MyVil

Thursday, June 30, 2016

Greetings, Intro, Table for ?


Hi, Don Allred here. Along with new stuff and reworks of prev. published, now or later to be found at
(and  archives of my writing  for the CG Weingarten-edited Paper Thin Walls https://papercomet.blogspot.com/ and the Kandia CH-edited Charlotte Creative Loafing https://myloaf.blogspot.com/
 
, I'm also here at MyVil, compiling (and in a few cases, just barely tweaking) my originals from the Village Voice, as revealed in this handy table of MyVil contents (from the newest review to the oldest):

Massive heritage-harvest of Orange Juice surges, lifts urges behind/via  stance-dances:
Luaka Bop compiles samba soul, suavetronica, sidetrips, pre-Uber zombie siren groove:
Fogerty is the increasingly wised-up, still antsy Huck Finn of CCR's expanded first six releases:
Patti Smith's words, vox, Kevin Shields' gtr. celestially navigate tides of M's veins:
Texastentialist drones,wails, ripples, bounces vs. earth, graves, b/w piano-reeling, mile marker:
NZ punks' harvest of shards, personal blue skies dent craters in everyday maze:
Os Mutantes' psych-pop pastel ballads levitating into strobe-lit workouts, wry sharp eyes 4 love:
Pylon's propeller lets chips fly, fall like brainy meaty pennies from heaven, bonus tracks too:
Boondocks attitude landmark, roughly polished still, and what's all this behind the pedestal:
Clash & coterie's limited chops on boundary-pushing tracks, other ironies: no prob 4 trib army:
'70s-based rock-blues-country associations lured, detoured by Isbell's character-actor flair:
Daring and expert emulators give it up for indelible '66 art-punks theeee Monks:
Hot Club Figaro of fiddle/chanteuse Elana James' Dylan tour-emboldened solo debut:
Garage-popping Oz voyager sands, sauces homing truths into rockers and thirsty ballads:
Giant Sandman wires old x new songs, swooping plain w cogent-plus Canadian Content, even:
"A foine kettle of all nations, steaming like relations":
Th' (sic) Legendary Shack Shakers, blasting li'l hard candy xm'ass rock salt & nails (sick!)
Terri Clark, veteran Hat slammer, tightens up w some twists:
Vagabond Mississippi Queen Shelly Fairchild's country hydrodynamics:  
Live A Little, Big Kenny advises; Jon Nicholson makes that A Lil Sumpin Sumpin:
All-timers x in-crowd fave raves x 1(?)-hit wonders make 4 evo-dancefloor thunder:
Sunset Strip blown right glam up by Texas Terri Bomb!
Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Big Nick Nicholas & co., allegedly jumping turnstiles:
Trips auf ticket: Humphrey's McGee, Kammerflimmer Kollektief, Shukar, Ladies W.C.:
Ancient Teutonic drone-rockers Faust x young Jersey art-hoppers Dalek:
Trailer (as in park x movies) form Grime's other other side:
David Toop mix, Luc Ferrari musique concréte, antennae on the beach:
Non-typical Texans NTX + Electric, Jamais-Jamais Paysers Metal Boys feat. China:
Mr. Ran-D "Noooman!" expands fractured fairy tale of Faust, then sits alone @ piano:
Gary Stewart, barstool freebird of yore, in them skies once more…:
Can a banana change its spots? Ask The Suntamana,The Mars Volta, Dysrhythmia:
Groovski: "Come und stand, next to, electric Poles, Godzilla, vould like, to step on your toes.":
Unexpectedly sharp Hat country trib 2 ZZ Top, also: Charlie D., rock-country pilgrim:
Dixie Chicks' Home: gettin' dark, so they're goin' out walkin':
Toby Keith's friendly ghost of a mullet:
Hank Jr., Hank III, steady & bigger change bandwidth cookin':
https://myvil.blogspot.com/2005/12/last-poke-chop.html
l"The next day at graduation, ever'body was saying the paramedics could hear 'Freebird' still playing on the stereo----you know, it's a very, lawwwwng sawwwwwwng":
Sensitive Maleness in CMT Countdown:
Buffalo Gals, Mustang Sallys (also sallies), unexpected lassos:
Once Upon A Wild Wild Modern West of The Mollys:
Mule, Dead, many others: Jam Today! And Tonight:
Electro Funk Breakdown remixing timespace:
"Whut fools these mortals be!"
Beth Hart Band!
"5 Hits Linked By 0 Concept!" (says Eddytor)
Early vision-glimpse of Destiny's Child ("The law can't touch her at all"?):
Cougie hosts a covers cookout by the heartland sea:
Return of Rhinstoned DAC-boyee:
Post-Avant Jazz Odyssey of Funk & Popular Music
Doc Watson, Bootsy Collins and their crew:
Unexpected pleasures of knockoff singles:
Unexpected pleasures of wrestling music:
Unexpected selections and connections and leaps through the ages:
Recombinant pleasures of (mostly) East Euro rock:

posted by Don Allred @ 6/30/2016 09:07:00 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

You Young Eccentric


Orange Juice for Everyone

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2010 AT 4 A.M.
By Don Allred
Orange Juice

Coals To Newcastle (Domino)

The synthesizer's bubbling like a mischievously well-tuned fart as the pickled meat-market beat starts, and why wouldn't it? After all, it's nearly 1983—ancient astronauts like Bowie and Roxy were luring their robot-disco tricks home to rock all the way back in '75. All the more reason for young Edwyn Collins, frontman of Orange Juice, to march in place: Scottish burr and slight lisp be as damned as expired fashion, he's doggedly keeping up with the same old thing, the same old first-vision-of/lost-chance-for love: The line "When I saw you standin' salty in the rain" is still music to his wounds. "Rip it up and start again," he suddenly commands himself, taking over the (his) guitar's tauntingly taut appropriation of Chic's cheerful "Good Times" lick. Ah, but soon he's adding "Swallow my pride" with a humorous Bowie-frog gulp, and it looks like "Rip It Up" is gonna settle into a lovable tears-of-the-clownin', semi-fly-for-a-white guy funk. Yet something's waiting at the bridge.
Collins sways up to the bar line, sounding a bit worse for wear, yet stealthily launching the song's second melody with "Where I take my pen/And feel obliged to start again," even though he knows, like you know, that "There are things in life/One can't quite express." Then again, "You know me, I'm acting dumb-dumb/You know the scene is very humdrum/And my favorite song is/'Bo-oh-ore-dom'!" That sweet punchline's initial, dead-on delivery is replaced by a slightly absent-minded (though well-earned) vocal agility, as if Collins is anticipating his latest OJ temp's big (and equally well-earned) guitar solo, during the song's appearance in the late-'84 concert on the DVD that accompanies the six CDs in Orange Juice's new box set, Coals to Newcastle.
Coals sells OJ's very, very complete output, including tracks rescued from flexi-discs, B-side stingers, 12-inch dub mixes, and demos, alongside the two and a half albums completed and released during the band's 1979–1985 active status: 124 remastered audio tracks total, including 16 previously unreleased. The DVD adds a couple early videos for singles to the TV performances and concert footage previously issued on VHS as Dada With (the) Juice. All incarnations of "Rip It Up," OJ's funky, punky, soulful, and sole Greatest Hit, mellifluously meld the band-written, non-disco bridge with the concluding "dumb-dumb" lines, which are, in fact, from "Boredom," a Buzzcocks song born Anno Punkemi 1977. That's also when Coals begins, with sometimes-ghostly punk tumult still breathing, albeit near quivering bowls of Collins's (passing) vocal angst. Good influences, resources, and/or getting a life, taking cues from all David Copperfields, are mostly what this box is about. For another instance, several key members of Glasgow's changeable Juice crew lived their formative years in Africa, which may be why dynamics get flexed in certain ways, usually not too self-consciously, and always in the nick of time.
You probably don't need the French or even the instrumental version of "Poor Old Soul," but we all need the original version's gentle touch to bleed on our best frenemies. Ditto "Tender Object" and "You Old Eccentric," which betray no ageist spite: Just Collins and his colleagues' somewhat serious in-jokes, though their rich implications calmly connect with other songs' urgent, obsessively reasoning need to figure out how far to take things. Especially the things you take to your lover-in-progress, and all other collectors.
Do take them "In a Nutshell," one of OJ's most beautiful ballads, thus its homely title. A little cautionary deflation, just eluding humblebrag, like when even the late-blooming DVD's Dada concert, despite being chopped into "chapters," mulches "All That Matters" by refreshing Collins's swoon-dive rhyme of "Now I realize" with "Our demise," and tacking on a spontaneously goofy quote of Paul Anka's goofy-as-written "Diana," which squeaks truth to love's power, adding zen flavor to the buzz.
Disc Six's 18 songs, as written and performed by varying OJ lineups in BBC sessions, finally rattle free of the original versions' personal and professional considerations, stance dances---free enough to reach new narrative momentum, within and between themselves, loop the loop.

posted by Don Allred @ 6/28/2016 10:26:00 PM 0 comments

Unskinny Bop


David Byrne's Rowdy Luaka Bop Label Turns 21

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10, 2009 AT 4 A.M.
By Don Allred
Various Artists

21st Century, 21st Year (Luaka Bop)

Is "Ponta De Lança Africano (Umbabarauma)" really about where slaves arrived in Brazil? Or did I just expand a mental legend over the years, trying to explain and contain the unsettling, unsettled poise and expanse of Jorge Ben's rolling, grinding samba soul classic? Literally, it's about soccer, but the key line "um ponta de lan a Africano" doesn't match the title ("Point of the African Lance," ouch!), but its translation—"an African point man" (also "um ponta de lan a decidio" or "a point man whose mind is made up")—is pretty pointed, too. But it sounds like big Ben's got all of the above and something else on his mind, that he's listening to, listening for. Sounds like he's still listening, and that's catching.

Ben's example further schooled Beleza Tropical, the reputation-making debut release on Luaka Bop, the New York City label founded by David Byrne and Yale Evelev in 1988. The compilation arrived like a ship from post–bossa nova Brazil, mostly (Ben's restless boldness aside) filled with discreetly fabulous/accomplished descendants of the tale-telling, refugee gamesters in Boccaccio's Decameron. The crew of Belize can largely be ID'd as members of the '60s Tropicália movement, who'd been exiled or isolated because of cultural activities that Brazil's ruling junta (and some of the leftist opposition) found excessively international, frivolous, and otherwise weird. They grew up, in no small measure, by sharpening their wits while whetting their appetites. Intelligent pleasure heads can learn, don't have to burn just yet. That was Boccaccio's word to his plague- and power- (including pietism) ravaged age, and maybe the Luaka Bopocrats' word to the somewhat similar '80s. Yet Byrne, Evelev, Boccaccio, and Chaucer were also savvy children of their own ages' enterprising spirit.

So, with that non-absolutist, live-and-let-earn sentiment in mind, it's perfectly/imperfectly OK that Ben's massively credible "Ponta" point man kicks off the 15-track celebratory retrospective 21st Century, 21st Year by landing re–fine-tuned ears on the mega-hyped, funk-lite balcony that Shuggie Otis built. Back in the day, Luaka Bop meant to demonstrate that resurrection was for Americans, too, so Otis's 1974 Inspiration Information was rescued from collectors-only obscurity, and the bargain bin, and record-show prices. Anyone could slip on the listening bar's headphones and dig how Otis played all the instruments in his nice niche just so his shaky little voice could go "Aht Uh Mi Hed," as 21st Century's second track's new third life still tells the tale. He's leaning far out into purple keyboard clouds of what should be ease, but with a bee in his bonnet. He's listening to it, wanting something more.

Although the next track, David Byrne's "Fuzzy Freaky," might be even more than Otis bargained for. As placed here by compiler Justin Carter, it must be especially harrowing for those who thought Byrne would make Luaka Bop just successful enough to fatally misrepresent the artists he reissued, reducing them to warm 'n' fuzzy li'l furriners and/or Tee-Headsy novelty nibbles around the edges of edginess. In this proud parody of Heads-era Byrne's fly-eyed, jittery white-guy persona, the guy learns to dance, in a truly foreign/alien way, and celebrates with a lithe, blithe self-nibble ("It's my body, and I'll eat it, too"). Oh, shut up.

But you don't really have to think about this stuff much to enjoy most of 21st Century. Marcio Local dances its theme-ness around a dreamy scenic route via "Samba Sem Nenhum Problema" ("Samba With No Problem"). Ironically, considering its truthful tag, the track is also on his excellent but tiresomely titled new Luaka Bop set, Marcio Local Says Don Day Don Dree Don Don. But that labored label kinda signifies, too, insofar as the Local lad is listening hard to his reverie of how Ben-style samba soul should be, this very afternoon. Listening till he takes his cue through the sunburst of his orchestra and yelps another acrobatic riff from way back behind the parade across his mirror shades. He's timing it so he won't get run over (upstaged) by the very ongoing tradition getting a recharge in his song. And indeed, Local's afterbuzz holds its own even as Venezuelan boogie knights Los Amigos Invisibles, Cuban jazz salts Irakere, and vintage African funk's Moussa Doumbia successively possess the rare-groovological students' graduation procession of self-expression. (Also new on LB: Check sex collectors Los Amigos' Commercial, which gets it on after the first quarter's fumbling foreplay.)

21st Century also flashes several mesmerizing songs about tuning (and perhaps turning) in to your car. American Steely-Police heads Geggy Tah are eternally ecstatic about changing lanes while merging with the radio. (It worked! "Whoever You Are" was Luaka Bop's biggest, least-obviously-recognizable-as LB-product mid-'90s micro-hit!) But all such slipstream profiles disappear in their rainlight as your attention is suddenly face-to-face with the sunny, freestyle smile of Os Mutantes' Rita Lee, singing "Baby" in 1971 and at the close of this set. When she, the descendant on her father's side of Confederado self-exiles from up North, exclaims, "We live in the biggest city/Of South America!" every tunneling music geek in the world sees the light, just as Lee leads another way through the shiny, shivery frame that Luaka Bop can't help trying to save/re-reissue her in. As the music moves as it must, to the extent that
it's a recording at least, at most, and all shades of these layers become more translucent, but never transparent.
"Look here . . . look what I wrote on my shirt."
(The title is listed here as originally given by the label, but can more easily be found---in 2017, anyway---as Twenty First Century, Twenty First Year.)(A reasonably longer, better version of this piece, with comments on other end-of-decade LB releases added: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2009/07/luaka-being-and-boppingness.html)

posted by Don Allred @ 6/28/2016 10:07:00 PM 0 comments

Out My Back Door



Revisiting Creedence Clearwater Revival

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2008 AT 4 A.M.
By Don Allred
When I was just a little boy
Standin' to my Daddy's knee
My Papa said "Son, don't let the man get you
And do what he done to me
'Cause he'll get you
'Cause he'll get ya now."
Well, I can remember the Fourth of July
Runnin' through the backwood bare
I can still hear my old hound dog barkin'
Chasin' down a hoodoo there...
Do it, do it, do it, do it
Behold! Fantasy has unveiled 40th-anniversary editions of Creedence Clearwater Revival's first six LPs, packed onto individual CDs with remastered, pungent-for-digital sound and three to five bonus tracks apiece, generally well-chosen. (Bayou Country needed them most.) Green River sports two officially "unfinished" but sturdy and intriguing instrumentals. Two "jams" (concise run-throughs) with members of Booker T. and the MGs are spread elsewhere: "Born on the Bayou" (appended to Cosmo's Factory) is rough, but deft organ accents highlight the pre-reggae profile of the skiffling "Down on the Corner," on Willy and the Poor Boys. You don't have to be a jamster to strut with a very live version of long, tall "Suzie Q" (which impresario Bill Graham wanted chooglin' well underway when the kids filed into the Fillmore---and, tacked onto CCR's self-titled debut, that was their hip FM radio passport). As presented here (they were opening for Jethro Tull!), Rockabilly Queen Suzi serves herself well by shaking off Creedence mastermind John C. Fogerty's cute little reefer-madness production touches.
On that debut, the gimmicks flaunted by the original studio "Suzie Q" are redeemed when Fogerty's mystical guitar arpeggiation (and penetrating wail) raise the freaked-out protagonist of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You" from the cartoon tomb of ancient novelty hits, providing him a new degree of eerie, still crazy-horny dignity, psychedelically enough, although nobody ever rescued one-hit-wonder Jay himself. (Fogerty probably empathized with singer and song both, having already spent a decade in a pack of striving studio and club rats—CCR had only recently changed their name from the suits-imposed Golliwogs; then the mostly jazz Fantasy Records gave their warehouse worker John F. & combo a shot.)(Fantasy's Saul Zaentz never let him forget it, nor was Fogerty one to back down from a long, long-running feud.)
"Porterville," another CCR track and Golliwogs-era Fogerty original, spotlights a marginalized, sketchy-sounding character, locked in a legacy of shadowy offenses to which he's possibly contributed, although he claims he's also tried to pay off family debts. Our antihero rattles through the verses but flips "I don't care" as a chorus, and tosses chirpy, brittle guitar notes into the grinding jaws of his history-minded neighbors, as played by bass, drums, and two guitars.
Far down the line from "Porterville" (success-wise, at least), Fogerty—having established Creedence as solid boogie artisans and radiogenic rootsy artists, in there between, say, Savoy Brown and The Band---now also weightily and worthily tagged by some as a plaid wine, cosmically cotton-pickin' Spokesman for Today's Troubled Youth (not no "Fortunate Son" neither, at least Vietnam War-era draft-wise), a Berkeley-born MetaSoutherner (waving the plaid before fellow Cali sons Little Feat, Blasters, Les Claypool, more) who lets it all hang out, and in—gets off the social-commentary bus at the conclusion of CCR's death-of-'60s-"innocence" concept album Willy and the Poor Boys. Now he's merely listing (as opposed to describing) moments, fixating on small elements of statically, endlessly replayed footage. You see, last night, some of the People, some people, burned something or other in "Effigy." Fogerty sings: "Last night I saw the fire spreading to the palace door/Silent majority wasn't keeping quiet anymore"; eventually, his curtness, sadness, anger, recognition, timeliness, crossroads connections, and everything else are drawn into the charring downstroke of a penultimate guitar note, along a maybe-loosened, dead-enough string, just before a breath rises and falls with the title word/chorus one more time.
So what can a Poor Boy do, but try to fry endings to their core, get right back on the bus, and go flying through the electric skies of Cosmo's Factory before reaching Pendulum's stimulating therapy session? Here, he greets intractable differences and other old acquaintances, dances some, then leaves us with a mellow keyboard bouquet that flips into a circus blast: "Rude Awakening #2" indeed. Y'all remember to keep count now, y'hear?
See also comments on CCR reissues etc. here: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2021/05/ichabods-nashville-scene-2008-releases.html ----esp. ,,, "Proud Mary," it really is a song about a boat, a boatopia ("people on the river are happy to give"--but what they're gonna give you ain't all good, as the albums indicate--Huck Finn on a sonic raft, a barn door, grid, etc)(but Pendulum mostly drops the hoodoo stuff, and its social commentary could be as much about marriage truces etc as anything else, then going out for a night on the town)"Sweet Hitchhiker" has him zooming by her, turned on but caught up in wondering "How long can I last"--then he crashes, and watches her zooming by, he thinks she's thinking to herself, "How long can I last": could be sex, could be career, they were such a phenomenon---it's a funny song, as written and delivered; this and his other songs on that last album (Mardi Gras, whoopee) are ironic, as his bandmates finally got their own spud-say at the last minute. (h'mm, it's not part of this reissue series).

posted by Don Allred @ 6/28/2016 09:48:00 PM 0 comments

Southern Crossing


Patti Smith & Kevin Shields's The Coral Sea

WEDNESDAY, JULY 9, 2008 AT 4 A.M.
By Don  Allred
Patti Smith & Kevin Shields
The Coral Sea (PASK)

From the ambered memory and legacy of the artist-collector Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989), his friend and colleague Patti Smith has drawn "the passenger M," whose name appears thus in her 1996 prose poem The Coral Sea, now a performance piece, recorded in collaboration with My Bloody Valentine guitarist Kevin Shields. M's abbreviation mark washes away as he (dreams that he) sets sail to find the Southern Cross—or at least glimpses "wet crepe, a beloved port, or a loved one fading, a tiny dot dissolving, in the vast grainy sea." But he's on his own way now (this isn't a Mapplethorpe biography), and even if he's glimpsed death, his sudden "weightless" relief isn't about casting off earthly snares and cares; instead, it's filled with "the earth-rageous scent of his own volition: The air is sweet. . ."
Smith says "earth-rageous" in the second of two shows, from 2005 and 2006, which comprise this double-disc set. Like all of her wordplay here---as written, sometimes spontaneously spoken, and occasionally sung---it fits. The original M. claimed that he never wanted his work to be outrageous. Even the photographer's Portfolio X, an eerie slow train of S&M-mad hopefuls, is fueled by the very extended draining of pain (and shock, revulsion---all bad blood) from its sculpted wake. With the same kind of conviction, Smith rides and guides the diverging momentum of these two shows, one 64 minutes long, the other 55. As M's visions and decisions ("He would dine on desire…") keep zigzagging and spiraling through the last of his refiner's fire, the tides of his veins, so Smith and M attune and recalibrate each other via the non-twangy, raised and extended twang bar of Kevin Shields' otherwise-unaccompanied (frequently E-bowed, sounding more like a violin than slide) guitar---and the singing, maybe-thinking-about-singeing hinges of its pedals.
A wicked tableau of a tropical paradise, in which other travelers, all of many pleasing aural colors, come bearing gifts to the discerning infant phenomenon, eventually jolts into, "He couldn't---he couldn't remember what they were for." One performance wobbles into a seemingly impromptu, tremulous, somewhat superfluous fable for hoarders (okay, c'est moi). But soon enough, Shields reveals another shiny reminder: all words and other sounds are rungs, bringing the passenger through. Ultimately, Shields' celestial navigation is closer than it often seems to his recurring role as blow-torch gator in MBV; though a beast is waiting for and in M, so is something gorgeous.
(A different way of putting it, in a different context:



posted by Don Allred @ 6/28/2016 09:12:00 PM 0 comments

Make It Here


James McMurtry's Just Us Kids

TUESDAY, APRIL 15, 2008 AT 4 A.M.
By Don Allred
James McMurtry

Just Us Kids (Lightning Rod)

"We Can't Make It Here," the relentlessly calm, guitar-and-kickdrum-powered opener of James McMurtry's 2005 album, Childish Things, was also the first shot of local-to-state o' the nation plainspeak across this veteran singer-songwriter-bandleader's always-handy panorama of Lone Star skies and neon highway lifelines, where he's long been rocking us through "Choctaw Bingo" and so on. McMurtry's new Just Us Kids is mostly up to his standards, though the title track is uncharacteristically maudlin, and the hyped first single, "Cheney's Toy," doesn't achieve liftoff from raised expectations. Oh, it's expertly droning, buzzing torture—appropriate for its subject, but duh. Why bother with such an easy target, especially since his characters have always struggled with the personal politics of need and greed, dust and lust. Less obviously, "Hurricane Party" just adjusts itself around a guitar riff, more like a twisted cable bouncing off the walls out there, but no one in here does likewise---no more "Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow---" Nah podner, it's another settling-down round of stories that somehow got this far, smoke 'em if you got 'em---what else can we do, at this point (not really a question anymore, that goes without saying, as long as there's music). It's a catchy little bend alright. Meanwhile, out along "Fireline Road," a junkie's shovel-blade epitaph/mile marker reads: "She couldn't even feel bad, without the stuff." Kissin' cousin to that fella with a "Freeway View," finally back in the game, and swept away by the piano-reeling feeling that he might still win or lose. Ditto, basically, the more cautious citizen in "You'd a' Thought (Leonard Cohen Must Die)," which takes hold in a Cohenesque, slippery way; plus, McMurtry can make it from a moan to a wail, while Cohen can't.

McM. always goes for the right detail, musically and verbally, while sometimes getting fixated and/or spelling things out too much But he wants to poke us, not spoonfeed, and these ain't no purtyfied parties, bub. He's always here to try to twist reality's wires some more, just so, and leave a little room to move. "You'd a' thought we'd know better by now."


James McMurtry and his Heartless Bastards play the Bowery Ballroom May 1

posted by Don Allred @ 6/28/2016 07:58:00 PM 0 comments