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.  

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.