Jonathan Richman...both childish and astonishingly wise

My review of Jonathan Richman's live show, last weekend in Northampton, is running today at Blurt. (sorry about the lousy photos.)

I begin:

Jonathan Richman is the world’s oldest child, his bug-eyed sense of wonder filtered through world-weary years of experience. His mid-song spoken word intervals can conjure the unguarded innocence of a six-year-old, or they can sound like the disgruntled peeves of an oldster. It is a curious mixture, the way he dances with the herky-jerky abandon of a preschooler, his face shadowed with a very adult sadness and knowing.

More here

This is maybe my favorite Jonathan Richman song right now (just passed previous bestie "19 in Naples"). It ended the show.

Jenn Rawling and Basho Parks

Wow, this is pretty, Tarantula Arms, the second album from Portland Oregon duo Jenn Rawling and Basho Parks...Jenn the main songwriter and singer, Basho the accompanist on various strummed and bowed string instruments. Rawling's voice has a wonderful little catch in it, a bit of grit that makes the sweetness sweeter. She apparently wrote these songs while working at a fire tower near Mount Hood. The two of them filmed this very stripped down version of "Dead Leg" in the same location.



Though really I like some of the slower material better. Their previous album, Take the Air, can be streamed in its entirety at bandcamp. Very nice.

Superchunk hates music

Or at least that's what they're telling us. I don't believe it personally, because how could you and run Merge, and bring the world Neutral Milk Hotel and also, this August, release another really great album, the tenth under the Superchunk name (not counting Portastatic albums), which is called I Hate Music.

It's another good one, bristling with aggression, super melodic, ruminating on mortality and, simultaneously, rocking out pretty hard.

The album trailer


How's everything at the front of the house? Pretty good, thanks.

Trails and Ways

Pretty good, slightly exotic electro-pop from an Oakland based band. I like this "Come Te Vas" track a lot better than the rest of the EP, which is called Trilingual.

It appears to be label-less and release-date-less, but you can hear most of it at the Soundcloud page. Very summery.

Sonny Smith's Antenna to the Afterworld

I really like Sonny Smith...a songwriter, visual artist and conceptual creative type whose defining achievement might be the 100 Records Project in which he invented out of whole cloth the bands, sounds, songs, art and liner notes to 100 singles, then took the whole thing on a gallery tour. It's an impressive thing, but more so because the songs were so good.

Antenna to the Afterworld is not a 100 Records offshoot but it shares that project's unbridled creativity, offhand craft and sci-fi goofiness. It's not as country as Longtime Companion either...a plus in my book.

You can stream it here:

Overseas...another super group of relative unknowns

I seem to be inordinately fond of the Kadane brothers various projects...Bedhead, obviously, but also the New Year, Macha, Consonant and, probably, two or three others I can't remember at the moment. Anyway, I was excited about the new Overseas album, since it's Matt and Bubba, plus David Bazan (I interviewed Bazan, BTW, a year or so ago for PopMatters) and Will Johnson of Centro-Matic and South San Gabriel. The album is really quite good and it's odd, because of the two singers, I think Johnson does the best job melting into the overall aesthetic, but Bazan's songs are odder, more abrasive and, because of that, more interesting. My review ran yesterday at Blurt.


Overseas
Overseas
Undertow

BY JENNIFER KELLY



Overseas collects the restless, subtly shifting energies of four individuals, two of them the Kadane brothers from Bedhead and the New Year, one Seattle’s rough-housing spiritualist David Bazan, the other Will Johnson, the ghostly Texan murmurer of Centro-Matic and South San Gabriel.

The four are connected by criss-crossing ties of touring and playing together over the years, but the main node of intersection seems to run through the Undertow Orchestra, a collaboration between Bazan, Johnson, Vic Chesnutt and Mark Eitzel of American Music Club. It was shortly after Chesnutt’s death in 2009 that Overseas first convened. All four of the new band’s members had been affected, in one way or another, by the songwriter’s life, work and passing, all four looked to the Orchestra’s model of shared songwriting and equal contribution as a way to work together.

The album took about three years to finish, working from sketches and jams into the fully-realized songs. Bubba Kadane played mostly guitar, his brother Matt a variety of instruments – guitar piano, drums – Johnston played drums and guitar, and David Bazan picked up the bass. Even so, it has a casual, lived-in grace, a happily accidental quality of four rather different sensibilities fitting together without losing their own shapes.

More

Overseas "Ghost To Be" from Undertow on Vimeo.

Heirlooms of August

I have a couple of reviews running today at Blurt...how about this one from Red House Painters bassist Jerry Vessel.

Down at the 5-Spot
Heirlooms of August
Caldo Verde

BY JENNIFER KELLY

Down at the 5-Spot is laid-back and ruminative, full of countrified touches like pedal steel, harmonica and close, male-female harmonies, but defined, mostly, by personal confidences. Red House Painters’ bass player Jerry Vessel writes about his garden, his young nephew, the low-key pleasures of road-side dining, arranging casual observations into gemlike patterns.

This second Heirlooms of August album feels more like a solo record than 2011’s Forever Moon because it centers on Vessel’s whiskery voice, but also because it hovers on the border between art and personal confession. Even the love songs – “Annabelle” – seem to exist mostly in Vessel’s head, as he wonders about the smell, taste and maternal inclinations of a chance encounter. It’s a pretty song, but without momentum. You can’t imagine the singer making his move.

More

There are no videos or soundcloud or anything for Down at the 5-Spot,but I do like the title track from the first album.