1996: Doo Rag - What We Do
I wish that instead of reviewing Doo Rag’s 1996 album, What We Do, I could just play it for a group of people and count the number of hips that start shaking as a result. In an ideal world, I’d just publish what would undoubtedly be a pretty high margin, type out “I told you so,” and be along my merry way.
Unfortunately, that sort of thing is frowned upon in the overly-verbose world of music criticism. So instead, I’ll outline my argument for why an album by a glorified junkyard band from 1996 -- mostly relegated to novelty status in a select few’s record collections -- is worth re-examining in 2009, when artists everywhere are sacrificing fancy digital recording techniques to recreate the tape-hiss drenched, feedback-filled sound du jour.
Whereas most of today’s lo-fi bands simply eschew production value, Doo Rag’s duo of frontman Bob Log III and percussionist Thermos Malling threw out conventional instruments entirely to make one hell of a sludge-covered, Delta-blues-punk, little-to-no-fi album that few people have actually ever heard. Handmade dobros, $2 thrift store guitars, microphones encased in hairdryers and amplified through vacuums, and a drum kit made of trash cans, metal film reels, grocery carts and Miller High Life boxes filled out their equipment. A splash of Hasil Adkins gets thrown into the mix and you’ve got the musical stylings of Doo Rag, in a nutshell.
That said, it’s easy to see how What We Do has been written off as gimmicky by histories tastemakers. Sure, songs with titles like “Naughty Little Wiggle” don’t offer up much in the way of poetry, and the musical content isn’t exactly exploring much new territory, either. But to entirely discount the album -- or the band -- is missing the point of making stripped-down music in the first place: giving a middle finger to innovation and getting back to basics.
The question then becomes not how innovative a band like Doo Rag were, but how well they did what they did. And the 20 songs on What We Do serve up an honest-to-goodness dance party on heavyweight vinyl that almost anyone can appreciate, even 13 years after the fact. Whether it’s the John Lee Hooker-esque blues shuffle of “Tire Knocker” or the Cramps-inspired mania of “Trudge,” it’s clear that Doo Rag’s main focus is getting folks to get dirty. Even in the rare moments when the album does slow its pace (“Freeloader” and album closer “Hans Kramer’s Super Disco”), it’s not for the sake of squeezing in a ballad, but for providing the inevitable hazy, slurring, still-drunk-the-morning-after comedowns to the rest of the album’s booze- and meth-fueled rager. The tracks might not always leave the listener feeling good, but neither do a lot of the best parties.
In that spirit, What We Do may not be a hidden classic or anywhere near approaching essential. But it was never aiming to be, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, no matter how much you love a good mathy jam or 200-piece experimental guitar orchestra, listening to rock music was never intended to be an overly-cerebral exercise -- and therein lies the beauty of What We Do. It’s broken-down blues run through a blender. No complex time signatures, no fancy harmonic acrobatics. Just loud shouts, percussive stomps, and blues riffs played quick and dirty. It all comes together to make one hell of a find for any music nerd willing to turn off his hyper-critical brain long enough to give it a go.
1. Nickel
2. Nickel (Club Version)
3. Bam
4. Freeloader
5. Trudge
6. Doin' It To It
7. Mop Down
8 Rickety
9. Kick Walken
10. Jalopy
11. Tire Knocker
12. Naughty Little Wiggle
13. Crooked
14. Don't Need But A Little
15. Kick Down
16. 2 1/2 Ft. Soul
17. Rectifier
18. Race Truck
19. Some
20. Hans Kramer's Super Disco
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - From Her to Eternity
Of the four albums reissued and remastered by Mute records, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ seminal debut, From Her to Eternity, is probably the most abrasive and difficult to digest. Coming off his stint as front-man for Australian noise-punk outfit The Birthday Party, Cave seemed intent to carry on in his former band’s atavistic tradition. Joined by, among others, fellow BP alum and lifelong collaborator Mick Harvey, Einsturzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargled, and Magazine’s Barry Adamson, Cave crafted the ultimate fulfillment of The Birthday Party’s promise: a raw, wet lump of writhing passion; a barb-wire tangle of love, hate, desire, and repulsion. The Bad Seeds stripped the song down to its ramshackle elements, then pulled it inside-out to expose all the quivering viscera.
The album begins with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche.” One of the darkest of the great songwriter’s early career, Cave peels back the tinkling guitar in favor of a slow, sleazy bassline and rolling, muffled drum fills courtesy of Harvey. The song crawls along on its belly under the weight of Cave’s rabid-animal snarl. The remastering has been particularly revealing for this track, which had been penalized for its menacing stillness in previous editions. “Avalanche” feeds directly into “Cabin Fever!” which, like the title track and “Saint Huck,” typifies the best of Cave’s earliest compositions. The song's central underpinning is a lurching bass figure, jarring and hypnotically repetitive; it cycles endlessly amid a cacophony of clattering drumsticks, free-form guitar shredding, and crashing cymbals. It’s one of Cave’s most harrowing vocal performances, too. He flits back and forth between ragged shrieks, squeals, and growls, conflating the experience of a seafarer going slowly mad with the singer’s own romantic turmoil (fueled, most likely, by his volatile relationship with fellow singer and occasional collaborator, Anita Lane). What makes the song so brilliant is that it presents a series of rising motions with no actual climax. In doing so, Cave creates an atmosphere of pure anxiety, of frustrated desire, a world of violent emotion from which release is unattainable. The music actually functions as a gateway into the artist’s psychological state.
"From Her to Eternity" is perhaps the most celebrated track on the album, a staple in The Bad Seed’s live set up through the ‘90s. Co-written with Lane, Cave narrates the speaker’s obsession with a woman who lives above him. The song presents some of his most vivid and unsettling imagery: “I hear her walking/ walking barefoot cross the boards/ all through this lonesome night/ I hear her crying too/ The tears come splashing down/ leaking through the cracks/ and down upon my face/ I catch ‘em in my mouth.” For four and a half minutes, the song teeters on the edge of destruction, often with only a simple, pounding piano theme holding the thing together. Bargled’s guitar lashes out periodically throughout, squalling, gnashing, and occasionally obscuring the vocals like a tangible outburst of the speaker’s id. It is followed, fittingly, by “Saint Huck.” Like the title track from Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!, “Huck” revolves around the displacement of its protagonist -- in this case Twain’s Huck Finn -- into a depraved, morally bankrupt contemporary setting. “Saint Huck,” however, is pervaded by a wholly different sense of humor from “Lazarus.” Absent is the wry wit or the irony, and in its place is the humor of the Underground Man: confessional, self-debasing, squirm-inducing.
While “Cabin Fever!” and “From Her to Eternity” were the full fruition of Cave’s early work, other tracks offered glimpses of where the band was yet to go. “Well of Misery” is a masterpiece of minimalist blues that Cave would explore more fully in The Firstborn Is Dead. “A Box for Black Paul” continues in the same vein, with Cave crooning over the death and burial of a small-town, Southern intellectual to the sparse sounds of his own barely-melodic piano accompaniment. At over nine minutes, it’s one of his most challenging compositions, but also one of his most haunting for its bleak depiction of the human condition. “Just who will dig the hole/ when you’re done ransacking his room/ grabbing any damn thing that shines?/ And throw the scraps down on the street/ like all his books and his notes/ all his books and his notes/ and all the junk that he wrote/ Whole fuckin lot right up in smoke.” Mortality, the tenuousness of community, the insufficiency of art to provide paths to transcendence -- these are the themes swirling around in that piano vortex.
More than a collection of songs, From Her to Eternity is an incarnation of late 20th century anxiety and confusion in the tradition of Eliot and Ginsberg, and it is finally being presented with the fidelity it deserves. The improved quality should make this a worthwhile purchase down the road for audiophiles who already own the 1994 CD transfer. Newcomers to Cave would be advised to look elsewhere for a first look, but for anyone who appreciates music capable of drawing the listener into its own subjective state, From Her to Eternity will be an ecstatic and revelatory experience.
Disc 1:
1. Avalanche
2. Cabin Fever!
3. Well of Misery
4. From Her to Eternity
5. Saint Huck
6. Wings off Flies
7. Box for Black Paul
Disc 2 (DVD):
1. Avalanche
2. Cabin Fever!
3. Well of Misery
4. From Her to Eternity
5. Saint Huck
6. Wings off Flies
7. Box for Black Paul
8. In the Ghetto
9. Moon Is in the Gutter
10. From Her to Eternity (1987 Version)
11. Do You Love Me Like I Love You, Pt. 1
12. In the Ghetto
The Simpsons - The Simpsons Sing The Blues
Within its first season in 1989, The Simpsons was a massive hit; America ate it up. So did you, as your parents surely remember -- they’re the ones who threw away your “Don’t have a cow, man” t-shirt in 1996. They also probably tossed The Simpsons Sing The Blues while they were at it, unless you set it aside as a cultural artifact you thought you’d find funny in, say, 2009.
If it was spared from garage sales, the time for re-examination has come. The Simpsons Sing The Blues, as you can probably imagine, has dated about as well as any episode from the show’s crudely drawn, Bart-centric first season. It starts with “Do The Bartman,” the producers' attempt to add “dance hit” to their endless list of merchandising wins. It was a modest success, as was the similar second single, “Deep Deep Trouble.” Both are pure early 90s: awkward rapping, cold stilted beats, and production by DJ Jazzy Jeff. They’re also the weakest links on the album, excluding a few funny spots (not much can top Dan Castellaneta’s delivery of Homer’s line “D’oh! Now you can’t go/ to the boat show.”)
The best (and, not coincidentally, least embarrassing) track on The Simpsons Sing The Blues is “Look At All Those Idiots,” on which Paula Abdul dance beats are contrasted with Mr. Burns’ decidedly unfunky demeanor. It works because the joke is about the characters, from Burns misunderstanding the concept of a “breakdown” (“What if there was an inspector around?!”) to Smithers unexpectedly ripping through a Prince-like guitar solo. It’s exactly what the rest of the record should have been: comedy, plain and simple.
Other ideas fall totally flat, such as Homer’s rendition of “Born Under A Bad Sign” (with the always-game B.B. King on lead guitar) and “Moanin’ Lisa Blues” (which was also featured on the Simpsons episode in which Lisa meets Bleeding Gums Murphy). These songs take the album’s title literally, and it’s here you realize: this is nothing but a cash-in, a waste of talent and time. The cringe-worthy “School Day,” featuring Bart butchering the Chuck Berry classic, is downright awful. “Springfield Soul Stew,” a homage to King Curtis’ “Memphis Soul Stew,” is innocuous enough -- and Marge saying “This is gonna taste alright” in a soulful growl is downright charming -- but you can’t help thinking that the players, and all the rest of us, had somewhere better to be.
The Simpsons Sing The Blues is a perfect musical snapshot of 1990. It’s also an effective encapsulation of The Simpsons in its first couple of years: a project full of potential, experimentation, periodic failure, and attempts to make a buck.
1. Do The Bartman
2. School Day
3. Born Under A Bad Sign
4. Moanin’ Lisa Blues
5. Deep Deep Trouble
6. God Bless The Child
7. I Love To See You Smile
8. Springfield Soul Stew
9. Look At All Those Idiots
10. Sibling Rivalry
A Handful of Dust - Now Gods, Stand Up For Bastards/The Philosophik Mercury
Named after a line in the T.S. Eliot poem “The Wasteland,” free noise duo A Handful of Dust has been one of the most influential and enigmatic projects to spring from the surprisingly fertile New Zealand experimental culture, along with other luminaries such as Birchville Cat Motel and Antony Milton. The duo consists of two heavyweights of that country's scene and of international experimental music in general: Bruce Russell, known for his work with crucial noise rock trio The Dead C, and Alastair Galbraith, an accomplished solo experimental and folk artist. Here we have a welcomed double-disc reissue of two long, long out-of-print albums released originally in the mid ’90s on Russell's own Corpus Hermeticum label. The discs come packaged in a nice fold-out case, sheltered in individual plastic sleeves to prevent scratching, and are accompanied by an illuminating essay by Marc Masters.
A Handful of Dust is a paradoxical group in many ways. For example, they are devoutly improvisational, yet they almost never perform live sets. Perhaps most interestingly, however, are the ways in which they straddle the divide between noisy, abrasive fracas and mainstream artistic credibility that sometimes today seems unbridgeable. Galbraith is the recipient of a major award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand for his contributions to the music of that country. Imagine for a moment Aaron Dilloway or Richard Ramirez receiving a National Medal of Arts from the NEA, and I think you'll understand what I'm talking about. These two discs are perfect evidence of this point.
Everything on here is immediately and unapologetically harsh, yet at the same time, there isn't the type of wild excess and spastic aggression offered up by many of their peers. You get the sense that, though improvised, these pieces are progressing — or at least processing. There is work being done somewhere within each track, work with some type of goal in mind, even if that goal is only to meet itself at its own tail. It's often difficult or impossible to follow the directions of the pieces while in their midst. The sounds are constantly mutating, splintering off the main body, disappearing into expanding puddles of drone that underly the tracks, and ultimately reappearing to zip past our heads. Massive prominences of butchered violin and guitar feedback burst inward with varying degrees of recognizability, sometimes allowing us moments of orchestral reverie, and other times eliciting shouted maledictions on the names of Andrea Amati and Antonio Stradivari.
However, at the end of it all, if we take a look back over our shoulders, we can see that the mire has coalesced into a discernible and often gripping pattern. It's a phenomenon analogous to the idea that from inside our galaxy (or any, for that matter) we see essentially chaos -- meaningless bodies positioned meaninglessly in space. Once we turn our eyes back on the same cluster of bodies from the outside, we are confronted with some of the most unquestionably beautiful schemes in the entirety of nature. I don't mean to call these pieces unquestionably beautiful, but there is an awareness of self in them that illuminates this phenomenon of perspective. It's this type of maturity that serves as the link between AHoD's abrasive tendencies and their artistic legitimacy. It's a feature that, for better or worse, you simply are not likely to find in the latest Lambsbread cassette. What A Handful of Dust does is to take the term "accessibility" (often a pejorative one in the experimental world) and, rather than shun the idea, absorb the possibility of thoughtful, open dialogue between the music and even the paradigmatic "average listener." It's a process that has been a constant in their art and is illustrated strongly on these well chosen re-releases.
Disc 1:
1. The Book Nature: Chapter The First
2. Oration On The Dignity Of Man
3. The Expulsion Of The Triumphant Beast
4. The Lullian Art
5. The Book Nature: Chapter The Second
6. The Dark Lantern Of Reason
Disc 2:
1. Fama Fraternitatis
2. God's Love To His People Israel
Comet Gain - Broken Record Prayers
Cobbled together in 1992 and sustained in shifting incarnations since, Comet Gain have always evinced a confident timelessness. David Charlie Christian Feck presses on, and for Broken Record Prayers he’s united, with no immediate warrant, sundry singles recorded between 1997 and 2007. The outcome is a 70-minute behemoth, a sprawling, desultory, but variously touching apparatus of melancholy and empowerment that, on the level of thematics, enshrines an indie-pop umbrella logic — daydreams, desperation, defeat — and articulates it in a wide range of idioms.
In other words, Comet Gain trades in universals and mounts a compelling archaeological case for pop’s debt to (or at least kinship with) an entire lineage of lovers’ rock departing from Northern soul and the numinous American garage. Variety abounds. Surprises don’t, but that’s fine; the flourishes of omnivory are more subdued this time than in the crew’s mid-period output — such as Réalistes, which can easily secrete the odor of affectation — and Feck occasionally strikes gold. His programmatic nostalgia is spread thick, to be sure; the liner notes read, “We believe in obsolete things and passionate hearts and still do and made these records from our hearts to yours for whatever it was and still is and could be.” More to the point, though, is the extent to which Broken Record Prayers, for all its aggressive sincerity, seizes on the collective aspect of cultural production, cataloging those commonalities and shared repertoires on which the scene effect fundamentally rests. More than ever, Comet Gain addresses interpersonal, transactional experience in a decidedly unstylized way.
Feck’s and Rachel Evans’ vocals deftly oscillate between abjection and triumph, two faces of the same cosmopolitanizing, impersonal British milieu. The spectral despair of “If I Had a Soul” stings, but the Gain gang saves face imagining “Love Without Lies,” one of six previously unheard tracks included here. “Jack Nance Hair” mourns the 1996 suicide of Heavenly’s Mat Fletcher, their drummer and Amelia’s little brother, while the spiky “Orwell Liberty Dance” spins a more ambiguous yarn over Kay Ishikawa’s heroically meaty bassline. There’s sadness aplenty, but it’s quickly transmuted into a point of pride, spouted all conviction-like atop crashing beats, jangling strings, and shape-shifting organ bits that portend sheepish spells of goosebumps. And anyhow, everybody hurts; between the defeatist Deena Barnes cover “If You Ever Walk Out of My Life” (“There’ll be sorrow and heartbreak/ Teardrops and heartache”) and their own “Look at You Now (You’re Crying),” no one loses because no one wins.
Problems arise in times of self-indulgence, and Feck hasn’t shed his predilection for a sort of orchestral maximalism. Too many songs run five, six, even seven minutes long; indistinct codas cap the big beasts; and the quieter songs can seem directionless. When he submits to squalls of proper nouns, or when his influences crystallize like an awed but still exoticizing literature review, no good can come.
Broken Record Prayers doesn’t suggest obsolescence. Its juxtapositions and scope, rather, illustrate the ease with which nostalgia, for all its tactical purchase, can in fact be overcome. Covering Curtis Mayfield alongside The Clean, waxing reflective and accusatory in the same heave, Comet Gain do appear vulnerable, but their evident strut offsets the echoes of inadequacy, and they have some fun dramatizing this give-and-take. Comet Gain will always be of the ’90s — call it C96 if you absolutely must — but their enduring worth, so fruitfully displayed on at least half of this compilation, outruns the strictures of time or place. In a synoptic but very permanent way, this record is every punk’s sentimental education.
1. Jack Nance Hair
2. You Can Hide Your Love Forever
3. Young Lions
4. If I Had a Soul
5. Brothers Off the Block
6. Beautiful Despair
7. Love Without Lies
8. Hard Times
9. If You Ever Walk Out of My Life
10. Books of California
11. Look at You Now (You’re Crying)
12. Mainlining Mystery
13. Asleep on the Snow
14. Beatnik
15. He Walked by Nite
16. Orwell Liberty Dance
17. Emotion Pictures
18. Tighten Up!
19. Germ of Youth Part II
20. Record Prayer
Kath Bloom - Loving Takes This Course
The cream always rises to the top, even if it takes 30 years. Since the late '70s, Kath Bloom has been releasing lo-fi folk with painfully honest lyrics and equally contemplative, sparse melodies. The classically trained Connecticut singer-songwriter wrote six records with avant-garde guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors before 1984. All six were pressed in numbers between 50 and 300; all fetch a principal's ransom on the black market.
Then Kath, daughter of renowned oboist Robert Bloom, took the last half of the '80s off on account of maternity leave, family issues, and financial instability. Eventually, cult classic director Richard Linklater caught wind of her and licensed "Come Here" for 1995's Before Sunrise, which rekindled commercial interest in her back catalog as well as her passion for writing songs. By Y2K, she was back releasing albums left and right.
To give her entire career due, Chapter Music commissioned a two-disc tribute album, Loving Takes This Course, which collects a selection of her greatest hits on one disc, and features a range of notable indie artists covering the same songs on another. Naturally, some covers don't quite "get" it, stretching out elegant vocals and smooth production that belies the original songs charm and gritty, off key quirkiness. However, inspired interpretations from Devendra Banhart, Scout Niblett, Amy Rude, and the gorgeous Mia Doi Todd ultimately save the disc.
Of course, the originals are the best reason to invest in this compilation; we get an even mix of Bloom's post-millennium projects and selections from her rare early work. "The Breeze/My Baby Cries" is heartwarming, with Kath's better-than-Joan Baez warble hitting the right kind of mournful over off-key guitar and subtly malfunctioning studio effects. The more lo-fi her surroundings, the more impact her vocals have. "I Wanna Love" has a sweet country-folk vibe going for it, bound to make first time listeners swoon. Every track is moving in its own way.
Considering how half-assed most tribute albums end up being -- bloated with phoned-in covers from the big name slackers -- Loving Takes This Course is a beacon of quality. From the names involved (lest we forget Mark Kozalek and The Dodos) to the choice greatest hits disc, it's the kind of once-in-a-career retrospective that makes an obscurity into a legend. San Francisco filmmaker Caveh Zahedi spent two years putting it together, and the effort shows. Expect to see the name Kath Bloom in the same circles as Vashti Bunyan, Gillian Welch, and Lucinda Williams a lot from now on.
Disc One: The Covers
1. Come Here (Marble Sounds)
2. The Breeze/My Baby Cries (Bill Callahan)
3. When I See You (Laura Jean)
4. Finally (Mark Kozelek)
5. Window (Mick Turner & Peggy Frew)
6. Forget About Him (Devendra Banhart)
7. I Wanna Love (Scout Niblett)
8. Biggest Light Of All (The Dodos)
9. Look At Me (Josephine Foster)
10. Ready Or Not (Mia Doi Todd)
11. Fall Again (Corrina Repp)
12. It's So Hard To Come Home (Marianne Dissard & Joey Burns)
13. In Your School (Amy Rude)
14. If This Journey (Tom Hanford)
15. There Was A Boy (Meg Baird)
16. Come Here (The Concretes)
Disc Two: The Kath Bloom Originals
1. Come Here
2. The Breeze/My Baby Cries
3. When I See You
4. Finally
5. Window
6. Forget About Him
7. I Wanna Love
8. Biggest Light Of All
9. Look At Me
10. Ready Or Not
11. Fall Again
12. It's So Hard To Come Home
13. In Your School
14. If This Journey
15. There Was A Boy
16. Come Here
