Category: Music

Welcome to the first Indie Round-Up of 2006!

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Fern Jones, The Glory Road

A crucial early scene in the recent Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line recounts Cash’s initial audition for legendary producer Sam Phillips, where Phillips interrupts Cash’s rendition of the popular gospel tune “I Was There When It Happened” to urge him to sing instead something from his heart. The rest was history; but it’s worth at least a pause to consider Fern Jones, the now almost completely forgotten writer of “I Was There.”

Steeped as a child in the popular white secular music of the 30s along with the “race music” that grew into rock and roll, Jones followed her husband Ray (she married at sixteen) into the religious life when he became a travelling preacher. Injecting her country-and-western and proto-rock-and-roll numbers with Pentecostal fervor, she brought a Cline-like swagger and a ringing, seductive vocal style to the religious songs she sang on the road, which included classic hymns as well as her own masterful compositions.

It seems no one else was doing quite exactly this, which made Jones almost a movement of her own. Indeed it was Jimmie Davis’s version of “I Was There When It Happened” that Johnny Cash knew. When Jones eventually did release an album on a real label (Dot Records, home to Gale Storm and Pat Boone) in 1959, it failed, and her attempt to promote it with a concert tour showed that something about what she was doing didn’t translate well from the revival tent to the auditorium. The songs were probably just a little too devotional. Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and other musical greats also had Pentecostal inspiration, but their rebellion against straight-laced religion was a lifestyle, not “merely” an artistic statement. In any case, Jones’s recording languished and was thought lost, but then, like a soul born again, it was found, and after a time Jones re-acquired the rights. Now the album receives a very welcome CD re-release.

It doesn’t do Jones proper justice to think of her as the “gospel Patsy Cline” (though there are vocal similarities). Nor is it correct to say that Jones was deprived by a capricious fate of a great career to which she was somehow entitled. Though Jones the singer can’t quite match Patsy Cline or Elvis Presley for gutwrenching pathos, her instrument was formidable, her songs (both those she wrote and those she interpreted) were wonderful, and her career ministering to the flocks under the tents seems to have been an unqualified success. We all make choices, and we all do what we can when we can; sometimes our timing is right, and sometimes it isn’t. That Jones’s one album – to which some additional singles have been added for this release – has survived is something of a miracle. With her voice and songs, and some of Nashville’s great musicians (like Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland) backing her up, it’s a fine record independent of its history. She died in 1996, but wherever Sister Fern is now, she’s got absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.

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Bradley Leighton, Back to the Funk

Smooth jazz-funk! Real instruments! Seductive, painless grooves! Bradley’s Leighton’s sonorous alto flute brings back the seventies, when the likes of Maynard Ferguson, Earth Wind and Fire, Stevie Wonder and Boz Skaggs merged jazz and funk into an easygoing blend that softened many a hard heart (and helped remove many a reluctant bra). You’ll have to shake your own earth, but if you’re in the mood for smoothitude, this collaboration between Leighton and writer-arranger Allan Phillips could be just the thing.

The disc’s one weakness lies in the fact that the 21st-century ear is accustomed to more modern – or at least more interesting – beats. It’s possible to lose oneself in Leighton and Phillips’s tasty horn arrangements, the former’s gorgeous flute tone and genteel bop touches, and the simple rhythms, but it’s also possible to wish for grooves that could tickle today’s jumpy sensibilities. However, if any of this description tickles your own fancy, it’s worth seeing for yourself.

This week, in addition to a couple of worthy new independent releases, I’m posting my Best of 2005 picks. These picks were kindly requested by Blogcritics, and have already been published there in individual articles for each category with the other critics’ selections, but for the convenience of my readers I’ve put mine all together at the bottom of today’s round-up.

First, this week’s items:

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Brianna Lane, Radiator

Confessional folk-pop: not generally my favorite style. Another grown-up woman singing in a little-girl voice about her dreams and disappointments: sounds pretty bleak, I know. But several elements lift Brianna Lane’s CD out of the common dregs of the coffeehouse.

First, Lane’s minimally adorned tunes and sentiments are undergirded by sophisticated melodic and lyrical writing that borrows from country, jazz and rock along with whitebread-folk. Second, producer Evan Brubaker swaddles the songs in dense twangy guitars and earthy rhythms that get the most out of Lane’s limited vocal range and breathy, husky sound. Third, her own solid, expressive acoustic guitar playing gets numerous opportunities to drive the music.

Some of the most serious and interesting songs come late in the CD. “Wrong Hands” has an intense Americana-rock flavor and “Man in the Moon” is a quietly depressing acoustic-guitar gem. “Bullet” is that rarity, a song that centers around being a songwriter yet says something touching and interesting instead of cloying: “i just might have a bullet of a song to make you cry / we gave each other songs just like flowers / i never really gave you enough flowers / now these rhymes are just like guns.” That’s a pretty eloquent expression of the awesome power writers wield with their pens. Brianna Lane writes in small letters, but sings of heartbreak with the soul of a poet. Whether her smart, expressive writing can make up for her lack of a big or beautiful voice and propel her to the level of a Jewel or Sarah McLachlan remains to be seen, but this CD will help make her case.

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Mark Tolstrup, Root Magic

Mark Tolstrup adeptly plays Delta blues (and related styles) on guitar and National Steel, singing in warm, flattened tones halfway between Charles Brown and John Mayall. He does fine justice to traditional numbers and to well-chosen classics by Robert Johnson, Leadbelly and others, and includes some of his own songs as well. His original lyrics don’t have quite the elemental heft of the classics, although “Old Man’s Blues” is epic in scope and “The Second Day of November,” based on Tampa Red’s “Denver Blues,” is haunting. Still they work well in the context of the CD. Tolstrup’s abundant skills and deep feel for the music make this a fine collection worthy of a place on anyone’s country-blues shelf.

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BEST OF 2005

It’s that time! Please note that you won’t find any White Stripes or Gorillaz here; my selections are taken from the pool of indie music, since that’s my most “regular” beat. I have also broken the rules and included items from the second half of 2004, since indie artists typically have a longer gestation and promotion period than major label acts and sometimes it takes them a little longer to get their review copies distributed: thus the ritual cutting of the slack.

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BEST SONG: “I Don’t Know”
Artist: Nicola
CD: What’s the Point

In addition to putting on a killer stage show, Nicola writes some of the most captivating songs out there. This one rocks, it’s full of intense passion, and it’s super-catchy.

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BEST ALBUM: Presenting The Great Unknowns
Artist: The Great Unknowns

Unfortunately still mostly living up to their name, this band infuses their weatherbeaten Americana sensibility with an unusual poetic lyricism.

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BEST ARTIST (SINGLE): Ray Wylie Hubbard

Townes Van Zandt is gone and now we’ve lost Johnny Cash, but we still have Ray Wylie, as deeply soulful as ever.

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BEST DUO OR GROUP: Moco

Iggy reborn? The Strokes on hash? The Ramones crossed with the Animals? Holy crap, these guys are stupid cool.

That is all. May our collective 2006 be better than 2005 was, and may your 2006 be your best year yet.

Been thinking a lot about soul music lately. Maybe ’cause it’s almost New Year’s Eve, when I will get to play a gig with my classic soul band The Hot Button All-Stars. Maybe it’s just always a good time to be thinking about soul music. Anyway, Bob Davis, proprietor of the invaluable Soul Patrol website, just wrote me, and it reminded me that I hadn’t recently published an updated list of my reviews relating to soul music and related matters. So here are the links, in all their underlined glory:

Janis Joplin
Victor Wooten
The O’Jays
Willie Hightower
W. C. Clark
Keb’ Mo’
Richard “Groove” Holmes
Gail Ann Dorsey
Bobby Purify
Corey Harris
Bobby Womack (DVD)
Lewis Taylor

Welcome to this week’s Indie Round-Up. Here in New York City we’re facing the threat of a transit strike, which feels like a mini-apocalypse in the making. So Aaron McMullen’s gritty urban folk music is fitting. Jay Mankita’s gentler songs are a balm. And Panic Division – well, the name feels just about right for this moment in this place. Read on.

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Panic Division, Versus

This is corporate noise-pop at pretty close to its worst. Polished, professional, and forgettable, its headbanging rhythms, frantic power chords and circular melodies add up to empty grandiosity. Here and there, as in “Paradise” with its skewed beat and U2-borrowed melody, and in the moody “Little Child,” Panic Division comes up with something slightly more interesting to listen to, but even those bits are too derivative to say anything even slightly important. We heard early U2 back in the days of early U2; a faster version of Flock of Seagulls isn’t going to turn anyone’s world upside down either. These guys should be doing something more original with their musical talents.

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Jay Mankita, Morning Face

Last time we covered Jay Mankita’s lighter-side CD. Today we discuss his more serious recent recording, Morning Face, which shows off his quirky, jazzy-bluesy songs, deft acoustic guitar work, and subtle take on the human condition. Everything Mankita does here is understated, and the more effective thereby. Graham Nash and early Simon and Garfunkel come to mind, but Mankita has a bluesier style than most guitar-folkies.

Songs like “Shadow” reflect his facility with children’s music, but it’s no kids’ song: “Shadow, shadow, you already know/You shadow of my former self, you’ve got to let me go.” The title track has a lilting, playful melody too, but there’s an adult sadness to the lyrics: “I bring to you my morning face, my morning face/My face before the thoughts rush in, before the waters of the flood rush in.” This is an evocation of childlike simplicity by a wistful adult mind that can’t quite recreate it.

Can’t always, anyway. Children and adults would both enjoy the delightful “Bread Alone” and “Rain Rain.” The latter unifies nature and humanity by calling on rain to “bring us life again,” wind to blow down “the foolish houes I build if they won’t bend,” and a ray of sunlight to “melt away the icy words I spoke to you today.”

In “How Deep And Wide,” a simple Donovan-like tune with a creepy minor-key break alternates with a traditional-dance instrumental theme and a folk-rock chorus a la the Roches. That structural complexity is of a piece with the irregular rhythms of the wordless “Finny in The Long Run,” the jazzy harmonics of “Worms in the Night,” and the jiglike but harmonically complex “Sliwa the Cat,” which picks up on the Celtic dance theme and adds a merry concertina to the mix.

Jay Mankita uses bits and pieces from various folk traditions to say his piece. His generous talent and heart will bring warmth to the spirits of – to use an overused but useful cliche – children of all ages. His CDs are available at CD Baby here.

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Aaron McMullen, 75mg

Aaron McMullen’s latest lo-fi Web album is another collection of miniature slices of life in the dual locales of drunken urban streets and a sensitive mess of grey matter circa 2005, and circa any year. Many of the songs have a fragmentary nature, but some, such as The Nick Cave-like “Sad Song Sung” and the dramatic-as-Brel “City Country City,” display an increasing songwriting maturity on the part of this fella who’s always had a way with words: “Oh, here in the dark beneath these sheets,/I watched a play performed by spirits midst the twisting waves of heat/And when the play was through, I had a wakin dream a you.”

Behold a true Irish poet of the back alleys. “Oh, and the queen done propositioned me,/He had a song he sang to me/Was a tattered love song, ode to someone chewed the soul from outta him/But the song that snared my senses, yeah,/Wasn’t his, was someone else’s, yeah/And I can’t recall a single line,/An I never heard that song again.” Treading the knife edge of consciousness, these songs pull on you like a feral cat its prey. If he builds up his vocal power McMullen could make a serious impact with language like this.

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Danielia Cotton, Small White Town

This lady can sing; she can rock; and she’s clearly got some serious backing, since she’s netted opening slots for Bon Jovi, Living Colour, Collective Soul and more. Perhaps Danielia Cotton’s a dynamo on stage – her take-no-prisoners vocals give that impression – but underwhelming material makes this CD a disappointment. The songs, in general, are insufficiently memorable, and, strangely for a rock album, the electric guitars sound thin.

Of the rockers, I liked “Today,” which has a good hook to go with its chunky beat. And Cotton makes some fruitful moves away from rock, into neo-soul territory for “4 A Ride” and the passion-drenched “Shame”; and back in time for the ballad “Pride,” which sounds like it could have been an Aretha Franklin track from the late sixties. Another positive: the downright inspiring, powerhouse vocal arrangements in “It’s Only Life,” “Take My Heart,” and the acoustic-electronic closer “Chains,” among others.

But overall, and particularly as far as her hard stuff goes, this Hendrix- and Led Zeppelin-inspired artist needs better material to make the most of her powerful pipes.

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Tina Dico, In the Red

To make a horrid generalization: pop music from Europe often sounds behind the times. The Danish star Tina Dico’s first US and UK release, with its 1970s feel, is no exception and by rights should feel pretty old-hat. But Dico’s songwriting ability and lyrical seriousness give the music a timeless quality, and sometimes untrendiness is cool. The contemplative “Warm Sand” and the gripping “Head Shop” are two prime examples of her straightforward attack.

That 1970s feel is found primarily in Dico’s strong, relatively uninflected singing style and close harmonies, which suggest earlier Northern European pop acts like Ace of Base, the Corrs and even Abba. But those groups had an intentional frilliness which Tina Dico does not share. Her sombre melodies and introspective lyrics are fetching in quite a different way. If music can be said to be both heavy-hearted and uplifting, that’s Tina Dico.

Vulnerability is nice when tastefully done, but there’s too much tasteless whining in female folk-pop (not to mention male alt-rock) these days. There’s much to be said for letting a song’s message come through unimpeded. Dico shows some welcome rawness in a few songs, like the lovely “Room With a View,” but as a whole this CD is a statement of the power rather than the lossiness of romance, and a bracing antidote to the pseudo-girlie, affected breathiness that habitually let down today’s would-be rock or folk-pop music fan.

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And for unconditional emotion from the male point of view, check out Steve Northeast‘s intense little self-titled EP. These four heavily emotional power-pop songs, with their focussed message and structure, charge directly into your brain, barreling through all pretense. It’s straight-from and straight-to-the-heart stuff that speaks for the romantic, the idealist, the lover, the hopeless (or hopeful) devotee, the Icarus, the Abelard in us all. And it’s a firm marriage of song and sound. “I want to share with you the air I breathe. I’m not pretending anymore – you are everything to me.” Indeed.

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Jay Mankita, Dogs Are Watching Us

Satire is always welcome in grim times, and since times are pretty much always grim, a good-natured but sharply clever songsmith like Jay Mankita has an important place in the musical rainbow. You can hear his smile in every lyric: in places he almost bursts into laughter while singing. The songs are by turns biting, funny, and touching; some are childlike enough to work as kids’ songs (not surprisingly, he does do children’s concerts); but he tucks thematic complexities into his simple descriptive accounts. The two anti-Bush tracks are clever and funny, but it’s in the quirkier ditties, like the weird “Little Soap” and the cockeyed, mushy “Tracy At the Bat,” where Mankita stands out from the crowd of musical satirists – a crowd that’s actually pretty small. Rapping Beastie-Boys-style about the philosophical quandaries of the Big Bang Theory, he doesn’t have to explain that just because a scientific theory isn’t fully worked out doesn’t mean it isn’t true. The message is implied, and well received.

I enjoyed this CD immensely, and Mankita also has another, more straight-ahead modern folk album which I’ll cover in a future column. All his CDs are available at CD Baby here.

Over the past decade countless Internet music ventures have gone down the drain. Sometimes it seems as if today only a giant (and gigantically rich) company like Apple with its iTunes store and software tie-in can succeed in music-download sales.

Magnatune is helping to prove the contrary. On the heels of its quietly revolutionary announcement that customers may share their uncompressed-audio music purchases with up to three friends, the online record label and store has seen a 40% increase in sales. I spoke by email with Magnatune founder John Buckman about his new offer to “fill your iPod for $200” and, generally, about what he’s doing right and what the music industry, on the whole, is doing wrong. This can be seen as a very innovative plan by getting buyers to set up a recurring payment whilst helping out other people in the process.

A basic element of Magnatune’s business plan is that although it sells directly to the customer, it also deals directly with the artists, who are signed to non-exclusive distribution agreements and receive 50% of the proceeds from sales of their music. The lack of an intrusive middleman is what makes this equal partnership economically and conceptually practical. With traditional record labels, creativity in marketing is discouraged, when it’s needed now more than ever; “Every business idea [the artists] have needs to be approved by the record companies [which] control the music,” Buckman says.

Native Internet companies aren’t immune from seemingly nonsensical thinking, either. When Real.com, through its Rhapsody service, cut its prices in half and sold ten times more music downloads, it ended up “paying the record companies more per song than they were charging, despite the fact that the tenfold increase in sales meant five times more revenue for the record companies. Basically,” says Buckman, “I pity anyone who has to convince record company executives of new business models: that’s a short path to insanity.”

Magnatune customers set their own prices, paying what they feel an album is worth (plus a fixed additional fee if they want a physical CD, including full artwork, mailed to them). On average, the artists receive $4-$5 per album sale, far more than artists on major labels get. And while that may be somewhat less than the typical take from a CD sale at the revered online indie record store CD Baby, and less (percentage-wise) than the latter pays out for download sales via its digital distribution service, Buckman explains that CD Baby is a very different beast: “CD Baby doesn’t promote your CD, it’s a shopping cart [and fulfillment house] for you to send orders to, from your [the artists’s] web site. Cargo Cult, for example, one of Magnatune’s best-selling artists, sees fewer than 10 sales a quarter from CD Baby yet sells hundreds of copies in that same time frame on Magnatune. That’s no failing of CD Baby, they simply have a different mission: CD Baby sells your CD to people who already want to buy it. Magnatune finds people and gets them to want to buy your CD. Totally different things, equally valid.”

Things aren’t quite that cut and dried: CD Baby does provide a recommendation engine and offer some promotional possibilities; conversely, Magnatune artists do have their own websites, from which they link to Magnatune. But Buckman’s distinction between a “boutique” store/label like his and a supermarket like CD Baby is important. Any artist can sell through CD Baby: currently it offers CDs from a staggering 112,000 indie musicians and bands. Magnatune’s 200 or so artists, by contrast, have been selected carefully by Buckman and his small staff. It so happens, for example, that Magnatune has an excellent roster of early (e.g. baroque, or pre-Classical) music, of which I am a fairly big consumer. Having bought several albums and sampled numerous others there, I know that most anything Magnatune offers in that genre will be something I would want to have. So, for me, Magnatune has become a destination in itself. And when I buy music there, I know that 50% of my purchase price will be going directly to the artist. Hence I am getting not only music I like but the satisfaction of knowing I am truly supporting the musicians. The support for musicians on every level is what keeps the music industry going and the influx of new and amazing artists, there is a music community app from cosound.com that can be a real support for connecting musicians to professionals that need it.

For its musicians, Magnatune offers more than a storefront. It employs “a full-time PR agency that does nothing but send our CDs out to magazines and websites for reviews. We’re constantly getting major PR.” This week’s issue of Time Magazine, for example, lists Magnatune among the top 20 music websites; a full page story in The Economist appeared recently; “and those stories usually feature our artists. Not to mention podcasters playing our music, our network of partner web sites (Webjay, iRate, last.fm) and others.” Buckman has a refreshingly radical view of paid advertising: “Advertising is stupid, it’s only for companies that no one is naturally interested in. Over 600,000 web sites point to Magnatune.com today, because they think it’s a very good thing and want to spread the word. Magnatune is religion. Fight evil! What could be simpler?”

Magnatune customers considering buying an album can listen to the whole thing online – not just samples – in high quality first. Once they buy it, they can download both MP3s (compressed) and CD-quality audio files. Although the latter are much bigger and take a lot longer to download, Buckman reports that “70% of buyers get the perfect quality files, and another 40% download the mp3s. You can download multiple formats, or come back in a month and get the files again. The trend is clearly toward perfect quality, as well as well-tagged MP3s for your iPod.” Since most online music stores do not offer full-quality files, this is one way Magnatune stands out.

Another is the selection. As a major label, Magnatune offers quite a few genres of music. But unlike a major, Magnatune sells more classical music than anything else. World music, Electronica, and New Age are also big sellers. Evidently, Magnatune has found an audience with tastes that are not being adequately served by the old-guard labels. So, although its nontraditional business plan may get much of the press, Magnatune’s concentration on high-quality music in second-tier genres is also a big factor in its success.

Buckman goes beyond pointing out the majors’ failure to adapt to the digital age. He considers their practices downright sinister. Magnatune’s slogan is “We are not evil.” By evil, Buckman means “behavior that is unethical and destructive. Labels not paying musicians… CDs going out of print, while the labels keep the rights so the musicians can’t even make their own CDs, that’s evil. DRM [Digital Rights Management, currently in the news because of the Sony rootkit debacle] is evil. Suing end-users is evil. Abusively high pricing is evil. 30-second samples are evil. Spyware is evil. We’re surrounded by so much evil stuff on the Internet and in the music business that I feel we’ve lost perspective. What would it be like to run a company that wasn’t evil?”

Magnatune might not be evil, but building a company takes money. Buckman has invested $1 million into the site, and it is just now “barely turning a profit, as of August 2005… [but] the ‘barely’ is on purpose: the focus is on growing Magnatune, not pulling cash out, because this is all about getting musicians enough money so they can keep at it, and avoid working at Burger King!”

Fees from music licensing (to independent filmmakers, for example) can be a significant part of the income an artist can make, but usually it’s a much more difficult side of the business for artists to deal with – unless they’re also lawyers. But Magnatune makes it unusually easy, both financially and technically, for producers to license its artists’ music. In fact, the artists who market and appeal to both consumers (via direct downloads) and producers (via licensing) do the best at Magnatune.

Another big part of growing the company is coming up with new marketing ideas. Some people turn to a local marketing vault to help them with this, obtaining new skills and learning methods to reach out to the public that they may have not known about before. Buckman attributes the recent sales jump to several of these, including giving customers who buy an album the right to give it to three friends and to podcast the music for free.

He will even send the enthusiastic customer a stack of promotional cards to hand out. Whilst these are all positive methods of marketing, music companies should also consider using social media marketing to help their artists become more successful. By using platforms like Instagram, musicians should be able to create an audience to promote their album, helping them to get more sales in return. Perhaps these musicians could also consider using companies like Nitreo to get instagram followers at first. This should encourage more people to follow them, helping them to establish a fan base. This should benefit sales, and help the company to earn more money. Social media marketing is a great way to push a music career.

Magnatune’s latest marketing idea is its new “fill your iPod” offer. Noting that iPods have a lot more storage space than the average person has enough music (and/or time) to fill up, Buckman came up with the idea of bundling its 400 or so albums into one $200 lump-sum purchase. Yes, that’s not much money going to each artist included in the bundle, but it’s better-than-free promotion, especially considering that people who take Magnatune up on the offer would not have otherwise been acquiring most of those albums at all.

“The average buyer spends $14 a year at Magnatune,” explains Buckman, “buying an album and a half (on average). If we can get those people to spend $200 on us instead, then, yes, the per-CD price is much lower (of course, that’s why the person spent the $200) but much more total money comes our way and gets paid out to musicians. As a musician, I’d rather sell 1,000 albums at 50 cents, than 10 albums at $8. It’s not only more money, but a much larger audience and word of mouth! Besides, people don’t buy 40-gig iPods to put just their five iTunes-store-bought albums on them. They want to fill them up! The need is there, it’s just that no one has ever offered to fill an iPod up with legal music, at a realistic price.”

Now someone has. Stayed tuned for the further adventures of Magnatune.

The Grateful Dead were far more famous as a live band than anything else, so it’s no surprise that their first live album, the two-disc set Live/Dead, is of unquestioned importance to Dead fans and rock music historians. Documenting the band’s first major flowering as a long-form experimental group, it has remained one of the most popular of the band’s official LPs since its release in November 1969.

Several of the tracks on Live/Dead (the first live 16-track album ever made) were chosen from a relatively carefully planned four-night run at the Dead’s “home base,” San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore West ballroom. Fans have long desired more material from those concerts, and so, recently, the Dead released a limited-edition 10-CD boxed set containing all four shows in their entirety.

A bit excessive, you say? If you’re not quite that much of a Deadhead – or if you didn’t snag your copy before they sold out – the beautifully produced 3-CD set Fillmore West 1969 should be just the thing to cure your Blues for Allah.

In 1969 the band was developing the template for Grateful Dead concerts for decades to come: a compact set of discrete, relatively short songs, followed, after a break, by a set of longer, free-form jams built around the skeletons of a few select numbers. Although, in their maturity, the Dead could base a jam on most anything, several of what became their favorites were chosen and developed at the time of these recordings. So this set is of unusual interest, as much for its historical significance as for its multifaceted musical inspiration.

It’s easy to forget that the early Grateful Dead depended hugely upon the singer (and harmonica and keyboard player) Ron “Pigpen” McKernan’s vocals and stage charisma. His Joplinesque energy and singing gave the Dead a degree of blues credibility the band wouldn’t have otherwise had. This is especially evident on the blues-heavy Disc One. Yet even in some of Pigpen’s songs, the band’s uniqueness comes through. Although “I’m a King Bee” and “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” are both straight blues tunes, the former is played fairly straight while the latter is full of the micro-rhythms and fillips that made the Dead the supreme jam band. The Bobby “Blue” Bland R&B classic “Turn On Your Lovelight,” a two-chord song that became so identified with the Dead that their rendition was actually the first many people ever heard, displays an almost bebop-like level of improvisatory complexity.

Discs Two and Three are representative of Dead show second sets: longer jams that merge into epic suites; more soloing, less singing; more ethereal, folksy Jerry Garcia, less gruff Pigpen. One gets a clear sense that despite McKernan’s continued presence, the band’s bluesy element was already becoming less important. Disc Two is dominated by the Dark Star -> St. Stephen -> The Eleven -> Death Don’t Have No Mercy suite, totalling almost 43 minutes, and Disc Three is one long suite anchored by “That’s It For The Other One,” a suite in itself which was always (for me) the most exciting of the Dead’s “usual” jams. The Disc Three suite also contains the “Drums” and “Space” (here called “Jam”) sections that practically every Dead second set was to include thenceforth.

A nicely printed booklet with plenty of photographs and Dennis McNally’s informative liner notes is built in, giving the package the comforting one-piece feel of a real album (in the old sense of the word). The sound quality is unusually good for the time. Sadly, Pigpen and Jerry Garcia are no longer with us, and while the band’s concerts will survive indefinitely through the bootlegging they encouraged, it is quite wonderful to have this fine-sounding and lovingly presented encapsulation of rock’s greatest improvisational band at their earliest peak.

[Cross-posted at Blogcritics]

British neo-soulster Lewis Taylor will be getting some long-awaited US exposure with early 2006 concerts supporting the American release of Stoned, his sparkling new CD. Whether American audiences will respond in a big way to Taylor’s sophisticated sound is, of course, an open question, but if they don’t it will be their loss.

Taylor, who sings in a falsetto that ranges from Russell Thompkins, Jr.-smooth to Steve Winwood-acid, has obviously absorbed much from the soul music greats of the seventies like Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway and the Stylistics; the influences are evident in both his songwriting and his singing. Modern drum sounds and effects give his arrangements an up-to-date feel, but since he takes the bulk of his inspiration from the great songwriters and interpreters of the 70s, his music has much more richness than most of today’s neo-soul, which owes more to modern limp R&B than to classic soul music.

One of Taylor’s own most distinguishing characteristics, besides his supple voice, is found in the vocal fills that encompass a style of his own as well as wider-ranging influences – “Throw Me a Line” and “Melt Away” even evoke Queen and the Beach Boys. Another is the acid-rock guitar that occasionally shakes things up, as in “Shame,” one of the best tracks of this solid one-hour set.

Not every song is equally marvelous, but each has something to offer and each listener will have his or her own favorites. The CD can be appreciated both as an homage to, and a reinterpretation of, the golden age of soul. It’s seriously good music for grown-ups.

The front page of Blogcritics bills this column as “New Indie CDs,” and that’s fine shorthand, but not entirely accurate. This week’s selection, for example, includes only one actual CD of new music. The others are 1) a set of songs available so far only at the artist’s Myspace.com page, and 2) a reissue of music that’s almost thirty years old. Nevertheless all three fit happily into this column’s large but friendly world: a) music that’s b) new or newly available and c) not released by a major label. Good stuff to tell you about, so read on! Here’s the

Indie Round-Up for November 03 2005

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fielding, self-titled CD

fielding (a band that lives entirely in lower case) makes power-pop with a dash of punk attitude – often sunny, occasionally snotty or grim. however this is a album not to analyze but in which to lose yourself. it doesn’t matter that the lyrics are fairly abstract, as powerful lead vocalist eric b. sings them with pathos and a hard edge that makes it seem he’s living them, and the band plays with equal zeal. individual lines do flash out: “you’re beautiful when you’re on the ground”; “the jacket you wear is such a pretty color… i’m hiding under the whitest covers.” it’s all very pleasingly accessible without being too derivative. songs like “big surprise” even evoke the naivete of 1960s pop, especially with the addition of effective, affectless vocals from keyboardist beth b. eric b.’s soaring vocals on “June 5” approach the expansiveness of thom yorke, while the song itself evokes the magical-realist american kitsch of talking heads: “so come on over, and test the waters/we’re floating above apartments and quiet.” “indigo” too is very influenced by radiohead. fielding uses repetitious vocal phrases effectively in several songs, particularly “big surprise” and “slide.”

the ten songs on the cd maintain a consistent guitar-rock sound with some strong keyboard touches, sustaining interest through compositional variety. with above average vocals and songwriting and an emotionally rich but mostly happy mood, fielding’s debut on the militia group label is a winner.

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Hayley Taylor, Waking (EP)

While it’s fair to ask if we really need another song about a man who can’t commit, the answer, if it’s Hayley Taylor’s haunting “Orange Tree,” is yes. This lovely minor-key tune is a small masterpiece of alt-pop. Taylor’s voice is pretty, but, like Nick Drake’s or Liz Phair’s, plainspoken to the point of discomfort – a sweetly disturbing sensation for the listener. Without remarkable strength or tone, it penetrates deep into the psyche. One almost feels one has been delivered the succinct lyrics telepathically instead of aurally:

You’ve got your orange tree
I’ve got the blues
You’ve got your easy answers but
I want the truth

The dreamy, country-tinged “Fallen” suggests what Radiohead (they’re everywhere these days, aren’t they?) might sound like with a pedal steel guitar and Aimee Mann singing. Here another frustrated lover (or perhaps the same one) seems to be sadly accepting her fate as a victim of incomplete love:

I’ll take the last train car
The one too dark to see
I’ll be the bravest heart
The missing part you need

But in the end she remains defiantly hopeful: “Love just keeps on calling/Till you start listening darling.” Here Taylor exaggerates her lazy drawl to simultaneously convey resignation, patience and a twinkle of humor, locking them down memorably with simple but sophisticated melodies.

“What I Never Said” layers a Beatle-esque tune over folky acoustic guitars to tell the tale of a volatile and doomed relationship. Taylor sounds very much like the rueful Liz Phair here, swallowing the words as if they’re nearly too painful to squeeze out. “You made me breakfast and you screamed ’cause you couldn’t cry.” Finally, “This Is It” is a catchy little waltz that evokes the Beatles’ “Hide Your Love Away.”

All four songs are enjoyable, and the best ones show an almost startling songwriting talent. They will appear on Hayley Taylor’s upcoming EP. Check her out at Myspace and make a note to buy the disc when it comes out. Very highly recommended for lovers of good songwriting and seriously sexy (or sexily serious) voices.

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Gentle Giant, Interview

Re-mastered and re-released for the band’s 35th anniversary, Interview (originally released in 1976) reveals Gentle Giant at the height of its prog-rock creativity. From “Timing”‘s unexpected blues-piano interlude and the off-kilter reggae of “Give It Back,” to the gentle acoustic guitars of “Empty City” and the gristly intensity of the masterful “I Lost My Head,” this album includes some of the band’s prettiest moments as well as some of their most complex writing. Though most fans didn’t consider it among their best, this re-mastered version may be changing some minds. Fans who’ve bypassed it in the past should definitely give it another listen; I do not consider this in any way a lesser effort than Freehand or In a Glass House.

[NOTE: an earlier problem with this re-release has been fixed. The version you will now find in stores is the correctly mastered one.]

Bob Dylan’s songs are so universal and brilliant that they stand up to a seemingly endless variety of treatments. Jerry Garcia‘s Dylan interpretations, however, are unusual in that they pair two equally iconic and influential musical sensibilities. Garcia’s fluid and imaginative guitar pushes up fresh, unexpected blossoms in Dylan’s compositional garden, yet there’s never any shock of the new; the two strains intermingle with ease and naturalness.

A new two-CD set provides a concentrated look at the long, if mostly indirect, collaboration between the folk-rock demigod and the king of improvisation. Of the fifteen selections, only four are by the Grateful Dead; the others come from several versions of Garcia’s side projects, most often known simply as the Jerry Garcia Band. This being Jerry, all are from live concerts, and while the Dead was a famously inconsistent band, Garcia’s inspiration rarely flagged when he played with his “solo” groups.

Several lineups from the 70s are represented on Disc One, including Legion of Mary (with Merl Saunders on organ) covering “The Wicked Messenger,” one of the most interesting tracks. This long Hendrix-ish jam may have appealed to Garcia because of its repetitive but asymmetical structure, the sort of thing that frequently lofted him (both with and without the Grateful Dead) to extended flights of inspiration. The underrated “Tough Mama,” which was a new song at the time, is the other unusual selection, a more complex but also irregularly timed number that inspires transcendent soloing.

The Dylan stalwarts “Positively 4th Street,” “Simple Twist of Fate” and “I Shall Be Released” (the latter recorded in 1987, and less than 8 minutes long!) show Garcia at his best as an interpreter. While his vocals waver off-key as always and never match Dylan’s in intensity, the songs’ deeper meanings (most of these are among Dylan’s sadder works) come through as clearly as the poet’s sometimes confounding but always vivid lyrics will allow. With Jerry Garcia it was never so much about the singing anyway. The singing was merely the stained and tattered road map. The music and the feelings were the trip.

The only shortcoming on Disc One is the seventeen-minute version of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” I always liked when the Dead played the song, but this Garcia Band rendition – with Keith and Donna Godchaux – put me right to sleep. Perhaps a true Head could appreciate this extremely slow ramble, but I couldn’t. Or maybe, as with so many things Jerry, you just had to be there. When I listen to this disc in the future I’ll probably be skipping over “Knockin'” the way one of my college Deadhead friends carefully spliced out all the Keith Godchaux piano solos from his bootleg tapes. (True story!)

Disc Two begins with a fourteen-minute “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” and it has a masterpiece of a guitar solo. This is a prime example of Jerry transforming a short, to-the-point song with a standard structure into a magnum opus. “She Belongs To Me,” from a 1985 Grateful Dead concert, shows the band in top form, and even “Forever Young,” a song I’ve never liked, shines in the Garcia Band’s slow gospel treatment: though Jerry’s voice isn’t quite up to some of the notes he reaches for, you can tell his heart is in it. “Tangled Up In Blue” is exquisite, and the gloomy, dirge-like “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power),” recorded just a couple of years before Garcia’s death, seems, in hindsight, full of presentiments of doom.

The last three tracks are all late-period Grateful Dead. In the latest, “Visions of Johanna,” from 1995, Garcia’s voice sounds very much that of an old man as he speaks or shouts, Dylan-like, the enigmatic lyrics. Here the two sensibilities converge most distinctly.

Garcia and Dead completists will certainly want this collection. It has excellent sound quality, very nice packaging, and detailed liner notes. For the curious, it’s also a good sampling of what the whole Jerry Garcia/Grateful Dead phenomenon was – and is – all about.

Bobby Womack may not be quite the hugest star R&B ever produced, but his career – now spanning over half a century – as songwriter, singer, guitarist, and soul man, marks him as one of the most important soul performers of all time, and the quintessential soul survivor.

Sam Cooke discovered the gospel group The Womack Brothers when they were kids in 1953. When, encouraged by Cooke, the brothers began to make the move from gospel to R&B, their father threw them out of the house. Recording for Cooke’s label as the Valentinos, the group toured behind James Brown, and later Bobby joined Cooke’s band as a guitarist. Bobby’s big break as a songwriter came during this period (1964), when the Rolling Stones’ recording of his “It’s All Over Now” went to number one on the U.K. charts. (Trivia time: “It’s All Over Now” was also, according to Songfacts.com, the first song Bruce Springsteen ever learned to play on guitar.) Rock and pop fans may also know (or be interested to) that Womack wrote and played guitar on “Trust Me,” from Janis Joplin’s “Pearl” album, and wrote “Across 110th Street,” a song (from the blaxploitation movie of the same name) which was revived as the theme to the hit Quentino Tarantino film Jackie Brown.

Soul Seduction Supreme presents nine songs from a late 1990’s concert at the Town and Country in London. A master showman, Womack plays the crowd, cavorts with his band, cracks jokes and sings his heart out. In between songs, the filmmakers visit him as he travels from gig to gig, fusses about money, relaxes in hotel rooms and in one somewhat bizarre scene, takes a bubble bath. There are also amusing bits where the band members practice and study, showing the joy, the drudgery and the anxiety that come with making music. And Womack’s philosophical but peppery reminiscences and reflections are of interest. But the DVD is primarily devoted to the performance, which is nicely recorded and fun to watch.

I was a little disappointed that it didn’t include Womack’s breakout hit “That’s the Way I Feel About ‘Cha,” but it’s otherwise a good selection of songs from the different stages of his career, from the early “Lookin’ for a Love” (re-recorded in the 70s, it was his only Top Ten hit on the pop charts) and “It’s All Over Now,” through “Woman’s Gotta Have It,” and the later “Love Has Finally Come at Last,” which was originally a duet with Patti LaBelle in the 1980s.

The main drawback is the lack of liner notes. Biographical information and discographies are easy to find on the Internet, but some information about the specifics of the tour and performance recorded here would have been nice. Still, this is a worthwhile DVD to own for fans of Bobby Womack or soul music in general.

[Cross-posted at Blogcritics]

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Man Alive, Open Surgery

One of the better punk-driven rock bands I’ve heard on disc lately, Man Alive hails from the unlikely location of Israel but is brought to you by the Militia Group, the lean and muscular West Coast label that also promotes Copeland (and other promising new bands). With big, husky vocals, a mix of punk shouts and sing-along melodies, and a forceful two-guitar attack, they owe much to their punk forebears (both “pure” and pop), but most bands with a similar sound don’t write as well as Man Alive.

Most of the songs are loud, crunchy, and on the fast side, though the slowish “Say What You Want” almost treads into Tears for Fears territory. In several songs (like “Stationary” and “Rewind”) the band fits multi-part arrangements, including time changes, into three-minute spans without breaking the integrity of the songs. The opening track, “Give Me a Sign,” is a catchy, anthemic distillation of stuttering, alienated youth:

Tell me how, how long were you planning to wait for
Are you in or are you out. Give me a sign, boy
You take it in. You take it in but you hold on for
For anything, for anything while everything passes you by

The real heart of the album is “Catch Phrases, Slogans and Chants,” an impassionate diatribe against conformity and in favor – surprisingly for a band with a punk attitude – of quiet:

There are times for silence
And there are times for action
But mostly there are times to listen
And listen with some love

Even with their agile songwriting and rough-edged sound, Man Alive doesn’t fully escape the sameness that persists in most of today’s punk-influenced rock. The context in which this band is good is a rather narrow one. Someone like the bluesman Danny Draher (see below) stays within a well-worn set of conventions too, but has a broader musical palette to work with and thus can record an album that’s over twice as long but never gets boring. Once you’ve listened to the 35 minutes of Open Surgery, though, you feel you’ve gotten everything Man Alive is about. It’s why people go nuts when a band like the White Stripes comes along – they’re excited to see someone using the old tools to build something even a little bit new. Man Alive uses their old tools very well, and they’re certainly a band worth watching. But I’ve received a lot of CDs in this genre recently, and when even the best of them (like this one) feels sort of old-hat, I wonder if there’s much juice left in the old punk-rock lemon.

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Danny Draher, Big Fun Tonite!

Veteran Chicago guitarist Danny Draher‘s debut CD as a leader is a blues album that sounds as good as it feels and vice versa. Draher touches on many of the song types you’d expect from a bluesman: long, slow jams like the epic “Don’t Know Much,” which features guest legends Dr. John on piano and Bernard Purdie on drums; funkified numbers like “My Desire”; the slow, crashing swing of “I Don’t Know Why”; tasty jump blues like “Garlic & Onions”; the rock-fortified “Disco Woman”; and arrangements that suggest earthy, sloshy big-band swing, like “32nd & 3rd,” where Chris Foreman provides an especially brilliant Hammond organ solo and the group gives a clinic in drawing high energy from a laid-back groove.

Recording all original songs was a good choice. Many blues artists mix covers with originals, and too often the originals don’t measure up in comparison, if only because the well-known traditional songs are so deep in the bones of the blues audience. Since Draher can write, play and sing well in all these blues modes I’m glad he lent his skills to his own material.

A sideman of choice for the likes of Etta James and Allen Toussaint, and a musician with a very long resume, Draher is a good singer who’s obviously absorbed some of the spirit of the great blues shouters: listen to “Goin’ Home” for some of the best evidence. But he makes his mark with his guitar, which speaks volumes, sometimes with few notes, often with many, but always exactly the right amount, and each infused with human warmth. His touch on the instrument is fluid but funky, deft but full-tilt, with plenty of tonal and stylistic variety, drawing as he does from the whole tradition of blues- and blues-inspired guitar, from jazz to pop, swamp to swing, Albert King to the Allman Brothers.

On most of these songs the only chordal instrument besides Draher’s guitar is the Hammond B3 organ (mostly played by the exquisite Foreman but with turns by other excellent players as well). Drums and sometimes bass are the only other presences on most tracks. Yet the small combos produce a wonderfully full sound because Draher surrounds himself with musicians who play, as he does, with equal measures of heart and skill. One of the best indicators of this is the beautifully syrupy instrumental ballad “Love For You,” which would sound perfectly at home on the dance floor at a Long Island wedding. Listen carefully to Draher’s and Foreman’s solos, though, and you’ll always hear something that goes just beyond the common tropes and cliches. In venturing their furthest from the blues, Draher and his group demonstrate best their mastery of and love for it. At nearly 80 minutes long, this CD leaves you wanting more, because it’s just plain fun, and that’s the ultimate test of a successful (and in this case overdue) debut.

[Cross-posted at Blogcritics]

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Copeland, live at Irving Plaza, NYC, Oct. 5 2005

Copeland (it’s a band, not a person) played an energetic opening set at the eagerly anticipated Bob Mould concert at Irving Plaza last night in New York City. Copeland is a tight quartet with a wall-of-sound two-guitar attack – except for a couple of songs where lead singer and rhythm guitarist Aaron Marsh switches to Rhodes piano – that charges and thrums through your whole body, especially out of Irving Plaza’s superior sound system.

Marsh has the look of a shoegazer but the voice of an angel. His soaring tenor, which frequently sails into an ethereal but assured falsetto, is the most remarkable thing about the band. Sounding at times like a less angst-ridden Thom Yorke, Marsh also can evoke the very young Roger Daltry. And when bassist James Likeness chimes in with his crystalline backing vocals, the harmonies and vocal quality bring to mind, just a tiny bit, Roger McGuinn and the Byrds. Yet the band’s attitude and sensibility are youthful and thoroughly modern.

Their anthemic songs could use a little more variety; their set steps up to a higher level at the end when they play their best two songs, “No One Really Wins” and “Love Is A Fast Song.” Those two show Copeland’s real potential to be a pop-rock powerhouse. Their ability to win over the Bob Mould crowd in spite of playing a very different kind of music was also an excellent sign.

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Mould and his amazing band, incidentally, kicked butt. Watch and listen, punk-rock kiddies: that’s how it’s done. (I hadn’t seen him since 1984, when Husker Du opened for REM at Harvard!)

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Amelia’s Dream, Unravel

After a long hiatus, Amelia’s Dream is back with their third full-length CD. Recording Unravel live in the studio (vocals and keyboards were overdubbed) drew lively, powerful performances from the musicians, and the band’s songwriters, Amelia Gewirtz and Harold Stephan, have a knack for catchy, simple melodies; the best of their songs, like the contemplative “Blue Sky,” the rocking “Covered Up The Sun,” the celestial “Save Me” and the Nirvana-inspired “Only On The Inside,” have real staying power after a couple of listens.

The sound is a mix of raw pop and emo. Gewirtz’s voice resembles Sarah McLachlan’s but her singing is edgier; the “dark side” of this band may be its most appealing aspect, in fact. There’s even a bit of Pink Floyd in the crunchy minor-key attack of “Only On The Inside.” But their lyrical elements are strong too.

The band’s melodic habits can get somewhat repetitious; the CD could have done with a few fewer songs. Their 9-11 tribute, for example, could have stayed in the lyrics-notebook. But overall this album is a mature, emotionally powerful effort from a talented team whose past work has not surprisingly earned many TV and film placements.

Available here at CD Baby.

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Anny, Naked

Anny’s press materials describe her music as “ground breaking [sp] approachable mood music.” I don’t know why everyone thinks they have to be promoted as ground-breaking. 99.9% of the time it’s just hype, and anyway, breaking new ground is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for music to be good.

Anny is not blazing any trails. But her best songs comfortably merge two time-honored grooves: 1990s ectophile’s delight, and bygone happy-pop in the vein of Petula Clark and Abba. Taken in this spirit, they’re very enjoyable. The opening track, “White Lipstick Girl,” epitomizes this recipe: after the verse trickles by with vaguely mystical preciousness (“sugar plum fairies / dance in her eyes”), the chorus charges in with strongly belted, doubled vocals. “Home” follows a mellower version of the same pattern, with rich harmonies elevating the understated chorus to a grand style.

“I Want To Break Free” is a gorgeously arranged ballad with a delicious little pop melody, but it’s dragged down, to a degree, by some awkward, prosy lyrics. The same problem crops up in “Here You Are,” although the organ-drenched groove and Abba-esque harmonies on the chorus are hard to resist. And the artist’s most characteristic pattern returns with “Gonna Get Mine,” where a fluid, octave-jumping and breathily delivered verse leads into a stately declarative chorus.

I like her quietly soulful version of the Hall & Oates chestnut “Every Time You Go Away,” too. But after that the album sags a bit. Even “Purple God,” a song about a vibrator, isn’t as much fun as it should be. The last track, “End of the Road,” is worth a listen for its whooshing soundscape, but it doesn’t have much of a chorus and Anny gives in – as she does in a few other places – too much to a tendency to ape Tori Amos’s vocal mannerisms.

Bottom line: I liked two thirds of this album, which is a lot. Well-structured, original songs with solid, memorable choruses are quite difficult to write, and there are a number of them here. You can feel good about buying Anny’s music, too, because you’ll be supporting someone who works as a Court Appointed Special Advocate for abused children. Talk about your real heroes of society.

Available here at CD Baby.

The Internet record label and store Magnatune has announced a new policy whereby uncompressed, CD-quality music purchased from its site can be legally copied and shared up to three times. While Magnatune, which now represents over 200 artists in a variety of genres, offers its music in compressed MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats, it is unusual among online music-download retailers in that it also provides the sound files in uncompressed formats (such as WAV) for download (or, for an additional charge, a packaged CD complete with artwork).

Even with broadband Internet access, downloading uncompressed music files can be a lengthy procedure because of their large size. Hence the popularity of compressed formats such as MP3 (typically unrestricted) or AAC (Apple iTunes‘s copy-protected format), which enable users to share and download easily and devices like the iPod to hold thousands of songs. But some listeners object to the loss of sound quality caused by compression, and some consumers object on principle to paying for a product that is of lesser quality than what was originally released by the artist and record company. Although some recordings and some types of music withstand compression better than others, and not all ears are equally discriminating, ultimately a compressed recording will never sound quite as good as the original version such as you find on a commercially packaged CD. Magnatune caters to those who want the option of acquiring the music without compromised sound quality.

Downloading a CD’s worth of uncompressed music from Magnatune costs less than what one would typically spend on a packaged CD – $8 is the usual suggested price, and, unlike at iTunes, the new Napster, and other download retailers, Magnatune does not sell sound files burdened with copy protection. However, while Magnatune’s MP3 versions are distributed under a Creative Commons license, which allows noncommercial reproduction and distribution, the uncompressed files are not; until now, buying them gave you just the same rights you’d have to the music you’d buy on a commercial CD, which do not (surprise!) include the right to rip and burn copies for your friends.

Now, however, Magnatune customers can legally distribute up to three copies of uncompressed music. Why? Founder John Buckman explains it this way: “People fall in love with new music by being exposed to it by others. It’s such an obvious point, and everyone knows the truth of it, yet the music industry has always fought it.” Buckman’s betting this form of grassroots peer-to-peer marketing will draw more music fans to the site and prompt more sales. Given the relatively small, boutique nature of the label – artists are hand-picked by Buckman and his small staff, with a browsably small quantity in each genre – I wouldn’t bet against him. One of the functions of a record label has always been editorial filtering, and the major labels’ failure to adapt intelligently to the digital age leaves plenty of room for small, discriminating labels – whether traditional, or entirely Internet-based like Magnatune – to step into the breach.

This week, instead of reviewing indie CDs, I’m rooting around in indie heaven (or indie hell, depending on your perspective): Garageband.com, a true Internet survivor.

Since 1999 the site, which counts George Martin, Jerry Harrison, Brian Eno and Steve Lillywhite as members of its (strangely, all-male) Advisory Board of 39 industry heavy hitters, has provided an intriguing form of peer review for over 150,000 bands and musicians. And now, musicians can get garageband on pc download to help them make musical projects from scratch.

The idea is simple: each indie artist who wants to get a song onto the site has to first listen to and review in writing one song from each of 30 other artists. Reviewers are expected to write something thoughtful and preferably specific about what they liked or didn’t like about the songs, which are presented anonymously in same-genre pairs, and indicate which of the pair they preferred, whether it’s a type of music they typically listen to, whether they’d be likely to buy it, and so on. The general public is welcome to register and participate in the reviewing process for their own edification as well.

It sounds a little cumbersome, but if you approach it in a spirit of adventure and helpfulness and you possess even an average facility with words it’s fairly painless. It’s probably a little like speed-dating, actually: you simply can’t spend a lot of time on any one song, or it’ll take up your whole day. Extra-busy (or language-impaired) bands can, incidentally, bypass the initiation by coughing up some cash to get their song straight into the review pool. But that’s taking the fun out of it, if you ask me.

Once you’ve reviewed a song, the site tells you the name of the band and lets you add the song to your playlist if you like it. Meanwhile, an actual human being at Garageband gives each review a quality rating. Higher ratings entitle you to extra benefits.

I’ve been mucking around in the slush pile for a few days and am well on my way to earning the right to put one of my own songs into the pool. The reviewing process is both encouraging and discouraging. Most of the music is terrible, which is encouraging, since it leads you to think, rightly or wrongly, that your own music is much better than most of what you’re hearing. It’s discouraging, though, to realize how many thousands and thousands of hopefuls are out there competing with you, and how even if only one percent of the artists were really good, that’s far, far more than there’s room for at the top of the heap.

Why is it worth it to artists to participate? If you believe the website’s hype, many have gone on to bigger and better things, some signing to major labels. (cf. American Idol‘s Bo Bice). What makes this hype, even though Garageband is unlikely to be literally lying, is that savvy, industrious indie bands aren’t going to sign up on a single free website. They’ll be all over the Internet, promoting here, competing there, looking for every possible connection and medium of exposure. Rather, Garageband stands out for other reasons: its peer-review pool concept, its longevity, and its fine user interface. (The site itself works quite well. Years of development have not been wasted.)

On the minus side: the tinny, low-fi sound quality makes it tough to evaluate some aspects of the music. You have to pretend you’re listening to a transistor radio that’s under a blanket. Then you’re OK. But get some more hard drive space, Garageband. Everyone’s doing it: Google, Yahoo, you name it. Get some space so you can host higher-quality files.

Now, about that all-male advisory board…

Although still best known in Japan and his native Hawaii, Jake Shimabukuro has become the pre-eminent worldwide ambassador for the ukelele, an instrument with more depth and soul than most of us know. If your image of the ukelele is Hawaiian kitch or Tiny Tim (a serious musician, but one who never overcame his popular image as a novelty act), any of Jake’s CDs will come as an edifying surprise.

His 2004 release, Walking Down Rainhill, showcased an impressive variety of technicial and compositional styles, from the sunny pop of “Rainbow,” which was used as Hawaii Tourism Japan’s theme song, to the gentle jazz-waltz lullaby “6 in the Morning,” to the hyperkinetic bop-rock of “Wes on Four.” Jake’s solo rendition of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was a loving and lovely tribute to George Harrison, one of his idols.

Walking Down Rainhill did require from the listener a degree of tolerance for the generic, “international” instrumental pop style for which artists like Yanni are both loved and despised. Fortunately, Jake’s music shows no signs of becoming full of itself; a little too much the opposite, in fact: on his new CD, Dragon, to be released next month, he seems to be taking it just a bit too easy. The album hangs together well, but there’s less variety and experimentation, resulting in a batch of songs that go down smoothly but – with some exceptions – don’t engage the listener as acutely as Shimabukuro does at his best.

In one sense, it’s a triumph for Jake and his ukelele that they can take us on a relaxing musical journey while making us almost forget that the maestro is playing an instrument with only two octaves and four humble strings. But a little more spice and a little less sweetness would have made for a more exciting dish. The CD opens strongly with the wah-wah-driven, Latin-fusion kicker “Shake It Up!” Jake’s exquisite tone and musicality can’t, however, make “With U Always,” “Me & Shirley T.” or “Circle of Friends” more than blandly enjoyable. The title track features Jake’s passionate soloing and almost unbelievable arpeggio technique, but is overloaded with orchestration.

“Floaters” is an exquisite solo piece that’s much more transcendent, and “3rd Stream” is an impressive, fusiony fast-fingers display with a jaw-dropping uke solo. Together the two tracks comprise the heart of the CD, distilling the best of Shimabukuro’s two sides: his lyrical sense, and his ability to compose a solid band number that shows off both his amazing playing and his compositional skill.

Some of the other tracks are either too heavy on the sap, like “Touch,” or just not very interesting, like “Toastmanland” and “Making a Perfect Yesterday.” Fortunately, listening to the liquid-crystal sound of Jake’s ukelele is a pure pleasure in itself, particularly where he keeps the orchestration less obtrusive, as in the sweet ballad “Looking Back.”

Jake Shimabukuro certainly isn’t looking back: He’s been touring with numerous top artists, including Bela Fleck, and more recently Jimmy Buffett. On the strength of all that exposure, Jake Shimabukuro and his uke should be getting wider recognition in the US, which, although the new CD is somewhat uneven, he deserves.

[Cross-posted at Blogcritics]

This week I focus on the most recent releases from two artists I will go out of my way to see. Not that I really have to go out of my way; both have performed this past year at the intimate Living Room right here in New York City. One’s a Texan and as American as they come, the other a European citizen of the world. One has a dark, grouchy rootsiness, the other an ethereally passionate one. Both have had major label contracts in the past…but that was then. They sound very different, but each exemplifies why music is such a large and essential part of my life.

INDIE ROUND-UP for September 8 2005

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Ray Wylie Hubbard, Delirium Tremolos

Ray Wylie Hubbard gained notoriety during the dying days of the Nixon administration when his parody “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother” became an outlaw anthem for Jerry Jeff Walker. Then he seemed to mostly disappear.

After a period of personal problems and lack of musical success, Hubbard rejuvenated his recording career in the 1990s and really hit his stride with 1999’s Crusades of the Restless Knights, which established him as a major voice on the Americana scene. His deep-blue folk-rock songs and husky, lived-in singing voice (gone scratchier with age) puts one in mind of Johnny Cash’s late recordings and rank him in the top tier of Americana with the likes of Jim Lauderdale, Gillian Welch and Greg Brown. Uncharacteristically, Hubbard’s latest CD is mostly covers, which disappointed me at first, but after several listens I like it very much, if in a slightly different way. In Hubbard’s own songs, even the funnier or lighter ones, there’s an intensity of focus and a not always faint pall of sadness. In some of these covers, though the latter is present as ever, there’s less of the former.

That’s not to say Hubbard doesn’t fully inhabit the songs he covers. Eliza Gilkyson’s “The Beauty Way” gains a richness of spirit from his straightforward, gravel-road delivery. “Rock and Roll Gypsies” has lyrics too awkward to light up its heartland-simple melody, while Hubbard’s own “Dallas After Midnight,” also simple in structure, is a textbook example of spare, evocative ballad writing. Its tale of a conscience-stricken robber is of a piece, in mood, with the plain and effective “Torn In Two,” by producer Gurf Morlix, who plays marvelous guitar (steel and otherwise) and bass on the album. “Drivin’ Wheel,” another cover, is a bit too slow and boring for my taste until the repeated chorus at the end is rescued by groovy backing vocals by Patty Griffin. The CD picks right up again with a rousing rendition of the Woody Guthrie gospel lyric “This Mornin’ I Am Born Again,” set to music by Slaid Cleaves, who, along with Griffin, Gilkyson and Bob Schneider, contributes vocals to the choir.

“Dust of the Chase” is an iconic minor-key Hubbard outlaw poem:

Patience is a virtue that I don’t possess
And I can’t deny that heaven lies beneath a cotton dress
How small a part of time we share till we hear the sound of wings
I am lost in the dust of the chase that my life brings

He turns the Elmore James blues “Roll and I Tumble” into a throbbing tribal wail of despair, but finds some redemption in his own “Cooler-N-Hell”:

A pack of Chesterfields, sunglasses and a suit
A half pint of gin and a gold tooth
Lightnin’ Hopkins and a pentatonic scale
Some things here under heaven are just cooler-n-hell…
Yeah, some of this stuff down here is just cooler-n-hell.

If I were to add my own verse to “Cooler-N-Hell” it would include Ray Wylie. He closes the CD by chanting an eight-minute, slowed-down version of James McMurtry’s novelistic “Choctaw Bingo,” about a bunch of characters heading for one hell of a family reunion. Music may have started as a mnemonic device or a means of communicating danger, but Ray Wylie Hubbard’s songs – even those he chooses to cover – remind us that what it does now – no matter how hard we try to tear ourselves apart – is make us all one big family.

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Katell Keineg, High July

Katell Keineg would be in my verse of “Cooler-N-Hell” too, but an icier cool. Though she’s a warm and giving performer (and decidedly disorganized on stage – it’s part of her charm), her voice, while it has its own peculiar beauty, is not usually sweet or even conventionally pretty. It surrounds or punches you, the combined keen of all the bereft mothers and disappointed girlfriends who have ever lived. And in spite of all the sharp sadness she musters, her most memorable songs are often uplifting, happy, even funny. The joyous “One Hell of a Life,” from the Jet album, is the biggest crowd-pleaser at her shows:

Don’t go writing on my grave
I’ve said it all before the end…
When I’m dead, please don’t philosophize
Or feel regret, just remember me when I said
I had one hell of a life, one hell of a life,
I had one hell of a life.

Recently Katell re-released her two classic 1990’s Elektra albums herself. But as for new work, she had, until this year, released only an EP and a three-song CD single (reviewed by me here and here). High July, her first full-length CD of the new millenium, starts appropriately with the eerily beautiful “What’s The Only Thing Worse Than The End of Time?”:

I was born in millenium tension
It’s all gone now…

I described her as a citizen of the world, but she really inhabits the whole Universe, with songs inspired by cosmology (“Waiting For the Weight of Space,” from the earlier EP), history and art (“Brother of the Brush,” Jet‘s “Ole, Conquistador”) and even politics (the delightful, uncharacteristically straight-ahead rocker “Shaking the Disease”) as well as love and relationships. Keineg’s lyrical thinking is deep and complex, her melodies hummable, frequently memorable and brilliantly constructed of tension and release. A common pattern is to divide a long song into a soft, ballady section and a heavier, two-chord rave-up section, as with “High Marks” and “On Yer Way.” In her hands such devices give the music signficance and weight well beyond that of the commonplace pop ingredients she also uses.

“Beautiful Day” starts as a lovely, soft pop tune with an unleavened positivity that at first seems something of a departure for Keineg, but then the bauble becomes vaguely sinister in an extended, philosophical bridge; doubled vocal tracks and small suggestions of minor chords complete the transformation. “Captain (Steal This Riff)” is a tense, feathery anthem that evokes the spirit of David Bowie’s “Heroes” but ends with a startled cry of “Oh my God.”

“Seven League Boots,” which includes Susan McKeown and Natalie Merchant on vocals during the rip-roaring chorus, is like a miniature, aural Fellini movie, though I can’t figure out what it’s about – Keineg’s strange vocal quality and slightly awkward accent make the lyrics hard to understand on this song among others, and I can’t find the lyrics published anywhere.

The album is her most uneven work to date, and three of the best songs have appeared before. Still it’s a thought-provoking collection with quite a few high points and several must-have songs. For the Katell neophyte, I’d recommend first checking out her debut, O seasons O castles, and then Jet. (Longer excerpts than Amazon.com provides can be heard here at CD Baby (where, incidentally, you can purchase High July for considerably less than the “import” price you’ll pay at Amazon.com).

Katell performs mostly in Ireland, where she makes her home, and once or twice a year in New York City where she’s spent considerable time as well – in fact, the cover photographs are of Coney Island. If you’re ever anywhere near either of those places, look up whether she’s playing. It will be worth going out of your way. And then you can join the community of Katell fans. We recognize each other by the beatific expressions on our faces.

[Cross-posted at Blogcritics]

An accomplished and big-hearted artist, sideman and musicians’ musician, Danny Barnes (formerly of the proto-Americana band Bad Livers) has more credits than you’d want to read. But you don’t need to know that he tours with bluegrass master Tim O’Brien and taught avant-jazz guitar great Bill Frisell how to play old-time music. Barnes’s new solo album of homespun bluegrass and traditional-style country is a thing of beauty, humor, and deep but simple pleasures. As facile with flatpicking, slide and bluegrass guitar as he is on banjo and vocals, he delivers a set of originals and cover tunes that climbs all over the landscape of Americana music like a truck rumbling from state to state, climate to climate, all inside one big country.

From his bluegrass version of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” (featuring fiddle wunderkind Brittany Haas) to the four-part gospel harmonies (all Barnes) on Blind Willie Johnson’s “Let Your Light Shine on Me” and the gorgeous banjo-and-fiddle treatment of the traditional “Cumberland Gap,” Barnes fuses reverence for classic old songs with his own full-blooded yet somehow self-effacing string virtuosity.

Barnes’s original songs aren’t amazing, but his flair for amusing turns of phrase and flawless feel for the old song forms make them interesting and enjoyable, and his tongue-in-cheek hillbilly vocals are a perfect vehicle for the clever, sometimes darkly funny lyrics. His attitude is summed up in “Get It On Down the Line,” a hilarious pastiche of cornball growin’-up-poor country cliches which Barnes himself can’t manage to sing without laughing:

When I got old enough to realize the life we had was tough
I asked my Daddy why he thought that shack would be enough
Three consumptive children and a life that ain’t never fun
Here is what my Daddy told me, Son,
You can work in a coalmine
You can make a little moonshine
Or you can get it on down the line

Danny Barnes’s quintessentially American music is quirky, sincere, modern and rooted all at the same time. I recommend it highly to fans of all kinds of rootsy music.

[Cross-posted at Blogcritics]

This week’s all-female edition of the Indie Round-Up is brought to you by the Sisterhood of the Happy Pants.

INDIE ROUND-UP for August 25 2005

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Cruiserweight, Sweet Weaponry

Like a female-fronted Green Day or a slightly sped-up Letters to Cleo (Telegrams to Cleo?), Cruiserweight weighs in with a strong album of pop-punk. The band’s crisp songwriting isn’t brilliant, but the tunes squawk by with such raunchy energy it matters less than you might think. Sung by Stella Maxwell in vibrato-free punk style, they express in equal measure youth’s bravado and confusion, though there is a little too much sameness to them – it’s the sort of music that’s best sampled in 25-to-30-minute doses, and the CD goes on too long.

Maxwell’s brothers Urny and Yogi along with David Hawkins round out the quartet, driving the songs with modern punk precision. This is a very, very good band that has already made some waves on college radio. A hit song or two could be all that stands between them and national prominence.

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Denise Barbarita, Chaos & Congeniality

Producer, guitarist and singer-songwriter Denise Barbarita’s second CD explodes out of the starting gate with three chilly-sweet songs that restore your faith in the spirit of art-pop originality. Barbarita’s talents as producer and sonic guitar artist are matched by her vocal power and, most important, a fine melodic sense that lifts her best songs to majestic heights.

Starting the CD with the spooky “In Pieces” might have been a little risky but it turns out to be an excellent introduction to all her strengths. Imagine a Tori Amos (circa Little Earthquakes) style melody over a Led Zeppelin acoustic-guitar hum with a gushing U2 production, and you’ll have some idea of what this song is made of. “Happy Happy” is a a short and sweet knockout punch of an anger song (it’s the most requested at her shows), and “Appleseed” has a gorgeous melody, swelling choral backing vocals and sweeping waves of sound from keyboards, guitars and percussion that form a bed of lush aural blossoms for the song’s somewhat abstract narrative.

The acoustic guitar-driven “For What It’s Worth” (not the old Buffalo Springfield classic) highlights Barbarita’s powerful six-string work and rhythmic sophistication, and “Hush Hush” is a chunky riff-rocker that echoes the White Stripes.

The second half of the CD has a couple too many ballads for me, though everything is recorded with consummate taste and skill and everpresent creativity. Barbarita plays interesting and inventive games with her vocal delivery, which can make the lyrics difficult to make out, so including them in the liner notes would have been a plus. “Fractured” and “Only Blue” are jazz-tinged slow numbers, the latter an especially haunting song about the heartache of losing communication, lovely but requiring a couple of listens to appreciate its subtleties. (Listen for David Weintraub’s otherworldly electric guitar fills.)

Barbarita’s rock roots push back aboveground in the two-part hallucinatory jam “The Last Breakdown,” with her sharp vocal stabs pushing in and out of the mix like bursts of distant thunder and lightning. Make sure to stick around for yet more spookiness in the unlisted tenth track, a increasingly dissonant sort of raga-chant that might take you some place you’ve never been.

Extended samples are available at CD Baby here.

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Tina Schlieske, Slow Burn

Mixing blue-eyed soul with southern rock and a dash of country, Tina Schlieske (formerly of Sire Records’ Tina and the B-Sides) presents a nicely produced new CD graced by heavy-hitter contributors like producer Sheldon Gomberg (Beck) and keyboardist Benmont Tench (Tom Petty, etc. etc.) But bland songwriting and tired-sounding singing make this CD a wallflower at the soul revival meeting.

I’d never heard of her, but Schlieske has a substantial track record and strong vocal chops – she was recruited to front Stevie Ray Vaughn’s band Double Trouble in 2001, and in live appearances is often said to evoke the spirit of Janis Joplin (you can hear that influence in many of her songs, most notably “Everyday”). But it sounds as if either her heart wasn’t really in this recording session, or someone was influencing her to hold back. Equally important, while Schlieske has an obvious love and affinity for seventies-style soul and for soul-influenced rock such as the Stones, Bonnie Raitt and The Band were doing three and four decades ago, she doesn’t breathe new life into the classic sounds, instead using her talents only to retread them. The result is a “been there, heard that” feeling, full of evocations and lovingly replicated trappings but little freshness.

Good songs can render such matters unimportant – a good song is a good song no matter its setting – but these are mostly pretty pedestrian. Even so, a singer of Schlieske’s ability ought to have been able to make more of them. But throughout this CD her voice sounds tired. (I can imagine this material sounding more exciting in a live setting.) A few songs stand out: “Son of a Gun,” echoing the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” is catchy and rocks hard. “Baby Blue” has an easy Motown-ish charm, and “Never Knew Love” is a tasteful take on the type of three-four ballad exemplified by Aretha Franklin’s “Do Right Woman Do Right Man” and Janis Joplin’s “Maybe.” But despite the sharp production and a few flashes of inspiration, one can’t get away from the fact that the CD just plain sounds tired.