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were invited, along with Anders Parker (Varnaline) and Will Johnson (Centro-matic), to cull through the vast archive of unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics by his daughter Nora.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in Uncle Tupelo, and his band Wilco, joined forces with British punk-folkster Billy Bragg on two albums that set unpublished Guthrie lyrics to music, 1998’s Mermaid Avenue and 2000’s Mermaid Avenue Vol.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.      

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.  

NEW MULTITUDES

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

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: February 29, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/feb/29/jay-farrar-jim-james-anders-parker-will-johnson-ce-ar-1728985/

New Multitudes, New Multitudes (Rounder)

ALT-COUNTRY ALL-STARS

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.      

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