Foxy Shazam

Foxy Shazam: “Red Cape Diver”

from Introducing (New Weathermen/Ferret)

good gaudy miss maudy //Out Jan. 23

(orig. pub. Jan 2008)                            

The sound of Foxy Shazam is the sound of one pin rolling, back and forth across a carpet full of crackers that won’t ever go smooth, no matter how fine their dust is ground. It’s the pressure in a knife sawing through a pan full of brownies harder than Astroturf (mysteriously so: all directions on the package followed to the letter, and that’s what we get for forsaking Great-Great-Grandma’s recipe). The sound and vision of Foxy Shazam is that of a family reunion, forced (as if) at gunpoint, nevertheless somehow busting loose in a good way (on shards of thin ice which will never melt permanently, of course). The sound of Foxy Shazam is that of close calls, across the rules and other speed bumps of music, of everything, at least by battle-rattling implication (which they don’t give much time for editorializing about, when their new album, Introducing, is playing, twitching like a background shouldn’t).

The sound of Foxy Shazam takes this reviewer back to and forward from the unexpectedly hammy, glammy frontmen of the slambands featured in Penelope Spheeris’s punk squatter saga, Suburbia: greasepaint as fuel and/or lubricant and/or salad dressing, for the festive-to-reckless rituals of the antsy-to-moshing audience. Also for those (in the Spheeris movie and in Foxy live shots on YouTube) sinners who are just grinning: you don’t have to take the sound just one way or another, which goes against punk and novelty strictures alike. The sound of Foxy Shazam is more careening carnival ride than the old punk der-der-der beat—but that rolling pin is rolling, like Sky White’s piano is rollicking, back and forth, through the ages of the living flame of punk, as “Yes! Yes! Yes!”,  for instance, spins and spews shards and shades of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, riding a streamlined Mars Volta (none of which allusions should be taken too literally, but  Foxy Shazam can often  be seen in the mental moonlight, shakin’ that family tree). The screaming of throatist Eric Nally (times Loren Turner’s guitar, Joe Holberstadt’s drums, Daisy’s bass) doesn’t get in the way of musical appreciation, or even Nally’s words. (Well, maybe on “Ghost Animals,” and anything may get a little blurry anywhere, but basically the studio tracks seem to know they need to provide more and some different detail than live offerings.)

“Red Cape Diver” starts with a “Spanish” piano intro, and is reportedly “about a bullfighter who is telling his family that he loves them before he goes off to work.” Not to judge him too harshly, ‘cause you couldn’t get this pixel-pusher fighting bulls, or Red Bull, for that matter, not even for the wife and kiddies, but…if you were fixing to go do that, wouldn’t you want to soothe them? Well, maybe the best way to do that is get ‘em swinging from the balconies, burning off that excess energy, and maybe that’s the best way to get yourself warmed up for the stage (all the world’s a stage!). And maybe every performer (everybody in the world, including the bullfighter’s wife and kiddies!) should reach way down sometimes (like every day, at least once a day), and come up with, “AHHHHHH! I DON’T WANNA DIE” as a chorus, and a motto, bouncing back and forth, from face to face, until the song is over. It might make everybody feel better. And then it would be something to look forward, to, like another day. The sound of Foxy Shazam is the sound of such thoughts, ground round (and round) as a head (and a spotlight). Their worth can be figured out (ditto whether it’s worth figuring out) by the pound (and the pound and the pound).  YEAH

The Battle of Land and Sea

The Battle of Land and Sea: “I Built The Sea”

from  The Battle of Land and Sea (Notenuf)

nautical noir // Out  Jan. 15

(review/interview, orig. pub. Jan. 2008)                                                   

The Battle of Land and Sea’s eponymous EP (re-released on the Notenuf label with two new tracks added to  the previous, self-released version’s six) consists of  female voice and agile solo guitar (Sara O’Shura and Joshua Canny, respectively) recorded in a dark, empty room, or maybe a dumpster—metallic, echoing, but clear enough. A nomadic, monadic sound, of purposeful wandering and private but palpable purpose, of figures moving behind a curtain, but with no hestitation. Isolation is necessary, mystery too, but so is an audience, a witness, and sometimes a driver.

A “Saltwater Queen” stands over the bed of a boy who’s pining for her; the narrator of “Birdsong”  testifies to being an eleven-year-old girl, pursued by someone who has promised terrible things. This is who she’s talking to: how much of this is a memory, and from how far back? No matter, it’s all present and accounted for—right up to the jump cut, to where “The Beautiful Ones” are gathering, rallying on the shore, about to turn “our backs to the cold wind,” and depart. O’Shura almost sounds like Jewel here, but the slightly querulous, princessy pitch of the chorus turns stern, bitter, determined. Regal enough, with reasons enough (and yeah, beautiful enough)  

Which makes the next track, a cover of Quarterflash’s “Harden My Heart,” seem redundant at first, at least as an idea (and after the quick-change artistry of  the first three songs,  is The Battle getting quagmired already?) But this version is much slower than the original, as the singer almost seems to lose her resolve, as if she’s going to slip into merely sensitive, quivering, sub-Tori Amos mode—then the guitar does some deeper brooding, just enough, and the voice bears its bruises and its tears into the chorus, where they get quietly hardened into armor. But the “armor” is just there to be implied, and felt: there’s no olden-tymes/acid folke “Beautiful Ones” aspect to Quarterflash’s song as Marv Ross wrote it (nor as The Battle Of Land and Sea perform it, sans the original arrangement’s Big 80s glitz). Yet, armor is armor…It’s not a better song than O’Shura’s originals, but the relatively “normal” linearity of it, and especially the struggle in this new performance, somehow add depth or shading to the map, as revealed so far. (All roads lead to Rome, and this one leads a grateful pop-conditioned nation to receive drops of realness from the wise Saltwater Queen, during one heck of a costume change.)

“Six Days” continues the down-to-earth bit by making it literal: the singer smiles up and across time and space, toward a traveller she’s waiting for. But though the pleasantness if this view is new, she’s not too passive, she notes that “I put you on the plane.” Just a little note of satisfaction in that; all’s right with the world, as in “I Built The Sea.” You built or maybe bought the boat, but she (and the guitar) have that easy, rolling authority, which is just flexing its muscles, riding somebody’s vessel high and low. Something vast is in the air, which is not just that of a princess, or a queen, but a goddess, even, eventually, beyond satisfaction (beyond all emotions little humans can have, maybe beyond all emotions, period) But there’s also some friction in there somewhere, some necessary adjustments. True authority doesn’t have to issue reminders—power does, and power is a utility, from a resource, and even if the latter doesn’t get clogged up (ha-ha, who could mess up the sea), the power bill does add up.

(So “Lady” will hold her head high, but carefully, as if it is about to fall off, and she seems to be stumbling alone; then,“You Are A Sailor” and she’s a sweet hitchhiker, suggesting terrible things, and suddenly reminding me that the slide guitar in “I Built The Sea” kept easing toward the Doors’ “Moonlight Drive,” the original of which moves as gracefully as the tides of logic, toward a proposed, underwater “surrender to the waiting worlds”—just a little joke planted, even in the apex of Electric Ladytopia!) Yeah boy, it all adds up. Eight tracks high, and rising.

 The Battle of Land and Sea’s Sarah O’Shura on “I Built The Sea”:

There’s an implied or at least an inferred storyline to this sequence of tracks. Was “I Built The Sea” written with a song cycle in mind?

Definitely. It was the first song that was written for this project. I was quite inspired by the band name and I wanted to write some songs that had a thread, and express my story infused with a bit of folklore.

Did the song seem to emerge all at once, or did you have some ideas in mind, with a certain moment or experience that provided a tipping point? (If the latter, please describe.)

Both actually. The song is about judgmental, short-sighted people that underestimate and begrudge me and my creativity. “I built the sea and not the boat you’re in.”: if I and this other kind of person were sitting in a boat and I told them this is mine, I created this, they would assume I was talking of the boat, when really I’m speaking of something much greater than that: the surrounding sea, I built the sea.

Was the song all written before you started recording?

Yes, I recorded a demo the day I wrote it to capture the vibe and intention of where I wanted to take the song. Usually I record a sketch of a song before anyone else hears it, that’s what I play for them first, not me sitting with a guitar and singing it.

Did words and music arrive together, or if not, which came first?

They did arrive together. I woke up and decided that I was going to write and record a song about what was going on in my life right then, a musical snapshot.  I had a few days off work, my boyfriend was out of town recording his record and I was brimming with creativity. I wrote two songs on the record in those couple of days.

Was it written with any mythological aspects in mind? If so, what?

Not specifically, I just wanted to tell a story within a story…

Tickley Feather

Tickley Feather: “Tonight Is The Nite”

from Tickley Feather (Paw-Tracks)

tinglin’ dice// Album Out April 29

(orig. published mid-April 2008)

           

Tickley Feather is no tease. Even in her video single, “Sex Face,” when she muses that “I wanna go home with you,” and also “I don’t wanna go home with you,” that’s just how it is sometimes; you do and you don’t. And even though she usually (at least on MySpace and YouTube) sounds like she’s singing in the shower, swirling around in a bit of gray metal echo and lo-fi recording hiss, so that most things she says and sings, however robustly, might be heard differently by different listeners; still, she does sound robust, if young, and girly, but not too waify, and her feather brushes by in a tantalizing way, but still it tickles, in a way that’s more gratifying than teasing usually is (to the teased). Not too scarily determined, not “gaslights and hard flirtation,” as George Eliot would put it, but flirtatious enough that it might be nice listen to, in gnarly loops, whilst watching the Jane Austen marathon on PBS. She’s cute but not cloying, and young, but never oh-what’ll-I-do? Maybe a little anxious, but resourceful, in a no-budget way. The perky-to-murky vocal notes, shuffley keyboard beats (and even hooks) may be rationed, but they’re there when she reaches for them. Tickley Feather is Annie Sacks, who claims she’s from the woods (bio says Richmond, VA, before Philly), and has in fact been a single mom for four years, so she knows how to put a basic meal together. And how to entertain a kid, and a notion. Stir the latter around, swirl it in the shower, ‘til you’ve got a strange brew, got an ear leant too, coming towards you, though she sometimes swerves, via her favorite “zoom effects box,” and more often a confident urge to vocally contour or at least decorate the chronic sonics and little shadowy places. Which can receive let’s call-‘em-dubby flickers of room noise, sprinkles of keyboard garble, and abrupt endings also.  It’s worked well enough, on Tickley Feather’s short trail of singles and EPs, to lead Animal Collective to give her an opening slot on some of their shows, and now she's got a self-titled, full-length debut album on A.C’s label, Paw-Tracks.

The advance single from Tickley Feather (the rest of which hadn’t arrived by press time) is “Tonight Is The Nite,” which bears no resemblance to the 50s doo-wop song (nor the Neil Young song) of almost the same title, except in terms of anticipation, and the aforementioned confidence. Ditto the aforementioned hooks, because a skinny, surefooted vamp jumps right out, and keeps on jumping in place, adding a little buzz to the possible question mark (something curvy like that) tickling “Tonight” ‘s more up-front-as-sung exclamation mark! (All this punctuation makes up for/even improves on the ending of another MySpace track, Tickley Feather and Money Bags’ “I Like To Watch, “  which leads right up to and through the title phrase, which disappears without a punctuation mark, much less an object: what’s she, who’s she watching…is not even a question, but a dissolving possibility, to be filled in by a listener led to be less passive, for once.) On “Tonight Is The Nite”, Tickley Feather provides an example of and for the active lifestyle. “Make you mine, make you mine, make you mine,” she seems to chant, and furthermore, “Goin’ downtown,  goin’ downtown, goin’ downtown,” or possibly, “Goin’ south, goin’ south, goin’ south,” which does not, in this context seem to mean,” Goin’ into decline.” If she’s going south, it’s in a good direction, and if this music don’t sound southern, get hip, buddeh. The clanky but not clunky keyboard riff (not a million years from Soft Cell’s recasting of “Tainted Love,” which was born as migratory as Motown), keeps landing like a black vinyl valentine heart, reflecting street lights, carlights and porchlights, right on a threshold that gets to look like a  dartboard, with all those little holes (courtesy the pointy valentine). So, not all pretty-pretty, but (close enough to) bullseye every time.

Mi Ami (less cut)

Mi Ami  “African Rhythms”

from African Rhythms (White Denim)

godwave rave// Out Now

(orig. pub. Feb. 2008, this is less cut)                                                

Before a couple of them jump-started Mi Ami,  D.C.’s Black Eyes added up to a quintet of malcontent multi-instrumentalists, who sometimes might turn into a ten-armed drum set, yet furiously deny any interest in dance—but, a bit like Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood fugitive Hazel Moats birthing his Church Without Christ, they splattered groove-and-self-denying beats, like they splattered guitar, sax, vocalizm, and other stuff, all over the tried and true templates of early 00s neo-post-punk, neo-no wave,  and the manly straight-edge grooves of Fugazi, parents of the Dischord label, where Black Eyes spent their short, sharp, splintery shelf-life. Yet BE’s second and final album, 2004’s Cough, opened with calm, attractive bass, drums, and voice, components of a profile which, the longer it wore a crown of monkey nerves (thin sounds agitating the left channel, especially on headphones), the stronger it seemed, by contrast and via subtle development—before vanishing into the seizure of “Eternal Life.” Nevertheless, they’d showed their hand, which had the last word on the last track, “A Meditation.” Here, even after the crusty metal petals of renegade bassist Jacob Long’s sax rends some velvet morning, and lets a chorus line of doggie howls out—even then, blood unsplatters, goes back into veins, into a pulse, just a sweet little body beat: the still, small voice of the senses, and sense is talking too: all talking ‘bout waiting for a little tune-up, maybe. Or maybe not. Damn!

So nothing for it, but for Long (apparently/sadly minus his sax, but sometimes with a keyboard as well as bass) and guitarist Daniel Martin-McCormick to split for San Francisco, separately and at different times, but  Everything That Rises Must Converge  (hesh now, Flannery). They eventually formed Mi Ami with 
De-e-e-troit Techno Murder City refugee and drummer Damon Palermo. 
To put it reasonably now: Mon Ami acknowledge the influence of dub, techno, and Afrobeat, but their somewhat downplayed jazz studies (like, in school, even!) also pertain. Mainly in a Milesian Tales way: just as Miles Davis’s late 60s-to-early 70s recordings often put bass, drums, guitar, and keyboards up front, with Miles’ trumpet gradually turning background into foreground, and/or
vice-verse, compulsively tweaking a sense of deep focus, so Martin-McCormick’s never still, but small (as filtered) voice chatters and wails behind the (rest of ) the rhythm section, also shadowing his stuttery guitar, which sometimes rises into crisis (as does the voice, more often), before either or both crash-land on the one, which is always making short, sharp phrases amidst the mists of granulated notes in the music pump.

But it’s not all work! “African Rhythms” is a nevolution of Black Eyes’ mega-percussion cussin’, plus flag-waving(-rippling, -writhing) guitar apparitions: just good clean fun, and suitable for your next prom, if you and your date take all your vitamins. On Mi Ami’s MySpace page, there’s also a remix, “Arhythms,” by Rickey Rabbit, DJ of Mon Ami tourmates and hiphopologists Food For Animals. Rabbit pumps some of the song into a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, which gets pretty friendly with passing buildings. Martin-McCormick is also encouraged to sunburst his guitar through some office windows, inspecting some folders and tasting some latte.

Also on their Myspace page, and on Mon Ami’s first release, the 12” vinyl EP/maxi-single African Rhythms, the title song is followed by “Clear Light,” which at first seems like a nice respite from the parade, a sweet chill spot. But soon comes a reminder that “clear light” is the stage of the acid trip when colors have just been peeled, and the lounge turns out to be liminal: the vibe is washed clean and stands raw, charged by the change and the falling away. Deep focus prevails, however, as a march is folded into the bass. The voice gets hung on a note, pulls back, eventually gets free enough to chatter on back there (warning to some: DMM’s vocally on the periphery, like Perry Farrell always should be--but a likeness keeps flickering by). On the MySpace, “Ark Version” then uses ominously magisterial organ to track the voice along a railroad of bass and drums, switching tracks just a little whenever a freak-out approaches—but “Ark Of The Covenant” is born in crisis, and, despite fleeting mentions of deities, “I wish I was dead” are the most clearly heard words on a Mi Ami recording so far. But the currents pull them on along (no spoilers here: hearing is the true believing, and no matter where they’re going, these tracks will address every muscle in your head). On the 12”, “Clear Light” is more like the slower, deeper adagio between  the allegrolicious “African Rhythms” and “Feel You,” which marches trouble around at a brisker tempo than “Clear Light.” “Summer-summer-summer-summer-summer-summer-go-WAY,” orders Daniel Martin-McCormick, but also he might be ending with “Buy me a car,” so there’s hope for the boy yet (good to know somebody still believes in something).

Kevin Ayers demo-pitch

Kevin Ayers, “Unfairground”

From The Unfairground (Gigantic)

vintage violets //Out Now

(demo-pitch, no go, would have been pub. in 2007)

Aye, ‘tis  the almost-title track (“The” dropped to make the protest more emphatic?) from Kevin Ayers' first album since 1992's Still Life With Guitar, a title that would be all too appropriate for

several tracks in this set, despite the all-star accompaniment (Hugh

Hopper, Phil Manzanera, Architecture In Helsinki, Euro Childs, many

more). At first he confines himself to a gruff petulance, and the

backup's deferential, not to mention genteel and drippy (despite my

loving some of the guests' own albums). But "Wide Awake" pulls him into the

music, of his writing and the ensemble, "and when I'm dancing and

singing along, it doesn't matter if it's right, doesn't matter if it's

wrong," which suits both his stoical and hedonistic tendencies (his own press kit mentions---well, never mind 'til edit).The song ends with a jolt. But he's still

awake, and has a "Brainstorm": "So you shout, so you scream, 'Give me

back my dream,' but if it's lost if it's gone, I won't keep hanging

on, so the storm, can blow me away," with cracking loose-wire guitar

after that, waiting for him, although not quite

dangerous-enough-seeming for the context, to my taste, anyway. But

then "Unfairground" finds him lured back into the sporting life, prowling the

galleries, seeking a prize, 'til the carnival music slides him back

into the country daylight, another sucker observing "birds in singing

in a cage. You understand you lost one. You step outside your

rage"(yeah, because we get a jolting, loping beat on this song, a

shrug, an elbow, a number of turns, also with guitar strum and

bouncing bass bow for a while, and he's past the aforementioned

petulance) "But what's left to believe in. The children in the lake? I

didn't see them go under. Let's try, another take." Told you there

were some jolts and turns! Not that he's that far from the tunnel of

love or his beloved (bottle) or  "you", whom he's murmuring all this to,

the old terseness serving him well for the moment(in balance with imagery and

stealthy progress). If we didn't get to use this song, those others

would be okay, and I could still talk about this 'un (oh yeah, and in the

last one, "Run Run Run", he seems to be married again, and handling it

okay, face-to-face-wise; some good terse vitality here too)

Shearwater

Shearwater: “Rooks”

from Rook (Matador)

horizoned out, in  // Out June 3

(orig. pub. late May or earliest June 2008)               

In a song called “Homelife, “ someone is reminded of being a little girl, “…Tracing the lines of a globe with your fingers: cool rivers, white wastes, desert shores, the forest green, and a limitless life in the breath of each tide, and each bright mountain rising. But now the boys are away, and such kicks they are having, slashing away at the forest walls, with their bitter bright knives, sparks bloom in their eyes, and they never look tired, will they never look tired…” Got it? Girls: good! Nature: good! Boys: eeeeuuuuh! And the singer, though male, is trilling away; he’s Mr. Sensitive. But then he asks her if she also remembers her mother’s initially soothing words-- and the music (which can, on Shearwater’s Rook, include piano, electric and acoustic guitar, drums, vibraphone, glockenspiel, Hammond organ, pump organ, hammered dulcimer, lap steel guitar, harp,upright and electric bass; not to mention the strings, brass and woodwinds, deftly arranged by Mark Sonnabaum), the music, as usual, knows when to part the waters and make an intimate space. Where Mother’s words have room to grow (as even the singer calms down): “Though this water is wide, you will never grow tired, you are bound to your life like a mother and child, you will cling to your life like a suckering vine, and like the rest of our kind, you will increase and increase past all of our dreaming.” The song grows, swells right past, or at least around its original good/bad polarities—in a monstrous way, I’d say, or at least a spooky one, you’d have to agree. Like a cancer, a virgin, urban sprawl, anything else in nature: it’s alive, so look out y’all!

Thus, on Rook, Shearwater (named for a very wide-ranging migratory seabird, which some swear lives its whole life in the air), gives us an aerial view of a world with its own poles (of man and nature, good and bad, etc.), but it’s also a cracked little vessel of melting absolutes, fluid identities, recurring themes and infectious images. There’s a shared sense of surging desperation in humans and other critters; vitality that doesn’t know what to do with itself or its prey, past a certain point, which seems to have been some time back. Of course, in the vast indifference, you must invent a meaning---and that’s Shearwater for you, spiraling back through (and building on) higher-minded/older thoughts, which also include invocations of the Life Force, the sublime, upper-case Romanticism, and “Leviathan, Unbound”(no lie, that’s the actual title of track three). Plus: a whole lotta moonlight, waves, even a balcony—all brought to us via the pear-shaped tones and vibrating vowels of Mr. Jonathan Melburg. Such are the risky results of an aerial view, which can seem distanced (nay, framed!) in time as well as space.

But arty art can work: the camera-bird’s got a zoom lens, and knows when to swoop and hover among us. When gravity’s got him, Melburg can yell, whoop, or be sneakily unobtrusive, as in the last part of “Home Life.” (Doesn’t happen that often, but it happens; usually, it’s the instruments that really put the songs across.) And, while this isn’t just a “green” record, in the usual sense, some recycled point of no return is throbbing pretty hard in “Rooks.” Rooks are crows; they like to scavenge (they’re also those canny little castles on the chessboard, and to “rook” is to swindle). But here, they’re just dead, piled up and burning. Birds of other feathers are dying too, and the narrator is ready to stay inside, to sleep hard. Yet a falconer wakes up--and, while “each empty cage just rings in his heart like a bell,” he (like the hunters who appear in other songs, like the blood-high”Lost Boys,” who come after that little “Home Life” girl, and the girl herself, “suckering vine” and all), he hears a vanishing song, and how the rest of it should go. (Something like this, although “Rooks” is a little tame, compared to what Rook can more typically do).

Stars Like Fleas

Stars Like Fleas: “I Was Only Dancing”

from The Ken Burns Effect (Hometapes)

gazebo gaze // Out June 3

(orig. Pub prob late mid-late May 2008)                        

The title of Stars Like Fleas’ third album might well have been inspired by Ken Burns’ response last summer to a query from Poynter.org’s Regina McComb, concerning the disciplined use of movement in manipulating  photographs. Burns: “As I became a filmmaker, I trusted that that still photograph to be a representation of a moment that was once very much alive…I not only looked at the photograph, I listened to it…you sit there…and suddenly compositional and other elemental tensions come into play, then perhaps holding even more permits the meaning that you’re intending to come through, or the meaning that’s inherent to come through.” Likewise, The Ken Burns Effect seems like the results of what musicians sometimes call the tale of the tape: especially here, composition includes listening to what’s been played, probably involving improvisation with differing but definite rules (“free verse is like playing tennis without a net,” but that can be worthwhile, like a fretless bass in the right hands). Then composition continues with editing the results, just a bit, as you catch the sound of people really listening to each other.  The process isn’t just employed by the artists, it includes them (“As I became a filmmaker…”), and anyone else who finds a way in.

 Gotta say, though, that, much as I respect and art-appreciate Stars Like Fleas’ microcosmic circus of a thousand concisely deployed instruments, where one missed cue can make the acrobat go splat, I can’t help wishing that would happen sometimes. Not that they seem anal, but their process is sometimes more appealing than its results, same as an unfettered jam band, so why not be that too, just once in a while? No, not like the finale, “Some Nettles”; it’s still too refined. Some (not too many) freakier sounds would increase their range, at least.

 But there are several tracks in which nebulae get pulled along by the insistent throb of anticipation, as wordsmith-crooner Montgomery Knott’s romantic haze finds itself easing around a certain comely silhouette. “I  Was Only Dancing” provides a good example, especially as it moves from the pangs of memory to a new encounter, and the bittersweet taste of the future, already seamlessly passing through. (Not that, as crooners go, Knott isn’t closer to Dave Matthews, John Mayer, and Jack Johnson than Frank Sinatra—but I never got much of anything like that “Dancing” vibe from the first three, to put it mildly.)