Record Reviews
Bonnie "Prince" Billy
originally published September 20, 2006
Bonnie “Prince” Billy has tapped into a wealth of inspiration by exploring the art of collaboration. Whether delving into the dark side of the male psyche with Matt Sweeney (Superwolf) or jamming on covers with Tortoise (The Brave & the Bold), new blood brings an incredible variety to Will Oldham’s catalogue. The Letting Go is his first proper round of new songs to materialize since releasing Master and Everyone in 2003. The space between has left an indelible mark on his songwriting, most notably via Superwolf. But whereas Oldham took a back seat in the duo to Sweeney’s songwriting, here he takes the reins with Dawn “The Fawn” Fables in tow.
With “Love Came to Me” and “I Called You Back,” Oldham and Fables share dark duets somewhat reminiscent of the Gram-Emmylou dynamic. In no time, darkness grabs the record, but rather than sinking into depression, Fables’ beaming croon brings an uplifting element that culminates over lush strings in “Cursed Sleep.” Fables is Oldham’s grievous angel, showing that indeed long is the way, and hard, and that the path out of Hell leads up to light.
There’s dark warmth shared between the two, giving rise to moods bound by a humble bridge between two lovers regaining trust after a long fight. Fables' voice is used as a textural instrument in the “The Seedling” and “Then the Letting Go,” weighing in against Oldham’s brooding ways, steering him away from easing on down the roads he’s already traveled.
Record Reviews
TV On The Radio
originally published September 20, 2006
The characteristic sound of TV on the Radio’s debut album Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes was a low-end drone, a mélange of synths, guitars and bass, with the otherworldly vocals of Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe floating over the top like ghosts over a bombed-out city. It sounded like the aftermath of something, or of everything.
Return to Cookie Mountain, by contrast, sounds like it was recorded in the midst of the attack. “I Was a Lover” opens the album with a factory-press beat, woozy, disoriented horns and waves of static. The dominant instrument is chaos. The lyrics trade in images of war and paranoia; the mental picture the song creates is of a Howard Hughes-style recluse locked in the tallest hotel in Vegas while the city crumbles around him. “Suddenly all your history’s ablaze / Try to breathe as the world disintegrates,” sings famous fan and guest star David Bowie on “Province,” one of the album’s more optimistic tracks. A fuzzy synth reaches for another inch; pianos plink in the background. “Playhouses” rides a jittery beat that’s too restless for its own good; as a reflection of a broken world, it works, but as a song, it never comes together.
Whereas most of Desperate Youth’s songs used that majestic drone as foundation, much of Cookie Mountain is built on drum loops - shuffling, skittering, marching drums, never taking a rest. Malone and Adebimpe show off their doo-wop chops on “A Method” over a bed of scrap-heap pounding. “Let the Devil In” hijacks a marching-band beat with bursts of compressed noise; it’s the dark side of Outkast’s celebratory “Morris Brown.” Without the drone, though, some of these songs sound thin, the ethereal vocals lost and desperate without an anchor. Nothing quite matches the ominous beauty of Desperate Youth’s “Staring at the Sun,” though the churning, skronking “Blues from Down Here” comes close - everything is taken down an octave or two, as it reaches into the gutter, TV on the Radio finds still more heights to reach.
The album closes with the epic “Wash the Day Away,” bass drums and electronic noise creating one of those perfect-storm waves, the kind that can knock over an entire city. TV on the Radio’s ambition gets the better of it a few times on Cookie Mountain, but there’s nothing wrong with knocking over a few of your own houses - the rebuilding process ought to make for a fascinating third album.
Record Reviews
Electric Six
originally published September 20, 2006
Comedy writers and fans like to complain that the Academy Awards have a bias against their favored genre, based on the Academy’s continued snubs of the likes of Anchorman, but the film industry’s annual festival of self-congratulations is a veritable Friar’s Club roast compared to the modern music scene. If it’s earnest over-emoting and dour self-seriousness you want, just turn on the radio. From Audioslave to Beyoncé, you’d be hard-pressed to find even the sonic equivalent of a grin. And though mall-punk imps like Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco may camp it up in their videos, the music is just the usual adolescent whining.
It’s comforting, then, to know that Electric Six is still out there, sweating it out to bring you the most serious comedy around. Switzerland, the band's third album, doesn’t veer far from the template established by Fire and Señor Smoke, though, as frontman Dick Valentine has noted, it’s the group's first album not to include a song with the word “dance” in the title. The emphasis, as always, is on the caffeinated fusion of disco and glam rock, with Valentine throwing out arch bon mots and sleazy come-ons in his hyper-masculine baritone. There’s the ever-present danger of the band falling onto the Spinal Tap side of the clever/ stupid line - “The Band in Hell” and “Pink Flamingos” sound like Reverend Horton Heat castoffs, for instance - but Electric Six avoids the novelty tag by turning its goofiest put-ons into its best songs. The lyrics of Fire’s “Danger! High Voltage” and “Gay Bar,” could have been written by sniggering fifth graders in detention hall, but the songs were ferocious dance-floor killers. Señor Smoke's high point, “Jimmy Carter,” is a beatless ballad about god-knows-what that liberally quotes the Backstreet Boys, but it achieves real psychological weight in its juxtaposition of pop-culture detritus and post-millennial dread.
Similarly, Switzerland’s best moment is “Infected Girls,” a stomping disco track about the joys of VD (sample lyric: “I gave you my heart, I gave you my soul / Now I’m just another number at the Center for Disease Control”) that balances its cheeky subject matter with bottom-heavy synths and an undeniable robotic bassline. It’s the perfect encapsulation of the Electric Six M.O.: keeping straight faces while joy-buzzering everybody in sight.
Record Reviews
Catfish Haven
originally published September 20, 2006
For a listener like I was, coming of age in the Midwest during the early ‘90s, progressing through the ranks of Minor Threat and the Misfits, moving onto Fugazi, Sebadoh, Helmet and so on, a band like Catfish Haven would most certainly have been the enemy. The group’s strong sense of rhythm and melody would have stood up to be counted amongst the Jimmy Buffetts and Joe Cockers, and summarily dismissed; but anyway, that was back then.
The laid-back, Memphis-style rock of “All I Need is You” encapsulates mustached dads wearing white shorts and Hawaiian shirts, sipping Jack Daniels on the rocks and playing games of Snooker in the basement. Whereas the teenage me would have scoffed and snorted over the gravelly, heartfelt croon of “Down by Your Fire” or “Grey Skies,” as a thirtysomething this sounds pretty sweet.
There’s no denying that Catfish Haven lays down a groove for adults, and frontman George Hunter definitely knows the craft. But there’s an understated Lou Reed element of loose rhythms in the guitar jangle that drives “Crazy For Leaving.” This sense of amphetamine melancholy adds depth and intricacy to such a straightforward, stripped-down sound. In this relationship that binds Catfish Haven’s uncomplicated songwriting, the group taps into a demanding musical and social milieu. Catfish Haven is not as uptight as Velvet Underground, but it’s certainly not blue-collar rock in the same sense as so many of its references. As a result, Tell Me's songs are well up somewhere in between.
Record Reviews
Johnny Cash
originally published September 20, 2006
Tupac may still be an all-time great posthumous unit-mover but, frankly, he doesn’t have shit on Johnny Cash. Since his passing in 2003, the Cash steam train has moved on at a steady pace under the wishes of its departed engineer. A Hundred Highways is the latest entry in the ever-expanding Cash catalog and (we’re told) the final volume of American Recordings that Cash began with producer Rick Rubin in 1994.
Continuing in the all-songs-up-for-grabs theme of past American volumes, V is no exception with only a single song, the shuffling “Like the 309," a Cash original. Elsewhere, Bruce Springsteen, Hank Williams, Larry Gatlin, Ian & Sylvia, Gordon Lightfoot and Tom Waits (through the stomp-clap-roar arrangement of the traditional “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”) get the honorary treatment. No Beck, no Soundgarden, no NIN - just the weary words of peers which, when put together, form a loosely assembled eulogy-in-life for the fading Cash.
That familiar booming voice had already begun to slip years back and increasing fatigue was obvious throughout American IV. Here, Cash goes from solemn whisper to commanding growl and, while the pipes don’t always rise to the occasion, the emotion, drive and conviction underneath are still conveyed to great effect. There’s also a theme of impending departure and ultimate perseverance that figures heavily. The narrator of “Like the 309” is anxious for the locomotive to arrive and carry him on to a better place, admonishing the concerned to “Take a look, see I’m doin’ fine / Then load my box on the 309.” Then, in a foreboding version of Williams’ “On the Evening Train,” a red-eye engine pulls away, carrying the body of a deceased wife as her beleaguered husband and child look on.
Admirers of Cash’s music may be swathed in tears by the time the closing spiritual “I’m Free From the Chain Gang Now” rolls around, and that’s understandable. However, the assuredness and reserve with which Cash faced the inevitable courses through these performances. None are note perfect and most are poignantly tear-worthy, but they are the last - and some of the most emotionally direct - entries in a series that didn’t aid in composing the legend of Johnny Cash; rather, it enforced his legacy to an almost otherworldly degree.
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