It's like it was 10 years ago or something!

A few weeks ago I was saying how I've not been going out to Pilot Light much lately but that must have been a phase that's now winding down. It may have something to do with this unseasonably warm weather making it nicer to venture out, but I was down there five of the last eight nights. Last week was a particularly eclectic week for PL, and March is a particularly busy month that provides an excellent case as to why that place remains vital to Knoxville.

Here's what went on last week, February 20-27:

Sunday - Junk Culture w/ Kunniggulus
Recent Illegal Art signee Junk Culture wasn't really my thing but it brought out a couple of dozen youngsters who probably hang out more at Valarium or Cider House than PL. Locals Kunniggulus returned with their laptop shenanigans, and even projected a pretty boss DVD of a '70s-era home video chopped and screwed by Kunniggulator Dugan.

Monday- Thank You w/ Yung Life
Baltimore's Thank You were way better than my memory of their debut album which I haven't heard in years would have me believe. A trio playing repetitive minimalist rock grooves with multiple guitars and analogue synths, they're kind of like a less punk, more melodic Oneida. Local trio Yung Life get better every time I see them. Totally great proggy take on 80s synth-pop, but way more interesting than that description would have you believe.

Tuesday - The Civil Wars w/ Mountains of Moss
Not even my great love for Adam Ewing's Mountains of Moss could overcome my indifference to the Jay Leno-approved Civil Wars. I've heard approximately 45 seconds of music from this duo, and that snippet combined with their general appearance and press kit convinces me their music is not for me. These guys look like they play the industry game so expertly it's as if their band is a Masters thesis on How To Make It as a Band in Nashville and L.A. They were by all accounts nice folks, though. There were apparently almost 100 people turned away and ridiculous bribes offered for entry at the door, making this the largest non-Halloween night in PL history.

Wednesday - What happened? Bar night? All I recall is I wasn't there.

Thursday - Matta Gawa w/ Double Muslims and Newark Sextets
A last minute show added a few days before, this was the surprise of the week in many ways. Matta Gawa were described as an improv noise guitar/drum duo, and that description always makes me leery, but these guys were awesome. Some old school improv with more jazz influence than noise, both musicians were amazing and very busy on their instruments. It's the kind of thing I don't hear nearly enough of live these days, and I wondered if groups like this don't seem to young Junk Culture/Girl Talk fans like hippies did to Jesus Lizard/Sonic Youth/Big Black fans 20 years ago. Like weirdos fighting a lost cause. Newark Sextets is Kunniggulator Dugan doing solo laptop work with an even more abstract video projection from the same home movie source. The Double Muslims performance was something of a warm-up, a peek at the new incarnation, with Maggie Brannon lending vocals to Jason Boardman's drums and Eric Lee's guitar dup. If you've heard DM, it might be hard to imagine them with vocals, but Maggie did great work improvising, and at least one piece was obviously a song they've been working on. This was a more explicitly rockist version of the band than we've heard in a while, and Damion Huntoon and Tyler Mucklowe from Woman are making some noise with them down in the practice space. I can't wait for the full-on debut of this lineup.

Friday - RB Morris and Angela Faye Martin
Don't know much about Nashville singer/songwriter Angela Faye Martin, other than Mark Linkous produced her last album, and I showed up too late to hear her. Arriving a little before midnight, I caught the last 5 or 6 songs (Early crowd!) by local hero RB, who I haven't seen live in several years. He was backed by Tim Lee and Greg Horne on guitar, Susan Bauer Lee on bass and somebody I didn't know on drums, and they sounded good. I've been listening to Warren Zevon's first two albums a lot lately (?!) and maybe I wouldn't have made this oconnection otherwise, but this group seemed to me to share an aesthetic affinity. Guitar greats Lee and Horne can come a little close to being too tasteful for my tastes, but they kept it loose and rocking enough most of the time.

Saturday - Vaygues, Die Job and Unicobra
I unfortunately didn't make it out for this one, an excellent line up of for a Saturday night local rock show. I'm told Vaygues drummer Graham gave an amazing, near-perfect performance that will be talked about for years to come, due to the heroic amounts of alcohol he had consumed earlier in the day that would have rendered most other musicians useless but seemed to faze his playing not one bit. I was sorry to miss this one, but Die Job and Vaygues play quite a bit, and Unicobra will no doubt play again soon.

Sunday - Going away gathering for Leslie Hatten
Yet another UT art graduate answers the siren call of NYC, the only place in the United States in America where "art" is taken "seriously." A bunch of people hanging out drinking, bullshitting, listening to some awesome classic and recent hip-hop and bidding farewell to a friend.

Every Knoxville ex-pat involved in the art/music scene is sorely missed, but who can blame them for moving on? Certainly not me, and the above week probably seems pretty paltry if not boring to our friends in NYC, Chicago, Austin, Prague, Portland, Seoul and wherever the hell else, but one of the things they're leaving behind is the fun and and the love unique to the place. Like on Thursday when Jason bought the 10 or so people who showed up for the show a round, and Will Fist ended up emptying his tip jar to buy multiple cans of Jeremiah Weed so everyone could try it, and then bought more beers for people to keep the night going, as everyone discussed the merits of Queen's Jazz album (which was playing because Eric Lee and/or Maggie are on a Queen kick, and though it could be annoying it's actually kind of endearing how people end up obsessing over the same band or record for a while*), and the out of town band showing genuine disbelief and appreciation about how nice everyone is and asking lots of questions about Knoxville. Or Sunday, when different groups of people who didn't know one another well or at all showed up to say goodbye to a mutual friend, maybe a little envious or sad or hurt that she was leaving us all behind, but knowing the good times are always going to be here for us if we just keep showing up. Not that this kind of thing doesn't go on everywhere, but this is a small community with solid roots whose members depend on one another to maybe even a not altogether healthy degree, and not that chasing a good time should be one's purpose in life, but somehow enough people around here keep making it worthwhile. We also generally have to make our own fun, which is a good start in ensuring the good times will always outweigh the bad.



*That reminds me - when Keith Wood of Hush Arbors played here several weeks ago, Eric Lee was bartending and played Fleetwood Mac's Tusk on the stereo, a carryover perhaps from when everyone was obsessing over Rumours (the younger folk) and Tusk (the slightly older folk) a few years ago. I was asking Keith about playing in Current 93 with David Tibet, and he told me after Ben Chasny recommended him to Tibet as Ben's replacement, the "audition" basically consisted of Keith hanging out with Tibet in his home, getting high and bonding over their mutual love of Tusk.

Earth - Angels of Darkness, Angelzzzzzzzzzzzz

As skimmed in MP.

Earth

Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 (Southern Lord)
After basically inventing the droning, slow-motion metal riff aesthetic that so many bands would go on to emulate, Earth frontman Dylan Carlson took an almost decade-long hiatus before reconfiguring the project in 2005. That year’s Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method had Carlson adding melody, pedal steel, and a Spaghetti Western sensibility to Earth’s cleaned-up sound, while drummer Adrienne Davies kept a Percodan-paced beat behind it all. It was a relatively simple but evocative and addictive style, one so successful they basically repeated it with minor adjustments for 2007’s Hibernaculum EP and 2008’s The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull. If you were into slowcore metal displaying a more scaled-back kind of epic Romanticism, these albums were great, if lacking somewhat in diversity. Now comes the supposed new direction of Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 and it sounds… like another Earth record.
More of more or less the same isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though, from a group with such a distinctive, purposeful method as Earth, and there are some new ideas to be found on the album. The addition of Lori Goldston’s cello is the most crucial difference, and it blends so naturally with the Earth aesthetic you wonder why Carlson didn’t think to add the instrument sooner. With the melodic, sonorous strains of the cello filling out the sound, Carlson is free to loosen up somewhat, applying more tremolo and reverb to add a tinge of warbly psychedelia to his guitar. And while duration has always been central to Earth’s process, it’s hard to imagine the 20-minute closing title track executed by an earlier incarnation. There’s a sustained sense of control and focus that the previous albums might have just been warming the band and audience up for. It’s undeniably epic while remaining improbably intimate.

The Dirtbombs - Party Store

As read in TMT.

It’s more common for electro-oriented artists to cover rock songs than for rockers to repay the compliment, a natural enough thing given rock’s deeper history, but the reverse does occur from time to time. Uwe Schmidt’s recording of Kraftwerk songs in a Latin style under his alter ego Señor Coconut stands out as one of the more imaginative of these efforts, but despite their reliance on synthesizers and bold declaration that they are the robots, Kraftwerk holds a secure place within the rock canon. Their songs have a more or less traditional structure and can be easily played on stringed instruments and drum kits. And while younger generations have fully embraced the idea of using machines to make music, techno still has a much tougher time getting respect from old-school rock fans. If a lot of these moldy figs listen to newer bands, they’re usually along the lines of blues-based, classic rock-loving acts like The White Stripes or The Black Keys. If they ever had a chance to hear them, the same people who love those groups would probably (hopefully) like the scads of lower-profile groups operating with more traditional forms of rock and soul, of which The Dirtbombs are one of the leading exemplars. What those listeners would make of Party Store, the band’s take on classic techno, I’m not sure.

The Dirtbombs aren’t the most immediately obvious band to record an album of techno covers, but when you both consider Mick Collins’ allegiance to his hometown of Detroit and recall Ultraglide in Black, the band’s 2001 collection of soul/funk covers from Collins’ youth, it makes more sense. Living in Detroit in the 1980s, when the songs selected for Party Store were originally produced, Collins heard cutting-edge tracks like Juan Atkins and Cybotron’s “Cosmic Cars” and Inner City’s “Good Life” long before the rest of the world took notice. And whether or not he was fully on board with the sound back when he was playing in his seminal punk blues band The Gories, he was certainly likely to have given it more consideration than the majority of his rockist peers must have. This recording also doesn’t seem so odd when you think about how much funkier and more concerned with rhythm The Dirtbombs are than a lot of rock bands. Although guitars certainly figure prominently on Party Store, especially on the extended freak-out in the middle of the 21-minute “Bug in the Bass Bin,” the album is dominated by improbably tight drum and bass patterns that mimic machines. It’s not unlike what bands like Gang Gang Dance or Teeth Mountain do, basing much of their aesthetic on their ability to produce marathon rhythmic workouts using multiple drummers, but coming from The Dirtbombs it’s a bit of a surprise and, not so surprisingly, has more of a groove.

“Bug in the Bass Bin” is something of an anomaly for the album, the most radical reworking of an original track. The version by Carl Craig’s Innerzone Orchestra was already less structured than the typical dance-oriented techno track, allowing for jazzy improvisation, and here the band stretch it out to twice the length of the original. It’s a bit jarring the first time around, and you may wonder why they let it go on as long as they did. But heard as the band’s take on an extended mix in the style of club music, it works well, even if nobody will be hitting the dance floor to this; it’s more a rock translation of the style than an attempt to ape it. Craig himself adds modular synthesizer to the track, and he tries to match Collins’ wigged-out solo with his own psychedelic sounds that seem more ELP than EDM.

Despite working with two drummers, the mechanics of some beats proved difficult to emulate, and drum machines do make appearances on a few tracks, most notably Derrick May’s “Strings of Life” and closing track “謎のミスタ-ナイソ (Detroito Mix).” The latter is the most identifiably techno thing here, a song the band has stripped of almost all rock elements and allowed synthesizers to dominate. If they had attacked the entire album in this style, it would have come off as more of a novelty, not nearly as fun or likely to stand up to repeated listening. Having said that, the conceptual nature of Party Store makes it the least all-purpose Dirtbombs record yet. Despite its title, I suspect it won’t become their fans’ go-to record at parties.

But The Dirtbombs are an easy band to like. They have a charismatic singer/guitarist with enviable swagger and unimpeachable street cred, superb musicianship that rarely gets showy, and excellent taste that comes from an obvious love for and knowledge of a wide range of American popular music. An unexpected album like this makes them even more admirable. Hailing from a city forever linked with some of the greatest pop and soul music, Collins and crew are also wise enough to know how large a part techno plays in the city’s history. They know that a sound so anathema to many rock and soul fans as anti-human or soulless may have been created on machines, but it was the left-field creativity and forward-thinking imagination of a few of his city’s citizens that helped to change the sound of popular music.

Bitch Magnet - Ben Hur

Ah, the late 80s/early 90s. This is a textbook (textrecord? that looks and sounds so wrong) case of what a small sliver of those years sounded like. That sliver would certainly expand and encompass a lot more territory, but 1990's Ben Hur captures that transition from hardcore to not quite math but math-y prog-like rock quite well. Shades of Rapeman, Jesus Lizard, Bastro, Crain, Shellac and yes, Slint, are apparent in this record. I heard Bitch Magnet years after I'd heard those other bands, even though they preceded many of them, and they now seem to be kind of a footnote in the evolutionary history of post-rock. Fair enough, I guess, this record probably won't blow your mind if you're familiar with the other bands I mentioned, but it's solid and enjoyable throughout, and if it sounds like a product of its time just remember these guys were in the front end of that time, and not chasing an already well-defined sound. Deluxe reissue/reappraisal coming soon?

Lead singer and bassist Sooyoung Park went on to form Seam with Mac from Superchunk, Orestes Morfin (holla) drummed for Walt Mink, a band I have no recollection of ever hearing, and you know what happened to David Grubbs. Bastro was up next for him, and though BM didn't have the chops of that band, they were already pointing in that direction. Cool cover art and a bonus 7-inch add extra joy.

Link hijacked from this guy.

33 1/3 - Slint's Spiderland

There are some music and film books I don't want to read because I don't really care to know that much about the background of certain albums and movies I love. This runs contrary to my nature, which is to gobble up as much context and history as possible about art and literature I enjoy, but some things are so magical bordering-on-holy biographical detail isn't necessary, and I'm even afraid it might ruin something for me. I don't think I'll ever read a book about Astral Weeks or Andrei Rublev, for instance. I can't decide if this is a childish way to think and if I'm consciously deluding myself about the nature of art, but I'm mostly fine with this attitude. So little mystery exists anymore, I'm happy to preserve what little remains.

Spiderland has always been a pretty mysterious album, especially in the first few years after it's release. With so little information in the limited liner notes, and not much written about it, all we had was the music itself. Former Slint members would pop up in other bands we liked, and that somehow added to rather than clarified the mystery. I was a bit apprehensive about reading this book, and when I first saw it was being published I assumed I'd never read it. But the album came up in discussion with a friend a few weeks ago (as it's wont to do), and we both were talking about how we had no real information about the background of the recording, and how that was just a given, so little was available you didn't necessarily want any. But then it occurred to me that the album is such a strange, singular thing, there probably could never be any explanation or history of it that could mar or alter my enjoyment of it. Those guys were so young when they made it, and it seemed to have no precedent, so even a great writer couldn't elucidate the mystery of how they came to make it. So I read it.

I was right about that supposition, and Scott Tennett even admits something to this effect in the beginning of the book. He just loves the album and wants to write about the history of the band that made it, knowing he can never fully explain the strange power it had on listeners who encountered it in the '90s. It's more a history of Slint than Spiderland, often funny and surprisingly low on nostalgia-baiting, though it did make me want to listen to a few bands. I had revisited For Carnation's small discography about a month before I read this, but already want to listen to it again. In lieu of a personal reminiscence a la my last post, I may have something on Bitch Magnet's Ben Hur once I dust it off and give it a whirl.



Edit: I chose Andrei Rublev as an example of a film I'd never want to know too much background about because it's probably my favorite film ever, and retains qualities of mystery no matter how many times I see it. Thinking about it, though, of course I'd want to read a book about the making of it: A Russian historical epic that took over a year to shoot in remote locations during awful weather conditions, the incredible raid sequence resulting in injuries to actors and the more or less torture of animals, with several scenes cut and the film forbidden to be shown in its home country once completed. And it was only Tarkovsky's second film. I want to read as much about that as possible. Let's leave the mysteries to some other favorites, likw Mulholland Dr and Wizard of Oz, the former I'm convinced Lynch made up much of as he went, a suspicion I never care to have confirmed, and the latter so full of imaginative effects and camera tricks that would now be done with ugly looking CGI that the film seems like a minor miracle of human ingenuity and imagination, imbued with no small quality of, no kidding, magic. In the old school, non-Disney sense.

33 1/3 - It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

Just read Christopher Weingarten's 33 1/3 book on Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. It's a great example of what this series does at its best, giving a decent background of the history and cultural context in which the album was recorded, and offering a fairly detailed description of the recording of the album. Though I enjoy the more abstract titles in the series, like Carl Wilson's already classic Let's Talk About Love, Erik Davis' magick-drenched Led Zeppelin IV and Marvin Lin packing in a wide range of musings on cultural topics and music theories in his recent Kid A, I appreciate the more generalized classic journalism/biography approach most of these books take. Weingarten also steers clear of the understandably-important-to-the-author but more often than not boring-to-the-reader personal experiences a lot of the writers like to cram in theses books. Since this is a blog and not a book, however, you will not be spared such a fate, and I'll be sharing a personal story after a few more comments on the book.

Though much of the information in this book, particularly a list of the samples used, is available on the internet (look at all the samples used in the 3 minutes and 14 seconds of "Baseheads"), Weingarten make sure we understand the reasoning and context behind The Bomb Squad's decision to use certain samples in specific songs, other than just for their sonic quality. The lengthy section on the Wattstax film and album is particularly interesting, as is the ongoing discussion of the influence of James Brown, Isaac Hayes and P-Funk to the album's sound. These are the most obvious sources and inspirations, and the book details many more. One thing that's fascinating was how much Def Jam honcho Russell Simmons hated PE. The first time he heard a tape of them, he took it out and threw it across the room. Cohort Rick Rubin had to convince him of their merit, and Simmons' told him, "Rick, I don't even know why you're wasting your time with this garbage. No one is ever going to like this. This is like black punk rock." (Weingarten quotes from Ronin Ro's Raising Hell: The Reign, Ruin and Redemption of Run DMC and Jam Master Jay.) And this quote provides a nice segue for my personal story.

I first heard the album in April, 1989, about a year after it was released, when I was 15 years old and living on the East Tennessee farm I grew up on. Although my siblings and I were too old for Easter baskets, our mother still bought us an Easter present, an idea that now seems incredibly absurd. I suppose it was supposed to be like Christmas-lite or something, equating receiving gifts with religious holidays so you'd associate church with getting stuff. I certainly wasn't critical of it at the time, because it meant getting a moderately priced present or two of your choice. I had been getting more and more into rap in the past year, and asked for a tape of Ice T's Power. Instead I got Nation. My mom took one look at the cover of Power and decided no way was he getting this for me. (And she didn't even know what the album's "L.G.B.N.A.F." stood for. At least I don't think she did.) So she asked a clerk at the Camelot store in the Morristown Mall for something like it but not dirty, and the guy had the wherewithal to hand her Nation. I have no idea what she thought of the cover picture of an angry black man and weird looking black man with a clock around his neck glaring out at the camera from behind prison bars, or the military style logo next to a silhouette of a man in crosshairs, or if she noticed song titles like "Countdown to Armageddon," "Mind Terrorist," and "Prophets of Rage," but I'm eternally grateful that her Methodist sensibilities preferred that to a cover of two black men standing next to a woman in a swimsuit holding a shotgun. (Several years earlier she refused to buy me a Culture Club tape because it contained a song called "Church of the Poisoned Mind." ((Plus for some reason my dad didn't really care for Boy George.)) What did she get me instead? The probably-Satanic-but-at-least-not-gay Bark at the Moon. Score two for mom!) I'm also glad that clerk was hip enough or at least had the sense of humor to recommend the album, because who knows how late I would have been coming to it otherwise. Because the first time I listened to it, it was the weirdest thing I had ever heard, and I hated it.

Thinking of Simmons' "black punk rock" quote, it occurs to me I was exposed to Nation before I'd heard punk rock. The speed and aggression of Black Flag and Husker Du, poetical-political lyrics of Minutemen, and the noise-as-texture watershed that Daydream Nation provided lay several months ahead for me. The strangest things to my ears up to that point were probably Dark Side of the Moon and "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)". (Actually I still find "1983..." pretty freaky. Dig those crazy voices!) Nation blew my farm-bred mind. I was put off by Chuck D's speed, cadence and haranguing voice, and anyway couldn't make out half of what he was saying, and I didn't understand much of what I could make out. I found the screeching noises annoying and, like Simmons, initially couldn't get past the general cacophony of it all. I was accustomed to the clean annunciation and rap along-ability of LL Cool J (just about every one of my guy friends could rap along with "I'm Bad" and "I Need Love" in its entirety) Slick Rick (ditto "La-di-da-di"), Too Short ("I Ain't Trippin"), RUN DMC (several tracks) and Beastie Boys (take your pick, though the soon to be released Paul's Boutique would be even more inscrutable than Nation). Chuck D's rhymes were harder to get your ear and mouth around. The dense liner notes didn't help things, the fold-out sheet of transparently thin paper with tiny print listing a bunch of names I wasn't familiar with, extremely lengthy song lyrics and pseudo-revolutionary jargon I had no idea was either pseudo or revolutionary at the time. I had very little context for any of it, even though I had more or less grown up with rap ever since my older brother brought home a copy of "Rapper's Delight" in the early '80s (he hated it, and I was young enough that all electro-oriented '80s pop music sounded both strange and perfectly normal). And of course Licensed to Ill and Raising Hell changed everything for teenagers. But this didn't sound like anything I'd heard when I'd gone to the theater to see Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.

After maybe two listens (and at @ an hour it was a long album by 1989 standards), the tape was put away for a while. I don't remember exactly when and how I finally "got" it, but I suspect it wasn't a eureka moment, that it was a gradual thing. Surely helpful was almost obsessive listening to NWA's gleefully vulgar Straight Outta Compton* later in the year, the first punk album I connected with (and interviews with white boys in suburbs and farms all over America falling in love with that album is a mini-documentary waiting to happen), as was my eventual introduction to the attitude and noise of punk rock and, ahem, grunge. On a more subconscious level, possibly, Nation helped prepare me for those albums. It also contained the most intricate sonic collages I'd heard, well before plunderphonics and Negativland were on my radar. Equally important, that album contained the most overt political music I knew of at the time. Fear of a Black Planet would take the sonic collages, noises and politics even further, and by the time it came out I was totally on board, but Nation helped break down some resistance and prep the mind for the sea change it would help bring to hip-hop and pop music in general.

Nation sits alongside Astral Weeks, Daydream Nation, Damaged, Loveless, Straight Outta Compton, Trout Mask Replica, Bitches Brew, Moment Precieux, and a Haters 7" with some of the music that helped rearrange my mind and open my ears as a teenager. Aside from the Haters and maybe Braxton/Bailey, that list looks fairly pedestrian and is full of accepted classics, but in pre-Internet farm land, where we didn't even have cable, Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Griff and The Bomb Squad really were mind terrorists, and I've had Stockholm Syndrome sever since.




*NWA anecdote: The first copy of Straight Outta Compton I had was recorded over a copy of ...And Justice For All, after I decided I didn't like metal anymore. It was dubbed on a crappy Emerson dual tape deck, and Metallica's riffs could still be faintly heard under NWA. It caused this constant high-pitch buzzing to run throughout the album, and I remember a particularly awesome guitar solo kicking off during one of the silence between songs. I eventually got a genuine tape myself, but for a few months I listened to the album with Metallica as a backing band buried in the mix. If I still had that tape I'd try to release it on Not Not Fun.

Bonus 7" - bonnie prince billy sings 'black dissimulation' and 'no such as what i want'

Both of these songs are great, and I rank "No Such as What I Want" as one of my all time Oldham faves. Released a year before Get On Jolly, Mick Turner is featured in the track, alongside Brother Jim White on drums, Colin Gagon on accordian, David Grubbs on electric piano and Tiffany White-Pounder on vocals. I tagged it on to the end of a cassette of a Silver Jews album and wore it out driving around Austin and its outskirts as a courier in the late 90s. It's a great driving song. I've probably heard the song well over a hundred times and still get a thrill from it. Great vocal performance by Will and Pounders-White, great drums, sweet sounding accordian, beautiful guitar and intermittently scrutable, fun to sing along with lyrics. The song has some of the feel of the Jolly recordings, but more robust. So good.

Black

Records of the day - Bonnie Prince Billy and the Marquis de Tren - Get On Jolly & Get the Fuck On Jolly Live

Speaking of Will Oldham, I like his newer music, but in the '90s into the early '00s I was high near obsessed with him, buying everything he released that I could find. I still think his run of albums from the Palace Brothers debut to I See a Darkness, plus all the singles and EPs that fall in there, are uniformly great. There's not a body of work quite like it in American music, nor one nearly so solid from the last few decades, and it's pretty remarkable how different each of those first six albums are. I can go on and on about him, and may do in the future, but I wanted to single out these two relatively overlooked recordings, Get On Jolly and Get The Fuck On Jolly Live.

I had them on my mind recently, probably because the sparse quality of the music always seems to work best in cold, dreary weather. Or so I thought, until after listening to them a couple of weeks ago during such weather, I was struck by the desire to hear them last weekend when we had an unseasonable 70 degree sunny Sunday afternoon. They sounded just as perfect then, too, their more buoyant charms complimented by the weather.

The songs here are derived from the Gitanjali by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. I know very little about Tagore, other than what I read here, in Yeats' introduction to the author's translation. (And for some reason I think his poetry was somewhat fashionable in the '60s and '70s, probably mainly among hippies.) I've never read the poems and have no future plans to do so, primarily because the song versions of them on these records work so well for me. I can't imagine reading them silently and I certainly don't want to read them out loud myself. That's probably not the best way of getting the most out of the poems, or hewing to their true spirit, but I'm far more concerned with this musical translation of them than I am the poems themselves. The ones selected by Bonnie and Tren are all love songs, very romantic poems evoking pastoral and animal themes, with a healthy dose of self-reflexive content about sitting around singing, composing poems, wooing and getting drunk.

The Marquis de Tren is inimitable Dirty Three guitarist Mick Turner. If you're familiar with that band, or more specifically Tren Brothers, Turner's duo with D3 drummer and all-around badass Jim White, (or even more specifically, Turner's solo records), you have a pretty good idea of what the Jollys sound like. The music is lightly brooding but romantic, atmospheric and just in general very, very lovely. The kind of stuff you imagine a modern Young Werther might like. And you know what Will's singing sounds like. Relying more on emotive resonance than technical proficiency, his vocals have become a bit more palpable to the normal human ear in the past decade, and it's not difficult to imagine some sort of training is to be blamed/thanked. (Some reviewer, in Puncture I think it was, wrote they always pictured Huckleberry Hound when listening to him, but that person was probably a sheltered Yankee.) But these two recordings, from 1999 and 2001, catch him in what I think of as more or less his vocal prime, shorn of much of the warble and strain of his first few records, but not so clean as of late. Honestly, a casual listener might not notice much difference between now and then, and it's the kind of voice that will only ever speak to a limited number of listeners, which is why I always found it amusing he begins both Jolly recordings with the lines "When you ask me to sing, it feels like my heart will burst with pride" before continuing "I know you take pleasure in my singing," kind of howling the "knooow" a bit. It's funny, but also absolutely perfect, because Will's lyrics and music tend toward the romantic anyway, so it's easy to imagine him wooing someone by singing these poems, and if you're a fan, you do take pleasure in his singing, and you know that he knows he has a fairly limited vocal range. It also brings these occasionally perfumey poems down to a less courtly, more pedestrian setting. To illustrate that thought, imagine what drama queens like Celine Dion or Streisand or even Nick Cave or Antony would do with these songs, and compare it to Will's more approachable approach. If, like me, you're always hopelessly out of tune, it's perfectly ok to sing along with him and not sound so off. In fact, using his as a guide vocal, it's fun.

Get On Jolly is a studio-recorded EP, while Get the Fuck On Jolly Live is, as its title makes clear, a live recording that's a bit lengthier. I prefer the EP, not only because I think Will's voice sounds better on it, but also because I listened to it constantly during a sad, lonely and impressionable time of my life, and though I know its limitations and dangers, I can be a sucker for nostalgia. It's the kind of music that makes being lovelorn bearable, offering an idealized impression of what it will be like when you get to be in love again. I suppose I could try to make an aesthetic argument for it, but really I don't even want to try. Some things work best on a personal level. One great thing about the live recording is it features a few songs not on the EP, including the immaculate "LXXXVI" (all the titles are the poem's numbers in the text), in which Will ecstatically repeats "I found a new way of living, I found a joy of my own" while Mick works his magic on guitar and harmonium.

But both recordings are truly special, and would make perfect Valentine's Day listening. Or, if you want, you could learn the songs and sing them to your special someone. I doubt you'll improve on Will and Mick, but if you lie and say you wrote these songs for your adored, you're guaranteed some action.

Will and Kels

For me, the most surprising thing in Will Oldham's interview of R Kelly is that Will watches 30 Rock. It's just hard to imagine him doing normal people thing like watch television. Do you think his favorite character is Kenneth? My favorite part of the interview is when Will tries to ingratiate himself to R by telling him he covers a few of his songs and R responds cordially before going completely non sequitur on him:

OLDHAM: I love that song “The World’s Greatest” as well. We perform that song onstage sometimes. We do sort of like a country version of it.

KELLY: Yeah? I would love to hear that. You know, I took the Queen Mary to Europe once because I didn’t want to get on a plane . . .

If you're in the mood for more celebrity on celebrity action, here's Kanye Wets interviewing Rihanna. If not, allow me to share a few of my favorite moments from the interview.

RIHANNA: Hey. How are you?
WEST: I'm good. I'm just out here in this retarded-ass studio- Peter Gabriel's studio.

*

WEST: How does it feel to know that you could have any man in the world? Or woman. How does it feel to know that you can turn straight women gay?
RIHANNA: Is that a real question?

*

WEST: Why you drink so much Red Bull?

*

WEST: Do you know any famous people now?
RIHANNA: Huh? [laughs]

Not another post about Egypt!

It's hard not to be fascinated by the events in Egypt this past week, and there's no end to internet articles on the subject. Egyptian citizens have unwittingly provided a laboratory setting to observe the dreaded "instant expert" disease which is an unfortunate by-product of life in the information age. It's not just your "friends" on Facebook who are graciously subjecting you to their informed opinion because they visited Egypt for a week a few years ago, or worked with a guy from Egypt once. This has infected much larger and "most trusted" sources for news and, more to the point, opinion. The few Westerner scholars and Arab world ex-pat experts news organizations keep on ice until something happens in places like Tunisia or Egypt are being thawed out, but not everyone has one handy. I certainly knew very little about Egypt society and government before last week, and so did you. We all did. But after a weekend of late nights with Google, suddenly everybody knows what's happening, why it's happening, and what should happen there. Granted, some of that is a no-brainer, and a simple "the people vs. a despised leader" narrative works to a point. It's the overall context and nuance of the op-eds, as well as the discussion of the future of the nation, where things get uncomfortable, especially since it all seems to be coming from the point of view of what's best for the United States.

I'm doing the same as everyone else and visiting all the usual news haunts, in my case the NYT (I know, I know), The Guardian, NPR and ZNet. These organizations have the resources and history with the region to do a fairly reliable reporting job, bearing in mind obvious biases and viewpoints. Al Jazeera is obviously the best places for expanded coverage and context, though I have to admit I only visit their site when something extra crazy is happening in the Mideast. The network was apparently blacked out across much of the U.S., but their website seems to be having no trouble at all. After spending time with the site, it all but renders the others I mentioned obsolete. I like peeking in and roaming around other sites, too, ones that don't seem as well-prepared to report from or comment on Egypt. I restrained myself from the voyeuristic/masochistic exercise of looking in on Fox, even after that ridiculous map they created in 2009 started showing up everywhere. Making fun of Huffington Post is like picking on a well-meaning classmate with limited intelligence and reasoning skills, but I have to hand it to them for straight up admitting they had to go to the ever-reliable, always thorough New York Review of Books for years of context. There's so much competing for our attention on this subject, NYRB seems to be a sober one-stop shopping source for a brief history lesson.