Too free-rangingly ruminative to ever play out on a public stage

Love this album, and rather like the way the review turned out...up today at Blurt online and also in the soon-to-hit-your-newsstand print issue.

MICK TURNER – Don’t Tell the Driver

Drag City

BY JENNIFER KELLY

Don’t Tell the Driver is not an opera, whatever Dirty Three guitarist Mick Turner might tell you. This languid, introspective, loosely drawn series of musical mood pieces is too diffuse and glancing, for one thing, insinuating but never quite laying out a story line of remembered love and idealized connection. For another, there’s not that much singing, just a couple of impossibly tender, breathy, vocal caresses from Caroline Kennedy-McCracken (she of the Plums, Deadstar and The Tupils), and one rather stunning performance Oliver Mann (who is, as it happens, an actual opera singer).

And lastly, Don’t Tell the Driver is far too gorgeously personal, too hushed, too subtle, too free-rangingly ruminative to ever play out on a public stage. Instead its chaotic swirls, its muted flares of brass, its clackety storms and ebbs of drumming (three percussionists, Kishore Ryan, James Wegener from Laughing Clowns and Ian Wadley all sound remarkably like the D3’s Jim White) seem destined to play out in private theaters—ours and Turner’s. In the dreamlike space this album inhabits, we, too, recall liaisons so immediate and overwhelming that a line like “Sometimes lover I can’t tell where your hair ends and the rest of the world begins” is not poetry but a literal description of the way things are.

DOWNLOAD: all of it.

Found long-lost Gary Higgin a pile under the desk

This record Red Hash was lost for, oh, maybe 30 years...a whispered-about folk classic recorded just before Gary Higgins was hauled off to jail. Ben Chasny dug up the songwriter (and the music, subsequently released on Chasny's label Drag City) and now Higgins sometimes even plays live (I saw him at SXSW once, and gotta say, if he takes that long to tune, it's no wonder he's only cut three albums in 40 years). So yeah, I didn't lose the album for that long. It's probably only been on my floor for 3-4 years, but it's good to have it back.



In other good news, I figured out Skype (I'm not expecting a prize for over-50 use of technology or anything, just saying), and had a video chat with my son last weekend, an unexpected joy. The big storms had just cleared over Chicago, and Sean had, being my son, just gotten back from a run through the apocalypse (and almost, per facebook, got himself blown off Navy Pier). The other cool thing (besides going for a jog through the tornado watch) that my son did this weekend was try out for the Arkansas Shakespeare Festival. He did something from Romeo and Juliet and his Trinculo monologue ("man or fish") from the Tempest and sang something by Scott Allen. It was for the regular company, not an internship, so it would be surprising if anything came of it, but how great that he tried. I should mention, maybe, that he did not get an audition slot when he applied, but went anyway on Saturday to see if they had walk-ins and they did. That kind of thing will pay off someday I think, and I am prouder of his grit than his talent (and, as you probably can surmise, I am plenty proud of his talent).

So onward and upward. Maybe I'll get paid for something this week.

Shade Perennial
Bottomless Pit
Comedy Minus One

By JENNIFER KELLY

“Rolling along like a middle child, happy as we had been in a while, forgot about you, myself too,” sings Tim Midyett in “Null Set,” sounding calm and centered in the space carved out for him. He sings in the midst of crashing guitar chords, blister-y bass, monstrous drum beats and firewalls of feedback, a typical maelstrom for this band formed in the wake of Silkworm drummer Michael Dalquist’s tragic death. This third full-length allows no let-up in the bludgeoning dissonance, the melancholic aggression that has characterized Bottomless Pit from the beginning, and yet it also has an edge of triumph to it, a brutal clarity that celebrates as much as it mourns.

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Clara Hill's Walk the Distance

Really beautiful new album from Berlin's Clara Hill...pitched somewhere between Schneider TM (who plays guitar on one track) and My Bloody Valentine. (Which is to say, it's electronically based, but has some very interesting wall-of-sound elements.)

This is maybe the most acoustic and song-like of the album's tracks, with the most overt vocals



This one's a bit rowdier and shoe-gazier. (Erg, shoe-gazier!)


If you're looking for more about Clara Hill, the Quietus -- fast becoming my favorite source for background on emerging artists -- just published a long interview.

Scary rabbit...the Nobunny conundrum

Nobunny the recording artist makes some of the music world's catchiest bubblegum garage, his albums, including the latest Secret Songs, a nonstop 1960s sock hop with nary a five o'clock shadow's worth of ambiguity or the most passing glimpse of hell. Nobunny, the performer, is truly disturbing, however, clad in a pants-less get-up with bondage gear and the world's dirtiest bunny mask.

So who is this guy, dissolute furry or uncomplicated party rocker? Both, neither. Just check the album out. It's a good one. (Out on Goner now.)

Sumie...softly devastating

A fragile, lovely collection of songs that might, a few years ago, have been described as freak folk, just guitar and a simple, ice-pure female voice. Sumie is the sister of the singer from Little Dragon, which, perhaps, will mean more to you than it does to me. She started singing and writing and recording songs after having two children, so she's stubborn and focused if nothing else. There's no sense of strain or chaos in this album, though...it's clear all the way through like water and beautiful. Check it out.





Her self-titled debut is out December 2nd on Bella Union

Jazz, lounge, dub...and a guest shot by Bad Brains' H.R.

I've been listening to the hard-to-classify Chaliwa from John Zorn protege Jamie Saft's New Zion Trio a good big lately, and just noticed that the singer on "Chant It Down" is H.R. from Bad Brains.

That's a surprise, because, for the most part, Chaliwa is wonderfully reticent and insinuating, an acoustic simmer of piano, stand-up bass and drums. The album lives in jazz but visits reggae -- you hear the dub influence mostly in a slinky backbeat.

Anyway, it's a really good album but fantastically hard (at least for me) to write about. Let's leave it to Sean Murphy at PopMatters, who wrote:

"An ostensibly straightforward ensemble, featuring [Jamie] Saft’s keyboards, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Craig Santiago, the trio manages to pull off a variety of sounds, ranging from narcotic lounge music (in a good way) to traditional piano jazz (think Bill Evans by way of Kingston) and darker-than-dread reggae meditations. On Chaliwa, the players double down on the dub, and the results are every bit as satisfying this time out."

You can read the whole review, including a good bit about Saft's other project Slobber Pup, here.





The album is out now on Veal Records.