Magic Trick, C. Spencer Yeh and Snowbird

First the obligatory post-Thanksgiving thanks for having a roof over my head, a nice family, reasonable health and really excellent food at hand...plus, as an added bonus, $600 to pay the first heating oil bill of the year!

Thanks!

Now, onto what I've been listening to lately, in the free-ranging, nearly-assignment-less interval of December, when I slap on whatever people send me...

Magic Trick, River of Souls (Empty Cellar) Kind of a headphones record, though I can't figure out why. It is not especially complicated or overstuffed or even hard to parse -- in fact, it is exceptionally, almost surreally clear sonically. But the fact remains that I listened to this once in the kitchen on speakers and thought it was dull, then twice on a run with earphones and thought it was remarkable.

What do you think?


C. Spencer Yeh / Okkyung Lee / Lasse Marhaug, Wake Up Awesome (Mexican Summer) Extended technique (i.e. banging, squeaking, scratching and, in general, playing your instrument in ways that would drive your orchestra teacher batty) and electronics make this an odd, twitchy, discontinuous listen...and weirdly, the breaks from abrasion make it all the more difficult to get situated. There's a hovering, half-focused loveliness buried in scratch and hiss on "Ophelia Gimme Shelter," a baroque throb of cello(?) in "Mission: Nothing" and even some kind of German music-box-y sentimental song in "Anise Tongue and Durian Wet Dream" in jarring conflict with the harsher elements of this album. Actually the soft pretty bits are just as jarring and the noisy ones. It's the constant back and forth that unsettles. Like when you're in Paris with your English-speaking friends and you'd be picking up a lot more French if you weren't always switching between languages. But it's interesting, and if you listen to it a few times (like three or more) it starts to make sense as a whole.



Snowbird, Moon (Bella Union) This is Simon Raymonde from the Cocteau Twins and Stephanie Dosen and it's very pretty, maybe too pretty, too soft? IDK. Guest shots from members of Radiohead, Midlake and Lanterns on the Lake, lots of gauzy, dreamy textures, but no spine, do you know what I mean?

No thanks to Weekender

Weird, I was going to post about Weekender, a Philly-based neu-gaze outfit whose Spanish Peaks came out on Paper Cup Records about a week ago. It's a pretty great little EP, shades of J&MC, a bit of the softer, hazier 1990s overdrive (i.e. more Slowdive than MBV). But apparently the band has taken down all of its videos and soundcloud streams...so you'll have to take my word for it, or, more likely forget about it. Does a video with 318 likes really need piracy protection? IDK, seems silly.

Okay correction, there is a soundcloud:


Thanks to Derek Sheehan for the link.

The other thing that I have been listening to and liking this week is a four-song EP from Synkro, a Manchester-based, dubstep type whose real name is Joe McBride. The Lost Here is full of wavery, water-y tone and skipping beats...it reminds me a lot of Burial's great Untrue in that it inserts a great deal of soul, emotion and humanity into a cerebral artform. That's partly down to Robert Manos who sings on the title track and also "In My Arms."



We are going for Thanksgiving dinner to a friends' house in town, who still have their teenage son and also a couple of other young men, maybe exchange students, in the house for the meal. I am not sure whether this will make me happier or sadder. (I have been a little sad, lately.) Anyway, all I have to cook is scalloped potatoes, which I did yesterday and they turned out beautiful, so I'm going for a little run now. It's very cold, sunny and a crust of snow on the ground, pretty much ideal over-the-river-and-through-the-woods weather.

Hope everyone is safe and warm and surrounded by loved ones. 16 days until Sean comes home.

The Entrance Band is back

The Entrance Band, that sepulchral electric blues outfit led by Guy Blakeslee, put out another album this week, the sublimely dirge-like, mandala-spinning guitar-psychedelic Face the Sun from whence comes this disturbing video.



I like it a lot, especially the sprawling, vaguely Middle Eastern flavored "Fine Flow" which sounds like Richard Bishop and the Doors in some sort of unholy mashup.

I reviewed the Entrance Band's Prayer for Death a sort-of-astonishing seven years ago, saying:

To the hallowed triad of sex, drugs and rock and roll, we should maybe add a fourth: death. Like the other three, death has certainly been a source of innumerable song lyrics and the intoxicant of choice for mystics, bluesmen, rockers, folk singers and assorted other scruffy geniuses. It's certainly Guy Blakeslee's drug this time out. Prayer of Death, as its title implies, doesn't just face the great inevitable, it embraces it, celebrates it, psychedelicizes it, becomes giddy on its poison fumes. "I want to die without no fear / I want to die rejoicing," he sings on the title track, perhaps the most gospel and straightforward blues number here, and he's not kidding. He really is happy about the whole idea.

You can read the whole thing here.

Lovers ...who says electropop has to be chilly?

I've got a review of the all-woman Portland band, Lovers, up today at Blurt.

LOVERS – A Friend in the World
Badman

By JENNIFER KELLY

Like a handmade Hello Kitty lunchbox, Lovers, out of Portland, splices pop ephemera with DIY freshness and honesty. A Friend In the World’s perky synthetic keyboards and dance rhythms conjure princess pink diva-pop, but singer Carolyn Berk weaves knowing cock-eyed melancholy through it all. It’s like Mirah’s peppiest dance party ever, like cold wave synth revival warmed to bath temperature. Someone never told the women of Lovers – Berk, Emily Kingan and Kerby Ferris – that electropop had to be chilly and inhumane. Their version breathes and sighs and confides, even as it urges the girls to dance.

More

Swearin'

I've been pretty vocal about Waxahatchee's Cerulean Salt ranking high in my top ten (it's #2 behind Nick Cave at the moment), but how about the other Crutchfield sister, Allison, whose band Swearin' put out a pretty fine blues-rocking album called Surfin' Strange a week or two ago on Wichita. It reminds me of the Moaners, which I know, is probably no help to anyone, but here try this...It's blistered, dissonance-altered guitar sweetened by longing, softened by understanding. It's what you hear at one a.m. from the radio, the crackle of static popping like acid as it eats through melody, leaving holes that just reinforce what you've lost. Yeah, like I said...reminds me of the Moaners.

Or you could just listen for yourself, eh?


Oh and how about that Waxahatchee? I just spent 45 minutes on ILX looking at year-end and it seems that I'll be alone again on this one (but not the Cave).

Eiko Ishibashi

Eiko Ishibashi is multitalented -- a well-regarded drummer (There are a number of really interesting female Japanese drummers, aren't there? Wonder why?), pianist, singer and composer. Her album Imitation of Life came out last year in Japan. I'm guessing that the fact that Jim O'Rourke plays on it got her a hearing at Drag City, which is now releasing it in Japan.

The album reminds me a lot of Petra Haden and Yuko Honda's If By Yes project, which is to say, proggily complex, intricately arranged, and yet oddly welcoming and soft. Imitation of Life pits pillowy soft vocals against spikily difficult arrangements of piano, drums and strings, so that you feel like you're in a sort of pop song where the floor is always shifting and the mirror-walled contours are showing you bits and pieces of things that might be you, yourself, or might be infinity.

Anyway, it's interesting. Have a listen.


We had our first snow last night, just a dusting really, though we caught a pretty dense squall on the way back from Northampton. Sean is safely arrived in Indianapolis, where it sounds like it will be non-stop fun stuff with his aunt and uncle. I had a pretty good week last week -- got paid from three different clients and have since paid all my outstanding bills and maybe able to spend a little on Christmas. I also think, though I'm not sure, that I've picked up a new client who, if I do everything right, could be pretty substantial. Also we continue to muddle through with Dusted. A few of us are trying to set up a Tumblr, Dusted in Exile, to publish the backlog of reviews and see where it goes from there.

So that's pretty much it, except that last week, I had this weird dream that I had written a musical and I remember nothing about it, except that John Boehner was a character and his show-stopping tune was called "The King of No." Pretty silly.

Fela covers and Dylan-ish rasp

I've got a couple of reviews up today at Blurt, one of the Fela Kuti-honoring Red Hot & Fela which I found mostly kind of tepid with a couple of really good songs. I wrote, "despite the abundance of good intention, Red Hot & Fela is only intermittently compelling. Listen to any of these cuts against the originals, and they sound chilled, glossed, smoothed and, especially, much abbreviated." There's more here.

Here's video of a concert at Lincoln Center which featured the disc's music...


There's also a new review of Ezra Furman's second Harpoon-less endeavor, The Day of the Dog, which I quite liked. I wrote: "Ezra Furman turns existential angst into roadhouse bravado on this second solo LP, framing burnt black lyrics with vamping sax, rollicking piano and double-time romps. Furman may be “broken, wide-open, bleeding everywhere” (per “The Mall”), but he’s still thrashing around in protest. The protest, in this case, takes the form of rousing, blustery, forget-yourself-in-rock-and-roll arrangements that recall everyone from electric Dylan to classic gospel to Bo Diddley (“At the Bottom of the Ocean”)." There's a bunch more here.



We finally hit Season 3 of The Good Wife last night, which I am enjoying immensely, especially Archie Panjabi and Alan Cumming, but also that the show has guest cameos from so many great theater actors, not to mention a running gig for Julliard-educated Christine Baranski. I'm a little worried about the two-main-characters-finally-having-sex thing, which has ruined so many good shows...I don't want to know anything about what happens, but does it suck from here or not?