The record of the year in my opinion. This is what living in 2012 feels like. The trio of “Shackled and Drawn”, Death to My Hometown,” and “Jack of All Trades” perfectly capture the anger and despair many of feel living in these times. The gospel filled back half reminds us why we keep carrying on. While It can be great to write songs about break-ups and parties, it’s something else to write for the masses and take on a critical moment in history. Recently, Green Day’s American Idiot and Springsteen’s The Rising successfully captured a heightened moment of the present and put it to music. Springsteen’s added another gem to this short list.
Best rock band of the 2010’s in my book. A fantastic follow up to 2010’s rock epic The Monitor. Patrick Shales is well on his way to becoming a punk legend. The scaled back garage sound on this record really makes these songs kick live.
I’ve been a JTE fan for a while now and I think this is his best. The album is a delight from start to finish. The whole thing was recorded live in the Appalachian mountains over the course of a weekend. This is the kind of record that makes a long drive a little shorter and a cold winter night a bit warmer.
A friend of mine from Charleston turned me on to this great duo last winter. When I hard O’ Be Joyful this summer I was hooked. For all you Loretta Lynn, Wanda Jackson, and Nancy Sinatra voice lovers out there.
I picked this one up at B-Side records in September after spending some time browsing the shelves and not knowing what to buy. Neneh Cherry and the Thing’s cover of Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” was playing in the system in the store. I found myself listening to this continuously after I got it. More free jazz than pop, this record will creep into your playlist and remain for a long time. It turns out there is still a reason to go to your local record store.
The perfect summer record. These irresistible pop songs make me want to live in California. I probably played this record every day as the days were winding down last June at the end of the school year.
A great record that did not get nearly enough attention. 73 years old and writing some the best rock songs around. Did I mention that rock 'n' roll is alive and well?
Honorable Mention:
Kendrick Lamar – Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City
Old Crow Medicine Show – Carry Me Back
Bobby Womack – The Bravest Man in the Universe
Night Moves – Colored Emotions
The Very Best – mtmtmk
Sharon Van Etten – Tramp
Dirty Projectors – Swing Lo Magellan
Best Collections:
Twin Cities Funk and Soul: Lost R&B Grooves from Minneapolis/St. Paul 1964-1979
What a treat this is. I still struggle to accept that it’s Wee Willie Walker singing and not Sam Cooke on a handful of these tracks.
Billy Bragg and Wilco – The Complete Sessions
Best Concerts:
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (Wrigley Field, Xcel Energy Center)
The reinvention of the band in Clarence’s absence is extraordinary. Jake Clemons crushes it. The tributes are perfect. I’m lucky to have been a part of it this fall.
Rock the Garden w/ Howler, Tune-Yards, Doomtree, Trampled by Turtles, The Hold Steady (Walker Art Museum)
My first official day of summer. The festivities began early and ended late. A nice welcome for me living in the Twin Cities just down from my place. See you at next year’s event.
Nick Lowe (First Avenue)
Eef Barzelay and Heligoats (Indie Coffee)
Concerts I Wish That I Had Not Missed:
Billy Bragg at the Barrymore Theater (also Billy Bragg with the Solidarity Singers the day of the show on the Capital lawn).
Three Fridays from now is the apocalypse, so I'm trying to get ahead.
Thankfully, so are Prince Rama. The sister-duo from what - for now - is Brooklyn, have taken it upon themselves to comb the post-apocalyptic soundscape to produce Top 10 Hits of the End of the World. They have conjured recordings from ten post-apocalyptic bands, each of whom adds their biggest post-apocalypse hit to this compilation. Hits offers one cathartic dance-dirge after another, and the artists on this record bear the same relationship to Passion Pit that TV on the Radio does to The Village People. I mean all of this in the most positive way I can about the end of the world; if I survived the apocalypse I would be excited that there was music like this around.
Even so, these songs mostly validate those of us planning for the worst. Cathartic though these dances be, the ended world of Hits does not seem like it offers much opportunity for dance. An Orwellian Black Elk (I'm guessing) greets the listener on the first track. A song determinedly promising, in title and in tenor, "Those Who Live For Love Will Live Forever" ends in terrifying, howling crescendo. A band called Guns of Dubai had a post-apocalypse hit with "Blades of Austerity." Everywhere, one cannot help but imagine a substantial amount of marching. (Except maybe during "So Destroyed" by Rage Peace.)
If I survive to dance my way through Prince Rama's post-apocalyptic desolation it will be because of bands like Cold Specks. I heard this band for the first time last Wednesday. They sound like Mavis Staples listened to some Macy Gray, then asked The National to play behind her with a couple of guys from The Walkmen. The shorter - better - description is their own: "doom soul." My theory is that if exposure therapy works for overcoming fear, the same might be true for overcoming imminent, apocalyptic, doom to one's soul. Needless to say, I Predict a Graceful Expulsionhas become ritual listening around here.
Singer Al Spx drives Cold Specks very close to the droning, hollow dissonance heard in the final days of humanity. Only humanity manages to prevail. Spx leaves you repeating, I am, I am, I am/a goddamn believer. And she reminds us that even doomed, souls love The Fresh Prince.
Today is Thanksgiving. (For some.) It's my first ever in the Twin Cities metro. Here's what I'll be spinning. 8:30am - Keep Your Hands on the Plow - Charlie Parr - Because today we're staying local, and we're celebrating the harvest.
4:00pm - Amazing Grace - Aretha Franklin -I intend to force this on my family over cocktails. I will explain about how it is important for my niece to pay close attention.
"What A Friend We Have In Jesus"
10:00pm - The Last Waltz - The Band - This movie gave Craig Finn inspiration to form The Hold Steady. Thankfulness to The Band and all the Fellahs!
"Such A Night"
11:45pm - Sunshine Daydream - The Grateful Dead, August 1972 (Veneta, OR) - Thanksgiving is a harvest celebration, but to get here you gotta make it through the summer heat. Goddamn.
I stood watching the Bruce and E Street these past few nights not only thinking about how fantastic the band still is but how incredibly lucky we are as fans to all share in these shows. With Springsteen at 63 and Jake Clemons triumphantly honoring his uncle wearing literally Clarence’s shoes, these nights have become a celebration of one of the greatest bands in history. With hundreds of songs to draw from, the band makes it feel as if you are seeing a special show every single night out.
(For me, these were first time they played "Savin’ Up" and a request "If I Should Fall Behind" from night one and The River’s "Stolen Car", a veteran’s day tribute first time E Street performance of "Devils and Dust", and an encore "Jungleland" from night two).
And the reinvention of the band in Clarence’s absence is extraordinary. E Street has become a hell of a lot blacker, soulful, and funkier. While the crowd still remains as white as ever, the band honors the finest R & B greats of the last 50 years. Anyone who has the red, white, and blue Happy Days Fonzi image of Springsteen in their mind these days is greatly misinformed. I always wished more people from a younger generation would realize this. Here’s a video that exemplifies everything I’m talking about:
"Shackled & Drawn" (Live in Louisville 11/3/12)
It seems like every time somebody writes about the E Street band they tend to overdose on superlatives. Lester Bangs did it in his review of Born to Run in 1975 and its happening again with just about every review of this tour. You cannot accurately capture what is happening during the course of these evenings without doing so.
I remain skeptical if there will ever be somebody again on such a grand scale that can tap into the struggle of life, connect with the audience, and celebrate what it means just to be alive. There were points each of the two nights during the shows that made my eyes tear up. It would not surprise me if this was the norm rather than the exception.
Springsteen is certainly full of arrogance (part of the job requirement) and the tickets cost too much, but I would argue this is a small price to pay for the restoration of one’s faith in humanity. Here’s a toast to the most dynamic band in rock and roll. I’m thankful to have been a part of it.
To me the problem with genre is less that it's a shortcut and more that it can keep us from listening. None of the classifications above are wrong, exactly. But three years ago Chastity Brown gave us a fantastic response to these attempts. You say you want to know me/that you'd like to understand/where exactly I came from/the type of person that I am. If you did, you only had to listen to the rest of "Bluegrassy Tune", her eight-minute autobiography from 2009's Sankofa. Or you could listen to its shorter incarnation as "Bound to Happen" on 2010's High Noon Teeth. And if you were really pressed for time you could skim her interview with Guante. There is more to this human experience than just one thing.
I first heard Chastity Brown after I had just finished reading If Beale Street Could Talk. She was playing with her band at the Clown Lounge in mid-July and I had been thinking about the part in Beale Street where Sharon goes on an impossible errand to some hip nightclub in Cuba. The band on stage is singing "My Lord and I."
That song is Birmingham, her father and her mother, the kitchens, and the mines. She may never, in fact, ever have particularly liked that particular song, but she knows about it, it is part of her. She slowly realizes that this is the song, which, to different words if words indeed there are, the young people on the bandstand are belting, or bolting out. And they know nothing at all about the song they are singing: which causes Sharon to wonder if they know anything about themselves at all.
Sharon should have come to the Clown Lounge. Chastity Brown sounds like she knows about the songs she is singing - play almost any track on Back-Road Highways next to "Go Up Moses" - but she also sounds like she knows about herself. She and her band can stretch "Leroy" or "Sunday Morning" or "Slowly" until the guitar bleeds like tears. Then they'll hit you with "After You", which is one of the most goddamned exuberant songs I have ever heard.
That night she closed with "Summertime" from Porgy & Bess. I had never particularly liked that particular song. I had never felt like I knew about that particular song. And that particular song had certainly never felt like it was a part of me. But then The Chastity Brown Band burned through their smoldering cover and Chastity speculated, I wonder what Gershwin would say if he heard this. He'd probably be like, what?
Maybe. But that response sounds like someone hung-up on genre, and that seems unlikely from the "Rhapsody in Blue" guy. It seems more likely that Gershwin would have heard "Bluegrassy Tune" or "Bound to Happen" and understood biography supplanting genre. Sometimes listening to people who know themselves helps us to know ourselves a little better. Gershwin would have appreciated the effort.
One of my favorite music quotes comes from Matthew Houck answering a question about the songs on his Willie Nelson tribute album. They were my earliest musical memories, though some of them I heard later on.
Chastity Brown made "Summertime" sound that way for me.
Rolling Stone has this thing at #4. Say what you will about Rolling Stone, or about Bob Dylan, this is the kind of album you know even if you don't actually know.
That's been my experience, anyway. Until April I hadn't listened to these songs as an album, front-to-back. I'd only met them on Greatest Hits collections, in documentaries, and in sundry disparate circumstance. It was like I'd been letting other people get my kicks for me. Listening now makes me wonder, if I had grabbed this album instead ofGreatest Hits Vol. I when I was at Record Express before a cello lesson some afternoon, would I have gone to law school?
Bob Dylan played Hartford with Paul Simon on July 24th, 1999. Matt, Jay and I had GA tickets on the lawn at the new half-covered amphitheater. My girlfriend also attended. She got her ticket through her Dad's Audi dealership on the morning of the show. It came with a parking spot and a free buffet. She preferred Paul Simon's set. So did the Hartford Courant's reviewer. Neither had appreciated the drunk people shouting, how does it feeeeeeeeel?
Of course I preferred Dylan's set. (I had just read this now-archived New Yorker article and I had been excited to hear him "make a mess of the songs.") My girlfriend and I had this only-half-imaginary conversation after the show:
Tom's Girlfriend: I did not like the Bob Dylan.
Tom: Really? I thought some of those guitar parts were cool.
Tom's Girlfriend: That wasn't him. That was his guitar player.
Tom: Hmmm. Something is happening here but you don't know what it is.
Tom's Girlfriend: And the Bob Dylan's voice isn't very pretty.
Tom: You should be made to wear earphones.
This album makes me feel like, whenever you can muster the energy to say "fuck you", you should always and definitely say "fuck you." Or, as Dylan explains on the back of the album, "if you do not know where the Insanity Factory is located, you should hereby take two steps to the right, paint your teeth & go to sleep." (Here he is making similar sense with John Lennon in the back of a cab in 1966.)
More than anything else, this album makes me think about what is possible and what is chosen. We are, today, concerned about next generations and whether they will appreciate the right influences; whether there are iconic albums or books to which they just will not relate. Dylan's musical innovations on Highway 61 today needcontextualization. His lyrical sneer does not. This is the only Dylan album my high school music fans even know. I asked them, then what's mine?
