A few things I've picked up recently...

Hank Williams III - Damn Right, Rebel Proud. It's shit-kickin' music: raucous and loud and raunchy, big attitude. Though he shares the legend's name, 3's his own man, for sure. About the only musical connection to Sr's legacy are in lyrical references: he likes to call out people who did Sr. wrong. He's definitely not trying to emulate that sweet, subtle poignancy of Sr's songs.

Screaming Females - Ugly. The way the singer puts a lot of energy and attitude into avoiding singing in key reminds me of really early Throwing Muses. But the Muses have better songs.

Bob Dylan - Bootleg Series #4 (live @ Royal Albert Hall, 1966). I'm slowly growing fond of Mr. Zimmerman. Took me a long time. I've always heard he rarely plays his songs live the way he originally recorded them. But that must be a recent change - they're all pretty much straight, here.

Alabama Shakes - Boys & Girls. 60's soul, 70's Stones with hints of the Walkmen and maybe a touch of Black Keys. Very nice. Great singer.

Heard anything you need to tell the world about?

As with many things in my life, my record buying is in a bit of a lull these days. Up until last week my iTunes "Recently Added" list was empty (which I think means I haven't added anything in like a month). But, I do have a couple of new-ish things to blab about...

1. Little Scream - The Golden Record. Little Scream is a woman named Laurel Sprengelmeyer, who received some assistance from indie rock friends on this record. It's kindof folky, kindof rock, kindof alternative. I stick her in the same part of my mental musical map as Feist, Wye Oak and St. Vincent: a strong female lead, sometimes introspective, sometimes brash, a lot of dynamics, a nice amount of sonic and musical experimentation, etc.. Categorization aside, I do like this. I wish Shuffle would bring it up more often. Cannons, Red Hunting Jacket, The Lamb.
   4 Thorns: þ þ þ þ

2. Van Halen - A Different Kind Of Truth. This is their first with David Lee Roth back in front since 1984's oddly-titled "1984", and the first without long-time bassist and background vocalist extraordinaire, Michael Anthony; Eddie's son, Wolfgang, took over the bass duties. I've heard enough live clips to know DLR's voice isn't what it used to be, so I wasn't expecting much from him. And I gave up on the rest of the band during their Sammy Hagar years. So, I wasn't expecting much from them, either. But, I've recently grown fond of their early stuff, after many years of dismissing it, so I thought I'd better at least give this one a chance - maybe they could find a bit of that old spark.

   Well, there's a decent amount of it. A couple of songs are truly catchy. And couple of them echo older songs, sometimes in deliberate ways (as when new tune 'Stay Frosty' winks back at 1979's 'Ice Cream Man'). And DLR's vocals are actually decent; no, he can't do those shrieks anymore, and his delivery is somewhat less singing and a bit more speaking. But, he gets the job done. Lyrically, he's as silly as ever: "mousewife to momshell in the time it took to get that new tattoo". Eddie's playing is as ferocious as ever - he hasn't diminished a bit. Alex still brings the thunder. And Wolfgang does a respectable job on the bass (not that you can really hear a bass over Eddie's full-spectrum guitar attack).

   Many of the songs here are actually re-worked unreleased songs from that era - some even predate their 1979 debut. So, in that way it really does sound like a classic-era VH record, and thankfully not like an old band trying to become relevant again by trying to write songs in today's style. Still, for me, it's just missing something. It's VH, so it's heavy and it's loud and it rocks - that's a given. But what made VH great back in the day was the hooks. They could put that power behind simply great pop songs. But there's no "Jamie's Crying" or "Feel Your Love Tonight" or "Jump!" on here. It's more "Atomic Punk", "Light Up The Sky" and "House Of Pain" - the stuff surrounding the gems. Still, B-level VH is better than no VH, IMO.

   But, what really gets me down is the sound. It's dense. Eddie's multiple, extremely busy guitars and their various thick distortions dominate the entire spectrum. To compete with Eddie, DLR's vocals are highly compressed and very loud; but it's obvious that he really doesn't have the lung power to be that loud, so it sometimes sounds strange. And not to be left out, the drums and bass are highly compressed, too - very little dynamic range there. Then, the whole mix is mashed and compressed even further, so the overall effect is often just a big loud rush of noise. I actually get worn out from listening to this at around the 20 minute mark - as in, my first two listens I checked the track list thinking, "wow, this must be a really long record!" Nope, just 13 songs, and only one breaks 5:00. And that's a shame, since I think the songs could maybe grow on me.

   After the second listen, I went back and listened to VH II. It's a record I don't play often, but the new "Honeybabysweetiedoll" echoes that album's "Outta Love Again", and I wanted to compare. And, I wanted to hear if I was mishearing this one. Maybe VH has always done full-on sonic saturation? Nope, VH II is a much better listen. This new one fatigues. Compression kills.

   Then, just for fun, I listened to their last record, 1998's Van Halen "III", which was done with former Extreme singer Gary Cherone. I'd acquired it somewhere, years ago, but never listened. I'd only heard bad things about it, but it wasn't terrible. It actually sounded, in places, a lot like a middling Adrian Belew record - similar sounds, song structures, etc.. Very odd.

   Anyway, 2 Thorns: þ þ

   Tattoo.

You all got anything good?

Let's listen to Dizzy Gillespie:

I'm sorry!

A few quickies about stuff I've been listening to:

• Wilco - The Whole Love. A few good songs, a few clunkers. Not as interesting as Sky Blue Sky or anything prior.
• Feist - Metals. Played it through a few times, haven't heard anything great, heard a few things that grate.
• Pixies - Bossonova. Managed to avoid this one, when it was relevant. But, I'm seeing them tomorrow night, so I thought I should give it a listen. A few good songs, a lot of stuff that just doesn't quite get there.
• Tuurd - I Wish My Wife Was This Dirty. A heavy, sludgy, bass (? detuned guitar?) and drums thing, with low grumbly vocals and a really meaty bass sound. I'm biased, because I know these guys, but I like it.
• Sebadoh - Bakesale. Also missed this when it was relevant. Don't really care for it now.

Y'all got anything new?

Let's listen to Frank Black and Moris Tepper.

You are welcome.

• Holy Sons - Survivalist Tales! Bought this after seeing them open for Malkmus & The Jicks. Live, they were a blisteringly loud blend of blues and jazz-inflected psychedelic/experimental indie rock, screaming guitar feedback/effect skronk, and dark lyrics. At least that's what I heard, standing ten feet from the guitar amp. But this record is sometimes electronics-heavy, sometimes based around acoustic guitars, always moody, often dense but rarely really loud. From what I can tell, Holy Sons is really just the work of one guy (though I was digging the actual band he had assembled on stage). Whatever the deal is, it's a unique sound. Worth investigating.
  Golden Child, Look Of Pain.

• Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Mirror Traffic. This one feels a bit less jammy than the last one, and a bit more into quick tempo/time changes. And there are a lot of songs on here that I really dig - more than the last record, even. But when you get right down to it, it still basically sounds like Malkmus; his unique vocal style and his by-now-familiar songwriting style completely dominate. So, not a lot of surprises if you've been listening to him since the days of Pavement. But it's still tasty. Comfort food.
  Senator, Tune Grief.

• Blue Cheer - Vincebus Eruptum. Yow! Another one of those bands that just drops neatly into a space in my mental map of bands, and makes the connection between two bands seem so obvious that I feel like an idiot for not seeing it before. In this case, the bands are Jimi Hendrix and Mudhoney. They sound like live Hendrix at his most feedback-drenched and free-spirited, but without the, err, stunning technical ability. That late-60's, primarily San Francisco-based, psychedelic blues sound (Janice Joplin, etc): it's loud and raw and loose, tends to long ragged bouts of improvisation, and gets its power from attitude and volume. So, take that, bind it up in tight punky song structures and you get Mudhoney; or, double the volume and speed and you get Boris. I've heard their "Summertime Blues" before (MTV used to show that trippy '68 video!), but never the rest of the record. Heavy duty.
  Summertime Blues

• Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions - Through The Devil Softly. Hope Sandoval was the voice of Mazzy Star, way back when. Since that band broke up, she's been doing her own stuff, with or without collaborators, and this is her latest offering (2009). Her voice is still that unmistakable dreamy, near-whisper; and the music, while lighter and more delicate than Mazzy Star, is exactly what you'd expect to hear next to her voice: it's slow, pensive and leans dark. Not really a party record, but it's a pretty one.
  Blanchard.

Got anything you want to tell us about?

• Gillian Welch - The Harrow And The Harvest. They're right back into their signature sound, as if that long gap since their last record, "Soul Journey", never happened. Right from the first notes, you know this is a Gillian Welch record, and that they didn't spend the last eight years doing something stupid like developing a new style, or getting really into electronica or whatever - which is great, cause what they do is perfect as it is. The first song, "Scarlet Town", sounds like it could've come from their first record; it's a cold and lonesome minor-key thing, cut from the same cloth as their "Rock Of Ages" and "Caleb Myer". Still, while their basic sound is intact, this album does stand apart from the rest. As a whole, it's much more laid back than previous records. There are a couple of songs that leap out at you ("Scarlet Town", "Tennessee", "Hard Times", and I really like the harmonies on "The Way It Will Be" - reminds me of "Deja Vu"-era CSNY), but most of the songs gently swing by, and can slip past nearly unnoticed, if you're not paying attention. So, it took me a while to really get into this. Now that I have: very nice. No, it's not as attention-grabbing as some of their other records, but flash isn't the only thing that goes into a good record. This is good in a different way. Glad they're back.
  Four raquos: »»»».

• The Budos Band - The Budos Band. This is a big "Afro-beat" band, who play funky 60's-style African soul instrumentals. Very groovy. I don't have a lot of experience with this kind of music, so I'm not exactly sure how to talk about it. But, I do like to listen to it...
  Three raquos: »»»».

• The Pixies - loudQUIETloud. This is a documentary movie about their 2004 reunion tour(s). The live concert footage is great, and I can't wait to see them in November. But it's the backstage/tour-bus stuff that really hits you: they are a crazy bunch of people. It's truly amazing that they managed to put out even one record, let alone as many as they have. And I could have done with fewer shots of Frank Black lounging around in his boxers. Though I do hereby lay claim to the idea for an "I ♥ Fat Frank Black" T-Shirt ( href ).
  Three raquos: »»»».

• A Tribe Called Quest - Beats, Rhymes, Life (album). It's not as thrilling as "Midnight Marauders" or "The Low End Theory", but it has a lot of good stuff. In hindsight, the smoother more soulful feel clearly points to where Q-Tip was going to go with his solo records, which I love. But, as a Tribe record, it's a little soft.
  Three raquos: »»»».

• A Tribe Called Quest - Beats, Rhymes, Life (movie). This is a documentary about the band by comedian, actor, director Michael Rapaport. It covers their entire career, from formation, to success, to decline, to break-up, and then their (inevitable, so it seems with bands these days) reunion shows. Lots of unflattering shots of some tough looking neighborhoods do a great job of conveying the feel of NYC; and the tons of interviews with people who were there, way back then, in the long long ago, in the late 80's/early 90's set up the hip hop scene in which ATCQ came up and thrived.

  While there's almost no explicit conflict in the Pixies' movie because they're all incapable of meaningful direct communication with each other, the Tribe is all about conflict, these days. Probably half the movie is about the conflict between Q-Tip (in-charge and confident, the star of the show) and his childhood friend, and co-founder, Phife (resentful and a bit insecure). Ali, and sometimes-member Jarobi, stand on the side lines shaking their heads in helpless dismay, as the other two bicker and complain. Great band, done in by that which kills all bands, in time: personalities.
  Four raquos: »»»».

See, hear, read anything interesting lately?

Some shit I've been consuming...

Music:

1. Modern Lovers - Modern Lovers. Love it. You already know that.
2. The Specials - Specials. Fun Brit ska-revival. Made me want to listen to Sublime. Then I listened to Sublime and learned that they're one of those bands whose hits are far better than the rest of what they do.
3. Ramones - Rocket To Russia. My first Ramones. It's 1/2 great, 1/4 good and 1/4 crap.
4. Albert King - The Best Of. Love the early stuff - before he started playing with big horn-encrusted bands. The early singles are killer.
5. BB King - some big monster iTunes collection. B.B. has a better singing voice, but I still like Albert King better.
6. The Avalanches - Since I Left You. An impressive technical achievement - so many samples! I still don't like dance music.

Books:

1. Téa Obreht - The Tiger's Wife. A wide-ranging tale about the intersection of fable, family and war, in an unnamed Balkan country, before, during and after various wars. Very nice.
2. Jeff VanderMeer - The Third Bear. A collection of short stories from one of my favorite fantastical authors. Among many great stories, it contains one of my favorites, "The Situation" - which describes the surreal office politics of a bunch of genetically-modified post-human creatures. That story appeared in an earlier compilation of his short stories, but I was glad to read it again. And you can read it here!

1. Anita O'Day And The Three Sounds. A one-off recorded one week in '62 with O'Day singing with The Three Sounds (a piano, bass & drums trio). Almost half of it is instrumental, and on those tracks where O'Day does sing, she often leaves huge instrumental stretches. The Three Sounds themselves are very low-key and minimal here, and so when O'Day isn't singing, sometimes it seems very empty. I can't help but imagine O'Day sitting there during those breaks, looking bored, walking around, doing some heroin (or whatever she was into at that time). And, it turns out that this was the last record she'd make for seven years - which was quite a change for someone who'd released ten records in the two years prior. So, I guess she really wasn't feeling it. Still, it's not bad, it's just realllllly laid back, and a bit light on the O'Day.
   Two raquos: »»

2. Anita O'Day - Anita Sings The Most. This one, though, is all about O'Day. All the songs are standards (Old Devil Moon, Stella By Starlight, S'Wonderful, Them There Eyes, etc.) and the band (the Oscar Peterson Quartet) is far more full and engaging than The Three Sounds. You can hear O'Day smiling her way through her lyrics.

   I'm not sure when jazz vocalists gave up on emotion, but in the stuff I hear on the local jazz station these days, female jazz singers have switched to a emotionally flat, and crisply enunciated delivery that sounds more like pitch-modulated speaking than what people usually consider singing. O'Day is definitely a singer.

   Three and a half raquos: »»»>

3. Harlem - Hippies. This record really wants to sound like a 60's garage band. The songs themselves are short and quick and musically sound every bit like something from The Seeds or The Syndicate Of Sound or The Kingsmen (or The Mosquitos!) or any of those other 60's bands who took the Kinks and Beatles as inspiration but came up with something much more lean and rough and raw, and much less interested in traditional musical theory than anything you'd hear from Lennon & McCartney.

   The guitars are played loudly with a lot of reverb but without heavy distortion, so there's a lot of clang. The vocals are shouty. There's a bass in there, but it's tough to hear at times. It's aggressively lo-fi. The record's not actually mono, but on most songs most of the sound is piled-up in the center of the mix, with some of the drums spread just slightly out to the sides. And, most noticeably, the whole thing has been EQ'd so that all the bass and high end is gone. So, basically, it sounds like an old 45 being played on a cheap record player with a worn-out needle. In sound-isolating headphones, that's not a terrible effect - it works. In my car, however, it sounds very thin and washed out and shitty.

   Still, the songs are fun.
   Three raquos: »»»

4. The Sea And Cake - The Moonlight Butterfly A five six song EP. First song is a somewhat standard current-era S&C tune. But, the chords in the verse sound a lot like a tune I wrote many years ago, about the girl who would, many years later, become the lovely and talented Mrs.. And so, this may be the first S&C song I've been able to learn by ear. I always said I wanted to be in S&C - and it's because I write little songs that sound like tiny bits of S&C songs. Always have, even before I knew who S&C was.

   The second tune does not sound like a typical new S&C song, which is a nice change. Besides an unusual (for S&C) acoustic guitar, it features a bass line that recalls a great old Unrest song called "West Coast Love Affair". Nice. If I have to be reminded of something, Unrest will do just fine. Then there's another ho-hum tune, then a mellow one stretched out to ten minutes which - because the song's now in my head - also recalls that Unrest bass line. Hmm. Not a bad effort, but I wish they'd branch out a little bit more.

   Heh... there's a sixth, titular, song, which did not make it to my iPod because I'd unchecked it in iTunes. It is apparently one of Sam Prekop's new programmed synthy electro-bloopy soundscapes. No!
   Two raquos: »»

5. Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca. In certain moods, I love this; in other moods, it's hard to take. The songs are complex and jittery: constantly shifting sounds and rhythms, disjointed; samples of instruments and vocals pop in and out; contrasting sounds are slapped against each other: brittle and angular King Crimson-ish guitar interjections in one ear and delicate harmonies in the other. Somehow, the overall effect is not always as grating as you might think; the careening melodies remind me a bit of the utterly brilliant St. Vincent; and there are tons of really nice parts in every song. But sometimes, I wish they'd just stick with something for more than a few bars. It's definitely a record that demands an open and adventurous state of mind, and close listening is rewarded. But, it's tough to find that mood, and that time.
   Three raquos: »»»