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On Eve Of SXSW, World Conquest, Wild Flag Waves O’er DC

Posted in Music with tags , , , , on March 11, 2011 by johnbuckley100

Supergroups are like some second marriages, in which adults, no longer young and quite so foolish, find their proper partners.  So it seems to be with Wild Flag, in which Mary Timony of Helium, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney, and Rebecca Cole of The Minders bounce around like ping pong balls about to be drawn in a winning lottery.  For while Helium and Sleater-Kinney had wide followings, our first exposure to Wild Flag would indicate they could be huge.

Anyone who’s listened to the antecedent bands would have recognized not just traces, but huge genetic thumb prints all over Wild Flag’s sound last night at DC’s Black Cat.  In both Helium and her own Mary Timony Band, Timony’s capable of garage-rocking guitar pop, off-kilter and running the gamut between sweet and snarling.  Brownstein and Weiss were two-thirds of one of the smartest bands of the ’90s, and Weiss’s propulsive drumming behind Brownstein’s energetic guitar textures updated the melodic punk rock of Sleater-Kinney in a different context.

For a band that has played less than a dozen gigs, with one songwriter (Timony) based in Washington, the other in Portlandia (Brownstein, the star, with Fred Armisen, of Portlandia), songs gelled nicely.  This is a band that has the wildness of rock’n’roll youth and the maturity of a graduate student before it even goes into the studio to record its first album.  It’s hard to describe songs you’ve never heard before, and for which you don’t even know the titles, but let’s just say there aren’t many bands that can make you think of Lou Reed and Jimi Hendrix, punk rock and the Haight-Ashbury all within the span of two or three songs.

It was something of a homecoming and farewell for Mary Timony, who in DC is more like Mary From The Block than a Riot Grrrl, and who has had an influence on an entire generation of young rockers.  It was great to see her here with the band she’s been working with cross-country.  We have more than an inkling that Wild Flag is going to take SXSW by storm, and that their freak flag is going to be raised above the world, in a conquest as sure as their performance last night before a sold out crowd in Washington.

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Women On The Verge: Wild Flag Plays DC

Posted in Music with tags , , , , , on March 11, 2011 by johnbuckley100

Great show at the Black Cat.  More tomorrow.  Mary Timony (l) and Carrie Brownstein (r). Leica D-Lux 4.

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Wye Oak Blossoms With “Civilian”

Posted in Music with tags , , , on March 9, 2011 by johnbuckley100

Baltimore’s Wye Oak is a band so ambitious that it’s produced its (first) masterpiece while there are still no more than five rings around its arboreal trunk.  Civilian builds on 2009’s The Knot in unexpected ways, and reveals that The Decemberists choosing of Wye Oak as the opening act on its winter tour was recognition of a sapling now grown into a mighty tree.

We’ve never been big fans of two-person bands, from the Method Actors to the White Stripes, because live the sound of drums and guitar without the flaps tied down by the bass imperfectly protects the music from the buffeting of sonic wind.  But Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack aren’t just ambitious, they’re visionaries too, and rather than compromise with a third musician, they’ve come to the Centaur’s solution of having Stack play both drums and bass (keyboard.)  Um, at the same time.  At the Beacon Theater in January, when they opened for The Decemberists, we marveled at how well it worked, Stack holding down, if not a heavy bottom, at least a sufficiency of rhythm, one arm bashing the drum kit, the other stretched to the keyboard.  We’re guessing he’s also good at simultaneous translations of English to Mandarin, can program in C++, and never was bored as a child, since he could play catch without needing another kid to come over.

Wasner can also do circus tricks.  She can strum like Peter Buck and head into Distortionland like Thurston Moore.  On perhaps Civilian‘s most brilliant song, “The Alter,” Wasner embellishes upon Air’s “Surfing On A Rocket,” which itself was a take on Eno’s “St. Elmo’s Fire,” with a sudden efflorescence into Frippertronics.  Wow.  We dare you to listen to “The Alter” and not go download this whole amazing album.  Wasner’s voice starts in Lida Husick alto depths, and can maybe range a little too far into Cranberries territory, but the effect of her singing, the mastery of  her guitar textures, and Andy Stack’s utility infielding should, with Civilian, introduce the proverbial wider audience to the charms of The Free State’s greatest gift to music since David Byrne.

Unfortunately their show Friday night at the Black Cat is sold out.  (Although for those of us with day jobs going to see Mary Timony play in Wild Flag Thursday night, maybe that’s a blessing.)  This isn’t the last chance we’ll have to see Wye Oak, though next time it’s likely them headlining at The Beacon.  Amazing.

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Don’t Believe A Word You’ve Read About PJ Harvey’s “Let England Shake”

Posted in Music with tags , , on February 27, 2011 by johnbuckley100

Depending on whether or not you’re a purist when it comes to considering which is the beginning and which the end of a given decade, PJ Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, released late in 2000, was either the first great album of the ‘aughts, or the last great album of the ’90s.  The same folk who can tell you precisely which decade owns the rights would also probably tell you that Stories From The City isn’t Harvey’s greatest album.  They would be wrong. Yes, Dry bowled us over, and in a near 20-year career there have been other high points, but Stories From The City was a perfect album, and there aren’t many of them.  Stories From The City was one of the greatest New York punk albums of all time, which is pretty cool considering Harvey was born and bred in rural England.

Since then, though, we’ve been disappointed. Uh Huh Her had some magic, but was a step down, and Harvey’s collaboration two years ago with John Parish had one delightful song, “Black Hearted Love,” but even by the standards of her off-albums a single winner constituted a low point.

So when Sasha Frere-Jones — who aside from being a gorgeous writer, generally writes only about music he likes — yawningly put down Let England Shake as pretty much a bore, we accepted that.  But of course still listened.  You have to listen to an artist like PJ Harvey — there is no oversupply of such artists, and you have to follow the great ones into the bushes to at least see what they’re up to.

And when we listened, we were moved to declare, Wrongo, Sasha!  No, there’s not a lot of guitar bashing, and there’s nothing to get the blood moving  like “Sheela Na Gig” or even “The Whores Hustle and The Hustlers Whore,” and yet this odd album, Albion-historical in nature, but still possessing a back beat, is actually filled with quiet greatness.  It doesn’t quite rock, but it is both melodic and dynamic.  In fact, it reminds us quite a bit of Stories Of The City. Go listen to “In The Dark Places,” which could easily fit onto her opus of 11 years ago.  In fact, listen to the whole damn thing.  Odd and lovely, which only partly defines Polly Jean herself, Let England Shake deserves an audience as great as the artist who made it.

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Capsula’s “Hit’N’Miss” Heralds New Album On 3/11

Posted in Music with tags , , on February 12, 2011 by johnbuckley100

In The Land Of The Silver Souls by Capsula, unquestionably The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band In The World* circa 2011, drops on 3/11/11. Plus, they’re playing at SXSW.  Pack your bags…

*Don’t believe me?  Want a taste? Download the song here, for free.

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North Mississippi Allstars In Championship Form

Posted in Music with tags , , , on February 6, 2011 by johnbuckley100

If you think of the North Mississippi Allstars as just a blues power trio, or as folks fishing the same pond as, at some times, Southern Culture on the Skids and, occasionally, the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, you will in no way be prepared for their magnificent new Keys To The Kingdom. The Dickinsons pay homage to their late dad Jim, whose piano lightened the Stones’ “Wild Horses,” and whose production of Big Star introduced a uniquely off-kilter sound to the world (Wilco said thank you with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot), and they do so in a manner wholly fitting the old man’s legacy.  This is not contemporary blues rock — you wouldn’t expect to hear this on Alligator Records — more like a time capsule recording a tryst between Exile on Main Street and Ry Cooder’s Into The Purple Valley. This may be an unfair comparison, but for those who’ve listened to each of the 60 albums released by the Drive By Truckers — another band of offspring from famed Muscle Shoals musicians — and wondered if they’d ever do something that sounds, you know, different, well, Keys To The Kingdom is an affirmation of growth, and a minor rebuke to the NoMi AllStars’ closest competition.  The year is young, and we’ve barely thrown a worm out there, and already we’ve landed a keeper.

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Ah, And Now Graham Lewis’s Take On Early Wire

Posted in Music with tags , , , on January 16, 2011 by johnbuckley100

From the same issue of Uncut:

On forming Wire:

(Wire) weren’t a punk group.  We didn’t join up for that… We weren’t interested in doing rock’n’roll – that was the ’50s..  We were interested in making a piece of art, and that was the group.  Bruce talked about it being a living sculpture.


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Incredibly Sad News: Don Van Vliet Is Dead

Posted in Music with tags , on December 18, 2010 by johnbuckley100

When Don Van Vliet ceased recording as Captain Beefheart, long about the early ’80s, the word was he had health problems, as well as a hankering to be a fine artist.  Now, lucky us: when we saw him in 1980 at New York’s Beacon Theater, he was in fine fettle, and it was hard to reconcile the jovial man with the myth, and subsequent reports of illness.  We’ve subsequently seen many of the paintings, and sometime in the ’90s went to a one-man show of his in a gallery in New York.

But the music — that Delta’n’ dustbowl growl, the multi-octave rollercoaster ride his voice would go on, those syncopated traffic jams his master musicians lurched through — that’s what we’ll remember him for.  That he lived as long as he did was a glory to the world.  That he is dead tonight (see  this notice in the New York Times posted a short while ago) is sad, sad indeed.

UPDATE: Ben Ratliff is a moron.  Oh Heavens.  To write a bio of Captain Beefheart and say the high point of his work was Trout Mask Replica shows he’s probably never even listened to anything Von Vliet did.  Or that he prepared for the obit writing by reading from a book. Hello, NYT?  There was early genius (Safe As Milk), and late genius (Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) and Doc At The Radar Station.) There was even under-appreciated greatness in his most accessible album, Clear Spot.  But reducing Captain Beefheart to Trout Mask Replica is like reducing The Rolling Stones to Satanic Majesties. Gimme a break.

 

UPDATE 2:  Well, Mr. Ratliff’s full obit of Captain Beefheart is up and it is much superior to what he posted last night, and worth reading. For starters, he doesn’t have Don Van Vliet’s life and importance peak with Trout Mask Replica.  It seems to show evidence of his having stayed up all night reading the liner notes to Dust Blows Forward, which is ok, cuz they’re good.

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Tulip Frenzy’s #1 Album of 2010: Darker My Love’s “Alive As You Are”

Posted in Music with tags , on November 30, 2010 by johnbuckley100

Let us admit that we can’t do better than the wag who said that Darker My Love’s Alive As You Are is “what the Byrds would have sounded like if they’d grown up listening to the Byrds.”  That’s particularly good, because it’s so accurate. Alive As You Are is a throwback that would have seemed derivative if it hadn’t been flawless — a flawless time capsule from the late ’60s woodshedding/gone-to-Marin era, a country rock gem.  One false note and maybe we would have questioned how a band whose leaders had once played with the Fall, and whose drummer was recruited from the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and whose first two albums plied the wire between punk rock and neo-psychedelica, could have produced an album as sunny and light as this.  Tim Presley and Rob Barbato are great singers, and superb songwriters, and these guys are to three-chord rock what Apollo Ohno is to the short track: they are graceful and precise, and know how to make their move.  Alive As You Are at first sounded like some weird detour, but we’ll be surprised if, no matter what sound comes next, they break the phyllo-thin crust of harmony and joy that encased this record so delicately. Since the advent of the cassette deck, we’re hard pressed to remember more than a handful of albums we’ve listened to in their entirety, over and over, without cutting off one downer or dog from our playlist.  The first J. Geils album.  The Clash.  Surfer Rosa by the Pixies. Take It From The Man! Darker My Love has just entered rare company: a band that has made a perfect album.  And in 2010, as in any other year, you can’t beat perfection.

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Tulip Frenzy’s #2 Album of 2010: Alejandro Escovedo’s “Street Songs of Love”

Posted in Music with tags , on November 30, 2010 by johnbuckley100

Alejandro’s physical recovery from his collapse seven years ago from Hep C might have been enough: just being able to get out and play again, sober and with his head held high, would have been an accomplishment.   What is even more remarkable than just surviving is that after a perhaps understandably weak post-recovery album, The Boxing Mirror, his music has gotten stronger and better than ever before.  We really like Real Animal, and not just for the way he mined his own story to produce, with Chuck Prophet, a batch of great songs.  We liked how the album had a kick, and showcased a band that could snarl, as if Al wanted the world to know how he used to rock back in the day.  When his acoustic trio came through town a few times since, we saw glimmers of delicacy and power sometimes in the same phrase, and I think we expected his next album would be like one of his solo records from the 1990s, filled with rockers, sure, but notable more for the soft and pretty songs than the ones with punk resolve.  So we were totally unprepared for the sheer roar, the power and might of Street Songs of Love , probably the best album of Alejandro’s long and glorious career, and the hardest rocking album by an American punk this year.  Next year Al will turn 60, but he shows no sign of slowing down, pulling his punches, or going soft.  Thank God for life, sobriety, and whatever underlying rage that keeps propelling him forward.

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