New Retribution Gospel Choir

I don't know if you remember how I went apeshit a couple of years ago for Alan Sparhawk's turn-up-the-amps side project Retribution Gospel Choir?

Well, okay, he's back and this time on Sub Pop, with an album called 2. Catchy title, eh? I've listened to it once, all the way through, and my initial read is that it's a little cleaner and more anthemic than the first, but just as good.

Sub Pop is giving away the opening track, which is called "Hide it Away." Go ahead, have a taste. The rest will be out on January 26th.

OOIOO

I’ve got a review of OOIOO’s last album Arminco Hewa up now at Blurt.
Fourteen years and six albums on from the day that Yoshimi P-We pulled together a fictional all-female band for a magazine article, OOIOO continues its euphoric, drum-pounding, girl-chanting adventures. Arminico Hewa enlists the same quartet of wild celebrants as 2006's Taiga: guitarist Kayan, bassist Aya and the double-drumming duo of Yoshimi and Ai. However, this latest album seems a hair more melodic and fluid than the last. In amongst tribal chants and ululations, you can pick up the occasional thread of conventional singing, sometimes even in English.

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“OOIAH”

Bear in Heaven

Last week, while I wasn’t really paying attention, Blurt ran my review of Bear In Heaven, out since November on the (really great) Home Tapes label.
Here’s a bit:
John Philpot's second full length as Bear in Heaven is an inchoate monster of an album, weighted with ritual percussive clangor and slow blossoming modal melodies. It's also a good deal more pop than you might expect, given Philpot's current association with experimental Home Tapes and his history (via previous band Presocratics) with avant gard Table of Elements. Not that he's headed for the Top 40 anytime soon -- elements of chaos and experiment lurk in nearly every cut of Beast Rest Forth Mouth. Still, they are unexpectedly leavened by dance-floor jitters of synthesizer, buoyant pop hooks and the slush of disco cymbals. You can hear Yes and Tears for Fears, Human League and Soft Cell side by side in these compositions, a weird, effortful, compelling mix of prog, new wave, rock, pop and even blue-eyed soul..

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“Wholehearted Mess”

Also, if you haven’t yet, go see It Might Get Loud, the documentary that brings together Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White, but only if you really, really like guitars.

No, really, go back to whatever you were doing...

I know it's christmas and I hope you have something better to do than to read my ridiculous blog, but if you don't, here's something kind of fun...Wooden Shjips covering "Oh Tannenbaum".



Happy happy...we're having a nice really quiet day, big breakfast, presents, long-ish runs or walks, and lots of new books to curl up with (well, that's me and Bill, Sean has been transfixed by Assassins Creed II).

Merry Christmas everyone…(or happy whatever you celebrate)

Hey, look, it’s here, and I am still way behind, but I believe I’ve bought all my presents and finally gotten the Christmas card situation under control and, best of all, I don’t have to go anywhere this Christmas, so no huddling in a plastic chair in Detroit or Chicago waiting for a golf-cart-sized prop plane to make its way through a snowstorm so that I can board.

But okay, what do you care about that? What’s going on in the fascinating world of music criticism. So glad you asked. Blurt has posted its year-end wrap-ups. You can peruse the aggregate top 50 here (yay, Sharon van Etten!), and (much more interesting, I think) the individual rankings here.

Oh and in another instance of the vast power of the internet, Steve Murphy from Gods Gift has just become one of my last.fm friends…weird world, isn’t it? Still waiting on Johnny Depp and Ralph Fiennes.

Ho ho ho!

Another running diary

So, things have slowed to a crawl in most ways, though I have gotten two “are you working Christmas week?” emails from corporate clients in the last 24 hours, so not entirely. Still the music stuff is just about moribund until 2010, so I have been dabbling in review CDs and mostly listening to whatever the hell appeals to me. Last night, while playing Trivial Pursuit with my son, we happened on The Veils’ “The Letter” and Sean was like, “Who is this? Can I have it?” So I burned it for him, and we listened to it on our very early drive to school.

I know really almost nothing about the Veils, except that their singer has a very dramatic, somehow-more-than-shoegaze-y kind of voice and that they use a lot of shiny, glossy, effect kinds of things to build shivery walls of guitar sound. Here’s a video of “The Letter.” If you like it, you might see if your mom could finagle a copy of Sun Gangs for you. It works sometimes, though not always.



And, while it was still barely light, I tromped off for my run, a very chilly one so that even with my hood pulled up, the iPod earplugs kept freezing and falling out of my ears. On the upside, it was long enough for another listen through the very excellent Yeti 4 compilation, all 28 tracks of it. (Thanks Michael!) I was intrigued by the comp because it had a track by Souled American, a band about which I know jack shit, except that it merited a long digression in Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem. And look here, I found a video by Souled American, though not of the song on the comp. This one is “In the Mud.” Don’t you love the internet?



Finally, as I was finishing my run and also buying Christmas dinner (hangar steak) and driving home, I listened again to The Mountain Goats We Shall All Be Healed, which I love really a lot more than the new one. The thing about Darnielle versus all the other clever songwriters (Stephin Merritt comes to mind) is that he really seems to care whether you hear him or not. There’s none of this ironic, posed detachment, and instead a kind of stridence and urgency which I would call sincere except that sincere has all kinds of zero-brained connotations and Darnielle is really, really smart. So, anyway, here’s a video of “Your Belgian Things” (there are some Shearwater folks playing back-up…whoo hoo!)


Stay warm!

Merry Christmas from my friend Neil Nathan

All you MOG (and ex-MOG) people may remember Neil Nathan...garage rocker, acoustic folker and habitue of famous Detroit recording venues with Bobby Harlow from the Go. He's a great guy and and he sent me a Christmas video, a really nice version of "Santa Claus" is coming to town. It's meant to raise money for the Fred Gabler Helping Hand Camp Fund, which raises money to send underprivileged kids to camp.

Enjoy!