My Jon Spencer interview is up at PopMatters

See, I didn’t even say finally…

“I think the best rap is really free. That’s incredibly liberating and powerful, when you use it as a way to make or even think about music,” Jon Spencer said.

The subject has come up because of the vastly expanded reissues of Blues Explosion’s landmark third and fifth albums, Orange from 1994 and Acme from 1999. In one sense, both albums are raw and live and stripped down, rooted in early rock and soul. But on the other hand, they are clearly linked to hip-hop, in obvious ways like the use of scratching and heavy, bass-driven beats, and in less obvious ones, like Orange‘s use of remixes.

That’s because if you got in the van with Jon Spencer and the Blues Explosion any time in the early 1990s, you were likely to hear rap. Public Enemy was on all the time, Spencer remembers. Ice Cube was another favorite. “We have always been influenced by rap music,” Spencer recalled.

Read the rest

Black Mountain

This is one of those reviews I wrote several months ago, for the print edition of Blurt, which came out a few weeks ago (and looks really nice, I think…I’ve got a little interview with Kelley Stoltz and a longer one with Nic Offer from !!! in it, as well as this review). The Black Mountain piece is up on the website now, a pretty good review, if I do say so myself, for a really good record.

Here’s how I started:
“Monstrous riffs, molten sludge, the bludgeoning weight of guitar overload-those have always been Stephen McBean's stock in trade, and never more so than on third Black Mountain full-length Wilderness Heart. Yet where most of Black Mountain's 1960s forebears were all-male affairs, this band has Amber Wells to shake up the stereotype. Just listen to how her warm, vibrato-laced contralto casts a witchy spell over the title track, making its head-thudding guitars, its rampaging drums into something wilder, sweeter and altogether more unpredictable. ‘Old Fangs,’ too, has the palm-muted, ‘vette-on-blocks stomp of classic Sabbath, yet synths and Wells' singing brings its old-style menace into the modern era.”

The rest is here.


“Old Fangs”

“The Hair Song”

I finished transcribing my Jon Spencer tape yesterday, and I might take a crack at writing the piece today. If I don’t screw it up somehow, it should be excellent. We spent a lot of time talking about his links to hip hop and interest in remixes circa Orange and Orange Experimental Remixes. Also, weirdly, we were up in Hanover NH at around the same time in the early 1980s, he finishing up at Hanover High and me at Dartmouth; I’m pretty sure my roommate Helen had a Professor Spencer for organic chemistry, who, in retrospect, had to be his father.…Anyway, he’s an interesting guy, no question, can’t wait to get to it.

I’m also getting ready to review this Psychedelic Aliens reissue, which is pretty great…it’s more funk/soul from 1970s Ghana, some beautifully laid-back Booker-T-ish grooves up front and a load of truly crazy percussion in the later (long gone missing, recently re-located) singles that round out the disc.

That’s it for now, back to work.

Black Angels

I’ve got a review of Black Angels Phosphene Dream up today at Dusted. I enjoyed it, but with some reservations, liking especially the handful of tracks where the disc “diverges from VU-ish drone into brighter, janglier territories.”

The whole review is here.
http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/6041

Here they are playing “Telephone” on Letterman.


Hey, I might be interviewing Jon Spencer today, if he has time. (He’s calling me…weird.)

Intriguing stuff that’s come in recently:
Exrays…new project from Tim Cohen
Reissue of T. Rex’s The Slider
New Giant Sand
Live Ex

Stay tuned.