I slip from a vacant view

Rather than append a few tracks to my earlier post about Bowie's '90s years fighting his way back from the wilderness of critical disdain, I'm starting a new post.

So: Bowie's '80s were a bit dismal, true. After the triumphant Scary Monsters in 1980, which summed up several ideas of his Berlin trilogy, Bowie followed with Let's Dance in 1983 (despite its title, it's not all commercial: the horn chart on that album's "Ricochet" is quite jazzy) and the rather underachieving Tonight in 1984 (the album contains a couple of fine tracks but mostly flounders through ill-advised covers - mostly by Iggy Pop), Bowie hit his nadir with Never Let Me Down in 1987. He seems to have known he was struggling; his next album of new material didn't arrive until six years later.

And despite some stylistic uncertainty, Black Tie White Noise finds Bowie revitalizing the experimental aspect of his music, this time along with his interest in dance music, R&B, and jazz. This makes for a rather densely recorded album, in which funk bass and Nile Rodgers' trademark guitar style sit alongside Bowie's sax playing and (something I suspect Bowie had been wanting to do for a long time) namesake Lester Bowie's free-jazz trumpet blurts. "You've Been Around" seems to exist in a flow of several different songs, the melody riding on top of everything - but that sort of confusion and profusion of surfaces is one thing that moves this record past the occasional dated backing vocal or synth blurp.

His next album, Outside (or according to some pedants, 1. Outside, which is what's printed on the cover...even though the spine gives the title as merely Outside) didn't exactly play nice with the public: it's described in the liner notes as "a non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle" (QQF?), and its subject matter - set at the then-upcoming turn of the century, it features a detective trying to solve a series of ritualistic art murders - must have seemed utterly daft and incomprehensible to most. (It is, however, based on the ideas of a handful of actual artists, the Vienna Actionists.) Despite the return of Brian Eno, and Carlos Alomar and Mike Garson (a lad insane on the piano) from Bowie's '70s bands, the music presents few of the easily graspable touchstones of that '70s work. Instead, it's dense, noisy, dark, chaotic, often nearly atonal, again with Bowie layering his melodies on top. Repeated listens reveal them as solid melodies, and there are indeed some catchy songs here, but this is dense, knotty (and long) work...and for listeners unwilling to put in effort, it probably falls confusingly flat. (The endorsement around this time of Bowie's music by Trent Reznor - then at the peak of his popularity - didn't really help either artist: Bowie's music here was far more complex and less visceral than NIN (ironic given the literal viscerality of the artwork in question), and Reznor's fans seemed ready to jump ship to simpler renunciations of, you know, shit that isn't dark...) "A Small Plot of Land" begins with Garson playing one of his typical frightened-cat-on-the-keyboard solos over a murky bed of rhythms, out of which gradually emerges Bowie's slow, measured vocal.

That contrast of simultaneous fast and slow textures was probably one thing Bowie found attractive in the then-just-past-edgy drum'n'bass (or jungle: let the aficionados argue whether the terms are equivalent). In trying to incorporate some of the sound and feel of that genre in his next album Earthling, Bowie ran afoul of the usual dilemma critically confronting older, established artists: continue to do what you did successfully ten years ago, and you're stuck in a rut, irrelevant, washed-up; pay attention to what's going on, try to incorporate it, and you're a train-jumper, a trend-follower, a hack who just doesn't "get" the style. What those critics missed was that Bowie wasn't trying to make a d'n'b record, he was making a DB record. (Sorry: I couldn't resist.) Stripped down to their skeletons, these are a batch of distinctively Bowie songs, with all his harmonic and melodic characteristics intact. What's new is the arrangements - which aren't slavishly d'n'b either (several tracks don't borrow from the style at all) but which incorporate more "rock" sounds than was typical of the genre. A few tracks fall a bit short, and Bowie dropped the density of sound characterizing his last two releases for a relatively transparent arrangement and mix. "Dead Man Walking" is a good example: while the rhythm treatment clearly is indebted to jungle, the track is built on a solid chorus counterpointed by Reeves Gabrels' cobra-like guitar line.

Overall, while none of these CDs is as consistent an album as Bowie's best work, they all present Bowie doing what he's always done: exploring and trying to find ways to present his material that sound both apt and arresting, catchy and innovative. (And it should be remembered that "classic" Bowie albums in the '70s sometimes had one or two forgettable tracks; we just remember the classic tracks and overlook the less-impressive ones...)

David Bowie "You've Been Around"
David Bowie "A Small Plot of Land"
David Bowie "Dead Man Walking"

pug pug...

A brilliant bit, wherein one's fantasy not only of chatting with David Bowie, but even having him write a song about you (on the spot, yet!) comes true...but at a cost... At Ye Olde You Tube. Bowie's looking good, too.

Note: I was made aware of this video over at Click Opera, and I'd just like to say, re the number of folks saying Bowie's all washed up: not so. I will admit that Never Let Me Down did, and that subsequent records weren't entirely cohesive or strong - but in retrospect, the stylistic restlessness was a good sign: he was at least not resting on a sound. I do think his last two titles (Heathen and Reality) show how he's confident enough now to reclaim large swaths of his classic sound without feeling like (or coming across as) an oldies act. Too bad it's been too long since his last release...

(I may post a track or two when I get home...ooh, posting from work, bad boy!)

a message from the future!

Robyn Hitchcock is surely capable of delivering the musical goods with nothing but his voice and an acoustic guitar - I Often Dream of Trains in large stretches features nothing but, and twenty-some years on it remains a brilliant, heartbreaking work of staggering, uh, insecurity, pain, and depression - but I've gotta admit, I like his work best in a band context. And so, after the semi-comeback of Spooked a year or so back (which featured Gillian Welch and David Rawlings in a relatively twang-free setting), his new CD Olé! Tarantula is, to my ears so far, a complete return to form. The band this time (co-billed in the title as The Venus 3) is Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, and Bill Rieflin (also the core of The Minus 5, and half of some obscure Athens, Georgia act), with notable appearances from former Soft Boys Kimberley Rew and Morris Windsor, Chris Ballew (ex-POTUSA), Sean Nelson (Harvey Danger) - plus a keyboard guest slot for Ian McLagan, and a co-write from Andy Partridge on "'Cause It's Love (Saint Parallelogram)."

The CD opens with "Adventure Rocket Ship" - not the very best song, but I'm posting it because it's at the Yep Roc site, and I don't want to post too many tracks in advance of the CD's early October release. But it's still a fine track - and it's great to hear a bit more rock'n'roll energy behind Hitchcock. Other early highlights of the CD for me include the oddly compelling "Belltown Ramble" (with a tinkling, repetitive piano part that's either annoying or brilliant), the long-time concert fave "(A Man's Gotta Know His Limitations) Briggs," which keeps reminding me of "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," and the approaching-psychedelia of "The Authority Box" (which contains the immortal line "Fuck me, I'm a trolley bus"...).

Here's a curious version of the CD's title track - which features journalist Pascal Wyse whipping out his mad trombone skilz. That's actually appropriate - because even though the CD's version lacks trombone, it does feature a similarly loose confederation of musical sounds, including harmonica, with a feel similar to "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35." (Yes, it appears that Blonde on Blonde was in heavy rotation over at the Hitchcock compound. Naturally, the other two most audible influences are the Soft Boys and R.E.M.)

PS (longer than the S): Everyone should buy this album...if only to send a little royalty funds toward the unfortunate Andy Partridge, who in the last year or so has had to battle a hand injury and wonky equipment that nearly deafened him - the resulting tinnitus is expected to diminish. Partridge fans will also want to know that the final volumes of the Fuzzy Warbles series are coming out - as well as an enormous box set featuring all eight volumes. Partridge has done the right thing by fanatics like me who've already bought the first six volumes: the box set (minus the first six discs) is available at a considerably reduced price (you get a booklet and some swag) along with the two newly released volumes.

Now if only my beloved Wrens would act similarly: I love 'em, but...they've released The Meadowlands on LP...with four "new" bonus tracks. Three of them ("Splitter #7: Fireworks/James, I Wanna," "Our Brightest New Year," and "Such a Pretty Lie") have been floating around in various forms and on various limited releases for several years (although it may be that "Lie" appears in a different mix from what was around before); the fourth ("Nervous and Not Me" - which has also been in the tube-o-sphere for a while now) has been spiffed up with "a new chorus chord progression [and] new guitars & bass."

So, apparently crazed Wrens nuts like me are supposed to drop $20 (plus postage) for a vinyl version of a partly new track? Grrr... Okay, yes; I could gain whatever bragging rights ensue from owning a vinyl copy of one of the better albums from three years ago ("Hey ladies! Check it out - this is the kind of guy who owns music in an outmoded medium!") - but geez guys, couldn't you at least make the tracks available for purchase as a download or sumpin'?

And while they're busy adding new tracks to old wine, wouldn't adding a few extraneous seconds to existing songs on Secaucus and Silver constitute a means to make an end-run around the currently shoved-up-record-company-exec's-posterior status of those titles' rights? I mean, hey: new recording!

Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 "Adventure Rocket Ship"
Robyn Hitchcock "Olé! Tarantula" (live)

poor old Tom

Pity the poor two-dollar bill. Along with its counterpart the dollar coin (of whatever type), it never really caught on. Perhaps that's because it's not a multiple of five, so you can't create change for the next-highest value bill with it. Yes, the same thing goes for twenties and a fifty - but the higher values mean change is made less often. (Speaking of which, any idea why it's a twenty-dollar bill and not a twenty-five dollar bill, which would seem to make more sense in some ways?)

At any rate, once people started imagining the bill was rare, it was doomed: receiving one, people would keep it, collect it, rather than spend it (and thereby circulate it).

Perhaps, say, to buy a guitar:

Two Dollar Guitar "Oiseau Blue"
Two Dollar Guitar "Turnaround"

Also: a very intriguing article on music blogs over at marathonpacks - well worth reading.

a big big boat

Self is a band (more or less: Matt Mahaffey often records everything himself) currently caught in the all-too-usual label limbo: label owns masters to latest CD, refuses either to release the CD or relinquish the masters. (As a wise man once said, "You can't fight City Hall...except with a bomb.")

Anyway, despite that, over at the band's fan site, there are approximately 7,396 mp3s for download - mostly b-sides, demos, live tracks, etc. Among these are two parodies (downloadable from the site at this page).

"Moronic" is the less effective of these two: its somewhat smug tone is an example of the most irritating occasional aspect of Self's recordings, its target is just a tad obvious, and the resentment seems misplaced. However, it (inadvertently?) points out that, divorced from its original singer's hairpulling vocal mannerisms, the song is pretty damned catchy. I believe Dante described a circle reserved in Hell for creators of exactly such combinations of attraction and repulsion.

"Titanic" (can you tell when these two tracks were recorded?) works much better, both because the fit between the source and the subject of the parody seems more apt, and because rather than being snarky it's just goofy. Of course, it does kind of ruin the original for me...in that I suspect I'll always hear these lyrics instead.

the lady who puts the little plastic robins on the Christmas cakes

I felt like making a mix CD. It'd been a while since I'd done a covers mix, so I went through the past few months' of songs and chose the most interesting cover tracks, then sequenced them on the fly (generally going by key relations and/or sound, with some attention paid to pacing).

The results are posted over at The Art of the Mix. Here are a few words about three of the more fun tracks (also, three of the tracks that aren't themselves from various mp3 blogs...don't want to get too redundant here).

Harpers Bizarre "Witchi Tai To": Part of the late sixties/early seventies vogue for all things Native American, this one stands out...for having been written by an actual Native American. Jim Pepper was a tenor saxophone player who infused his jazz playing with music from his background (Kaw and Creek, per Wikipedia). This version avoids being overobvious about the Indian stuff, instead layering echoey string charts, flutes, and...whatever the hell that ringing sound is, which sounds like tuned bicycle bells. Whatever it is, it's just a very cool sound, and a reminder that before the days of ubiquitous synthesizers, arrangers were compelled to be creative with other means.

Momus "Orgasm Addict": Nothing against synths, since this track is full of them. Momus slows down the, uh, rather aroused tempo of the Buzzcocks' original, croons the melody instead of sneering it, and turns the whole thing into an amusingly sleazy sort of trip-hop lounge track (to borrow his description from the notes for the CD). He says that he was aiming at a Tony Bennett vocal approach...but of course his insinuating, quiet Scots voice has a wholly different effect (and affect).

Don Dixon "Cool": Yes, from West Side Story. When I was younger, I imagined this sort of angular, finger-snapping stuff was what jazz was all about. It isn't - there's much more, of course - but it's a fun sort of imaginary world, full of black berets and incomprehensible slang.

Harpers Bizarre "Witchi Tai To"
Momus "Orgasm Addict"
Don Dixon "Cool"

ps: Normally, I make mixes only when I'm sending one off to somebody. This time, there was no assigned recipient - yet here I am, with an extra copy (remember: the whole track listing is over at Art of the Mix). Drop me an e-mail if you want a copy - but only first-come first-serve, so go man go! (But not like a yo-yo schoolboy.)

history as farce, history from farce, farce from history

This was originally going to be a simple little post expressing amusement that, apparently, an actual fashion designer included this little item in a show (headlined at Yahoo). The amusement (other than the "hat"'s inherent absurdity) is that, of course, a very similar shoe hat featured in Terry Gilliam's Brazil - and so I was going to have a little laugh that Gilliam's parodic joke at the absurdity of high-fashion design had been (like so much else) outdone by reality.

Problem is (damn my compulsive fact-checking), in looking for an image from the Gilliam film to complement the Yahoo photo, I found out that Gilliam himself was inspired by a '30s-era fashion moment (designed by Salvador Dali - search "shoe hat" on the page to get directly to the relevant image and paragraph).

So Kazuo Takashima (the designer of the new shoe hat) is essentially remaking history himself.

(And, of course, Homeland Security seems intent on imagining the world of Brazil as its model for actual reality...)

apparently I am a sick bastard

Remember that scene in Intolerable Cruelty in which Wheezy Joe tragically mixes up his gun with his inhaler? Nearly as hilarious in potential for some sick-ass filmmaker looking for real-life inspiration is the following set of incidents reported in "News of the Weird" (which you really have to visualize or, better, re-enact sans gun): "criminal suspects Fabian Patillo, 21, in a Chicago suburb (June), and a 23-year-old man in East Germantown, Pa. (July), shot themselves in the head when they too-hastily fired their guns behind them trying to shoot pursuers. (Mr. Patillo did not survive.)"

local content

So, the College of Comics Cardinals over at the wonderful Comics Curmudgeon are all abuzz over the weird and creepy film versions of a month's worth of Mary Worth comics someone found online.

But hey, look: they're by the Milwaukee-based gang of filmmakers and artists working under the umbrella Zero TV! Which led some commenters to say things like, oh, that explains the people's Canadian accents or, they thought the site seemed kinda "Neo-Canadian."

Please note: Milwaukee is not now, and never has been, a part of Canada.

However, if anyone wants to print up t-shirts that say MILWAUKEE: WE ARE NOT NEO-CANADA, I will happily collect any profits you might make.

go!

I've noticed that newer green lights on traffic signals are colored an annoyingly grassy-bright shade of green. They look as if they're made up of a number of little light-cells clustered together. The older green lights have a kind of cool, minty hue, and are somewhat eye-like in being (I think) a central light with a reflective backing and tinted lens. Although their surfaces are mottled, kind of like a football, they're also curved-looking, organic. The new ones look harsh, overbright.

If any signal needs to be brighter, it's red. People don't have problems seeing green lights!

Canada Light and Dark

Perhaps all the good musicians left the US when Bush became President, or perhaps the rhythmic patterns of hockey pucks repeatedly caroming off the boards inspire musical thinking...but for whatever reason, the last several years have witnessed a seemingly insurmountable flow of talent from our northern neighbors (that would be Canada for those of you who failed geography class). Acts such as the New Pornographers, Destroyer, the Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, Frog Eyes, Wolf Eyes, Frog Parade, and Sufjan "Michigan Is Not Part of Canada You Dope" Stevens have made clear to listeners outside of their native land that there's more to Canadian music than Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Celine Dion.

Something else: there's often something just a little off, just a bit strange, in the best Canadian acts. All of the Canadian acts mentioned above* tend to look at things a bit askew and present them that way as well. Recently I picked up CDs by two exemplary Canadian viewers-askew, and it struck me that at least in some respects, they made a good contrasting set of songs.

I recently picked up Jane Siberry's first, self-titled album on CD. I'd had the music on a ratty old cassette, but hadn't listened to it for years, remembering it as being a bit too twee. Well, it probably is that - but I think part of that is a peculiar distaste people have for lightness, for joy, even though I'd argue it's a lot harder to effectively (and non-sappily) convey those sorts of feelings than to do doom and gloom. I really like the synth part on "The Sky Is So Blue," and the way the rhythms shift, and Siberry's somewhat breathless delivery of the verses. More ambiguously, there's "The Mystery at Ogwen's Farm": seems an odd girl was talking to Bessie, and Bessie somehow...just...disappeared. Good thing for Bessie, it seems.

By contrast, a few months ago, Carl Wilson (a/k/a Zoilus), guesting at the estimable mp3 blog Said the Gramophone, posted "Night Falls" by another Canadian musician, Kathleen Yearwood...and I was so impressed I ordered the CD it was on within a day of hearing the track. What grabbed me was the shift in moods of the song, and its intensity. glenn mcdonald (in his late column "The War Against Silence") reviewed that CD, Book of Hate - and he aptly describes the way nearly every track upsets the preconceptions set up by the previous tracks. The opening track, "Peggy Gordon," presents Yearwood at nearly her most straightforward and folkish...but the arrangement of the track is almost baroque, sort of if Fairport Convention had hired Gentle Giant to arrange a song.

A final note: it fascinates me that both of these artists are, to an audible degree, influenced by something best described as "folk music"...although in both cases (and to very different ends), they move far beyond a merely genre-specific exercise (and far beyond the stereotype of sweater-wearing, Starbucks-patronizing NPR listeners as implied audience). Although neither of these recordings is new (Siberry's is from 1981, Yearwood's was recorded in 1992), the ongoing resonance of some aspects of folk with people aren't necessarily buying traditional folk music is intriguing, and something I've been meaning to explore further. There's something to the rootedness of the form that appeals...but it's not the often too-safe rootedness that (perhaps) appeals to that stereotypical audience. There's also no purism: if these artists want to throw in a programmed synth rhythm or a trombone solo or write about gay pornographers, they go ahead and do so.

Jane Siberry "The Sky Is So Blue"
Jane Siberry "The Mystery at Ogwen's Farm"
Kathleen Yearwood "Night Falls"
Kathleen Yearwood "Peggy Gordon"

* Yes, I know: Wolf Eyes isn't Canadian. And as far as I know, there's not really a band called Frog Parade. I get easily confused with all those Wolf bands out there.

late edit: More Canadiana...The Bejar Family Circus!