So, okay, it's Saturday and I have an as yet unmet deadline for the great Dusted magazine, but instead I am listening to the new Wooden Shjips album, and it is AWESOME, exactly like every other Wooden Shjips album (which is to say hypnotically repetitive, with a hard bass-drum beat that somehow lulls you into paralysis and a soft, otherworldly vocal and guitars that spin off into the ether, and you know you had that shopping list to finish somewhere, but you've been spending the last 45 minutes staring into space and...hmmmmmmmmmm) So, there is NOTHING new here, sorry, I know how novelty obsessed we all are. But still, if you like Wooden Shjips, there is MORE of it and that is a very, very good thing.
Yup there's a video, enjoy your afternoon.
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Friday, September 6, 2013
Casually polished, beautifully offhand
I've gotta write some more reviews. I'm running out of stuff to post.
FELSEN – I Don’t Know How to Talk Anymore
(Self-released)
By JENNIFER KELLY
Felsen, a slyly clever power pop outfit from Oakland, has one foot in 1960s and 1970s classic rock, the other in the web-connected, socially-mediated early teens. Songwriter Andrew Griffin is a Berkelee trained session drummer turned Wilco/Matthew Sweet/Teenage Fanclub acolyte. He may be old-school enough to slip a line from “Cinnamon Girl,” a riff from Zep’s “Good Times, Bad Times” into opening salvo “Rock ‘N Roll’s Not Dead,” but he’s no stranger to the blogging, commenting, sharing (and over-sharing) present.
I Don’t Know How to Talk Anymore is Felsen’s fourth LP, a casually polished, beautifully offhand collection of smart, quirky pop songs. Griffin has the trick of .
More
FELSEN – I Don’t Know How to Talk Anymore
(Self-released)
By JENNIFER KELLY
Felsen, a slyly clever power pop outfit from Oakland, has one foot in 1960s and 1970s classic rock, the other in the web-connected, socially-mediated early teens. Songwriter Andrew Griffin is a Berkelee trained session drummer turned Wilco/Matthew Sweet/Teenage Fanclub acolyte. He may be old-school enough to slip a line from “Cinnamon Girl,” a riff from Zep’s “Good Times, Bad Times” into opening salvo “Rock ‘N Roll’s Not Dead,” but he’s no stranger to the blogging, commenting, sharing (and over-sharing) present.
I Don’t Know How to Talk Anymore is Felsen’s fourth LP, a casually polished, beautifully offhand collection of smart, quirky pop songs. Griffin has the trick of .
More
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Mark Lanegan, frustrated crooner
The world's best (and lowest) rock voice finds itself toying with ALL kinds of ungodly shit, and, since it's Mark Lanegan, makes it sound surprisingly good. Don't even get me going on the Abba cover ("Solitaire") ...there are also alternate treatments of Chelsea Wolfe's "Flatlands," Nancy's Sinatra's "You Only Live Twice" and Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife."
Here are a couple samples, neither embeddable...but whatever.
"I'm Not the Loving Kind" (John Cale)
"Deepest Shade" (Twilight Singers)
Here are a couple samples, neither embeddable...but whatever.
"I'm Not the Loving Kind" (John Cale)
"Deepest Shade" (Twilight Singers)
I listen to the new Kandodo and all I hear is water
My review of the really beautiful, languid, lyrical new Kandodo album is up today at Dusted, and now that I read it, I'm thinking that maybe I went, er, overboard on the water business.
Kandodo
K20
Thrill Jockey
Kandodo’s self-titled album conjured wide, treeless plains, a large scale landscape given drama not by its features but by the expanse of space without them. k20, coming a year later, is similarly vast, but this time oceanic. You can hear the waves, literally, on brief sound-sampling “Waves” and on lengthy, droning “Swim into the Sun.” You can sense the pitch and roll of currents on nearly all these tracks. It’s no accident that the sprawling second side’s “Swim into the Sun” evokes passage through water. There’s a slippery liquid envelopment in Kandodo’s sound, now amniotic and warm, later chilly and bracing, but always washing over in long waves.
More
In other news, I am interviewing Miles from EMEFE today for Blurt. I'm going to ask him if they've ever all tried to fit in a Volkswagon.
We also got the word that our washer is kaput and we will now have to come up with a very unfun, unexpected $700 or $800 to replace it. We bought it a week or two after we bought the house, so it's not like we didn't get some use out of it. Also, things have been going well workwise, so it's not a terrible time to have to do this. Still, I can't help but feel that we will never, ever get ahead. It's always something.
Kandodo
K20
Thrill Jockey
Kandodo’s self-titled album conjured wide, treeless plains, a large scale landscape given drama not by its features but by the expanse of space without them. k20, coming a year later, is similarly vast, but this time oceanic. You can hear the waves, literally, on brief sound-sampling “Waves” and on lengthy, droning “Swim into the Sun.” You can sense the pitch and roll of currents on nearly all these tracks. It’s no accident that the sprawling second side’s “Swim into the Sun” evokes passage through water. There’s a slippery liquid envelopment in Kandodo’s sound, now amniotic and warm, later chilly and bracing, but always washing over in long waves.
More
In other news, I am interviewing Miles from EMEFE today for Blurt. I'm going to ask him if they've ever all tried to fit in a Volkswagon.
We also got the word that our washer is kaput and we will now have to come up with a very unfun, unexpected $700 or $800 to replace it. We bought it a week or two after we bought the house, so it's not like we didn't get some use out of it. Also, things have been going well workwise, so it's not a terrible time to have to do this. Still, I can't help but feel that we will never, ever get ahead. It's always something.
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Califone's Stitches
My friend Bill Meyer (who wrote this reoord up for Magnet) thinks that Stitches is maybe not so personal and direct as Rutili is giving out, and it is fairly cryptic for a confessional..I might have gotten sucked in by the one-sheet on this. Anyway, really enjoyed the album, another good one from Califone.
Califone
Stitches
Dead Oceans
Califone has always worked in the subconsciously familiar, hammering together folk memories and spare industrial parts to create altered-but-recognizable textures. Yet here on the collective’s seventh full-length, Tim Rutili seems to have taken the same approach with his words, eschewing the vivid abstractions of past work to talk more plainly about his own condition. Despite its references to Chinese opera and deep-sea divers, the album’s title track is a love song, pure and simple. “Didn’t we fit together like someone else’s sweater?” he asks, likening stitches to sutures, needlework, embroidery in the way they connect and enhance disparate beings.
Stitches, then, uses large-scale mythological imagery to hone in on concerns like love and mortality. Its lyrics are unusually direct and readable, at least by Califone standards, but infused with a collective conscious’s ghostly imprint. Here, monumental figures like Moses, Jacob and Esau and Mary Magdalene give resonance to Rutili’s queries about life’s meaning (or lack of it). In “Moses,” for instance, the prophet forever exiled from the Promised Land is a stand-in for an ordinary man’s inability to commit to a lover. Califone’s hoarse-shouted chorus of “if I let myself need you, how long before we die?” feels personally, individually true, but also archetypical and vast.
More
Califone
Stitches
Dead Oceans
Califone has always worked in the subconsciously familiar, hammering together folk memories and spare industrial parts to create altered-but-recognizable textures. Yet here on the collective’s seventh full-length, Tim Rutili seems to have taken the same approach with his words, eschewing the vivid abstractions of past work to talk more plainly about his own condition. Despite its references to Chinese opera and deep-sea divers, the album’s title track is a love song, pure and simple. “Didn’t we fit together like someone else’s sweater?” he asks, likening stitches to sutures, needlework, embroidery in the way they connect and enhance disparate beings.
Stitches, then, uses large-scale mythological imagery to hone in on concerns like love and mortality. Its lyrics are unusually direct and readable, at least by Califone standards, but infused with a collective conscious’s ghostly imprint. Here, monumental figures like Moses, Jacob and Esau and Mary Magdalene give resonance to Rutili’s queries about life’s meaning (or lack of it). In “Moses,” for instance, the prophet forever exiled from the Promised Land is a stand-in for an ordinary man’s inability to commit to a lover. Califone’s hoarse-shouted chorus of “if I let myself need you, how long before we die?” feels personally, individually true, but also archetypical and vast.
More
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Soul psych, blue jasmine and jazzfest by proxy
This was one of those very long lead, maybe-for-print type reviews, so I sort of forget about what the record sounded like but it seems like I must have liked it.
KING KHAN AND THE SHRINES
Idle No More
Merge
BY JENNIFER KELLY
It’s been six years since King Khan and the Shrine’s soul-psych extravaganza What Is?, where the Montrealean garage revivalist channeled an acid-tripping Sam and Dave or, perhaps, a Syd Barrett duck-walking in shiny pointed dress shoes. Khan has apparently spent the early teens honing a sleeker, denser, more Spector-esque sound, the raw scrape of, say, “Torture” moussed and primped into a wall-to-wall swirl of sensation. At its best, for instance in the unstoppable “I Got Made,” Khan balances a sharp, swaggering attack with the pillow-y lushness of a Morricone score. Or he allows bumping 1960s Motown bass-lines and crackling Blaxploitation wah wah solos to simmer under the giddy crescendos of girl-group-y “Thorn In Her Pride.” And single, “Bite My Tongue” (in the video a profanely hilarious Batman vs. Jesus duel) has the slanted drive of a Nuggets garage anthem, embellished with the brass and string swells lifted from James Brown.
More
We went to see Blue Jasmine on Sunday, and Cate Blanchett should totally get the Oscar for it. She can go from poised to poisoned in about 3 seconds -- and she has can add 20 years to her face just by the way she holds her mouth. The most squirm-worthy scene -- and also maybe the best -- is the one where she explains her sordid situation to two tweener boys she's babysitting at a diner over cokes. Amazing. Bobby Carnavale is pretty great, too, and Sally Hawkins. (Alec Baldwin is doing a variant on Jack Donaghy, but he's good that that, so why quibble?)
Sean called late Sunday to tell us that he'd gone down to Chicago Jazzfest with a pack of his friends and he wasn't sure what he'd seen (Robert Glasper, apparently), but LUPE FIASCO had come on stage!!! Very cool that he's getting the best out of the city...kind of jealous that he can just saunter over to the park for things like this.
Not the greatest video but... (it's not Sean's. I found it on the internet.)
KING KHAN AND THE SHRINES
Idle No More
Merge
BY JENNIFER KELLY
It’s been six years since King Khan and the Shrine’s soul-psych extravaganza What Is?, where the Montrealean garage revivalist channeled an acid-tripping Sam and Dave or, perhaps, a Syd Barrett duck-walking in shiny pointed dress shoes. Khan has apparently spent the early teens honing a sleeker, denser, more Spector-esque sound, the raw scrape of, say, “Torture” moussed and primped into a wall-to-wall swirl of sensation. At its best, for instance in the unstoppable “I Got Made,” Khan balances a sharp, swaggering attack with the pillow-y lushness of a Morricone score. Or he allows bumping 1960s Motown bass-lines and crackling Blaxploitation wah wah solos to simmer under the giddy crescendos of girl-group-y “Thorn In Her Pride.” And single, “Bite My Tongue” (in the video a profanely hilarious Batman vs. Jesus duel) has the slanted drive of a Nuggets garage anthem, embellished with the brass and string swells lifted from James Brown.
More
We went to see Blue Jasmine on Sunday, and Cate Blanchett should totally get the Oscar for it. She can go from poised to poisoned in about 3 seconds -- and she has can add 20 years to her face just by the way she holds her mouth. The most squirm-worthy scene -- and also maybe the best -- is the one where she explains her sordid situation to two tweener boys she's babysitting at a diner over cokes. Amazing. Bobby Carnavale is pretty great, too, and Sally Hawkins. (Alec Baldwin is doing a variant on Jack Donaghy, but he's good that that, so why quibble?)
Sean called late Sunday to tell us that he'd gone down to Chicago Jazzfest with a pack of his friends and he wasn't sure what he'd seen (Robert Glasper, apparently), but LUPE FIASCO had come on stage!!! Very cool that he's getting the best out of the city...kind of jealous that he can just saunter over to the park for things like this.
Not the greatest video but... (it's not Sean's. I found it on the internet.)
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Holy moly...it's Emefe
I don't know what you did to start your weekend, but I went to see Emefe, the 10 to 12-person Afro-Beat collective surrounding Miles Amtzen.
I spent all morning writing it up, so if you want more, you'll just have to see what I said at Blurt.
Namely...
Emefe + Mammal Dap 8/31/13, Northampton MA
Dates: August 31, 2013
Location: Iron Horse, Northampton MA
Emefe
BY JENNIFER KELLY
You don’t even realize the show has started until it has. Sometime in the complicated set-up for Emefe – 10 players, two drum stations, stacked keyboards, two guitars, a bass, a four-man horn line — all the shaker gourds have disappeared. Now towards the stairs that lead down to the bathroom, a syncopated beat has started to pound, a snaky conga line has formed, the bell-ends of trumpet, trombone and two saxophones are swinging side-to-side as the non-plugged in members of Emefe swagger in to “Stutter,” the opening track from their self-released album, Good Future. People in the audience are already sucked in to a swaying, blatting, stop-start Afro-beat groove before they have time to think about it. You can’t imagine how a sound this large – forget that, a band this large – will fit on the tiny Iron Horse stage. In fact, they’re taking up most of the dance floor, stomping and shaking in a circle, horns facing inward, a bleating, fluttering, agitated sound rising out of the center.
More
I spent all morning writing it up, so if you want more, you'll just have to see what I said at Blurt.
Namely...
Emefe + Mammal Dap 8/31/13, Northampton MA
Dates: August 31, 2013
Location: Iron Horse, Northampton MA
Emefe
BY JENNIFER KELLY
You don’t even realize the show has started until it has. Sometime in the complicated set-up for Emefe – 10 players, two drum stations, stacked keyboards, two guitars, a bass, a four-man horn line — all the shaker gourds have disappeared. Now towards the stairs that lead down to the bathroom, a syncopated beat has started to pound, a snaky conga line has formed, the bell-ends of trumpet, trombone and two saxophones are swinging side-to-side as the non-plugged in members of Emefe swagger in to “Stutter,” the opening track from their self-released album, Good Future. People in the audience are already sucked in to a swaying, blatting, stop-start Afro-beat groove before they have time to think about it. You can’t imagine how a sound this large – forget that, a band this large – will fit on the tiny Iron Horse stage. In fact, they’re taking up most of the dance floor, stomping and shaking in a circle, horns facing inward, a bleating, fluttering, agitated sound rising out of the center.
More
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