phivestarr Productions, demonstrates this ability nicely, and while it’s a little long at five and a half minutes, the song is a good showpiece. Basically, the jury remains out, but Henry Fonda appears to be winning them over to the side of the defendant.
Dirty Pretty Things
Waterloo to Anywhere
Mercury / Interscope
originally published October 25, 2006
It's hard to imagine a more loathsome band than the Libertines. Celebrated for reinforcing every hoary rock cliché in the book to the point of actual failure, they rode a tide of opportunity that serves only to further everything bad about music - dysfunction as admirable and important rather than an unfortunate co-morbid disorder, myths about nightlife presented as the very heaven to which the elect may one day descend, rock as Renaissance Faire - and continue to be an apparent inspiration for every lazy soul-searcher born within five miles of a chip shop. Thankfully, they've remained marginalized in this country, but the members of the Libertines that don't go to court on a regular basis, as former frontguy Pete Doherty does, have formed a band fashionably named Dirty Pretty Things.
And guess what? They're horrible. They yowl about cigarettes and drugs and dying and their guitars are thin as vinyl pants, like the Strokes if they believed their own press. It's energetic and inspiring only if you've never, like, heard music before; their continued existence must be due to a government subsidy intended to distract vulnerable youth from becoming creative.
Here's a line: "All the sycophants and vampires, I pack them off to hell / Well I've been up for days, I hope no one can tell." If Vince Neil or Lindsay Lohan sang this, it would be awesome. But here there's no meaning to it, no sense that it's anything other than playing a role: the Queen stepping to the balcony, waving a gloved hand and returning to the shadows. Let's hope these creeps do the same, and soon.
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