Noel Torres, José Feliciano, y Otros are Worth It!

From my latest Sheep & Goats, over at Burnside Writers Collective:

You don’t look to the Managing Editor of Entertainment Weekly for music tips, but it was still jaw-dropping to read this in his post-Grammy editorial: “Mumford & Sons’ victory established folk rock as the most exciting and artful movement in music right now.” Do people really think that? Apparently so — EW ran a cover story on the “movement” the following week, and worship music has started biting the Mumfords’ style like they’re a new U2. Nothing against the Mumfords, who basically resemble what you’d get if Coldplay replaced ZZ Top in Back to the Future III, but surely folk rock is only the most exciting and artful music played by acoustic instruments, covered byEntertainment Weekly (a Time Warner company), and directed at English-speaking brains — if that. (I’d still take jazz, fwiw.)

Where I live, in the northern suburbs of Chicago, the winner of Most Exciting And Artful Musical Movement is currently banda from the state of Sinaloa, Mexico. Like English folk music, banda’s been around for a long time and is enjoying one of its periodic resurgences. If you’re seeking acoustic radio hits, the big swinging horn sections of Roberto Tapia, La Arrolladora Banda El Limón, and Banda El Recodo get as much radio play as the Mumfords, the Lumineers, and their ilk. One of our seven (!) Spanish-language FM stations recently changed its slogan from “Más Y Más Música” to “Banda Y Más,” which seems significant, though several other Latino genres are hot on banda’s heels. This is the cultural bounty of demographic shift, of course; the suburbs where I live and work are both younger and more Hispanic than the country at large. But if the last presidential election taught us anything, it’s that diversificación is sweeping the nation, so with any luck your radio waves and public library will soon carry some of the following, if they don’t already. (Or you can click on most of the titles below to stream them.)

(... and then you get reviews of the astounding Torres, the suave Felicianos, the dreamy Veronica Falls who don't really fit, the Dovells-like Los Caporales de Chihuahua, and more...)

This System of Survival Album is Worth It!

My heavily fictionalized experimental PopMatters review of a lovely microhouse CD:

I'm sure I left the drop around here somewhere.

Never Let 'em See You Sweat

Convinced I’d discovered System of Survival’s m.o. – Deny the body! Abdicate corporeality! – I decided to take them running through the forest preserve. All my family, we all sweat like stalactites (a natural phenomenon, simply what’s expected from us genetically), and these serene Italian DJs seemed the best antiperspirants on the global market. Listening to their debut Needle and Thread, it’s all straight lines and cool, crisp gestures, guest voices cut free from their bodies and processed like daemons severed from flesh (corpses don’t sweat) and jarred in a dry goods pantry, no moisture anywhere. These songs’ll keep for centuries. They’ll still be fresh when the roving hordes of cannibals take over.

I assume nobody sweats when they dance to SoS at the DJs’ home base of Circo Loco, DC10, Ibiza (address yr fanmail there), unless they happen to spot one of those lunatic clowns that rove in hordes across the dance floor, exacting flesh as tribute. Since clowns held my family hostage in youth, I can’t look at them, so as I was saying I decided to visit the forest preserve instead. At a picnic pavilion, the spectre of a child’s birthday party sent a tremor through my bowels, but fortunately they hadn’t invited any clowns, unless you count the apish Dad trying to finagle kids into the bouncy house – “Cmon Tyler! It’ll be FUN!” – without regard for the sanctity of their youthful limbs and psyches. After staring at this sordid scene a moment with murderous rage settling in my chest like chutney, I decided to run it off.

As soon as I hit the forest path my iPod did that thing where it shuffles the playlist, I have no idea how to turn that off, so an ordered analysis of Needle and Thread was out of the question. First up was “Phat Trax”, which reputedly has to do with Chicago house, but whose midrange synth squiggles sounded more Krautrock without a backbeat. (But maybe that’s what Chicago house evokes?) Disembodied dude shouts “Bep!” every so often, echoing, and a cymbal trades off with a bass-y squelch and a two-note piano figure for place of prominence, one falling while another rises. As I ran and listened, nature grew neater. Not “neat” like “Wow Tyler, isn’t that spiderweb neat?”, but Apollonian, ordered, the exquisite craft of a spider shitting out thread and organizing it into God’s mathematics. SoS don’t really capture the “shitting out” part of the equation, but they do God’s math like nobody’s bizness, and anyway maybe they’re just taking the broader view: how all nature’s brutality – sweating, devouring, fucking, um, excreting, basically anything involving an orifice that tunnels inside your skin – belongs to a system so logical we can’t even comprehend it. The spider spins the web, catches the fly, numbs it down, spins it ‘round, sucks out its liquefied innards (I may be forgetting a step), and the fly becomes a new web for his friends. It’s a system of survival, at least for the spider.

We humans have what you might call “extrapolated” on this idea of survival, which is why we created minimal techno and birthday parties. When “Nihil” came on, I thought, OK, this’ll be the one that breaks down the Apollonian facade, but really its rackety denials are just as serene as the rest; it’d slip neatly into the background of one of those swank cocktail parties where everyone struggles to pretend they’re not actually eating or drinking. (As would the smooth-jazz-leaning “I Can’t Find Food”.) Soul diva singing something close to words, switching up with an attackless whoosh of a riff, and then a bare-bones beat and handclaps that aren’t actually handclaps. The beat manages to be tricky but smooth. “Genny Casanova”, which PJ Harvey should cover, is your basic lady muttering in foreign tongue over motorik groove, and its wash of cymbal coincided nicely with me running through a swarm of gnats. Little whip sounds indicated I should be whipping some part of my body, probably arms, abruptly and forcefully, and I complied because that’s what you do with gnats.

Ascending a hill into a clearing overlooking a sunset field full of cows in various states of repose, and all of them chewing, I stopped to mop my forehead and reflect that of all God’s creatures there’s none grosser than the gentle cow. A real slap in the faces of the anti-corporeal crowd, these beasts: four digestive chambers, endless regurgitation, mountains of feces and sore nipples, and each of them probably knows someone who’s been slaughtered. As their presence saddened and reassured me, my jaw began tapping up and down in time to the music (my wife detests this habit), a sad and reassuring downtempo whose disembodied woman sang “Go to sleep my little baby ... everybody’s gone,” and some chopped snippet of a phrase ... “God is good”? “Body’s dead”? Vice versa? The name of this bovine accompaniment: “Moovin Groovin”. System of Survival understand more than they let on.

This Wadada Leo Smith album is TOTALLY WORTH IT!

Here in full is my PopMatters review of Wadada Leo Smith's jazz/classical/space/civics masterclass Ten Freedom Summers. Still sounds great every time it comes on.

All those descriptions of “monumental” make sense. Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers is first of all BIG: a four-disc 19-track monument to the Civil Rights movement, performed by the 70-year-old Smith on trumpet along with the nine-member Southwest Chamber Music ensemble and the latest incarnation of Smith’s Golden Quartet (or Quintet, if two people are drumming). Whenever he can corral them all to perform the thing live, the concert lasts three nights and covers audiences with heaps of music: free improv, modal jazz grooves, and classical composition including (why not?) a string quartet movement. Though bracketed by tributes to Dred Scott and Martin Luther King, Jr., the work is so sprawling it can’t even be constrained by its Civil Rights framework. Songs keep spilling off like free-associative ideas with ungainly titles: “Buzzsaw: The Myth of a Free Press”, “The D.C. Wall: A War Memorial for All Times”, and so on. Monuments seek to overwhelm, and Freedom does its best.

Is there precedent in jazz for such a work? Cecil Taylor’s box sets are even bigger, but they lack a connective framework beyond their performance scenarios. Wynton Marsalis has written extended works for large ensembles, notably the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Fields, but unlike Marsalis, Smith refuses to put too fine a point on his ideas. Freedom forgoes singers, and you never catch it winking at the audience; there’s no Marsalisian pastiche or cutesy humor here. Smith’s music speaks with a statesman’s seriousness. These pieces transform their subjects into musical invention and moods; they’re not literal or programmatic. Freedom‘s closest forebears are contemporary classical pieces—“Creative Music”, the AACM veteran might say—that invite meditation and make their points through abstraction.

This shouldn’t imply that you need a music degree to enjoy it. More than anything, Freedom is about sound: the tangible, physically beautiful sounds of Smith’s imperative trumpet and of different instruments in combination, testing their own limits. Most of the lengthy pieces are split into distinct sonic areas, with each area receiving the spotlight in turn. “The Freedom Riders Ride” (song 10, if you’re keeping track) builds from an uncertain opening, the Quartet scattered and thinking out loud, into a ravishing group improvisation. Anthony Davis’s lush piano chords coexist with stripped-bare dissonances, and tempos shift according to some precise telepathy. Then, four minutes in, an ominous stop-start section tumbles into a blazing free walk, with trumpet, piano, bass and Susie Ibarra’s drums all racing along in the sort of collective freedom that jazz exists to celebrate—beautiful beautiful beautiful. But it doesn’t last. Things fall apart, as things do, to focus on the different instruments—sawing bass, skittering drums—building until another fast walk ends the piece. If lightning-fast swing is the reason you turn to jazz, Freedom has plenty such passages, but its explorations of space and stillness are just as crucial.

Other indelible moments:

—the fuguelike section in “Emmett Till: Defiant, Fearless”, where strings, harp, and quartet enter bit by bit and swirl into cacophony;

—in “Buzzsaw”, an aggressive, mournful groove, the contrast of John Lindberg’s bowed bass against propulsive piano, drums, and trumpet;

—in “Thurgood Marshall and Brown vs. Board of Education: A Dream of Equal Education, 1954” (whew!), the swinging bass groove that gradually disintegrates over the course of eight minutes;

—the smearing, sliding strings of “Black Church (String Quartet No. 3)”;

—the times that recall Miles Davis’s “In a Silent Way”, with Smith’s clear tone soaring over wobbly rhythm section drones, and sometimes fighting against them, in “America, Parts 1, 2 & 3” and “Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 381 Days”.

For all these and more, credit Smith’s musicians and his compositional methods. Like many modern jazz and classical composers, Smith has developed his own system for organizing improv. He calls it “Ankhrasmation,” a graphic notation that helps musicians coordinate their jumping-off points. While he doesn’t seem to have used that system in Freedom, his goal is similar. Pre-ordained motives move inexorably to moments of spontaneous creation and back again. Even during the slow parts, when the music threatens to crawl to a stop or turn into a hazy Terence Blanchard score, violin and cello and trumpet hold their notes slightly out of tune, vibrato and dissonance beating with portent, and the effect is riveting. Every instrument pops; sound and silences pulse with vitality.

If Freedom resembles a monument, at least in my mind, it’s the Gateway Arch in St. Louis—“just a big piece of modern art on the bank of the river,” a friend once affectionately described it. It’s abstract and even austere, sure, but that only makes it more universally accessible. A short walk from the courthouse where Dred Scott sued for his freedom, the Arch embodies different shades of symbolic meaning. Depending on your sympathies, it can be a soul-stirring paean to Western expansion, a costly reminder of American imperialism, or a fun place to go on a field trip. All sorts of stuff, good and bad, baked into an inverted steel catenary. Freedom lacks the Arch’s simplicity of line, but its takeaways are just as complex. It’s never simply a celebration or a lament, a history lesson or a big piece of modern art. You don’t have to choose, Smith seems to say; this music contains everything.

Freedom is even sort of shaped like the Arch; it climbs to a rarefied peak. The album’s 24-minute centerpiece, “Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964”, stretches austere abstraction to its limits, but it contains moments that rival Stravinsky’s famous Rite chord for time-stopping sound, moments you could reach out, touch, crawl inside, and settle down with. It’s quantum music theory: the strum of a harp contains the world. Live with this music long enough and it seeps into the rest of your life. These days I can’t look at Robert Caro’s massive LBJ biography, or even think about America’s elongated battle over health care reform, without hearing the roiling timpani that define “Great Society”, giving voice to slow-motion legislative wars in every age.

Monuments overwhelm, but they do so by speaking to us personally. Like visiting a sacred site or reading Tolstoy or Proust, listening to Freedom is an emotional and intellectual luxury, a chance to commune with greatness. Years after I’d taken my last field trip to the Arch, I graduated from school and moved back to St. Louis, for the first time living on my own in a cramped little apartment. One day I parked at the library and walked to the river, and as the Arch loomed before me I was overcome by emotion. Besides being a symbol of Western expansion, the Arch had become my expansion, at once my freedom and homecoming, my destiny tied to the country’s destiny. Ten Freedom Summers speaks like a great civic monument. In four and a half hours, Wadada Leo Smith writes one of America’s defining events in sound, and the story is all of ours.

[10/10]

This Kottarashky Album Probably Isn't Worth It...

... unless you are stoned and throwing money around. Nonetheless, here's the PopMatters review in full, because you like jokes about Bulgarians, Augustus Pablo, and Blossom. Because you are stoned.

Dub vamps! Get your one-chord dub vamps! Only you know whether you need any more one-chord dub vamps sitting around the house. Don’t worry; this is a safe place where no one will judge you. Not like Bulgaria. Did you know that in Bulgaria you can get one to six years just for possessing an Augustus Pablo album? Even if, like most people, you don’t actually listen to your Augustus Pablo albums, just keeping them on your shelf is enough. Upon entering jail they confiscate your keys, your driver’s license, and your melodica. It’s gotten so bad that a charity group, the Sofian Mission to Assist the Reclamation of Melodicas (SMARM), has begun teaching prison melodica bands the Balkan Brass repertoire. These bands require heavy amplification but they’re the New Sound of Tomorrow, polkain’ for a cause, and they need your support. Only beware—if you’re planning a mission trip to Bulgaria, the law does not distinguish between various dub-inspired world musics, so leave that Cachaito CD at home. Hillary Clinton’s got enough on her plate without having to clean up your international incident.

The selector here is DJ Kottarashky, aka mild-mannered Bulgarian architect Nikola Gruev, who combs the countryside with panache and recording devices looking for songs he can steal. Sorry,appropriate. Better yet, preserve for all time in a format young tastemakers will actually wanna listen to. He’s like the digital Béla Bartók, building bouncy little ditties around the music of The Folk. I do not know his financial arrangements with The Folk, so I’ll trust he does the right thing by them. Kottarashky’s 2009 album Opa Hey! manipulated voices, accordions, clarinets, brass, and surely melodicas in a variety of ways. It was fairly catchy and vibrant. This new one, Demoni, is something different.

You see, Kottarashky wanted to play live shows, so he formed a band and, because he is a huge fan of Joey Lawrence in the Blossom pilot, named his band the Rain Dogs. (In Bulgaria, compulsory reruns of Blossom air night and day.) Kottarashky lets the band surround his folksy samples with clarinet solos, mellow guitar patterns, and dubby riddims. Everything’s smooth and seamless, and the structure of opener “Aman Aman” is typical. Vaguely reggae syncopation sets up a groove, bass and drums are precise, percussion is worth listening to, solo solo solo, and then more sampled elements enter and the whole thing crescendos to the end. The brass lines and shrill woodwind warbles betray their Balkan roots, but everything else speaks the universal language of chill-out. At one point New Zealand singer Tui Mamaki stops by to recite some word jazz, but she’s the only one who messes with the formula.

It’s difficult to love or hate this album. On the one hand, the band and its leader obviously made their music with thought and care. On the other hand, they didn’t think or care about playing actual hooks. Some songs come close: the soul riff of “Doctore”, the opening accordion line of “Pancho Says”, and the pretty four-chord pattern of “Put a Blessing On” all create indelible moments, but they float disconnected from the rest of their songs while samples enter and dissipate. Kottarashky sometimes seems like a grinning vendor of sounds, spreading out his samples one by one on a table of Rain Dogs groove.

Of course, that’s what you expect with dub albums. But unlike the polite Demoni, great dub music messes with your head, like some grinning sound vendor out of a Jodorowsky movie. Sounds appear at unpredictable intervals, mixed louder than they should be as though they’re being dreamed. You want dub to lull you into the all-enveloping bass and then you turn around and OMG IT’S A HUMAN HEAD ON A PIKE. Or something. I am certainly not saying all Bulgarians put human heads on pikes; I’m not even saying that they should. All I’m saying is, if you gotta get busted for owning a world-dub-fusion album, you should pick something more interesting than this.

This Riz MC album is Worth It!

Not a trick -- an illusion.

From my PopMatters review of Riz MC's MICroscope -- he's a British rapper, don't you know -- some sentences:

Let's all do the smokey kokey!

When Riz turns to love, he sounds like he’s reading from the Harlequin Historical series. He tells his lady he wants to “be the first to get a taste of your creamy truth”, which is just not something you say in public. And then there’s this: “Now I’m diggin’ in your trenches, bending you / And you’re No Man’s Land, wanna enter you.” I defer to Babette Gladney from Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise: “I don’t care what these people do as long as they don’t enter or get entered.”

The beats sound really good—deep bass shudders, sproingy kick drums, a giant snare backbeat in “People”, and transient random-noise bursts with the MC’s announcements. DJ Lazersonic sometimes slips into hackneyed social alienation stuff—“the world is a noisy scary place, so that’s what music should sound like,” he seems to say—but he brings plenty of momentum and cool effects, so the beats actually sell you on the alienation.

Riz sees much with his actor’s eye, and he turns his portraits of other people around on himself.

The beats by Lazersonic and Redinho churn and pop, squeal and squirm, and Riz tries to take the edge off by cracking jokes. Sometimes those jokes are terrible. He coins the word “trashionable” for the gentrification anthem “All in the Ghetto”; a bemused look at the economic crisis climaxes with the line, “You take the piss, I’ll chop off your schlong.” But that just means he’ll try anything for a laugh, a quality as endearing as it is annoying.

Riz’s originals flip around in all sorts of directions; processing their beats feels like trying to hold freshly caught fish. The remixes just tend to pick one thing and do it over and over for five minutes. The winning exception is True Tiger’s huge and heartrending remix of “Get On It”. In what may be dubstep’s New Romantic moment, it’ll make you grab whatever light source is handy and wave it in the air. It has little to do with the rest of MICroscope, but one taste of its creamy truth won’t be enough.

This Rap Soundtrack Is WORTH IT, Despite Reservations (BEWARE CUSSING)

OK, I really wanna see this.

Here's the PopMatters review of the Something From Nothing: the Art of Rap soundtrack, which is good to have around the house, though it does begin to wear after awhile and could be much much better:

Eric B. & Rakim’s “Follow the Leader” is the greatest song in the history of mankind. While Eric B. whisks you into outer space on an impossibly deep bass squelch and Baby Huey horn stabs, Rakim lays down one of the most astounding solos ever committed to tape. Focus too much on the lyrics and you might miss his musical accomplishment: he unpacks the implications of Eric B.’s beat. Changing his rhythmic pattern with every line, Rakim traces the outlines of a core cadence that he never states directly. More than even the drums, Rakim propels the music using only the perfectly coordinated movements of his mouth and throat. That he does all this while saying actual words—quotable words (“I’m everlasting, I can go on for days and days”), words of winking audacity (“In this journey of the journal I’m the journalist / Am I eternal or an eternalist?”)... well, there’s just nothing like it, in music or art or literature or anywhere else you might care to look.

OK, maybe a couple other things compare. Jay-Z’s “99 Problems”; Ice Cube’s “The Nigga You Love to Hate”; The Coup’s “Breathing Apparatus”; A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario”; Mr. Lif’s “Heavy Artillery”; Eminem’s “Stan”—each audacious song becomes the greatest song in the history of mankind any time I listen to it. Of those, only “Follow the Leader” appears on the soundtrack toSomething From Nothing: The Art of Rap, Ice-T’s new documentary about the skill and craft that go into rapping. That’s fine; picking overlooked songs for soundtrack albums is a fool’s game, akin to yelling at people in the comments of their year-end Top 10 lists. Whatever your beef, at least listen to what this compilation is trying to tell you. But that’s the problem with this soundtrack: while it may make for a pretty good listen, it’s useless as an aesthetic manifesto. It doesn’t live up to its audacious subtitle.

First, the “pretty good listen” part. You can’t fault a compilation for roaring into your life with N.W.A.’s dive-bombing “Straight Outta Compton”, Run-DMC’s obnoxious “Sucker M.C.’s”, and “Follow the Leader”. Further along, Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock show up with “It Takes Two”, which still feels like waking up inside the party of your dreams. Speaking of dreams, Schoolly D’s proto-gangsta “P.S.K. What Does It Mean?” is all whooshing nightmare: a gleeful sicko picks up a woman, discovers she’s a prostitute, and then goes to a party and pulls his gun on an MC for biting his style. Throw in Afrika Bambaataa’s “Don’t Stop… Planet Rock” and Nas’s “The World Is Yours”, and you’ve got yourself a big handful of rap essentials. No matter how much you love them, you need to hear them just to understand the conversation.

The album veers from such obvious tentpoles to overlooked gems. “As High As Wu-Tang Get”, a rarely anthologized song nestled within the mammoth Wu-Tang Forever, features a great verse of Method Man spitting so far behind the beat, he sounds like he’s stepping on chewing gum. Public Enemy represents not with one of their many classics, but with “Harder Than You Think”, a blazing song from their little-heard 2007 album. And since a good DJ feature never hurts, the soundtrack includes Mantronix’s largely instrumental “King of the Beats”. (Confidential to Shaun of the Dead: it’s not electro, it’s hip-hop!) Every so often a rapper appears between songs with one of Something From Nothing’s freestyle demostrations. These snippets are often impressive and they help keep the album moving along.

So far, so listenable. But as you listen, questions arise. Maybe seeing the movie clears things up. (No theaters near me are showing it.) There must be a reason, for instance, that the soundtrack producer picked Q-Tip’s pleasant little sing-song “Vivrant Thing (Club Mix)” over Tribe’s “Scenario”, which features the most joyful song lyric in the history of mankind: “So here’s Busta Rhymes with the scenario.” (If you’ve never heard the song, Busta goes on to destroy the world and rebuild it in the image of a dungeon dragon.) And there must be some rationale for including, out of 16 full-length songs, only one by a woman and two by non-New Yorkers. Poor MC Lyte appears next to last, in the Token spot, with her so-so “Cold Rock a Party”—and not even the more vivrant Bad Boy Remix, which would’ve at least let us hear Missy Elliott.

But then, giving the Virginia-raised Missy some time would have meant tentatively acknowledging the South, which is apparently off limits. OK, I understand, this is just a movie soundtrack and you can’t cover everything, so I will simply calm down and ask the soundtrack as politely as possible: where the fuck is the South? Because the cover of this innocuous soundtrack is emblazoned with the huge words “THE ART OF RAP”, implying that its contents will summarize the genre for proverbial men from Mars and other newbies. And IF I’M NOT MISTAKEN, Southern rap was arguably the most vivrant musical genre last decade. Of all music! Not just rap! It blew up the characteristic rhyming styles of Missy, Outkast, and Ludacris, who prioritize unique musical shapes that often twist their words out of place. The South produced production auteurs—including Mannie Fresh, Organized Noize, and, if we’re counting Virginia, Timbaland and the Neptunes—who reshaped rap’s sound. Weezy! Jeezy! Crunk! Um, Bushwick Bill, since it sounds like I’m calling dwarfs! Heck, Ice-T could’ve just slipped in the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” and he would have spared you this rant. Is the South’s embarrassment of riches not “art”?

Such omissions make Something From Nothing more conservative than it should have been, which means its portrait of rap is too conservative. Most everything here follows a similar template: male New Yorkers rapping virtuosically about how great they are, using the time-tested metaphors of money and violence to make their points, with beats that favor hard ambiance over hooks. There’s at least one exception to each of those criteria—Run-DMC weren’t all that virtuosic, for instance, and hooks don’t get any bigger than “It Takes Two”. But Big Daddy Kane’s “Raw”, Gang Starr’s “Full Clip”, Das EFX’s “Real Hip-Hop”, Ultramagnetic MCs’ “Ego Trippin’”, and Nas all fit the profile exactly, and the others come close. Each of these songs sounds fine on its own, but the overall effect gets a little old. Not as old as Das EFX’s “figgedy-faggot” bigoty-bullshit, but old nonetheless.

Something From Nothing ultimately sells rap short. Anybody who’ll give rap the time of day knows about virtuosic poetry. What’s missing here is more audacity—those times you can sense rappers achieving things that surprise themselves and us. Think of Jay-Z impersonating the cop in “99 Problems”; Eminem (who appears in the movie) flying free of the beat yet keeping perfect time in “Stan”; Roxanne Shanté beating U.T.F.O. at their own game; Trina and Gillette taunting the pants off everybody else’s men; or Nicki Minaj destroying the world and rebuilding it in the image of a “Monster”. And audacity doesn’t necessarily mean virtuosity. Witness the Ying Yang Twins, the Sugarhill Gang, and L’Trimm, all of whom continue to echo throughout the culture. Whether the producer of this soundtrack approves of all those examples hardly matters. They’ve all contributed to the art of rap, and together they tell a richer, more thrilling story than the one on Something From Nothing.

This Album by The Very Best is Totally Worth It!

One of these men is Philip Seymour Hoffman.

From the PopMatters review of The Very Best's MTMTMK, some sentences:

A slam-bang dance pop album of the first order, MTMTMK is technically an Africa-meets-Western-pop hybrid, because The Very Best is comprised of a Malawian singer who met a Swedish producer in London.


MTMTMK is like a Western pop album that’s decided to suss out all the Africanisms inherent in Western pop.


For instance, most of the album’s beats are derived from the Afro-Cuban clave rhythm, which shape-shifts and echoes out of music across the world—highlife, reggaeton, Bo Diddley, “Pass That Dutch”, Zumba workouts, and I even hear a large-scale impliedclave in the melody of Britney’s “Till the World Ends”.


In the single “Yoshua Alikute”, the clave beat moves from drums to synth and adopts a whole different character—it’s sexier and smoother, as though twirling you around the dance floor with a rose in its teeth. Hugo accordingly inserts whoooshing sounds.

This My Darkest Days Album is NOT Worth It.

Hang loose, Satan.

Some lines from the PopMatters review, unread by millions, of a wanton band of Canadian boredom-rockers:

This album isn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but then, My Darkest Days don’t really do “imagination.” 


MDD’s hook, the thing that sets them apart from similarly industrious Canadian rasp-rock bands Theory of a Deadman and mentors Nickelback, is their embrace of electronic and R&B music. It’s a tentative no-homo embrace, sure, but MDD dabble in textures you might find on darkwave label Metropolis—sinister keyboards and programmed beats against thick walls of guitar, occasionally sounding sort of like the Birthday Massacre. Also they cover Joe’s “Stutter”.


Joe’s original was all stutter, with the beat and Joe and special guest Mystikal caroming off one another, spinning a tangled web of paranoid hypocrisy. MDD just play the song. It’s got a backbeat; they can’t lose it. Scratchy-voiced Matt Walst stutters like he’s reading the stutters off notebook paper. There’s not even a guitar solo, the rock equivalent of a Mystikal verse. These guys are so meat-and-potatoes they sometimes skip the potatoes.


There’s nothing sick or twisted about Sick and Twisted Affair, which manages to make wild sex sound about as wild as carrying seven-dollar beers back from the concession stand.


Most of the songs work grungy variations on Nickel-backbeats. There’s a ballad. I’m sure My Darkest Days tour the seediest underbellies of society guided only by loins and id, but their music sounds like sandpaper—and not the sexy kind!

This Balkan Brass Best-Of is Sort of Worth It

The PopMatters review of Golden Horns, by the Boban i Marko Markovic Orkestar, who I've seen live and they were very good... but you'll see:

More swerve!

Maybe you have to see them live. In Chicago back in 2008, the headlong rush was incredible—virtuosic but off-kilter, like flying along in one of those Indiana Jones mine cars only perfectly, surrounded by control and chaos all at once. Whatever musical devices they used to get that effect—percussion perched on top of the beat? horns going slightly sharp? certainly the solos were more unhinged—the rush comes across only occasionally on Golden Horns, a compilation from the Boban i Marko Marković Orkestar, Serbia’s premier brass band led by father Boban (flugelhorn) i son Marko (trumpet).

This is frustrating, if not unexpected. After all, “you gotta see ‘em live” is one of the biggest clichés of the recorded music era. (Maybe people said the same thing about unsatisfying sheet music—“This Mozart aria reads OK, but you gotta hear it live, man.”) Album opener “Khelipe e Cheasa” promises adventure, excitement, thrills, chills and sljivovica: somebody wolf-whistles, tenor horns blat and men shout “Hep!” on the offbeats, saxman Erol Demirov calls ducks, and the horn tuttis are surrounded by little warbling countermelodies. A party! But for all its promises, “Khelipe e Cheasa” doesn’t thrill. It’s a very pleasant song; the band switches from hook to ingratiating hook with professional ease, and their chops should make us proud to be human beings. The song closes with an aggressive shimmering cacophony, some horns trilling away while others interject melodic lines, and it’s all very impressive, but it’s hard not to feel like something’s missing.

Much brass band music, whether Balkan or banda, straightlaced Sousa or downtown New York, walks a particular sort of high-tension wire. The prevailing texture of this stuff is homogeneous. It’s got counterpoint—a few horns work the melody, some other horns work the harmony, and maybe someone else throws in a countermelody—but everyone’s working together towards a unified musical effect. What keeps things interesting is the threat of heterogeneity. The more musicians you get together, the greater the probability that something will go wrong intentionally or otherwise. The parts will diverge and someone’ll start playing an unexpected counterpoint that doesn’t quite fit, even as it ratchets up the excitement. This is simple math, the arithmetic of obnoxia.

On record at least, the Orkestar isn’t obnoxious enough. In the formulation of writer David Wondrich, they’ve got a lot of drive but not enough swerve. (Wondrich: “Whenever there’s a proper, legit, ‘dicty’ way of phrasing the tune in question and a musician plays something arbitrary, irrational, spontaneous, unexplainable, that’s the swerve.”) Partly this is a matter of expectations. You listen to most brass band music, including Balkan brass, with the expectation of craziness. Fanfare Ciocărlia plays chewy staccatos that threaten to become pure rhythm. Yolanda Pérez’s banda goes so fast and sharp you fear it’ll topple over. Something’s bound to go wrong. Indeed, the Orkestar plays up these expectations, rapping a song called “Sljivovica”, shouting “Hep!” and “Hey!”, subtitling the 2007 album that contributed several of these tunes Brass Madness. Not Brass Skill or Virtuoso Brass or Brass Who’ve Worked Really Hard to Cross Over. No, these guys claim to be mad crazy; they just don’t sound like it here. Their largely instrumental songs are about parties, but they don’t bring the party itself. They’ve premeditated every “Hep!” and “Hey!”

That’s not to say I couldn’t listen to them for a while. Golden Horns compiles some fine moments, from the ‘70s car-chase tribute “Dzumbus Funk” to the burnished spaghetti Western vibe of “Obećanje”. Besides their trademark polkas, the Markovićs and their drumline touch on all sorts of rhythms: funk, reggaeton, ska, swing, you name it, and that’s not counting the two limp dance remixes tacked onto the end. They throw in winking touchstones like Mozart’s 40th Symphony (you know: “dunaNA dunaNA dunaNAHNA! dunaNA dunaNA dunaNA!”) and, in the album’s most thrilling moment, a live version of “Hava Naguila” whose swerve comes from its playful tempo changes. Their tunes are catchy and their burbling arrangements always carry plenty of momentum. Balkan brass could do worse than these genteel ambassadors.

The Orkestar sort of reminds me of two rock groups I love: Sonic Youth and Lightning Bolt. They’ve fashioned unique styles for themselves, you could imagine them working minor variations on those styles until the world ends, and they all nod to a transgressive craziness that, at this point, you know they’ll never actually deliver. For all their noise, Lightning Bolt basically play groovy dadrock, and all the Markovićs’ party promises amount to enjoyable family music for public lawns. Go see ‘em live. The adults drink, the kids dance, sometimes vice versa, and everyone has a fine time before driving home in their SUVs. The group’s virtuosity is never in doubt. If it was, they might sound more exciting, but they’d have trouble getting gigs and you’d be way less likely to hear them.

This Adam Lambert album is NOT Worth It, unless you are a SUPERFAN

Hola, partidistas del Glamberto! If you are moved to comment, please do so with etiquette and decorum. I LIKE HIM, REALLY. AND I DON'T THINK HE NEEDS TO BE MORE GAY OR LESS GAY. (And really, why is nobody calling me on the terrible Ed Lover joke? Just godawful.)

My PopMatters review of Glambert's Trespassing has been a fruitful commentary magnet, so you should definitely click on over there and read all the passion one man can inspire. But here's the review in full:

"Trespassing"? Yeah, my ass.

Let’s get something straight: Trespassing is not Adam Lambert’s “big gay dance-club album” (as one illustrious publication put it) any more than Savage Garden was Savage Garden’s big gay pop album or Songs from the West Coast was Elton John’s big gay roots album. With Trespassing, Lambert becomes the first out solo artist to score a number one album—cigars all around!—but queer identity barely shows up in the songs themselves. The pronouns are mostly “you”, and the innuendos pretty much top out at “straight jacket” and “Such a beautiful release / You inside of me”. Everything else—ignoring “no trespassing” signs, partying all night, enjoying naked love—is hedonism available any day of the week in Pink or Ke$ha songs, on classic rock radio or blues clubs or wherever. This isn’t a knock against the album; that’ll come in a minute. But taken at face value, Trespassing reads straight or gay: however you want it. Take the subject of “Kickin’ In”, the one who puts her shot glass down and asks for another round. If you hear her as a drag queen, you probably read about it on Twitter.

Screw Twitter. I’m too busy trying to figure out whether the drag queen’s friend Eddie, who’s got words that rhyme and a dirty mind, is some outdated Ed Lover reference.

Anyway, heard at face value, “Kickin’ In” is the best song here—produced by Pharrell Williams in strutting MJ knockoff mode, with mysterious synth percussion that makes me laugh like his Britney jams did more than a decade ago. (Remember “Boys”? Now, don’t you think Glambert should cover it? Let’s start a petition.) Lambert sings in octaves, his party starter tenor laced with the menace of his impossibly clear falsetto. There’s a cool breakdown with a kaleidoscopic array of Glamberts leering and shouting, as though you’re viewing him through the bottom of an empty tumbler. Pharrell also produced the opener “Trespassing”, a funky march with handclaps and a bassline that swings like a Chic-y monkey. Speaking of Chic, guitar hero Nile Rogers shows up on “Shady”, a reasonably funky Lester Mendez production that inhabits the same freak-infested clubs as Ke$ha, with salacious vocal swoops out of the Pussycat Dolls’ “Buttons”. These songs are all on the album’s first half, seven uptempo dance tunes ranging from really good to pretty good (“Cuckoo”, “Naked Love”) to forgettable (“Pop That Lock”, inexplicable second single “Never Close Our Eyes”). The kick drums stomp; the synths are state-of-the-charts; song lengths fill a narrow range from 3:00 to 4:08.

Here’s why I mention song lengths. Almost from the start of American Idol, fans and critics speculated about which contestant would use the show’s format to break molds and shift paradigms, or to rebel against the format itself. To date on Idol, only two contestants have fit the bill: Sanjaya Malakar, who demonstrated that the public has terrible taste, and Adam Lambert, who proved the opposite. Even Joshua Ledet, Season 11’s insanely talented gospel-soul screamer, fits the Idol mold: an attractive person singing a song well, usually in a way we’re accustomed to hearing it sung, and receiving a reward. In contrast, Lambert took over Season Eight, mentoring the other contestants, doling out his own rewards (“Mad World”) and punishments (“Ring of Fire”), and using the format to establish himself as the country’s most vital entertainer. Despite his second-place finish, he owned the show; he was bigger than the Simons. (Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield: “Having Adam around seems to cheer everybody up, including the other singers, who know the pressure’s off. Hell, even Simon looks happy.”) If Season Eight—or Idol itself—is remembered artistically centuries from now, it’ll be for Glambert’s performances.

After the season ended, the question—the worry—became, “How does he translate this persona into a recording career?” Idol gave Lambert the gift of constraints; he kept his songs to a certain length so the producers wouldn’t give him the stiletto boot, because what fun would that’ve been? He sang MJ and Johnny Cash because he had to, upending audience expectations in the process. On-stage, Lambert was a big-hearted rebel, but the show’s narrow parameters gave him something to rebel against. As my wife feverishly downloaded his singles, there was something disappointing about hearing “Black or White” apart from the Idol stage—it simply sounded like a really good singer’s cover version, but not like the world historical chokehold of the previous night.

So unfortunately, the answer to that worried question remains, “He hasn’t figured it out yet”. Like his first album For Your Entertainment, Trespassing disappoints because it’s Lambert playing on pop’s terms and sometimes narrowing the terms unnecessarily. He hires the same big-name Top 40 writers and producers that everyone hires—heck, even Entertainment featured pomp-rock guys from The Darkness and Muse alongside Max Martin and Shellback. His songs all run about the same length—yes, pop singles are supposed to be short, but pop albums from Erasure to Big & Rich to Madonna have been unafraid to stretch out musically. Trespassing deviates from the big beat formula on its second ballad-heavy half, notably on the lite industrial groove of “Chokehold” and the Wainwright-y falsetto warbling in “Outlaws of Love”. But “Outlaws”, like its neighbors in Ballad Land, isn’t much of a song. The second half gets pretty dispiriting, especially if you shell out for the version with three “bonus” tracks, which are like ending the school year with some bonus homework. 

Most worryingly, for all their talk of trespass and release and lock-popping, Glambert’s songs unleash very little Glambert. On the solemn ballad “Underneath”, Lambert sings, “Underneath, under my skin / Underneath the depths of my sin / Look at me, now do you see?” Well, no actually, we don’t. Not that Lambert needs to provide a blow-by-blow account of his “sin”, but most of his lyrics amount to workmanlike clichés. “Tower of Babel has fallen down again”; “Let’s just stay awake until we grow older”; “I’m swingin’ off of my hinges / I’m cocked and I’m ready to go”—these ideas have been expressed better elsewhere and could’ve been expressed by anyone. I should also point out that the Five Man Electrical Band came up with more creative “No Trespassing” signs.

So while I’m rooting for the guy and his amazingly versatile screeches, he still doesn’t know how to make pop music work for him, rather than the other way around. Other people do. Take the big gay examples from up top. Elton John’s “Original Sin” and Savage Garden’s “Santa Monica” are both strange and beautiful songs that become more poignant if you hear them as gay monologues. Lambert’s songs don’t work that way—“Outlaws”, his closest contender, is too flatly written to achieve strangeness, beauty, or poignancy. But it’s not just old music that’s showing him up. This year in mainstream pop, fun., Graffiti6, and Dev have all packed their albums and singles with more weirdo personality than Glambert’s self-proclaimed “world of truth”. Whether his songs would improve with more queer self-expression is anyone’s guess, but he clearly needs to do something.

This PO PO Album is Totally Worth It!

POPO
Dope Boy Magick
(Mad Decent)

Zeb Malik makes ramshackle little indie rock tunes, snatches of riff presided over by a wafting tenor that suggests Marshall Crenshaw chanting a liturgy of slack. Lucky for Malik his instrumental timbres are catchier than most people’s tunes -- cf. “Let’s Get Away”, a suicide drink of Van Halen’s synths, Sonic Youth’s white noise, Kate Bush’s Fairlight flute, and Phil Collins’s drums. (Did you know “Phil Collins” is the technical term for a familiar drum rudiment?) The ‘80s will ALWAYS be back. “Losn My Mind” features a sound I desperately wish was an electrified oboe but probably isn’t. Malik also includes several ingratiating “mood” pieces; their mood is the totally relatable “I feel like messing around with this button on the keyboard.” Pick hit is “Bummer Summer”, an evocation of summers past that gets by on its guitar treatment. Though actually, the tune’s not bad either.

This Batida Album is Totally Worth It!

Designer Lewis Heriz deserves credit for creating my new wallpaper.

From my review at the PopMatters, some sentences about an album that's in the same ballpark as Buraka Som Sistema, only lusher. (Real grass as opposed to artificial turf?) (No; more like a beautifully landscaped terrace in the midst of all that concrete and steel.)

Near the end of Batida’s vaguely sinister song “Ka Hueh”, some guy helpfully sneers the word “Freestyle!” Frankly, it’s hard to tell what he means by that.

Batida mastermind DJ Mpula tricks out the beat with a kaleidoscope of echo and FX, including what sounds like a bunch of oversized resonant fork tines jangling together in space.

Like Baltimore house and Brazilian baile funk, kuduro music can intimidate and punish, but it can also tantalize you with touches of beauty that gain power from their harsh surroundings. You appreciate when kuduro at least tries to make you happy.

The Angolan MCs, on the other hand, are tense and tight, their chewy voices taunting the beats and competing for attention with the DJ’s laser sounds. Dama Ivone, Ikonoklasta, and Sacerdote—a woman and two men, it’s worth noting—tear up their tracks and deserve to be heard far and wide. And hey, even The Economist just ran an article on Angolan rap, so you know it’s hot.

More often, Mpula fundamentally transforms his source material—as in “Allegria”, when sample dissolves into sample, choirs appear out of nowhere, and the textures shift like a dream. It’s an uneasy early-morning dream full of noise and relentless beats and freestyle, whatever that means. 

This Counting Crows Covers Album is Worth It!

The story continues...

The Counting Crows aren't the only band to veer from very very good songs ("Hangin' Around", "Mr. Jones") to embarrassingly unlistenable cringe machines (anything they did for a soundtrack?), but I fear they're underrated because the dreck isn't a huge sonic departure from the good stuff. They always sound like themselves, as evidenced by this fine covers album, reviewed at PopMatters, excerpted herewith:

Genghis Khan's brother Don is sadly absent.

You gotta hear this new Counting Crows album, they sound like a BAND!

They’ve recorded 15 covers with as fine a sense of group interplay as you’ll find outside the jazz world.

“Covers?” I hear you say with some alarm. “Isn’t this the band who blighted the Two Weeks Notice soundtrack with a terrible version of ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, itself a pretty bad song?” Yes, over the course of their respectable 20 year career, the Crows have left behind them a smattering of cloying idiocy for which they’ll one day have to answer. Not here, though.

For example, lead single “Untitled (Love Song)”, a floppy Romany Rye song that could’ve easily been titled “Throw Your Arms Around My Neck” (or maybe just “Neck” if they were Brad Paisley), starts with a plain old electric guitar riff over which Duritz starts singing, then another electric saunters in, along with the drums and piano, until finally the whole band is lurching around with their three chords. This additive maneuver is one thing you can do with a band, particularly a band containing three guitarists; in musical parlance it’s known as the “Hotel California”. (Enjoy the colitas!)

And sometimes the strategy is simply to smoke the pants (and metaphors) right off the song, as in their blistering rendition of Dylan’s Big Pink staple “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”, during which Duritz collapses into fits.

He's a very good singer, you know? Reminds me of his contemporary Garth Brooks; there’s always the danger they’ll rely too much on their trademark vocal tics, in Duritz’s case oddly-shaped warbles and wordless scatting nonsense. Throughout this album, though, Duritz delivers the songs with unmannered ease, saving his Duritz stuff for key moments like the meltdown section of the Dylan song.

If you want rock ‘n’ roll to be galvanizing rebellion or something, Underwater Sunshine isn’t the place for you. But if you want your rock ‘n’ rollers to offer a feasible career option that sounds great, the Counting Crows do. Is it still rock ‘n’ roll? What else you gonna call it?

Recent Jukeboxing

Now that Easter's over and book proposal's turned in, I've had a little bit more time to write for The Singles Jukebox, the extraordinary site that discovered both Gotye and Carly Rae Jepsen before you (or I) did.

Le bien:

fun. - "Some Nights":
About two thirds of the way through, right after Nate Ruess gets sucked into his nephew’s eyes and flips into his little Autotune cadenza, I realize I have no idea what or who this piece of music stands for. It builds a stadium singalong out of insular incoherence, like the verses of Queen’s “We Are the Champions” only even more embarrassing. Who wants to sing along to a 7th grade notebook line like “What do I stand for?” Especially around other people? All this business about martyrs in beds and lips building castles is icky icky icky, “jack my style” is Train-unforgiveable, and this guy can’t expect us to care about his sister if we only just met her. But, yes, this is a singalong, if only because I’m sure I’ll be singing along to it the rest of the year. If anything, the glorious drums and guitar ostinato and Ladysmith Black fun.bazo voices make me wanna get to the bottom of Nate’s narcissism, surely an impossible task, but more exciting for that.
[8]


Eric Church - "Springsteen":
“Every time I think of you, I always catch my breath” … that’d make a lot more sense, but this song isn’t about that song. “That song” — the one that means freedom, lust, masculinity, tattoos, a Jeep, amateur astronomy, and a girl not wanting Eric to go — seems to be “Born In the USA,” which isn’t necessarily weirder than “Jack and Diane” for Kenny Chesney or “Sweet Home Alabama” for Kid Rock. Guitar sounds and unnamed drummers evoke what they will and who can understand the connections? Eric doesn’t try, just as he avoids forcing his specific reverie onto his listeners, sneaking the name of the song into the second verse. As an audio madeleine, “Born In the USA” would seem incongruous to most people, but “Springsteen” the song doesn’t even have to be about Springsteen, really, or sound like him — he’s just big and mythical enough to fade into the scenery of a song whose real subject is a night when every listener was seventeen.
[8]


Santigold - "Big Mouth":
Why are you so petrified of silence, Big Mouth? Here, can you handle this? (Cue wordless vocal fx building to EXCRUCIATING LOUDNESS YAWP!) Tick tock tock that shit nonstop — you’re such a shit talker, RUN! yaMOUTH! MORE! THANANYONEI’VEEVERKNOWN! You’re everywhere I go, thinkin’ that you know, O Big Mouth, Big Mouth, mymymy you’ve said enough. You talk too much; you even worry my pet! (Cue wordless chirps and shrieks.) GaGaGa all slighty off; not me, I’ll take the loss, I’ll never talk again, you’ve left me speechless, so speechle-ye-ye-yes. (Boobooboo, boobooboo, boobooboo, boobooboo…) Hey, um, Big Mouth… why you so speechless? 
[9]


Le mal:


Kanye ft. Khaled - "Theraflu":
DJ Pharris! Hometown! Power 92 is way better than WGCI! That said, best case this is Kanye feathering his nest, worst case it’s Kanye as immaculately self-absorbed cat obsessing over the minutiae of his own asshole(ry). I will not give a definitive answer because that’d require listening to it again.
[3]


et le mot juste:


Teedra Moses ft. Wale - "Another LuvR":
Nexuses of meaning are embedded in Mickey Bass’s 1973 bassline and its use in hip-hop, and someone should explore them thoroughly. They could examine whether A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘91 “Excursions” now signifies the same elder statesman classiness as Art Blakey’s “A Chant for Bu”, if indeed that’s what Blakey signified for Tribe. (Yes — but that’s not all he signified.) Or how by looping just the first two chords, which happen to have the same relationship as Miles Davis’s “So What” chords, Tribe showed how modal jazz anticipated such loops back in ‘59. Or how the mystical connotations of the “Chant” rub shoulders with the practical, both in Blakey’s famous work ethic and in Q-Tip’s punchline, “If you got the money, Quest is for the bookin’.” This song won’t be a very big part of the story. Moses hands us all these possibilities on a platter and then floats off to worry about something else.
[6]

This Gene Watson Hits Album is sort of Worth It

From my PopMatters review, whose every paragraph begins with the suck-'em-in gambit "If you're," some thoughts:

If you’re a fan of country hitmaker Gene Watson and you’re considering buying his new collection Best of the Best: 25 Greatest Hits, you should know all 25 “hits” are re-recordings. They’re faithful re-recordings, slavish to the original arrangements and even keys, so it probably won’t make a huge difference to you. All the same, the gentleman Watson might have warned consumers somewhere on the album’s packaging.


And if you listen to Best of the Best in a certain way, Watson and Johnson’s meticulous re-creations become impressive pop-art endeavors, like Gus Van Sant’s nearly-shot-by-shot remake of Psycho or Damien Hirst’s extensive series of spot paintings. What constitutes an “original” work of art? When is a greatest hit not a greatest hit? When we plunk down money to relive a song, do slight differences reinvigorate that song or suck the air from our memories? Since Watson remade these songs for blatant financial reasons, does that somehow invalidate the songs as art?


If you’re skeptical, if slick turn-of-the-’80s Nashville doesn’t do it for you, you should still check out this album’s sequencing. Seriously, if the Grammys had an award for Best Album Sequencing, Best of the Best would be the one to beat. Watson and Johnson have grouped the songs into little thematic units, so that Gene Watson songs from different years converse and comment on one another. Watson made this album with money on his mind, but he opens it with a suite of songs discussing the evils of money and the virtues of poverty. “Fourteen Carat Mind” goes into the gentle “Paper Rosie”, where Watson idealizes a little old lady who sells paper roses and touches lives. (He also enjoys wine in both songs.) From there we move to the racy “Nothing Sure Looked Good On You”, Watson’s lament that his current gold digger isn’t satisfied with life like Paper Rosie. Offended, she engages in wanton behavior, so he sings “You’re Out Doing”, and… you get the picture. We hear diptychs on big themes: Loneliness (“Got No Reason Now For Going Home” and “One Sided Conversation”); New Orleans (“Love In the Hot Afternoon” and “The Old Man and His Horn”); Cheating and Insanity (“Should I Come Home (Or Should I Go Crazy)” into “What She Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Her”); and Hot Sex, or its absence (the aforementioned “Cowboys” slides wickedly into “This Dream’s On Me”). Watson closes the album with songs of memory, infidelity, and home, until he cheerfully falls off the wagon in “Drinkin’ My Way Back Home” and neatly loops back to the album opener “Fourteen Carat”. It’s like The Dark Tower with more honky-tonks.


If you’re up to it, though, you could explain to me the appeal of the brutal waltz “Where Love Begins”, in which the gentleman Watson pressures a virgin to give it up. “What’s that? What’s the matter? What’s making you cry? / You say it’s the first time for you? / LEEEAVE if you’d rather not lose what you came for! / Walk out the same door that I let you in!” Number five in ‘75, a precursor to Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night”; what a cad.

This Dennis Rollins Album is sort of Worth It

From my PopMatters review, some sentences. (They are the reviewer's bread and butter, you know.) (If we're comparing "writing record reviews" to "building sculptures out of bread and butter"?) (#dancingaboutarchitecturewhilecoveredinbutter)

Rollins plays his trombone with a beautiful burnished tone, bouncing and swooping into his notes on little catenaries of sound, reaching out to listeners with a grin and a handshake. He’s also got an Aquarian numerological thing going on. Motéma had the spiritual wisdom to release The 11th Gate on 11/11/11, the day Rollins turned 47, and you’ll notice that four plus seven equals 11. (They released it digitally, that is; the physical CD had to wait until January.) Naturally the trio has included 11 tracks here, the better to usher in Rollins’s “universal paradigm shift, an emergence into our authentic selves”.

My authentic self tells me they had to pad this album to reach 11 tracks.

Opening song “Samba Galactica” punches out of the speakers with a tricky rhythm, Segundo skittering around the beats while Rollins uses some electronic device to harmonize with himself. The apparently ambidextrous Stanley handles the bassline with his left hand; his right hand either harmonizes closely with Rollins’s trombone, plays remarkably fluid solos, or stretches out on thick washes of sound that make you say, “Ooh, Hammond organ!”

This is all fine, accomplished stuff, but The 11th Gate is ultimately too tidy to set anyone’s world on fire. Solos are inventive but never outlandish; the chord changes go to unexpected places, but they never astonish. The album sounds immaculate, and you get the sense these guys knew what they were doing every step of the way. They’ve made a solid and professional straight-ahead jazz record. That’s not exactly a universal paradigm shift, but it’ll at least keep you awake until your enlightenment kicks in.