I listened to this band because they derived their name from the fantastically weird and talented and interesting harpist Joanna Newsom. I’m sure that’s what they wanted, but it’s hard to see what the connection is. Newsom, from the Bay Area (her uncle used to be mayor of San Francisco) is an alt-harpist, a master of long form storytelling suffused with lyrical whimsy, surreal autobiography and pinpoint musical control. Gruesome, from Wales, features pounding hyperactive drums, many layers of guitars, other sounds and reverb, and oddly reticent (undermixed) yet attractively authoritative vocals (with impossible to discern lyrics).
At low volume, like if you’re working, it sounds a mess, but crank it up and you’ll wish you were in the club hearing them do this live. And the whole album is this way (check out their cover of Galaxie 500’s Tugboat).
To my mind, one of the most perfect of pop songs because of it’s infectious beat and rhythm changes, a singalong melody, and a brilliant first person voice that captures innocence, desire, self-consciousness and rebellion, all in a chewy piece of minimalist cotton candy.
A footnote in England’s Great Train Robbery, he was engaged to hire a train engineer to move the train forward to the unloading point and he hired an old guy named Pops who didn’t know how to operate the train, Biggs was captured because his fingerprint was found in the hideout on a catsup bottle. Biggs was also responsible for coshing the train’s original engineer on the head, and then forcing him to move the train forward himself while bleeding. The engineer died six years later, having never completely recovered.
A couple years later Biggs broke out of jail, and later ended up in Brazil, making money by hosting British tourists in his home for dinner. Which somehow led to a connection with Julian Temple, who was making his documentary the Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, the story of the Sex Pistols from Malcolm McLaren’s perspective. Great Train Roberry = Great R’n’R Swindle, leads to this (with Biggs on Vocals, Cook and Jones doing what they do, and apparently a random exiled Nazi playing bass):
It only seems appropriate that I should dedicate the final SotW for 2013 to a song that was one of the best of the year. It is “Song for Zula” from Phosphorescent’s terrific album Muchacho. (Phosphorescent is the creative outlet for Matthew Houck.)
I was first introduced to the “band” through the terrific LA based music blog Rollo & Grady (www.rollogrady.com). (It’s a great resource for anyone interested in keeping current on emerging bands in the indie rock scene.) Every Phosphorescent song they’ve featured over the years has appealed to me. So I was very excited to learn that a new album, Muchacho, was dropping this year.
And a fine album it is. No, it doesn’t have radio friendly “hits.” No, the songs won’t garner millions of YouTube viewings. No, the album won’t sell hundreds of thousands of CDs. But it is a very well-conceived and executed album in the traditional sense. Not exactly a “concept” album, but still a collection of songs that hang together with a common theme – in this case a break up. Is it possible Houck can express anything new to this universal, but well worn, experience? The answer is a resounding YES.
“Song for Zula” is a beautiful example of the gravity of the songs on Muchacho.
The lyrics have a majestic beauty missing from most of today’s pop music.
You see, the moon is bright in that treetop night
I see the shadows that we cast in the cold, clean light
My feet are gold. My heart is white
And we race out on the desert plains all night
See, honey, I am not some broken thing
I do not lay here in the dark waiting for thee
No my heart is gold. My feet are light
And I am racing out on the desert plains all night
It has the atmospherics and soaring dynamic that Daniel Lanois contributed to U2’s “With or Without You.” You will hear it from the opening notes of the intro. Houck has a thin, fragile voice that compliments this song perfectly. It conveys his sadness and resignation with subtle intimacy.
Best wishes for a happy new year. I can’t wait to share more great music with you in 2014.
A friend of Gene’s on Facebook got me thinking today of my 10 albums that easily came to mind that stuck with me, and most of those I thought of were classic disks from the 60s and 70s. As they should be. Two others were a little less obvious: Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen’s Lost in the Ozone and The Mekons Fear and Whiskey, both great albums by bands that are central to my listening life. That got me to nine.
But No. 10 was hard. There were scores of records from the 60s and 70s that qualified, but I didn’t want just oldies. And I could have chose lots of classic artists’ later work, or albums by 90s artists like Pavement, the Pixies, Nirvana, Hole, that I loved at the time. But as I thought about it I thought they all echoed the earlier choices. What, I asked myself, have I been listening to in the new century that has stuck with me?
The answer came down to four artists: John Legend (soul crooner love man), Stars (arty rock band), Jens Lekman (international electronic singer songwriter) and Nellie McKay (neo cabaret political activist).
These are not rock bands, though all turn it up at times. But what I love about all of them is that they have made great music that pumps the heart and strokes the head, is filled with beauty and ideas, and I’ve wanted to play over and over again. Of them, Nellie McKay is the boldest. She’s a fierce animal rights activist, has been staunchly involved with trying to limit Columbia University’s illegal use of eminent domain to expand its holdings in Morningside Heights (where Nellie grew up), and her records are full of incredible jazz, rap and pop arrangements and songs full of lyrics. Whip smart lyics. She is, of course, cabaret first and foremost.
This clip is pure corn, but it is withering corn, satire that Randy Newman wishes he could pull off (just like the pink ensemble, I’m sure). Some might see this as light, especially given the View’s awful hucksterism, but when I look in Nellie’s eyes I see Johnny Rotten’s. I’m pretty sure that’s what she sees too.
Watched Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha tonight. Gerwig is both insufferably cute and overwhelmingly charming, in a story that is a tribute to her commitment as a writer and actor to her vision of life as a melding of grace and grit. Here it’s filtered through the lens of French movies of the early sixties, notably those of Francois Truffaut, which starred Jean Pierre Leaud playing Truffaut’s alter ego. Frances Ha Gerwig seems to play her own alter ego in a similar style.
In tribute to the Nouvelle Vague, Frances takes and impetuous trip to Paris when she is offered a pied a terre in the Sixth Arrondissement. The montagey staging of her visit is punctuated by Hot Chocolate’s fantastic “Everyone’s A Winner,” which is featured tonight to a much different purpose. Bon soir.
Peter and I have written back and forth about what it is that triggers the “Night Music” pieces, at least for us.
For me, sometimes the impetus is simply hearing a song on the radio (yes, I still listen to that old fashioned medium) or on my shuffle. Sometimes a tune just pops into my head. Sometimes something will occur during band practice and remind me that “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love” was not a bad tune and one the Biletones could cover.
And, sometimes it is a stimulus-response thing, as in one of us will write about a song and band, and that starts the whole association moving along.
So, Peter, writing about the Rutles has done for me.
As an already crazy Python fan when The Rutles All You Need is Cash was released in 1978, I watched it, loved it, and even bought it on DVD years later.
I am still a fan of all things Python related, but my familiarity with the music of Python pre-dated my seeing the comedy act by a handful of years. Before that, my friend Stephen Clayton and I had been big fans of the Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah Band), whose principle song writer was Neil Innes.
Innes moved on to do the music for the Python films, and as Peter noted, headed up the Rutles (with Eric Idle, from Python) and also did some solo stuff. Innes also appeared on Saturday Night Live, when I believe Idle was the guest host, and if memory serves, he wore white and played a white grand piano, a la Lennon, and performed the Rutles Cheese and Onions.
The Bonzo Dog band were a goofy consortium of great British musicians with a slight twist on everything, pre-dating quasi pop-rock Big Band sound Squirrel Nut Zippers and their ilk produced by nearly 30 years.
The band’s biggest hit–at least in England–was the venerable I’m the Urban Spaceman but my fave song of theirs was the opening cut to the album Gorrilla from 1968 called The Intro and the Outro, a shameless grab of Duke Ellington’s C-Jam Blues, although in the Bonzo’s treatment,Count Basie gets the nod over the Duke lyrically, shall we say.
Still, a great riff, funny words, and everything that is Innes, Bonzo, and Python.
The 1983 Punch the Clock album, along with it’s follow up, Goodbye Cruel World, were the first Costello albums that didn’t deliver fully. One had the impression that after the art move of Imperial Bedroom, the decision was made to get commercial. New producers added horns, there were 12″ dance mixes, and to tell the truth a lot of really good songs on both records. But on Boxing Day every year I wake up singing this song, because it’s the only one I know about Boxing Day.
It has a driving beat and driven insistent horns, and it feels like it should get you jumping, but like many of the less successful tunes on this album, there is a lack of warmth and a brittleness to the arrangements. What sounds like it should be rollicking, like Dexy’s Midnight Runners, sounds mechanical and a little heartless. But I hear, with a little more relaxed groove and a suppler beat, a song with a hard groove and an appealing hook. Until they do it that way we have it this way.
I remember seeing the Rutles mocumentary, All You Need Is Cash, back in 1978, and being quite fond of it. A story about it in the NY Times last week sent me to YouTube, where my reaction was of a somewhat different sort. What I remembered as cute parody back then, plays as alternative Beatles tracks now. As Paul Simon says in the Times’ story, “it is more of a panegyric than it is a satire.” I think maybe the confusion stemmed from the title, which sounds satirical. Meanwhile, the music is so much like the Beatles sound that on the surface on crummy speakers it can almost pass.
That’s why Neil Innes, the songwriter, paid when the Beatles’ publishing company sued. And why these songs are a pleasure to hear even today.
