JOLIE HOLAND

The slanted enchantments of Jolie Holland's new "Pint of Blood"

By The Burg Staff on Jun. 29, 2011
By Matt Ashare

 Songstress Jolie Holland draws a Pint of Blood

Texas-bred singer-songwriter Jolie Holland has been called a lot of things since her self-released 2003 debut Catulpa — really a bedroom demo — caught the ear of Tom Waits, who nominated it for the Shortlist music prize and helped get her signed to Epitaph’s Anti-imprint, where Waits, Nick Cave, and Neko Case are some of her labelmates. Deconstructed blues, gothic folk, and rootsy Americana are all part of her lexicon. And there’s also something vaguely jazzy about the way she often sings around a melody, like a raven circling in on its prey, soaring with a beauty that’s both devastating and enchanting, gliding from note to note with a natural grace that seems less learned than uncannily congenital.
     Like Waits, Holland is simply too mercurial to pin down neatly. If she were a painter — and she did indeed create the artwork that adorns her new Anti- release Pint of Blood — she might well be considered an “outsider” artist, although she did make small strides toward a kind of slanted and enchanted accessibility when she brought producer/multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily on board for her 2008 album The Living and the Dead.
     Holland’s productive partnership with Ismaily remains intact on Pint of Blood. And the disc’s opening track, the mid-tempo, plaintive, and touchingly twangy “All Those Girls,” creates the immediate impression that they’re picking up right where they left off in 2008, edging ever closer toward the accessible without ironing out too many of Holland’s captivating kinks. Against a country folk backdrop of strummed acoustic guitar, a softly swinging backbeat, and the heavily reverbed distortion of an electric guitar that threatens but never quite delivers discord, Holland’s voice quivers and quakes as if she can’t quite get her mouth around the words. Sounding like a less buttoned down, more adventurous Lucinda Williams, Holland imbues the song’s signature lyric — “I can’t believe you treated me like all those girls/All those sweet girls/Go home to cry/And wonder why” — with a kind of world-weary defiance. She’s certainly mastered Williams’ gift for turning vulnerability into an alluring asset, for bearing emotional scars as a sign of inner strength.
     The disc picks up some steam with the harder-hitting “Remember,” another countrified rocker with a bit more of a bounce to it than “All Those Girls.” Holland sings the first verse so steely sweet that the pleasure she takes in the implicit violence of the song’s narrative is amplified. “It brings a smile to my lips,” she unabashedly admits, “When I think of your fist/Narrowing in on and cracking his ribs.” It’s a track that plays to all of Holland’s considerable talents — her penchant for poetic turns of verse (“Mockingbirds sing at the moon/And the stars fall from the sky/If you don’t catch me when I fall for you/I’m gonna have to remember how to fly”); her uncanny ability to project an aura of toughness even as, in desperation, she croons “Can I stay here ’til dawn?/I don’t know how to get home/My phone is broken and my friends are gone/Can I stay here ’til dawn?”; and the unadulterated, un-pitch-corrected pleasure of her slurred delivery.
     “Remember” is the album’s real knockout punch, and Holland was smart to frontload Pint of Blood with two of her most immediate and affecting songs to date. Like good pick-up lines, they lure listeners into what one might call the more challenging side of Jolie Holland. “Tender Mirror” is an almost painfully spare broken-hearted piano ballad; on the acoustic “June” she says more with her screechy violin than with her softly sung verse. And, yet, there are plenty of other high points here. The heartbreak of the aptly named “Wreckage” (“If disappointment were like a drug/I overdosed again”) is offset by an almost upbeat handclapped rhythm and jauntily strummed acoustic guitar.
      Holland revisits “Littlest Birds,” a song she wrote when she was briefly part of the Canadian folk trio the Be Good Tanyas and included on her first solo disc, and reimagines it as a Rickie Lee Jones-style jazz-pop number. And she closes the album with a hymn-like cover of Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt’s mournful “Rex’s Blues” that brings to mind what Jeff Buckley once did with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” In fact, given her roots, perhaps Holland is best described as her own kind of Texas troubadour.
http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/the_slanted_enchantments_of_jolie_hollands_pint_of_blood

TIGER ARMY'S NICK 13

Tiger Army captain Nick 13 gets comfortable with country music

By The Burg Staff on Jun. 22, 2011
By Matt Ashare

Country Gentleman: Tiger Army's Nick 13

The original class of ’77 punks may have been looking to a new kind of future — or, “no future,” as the case may be — in their efforts to eliminate the excesses of the prog-rock and glam bands that ruled the day. But it’s no secret that groups like the Sex Pistols and the Clash were perfectly comfortable drawing on the past as they stripped rock and roll down to its raw and raucous essence. The Pistols famously amped up not one but two of ’50s rockabilly star Eddie Cochran’s hits, “C’mon Everybody” and “Somethin’ Else.” The Clash went so far as to rework “I Fought the Law,” the 1959 Sonny Curtis tune that the Bobby Fuller Four hit paydirt with six years later, on their second album. And long before he had his first mohawk, Joe Strummer was singing pub-rock r&b tunes with the 101’ers and greasing back his hair in the style of young punks from the ’50s, not the ’70s.
     What began as something of a happy or, perhaps, inevitable accident has, over the past four decades, coalesced into and persevered as a punk/rockabilly hybrid known to most as “punkabilly” (Think Reverend Horton Heat). And in the last 10 years, thanks to a coterie of LA bands centered around Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong’s Hellcat imprint, punkabilly has morphed into the more colorfully outrageous “psychobilly,” although you could make a fairly persuasive argument that the Cramps invented the style out of whole cloth way back in ‘79 with the release of Gravest Hits. But that’s a whole other story.
     Tiger Army, a perennial Warped Tour favorite fronted by the dark, brooding, neck-tattoo’d Nick 13 (nee Kearney Nick Jones), have been one of the more accessible and successful self-proclaimed promulgators of psychobilly. They’ve toured with Social Distortion and Morrissey, and their 2007 album Music From Regions Beyond cracked the top 50 in the Billboard charts, in part because, excepting stand-up bass and just the slightest touch of twang, the single “Forever Fades Away” wouldn’t sound out of place on a Green Day album.
In fact, given Nick 13’s penchant for wearing black eye make-up and writing darkly romantic songs with titles like “Ghosts of Memory,” “Through the Darkness,” and “Incorporeal,” he may want to consider changing the band’s genre designation to “gothabilly” or “horrorcore.”
At least for now, Nick can put that decision on hold because his latest venture, a self-titled solo album on the country/folk label Sugar Hill, is about as far from punk as the Grand Ole Opry is from CBGB’s.
     With Nick playing cowboy chords, Lucinda Williams-sidekick Greg Leisz and multi-instrumentalist James Intveld co-producing and playing alongside legendary Nashville steel guitarist Lloyd Green (of the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo fame) and a bunch of other studio pros, “Nick 13” isn’t just country, it’s old-time country or, as Nick himself has been calling it in interviews, “hillbilly music.” The disc, which made a surprise debut at No. 22 on Billboard’s “Top Current Country Albums” chart last week, opens with the walking stand-up bass line, pedal-steel flourishes, and downhome fiddle solo of “All Alone,” as Nick puts a contemporary twist on an old C&W theme with lines like, “A tattoo in pen and ink/Spells her name upon my arm/F-o-r-e-v-e-r/Her love was here but now it’s gone.”
     Singing in a high-and-lonesome voice that bears an eerie resemblance to Chris Isaak’s, Nick throws a bone to Tiger Army diehards by reprising two of the band’s songs here: “Cupid’s Arrow” turns up as a twangy ballad with a touch of Byrdsy jangle, and “In the Orchard” is slowed to a dreamy Roy Orbison slow dance. And his characteristic fascination with the morbid — a Tiger Army staple — rears its head in the plaintive “Carry My Body Down,” where, against weeping pedal steel and cowboy chords, he wonders, “Will they carry my body down?/Will they take it from the river/After I’ve jumped in and drowned?” Indeed, it’s a safe bet that at least a few of the tunes on Nick 13 will find their way into Tiger Army sets when he returns to the band after this successful country sojourn.
http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_tiger_army_captain_nick_13_gets_comfortable_with_country_

JUNIOR BOYS

Junior Boys aim to gain traction

By The Burg Staff on Jun. 15, 2011
By Matt Ashare

Junior Boys Jeremy Greenspan and Matt Didemus get their brood on

Thanks to artists as wide-ranging and diverse as Brooklyn’s electrodelic MGMT, French funksters Daft Punk, and, well, even Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard with his Postal Service offshoot, synth-pop remains very much alive and, occasionally, kicking.
Four albums into a career that began auspiciously enough with a self-released 2003 EP, Birthday/Last Exit, featuring a remix by the Australian electronica master Fennesz, the Ontario-bred duo Junior Boys (who play the Jefferson in Charlottesville June 18), are still junior members on the growing list of neo-new wavers. Singer Jeremy Greenspan admits as much when he relents that Junior Boys’ last album, 2009’s “Begone Dull Care,” failed “to gain traction with people,” in a candid quote from the press release for the duo’s new “It’s All True.”
     That lack of “traction” might best be chalked up to something along the lines of an identity crisis: it’s never been quite clear whether Junior Boys have the dance floor, rock clubs, or pop charts in sight. And it can often seem like Greenspan, whose sad croon brings to mind the New Wave, New Romantics, and New Orders who populated post-punk Brit-ain in the ‘80s, and pro-grammer Matt Didemus, who now lives in the electronica capital of Berlin and favors an eclecticly techy mix of futuristic glitch-pop, hard House beats, and airy analog synths, are working at cross purposes. It’s no surprise, for example, that Junior Boys had their biggest international hit to date, the plaintive yet melodic, dance-friendly “Birthday,” when Dutch DJ Sander Kleinenber included it on his 2004 mix CD This Is Everybody Too.
     “It’s All True” opens on a more upbeat note: a panoply of giddy synths dance playfully around a fleet beat as Greenspan approximates a more soulful take on New Order frontman Bernard Sumner’s artless disaffection. Listen closely, though, and it’s hard to miss the sense of melancholy, the hints at unrequited love, and the generally downcast nature of the lyrics. “You look better if you’re lonely/And barely holding on,” is a typical Greenspan observation.
And by the end of the track, having used the analogy of a fly trapped in a window to describe someone (himself?) suffering from a bad case of tainted love, he asks “Would you go back outside?/Out where they’ll crush you with a paper folded/Just to see you die/Just to see you die …”
     Didemus gets on the same sad page as Green-span in the deceptively titled “Playtime,” an almost painfully bittersweet slow-dance about a relationship that’s become so dysfunctional that mutual animus is the only glue still holding it together. “Come a little closer,” Greenspan nearly whispers, “Stare a little longer/Like competitors do/’cause this fight’s forever/And if it breaks up they’ll be nothing to do.” It’s a gorgeous slow-burner that, at nearly seven min-utes, seems to drag on for-ever, just like the end of so many broken affairs of the heart. And Greenspan gives Didemus room to indulge his inner electro-nerd on “Kick the Can,” a mostly instrumental display of programming prowess and shape-shifting electro-minimalism that still manages to deliver a suitable hook or two.
     Even if Didemus’ mode doesn’t always fit Greenspan’s mood, and deconstructed beats sometimes obscure the disc’s better lyrics (“Remember you’re still a lousy faker/Ten years ago at least just a burnt out raver/And now you need a favor/’cause you’re living in the past,” from the stuttering “Second Chance”), It’s All True is oddly accessible enough to bring Junior Boys at least one step closer to gaining that elusive “traction.” It’s also a disc that’s screaming out for remixes. So it wouldn’t be a total surprise if several of these tracks here find a life beyond the pop charts, specifically on DJ mixes in dance clubs.
     (Junior Boys perform Saturday, June 18, at the Jefferson Theater in Char-lottesville with Miracle Fortress and Birdlips; call 800-594-8499 for tickets.)
http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/junior_boys_aim_to_gain_traction_with_their_new_its_all_true

Arctic Monkeys

Music review: An artfully composed Arctic Monkeys orchestrate a breakthrough on new album

By The Burg Staff on Jun. 08, 2011
By Matt Ashare

In 2009, Britain’s Arctic Monkeys took a fairly unexpected left turn — not to mention a long plane ride — when they left the cold comfort of Sheffield for Josh Homme’s sun-baked Southern California desert enclave, where America’s reigning king of neo-stoner rock helped produce the foursome’s third disc. It would be wrong to assess the resulting release, Humbug, as an artistic failure. But for a band whose 2005 debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, came out of nowhere to become the fastest selling album in British chart history (in the process all but eclipsing Arctic Monkeys’ like-minded Domino label mates Franz Ferdinand), it certainly marked a modest commercial setback.
     Homme, best know as Queens of the Stone Age’s fearless leader, is back to lend a hand on Arctic Monkeys’ new album. Only, this time, his role amounts to little more than adding some nondescript background vocals to the noisy, supercharged, and willfully dumbed-down “Brick By Brick,“ a lumbering power chord rocker featuring guitarist Jamie Cook on vocals and a rather Homme-y blast of guitar-god soloing by — and I’m guessing here — singer/guitarist Alex Turner. The song, which was leaked via a YouTube video back on March 4, was conceived, I suspect, as a puckish prank or smokescreen to mislead fans and critics alike into assuming that the rest of the disc would be much in keeping with the dark density of Humbug, rather than a return to the infectiously playful, hyperkinetic post-punk intensity of the band’s first two albums.
     None of the above: that would be the most accurate assessment of Suck It And See (yes, that’s what the disc’s called). To suggest that a band who have chosen a title that’s caused more than a little consternation in the boardrooms of big-box retailers like Wal-Mart for their most accessibly melodic disc to date have “matured” might invite something along the lines of, say, ridicule. And, although it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate to characterize the disc that way, I’m gonna play it safe and suggest that, minus “Brick By Brick,“ Suck It And See — an album well poised to be Arctic Monkeys’ big American breakthrough — is better described as a recording that’s more clearly composed, in both senses of the word, than their previous efforts.
     There are echoes of the bash-and-pop punk that propelled the quick-fire blasts of Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not and 2007’s Favourite Worst Nightmare, most notably in the reeling and rambunctious first minute of “Library Pictures.“
There’s even some bark in Turner’s voice as he bites into meaty bits of lyric like “Draw some ellipses to chase you round the room/Through curly straws and metaphors and goo.“ And then the clouds of distortion fade, the drums stop pounding, and Turner turns to a croon for the impressionist, vaguely psychedelic verse/bridge — “Been watching all the neon blossoms flickering/You look like you’ve all forgotten where you’ve been.“
     Turner’s always been a cynical romantic with a peculiarly persuasive way with words that brings to mind former Blur front man Damon Albarn. “I pour my aching heart into a pop song/I couldn’t get the hang of poetry,“ he cheekily acquiesces against the melancholy tug of Cook’s Johnny Marr-ish, Smiths-style arpeggios on the title track, before deploying one of the disc’s most arresting images: “That’s not a skirt, girl/That’s a sawn-off shotgun/And I can only hope/You’ve got it aimed at me.“
     With Cook brandishing his guitar to paint colorful figures around Turner’s never less than vivid lyrics, and bassist Nick O’Malley and drummer Matt Helders holding back just enough to give Turner the room he needs to employ a purer tone of voice, Arctic Monkeys, at their most composed and, yes, accessible, have begun to take on aspects of mid-period Echo and the Bunnymen. Except, I’m pretty certain Ian McCulloch never wrote a lyric as alluringly oblique, emotionally evocative, and playfully pointed as “Home sweet home, home sweet home, home sweet booby-trap/I took the batteries out my mysticism and put ’em in my thinking cap”. . . At least not in the context of a song as sing-along catchy as “The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala.“

My Morning Jacket, "Circuital"

My Morning Jacket Take Their Own Sweet Time On the New “Circuital”

By The Burg Staff on Jun. 01, 2011

By Matt Ashare

My Morning Jacket do not sound like a band who are in even a little bit of a hurry to get anywhere on their new “Circuital,” the Louisville, Kentucky band’s sixth album in a dozen years. The disc actually features a song called — yes — “Slow Slow Tune,” a deliberate, willfully, and perhaps even a bit brilliantly ironically slow, slow tune that, with its psychedelic ambiance, its heavily reverbed guitars, and its au naturel production, brings to mind the Tommy James and the Shondells classic “Crimson and Clover.” “Slow/Not the meter of today/But I’m not singing format anyway/This slow, slow tune,” singer/guitarist Jim James (aka Yim Yames) lazily murmurs, winking affably and nodding knowingly before laying his meta-rock cards on the table with this verse: “You/Somewhere in the future listening/I hope the present for you’s glistening/With notes that ring so true/This slow, slow tune. . .”

James is holding a straight flush, and he knowest of what he speaketh: there really isn’t a single note that doesn’t ring “true” on “Circuital.” His awareness of that — reflected in both the snarled simplicity of his lyrics and the relaxed intensity of the songs themselves — is a big part of the pleasure of the MMJ vibe. And vibe, more than clever turns of phrase, musicianly displays, or hooks you’d pay to play, is what “Circuital” is all about. I mean, you gotta get four songs deep into the disc before James finally offers up a track with a trad verse/chorus/verse structure, the rootsy, fingerpicked, mostly acoustic alt-country “Wonderful (The Way I Feel).”

In most bands’ hands, the tune would be a throwaway — a gratuitous tip of the cowboy hat in the general direction of Gram Parsons and all his various and nefarious acolytes. But Jones and his MMJ crew (bassist “Two-Tone” Tommy, drummer Patrick Hallihan, and multi-instrumentalists Carl Broemel and Bo Koster) have mastered the art of the understated overstatement. “Wonderful (The Way I Feel),” for all its pedal steel whines, cursory rhymes (“I’m going where the living is easy/And the people are kind/A new state of mind”), and prosaic lines like “With the sun on my shoulder/And wind at my back/I will never grow older/At least not in my mind,” is more Southern than country, as in Terry Southern. And, once again, James unabashedly shows his hand: “I can learn from way back when/And still live right now,” he croons with a passion that suggests he means it.

The “way back when” My Morning Jacket conjure so vividly as they forge resolutely forward on “Circuital” brings to mind the bold and, at times, even reckless genre (ad)ventures of classic-rockers like the Stones, the Who, and the Beatles, once they’d established their brands, secured loyal fan bases, and taken to challenging their fans.

The title track, like most of the disc, takes time building up to its explosive hook. But the payoff — Pete Townshend powerchords paired with a very Neil Young guitar solo — is so worth the wait. One of the more immediately appealing tracks is a retro-funky in-joke titled “Holdin’ Onto Black Metal.” And layers of ethereal vocal harmonies, an insistent keyboard hook, and a muscular backbeat that keeps threatening to trip over itself on “The Day Is Coming” brings to mind something John Lennon might have thrown on the “White Album.”

Still, “Circuital” isn’t so much reverential as it is referential. Simply put, it’s the sound of a band transcending easy labels like “New Southern Rock” or “Alt-Rock Jam Band,” reaching beyond their so-called “country” roots, and having a good go at taking their own sweet time finding those notes that truly do ring, well . . . true.http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/my_morning_jacket_take_their_own_sweet_time_on_the_new_circuital