A Downloader's Diary (39): July 4, 2015
by Michael Tatum
I don't normally make an auxiliary appeal for my recommendations,
but I'll make an exception for the exemplary Paul Heaton/Jacqui Abbot
record, which is only available as a British import -- after a decade
of relative invisibility for both principals, it debuted in the UK
charts at #3, right behind (I can't get over this) Michael Jackson
outtakes. Frankly, I'm not sure which detail in that revelatory
factoid is stranger, but if you're still on the fence, be advised that
several other items below won't cost you a dime. The delicate balance
of commerce: it's not for us to understand.
Aloe Blacc: Lift Your Spirit (Interscope) How
anachronistic is R&B journeyman Egbert Nathaniel Dawkins III? He
nicks the spirited hook for the best song he'll ever write -- as it
turns out, an uplifting anthem of black pride -- from Elton John's
"Your Song." Then he retrofits his 2013 dance-pop crossover hit with
Avicii with a galloping acoustic arrangement straight out of
Riverdance. And between his un-processed baritone and feel-good
bromides he comes on like a modern day Bill Withers -- and I don't
mean the genteel but tough troubadour of "Use Me" and Live at
Carnegie Hall, I mean the leisure-suited cheese ball who courted
the thronging disco masses with the insipid "Lovely Day." But what
might have been repellent in 1977 is such an overwhelming breath of
fresh air now that it might take a few spins to process how strong and
self-possessed these anthems really are -- even when Dawkins falls
back on such dubious self-help shibboleths as "here today, gone
tomorrow" or "love is the answer" or "I'm the man/I'm the man/I'm the
man," his music is so confidently ebullient that you know he won't be
bitter after his inability to capitalize on the warm afterglow of his
fluke hit forces him back into anonymity. B PLUS
Paul Heaton & Jacqui Abbott: What Have We Become
(Virgin) Has a decade of low-profile solo records and owning his
own pub mellowed out righteous barfly angel Paul Heaton? In a recent
Q&A supporting this album conducted at that very establishment,
when a fresh-faced lass innocently put this record's titular query to
the great singer-songwriter, he devilishly replied to the delight of
the audience, "Well, the question was more for you rather than
me." Of course, Heaton's never been at a loss for a witty line,
in evidence and then some from with the caustic put-down of a wannabe
rebel that rockets this comeback to a breathless start ("The
revolution won't be televised/and neither will your death") to the
sardonic message in a bottle he sends to that pompous sot Sting ("Lose
the fucking yoga"). But when Heaton elected to turn this into a duet
project with the sublime Abbott, by far the finest of the three female
vocalists to serve as his foil in the Beautiful South, he immediately
launched into edit mode, re-writing songs already slated for what
would have been a solo album and composing a few more for the
occasion, resulting in the most carefully conceived -- and best --
studio recording of his nearly thirty-year career. Abetted by the
group's secret weapon, jaunty keyboardist Stephen Large, guitarist and
tunesmith Johnny Lexus operates from the ingenious assumption that
Elvis Costello's Trust could have been improved by pub-ready
sing-a-longs and the occasional power chord, while offering Heaton his
most energetic accompaniment since the latter's days fronting the
Housemartins. And the eternally winsome Abbott supplies enough
compassion and dulcitude to make Heaton's earnest demand for the death
of Phil Collins sound like a mission of mercy. A
Chrissie Hynde: Stockholm (Caroline International) Damn
right this counts as Hynde's first solo album -- where, say, the
Pretenders' Packed featured none of the co-founders of the
original charter but still adhered to the illusion of front woman plus
guitar-bass-drums, this one not only jettisons the concept of a
traditional working rock and roll band but traditional "rock and roll"
altogether, at least as how Rolling Stone and your ex-hippie
father might define it: when Hynde claims she wants to stoke the
sensibilities of not just John Lennon but ABBA too, she's not
kidding. And like the album title promises, she couldn't do without
crucial input from Swedish sous-chef Björn Yttling of Peter Bjorn and
John, who co-wrote every song save the two co-helmed with Joakim
Åhlund of the Teddybears. The secret to their success ratio with
their sextagenarian charge is that both treat collaborating with Hynde
no differently than they would with Taylor Swift, which is why the
familiar new-love tropes sound so much more thrilling than they did on
Hynde's 2010 debacle with J.P. Jones and the Fairground Boys -- with
its swirling keyboard lines and thundering synth-timpani, the
exhilarating "You or No One" could be updated Ronettes. She's never
made a more instantly ingratiating record -- which, as should go
without saying, doesn't mean she's going to threaten Swift's chart
dominance any time soon. Then again, Swift wouldn't wrap her sweet
timbre around a line like "Don't fuck with this heart of mine" and
make it sound like a bracing, romantic
declaration. A MINUS
Kool AD: Word OK (free download) Although you can't
fault his generosity, the main problem with Victor Vazquez releasing
his OK outtakes several months prior to his OK intakes
is that it points up how indistinguishable both batches of admittedly
quality material are from each other -- sort of like claiming one
Iceberg lettuce salad is superior to another because each is tossed
with a different brand of bottled ranch dressing and served on
dissimilarly shaped plates. I mean, I've spent two months with the
damn things and all I remember conclusively is that this record -- the
intakes one -- features the track that bites Nirvana's "On a Plain."
After that, I'm scrambling for my college-ruled spiral notebook: on
which one does Vazquez sing, "Rikki-tikki-tan, Rikki-tan-tan-tan?" (A:
Not OK.) One which one does Vazquez deliver the amusingly
accented reference to "toe-bock-o leaf papers?" (A: Word OK.)
Which one briefly cedes the spotlight to nerd-rapper Milo, who brags
he writes "young adult fiction like Gary Paulsen?" (A: Not OK.)
Which one reprises Vazquez' mockery of Jay-Z's upturned vocalese? (A:
Word OK.) On which one does Vazquez proclaim he's "Kool AD,
Kool AD, Kool AD, I'm the greatest rapper in the world?" Okay, that
was a trick question ("Bieber! Bieber! Degrassi! DeGrassi!"). But
this one does boast my favorite moment: Vazquez slowly coming to the
conclusion that, hey, maybe there is something he can do about
urban hunger ("But what can one man do? I don't
know . . . probably a lot!"), then noting about his
music, "You don't really even fuckin' need to listen to all if it, but
some of it is nice, and this joint? It's hella nice." If
that doesn't sum him up, nothing does. A MINUS
Amy LaVere: Runaway's Diary (Archer) Like Lana del Rey,
"Amy LaVere" is an exotic nom de rock, which is too bad --
Amy's birth surname, "Fant," is old French for "child," which fits
this thirty-eight year old woman's troubled teen construct much more
accurately than "LaVere," which merely places her hypothetical
ancestors in a village near Bayeaux, Normandy (the word means "alder"
in Gaulish, so maybe Amy's wrong about the feminine article). Also
like del Rey, this "self-made orphan" has got some serious Daddy
issues, albeit smarter in the way she underplays them, as in the
creepy one in which she laments how Daddy paid more attention to her
big sister because her elder sibling was more sexually
developed. Having said that however, I much prefer offhandedly
depraved details like "Ring, goes the bell of my bike" or her
shortlist of intimates ("It's only got you, Michelle, and one other
dude") to laughably grandiose "statements" like del Rey's "I fucked my
way up to the top," and what's more the former does more with her
childlike soprano than the latter does with her Nancy Sinatra
impersonations -- better the otherworldly high note accentuating her
soon-to-be-lost "innocence" on "Last Rock 'N Roll Boy to Dance" than
del Rey warbling through gritted teeth like she's maneuvering her
tongue around an oversized orthodontic retainer. You don't have to
deal with the real-or-fictitious-who-cares death wish fantasies,
either -- the glib closer, which coyly demands to know why her
homecoming isn't celebrated with ticker tape parades and trumpet
blasts, posits LaVere firmly on the side of the ironists, where she
belongs. Of course, del Rey is on the side of ironists too, even if
she would never admit as much to The Guardian. But LaVere also
illustrates the real life limitations of a life devoid of trust and
intimacy, particularly on her well-chosen covers -- John Lennon's
"How?" used to be a litany of rhetorical questions. Finally, they get
answers. A MINUS
Bob Mould: Beauty and Ruin (Merge) Mould is the last guy
I'd want to invite to my lampshade party, but from watching magic go
down the drain in the dirge-like opener to "I don't know how anyone
survives" in the supposedly inspirational closer "Fix It," the death
of his father has got him even more despondent that usual. The
difference between this and 2012's dull Silver Age however is
that now he's got purpose, which is why he's once again he's indulging
his muse with the mercurial guitar and soaring tunes like he hasn't
since leading Sugar. Strangely, even with a different rhythm section,
between the compressed sound and the discretely mixed parts, this
sounds exactly like Sugar -- indeed, use the shuffle function
on the music device of your choice and your ear might be tricked into
thinking these were culled from the same sessions as, say, Copper
Blue. In other words, expect consistency not revelation -- Mould will
never again unhinge himself musically or spiritually as he did on
those classic '80s records with Hüsker Dü. But the rapprochement with
the dead that he details so poignantly on "Forgiveness" begins with
the knowledge that the old man who yells at those punks to get off his
lawn isn't his Dad, the fictitious "Mr. Grey," or Paul Westerberg --
it's himself. A MINUS
Conor Oberst: Upside Down Mountain (Merge) Not counting
relatively obscure tour arcana, this is Señor Vibrato's first
solo record since his 2008 self-titled peak -- for a bewilderingly
industrious scenester once considered the font of quality song Ryan
Adams only wishes he was, that's worth noting. Between collaborative
efforts with the Monsters of Folk and his own Mystic Valley Band, as
well as that unendurably pretentious Bright Eyes swansong, it's also
his most straightforward and personal, and that's also worth
noting. Measured to his previous output, Oberst hasn't been less
productive in the new decade, but he has been slightly off the radar,
which makes we wonder: why? With "Shell Games," ironically the only
bit of prophecy on Bright Eyes' post-millennial The People's
Key, an ominous harbinger, Oberst's latest batch of
singer-songwriter plaints, which comes on the heels of a particularly
nasty rape allegation (Oberst has since sued his
credibility-challenged accuser of slander), may provide some
insight. In the opener, he sequesters himself in a town that "time
forgot/where I don't have to shave or be approachable." Later, he
advises a gawker who tells him he resembles a famous actor, "There are
hundred of ways to get through the day/You best find one," and
bitterly tells "Enola Gay," the author of a "big tell-all," "You will
get your wish, it's just a matter of time/Until you vanish like the
rest, out of sight and out of mind." Once indie rock's pretty boy
gadfly, nowadays the man only wants a quiet room of his own, regarding
even the concept of "home" as a "perjury, a parlor trick, an urban
myth." As subject matter goes, this is of limited value -- no way this
is going to compel in the manner of, say, his twin songs about
mortality from 2008, "Danny Callahan" and "I Don't Want to Die in the
Hospital." But from his overactive uvula to a rough-and-tumble
verbosity he once again justifies musically, Oberst has always been a
head-clearer -- if he can put out another album this good in 2010 I
say we change his name to M. Ward and shuttle him into the Witness
Protection Program. A MINUS
Parquet Courts: Sunbathing Animal (What's Your Rupture?)
I don't quite get the disappointment surrounding this record -- are
fans bummed these Brooklynites by way of Austin, Texas now sound less
like Pavement than they did on 2012's Light Up Gold? There
wasn't really that much of an aural resemblance, of course -- that was
just a shorthand reference to place them in the tradition, and you
know how sentimental those Gen-X types can get -- but with last year's
Tally the Things You Broke EP now sounding like a dandy
transition, on this tighter, less shambolic follow-up they're less
vieux jeu and more like a stylish chapeau cocked over
the forehead. They haven't forsaken obscurantism or spiky guitar
riffs, but now the instrumental parts artfully interlock like the
herringbone mosaic of wood tiles comprising the ground floor of
Versailles. And while you might not hear it that way at first, after
several listens the songs themselves, from pithy fragments to
faux-blues extravaganza to moments of genuine lyricism,
coalesce into a brisk suite of sparks and dust so cannily sequenced
your ear will actually crave hearing it in that order -- and with the
record beginning and ending with the same coy harmonic pivot between F
major and F minor, that was clearly the idea. Like most clever guys,
they're not so forthcoming about the nuts-and-bolts details of their
apparently frustrated romances, so consider that a theme, from a
"hypnosis poet" who confesses the names of the guys she makes
breakfast for only to her moleskin, to the cruel "mamasita" who
performs "instant disassembly" until "the house collapses on itself,"
though maybe they'd get further with the fairer sex if they didn't
refer to their inability to communicate as "the parlance of the
problem itself." On that note, as for whether "Vienna II" refers to
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Eastern European trade agreements, or the
old Billy Joel song, well, you tell me. A
The Roots: . . .And Then You Shoot Your Cousin (Def Jam)
As a passionate devotee of Pynchon, Nabokov, Dick and other
post-modernist weirdos, I have a great respect for artists who explore
different modes of storytelling, but the reverse chronological gambit
of Undun didn't entirely work, mainly because the impact of the
not-quite equal parts didn't resonate any greater programmed backward
than forward -- the fault lay in the underdeveloped narrative itself,
something temporal fuckery on its own couldn't cure. As the
appropriated Romare Bearden cover collage suggests, their second
thirty-minute concept album in two years doesn't track the life of one
person but several, which certainly gives Black Thought an out for not
designing a cohesive piece united by one definitive statement. This
time Ahmir Thompson and the band elect to tie up the loose ends
musically with oddly compelling interludes from Nina Simone, Mary Lou
Williams, and French experimental composer Michel Chion, and if those
ingredients suggest they're moving one step further from the hip hop
that's been their bread and butter to the "respectability" of
classical music and jazz, be assured that this is gratifyingly lo-fi
and atmospheric without any sacrifice of the rhythms that are their
primary reasons for being. Admittedly, the agnostic that I am, I'm not
particularly bothered by those who run from the face of God after
begging for His divine intervention -- for me, the problem lies in the
passive belief in the deus ex machina scenario in the first
place. But damned if they didn't beat me to that point with a
ironically sunshine-kissed little ditty in which guest star Raheem
Devaughn sadly notes, "Everybody wants tomorrow right now." Which they
then immediately follow with an ocean of diffuse piano chords that
ends the album with a question mark, suiting their idea of closure
much more succinctly than a dying thug's melodramatic soliloquy ever
could. A MINUS
Young Thug and Bloody Jay: Black Portland (free
download) Boasting a wacked-out penchant for spacey wordplay which
he explores almost exclusively on free mixtapes, charismatic Atlanta
rapper and inveterate workaholic Jeffrey "Young Thug" Williams is a
L'il Wayne acolytle, though naming his forthcoming major label debut
Tha Carter VI is, well, perhaps taking hero worship a mite too
far. Like his forebear, he's a pure entertainer who doesn't have much
interest in making serious statements: his only message seems to be
that you have a subconscious, and beneath that you have a
sub-subconscious, and beneath that you have a sub-sub-conscious, and
that all three strata of your spongy gray matter love to party. As
such, this is -- though some will probably deem me downright screwy
for making this comparison -- the Dirty South's hip hop answer to
R.E.M.'s Murmur: rarely have I ever been so enchanted by an
album's musical aesthetic while simultaneously not having a fucking
clue about the highly elliptical and/or nonsensical lyrics, and the
usually helpful RapGenius.com is throwing in the towel on that front,
too. So, let me proffer two helpful observations. First, Williams'
bizarrely creative approach to phonetics signifies as a hook in
itself: he treats the word "Florida" as if it has two syllables rather
than three, then when he joins it to the word "water" to describe a
bangin' honey, he pretends all four sonants consist of only one vowel
sound -- a long O -- and makes you love it. Second, unlike his
three I Came From Nothing mixtapes, this has Justin "Bloody
Jay" Ushery contributing indelibly nutty one-line hooks ("I like
chicken, I like fiiiiiiiish!") just when you might think
Williams has wandered out of the studio to get his umpteenth tat. And
now I hear both have been arrested for drug possession, reckless
driving, and not wearing safety belts. Come on guys, stay
frosty -- if you don't keep Portland weird, who will? A
Young Thug & Gucci Mane: Young Thugga Mane La Flare
(free download) Next, we have the strange case of Birmingham's
Gucci Mane, better known to Atlanta law enforcement as Radric Davis,
currently serving time for possession of a firearm by a felon, his
illustrious rap sheet including such accomplishments as battery,
assault, and numerous parole violations, though in 2011 he was sent by
a judge to be evaluated by a psychiatric hospital, a tidbit which does
make me raise a sympathetic eyebrow. Yet all of this appalling
behavior didn't stop luminaries like Pharrell, Swizz Beats, Nicki
Minaj, and even whatever-happened-to Wyclef Jean contributing to
The Appeal: Georgia's Most Wanted, which in 2010 the
sociopathic mush-mouth somehow took to #4 on the Billboard charts. But
I digress. With his rallying cry "Holiday season, bitches!" (enjoy
that weekend furlough, my man), Davis finds a fellow traveler in Young
Thug, with whom he shares an affection for codeine, concealed weapons,
trap music, and rhymes so addictive I may have to join the duo in
whatever Narcotics Anonymous support group they end up in when they
finally get paroled. This is less appealing than Black Portland
because both the music and the metaphors are a little less mysterious
-- I totally dig YT's wild phrasing on the crack and smack fantasia
"Bricks," but you can only go so far with the observation that
drinking too much lean can make you look pregnant, and the unnerving
"Don't Look at Me," in which YT details all the reasons he's
considered a "flight risk," is as scary and unnerving as it is
absolutely mesmerizing. So I'm begging officials in DeKalb County: I
don't mean to pull a Norman Mailer on this pair of Jack Abbots. But as
long as they're locked up, make sure they've got a laptop with a good
pair of headphones. Western civilization needs one more "OMG Bro."
A MINUS
Honorable Mentions
Lana del Rey: Ultraviolence (Interscope) He hit me
and it felt like a cynically deployed shock tactic ("Brooklyn Baby,"
"West Coast") ***
Rough Guide to African Blues (World Music Network)
Blues means different things to different people -- sometimes it's
"Wang Wang Doodle," sometimes it's the theme to Chapelle's Show
(West African Blues Project, "Lalumbe"; Tamikrest, "Tamiditin")
***
Lykke Li: I Never Learn (Atlantic) The real Roxette
("Gunshot," "I Never Learn") **
Courtney Barnett: The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas (Mom
+ Pop Music) I'm not sure how to gauge my level of interest when
the crisis in the best song could have been averted by staying indoors
and keeping hydrated ("Avant Gardener," "David") **
Chromeo: White Women (Big Beat) Still as witty and
tuneful as ever, but let's face it: they couldn't radiate star power
if God gave them the ability to fuse massive amounts of hydrogen
("Jealous (I Ain't With It)," "Lost on the Way Home")*
Anansy Cissé: Mali Overdrive (Riverboat) World Music
Network's online Battle of the Bands competition: so much more
reliable than American Idol, no? ("Sekou Amadou," "Baala")
*
Trash
Lee Fields: Emma Lee (Truth and Soul) According to
Wikipedia, sixty-three year old R&B singer Fields, who I'd
describe as a "journeyman" if his career had actually traveled an arc
perceptible by a protractor, has been "sometimes nicknamed 'Little
JB,' for his [ed. -- utterly nonexistent] physical and vocal
resemblance to James Brown," which if you peruse the references they
attribute to the soul music experts at the French weekly news magazine
L'Express. The page then claims -- I'm not making this up --
that he "recorded his first 45 tours in 1969," which deserves some
sort of investigation by the Guinness Book of World Records, not least
an answer as to how many tours Fields embarked on in 1969, if
one-city-stops are counted as a discrete "tour," and if he's had to
rent out a spare apartment to keep the recordings of said tours
pristine for the listening enjoyment of further generations. As it
turns out, I'm having a little fun with a sloppy wiki translation from
French to English (tours means 45 rpm record in French),
but this heavily-promoted pallid imitation of early '70s R&B is
nevertheless one of Metacritic's hottest items of the year, garnering
praise from John Paul at Pop Matters to Hal Horowitz at
American Songwriter (though, hmmm, no one from Vibe or
The Source). I mean, what gives? If this record (as Paul says)
"could easily sit next to, if not surpass, the greatest releases of
the late 1960s and 1970s," where's the "What's Goin' On" or "Tired of
Being Alone" or "Freddie's Dead?" Hell, where's the "Alone Again,
Naturally?" And why isn't anyone complaining about the Expressions,
his somnambulant backing band? Because -- just maybe -- the
involvement of white soul poseurs "legitimizes" the whole cursèd
enterprise? Especially annoying: funk-deficient drummer Homer
Steinweiss, who makes the dude in Wild Cherry sound like Clyde
Stubblefield. C PLUS
A Great Big World: Is There Anybody Out There? (Black
Magnetic/Epic) The top-40 abomination of the year: a perky dweeb
who comes on like Marc Cohn at sixteen-going-on-twelve, with maybe two
years of precious piano and voice lessons under his belt, recording
his self-pitying, fourth-hand show tunes in his school's performing
arts center at lunch. Sound insufferable? Now imagine a band
comprising two of them. Especially annoying: an unironic
zippee-dee-doo-dah ditty straight out of South Park that advocates
fair treatment to our homosexual brethren because "everyone is gay,"
rather than because it's, you know, the morally right thing to
do. C MINUS
Neil Young: A Letter Home (Third Man) Despite that fact
it has antecedents in about a dozen middling Twilight Zone
episodes, the poignant conceit for this modest collection of painfully
obvious folk-pop covers is so touching I'm inclined to share it. It
begins with Young cheerfully addressing his late mom through the
"magic" of a refurbished 1947 Voice-o-graph vinyl recording booth
owned by "his friend Jack." He urges her to start talking to his
father again now they're both "up there," makes a cute joke about
having met Al Roker ("the weather man for the whole planet, if you can
imagine that!"), asks her to say hello to his old friend Ben Keith,
and tells her he'll be there eventually -- "Not a while though, I
still really have a lot of work to do here!" He then launches into
what we are later told are "the old songs" he used to play with his
parents as a little boy growing up. Now I don't know if Neil prized
Bruce Springsteen's "My Hometown" as a spindly teenager, nor if he
relates to that highly Jersey-centic lyric (were there black people
even living in 1950s Winnipeg?), but I do appreciate the
personal touch, and if I was his mom, I'd be proud. Unfortunately, as
a un-maternally finicky rock critic I feel obligated to point out the
off-the-cuff arrangements are spare to indifferent, the songs
sometimes inappropriate for Young's vocal range, and the audio
fidelity dim and stifled, especially coming from an ambitious
entrepreneur who wants me to re-purchase my entire CD collection after
investing in his new goddamn MP3 system. Re-tooling Stephen Foster
with Crazy Horse via his old buddy Tim Rose was one thing -- offhand
Bert Jansch and Gordon Lightfoot (twice!) is another. Also, if it's
not too impudent of me to say so, Neil and his friend Jack make a
lousy fucking Everly Brothers. C PLUS
R.E.M.: Unplugged 1991/2001: The Complete Sessions
(Rhino) A born studio band offers one set supporting 1991's Out
of Time, another for 2001's Reveal -- guess which one is
kinda-sorta worth your time. B MINUS
The Strypes: Snapshot (Virgin) Rockpile might be
their touchstone (get it?), but these upstart Irish retrogrades seem
to think their forebears might have been a greater band with Terry
Williams penning the lyrics -- and Nick Lowe bashing away on the
drums. B MINUS
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