A brand new, star-studded Fortune & Maltese EP is coming soon from Get Hip. MP3 samples available here.
Split Lip Rayfield – Should Have Seen It Coming
Split Lip Rayfield – Should Have Seen It Coming (Bloodshot)
With Should Have Seen It Coming, Split Lip Rayfield continues to expand on its trademark psycho version of bluegrass, often times played at manic break-neck speed that would make fingers bleed, other times reduced to quieter moments of plucking and strumming.
The album careens between downright serious and accomplished to goofy and care-free, working both extremes pretty well. From painting humorous caricatures of hillbilly life and telling pensive tales of doom, to celebrating the excesses of drugs and plenty of pre-requisite country tales of lost love.
Though, it’s a lot to take in at once—Is it insurgent country or goofball bluegrass? (Both and neither)—it doesn’t really matter. Just call up some friends, crack a few Miller High Lifes, get some Bar-b-que going, and enjoy.
Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Brit Pop
Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Brit Pop
Remember the 90s? No? Well, put down that Modest Mouse CD, Sally, and I’ll tell you all about it. They were heady times. The economy was rocking, and so was the White House. While the market was going up, Monica was going down and we were all having a laugh while Republicans tried to dismantle democracy in America. Yes, we were all gleefully hoodwinked by the early volleys of a culture war that is just now taking its toll.
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Jonny Polonsky – The Power of Sound
Jonny Polonsky – The Power of Sound (Loveless Records)
Jonny Polonsky’s first full-length in eight years, The Power of Sound, should be a welcome surprise to anyone who had the good fortune of discovering him in the mid-’90s and since assumed his career’s demise. For the rest of us, it’s a full-fledged indoctrination into the music of a man we should’ve been listening to all along. In a cliché just begging to be exploited, this is one powerful album, a blitzkrieg of grungy power-pop. At only ten songs and 31 minutes in length, it’s over before you’re ready, but it doesn’t give itself the chance to let you down.
Handpicked by Frank Black and Pete Droge, Polonsky’s got built-in credentials. The rock/power-pop singer/songwriter from Wilmette, IL first impressed Black with a homemade tape back in the early ’90s. Black produced a proper demo tape for Polonsky and hooked him up with a manager, helping him to sign a deal with American Records in 1995. The result was 1996’s Hi My Name is Jonny, also produced by Frank Black. When American lost its distribution deal, Polonsky was back on his own, and it took him five years to release the There is Something Wrong With You EP on eggBERT Records.
During a subsequent tour, Polonsky met the like-minded Pete Droge, whose song “If You Don’t Love Me, I’ll Kill Myself” served as the wonderfully wry soundtrack to the snowball fight scene in Dumb and Dumber. Droge also dug Polonsky and helped him to get a contract with Loveless Records, who agreed to release The Power of Sound.
Listening to the album, you might hear an edgier Matthew Sweet, or perhaps a poppier and more melodic Sweet Water. Either way, you’re sure to conclude one thing – this stuff is sweet! Frank Black, a favorite artist of the teenage Polonsky, makes his presence felt through driving and multi-layered rock made accessible and fun. With a name like The Power of Sound, you’d also expect a broader musical palette than just guitar, drums, and bass – and that’s what you get – well, sorta. Polonsky, who plays all the instruments save a few drum tracks carried by A Perfect Circle’s Josh Freese, introduces violin, tambourine, and keyboard into a few cuts.
“Where the Signs End” is the album’s greatest rocker, where Polonsky busts out his wickedest riff and guitar solo and even opens up the pipes for some cathartic screams. Next in line is another highlight, “How Much Do You Know?” Fans of the Smashing Pumpkins will hear fellow Chicago native Billy Corgan incarnate in multiple guitar parts throughout this song, but there’s also a sunniness to the song that is decidedly non-Corgan. “I’ve been waiting so long / Just to tell you, tell you something / Wonder if you know what I will tell you / Of my secret,” he sings at the opening of the track. Polonsky’s tease hints at the fun he finds in uncertainty, a recurring lyrical theme throughout all ten songs.
The acoustic guitar is only showcased once on the album, a rare feat for a solo artist of Polonsky’s ilk. The song in which it appears, “All This Freezing,” is actually a dull moment on the record for its slower pace and sparser sound. But it does hint that Polonsky could probably perform a stunningly soulful acoustic set if he felt so inclined.
Take it from Frank Black, Pete Droge, and yours truly – this guy’s got something special. At a time when most independent rock is less-than-cheerful, our country is less-than-united, and our world is increasingly unstable, Jonny Polonsky is more than happy to remind us that there is still hope – The Power of Sound. As he urges us in the album’s closer, “Come on / Don’t you live for the light?”
Rilo Kiley – More Adventurous
Rilo Kiley – More Adventurous (Brute/Beaute)
If Rilo Kiley were a person, it would be a prom queen at two a.m.—gorgeous, world-weary, lipstick-smeared, desperately trying to convince you that she’s a little bit bad. Their latest release, More Adventurous, also fits this fictitious persona. It’s got attitude for miles and a grace and confidence that help make up for the tiny flaws that humanize it.
The album starts out with “It’s A Hit,” which contains some fairly facile comparisons of the current White House to a chimp that throws its own “shit at the enemy,” but the anger and tone of the song, along with the tight instrumentations and melodies, help the listener forgive its flaws. “Portions For Foxes” deserves to be on every radio station everywhere. It’s an absolutely flawless, gleeful New Wave shout of a song that at the same time admits, “I know I’m alone whether I’m with or without you.”
The two highlights of the album come back-to-back: “I Never” and “The Absence Of God.” It’s been widely reported that singer Jenny Lewis stripped naked in the recording booth in order to create a feeling of being more exposed. The result is absolutely stunning—a modern doo-wop girl group song that finds the narrator admitting “I’m afraid habits rule my waking life / I’m scared and I’m running in my sleep for you.” “The Absence Of God” is reminiscent of Kate Bush’s “Moments Of Pleasure,” another sad, gorgeous wisp of a song that muses over God, love, and death while (presumably) namechecking people in the songwriter’s life (“And Mike, I’ll teach you how to swim / if you turn the bad in me into good again”).
Jenny Lewis’s voice, by turns warm, bouncy, growling and resigned, carries the album through its wild experimental fits and is so gorgeous that by every song’s end you believe that Rilo Kiley could pull off speed metal. There are people who feel that the inclusion of guitarist Blake Sennett’s songs, something that Rilo Kiley has done on each album, is a misstep. The example found here (“Ripchord”) is a bit jarring in its placement, but it’s a lovely, shy song that deserves to be heard as much as anything else on the album.
This album is enough to keep both first-time listeners and seasoned fans happy—a feat that is so difficult to do these days, Rilo Kiley really must be able to do anything.
Rilo Kiley mp3s available across the web from their previous labels: Saddle-Creek and Barsuk.
Jeff Buckley poem: Fullerton Road Trick
Jeff Buckley’s class act – A guy takes a poetry class in New York in 1996 to meet women but ends up meeting Jeff Buckley.
Crunk in Public: The 2004 MTV Video Music Awards
Apparently New York City isn’t big enough for both MTV and the RNC. Ceding Manhattan to the invading army of potato-headed donkey punchers, the network moved its annual Video Music Awards promotional event to Miami’s American Airlines Arena. The move made sense logistically, even if the Page Six stories of hotel bar meetings between, say, Petey Pablo and Senator Sam Brownback would’ve been hilarious. But it was also a reminder of how far south the popular music axis has shifted. Crunk dominated this year’s VMAs from the window to the wall, Outkast continued to clean up (deservedly) for Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, and rock music was viewed only as a nuisance, represented by performances from a few tepid middlers, but best consumed in condensed form. See KRAVITZ, Lenny.
Continue reading Crunk in Public: The 2004 MTV Video Music Awards
Mr. David Viner – This Boy Don’t Care
Mr. David Viner – This Boy Don’t Care (Polydor)
There is a theory in social psychology that suggests that first impressions aren’t as important as you might think; the deepest and most long-lasting friendships are often formed between people who initially don’t get along. The supposition is that if you have to work at it, if you have to dig a little deeper to find something likeable about a person, then the friendship becomes less superficial, less disposable and more concrete. Now, I don’t know if the same is true for music but for Mr. David Viner’s sake I sincerely hope so. Because my first impressions of this album weren’t good. In fact my first instinct was to find Mr. Viner, nail him to his guitar, place him in a sack and drown him in a river.
So no, I didn’t like This Boy Don’t Care. Initially I found it twee, boring and a bit of a mongrel, unsure what it wanted to be and falling uncomfortably between stools. But slowly my homicidal urges began to pass. Because I started hearing something distinctive, something pleasingly eccentric and, as the sleeve notes suggest, something with soul; a mutt for sure, but one with big mournful eyes, a waggy tail and enough character that you want to take it home from the pound.
Fostered by the Detroit community with a backing band consisting of several Soledad Brothers and production by friend to the White Stripes Liam Watson, you may expect This Boy Don’t Care to be another addition to the garage-rock ranks, another foot soldier in the new-rock revolution, but it isn’t. Viner is a throwback to an age of singer-storytellers, a troubled troubadour telling the world of his problems. All hail the leader of the new-minstrel revolution, as absolutely no one will be calling it.
Mr. David Viner has got several points in his favour: he’s an accomplished guitarist, a roguish vocalist and a skilful lyricist. And when the combination of my-woman-dun-me-wrong blues and a typically British dry-wit and cynicism works, it really works: “Seven Years” and “Please Think Of Me” are lovely, simple melancholy laments and “This Boy Don’t Care” is a great vitriolic, post break-up track. It’s only the songs bearing a more honky-tonk, countrified feel that don’t really capture the imagination.
So it took a little while, but this album has really grown on me. The cyclic nature of music would hint that it was only a matter of time before someone started pretending to be a delta bluesman from the 1920s, but I don’t think anyone thought the artist leading that charge would be a 24-year-old from London. Even so, don’t let that put you off; This Boy Don’t Care is a bizarrely endearing album…eventually.
MP3s of “Corrina, Corrina” and “Trouble in Mind” courtesy of DIM-MAK Records.
Curiosa: Joyfully Gloomy
Curiosa at the Tweeter Center
Tinley Park, IL, August 12, 2004
I really only wanted to see the Cure. I’ve been listening to them since, when? 1987? so it seemed like as good a time as any. I had actually made plans to go with a friend at his birthday party and I was drunk and completely forgot about it the next day. “Oh yeah, of course I still want to go. When is it again? Thursday? Perfect!”
Old Enough To Know Better: 15 Years of Merge
Various – Old Enough To Know Better: 15 Years of Merge (Merge)
As if North Carolina based Merge Records hasn’t done enough for its fans over the last 15 years. It has released albums from Superchunk, Spoon, Destroyer and Neutral Milk Hotel. Now it drops a 3-disc compilation on us, Old Enough To Know Better! The first two come loaded with Merge classics. The third is filled with unreleased rarities. Listening to this compilation is like having a best friend hand you a mix tape. They know exactly what gets your foot tapping.
Gorgeous pop songs like East River Pipe’s “Shiny Shiny Pimpmobile” and Portastatic’s “Noisy Night” (mp3) are mixed throughout the first disc. Then, there are complete rockers from Buzzcocks, Breadwinner, and emo band of the moment …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. Disc 2 shows how diverse the label artists have been. Imperial Teen’s terrific “Ivanka” (mp3) and M. Ward’s “Outta My Head” are standout moments of the entire compilation. There is even the wonderful country tune “Isolda” from Paul Burch. The rarities disc features a cover of “Decora” by Spoon. It also shows how underappreciated bands like Ladybug Transistor and Rosebuds are. Of course people will insist that there were better Clientele songs or Destroyer songs than what Merge offered. But it’s hard to find a legitimate misstep.
You will probably find in your circle of friends someone that can relate a high school or college story to when one of these songs were playing in the background. And it’s funny how such a small label can provide such grand feelings of nostalgia. But then, that’s why we love music so much. Merge is donating all proceeds to the Future of Music Coalition, which leads us to ask what more can we request from this label? Maybe 15 more years isn’t too much.