Paul Messis

I've got a new review up at the Dusted In Exile Tumblr of the very retro Case Closed from paisley revivalist Paul Messis.




Paul Messis — Case Closed (State Records)

The very first song on Paul Messis’ latest record, the 1960s-redolent Case Closed is called “I Hate the World Around Me.” It’s pretty clear why that might be the case. The song, which could easily fit on the Nuggets-Pebbles continuum, begins in a flower power jangle of guitar, psychedelic Moon drums kicking under Byrdsian electric folk rock. There are tight, giddy harmonies, a la the first couple of Beatles records, and quick mercurial shifts from major key brashness to minor key diffidence, just like in Odeyssey and Oracle.

It’s the kind of song that would have raised no eyebrows at all in 1967 or so, but singing it, Messis himself acknowledges its out-of-time-and-place oddity and his own anachronistic predicament. “To make it in this world / I’ve got to be somebody else / Live a life against myself,” he sings.

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This was one of those records I picked off the WFMU heavily played list without really knowing anything about it.

Ooops, missed one

We are now entering that part of the year in which reading other people's lists makes you realize that a dump-load of good music seems to have been released while you weren't paying attention and that maybe your top 10 is not the omniscient survey of 2013-ness that you thought it was. (if you did).

Anyway, I was listening to Mojo's free CD with their favorites on it, and I got all the way to the end before I said "What is THIS?"

And it was Low.

So, Sub Pop, you send me Thumpers but not this? Don't you like me any more?

Doug Keith with a famous shredder guest, other recent listening

I've been catching up on promos the last few days, trying to listen to everything I put on mid-December a few times before it falls off the new list> I'm really liking Doug Keith's Pony, which will be out February 11th on Keith's own Village Label. Keith has been playing bass for Sharon van Etten lately...and he's apparently made some connections with the W. Mass indie mafia. There is a guitar solo of unmistakeable provenance* on this song "Pure Gold in the 70s," also one or two others. Keith has a thoughtful, interesting blog, too, whose most recent post connects him to Northampton's other famous guitar player,** so I don't know, maybe he's a neighbor? He never calls, never visits...how would I know?



That's the giveaway track, but the one that I keep playing over and over is "Black Metal Black." It reminds me a lot of Luna.

I have also been listening a good bit to:

ILLLs (with the extra L), which reminds me a lot of Blank Dogs and is what I would consider a near miss.



And also Mirror Travel, an Austin-based, two-third-girls threesome in the psych-drone-garage vein, which I like a little better than ILLLs, but not as much as Keith.


I am not into Gardens & Villa at all, so you'll have to find your own soundcloud if the falsetto-and-synthesizer, neo-disco thing is your deal.

Merry Christmas or [insert your own preferred holiday greeting here]!

*J.
**Thurston

Nathan Salsburg

Another quiet gem from old time archivist and Takoma-style guitar player Nathan Salsburg, reviewed today at the new Dusted Tumbler

I wrote: "Nathan Salsburg’s reels and jigs and rambles run placidly through this nine-song, mostly solo collection. This is a remarkably calm and unruffled album, intricately played but without show-off-y virtuosity, held to a constant rhythm and contained within a fairly narrow dynamic range. Salsburg is never in any hurry, but there are no long pauses either. The pieces proceed at the same mid-level volume until they’re quiet at the end. No crescendos, no sudden stops and starts. A shadow-y shift from major to minor, a sudden surprising bent note, these are the only, fairly modest revelations that these tunes offer. And yet, though bereft of big gestures or spontaneous combustions, the songs are rather lovely in a quiet, sun-dappled country way."

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Destroyer in Spanish

So, happy Christmas, merry holidays, ho ho ho and all that. After some weather-related drama, my son is home for the break, and he is not feeling especially good (bad cold, which I believe he's been putting off until he had time to have it, and now he does), but it is still very sweet to have him in the house again.

I have been pretty delinquent about this blog lately, I know...the new dusted tumblr has been hoovering up my spare time, and, also the holiday thing is a bit consuming...but I do have a couple of things to report on.

First my review of Destroyer's brief, very enjoyable Five Spanish Songs is up now at Blurt.


DESTROYER — Five Spanish Songs
Merge By JENNIFER KELLY

On Five Spanish Songs, Daniel Bejar pulls off the rare trick of covering five songs by a single author – the Spaniard Antonio Luque, who records as Sr. Chinarro – while sounding precisely like Daniel Bejar.

That’s a feat for any performer, but more so for Bejar, who is, by nature, slippery and hard to define. He is a midi-mastering solo symphonist one minute (Your Blues), a full-band rocker the next (Destroyer’s Rubies), and most recently a lite-fm Gerry Rafferty devotee (Kaputt, which is a good name for it). The main connector, for me, has always been his skill as a writer. His words have a sinuous-ness that glide effortlessly until they land in a tangle, dense, elegant, impacted with inference. He’s just too good at the oblique image, the tossed off bon mot, the line-drawn portraits of strangers in a crowd to be considered apart from the words. The music just wraps around them.

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Also my review of the much more difficult, less accessible (but still interesting) Rene Hell album Vanilla Call Option is up now at the Dusted Tumblr. I picked this off the old Dusted dropbox by closing my eyes and clicking on it (I got three albums this way), and then when Otis was asking for reviews last fall, offered to review it. I have an extremely inadequate background for this sort of thing, so bear with me.

I said, "Jeff Witscher, in his latest effort as Rene Hell, has pushed beyond rhythm, melody and motif into pure abstracted sound. Squeaks, squibbles, odd itches, burbles and scratches are floodlit with blinding clarity, set like museum pieces against backgrounds of bright, disturbing silence. If “Smile Models” sounds, from certain angles, like an unoiled door swinging open and shut, it is the dream of a dream of a dream of that door. It squeaks without real friction, heat or physical presence."

There's more here.

Here is a sample of his stuff


I am just going to assume that this is the one and only blog post ever to feature both Destroyer and Rene Hell until someone shows me another one.

The indescipherable prettiness of Sumie

SUMIE – Sumie (Bella Union)


BY JENNIFER KELLY

Sumie Nagano plays a spare and delicate folk music, her fingers tracing spidery guitar patterns that circle one chord and then another, her voice cutting clean through a sparkling silence. She sounds a bit like Linda Perhacs if you can imagine her without the occasional blues slide, or perhaps somewhat akin to Sharon Van Etten, though more remote and less vulnerable.

The person she does not sound like, at all, is her sister Yukimi Nagano, who shades the electro-pop of Little Dragon with stylized R&B cools and trills. Little Dragon is all stylish pose and posture. Sumie, by contrast, brings almost no artifice to this self-titled debut. She uses no vibrato, indulges in no surface emoting, refuses to belt and declines, even, the drama of a well-placed stage whisper. Sumie merely sings, hitting the notes crisply and exactly. Her guitar playing has the same distilled clarity, each note plucked and rounded and left to hang, nothing fancy like bends or pull-offs or hammer-ons.

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Bailter Space...still back

Whoa, look, it's mid-December and I'm still stumbling on records that mighta/shoulda/woulda found a place on my top ten (if I had not already filled it up with albums I love). Check out Bailter Space from NZ, who re-emerged last year from a decade-plus hiatus and re-re-emerged this year with a noisier take on an already noisy genre.


BAILTER SPACE – TrinineFire (Fire)
Release Date: September 30, 2013

By JENNIFER KELLY

In 2012, Bailter Space put out its first album in thirteen years, the spectacular Strobosphere, which merged the band’s dense, dissonant murk with wavery tunefulness. It was a welcome return for the band tagged as New Zealand’s Sonic Youth, the wild card noise instigators among its lo-fi janglers. Now just a year later, Bailter Space has returned with more abrasive take on its feedback-altered storm and drone. Trinine builds on static-fuzzed foundations laid down more than three decades ago in cuts like “Grader Spader” (off the wonderful Flying Nun compilation In Love With These Times). It just takes them a little further into mess and distortion than Strobosphere did.

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