Imaginational Anthems IV

And why not, one more from Metro Pulse.

Various Artists

Imaginational Anthem IV: New Possibilities (Tompkins Square)

The fourth volume in Tompkins Square’s Imaginational Anthem series showcasing contemporary acoustic guitarists bears the subtitle New Possibilities. It’s an allusion to one of John Fahey’s most famous albums, though no one really needs to be reminded how heavily the late guitarist’s influence looms over the current generation of fingerpickers. It works as a title, though, because most of the 10 artists represented here are newer names on the scene, and though these guys (and it is mostly guys who are compelled to play this stuff) are well-versed in the traditions of the past, most of these selections look forward as much as back.

Chris Forsyth underscores the nervous agitation of his acoustic playing with a calm ambient electric hum on the aptly named “Paranoid Cat”; Nashvillian William Tyler, who performed at this year’s Big Ears festival as Paper Hats, turns in a gorgeous, tricky tune that hints at the blues; Nick Jonah Davis displays a flair for both minimalism and Spanish guitar; Pat O’Connell’s “Song for Eugene” is a charming piece of ragtime that ends abruptly as it’s just getting going, adding a strange note of self-conscious artificiality to the otherwise neo-primitive proceedings; Band of Horses guitarist Tyler Ramsey’s “Our Home Beyond the River” is perhaps the least formally challenging piece, but is still as lovely sounding as it’s title suggests; Micah Blue Smaldone plays a languid country blues that’s perhaps the most Fahey-derivative thing on the album. The album closes with two highlights, 20-year old self-taught Aaron Sheppard’s dexterous run through “We Meet,” and a jaunty, Davey Graham-influenced Celtic piece from U.K. player C Joynes.

New Possibilities ends up hosting a wide variety of styles, and the guitarists all exhibit excellent technique without being precious, their playing emotive but not sentimental.

Antony and the Johnsons - Swanlights

From Metro Pulse!

Antony and the Johnsons

Swanlights (Secretly Canadian)

With his third album, 2009’s The Crying Light, Antony abandoned the already slight rock influences that popped up on his breakthrough album, I Am a Bird Now, and even removed most of the pop from his chamber pop. The result was a work of refined ambience and subtle complexity that could seem stunning if you gave it your full attention, stuffy if you weren’t in the mood. Though Swanlights exhibits a similar austerity, there are moments that hark back to Antony’s cabaret and theater beginnings. With their orchestral swells, busy piano runs, and dramatic vocals, “Ghost” and “Salt Silver Oxygen” seem well-suited for a musical theater production, while a carnival organ runs through the jaunty, sing-songy “I’m in Love.” The obvious single, “Thank You for Your Love,” gets things swinging for a couple of minutes with horns and a backbeat borrowed from Stax, but for the most part the songs ride a slow tempo set by a piano and accompanied by a string section.

This increased refinery might put off listeners who were first drawn in to Antony’s world by the elegant but quirky “For Today I Am a Boy” or the sleazy swagger of “Fistful of Love.” At times the music runs the risk of being like wallpaper, and the floral kind at that. Fortunately, Antony’s voice will always be the star of the show, the anchor of the songs in the arrangements and the mix. His effortless, androgynous tenor oozes emotion, usually tending to the torchier side of things, and his control of it is awe-inspiring.

There is one blatant misstep on the album. Bjork is allowed the lead on “Fletta,” appearing near the end of the album, while Antony is relegated to a background singer. Normally I’m a Bjork apologist, but her vocal is out of place here, its pungency a rude intrusion on what had been a pleasant enough experience, like someone slipping a sardine into your milkshake. Skip it and you’re that much nearer to album-closer “Christina’s Farm”—an exquisite piano ballad with a grand orchestral build toward the end, it’s a prime showcase for Antony’s vocal and lyrical talents. And while it lacks the panache of some of his more dramatic material, it could well end up being one of his greatest songs.

Neil Young's "Borrowed Tune"

I don't always post my Metro Pulse reviews, mainly because I tend to be displeased with them after they're published. Liek I've left something out or didn't follow a thought far enough. I think it's the restrictive word count, compared to the long leash I'm given at Tiny Mix Tapes. And as my own editor, I was pretty much off the chain at Knoxville Voice. What can I say, I'm a windbag.

Anyway, this is something I actually liked, and I was glad to be asked to participate in MP's Neil Young appreciation.

Neil Young's "Borrowed Tune"

The discussion of “authenticity” in music is a losing game, but Neil Young’s album Tonight’s the Night certainly sounds like a genuine expression of guilt, regret, anger, and misery, punctuated by the occasional good time. The death- and drug-obsessed sessions led to a batch of unlikely beautiful songs, and “Borrowed Tune” stands out as a teachable moment in the vagaries of the Neil Young aesthetic. It’s Neil alone with harmonica and piano, his voice tired and shaky after too many sleepless nights and pharmaceuticals. The lyrics sound made up on the spot, the piano playing is rudimentary and the harmonica grates. When he cops to taking the tune he’s playing from the Rolling Stones (it’s “Lady Jane”) because he’s too wasted to write his own, he pulls off the not easy task of being both as self-reflexively meta and uncomfortably confessional as can be. It’s a stark song, existential to the bone: “I hope that it matters/I’m having my doubts” goes the refrain. As “woe is me” songs go, it’s too genuinely pitiful to identify with or sing along with, yet it still registers as brilliant pop music. He apparently doesn’t perform this song live much, and who can blame him?

Dwarr - Animals

My God, what a cover. From Tiny Mix Tapes.

What sort of intended audience could Duane Warr have had in mind when he self-released Animals on records back in 1986? In today’s market of countless small labels, mp3 hosts, and self-released CD-Rs, quirky lo-fi albums that don’t fit comfortably into their genre are churned out daily. But 25 years ago, this druggy, cryptic missive from Columbia, South Carolina must have sounded like some truly out shit to whatever ears it might have reached. The music isn’t quite as loco as the Planet of the Apes meets Cannibal Holocaust meets Thundarr the Barbarian cover art would have you believe, but Warr was definitely far beyond driven as he hammered out these tracks, playing every instrument except drums.

The most obvious and deep influence is Sabbath, at its plodding heaviest. It can hardly be a criticism that “Ghost Lovers” is practically a rewrite of “Electric Funeral,” since bands like Electric Wizard and Sleep did the exact same thing with that classic Sabbath template to far more (relative) acclaim and glory nearly a decade later. In the mid-80s, Sabbath wasn’t exactly the hippest metal band, but this southern factory worker seemed to want to reclaim their sound as a bulwark against the watered-down metal that was pouring forth from radio and MTV. “Ah, get the hell off the radio,” Warr growls at the start of “Are You Real,” presumably to the hair metal hordes, before launching into some epic Iommi-esque riffage. To most ears, he would have seemed hopelessly behind the times, the metal equivalent of a moldy fig. His soloing was peculiar, too, most reminiscent of Greg Ginn when Ginn would freak out with those irrational, anti-math rock solos on those great, late period metal-soaked Black Flag records. A couple of instrumentals here resemble a less funky version of Ginn’s trio Gone. And though there’s no way of knowing if Neil Hagerty heard this record way back when (though the fact that his label Drag City is reissuing this makes you wonder), Warr’s playing at times sounds eerily close to some of Hagerty’s on Royal Trux’s 1997 album Sweet Sixteen. (Compare the guitar tone and soloing on Dwarr’s “Lonely Space Traveler” and “Cannabinol: The Function” to Trux’s “Morphic Resident” and “Golden Rules.”)

Drag City has not only deemed Animals worthy of reissue, but a “Hard Rock Masterpiece.” And while that’s going waaaaay too far, the timing of the release is fortuitous. If this had been released 10 years or so ago, we may have heard it as a lone nut harbinger of doom metal. But oddly enough, the tin-can, murky production and oddly placed, weird keyboard and bell tones will sound perfectly natural to ears accustomed to hypnagogic pop frequencies; “That Deadly Night” may in fact be the first hypnagogic metal track.

Despite this, it would be disingenuous to say that Warr was ahead of his time. Though the heavy end of Sabbath that Dwarr was borrowing would become popular with the doom movement, there were still plenty of heads in basements and garages across America playing these seductively simplistic, hypnotic riffs while stoned out of their gourds. And it’s likely lo-fi because Warr couldn’t afford to make it sound any better, not because he was a black metal visionary. So rather than being a document of an overlooked genius/pioneer, Animals ultimately sounds like the record of a talented, highly-motivated, highly antisocial guy who loved metal but also had some unusual musical ideas of his own. Which is to say it’s highly recommended, because that’s more than a lot of metal bands can say these days.

Moogfest

Review here.

Sun City Girls - Funeral Mariachi

From Tiny Mix Tapes.

Sun City Girls Funeral Mariachi

When first putting the needle down on Funeral Maricahi, I expected to be in for the kind of crazy, unpredictable aural adventure that only Sun City Girls deliver. Having released over 70 recordings of adventurous and at times bewildering material fusing rock and various ethnic styles with an often aggressive avant-garde edge, odds were good their final studio album would be as wild as ever.

Opening track “Ben’s Radio” certainly met these expectations, a tempo-shifting exploration of Eastern and African styles, accompanied by raucous group vocals. Reminiscent of the Radio series of dial-turning field recordings issued by SCG guitarist Alan Bishop’s label Sublime Frequencies, the song is slightly disorienting with its abrupt changes. The following track, “The Imam,” continues in this vein, beginning with a shrill horn blaring intermittently amidst rapid-fire acoustic guitar playing. But a shift in tone occurs mid-song, the music settling down into a calm rhythm as Alan begins singing in a keening, Arabesque wail. Following such a spiky beginning, the vocal is disarming in its unmannered allure, and the remainder of the album continues in a similarly subdued, lyrical manner. It’s a totally unexpected approach for the band to take for their final release, and all the more powerful and affecting for it.

Not that Sun City Girls haven’t played it straight before. Although known as incorrigible pranksters and wise-asses, there’s never been any doubt to the seriousness and proficiency of their musicianship. For 27 years, brothers Alan and Rick Bishop played alongside drummer Charles Gocher to create some of the most complex, challenging American music of the last three decades. By stubbornness and/or good luck, they remained a true underground institution at a time when even the most careerist-defying bands would eventually find some form of forced exposure that would attract a wider audience. They never had designs on anything resembling fame, though, and their lunatic take on a hodgepodge of musical styles combined with a confrontational stage presence often obscured what great musicians they were, assuring they’d remain a curio to most. Gocher’s death from cancer in February 2007 led the Bishops to formally declare the end of SCG, though a deep archive of live recordings will probably ensure future releases for a good long while.

Gocher’s illness may explain the more gentle tone of Funeral Mariachi, which was recorded shortly before his death and has an unusually high amount of straightforward tunes for the band. The ever-present African and Arabic influences are filtered through a mellow folk sensibility, and songs such as “This Is My Name” and “El Solo” reveal a seductiveness rarely displayed by the band. Many songs are driven by Richard’s lovely piano playing, and with its high-pitched vocal, “Vine Street Piano” sounds not unlike, believe it or not, Sigur Rós. The second half of the album is dominated by an Ennio Morricone influence, “Blue West” and “Mineral Wells” sounding as though they were lifted straight from a 60s Spaghetti Western soundtrack. SCG offer their own twisted take on the Western ballad with “Holy Ground” before tackling one of Morricone’s most famous pieces, “Come Maddalena.” The title track closes the album, and it’s as fitting a tribute to Gocher and farewell to the band as one could hope. A mournful tune complete with requisite baleful mariachi trumpet, it never slips into melancholy or sentimentality.

Sun City Girls have long had to deal with accusations of cultural tourism, suggestions that they were taking the piss with sacred musics of the world. That’s partly true, but probably not in the way their critics meant. For some, their mashups of music from exotic locales most of us would never physically visit was a welcome contrast to the piety of WOMAD, an answer to the Gabriels, Simons, and Stings who smugly pontificated on “world music” to Rolling Stone and CNN. These guys often acted as if they discovered these musical cultures the way Columbus discovered America. That’s harsh, and the pros and cons of WOMAD is a complex subject, but in the 80s and early 90s, there wasn’t a lot of distribution for non-Western music in America, and to have to suffer through receiving it via the filter of milquetoast millionaire rock stars was kind of galling. Sun City Girls reminded or even taught us that this music didn’t have to be treated with reverence, that it was amendable to the playful rules of rock ’n’ roll or Fluxus-like tweaking. But listen to the singing on “Imam” and “Black Orchid” and tell me there’s not a deep love and respect for Arabic music there. Listen to the playing on virtually any track on Funeral Mariachi and you’ll hear the feeling that immersion in foreign countries for prolonged periods has brought to their playing.

It might seem foolish or maybe just hopeful to call Funeral Mariachi accessible, since this music will only ever appeal to a marginal audience. But the wild men who still love to cop an attitude and provoke have created an album of unexpected beauty. They go out not with a bang or a whimper, but with a wide-eyed and confident work tinged with sadness, knowing they were part of something truly unique and amazing that met an untimely end.

Group Inerane - Guitars From Agadez Vol. 3

From Tiny Mix Tapes.

Political turmoil, violence, and personal tragedy are not what immediately come to mind when listening to Group Inerane. The joyful, exuberant songs on the latest in Sublime Frequencies’ Guitars from Agadez series don’t seem indicative of the circumstances in which the music was created. Listen to an upbeat tune like “Tamidit,” a perfectly suitable piece for the wedding celebrations that still serve as Inerane’s primary venue in their home country of Niger, and you’d never guess that it was recorded shortly following a coup d'état that replaced that nation’s president with a military junta. And you certainly wouldn’t think this album followed so soon after Inerane’s guitarist Adi Mohamed was shot dead during a rebel battle.

By now, the music and history of the nomadic Tuareg people of the Western Sahara are relatively well-known to "world music" aficionados and NPR listeners, thanks in large part to Tinariwen. That group serves as ambassador of the politically-born, groove-driven guitar music to most Western audiences, and as such tends to be a more well-scrubbed, professional ensemble than many of their peers back home. If you've heard Tinariwen, or especially if you've seen them live, you know how hypnotic and trance-inducing they can be. But playing in the concert halls and festival stages of Europe and America to thousands of people for years has somewhat taken the edge off their sound. Group Inerane, like Sublime Frequencies labelmates Doueh and Bombino, still sound like what they started out as and largely remain: the local party band. This is social music, intended for dancing and celebrating.

To record the album, Inerane leader and guitarist Bib Ahmed had to leave the group’s home of Agadez, because it was too dangerous for Sublime Frequencies co-founder and archivist Hisham Mayet to go there. Ahmed traveled to the Nigerian capital of Niamey, where he arranged for a pick-up rhythm section to record with him. He also enlisted the services of Koudede, an acclaimed, much-sought-after guitarist of the Tuareg style. The addition of Koudede, bassist Abdulai Sidi Mohamed, and drummer Mohamed Atchinguel has resulted in a more relaxed-sounding Inerane than the one found on Volume 1. Cleaner production also contributes to this sound; whereas Volume 1’s on-location recording contributed to its raw, psychedelic sound, the photos inside the gatefold of Volume 3 show the group within the eggshell-soundproofed confines of a studio. The high-pitched ululating and group vocal chanting are gone as well, leaving Ahmed to handle the singing with Koudede supplying occasional backup. In many ways, this is a much different group from the one heard on Volume 1, and this recording documents the transformation of a group that has been forced to change due to circumstances beyond its control. Recorded live in the studio, the music is no less energetic or immediate, and it sounds like these guys are having a great time.

There’s some debate as to what extent, if any, American blues influenced Tuareg music or if both merely share a common ancestor in West Africa. Tinariwen denies that they ever heard blues before visiting America in 2001, while Doueh has readily admitted the influence of Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. Musicologists and amateur scholars love to argue about this stuff, but it’s doubtful that there’ll ever be a conclusive answer to what extent who made whom. Regardless, this music inarguably shares some source with Mississippi Hill Country blues, as most recently recorded and disseminated by the Fat Possum label. That sound is far more pronounced here than in any previous Agadez release; the crawling groove and droning guitar of “Alemin” is especially reminiscent of a Junior Kimbrough slow-burner, and even the vocal intonations are reminiscent of the late Holly Springs bluesman.

There’s no question that the ongoing political upheavals and violence in Niger’s Agadez Region has offered an extra layer of "exoticness" to the Tuareg albums for Western audiences. Virtually any article, press release, or review you read is going to mention it, and it would be foolish if not irresponsible not to. But you have to wonder: What exactly does the relationship between the music and the environment it springs from mean to the outside listener? How much does the backstory color how we hear the music? Is the music more of a gateway to learning about a region and culture most of us wouldn’t think much about otherwise? Dwell too long on the contrast between the day-to-day reality of these musicians and the fetishistic collectibility of these limited-edition LPs and things can really get strange.

Of course, how much context matters differs from listener to listener. Some people can’t enjoy music without having as much background information as possible. More casual listeners have dispensed with liner notes altogether and wouldn’t think of doing beyond the most cursory internet research. If they like something, they listen to it and don’t really care about M.I.A.’s position on the Tamil Tigers. Most people fall somewhere between these two extremes, while Sublime Frequencies loyalists definitely skew to the former grouping. But despite how much context you bring to it, if you can listen to this record without being moved — physically and emotionally — there might be something severely wrong with you. Put this record on at a social gathering, and it’s hard to imagine that people won’t start nodding their heads, tapping their feet, or unconsciously swaying to the music. This is the kind of music that can interrupt the flow of daily life, make people look up from their computer screens at coffee shops, suspend their small-talk in bars, or start dancing at an otherwise dull house party. This music is plain wonderful, life-affirming, and celebratory any way you look at it, and if you consider its origins, even more so.