TERROR TRAX: A Lucky 13 for Halloween

TERROR TRAX: A Lucky 13 for Halloween
By Matt Ashare
 

SCARY MONSTER OR SUPER FREAK: Bowie, 1980

The advent of on-line digital music sites like Spotify and Soundcloud has made it ridiculously easy to program a playlist for just about any occasion. But half the fun of creating a perfect mix — at least for me — has always been about the process: the painstaking perusal of dozens of potentially appropriate tunes that can, if you're lucky, lead to dark, half-forgotten corners of a record collection; the mental trips off the beaten path to at least a couple of tracks that may just surprise a few friends; and, as deadline looms, the agonizing decisions that go into picking one tune over another as the winnowing out process takes hold.
    Halloween tends to be one of the more fecund opportunities for mixing things up, so to speak, because flirting with the dark side has been part of rock 'n' roll's DNA going all the way back to Robert Johnson's notorious deal with the devil at the mystical crossroads where good meets evil. So, while it's easy enough to settle for the stock scares of perennial favorites like Bobby "Boris" Pickett's novelty single "Monster Mash"— not to mention the themes from The Addams Family and/or The Munsters — there's a lot more fiendish fun to be found in fashioning a personalized, idiosyncratic Halloween playlist, whether it begins with the clang-and-bang of AC/DC's "Hell's Bells," or the playful innuendo of Bow Wow Wow's version of the Strangelove's 1965 hit "I Want Candy."
    Here's my list of 13 picks for this year's All Hallow's Eve, any one of which could easily be the starting point for dozens of other potential playlists. . .

1) Nina Simone, "I Put a Spell on You" (1965). These days, the original 1956 version of this tune by r&b shouter Screamin' Jay Hawkins tends to get more play than Simone's smoother, smokier, and, yes, spookier jazz-inflected cover, which was the title track of an album she released in 1965. And that's no surprise: Hawkins, who was famous for emerging from a coffin on stage, pretty much made a career out of playing this Halloween favorite to death. No disrespect to Hawkins, but Simone's more nuanced, orchestrated take on the tune has just the right balance of heated thrills and cold chills to ease into an evening of tricks and treats. Plus, I do love a good cover. . . "I Put a Spell on You" live

2) Sonic Youth, "Hallowe'en" (1985). If you only know the band from their post-"Goo" incarnation, then this may seem like an abrupt segue from Simone. But early on – and 1985's haunting Bad Moon Rising was essentially the band's first studio album – Sonic Youth were as interested in exploring ethereal tones and fractured textures as they were in generating discordant feedback and churning distortion. Bassist Kim Gordon handles the vocals here, narcotically reciting what appear to be stream-of-consciousness lyrics about something kinda creepy, leaving Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo to create quiet tension with spare guitar chordings. I generally avoid any Halloween song with "Halloween" in the title – and there are plenty — but the apostrophe earns this track an exemption. "Hallowe'en"

3) Pixies, "Wave of Mutilation" (1989). Not only were the Pixies one of the crucial bands who provided a bridge between the post-punk experiments of Sonic Youth and the explosive dynamics of Nirvana's Nevermind, but they did so with an abiding love for sci-fi surf riffage and frontman Black Francis' twisted fascination with the macabre. It's never really clear what the "wave of mutilation" he's conjured up here embodies, but if it's fear of the unknown he's going for, he nails it. "Wave of Mutilation"

4) Rob Zombie, "Living Dead Girl" (1989). Sure, there are plenty of Rob Zombie/White Zombie tunes to chose from this time of year. But this b-movie, disco-metal throwdown, from Zombie's first solo album, Hellbilly Deluxe, has everything you could really want from a good gross-out — "cemetery things," "hunchback juice," and, of course, a "living dead girl." "Living Dead Girl" video

5) Ozzy Osbourne, "Bark at the Moon" (1983). Sadly, the Ozman didn't get around to recording this headbanger until after the death of his original guitarist, Randy Rhoades. But you really can't beat the demonic laughter that follows the first chorus, or lyrics like "Howling in shadows/Living in a lunar spell/He finds his heaven/Spewing from the mouth of hell," or the cheesy wolfman suit he's wearing on the cover of the album. "Bark at the Moon"

6) Kiss, "Creatures of the Night" (1982). It's hard to go wrong with Kiss, especially if you stick to their first six albums — before they started dropping original members and toying with taking the make-up off. I enjoy going out on a limb from time to time, so this Halloween I'm taking a bit of a longshot with thr hard-hitting title track from their 10th studio disc, recorded after two original members (drummer Peter Criss and guitarist Ace Frehley had been replaced, even though Ace is still pictured on the cover). "Ohhhhh, we're creatures of the night. . . yeah!" "Creatures of the Night"

7) Concrete Blonde, "Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)" (1990). Yeah, I'd pretty much forgotten about this group of LA rockers, who got their start on Sunset Strip's hair-metal scene in the ’80s before transitioning to alt-rock lightweights in 2001. But then I remembered this stomping piece of hard-rock candy and, while zombies do appear to be taking over of late, vampires are still very much in vogue. . . "Bloodletting" video

8) Bauhaus, "Bela Lugosi's Dead" (1979). While we're on the subject of vampires. . . This nine-minute-plus epic by the British band more or less created the idea of goth-rock. Like an undead Bowie, Peter Murphy deploys a dark, stoic croon as he repeats "I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead," and recites dark poetry over a stark backdrop of ticking-timebomb drums, and an echoey descending guitar riff that circles ominously around him for pretty much the duration of this gloom tune. "Bela Lugosi's Dead" original single

9) David Bowie, "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)" (1980). It wouldn't be fair to include Bauhaus, who famously recorded a note-for-note cover of "Ziggy Stardust," without also bringing Bowie into the mix. By 1980, the man who fell to Earth was looking less like a scary glammed-up monster than a white-faced super creep, but the art-damaged, new-wave-y title track from the last entry in his "Berlin Trilogy" seems to be more about the rabid fans who'd get all made up like Herr Stardust and swarm like zombies to his concerts in the ‘70s than anything else. Or maybe it was his comment on goth-rockers like Bauhaus. . . Either way, it does the trick. "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)"

10) The Cramps, "TV Set" (1984). Ok, so it's also hard to go wrong with the Cramps. Whether you're looking for werewolves, creatures from the black lagoon, or zombie dances, their catalogue pretty much covers all the horror-film basics. The self-proclaimed "hottest thing from the north to come out of the south" fused punk attitude and garage-rock trashiness into a brand of psychobilly that was less about speed and thrash than finding a ghoulish groove. This track, from the band's debut full-length (Songs the Lord Taught Us), finds the late Lux Interior in psychotic reaction mode, placing parts of his dismembered beloved inside a TV set so he can watch her, I suppose. Enough said. "TV Set"

11) Misfits, "Skulls" (1982). Another charming love song, this Misfits classic from the horror-core band's debut Walk Among Us, finds a young Glenn Danzig (long before he dropped the Glenn), shouting in that deep growl of his, "I want your skull/I need your skull," against a noisy backdrop of chainsaw guitars and pounding drums. It's a fast blast of zombie-inspired punk that's the perfect lead into. . . "Skulls"

12) Social Distortion, "The Creeps (I Just Wanna Give You the)" (1983). Social Distortion frontman Mike Ness has mutated over the past three decades into a Johnny Cash-meets-the-Clash, hard-bitten survivor. But when Social D first emerged in ‘82, he was wearing black eye make-up, singing with a touch of a British accent, and doing his best to give anyone who wasn't in on the joke the creeps. This revved-up homage to the fear punks once had the power to inspire works quite well as a scare tactic for any ocassion. Trust me. . . "The Creeps"

13) Frank Sinatra, "That Old Black Magic" (1961). Sinatra dug this tune by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer so much he recorded it twice: once as a ballad during his Columbia years, and then again as a swinging number when he moved to Capitol in 1961. Think of it as a classic way to wind down things down sometime before dawn breaks and it's time for the creatures of the night to find a safe haven until next this time next year. "That Old Black Magic"

JANE'S ADDICTION

Jane's Addiction find new artistic life on The Great Escape Artist

By Matt Ashare

"I'm a hustler/I'll never give up the underground," sings Perry Farrell in his patented snarling croon at the start of "Underground," the opening track of The Great Escape Artist (Capitol), only the fourth studio album his band Jane's Addiction have released in 23 years, and their first since 2003's subpar Strays. Even if he's just role-playing, it's still one of the more honest, revealing, and accurate lines he's ever written. Because, no matter what you think of Farrell, he's always been as much a schemer as singer, going all the way back to the early days of Jane's Addiction, when he and the band's founding bassist Eric Avery conceived of an art-damaged answer to the spandexed metal that ruled Sunset Strip in the ’80s, recruited two hard-rock castaways (drummer Stephen Perkins and guitarist Dave Navarro), and hit a crucial nerve with the aptly titled 1988 modern classic Nothing's Shocking. That album and 1990's Ritual de lo Habitual were, at the very least, instrumental in laying the groundwork for the alternative explosion spearheaded by Nirvana in ’91.

       Jane's didn't stick around much longer to reap the considerable rewards of the mainstreaming of the underground. By late ’91, with the departure of Avery and Navarro, they’d broken up. But a good hustler is always working on his next big idea, and Farrell's was a brilliant one: in the summer of ’91 he helped inaugurate the first Lollapalooza, a traveling festival of alternative artists that Jane's Addiction headlined as a de-facto farewell tour. Not a bad way to go out, especially since it left Farrell at the creative/conceptual helm of an institution that came to define the alternative ‘90s.

       Not all of Farrell's schemes have panned out quite so well. When he tired of Lollapalooza, Farrell dreamed up something of a rock-meets-rave twist on the festival tour, christened it ENIT, and brought his new band, the Jane's-lite Porno for Pyros, along for what turned out to be a bumpy, and ultimately short-lived run in ’95/’96. (Of course, by the following year, in the absence of Farrell's curatorial prowess, Lollapalooza had more or less run its course.) And his 2005-2007 experiment with Satellite Party, a new-agey collective that included wife Etty Lau Farrell, ex-Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt, and, at various times, Fergie of Black Eye Peas, New Order bassist Peter Hook, and members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, was perhaps a tad too ambitious to properly get off the ground.

       Through it all, Jane's have loomed in the backdrop, reuniting from time to time with various bassists — Flea in ’97, Porno for Pyros' Martyn LeNoble (2001-2004), and, most recently, Avery (2008-2010) – mostly as a festival-ready nostalgia act, performing fan faves from their ’80s albums. The notion that they might ever match the raw power and artful majesty of Nothing's Shocking in the studio seemed, at best, improbable.

       But Farrell, the hustler, has once again pulled off a major artistic coup, largely by looking to the “underground” for a fresh muse. When Avery once again jumped ship last year, he brought former Guns ’N Roses/Velvet Revolver bassist Duff McKagan on board to write songs for a new album. When that didn’t work out, he drafted an unlikely collaborator, multi-instrumentalist David Sitek of Brooklyn’s TV On the Radio. Sitek proved to be more than just a fill-in bassist: he co-wrote seven of the disc’s ten tracks, added guitar, keyboards, and programming to the sessions, and assisted in the production. In fact, it wouldn’t be going too far to say that, with the exception of Farrell’s unmistakable vocals, Sitek’s aesthetic — a masterful marriage of digitalized electro-organic instrumentation, deep beats, and soaring melodies — is the dominant force on The Great Escape Artist.

       “End to the Lies,” the first of two singles that have already been released, begins, in typical TV On the Radio fashion, with a deliberate, pounding drumbeat emerging from a quiet storm of electronic interference before a thundering bass line and churning guitars come crashing in. Farrell, who’s been perfectly willing to toss off a provocative line or two in the past, sounds positively inspired as he bites into verses like, “You never really change like they say/You only become more like yourself/He thought he knew me back in the day/When I was down, but now it’s him crying help.” Navarro, who’s always been a Sunset Strip shredder at heart, gets his licks in, but he’s equally in tune with crafting sinuous hooks and layering dark textures of feedback and distortion. And somewhere in the mix, Perkins’ pounding percussion is abetted by Morocco’s Master Musicians of Joujouka.

       Sitek has a true talent for making the complex sound surprisingly simple, for pushing sonic boundaries in remarkably accessibly directions. “Irresistible Force (Met the Immovable Object),” the second single, is practically a study in Sitek science. A sinister bassline circles a syncopated groove as synths and programming flutter and drone in the backdrop, and Farrell drops his voice an octave to offer an apocalyptic vision of romance. “We didn’t know that it would blow up with such might,” he intones, “We stars are even brighter/Contrasted with the night.” It may not be profound, but it’s more than effective. The tune takes a turn for the epic on a soaring chorus filled with swelling synths and looming powerchords, and, after a Sitek synth solo, Navarro lets loose with what might be some of his most tasteful guitar heroics to date.

       There are familiar echoes of classic Jane’s in the sordid story from the wrong side of romance that is “Twisted Tales,” which finds Farrell playing the role of a less than honest lover who’ll say anything “To fit in, and yes get in bed with you.” And the acoustic guitar-based “Broken People” reprises some of the same mellow drama as “Jane Says,” as Farrell declaims, “Welcome to the world/Welcome to the aching world/A woeful world of broken people.” McKagan gets a writing credit here, but Sitek’s presence is still felt in the subtle atmospherics that accentuate the song’s pathos. If imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery, then I think I know how the guys in TV On the Radio are feeling right about now.

http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2011/oct/18/janes-addiction-find-new-artistic-life-great-escap-ar-1392828/ 

 

RYAN ADAMS

Ryan Adams hits a soft spot on Ashes & Fire

By: MATT ASHARE
Published: October 12, 2011

Ryan Adams’ eagerly awaited "Ashes & Fire," his first proper solo studio album since he cleaned up his act three years ago, married singer/actress Mandy Moore, and started his own PAX-AM label, finally hit stores this week. But first a digression. . . On Saturday, Oct. 8, a longtime if somewhat estranged friend of mine, Michael Welsh — Mikey to me — was found dead at the age of 40 in a Chicago hotel room. Welsh played bass for a bunch of half-forgotten Boston bands — Left Nut, Jocobono, Heretix, Chevy Heston — before he was drafted to tour and record with Julianna Hatfield in 1998. Around the same time, he got his big break as a musician when Rivers Cuomo regrouped Weezer and brought Welsh on board to replace departed bassist Matt Sharp on the group’s self-titled third studio album. His three-year tenure in Weezer ended abruptly, shortly after a long, worldwide tour in support of what’s commonly known as "The Green Album." Welsh, who’d retired from music to become a painter and was living in Vermont with his wife and two children, was in Chicago at the behest of Weezer, who played the city’s Riot Fest the day after his passing.

     This isn’t meant to be a eulogy or an obit, just a reminder that music never exists in a vacuum — that every note, riff, beat, song and album is intrinsically contextual.
I say that because for the better part of the week leading up to Mikey’s death, I’d been listening on and off to an advance of Ashes & Fire (PAX-AM/Capitol) and, frankly, I just wasn’t feeling it. It’s not that I thought it was a bad album: Adams recorded it with veteran producer Glyn Johns (perhaps best known for his seminal work with The Who), recruited Norah Jones to play piano and sing background vocals, and deployed Tom Petty keyboardist Benmont Tench to add tasteful organ accompaniment to several of the disc’s well composed, artfully executed tracks. Nothing to complain about there. But something about the album — perhaps the very professionalism of it all — struck me as a bit bloodless. As I said, I just wasn’t feeling it.
     Maybe I was just expecting something different from the mercurial Adams, who first emerged fronting the Raleigh-based alt-country band Whiskeytown in 1994, "playing make-up and wearing guitar," to steal a Paul Westerberg line. By ’97, Whiskeytown had fallen prey to ego, alcohol and music industry machinations; it looked as if Adams might be destined, in Westerberg’s words, to "grow old in a bar." But Adams rebounded from the Whiskeytown break-up fairly quickly. His first solo album, Heartbreaker, came out in 2000 on the Chicago indie label Bloodshot and featured a rather stellar alt-country cast, including Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Kim Richey and, as both producer and drummer, Glyn Johns’ son Ethan.
     Since then, he’s made something of a habit of confounding expectations, both on stage and in the studio. After Universal’s Nashville-based Americana imprint Lost Highway signed him, he took a turn toward classic ’70s rock on 2001’s Gold, and in 2003 he went into full rockist mode on Rock N Roll, while simultaneously releasing a very singer-songwriterly pair of companion EPs titled Love Is Hell. Then, in 2005, as if he still felt he had something to prove, he put out three albums, returning to Whiskeytown roots with the double disc Cold Roses, trying out a little honky-tonk country on Jacksonville City Nights — both of which featured the versatile backing band the Cardinals — and getting back into solo folkster mode on 29. By the time Adams disbanded the Cardinals in 2009, they’d morphed into something of a rootsy jamband, willing and able to cover tunes by everyone from Alice In Chains to the Grateful Dead. As if that weren’t enough to demonstrate his mastery of genre, Adams wrote, recorded, and released entire on-line albums of punk, death metal and hip-hop under various pseudonyms.
     Ashes & Fire, in contrast, is easily one of the most straightforwardly country, heart-on-my-sleeve, singer-songwriter albums in the Adams discography. There’s no tongue in his cheek this time, no winks or nods: Just 11 intimate, heartfelt, verse/chorus/verse tunes that play to Adams’ strengths as an affecting singer and gifted songwriter. From start to finish, Adams’ acoustic guitar and emotive voice are front-and-center, with strings, Jones’ piano and Tench’s keyboards adding subtle embellishments in just the right places. Indeed, the disc opens with Adams alone, slowly strumming the chords to "Dirty Rain" before gospel-inflected piano and a simple backbeat arrive to support the swinging cadence of Dylanesque verses like, "Last time I was here it was raining/It ain’t raining anymore/The streets were drowning/Waters waning/While the ruins washed ashore/I’m just looking through the rubble/Trying to find out who we were/Last time I was here it was raining/It ain’t raining anymore."
     On the disc’s more raucous title track, a ragged, waltz-time meditation on love lost, Adams sounds like he’s channeling Nashville Skyline Dylan, singing cryptic rhymes like "Her eyes were indigo/The cats were all calico," in a slightly nasally tone. But ‘’’Come Home," a simple, fingerpicked ballad with quietly brushed drums, a touch of pedal-steel, and gorgeous harmonies by Jones, is the song that finally reeled me in. "Nobody has to cry to make it seem real," Adams sings, soft voiced and melancholy, with a stoic vulnerability that brings to mind a young Willie Nelson. ‘Nobody has to hide the way that they feel/If you stay right here, tomorrow you’ll be fine/I’ll be right here, standing by your side/So come home. . ."
     Maybe it’s the artless beauty that caught my ear. Or it might have been the thought that my friend won’t be coming home. Either way, I’ve now only scratched the surface of an album that I’m destined to revisit again and again. And if that sounds corny, then so be it.

WILCO

Wilco travel beyond genre on The Whole Love

The Burg staff

By Matt Ashare

If Vegas had laid down odds on which founding member of the semi-legendary late-’80s/early’90s band Uncle Tupelo was more likely to go on to greatness when they broke up in 1994, most of the good money would have been on Jay Farrar, not Jeff Tweedy. Sure both sang and had songwriting credits on their four studio albums. But, Farrar always appeared to be the band's alpha dog — the one with the voice, the vision, and, well, the tools to take the alt-country stylings of Uncle Tupelo to the next level, wherever that might be. Tweedy, who'd started out playing bass in the original trio before moving over to guitar as Uncle Tupelo took on new members, possessed a certain boyish charm and playful charisma, but for most of the band's seven-year career, he clearly seemed to be playing second fiddle to the more stolid Farrar.

       As the leader of Son Volt and as a solo artist, Farrar has indeed continued to carry the alt-country torch. And he's acquitted himself quite well, retaining a loyal cult following among Americana enthusiasts. But Tweedy's exceeded all expectations by embracing an expansive musical sensibility that goes well beyond rote roots with his band Wilco, whose highly anticipated eighth studio album, The Whole Love (dBpm), hit stores this week.

       If there was a turning point for Wilco, it was the 2002 release of Yankee Foxtrot Hotel (Nonesuch). Tweedy and multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett, who left the band after the Yankee Foxtrot Hotel sessions in ’01 and passed away in May of 2009, had already begun to broaden Wilco's sonic palette by exploring the possibilities of digital production on the 1999 disc Summerteeth (Reprise). At the same time, the band earned critical kudos for Mermaid Avenue (Elektra), a collaboration with British folkster Billy Bragg that set previously unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics to rootsy riffs and went on to earn a Grammy nomination in the Best Contemporary Folk category. But with the production help of Chicago avant-guitarist Jim O'Rourke, Wilco went out on an experimental limb that married Tweedy's earnest introspection with something akin to the paranoid android alienation of Radiohead on on Yankee Foxtrot Hotel, a disc that found a sweet spot between impressionistic soundscapes and solid songwriting

        Wilco haven't exactly been running in place since 2002. In fact they've kinda been all over the map, reprising airy experimentalism on 2004's A Ghost Is Born (Nonesuch), revisiting rootsy guitar rock on 2007's Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch), and settling into something of a ’70s-style groove on 2009's somewhat tongue-in-cheek Wilco (The Album) (Nonesuch). But, The Whole Love is a whole different beast. Easily the Tweedy's most ambitious in scope, it's also at times his breeziest in the sense he and the current incarnation of Wilco – longtime bassist John Stirratt and more recent recruits Nels Cline (guitar), Glenn Kotche (drums), multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone, and keyboardist Mikael Jogensen — sound comfortable and confident enough to try just about anything in the name of fun.

       That's not to suggest that The Whole Love doesn't have poignant, reflective, and even rather serious moments. In fact, the disc ends a particularly somber note, with Tweedy nearly whispering words to a departed father over a quietly skiffling beat, loungey piano, and softly strummed acoustic guitar for the full twelve minutes of "One Sunday Morning." "I said it's your god I don't believe in," he intones in Dylanesque fashion, "No your bible can't be true/Knocked down by the long lie/He cried 'I fear what waits for you.'" But the heaviness of lines like that are offset by the peaceful, easy groove the band stay locked into for the long ride home.

       In contrast, the disc's opener, "Art of Almost," is a skewed, seven-plus minute electro-acoustic opus that begins, Radiohead-style, with a glitchy beat that leads into a swell of strings before giving way to Tweedy's strained delivery of stream of consciousness lyrics, a subsonic bassline, periodic interruptions from a distorted synth, and Cline's avant guitarisms. Elsewhere, Tweedy and co. take an infectious romp through the upbeat, organ-laced ’60s pop of "I Might." They slow things down for a Lennon-style, reverb-laden balled ("Sunloathe") that gives Cline the opportunity to channel another Beatle, George Harrison, in a sweetly played solo. An they deploy some tasteful twang to accentuate the countryfied feel of the romantic "Open Mind.” And that’s really just scratching the surface of an album that simply defies categorization.

       It’s admittedly a lot to take in, especially in one sitting. But it’s well worth the effort.