If there’s such a thing as an “Austin sound,” Bob Schneider would exemplify it.
Schneider’s latest solo outing, Lonelyland, sports a dirty, bluesy brand of rock that’s not twang or wail enough for Americana music and not post-grunge or post-Lilith Fair enough for mainstream “modern” rock.
It’s a similar kind of sound listeners can find on Ian Moore’s … and all the colors. Traces of it appear on Seela’s Something Happened, and of course, Austin rockers such as Fastball and Vallejo owe more to, say, Joe Ely than the Clash.
Schneider’s singer-songwriter blues rock won him an award at the Austin Music Awards this year and for good reason.
Schneider knows the power of a simple, catchy chorus, and after packing a whole lotta words in his verses — and there isn’t a track on this album that doesn’t have a lot lyrics — the immediacy of his choruses positively shine through.
Lonelyland also sports some pretty smart arrangements. From the Beck effects on “Jingy” and “Big Blue Sea” to the African chanting and operatic accompaniment on “Round and Round,” Schneider’s music takes many clever turns without coming off as precious.
Schneider’s parent band, the Scabs, packs the house at Antone’s every Tuesday night, and his solo work has gotten similar attention. Deservedly so, quite frankly.
There’s just no other way to enjoy this album: Turn off your brain.
Coco Lee’s American homecoming — she’s recorded seven Chinese-language albums in Asia — sports the kind of bubblegum R&B trafficked by the likes of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
Pretty savvy move, really — it’s a recognition of what’s driving the music business economy these days, at least until the next demographic-income shift.
Does that mean Just No Other Way is necessarily a bad album? Not really.
Lee definitely has a set of pipes on her, and when she wraps them around those inane “love me-love me-love me” lyrics trademark of her chosen genre, she actually sounds earnest. She doesn’t melissmatize her ad libbing as badly as many R&B grandstanders. And above all, her voice is actually pleasant.
Musically, Utada Hikaru she is not. All of the tracks on Just No Other Way contain the interchangeable hooks found on other such R&B albums. When she slows down to sing a dramatic pop ballad, don’t be surprised if you hear an electric piano playing the step-wise hook.
(I’ve always wondered how people who dig R&B can distinguish one album from another. I certainly wonder about that with most alternative rock music.)
And for all its lack of anything really original, Just No Other Way is guiltily enjoyable. Like Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, which works best when you actively ignore it, Coco Lee’s brand of cookie-cutter R&B is pretty tolerable.
Piece and Love has got to be one of the best albums of 1999 to go unnoticed by every critic on the planet.
While everyone was cooing over Moby’s marriage of techno and Folkways recordings or the Magnetic Fields‘ magnum opus to love or the Flaming Lips’ string-laced psychedlia, Meg Lee Chin produced one of the loudest, slickest, rock-meets-rave albums in recent history.
Combining distorted, thundering drum machines with blasts of NIN-ish, Orgy-esque guitars, the former singer of Pigface crafted a set of hook-ladended, dynamically arranged music to come out of a recording studio.
Chin’s voice ranges from seductive whisper to blaring scream, and she does an excellent job in layering all her vocal abilities in a single song — it’s not uncommon to hear rap, straight-forward singing and wails all at the same time.
She wraps her powerful vox around some pretty clever lyrics, too. References to Allen Ginsberg in “Nutopia” don’t seem overly smarty, and that bit about “7-Eleven nightmares at 3 a.m.” is particularly evocative.
Musically, Piece and Love is a studio wonder. The array of effects used in each song complements Chin’s own talent. The music whispers when she whispers and screams when she screams. It’s terrific.
Trent Reznor said he’s been looking to collaborate with a woman. He’d be remiss to overlook Meg Lee Chin.
So this friend of mine, right? He e-mails back in February, saying his band the Prairie Cats scored a Friday midnight slot at SXSW. And I’m like really stoked and stuff, but in the back my head, I panic.
You see, he mailed one of the few freebies the then-Soloist’s Notebook ever received, and that was like ages ago, and what do I do? I played the Cats’ debut album The Big One maybe once, twice at the most, and I never put it back in the stereo again.
I think maybe I was overdosing on rock en Español at the time, but I just so neglect to review the disc. I figure I should just be a man and chalk up to my irresponsibility as reviewer and tell my friend after I’ve seen their show.
And man did they burn! I’m mean, the Caucus Club was on fire!
The dance floor was packed with bodies on the count that it’s SXSW and stuff, but that didn’t stop the folks who wanted to dance to do so. At the very end of the Cats’ set, this one couple was just tearing up what little real estate was available at the foot of the stage.
It rocked.
So the next day at work, I do this sort of half-assed review, ‘cos I was supposed to be watching this band Lolita No. 18 but didn’t. What did I say? Something like: “the Cats burned on stage with its brand of smart swing that’s never content to be just dance music, even within a song.”
Of course, now I have no more excuses to let The Big One collect dust on my shelf. I take it out, put in my CD-ROM player — and the vague impression I had on my few listens were confirmed.
The first tracks of The Big One seem a bit attached to that usual descending rockabilly bass line, but as the album progresses, there’s a bit of Cuba (“Butterfly Woman”), a bit of Asylum Street Spanker-esque vaudeville (“On the Prairie”) and some thundering “Sing Sing Sing” drumming (“Lightning”).
Slick, this recording is, as Yoda might say. But it pales in comparrison to the real thing. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy this album, but if the Cats ever swing (pun not intended) by your side of the cosmos, do yourself a favor and see them.
When I let the Golden Arm Trio’s Why the Sea Is Salt just play while I’m mindlessly working on something else, I forget that I’m not listening to downtown New York musicians. I forget I’m not listening to the Kronos Quartet or the Brodsky Quartet.
The Golden Arm Trio, which is really Graham Reynolds and however many musicians he needs to realize his muse, performs music that could have come straight from the Lower East Side.
Reynolds works within the strict limitations of the Western classical tradition, but like the best downtowners, he creates work distinctive to his own voice, not beholden to the fashions of academia or the weighty confines of “art music.”
The Austin Chronicle describes Reynolds as “post-Zorn.” Wayne Horvitz seems like a more parallel comparrison — a composer with a distinct way to create hooks from the most unlikely harmonies.
Why the Sea Is Salt veers from pieces with solid thump-whack drums beats (“Swift Ship Sailing”) to string quartets (“Poor Brother Percival”), from bouncy, celebratory tunes (“Finster Crumley”) to poignant, mournful melodies (“The Old Woodcutter”).
And that’s only the first six tracks.
The Tosca String Quartet dominates this recording, performing on six of the album’s 19 tracks. The Tosca has a tight, energetic sound and an obvious inter-player chemistry. Under Tosca’s hands, Reynolds’ pieces sing.
Perhaps the most brilliant aspect of Why the Sea Is Salt is a lack of pauses between tracks. One pieces runs into the next, giving the disc the feel of being a complete work. No album in recent memory has ever included such an array of timbres, styles and instrumentation and still felt like a cohesive opus.
How is it possible for an Asylum Street Spankers album to feel rushed?
After last year’s Hot Lunch, which ran the gamut from emotionally poignant to downright silly, Spanker Madness seems somewhat narrow.
Of course, Spanker Madness is the Asylum Street Spankers’ stab at a concept album — songs devoted to that most fashionable of weeds, marijuana. A pretty gutsy for a group that is all concept.
But this time around, the Spankers’ usual brand of highly entertaining, all-acoustic vaudeville comes across as flat.
The band doesn’t jam as much on this album as previous efforts, and the songwriting, while still all over the geographical map of America, doesn’t seem to live up to the potential of its subject matter.
Guy Forsyth’s political tale, “Take the Heat,” sticks out like a sore thumb next to the bouciness of Christina Marrs’ “Wake and Bake” or Wammo’s caustic “Winning the War on Drugs.” Forsyth also performs the song with a husky baritone that lacks the character of his previous Spanker contributions.
And while the band burns on “High as You Can Be,” its usual extended solos are truncated on this album. The album clocks in at a somewhat unsatisfying 42 minutes.
The engineers on this album also failed to capture the group’s essence. Compared to the intimately lo-fi Spanks for the Memories and the lush polish of Hot Lunch, Spanker Madness sounds dull. Listeners can barely feel the impact of the “chorus and ascent to righteousness” in “Winning the War on Drugs.”
But before you think this Asylum Street Spanker album sucks, just remember — even a bad Spanker album is still pretty cool.
So. Is the soundtrack to The Million Dollar Hotel the next U2 album? In a word, no, but it’s certainly a great substitute until the next U2 album comes out later this year.
Bono’s voice pretty much dominates the first half of the soundtrack, and while only three songs are attributed to U2 the Group, it’s hard not to feel the band’s influence throughout the disc. Million Dollar Hotel star Milla Jovovich even does a rendition of Lou Reed’s “Satellite of Love,” covered by Bono and pals as a b-side for “One.”
Movie actors performing their own musical numbers is the latest public relations gimmick by Hollywood studios — Matt Damon sings in The Talented Mr. Ripley! — but Jovavich affects a pretty good Macy Gray on her version of “Satellite of Love.”
As he’s done with other projects, soundtrack producer Hal Wilner has fashioned a house band for The Million Dollar Hotel, giving the disc the feel of an album. That wouldn’t be such a revelatory thing if soundtracks, which are usually scattershot affairs, weren’t used as promotional material by studios and A&R launching pads for labels.
And this house band has some stellar names: John Zorn collaborators Bill Frisell (guitar) and Greg Cohen (bass); Jon Hassell on trumpet; Daniel Lanois and drummer Brian Blade from Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball crew — even Bono!
Once the disc moves from its songs to its incidental music, The Million Dollar Hotel becomes the soundtrack it was always meant to be. The instrumental pieces are dark and moody — especially with Frisell’s more prominently featured haunting timbres — but those tracks never become more than film score.
While Wilner and co-producers Lanois and Brian Eno do a marvelous job of creating their usual dreamy atmospherics, the final track of the disc is the best — a rock en Español version of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the USA” with Tito Larriva belting out “Anarchiiiiiiiaaaaaaaa!”
Bill Frisell has a keen way of picking his ensembles.
From the rhythm section-less spookineses of the Bill Frisell Quartet to his work with members of Allison Krauss’ Union Station, Frisell has always managed to pluck the most haunting sounds from his collaborators.
With Ghost Town, Frisell reduces the number of players on this album to one — himself.
Judging by the credits on the cover, it’s easy to mistake Ghost Town as a solo virtuoso album — in the sense that Frisell plays only one instrument per track.
Not so. Frisell and producer Lee Townsend use the magic of multitrack recording to create one of the largest sounding recordings in the guitarist’s career.
Of course, there’s a lot of open spaces in Frisell’s music, so even a large recording is still intimate. And the album’s title fits the music well — imagine the musical equivalent of tumbleweeds tossing about in a dusty wind gusting through an abandoned town.
Frisell does a number of covers on this album, but his arrangements are so idiomatic to his playing, they sound just like his originals. I don’t think George Gershwin would recognize his own “My Man’s Gone Now.”
Personally, I prefer the version of Edward Heyman and Victor Young’s “When I Fall in Love” from Frisell’s cover album Have a Little Faith than the stacatto banjo version on Ghost Town.
On the whole, Frisell is a master of shading. He sounds like himself on all his albums, yet he makes enough distinction between them to warrant acquiring all, if not many of them — including Ghost Town.
And for all the conotations that word may have, it suits the sound and feel of Yuji Oniki’s Orange just fine.
At times channeling Murmur-era R.E.M. or a Valium-induced Dukes of the Stratosphear, Oniki performs the sort of pop music that’s sugary but isn’t, psychelic but not psyched-out, and dreamy but not sleepy.
If anything, Orange sounds like the distant cousin of another album by a Japanese-American, James Iha’s Let It All Come Down.
Orange is a lush production, sporting chiming guitars, echo-y vocals and an ever-distant trumpet hovering in the background. Oniki possesses sharp songwriting chops, laying simple melodies over not-so-simple chord progressions.
“Tokyo Clover,” which opens the album in English and closes it in Japanese, exemplifies Oniki’s muse — a catchy bass hook grounds a series of surreal guitar chords, while Oniki renders a straight-forward melody over the whole subdued mix.
If you’re still waiting for Sonic Youth to deliver a decent follow-up to Daydream Nation, check out Number Girl to pass the time.
The Japanese quartet plays two kinds of tempo (fast, faster) and two kinds of volume (loud, louder). And while Number Girl busily rocks out, pushing the amp volume to 11, the band doesn’t sacrifice its hooks — however buried they are under a barrage of guitars and thunderous drums.
Number Girl’s 1999 major label debut, School Girl Distortional Addict, isn’t as harmonically complex as SY’s seminal opus, but the album does share Daydream Nation’s sense of sonic proportion. Guitarists Mukai Shutoku and Tabuchi Hisako know how to pack a wallop with their six-string interchange.
The album also perfectly captures the essence of Number Girl’s live performance, right down to vocalist Mukai’s futile attempt to sing over his bandmates. On some tracks, listeners can hardly hear him. And yet, his larynx-unfriendly howl is one of the most arresting musical sounds to come out of a pair of lungs.
Number Girl precariously balances aggressive, noisy early punk rock with a clear sense of melody. It’s a winning combination that’s as cathartic as it is addictive.
By the way, don’t forget to bring a pair of earplugs if you attend a Number Girl show — your ears will thank you later.