We honestly did not expect this, Chan Marshall coming through with an album that was deeply satisfying as “Sun” was. Huge musical growth, a genuine triumph it was. As we said then, “In the cover photo, she looks like a penitent entering the convent, not so much Mariette In Ecstasy as Ophelia showing up at the nunnery, startled by her fate. Musically, it sounds like Chan Marshall was given a church key not to open bottles but to move her musical operation to an abandoned cathedral where, without benefit of any altar boys, she was the lone congregant and celebrator of the mass. Sun is at once a minimalist masterpiece and a remarkably deep pop album, showing what a single woman can do with a drum machine, piano, some synths, and an almost infinite number of tracks on which she can project her voice. In fact, her voice is as multilayered as Jimi’s guitar was on First Rays Of The New Rising Sun, another album that pays its respect to morning and the renewal that comes when that yellow orb warms us, canceling the night.”
Archive for November, 2012
Tulip Frenzy’s # 5 Best Album of 2012 Was Cat Power’s “Sun”
Posted in Music with tags Cat Power, Sun, Tulip Frenzy Top Ten List on November 23, 2012 by johnbuckley100Tulip Frenzy’s #6 Best Album of 2012 Was Calexico’s “Algiers”
Posted in Uncategorized with tags "Algiers", Calexico, Tulip Frenzy Top Ten List on November 23, 2012 by johnbuckley100Not for the first time has Calexico, America’s finest purveyors of authentic Southwest musical chili con blood’n’guts, made it on our Top Ten List, and Algiers was some kind of revelation. As we noted, “Algiers wasn’t recorded, as you might have expected, in the roiling sandstorm of North Africa, but the Louisiana precinct of the same name. And how does humidity leaven the Tucson-based band’s first album since the brilliant Carried To Dust from 2008? It actually doesn’t seem to have affected it much at all. Algiers may be the most radio friendly Calexico album to date, but it is still filled with enough slickrock mystery to animate a B. Traven novel, with all the humanity, though a lower body count, of something by Cormac McCarthy. The latter may have migrated, like so many others, from Appalachia to the Deep South to the Southwest Desert, the reverse route of Calexico on at least this album, but he always maintains an essential American talent for mayhem, and so do Calexico, as American as pico de gallo.”
Tulip Frenzy’s #7 Best Album of 2012 Is Thee Oh See’s “Putrifiers II”
Posted in Uncategorized on November 23, 2012 by johnbuckley100One of the pleasures of the year was discovering Thee Oh Sees. And just when we thought we had a handle on the prolific San Francisco punk rockers, they released the ambitious + commercially viable Putrifiers II. As we said at the time, “It actually is kinda hard understanding Thee Oh Sees, whose new album Putrifiers II stimulates all body parts, from the tips of your toes to the furthest cranial hideaways. How could a band that, just last year, in their epic punk rock masterpiece Carrion Crawler/The Dream, harken to the heyday of “Final Solution” Pere Ubu and give Capsula a run for their pesetas as the band you’d like to pogo to, come back with something so jaw-droppingly boss’n’beautiful as Putrifiers II? There’s punk rock galore on this album, but saying it’s a punk album is like saying Sgt. Pepper’s is rock’n’roll — there’s rock’n’roll on it, but so much more! Just when you think you’ve got them pegged, they wriggle out of your mind’s definition and confound you! And if that’s not the mark of a first-rate rock’n’roll band, we don’t know what is.”
Tulip Frenzy’s #8 Best Album of 2012 Is The Magic Castle’s Eponymous Debut
Posted in Music with tags The Magic Castles, Tulip Frenzy Top Ten List on November 23, 2012 by johnbuckley100We’d never heard the Magic Castles before they opened for The Brian Jonestown Massacre in August, though the fact that Anton Newcombe had taken them under this wing was of course a good sign. But wow! Their first album had all the magic they built on stage, and then some.
It was a rhetorical question when we asked “Are the Magic Castles the best young band in America?” For with references such as what follows from our review at the time, of course the answer was yes. “Imagine John Densmore drumming while Dean Wareham and Sterling Morrison back up Neil Young. We’d read the reference to them in last week’s issue of The New Yorker, capsule-previewing their opening for the BJM with that shorthand citation: a comparison to the Velvet Underground. As some know, Tulip Frenzy has an office policy, rigidly enforced from the senior staff on down to the interns, to be curious about any band that is referenced in the same sentence as the VU, either as in, “They sound like the Velvet Underground,” or, “They sound nothing like the Velvet Underground.” We don’t much care which way it goes; any such reference is worthy of our checking it out. Only, when we saw them play last night, we didn’t think of the VU so much as First Communion Afterparty, the Doors, Luna, Kurt Vile, Fripp and Eno, or maybe it’s Cluster and Eno — all of them great character references.”
Tulip Frenzy’s #9 Album Of 2012 Is A.C. Newman’s “Shut Down The Streets”
Posted in Music with tags "Shut Down The Streets, A.C. Newman, Tulip Frenzy Top Ten List on November 23, 2012 by johnbuckley100It turns out that, A.C. Newman’s Shut Down The Streets was not only the best New Pornographer’s album of 2012, it was also one of the best albums of the year. As we said in October, “We’re liking Shut Down The Streets almost as much as The Slow Wonder, and a lot more than Get Guilty, which came out in 2009. After the first two New Porno albums made the world a whackier and far more joyous place, some of the band’s fans reacted to the third album – Twin Cinemas, with its oft-slower, less manic songs — like Andrew Sullivan reviewing the President’s recent debate performance. But we liked the depth and minor-key melodic shifts, the emotional complexity of that album and what followed, especially on subsequent albums, with songs like “Fortune” and “We End Up Together,” which swapped effervescent irony for psychic nourishment, pop rocks for comfort food. And so it goes with Shut Down The Streets, which shows a parallel progression from The Slow Wonder that Together showed from Mass Romantic, and is a lot more like “Bones Of An Idol” than “The SlowDescent Into Alcoholism.”
Tulip Frenzy #10 Album Of 2012: Patti Smith’s “Banga”
Posted in Music with tags Banga, Patti Smith, Tulip Frenzy Top Ten List on November 23, 2012 by johnbuckley100For the first time since we began our Top 10 List, Tulip Frenzy has included Patti Smith, whose Banga is a delightful return to form.
In June, we stated, “Banga is a remarkable album because it connects in a straight line to Horses, released, what, 37 years ago, and to virtually every bit of great music waiting to be played in the great Jungian juke box. It’s not just hearing Tom Verlaine play lead on “April Fool” that produces the rapture — yeah, rapture — this classic album inspires. Maybe it’s the thought that unlike Dylan, who when he produced Love and Theft had lost the voice that could really do the songs justice, Smith still can sing, those years spent inactive paying off now, as like a pitcher with a fresh arm stemming from a late start, she can come in and finish the game without the seeming accumulation of age.
This Is The Church, And This… Oh.
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Leica 35mm Summilux FLE, Leica Monochrom on November 23, 2012 by johnbuckley100Leica Monochrom, 35mm Summilux FLE.
Dylan’s Fine Show At Verizon Last Night
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Bob Dylan, Dylan at The Verizon Center on November 21, 2012 by johnbuckley100I suppose that, if Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King had conspired to move the hotel in The Shining to some hill region outside of Memphis, they would have built a set, and clothed the amazing band Dylan plays with, for the barroom scenes. For Dylan’s whole presence these days is meant to conjure us back to a day that never existed, when bands effortlessly plied the waters between blues and rock’n’roll, and most of all swing. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys comes to mind when we see them, Dylan in his black velvet pajamas with the red stripe and his hat on, the band all clothed in stage suits and standing dutifully in their places. Has there ever been so subtle a band, so supple a band, to play big basketball arenas?
His voice strong, but caught in that low-growl single register with its barks for emphasis, Dylan and His Band — yeah, His Band — played wonderful versions of “Tangled Up In Blue,” “Highway 61,” even a lovely encore of “Blowin’ In The Wind.” “Early Roman Kings” was especially strong, for how could it not be with George Receli, the closest incarnation we have to the great blues drumming of Fred Bellow, kicking the band through its paces. Dylan was frisky, playing barrelhouse piano, mostly, though of course he is so perverse that when it came to a great version of “The Ballad Of A Thin Man,” the one song that live he used to play piano on, last night he didn’t. Go figure. Every time the band sounded spectacular, it was because Dylan hit just the right note, and every time the band was off, it was because he hit the wrong note. After 50 years of playing it, he can play “A Hard Rains A-Going To Fall” any damn way he wants to. It’s his band. His show. We continue to give thanks we get to see him.
Dylan Returns To The Verizon Center
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Bob Dylan, Dylan at The Verizon Center on November 21, 2012 by johnbuckley100Image bears the same relationship to photography as the great man’s voice does to his youthful singing, but we were just glad to see the old man again. Digilux 2, cropped beyond belief, noise reduction like a bafflement in LR4.
What “Crossfire Hurricane” Gets So Right About The Stones
Posted in Music with tags Crossfire Hurricane, Rolling Stones on November 16, 2012 by johnbuckley100Crossfire Hurricane had its U.S. premiere on HBO last night, and what, you think the folks at Tulip Frenzy were going to miss it? It had much to offer, and we have the usual complaints.
We loved hearing Brian Jones speaking to the camera. We can never get enough of the video footage, not to mention Dominique Tarle’s still images, of the band recording Exile On Main Street. But it was the usual pastiche of footage we’ve seen, edited together kaleidoscopically, from movies such as Charlie Is My Darling, Gimme Shelter, Cocksucker Blues, etc. And it always makes us mad that, in these sorts of films, we can’t get no satisfaction of seeing any given song played live for more than, say, 30 seconds.
But there was one thing — a big thing — that director Brett Morgan completely got right. The two-hour movie takes the Stones from 1962-1981 and ends there, recognizing that by then, they no longer had it, and the 31 years of hugely profitable touring since then has largely been a scam, if not an embarrassment. A subtraction from, not an addition to, the greatness of the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world, and our first love.
But the arc of the movie even more profoundly makes the essential point about the Rolling Stones story. Over 100 minutes, we see the Stones rise from their shadow-Beatlemania phase through their Golden Age — from “Jumping Jack Flash” through the ’73 tour of Australia. The movie stretches out a little, takes its time, from the period between Brian’s death and the Exile era. We actually get to see more than 30 seconds of “Midnight Rambler” during the ’72 tour, which Tulip Frenzy has long posited was the apogee of the art form, not just the Stones’ greatest tour but perhaps rock’n’roll’s highest moment. And then, following those shows and the subsequent tours of Australia, Hawaii, and Europe, Mick Taylor decided he needed to leave the band, if he were going to survive in the Sandy-like destructive wake of Keith’s heroin addiction. The movie spends two or three minutes on Mick’s departure. And while the Stones welcome Ron Wood into the band, the director makes his feelings known — and it is a sentiment we completely agree with — that while we used to love them, it’s all over now. We see a few minutes of footage from those dire Black and Blue days, and then it’s all over, save for a momentary respite when the Stones, challenged by punk, exerted themselves to produce Some Girls.
The movie effectively ends the moment Ron Wood joined the band. And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. The day Mick Taylor left, it was over.
The Stones are celebrating their 50th Anniversary as a band. We celebrate the first 10, maybe 12 years. And we regret the rest. Apparently so does Brett Morgan.
Tulip Frenzy 