Danger Mouse

Music review: Danger Mouse conquers “Rome” with Jack White and Norah Jones

By The Burg Staff on May. 25, 2011
By Matt Ashare

It’s remarkably rare, if not entirely unprecedented, for a producer to get top billing on an album. After all, Sir George Martin may have been the brains behind the board when the Beatles entered the studio in 1966, but you won’t find him mentioned anywhere on the cover of the album that emerged from those sessions — Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Then again, Brian Joseph Burton, the artist known as Danger Mouse, is anything but your average producer. This past February, he won the “Best Producer” Grammy for his work on not one, not two, but three discs: the Black Keys’ gutbucket bluesy Brothers; the avant-indie collaboration Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse Present Dark Night of the Soul; and the self-titled alterna-pop debut by Broken Bells, a project Burton formed with the Shins’ frontman, James Mercer.
     Burton began producing and remixing back in ‘98, yet it wasn’t until he shocked the music world with the black-marketed The Grey Album in 2004 that the Danger Mouse franchise really took off. A bold, brilliant, and entirely illicit remix that took the naked vocal tracks from Jay-Z’s The Black Album and artfully set them to samples from the Beatles’ “White Album,” The Grey Album — initially recorded just “for friends” — quickly found its way online as a free download, where it went viral before anyone was applying epidemiological jargon to the Internet. It also popularized the DJ genre known as “mash-ups,” adding quite a bit of fuel to the already raging firestorm of controversy over the issue of “fair usage.” (Remember, this was long before you could legally download anything from the Beatles catalog, anywhere, much less the entire “White Album.”)
     Burton likely could have made a mint as a mash-up specialist, but he had bigger plans. Much bigger. A voracious omnivore with exquisite taste, he’s spent the last seven years racking up too many credits for me to list here, while blurring to the point of near irrelevance the distinction between “producer” and “artist.” With Damon Albarn, he helped perfect the pomo pop of the “virtual” band Gorillaz on 2005’s Demon Days, and followed-up with the ex-Blur frontman on The Good, the Bad & the Queen in ‘07. He partnered with rapper MF Doom as Dangerdoom in 2005 for the sampledelic The Mouse & the Mask, then went on to delve into more soulful hip-hop with Goodie Mob emcee Cee Lo Green as Gnarls Barkley in 2008. Let’s just say it’s no surprise Paste Magazine named Danger Mouse “Producer of the Decade” in 2009.
     The latest Danger Mouse foray took Burton all the way to Italy, where, sans samplers, he joined forces with Italian composer Daniele Luppi to create a vintage homage to the spaghetti western scores of Ennio Morricone and his lesser-known contemporaries. Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi Present: Rome was six years in the making (please, no jokes about Rome not being built in a day), in part because Burton and Luppi went to great lengths to track down the original orchestra and choir members from soundtracks to films like the 1966 Clint Eastwood classic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
     But Burton’s real masterstroke was recruiting ex-White Stripes frontman Jack White and sultry songstress Norah Jones to lay down vocals on six of the disc’s tracks. Their voices intertwine with sensual allure on the gorgeously mournful “The Rose With a Broken Neck,” lending dark mystery to simple lyrics like “A plow on the farm/A train on the track/The tracks on my arm/The train in a wreck.” Jones, for her part, hasn’t sounded as disarmingly seductive since her debut as she does against the undulating sway of guitars and strings of “Season’s Trees.” And White’s bluesy swagger animates the spare, acoustic “Two Against One.”
     Without Jones and White, Rome might have still succeeded as a faux soundtrack to a non-existent film. But the six non-instrumental tracks create a compelling EP within an album that would otherwise have merely been a vanity project as genre exercise. And that’s just not how Danger Mouse rolls.
Contact Matt at mattattheburg@gmail.com with tips about any local and/or regional music events.

Josh Ritter

The politics of songwriting

Just Josh Ritter

By MATT ASHARE  |  April 28, 2006

Back in February, former Somerville resident Josh Ritter was in town to give some old friends a peek at his then forthcoming V2 debut The Animal Years at Studio One Guitars. He captured the chatting crowd’s attention by opening with a song so quiet, you could hear the clink of wine bottles — just his fragile voice buoyed by a couple of plucked guitar strings. It worked: the crowd was his, as he upped the intensity and introduced songs that transcended folky introspection to tackle thorny political issues about war and religion. 

     Over lunch at the B-Side Lounge, a low-key Ritter, who recently bought a house not far from where he grew up in rural Idaho, was again in soft voice as he described his “need to get away . . . The distractions of traveling become inhibiting. I need a place where I can be just working on my stuff . . . ”

      It’s been a while since he had a place to call home. He won’t even get to spend time in his new one until June. Until then, promoting the new album is the priority — he’ll headline Avalon this Saturday as part of a national tour.

      If there’s a normal route to success, then Ritter missed it. He was temping, commuting from Providence to Boston to play small rooms like the Kirkland, Passim, and the now defunct Kendall when the Irish rock band the Frames caught him at an open-mic night. “I had made a record called Golden Age of Radio around 2000, and two years later I was playing at the Kendall when they showed up. They saw me do two songs and invited me over to our Ireland. I was like, ‘Who are these jokers?’ But I didn’t have anything to lose. So I flew to Ireland. Suddenly I was playing to three or four hundred people and selling my CDs. That’s when I realized this was something I could really do.

      “I went back to Ireland more and more. Any money I made I’d use to keep from temping for as long as possible. I started touring the States and then, in late 2003, the UK. But it all grew out of Ireland.”

      Initially pegged as a singer-songwriter in the alt-country vein, Ritter now feels conflicted about the label. It was hearing Johnny Cash and then Dylan’s Nashville Skyline that inspired him to start writing songs. But he feels, as he puts it, “a responsibility to push himself and to push his audience.” After hearing Modest Mouse’s 2000 album The Moon & Antarctica (Sony), he retained the disc’s producer, Brian Deck. “They made a rock record that didn’t sound like a rock record. I wanted something like that, not a boring confessional record about relationships.”

      The Animal Years isn’t a huge departure, but it’s his most complete artistic statement yet — an often dark yet passionate collection of songs that seems to take cues from the storyteller Springsteen of Devils & Dust. “I got away from the guitar and played more keyboards. And I pushed myself to write what really mattered to me — songs that made me feel better about the way this country is. I don’t want to tell people what to think. There’s too much of that bullshit. The reason to believe in anything — a country or music or a religion — is that it has the potential to be great. But when you abdicate the responsibility to try to be great, the depths to which you can go are unfathomable.”

Read more: http://thephoenix.com/boston/music/10463-politics-of-songwriting/#ixzz1NEvEN5jM

Jolie Holland's new single

Gonna take me a couple of weeks for me to decipher the lyrics, but the new single from songstress Jolie Holland sounds pretty damn good. The full disc, Pint of Blood, is due on Anti- on June 28. . . This track's called "Gold and Yellow" for reasons that, at least for now, elude me. . . http://soundcloud.com/antirecords/jolie-holland-gold-and-yellow

FLEET FOXES

Music review: The rousing retro-folk of Fleet Foxes’ Helplessness Blues

By The Burg Staff on May. 18, 2011
By Matt Ashare

For all the grousing and grimacing over the deleterious impact digital technology has had on the music industry (i.e., on major music labels), the same cannot be said for the effect it’s had on music itself. Beginning with the introduction of CDs in the late ’80s, the move to digital precipitated a veritable deluge of hard-to-find, out-of-print, and just plain obscure releases by a bevy of odd artists whose work is now not much harder to find online than the latest Lady Gaga remix.
     In fact, over the past dozen years, the rediscovery of lost recordings by late-’60s/early-’70s singer-songwriters like Vashti Bunyan, Judee Sill, and Jeff Buckley’s father Tim Buckley, has helped catalyze the emergence of the so-called “freak-folk” movement, a loosely bound underground that includes Baltimore’s Animal Collective and all its various spin-offs, Detroit singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens, and the California songstress Joanna Newsom. (Incidentally, I prefer the designation “avant-folk,” given the often experimental nature of “freak-folk,” but apparently I’ve been out-voted.)
     Until now, this indie offshoot hasn’t produced a true Billboard-charting breakthrough on par with the Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs or even the Decemberists’ more recent The King Is Dead. But with Fleet Foxes gearing up for an American and European tour to support their new Helplessness Blues, that may soon change, in part because the Seattle-via-Portland sixsome have crafted an album that, even at its most extreme, is only guardedly avant.
It was a rich knowledge of folk-rock history, reflected in the fingerpicked guitars, flawless vocal harmonizing, and hints of Harvest-era Neil Young on Fleet Foxes, the band’s hushed 2008 full-length debut, that gained the group acceptance among freak folkies and led to singer-guitarist Robin Pecknold touring with Joanna Newsom in 2009.
     That jaunt kickstarted Pecknold’s songwriting for Helplessness Blues, and may explain why, despite the addition of a crafty sixth member — multi-instrumentalist Morgan Henderson — much of the album retains the pastoral, stripped-down sensibility of Fleet Foxes, particularly the muted “Blue Spotted Tail,” with its single acoustic guitar and close-mic’ed vocal track, and the more strongly sung and strummed, drum-less album closer “Someone You’d Admire.” But Henderson’s impact on a group that includes guitarist Skyler Skjelset, drummer Josh Tillman, bassist Christian Wargo, and keyboardist Casey Wescott, offers Pecknold the opportunity to broaden Fleet Foxes’ folk-rock palette, and he takes full advantage.
     Acoustic guitars still dominate, and those sterling, sometimes choir-like harmonies that at various times bring to mind Crosby, Stills and Nash (the pounding opener “Battery Kinzie”) and early Simon & Garfunkel (the airy epic “The Plains/Bitter Dancer”) remain central to Fleet Foxes’ appeal. Yet a vaguely Eastern-sounding violin accents the swooning “Bedouin Dress,” hammered dulcimer makes an appearance in the fast-picked “The Cascades,” and pedal steel slides accentuate the comfortable countrified clutter of “Grown Ocean.”
     Pecknold can occasionally be too preciously poetic for my tastes — “I slept through July while you made lines in the heather” (“Lorelai”) is a bit much. But his growing command of folk idioms serves him well, especially on the disc’s centerpiece, the yearning, rousing title track “Helplessness Blues,” a sprawling strum-along number with lyrics that recall early Dylan. “And now after some thinking,” he sings, “I’d rather be a functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me.” Don’t look now, Robin, but you already are.http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_the_rousing_retro-folk_of_fleet_foxes_helplessness_blues
Ashare, a freelance writer living in Lynchburg, is a former music editor for the Boston Phoenix.

Okkervil River. . . Pretension is in. Being a fucking idiot is, apparently , out. . .

 Music review: Okkervil River deliver an indie magnum opus

Okkervill River, I Am Very Far (Jagjaguar)
The Burg Staff on May. 11, 2011
By Matt Ashare

Rock songs that deal with the trials and tribulations of being in a rock band are a tricky business. I mean, do we really need any more songs about how hard life on the road is? And does anyone who works a 9-to-5 job really care that getting paid to play can have an adverse effect on the artistic temperament? Then again, we tend to have a certain fascination with the human trainwrecks who populate “reality” TV franchises like MTV’s “Celebrity Rehab,” and the rise/fall/redemption storylines that kept VH-1’s “Behind the Music” in business for so many years.
     Will Sheff, the main brain behind the Austin-based band Okkervil River, expertly tapped into the allure of the troubled artist on 2005’s “Black Sheep Boy,” an album loosely based on ’60s folk singer Tim Harden’s struggles with heroin addiction — a battle he finally lost when he overdosed in 1980.
     Sheff’s way with words, his storyteller’s eye for detail, and his moody demeanor all helped elevate him to a top spot among indie rock’s literati (see Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes, and Win Butler of the Arcade Fire). And “Black Sheep Boy” not only inspired a sequel — the 2005 EP “Black Sheep Boy Appendix” — it also led Sheff to mine the lives of other tragically flawed artists, including the poet John Berryman (suicide, 1972) in “John Allyn Smith Sails,” and an obscure, probably schizophrenic glam-rocker Jobriath (AIDS, 1983) in “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Hotel Chelsea, 1979” (both from the 2007 disc “The Stand Ins”).
     So, yeah, it would be entirely fair to say that Sheff has rarely, if ever, shown any fear in the face of pretension. And he’s never wavered from the grand gesture, a tendency he exploits to its fullest on Okkervil River’s new “I Am Very Far.” (BTW: the band’s named for a short story by the Russian writer Tatyana Tolstoya.)
    There’s no overarching theme or concept uniting the 11 tracks on “I Am Very Far,” unless you count Sheff’s unwaveringly grim worldview. A dark shadow lies over the thump of “The Valley,” a wordy epic that finds a characteristically poetic Sheff watching “The sun switching in the sky off and on/While a friend stands bleeding on a late summer lawn/A slicked back bloody black gun shot to the head/He has fallen in the valley of the rock and roll dead.”
     For someone who’s always seemed more than a little suspicious of music industry machinations, Sheff’s got Okkervil River sounding suspiciously like Grammy winners the Arcade Fire on the neo-new wave “Pirates,” where he cryptically croons about “a murderess/Moved by writing a song/We agreed that it was wrong/And to believe in it,” and even more so on the urgent, orchestral “Rider,” a track filled with apocalyptic visions like “Over the ruins like we’re staggering apes/What we get is what we take/In a split open place where a man can get kinged/In a palace of panic and flames.”
     Sheff, who produced the disc, even does Win Butler’s two-drummers trick one better: “Rider” and the plaintively pounding “Wake and Be Fine” are fully stocked with two pianists, two bassists, seven guitarists, and, yes, two drummers.
     For all its arty extravagances — along with tympani, tuba, and bassoon, Sheff employs the found sounds of crashing cabinets, unreeling duct tape, and, on “Pirates,” a fast-forwarding cassette tape — “I Am Very Far” manages to stay within the bounds of indie-rock accessibility a la the aforementioned Arcade Fire and Decemberists. If that means Sheff may soon be dealing with some of the same pressures that ultimately undermined Tim Harden’s career, at least it’s a subject he’s studied well. http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_okkervil_river_deliver_an_indie_magnum_opus
Ashare, a freelance writer living in Lynchburg who teaches journalism at Randolph College, is the former music editor for the Boston Phoenix, the former reviews editor for CJJ New Music Monthly, and a fan of music of other cultural emissions.

Beastie Boys Bring Back the Rap on “Hot Sauce Committee Party Two”

Music review: Beastie Boys Bring Back the Rap on “Hot Sauce Committee Party Two”

By The Burg Staff on May. 04, 2011
By Matt Ashare

The career length for most rappers isn’t much longer than the wingspan of your average hummingbird. It’s not just that hip-hop tends to be a young man’s game: it’s that the biggest emcees begin diversifying their portfolios early on, moving into film and TV like Ice T and Ice Cube, opening restaurants and creating clothing lines like Diddy. Before too long, rapping becomes a secondary or even tertiary concern.
     Given hip-hop’s penchant for bravado, and the ginormous egos it tends to breed, the odds a rap duo or group will stay intact for more than a couple of Congressional terms are even slimmer. So even if you ignore all of their accomplishments — and up to the release this week of the new “Hot Sauce Committee Part Two” there have been many — the mere fact that Beastie Boys, a trio who stumbled into hip-hop almost three decades ago after cutting their teeth in NYC’s punk scene, are still a functioning musical unit goes beyond mere anomaly. That they’ve managed to remain relevant since the first bratty stirrings of the now classic 1983 single “Cookie Puss” is just plain freaky.
     Of course, I’ve got my theories. (After all, that’s what I’m here for, right?) Maybe they’ve just been super lucky. But Beastie Boys have scored a veritable hat-trick when it’s come to capturing cultural zeitgeist in a bottle. With their 1986 chart-topper “Licensed to Ill” they joined Run DMC in finding that sweet spot between rap and hard rock that brought hip-hop its first mainstream success. Then, on its follow-up, 1989’s “Paul’s Boutique,” they hooked up with future Beck producers the Dust Brothers, and found themselves on the cutting edge of pomo sampling collage, a kind of hip-hop-meets-musique concrete aesthetic that presaged contemporary electronica. Almost 10 years later, rather than just holding steady, they took another major left-hand turn, jettisoning samples for straight up old-school-style hip-hoppery with muscular Mix Master Mike working two vinyl turntables while Mike D, MCA, and Ad-Rock deployed their rhyming skills. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before the hip-hop DJ — all but an anachronism when “Hello Nasty” hit the racks in 1998 — and the art of turntablism was undergoing a major revival in the capable hands of masters like DJ Shadow.
     That’s not luck — it’s what I’d call “good taste” coupled with a genuine passion for the genre. Beastie Boys have always been into hip-hop more as style — a mode of expression, if you’ll excuse my pretension — than lifestyle. That’s one reason the Beasties never played much of a role in rap’s notorious East Coast/West Coast rivalry and you just never hear about any of them pulling an Eminem and getting arrested for guns or drugs. Not saying they’re choir boys, but the Beasties earned their stripes in the studio, not on the streets.
     Still, when the trio returned to their original positions (bass, drums, and guitar for MCA, Mike D, and Ad-Rock respectively) on 2007’s “The Mix-Up,” an all-instrumental romp through everything from fatback funk to noisy punk, I thought they were done with hip-hop — that they were ready to ride out their career emceeing larger concerns from the wings of their Tibetan Freedom Concerts. I was wrong. There may be extra-hip-hop excursions on “Hot Sauce,” but the Beasties are fully back to rapping in 2011. “Yes here we go again give you more nothing lesser/Back on the mic it’s the anti-depressor,” boasts Ad-Rock in his now vintage whine (it’s still a bratty varietal) on the disc’s opener, “Make Some Noise,” a wah-wah-organ funk-fueled affair that finds Mike D unabashedly repeating the hook from the Beastie classic “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (to Party!)” and Ad-Rock happily dating himself by referencing Ted Danson and dropping this giddy rhyme: “Leggo my Eggo while I flex my ego/Sip on prosecco dressed up in a tuxedo.”
     Too soon to tell whether the Beasties have again captured the zeitgeist. But the self-consciously stripped-down, lo-fi production of “Hot Sauce” suggests the Boys have been getting down with the underground — what the kids call indie-hip-hop. And the anything-goes infectiousness with which they incorporate everything from live instrumentation (metallic guitars), sci-fi samples, and DJ scratching on a track like “Say It,” along with the fearlessness with which they delve into reggae with guest singer Santigold on “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win,” return to punk-rocking out on “Lee Majors Come Again,” and indulge in some sensual instrumental dub on “Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament,” may just portend the arrival of the global genre-hopping hip-hop band.
     Of course, as long as the Beasties are still with us, keeping their ears to the ground and their wordifying mouths on overdrive, we’ve got at least one trio who are practicing masters of the form. http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_beastie_boys_bring_back_the_rap_on_hot_sauce_committee_pa
Ashare, a freelance writer based in Lynchburg, is a former music editor for The Boston Phoenix