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Review of Hounds of Love

engelcox — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 11:21:24 GMT

I bought this in 1986, having heard Bill Humphries sing the praises of Kate Bush for months. It was the Spring-Summer of my triumphant return to UT Austin (before the inevitable Second Fall from Grace that was to occur a couple of years later), and while I had listened to this album quite a bit during my commute back and forth to classes that Spring, it cemented its hold in my heart during Winedale summer, as I prepared for the Shakespeare course that Mike Godwin had instructed me to enroll in during the Spring, then followed up for an intensive Summer section. Listening to it now reminds me of that summer, especially the first song, "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" and the entire "Ninth Wave" second half, in that I had indeed made a deal with God that I would try and turn my school life around and I was immersed, not so much in water, but in the creativity and spirit of Winedale. The album is somewhat bittersweet, and so was that summer, for while I indeed did well that year, it was a rough period, made more so by the ties I had been making with my girlfriend of the time (who would eventually become my wife, uhm, ten years later).

I had been primed to fall for the Divine Miss Bush for years, having spent my high school years listening to a progression of pop music (Elton John and Fleetwood Mac) to "hard rock" (Styx and Journey) to "art rock" (Genesis, Rush and Yes). The next step along that road was to experimental rock, and Laurie Anderson had been my introduction and Kate Bush became my guide in the form. At the time, since I hadn't heard much of Bush's previous work, I simply saw her as a companion to Peter Gabriel (she had, after all, performed a duet with him on his recent album, So, as had Anderson), who also went into the studio to drench her songs in layers and layers of production. The strangeness of some of "The Ninth Wave" washed over me, and it wasn't until years later that I actually took notice of how many things were actually going on in those songs. Now that I look at this album and compare it to her previous work, I see how some had rightly accused Bush of "selling out" to pop music, much like they had accused Gabriel of the same (my favorite memory of which is my friend Karl Rehn's rewrite of the chorus of "Sledgehammer" as "I want to be / Phil Collins"). Hounds of Love is defiantly pop, but this is pop with an edge.

Take, for example, the opening song, whose title was changed because her record company feared that "A Deal with God" would raise fundamentalist hackles in the States and Italy. Its insistent drum beat over the atmospheric synths belie the lyrics, which have nothing whatsover to do with the diety, but instead describe the love/hate symbiosis in most relationships. The titular deal is the narrator's urgent desire to be able to switch places, so as to better understand each other. (Of course, in all modesty, you could also read the lyrics as the narrator wanting to swap places with her lover so they could experience orgasm from each other's point of view. I'm just saying, and those moans in the background bear me out on this, I think.)

"It's in the trees! It's coming!" What? This is a pop record? What was that? That was the beginning to the second song, "Hounds of Love," that's even more over the top in its attempt to describe how much it feels to be the object of someone's affection, or perhaps the narrator's fear of being in love itself. As she runs from those hounds, she's unsure if she wants to be in love or to be pursued by love or to give in to her own feelings. I was 20, and in the throes of my first love affair, and I knew how she felt to be hounded by love.

"The Big Sky" changes the mood to be a little more light-hearted, almost childish, as the narrator rolls in the grass and focuses her attention on the shapes that she can see in the clouds. What I like most about this song is the vocal nonsense sounds in the background that are almost like Philip Glass in their repetition. Each of these first three songs are "big music," in the phraseology of Mike Scott of the Waterboys: they fill the room/car/arena with their sounds, so much so that the louder you play the song the more you hear going on.

But, as celebratory as the last song was, Bush quickly turns to a darker subject, and one of my favorite songs she has ever done, "Mother Stands for Comfort." Unlike the ambiguous nature of the first couple of songs, it's not hard to follow the lyrics on this one: from the breaking glass at the beginning, to the industrial background sounds, this is a song about a broken person, who adores his mother who "knows that I've been doing something wrong / But she won't say anything." In the chorus, the narrator even calls himself a madman. This is a sincerely creepy song, in which the music both supports its eerie theme as well as coats it over in slinkiness.

From one child to another, "Cloudbusting" is told from the point-of-view of Peter Reich, the young son of Wilhelm Reich. Drawn directly from Peter's book about his experience, it tells the story of when the government agents came for his father, interspersed with a child's love for his father and the dreams his father had instilled in him. It's an effective piece in that it makes you want to know more about Reich and his beliefs about Organon.

Thus ends side one on the album (for this was when artists still thought of Side A and Side B to match the order of songs on a piece of vinyl). Side B has an overall title of "The Ninth Wave," and describes a shipwreck survivor lost at sea, struggling to keep his or her head above the water. The opening song, "And Dream of Sleep," sets up this situation, and also manages to prefigure some of the experimental sections that follow in its small snippets of sound that merge into a collage all the while Bush sings sweetly about being seduced by sleep, which she cannot fall into lest she drop into the deep water and drown. The next section, "Under Ice," is chilling (pun intended), for the water the protagonist is in is cold, and the very real danger that she faces is underpinned by the minor key and urgent violin part. "Waking the Witch" puts the sound collage in the foreground, like a view into the protagonist's mind, a jumble of phrases and voices that abruptly seques into a call and response between a sinister male-type voice and a desperately stuttering staccato female voice, separated by sections of childlike chanting. This is the weirdest song on this album, and while there's nothing as outre in it as the braying donkey in "Get Out of the House" on The Dreaming, it would be hard to describe this as pop. (Interestingly enough, it's theme of judge and jury and the helicopter sample that ends it recalls, unintentionally I think, Pink Floyd's The Wall.) Returning to a more sedate, if still not normal, mood, "Watching You Without Me" starts as a lullabye, broken by a bridge of either nonsense or foreign lyrics not repeated in the liner notes as well as a repeat of the stuttering "talk to me, talk to me, talk to me" heard earlier. The point of the song, I think, is to provide a calm trough between "Waking the Witch" and "Jig of Life," the latter being a minor-key and darkly urgent variation on the traditional jig. By this time, the drowning theme has been downplayed to some extent, as these middle songs likely portray an inner struggle in the protagonist. "Hello Earth" brings us back to the story, however, by an implied comparison of the drowning person in the overall black sea to the Earth in the inky depths of the Universe. "With just one hand held up high / I can blot you out / out of sight" is a line written as if the Earth is viewed from off-Earth (the Moon or a space capsule), and later in the song the viewer sees storms forming over America and tries to warn the sailors and other in the water, including the poor drowning person, who is in the path of the storm. And then the finale comes, like the calm following the storm, a simple love song that is either the protagonists parting thoughts or, if you want to believe that she is actually rescued before drowning, her affirmation of life and understanding of the tenuousness of our existence by reiterating what she plans to do: "I'll kiss the ground / I'll tell my mother / I'll tell my father / I'll tell my loved one / I'll tell my brothers / How much I love them."

Is this pop? Maybe, perhaps, somewhat. Bush had always played with pop music tropes from her first success, the book turned song "Wuthering Heights," and each successive album contained some nods towards a simple ballad, but it wouldn't be until two albums following this one that Miss Bush would write her own "Sledgehammer" in "Rubberband Girl" (on The Red Shoes, an album that would also feature a song co-written and performed as a duet with his purpleness, Prince). To me, though, Hounds of Love is Bush's career high point, where her experimental art sensibilities were leavened with enough pop understanding to achieve a masterpiece of production, performance, and purpose, propelled with a singular power of vision and which wraps up in a peaceful platitude. Other albums contain highlights; only this one is perfection.

Review of Moving Pictures by Rush

engelcox — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 17:20:06 GMT

I recall once telling Mike Godwin that this was one of my favorite albums, to which his reply was, "But you can't dance to it." I'm not sure if he was being facetious at the time, referring of course to the traditional rating comment on American Bandstand, but it's a comment that's lived with me to this day. Of course you can't dance to Rush--it's progressive, "arty," rock, that's meant to be listened to, and somewhat closely at that, kind of like Take Five in the jazz world. Moving Pictures is Rush at their best, full of time and key changes, masterful interplay between lead and bass guitar, innovative synth sounds and production, and the best drumming in modern rock. While Geddy Lee's high-pitched nasally voice is not for all, this is an album where his screeches are somewhat muted, and he often sings in mid-range rather than the higher register that characterized earlier albums (as he has aged, he's lowered the range at which he sings on each successive Rush album it seems). The lyrics are an overview of the classic Rush themes: science fiction ("Red Barchetta"), the disillusionment of youth ("Tom Sawyer"), fantasy ("Witch Hunt"), science ("Vital Signs"), fame or the life of an artist (or at least, being in the spotlight, as in "The Camera Eye" and "Limelight"). Nothing was that new here, in comparison to Rush's previous albums, but here it was presented in more manageable chunks (unlike, say, the Cygnus tunes that take up entire LP sides) with radio-friendly production.

"Tom Sawyer" is probably the most played Rush song and it sounds as fresh today as when I first heard it in the 80s. The lyrics are nonsensical to some degree, almost as much as "Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads, another big song of the time, where the lyrics are more of a style than necessarily trying to tell a story or make a point. For Rush, that was something of a novelty. Most of Neil Peart's lyricism was based on stories, such as the previously mentioned Cygnus songs, or the side-long epic "2112." When they didn't tell stories, they were fairly clear what the songs were about, such as "Spirit of Radio" being about the business of music radio or "The Trees" being a warning about bigotry. But there are moments of "Tom Sawyer" where you just wonder what the hell Peart was smoking to come up with "The world is, the world is/Love and life are deep/Maybe as his skies are wide." But the song works, and the sense you get from it is that Tom, Mark Twain's rebel child, still exists today.

Much more like their normal songs is "Red Barchetta," based on a science fiction story. In it, the protagonist talks about escaping the stultifying confines of the modern city to escape to his uncle's farm in the country, where his uncle keeps an old automobile that the protagonist then takes out, "commit[ing] his weekly crime." It's basically the same story as "2112," except made much more palatable by not being about music, but about cars, and clocking in at a decent Album Oriented Rock single time limit. The chase sequence between the government aircars and the old automobile gives Lee and Alex Lifeson another opportunity to play dueling guitars, something they've liked to do since "By-Tor and the Snow Dog" from the Fly By Night album.

"YYZ," the instrumental on the album, is named after the airport code for Toronto Pearson International Airport, a code that Rush, being Canadian, were always happy to see, because it meant they were headed home. What's interesting about the opening to it is that the guitar part plays out the letters YYZ in morse code. "Limelight" and "The Camera Eye" are companion pieces of a sort, although the former talks about being the focus of the camera while the latter is a descriptive piece that tries to put into words what is being caught by the camera as it is being used. Of the songs on this album, "The Camera Eye" is probably my least favorite, but that's really no fault of its own, but just how it pales in comparison to the other six songs.

The final two songs are as strong as the opening two. "Witch Hunt" repeats a motif originally used by Peart in the Cygnus pair, wherein he compares something in the past to something in the present. Here, the Salem witch trials to modern discrimination. It's pretentious and would have collapsed under its conceit if not for the moody nature of the music that fits the general paranoia and tension that Peart is trying to say go hand-in-hand between the two time periods. (Interestingly enough, for a band and an album that has always been the bane of the Christian right--something about their pentangle in a circle symbol has always made the more paranoid fundamentalists brand Rush as a satanic band--this is the only song on the album that refers to anything actually otherworldly. Most of the songs are about technology or modern life, not cavorting demons.) The album ends with "Vital Signs," which should have been as big a hit as "Tom Sawyer," and is one of my all-time favorite Rush tracks. It begins with a repeated synthesizer sequence that musically represents a EKG graph, with a very staccato Lifeson guitar part. The lyrics are wonderful, with some quite strange words being placed together in a rock song, such as in the opening, "Unstable condition/A symptom of life/In mental and environmental change/Atmospheric disturbance/The feverish flux/Of human interface and interchange." This is a far cry from what rock and roll was originally about--i.e., sex, or at least romance--and for me typifies why I was drawn to them, because they weren't afraid to be intelligent.

This is an album that I've listened to since high school, and it has continued to hold up for me over the years. While I can still listen to many of the other bands that I first started listening to at that time, including Styx, Journey, Genesis, and Yes, I consider many of those guilty pleasures, perhaps not something I'd mention as a favorite to a new acquaintance. I'm not embarrassed by this album, though. Genesis and Yes may have had the same musicianship and intelligence, but their songs didn't have the hooks that Rush had, and while Styx and Journey may have had the hooks, their music is actually quite simple and formulaic, more obvious in retrospect than it was for me at the time. Re-listening to this album to write this review only renewed my appreciation for it and for Rush.

Review of Moving Pictures by Rush

engelcox — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 17:19:50 GMT

Review of The Californian by Bob Schneider

engelcox — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 13:40:34 GMT

Bob Schneider has been a mainstay of the Austin music scene for over ten years now, and still remains fairly unknown outside of Texas. In fact, at a recent concert in Virginia, it seemed the audience was made up of more Texan expats than locals. Schneider's sound isn't Texan, though--at least not like Stevie Ray Vaughan, ZZ Top, or Lyle Lovett. He doesn't sing with a drawl, and he's as like to say a four-letter epithet in his songs as he is to say m'am. His sound typically runs between a growling hip-hop to straight-ahead rock that used to be the mainstay of 80s rock. That may be what prevents Schneider from breaking through, as he does flirt with a number of genres, some of which are extremely out of vogue. He's also extremely prolific, having fronted both the Ugly Americans and the Scabs as well as releasing several solo albums and at least one duet with Mitch Watkins, so it's a bit tough for new listeners to know exactly where to begin with his catalog. Which makes The Californian a welcome addition to Schneider's oeuvre, because it gives an overview of all his facets and is likely the strongest set of songs he's ever put on a single album.

The CD starts with "Holding in the World," that immediately grounds the listener into Bob's world: a guitar riff that seems the offspring of Foreigner or Bad Company and then Bob's voice comes in, harkening back to Bob Seger's growl or even a young Tom Waits. His voice has matured with the years, a deep baritone that has some remnants of the dangerous sound of Johnny Cash when he still did rockabilly. And when the song hits the sing-a-long chorus, it's almost too infectious--this is the kind of music you find yourself humming for hours and days after hearing. Schneider's a child of the 80s, and like Ben Folds, will often pepper his songs with both cultural references to that time period (such as comic books on songs like "Superpowers"). He also has absorbed a fair amount of hip-hop, which shows up in both the attitude of songs like "Everything I Have Means Nothing to Me Now" or "Mix It Up." "Game Plan" sounds like a cross between Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World as I Know It" as done by a hip-hop artist. And for the modern rock crowd, songs like "Flowerparts" sound like a Coldplay song rescued from an alternative Earth.

According to the liner notes, this album was recorded live in the studio, often on the first take, with only a minimal amount of overdubs. This is similar to previous releases by Schneider like Songs Sung and Played on the Guitar at the Same Time that are often only a step away from demos. However, in this case, the songs are being performed by a road-tested and experienced band who are tight--these songs sound like they were produced, even when they aren't. What this album also captures is the raw power of Schneider live, who can energize a crowd and get them singing along with him. Several of the songs here benefit from choruses or parts that invite crowd participation, including the goofy final song on the album, "The Sons of Ralph," which is like something Tenacious D would have written.

Musical tastes go in cycles, and the kind of music that Schneider is performing (a rougher, hard edge guitar-driven rock) doesn't sit well with American Idol vocalist-driven pop or the do-it-yourself sound of garage bands. If Schneider can sit it out and wait for the cycle to turn, he's situated to break into the mainstream as long as he can keep releasing albums of this quality. I envy those people who will discover him in the future, because they'll have some great music to unearth as they descend into his back catalog.

Review of Trouble No More by Darden Smith

engelcox — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 17:30:52 GMT

I vividly recall buying this album (from a used CD shop in Pasadena) and bringing it back home, putting it into the player, and simply sitting back on the couch realizing that this was the type of music that spoke directly to me. After listening to it once, I had to leave the apartment for an appointment, but I left the CD in the player, the jewel case sitting out on top of it. Jill told me later that when she came home, she saw the new CD, began playing it, and thought the same thing: this is a great album.

Ten years later and I still think this is a great album. I can put this album on and listen to every song on it without feeling the urge to press the skip button, and if I'm in the car alone, I'm singing along at full voice. And because of how I remember so vividly when I bought this album, listening to it inevitably reminds me of Los Angeles, the first time I had lived outside of Texas. In Austin, Darden Smith's home town and mine for five years, I had never gotten into the local music scene, although I did listen to local radio and briefly co-hosted a show on the student-run radio station that had just started. I knew of Darden from a small local hit on KLBJ, a duet with Boo Hewerdine called "All I Want (Is Everything)." But none of that prepared me for Trouble No More, which sounded to me, after a year in Los Angeles, like nothing but home itself.

The album accomplishes this partly through Darden's slightly accented voice, which has a slight Texas twang, unnoticeable except for the pronounciation of certain words (as compared to, say, the noticeable accents of Lou Ann Barton, Richard Thompson, or The Proclaimers). There's a country tinge to the music as well, which mainly relies on Darden's acoustic guitar as its main feature. But most of all, I think of home because of the lyrics, which reference a combination of religion, settings, situations, and people that I know intimately.

The album starts off with a slowly building song called "Midnight Train," that begins with a repeated acoustic guitar part that sounds a lot like the motion of a train. As the song moves along, it slowly adds more instruments and layers until it drives to the end with locomotive intensity. The lyrics are about lost dreams, brought up by the sound of a midnight train passing by while the narrator lays in bed.

The next song, "Frankie and Sue," is one of the most upbeat of Darden's career. Based on a real story of some friends of his who didn't realize that they loved each other until one moved to Hong Kong, it has a bright, bubbly bounce to it that sounds like Brian Wilson meets Lyle Lovett, especially in the nice use of call-and-response background singers.

Most of the songs are slower and intimate, internally reflective rather than stories about others. In this album, Darden relies heavily on cliches, which aren't quite as horrible when set to music as they are when you simply read them. He often plays off them, mutating them into something of his own, but not so much in "All the King's Horses," a song where he laments a love affair beyond reconciliation.

The most powerful songs on this album are the ones where Darden mixes his down-home sound with the imagery of Christianity, which he does in both the title song and "2000 Years," whose chorus pleads, "Answer my prayers / If there's anyone up there / 'cause 2000 years is a mighty long time / If you're going to call me home, now's the time." In "Trouble No More," the background singers become a church choir that join in assuring us all that "someday...when the burden has lifted / you won't have trouble no more."

There are so many great lyrics in here that I have trouble narrowing it down to just a few. In some of my favorite songs, like "Fall Apart at the Seams," the metaphor would have been strained in the ham-handed hands of a big-hat country artist. But Darden seems to be able to keep the analogy in check. For example, "Now I used to have a house on the rock, oh man / but because I just couldn't be satisfied, I took out across the sand. / Now that lack of satisfaction has cost me everything / I lost my rock, and fall apart at the seams." Another writer would have required everything to be about clothes, rather than trying to work it in with an unconnected image, and yet he's able to join them through the implied connection. (In addition, making yet another, somewhat oblique, religious reference -- Jesus said that he would be the rock that the church would be built upon.)

Along with "Frankie and Sue" and "Trouble No More," two other songs have a more sprightly feel to them that has been lost in Darden's more recent albums. "Ashes to Ashes" suffers from the same repeated lyrical cliches, but redeems itself in the choir-chorus use like in "Trouble No More" and strikingly original lines like "I lied and I cheated, I marked my cards / Gave into temptation, boys it wasn't that hard. / The most, the most original sin / I did it day after day, time and time again." In "Johnny Was a Lucky One," the narrator reveals that he's envious of his friend who didn't survive Vietnam because all the home town see Johnny in the best light, rather than the narrator who came back to make nothing of himself following the war.

"Long Way Home" is another story song, where the female protagonist decides to drive a little bit longer before getting home, the implication that maybe she didn't return at all.

The album ends with a soft song with some of the best imagery in the album, where the songwriter and his guitar (with a understated harmonica in the background) pair in a most unusual love song. "You soil me, you stain me, I could never come clean / there's a wrinkle on my heart you wouldn't believe." All because the narrator knows that he needs his love, and that only that love could rescue him from the "Bottom of a Deep Well."

I'm not sure that others would be as affected by this album as I am (or, I think, Jill is). We all come upon books and music, movies and plays, with our gathered experiences, the baggage of both where we have been and what we've decided to keep from it. For me, though, this is an album that defines me, that offers me solace, and that continues to reward me upon repeated listening.

Ben Folds at Washington College, November 18

engelcox — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 18:16:56 GMT

Over the last couple of years, J's become a Ben Folds-atic. I debated last year whether or not to get her a fan club membership, and I probably should have. J's always loved piano playing, especially in rock music, and laments that Ben Folds is the only one who seems to really rock out on the piano these days (as opposed to other piano rockers such as Keane, who use the keyboard to layer sounds). I was busy with something the last time Folds was in our area, but she went and saw his performance with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra which she said was enjoyable, but she had gotten tickets on the right side facing the stage and so didn't get to see his hands as he played the piano. Last weekend, we got to talking about concerts we'd like to see, and she pulled up Folds's web site and discovered that he was playing two concerts in the next week in our area: this last Wednesday at American University's Bender Arena and Saturday at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. I was already scheduled to go to see Bob Pollard on Wednesday, and Chestertown was only a couple of hours away, so we bought tickets for that show. (As it turned out, Pollard hurt himself on Tuesday and my Wednesday show was cancelled, but by then other things had come up that made Saturday a better choice in any case.)

We left Silver Spring around 4pm in the afternoon, to not only give ourselves more than enough time to get there, but also to allow for a leisurely dinner before going to the Lifetime Fitness Center on campus. (I assumed correctly that this was their basketball arena - Folds has previously proclaimed his love for bball, most musically on his tribute to Eliott Smith, "Late" - so it wasn't surprising to see him embrace that kind of venue for this tour.) We ran into no traffic at all on the Bay Bridge and made it to Chestertown in an hour-and-a-half. We found a restaurant on the dock, the Old Wharf Inn, for a decent although not great meal, and then had drinks and some wonderful desserts at The Imperial Hotel. J wanted to get over to the arena an hour before the doors opened, but we lingered a bit and got there at 7:15pm, to discover a line about a block long--not really that long. They hadn't opened the will call window yet, so after they opened the doors, the line had to separate into those with tickets and those without. J had paid the Ticketbastard fee, thinking that the tickets (general admission) might have sold out, but there was no fear of that. I doubt the arena was a third full at any time during the night.

While we didn't get right at the front, we were able to be a just a row back and on the left side so we could see Folds hands as he played. While waiting for the show to begin, we joked that we were probably some of the oldest folks in the room, although we're the same age as Folds himself. The kids in front of us turned out to be from high school - born in 1990! - although they pointed out the girl's father and mother who looked to be in their 50s.

The opening act was a fellow from Bowie, MD called Corn Mo. He came out and strapped on an accordion and played what I could only call over-the-top: songs that seemed to have no grounding in sense or good taste. I was convinced that it was Folds himself in a wig and a "big suit" doing a kind of self-opening act spoof similar to how the guys in Spinal Tap used to open for themselves as The Folksmen (of A Mighty Wind), but afterwards was surprised to see the big fellow in the huckster area hawking his CDs and trying to get folks to sign up for his mailing list. The highlight, if you could call it that, of his set was a version of "We Are the Champions" on accordion.

A fifteen-minute break to clear away Corn Mo's keyboard and to do some sound level checking and Folds came out, instantly taking charge of the stage and the audience. It was obvious that the audience, while small, were all fans and knew the songs, and it was also obvious that Folds enjoyed playing live, as evidenced by the occasions when he would look out to the audience and simply grin. I didn't make any set list notes, but he mostly performed songs his solo albums with a few thrown in from his Ben Folds Five days, including "Bastard," "You to Thank," "Jesusland," "Trusted" and "Landed" from Songs for Silverman; "Annie Waits", "Fred Jones Part 2", "Zak and Sara", "Not the Same", "The Luckiest" and the title track from Rockin' the Suburbs; "Kate", "Brick", and "Army" from the group albums. He performed three covers: a version of Merle Haggard's "Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down," which most of the audience didn't know what to make of, but which I enjoyed; "Rock This Bitch," by Dr. Dre, which is about as foul-mouthed a song as you can get; and some modern rock song that it seemed everyone in the audience except me knew.

One of the highlights of the night was when he invited a group of audience members up on stage to accompany him on "Underground." Not only did they acquit themselves well, it was obvious that both he and they were enjoying the spontaneity of trying to work together.

Aside from seeming genuinely charming and enjoying what he was doing, the thing that stuck out from the concert was just how spontaneous and improvisational Folds can be. Early in the evening he told a story about how their car had hit a pothole while driving through Delaware that resulted in two flat tires and a couple of hours delay in getting to Chestertown. "Delaware Pothole" thus became a recurring theme in the night, interjected in the lyrics of several songs as well as the subject of a composed on the spot number. Also, during the ending chorus on "Brick," in a quiet moment, someone in the crowd yelled out "Freebird!" and, without dropping a note, Folds merged the first couple of lines from that song before finishing "Brick" and then announcing that it was his latest medley.

For the most part (with the above exception), the crowd was well-behaved, limiting their yells to between the songs rather than during them. They also responded positively to Folds's other trademark in performance, where he gets the entire audience to join him by vocally performing the trumpet and sax parts on "Army" and the background vocals on "Not the Same," which ended the evening by having Folds atop his piano conducting the crowd like an orchestra.

J said it was probably one of her top five concerts ever, and I'd probably give it at least a spot in my top ten. It was a good hour-and-a-half of songs that I mostly knew, performed with the gusto of someone enjoying himself tremendously and with the skills to show the songs off, in a small venue with a responsive crowd. Live music doesn't often get better than that.

Review of Songs in Red and Gray

engelcox — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 18:25:52 GMT

With some albums, to fully enjoy them takes some extra knowledge that you have to acquire outside of the tracks and liner notes themselves. For example, Eric Clapton's "Layla" is a beautiful song, but it becomes something more when you learn that Clapton wrote it as a love song to his best friend's wife. Similarly, Fleetwood Mac's album Rumours contains all sorts of hidden messages sent by the three songwriters of the group to their respective exes: Buckingham to Nicks, "packing up, shacking up's all you want to do" from "Go Your Own Way" and Nicks to Buckingham, "players only love you when they're playing" from "Dreams." Some are obvious (Roger Water's paeon to his father in Pink Floyd's The Final Cut) while others take a kind of fanaticism to decipher (the ongoing battle between John Fogarty and his ex-manager in songs like "Zanz Kant Danz").

Between Suzanne Vega's last studio offering, 1996's Nine Objects of Desire, and this release, several things occurred in her life that provided the germ for the songs and the tone of Songs in Red and Gray. Both her two previous albums had been produced by her husband, Mitchell Froom (they had married in 1994, between the two albums he produced), but the new album is produced with Rupert Hine. Vega also separated from Froom in 1998, retaining custody of their daughter, Ruby Froom.

The change in producers is the first thing you notice as you start listening to Songs in Red and Gray, which sounds much more like Vega's first couple of albums in their intimacy and the relationship between Vega's soft vocal and the accompaniment. While it's not a total return, as most of the songs sport more than the sparse guitar and soft synthesizer work that is the focus of songs like "Marlene on the Wall" or "Knight Moves" (both from her eponymous first album), there's nothing like the industrial clanging or heavily sampled guitar that Froom brought to "Blood Makes Noise" (from 99.9F) and "No Cheap Thrill" (from Nine Objects of Desire). Froom's production was complicated and took a lot of risks, some of which worked, but often was at odds with the kind of folk tradition of Vega's compositions and lyrics. Some of this risk is still present in Hine's production, but it is much more muted, such as the syncopated backbeat in "Solitaire" and the calliope sound that bridges the lyrics of "Machine Ballerina."

Once you start listening to the lyrics, however, you start to get glimpses of the aftermath of Froom and Vega's partnership that is not part of her sound but that of her life. The results are often startingly confessional, masked only by the smoothness of her delivery and the softness of her tone, which makes even what could be the harshest criticism somewhat reflective and apologetic. We shouldn't be too surprised -- I find it hard to imagine Vega ripping someone to shreds a la Elvis Costello.

Consider these lines from "If I Were a Weapon":

if you were a weapon
a hammer's what you'd be
blunt and heavy at the end
and coming down on me

or even this from "Machine Ballerina":

Am I an afternoon's pastime?
a thing on a string
to be thrown and retrieved
like a phone call received
on somebody's birthday
to tease and delight
and then say goodnight
and then just say goodbye?

What leavens these kinds of accusations are the parts where Vega reveals her complicity in the breakup, from acknowledging that the fault wasn't necessarily in Froom that makes up the strongest song on this album, "Soap and Water." In it, she sings to her daughter, "Daddy's a dark riddle/Mama's a handful of thorns/you are my little kite/caught up again in the household storms." This ability to reflect on how the change might be affecting her child is one of Vega's strengths, to remove herself from the scene while also being a participant. Like a good novelist, she strives to discover not only the motivation of her narrator, but also the other characters in her passion play.

This is not an album that is instantly rewarding, as nothing here has the instant hook of "Luka" or "Tom's Diner." On repeated listens, however, it insinuates itself inside your psyche until you start to admire not only the phrasing but also the gentle way it is presented to you.

Review of Red by Eliza Carthy

engelcox — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 19:23:06 GMT

I liked Eliza Carthy's latest album, Angels & Cigarettes, so much that I had to special order this one (I had actually hoped to get the two disk set of Red/Rice, but the CD Exchange wasn't able to grab both for some reason--some mess up in their database). Carthy fills that void that Kate Bush's ten-year absence from the CD release rolls had left, at least for me. Her voice doesn't have quite the range, and she may not be as quirky, but her instrumental talents are fierce (she plays the violin and piano) and her songwriting is strong. Plus, coming from the traditional folk roots of her parents, her take on some of the handed-down songs seems a little more organic than Bush's try at things like "My Lagan Love."

Red, as I understand it, is the more modern of the two disks, yet it still contains at least four songs that come from traditional sources ("Billy Boy/The Widdow's Wedding" [is that a British spelling for Widow?], "Stingo/The Stacking Reel," "Greenwood Laddie," and "Mrs. Capron's Reel"). The "single" from this album, the rolling piano and drums of "Walk Away," was a finalist for the Mercury Prize, and it is a strong song, slightly reminescent of the Corrs, yet not quite as produced nor as simple. The other possible single is "10,000 Miles," which uses a repetitive violin signature before giving in to a combo acoustic guitar/drum progression to keep its momentum.

This is the kind of album that sneaks up on you in repeated listenings, where the songs insinuate themselves in your head and you start humming them before you realize it. That's not to mean that all of the songs are hummable--some of them use an off-beat syncopation that's more appropriate for active listening (like "Greenwood Laddie") than pleasant background. It's a strong album, worth checking out if you've liked Carthy's other work.

Review of Little Victories by Darden Smith

engelcox — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 17:54:08 GMT

The progression of Darden Smith from his debut as a Lyle Lovett-lite country crooner to the smooth adult contemporary sound of Little Victories would have been alarming had there not been three intervening albums (two solo, one with Boo Hewerdine) that, like the word game where you add and subtract letters to go from one word to another in three changes, illustrated how the twang was removed and the strings added. The songs, mostly written by Smith, are not all that different between the two albums. What changed was the conception of how the songs should sound. I doubt this evolution was deliberative on Smith's part. More than likely he was responding to the positive feedback he received from AOR radio to his James Taylor-ish singer/songwriter aspect and the lack of response to his music from country stations looking for big hat dancehall singles or sickly sentimental ballads. Songs from his first album like the swingy "God's Will" might feature an accordion and steel guitar, but the lyrical use of biblical references used in a nonreligious manner was just a touch too edgy for mainstream country radio. I have no idea if the song title and form was an intentional homage to Lovett's song, "God Will," off his eponymous debut, but the songs have more in common than just the title: a first-person point of view that reflects both the singer's upbringing and conflict with that same. Lovett went AOR by embracing the big band spirit of Bob Wills, similar to k.d. lang. Smith's metamorphosis owes more to the spirit of 70s folk and blues artists like Bonnie Raitt, who found their sound smoothed out by expert producers like Don Was until they could find a place in elevators and doctor's offices.

The VH1 hit "Loving Arms" is probably Darden's pinnacle of pop popularity, a multi-tracked masterpiece that could have been lifted from Don Was's production playbook. There is nothing offensive about the song; there's also nothing that truly distinguishes it much either. I enjoy it because I like Smith's voice, Boo Hewerdine's backup, and the solo piano part, but anything else I say for it would be faint praise.

Some of the other songs on Little Victories suffer from a similar production-heavy miasma, like "Place in the Sun," "Days on End," and the title track, although all of these songs show some sparks of the rougher edge that Darden can have. The bridge in "Days on End," in particular, where Smith's voice breaks into more of a nasal sneer (not necessarily matched by the sentiment of the feel-good lyrics) is an example of how these songs still have some individuality.

I'd still likely enjoy Little Victories if all the songs were innocuous as those, making it an easy listening version of the Texana music that I grew up with, but this is one of my favorite albums for all of the other songs. The reflective and mostly acoustic "Hole in the River" is a prime example of why Darden Smith is a favorite artist of mine: using two visual images in a kind of mixed metaphor that only seems to work in songs, Smith and his guitar achieves a feeling of sadness and longing that can stand for any number of life events--lost love, relationship arguments, death--just as the best poetry can achieve. "Only One Dream" is the piano acoustic complement to "Hole in the River," sounding like a church solo performance of one man's personal testimony of faith. "Love Left Town," I believe, is a song that had been written for Darden's previous album, Trouble No More, but which didn't make the cut, as it appeared on the Smith/Hewerdine interview disc, Midnight Train, and shares some similarities with that song: a driving guitar with a faster pace than the laid back piano of the AOR songs here. More so, it resembles some of the songs off Evidence, the Smith/Hewerdine collaboration album that first brought Darden to my attention. I think the Midnight Train version of this song, in an acoustic rendition, is even better, but it is one of my favorite Smith tracks.

After this album, Smith would reject the pop world of VH1 pop for an album that was moodily self-reflective, an Elliot Smith-like deeply personal album. In this album, that move is foreshadowed by the subtle duet with Roseanne Cash, "Precious Time." It seems to me like a song that could easily have been included on Cash's own genre-bending album, Interiors, wherein she rejected her own previous brand of countrification for an intimate indy singer/songwriter stance. "Dream's a Dream" merges much of the other styles of the album into one song: heavy production, yet snappy guitar-based theme, harkening back to Smith's religious roots with the bridge call, "Father, forgive my sins." The vocals are more nasal here, occassionaly hinting of is Texan twange, and the sentiment is as self-actualizing as "God's Will."

My absolute favorite song here, though, is "The Levee Song," cowritten with the man responsible for the Trogg's hit, "Wild Thang." Unlike the rest of the album, this song sounds like an escapee from Creedence Clearwater Revival, a little swamp-influenced blues-based tune that has an undercurrent of dirt both in the music and in the lyrics. There's just something about the way Darden sings, "Thinking 'bout your dress, it was lying on the floor," conjurs up all sorts of nasty thoughts.

The complete album, admittedly, is a mixed bag, a far cry from the unified theme mixing religious imagery with personal stories that characterized Trouble No More. I'm sure that part of the reason I enjoy Little Victories is due to a holdover sentiment from that previous album, having connected so strongly with Smith there, and thus I focus on the little echoes that occur in this one. Smith himself seemes to have repudiated this album, which failed to meet the expectations either he or his label set for it at the time, and his follow-up, Deep Fantastic Blue was such a radical departure that it is an album that I can't even listen to.

Why I Won't Go See Lindsey Buckingham

engelcox — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 17:06:32 GMT

Lindsey Buckingham is one of my favorite artists both solo and with Fleetwood Mac. So when I saw that he was going to release a new album and tour solo, I checked to see if he would be playing near me and was quite excited that he would be playing at the State Theater in Falls Church, Virginia on Oct. 9. Sure, it's my tennis night, but I'll go see Lindsey in such a great intimate venue, for sure!

We had to see some friends in Virginia last weekend anyway, which gave us the opportunity to swing by the theater and buy a pair of tickets (the box office is open weird hours, but typically from noon on a day of a show, and most days are show days). When I asked about buying tickets for the Buckingham show, though, the clerk said he couldn't see me any.

"What? You're sold out?" I asked, disappointed.

"No, I mean I can't actually sell you any. You have to buy them through Ticketmaster."

I glared at him, "I don't want to buy them through Ticketmaster--if I buy them through Ticketmaster, I have to pay an extra $10 per ticket, and even on a $60 ticket, that's a hefty extra markup."

"It's not that I don't want to sell them to you," he said. "I can't. We don't have any here. I've been working here for five years, and this is the first show we couldn't sell tickets at the door."

As I stormed away from the window, I marked that here is yet again another example of why I don't buy from Ticketmaster. Not only do they take money away from the consumer for a very limited convenience, they take money away from the venue and, in the end, do no real service for the artist. It's a nice gig if you can get it, being the middleman who can skim money off of everyone.

But it's also the reason why I won't see Lindsey Buckingham next month.

When I blog...

engelcox — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 00:07:35 GMT

I blog at http://www.engel-cox.org