NEW MULTITUDES

Jay Farrar, Jim James, Anders Parker, and Will Johnson celebrate Woody Guthrie’s centennial

By Matt Ashare

New Multitudes, New Multitudes (Rounder)

It’s hard to imagine that Son Volt singer/guitarist Jay Farrar and My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James (a/k/a Yim Yames) weren’t at least thinking about the current state of affairs in this country when they were invited, along with Anders Parker (Varnaline) and Will Johnson (Centro-matic), to cull through the vast archive of unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics by his daughter Nora. The idea was for the four alt-country fellow travelers to join forces on an album that would bring those lyrics to musical life to mark the centennial celebration of Woody’s birth year.

         That year has come. And the album, New Multitudes, has arrived with fairly minimal hype at a time when Occupy Wall Street is still going strong, during a week that began with seemingly tone-deaf Republican presidential hopeful making news with a rather bone-headed remark at the Daytona 500. In case you haven’t heard, when asked if he followed auto racing, Mitt Romney responded, “Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans. But I have some great friends that are NASCAR team owners.” Maybe he was just kidding. But given the size of his bank account, not to mention his Super PAC, it’s not all that funny.

         So whether or not Farrar, James, Parker, and Johnson, who are touring under the moniker New Multitudes, meant to drop a populist smartbomb in the midst of a our on-going recession and one of the nastiest political climates in recent memory, they’ve succeeded. Because, while the real Woody Guthrie was a complicated artist who wrote all kinds of songs, the mythical Woody Guthrie lives on as the activist Dust Bowl Troubadour who penned “This Land Is Our Land,” scrawled “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar, and, in contemporary parlance, trumpeted the cause of the 99%.

         Farrar and his crew aren’t the first songwriters to be given access to the Guthrie archives. Jeff Tweedy, Farrar’s former bandmate in Uncle Tupelo, and his band Wilco, joined forces with British punk-folkster Billy Bragg on two albums that set unpublished Guthrie lyrics to music, 1998’s Mermaid Avenue and 2000’s Mermaid Avenue Vol. II. And Guthrie’s been a major influence on socially conscious artist since Bob Dylan first coopted the Dust Bowl Troubadour mantle back in his freewheeling folk days. Clash rabble-rouser Joe Strummer originally dubbed himself Woody Mellor in Guthrie’s honor. And Bruce Springsteen, an avowed Guthrie acolyte, has been known to pull out “This Land Is Your Land” from time to time, most memorably on his album Live 1975-1985.

         But New Multitudes, through no fault of their own, have arrived at a time when simply invoking the legacy of Woody Guthrie carries a moral weight that would be difficult to quantify. To their credit, though, they don’t get mired in anything too heavy handedly dogmatic or overtly preachy. Farrar kicks off the album with the meditative “Hoping Machine,” a slow building rocker he delivers with characteristic world-weariness as he winds his way through lyrics like “Word is the music and the people are the song” until his fellow singers join in on the open-ended punch line “Out of order,” a sentiment that could apply to just about anything in the broken-down world the song inhabits.

         Elsewhere, Parker, who played with Farrar in the band Gob Iron, takes the lead on the acoustic “Fly High,” a straightforwardly folky, poetic rumination on a troubled romance sung from the window seat of cross-country flight. And, Johnson is at the helm for the album’s hardest hitting number, the unmistakably Springsteen-styled “V.D. City,” a place populated by skid row denizens where “nobody knows you by name,” harmonicas blare, and overdriven guitars tangle a friendly fight to an anthemic finish.

It’s James who tackles what might be the album’s most outwardly partisan tune, the spare, fragile, and bluesy “My Revolutionary Mind,” a forlorn love ballad or sorts that culminates around a gently sung, if somewhat bemusing chorus: “I need a progressive woman/I need an awfully liberal woman/I need a socially conscious woman/To ease my revolutionary mind.” And Farrar manages with relative ease to invest the disc’s simple title track with a solemnity of a secular prayer. Against a backdrop of strummed acoustic guitars, he intones “Gonna win my battle for peace,” “Gonna build my world over,” “Gonna build my world with love,” turning what sound like scribbled thoughts into a coherent and powerful statement of purpose.

That said, the real strength of New Multitudes is the balance Farrar, James, Parker, and Johnson bring to the project, both in terms of the music they’ve set Guthrie’s words to, and the glimpses we’re given into Guthrie’s world. There are deep thoughts, dark images, and serious moments here. But there are also bright spots like R.E.M.-ish jangle of “Old L.A.,” an ode to an oft maligned city sung by Parker in a manner that brings to mind Michael Stipe. And just having the opportunity to hear Farrar and James spar on guitar should be enough to bring a smile to the face of contemporary Americana fans.

It’s hard to know exactly what Farrar, James, Parker, and Johnson went digging for when Guthrie’s notebooks were open to them. But they appear to have found it.      

MATISYAHU

SPIRITUALIZED: Matsiyahu aims to transcend genre on his slick new Spark Seeker

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: July 25, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment

TO BEARD OR NO TO BEARD: That is the question for Matisyahu

A little over six months ago, Matisyahu, the reggae-inflected rapper who'd been openly flaunting his devotion to orthodox Judaism since the start of his musical career in 2005, sent a missive to his fans. He employed what's fast become the preferred means of mass communication for hip artists. He Tweeted, presumably not on the Sabbath. "No more Chassidic reggae superstar," he began. "Sorry folks, all you get is me." Included was a fresh photo of the singer without the traditional long beard and unshorn hair that had become a Matisyahu trademark.

It looked as if the Pennsylvania-born Phish-head, who'd dropped out of his Westchester, New York high school before getting his act together in Israel, reclaiming his Jewish roots, and launching his musical career from Brooklyn in full Chassidic garb, had taken the first steps toward secularizing himself.

       Not coincidentally, Matisyahu, who'd relocated to LA, was also gearing up for the release of his fourth studio album, Spark Seeker, a slickly produced, big-budget, multi-national operation overseen by proven hitmaker Koool Kojak, a dude who has also worked with the mainstreamed stars Nicki Minaj and Key$a. Matisyahu, it appeared, was ready to move on to a new stage in his career. As he Tweeted, "Get ready for an amazing year filled with musical rebirth. And for those concerned with my naked face, don't worry. . . you haven't seen the last of my facial hair."

       I can't remember the last time there was something even remotely resembling a stir over the status of an artist's beard, unless you count the possibly apocryphal incident when Gillette offered ZZ Top frontman Billy Gibbons a large pile of cash to take a razor to his face. Then again, I'm fairly certain that, prior to Matisyahu's emergence, there weren't many opportunities to string together the words "Chassidic reggae superstar" outside of an imagined SNL skit or, perhaps, a discarded Sascha Baron Cohen film treatment.

       There is a largely underground scene of devout Jewish musicians centered around Brooklyn and the indie label Jdub, which is where Matisyahu got his start. But it's safe to say that, until now, dude's pretty much had the stage to himself, so to speak. If that's occasionally made Matisyahu, who peppers his raps with Hebrew prayers, a little Yiddish here and there, and plenty of allusions to the Old Testament, seem like something of a novelty act, then so be it. Clearly, his spiritual message has continued to resonate, particularly with various tribes in the land of jam-banding, where transcendence through sound and a certain open-ended positivity are the coin of the realm, whatever one's musical or religious persuasion may be. No surprise then that this weekend's FloydFest, an eclectic, four-day roots 'n jam celebration in Floyd, Virginia, that runs through July 29th, is one of the first stops on Matisyahu's Spark Seeker tour. He's scheduled to be one of the Saturday headliners.

Matisyahu, Spark Seeker (Fallen Sparks)

As for the album Spark Seeker, it's not quite the departure that Matisyahu's change in grooming habits might suggest. Recorded in both in Israel and LA, it's more transitional than transformative, more Los Angelian than Brooklynite, and, despite the singer's Jamaican-inflected delivery, more West Coast hip-pop than Trenchtown Jamaica. The disc opens with a snippet of a Hebrew prayer that gives way to some very Middle Eastern sounding Arabic instrumentation, a nod in the general direction of the mostly unstated panculturalism that Matisyahu embodies. But the track, "Crossroads," quickly gives way to a propulsive hip-hop groove, with Matisyahu throwing down defiant rhymes with what could be vaguely veiled references to the Holy Land. "These lies have got me tired/I'm free falling, I'm done stalling/I'm done crawling up this mountain top/I won't stop 'til I manifest my crop." His voice, surrounded by a complex array of synths and sequencers, is joined by a chorus of background vocalists as he delivers the sort of anodyne chorus that's become his stock in trade: "Crossroads, one million miles/I'm kicking up dirt when I fly by."

       It's about as workaday as a Justin Timberlake refrain — and as a singer, Matisyahu’s no Justin Timberlake. So, even if Matisyahu wants to insist that "I've come back to take the music back," he's really not breaking any new ground here. Indeed the disc's first single, the reggae-styled, electronified "Sunshine," with its touches of echoey dub production, rests on the rather generic chorus, "Reach for the sky/Keep your eye on the prize/Forever in my mind/Be my golden sunshine." You don't have to be a Biblical scholar to come up with lines like that. Any self-help book would pretty much do the trick.

       On the other hand, if Matisyahu's intent with Spark Seeker was to find a more mainstream approach that would accommodate his idiosyncrasies, he succeeded. Tracks like "Sunshine" and "Crossroads" are offset by deeper, more religiously inspired cuts like the freewheeling "Tel Avin'n." A breezy ode to Israel's most cosmopolitan city, it finds him getting back to the Book, calling out to the "Moshiach" (the Hebrew word for "messiah"), and stopping mid-song to recite the first verse of one of the holiest of Jewish prayers in Hebrew.

       The only real misstep, if you could call it that, is "Buffalo Soldier," a tribute to Bob Marley that's not the Bob Marley song, but that quotes liberally from the original. Matisyahu's smart enough to bring rapper Shyne aboard to handle rhymes like "Buffalo soldier/No, I'm not a Rasta/Used to be a mobster/Burning up the block, bro." Matisyahu picks up the flow with some of his semi-Biblical wordifying ("Went running away to the cave/Went in a slave and came out all flames”). But his cred as a rapper takes a major hit when Shyne shows up for the final few verses and simply shreds as he offers a timely take on a message Marley might appreciate. "I shot the sheriff, the D.A., and the deputy/Sorry Al Sharpton, I don't need you to lecture me/Maybe I'll stop talking about guns/When you talk about the fund that they cut for the youth." Maybe it's time for Matisyahu to bring back the beard.

WHOABEAR

ORIGINAL PROGRAMMING

Whoabear dive into the deep end of electronica

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: July 25, 2012

WHO: Whoabear and Red Rattles

WHEN: July 27, 10 p.m.

WHERE: Bull Branch, 109 11^th Street, Lynchburg, VA

COVER: Free, call (434) 847-8477

THREE OF A KIND: Dillard, Dodson, and Penkert at play.

Right around this time last year, Beau Dodson was sitting rather pretty with what most young musicians in town would consider a good gig, as the latest in a string of drummers who'd signed on to back veteran singer/songwriter David Sickman in the Bell Weather States. Dodson and the band's other two principals, bassist Adam Penkert and keyboardist Andrew Dillard, were forging a strong musical bond, and

Sickman, who'd made a name for himself as a founding member of the Charlottesville roots group the Hackensaw Boys a decade earlier, was using his old connections to generate a steady stream of gigs. Nothing to complain about.

       But just a few short months later, all that changed when Sickman rejoined the Hackensaw Boys, the Bell Weather States were put on indefinite hiatus, and Dillard, Dodson, and Penkert found themselves stuck without anyone to front the formidable musical force they'd become. There was, however, a silver lining of sorts: Dodson had a backlog of songs he'd been working on for several years, and he'd had a chance to perform a few of them at what turned out to be one of the last Bell Weather shows.

       "I sat on those songs for four or five years," Dodson recounts. "And then one of our shows in November at Rivermont Pizza got a little out of hand. . ."

       "We took a break outside," Penkert interjects with a puckish laugh. "And when we came back in I told Beau to start rapping. I took over on drums, and David was playing bass."

       "We had so much fun with it," Dodson continues. "And I remember on our way out of there Adam just said to me, 'Man, we gotta do something with this stuff.'"

       What they began to do with that "stuff" — mixing elements of rap, rock, and electronica — may have seemed like a major left turn for three guys who'd found a peaceful, easy Americana feel playing trad instruments with Sickman. But it rapidly evolved into a coherent, if somewhat quixotic, vision that coalesced around the trio’s deep appreciation of groove, with Dillard manning a growing arsenal of synths and sequencers, Penkert taking over on drums, and the long-maned, tattoo'd Dodson emerging as a fierce frontman. Indeed, they finished recording the three tracks for their self-released debut EP Hold Me, I'm Fascinating, and even completed a video for the electro-rap-rocking cut "The Day the Board Game Died,” before they finally managed to settle on a name for the band: Whoabear.

       Jump ahead to a humid Saturday afternoon in July. Whoabear are gearing up for their fifth gig, a show this Friday at Bull Branch. The EP's been mastered, pressed, and packaged, replete with an official Whoabear logo — a rough black-and-white drawing of roaring bear head. There's merch too, including rubber Whoabear wristbands, paper Whoabear masks, and even a complete Whoabear "care package," along with a solid ReverbNation website (http://www.reverbnation.com/whoabear), a YouTube "intro" to the band (http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?

v=uzUrdGpFgmA), and, of course, the video for "The Day the Board Game Died" (http://www.google.com/url), which has the look and feel of a "Sabotage"-style Beastie Boys production.

       Dillard, Dodson, and Penkert are sweating it out on a couple of makeshift benches, waiting to shoot their second video in the middle of what they refer to as "Sickman's farm," a small piece of land littered with random piles of wood and populated by a small cadre of goats who seem intent on eating just about anything that won't bite back. It’s a rather paradoxically pastoral setting for a trio who, with the exception of live drums, have essentially eschewed organic instrumentation for the tools of techno. But the members of Whoabear don’t make any clear-cut distinctions between the two.

“It's hard to really say what it is that we do,” offers Penkert.

“I've gotten to the point where when people ask what we do, I just say alternative-infused dance music,” Dillard suggests. “Basically, we've all been live players and now we're getting into sequencing and electronics. But everything I do when we play is live. So it's always a little different.”

Penkert nods and adds, “We all have jam roots and a lot of times I feel like we get going and then everything still comes together organically.”

That’s perhaps best reflected in the dramatic leaps of genre the band accomplishes in just three tracks on Hold Me, I’m Fascinating. Dub-inflected keys and a vaguely reggae beat lay the foundation for rapid-fire rapping on “25 Happy Street,” a track that works itself up to an aggro climax that’s heavy without the metal. “Long Time” rides a pair of glitch-pop synth lines into a prog-rocking chorus as Dodson delivers what amounts to a straight-up love letter, half-rapped/half-sung. And, “The Day the Board Game Died” is a throttling techno thrasher with melodic respites that serve as a base for intriguing internal monologue, a bit of mischief Dodson says was inspired by nothing more than a boring night alone at home.

“It’s about a guy's conscience catching up with him,” he explains. “I don't even know what he did. I'm big on user interpretation. I don't know what any of it means. It could mean a million things and that's kind of cool to me. Someone told me that the title meant a lot to him. And I was like, it's just a play on the title ‘The Day the Music Died.’ It's kind of like the board game dies and electronic music takes over.”

And yet, Whoabear haven’t been entirely taken over by electronics. As Dodson is happy to point out, “Every show's different, every song ends up different, the words are different each time. Nothing ever ends up the same and that's part of the fun.”

“A lot of that stems from David,” Dillard says of their former Bell Weather Statesman. “He led us off on all kinds of tangents we weren't expecting when we played shows. And, he was instrumental in getting us to this point. We played over a hundred shows with him. Basically, he showed us what was possible and now we're taking it from there.”

JIMI HENDRIX REISSUES

RE-EXPERIENCED: Two gems from the vault get makeovers Hendrix's 70th anniversary

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

VOODOO CHILD: Hendrix works his magic in Berkeley.

On May 30, 1970, Jimi Hendrix performed a pair of shows at the Berkeley Community Theatre in California. There was, to borrow a Dylan line, protest in the air, not just surrounding the Vietnam War, but also over the commercialization of the Woodstock Festival through the release of the Woodstock documentary just a month earlier. And there were tensions in the Hendrix camp as well, owing at least in part to Jimi's desire to forgo touring in favor of spending as much time as possible in his nearly completed Electric Lady Studios. So a deal was brokered: Hendrix and a reconstituted version of his trio the Experience, with Band of Gypsies bassist Billy Cox replacing Noel Redding alongside original drummer Mitch Mitchell, would play a series of fly-in weekend dates around the country, leaving weekdays free for recording. But, as an insurance policy of sorts, Hendrix manager Michael Jeffrey arranged for the Berkeley shows to be filmed and professionally recorded so he'd have something tucked in the vaults in the event that his increasingly flighty client went south on him. Three and a half months later, on September 18, Hendrix was found dead in London, just a little over a month shy of his 28th birthday. If he'd lived, this upcoming November 27th would mark his 70th birthday.

       Prior to his passing, Hendrix had only released three proper full-length studio albums, along with a live album featuring Band of Gypsies. But, toward the end of his all-too brief three year stint as one of rock's reigning guitar gods, he did indeed spend quite a bit of time at Electric Lady, famously committing to tape hours upon hours of song ideas and partially finished material, much of which has been packaged, repackaged, and released on dozens of posthumous albums, compilations, and box sets. In fact, as recently as 2010, Experience Hendrix L.L.C., the trust that was established by Jimi's father James in 1995 to manage the estate, approved the delivery of yet another album of a previously unavailable studio album titled Valleys of Neptune. To date, nine official collections of "new" Hendrix studio material have surfaced since his death. Add to that another several dozen live albums, and over 25 compilations and box sets, including last September’s 4-disc Winterland reissue, and you're left with a fairly formidable pile of posthumous product that is dizzyingly daunting enough to frustrate all but the most ardent of Hendrix fans.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Live at Berkeley (Sony/Legacy)

And now we've got two more archival artifacts to add to the growing stack of Hendrix mementos, both products of that May evening in Berkeley. The first, simply titled Live at Berkeley, is, as advertised, a recording of the Jimi Hendrix Experience's performance at the Community Theatre. Actually, it's a reissue of the very same live album that originally came out in 2003, featuring the second of the band's two sets that night from beginning to end, although the new one boasts a "24 page booklet with detailed liner notes and rare photos." It's available on CD and as an "audiophile 12" double album" on 200 gram vinyl.

       To go along with that, Sony's catalogue division, Legacy Recordings, has also revamped the film Jimi Plays Berkeley, not to be confused with the "soundtrack" of the same title that includes studio cuts and live tracks recorded at Woodstock and in London, and reissued it as a digitally remastered DVD and Blu-ray. As if that weren't convoluted enough, unlike the Live at Berkeley CD, Jimi Plays Berkeley isn't purely a performance film. It was created independently of the live recording and edited as a documentary, cutting together footage culled from both sets with shots of Hendrix's entourage arriving at the venue, the band sound checking, and the reaction of fans outside the theater, some of whom ended up starting a near riot when it became clear that there weren't nearly enough tickets to accommodate all of them. But it does include, as one of its "special features," an "audio only presentation of Jimi's complete Berkeley second set performance mixed in 5.1 surround sound." In other words, while you don't get the new 24-page booklet of liner notes and photos with the DVD/Blu-ray, all of the audio from the CD is there.

Jimi Hendrix, Jimi Plays Berkeley (Sony/Legacy)

The film itself has something of a tangled and, well, ugly history. The raw 16mm footage essentially sat undeveloped for several months in a freezer belonging to producer Peter Pilafian, a guy described in the liner notes as "a musical jack of all trades" who, sadly, knew very little about directing and didn't have enough equipment to shoot both sets in their entirety. A finished version by Pilafian was eventually handed over to Michael Jeffrey, who cut it down to about an hour of performance footage and sent it on a tour of colleges and indie theaters. A restored version, bumped up to 72 minutes, came out on DVD in 2003, and now it's been remastered with additional supplements like some commentary by the audio engineer who recorded both sets that night.

       Other than that, there’s really nothing particularly new here, on Jimi Plays Berkeley or the Live at Berkeley CD. And that really is a shame. Hendrix remains a fascinating icon — a domineering presence who spoke through his guitar in a language that took the blues to a whole new plane, a language that still resonates today. At the time of the Berkeley shows he was apparently at a crossroads of sorts, as he tried to forge ahead musically without leaving behind the folks who’d facilitated his meteoric rise. You get a real sense of that in the Live at Berkeley set, which opens with nearly 7 minutes of progressive jamming (a song then known at “Pass It On” that would eventually shortly morph into “Straight Ahead”), moves onto more familiar ground with a furious rendition of “Stone Free” and a notably laid back “Hey Joe,” and then closes by taking his explosive interpretation of the “Star Spangled Banner” straight into “Purple Haze” and an extended version of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” And yet, there are times when it feels like he’s a little lost, when he seems to be searching for something — a sound, an epiphany — that’s eluding him. Perhaps, for all its flaws, that’s more apparent in the footage from the film, particularly in his searing cover of “Johnny B. Goode,” a tune that tellingly didn’t make the cut for the second set. It’s certainly an inspired update of the original. But in the end, it sounds like he’s trying to take the song somewhere it’s not quite ready to go just yet. Of course, none of this should come as a surprise to dedicated Hendrix fans: They’ve had access to this material for a decade or more.

R. KELLY

TRANSFORMER: R. Kelly returns to the roots of r&b on his new album

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

LADIES MAN: R. Kelly seduces like Marvin Gaye at his transcendent best on "Write Me Back."

Depending upon the time period and often the region, the term "rhythm and blues," or r&b, has meant very different things to very different people over the past seven-plus decades. As the musicologist (not the "addicted to Love" dude) Robert Palmer noted in his 1995 book Rock & Roll: An Unruly History, it essentially took hold as "a catchall term referring to any music made by and for black Americans." But even Palmer was well aware that, by the mid-’90s, his definition had long since become an anachronism— that by the end of the ’50s, r&b was rapidly being incorporated into the lexicon of rock and pop, where it has remained ever since.

       That's not to suggest that r&b hasn't remained a uniquely vital force in music, or that there aren't certain stylistic distinctions that can still be made. You've got traditionalists like Jill Scott and Jon Legend, along with more underground revivalists like Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. The r&b charts have also long been a home for pop phenoms in the vein of Adele, not to mention megastars like Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson. And, in more recent decades, singers whose stylings borrow heavily from hip-hop have formed something of a new and rather lucrative incarnation of r&b, populated by the likes of Usher, Alicia Keys, and Beyoncé. In fact, if you'd asked me just a few years ago where R. Kelly, a guy who's widely acknowledged to be one of the most successful r&b singer/songwriter/producers of the past twenty years, fit in to that continuum, I'd have called him the king of new jack swing, such is the ease with which he'd been able to navigate between straight, sexually charged r&b crooning and hip-hop hybrids like his collaborations with Jay-Z and his groundbreaking, multi-episode hip-hopera "Trapped In the Closet." 

       But Kelly, who's worked with everyone from Janet and Michael Jackson to Whitney Houston and Celine Dion over the years, has been undergoing a transformation of sorts that began two years ago with the release of Love Letter, a vintage-sounding, old-school soul soother that largely eschewed sexual seductions for come-ons of a more spiritual nature. Love Letter came off as a heartfelt tribute to r&b greats like Smokey Robinson and, especially, Marvin Gaye. It also seemed like a fairly unabashed attempt to gain a certain credibility by raising his art to the level of those legendary artists — just the sort of respectful and respectable mid-career excursion a performer of Kelly's stature might embark upon to cement his place in the pantheon of r&b royalty.

       But, with the release this week of Write Me Back (RCA), yet another collection of toned-down tunes that delve deeply, if a bit more widely, into the past, it appears that Kelly, whose bad boy boasting and behavior has gotten him into trouble in the past, may indeed have found a kind of redemption in returning to the roots of the music he's so closely identified with. Or, as the titles suggest, Write Me Back may just be Kelly's clever way of continuing the dialogue he began on Love Letter, a somewhat steamier sequel from an artist with a well-documented affinity for sequels. (As a side note, Kelly's announced that several new installments of "Trapped In the Closet" are already in the works.)

       Either way, Write Me Back builds on the retro foundation of Love Letter, with Kelly broadening his palette to incorporate stronger echoes of the smooth, string-embellished flow of classic Philly soul, along with some straight-up Smokey Motown grooves, a little Ray Charles house-rocking, and more than a touch of Barry White-style disco-ball slow dancing. The disc opens with the lite-funk of “Love Is,” a throbbing bassline and mellow piano chordings creating a cooled-down setting for Kelly’s increasingly intense testifying on the virtues of true romance, as lush Gamble and Huff-style orchestrations drive the song toward a climactic chorus of yearning, multi-tracked voices crooning, “Love is/You and me/Together for/Eternity.” It’s a simple sentiment that might better be suited for a greeting card, but, like Marvin Gaye at his transcendent best, Kelly relies on the naked urgency of his delivery to get his point across.

       Another high point is the gospel-tinged “Believe That It’s So,” an earnest track with lyrics like “There’s no mountain we can’t move/We will find strength in the groove,” that takes a playful turn from the sacred to the secular halfway through, with Kelly signaling, “We’re gonna switch it up” and moving into “fingernapping” clubland with the refrain, “I had a little too much to drink.” And “When A Man Lies,” with its church organ, strings, and gospel groove, is the kind of fervent yet controlled anthem that, again, brings to mind the best of Marvin Gaye.

       If there are missteps on Write Me Back, it’s Kelly’s flat attempt to rock out like early Ray Charles on the bluesy “All Rounds On Me” and the doo-woppy “Party jumpin’.” Both fall well outside of Kelly’s comfort zone and sound a bit too much like novelty knockoffs. Kelly’s strongest when he’s chilling, seducing, laying back and going with the groove. And, Write Me Back reveals time and time again that he’s got the voice, the timing, and the smarts to rise up to the level of a Marvin Gaye artistically. If Kelly truly believes that this is his calling, then the next step would be to move beyond making love to making larger points, like Gaye did with What’s Going On. He’s got the talent and clout. All he needs now is the will.  

THE FLAMING LIPS

SPACE CASES 

The Flaming Lips get high with a little help from their Heady Fwends

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: July 02, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/

AVANT GARDENING: The Lips stay strange on the new Fwends

Bottle-blond rapstress Ke$ha, indie beardo Bon Iver, glitch-hop auteur Prefuse 73, My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James, goth overlord Nick Cave, soul sistah Erykah Badu, and the one and only Yoko Ono are just a few of friendly folks who turn up on The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends, the new album by a band who, along with massive rodeos, the not quite mighty enough Thunder, and Gennifer Flowers, stand as one of the more noteworthy products of Oklahoma City. Add Biz Markie, and a handful of hip underground artists with names like Lightening Bolt, Tame Impala, and Neon Indian to the mix, and you've got a pretty impressive, suitably eclectic guest list for the sort of mercurial madness that's become a Flaming Lips specialty. But if there's a cosmic joke here, then the punch line is that Fwends was never really meant for widespread release: the disc was originally little more than a super limited edition, vinyl-only keepsake for the few lucky fans who snatched up copies in the early hours of Record Store Day this past April 21. In fact, Warner Bros. was already in the early stages of prepping for the arrival of the Lips’ next proper studio album, due late this year, when popular demand for Fwends compelled the label to repackage it in CD and downloadable form for worldwide release this week.

COOL CAMEOS: The Flaming Lips invite everyone from Nick Cave and Yoko Ono, to Bon Iver and Erykah Badu to join them on The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends (Warner Bros.)

       Record Store Day began in 2007 as a loosely organized underground push back against the rising tide of digital downloading and as a way for engaged artists like the Flaming Lips to support an ailing network of independently owned brick-and-mortar record shops while providing fans with often elaborately designed vinyl collectables. But as it has grown in size and stature, it's become emblematic of a larger cultural shift, as the hunger for vinyl, which waned after the introduction of CDs, has steadily grown in recent years. The latest numbers show a 50% increase in annual vinyl sales, from 2.8 million units in 2010 to almost 4 million last year. It's still a niche market. But, as the Flaming Lips have demonstrated with Fwends, it's having an increasingly significant impact on artist creativity, the machinations of the music business, and vagaries of consumer behavior.

       Or, to put it more bluntly, Fwends, for all its compelling cameos, is the kind of willfully difficult and sonically challenging album that major labels have been known to reject out of hand because there simply isn't anything even resembling a radio-friendly single here. The disc opens with an amusing false start by Ke$ha, who, once she recovers, offers this uplifting observation: "Well, it's 2012, think we're going to hell/Put me under your acid spell/I want my mind to be complete toast." A robotic voice interrupts her flow with the sinister directive, "You must be upgraded," as a primal beat pounds in the background and a synth set to mimic a malfunctioning alarm signals at irregular intervals. It's intriguing in the same way that putting Rihanna in the studio with Radiohead at their most radical might be, which is to say that it's essentially a determined study in the aesthetics of anti-pop.

       Admittedly, the Flaming Lips are definitely not a good place to set the baseline for where the music industry is headed, and the same goes for Ke$ha's cameo on "2012 (You Must Be Upgraded)." The band may have cut their teeth bashing out psychedelically bent garage-punk in the mid-’80s, and found a home on alternative radio in 1993 with the melodically skewed yet catchy hit, "She Don't Use Jelly." But, before the end of that decade, frontman Wayne Coyne was engaged in all kinds of sonic explorations, like the band's boombox experiments, a series of events at which Coyne conducted orchestras of audience volunteers wielding portable cassette machines with tracks the Lips had recorded, while the rest of the band added drums and other elements to the symphonic overtures. The Lips, riding a wave of critical acclaim, even managed to convince Warner Bros. to release a four-CD set, Zaireeka, that required the listener to play all four discs simultaneously, and in sync, in order to hear the completed songs.

       That was in 1997. Over the last decade and a half, the Lips have artfully navigated a course somewhere between deconstructed avant gardens and epic space-rock formations, between harsh electronics and soothing organic tones, between the demands of a good brain tease and the pure pleasure of a pop hook. Fwends has its moments of clarity — Nick Cave's unhinged soliloquy in "You, Man? Human???"; the dirty, damaged-blooze drive of the Jim James-sung "That Ain't My Trip"; Erykah Badu's echo-drenched delivery of the Lips’ nearly broken version of the Roberta Flack hit "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." But, at over ten minutes long, even the latter can feel a bit like an endurance test. Which may very well be the point. Recordings like "Fwends" clearly aren't conceived for or aimed at a mass audience. But if parts of it manage to reach the ears of the uninitiated – of listeners who are used to the softer side of the Flaming Lips — the world will feel like a slightly better 

place to me, if only for a fleeting moment or two.