Touchstones

...I have a love/hate relationship with the ECM label (which is now owned by Universal/Decca/Polywhatever). This mysterious European outfit always intrigued me when I was a kid -- our library had a bunch of their titles, and I was mystified by the spacious, almost negative-spacious artwork. I remember staring at one record, probably a Keith Jarrett album, and asking myself "What IS this?" You can't really tell anything from the covers, which usually feature a landscape shot, or sometimes just a block of solid color. I've come to dig the artwork, as it forms a part of the label's brand. In these bland post-digital days, so few labels have an aesthetic. It's nice to see ECM continuing to carry it through.

But what makes it a love/hate situation? Let's break it out into two lists.

Love:

1. At its best, the music is a dramatic extension of traditional jazz, incorporating modal and free elements while still remaining strangely accessible.
2. The cover art is continuous and cool -- you know upon seeing one of their projects that it is an ECM release. What other label can you say that about these days?
3. They support new classical composition via their ECM New imprint, which is fantastic.
4. They supported (eventually incorporating) Carla Bley and Michael Mantler's JCOA and Watt labels.
5. They release Michael Mantler's brilliantly uncategorizable albums.

Hate:

1. At its worst, the music has a droney, new-agey feel. Very easy to make fun of!
2. The cover art is pretentious and often conveys little helpful information to the uninformed consumer.
3. They seem to indulge Keith Jarrett's every fart. They guy is great, but maybe we should rein it in a little.
4. It's hard to find a lot of their classic titles in stores (probably more stores' fault than ECM's).
5. Their list price is always high -- $18.98 per CD. Consequently, most of the ECM titles in my collection are used LPs or used CDs or promos.

It's great to see ECM address the last two factors with their new "Touchstones" series, which takes classic ECM catalog titles and reissues them in simple four-panel digipaks (no great loss, as the original albums rarely had any liner notes or photos, so they don't take anything out!) at a budget price ($11.99). I was surprised to walk into my local record store and find the "Touchstones" reissue of Marc Johnson's Bass Desires album, which I'd been looking for for a while. Other quality titles in the first batch are Bill Frisell's Lookout for Hope and Paul Bley's Open, To Love. Kenny Wheelers Gnu High is also in the first batch, but I've yet to find a copy.

...a worthwhile initiative.

Not-Reissued Wednesday: Nothing Painted Blue

Nothing Painted Blue
A Baby, A Blanket, A Packet of Seeds
Jupa, 1990

This weekend I saw Franklin Bruno do a performance in a small art gallery/performance space not far from my house. I took great comfort in the fact that not only is he a brilliant, insightful songwriter -- he is also a riveting performer and, in our limited interaction, a very nice guy. You know never know when you meet someone you admire or see a favorite musician live for the first time. They could be jerks, they could be lousy performers, they could be both...I've seen it all!

As usual, seeing Bruno live sent me scurrying through his discography which has quietly grown quite sizable, when one considers things under his name, with his band Nothing Painted Blue, and his new outfit, the Human Hearts. He doesn't make bad records, so you can jump in anywhere...

This curiously-titled platter is the self-release debut of Nothing Painted Blue. The little insert boasts "Sixteen hours in the studio, sixteen songs...", which explains the stark, unadorned sound quality. You have to wait four songs to even get a harmony vocal overdub! It sticks pretty closely to the guitar-bass-drums format, with the great, underrated Kyle Brodie pounding the skins. (I actually asked the drummer who played with Bruno this weekend what his name was, on the off chance it WAS Brodie -- it wasn't but he did a great job nonetheless.)

It's definitely a nascent effort. The songs have a lot of future Bruno hallmarks: a sort of nervously skittering intellect, endless wit, bluntly catchy hooks, etc. Bruno's voice isn't quite the bold bleat it is now, and the songs lack a certain depth and nuance, but it's a very exciting debut, and has aged quite well. Plenty of bon mots to go around, like:

She was as subtle as a raw fish
She was as stable as a drug
If she'd been any less standoffish
She would have been a bearskin rug

From what I can gather, this isn't an easy record to come by. It was apparently pressed twice, the second pressing including a bright yellow tour poster -- which is the pressing I had. I got it from a dealer at a record show...it looked like he'd bought the stock of a failed indie distributor, as he had a lot of weird early '90s and late '80s indie rock and punk records. I think this one was $8.00, and it was still sealed. I also got a red vinyl Happy Flowers record and the first self-released Bob Paisley album (which ain't exactly indie rock -- not sure how that got in there).

Most of Nothing Painted Blue's oeuvre is easy to find. I especially like their most recent album, the hard-rockin' Taste the Flavor and the brilliant Monte Carlo Method. But you can't really go wrong with anything Bruno's done...

Here's a shot of him in action from the other night:

On the road again...

So, for the past ten years or so, before even graduating from college, I've worked for record labels, often charged with the task of "supporting" touring artists while on the road. Said "support" consists basically of alerting the local media well in advance of the gig -- press, radio, local societies and such. I hesitate to say it's a thankless job. It's more like covering your ass...you want to be sure to have at least one or two big media hits (like a juicy radio interview or a feature in the local paper), so that when no one shows up to the gig, you can say, "But we had a big feature in the Buttscrunch Journal." The actual correlation between local media and show attendance is, of course, fleeting and unproven.

It was interesting to be on the other side of the fence a few weeks ago, when my young-ish band (we've been together about a year and four months) took in a short tour of the southeast. It was the first time for all of us, and even though it was only six days, I think we learned some lessons...those being:

1. Sleep
If you do one night where you get less than 7 or 8 hours of sleep, you leave yourself open to infection and grumpiness. And headaches. It's a vicious cycle.

2. Eat Well
Fast food and donuts also lead to headaches, crankiness, and indigestion.

3. Friends Are Great
Call it playing it safe, but for this first round we hit towns where we had a lot of friends and family. They came. They bought a lot of merch. They brought us snacks. They cheered loudly.

4. The Media May Not Matter
We didn't have any big media hits, outside of some good radio spins in one town. And it didn't seem to make much difference...which is fine, because local press and radio were astonishingly unfriendly and unhelpful.

5. Seven Hours Is Probably Too Long
Driving seven hours (which turned into eight-plus with traffic) and doing a show that night may be too much. Again, tired and headaches and crankiness can result.

The above makes it sound like the tour was a big malnourished crank-fest, which it wasn't! We just noticed that these little things would start to come up, and fortunately my buddies are all too nice and civil to act on any ill-achieved impulse. It was great fun...

New Release Monday?

...I'll fess up -- I've been bad! I went on tour with my band a week ago, came home sick for a week, and am only just now feeling like standing up for longer than it takes to stumble to the bathroom. Forgive me. I'll resume posting with some regularity this week.

I got this awful cold in Athens, Georgia. I've since spoken to a bunch of folks who were at the same event, and apparently something was going around -- and not just excitement and enthusiasm. One of the worst effects of this bug is that my ears are really clogged -- I can't hear well out of my right ear. So I don't want to assess anything critically right now, feeling as how I am somewhat incapacitated.

It's ironic that one of the records I really want to sink my words into is Brian Wilson's new one, Lucky Old Sun -- the irony being that Brian is deaf in one ear...I'm only temporarily impaired, but I still want to let it clear up before I talk about someone else's music. I will say that, while far from perfect, this is by a great length his best (non-SMILE) solo album. The lyrics (mostly written by bandmate Scott Bennett, but also one tremendous tune from Van Dyke Parks and one okay one by Brian himself) are a big improvement, and melodically and arrangement-wise, this is much more ambitious.

I'll also blog a little bit about what it was like to do a short tour myself, after supporting touring artists for the past ten years in a different capacity. Stay tuned...

...gone pickin'...

...I'm traveling and playing music this week, so there will be no posts for a while!

Forty-Five Friday: Alan Licht

Alan Licked (aka Alan Licht)
Calvin Johnson Has Ruined Rock For An Entire Generation
Eighteen Wheeler, 1994

...I don't delve into the used seven-inch bins at record stores all that much. In the northeast, at least, that usually means a ton of gutter-punk singles, that all look and sound pretty much the same....that said, today I found a few random platters at one store that were intriguing -- no more so than this one. The cover says it all, doesn't it? I actually don't mind Calvin Johnson, though I am seeing a lot of indie pop bands taking on his mannerism without his wit and soul...

As far as Alan Licht goes, I've had mixed success with his records. I liked his CD Sink the Aging Process, but his two-disk set New York Minute didn't do much for me. I should revisit it. I really enjoy his writing on music, like his short book An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn and the liner notes to Sink.

But I won't lie. I bought this one for the cover. I started to play it, and it sounded like a looped bit of guitar noise, but my wife made me take it off after the first minute. Still, great cover, right?

Cocaine Reggae

The other day I posted this question on a social networking site:

Does liking the new Walter Becker album make me a bad person?

I'm only partly joking when I ask that...Becker, best known as one-half of the joint-chamber known as Steely Dan, has a new disk out called Circus Money. Of course, the Dan made a career (and hopefully a fortune) in welding a sort of wry, after-hours cynicism with a sophisticated harmonic palette. Theirs wasn't really a Randy Newman-style pop misanthropy -- it seemed more first person, in the sense that Newman's narratives play out as grand fiction, whereas Fagen/Becker's writing seemed more like reports from the frontline of depraved boredom.

Becker always intrigued me, as he was something of a silent partner in Steely Dan. He co-wrote everything, but rarely sang, and while he contributed much in the way of guitar and bass, a lot of the more heralded bits of their oeuvre came courtesy of hired guns (like "Skunk" Baxter on "My Old School" or Chuck Rainey's bass lines on Aja). Becker stepped forth with a solo album in 1994, which was intriguing but a bit gauzy...it had a smoke-filled quality that I couldn't quite reconcile, despite some strong songs and the surprising soulfulness of Becker's singing.

Circus Money is different. It's very sparse -- although slickly executed and immaculately produced, the tracks feel pared to the bone. The predominate feel is reggae...but to call describe it as "really relaxed reggae rhythms" as Stephen Thomas Erlewine does in his remarkably uninsightful allmusic.com review, is to miss the point entirely. This is a tight, profoundly uncomfortable sort of reggae...if most reggae is pot fueled and mellow, this is dry, flaky, cocaine reggae. It reminds me of the way your nose feels once it finally stops bleeding.

It's a record worth hearing...Becker's bass playing is tremendous -- he knows his reggae shit, but isn't afraid to stray from the formula. The chord progressions are typically ingenious, with quirky modulations all over the place. More than once the band will lock into a one-chord groove over which a keyboard will layer a second chord progression, creating a great sense of tension. Lyrically Becker is in fine mettle, dashing off disgusting scenarios populated by loathsome characters, wrapped in desperation. I think my favorite may be "Darkling Down," which wraps up with this little run:

Who will feast on this buzzard's banquet?
Who will render my heroic bust?
Who will choke on my lachrymose musings?
Who will eat my zero dust?
Who will wear this puke-streaked tunic?
Who shall gorge on this cup of spleen?
Who will sing about the good bad and ugly
And all and everything in between?

I believe that this disk is the first recorded work produced by Becker without the involvement of Donald Fagen...maybe that's significant, maybe it's not. But it is an intriguing project...not the kind of stuff I usually listen to, but maybe that's why I'm listening to it so much.

Reissue Wednesday: Tony Rice

Tony Rice
Night Flyer: The Singer Songwriter Collection
Rounder, 2008

Behind the drab cover and awkward, inaccurate subtitle (Rice is not a songwriter, and not all of these songs come from the singer-songwriter cannon) is actually an interesting, well-chosen compilation covering an overlooked era in the music of the maverick guitarist and vocalist Tony Rice. From about '83 until '92, Rice cultivated a kind of acoustic roots music art song. He applied his bluegrass chops to slightly more sophisticated material from singer/songwriters, country, and jazz, along with vividly reimagined folk and bluegrass songs...the result was a series of wonderful records like Cold on the Shoulder, Native American, and Me and My Guitar. The records have been somewhat overshadowed by Rice's major triumph's like Manzanita, the first records with Crowe and Grisman, and his recent work with Peter Rowan. Hopefully this collection will correct that oversite.

There are two particulars worth noting -- first off, the liner notes by Ron Block are great: insightful, passionate, thoughtful, and conversational. Secondly, and this is not really mentioned in the promotional literature or on the sticker, this collection contains Rice's last recorded vocal, "Pony."

I've had some trouble with my voice lately...nothing major, but some unwelcomed wear and inflammation brought on by a combination of bad habits and gastro-intestinal issues. But even this mild threat hit me really hard. I mean, your voice is who you are. It's how you express yourself to other people. It's how you communicate emotions and thoughts...it's how you talk and sing and interact. That said, when I was struggling (and I still am a little) with my voice, I got really depressed. It seems like a basic right, you know? Something we all take for granted.

Tony hasn't sung in ages, due to some strain of dysphonia. No one knows exactly how -- maybe the upcoming biography on Tony will address it, but I doubt it. Bluegrass people don't talk about it. It's an extensive sort of denial that persists...

In 2000 or 2001, during a break from recording a Rice, Rice, Hillman, and Pederson, Tony sat down with John Carroll and recorded a version of "Pony," a Tom Waits song. First off, it's a brilliant song, with a cascading melody and a resonant, powerful lyric. So many Waits fans that I know seem to be into his music just for the weird factor...they always say "Listen to this -- it's like two hobos beating on an oil can inside a factory!" They never say "Listen to this -- it's such a beautiful, well-crafted song!" Waits' own performances, I feel, sometimes undermine the grace and beauty of his craftsmanship.

This version of "Pony" is devastating...maybe it is the circumstances. You can hear Rice's voice fraying. You can hear the great amount of effort he is putting into pushing air through his throat and over his vocal cords...his struggle goes hand in hand with the lyric of the song, and the result is just hard to take. My wife made me turn it off. I only listened to it once. That was all I could stand...it's really sad. But kudos to Tony for having the balls to release it. Tom Waits may pretend to be raspy and broken down...Tony Rice is raspy and broken down. I'm not sure if its art or documentary, but it deserves to be heard.

Best. Sticker. Ever.

Sorry this photo is a little fuzzy...I took it with a camera-phone at a record store. Beneath the fuzz is probably the best sticker I've ever seen on a commercial music product. In case you can't read it, it says: Nordic Folk Metal Comeback of the Year.

Now, record stickering deserves its own post, and I'm sure I'll do one in the near future on the subject...but in the meantime, let's give this one some thought. Stickers, I thought, were designed to make people who normally wouldn't buy the album buy the album. They are designed to widen your audience. Well, this thing has the opposite effect, and brilliantly so! Think about it as a dialog between the sticker and the potential consumer:

Consumer: I like metal.
Sticker: Do you like Nordic metal?
Consumer: I do like Nordic metal.
Sticker: Do you like Nordic folk metal?
Consumer: I do, but really only bands from the classic Nordic folk metal renaissance that happened a few years ago.
Sticker: Well, do I have an album for you. Remember Vintersorg?
Consumer: Didn't they break up?
Sticker: They came back.

I love this sticker. By insuring the narrowest possible audience for their release, this band/record company will be guaranteed the CD will only fall into the hands of those truly worthy and capable of understanding the magic therein. That is, if people read stickers on CDs/albums/etc. Do they?

New Release Monday: Let's Whisper

Let's Whisper
Make Me Smile
WeePop!, 2008

...I've had this one on repeat for what seems like the past week, and probably is. First, some formalities: if you don't know WeePop! Records, you should! They are a UK-based imprint that serves up indie-pop, a genre whose definitions and boundaries tend to confound me. As a listener, I tend to like about half of what I hear that calls itself "indie-pop." WeePop have a brilliant little model: they release limited edition (used to be 120, now it's 160, I think) three-inch CDs (CD-Rs, technically) by bands they like, all done up in increasingly intricate hand-made packaging. Visit them at www.weepop.net. Buy their stuff. I do, for what it's worth.

So this one showed up on my doorstep last Saturday, and I've spun it dozens of times. More formalities: Let's Whisper is a side-project from Colin Clary and Dana Kaplan of New England indie-pop magnates The Smittens. I assumed that, because they are just a duo and The Smittens are a whole band, that this project would be a quieter, more stripped down, low-fi yin to The Smittens' yang. It's actually a curious reversal: The Smittens great new album The Coolest Thing About Love (buy it here) continues their winning streak of defiantly, joyously low-fi pop -- geeky, adorable, well-crafted and spontaneous in equal measure.

Make Me Smile is something else. Contrary to their duo shows (which is the only way I've seen them perform), there are bass and drums, along with some vocal and guitar overdubs, that make this much fuller than I anticipated. Also, it appears that much of it was recorded in an actual studio, and it has a rich, warm sound that's not really low-fi. And, after having forced my ears to dig for melodies under layers and layers of tape hiss with so many acts who think that low-fi recordings will make bad songs better, it's actually a welcomed vibe!

There are only 160, and you should really buy one now, because it is a genuinely wonderful, heartwarming effort that soars via all that is good about indie-pop and sidesteps all the genre's cliches. The writing is first-rate, starting with Dana's "Dylan Song," which to me is a incredibly thoughtful meditation on a subject (childbirth, I think) which too often leads to icky, sentimental songs. Colin's "Tender Circle" is another in what seems like Clary's endless supply of heartfelt, genuine, insightful love songs. Colin and Dana collaborate on the bittersweet audio postcard "Open Road" and the ridiculously sublime "When You Were Eating Ice Cream." I never thought I'd like a song with a refrain that went "nummy num num," but it's lodged in my head...and you know what, people do look cuter eating ice cream than they do eating steak. Bingo, gang!

The Smittens camp has seen a lot of action lately. There's also a split seven-inch with Tullycraft that you can only get at shows or via the Happy Happy Birthday to Me singles club. CDs, EPs, 45s...don't deprive yourself of any of it.

Forty-Five Friday: Alex Chilton

Alex Chilton
Singer Not The Song
Ork Records, 1977

What's more fun than seven-inch records? For some reason they go hand in hand with the concept of Friday...hence, Forty-Five Friday! Of course, some of y'all will give me grief for kicking off Forty-Five Friday with a seven-inch that plays at 33rpm. Pobody's nerfect.

I stumbled on this gem a few weeks ago, after a ball game at a used record store for six bucks...it's an original pressing, complete with the hard cardboard sleeve, and is probably worth more like $25-$45 in this condition, though I doubt I'll ever sell it. It's the first officially released Alex Chilton solo project, post-Box Tops and post-Big Star, although he'd recorded solo sessions in between the dissolution of the Tops and the formation of Big Star. Those sessions wouldn't see the light of day until a 1996 CD called 1970.

By all accounts, the mid-seventies were shaky times for Chilton. The unfair neglect of Big Star's work by the general public, combined with Chilton's alcoholism, seemed to cast a dark, dark shadow around everything. When he was allowed free reign in the studio to follow his own muse, he produced the brilliantly ramshackle 1978 single "Bangcock." The sessions that created this EP, however, were supervised by John Tiven.

Tiven is an interesting figure. I met him once, and he seemed like an earnest enough dude...kind of a hustler, but that's what you do when you are a freelance producer. In the '70s he contributed a bit to Memphis power-pop lore by producing this disk and as one half of the band Prix with Tommy Hoehn. In '78 he released a solo album under the name of The Yankees, which was a minor success and an engagingly rough-edged new wave pop album. Since then, Tiven has emerged as something of an R&B svengali, taking veteran artists who still have some stuff to strut and co-writing songs with them and producing the resulting recordings. Unfortunately, he's not that interesting of a songwriter or producer, and the results tend to be relatively tame and dull.

Still, on a record like this, Tiven must have felt like he was herding cats. Even in the William Eggleston cover photos, Chilton looks wrecked. Alex is a great guitarist, yet all the guitars on the record are played by Tiven -- was Chilton just too zonked? What emerges on Singer Not The Song is a weird, uncomfortable collision of styles: Chilton's freewheeling spontaneity (which he'd explore further on the brilliant Like Flies On Sherbert) and Tiven's more controlled roots-pop.

The resulting disk is charming, mostly because of Chilton's spacey singing and the quality of the songs...opener "Free Again" was originally cut by Chilton in '70, and is a wide-eyed country stomp well matched on side one with a version of the Rolling Stones' title track. Side two features a version of Chilton's much-recorded "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It" that is a little smothered, but amusing -- especially when compared to Tiven's mannered, self-consciously lewd version on the Yankees' record. For me, the record's highlight is "All The Time," a pop gem co-written by Chilton and his girlfriend Lesa Aldridge, where Tiven's devices (what's with the weird flanged guitar?) are undone by Chilton's brilliantly casual vocal.

This material was compiled eventually as a CD, now deleted, called Bach's Bottom, along with the 1978 single ("Bangcock") and some other stuff. Tiven couldn't resist tinkering with it, though, and remixed a bunch of the tracks re-inserted some guitar left off the original released mixes. It's nice to have the original mixes, though.

An interesting corollary to this disk is that Chilton wrote liner notes to the Bach's Bottom reissue that were not used, illuminating the tension of the sessions. Surely alcohol and drugs played a role in keeping things off the rails, but more than that was a difference of intent and process between Tiven and Chilton. Chilton writes..."The young producer was appalled and failed to see the beauty of letting the music happen in a manner so obviously out of control. Some of these have undergone some major audio surgery at the hands of the producer who, after seventeen years, still does not seem to know the chords."

Yikes...