Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait. From MassEducation, out now on Loma Vista.
This is nuts. When I first heard the new version of this song I doubted that it was just Annie Clark’s voice and a piano. You can clearly hear a plucked bass and strummed guitar chords. Or can you?
As this video makes clear all those sounds are created by pianist Thomas Bartlett using a technique called palm muting where he reaches his left hand inside the grand piano and presses on the strings while he plays notes with his right hand. It looks bonkers and sounds incredible.
This was filmed at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles on earlier this month by none other than Bobcat Goldthwait. Clark looks and sounds stunning. She’s got an almost Winona Ryder vibe going on with her hair and makeup.
“Savior” is a song that didn’t make a big impression on me on last year’s MASSEDUCTION, but this new piano version reveals that I clearly wasn’t listening. It’s freaky. And dope.
Adore you to the grave and farther
Honey I can’t be your martyr
Maybe it’s just human nature
But honey I can’t be your savior
But then you say, “Please”
Oh man, while their last single we covered (“Drive Your Car”) was a badass rave-up garage stomper, “Baby in Blue Jeans” is a slow burner with hints of early Spaceman 3 or some of the trippier elements of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. It’s psychedelic without employing any of the cliches associated with that descriptor. And now it’s got a gritty video to fit the mood.
Goshen Electric Co. is what happens when Strand of Oak’s Tim Showalter spends a half a day in the studio with the members of Magnolia Electric Co (Mike Benner, Jason Evans Groth, Mikey Kapinus, Mark Rice, Peter Schreiner).
The digital single will include an extended, nine-minute version of “Ring the Bell” from Songs: Ohia’s Didn’t It Rain (2002) and Magnolia Electric Co.’s Trials & Errors (2005).
It’s been more than five years since Jason Molina died and it hasn’t started hurting any less. Showalter feels the loss as deeply as anybody. “There was such an intimate relationship with his music -– it felt a lot deeper than just liking a song,” he’s said. “You live in these songs.”
Showalter and the band toured Europe, calling themselves “Songs: Molina – A Memorial Electric Co.” This seems like an appropriate tribute to a singer and songwriter who is terribly missed.
Another globetrotting video from Tracyanne Campbell and Danny Coughlan, this one featuring lead vocals from Coughlan who says, “I worked in a plastics factory for a while in my teens, and there was a woman, I guess in her late twenties, who would turn up for her shift looking like a film star despite the hair net, white wellies, and love bites on her neck. We all had crushes on her and adored her. I guess it’s a fond look back at a simpler time of adolescent infatuations.”
Directed by Mustashrik. From Look Now, due October 12 on Concord Records.
“Suspect My Tears” is ostensibly by Elvis Costello and the Imposters. Elvis is certainly front, center and foremost on the orchestration, for a full-throated orchestration it is. And, no doubt, Nieve, Thomas and Faragher are playing their instruments on the performance.
But the real sound comes from Burt Bacharach, the man with whom Costello collaborated on 1998’s Painted from Memory.
Now look at that date for a moment: 1998. That’s 20 years ago. A life and then some in professional music. When the two created that album Costello was 44. Bacharach 70. The two, remarkably, still have it.
When some people hear the strings, hear the back up vocals that might sound completely suitable for a Dionne Warwick single, hear the torch-song-like singing, their reaction might be: Costello has lost it.
But so far as “Suspect My Tears” goes (I’ve yet to hear the entire Look Now so I can’t comment on the other cuts), it is simply that Costello has gone back to a type of music that has the sort of emotional resonance that arguably has its roots in “Alison.” That song appeared along with “Welcome to the Working Week,” “Mystery Dance” and “Waiting for the End of the World” on 1977’s My Aim Is True. Arguably “Alison” is an anomalous cut on that disc, yet its lyric stands as the title of the whole thing.
So maybe Elvis is going back to his roots in some ways.
Costello has created a body of work over the past 40 years in a way that few of his contemporaries have. For example, take Graham Parker. He and the Rumour put out the same hard-driving “Pump It Up”-like music when Costello was with the Attractions. And Parker had and has the same lyrical gift that Costello has and a seemingly similar sensibility or worldview. Yet Costello has created everything from works with a string quartet to the soundtrack for a British TV show to country music to some of the most resonant rock of all time. Parker went solo, minimal, and then back with the Rumour (and now the Goldtops). Parker is an acquired taste that once imbibed continues. Costello is someone who seems to be constantly changing in some ways, yet clearly consistent. There seems to be more musical relevance and endurance, but the relevance is timeless.
“You’re not the only one who can turn it on
“When you need it
“I’ll cry until you suspect my tears.”
People don’t seem to write too much music about heartbreak any more.
So this is a rare thing. A rare, sumptuous, beautiful thing.
And if those adjectives aren’t the sort of thing that you associate with Costello, if Painted from Memory doesn’t strike you as the work of two brilliant collaborators, then God Give Me Strength.
You know how we feel about cults around here. We love ’em!
Laura Gibson told NPR, “The song ‘Domestication’ took form as a fable, the story of wolf trying and failing to live as a woman. I was thinking a lot about shape-shifting. Wolves and dogs seemed to haunt my lyrics on Goners. […] Though I’d meant ‘domestication’ in the animal sense, when it came time to make the video, I liked the idea of using the term in the homemaking sense. I’d been obsessed with this photo I’d found of the pastel women of the FLDS cult, and wanted to build a world and a story around the aesthetic — something like the speculative societies of Margaret Atwood or Ursula Le Guin. At the end of the story, I wanted the women to act like wolves.”
I’m guessing the photo she found was this one:
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
That photo was going around a few years ago when Amy Berg’s documentary Prophet’s Prey came out.
Directed by Hugh Hales-Tooke. From Robyn Hitchcock, out now on Yep Roc.
Everybody knows that he’s been obsessed with Syd Barrett but it’s weird when Robyn Hitchcock sounds like post-Barrett Pink Floyd. This could almost be an outtake from The Wall.
Losing my face, losing my friends, losing my temper
Losing my place on the map, losing my home
“I first saw Robyn Hitchcock in my hometown, Cambridge, in 1976,” director by Hugh Hales-Tooke told Rolling Stone. “He was playing with a fairly early incarnation of the Soft Boys. It seemed fitting for Cambridge to be the place for Robyn Hitchcock to emerge. He was doing something strong and unique but with a strong connection to Cambridge, the home of Syd Barrett and early Pink Floyd psychedelia.”
Directed by Kansas Bowling. From Darkness Rains out today on Suicide Squeeze.
On March 24, 2018, “Mad” Mike Hughes successfully launched himself into the sky in a homemade, steam-powered rocket. Elon Musk’s got nothing on this daredevil.
Director Kansas Bowling was there and the new Death Valley Girls video combines her footage from the day with additional footage of ritual sacrifice and mourning. Everybody grieves differently. Kansas Bowling does it with a fish.
Bonnie Bloomgarden said, “We heard of this guy that wanted to shoot himself into the sky in a home made, steam-powered rocket ship to prove that the Earth was flat. Kansas Bowling asked us if we wanted to go film the launch. At first we thought we didn’t care at all about flat earthers, or the flat earth theory, but then we met Mad Mike Hughes. Mad Mike is an amateur rocket scientist, lawyer, limo driver, dare devil, Guinness Book world record alum, conspiracy theorist, and is now running for governor of the state of Nevada. After going to three launches in the desert – two attempted, and one successful – we learned a lot. While we don’t agree with his politics at all, we are glad we met him, and that we learned one more thing before we die.”
You can see more footage from the launch on YouTube and some of it even includes cameos by Bowling and the band.
“(One Less Thing) Before I Die” features guitars that sound like they could’ve come straight from Sonic Smith and Wayne Kramer. And that’s high praise.
It’s always news when Tom Waits does anything. Especially when he records a version of an old anti-fascist resistance anthem from the Italian Civil War.
One fine morning I woke up early
Find the fascist at my door
Oh, partigiano, please take me with you
Bella ciao, bella ciao, goodbye beautiful
This comes from a new collection of protest songs from guitarist Marc Ribot, who recruited a bunch of singers (including Steve Earle, Tift Merritt, Syd Straw, and Meshell Ndegeocello) to voice historical songs and a few originals.
Explaining “Bella Ciao” Ribot says, “Mussolini’s voodoo economics led Italy into a generation of poverty and a senseless war with hundreds of thousands of Italian casualties—including over 30 thousand Partisans. This song tells the story of one of them. At a tender moment when he or she is saying goodbye to her lover (Bella Ciao=goodbye, beautiful) and trying to imagine what it means to fight for freedom. I played Tom a bunch of the tunes and he immediately bonded with that one. “Of course, he brings a certain gravitas to everything he does—my Italian friends say he sounds exactly like an old ‘partigiano’ (resistance fighter)!”
Portions of the album’s proceeds will be donated to The Indivisible Project, an organization that helps individuals resist the Trump agenda via grassroots movements in their local communities.
