Speech, Sly & Jah: Fishin' 4 Religion with Arrested Development

The DJ's final song before D'Angelo and ?uestlove hit the stage at First Avenue last June was "People Everyday" from Arrested Development's 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days In the Life Of..., an album that had the misfortune of being groundbreaking two months after The Chronic was groundbreaking. Greg turned around and raised a toast to the first CD he'd ever purchased. It was one of my first CD purchases, too, and it's one of basically two hip-hop albums I can remember loving before I got to college. Jurassic 5 was the other one. Both are throwback albums, with 3 Years... owing its heaviest debt to Stand, the magnificent Sly & the Family Stone album from 1969. This is where "People Everyday" was first recorded as the soul standard now recognizable as a Toyota jingle. The harmonica-driven beats on "Mama's Always on Stage" are also a kind of backyard BBQ approximation of Sly's blues on "I Want to Take You Higher." 

The more important similarity is the democracy of voices that both Sly and AD frontman, Speech, manage to balance. Rhythm sections, horns, bass and vocals share the spotlight and borrow language from one another. Arrested Development introduce a conversational style that blends gospel, blues, hip-hop and reggae. The instantly recognizable scat opening on "People Everyday" greets Caribbean-toms and builds over the course of the album to a call and response between, horns, backup vocalists and "the ghost of childhood." Singing along as a 12-year old in suburban Connecticut, this album was my introduction to the idea that there were a lot of American stories I hadn't heard.

A few of you have probably seen the dude who stands outside First Ave in the winter asking for exiting concert goers to sign his coat and spare a dollar or two. The other night he was outside Tracy's on Franklin asking for signatures and a favorite song on his t-shirt. (And a dollar or two.) And I thought, hey, I know this guy! I've got a dollar! I said hello and signed his shirt. We did not exchange knowledge for shoes, but we did smile about Sam Cooke. ("You have put a maestro on my shirt!") I walked away thinking "to give him money isn't charity." Critics dismiss this as naive, self-satisfied personal politics, and they have a point. Nothing here is as biting as Sly's "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey." Mr. Wendal is a friend with new shoes! We are not exactly fucking the police. I memorized the song from KISS 95-POINT-7's nightly Top 7 at 7. 

For all of the white teenagers who probably did the same thing, politically we were not exactly the intended audience. Speech's lyrics sound a clear call for African unity, and the music itself sounds an even more specific call for black communities to resolve a tension that emerged from the successes of the civil rights movement. The experience of discrimination in America's northern states challenged the notion that a slave could find liberation in the West. Craig Werner explains, "the symbolic West - the place of exile - and the symbolic South - the place of slavery - are the same place. What's different is the self-understanding of the black people living there. Are you an exile or are you a slave?"

This was Jamaican Reggae's specific response to the gospel ascensions of Curtis Mayfield's and Marvin Gaye's American Soul. Per Werner, "the centrality of Africa in reggae was the primary difference between the soul music of the sixties and seventies and the reggae of the same period. As long as black Americans and black Jamaicans focused on the hardships of daily life, the visions ran close together." But politically and spiritually their paths to redemption pointed in different directions. American Soul sang the slave's journey north to freedom. Jamaican Reggae sang the exile's journey home.   

These are the spiritual politics of AD's "People Everyday", a reggae-rap rewrite of one of the most famous and most idealistic songs in American Soul. Speech explicitly brings the divergent voices into conversation. Answering Sly's familiar chorus he lays out the choice facing everyday people everyday:

that's the story y'all, of a black man

acting like a nigga and get stomped by an African

This choice, not the choice to spare $2, is the one also at the heart of "Mr. Wendal." Mr. Wendal is only a bum by the terms of a quick-to-diss society. Even in the North he is a no-one, though he remains a "human by flesh." He enjoys a spiritual "freedom that you and I think is dumb" only by enduring the physical conditions of exile. For Speech, to know Mr. Wendal is to know his own history. This is why giving money isn't charity. They belong to a united African diaspora.

On "Tennessee" Speech considers the alternative. He asks the Lord to direct him home but on his ensuing journey south he only breaks "outta the country and into more country." He finds roots only in the trees his forefathers hung from, growing in shallow soil next to watermelons viney with memory. Speech tells the Lord: "I am still thirsty." Dionne Farris closes the song with a haunting gospel moan that adopts the exile's freedom cry, "won't you please take me home?" She cannot mean North and she cannot mean South. "Take me to another place. Take me to another land." Middle schoolers in West Hartford only sang along. 

A conversation between soul and reggae in the early-90s may have been naive. In hindsight it seems especially egregious for AD to have been so eagerly dismissive of the harder gangsta-blues that resonated with many black Americans. What is naive, however, was also empowering, especially to white suburban adolescents and other people who haven't been explicitly disempowered. Hearing how simple things - like buying shoes or staying calm or simply listening - can make an important difference in another person's life is a powerful message at twelve, when nothing you do seems to really matter. Plus Speech was a "fashion misfit" -- just like me! His politics begin as the politics of careful listening. His music is a celebration of human complexity. 3 Years... is the after-church sound of backyard introductions, children and conversation. Anyone buying Mr. Wendal a pair of shoes starts by asking for his size. 

  

Don't Stop The Carnival: Happy Birthday, Harry Belafonte!

Today is Harry Belafonte's 86th birthday. I strongly encourage you to begin any celebrating you undertake this weekend by toasting the living legend and watching his 1997 performance of "Matilda."

***

Belafonte's 1956 album, Calypso, was the first US LP to sell more than 1 million copies in a year. His recording of the "The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)" made the Jamaican folk song so famous that in 1993 Al Bundy could sing an extended parody on Married With Children. His (Belafonte's, not Bundy's) beautiful "Jamaica Farewell" forces even the most hearty Minnesotan to wonder why he shouldn't move someplace where "the rum is fine any time of year." That wedding where you tripped trying to lead a conga line and everyone dominoed behind you and the bride's parents quietly asked you to leave? You were probably dancing to Harry Belafonte.

He was friends with Martin Luther King. And John F. Kennedy. And Bobby Kennedy. In 1961 Belafonte helped to convince JFK that he should provide airlifts for a group of Kenyan students and issue them visas to study in the United States. "[O]n one of those planes, we had Barack Obama's father." Two weeks ago he was given the NAACP's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, and he delivered this amazing speech.

***

Harry Belafonte's 1959 recording, Live at Carnegie Hall, was the first commercially successful live album, which means that the double vinyl LP is easy to find and cheap. (I bought my copy for fifty-cents.) The CD format cut four songs and all of Belafonte's stage banter so that the recording would not spill onto a second disc. Both formats include his performance of "The Marching Saints", but only the LP includes his 90-second introduction to the song.

It is a choreographed introduction. Belafonte wonders to his audience, what would "When The Saints Go Marching In" sound like if the gospel hymn popularized by Louis Armstrong had instead grown out of the English madrigal tradition? Then, at Carnegie Hall in 1959, Belafonte adopts a wonderfully haughty, over-enunciated British accent and sings the first verse as if he were a prim Episcopalian warming up for choir rehearsal. "Tra-la-la-la-la-la-la" follows each phrase and he closes to laughter and applause -- "Good show, good show!" His voice then subtly hardens as he addresses an audience not actually so different from the one he has just satirized.

But it wasn't meant to be a madrigal; it was meant to be exactly what it was. An historical opportunity for a group of Negro musicians down in New Orleans to play and to celebrate on some festive occasion. And at the time that this song came about, what could have been more festive during that period than a funeral?

***

Fifty-four years later, Harry Belafonte deserves a rum and Coca-Cola and a festive Friday for his 86th birthday. Don't stop the carnival!

(BONUS: Here's Belafonte performing a 14-minute "Matilda" and showcasing his Swedish language talents in 1966!)

The Age of Nothing, The Age of Dawn: Free Energy's Love Sign

Two years ago on Valentine's Day my wife found me cavorting with a new pair of speakers. "Those are much bigger than you described," she complained. (Accurately.) "Is this Free Energy?"

"Um. Yes." I calmly replied.

***

That was 2011, which meant that Free Energy's 2010 debut, Stuck on Nothing, was in steady rotation around our apartment. We'd been excited about them since we'd heard the band's earlier incarnation, Hockey Night, doing "For Guys Eyes Only." We had "Dream City" on our 2009 summer mix. We loved the shimmering leaps from one carefree guitar hook to the next. We loved that it was so easy to sing along. Two years ago Stuck on Nothing was road trip music, grilling music and even dinner music. It was the year we went to Mexico.

("Bang Pop")

***

Hearing Free Energy for the first time was like hearing Boston for the first time: crammed in the back of my friend's van, fake-snorting pixie stix and returning from a Boy Scout camping trip with his dad behind the wheel. It was the first time I'd heard guitars that sounded like lasers! And those diamond-tipped vocals! It sounded like Aerosmith, only waxed and polished. We got home and I immediately raced out to buy Don't Look Back and Third Stage. The latter was released in 1986. It was the first album to be certified gold in both CD and LP formats. 

"On Third Stage," I bragged to fascinated friends, "Tom Scholz didn't use any synthesizers! He spent six years using real guitars to make synthesizer sounds!"

"Why didn't he just use synths? They chorused.

"HOLLYANN!" I calmly replied.

It was around this phase of my life that I sat down for lunch one day and ate ten spoonfuls of yogurt without realizing that it was actually raw pancake batter.

("Feelin' Satisfied")

***

Free Energy's second album, Love Sign, is out this year in time for Valentine's Day. My wife and I share our speakers now with a cat. The founding equities of this transaction had been well balanced: a great deal on great speakers = one (1) cat one (1) year later. Only then we ended up with a cat whose favorite album is On The Corner by Miles Davis. So while the speakers have been great, the cat is a young Jordan.

One area in which our speakers consistently outperform the young Jordan is sound quality. Another is volume. One album that is well served by each of these performances is Love Sign, by Free Energy. Sometimes we crank "Backscratcher" and watch the young Jordan dunk from the free throw line.

***

Back in college the cross-country team would wake up at nine on Sunday mornings to shuffle through whatever stupor Saturday had sent. After we ran we drank some fucking coffee and cooked some fucking pancakes. We had eggs, too, and probably bacon and whatever it was that Hooley was eating back in those days and Biz had these hemp seeds that he ground with the coffee because that's what Jack down at Stadium said to do...

There were two songs; two live recordings: Bruce Springsteen's "Cadillac Ranch", promising sure salvation just over yonder state line...

Hey there little girlie in those blue jeans so tight

Drivin' alone through that 

Wisconsin night!

...and Bob Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm", performed as if not only was there shelter, it had a liquor cabinet!

Suddenly I turned around and she was standin' there!

In that kitchen the role of pancake flipper was nearly as respected as the role of air guitarist.

***

Last weekend I put Love Sign on the Valentine's Day speakers. I wanted to hear it in the kitchen from the living room. It had started to snow and it was a good morning for some fucking pancakes. "Electric Fever" came on and I thought, oh cool, this has that faster-Creedence groove from 'Cool The Engines'! "Girls Want Rock" came on and I thought, oh cool, this sounds like 'Bang Pop'! The young Jordan dunked from the free throw line.

("Electric Fever")

***

Pitchfork had a different reaction:

[F]or all of the "That 70s Band" affectations that accompanied their occasionally charming and novel 2010 debut Stuck On Nothing, most of Love Sign is actually slick, subcompact power-pop that traces its lineage from the Cars (without the jittery, new wave idiosyncrasies) to Blue Album Weezer (without the emotional reckoning) to Jimmy Eat World (without the generous heart), and unfortunately, back to latter day Weezer in how it aggressively cops to its own formulism as a preemptive strike against critique.

The pancakes that morning were a modified recipe. I'd halved it, and also we were out of baking powder. "Hey Tonight" came on and I substituted butter. 

If so much of Free Energy's praise thus far has taken to the theoretical-- you could totally hear it coming out of an airbrushed van! These could all be hits in 1975!-- it's because none of it feels inspired by anything resembling a real human interaction.

We were out of milk, too. "Hold You Close" came on and I substituted coffee.

Sloan had the encyclopedic knowledge and chops to serve as satisfying meta exercise and compete with the power-pop originals, the Darkness juxtaposed the groupie-slaying connotations of their music with incredibly nerdy puns about STDs, masturbation, and RPGs, Junior Senior traded in subversive and very non-subversive sexual politics, Andrew WK didn't make a record so much as a code of ethics.

My friend's friend does this thing where she'll take a pad of butter and hide it in every few pancakes. She just sets it on top as the pancake surface bubbles. The pancake soaks it up. She calls it the "butter surprise."

And do they ever love those groovy girls who just want to dance all night. That last part is important: seemingly every other song makes some sort of reference to dancing or shaking it all night, but only one is actually called "Dance All Night".

This is true. On Love Sign, Free Energy make no fewer than 15 solicitations for listeners to dance all night. (I'm guessing.) Love Sign thus finds Free Energy offering clear signage for love. Teachers praise this technique as "giving explicit instructions." A corollary principle is called "setting expectations." Good teachers use these strategies to invert a student's prejudices: wait a minute, why aren't you dancing?"

(Backscratcher Live)

***

Pitchfork's Love Sign reviewer also cites his frustration that "a lyric about 'making out with your lip stick gloss' is as close as you get to second base." The full lyric is actually, "Well I feel so boss/making out with your lip stick gloss." Free Energy live in a post-Samberg world. "Boss" belongs to the memes, and the narrow emotional reckoning its rhyme offsets is both deliberate and familiar. Those who worry over the album's lacking in "anything resembling a real human interaction" only beg the question: how recently did this person last experience a real human interaction? 

***

Without any baking powder last weekend the pancakes turned out a little bit soggy. But they also tasted like buttery coffee, and after I doused them in syrup they weren't actually that much soggier than normal. I tend to be generous with my syrup. 

***

Love Sign is eponymous of the Prince song. The eighth track, "Street Survivor", is eponymous of the Skynyrd album. It is the fact of Love Sign's deliberateness that makes it human -- the fact of its own deliberate appeal to human listeners for real human interaction. It delivers exactly as much as we can share and remember. It is an album that invites air guitars and improvised recipes. Play it on Valentine's Day speakers and dance all night. 

("Free Energy" Live)

Neil Young - On The Beach

Start with this: I am a complete sucker for Neil Young’s guitar work. Depending on what iteration of him you’re listening to, his guitar style migrates from folk- and country-tinged songs to stretched-out electric guitar workouts to distortion-laden noise-making. I eat up pretty much all of it, but I’m especially partial to his electric stuff, in particular the early-to-mid 70s Crazy Horse guitar jams. The best of them morph a melody, building a sense of momentum while pounding that melody into the ground in an absolutely relentless fashion. There’s a groove to the guitar work, and it’s often melodic. But it’s also rough; guitars bleat and wail, with piercing high notes held to glorious effect. For me, the combination can be euphoric, and Neil Young is one a few musicians that can hit that sweet spot.

In that sense, On the Beach is a somewhat strange album for me to choose.* Crazy Horse is nowhere to be seen, and there are no long electric guitar jams. The album followed the death of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten, who died of a heroin overdose the night Young kicked him out of the band (for the second time) because he couldn’t stay sober enough to perform. Young felt guilt over his death, and after recording Tonight’s the Night – a drunken, sloppy album that his record company initially rejected – he returned with On the Beach.

What it does do better than any other Neil Young album, for me, is blend all of the various stylistic touch-points that he pulls into his music. Over Neil’s catalog, he’ll grab a sound – country or dissonant rock or folk or blues or electronic music or Americana –and construct an album that bores into that sound. On the Beach is ostensibly a blues album, but more than any other release of his, it takes all of those genres and blends them, like how an egg white treats flavors in a cocktail, creating complexity by mixing the flavors while subduing the sharpness. Production is sparse, there’s more space in the music, the guitarwork is interesting but without most of the sharpness. The mellow delivery lets the music bloom.**

There are nice elements on the front half of the record. "Walk On" and "See the Sky About to Rain" could fit on a number of earlier Neil Young albums, and I really dig the subtle guitar work that closes out "Vampire Blues." But it’s the back half that makes the album for me. The guitar work in “On the Beach” sounds emotive in the best sort of bluesy way, and the quiet acoustic guitar work on the last two tracks is some of my favorite work he’s done. “Ambulance Blues” has been called Young’s “Desolation Row” and the meandering delivery and stellar guitar make the comparison understandable.  But Neil doesn’t have the lyrical chops of Dylan, and while his singing is emotive in a similar fashion to Dylan, his sneer is of different type.*** 

* Titus and Neil are not the tightest of pairings, but it works. Neil Young is a hippy, but he’s got enough ornery punk fuck-it-all attitude to fit the bill. Titus Andronicus stretch the shit out of their punk anthems. Whiskey goes well with both. And there’s this.

** Correlation is not causation, but this mellowness may be a byproduct of the creative process used while recording the album, which involved consumption of “a homemade concoction dubbed ‘Honey Slides’, a goop of sauteed marijuana and honey that ‘felt like heroin’.”

*** I haven’t mentioned the album’s lyrics? Telling. Typical Neil Young lyrics: a smattering of lines that cause a smile, either for good reasons and bad; enough imagery to work even when the snippets never get stitched together. There’s nothing quotable enough to fit in this song, but you do get this bit of wisdom: “Though my problems are meaningless / That don’t make them go away.”

-a.s.

Titus Andronicus - The Monitor

In the spring of 2010, I was living in my parent’s basement, scrounging around in my home town, substitute teaching to occupy my time, and clinging to remains of college life that had ended only months earlier.  Sometime early that spring, my brother sent me a leak of Titus Andronicus’s The Monitor.  As a recent graduate struggling to make my way through the graduate wasteland of 2009, the existential crisis at the forefront of the album immediately resonated with me.   With the financial collapse happening earlier that fall, Titus Andronicus captured the emotions of millions of twenty something’s entering the world of adulthood with no place to go.

These guys went for it all.   In rock and roll music in recent years, I can only think of a handful of records with so much ambition that worked this well,  (I’m thinking Green Day’s American Idiot, The Hold Steady’s Separation Sunday, Wilco’sYankee Hotel Foxtrot).  The Monitor rocks more aggressive, authentic, articulate, and righteous than any record released in my lifetime.  This is what rock and roll and punk music is all about: 

I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject,  I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. I am in earnest. I will not equivocate,  I will not excuse,  I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard. - William Llyod Garrison

Titus Andronicus have become one of my favorite bands.  Songwriter and lead singer Patrick Stickles decided to chase rock and roll instead of pursuing graduate school and becoming a teacher.  He was still living at his parent’s house after moving out of his girlfriend’s place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn before embarking to tour for the new record, Local Business.

Maybe this is simply a pretentious emo record for those in their twenties and thirties that came out losers on the other end and want to piss and moan about the rules that led them there.  Maybe that’s what great rock and roll has always stood for in some sense.

Some interesting facts:

-The first single, “Four Score and Seven” was released on Lincoln’s birthday.

-The album came out on the anniversary of the Battle of Hampton Roads. 

-The liner notes include a New Jersey Honor Roll of musicians and a Civil War recommended reading list. 

-w.u.

2012 in Review: Tom Church

12 Favorite Albums From 2012

The Taxpayers - God, Forgive These Bastards

This grabbed my ear at Hymie's and never let go. The songwriting is powerful and immediate. The narrator blurs distinctions between himself and his subject and his audience. The cacophonous horns kick you into the street and the closest you get to B-side redemption is I love you like an alcoholic...I love you like a pack of dogs. Dave makes many of these points in his excellent review. For me the surprise was recognizing a depth of empathy as complex as Van Morrison's "Madame George" breathing inside songs as raucous as Titus Andronicus and as melodic as The Mountain Goats. It is overwhelming and it is brilliant.

(I Love You Like An Alcoholic)

Chastity Brown - Back-Road Highways

A reverent celebration of life's elusive beauty. On the first track, "House Been Burnin'", Brown introduces us to a broken-voiced singer: Oh just listen to him now/As he's breakin all his chains! We celebrate with him, but beauty lies in the work still ahead: Don't be scared, love/Just do what you got 'cause/You gotta do what you gotta do. When Brown describes her own impossible errand, on "Solely", beauty lies in not rushing the work: Had a day to get there/So I took my sweet time. She stretches across a full album the kind of hopeful solemnity that Roberta Flack conjures in "Go Up Moses," and her arrangements are similarly patient. On "Leroy" or "Could've Been a Sunday" or "If You Let Me" there are moments when it sounds like the guitar riffs from Flack's song have been drawn over an Indigo Girls arrangement of Cat Power's "Good Woman." Punctuating this mood is "After You," a celebration that underscores every quieter celebration on Back-Road Highways. 

(After You)

Father John Misty - Fear Fun

J. Tillman's transformation from this to this produced the catchiest album I heard all year. We could do ayahuasca/Baby if I wasn't holding all these drinks! 

(I'm Writing a Novel)

Cold Specks - I Predict a Graceful Expulsion

Haunting and almost redemptive, I Predict a Graceful Expulsion made it to number 1 on emusic's 2012 list. I hope that means doom soul is here to stay. This is a fully-realized debut, and Cold Specks has as much promise as the Mavis Staples + The National comparisons suggest. I am, I am/a goddamned believer. 

(Blank Maps)

Alabama Shakes - Boys & Girls

Tracks like "Going to the Party" and "On Your Way" give Boys & Girls dimension even beyond Alabama Shakes' rollicking, gut-bucket soul.

(Going to the Party)

Alt-J - An Awesome Wave

This album sounds like walking around October in the rain the same way that Deerhunter's Halcyon Digest sounds like walking around October when it's crisp and sunny. Intricate, pulsing, and gently textured with gloom.

(Something Good)

Lord Huron - Lonesome Dreams

Lonesome Dreams is full of lush guitars and big, un-ironic hearts. Listeners will recognize the former from The War on Drugs and the latter from Cloud Cult, with less tragedy. "Brother (Last Ride)" and "Time to Run" are the best kind of sing-along anthems. I wanted everybody else in the world to know it!

(Time to Run)

Shovels & Rope - O Be Joyful 

My favorite roots-country album of 2012. Any band you could imagine live on the West Bank is a strong candidate in any category, but this one especially. Shovels & Rope played the 400 Bar when they came through in November. Their album sounds like they might strike-up a conversation with you at any time. Whiskeyandawhiskeyandawhiskeyandawhiskey!

(O Be Joyful!)

The Mountain Goats - Transcendental Youth

This album opens with the directive: Do every stupid thing/that makes you feel alive! So not only is it one of John Darnielle's most accessible, pop-driven efforts, it also ranks among his most positive recordings. That is not to say that the album is devoid of sadness or melancholy. Both are present, but so are triumphant passages echoing those on All Hail West Texas, The Sunset Tree, We Shall All Be Healed and Heretic Pride. These earlier triumphs often came in service of adolescent rage or methamphetamine or dreams lost but defended, but on this album Darnielle seems willing to let them emerge more simply: Transcendental Youth, unsurprisingly, celebrates youthful transcendence. Play with matches/if you think you need to play with matches. 

(Amy a/k/a Spent Gladiator 1)

Leela James - Loving You More: In the Spirit of Etta James...

There were a lot of things that could have been terrible about this kind of tribute. I was expecting it to be too safe or too sacharine - closer to Beyonce's covers from Cadillac Records; nothing I would ever choose to listen to over Etta James herself. But Leela James transforms these songs without bruising them. "I'd Rather Go Blind" and "At Last" sound impressively fresh as duets, and she mixes-in two originals alongside Johnny Guitar Watson's "I Wanna Ta-Ta You Baby" without losing Etta's blues. "Something's Got a Hold on Me" was the song that hooked me.

(Something's Got a Hold on Me)

Matthew E. White - Big Inner

This one took some time to grow on me, but it is much more subtle and textured than it might seem after a first listen. White's whispery vocals are down in the mix, which leaves the impression that he is following his mellow-New Orleans style band more than leading. As long as we are moving at a steady pace, baby, we can take our time. 

(Steady Pace)

Schoolboy Q - Habits & Contradictions 

On Habits & Contradictions, Schoolboy Q voices characters you know you almost know. One of my first-graders last spring was especially mercurial, hilarious and defiant. I imagined "There He Go" playing continuously in his head. Metapho'/how I come up with it?/I don't fuckin' know!

(There He Go)

-tc