JC Brooks is trying to break your heart

Wrote this a while ago for the Fall print edition of Blurt, but it's online today if you didn't catch the magazine.

SOUL, MAN! JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound

Currently on tour in the U.S. and fresh off a riotous reception in Austin at Blurt's SXSW party, the Chicago funk-soul freight train is STILL trying to break your heart.

JENNIFER KELLY

"Shi-it," talk-sings JC Brooks, putting his whole body into the phrase and drawing it out into multiple, Southern soul syllables to the delight of his audience. He is a sharp-dressed man in an oversize white suit and Keds as he flirts with the audience, his band behind him in a locked-in, Stax-style groove. They're a stolid bunch, but that's okay because Brooks is all the show they need. Soon he's chicken-walking, jump-pirouetting James Brown style, and fanning one hand like a Southern Baptist grandmother caught up in one heck of a funky transport.

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Eric Chenaux

Finally...a review. Eric Chenaux Guitar & Voice Constellation Much like certain Loren Mazzacane Connors recordings, Eric Chenaux’s Guitar & Voice straddles the boundaries of experimental improvisation and song-based composition. This latest project, which Chenaux calls an extended meditation on balladry, includes four songs with vocals, one extended guitar solo and four compositions in bowed guitar, all composed and performed solely by Chenaux. The vocal pieces are the initial draw here, drawing the listener in with melody, but surrounding these melodies with prickly, unexpected instrumental elements. Chenaux’s voice expands haunting, jazz-tuned melodies from the inside. His voice is weightless, haunting, alighting on words and phrases without putting pressure on them, then skittering up an octave or so for spectral climaxes. He sounds very much like Jeff Buckley in spots, particularly the long, lovely “Dull Lights (White and Grey).” He is prone to the sudden swoops, the free-form syllable-bending runs. Vocal phrases are widely spaced, allowing Chenaux the time to comment, to revise, to inject via his other voice, the guitar. On “Dull Lights (White and Gray),” you hear slow, lingering runs of plucked notes, arcing off like a riposte to Chenaux’s observations. A chord serves as home; from there, the guitar ventures out in twisting folk cadences, some altered and given physical weight with bends and taps and the audible weight of fingers on strings. Later, “However Wild the Dream” pulls the trick, grounding Chenaux’s airy, otherworldly song in a tangible, physical mesh, of plucked intervals, strummed resolutions and an enveloping, grounding drone. More

March faves, very similar to February

No big changes in the provisional best-of this month. I heard a few records I liked quite a bit, but not much that I loved…the main exception is the new one by Here We Go Magic, not out until May, which I’m going to sneak in at the bottom of the list and maybe it’ll move up. I’m also putting Damien Jurado back into the mix, because that record continues to grow on me…

Shearwater, Animal Joy
Sharon Van Etten, Tramp
Dirty Three, Toward a Low Sun
Mark Lanegan, Blues Funeral
Kevn Kinney and the Golden Palominos, A Good Country Mile
Twilight Sad, No One Can Ever Know
Here We Go Magic, A Different Ship
Damien Jurado, Maraqopa

In terms of stuff that I liked that probably won’t make top ten…

Royal Baths, Better Luck Next Life (Kanine)…scuzzy, decadent, VU-tinged r ‘n r…interview coming at some point at Blurt.

Luke Roberts, The Iron Gates at Throop and Newport (Thrill Jockey)…raw, powerful, but a bit more centered than Big Bells and Dime Songs, reviewed a couple weeks ago at Dusted

Alexander Tucker, Third Mouth (Thrill Jockey)…this one might actually get onto the list at some point, depending on how it ages…very trippy, beautiful psych folk

Eric Chenaux, Guitar & Voice (Constellation)…not sure about the record as a whole, but I LOVE “Dull Lights (White or Grey)”, this month’s best approximation of Jeff Buckley.

Anton Barbeau, Three Minute Tease (Pink Hedgehog)…one of America’s best, most overlooked power pop writers, supported by two-thirds of the Soft Boys and Bevis Front.

Jennifer Castle, Castlemusic (Flemish Eye)…very soft beautiful songs at the conjunction of folk, country and experimental electronics.

Brendan Benson

I mentioned Brendan Benson yesterday, when I was posting about Salim Nourallah's Hit Parade, which reminded me how good he is...and how much I love this song.

How about you?

Salim Nourallah's Hit Parade

If you like Beatles-flavored power pop, you can hardly go wrong with Texan songwriter Salim Nourallah's latest, Hit Parade, out on April 12. Nourallah has been kicking around for a while, first with the Happiness Project, later as a solo artist on Western Vinyl and Tapete Records. He has produced albums for the Old 97s and Rhett Miller..and this is actually not a bad reference point (others would be Brendan Benson, Wilco and the Deathray Davies) for his warm, catchy, carefully put together songs. Hit Parade shows some maturity -- the songs concern kids and spouses and credit card problems more than teenage romance and alienation -- but maintains a pretty sharp edge. I'm liking "Unstoppable", "Channel 5" (did Nourallah once date a "Dancing with Stars" contestant?), "Goddamn Life" and "Travolta" the best, but the songs are mostly pretty good.

Here's a live performance of "Unstoppable"

Record shopping

Someone dumped a whole load of 4AD at the Turn It Up in Keene, NH, so while, really, the last thing in the world that I need is more CDs, I have bought a couple recently. The first is Treasure from the Cocteau Twins, whom I missed somehow when they were going on...I mean, I knew the name, but I couldn't remember a single song when I bought this and had to ask one of the guys who help me pick from the 5-6 Cocteau Twins CDs they had. It is very beautiful...most of you probably already know this...and also, doing this backwards, seems to have a real influence on a lot of the stuff coming out of the Vivian Girls camp...Frankie Rose, certainly, but also Dum Dum Girls and maybe La Sera.

Anyway, here's a live version of "Lorelei"


The other thing I bought was the Monochrome Set's double-disk Tomorrow Will Be Too Long from 1980 and 1981...which I played twice through last night and liked a whole lot.(It's long at 70 minutes, so you probably wouldn't listen to it twice, right away, unless you liked it quite a bit.)



Blurt has been on break for a couple of weeks, so I have not had very many reviews to post lately, but I'm still writing them, so hopefully that will correct itself soon.

Andre Williams anticipates the hoodies controversy

So late on this really excellent Andre Williams disc Hoods and Shades, out since late February on Bloodshot records, kind of simmering and low-down and lots of acoustic sounds (though not entirely acoustic, there's some great electric guitar and bass, too). So yeah, there are lots of interesting people kicking in (Dennis Coffee, for instance, the Dirtbombs Jim Diamond, Jim White from Dirty 3, Don Was)...but the main reason I am writing about it now is because of Williams' exact nailing of the post-Trayvon zeitgeist with his epic, seething-but-never-quite-boiling-over "Hoods and Shades."



Of course, I can't share that one. The one they're giving away is "Dirt". It's pretty good, too.

I missed this one, but there's an Andre record with the Sadies coming in a month, so I might get something going there.

Hope you're all having a nice weekend. We saw Pina yesterday and thought it was intermittently stunning but could have used a little narrative and what-the-fuck-are-we-looking-at type connective tissue and could also, maybe, have been half an hour shorter. Also continued our slog through the first season of Games & Thrones...very surprised that Renley and Loras are so gay on TV...and, one night later, watched part of J.Edgar, but got bored and went off to read a new Neil Gaiman book called American Gods, which is quite entertaining.