Greetings, gentle earthlings (and other music-loving life forms),
‘Tis your friendly neighborhood Immerglück checking in-
At long last, back again whether you wanted it or not, another magnum opus of long winded opinions regarding your faithful scribe’s “best in show” for 2005. I know we’re already ankle deep into 2006, but those who don’t study the past are doomed to repeat it. (Really people, can we possibly withstand another Ashlee Simpson?!)
Let the games begin…
2005 Round Up
Top 10 Albums 2005
No foolin’ fellas, better run for the hills, this girl ain’t playin’… She’s horny, hungover, she’s got a bad case of the blues and its all your fault.
I’ve been toying with her records for a while now, but this sweltering live set really turns the trick. Failed love, hot alcoholic sex, unrequited lust, Viet Nam vets hooked on smack, real live bleeding fingers, confessional puking in the bathroom – this tragically romantic dive-bar dweller has no qualms about shredding her (amazing) voice and spilling her guts out in front of you; her tight but loose heartbreaker of a band (finally distilled down to an economic flexible quartet) takes no prisoners!
As I listened to this album over and over again on a long rainy drive between Richmond VA and NYC last summer, I was cruelly reminded that the only time I’ve felt uncomfortable following someone on stage was when Counting Crows had to play after Lucinda at a festival in Memphis a couple of years ago. I watched in horror while her band appeared to suspend a hypno blues groove a few inches above the stage for what seemed like an eternity while Lucinda put herself (and the audience) in a tequila induced trance…
“We got the mojo workin’ tonight!”
No shit…
Anyone who thought that all he had left in him were house of wax “Stairway To Heaven” regurgitations with his surviving ex-bandmates gets it right back in the face with this instant Berber rock classic. “There but for the grace of Allah go I”, says Robert, and does a runner down to North Africa with his latest gang of celestially equipped musicians. The old conjurer mines gold in the Atlas mountains and finds the fountain of youth the old fashioned way – tapping directly in to his own contagious love and wonder for the art, craft and magick of minting fresh music.
Now, what’s Jimmy Page done for me lately? Certainly nothing THIS brazen!
As certain as taxes and death: a new year, a new lineup change, a new killer Fall record. Somewhere back in the early 90s Mark E. Smith, acerbic frontispiece for this undying Manchester institution, must have metamorphosed into Kafka’s giant cockroach. It seems nothing short of complete and utter nuclear holocaust will make this guy lay his long-suffering band to rest (or keep him from throwing yet another top notch album on the ever growing slagheap of great Fall albums). Actually, come to think of it, as the smoke clears and any remaining trace of civilization is buried under radioactive ash, I’m sure Mr. Smith will still be there standing on top a pile yelling “I told you so-ahh!!” through a megaphone…
Roc! Roc! Roc!
They just keep coming with the goods, batting 5 for 5 near as I can tell. Despite Mr. White’s temporary lapse into headline grabbing carousels with lame Hollywood super starlets, he emerges here with his singular vision and religious/sexual turmoil intact; Meg continues to be the funnest/foxiest drum mauler going. Die-hard “I was there before you” fans complain about the abundance of keyboards, marimbas and general deviation from the distorto duo format they’re known for. I say this thing slams, and “My Doorbell” is the best hit single Michael Jackson hasn’t had in 25 years…
Was this gem really recorded in a downtown Manhattan studio? Sounds like it was birthed in a 1 room shack on the Mississippi delta, mid 19th century (or was that mid 24th century?!)
This unabashed iconoclast of the guitar gets medieval on your ass with a handful of blues classics and a brace of his own “devils round the corner” originals with nothing but his unadorned inimitable fractured guitar and voice. All the cerebral quantum mechanics of Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic music system (from whence Ulmer hath been spawned) can’t keep the man’s “creature from the black lagoon” feet out of the earthy Mississippi mud. I’ve always got time for this guy.
It seems there DOES appear to be life after life…
The guitars rock like they’ve been playing together for 30 years (literally). The singer uses a variety of voices and sneers to get you to raise some hell and jump into bed with him (again). The drummer sounds like he’s playing for his life (literally). The songs are written like they mean it, maaaaann! This combo puts bands 1/3 it’s age to shame (literally).
I understand they’ve made a number of other recordings worth checking out as well…
I gotta admit, the girl seriously blind-sided me with this one…it’s not like I’ve been waiting around these past 15 years for the next Kate Bush album. I stopped paying attention after “Hounds Of Love”, and that was waaay back in 1985!? The flurry of pre-release hype on “Aerial” certainly didn’t bode well: “renaissance” guitars? Songs about house keeping? A cd-long song cycle about a day in the life with her husband and son? Labored over in seclusion for years with digital tweezers (and, no doubt, the usual array of forbidden 80s keyboards)?! Sorry honey, but my tastes as of late have been running more towards free jazz, The Stooges, and blues music from the 30s…
Still, something compelled me to pull it off the rack at my local and take it home for perusal (I am an omnivore, after all). Go figure, but to my infinite surprise, this thing turns out to be a flat out masterpiece!?! After the first listen-thru I suspiciously allowed that yes, her voice still sounds surprisingly outstanding, and that she always DID have a way with the coiling synth bass line. By the third time through I was begging for mercy and forgiveness… This musical witch manages to turn the dull act of doing laundry into a supernatural event, she mesmerizes by singing strings of numbers (as the chorus of the killer reverie “Pi”), every one of her haunting melodies “puts on the hex”, and the sympathetic playing throughout is sublime (notably Peter Erskine, late of Weather Report, on drums). And yes, the “domestic bliss song cycle” is one of the better things she’s done. Goddamn my ears, in a stretched and strange career, I think it might just be her best album!? (so far, that is…I WILL be waiting for the next one, even if it takes another 15 years).
When the going gets weird, the weird make records…
Bearded pixie hermaphrodite makes good on promise as “most interesting young upstart to keep an eye on” and tops last years’ double whammy with this psyche-folk tour de force. I failed to secure a pipeful of the banana peel/oregano mix Hollywood’s disaffected hipster youth were smoking in the parking lot at the all-ages show I attended in support of this album, but no worries, Devendra and his band of poly-sexual freaks got me high as a kite with their subtle and gripping blend of glitter tropicalia and psychotropic folk rot. A word to the wise – continue to watch this space.
Why do I always feel like I’m in the set piece of a Sam Peckinpah flick when I hang out with Johnny? Must be that “noble outlaw” rocker code that runs through everything he does. Maybe it’s the hard time spent fighting it out in “shoot ‘em up” Bakersfield honky tonks; or was it the way he traded eyeliner secrets with me just before ripping a “Hooplesque” alley-fight guitar solo last time we were in the studio together? Couldn’t say. I do know that with “Palmhenge” my sometime colleague, on a busman’s holiday from main band Cracker, takes a star turn and hatches a fully formed paean to Southern Californian fringe dwellers and their lost dreams amidst all the glitz and promise - something our man “Lonesome Johnny” knows a thing or two about. Soulful, engrossing…the boy’s done me real proud here, and remains a 6-string gunslinger I’m always stoked to ride alongside.
The kidz ARE alright! With an apparent complete disregard for anything resembling concessions to the contemporary pop culture landscape, this unruly aggregate of Clearasil drenched prog-punks come on like a swarm of toxic alien locusts. “Frances The Mute” aspires to be a dense impenetrable concept album about WHAT(?) I don’t know (some nightmarish post mescaline death-wish hallucination, maybe…), musically embracing with impossibly unlikely scope everything from The Dead Kennedys to The Mahavishnu Orchestra (!?). Whatever this challenging band lacks in technical ability they more than make up for with their heroically preposterous and impassioned reach.
Late season live release “Scab Dates” pretty much captures the earth shaking show I saw over the summer where 8000+ anti-MTV generation high schoolers and college freshman were kept in frenzied rapture for close to three hours while “The Volta” nearly decapitated the entire throng with their audacious mind fuck of a sonic onslaught… Screw “American Idol”; Dig the new breed!!
Raw, exposed, and almost entirely off the cuff, guitarist extraordinaire Mr. Thompson dispenses with vocals and his usual (albeit superior) bittersweet songwriting and, armed with a few skeletal themes, improvises his best effort since I can remember. With the help of a small group of empathetic musicians (corralled by stalwart avant gardist Henry Kaiser), the living legend is let loose and encouraged to do what he does best – shut his eyes, shut his mouth, and transport himself (and you) into the mystic with endless variation on the instrument he mastered long ago; I mean, really - throw his guitar in a drop-D tuning, give him a modal 2 chord vamp, and no one (and I mean NO ONE) can touch him! This one’s been a long time coming. (The movie, directed by cinema genius Werner Herzog, is excellent as well…)
Did Moby Grape sound this good? I don’t know, but this kind of lunacy could only have come from the SF bay area. My pal Greg Loiacono (from Nor Cal’s best kept secret, Mother Hips) indulges his charmingly insane muse with a dynamite new trio (featuring multi instrumentalist mega maniac Paul Hoaglin, also from the Hips, and one time Cake drummer par excellence Todd Roper) and comes up with a hilariously brilliant shot of Golden State psychedelia. Barbary coast music hall mixes with hopped up kinky garage gronk and ornate folk miniatures to unpredictably rocking effect. Bearing many a repeated listen, this album is a prime example of why it’s a good idea to drink the funny water that everybody knows has been running through the pipes around San Francisco for a long time now.
Fave Reissues
Francophile kosmonauts rejoice! 3 Cds + DVD of rare singles and B-sides spanning the ongoing career of this sexy bi-lingual trance pop collective. With the song selection sequenced out of chronological order, a full picture of this visionary band appears, all grinding Velvet Underground/white noise drone banging up against easy listening super elastic bubble plastic confection like a potent neon absinthe buzz. If the playfully driving effervescent groove of the tracks doesn’t get you, then the brilliant and deceptively naive melodies of hypnotic singer Laetitia Sadier are bound to rope you in…
Poor lads…always outta step with the times. Scorned and reviled in their hometown of San Francisco at the height of Haight Ashbury hippiedom for wearing outdated matching suits and aping the early squeaky-clean Beatles, while their more popular peers formed communes, went native and jammed cosmic on “Dark Star” (or posed anti-establishment with airwave hits like “Volunteers”). These hopelessly unhip fan boys soon decamped in shame to England and quietly set off the not-so-heralded back-to-roots pub rock revolution!? A couple of garage classics (“Teenage Head”, “Slow Death”), a bonafide near-hit pop masterpiece (“Shake Some Action”) and a handful of excellent “direct-to-cut-out-bin” albums pretty much brings us to this sludgy shipwreck of a record from 1980. The originals sound like bizzaro outtakes from a mid-period Stones album, they’re STILL(?) covering the early Beatles (and The Byrds), but gawd, I love ‘em!! I don’t know why, but this record just hits me right (actually, I cherish the entire “oeuvre”, if you must know). Terminally regarded as a B-level band, but really, in garage-rock parlance, what’s more Rock N Roll than THAT?
“This heaven gives me migraine”? I’ll say! It’s shocking how their anti-capitalist sentiments and Orwellian media dread ring as true now as they did in 1979, when this dirty bomb of an album was originally released. Within 10 bars of blistering opener “Ether”, every trendy post punk revival band to appear out of London or Williamsburg over the last 5 years claiming lineage to the Gang gets pitifully laid to waste. Ain’t nuthin’ like the real thing, baby! Marxist diatribe never sounded so danceable; Andy Gill cracks your skull and reinvents the electric guitar with his much imitated/never duplicated shattered glass solid-state fragment theory. One of the most startling debut albums of all time, and one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen.
In which the Queen of Soul (at the behest of crossover hungry record company) descends on fabled acid rock ballroom for three historic nights in 1971 to catch requisite stoned out audience unawares with her high-octane gospel gumbo, crack band of chitlin-circuit veterans (led by the mighty King Curtis) in tow (miracle drummer Bernard Purdie nearly steals the show!). Aretha got a hit album out of the recordings, as did King Curtis with his opening set, but this godsend of a 4 CD deluxe reissue contains every note played over the three-night stand, and the buried treasure is nothing short of revelatory! There are SO many high points, but if the spontaneous Baptist explosion at the end of opening night’s amazing “Dr. Feelgood” doesn’t make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, you better check your pulse and make sure you’re not dead. Rest assured, the poor hippies never knew what hit ‘em…
Celebrating the release of “Rock Bottom”, his 1st album after tragically falling out a window and rendering himself paralyzed from the waist down(!?), Soft Machine founder and unrepentant musical adventurer Wyatt delivers a triumphant scorcher of a show, against all odds, from the confines of a wheelchair. With a cast of friends and underground stars (Mike Oldfield, Fred Frith, Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, Ivor Cutler, to name a few) lending an expert hand, Wyatt’s unique blend of jazz, rock, pataphysical wordplay and tone poem becomes a living thing, wafting over the audience like a rainy day cloud of pastel smoke. And that voice, good Christ, that voice…Arguably one of the finest and individual singers to emerge from the British Isles. Here’s why.
Oft bootlegged, now finally receiving a long overdue proper release. Amen!
I gave a copy of this mini compendium to wholesome Jim Bogios ‘round Xmas time. He called me from his car a few days later, freaked out in a cold sweat panic, pulled over on the side of the road – said he’d almost just had a fatal accident cuz the music on this creepy CD scared the bejeezus out of him while he drove alone…Hey, I can’t hardly blame the boy, as “Crime And Dissonance” mercilessly collects rare horrordelic items from the Italian master’s soundtracks for cult European psycho sexual slasher and hyper violent crime flix. You might not want to operate heavy machinery while listening, either…
A woman’s desperate disembodied voice seems to have painful orgasms while a piano slowly gets taken apart in the background; a faux Roman jazz funk combo, most likely drowning in cologne and hair gel, simulates psyche rock improv, complete with wah wah abusing guitarist’s liquefied brains dripping out his left ear; a small chamber orchestra plays eerie dissonance while a psychopath whistles a child’s melody…
Ahhhhh, the delights are abundant!
Everything you wanted to know about the wonderful and frightening world of The Fall but were afraid to ask…26 years worth of the band cooking it up quick on the BBC for their #1 champion. Unfolding like an alternate Fall history, the 6 CDs cover every period of the hectic band’s career, from their tattered Salford beginnings right through to their latest brilliant release. As John Peel himself described their internal machinations, “always different, always the same”. Beefheart covers, improvised scree, premiere versions of songs that never appeared on record, definitive versions of songs that did…all found herein, indelibly colored by leader Mark E. Smith’s obvious maniacal relish for the bonzai “live in the studio” radio spot. Exhaustive! Amazing! Recommended.
Who’s the guru and who’s the student? Hard to tell, but it IS a Monk gig after all. The ever-searching Coltrane sure has a way with the maestro’s beatnik cubist nursery rhymes, though, immersing himself totally in Monk’s strange world for a season of N.Y. shows in 1958 (between stints with Miles Davis). Still, the real attraction has to be the backwards algebra Thelonious seems to employ while “comping” under Coltrane’s flights, not to mention his own mind-warp solos. An extremely rare snapshot of these two titans together, and like almost everything either of them ever did, utterly astonishing and essential listening!
Back in the day, when I was but a wee lad, I couldn’t make heads nor tails outta this shit (a few tracks surfaced on 1971’s difficult “Live Evil”). It sounded like leaking battery acid to me, corrosive and impenetrable. Still sounds that way today, too, only difference being it’s kinda ALL I want to listen to anymore…
Once again, an expansive boxset from Columbia, unearthing a truckload of unheard recordings and reframing the career of the 20th century’s most panoramic musician. This time out, 6 cds cover a 4-night stand at a DC nightclub, a snapshot of our hero in a state of perpetual transition. Barely a year after the release of his flashpoint “Bitches Brew”, yet he’s already a million miles away. Hear Miles walk on hot coals while his band of young acolytes negotiate the rapids of the funk infused electric pygmy noise they’re inventing every night, unfazed by the perplexed critics left in the dust screaming “Sell out!”
Wynton Marsalis (and Ken Burns) can’t deal; people like me continue to mull in awe over this terrifying beautiful racket.
Special bonus: on Miles’ request, John McLaughlin joins the group for the last night to blowtorch what remains of the smoldering wallpaper with his fabulously out of tune, gloriously molten guitar…
No one quite does “UGLY” like this inscrutable ensemble…
The only prog rock band to survive the “cultural cleansing” of Punk year zero, Van Der Graff enjoyed being name checked by Johnny Rotten and Mark E. Smith while contemporaries like Yes and (lablemates?!) Genesis lay in smoking bewildered heaps. Their entire magnificently mystifying catalog was remastered and reissued last year, and I’d recommend it all to anyone with intrepid ears. The above album is singled out for its inclusion of the outrageous “White Hammer”- singer extraordinaire Peter Hamill’s existential examination of occult oppression beginning with the 15th century Inquisition (!?) and containing the immortal opening line, “In the year 1486 the Malleus first appeared/designed to kill all witchcraft and end the papal fears…” “Love Me Do” it ain’t!
C’mon, I dare ya… GET WITH IT!!
I swear, there really WAS something about The Fillmore West…
4 auspicious nights in ’69 recorded in their entirety, and including the bulk of the band’s era-defining watershed opus “Live Dead”. Yes, amongst the embarrassment of riches, you’ll find the fabulously lysergic “Dark Star” that bent a few 100,000 minds (mine included, I’m afraid…) and permanently elevated Jerry Garcia to visionary guitar avatar status; the real treat however is hearing the 3 other previously unheard stabs they make at the classic, each unique and amazing in their own way. With Garcia at the top of his game, these shows marked the 3 year culmination of the cod baroque psychedelia and epic interstellar excursions they’d been trading in that soon made way for the cosmic olde west songcraft of their early 70’s period. (Do I sound like a basket case yet?) What can I say? I grew up to ‘em…(The limited edition 10 CD box, for maniacs like myself only, sold out immediately upon release. A 3 CD reduction is available at a Virgin Megastore near you…)
What I Was Really Listening To
I’ve cleared rooms with this stuff. I’ve also had deeply felt inspiring musical experiences listening to this prime icon of the late 60s free jazz movement. Excessive to some, maybe; this 9 CD box, with it’s incomparably devotional packaging, paints a portrait of a man unable to march to anything but the sound of his own drummer, regardless of audience/peer approval, or lack thereof (hey, Coltrane dug him…). It blares, it yearns, it’s got a sense of humor, but above all, the joyous cacophony Ayler stirs up challenges and rejuvenates. Additional use: just when you thought you were completely sick of music, a good blast of this will definitely steam-clean your brain!
I went fanatical on this West African one-chord genius last year. Who knew the ghost of John Lee Hooker lived in Mali? Claiming to commune with the spirits, the endlessly listenable Farka Toure remains the unsurpassed master of the Islamic voodoo blues. Careful now, he’ll put a spell on you…
(Bad news – he passed away while I wrote this)
Simple as a quiet backcountry stream, deep as the Milky Way…
Vuh mainspring Florian Fricke’s mournful languid moog and mellotron clusters perfectly capture the beautifully foreboding Amazon rainforest locales and the inevitable descent into madness Klaus Kinski’s megalomaniac conquistador succumbs to in the famous Herzog flick (one of my personal faves). Krautrock at it’s most spiritually emotive.
Ohhh, whatever were they thinking?!? (We could use a big helping of this sort of nonsense right about now!)
The brightest star from Senegal (and possibly all Africa) eschews boundaries both geographic and religio-politic, taking his afro funk pop to Egypt to fuse with traditional Arab and Egyptian orchestras, forging an astounding cross-cultural love song to his chosen Islamic faith, Sufism. Could be THE statement of his long and fabulous career, and should be required reading at the Pentagon. I say get this record immediately, and let yourself be transported to another world – the borderless world in which we actually live…
There’s a reason this quietly possessed blues master had a life sentence for murder lifted, playing and singing his way out of Angola State Penitentiary in 1959. Take a listen to any of his distinctive records and I’m sure you’ll hear why. NONE BETTER, and I can’t for the life of me figure out how he makes his guitar sound like it’s standing up and walking around like a rattling wooden skeleton…
There are literally hundreds of bootlegs chronicling this mammoth band’s live antics, and, though I’m loath to admit it, I have most of them. Trust me, don’t endlessly scour the internet and waste hour upon hour listening to no-fi audience recordings where the sound of the bubbles in the taper’s bong is louder than Bonham’s kick drum (like I have); don’t make seedy deals in the back of an illegal bootleg distributor’s car for a trunkful of Zep contraband (like I did); just take my advice and track down this singular “jewel in the crown” of live Zeppelin shows: St. Louis, and it’s still early in the notoriously ragged ’75 tour. The drug rot’s beginning to set in, but they’re not down for the count yet; Plant masterfully negotiates his already flu-addled voice with a rugged macho je ne sais quois, while Page simply lights himself on fire for your benefit at every turn. Par for the course, to be sure, but the truly exceptional things about this particular show are the psychic interlock of rock’s greatest rhythm section on a peak night, and the “devil may care” extrapolations of underappreciated bassist John Paul Jones (the real hero here!) as he reinvents every tune for himself, as if he’s laughing at some private joke the entire time. This recording also provides one of the only audible examples of Jones’ dazzling bass pedal work (with his feet!?) while he covers the keyboards (best “No Quarter” ever!). Not to be believed! Probably my favorite Zeppelin document. (I know, I know…I’m a goner)
Happy hunting…
Jonathan Segel, incorrigible CVB polymath, pixilates himself and his vocalist collaborator, Meredith Monk grad Dina Emerson, using the computer that’s been attached to his hip for some time now, as well as his usual slew of stringed and keyed instruments. I love Jonathan cuz he’s a fearless musical “go-er”. I love “Radio”, a live-on-the-radio improvisation, cuz it’s a riveting chunk of pleasant noize…
Every once in a while, the original guitar strangler pops up out of nowhere and drops an album to remind everybody, lest we forget, who’s still BOSS!! They definitely broke the mold with this cooler-than-cool axe murderer. “Blackbird”, the outlandish duet with a couple of chirping birds(?), is like nothing I’ve ever heard anyone do on ANY instrument…
An old roots reggae fave of mine from the late 70s. This seminal Rastafarian vocal trio delivers a master class in harmonizing while Earl “Chinna” Smith lets his guitar crawl all over the tracks like an agitated sand crab and Robbie Shakespeare shows exactly why he’s one of the best bass players on the planet, bar none.
Okay, that’s all fer now…race ‘em, trade ‘em, collect ’em, but above all, check ’em out!
Ciao
the one with the bindi
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