The walk from Georgetown University to Adams Morgan, the DC neighborhood where I live, takes about 45 minutes. The route you choose doesn’t seem to effect total travel time; in the cold I tend to walk faster, or occasionally just wuss out and take the bus, but most of the time I make it on foot. I like the walk: it gives me the chance to spend a while by myself, think a bit, and listen to music on my increasingly unreliable second generation iPod (it’s a miracle the thing is even working at this point). Yesterday was the first real day of spring here in Washington and as I left campus just after sunset I cued my iPod up to Person Pitch, hoped the battery would last, and started walking. I’ve been listening to Person Pitch, the third solo release from Animal Collective member Panda Bear (a.k.a. Noah Lennox) off and on for the last three months. His previous album, Young Prayer, was a beautiful document of grief and mourning. Released just a few months after Animal Collective’s gorgeous, playful Sung Tongs, Young Prayer seemed the perfect response, capturing the melancholy and pain that its creator was feeling without being either banal or obvious. It’s a record that I underrated, and one that I have come back to many times in the last three years. As I came around on Young Prayer I became more excited about the new album; I was not, however, prepared for it. If Young Prayer was Lennox’s record about grief, Person Pitch is his attempt to capture joy. All seven songs here are permeated by a sense of happiness: the elation of new love, fatherhood, and home. He’s clearly enjoying his new life in Lisbon, and with Person Pitch he has captured the tone, texture, and feel of that happiness. He even manages a good visual approximation with the goofy album art, which bizarrely surrounds a page-long thank you to his favorite (or maybe just most inspirational to this project) bands and artists — including the likes of Pete Rock, the Beach Boys, Michael Jackson, Kraftwerk, Love, Spacemen 3, and…the guy who wrote “Sussudio.” The rich new sound that Lennox has carved out is put on display with the opening bars of “Comfy in Nautica.” The song clatters in on a constant series of sound effects, handclaps, and wordless chants. Lennox’s lyrics are distinctly straightforward and even relatively decipherable compared to his past work but they still remain secondary to the sound. The song itself goes almost nowhere, but that’s hardly the point: this is a record about tone and the aural possibilities of pop music. There are huge swells of electronics, tribal drums, chanted choruses, looped sound, and driving guitars. Listen to “Bros,” a twelve-minute song that is all acoustic guitars, simple drum patterns, and the occasional weird sample. In theory this shouldn’t work, but Lennox manages to subtly alter elements throughout the track, looping in a series of blissful pop hooks throughout and transitioning to a positively uplifting guitar crescendo toward the end. Brian Wilson is going to be coming up a lot in reviews for this record, and it’ll be for good reason: like the best of the Beach Boys’ work, Lennox is aiming at broaden the horizons here, bringing in the extraneous and weird in a conscious effort to make a pop record that is experimental and forward-thinking yet unreservedly listenable. He succeeds wildly. The best example of Lennox’s new approach to sound is “Take Pills,” a song decrying the overuse of antidepressants that, about two and a half minutes in, switches from a slow dirge to an upbeat pop song. It’s about as good as an anti-drug psychedelic pop song can hope to be (not a lot of competition in this category, really). I’ve written at some length about the album’s other behemoth track, “Good Girl/Carrots” here, and that one manages to patch together disparate elements just as well. Even on the beautiful “Ponytail,” Lennox avoids a basic acoustic guitar ditty by employing reverb and a quiet drum beat that pushes it over the top, making it the perfect closer for the record. Person Pitch is just over 45 minutes long, making it perfect for my commute to and from school. I was about three blocks from home last night when “Ponytail” finished. I couldn’t decide what to put on next, so instead I just took the ear buds out and walked the last few minutes in silence. It was a beautiful night out; warm but not yet humid. People were congregating outside, eager to take advantage of the weather, which was coming less than a week after our most recent snowstorm. Just listening to the sounds of the evening and the beginnings of springtime seemed like the only real way to follow up a record as odd, joyous, and wonderful as Person Pitch. Peter Hepburn
Elvis Perkins has a legitimate claim to the melancholy singer songwriter thing: His father, the actor Anthony Perkins, died of AIDS when Elvis was seventeen, and his mother was killed on one of the planes on September 11th, 2001. Perkins alludes to his past obliquely, but it’s hard to avoid — for one, the album title appears to refer to the day after 9/11. “While You Were Sleeping” has a trancelike feel and chilling lyrics (”I made a death suit for life/For my father’s ill- widowed wife”). Most tracks stick to a downbeat, acoustic-folk template, although “May Day!” sounds like a lost Neutral Milk Hotel hoedown. On the standout “Emile’s Vietnam in the Sky,” which mixes French dialogue with fiddle and accordion accents, Perkins asks, “Do you ever wonder where you go when you die?” He has.
At this point, the misuse of Andrew Whiteman on Broken Social Scene records is approaching nearly George Harrison levels. A ferocious electric guitarist, Whiteman is probably partly responsible for BSS morphing into Yo La Tengo halfway through 2005’s eponymous sophomore album, a welcome and successful transformation that neither band seemed to realize was happening. Still, he hasn’t matched his lone vocal contribution, the loose, warm “Looks Just Like the Sun” from You Forgot It in People. Whiteman reprised the role on his debut turn as Apostle of Hustle, 2004’s Folkloric Feel, but there’s no doubt that Broken Social Scene missed Whiteman’s naturalist pop.
As enjoyable as Folkloric Feel was, its replay lifespan clocked in somewhere just under two weeks, and no one knows if it’s aged well because no one’s taken it off the shelf since. Apostle of Hustle’s second disc, National Anthem of Nowhere, is a slightly improved redux of Folkloric Feel, full of agile, mid-tempo pop-rock songs performed under the guise of indie rock.
Take the album title seriously: Apostle of Hustle brand a particularly rootless style of rock music, indebted to folk and blues only inasmuch as all “rock” music is. Whiteman’s devotion to Cuban music shows in two tracks sung in Spanish, but they otherwise differ little from the remainder of National Anthem.
As a result, National Anthem, is monochrome and even somewhat sterile, characteristics often overcome by Whiteman’s increasingly excellent craftsmanship. Whiteman leaves big, brash choruses for less modest songwriters; instead, he excels at writing sublime verses, apparent on the blog-approved title track and “‘My Sword Hand’s Anger.’” Whiteman writes aggressively, too—see the Waits-ian “Haul Away” or the jaunty thrust of “Fast Pony for Victor Jara”—but the almost omnipresent acoustic guitars and Whiteman’s own smooth tenor turn anything that might resemble “anger” into “slightly urgent prodding.”
As a lyricist, Whiteman does well to avoid maudlin sentimentality and silly, obvious rhymes, but no one who listens to this album will really have any idea what the fuck he’s going on about, and that…well, it complicates things. National Anthem is full of well-constructed images, but Whiteman is neither a narrative writer nor an obviously involved symbolist—isolated ideas will resonate, but never entire songs. At the end of the day, a line like “You run / You fly / You’re chased by ghosts / You cannot say goodbye” sounds like it could mean something, but I’ve no idea quite what. I’m not emotionally invested enough in Apostle of Hustle to shoehorn meaning into these songs; I suspect few people are.
Still, National Anthem is worthwhile for “Cheap Like Sebastian” and “A Rent Boy Goes Down,” two tart pop numbers that fall right into Whiteman’s wheelhouse: vanilla rock songs that, while not exactly the pillars of a world-beater, would’ve been succinct replacements for some of BSS’s stabs at atmosphere and ambiance. The better of the two, “A Rent Boy Goes Down,” slides between Cuban-inflected bursts of electric guitar and a flippant piano, reminiscent of the tragically ignored late-’90s alt-crooners Creeper Lagoon. Strong as it is, “A Rent Boy Goes Down” won’t stick in your head long; its most lasting contribution is writing a perfect epitaph for National Anthem: “You’re gold for a moment but gold isn’t anything you can keep.”
Jarvis Cocker’s solo debut is not so much a curate’s egg as a game of two halves. The first “side” triggers a sinking sensation reminiscent of hearing Morrissey’s “Kill Uncle” for the first time in 1991: has our hero truly lost his touch?From the cursory intro-instrumental “Loss Adjuster”, through the ’70s plod-rock of “Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time” to the clumsy corn of “Heavy Weather” (Jarvis in “timeless power of cliché” mode) and “I Will Kill Again” (Jarvis in “MOR with a heart of darkness” mode), it’s all dismayingly unconvincing and lacklustre in execution – even though the band features Pulp’s Steve Mackey on bass and Richard Hawley on guitar.
Aiming for third Big Star-style wrecked majesty but ending up closer to half-finished Nilsson, “Black Magic” does at least feature some clever production touches. Whereas the plinky, glockenspiely arrangement of “Baby’s Coming Back To Me” is worthy of, ooh, Side Two of “‘Til The Band Comes In”.
Then something changes. “Fat Children” is the pivot. Unpromising at first, with its club-footed indie stomp-rock and opaque lyric about psycho youth (redolent again of shite-period Moz), the song blossoms with the dreamy coda’s wordless wails and incandescent guitars. A hilariously mordant whinge at humanity’s worthlessness, “From A To I” predicts the fall of Western civilization and points the finger at every last one of us: “Evil comes from I know not where/But if you take a look/Inside yourself/ Maybe you’ll find some in there.”
Its shimmery epic-ness not a million miles from the Verve’s “The Drugs Don’t Work”, “Tonite” also argues that change starts with the individual: “You cannot set the world to rights/But you could stop being wrong/Oooh, tonight” - this wracked “oooh”, mingling contempt and compassion, anguish and hope, being something of a Cocker trademark. “Disney Time” recalls Milan Kundera’s contention that kitsch is “the refusal to admit shit exists”. It’s the shittiness of the world, Cocker notes, that makes us take shelter in feelgood movies and infantile happy endings.
“Julie” is prefaced by the opening sentences of Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding, a novel about a 12-year-old girl undergoing an existential-sexual crisis triggered by the wedding of her elder brother (who just happens to be named Jarvis, an unlikely moniker for the 1940s South). In Cocker’s “remix”, a troubled teenager with a developing body fends off sweaty lads and lecherous adults, protected by the feeling of invincibility granted her by pop music.
The best comes last, with “Quantum Theory”, which sounds exactly how everyone, deep down, wishes “The Drift” did: “Scott IV - the Sequel”. A lambent ambient-orchestral arrangement, teeming with tingling sublimimals, frames Cocker’s dream of a parallel-dimension paradise where “Everyone is happy… fish do not have bones… gravity can not reach us anymore… you are not alone.”
When he croaks the closing refrain, “Everything is gonna be alright”, Jarvis sounds broken but a believer despite himself; the cynicism and misanthropy, tinged with shame and self-loathing, that’s belched forth elsewhere on the record evaporated clean away. There’s such a distance, such a journey, between the first song and this luminous closer, it’s almost like two different albums, two different artists even.
CD released on February 20th, 2007 by VICE Records.
From experience I can say that dating a stripper is not as great as it sounds.
The problem being that when you meet a girl at a strip club and take her home the excitement level is enough to make you feel like you might be the most powerful man in the world. As far as I could tell their was ups and downs.
Downs being the obvious jealous rage thats produced when your girlfriends primary job is taking off her cloths so that random men can have her stock pilled in their spank banks. OK, so it’s a massive fucking downer, especially if your moderately insecure, but lets hope if you\’re taking a stripper home insecurity isn’t really a problem you have.
For those of you left with the balls to try it, let it be known before hand that it can never last long. Never. Never ever ever never ever. In this world anyone can be bought and sold, and no happily-ever-after stripper romance ever has been worth a dam (excluding that dude from biohazard).
Upside if you can last more than a week…she might let you pick the music.
Go with something old school like “I Wanna Destroy You” buy the Circle Jerks; you’ll thank me later.
Andrew’s new album, “Armchair Apocrypha” is out now! You can get it at your favorite local record store, online outlet, or order the album from Fat Possum (North America only) and from Fargo Records (Europe). We’ll have it for sale on the website next week. Here’s an MP3 from the new album called Heretics.
Andrew will make his late night TV debut on April 10 on the David Letterman show.
The spring tour is now announced - check the shows page for all the details and information. Andrew’s going to be greening up his tour, which means biodiesel, organic food, recycling initiatives, carbon offsets and much more - this is being made possible with the help of the nice folks at Reverb and Stonyfield Farm Shift - thanks guys!
We’re looking for a few helpers in the following towns to help put up flyers and posters - drop a line if you want to help out… Detroit, Cincinatti, Champaign, Chicago, Columbia, Boulder, & Tucson.
Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak Dance Company’s My Name is a Blackbird piece is running Thursdays–Sundays in April - Andrew was involved in creating music for this choreographic project, inspired by mutation and the concept of transmogrification… more info @ www.madshak.com
A Broadway musical version of The Flaming Lips LP “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots” is to be co-written by the band and West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin.The TV writer’s rep yesterday (March 20) officially confirmed Sorkin’s involvement to write the script based on the 2002 album prompting Lips front man to proclaim ‘’Maybe that means they’ll need to build a stage with lots of hallways on it. “It will be a giant tube that’s always moving!'’Also onboard for the musical is Des McAnuff. The Tony-Award winning director has previously worked on The Who’s “Tommy” stageshow, and is a massive fan of the Lip’s record.
Coyne told Entertainment Weekly that “When Des heard the record, he heard a lot about death and loss and triumph of your own optimism… he had an emotional attachment to it.”
It was McAnuff who pursued the idea of putting together a musical using their spacey back catalogue with the band.
Details of any plot are not specific yet, and the musical is likely still a couple of years away from completion.
Coyne adds a final note of optimism, by comparing the Yoshimi concept to Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”
Coyne says: “There’s the real world and then there’s this fantastical world,'’ explains Coyne. ‘’This girl, the Yoshimi character, is dying of something. And these two guys are battling to come visit her in the hospital. And as one of the boyfriends envisions trying to save the girl, he enters this other dimension where Yoshimi is this Japanese warrior and the pink robots are an incarnation of her disease. It’s almost like the disease has to win in order for her soul to survive. Or something like that. Sounds bizarre, but so does a musical about a ‘’deaf, dumb, and blind'’ pinball virtuoso. That one turned out okay.”
Tom Waits, according to the esteemed American critic Robert Hilburn, is clearly one of the most important figures of the modern pop era. Such sentiments are not mere hyperbole; in a career that now spans four decades and over 20 albums, Tom Waits has long since emerged as an extraordinary innovative force, a singular voice whose music remains determinedly and even gloriously - well beyond the trivial fads and fashions of popular culture. Waits latest release, the 3CD set Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards adds further weight to that stellar reputation.
Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards is a wide-ranging collection of 54 songs - including 30 new recordings equaling over three hours of rare and never-before heard music. The set comes complete with a 94-page booklet.
Each of the three CDs is separately grouped and sub-titled Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards to capture the full spectrum of Waits ranging and roving musical styles. Brawlers is chock full of raucous blues and full-throated juke joint stomp; Bawlers comprises Celtic and country ballads, waltzes, lullabies, piano and classic lyrical Waits songs while Bastards is filled with experimental music and strange tales.
In addition to the new work, Orphans features a number of songs originally recorded for the cinema, the theatre and other projects but which now find a home on a Waits album for the first time. They include his unique interpretations of songs by such extraordinarily diverse talents as The Ramones, Daniel Johnston, Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht, Leadbelly, Sparklehorse, Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac.
“Orphans are rough and tender tunes. Rhumbas about mermaids, shuffles about trainwrecks, tarantellas about insects, madrigrals about drowning, says Waits. Scared, mean orphan songs of rapture and melancholy. Songs that grew up hard. Songs of dubious origin rescued from cruel fate”.
Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards (Anti Records) is Waits first release since 2004s much-lauded Real Gone. The album was written and produced by Waits with his wife and long-time collaborator Kathleen Brennan and is released in the UK on Tuesday 21th November 2006.
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Its been just over 30 years since Tom Waits made his recording debut. In that time his music has taken adventurous twists and turns, from confessional country-blues and jazz-flavoured lounge to primal rock and avant-garde musical theatre. By turns tender and poignant, strange and twisted, his songs have tended to explore the dark underbelly of society as he has given his voice to a litany of characters and tales on the fringe and in the fray.
Waits has drawn from a deep well of song idioms; folk, blues, country, jazz ballads, polkas, waltzes, cabaret, swing, popular ballads and a category which by now can only be described as Waitsian. The tools of his trade have included such instruments and objects as the marimba; trombone; brake drum; metal aunglongs; banjo; bell plate; bullhorn; conga; accordion; optigon; mellotron; maracas; pump organ; basstarda; chamberlain; harmonium; viola; sticks; chairs and musical saw as well as the regular old guitar, bass, piano and drums. There is also, of course, his trademark gravelly voice.
In the early-Seventies Tom Waits worked as a doorman at the Heritage in San Diego, a nightclub where artists of every genre performed. An avid fan of such authors, songwriters, musicians and performers as Hoagy Carmichael, Lord Buckley, Bob Dylan, Stephen Foster, Raymond Chandler and Marty Robbins, Waits began developing his own idiosyncratic musical style, combining songs with monologues. He took his newly formed act to Monday nights at the Troubadour in LA, where musicians from all over stood in line all day to get the opportunity to perform on-stage that night. Shortly thereafter, Waits was signed to Asylum Records. He was 21 years old.
Waits first formal recording, Closing Time, was released in 1973. Among the tracks was Ol 55, a song later covered by his labelmates The Eagles for their On the Border album.
Waits began touring and opening in America for such artists as Charlie Rich, Martha & The Vandellas and Frank Zappa. As the decade unfolded, Waits gained increasing critical respect and a loyal cult audience with his subsequent albums The Heart of Saturday Night (1974); Nighthawks at the Diner (1975); Small Change (1976); Foreign Affairs (1977); Blue Valentine (1978) and Heartattack and Vine (1980). It was an incredibly prolific period for Waits, establishing his reputation as a visionary songwriter.
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In 1982, the same year as his Oscar-nominated soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppolas One From the Heart, Tom Waits produced Swordfishtrombones with Kathleen Brennan. It was the first time Waits had produced his own work. The response from his record company Elektra-Asylum, however, was less than enthusiastic both Waits and the album were dropped, with label president Joe Smith warning with this record you will lose all your old fans and gain no new ones. Smiths successor Bob Krasnow also elected not to release the album or renew Waits recording contract.
A year later, in 1983, Waits signed to Island Records, then one of the worlds leading independent labels. Island rescued the now legendary Swordfishtrombones and released it with new artwork as his first album for the label.
Swordfishtrombones marked a startling new creative point in Waits career with its visceral hybrid of styles and instrumentation. Waits experimented with the sound of his voice, tried unusual recording techniques and utilised found sounds and bizarre textures. His trademark storytelling backed by a piano combo had mutated into impressionistic and surreal aural landscapes. Just at the time in the Eighties when hair and recording got slick and big, Tom Waits offered up lo-fi primitivism, helping to set off a whole new aesthetic that went on to inspire a generation of new artists.
This period of bold experimentation continued with Rain Dogs (1985) and Franks Wild Years (1987) which, with Swordfishtrombones, formed a landmark trilogy, one of the most accomplished musical achievements of the decade.
The trilogy was followed by Big Time (1988), a film and soundtrack record of Waits acclaimed 1987 U.S. tour; Bone Machine (1992), which won an American Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album and The Black Rider (1993), a recording of the songs and music Waits wrote for director Robert Wilsons award-winning opera, adapted by Beat novelist William Burroughs from an old German folk tale.
So successful was The Black Rider - Germanys longest-running and most influential stage production of the Eighties - that Robert Wilson later commissioned Waits and his wife and collaborator Kathleen Brennan to compose the songs and music for two further street operas. The first, Alice, based on Lewis Carrolls life and works, premiered in Hamburg at the end of 1992 while the second, Woyzeck (based on the German writer Georg Büchners nightmarish 19th century play of a cuckolded soldier who murders his girlfriend), opened in Denmark eight years later. The songs from both works later appeared on Alice and Blood Money, the albums Waits released in 2002.
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In retrospect, it was always inevitable that an artist so steeped in imagery as Tom Waits should be naturally fascinated with the cinema. His first steps in that direction came when he wrote songs for Sylvester Stallones 1978 movie, Paradise Alley, in which Waits also had a cameo appearance. He then wrote and performed two songs for Ralph Waites acclaimed portrait of skid row, On the Nickel (1980), before being entrusted with the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppolas One from the Heart, the directors follow-up to his epic and award-winning Apocalypse Now.
Waits succeeded magnificently. His soundtrack featuring duets with country singer Crystal Gayle - is an enduring classic of American cinema. One from the Heart also won Waits an Academy Award nomination. It was the start of a long association with Coppola, evidenced by Waits appearances as an actor in the directors Rumble Fish, The Outsiders, The Cotton Club and as the unforgettable Renfield in Bram Stokers Dracula.
In 1986 Waits appeared in Jim Jarmuschs Down by Law, a film that coincidentally marked the international debut of Italian actor Roberto Benigni. That same year Waits made his theatrical stage debut with Franks Wild Years - a musical play he co-wrote with Brennan - at Chicagos Steppenwolf Theatre.
Later film appearances included Ironweed, Queens Logic, The Fisher King, At Play in the Fields of the Lord and another Jarmusch movie, Night on Earth, for which Waits and Brennan composed the score, released as an album in 1991.Waits also had a memorable acting turn in Robert Altmans Short Cuts.
Following the release of The Black Rider in 1993, there was to be a six-year hiatus before the next Tom Waits album. In those intervening years, however, he devoted himself to an array of different musical projects. Waits and Brennan, for instance, wrote two songs for the Dead Man Walking soundtrack album at the request of director Tim Robbins.
Tom also contributed a song to the Wim Wenders film, The End of Violence while, in 1998, Waits and Brennan composed the score and a song for Bunny, which won the Oscar for Best Short Film (Animated). That same year Tom and Kathleen wrote two songs for Barry Levinsons Liberty Heights film.
Among other films to which Waits and Brennan have contributed songs are Ed Harriss Pollack, director Arliss Howards Big Bad Love and the Oscar-nominated Shrek 2 while Waits can be seen playing opposite Iggy Pop in Jim Jarmuschs critically acclaimed 2004 film of vignettes, Coffee & Cigarettes.
In between this film work, Waits also recorded a vocal for Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet, the English composer Gavin Bryars remarkable 75-minute orchestral essay. The work centred on a 1971 field recording of a London hobo singing a religious tune; on Bryars album, Waits duets along with the voice of the tramp.
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In 1999 Tom Waits returned to the limelight with Mule Variations, his first album in six years and his debut for the independent American label, Anti / Epitaph. The album, which synthesised Waits affinity for the American song tradition with his love of naturalistic sound worlds, was arguably the most direct and intimate recording of his career. It was certainly the most successful, selling over a million copies around the world and winning a Grammy into the bargain. In the UK it was Waits first-ever Top 10 hit.
As the follow-up Waits released two separate and distinct albums Alice and Blood Money on the same day in May 2002. The albums were as original as they were different from each other, with Alice chronicling the songs Waits and Brennan had written for Robert Wilsons 1992 theatrical production and Blood Money containing the music commissioned for 2000s Woyzeck. Alices songs are a school of fish that lead the listener into the rapture of the deep. Blood Moneys songs are musical dispatches from the dark, human carnival of life, said Waits, explaining how the two albums differed.
His rich vein of creativity continued with Real Gone, Waits 2004 album which featured primal blues, rock-steady grooves and Latin rhythms, all mixed and stirred with what Waits called cubist funk and vocal mouth percussion the latter unveiling his unique approach to hip-hop human beatboxing. For the first time in Waits career, there was no piano on the record.
In between album releases, Waits also returned to the road. A legendary live performer, his appearances are rare, extraordinarily memorable and highly anticipated events. Part distorted vaudeville, part big top, part piano bar and part stand-up, live shows are meticulously orchestrated to have all the grace and excitement of a derailing train, as those lucky enough to have seen his post-Mule tours can testify. In the US, for instance, Waits 2006 summer Orphans tour - the live prelude to the album release - received some of the most extraordinary critical applause of any concert series in the past decade.
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Waits and Brennan were recently named number four in a list of the 100 Best Living Songwriters published by Americas Paste magazine. In literature only a handful of writers have pulled off the near impossible. In music, it happens on every Tom Waits recording, said the magazine.
Named as one of VH-1s Most Influential Artists of All Time, it is no surprise that Waits body of work has long been covered (and coveted) by other musicians. Notable cover versions include Bruce Springsteen (Jersey Girl); Rod Stewart and Everything But The Girl (Downtown Train); Johnny Cash (Down There By the Train); Marianne Faithfull (Strange Weather); The Ramones (I Dont Wanna Grow Up); 10,000 Maniacs (I Hope I Dont Fall In Love With You); Tim Buckley (Martha); T-Bone Burnett (Time); Bob Seger (Blind Love); Lucinda Williams (Hang Down Your Head); Los Lobos (Jockey Full of Bourbon); Elvis Costello (More Than Rain) and The Blind Boys of Alabama (Jesus Gonna Be Here) as well as Wicked Grin, the critically acclaimed collection of Waits songs recorded by John Hammond and released in 2001.
There is also a diverse list of artists who have cited Waits as an inspiration, including Bob Dylan who named Tom as one of his secret heroes. The adoration also strikes a chord with a rabid following there is even an annual celebration called Waitstock near Poughkeepsie, New York.
Taken from: myspace.com/tomwaits
As year 2000 drew to a close, singer/guitarist Jered Gummere and bassist Melissa Elias decided it was time. They recruited drummer Nathan Jerde and THE PONYS started playing around Chicago, eventually recording two singles in 2002. These found their way into the hands of In The Red’s Larry Hardy, who signed the band, prompting them to add Ian Adams on keyboards and guitar, so as to better duplicate their layered recorded sound live.
THE PONYS’ debut LP, Laced With Romance, was recorded with Jim Diamond in Detroit and released in February 2004 to great acclaim, NME calling it “a dirty-sounding mess of post-punk choppiness, ear-searing Farfisa organ and timeless teenage snarling.”
After months of constant touring, they slipped into Chicago’s Electrical Studios with Steve Albini for Celebration Castle, released in May 2005. Even more varied than their debut, Celebration Castle seemed to accentuate the band’s physical power and precise dynamics. Rolling Stone said, “While other indie bands fuss themselves into a lather straining to redefine the templates of ‘garage rock’ or ‘post-punk,’ The Ponys just get it the hell done.”
Just before the release of Celebration Castle, however, Ian decided that touring life was not for him, and he was replaced by guitarist and local charmer Brian Case. His addition reinvigorated the band and led them toward a more ballsy sound; indeed, some of the artier forays that Ian brought to past records have been replaced on Turn The Lights Out by pure sonic density.
Matador finally got their hands on THE PONYS and, dragging them off the road for a while, got them in Electrical Studios and Brooklyn’s Headgear Studios in September 2006 with John Agnello (www.johnagnello.com) to record Turn The Lights Out. With their most brilliant batch of songs to date, plus the luxury of being able to take their time in the studio, THE PONYS turned in an ambitious, but wholly addictive, record. Sexy and exuberant, this is a sound which references so many of the great twin-guitar bands of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, but resists definition.
It’s been all change in the Super Furry Animals camp since the release of 2005’s opulent, leisurely-paced Love Kraft. In that period, the band have parted company with Sony/BMG and inked a fresh deal with Rough Trade, drummer Daf Ieuan has formed The Peth, a supergroup that contains within its number actor Rhys Ifans, and keyboardist Cian Ciaran is performing as Beach Boys-inspired electronica act Acid Casuals.
One face that has been largely absent, though, is frontman Gruff Rhys, who emerges here, blinking as if from hibernation, with his second solo album. Recorded at SFA producer Gorwel Owen’s cottage in Anglesey, Candylion is a more layered, fully-realised album than 2005’s Yr Atal Genhedlaeth; 12 tracks of fantastical, strings-assisted acoustic pop and exotica-tinged psychedelia that smuggle in curious parables and flashes of apocalypse amid its nursery rhyme sing-songs.
The childish, xylophone-accompanied title track is cute and guile-free. Further in, though, Gruff’s more esoteric musical fascinations – Brazilian Tropicalia, Turkish psychedelia, ‘70s Welsh prog – rear their heads. “Lonesome Words” is a spooked folk elegy dashed with violins courtesy of High Llama Sean O’Hagan. The wonderful “Con Carino”, meanwhile, imagines the fuzz-pop of Psychocandy in gentle slumber, a blissful drone with the voice of Lisa Gen – a vocalist from Gruff’s hometown of Bethesda – seemingly fed in through airport tannoy.
Thematically, it’s all very much in step with the times. “Cycle Of Violence” is like Dr Strangelove set to song, while “Ffrwydriad Yn Y Ffurfafen”, one of two Welsh language songs, loosely translates as “Explosion In The Upper Stratosphere”. Yet the mood is unshakeably upbeat. Take “Skylon”, a 13-minute modern fable that casts Gruff as a bomb disposal expert snipping at wires on an airborne aeroplane. In one comic passage, Gruff considers self-immolation when he recognises the tedious TV personality sat next to him. By the close, though, the moral is clear - we should overcome our differences in the name of the common good: “Define myself/Against everything you stood for, now I’m sitting by your side.” Good attitude. Great album.
OOIOO’s earliest music was minimal and digital, just as their binary name may suggest. But as the band’s lineup evolved over four previous albums, so did its sound. New-wave poppy grooves gave way to chaotic plateaus and psychedelic freakouts on albums like KILA KILA KILA and Gold & Green. OOIOO’s current manifestation has derived a rhythm-based sound scapes, spacious, spiritual and elevatory, intended as communication with the Earth and motivated by nature.Along with guitarist Kayan and bassist Aya, is Yoshimi P-we, founder, leader, and songwriter of OOIOO. She began her music career in 1986 playing drums in UFO or Die with Eye and joining him in revolutionary noise-pop experimentalists Boredoms. Formed as a fictitious band for a 1996 magazine article, OOIOO quickly gained attention when they opened for Sonic Youth in 1997 with their powerful and positively energetic force on stage. There are very few bands who can step on stage and instantly demand your attention, quickly capture your heart and inevitably make you move as OOIOO does.
It’s not often you get to use the word ‘cat’ about a fellow human being without feeling (a) anachronistic and (b) a bit of a twat. But then it’s not every day you come across someone like Pop Levi. And Pop Levi is one strange cat.
Born in London, with musical roots in Liverpool, a stint playing with Ladytron and a home in Los Angeles, Pop Levi likes to describe what’s good about pop music as “astral”. His debut album, “The Return To Form Black Magick Party,” is, fittingly, worthy of the term. Although the most obvious precursor of his sound might be Mark Bolan, listen carefully and you’ll hear touches of everyone from Jack White, Prince and Hendrix to Dylan, Lennon and Beefheart in there. But rather than being any kind of eyebrow-raised pastiche, this is what Pop describes as “channelling” – an album of such complete conviction, flair and energy (plus a lorryload of hooks) that it is utterly irresistible, a stack heel pushed right down on the accelerator.
From opening single, “Sugar Assault Me Now,” “Return To Form…” picks you up and carries you along on a wave of jagged guitar riffs, rumbling drums, fuzzed up bass and Pop’s unique voice. Before you know it, “Blue Honey” has kicked in and you’re riding bareback over another monster groove. “(A Style Called) Crying Chic” is acid-fried folk blues, “Pick-Me-Up Uppercut” classic call-n-response bubblegum pop that somehow manages to reference the Undertones as well as the Shirelles. “Skip Ghetto” takes a more contemplative turn, the lyrics ostensibly about a girl, but actually a commentary on musical pigeon-holing. “Dollar Bill Rock” takes the tempo up again with a crazed blues skank. And so it goes on. “Flirting” is epic and affecting, “Mournin’ Light” a monster of rock riffage, “See My Lord” nods to avant garde jazz, “Hades’ Lady” to electrified Dylan. The album is rounded off by “From The Day That You Were Born,” a lullaby for Pop’s as-yet-unborn daughter, which builds to a truly beautiful string-fuelled coda.
In the process Pop seems to completely explode the already-tired consensus of rock music in the UK. Not for him the dour re-telling of reality. Pop Levi is not a reporter. He wants to re-make reality, and re-make it in his image. Call it astral projection if you like, but Pop Levi is going to be a star.
The debut solo album from Albert Hammond, Jr. Is now available on Scratchie/New Line Records in the United States! It features 2 bonus tracks, and also includes the “101″ video.
The album was recorded at New York’s Electric Lady Studios, LoHo Studios, and The Cabin In The City with Hammond, Jr. as guitarist and vocalist together with Josh Lattanzi on bass and Matt Romano on drums.
That basic trio has been augmented on various tracks by Julian Casablancas, Jody Porter (Fountains of Wayne), Ben Kweller, Sean Lennon, Chris Feinstein, Mikki James, Sammy James Jr. (The Mooney Suzuki) and Ryan Gentles.
The album was produced by Greg Lattimer who first came to attention as vocalist with New York’s Thin Lizard Dawn in the late-nineties. The album comes in addition to Albert’s role in The Strokes - he is not leaving the band.
During the last three years of Montreal have been on a tear: releasing 2004’s Satanic Panic in the Attic and 2005’s The Sunlandic Twins and spreading their dance party-inducing live shows to the masses. Now, of Montreal have created their masterpiece with Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? It’s an irresistible and remarkable album, sounding like a logical extension of the erratic indie-disco sounds of The Sunlandic Twins. However, Hissing Fauna is also the most personal of Montreal album to date, with Kevin Barnes, lead of Montreal songwriter, pouring tremendous amounts of emotion, heartbreak, frustration and elation into its twelve tracks. Written and recorded primarily during what he calls “an insane year,” Hissing Fauna sees Barnes adopt a new writing style. It’s an unabashedly autobiographical attempt from a songwriter whose early material tended towards characters and story-songs. Barnes continues down the whimsical pop funk path, while changing up its lyrical scope; and Hissing Fauna balances its poppy nature while showcasing brutal and unflinching honesty
