The three CD examination and exhumation of the sessions which became Big Star's Third album, also known as Sister Lover's and at the time (possibly) intended to be called Beale Street Green, both enhances the music's intrinsic value and enables a more varied and deeper understanding of this stone classic. Intended originally as an Alex Chilton solo project 3rd is popularly seen as his paean to breakdown and dissolution, reflecting substance use and emotional chaos. That 3rd is such a superb record indicates, consensus tells us, that only a supremely talented and driven artist could wrench such quality from such disorganisation and disintegration. This is similar to the stance taken about Tonight's The Night, Exile On Main Street and Pink Moon, amongst others. This set provides evidence to support the view that, as suggested in Robert Gordon's It Came From Memphis, for instance, that the sessions at times were bacchanalian and loose; I would contend that it is not at all paradoxical that the set also underlines the application and aforethought Mr Chilton and his collaborators put into their performances.
One of the knee-jerk tenets of rock criticism is that there is nothing as glorious as a wasted talent, whether that is wasted as in squandered or wasted as in dissipated and prone. Received wisdom is that we can apply both categories in parallel to Mr Chilton and there are recordings and anecdotes that can be cited. Take a listen to the November 1978 bootleg of Alex' appearance on KUT radio for an instance of this. I have yet to read the Chilton biography, which I'm sure would round this piece out nicely, but its appropriation of the later album's title A Man Called Destruction neatly sums up a prevailing view which is very much only part of the picture.
The set begins with a dozen or so acoustic demos - guitar and piano- which immediately undercuts the seductive myth of narcotic 3a.m. ennui. The majority of the songs which form the album's protean core are previewed as tight and focussed 2 or 3 minute sketches of acoustic perspicacity, melodic and glowing, much like side two of No 1 Record. There is a darker undertow to some of the songs - the piano demo of Holocaust is a fully-formed shiver, and Number 37 should be advised not to take a look at the demo of Femme Fatale - but most find Mr Chilton a mischievous choirboy, a sweet angel of discord hymning songs of lovelorn melancholy. If the sessions had ended at that point there was a great album that could have been compiled merely from the demo's and the performances of them, which as countless expanded editions of great albums have shown us is often, perhaps seldom, the case.
The set then runs through more filled out takes with Ardent's John Fry and some rough mixes with Jim Dickinson which do indeed echo with after hours excess, piano's tumbling downstairs, impromptu midnight choirs, guitar solos skidding off-piste. Alex's girl at the time, Lesa Aldredge, sings some cuts - The Velvets After Hours among them. The cousin of photographer William Eggleston and the subject of his famous pre-Raphaelite photograph, used on the cover of Lesa's Barbarian Women In Rock single. Lesa's untutored vocals will have appealed to Alex, though as their relationship deteriorated he is said to have erased some of them. If 3rd had become the double album that Jim Dickinson indicates had been considered the Lesa vocals and numerous covers would complement the core of Chilton compositions on which the records reputation largely stands. It is a considerable achievement that of the 70 cuts on the set there is nothing that is not enjoyable and eminently listenable. (For all its thoroughness, one listens to, let's say, The Pet Sounds Box with a different agenda).
Very little on the finished album is unstructured or unfinished, and some is as finely and innovatively arranged as on the two preceding Big Star albums. Thank You Friends has an upbeat, classic Big Star setting which counterpoints Alex's irony. The sparse apocalyptic setting of Holocaust is unerringly apt. Jody Stephens, the only other original band member involved, said, " He was going through a pretty dark period in his life. And I think he did a brilliant job of reflecting that on that album." I think Mr Stephens is accurate in supporting the view that be it Beatlesy pop or doomy ballads, the takes and the production choices serve the songs and their subject matter; to see the album as lost or the sessions as inchoate is to under-appreciate the craft and ability on display. Jim Dickinson said, " It's like a stage show. The musicians see one thing and the audience something else. I think Sister/Lovers is very definitely a case of that. I think that what is perceived is way different from what was conceived."
It has become commonplace to apportion to Mr Chilton a contrarian streak as wide as the Mississippi. He followed his muse with little attention to career afterwards, veering from label to label, tour deal to tour deal, often subsisting, sometimes going below that level. He had, of course, had success as the 16 year old vocalist with the Boxtops (and toured regularly with the Beach Boys, hence the inclusion here of Don't Worry Baby); the underbelly of the music business held no allure. 3rd is comparatively tight when considered against the follow up, also helmed by Jim Dickinson, Like Flies on Sherbert, which is the apotheosis of Chilton's primitive, Back to Basics style, also seen on The Singer Not The song EP, and his production work for The Cramps and Panther Burns. All these records are also towering achievements, with a continuing appeal to garage aficionados and all open eared cognoscenti. His subsequent work, sometimes skimmed over, showed a fealty to a certain R and B ideal and reverence for a finely honed song. It is said that Mr Chilton saw himself more in the mode of Chet Baker, covering classic songs, rather than the singer-songwriter-performer that is the common expectation of the modern music market. Nonetheless the No Sex Ep , High Priest, Black Market all have superb originals alongside covers. Even the Clichés LP, ten acoustic covers of classic songs, evidences a care and focus that is to be found throughout his career. We can see that attention to detail and quality in the six versions of Big Black Car on the set, a contender for the emotional heart of the album, a sleepwalking drive at below the minimum speed limit and as good a song about detachment as ever written.
My key exposure to the album, the 12 track Aura LP version released in 1978, did not include Big Black Car, though I bought the single of Jesus Christ of which it was the flipside (in all senses of the term). Much of the debate about "What should the Running Order be?" is not answered by the set, and not attempted. The question is as much a part of its mystique as that attached to the running order of Smile . Every reissue (apparently there have been ten) have scooped up additional cover versions, and now with 70 tracks to consider, 3rd becomes almost an analogue of Naked Lunch, where one is invited to dig in at random or favourite points to consider what one finds on the end of ones fork. I shall conclude with an attempt to suggest a track listing for an idealised 3rd/Sister-Lovers. I have stuck to the suggested 7 tracks per side of the original Ardent test pressing, which the third cd here also does, though have altered the choices and order. I've dropped Jesus Christ-always a bit Greg Lake for me- and all the covers bar Femme Fatale, which is part of the emotional undertow alongside Kangaroo and others. There is no place for the cover of Nature Boy, not added until the 1992 CD reissue, even though it is a marvelous song and performance, and its depiction of a strange, enchanted boy surely applies as much to Alex as the songs author Eden Ahbez. "The greatest thing you'll ever learn, Is just to love and be loved in return" may be the refrain which sums up the romantic yearning under Alex's songs on 3rd, but it is entirely in justifiable that this key song should be absent. Big Star's 3rd remains a work of Genius with a part of it forever unknowable.
Side One: Stroke It Noel, Downs, Holocaust, Femme Fatale, Blue Moon, Kanga Roo
Side Two: You Can't Have Me, Kizza Me, O Dana, Nightime, Big Black Car, Thank You Friends,
Take Care.
Monday, 16 January 2017
Wednesday, 4 January 2017
Twenty Sixteen Was My Number Part 4: Best Albums of the Year.
Cultureberg's Top 5 (In alphabetical Order)
1. Robert Coyne and Jaki Liebzeit - I still Have This Dream
2. Damien Jurado - Visions of Us on The Land
3. The Limanas - Malamore
4. Cian Nugent - Night Fiction
5. Ryley Walker - Golden Sings That Have Been Sung
Best Reissue - Big Star's Third
1:Robert Coyne and Jaki Liebzeit
The wholly speculative purchase which reveals itself as a rare treat is one of the many pleasures of shopping for records. Perhaps it merely plays into a bogus sense of critical infallibility, but a glance into the Carrier Bag of Doom prior to a trip to the Charity Shop should quickly scotch that conceit. Whatever, Robert Coyne and Jaki Liebzeit's third album together is just such a creature.
If I was expecting the metronomic funk of Can or the Warped English Blues of Kevin Coyne, Robert's father, it wasn't that that I found. In it's place are simple but precise drum patterns and tightly wrought guitar figures underpinning sparse, koan like lyrics.
The album works best in late evening, the hum of the songs intoxicating and transfixing. Best is the eleven minute Thank You,I've Got The Idea. The drumming has the regularity and repetition blended of prime Liebzeit with a loose limbed suppleness and warmth that no machine can emulate. The songs are coloured by cello and keyboards and some backing vocals hare and there. The video of the construction of the back cover illustration Days of Bookmongers by Wendy Coyne is below, and includes some of the music.
It's an album that has reappeared when its brasher brethren have been filed away, and its deceptive simplicity keeps rewarding. The opening track Cockney Mystic is a good example of the lyrics' terse sarcasm and undercurrent of cruelty, or perhaps an exposure of the offhand cruelty underlying peoples lack of commitment. It brought Cultureberg to remember a seventies throwback, R D Laings book Knots, where tangles, insecurities and haphazard indifference are laid out on the page. This is a sort of link to the mileu where Kevin Coyne and Can albums would have been as a backdrop to tea and spliffs, Mike Leigh plays, SWP fundraisers and unreliable plumbing. The uncomfortable echo in the nocturnal balm that raises I still Have This Dream above the mundane.
2: Damien Jurado
Cultureberg has been listening to Damien Jurado since his debut Rehearsals for Departure which fit comfortably into an emergent Americana, Carver-esque narratives, spoken word samples, strummed acoustics. Three or four albums ago his sound exploded. Like Tom Waits with Swordfishtrombones he overhauled his sound from sepia to technicolour. The four albums he has made with producer Richard Swift (himself a highly talented songwriter with a back catalogue of superb albums) have been a revelation. A reference point for the sound might be Danger Mouse's production on Beck's Modern Guilt or with Broken Bells - Mr Swift has performed with The Shins at times.
Widescreen, pummelling drums, massed choir of backing vocals and the feel of a parched drive through the desert, pulling out of Barstow when the bats hit., It's a big sound, like reveille in Monument Valley, an hallucinatory pinsharp production which nestles somewhere between the AOR psychedelia of A Horse With No Name nd the Studiomusodrifterama of Jim Sullivan's UFO.
Visions of Us on the land is in many ways the epitome of modern American music; adventurous, mystical and cavernous. Mr Jurado has wandered from the Troubadour path, but beneath the towering superstructures are the few notes and chords of the acoustic guitar on which they are likely to have been germinated. Prisms, for example, is just voice and guitar, sounding like it has escaped fromSimon and Garfunkel's Bookends.
It seems that many albums today are sold on the strength of a backstory, often a set of circumstances or a shaggy dog story as flimsy as the music. Visions is the third part of the very loose Maroqopa trilogy, after Maroqopa itself and Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son. The trilogy is described as a story in which a character has to disappear from society in order to discover some eternal truths., which is enough guidance for me. The cover art - tidal waves, crashed cars, ufos, a walrus - resembles the cover of a science fiction paperback bought in a roadside store and thrown onto the back seat. Interlocking stories? Shared Themes? You can make your own associations or delight in the individual tracks. I suspect there is a structure there but the listener makes their own meaning. It's a road trip off the beaten track, a series of mid-life epiphanies that are maybe mystical, maybe chemical, definitely musical. There are seventeen tracks (it's a double on vinyl) and all I have is the cardboard promo sleeve as a guide, which is enough. Visions of us on the Land is a deep, immersive experience and Cultureberg urges you to take the plunge.
3: The Limanas
The Limanas are a husband and wife psychedelic band from near Perpignan in Southern France whose new album, Malamore, occupies a midpoint between the kitsch-psych of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood (I'm thinking particularly of Some Velvet Morning and Sand here) and Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson. The Limanas emulate the sound Serge achieved with the cream of London session musicians, and add touches of freakbeat, ye ye and Calexico on the side. There's wah-wahs grinding, organs and drums spiralling. Paradise Now steals the progression from You Only Live Twice (more Nancy), no doubt deliberately and meaningfully, over which the refrain of "It's like going into the sky" is repeated breathlessly. The titles will indicate the albums orientation - El Sordo, Dahlia Rouge, Zippo, El Beach, - music which throbs and shimmers in the sharp sunlight.
Some years ago Cultureberg drove from Calais to the South of France in late December. Even then there is a point where the light changes and sunglasses are essential and not an affectation. The Limanas pose (without posing) on the cover of the album dressed in black, shades on, leaning on an Airstream. That's what this sounds like. It is first and foremost pop music and avoids the garage of genre, the ghetto of categorisation and the nod out of niche to make a claim on the mainstream. 12 tracks in 41 minutes, it speaks English, French and the Lingua Franca of Rock and Roll. Whenever I play it you can observe the tapping of toes like slow motion film of seeds germinating and people say "Who's this? It's terrific" and they're right.
They've drafted in Peter Hook on Garden of Love to play an elegiac bass part, but this is integrated seamlessly into the soundworld The Limanas cook up, making it the most straight-out entertaining record I've heard all year. Some have compared them to the Velvets (Okay, Mme Limana is the drummer), the Jesus and Mary Chain (Okay, I've seen a coupe of live things and I get that) but their mix of magpie classicism and sizzling hauteur is all their own. "I'm Robert Mitchum, I'm Bob Duvall, Sit yourself down and Shut Your Mouth." Bien sur!
4: Cian Nugent - Night Fiction
To call an album likeable is to risk damning with faint praise, but, as with people, one must like an album to spend time with it. We can admire an album' s ambition - the root cause of Joanna Newsome and Julia Holter's popularity, perhaps - or we can keep listening out of brand loyalty, but the mixture of comfort and novelty that adds up to pleasure should not be undervalued. It is hard to manufacture likeability.
Cian is an Irish guitarist who is frequently bracketed with Steve Gunn, Ryley Walker, Chris Forsyth and a wide swathe of guitarists with feet in tradition, improvisation and extemporisation. (I know that's three feet, but they keep moving 'em!) Where he scores for me is in a relaxed spontaneity and a conversational quality in his songs, his singing and his playing which draws the listener in. I've heard little of his earlier stuff, which I understand is largely instrumental (as is the lovely, melodic Lucy on this record) and though his vocals are not jaw-dropping they have the same approachability as Bert Jansch or Richard Thompson and will appeal to people of much classic guitar music.
Thompson is a guitarist Cian is often compared to, alongside comparisons to Tom Verlaine. You can understand why on the closing, 12 minute track Year of the Snake, bringing to mind the long live version of Calvary Cross to me. It's nearly 7 minutes before a vocal comes in and it's a stormer, but the quieter tracks do it for me, the aching Things Don't Change That Fast and particularly the 8 minute Shadows whose coda hums and pulses on a bed of horns, much in the manner of Van on Common One. Its as catchy as The Band at times, the guitar playing often restrained and it is, let's return to the start, a supremely likeable and enjoyable record.
5: Ryley Walker
Golden Sings That Have Been Sung - it's very title sums up Ryley's gushing awkward transcendence - has pulled him back from a precipice, from a cul de sac. He could have become the Barron Knight of Folk Rock;.... and this is me, he might now be saying.
Cultureberg was very enamoured of his first album, all the borrowed Bert Jansch-isms were full of youthful ardour, trying on someones hat and coat whilst deciding who they were. His second, Primrose Green, perhaps went too far down the road of sincere flattery. The Happy Sad vibes, the John Martyn electric piano a straitjacket not a leaping off point. Even the sleeves homage to Elektra Records seemed a tad forced, and Mr Walker seemed keen to see the album as a point in time he had moved on from.
When Cultureberg attended his show at The Brudenell in Leeds this spring, when Danny Thompson was unable to attend and partner him, he played many new songs, presumably many of them finding their way onto the third album. He was the most enthusiastic of giddy kippers, the sort of artist who dives headlong into a genre or oeuvre, heady with exploratory zeal. With this album he has successfully surfaced with 8 tracks that are individual to him. A few listens in and even the occasional twinge of Jim O'Rourke has faded. The lyrics are individual and idiosyncratic, half gnomic and half tossed off, and all the better for that. Digressions about his credit being shit and his dad wanting a daughter are inconsequential but have the ring of truth, adding to the songs uniqueness.
The other musicians drawn from Chicago's improv and jazz scene, notably Health and Beauty, are empathetic to the songs' roll and eddy. His desire to stretch out live is well documented (visit the nyc taper site for some live shows), but here he keeps to 5 minutes or so and they thus repay frequent revisiting. The album captures the songs at that sweet point where spontaneity remains yet a working knowledge has allowed the musicians to add their individual contributions to the tracks.
Golden Sings is the album where Ryley Walker realises his potential and fully delivers on his promise. At The Brudenell Cultureberg ran into a confrere who had been missing in action, The Great Watto, who declared Ryley to be a genius. Cultureberg's self restraint would not stretch to such an epithet, but undoubtedly Mr Walker has alchemised his undoubted ability into an individual vision and has absorbed his influences to produce a record which will, on its own terms and with its own voice, stand the test of time.
1. Robert Coyne and Jaki Liebzeit - I still Have This Dream
2. Damien Jurado - Visions of Us on The Land
3. The Limanas - Malamore
4. Cian Nugent - Night Fiction
5. Ryley Walker - Golden Sings That Have Been Sung
Best Reissue - Big Star's Third
1:Robert Coyne and Jaki Liebzeit
The wholly speculative purchase which reveals itself as a rare treat is one of the many pleasures of shopping for records. Perhaps it merely plays into a bogus sense of critical infallibility, but a glance into the Carrier Bag of Doom prior to a trip to the Charity Shop should quickly scotch that conceit. Whatever, Robert Coyne and Jaki Liebzeit's third album together is just such a creature.
If I was expecting the metronomic funk of Can or the Warped English Blues of Kevin Coyne, Robert's father, it wasn't that that I found. In it's place are simple but precise drum patterns and tightly wrought guitar figures underpinning sparse, koan like lyrics.
The album works best in late evening, the hum of the songs intoxicating and transfixing. Best is the eleven minute Thank You,I've Got The Idea. The drumming has the regularity and repetition blended of prime Liebzeit with a loose limbed suppleness and warmth that no machine can emulate. The songs are coloured by cello and keyboards and some backing vocals hare and there. The video of the construction of the back cover illustration Days of Bookmongers by Wendy Coyne is below, and includes some of the music.
It's an album that has reappeared when its brasher brethren have been filed away, and its deceptive simplicity keeps rewarding. The opening track Cockney Mystic is a good example of the lyrics' terse sarcasm and undercurrent of cruelty, or perhaps an exposure of the offhand cruelty underlying peoples lack of commitment. It brought Cultureberg to remember a seventies throwback, R D Laings book Knots, where tangles, insecurities and haphazard indifference are laid out on the page. This is a sort of link to the mileu where Kevin Coyne and Can albums would have been as a backdrop to tea and spliffs, Mike Leigh plays, SWP fundraisers and unreliable plumbing. The uncomfortable echo in the nocturnal balm that raises I still Have This Dream above the mundane.
2: Damien Jurado
Cultureberg has been listening to Damien Jurado since his debut Rehearsals for Departure which fit comfortably into an emergent Americana, Carver-esque narratives, spoken word samples, strummed acoustics. Three or four albums ago his sound exploded. Like Tom Waits with Swordfishtrombones he overhauled his sound from sepia to technicolour. The four albums he has made with producer Richard Swift (himself a highly talented songwriter with a back catalogue of superb albums) have been a revelation. A reference point for the sound might be Danger Mouse's production on Beck's Modern Guilt or with Broken Bells - Mr Swift has performed with The Shins at times.
Widescreen, pummelling drums, massed choir of backing vocals and the feel of a parched drive through the desert, pulling out of Barstow when the bats hit., It's a big sound, like reveille in Monument Valley, an hallucinatory pinsharp production which nestles somewhere between the AOR psychedelia of A Horse With No Name nd the Studiomusodrifterama of Jim Sullivan's UFO.
Visions of Us on the land is in many ways the epitome of modern American music; adventurous, mystical and cavernous. Mr Jurado has wandered from the Troubadour path, but beneath the towering superstructures are the few notes and chords of the acoustic guitar on which they are likely to have been germinated. Prisms, for example, is just voice and guitar, sounding like it has escaped fromSimon and Garfunkel's Bookends.
It seems that many albums today are sold on the strength of a backstory, often a set of circumstances or a shaggy dog story as flimsy as the music. Visions is the third part of the very loose Maroqopa trilogy, after Maroqopa itself and Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son. The trilogy is described as a story in which a character has to disappear from society in order to discover some eternal truths., which is enough guidance for me. The cover art - tidal waves, crashed cars, ufos, a walrus - resembles the cover of a science fiction paperback bought in a roadside store and thrown onto the back seat. Interlocking stories? Shared Themes? You can make your own associations or delight in the individual tracks. I suspect there is a structure there but the listener makes their own meaning. It's a road trip off the beaten track, a series of mid-life epiphanies that are maybe mystical, maybe chemical, definitely musical. There are seventeen tracks (it's a double on vinyl) and all I have is the cardboard promo sleeve as a guide, which is enough. Visions of us on the Land is a deep, immersive experience and Cultureberg urges you to take the plunge.
3: The Limanas
The Limanas are a husband and wife psychedelic band from near Perpignan in Southern France whose new album, Malamore, occupies a midpoint between the kitsch-psych of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood (I'm thinking particularly of Some Velvet Morning and Sand here) and Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson. The Limanas emulate the sound Serge achieved with the cream of London session musicians, and add touches of freakbeat, ye ye and Calexico on the side. There's wah-wahs grinding, organs and drums spiralling. Paradise Now steals the progression from You Only Live Twice (more Nancy), no doubt deliberately and meaningfully, over which the refrain of "It's like going into the sky" is repeated breathlessly. The titles will indicate the albums orientation - El Sordo, Dahlia Rouge, Zippo, El Beach, - music which throbs and shimmers in the sharp sunlight.
Some years ago Cultureberg drove from Calais to the South of France in late December. Even then there is a point where the light changes and sunglasses are essential and not an affectation. The Limanas pose (without posing) on the cover of the album dressed in black, shades on, leaning on an Airstream. That's what this sounds like. It is first and foremost pop music and avoids the garage of genre, the ghetto of categorisation and the nod out of niche to make a claim on the mainstream. 12 tracks in 41 minutes, it speaks English, French and the Lingua Franca of Rock and Roll. Whenever I play it you can observe the tapping of toes like slow motion film of seeds germinating and people say "Who's this? It's terrific" and they're right.
They've drafted in Peter Hook on Garden of Love to play an elegiac bass part, but this is integrated seamlessly into the soundworld The Limanas cook up, making it the most straight-out entertaining record I've heard all year. Some have compared them to the Velvets (Okay, Mme Limana is the drummer), the Jesus and Mary Chain (Okay, I've seen a coupe of live things and I get that) but their mix of magpie classicism and sizzling hauteur is all their own. "I'm Robert Mitchum, I'm Bob Duvall, Sit yourself down and Shut Your Mouth." Bien sur!
4: Cian Nugent - Night Fiction
To call an album likeable is to risk damning with faint praise, but, as with people, one must like an album to spend time with it. We can admire an album' s ambition - the root cause of Joanna Newsome and Julia Holter's popularity, perhaps - or we can keep listening out of brand loyalty, but the mixture of comfort and novelty that adds up to pleasure should not be undervalued. It is hard to manufacture likeability.
Cian is an Irish guitarist who is frequently bracketed with Steve Gunn, Ryley Walker, Chris Forsyth and a wide swathe of guitarists with feet in tradition, improvisation and extemporisation. (I know that's three feet, but they keep moving 'em!) Where he scores for me is in a relaxed spontaneity and a conversational quality in his songs, his singing and his playing which draws the listener in. I've heard little of his earlier stuff, which I understand is largely instrumental (as is the lovely, melodic Lucy on this record) and though his vocals are not jaw-dropping they have the same approachability as Bert Jansch or Richard Thompson and will appeal to people of much classic guitar music.
Thompson is a guitarist Cian is often compared to, alongside comparisons to Tom Verlaine. You can understand why on the closing, 12 minute track Year of the Snake, bringing to mind the long live version of Calvary Cross to me. It's nearly 7 minutes before a vocal comes in and it's a stormer, but the quieter tracks do it for me, the aching Things Don't Change That Fast and particularly the 8 minute Shadows whose coda hums and pulses on a bed of horns, much in the manner of Van on Common One. Its as catchy as The Band at times, the guitar playing often restrained and it is, let's return to the start, a supremely likeable and enjoyable record.
5: Ryley Walker
Golden Sings That Have Been Sung - it's very title sums up Ryley's gushing awkward transcendence - has pulled him back from a precipice, from a cul de sac. He could have become the Barron Knight of Folk Rock;.... and this is me, he might now be saying.
Cultureberg was very enamoured of his first album, all the borrowed Bert Jansch-isms were full of youthful ardour, trying on someones hat and coat whilst deciding who they were. His second, Primrose Green, perhaps went too far down the road of sincere flattery. The Happy Sad vibes, the John Martyn electric piano a straitjacket not a leaping off point. Even the sleeves homage to Elektra Records seemed a tad forced, and Mr Walker seemed keen to see the album as a point in time he had moved on from.
When Cultureberg attended his show at The Brudenell in Leeds this spring, when Danny Thompson was unable to attend and partner him, he played many new songs, presumably many of them finding their way onto the third album. He was the most enthusiastic of giddy kippers, the sort of artist who dives headlong into a genre or oeuvre, heady with exploratory zeal. With this album he has successfully surfaced with 8 tracks that are individual to him. A few listens in and even the occasional twinge of Jim O'Rourke has faded. The lyrics are individual and idiosyncratic, half gnomic and half tossed off, and all the better for that. Digressions about his credit being shit and his dad wanting a daughter are inconsequential but have the ring of truth, adding to the songs uniqueness.
The other musicians drawn from Chicago's improv and jazz scene, notably Health and Beauty, are empathetic to the songs' roll and eddy. His desire to stretch out live is well documented (visit the nyc taper site for some live shows), but here he keeps to 5 minutes or so and they thus repay frequent revisiting. The album captures the songs at that sweet point where spontaneity remains yet a working knowledge has allowed the musicians to add their individual contributions to the tracks.
Golden Sings is the album where Ryley Walker realises his potential and fully delivers on his promise. At The Brudenell Cultureberg ran into a confrere who had been missing in action, The Great Watto, who declared Ryley to be a genius. Cultureberg's self restraint would not stretch to such an epithet, but undoubtedly Mr Walker has alchemised his undoubted ability into an individual vision and has absorbed his influences to produce a record which will, on its own terms and with its own voice, stand the test of time.
Tuesday, 3 January 2017
Twenty Sixteen is the number, part two
Best Americana Album
What is Americana? For the purposes of this round-up I take it to be music where a Country element is significant, though not necessarily wholly defining. I think it was Harlan Howard who said Country was three chords and the truth. That's enough of a definition.
Close contenders included Kurt Blau's Introducing, see a previous post, whose Fallin Rain was, for me, the best track of the year. Some of the cover choices were very apposite for 2016, some tasty versions of great songs. Also up there was The Jayhawks' Paging Mr Proust, an immediately engaging set of melodic songs, brilliantly off-kilter guitar solos (move over Nels Kline) and harmonies honed over decades. But the Cultureberg Imaginary gong goes to Elizabeth Cook.
Cultureberg first became aware of Ms Cook by traditional means, via the car radio, just outside Exeter, as I recall. Her song Sometimes It Takes Balls to be a Woman leaps off from its arresting title and sassily sashays it's way through gender conflict, a theme that is an essential ingredient in the country pie. At Elizabeth Cook's kitchen table that pie may well be upturned upon a big hat, dripping gravy down a cowboy's cheek. Hooked, Cultureberg snapped up the mother album "Balls", wherein music manners and mores were lambasted and lampooned. The cover of The Velvet Underground's Sunday Morning was so beguiling and perfect you could not imagine it not having been countrified before. An artist to watch.
Like the best artists worth keeping an eye on, she disappeared from gaze for a bit, now returning
with a new album Exodus of Venus, something of a departure. If country music is a bureaucracy wherein the toiler must position themselves, Ms Cook has decided to head for the margins. More recalibration than total overhaul, nonetheless largely gone are the whip-smart Loretta Lynn meets Dolly Parton observations and acoustic instruments, in are grunge guitars a la Todd Snider's Hard Working Americans. Gone are snarky digs at Britney Spears, in are songs called Slow Pain and Methadone Blues.
If country is indeed the truth plus three chords, the best country deals with the drinking, cheating and everyday frustrations that underlies both Soap Opera and High Art with disarming honesty and wry wit. It is what elevates Porter Wagoner's The Cold Hard Facts of Life, George Jones' He Stopped Loving Her Today or Loretta Lynn's Fist City into the pantheon, and though there aren't any songs with such a salty tang on Exodus of Venus (candidate for least country album title ever), the album mines thee topics that have fuelled the genre since the Carter Family.
The album is produced by Ms Cook's new paramour Dexter Green, who is also on guitar. Draftees included are seasoned professionals like Matt Chamberlain on drums, who has played with Pearl Jam,
The Wallflowers, Tori Amos and Fiona Apple. That mix of grunge and oestrogen should give you a taste of where the album is coming from. Willie Weeks, who has played with everyone from the Stones and Clapton on down is on the bass guitar, and the sound is more Drive-By Truckers than Dollywood. Slow Pain is organ and swampy guitar topped off with slide and only the duet with Patty Loveless on Straightjacket Love and the white trash indignation of Tabitha Tudor's Mama show echoes of previous records. The drumming on Orange Blossom Trail could almost be Richie Hayward of Little Feat and the guitars are sharp and cutting on the least country title on the album, Broke Down in London on the M25.
Like all new releases there is a coherent backstory that is repeated throughout media pieces, somewhat unavoidable in Country music. It covers Miss Cook's marriage breakup to Tim Carrol, her record label insisting she go into rehab despite her lack of a substance problem (no, me neither), deaths in the family, houses burning down, the gamut. What elevates the record is its commitment to a somewhat uneasy listen and songs that seem to have had to be written rather than placed by the company. Matthew Arnold, just after he moved to Nashville from Oxford over a hundred years ago, said "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recalled in tranquility." He did not comment about three chords and the truth, or indeed iambic pentameter and the truth. Had he heard Exodus of Venus he may well have joined Cultureberg in toasting a country grunge hybrid which recalled life's little ups and downs in tranquility (or maybe in tumult,) producing a record which utilises Miss Cook's wit and pizzazz in a new way.
What is Americana? For the purposes of this round-up I take it to be music where a Country element is significant, though not necessarily wholly defining. I think it was Harlan Howard who said Country was three chords and the truth. That's enough of a definition.
Close contenders included Kurt Blau's Introducing, see a previous post, whose Fallin Rain was, for me, the best track of the year. Some of the cover choices were very apposite for 2016, some tasty versions of great songs. Also up there was The Jayhawks' Paging Mr Proust, an immediately engaging set of melodic songs, brilliantly off-kilter guitar solos (move over Nels Kline) and harmonies honed over decades. But the Cultureberg Imaginary gong goes to Elizabeth Cook.
Cultureberg first became aware of Ms Cook by traditional means, via the car radio, just outside Exeter, as I recall. Her song Sometimes It Takes Balls to be a Woman leaps off from its arresting title and sassily sashays it's way through gender conflict, a theme that is an essential ingredient in the country pie. At Elizabeth Cook's kitchen table that pie may well be upturned upon a big hat, dripping gravy down a cowboy's cheek. Hooked, Cultureberg snapped up the mother album "Balls", wherein music manners and mores were lambasted and lampooned. The cover of The Velvet Underground's Sunday Morning was so beguiling and perfect you could not imagine it not having been countrified before. An artist to watch.
Like the best artists worth keeping an eye on, she disappeared from gaze for a bit, now returning
with a new album Exodus of Venus, something of a departure. If country music is a bureaucracy wherein the toiler must position themselves, Ms Cook has decided to head for the margins. More recalibration than total overhaul, nonetheless largely gone are the whip-smart Loretta Lynn meets Dolly Parton observations and acoustic instruments, in are grunge guitars a la Todd Snider's Hard Working Americans. Gone are snarky digs at Britney Spears, in are songs called Slow Pain and Methadone Blues.
If country is indeed the truth plus three chords, the best country deals with the drinking, cheating and everyday frustrations that underlies both Soap Opera and High Art with disarming honesty and wry wit. It is what elevates Porter Wagoner's The Cold Hard Facts of Life, George Jones' He Stopped Loving Her Today or Loretta Lynn's Fist City into the pantheon, and though there aren't any songs with such a salty tang on Exodus of Venus (candidate for least country album title ever), the album mines thee topics that have fuelled the genre since the Carter Family.
The album is produced by Ms Cook's new paramour Dexter Green, who is also on guitar. Draftees included are seasoned professionals like Matt Chamberlain on drums, who has played with Pearl Jam,
The Wallflowers, Tori Amos and Fiona Apple. That mix of grunge and oestrogen should give you a taste of where the album is coming from. Willie Weeks, who has played with everyone from the Stones and Clapton on down is on the bass guitar, and the sound is more Drive-By Truckers than Dollywood. Slow Pain is organ and swampy guitar topped off with slide and only the duet with Patty Loveless on Straightjacket Love and the white trash indignation of Tabitha Tudor's Mama show echoes of previous records. The drumming on Orange Blossom Trail could almost be Richie Hayward of Little Feat and the guitars are sharp and cutting on the least country title on the album, Broke Down in London on the M25.
Like all new releases there is a coherent backstory that is repeated throughout media pieces, somewhat unavoidable in Country music. It covers Miss Cook's marriage breakup to Tim Carrol, her record label insisting she go into rehab despite her lack of a substance problem (no, me neither), deaths in the family, houses burning down, the gamut. What elevates the record is its commitment to a somewhat uneasy listen and songs that seem to have had to be written rather than placed by the company. Matthew Arnold, just after he moved to Nashville from Oxford over a hundred years ago, said "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recalled in tranquility." He did not comment about three chords and the truth, or indeed iambic pentameter and the truth. Had he heard Exodus of Venus he may well have joined Cultureberg in toasting a country grunge hybrid which recalled life's little ups and downs in tranquility (or maybe in tumult,) producing a record which utilises Miss Cook's wit and pizzazz in a new way.
Sunday, 1 January 2017
Twenty Sixteen is my number Part Three:Monsieur Jim's Best of 2016
When compiling Cultureberg's Best of 2016 list, fellow traveller Monsieur Jim, of Chateau de Chouette, was invited to similarly size up the contenders. We all love a list, and I reproduce his list below with some notes of reflection, and Cultureberg's responses within parantheses.
Top 5 albums.....
1. Bon Iver - 22- a million
2. Riley Walker - Golden sings that have been sung
3. Quilt - Plaza
4. Cat's Eyes - Treasure House
5. David Crosby - Lighthouse
(As will become evident from comparison with the Cultureberg rundown, only the Ryley Walker is in common, a sign that all associates are Most Independent Thinkers. In fact, I've never beard of Quilt, let alone heard the album, but will remedy that soon. The Crosby album had been in contention for the Cultureberg Top 5, narrowly missing out.Though M. Jim favours last year's Croz, I must demur and wholeheartedly endorse his comments that "this stripped down record has revealed its stark and fragile beauty with each play.")
Artist of the Year - Leonard Cohen. M.Jim salutes the sense of timing of the album's release, its message and his exiting this mortal coil prior to Trump's election. (Having frequently addressed oppresssion in many guises and made the link between the personal and the political explicit in his lyrics, Leonard would no doubt have commented caustically on The Donald had he lived longer, as the event was semtex in the Zeitgeist...A few days after the election Cultureberg' favourite Circuit des Yeux was making comments from the stage in Manchester. expanding her own song's meanings to the current events....for want of a nail, indeed.)
Americana Lp of the Year: Laura Cantrell Live at the BBC, because the songs work so well live.
Jazz lp of the year : Kamasi Washington - The Epic, which M. Jim admits is a slight twist, as this was released last year, "but only heard this year and nothing else I've heard this year sounds as good." A blind eye is turned as the argument is persuasive, and Kamasi is a biot of a modern day Kolossus.
Reissue of the year: Big Star - The complete Big Star Third. In this choice Cultureberg is in complete agreeement, and a longer, more considered piece is to follow shortly. Often extra tracks detract from the previous unity of an album, in this case they add, enlighten and illuminate an album for whom form is shifting and imprecise, but whose brilliant songs twinkle brighter than ever. (Dear reader, Cultureberg almost went festive for a moment.)
Box set of the Year - The Rolling Stones in Mono. At last, says Jim, their early catalogue has been superbly remastered and reminds one of how good the Sones were when they mattered. (And combined with their, it has to be said , very sprightly and listenable, if somewhat marginal, blues set doing well, Mick and Keef may never have to return to running the corner shop. Wellallwight!)
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Top 5 albums.....
1. Bon Iver - 22- a million
2. Riley Walker - Golden sings that have been sung
3. Quilt - Plaza
4. Cat's Eyes - Treasure House
5. David Crosby - Lighthouse
(As will become evident from comparison with the Cultureberg rundown, only the Ryley Walker is in common, a sign that all associates are Most Independent Thinkers. In fact, I've never beard of Quilt, let alone heard the album, but will remedy that soon. The Crosby album had been in contention for the Cultureberg Top 5, narrowly missing out.Though M. Jim favours last year's Croz, I must demur and wholeheartedly endorse his comments that "this stripped down record has revealed its stark and fragile beauty with each play.")
Artist of the Year - Leonard Cohen. M.Jim salutes the sense of timing of the album's release, its message and his exiting this mortal coil prior to Trump's election. (Having frequently addressed oppresssion in many guises and made the link between the personal and the political explicit in his lyrics, Leonard would no doubt have commented caustically on The Donald had he lived longer, as the event was semtex in the Zeitgeist...A few days after the election Cultureberg' favourite Circuit des Yeux was making comments from the stage in Manchester. expanding her own song's meanings to the current events....for want of a nail, indeed.)
Americana Lp of the Year: Laura Cantrell Live at the BBC, because the songs work so well live.
Jazz lp of the year : Kamasi Washington - The Epic, which M. Jim admits is a slight twist, as this was released last year, "but only heard this year and nothing else I've heard this year sounds as good." A blind eye is turned as the argument is persuasive, and Kamasi is a biot of a modern day Kolossus.
Reissue of the year: Big Star - The complete Big Star Third. In this choice Cultureberg is in complete agreeement, and a longer, more considered piece is to follow shortly. Often extra tracks detract from the previous unity of an album, in this case they add, enlighten and illuminate an album for whom form is shifting and imprecise, but whose brilliant songs twinkle brighter than ever. (Dear reader, Cultureberg almost went festive for a moment.)
Box set of the Year - The Rolling Stones in Mono. At last, says Jim, their early catalogue has been superbly remastered and reminds one of how good the Sones were when they mattered. (And combined with their, it has to be said , very sprightly and listenable, if somewhat marginal, blues set doing well, Mick and Keef may never have to return to running the corner shop. Wellallwight!)
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