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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
One of the guitarists of Mummy the Peepshow calls herself Youngus Akkie. A band so coy as to make a slight reference to AC/DC has got to rock.
And Mummy the Peepshow does.
The clear hit among Japanese bands at SXSW 2000, Mummy the Peepshow plays the kind of punk pop that put Shonen Knife on the international map back in the early 1990s.
An all-girl group, Mummy is the Sanrio version of the Donnas — loud and rocking but cute too.
Mummy knows how to nail its hooks, as evident on such tracks as “Dear Big Tongue,” “Jenny is Feeling Bad” and “Spring pants has come.” But they also know how to make screaming, noisy Dead Milkmen-esque punk, such as on “wonder BREAD angel SOUP” and “Annie.”
And they make such sweet harmonies too.
This is Egg Speaking, Mummy’s second album, is far and away a more solid album than it’s scattered debut, Mummy Bullion. The band embraces both its punk roots and some pop hooks on Egg, making it a wonderful, bratty find.
Two complaints, however. The album is mixed terribly. It’s as if a master for vinyl was used for the CD pressing. The two tracks on the Japan Night 2000 sampler are mixed better.
Secondly, the CD is rigged to pop up a web browser to the Sister/Benten Records web site. While effective marketing, it gets old after a while.
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.
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.
It’s almost easy to dismiss Shinohara Rika as another woman indie singer-songwriter, but two things prevent that from happening.
First, Shinohara is a musical rarity. All the Japanese women I’ve run into have either been idols or members of punk outfits. Idol pop singers, by their nature, aren’t exactly towering figures of feminism and all-girl bands such as Shonen Knife, Lolita No. 18 or Mummy the Peepshow are group-oriented.
By aligning herself with Sheryl Crow, Suzanne Vega and Lisa Loeb, Shinohara asserts her individuality — something quite outside of the Japanese norm, especially in terms of idols and punk girl groups.
Second, Shinohara writes some really good songs. Don’t let the subdued arrangements give a wrong first impression. Repeated listenings and Shinohara’s full alto reveal the simple beauty of her melodies.
During a recent showcase at SXSW, Shinohara sang most of her songs in English and sold two versions of her CD, Seikatsu no Uta — one in its original Japanese, the other as an English CD-R. She’s serious enough about breaking into the U.S. that she’s doing it on America’s linguistic terms.
But give the Japanese version of Seikatsu no Uta a chance. These songs deserve to be heard in the tongue for which they were originally written.
At first, Terra 2001 might strike listeners as a sonic sequel to the Brilliant Green’s self-titled debut album.
But after a few spins, it becomes evident that this second album by one of Japan’s most popular alternative rock bands is a stronger work.
The opening track, “Bye! My Boy!”, bursts out of the speakers like race horses at a derby. It’s grungier, harder, definitely more up-front than anything on the band’s previous album.
After retreating for a while back to the bouncy jangle pop of The Brilliant Green, the trio sticks to its creative guns, muddy-ing up the guitars and boosting the rhythm section.
“Call My Name” lays it on heavy, pitting some classic ’60s bass rhythms with a wheezy, chaotic organ.
“Funny Girlfriend!!” lyrically and musically evoke some pretty strong flower power imagery, and “Round and Round” practically kowtows to “House of the Rising Sun.”
The Brilliant Green seems to have gotten better at twiddling the knobs, hammering out an album with a beefier sound. On such tracks as “Sono Speed De” and “Can’t Stop Crying,” guitarist Matsui Ryo positively blares out of the stereo, burning up on his solos and laying a heavy curtain of tactful distortion.
Even the album’s sole ballad, “Maybe We Could Go Back to Then”, possesses a bit muscle.
And tempting as it was to get heavy-handed with this stronger sound, singer Kawase Tomoko is never lost in the mix. In fact, her singing has gotten more confident since the band’s debut. And as usual, English-language songs outnumber Japanese ones. Both still sound very good.
Songwriting-wise, the songs on Terra 2001 are a bit darker, but they’re every bit just as memorable. By easing back from the jangle-pop of its first album, the Brilliant Green has produced a set of songs that appeals to rock fans who like their music as rough as it is bright.
In all, Terra 2001 is a proverbial major step for the Brilliant Green, a sign that this trio knows it can get better. And will.