The Twisted, Brilliant Warren Zevon; Moby; Roger Miller's Rockabilly Trip; Danilo Perez
Alison Goldfrapp sang on one track ("Pumpkin") on Tricky's debut, Maxinquaye, and her own Mute debut has more than a bit of Bristol vibe to it. Goldfrapp and her collaborator Will Gregory have not only mastered the low undulating grooves that lurk beneath the clutter in Tricky's best work, but they've copped a bit of the chilly soul of Portishead as well. It would be reductive, however, to slim one's appraisal of Felt Mountain to that one anxious influence. There's a lot more going on here, and most of it is quite clever and appealing.
The Portishead comparison is instructive in this one sense, however. Portishead grounds its songs in an indelible hook and then lets the pained operatic aura of Beth Gibbons provide the coloratura. Goldfrapp's approach is more varied and busy: her voice often fades or is nonexistent, and flourishes of brass or electronic buzzes and beeps carry much of the emotional freight. "Oompa Radar" is a case in point. It's a sublimely spooky montage that ratchets up the tension to high-wire proportions with brass and organ. "Oompa Radar" could feature in the soundtrack to any esthetically fine-tuned cinematic circus from Fellini to Wenders. It's that atmospherically perfect.
When that sense of on-target musicality hooks us with a stronger emphasis on Goldfrapp's smoky voice, the results are equally compelling. "Human" might be the best song in this genre that you'll hear all year?a gently throbbing bass and steady shuffle builds with Goldfrapp's voice and an undercurrent of strings into a frisson of horns reminiscent of Gainsbourg's early flirtations with samba or Perez Prado. It's very infectious stuff. Felt Mountain's opening track, "Lovely Head," is also a winner, matching Goldfrapp's breathy and seductive double entendres to a nervy backing track that ping pongs between a luscious warm sweetness and icy stalactite. Near the end of the album, "Utopia" summons up the best aspects of Thomas Dolby's Flat Earth era?its fizzing electronics are matched to intricate percussion with the intent of reaching something more (and not less) human. Any one of these songs would improve your autumn radio or DMX experience immensely.
There's almost too much echo and influence to digest on Felt Mountain. At times, the listener feels like the host of Romper Room at the end of the show, gazing into a handheld mirror and rattling off names: "I hear Eno and Bowie and John Barry. I hear Barry Adamson and Dietrich and Stereolab." The important word, however, is "almost." Alison Goldfrapp pulls it off wonderfully, and if you like any of the people that she pays homage to on Felt Mountain, you'll like this album as well.
Richard Byrne
(2) A fan of anarchic karaoke. (Aren't we all?) "Tofu Song" is like the soundtrack to Hair sung by a combination of slightly out-of-key Roches fans and their boisterous hairdressers. For no apparent reason "Zozoi" sees the three girls retreating into African jungle territory with operatic?some might say histrionic?singing and beats nicked from wherever Stomp left them lying. You could say that Ex-Girl are like a cross between the delinquent tendencies of Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares and someone all spiky and fierce?the Slits, say. Except that there is nothing cross or logical about this schizophrenic, gleeful mess.
(3) A follower of Free Kitten. Maybe the Casio sound and random drumming on "Hao Hao" is what Kim Gordon sounds like to Japanese ears as obviously warped as Ex-Girl's. Maybe. It's only a thought. Certainly, Ex-Girl's version of the James Brown chestnut "Sex Machine" is twice as sexy and 30 times as revolutionary as Ciccone Youth's take on Madonna's "Into the Groove." Except that to describe Ex-Girl's dysfunctional, almost no-wave funk as anything remotely approaching sexy would be perverse in the extreme. And no, this music isn't logical, although you could dance to it. If you wanted. When I grow up, I want to marry all the girls in Ex-Girl, all at once. This is the most fucking brilliant noise album I've heard since McCartney's Pipes of Peace.
Everett True
And now his former label, Elektra, releases this compilation of his work for them in the mid-90s, hoping to cash in on his increased popularity after Play, which was released on the V2 label. Besides the obvious drawback that this comp only covers a limited period of his career to date?it's missing his early, stomping techno?another problem is that everybody from the aging raver to your mom has their own vision of what constitutes Moby's best.
Songs predictably cuts from the same cloth as Play, emphasizing string-heavy ambient tracks and gentle guitar-kissed funk over his speedier club anthems or his goth/industrial tendencies. Almost half the tracks come from Everything Is Wrong, his kaleidoscopic masterpiece, but here they're forced into a slick context that favors soothing soundscapes over prickly diversity. Further proof of this is how easily tracks from I Like to Score, his collection of soundtrack music, blend into the mix.
But you could do a lot worse than your mom's Moby. For one thing, there probably are a lot of newer fans who don't own club classics "Move (You Make Me Feel So Good)" or "Go," and the comp also rescues a few great tracks from the marginal Animal Rights. But most of all, the collection adeptly shows off Moby's impeccable songcraft, which is what makes him a true visionary of the genre. None of these songs overstays its welcome, and the CD eventually builds a solid, dreamy case. Listening to it while driving around Joshua Tree National Park one recent weekend, I began to understand that ambivalent desire to disappear into an unearthly, unfamiliar landscape, and how lonely that might feel.
Justin Hartung
At least on Night Tide they are. This isn't bad. If Night Tide is sonically a throwback to the 1950s, lyrically it might be closer to grunge. Take the title track, in which the narrator ventures from his "lonely room" and contemplates, "Standing on life's rocky shores I've seemed to lost my light/the dark cold waters seem to say come join me in the night tide." Things aren't much cheerier in "Between Darkness and Dawn"?"Here by the wayside I fell I can't go on/Caught between the darkness and dawn." Not to mention "When Sleep Won't Come" and the melancholy instrumental "In the Steel of the Night."
Yet for all the grief, this is an uplifting, even joyful album. The boom-chicka beats (think early Elvis) make the feet want to dance even while the lyrics sting with regret and loss. In the last 30 years a lot of popular music has forgotten what was once so integral to American music: that the sorrow expressed in a song is intended to create empathy, and that there's no contradiction between a singer contemplating tossing himself into the sea while backed by a spritely beat and lovely melody. Besides, Night Tide ends with a happy rouser, "Let Her Know." This is the kind of American music that's rarely made anymore, and even more rarely made with this kind of intelligence.
Jazz pianist Danilo Perez's Motherland is also quintessential American music. But, unlike Big Sandy, whose music places him in a era from the past with some modern twists, Motherland musically embraces the multiethnic America of the 21st century. Motherland is about the Americas, both North and South, in a melange of styles: post-bop jazz, folk, African and world music?even a punto, a traditional form of dance music from the singer's native Panama. Perez has gone from working with his usual trio to 18 musicians, and the results are hit or miss. On some of the songs the genre blending results in something of a bland gruel, particularly on the meandering "Suite for the Americas?Part 1" and lighter than air and somewhat aimless "Rio to Panama." The other tributes to Panama, "Panama Libre" and "Panama 2000," ostensibly tributes to the music of not only Panama but Cuba and all of South America, also seem weightless, especially when the dynamic Latin pianist Chucho Valdez?not to mention the Buena Vista Social Club?is doing this stuff with so much vitality.
But when it works, Motherland is gorgeous. "Elegant Dance," which mixes Panamanian punto dance rhythms with jazz piano, then layers on top the jazz violin of Regina Carter, is lovely, as is the lament "Song for the Land" with vocals by Claudia Acuna.
Mark Gauvreau Judge
"See, I'm a guy, so I generally don't buy a lot of underwear. And I was living with my girlfriend and working at Denny's, and I really didn't have more than a few pairs of underwear, so if I didn't do laundry, I'd have to go without. So one morning, I was really late for my shift and I didn't have any clean underwear. My girlfriend saw me go to put on an old pair, and she fixed me with a stare and said, 'You're not wearing those.' Now this was a girl who once threw a live cat out a third-floor window, so I was not about to get into it with her. I started to put on my pants without my underwear, and she had a fit about that, too.
"Finally?and I was really late for work at this point?I said, 'What do you want me to do?' Well, she wanted me to wear her underwear. Her red, lacy, satiny panties. So I said fine, figuring I could take 'em off and put 'em in my pocket once I got to work. But Denny's was so busy, I totally forgot about the panties. And then my mom called. Now, my mom is a wonderful lady, but we don't have the best of relationships. So when she offered to take me food shopping?and I was really broke at the time?I said great, and ran from work to meet her.
"So we're in the supermarket, and I see some Fruity Pebbles. And boy do I love Fruity Pebbles. But as I reach for the cereal box on the top shelf, the back of my t-shirt rides up and my mom can see the lacy, satiny red panties and starts screaming bloody murder in the middle of the supermarket."
"And the girlfriend was Carissa?" I ask.
"Nah," says Mat. "Heather Rhodes."
"Heather Rhodes" is also the first song on Ugly but Honest, Carissa's Wierd's first CD out on drummer Ben Bridwell's Brown Records. Despite her dramatic feelings about underwear, the song named after Heather is far from explosive?just a guitar picking out a dainty tune, Brooke deadpanning quietly, "This isn't an insult/to your intelligence/we both already know/how you feel about that," his voice the soul of restraint. In most cases, this kind of delicate, guitar-based, gently atmospheric folk-rock would have me complaining about wuss music and how Elliott Smith should suck it up and quit whining. But somehow, Carissa's Wierd leaves me perfectly happy.
What is it about them? It may be that they make music that's pretty without being sappy. It may be that they never wallow in their lyrics. (Mat once told me that he was going to stop using the word "alone" in his songs.) It may be that they rock out without distortion or a bass guitar. It may be that talent will out. It may be that they don't sound like any other contemporary band I've heard, and I don't say this lightly. It may be that it's good music for deep thinking. It may even just be that they don't look the part of wuss rockers. Ben, Jenn and Mat all sport tattoos up one arm and down the other, and Sarah Standard's bright orange Louise Brooks bob and kohl-rimmed eyes don't exactly whisper "violinist," but that's what she is.
Carissa's Wierd's music recalls Jean-Michel Basquiat's "ignorant art" except that it's entirely free of satire. Even the name?it's common enough to misspell "weird"?is basically guileless. Any band that follows up "It's too cold outside to watch the stars tonight" with "It's too cold outside to be out here at all" has nothing to prove. And they're prone to clever reversals, like in "One Night Stand," whose refrain is, "This really isn't like me at all." How many rock bands can say that with a straight face?
They're not particularly naive, even though they're all in their early 20s, or unsophisticated, despite the fact that they met and formed as teenagers in Arizona. Carissa's Wierd are just artless artists, writing genuine songs that neither presume any knowledge outside of their experience nor inflate their experience to melodramatic schlock. They don't have showy vocabularies, expensive equipment or encyclopedic music collections. They're not of the personality type common to musicians. And that's what makes their songs so good.
Erin Franzman
One man from that scene stood out like a beacon of truth. He was like a deadly nightshade growing in that garden of sloth. He was Warren Zevon, telling tales of junkies strung out, headless Dog Soldiers wandering the night, rich kids pleading with their dads to send lawyers, guns and money, and revolutions in Mexico as Zapata closed in. He had the tortured soul of a city kid mixed with savage instincts.
The 70s ended, and so it seemed did Zevon. Now he's back, and that is good. Life'll Kill Ya is one of his best ever. He is still a savage wordsmith, but now he's bitter, old and sick, and while that may not be good for him personally, it makes for some very fine music. The shame is the guy never was big when he was younger. If he is remembered now it's for one of his weaker songs, "Werewolves of London." He has flown under the radar for the last 20 years. It will probably remain thus, but it shouldn't.
It took me a few listens to realize one of the best songs on the CD, "Porcelain Monkey," is about Elvis. I love me a good Elvis song, and this one is it. It is a thing of beauty how he pulls you into a song. He expects you to have some intelligence and keep up with the storyline. And anyone who can pull off rhyming "gold lamé" with "royal sobriquet" and "latest trends" with "regicidal friends" is a good writer. You're never sure if he feels bad for Elvis or thinks him a fat old drugged-out fool. At the end of the song he repeats the words "porcelain monkey," then adds a mocking har-har-har.
Rock 'n' roll used to be about telling stories, and the best of those songs still hold up today. Listen to "Stagger Lee"?it hasn't aged a bit from the late 50s. Zevon is telling stories. "Life'll Kill Ya" is about what a crazed 53-year-old piano man thinks about late at night. "For My Next Trick I'll Need a Volunteer" is vintage Zevon; a magician opens it with, "I could saw a woman in two/but you won't want to look in the box when I do." He takes Stevie Winwood's "Back in the High Life Again" and gives it the mugging it always needed. He plays a warped preacher in "Dirty Little Religion," asking all those good-looking women to come back to his tent and get saved. On "My Shit's Fucked Up" he captures the barroom conversation of a man who's going down from drink or drugs and not getting back up anytime soon. Zevon's voice gets so low and dirty you need to shut it off or go out and get loaded yourself.
You listen to this record and think this cat might not make many more. I know nothing about Zevon other than he's a twisted fuck who grew up in Chicago, went to California and wrote some incredibly wicked, funny and dark songs. That's all I want to know.
C.J. Sullivan