FIONA APPLE

GROWING PAINS

Fiona Apple delves deeper into the dark heart of dysfunctional romance

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: June 19, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/201

Fiona Apple's right: There's nothing inherently wrong when a song ends in a minor key. That's one of the central metaphors in "Werewolf," one of ten emotionally wrought, musically spare tracks on her new The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, only her fourth studio album since debuting, in 1996, with the multi-platinum Grammy-winner Tidal, and her second with a title that exceeds a dozen-and-a-half words.

Fiona Apple, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do (Epic)

       That romance can be treacherous terrain — that, as Neil Sedaka once put it, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" — has been a central motif for Apple throughout her career as a singer/songwriter/pianist, a run that has been marked by nearly as many long silences as expansive album titles. It's as if, in order to summon the muse, Apple must first subject herself to nearly toxic levels of personal trauma, romantic turmoil, and self-flagellation. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that if one bad date's an anecdote, two's a coincidence, and three's a pattern, then Apple appears to have turned questionable mating habits into something of an obsession.

       "Every single night's a fight/And every single fight's alright," she sings through jaws clenched tight on the opening track of The Idler Wheel, against a brittle celeste melody reminiscent of toy piano. And she starts the next cut, "Daredevil," by quietly admitting, "I don't feel anything until I've smashed it up," before working up to the raw-throated, feverish demand, "Gimme, gimme, gimme what you got in your mind, in the middle of the night." Sure, it's candid, as Apple is wont to be. But it's not exactly a recipe for a successful love life.

       "Left Alone" and "Regret" are two of the more telling track titles on The Idler Wheel, as is "Jonathan," which just happens to be the first name of one of her more recently departed semi-famous flames, the writer/comic provocateur Jonathan Ames. (Before that, it was deadpan street magician David Blaine.) Reading autobiography into songs is, more often than not, a dangerous game. But, when Apple croons plaintively, "Jonathan, call again/Take me to Coney Island/Take me on the train/Kiss me while I calculate/And calibrate/And heaven's sake/Don't make me explain," it's hard to imagine she's doesn't have Ames in mind, especially when she concludes with the open ended, "You're like the captain of a sinking ship/But I like watching you live."

       There's more. "How can I ask anyone to love me, when all I do is beg to be left alone," she implores on the chorus of "Left Alone," stretching the last syllable of that final word out until it's barely recognizable. And there's a tinctured touch of targeted venom in Apple's whisper-to-a-stinging-scream delivery of the daggered verse, "Now when you look at me/You're condemned to see/The monster your mother made you to be/And there you got me/That's how you got free/You got rid of me," in the fittingly rueful "Regret."

       So, yeah, the songs do remain pretty much the same in terms of subject matter for Apple on The Idler Wheel. (For better or worse, the rhyme, “I’m a tulip in a cup/I stand no chance of growing up,” from “Valentine,” is a good example of honest self-criticism.) But the settings for the wounded soul-baring on the new disc represent a rather radical – and wise – departure from Apple’s previous albums, which she recorded with the help of pop-savvy producer Jon Brion and a full complement of seasoned studio pros. This time, she teamed up with multi-instrumentalist Charley Drayton, a jazz-trained percussionist who, among other credits, made the cut for Keith Richards’ solo band the X-Pensive Winos. Working in tandem, they’ve stripped each song here down to its skeletal essence, mirroring, in a sense, the unfiltered flow of naked emotion Apple pours into each track.

PERSONAL NOTES: There's a tinctured touch of targeted venom in Apple's whisper-to-a-stinging-scream delivery.

       Apple’s still a Tori Amos acolyte at heart, a dark, smoldering piano-playing chanteuse given to deeply personal poetic flights of fancy. But it feels like she’s growing into an artist who’s more uniquely herself. It also sounds like she’s taken some pointers from the quirkier symmetries of anti-folk songstress Regina Spektor, given the odd angles with which she approaches piano chordings, the jazzy trills and sly slurs she incorporates into her vocal delivery, and the avant touches she includes like the recording of what appears to be a factory machine that creates the rhythmic foundation for “Jonathan.”

       Drayton’s contributions are largely an exercise in modest restraint, as Apple exorcizes her demons with demonstrative stabs at her keyboard, flowing arpeggios, and, of course, plenty of minor chords. He adds a soft pitter-pat beat and some vamping guitar to “Daredevil,” drops a couple of frenzied drum solos into neurotic rush of “Left Alone,” and lays some complicated polyrhythms under the oscillating chords of the reservedly optimistic “Anything We Want.” But just as often, he steps out of the picture and lets Apple go off on her own strangely compelling tangents, coloring around the edges with ambient shadings.

       If, at times, that makes for a challenging listen, it also marks The Idler Wheel as Apple’s most complete artistic statement to date. She’s certainly stepped out on the ledge emotionally in the past; here she matches that by taking some chances musically, particularly with her voice. Indeed, the album ends with nothing but a multi-tracked Apple singing three intersecting verses a cappella fashion in “Hot Knife.” I believe it may also be the only track on the disc that doesn’t end in a minor key.

PATTI SMITH

REALITY BITES

Patti Smith mines her extraordinary life for beautiful music

By: MATT ASHARE | http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/jun/16
Published: June 16, 2012

You gotta hand it to Patti Smith — she's really has led quite a life. In her early twenties, she made her way from college in New Jersey to Manhattan's Lower East Side, struck up a romance with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe that's lovingly chronicled in her 2010 memoir Just Kids (a National Book Award winner), and had her first exposure to NYC's burgeoning underground music scene while living at the Chelsea Hotel and frequenting Max's Kansas City and CBGB's, each a landmark in the unofficial registry of hip creative locales. By the time she hooked up with guitarist Lenny Kaye to form the Patti Smith Group in 1974, she'd already published her first three poetry collections. Seventh Heaven, Early Morning Dream, and Witt.

Patti, Banga, (Columbia)

       The original PSG, anchored by Kaye, guitarist Ivan Krahl, drummer Jay Dee Doherty, and keyboardist Richard Sohl, put the electrifyingly unconventional Smith in the spotlight as a dark-maned, androgynously thin-as-a-rail proto-punk priestess. A daringly smart, sexy, spiritually grounded force of nature, Smith wasn't afraid to mix free-form, spoken-word poetry slams into the band's gritty brand of garage-rock on four albums that culminated in 1978 and 1979 with Easter and Wave, discs that featured, respectively, a track she co-wrote with Bruce Springsteen (the radio hit "Because the Night"), and another that U2 would famously go on to cover ("Dancing Barefoot").

       Smith sketches what might be a portrait of herself from those days in one of the more arresting tracks on her new Banga, her eleventh studio album and first in eight years. A wistful, ruminative piano ballad with a stern backbeat, mellifluous string quartet embellishments, and a searing slide-guitar solo by her son Jackson, the song is dedicated to the memory of French actress Maria Schneider (perhaps best known on these shores for her role opposite Marlon Brando in 1972's Last Tango In Paris), who passed away last year. "I new you/When we were young," Smith bellows on the rousing chorus, recalling a chance 1976 meeting she recounts in the disc's liner notes. "I knew you/Now your gone." And then, turning the mirror back on herself, she catches a glimpse of "Wild, wild hair/Sad, sad eyes/White shirt/Black tie. . ."

       Banga is a deeply reflective album by an artist who, at 65, has a lot to reflect on. It's also the most compellingly cohesive album she's released since taking a prolonged sabbatical from music to raise a family with Fred "Sonic" Smith, the late, great MC5 guitarist, in his native Detroit. It's not entirely uncommon for creative types to take a year or two off – these days, I believe it's usually called "celebrity rehab." But Smith more or less dropped out entirely for close to 14 years, returning to New York only after the death in ’94 of her husband and her brother Todd. At the behest of Bob Dylan, she returned to the stage the following year. And, by ’96, she'd struck up a friendship with Michael Stipe, collaborating with his band R.E.M. on their "New Adventures in Hi-Fi," and was back to recording with members of the PSG.

       While it wouldn't be at all fair to characterize the five albums leading up to "Banga" as artistic failures, with the benefit of hindsight one gets the sense that Smith has spent much of the past decade and a half adrift, trying to reconcile the explosive, groundbreaking nature of her early work with her more obscure, avant inclinations, perhaps even trying a bit to hard not to merely repeat herself without entirely eschewing her bad-grrrl rocker leanings. Reading the liner notes to "Banga," it becomes clear that Smith was quite literally adrift during the formative stages of the new album. Indeed, she and Kaye, who rejoins Daugherty, longtime collaborators Tony Shanahan (keyboards and bass) guitarist Tom Verlaine (of Television) on Banga, were invited on a ten-day cruise by director Jean Luc Goddard as he shot scenes for a new film in the Mediterranean in March of 2009, when they began the writing process.

       Some of the other inspirations for Banga, as Smith tells it, were a trip to Moscow, where she visited a monument to the writer Nikolai Gogol, a few days spent with Johnny Depp (who's credited with playing guitar and drums on the disc's title track) on location in Puerto Rico shooting The Rum Diaries, and a tour stop in Arezzo, Italy, where she encountered the painting by Piero della Francesca that's referenced in the epic, ten minute-long reverie "Constantine's Dream." But, you don't need to know the biographical details or the background stories, for that matter, to appreciate the gentle ease with which Smith conjures the breeze aboard the ship that, in 1482, brought Amerigo Vespucci to a new world that would, in time, be named for him, on the album's first track (the flowingly melodic "Amerigo"). Or the subtle guitar hook that wends its way around Smith's unadorned voice on "April Fool," a romantic ode to breaking rules that gets a big boost from a beautiful solo by Verlaine. Or, the way Smith subtly channels the spirit of Amy Winehouse in "This Is the Girl," a swaying stab at r&b that's shot through with the kind of striking imagery ("This is the song of the smothering vine/Twisted as laurel to crown her head/Laid as a wreath upon her bed") that surfaces time and time again on Banga.

Patti Smith found her inspiration for Banga around the world

       On the other hand, knowing that "This Is a Girl" is derived from a poem Patti penned to Winehouse in Madrid after learning of her death, is a nice little reminder that Smith really has led quite a life. That she continues to. And, that she keeps on finding rewarding ways to incorporate those experiences into her art.

NEIL YOUNG

CANNON BLASTS

Neil Young & Crazy Horse rewrite the Americana songbook

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: June 09, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com

Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Americana (Reprise)

It's no secret — and it hasn't been for quite some time — that Neil Young is proud to wear his eccentricities on his sleeve, flaunting the very quirks that make him ripe for parody. He's a legacy artist whose idiosyncrasies are so strikingly pronounced that Jimmy Fallon's audience knows exactly who he's about to impersonate whenever he appears in the requisite faded jeans and flannel shirt, long before he plays the first guitar chord or sings a single plaintive, imperfectly pitched, adenoidal note in a voice that is unmistakably and absolutely definitively Youngian. And yet, as easy as it may be to caricature a true character like Young, whether he's in Harvest hippy mode with broad-brimmed hat and harmonica holder, or violently attacking an electric guitar as he keeps on rockin‘ in the free world with Crazy Horse, he remains an unpredictable enigma, a restless soul fully capable of confounding expectations at any time. Get too comfortable with who you think Neil Young is, and he'll take off in some radical new direction, toying with electronics, as he did on 1982's prescient Trans, hooking up with Booker T. & the M.G.'s for a little study in retro r&b (2002's Are You Passionate?), or, more recently, exploring atmospheric guitar abstractions in the company of Brian Eno protégé Daniel Lanois on 2010's Le Noise.

       So it shouldn't come as a total shock that Young's new Americana, the 34th album he's released as a solo artist since his self-titled debut in 1968, isn't exactly what at first glance it might appear to be. For starters, it's absolutely not a twangy excursion through the dusty back roads of what's come to be known as "alt-country." Young kinda already did that back in 1985 with the then controversial Old Ways, an album featuring, among other Nashville luminaries, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. The disc was so country-to-the-core — i.e., not the rock album people were expecting from Young — that it took nearly two years of legal wrangling with Geffen before the label finally agreed to release it.

       Indeed, Young's notion of Americana as both genre and genome is expansive enough to include the Civil War-era murder ballad "Tom Dula" (a tune popularized in sunnier fashion by the Kingston Trio as "Tom Dooley" in 1958), a ‘50s doo-wop number originally recorded by the Silhouettes ("Get a Job"), the Woody Guthrie campfire classic "This Land Is Your Land,” and, oddly enough, "God Save the Queen" (not the Sex Pistols' angry salvo, but the British anthem that also furnished the melody for our own "My Country, ’Tis of Thee"). In many respects, it's an idea, or ideal, that dates back to Young's nascent experiences as a player in California's burgeoning folk-rock scene in the early ’60s, to the era when Dylan went electric in Newport and plugged-in bands, including Young's own Buffalo Springfield, borrowed freely from long forgotten sources unearthed two decades earlier by dustbowl troubadours like Guthrie.

       But Young doesn't approach this canonized material with anything resembling the sterile reverence so aptly lampooned by Christopher Guest and his cohort in the mockumentary A Mighty Wind. Instead, he hooks up with his longtime compadrés in Crazy Horse (bassist Billy Talbot, drummer Ralph Molina, and guitarist Frank Sampedro), and subjects them to a Rust Never Sleeps-style pounding that makes them roar and howl with new life. Young and Crazy Horse aren't engaged in "covering" the eleven songs on Americana in the conventional sense; they're reinterpreting them, freely and often radically, treating them as the open and ever-evolving texts that they were prior to record industry standardization.

TAKING LIBERTIES: Neil Young subjects folk classics to a pounding that makes them roar and howl.

       Young is explicit about that in his liner notes, which trace the lineage of each track and detail the degree to which he's taken liberties with them. "Wayfarin‘ Stranger," the only Americana track that sets aside grungy, overdriven electric guitars for folky acoustic strumming, is a “19th-century folk song. . . influenced by the Burl Ives’ 1944 recording," while "Clementine," a churn-and-burn rocker in Crazy Horse's hands, is based on an old tale – of a man's loss of either his wife or daughter – that's been credited to as many as three different writers in the second half of the 19th century, "using many of the original words and a new melody."

       But you don't have to be a folkologist to appreciate what Young's up to on Americana. Most of the song titles and plenty of the refrains here have the ring of the familiar, even as the melodies are muscled in unexpected directions, artfully contorted by the intuitive chemistry — a kind of electromagnetic bond — Young has spent years cultivating with Crazy Horse. As if to drive that point home, the disc opens with what sounds like four guys just messing around in the studio, searching for the right note, with Young sketching the outlines of a groove with some sinewy guitar soloing, and Molina pounding out a few snare hits and hesitantly riding a cymbal before they all land on the same chord and begin to pick up a head of steam that keeps them chugging along blissfully for a good five minutes. "It sounds very funky. . . it's really good. . .," you can hear Young enthuse as the Americana interpretation of "Oh Susanna" (originally performed on September 11, 1847 by Stephen Foster; updated in 1964 by Tim Rose and the Thorns) comes to a crashing close.

       Americana is peppered with small pleasures that, like “Oh Susanna,” erupt with a nearly palpable emotional intensity, with seemingly unguarded moments when you can almost feel the songs coming together in real time, and the band’s enthusiasm becomes infectious. Even “This Land Is Your Land,” a one-time protest song written in reaction to “God Bless America” that’s largely been rendered inert by too many facile sing-alongs, comes back to life as a barbed — and timely — social commentary, thanks largely to Young’s rescuing of several verses that might otherwise have been lost in the dustbin of history. “Through the shadow of the steeple, I saw my people” he sings against a clippity-clop country groove, “I saw my people by the relief office/I seen my people as they stood hungry/And I stood there asking, is this land made for you and me?”

       Young has a few other political points to make on “Americana.” But I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise of the snarling spin that he, Crazy Horse, and a children’s choir put on “God Save the Queen.” Americana embodies a larger artistic idea that transcends politicking: time doesn’t kill songs; people do. And, more often than not, it takes someone as defiantly unconventional as a Neil Young to reverse that process. 

REGINA SPEKTOR

SINGULAR SONGSTRESS
Regina Spektor splits the difference between avant-folk and pop pleasures

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: June 01, 2012  http://www2.the-burg.com

Regina Spektor, What We Saw from the Cheap Seats (Sire)

Regina Spektor's new What We Saw from the Cheap Seats, her sixth full-length in a dozen years, begins straightforwardly enough. Accompanying herself quietly on piano, she wistfully reflects, "I must have left a thousand times/But everyday begins the same/Cuz there's a small town in my mind/How can I leave without hurting everyone that made me," singing in a soft, plainspoken voice that suits the seemingly plaintive tone of "Small Town Moon." A spare drumbeat arrives on the second verse and the narrative takes a slight turn for the strange, with Spektor stringing together apparent non sequiturs ("Oh baby it's all about the moon/I wish you wouldn't have broke my camera/Cuz we're gonna get real old real soon/Today we're younger than we're ever gonna be") in a carefree manner that's reflected in the offhand way she slides freely toward notes that put her perilously close to a region that lies just beyond her vocal range. And, then, after a short pause, serrated guitars and a heavy backbeat tear into the serenity, and Spektor, in full rock mode, bangs away at the piano, crooning "Stop, stop, what's the hurry?/Come on baby don't you worry, worry/Everybody not so nice, nice. . ."
    For one track, at least, Cheap Seats has a fairly familiar feel. Indeed, "Small Town Moon" isn't all that different from something you might hear from a sultry, soul-bearing, piano-playing songstress like, say, Tori Amos. But Spektor is categorically and unabashedly different. A Soviet emigre whose family moved to the Bronx when she was nine, Spektor studied classical piano and composition up through a four-year program at Purchase College's Conservatory of Music before finding a temporary home in NYC among what became known as the "anti-folk" scene — essentially, a loose coterie of singer-songwriters who didn't quite fit the trad folk mold, weren't really rock enough for the established club scene, and, among others, included artists as diverse as Beck and Michelle Shocked among its more notable members/supporters.
    Spektor, who self-released her debut album, 11.11, in 2001, didn't exactly abandon her classical training. Instead, she began to incorporate an eclectic array of genres into her songwriting, freely mixing and matching elements of folk, lo-fi indie-rock, jazz, blues, hip-hop, and what might best be described as just plain avant-garde. (The titles "Rejazz" and "$2.99 Blues" from that first album offer some sense of where she was headed artistically.) So. while she's perfectly capable of pulling off an accessibly skewed pop tune like the bittersweet "Small Town Moon," she is a much more idiosyncratic creature than even someone as mercurial, at times, as Tori Amos – a puckish pixie with a penchant for dropping guttural growls, fluttering trills, and other oddly affecting flights of vocal fancy into stylized songs that lean toward the theatrical.
    On Cheap Seats she dials back some of her more eccentric tendencies and splits the difference between anti-folk subterfuge and pop pleasures. "Oh Marcello" is a playfully perverse mash-up of sorts that alternates between Spektor delivering, in broken English and a faux Italian accent, lines about a bad-news dude, and dropping the accent to cop the central hook from the Animals' hit "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" ("I'm just a soul whose intentions are good/Oh lord, please don't let me be misunderstood"). And "Don't Leave Me (Ne me quitte pass)" is a Caribbean-style reworking of a tune she's been performing live for years, a bouncy tale of life in various NYC's Burgs now outfitted with a brassy horn section for a little extra punch. On some level, both songs are essentially genre exercises. But they're also somehow essential reminders of who Spektor is as an artist.
    Elsewhere, with the simple titled "How," Spektor irons out most of the kinks in her vocals and offers a straight-up smokey blues-inflected piano ballad about romance gone wrong — a torch song of sorts that one could easily imagine Adele digging into with her deeper, throatier voice. And, after a noisy electronic drum salvo, "All the Rowboats" morphs into a cleverly quirky rumination on the life of paintings locked in galleries and museums ("Masterpieces serving maximum sentences/It's their own fault, for being timeless/There's a price to pay, and a consequence"), while the dynamic, full-throated "Ballad of a Politician" has a little timely fun with the current state of our government without resorting to preachy dogma.
    The production on Cheap Seats emphasizes Spektor's voice over all else, creating a sense of intimacy that imparts a certain rawness to even the disc's most refined tracks. So, it would be a stretch to say it's a polished album by modern standards. But it's definitely Spektor's most accessibly composed disc to date. And, that's saying a lot for an artist who seems to revel in being an acquired taste.