Cheri Monastery, Bhutan, March 2007
Leica M8, 35mm Summilux (prior version)
Subtlety Is Overrated
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 35mm Summilux, Leica M8 on November 17, 2011 by johnbuckley100A.A. Bondy’s “Believers” Must Have Been Recorded In Another Green World
Posted in Uncategorized with tags A.A. Bondy, Peter Case, Ryan Adams, Verbena on November 17, 2011 by johnbuckley100It’s hard not to think of A.A. Bondy — whose new album Believers may be the best sounding record we’ve heard in years — as the inverse of Ryan Adams. Whereas Ryan Adams led the definitive 1990s alt.country band, Whiskeytown, only to let loose an occasional hard-rocking persona as a solo artist, A.A. (Scott) Bondy led the definitive 1990s Nirvana-influenced punk’n’roots band, Verbena, and he’s recently been reincarnated as… an alt.country/folk singer. It’s almost weird how much Bondy sings like Adams on the brilliant Believers and its stunning predecessor,When The Devil’s Loose, but it’s the really good Ryan Adams’ voice that we miss, not the mannered singer who flamed out with the Cardinals.
But we’ve buried the lede. The reason why Bondy’s new album is so affecting — well, aside from having great songwriting, powerful singing, and a musical structure that allows every snap of the snare, every twang from a string to shimmer in the air like a smoky revelation — the thing that is unbelievably affecting is how it self-consciously brings to mind the sound, if not of the classic Eno solo albums, at least that amazing duet with Robert Fripp, Evening Star. You know the album, the one where squalls of Frippertronics rise into the night sky while Eno concocts a frappe from spare bits of magic. Bondy does this for an entire album, only the genre is more like Southern folk rock than Brit-genius art-rock.
“The Heart Is Willing” starts the proceedings with a minor key exploration into slow mo’ rockabilly, artisanal fare served at a four-star restaurant alongside Highway 61 where the mystery train glides by. By the time we get to “Down In The Fire (Lost Sea)” we are in pure Frippertronics territory, only Bondy sings in this not-quite-lazy but somewhat unmotivated voice. And it is staggeringly affecting, pulls you in. How a fellow who once seemed easy to dismiss as a Cobain wannabe could produce music this lovely is a question maybe Malcolm Gladwell could answer, for we’re sure glad we didn’t just blink and permanently peg him as the artist he isn’t.
Another artist whose similar journey comes to mind is Peter Case, who went from making great power pop (The Plimsouls) to becoming his own version of Antiques Road Show, finding gems in every flea market, reviving more Dust Bowl songwriters than Ry Cooder ever thought to. But this is different: this is a young man from the South who does not parody his native culture as being on the skids, he just seems to have given up power chords in favor something far more powerful. Emotion and melody told in a manner as spare as John Hammond’s Source Point, though perhaps without the kick.
Some will put Bondy down for writing precisely the kinds of songs that get included in Friday Night Lights soundtracks. But we liked some of those songs, and we like a lot of what he’s produced on his last two albums. Believers may refer to anyone who takes the time to listen to this album.
Just when Tulip Frenzy’s 2011 Top Ten List seemed racked, it’s hit by A.A. Bondy’s cue ball.
Late Autumn
Posted in Uncategorized with tags CV Nokton 50 f/1.1, Leica M9 on November 15, 2011 by johnbuckley100Leica M9, Nokton f/1.1
The Return Of Howard Devoto and Magazine
Posted in Music with tags Howard Devoto, Magazine, No Thyself on November 15, 2011 by johnbuckley100This past week brought new tracks from Mazzy Starr for the first time in fifteen years, about the same rhythm of return as Halley’s Comet. The news that Magazine would suddenly show up with an excellent new album, No Thyself, three decades after The Correct Use Of Soap, and more than 20 years since Howard Devoto was last heard from (in the band Luxuria), brings to mind not so much the looping trajectory of a distant comet, but some strange cicada, buried underground and suddenly emerging into view.
And how do we look after all these years? It’s not entirely accurate to say they sound just the same. After all, the glorious John McGeoch died in 2005, leaving Noko, Devoto’s partner in long-dormant Luxuria, to wield the axe. Barry Adamson is apparently not on the record, though Dave Formula certainly is. Noko’s brittle riffs and fluid, impassioned runs show him to be a respectful heir to his predecessor, and Formula still has, well, the right formula. Devoto was so much older then, and seems so much younger than that now, it’s fair to say the passage of time has been kind. Even better, they’ve released in 2011 an album we would have liked, maybe even loved, had it been the follow up to Magic, Murder and the Weather on a timetable measured in months, not generations.
For those to whom this story is new, let us take a walk through time. Back in the summer of 1978, just as the entire musical world was getting with the program of three-chord rock, from out of nowhere, it seemed, came Magazine, with a debut album (Real Life) that had a synth-frisky and Manzaneran sound. They seemed an un-ironic version of Roxy Music, closer to the Bowie of Station To Station than, say, the Buzzcocks. That Howard Devoto had, um, founded the Buzzcocks only made the story richer. Sublime lyrics, a propulsive beat, by the time they showed up on our shores to play at Hurrah the next summer, Magazine had proved its point. You could be a punk band and still play intricate rock’n’roll with incredible musicianship and word smithery that was a snarling update on Dylan. He never had much of a voice, and his phrasing was less clever, perhaps, than Elvis Costello, but even the diminutive Devoto could have clocked Bonnie Bramlett, not the other way around. They were tough, Magazine was; they’d have to be shot by both sides to go down.
When The Correct Use Of Soap came out a year later, it confounded expectations partly by grafting on a funk sound that made covers of Sly Stone songs not just logical but really great, and it revealed in Devoto a singer unafraid to show emotion. But then McGeoch left for Siouxsie and the Banshees and soon all we had was an excellent Devoto solo album, Jerky Versions Of The Dream, and seven years later, Luxuria, and then… silence. Sure, we could hear Magazine through other bands. They were the chassis on which Garbage drove. But we lamented their absence, especially not having Devoto, who was a wonderfully protean figure, clever and admirable in his willingness to stand tough and somehow still be vulnerable.
Now, all these years later, comes No Thyself, and it is an angular, hard rocking, lean Magazine that returns. There’s no mistaking them, even if the pace has slowed down a bit. A parallel may be found in Radio Birdman’s return with Zeno Beach, but to me this feels lighter, and I’d just as soon listen to it as to the old stuff, which is a very big deal for a reunion album. Devoto hasn’t mellowed, and if this is Dad Rock, it’s the kind of rock that dad’s who still wear black jeans will love.
We had no idea this was in the works, even though we rejoiced two years ago with the news that Magazine had reformed. But we thought that was just to play gigs. To have come back from the great beyond to put out an album this fine is a story of redemption worthy of a Howard Devoto song.
To The Return Of The Psychedelic Sounds Of Mazzy Star
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Leica M9, Noctilux 0.95 on November 12, 2011 by johnbuckley100Leica M9, Noctilux 0.95
Source note: a bush found while on a random walk in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Good Heavens, Mazzy Star Returns
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Dave Roback, Dum Dum Girls, Hope Sandoval, Mazzy Star, the black ryder on November 12, 2011 by johnbuckley100Mazzy Star has returned from… from where? The two new singles they released this week, “Lay Myself Down” and “Common Burn” are so familiar, so perfectly within the tradition in which they once worked that if you were to say these fine songs were emptied from the vaults, we would have believed you. But Hope Sandoval announces that, after 15 years hiatus, they’re new, and damned if they’re not.
When you think of the all the bands that are currently evoking the folky, ethereal mix that Dave Roback and Hope produced in the ’90s — imagine the Velvet Underground jamming with the Dylan’s Nashville band, Mo Tucker playing tambourine, Sterling Morrison playing pedal steel, as echoes of the Chocolate Watchband emerge from their rehearsal space next door — you might think they’ve returned to claim their throne. From bands as disparate as the black ryder to the Dum Dum Girls, it’s not like their sound really went away, and we always had Sandoval’s solo albums. But these were missing the glorious tastefulness of Roback’s guitar. Nothing either has done without the other — not Hope’s cameo role with the Jesus and Mary Chain, not Roback’s Paisley Underground band The Rain Parade — could ever match what they did together. And now they’re doing it together again. Happy day.
(Hat tip to Leah Jeffers; we hand’t heard.)
Upper Georgetown In Autumn
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 35mm Summilux, Leica M9 on November 9, 2011 by johnbuckley100Leica M9, 35mm Summilux with floating element. ISO 80, wide open.
“Achtung Baby” Twentieth Anniversary Addition: Even Better Than The Real Thing?
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Achtung Baby, Eno, Nirvana, U2 on November 9, 2011 by johnbuckley100We kind of dreaded the idea that U2 was going to release a “deluxe edition” of Achtung Baby, pegged to the 20th anniversary of its release. Divorced from the context in which the classic album was created — not just U2’s evolution from a band at the center of what mattered to its current (semi-functional) status as nostalgia act, but honestly, how many among its fans remember the glorious tension in the air after the Berlin Wall came down and the capital most fraught with history and ghosts became the locus for Eno and U2 to create a masterwork? — the prospect of the commercial packaging of Achtung Baby, with its coasters and branded rhinestone Bono-specks seemed worse than a joke, a symbol of a great band’s decline. Remember too: twenty years ago this month, Nirvana’s Nevermind hit the charts, a moment that seemed as liberating as the Berlin Wall falling, but the question today of what that that release meant is as devoid of mystery as modern-day Berlin, the “sexy but poor” capital of the richest state in Europe. Nevermind did not, alas, mean punk rock uber alles, though Achtung Baby certainly was the zenith of U2, both musically and as an authentic act. Everything since, (some brilliant moments on Pop notwithstanding) from the phony dance rock of Zooropa to the pretty, pleasing anthem rock that followed, has been anticlimax. So of course they package their greatest album with all sorts of bells and whistles, extracting one last pint of lucre from this symbol of their past.
Except it’s great. No, we don’t know about the box set and all that, but the extra songs available via the release on iTunes contain some gems. Yes, we were able to get “Lady With The Spinning Head” and their cover of Creedence’s “Fortunate Son,” and I think that cover of “Paint It Black” in earlier compilations. But songs like “Blow Your House Down,” “Salome,” and even “Where Did It All Go Wrong?”, with it’s Gene Simmons barre chords are, well, at least as good as the real thing. The big question with these repackages of classic albums that empty the cupboards is whether or not, had the newly released songs been included the first time around, they would have increased your sense then of the album’s greatness. When the Stones re-released Exile On Main Street a couple of years back, the inclusion of new/old songs was delightful on any level, but I could understand why, with the exception of “Plundered My Soul,” those songs never made it out the first time. (And of course “Plundered My Soul” was dropped because it too closely resembled “Tumbling Dice,” though in retrospect, as much as this may qualify as apostasy, they may have chosen the wrong one to go out with in 1972.) But then an album like Tell Tale Signs is released, containing not so much unreleased songs, but different versions of the songs Dylan and his producers chose for his albums from 1989 to 2006, and it was a bloody revelation: it actually made me remove Time Out Of Mind from my list of the greatest Dylan albums because I felt cheated: the songs not chosen were so much better than what he actually put out.
Several of the songs released with the “Deluxe Version” of Achtung Baby would have made a great album even greater. Yes, they border a little too closely on territory claimed by the songs that made it. And it’s clear that they never got the full Eno treatment — they seem slightly less substantial than the original songs as they were dipped in the little genius’s sonic frying pan. But they are well worth a listen, and it is well worth remembering just how great Achtung Baby was when it came out, and Europe was being remade, even as Nirvana was about to eclipse U2 as the band that truly mattered. And it’s too bad things didn’t turn out all that well, for everyone other than Dave Grohl and U2’s bankers, none of whom we hope are German.
The Dictator Dreams Of His Halloween Date With Condi
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 35mm Summilux, Leica M8 on October 16, 2011 by johnbuckley100Leica M8, 35mm Summilux
On The Reissue Of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Munki”: An Appreciation
Posted in Music with tags Jesus and Mary Chain, Jim Reid, Munki, Munki reissue, William Reid on October 16, 2011 by johnbuckley100Few bands go out on such a high as The Jesus and Mary Chain, whose final record, Munki, both followed the Vaudeville adage of “always leave ’em wanting something more,” and seemed a perfect evocation of all the chaos and glory the Reids packed into their years as a band of brothers. That the album began with Jim Reid singing “I Love Rock’n’Roll” and ended with William Reid singing “I Hate Rock’n’Roll” was such a perfect distillation of the dichotomy at work, of course they had to leave it there.
Thirteen years later, Edsel Records is releasing (alas, for now, only on the other side of the pond) a full set of the Mary Chain’s work, replete with B-sides, live sets, and an excellent archival series of booklets commemorating this amazing band. The liner notes for Munki have interviews with both brothers, Jim now sober, William living in LA, talking seriously about the ragged way the band went out. But oh, what an album to have left us with.
As the interviews make clear, Munki was recorded by two bands, Jim’s and William’s. They were rarely in the studio together by this time. But Munki was a distillation of what made JAMC so magical — from the sweet melodies to the discordant squall of William’s guitar, the Mary Chain was always a competition of visions literally connected by the same DNA. Throwing the Cramps, Velvet Underground, and Brian Wilson into a blender that shorted out spectacularly and noisily created a sound, not just for the ’90s, but for the ages. We have long thought that “Virtually Unreal” was the greatest single song the Mary Chain produced, and of course it comes close to containing all of the parts that made them great: Jim’s great rock’n’roll voice, William’s great rock’n’roll guitar, a propulsive beat, the raggedy edges of a sound schizophrenics likely hear when things are going either terribly right or terribly wrong.
Several of the extras thrown in on Disc Two of the reissue were already released in the massive Power of Negative Thinking, the seemingly encyclopedic post-breakup compendium. But some were not: incredible live takes from the band’s final, combustible tours, BBC sessions that’ll blow your mind, and the album finishes with a live version of “Virtually Unreal.”
What the extras also show is just what a death trip folks involved here were on. We’re not referring to the Jesus and Mary Chain, but to their label, Warner Bros. This all happened in 1998, before Napster genuinely threatened to disintermediate the labels, with the labels offering, through greed and stupidity, near justification for it. Warner Bros.’ treatment of Munki a preview of what would happen three years hence, when what once had been the music industry’s most creative and artist-focused label revealed just how desperate they were to destroy themselves — we’re talking of their rejection of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, a classic album of the age, because it wasn’t commercial enough. Warner Bros, you see, rejected Munki. It just didn’t have potential, they said. They were happy to let it walk out the door and be released by Creation, as boneheaded a move as, say, the New York Jets letting Danny Woodhead go to the Patriots. Listening now to two of the (included) highlights from The Power of Negative Thinking, “Bleed Me” and “Rocket” — recorded as part of the Munki sessions — and thinking about Munki’s greatness, you have to wonder just what the record execs of this era were smoking. I mean, we know what William Reid was smoking, and we know how much Jim Reid was drinking and snorting. But as evidenced by Munki, theirs was clear-eyed brilliance compared to the morons who didn’t think this was a record worth releasing.
Tulip Frenzy 