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What Sasha Frere-Jones Gets Right, And Wrong, In His Rare Miss On Bowie

Posted in Music with tags , , , , , , , , , on March 16, 2013 by johnbuckley100

It is unusual for Sasha Frere-Jones to use his bully pulpit in The New Yorker to resist committing to a strong point of view, but when he finished his review of Bowie’s The Next Day with a taunt that “the bar rats can fight it out” over the exact status of the album among Bowie’s canon — declaring it “a fine rock record that is a few hairs away from being among his best,” and that “even the obsessives should be able to accept that” — we were disappointed.

Disappointed because Frere-Jones is, like Jon Mendelsohn, Lester Bangs, R. Meltzer, and Byron Coley before him, among the only voices in the rock criticism of his era that really matter.  While he does not write with anywhere near the pyrotechnical verve of any of these likely mentors, his perch exists at a time where Americans are given the dreary choice between reading the idiots at Rolling Stone, the even bigger idiots who labor under Jon Pareles’ Fidel-like reign at the formerly authoritative New York Times, and the onanistic closed loop in the bell jar that is Pitchfork.  Though it must be acknowledged that Ken Tucker at NPR has a wonderful sensibility, Frere-Jones may be the only main-market rock critic who really has an impact.

So yes, we were disappointed because the passive distancing of “a few hairs away from being among” Bowie’s best violates every rule of resistance to gainsaying, to soft pronouncements,  that we were taught, lo those many years ago, by Andy Schwartz, the great editor of NY Rocker, where we were once a young pup (along with Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, the aforementioned Coley, Glen Morrow, and others.)

If you want to say the album isn’t so good, say it, Sasha.  And if you want to say it’s great, say that.  If it’s somewhere in between?  Find a way of committing to exactly where it stands, without weasel calibrations like “a few hairs away from among his best.”

But that’s not the point of this post, a rare criticism of Frere-Jones.  In his review, Frere-Jones holds up Bowie’s under-appreciated 2002 album Heathen as a “magnificent” collection “with fewer good songs than The Next Day (though) a more cohesive marriage of electronic textures and traditional guitar work, and Bowie was in robust voice.  Bowie and (producer Tony) Visconti worked on that together, and it’s difficult to understand how they could have been so in synch with the moment then but not now.”  So, score a point for Sasha that the production on The Next Day does have that brittle 1980s sound that makes so many of the good albums from that epoch unlistenable today.  And he is right that Heathen, as well as the half-decent follow-up Reality, have a less bombastic, arch sound.  But come on: two of the three best songs on Heathen were written by Black Francis, as if Bowie was so out of it in the 1980s that he only picked up on the Pixies’ genius a decade later.

As between 1) having a production that sounds too much like the ’80s, but a series of great, fresh songs, and 2) a smooth sound set amidst a songwriting dry spell that necessitates having to dip into Black Francis’ bag for inspiration, we’ll take the former.  Frere-Jones is right that the production on The Next Day weakens it, but his inability to commit to what he thinks about it, leaving it to the “bar rats” to decide how good it is, is an abdication of his responsibility.  If an artist played it as safe as he does in his review, we hope he would excoriate them for it.

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“Mr. Bowie’s Twilight Masterpiece”

Posted in Music with tags , on March 10, 2013 by johnbuckley100

We so dreaded this morning, not because of losing an hour’s sleep, but the possibility of revulsion emanating from Jon Pareles being assigned the big New York Times piece on Bowie’s The Next Day.  Thankfully, the editors made the wise decision to assign Simon Reynolds to write a smart piece,, which he has done.  “Now, after his longest musical break ever, the 66-year old Englishman and New York resident is back for what could well be his last blast, the supernova of his stardom.”  We hope that last part is wrong, but the rest of the piece, especially the comparison of the new record to Bowie’s last great one, Lodger, sure rings true.

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You Can Finally Get Your Deathfix, And Man, They Take It All The Way

Posted in Music with tags , , , , , , , on February 26, 2013 by johnbuckley100

We had February 19th circled on our calendar ever since Spin glommed “Transmission,” a magnificent early cut from the first Deathfix album, and streamed it on their site.  But even though we hit refresh on our iTunes about a dozen times last Tuesday, it only was released today.  Fortunately, those nice people at NPR let us stream the whole album all week, so we haven’t exactly been waitin’ for our man.  We may have set new records for streaming a single album, but we sure got our Deathfix, and as of today we finally have a renewable supply, and can take it to the limit.

And that’s the worry, for now that we have our own copy of Deathfix coursing through our headphones, we find the whole album is such a crystalline mound of glittering goodness, we could listen to it over and over until we emerge from the room —  if we were to emerge — looking like an R. Crumb character. It’s that good.

Much has been made of the opener, “Better Than Bad” sounding like a Big Star track.  Right era, but maybe the wrong band.  It seems built less on proto-power pop than on George Harrison’s “What Is Life.”  But placing the context from which Deathfix emerges is important, given how much the band confounds expectations.  With musicians who have roots in Fugazi, Bob Mould’s solo career, and D.C. secrets like The Mary Timony Band, who would have imagined there is a late ’60s/early ’70s prog sophistication at work here, that in a song like “Transmission” we can imagine Joe Boyd producing a Traffic session.  The musicians are virtuosi, even when you realize that singer/guitarist Brendan Canty isn’t playing the drums, which he did so magnificently for Fugazi, but instead has embarked on the same path as Chris Mars and Grant Hart and, yeah, Dave Grohl before him, going from behind the drum kit to the front of the stage.

It all works, as an incredibly catchy set of updated 10cc songs, as a staggeringly sophisticated first album made by adults who know their way around the studio, but haven’t lost a scintilla of wonder about just what can be accomplished with guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards.  This may seem far afield, but the only contemporary band that to us seems to be fishing with the same tackle is White Denim, and by that we mean a band that completely understands how uncool it is to play music with such a knowing understanding of pre-punk rock sophistication, and then they just go ahead’n’blow everyone away with the power of their songs, their incredible musicianship.  Resistance is futile.

Despite the dance club vibe of “Dali’s House,” this is a cerebral album, clever and beautiful (at times) without being emotional.  It sounds like it was made by a band as well-synced as The Soundtrack of Our Lives, but of course, they’ve only been playing together for a matter of months.  Our humble belief is that Deathfix could be the biggest band ever to emerge from D.C. — we mean commercially viable and huge — and wouldn’t that be ironic, given Brendan’s roots in Fugazi?  Richly deserved though, right, to have a nice guy finish first?  Whether or not we’re right — we’re usually not, when it comes to predicting who’s going to be huge — Deathfix has produced a first album that we pray is just the kickoff to many more.  You can start your 2013 Top 10 list scorecard now.  Maybe you can even put down your pen.

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Could The New Bowie Album Really Be This Good?

Posted in Music with tags , , , on February 25, 2013 by johnbuckley100

We anxiously await tomorrow’s release of Deathfix by, um, Deathfix.  (Thanks to NPR, we’ve been listening to it streamed all week, and yeah, it’s great!  More anon.)

And yes, we are looking forward to the Atoms for Peace album coming out tomorrow.

But even after reading a great Rolling Stone interview with Tony Visconti, which goes through the new album track-by-track, we have been only mildly interested in the new Bowie album, The Next Day, which comes out in two weeks .  We found the early single, “Where Are We Now,” a little too much like a boring version of “Fantastic Voyage,” from 1979’s Lodger, which come to think of it, was the last really great Bowie album.  (Let’s Dance had its moments, and Scary Monsters had Tom Verlaine’s “Kingdom Come,” but honestly, the downward curve for Bowie in the ’80s matched the Rolling Stones’.) Which left us with nice ’70s memories, warm feelings, and hats-off respect, but nothing since the Golden Years would give us much to get worked up about, at least not at the thought of a new album.

And then comes today’s review in The Telegraph, and holy moly, if this doesn’t get the juices flowing.  Click on the link and read Neil McCormick’s rave, but this’ll give you an idea:

“It is an enormous pleasure to report that the new David Bowie album is an absolute wonder: urgent, sharp-edged, bold, beautiful and baffling, an intellectually stimulating, emotionally charged, musically jagged, electric bolt through his own mythos and the mixed-up, celebrity-obsessed, war-torn world of the 21st century.

Musically, it is stripped and to the point, painted in the primal colours of rock: hard drums, fluid bass, fizzing guitars, shaded by splashes of keyboard and dirty rasps of horns. The 14 songs are short and spiky, often contrasting that kind of patent Bowie one-note declarative drawl with sweet bursts of melodic escape that hit you like a sugar rush. Bowie’s return from a decade’s absence feels very present, although full of sneaky backward glances.”

Read the whole thing.  Wow.  We’ll start poking sofa cushions to find the spare change necessary…

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Widowspeak’s “Almanac” Is A Compendium Of Facts About An Emerging Great Band

Posted in Music with tags , , , , on January 23, 2013 by johnbuckley100

When Widowspeak’s eponymous first album was released in 2011, you’d have been forgiven for thinking it was that Mazzy Star reunion we’ve all been waiting for.  Robert Earl Thomas was less adventurous than Dave Roback, maybe, though certainly his equal in sonic tastefulness, and singer Molly Hamilton sounded a lot like Hope Sandoval, minus the otherworldliness.  Now they are back with Almanac, and have surer footing, and a more aggressive pace, and we feel confident that the path they are on will take them far.

They make good partners, Thomas and Hamilton, as he shapes the sound with his lead guitar while she holds down the rhythm guitar parts forging the melody with artful phrasing.  Her voice stretches the canvas on which the songs are written across a fairly narrow frame.  Most times a baby doll husk, occasionally it loses all substance and recedes entirely into pretty fog, like Chet Baker playing trumpet on a slow song.  Widowspeak’s limitations, such as there are, emanate from whether one can live on the sustenance provided entirely by vocal meringue, and as we’ve just today heard about a restaurant in Tokyo that serves customers meals containing actual dirt, we have found ourselves nodding, seeking just a little grit, and wondering whether Widowspeak would be more satisfying listened to in longer increments if they emulated that approach.

Pareles used a Velvet Underground reference in his recent nice write up of Almanac, and while a stopped clock is occasionally right, you won’t be surprised that we beg to differ, that we think of Widowspeak less in the context of the VU than in the fourth-degree separation that comes from a young American band actually sounding more like the black ryder’s mutation of a Morning After Girls homage to the Brian Jonestown Massacre, who actually possessed the direct link to that VU sound.  Good company, though, right? More than sounding like Mazzy Star, better than sounding like one more acolyte of the Velvet Underground, Widowspeak reminds us of that magical moment we first heard the black ryder’s Aimee Nash singing with the Morning After Girls, though others will think of Miranda Lee Richards fronting the BJM.

For his part, Robert Earl Thomas is a canny lead guitarist who sounds more delicate on Almanac than he did live last November when Widowspeak opened for Woods at that amazing show at the Red Palace.  When he plays slide, he sounds like David Byrne on “The Big Country,” which of course was an homage to Phil Manzanera playing “Prairie Rose.”  All good lineage, all good music, a band with a future that links to the past — the best kind — and an album we will be listening to, over and over, until they mercifully deliver the next one.

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Capsula’s “Ziggy Stardust” Is A Little Muddled

Posted in Music with tags , , , on December 3, 2012 by johnbuckley100

Capsula’s admirable concept of reviving Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars hit us like space debris, something so random we never could have predicted it.  Redo Ziggy Stardust? Our favorite Argentine expat punk band coming up with this from their perch in Bilbao?  Wow.

Come to think of it, when Bowie released the original, forty years ago this past summer, it also came as something of a shock.  Hitting our shores the same summer that the Stones were touring behind Exile On Main Street — as straightforward an evocation of American roots music as there possibly could be — Bowie’s sheer Britishness, his theatricality, his publicity-stunt bisexuality, made him seem like the man who fell to Earth three years before Nicholas Roeg would actually cast him in that role.  That Bowie arrived more or less at the same ephemeral moment as Mark Bolan/T.Rex, the same moment as glam rock, gave us something to hang onto.  Here comes rock’s next thing, though it would take Roxy Music and Bowie’s own Alladin Sane and Diamond Dogs to herald just how completely different things were on one side of the Atlantic from the Little Feet, Alice Cooper, and Big Star rockets that began going up on our side.

Musically, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars had the transformative effect of connecting the Beatles to Iggy and the Stooges, no small feat (nor Little Feat.)  For Bowie was one part British cabaret, one part avant garde, one part Velvet Underground.  Songs like “Hang On To Yourself” predicted the sound we would associate with what became punk rock more than any other song of its era — you can hear its echoes in both the Sex Pistols and the Ramones — and both this album, Bowie’s faux transvestism, and the glam rock reshuffling of Chuck Berry riffs gave license to bands like the New York Dolls, who vamped until punk rock was ready for the curtains to be pulled back.  Ziggy was amazing, because of its sheer inventiveness, because of Bowie’s voice — and because of the crunch of Mick Ronson’s guitar atop the thunder of Woody Woodmansey’s drums.  What we’re getting at is that everything, from the concept to the sound of the band, rendered Ziggy Stardust as one of rock’s pivotal moments.

Which was why we got so excited by the idea that Capsula, who we consider to be the most exciting rock’n’roll band in the world today , were releasing their take on the album in its entirety.  The problem is, it doesn’t quite work.  Martin Guevara is terrific songwriter and bandleader, and an exciting guitarist, but he’s an adequate singer, and English isn’t his first language.  Bowie is, of course, one of the greatest singers ever, and his vocal performance on Ziggy made him a superstar.  Moreover, as great a drummer as Ignacio Villarejo is, on this album, the drums are a little muddy — in fact the whole production is a little muddled, which wouldn’t matter so much if it were an album of Capsula songs, but because it’s a remake of an album that depends on the singer’s voice, the particulars of the guitar sound, the precise tuning of the drum kit, it’s off-putting.  Musically, it fails, by a small margin, to deliver.  Because it is punk rock, Capsula’s version (with Ivan Julian, among others, playing along with the core band),  of “Hang On To Yourself” is amazing.  “It Ain’t Easy,” which starts out with Coni Duchess singing, is wonderful — better even than the Long John Baldry version!  “Suffragette City” of course is fantastic in Capsula’s hands.

Any of these songs would be startlingly wonderful live encores.  But doing the whole album?  Well, it likely could go in one of only three directions.  It could be a nominally reverent but actually tongue-in-cheek send-up, like Camper Van Beethoven recording Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk.  It could be an actually reverent, quite sincere effort to redo the original — which then would have to be compared to its predecessor on its terms.  Or it could have been enlivened, like Mike Nichols’ revival of Death Of A Salesman with Philip Seymour Hoffman — great theater because of the quality of the performance stretching the limits of an iconic play.  Alas, Capsula’s The Dream of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars falls in the middle category.

We love them no less for trying, and perhaps the balls it took to attempt this will open one of our very favorite bands to the global superstardom they deserve.  But sadly, Capsula’s version of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars does not transcend the original, or win on its own terms.

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Capsula, The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band In The World — Yeah, You Read That Right — Are About To Release A Remake Of “Ziggy Stardust”

Posted in Music with tags , on November 30, 2012 by johnbuckley100

There’s a reason this site is called Tulip Frenzy, not Tulip Placidity, and it has to do with the team here’s thoroughly warped love of real rock’n’roll.  Recent readers might get the impression we think the world revolves around young Ty Segall, and yeah, it sort of does.  But if there is one band in the world today that absolutely twangs our woogie, it’s Capsula, the Buenos Aires natives who, a few years back, moved their operation to Bilbao, Spain. (They did it because they couldn’t earn a living playing across South America, given the distances between the cities; in Bilbao, they can play anywhere in Europe and be back on Monday.)  Longtime Tulip Frenzy denizens will remember, we think Capsula is the greatest punk rock band of our sorry age.

We first heard Songs & Circuits, which came out in 2006, after their move, and after they’d begun recording in English. Our mind? Blown like a 50-amp fuse.  We would have moved to Bilbao, too, but they’re, like, touring all the time.  So we stayed put and just kept playing their music, pressing cds into the hands of friends and saying, “You won’t believe it, but these guys are up there with the Clash, and Gang of 4, and the Ramones, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids.”  (Things got worse, of course, when they actually played on an album by former Voidoid Ivan Julian. The release of The Naked Flame converted our mere fandom into a full-blown, well, frenzy.) All signs of skepticism would drain from said friends’ faces by the time the second power chord was played.  Songs & Circuits is still the high water mark, but they’ve released two albums since then, the very good Rising Mountains (2009), and the awesome In The Land Of The Silver Souls, which made Tulip Frenzy’s Top 10 List last year.

And now we find out that on Tuesday, they are releasing their version of David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust,” entitled Dreaming Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, and featuring old friends like Ivan Julian on guitar.  Moreover, they’re releasing a DVD on their making of the record.

Whoa.  We did not see this coming! Everything will be available Tuesday AM.  We plan on camping out all night, right outside our own den where the iMac sits.

And wait, there’s more!  The three previously unreleased, Spanish-language albums they recorded in Argentina just showed up in the new iTunes Store.  This’ll tide us over ’til Ziggy‘s out next week.

Watch this space.

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White Fence, And The Bands That Didn’t Make It Onto This Year’s Tulip Frenzy Top Ten List: An Explanation

Posted in Music with tags , , , , , , on November 27, 2012 by johnbuckley100

Making a Top Ten List is hard in years when there is a lot of good new music.  And just when you think you’re done, inevitably you find you missed stuff.  (One of the most fun aspects of December is reading other people’s Top Ten lists and getting turned on to bands that had not punctured your force field.) But while we’re sure we’ll be doing, if not addenda, then at least announcements of bands we discovered after we’d cast our vote, right now we want to do something else. We thought we should report, if not on the runners up, then at least on the bands that were in contention, or should have been, but which didn’t make it, with some explanation of why not.

White Fence – Family Perfume, Volumes 1 and 2

Tim Presley is a deity in our house, with the shrine next to the bird feeder, on top of the old 8 Track.  Some will remember that Darker My Love’s last outing, Alive As You Are, was Tulip Frenzy’s Album of the Year in 2010.  Of course, Presley is represented on this year’s list by his collaboration with Ty Segall on Hair.  But while aspects of Family Perfume, the epic 29-song double album he released in two parts, in April and May, were as weirdly coherent as anything out of the E6 brotherhood, in the end, we found its extreme lo-fi production coupled with what we can only imagine was an intense psychedelic ambition was excessively confusing.  We almost wanted to shake Mr. Presley by his shoulders, urging him to focus.  We can say honestly that virtually everything his friend Segall does by his lonesome has visceral appeal, but as White Fence, recording all the instruments, Presley’s work is too ethereal, too diffuse.  There’s too much of it and, while snippets are appealing, ultimately it doesn’t rock. And while it is unfair, perhaps, to compare him to Ty Segall — a once in a decade talent — on a good day, Tim Presley’s one of the most compelling figures in all of rock’n’roll music.  Did we mention that just two years ago we gave an album he recorded with his colleagues in Darker My Love our highest honor?  White Fence — Presley and musicians, real sidemen, not imaginary friends – just launched a European tour.  May they knock ’em dead.  And come back and record an album as amazing as Tim Presley’s talent.  From where we sit, Family Perfume didn’t stink to high Heaven, but it just wasn’t it.  We play it, and enjoy it.  But we want more.  We want candy.

The dBs — Falling Off The Sky

God, it was magical hearing Peter Holsapple singing with Will Rigby and Gene Holder kicking down the tobacco barn behind him, and maybe doubly so to have the whole family together with Chris Stamey.  We loved Falling Off The Sky, a genuinely fun album recapturing the magic of Winston-Salem’s finest-ever export to Lower Manhattan.  Both Holsapple and Stamey’s songwriting was strong, and the band is as charming as ever they were.  “Send Me Something Real” was the best Stamey song in years, and “That Time Is Gone” was classic Holsapple. This is the case of a band just barely missing the list, beaten out by Patti Smith, of all people, whose Banga was just that much better.  They were half a game out of the playoffs when the season ended.  Wait ’til next year.

Brian Jonestown Massacre — Aufheben

We got so much joy out of hearing the first really good album from BJM in a decade, and performing the songs live this summer at 930, Anton Newcombe seemed to have a new lease on his plectrum.  In a weaker field, Aufheben would have made it, for it was in many ways classic Brian Jonestown Massacre.  But it wasn’t a weak field, and they didn’t.

Alejandro Escovedo — Big Station

Al’s third Tony Visconti-produced album in the last four years was good, but didn’t make the list because it was third-best among those offerings.  It was good, but something’s missing. We love Alejandro, but admit to a minor disillusionment now that, at least on this album, and for the last two or three tours, he’s gotten away from the larger orchestration of multiple guitars, rockin’ cellos, boogeying violins, etc.  This is a guy who for years would come through town each summer playing punk rock with a real band, and then a few months later return with just cellos. And he would rock just as hard with just the cellos. But when he plays punk rock in a pared-down quartet with just bass, Hector Munoz on drums, and a lead guitarist, something that was so magical about the old Alejandro is missing.  We mull the etiology: whether Al feels the need to play the hard rocker, or whether economics keeps him from performing with a larger set of musicians.  All we know is that, now that he is getting perhaps the most sympathetic listen of his career, with the strongest promotion (Hell, he has Bruce watching his back), and even finds his songs played on the radio… NOW is the time to tour with the whole shebang, the cellos and the peddle steel guitar, the violin and double guitars.  What once was the most magical act in rock’n’roll has been pared down to its essentials, but we want him to give us something more.  We want what Al offered all those many years when we dragged friends to see this guy they’d never heard of, only to have them so blown away, they quit their jobs to follow him like Deadheads.

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Uncut Mag Gives Ty Segall “New Artist Of The Year”

Posted in Music with tags , on November 24, 2012 by johnbuckley100

We’re not exactly certain how you can give a 25-year old with at least ten albums under his belt (both solo albums and as a member of The Traditional Fools, Epsilons, Party Fowl, the Perverts, among others).  But heck, if you want to recognize what he accomplished in 2012 — three amazing albums, two of which, as you will see below, tying for 2nd place in the Tulip Frenzy Top Ten List ™ — that’s not a meaningless accolade.  Even though of course they should drop the “New” and just call him “Artist of the Year.”

But in the write-up, the following few sentences simply made us sigh: “Segall was born in 1987 in Laguna Beach, down the coast from LA.  He was seven when Kurt Cobain died.  He still remembers playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on his first boom box.”

Okay, we’ll do what Uncut shoulda: we pronounce Ty Segall Tulip Frenzy’s Artist of the Year.

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SHOCKER: Woods Beats Out Ty Segall To Take Tulip Frenzy’s Album Of The Year!

Posted in Music with tags , , , on November 23, 2012 by johnbuckley100

If you followed the internals of the polling, did not try to skew them, but had a rationalist’s belief in data, by Election Day it would have been clear for all to see: Woods’ brilliant “Bend Beyond” was shooting up like a rocket en route to taking Tulip Frenzy’s Album of The Year, even beating out the great Ty Segall, who many people believed would be a lock.

But if the phrase, “Album of The Year,” has any meaning, of course it would go to Woods.  For Bend Beyond is an album that encapsulates all the musical goodness of 2012 — a glorious mix of garage rock, Byrdsy jangling, and smart songwriting — and is one of those records we’ll still be talking about ten years hence.

Here’s what we thought when we first heard it — and we should note, we’ve played it almost daily since then:

“Bend Beyond ranks in the Pantheon with Darker My Love’s Alive As You Are, John Hammond’s Southern Fried, Luna’s Penthouse, and The J. Geils Band.  You know where this is heading: yes, the declaration that Bend Beyond is a *perfect* record.  That’s right, perfect.  As we’ve commented before, perfect records are as rare as baseball pitchers’ perfect games.  (Even with that pronouncement, whether it will end up as Tulip Frenzy’s Album of the Year is not yet known, for as perfect as it may be, and it certainly is, the world has to account, and likely this year, for the greatness that is Ty Segall.  Does “World Historical” beat “perfect”?  We shall see.) [Editor’s note: And now we know.]

“Bend Beyond does something we never even considered possible, it is an expression beyond our previously far too limited imagination, for it melds the aforementioned folk-rock marriage between Neil Young and Galaxie 500 to farfisa-lubricated garage rock with ambient traces of psychedelic fireworks exploding softly on the edge of your vision.  Somehow, like a Ben’n’Jerry’s flavor combo moved to the realm of geographic mash-ups, we have achieved this brilliant union of Brooklyn with Woodstock with Topanga Canyon sliding in muddy goo right on top of it, and the tasty output, while perhaps a mite bit lacking in carnivorous gristle, is nourishing and fine.

“Go listen to “Find Them Empty” and tell me to my face that if it were slipped into a pail of nuggets taken from Lenny Kaye’s latest archaeological dig, you wouldn’t think it was the ’60s garage find o’ the year.

“Tell me — we dare ye — that if you heard “Cali In A Cup” while lying outside on an autumn sunny day, headphones on while you stared at that red leaf falling from a maple tree, you wouldn’t contemplate chucking it all to go work in some Williamsburg wine bar, dedicating your evenings to reading Richard Brautigan novels.

“Play “Is It Honest” loud from your Mustang while driving on Sunset Boulevard, and the remnants of the Paisley Underground would all march out with their hands up, their eyes blinking from behind Roger McGuinn half-shades.  ”Hey man, what is that?”

“It’s Woods’ Bend Beyond.

Like we said, a perfect album.”

And now it is Tulip Frenzy’s Album Of The Year.

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