Look Both Ways #12: What Was I Thinking?

What was I thinking? If you've been wondering, I don't blame you. I've been drawing false lines around bands, tying artists together with ersatz thread, acting as if one group's music can possibly be defined as the offspring of one influential parent. In truth, each new song is no less than a singular brew culled from the reactive cauldron where every bit of music that's ever been heard resides. Even we, as human daughters and sons, are products of our surroundings, the languages we learn, the friendships we make, the sex and stock villains we see on TV, more than the genes we've been stuck with. If it were the other way around, Jakob Dylan and the Wallflowers might have really had something going for them. But alas, all we've got to hang on to is "One Headlight" and that catchy song where Adam Duritz wails his big old heart out on the background vocals.

When I set out this January to write a column tying one new album each week to a classic progenitor, I anticipated relatively smooth sailing. But early on, I found that it could be impossible to pair up a great new musician, no matter how "retro" he was, with a single forebear. In a piece about Raphael Saadiq's The Way I See It, an R&B record that seems to be obsessed with hearkening back, I couldn't find a single past album that would do it justice. I paired The Way I See It with a Motown hits collection, allowing myself to discuss an array of Saadiq's influences from the early days of soul.

In my article on Wynton Marsalis' new album blending spoken word and instrumental jazz, I didn't bother tying him to anyone else -- I compared the new He and She to an old Marsalis record with a similar bent. In my piece on King Khan and the Shrines, I had to spend a solid third of the article detailing my struggle to tease out the most appropriate reference point.

And for all the difficulty I've had deciding which old albums to highlight, what's to say a band's musical predecessors are its most important influences? Had I chosen to write about Inside the Human Body, Ezra Furman and the Harpoons' latest LP, I might have been better served tying it back to the literature courses Furman took while majoring in English at Tufts University, or to his favorite novel. After all, it's his glowing narratives and self-excoriating lyrics more than anything else that make him such an exciting new talent.

I think Stephen McBean of the band Pink Mountaintops has it about right. McBean told Stereogum last month that the group's newest record was influenced by "weddings in Montreal, winter, Pink Floyd's 'The Final Cut,' Christmas albums, that one Exile song and that one Echo and the Bunnymen song, the Bermuda Triangle, being depressed in the sunshine, people who haven't made out yet but will in the future, The Everly Brothers, clowns in the ceilings and bedrooms where skinheads used to live."

The best I can hope for, to quote Stephin Merritt, is that my comparisons' "truth or falsity is moot" because I've turned you on to some great new artists and maybe even a classic record or two that you'd never heard.

A version of this piece first appeared as a column in the May 17 issue of the Tufts Daily.

Look Both Ways #11: Feeling (W)iggy with a New King

King Khan and the Shrines are definitely a throwback, albeit a triumphantly forward-looking one. Where exactly they’re throwing us back to, though, is tough to say. Is it to 1974 New York City, where the Ramones’ black leather jackets blend into the damp, dark walls of CBGB as they tear through an early version of “Blitzkrieg Bop”? Is it to Abbey Road Studios in 1967, where the Zombies are bringing psychadelia to a boil with their single, “Time of the Season”? Maybe it’s to 1964, when the Rolling Stones and the Animals are recording their first Chuck Berry covers, prompting bluesman Sonny Boy Willamson II to muse, “Those English kids want to play the blues so bad, and they play the blues so bad.” Or is it to Harlem in 1962, when James Brown’s Famous Flames are tearing up the stage at the Apollo with hyperactive horns and unrelenting theatrics?

King Khan charges all the delirious mania of the psychedelic era into his soul confessor’s shout. He layers horns on top of wildly distorted guitars. He uses the ominous haze of a minor key like few musicians after Eric Burdon have been able to. In fact, the sound of Khan’s insouciant youthfulness is so tied up in the 1960s that it seems difficult to accept the overwhelming punk influence on this record.

His band teeters carelessly at the precipice of sanity, threatening to launch off with us strapped precariously to its back (kicking and screaming, yes, but laughing in spite of ourselves). And in this way it distinctly recalls four true children of the ’60s who are widely credited as the godparents of punk rock: the Stooges.

Two years ago, King Khan and the Shrines released an incredible album, What Is?!, in Europe. The LP finally got its due across the pond last week, when Vice Records released it in the United States.

The Stooges released their debut album, The Stooges, 40 years ago after frontman Iggy Pop drew inspiration from MC5 and the Doors to escape the derivative blues model of so many British Invasion bands. The Stooges fused the rhythmic and lyrical repetition of a blues stomp with the frustrated romanticism of post-adolescence and created a heavier, grimier and more lascivious music. Five years later, punk rock would emerge as a slightly whittled-down version of that sound.

There is nothing whittled down about King Khan. He takes the Stooges’ nasty guitar pulse and throws in an organ and some blustering horns. He takes the deadpan exasperation of Iggy’s lyrics and kicks it into fifth gear, often consciously bordering on self-parody. King Khan even takes Iggy’s incendiary stage presence (he was famous for climbing into the crowd and was often smeared in his own blood by the end of concerts) and adds a go-go dancer. No, I’m serious—Bamboorella is the Shrines’ full-time go-go dancer.

There’s a cockiness about both these singers that’s engendered by a supreme sense of nothing to lose. On “Real Cool Time,” a bass-heavy three-chord jam bathed in distortion and wah wah, Iggy sings, “Can I come over tonight?/ What do you think I wanna do?/ That’s right.” The same know-it-all nonchalance imbues King Khan’s “(How Can I Keep You) Outta Harm’s Way,” which sounds like the Zombies and the Animals got their hands on some horns and somehow churned out a hard-rock tune. King Khan wails, “Spilling all your honey and lies/ Got you nothing but grief/ I can hold you, baby, in my arms,/ Give you a little relief/ Believe me, baby, and understand,/ I got you here in the palm of my hand.”

King Khan’s influences are as wide-ranging and unpredictable as his stage antics, but he leaves listeners no choice but to join him in surrendering to an intense brew of emotions—the powerlessness of youth, a need for sexual commiseration, the unstoppable urge to just forget it all and dance. It was Iggy Pop’s unflinching representation of these very torments that made him so revolutionary and keeps his music fresh today.

A version of this piece first appeared as a column in the April 27 issue of the Tufts Daily.

Look Both Ways #10: Squarepusher has Tomorrow’s 'Weather' Forecast

Experimental musician Squarepusher, a.k.a. Tom Jenkinson, recorded an album last year inspired by something that most people might assume to have been a psychedelic-drug-induced hallucination. Jenkinson laconically calls it “a daydream.” In this fantasy, a magical rock band played a concert involving a guitarist who could travel through time, an entire building that served as a bass amplifier, and drums that switched places with each other and received electromagnetic radiation from stars. The album that resulted, last year’s herky-jerky Just a Souvenir, is not for the faint of heart. But if you get jazzed, so to speak, by exploratory instrumental music, it’s a real gem from one of today’s best progressive musicians.

Squarepusher is performing this Friday in my temporary hometown of Bologna, Italy, so to prepare for the show I’ve been listening to Souvenir, his latest. I’m constantly reminded of its nagging similarities to innovative jazz-fusion group Weather Report’s 1976 LP, Black Market.

Weather Report was founded in the early 1970s by saxophonist Wayne Shorter and keyboardist Joe Zawinul, two preeminent expatriates of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way sessions. The group quickly moved away from these roots, embracing a highly arranged and more composition-based sound that cuddled even closer with rock music. Weather Report even scored a hit single – almost unheard of in instrumental music – with “Birdland” in 1977.

Squarepusher, meanwhile, is a one-man band from England who started out in the 1990s as a leader in the virtuosic genre of manic dance music known as drum and bass. Squarepusher has always incorporated jazz and rock into his music, and they are especially relevant on Souvenir.

It’s a truism for me to say that the differences between the artists I compare far outweigh the similarities, but in the case of the relentlessly innovative and unpredictable Squarepusher it bears mentioning. His music is absolutely not a direct legacy of Weather Report, but the similarities are there.

For one, the fretless electric bass is central to both records. Jenkinson’s primary instrument is the bass, and his playing – ranging from surprisingly ear-catching improvisations to rhythm-bending bass lines – is his music’s most engaging element. Black Market was the first Weather Report album to feature Jaco Pastorius, arguably the most influential electric bassist of all time. But it also showcased outgoing bassist Alphonso Johnson, who should not be lost in Pastorius’ shadow. Both players provide conspicuous, energetic foundations for the complex and highly rhythmic compositions on Black Market.

“Gibraltar” is Black Market’s most similar song to the music on Souvenir. When the rhythm section busts in at 1:20, we hear a Johnson bass line that strays from root notes and downbeats, playing games with the quick and funky drum part. Shorter and Zawunil double on melodies that zoom up and shoot back down, and I find myself nodding my head so forcefully it looks like a Dr. Dre beat must be coming through my headphones. On the Souvenir song “Planet Gear,” Squarepusher layers synth chords over a jumpy bass line and a mathy drumbeat, while a climbing, atmospheric synthesizer line recalls Shorter’s solos on the lyricon (a type of saxophone synthesizer he used on Black Market).

And forget about the comparisons for a moment—Souvenir is a record worth hearing regardless of context. To listen to Squarepusher’s bass improvisations on the song “Quadrature” is to hear him turn out scores of incredibly melodic phrases – each of which could serve as hooks for their own fusion compositions – while he ventures in and out of scales. Sometimes he glides along with the fleeting chords, sometimes he collides with them. Some of the phrases are jazz arpeggios and some are classical-influenced lines that stair-step downward, adding color to the chords beneath them.

• To watch and/or download some high-quality videos of interviews with and performances by Squarepusher, click here and choose the "03. Watch" tab.

A version of this piece first appeared as a column in the April 13 issue of the Tufts Daily.

Look Both Ways #9: Wynton Marsalis and the Stories of Music

Much of what luminary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis does, including his work as musical director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, is aimed at keeping jazz music relevant. And last month, Marsalis came out with one of his most impossible-to-ignore new projects: a concept album composed of quick poetry readings and accompanying musical pieces performed by his jazz quintet. Gimmicky? Sure. Fun? Absolutely.

When I listen to the album, He and She, I’m often haunted by the mental image of Marsalis sitting in his Midtown Manhattan office, clad in a Brooks Brothers smoking jacket. He claps his hands and exclaims, “I know something they’ll all like—I’ll do a poetry album about puppy love, and I’ll play jazz tunes that go along with the poems!” Of course, this is unfair, and Marsalis deserves credit for pushing into new territory and coming away with something as refreshingly original and utterly enjoyable as He and She. That said, the pleasant music just isn’t as energetic or engaging as Marsalis’ best work.

To find a more timeless record that uses both spoken word and jazz to illustrate the emotions of romance, we have to go back in history but we don’t have to abandon Wynton. Seventeen years ago, he made a remarkable album, Blue Interlude, whose centerpiece is a 37-minute-long suite called “Blue Interlude (The Bittersweet Saga of Sugar Cane and Sweetie Pie).”

In this piece, the Wynton Marsalis Septet uses instrumental music to narrate the dynamic relationship of two mythic lovers. But it’s not without the help of spoken word: in a monologue that precedes the suite, Marsalis introduces Sugar Cane and Sweetie Pie, interspersing the occasional piano line to help acquaint us with the characters. “Well now this is Sugar Cane,” he says, banging out two high, harsh chords on the keys. “As you can tell, he’s a very dissonant, high-strung sort of fellow, perhaps trapped in the gruffness of his own presentation.”

The suite itself comes off without a hitch, and its sheer force is owed to the players, who comprise one of Marsalis’ most exciting ensembles. The musicians handle with remarkable virtuosity the piece’s many time changes and blurry blend of strict arrangement, communal improvisation and big band-style horn harmonies that back a single player’s solo. There are happy times and sad times here, attraction and anger, confusion and confidence.

Where Blue Interlude gives its top-notch musicians ample time to stretch out with expressive solos, He and She concentrates more on discipline and structured arrangements. Occasionally, it can feel like it blurs the line between classical and jazz (both genres in which Marsalis is an expert) as much as it blends poetry and music. Long-form solos are scarce, and while the tonal tales of an endearing four-track suite on firsts (“First Crush,” “First Slow Dance,” “First Kiss” and “First Time”) surely get their point across, most jazz freaks would probably agree that Marsalis succeeds more comfortably when he is less concerned with realist representation and more inclined to let the old tricks of bebop work their magic.

For instance, the 12-minute-long “The Razor Rim” hits a stride thanks to unbridled solos from Marsalis and tenor saxophonist Walter Blanding. Pianist Dan Nimmer does his best McCoy Tyner over the tune’s mid-tempo, hard-bop feel, pounding out planar harmonies and thundering fifths in the low register.

Marsalis probably won’t become the Lincoln Center’s poet laureate, but the verses he uses to set up the music on He and She are whimsical and charming. The first poem runs, “What caused country blues men to claim / A man and a woman is a dangerous game? / Well every school boy knows one plus one equals two / And boys know less than girls do.” It’s followed by “School Boy,” a tune that lives up to its name by returning to an earlier time, striding along while Marsalis channels King Oliver. Nimmer polishes off a lively chordal solo à la Erroll Garner, and all told, the tune conjures the sneakiness of a class clown and the nostalgic joy of everyone’s first-grade memories.

A version of this piece first appeared as a column in the April 6 issue of the Tufts Daily.

Look Both Ways #8: A Dancing Deacon Worshipping at the Church O'Riley

It’s hard to explain how Dan Deacon became the poster child of today’s electronic music avant-garde. But at some point between his graduation from the conservatory at SUNY Purchase and now, the quirky singer/songwriter/sampler/celebrator found himself perched at the fore of a coterie that includes Panda Bear, Girl Talk and the Black Dice.

Deacon just released an exciting new album, Bromst. It lays bare the staggering importance of electro pioneer Terry Riley, and his legendary 1967 LP A Rainbow in Curved Air. On paper, it might seem ironic to tie Riley, widely hailed as the father of minimalism, to Deacon’s summit-seeking, bigger-is-better sound. Where Riley built on his loop-laden foundations with disciplined improvisation, for instance, Deacon opts for noise rock-era fuzz. But just listen to how Riley begins A Rainbow in Curved Air’s 19-minute title track: he repeats a simple synthesizer line, then lays other similar patterns on top to create a spinning vapor of inorganic beauty (think of the intro to Animal Collective’s new single “My Girls,” but a whole lot headier). On Bromst’s opener, the five-and-a-half-minute “Build Voice,” Deacon repeats a quick clip of his vocals – cut up and smothered in effects to the point of sounding like smooth-churning machinery – and slowly adds other vocal tracks and instrumental sounds. The strong eighth-note pulse never dissipates, and it leaves a familiar Riley-esque aura.

Riley, like Deacon, earned a degree in composition, then gained renown in the early 1960s for his eclectic menagerie of compositions, concerts and recordings; they ranged from improvised harmonium performances that lasted all night to trailblazing albums consisting of early tape loops and found sounds. Deacon’s early releases similarly comprised sound collages and instrumentals that were either computer-generated or lifted from live performances.

Deacon performs his shows from a table in the crowd rather than onstage, and he puts a large emphasis on communal participation. He often asks audience members to sing a capella, join him in chants, or dance in giant formations. It’s a bit wilder and more animalistic than Riley’s famous “In C,” a minimalist composition from the ’60s that consists of 53 simple melodies to be played on virtually any instrument and at any tempo. But the similarities are unmistakable.

Riley drew heavily on a wide range of influences, from John Coltrane to John Cage to the Hindustani classical singer Pandit Pran Nath. Deacon tips his hand to reveal one of his other influences on the magnificent “Snookered:” it sounds like it was recorded deep within Brian Eno’s other green world, with Deacon intoning over sparsely ambient instrumentals, “Been ’round this road so many times / Feel like its skin is part of mine.”

On “Wet Wings,” Deacon starts with one haunting female vocal line and lays it over itself, along with a number of other patterns sung by the same woman. The entire concoction builds to a blurry, cacophonous howl that sounds beautiful through good headphones and frighteningly bad through shoddy ones. There are almost no other sounds on this song, just countless tracks of that woman singing. At its peak, the effect is as riveting and enveloping as that of “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band,” the atmospheric second track on A Rainbow in Curved Air.

Near the end of “Wet Wings,” everything peters out all of a sudden and only one track is left. The woman’s lone voice sings with a startling confidence, “The hour of death is near.” That line cuts to the core of the so-called “absurdist” worldview, equal parts nihilism and Dada, that is behind Deacon’s raucous music. He explained it during a 2007 interview with Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction: “Absurdism is mainly defined … as a philosophy that the universe ultimately has no meaning, and it will be ending in some sort of demise, so why not just go balls-out all the time?”

A version of this piece first appeared as a column in the March 30 issue of the Tufts Daily.

Look Both Ways #7: In the Apollo’s Shadow, a Godson of Soul

My cousin Tom used to lecture a more impressionable me on the folly of interpreting Bob Dylan songs. Dylan lived his songs; he was in them. They weren’t just great poems or pieces of music, they were his blood coming through the speakers. Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower” was garbage, Guns N’ Roses’ take on “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” treason. If all professional musicians’ renditions were blasphemous, I asked, why was Tom always playing Dylan tunes on the acoustic guitar? “I’m not covering them,” he answered. “I’m channeling.”

Of course this made me laugh. But after a listen to Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears’ debut record, I understand what channeling means. Lewis is new on the soul scene, but his incorrigible howl, throaty growl, wordless and punctuated gasps on off beats, selective precision mixed with screams that abandon pitch—it all reeks of the Godfather of Soul, James Brown.

On the Honeybears’ new Tell ’Em What Your Name Is!, released last week, the influence of James Brown’s incredible 1963 album Live at the Apollo shines bright. It’s important to bear in mind that while it would be an undue compliment to claim that Lewis can match Apollo’s genius or ebullience, it would also be selling the new album short to suggest that it’s a derivative work with nothing new to offer. Lewis explores ground that Brown never broached on Apollo, particularly on the tunes “I’m Broke,” with its electric piano and hip-hop groove, and “Master Sold my Baby,” whose music recalls Southern blues musicians who moved to Chicago in the ’40s and pawned their old acoustic guitars for Telecasters. Still, the cowlick of James Brown’s silhouette looms huge whenever Lewis opens his mouth, whenever he plucks out a riff on his electric guitar, whenever his thick horn section hits a break.

On Apollo, a young Brown presented his sound, already famous from its tamer incarnations on the "Ed Sullivan Show" and in studio recordings, as the gamely, untethered dynamo it was during concerts. Brown’s vocals are squirming with energy, even on ballads like “Try Me,” and his horn section’s harmonies waver from lilting to wailing. The rhythm corps, meanwhile, seems to get ahead of itself so giddily that each of the first four tunes, a quick two minutes each, doesn’t come to an end so much as vault off the stage and into the Harlem night.

Lewis deftly approximates that nascent-funk-meets-soul sound, but it’s disappointing how obvious it is that he’s doing this as a 21st-century musical historian, not a vintage innovator. For instance, the guitar on Apollo is packed with personality, laden with the grime and crunch of a lightly overdriven tube amp. On Tell ’Em, Lewis’ guitar suffers from a distinctly digital-age distortion. A filthy cloud of virtual sound soot, clicked and dragged onto these tracks with a mouse and keyboard, hovers between his instrument and the final product.

And then there’s the typical neo-soul problem of “sound” over song. Luminaries Sharon Jones and Raphael Saadiq are today’s masters at replicating the sonic formulas of old Motown and soul records. What they often miss out on are the timeless melodies and irresistible hooks that provided the real backbone of black pop music in the ’60s. Lewis has failed to write any song as infectious as “I Don’t Mind” or “I’ll Go Crazy,” highlights of Brown’s Apollo. Still, Tell ’Em holds its own on today’s scene and appears to be the debut of a formidable new band that’s worth keeping an ear on.

A version of this piece first appeared as a column in the March 23 issue of the Tufts Daily.

Look Both Ways #6: Antony Trudges Across the Nile

“Out of my stereo came his startling, other-worldly voice, the sound of someone enraptured—or maybe possessed. He seemed to embody his dire ballad, rather than to merely perform it."

When music writer Barry Alfonso wrote that, he was recalling his first listen to Appalacian folk legend John Jacob Niles. But it would have been just as appropriate if written about Antony Hegarty, the transcendental singer of Antony and the Johnsons.

In 1959, Tradition Records put out An Evening with John Jacob Niles, a collection of folk songs performed, inhabited, stretched to their frightening limits by the so-called Dean of American Balladeers. It was Niles’ second record on the label. Fifty years later, Antony and the Johnsons have just released their second album on the Secretly Canadian imprint, the stunning and stirring The Crying Light.

If you’re concerned with concretes like era and instrumentation, you’ll find little tying these two albums together. But after one listen to both singers, with their unnerving tremolos and haunting high notes, the bond is undeniable.

Niles was a dulcimer-toting Kentucky-bred folk musician, albeit a notably worldly one. Antony, meanwhile, is a British bandleader with an expert group of musicians who provide a bright, floating landscape for his elegiac vocals. Still, the two artists’ ultimate effects are similar.

Those eager to parse and parcel have done their best to fit Antony’s music into categories, often calling it baroque pop or folk. It’s neither, of course, but the roots of such brandings are apparent. The Johnsons, full of violins and cellos and woodwinds and finger-plucked acoustic guitar, sound nothing like a rock band and everything like a mini pit orchestra backing some arty off-Broadway musical. The baroque tag grows out of this. The folk categorization comes from the music’s soft, acoustic bent and the fact that it all revolves around Antony’s storytelling (to use such a term liberally). After all, it is more common in today’s alt-pop world for lyrics to play second fiddle to the music’s overall aesthetic; most reviewers, unfortunately, give only cursory attention to the words when discussing new music. Antony and the Johnsons make this an impossibility.

Antony’s poetry would be beautiful with or without his emotive vibrato (one that’s so aggressive it often borders on melisma). Some of the songs on “The Crying Light” have a puzzling, shrouded quality that can liberate and empower the listener. On “Kiss my Name,” for instance, Antony weeps, “And my tears have turned to snow / I’m only a child / Born upon a grave / Dancing through the stations / Calling out my name.” In other instances, his songs’ understatement and brevity render them all the more revealing. On the title track, Antony sings, “Inside myself / The secret grows / My own shelter / Agony goes / Crying light, the crying light / I was born to adore you.”

Niles was never opaque, but the folk songs he interprets and the way he presents them can be as eerie and obsessively fatalist as Antony’s work. For instance, “The Black Dress” is a tale of a “forlorn” and “forsaken” young bride that Niles, with the force of his voice, puts into a frightening, nocturnal fantasy world. And the wistfulness of his “The Turtle Dove” feels like a clear predecessor to Antony’s songs of lacking. But Antony goes further—he does not simply sing about past tragedies or loss in the traditional sense; his forborne malaise seems to reach into the future, it feels as if it could continue forever.

A compelling and especially poignant side of Niles comes out when he sings his most famous original songs, such as “Go ‘Way from my Window” (yes, that’s what Dylan was referring to) and “I Wonder as I Wander.” Unfortunately, you will have to look deeper into his largely inaccessible catalog to find these—the easiest way to find them is on another Tradition Records LP, “I Wonder as I Wander” (1958).

But on all his records, Niles indicates the breadth of his influences, and this is another quality he shares with Antony. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Niles is clearly as indebted to country blues singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell and Bukka White, who went far beyond singing, making their mouths into interpretive instruments, natural sound-making machines. Antony and his band, meanwhile, take quite a few pages out of the book of soul. It's obvious in some of their most gratifying harmonic structures and turnarounds. Whatever their influences, Antony and Niles haunt and transcend, entirely differently but with a similar potency.

A version of this piece first appeared as a column in the March 9 issue of the Tufts Daily.

Look Both Ways #5: Musical Magellans

In April of last year, Zach Condon posted a mystifying message on the Web site of his intercultural music project, Beirut. He cancelled the group’s tour and said he was in need of a creative shift: “It’s come time to change some things, reinvent some others, and come back at some point with a fresh perspective and batch of songs,” he wrote. “I promise we’ll be back, in some form.” Now Beirut has returned—and indeed some things have changed.

           

Condon hollowed out a niche for himself in 2006 as the only 20-year-old “indie rocker” making records that sounded like a French chansonnier crooning over a Balkan gypsy ensemble. Two albums, three EPs and at least one musical crisis later, Beirut is back with the gripping March of the Zapotec EP.

 

Rather than forging an ethnic aesthetic using hired hands in a New Mexico studio – or bedroom – as per usual, Condon decided to embed himself for Zapotec. He traveled to southern Mexico last year to play with the Jimenez Band, a 19-piece Oaxacan brass outfit. The results are exciting and, of course, surprising.

 

Listening to these six tracks and thinking about how they were made, I couldn’t prevent Paul Simon’s Graceland from springing to mind. Like Condon, Simon had long held a penchant for drawing on various foreign styles. He’d never been nearly as ambitious as he was in making his mid-’80s comeback record, though. Simon ventured into an apartheid-riven South Africa to record what would become his magnum opus.

 

Drawing on local musicians as well as some Americans, Simon crafted a sound that’s as timeless as it is unclassifiable. The album shakes and shuffles with African pop’s snare-drum rhythms, it shimmers with the jangle of lead guitars, and it shrieks with the urgent background vocals of the Gaza Sisters (who sing in their native Tsonga on the chorus to the unbearably danceable “I Know What I Know”). At the same time, it is clearly Simon’s record: this is still his silky, reassuring voice; his songwriting; his brainchild.

 

The same goes for Zapotec: it is more Condon’s brand of popular music than Mexican folk. He wrote the songs, and the lush horn arrangements, while distinctly Latin American, are not as far divorced from his neo-Balkan orchestrations as one might expect. It does feel more organic than Graceland, which was influenced and recorded by South African musicians but is essentially an ’80s-pop record. This is largely because Beirut was never an indie-rock band so much as a cultural-music experiment.

 

Then there’s Condon’s voice. Its thickness and operatic flair recall Charles Aznavour, the so-called French Frank Sinatra, and this feels appropriate on top of European gypsy music, all mournful accordion and French horn. But when the instrumentals remind us of Mariachi, it’s more of a stretch. That’s okay—Condon is not trying to sound like any old band leader here, he’s trying to sound like an experimental young New Mexican in Mexico. And at that he succeeds with ease.

 

Lyrically, both Condon and Simon largely stick to their guns on this album. The former pieces together dramatized verses, often with incomplete sentences, and makes up for their inconsistent quality with a presentation that is both emotive and theatrical to the point of rendering some of the words indistinguishable. Simon, on the other hand, has never been better at slicing into human weakness and need, with both his soft-voiced presentation and his understated poetry.

 

“She comes back to tell me she’s gone,” he sings on the title track. “As if I didn’t know that, as if I didn’t know my own bed / As if I’d never noticed the way she brushed her hair back from her forehead.”

 

Condon might not be the lyricist Simon is, but his new Zapotec has its own, potent list of virtues. The record is on sale in a double-disc package with Holland EP by Realpeople, Condon’s electro-pop side project.

• Click here to see the video for Zapotec's best song, "La Llorona." As Simon does on a number of Graceland tracks, Condon reaches into the culture of his host country for inspiration on this track; the story of La Llorona is a popular Latin American legend centered on a woman whose ghost roams the night looking for her lost children.

A version of this piece first appeared as a column in the March 2 issue of theTufts Daily.

Look Both Ways #4: New Times, Guided by Noise

Guided by Voices’ milestone record, Bee Thousand, might make you think that Pete Townshend had a crazy idea one day. It sounds like he put Sonic Youth, Dire Straits, the Modern Lovers and Neutral Milk Hotel in a room with one guitar amp, a bass amp and a drum set and told them all to plug in and start playing without much attention to planning songs or testing levels.

Take that sound; put a heavy emphasis on Sonic Youth; add a bunch of My Bloody Valentine’s hauntingly atmospheric, pounding noise; and tell a pouty girl to shout something infectious over and over into a painfully distorted microphone. Now you have something like Times New Viking.

Sounds terrible, right? To a lot of people, I’m sure it is. But those who can put up with the distortion – better yet, those who can appreciate the scratchy depth that the veneer adds to TNV’s sound – will fall in love. The group recently released a critically acclaimed EP, but TNV novitiates would do well to listen to the trio’s latest full-length, Rip It Off.

Fifteen years ago, Guided shook indie rock with the cage-rattling Bee Thousand, and the parallels between this album and Rip It Off are inescapable. Both bands hail from Ohio. Guided’s seventh record, Bee Thousand was their first to be distributed by Matador Records, and Rip It Off is TNV’s first release on Matador. Each band has a contempt for high-tech recording, rendering their albums unsurpassably visceral—grating in a gratifying way. And in the tradition of punk rock – a categorization both bands consistently sidestep as soon as any critic thinks of conferring it – more than half of the songs on both albums are less than two minutes long; they’re short, fuzzy, hyperactive earworms.

Robert Pollard, Guided’s frontman and only consistent member, had been the victim of feeble success for 10 years. He had tried the high-fidelity studio thing, but he was frustrated with what he described as “sterile” results, not to mention the costliness. The lo-fi sound of a tape recorder became a defining element of the band. But it’s too easy to get hung up on the “noise.” Far from being some elitist, alt-obsessed Luddite, Pollard was a lifelong devotee of the Who with rock-star dreams. (After Bee Thousand launched him into the spotlight, Pollard became renowned for onstage leg kicks and microphone twirls à la Roger Daltrey.) Pollard’s tunes are sing-songy pop, and they whirl around in catchy circles with centripetal motion centered on savvy hooks.

Pollard’s verses hopscotch from opaque metaphor to soaring rock romanticism, often landing somewhere in between. Think of Bob Dylan’s blend of sly-witted metaphor and enamored entreaty on “Queen Jane Approximately,” and throw in some of the epic lyrical simplicity from the Who’s Who’s Next. But they are also surrealist, and often sci-fi-centric. He sings songs called “Hardcore UFOs,” “You’re not an Airplane” and “Kicker of Elves.”

On Rip It Off, TNV takes the Guided paradigm a few steps further in the noise direction. They don’t use a bassist, eschewing their forefathers’ deep, propelling current for a blurrier and more impressionistic sound. TNV create more of an atmosphere than a sum of parts. They also rarely sing harmonies, which are so often part of Guided’s hooks; instead, male and female lead singers often sing in unison or in octaves, and they slather a scraping, trebly distortion onto their voices.

This distortion, another obvious embrace of a “noisy” sound, makes listening to the lyrics a near impossibility, which is a shame because they’re often weighty and contemplative enough to paint gray clouds all over the bright, pop melodies. On opening track “Teen Drama,” TNV warn, “Stop staring at things that are just standing still / Get in line, pretty people, we are coming in for the kill.” Whether you’re following their advice or finding it too difficult to stop dancing, TNV are worth your attention.

A version of this piece first appeared as a column in the Feb. 23 issue of the Tufts Daily.

Look Both Ways #3: Fleet Foxes Give CSNY Déjà Vu

With glowing four-part harmonies and bandying baroque counterpoint, the flannel-clad quintet Fleet Foxes invoke blissful summers, Baptist hymnal singalongs, toasty winter fires and cross-country car rides. And their self-titled debut album, released last summer to deafening praise, happens to sound a lot like the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young classic Déjà Vu.

Fleet Foxes and CSNY differ in that while the latter was a supergroup comprised of already-famous ’60s rock stars, Fleet Foxes are as green as the pastures their music conjures—a troupe of young friends, some of whom met in high school. While the spectrum of sounds and styles on Déjà Vu reflects the dispersive passions of its four geniuses, Fleet Foxes is clearly the brainchild of lead singer and songwriter Robin Pecknold; it sticks together like kneaded dough, even as it sags and soars from song to song.

Fleet Foxes don’t really do the electric-guitar-so-dirty-it’s-gonna-singe-your-trousers thing, as CSNY do on David Crosby’s nasty “Almost Cut My Hair,” the third track on Déjà Vu. (“Your Protector,” Fleet Foxes' most My Morning Jacket-indebted song, amps up the intensity to a comparable degree, but it does so without the guitar pedals.) Instead, think of the soothing warmth from Déjà Vu’s classic country twanger, “Teach Your Children,” plus the pulsating energy from “Woodstock” and “Country Girl.” What you end up with is music more akin to the CSNY album’s opening track, “Carry On/Questions.” It’s all resonant acoustic guitars, often with an electric tracing out a memorable melody over it; ethereal organ and piano; lush but articulate vocals; drums and bass that, while robust, are so delicately woven into the fold that they’re often felt, not heard.

The similarities between CSNY and Fleet Foxes aren’t only musical: Both groups are cited as leaders of their respective Americana movements, classic rock’s and indie pop’s ambassadors (respectively) to the roots music contingents of Appalachia and the western United States. But both bands are actually more mimickers than mountaineers. CSNY were multinational all-stars—Graham Nash hails from Britain; Neil Young is Canadian; Stephen Stills was a military brat born in Dallas, Texas; and Crosby was raised in Los Angeles by a cinematographer and his wife. When Fleet Foxes sing “Blue Ridge Mountains,” meanwhile, it’s as expert channelers of the Kentucky spirit, perhaps, but not as true Appalachians: this quintet hails from Seattle.

“Ragged Wood” might be the Fleet Foxes song that most resembles Déjà Vu, and it’s a strong candidate for the album’s best track. Like “Carry On/Questions” and “Country Girl” from Déjà Vu, this song has distinct movements—and each one relies heavily on thick vocal harmony. “Ragged Wood”’s first section is a folk-rock shuffle with a simple verse-hook format. The second starts at the end of minute three, after everyone but bassist Christian Wargo has dropped out. Building from just the bass, then some tom-toms, then a repeating electric guitar line, then sustained octaves on the organ, the second movement glides higher and higher on the wings of four cooing voices (“Lie to me if you will / At the top of Beringer Hill / Tell me anything you want / Any old lie will do / Call me back to / Back to you”). It evaporates altogether upon the striking of one collective beat—voices die out, organ fades and a cymbal rattles into silence. Where did the song go? Probably to the same distant world where Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young are forever asking those big “Questions” during the harmony-laden climax of their famous song: “Where are you going now, my love? / Where will you be tomorrow? / Will you bring me happiness? / Will you bring me sorrow?” If CSNY’s “love” is their music, Fleet Foxes have the answers.

A version of this piece first appeared as a column in the Feb. 9 issue of the Tufts Daily.

Look Both Ways #2: Raphael Saadiq Bares His Soul

Old school is back—and not one Brian McKnight record too soon. Soul music is back in style thanks to artists like Amy Winehouse and Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. They’re making music with real drum sets and punchy horn sections rather than the turntables and drum pads of contemporary R&B and neo-soul. Hey, even Seal has a new album of ’60s and ’70s covers, simply titled Soul.

Raphael Saadiq, a longtime neo-soul singer with strong, versatile pipes, released an album this fall that will fly out of your computer speakers like it’s coming off vinyl. At its best, The Way I See It can feel like a condensation of soul music’s greatest moments, while retaining a welcome freshness.

Saadiq draws on so many influences that it’s really impossible to find a particular album by one artist that is appropriate for direct comparison. (I tried, first with James Brown’s Live at the Apollo Theater – the one from 1963 – but Saadiq sings with elegance, not Brown’s down-on-your-knees abandon. Then I went for Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions’ The Anthology; that was closer, but too of-a-piece to account for all the influences on The Way I See It.) This album draws on almost the entire Motown sound in its various incarnations over the years, so the best “parent” that I could find for this installment of “Look Both Ways” was Motown 1’s, a tastefully selected collection of hits from the Detroit label that helped craft the soul genre.

On this compilation, you’ll trip over the roots of Saadiq’s vocal sound everywhere: Stevie Wonder’s high-climbing, rapturous voice, audible on “Uptight (Everything’s Alright);” Smokey Robinson’s silky alto, featured twice on 1’s; and Marvin Gaye’s sexiness, most apparent, of course, on “Let’s Get It On.”

The instrumentals on The Way I See It essentially run the gamut of the Motown collection, taking as many cues from the saxophone-driven, fast strut of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave” as from and the guitar-and-strings sweetness of “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5. But Saadiq adds something – sometimes subtly, sometimes plainly – to the retro sound. He’s clearly a neo-soul artist, and the drums sound owes as much to ?uestlove as to the Funk Brothers. Unapologetic throwbacks “Sure Hope You Mean It” and “100 Yard Dash” don’t make it back to the ‘60s without getting a scrap of Macy Gray’s (mostly overlooked) neo-soul gem, On How Life Is, caught in the time machine with them.

The songs on Saadiq’s latest are brief, but, hey, that’s how they did it in the old days. He doesn’t really bother with bridges or huge dynamic changes, but the album makes up by proving surprisingly heterogeneous from song to song.

Calls for social change, one critical aspect of classic soul, make a brief appearance on Saadiq’s record, on tracks three and four. They are the swinging “Keep Marchin’” and the bayou-shuffling “Big Easy,” an ode to a lover swept up in Katrina’s waters. A greater showing would have been welcome from Saadiq, especially at a time when a wake-up call is necessary; after all, one election doesn’t signal the end to racial divisions in this country, and it’s surely not the ultimate realization of one leader’s famous dream, as many have claimed.

Both 1’s and The Way I See It serve as excellent gateways into soul music fanhood—Saadiq’s because it bridges yesterday and today explicitly yet gracefully, and 1’s because it’s simply a strikingly comprehensive compilation of the best number-one hits Motown Records ever produced.

• To see the video for The Way I See It's debut single, "Love That Girl," click here. If the music was about to make you forget this is the 21st century, don't worry: in this video, Saadiq sings lines like "Cuz you're so sweet, I could never imagine somebody like you"--to three different girls.
  

A version of this piece first appeared as a column in the Feb. 2 issue of the Tufts Daily.

Look Both Ways #1: Animal Sounds

When I listen to the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, I often imagine all five members passing smiles to one another in the studio, feeding off a collective vibe as they sing into their microphones. Usually, I sing along. When I listen to Animal Collective, I get sucked even deeper into the musical process. I often find myself adding something to their explosive, communal music--perhaps I’ll sing a rhythmic “dah dum” on every downbeat, or maybe add a harmony line.

On Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys’ famous vocal harmonies comprise only a fraction of what makes this music feel so bright and inviting. And if there is one band today that builds on the Beach Boys’ collaborative rubric, breaks down another wall, launches their musical pastiche into another universe, it’s Animal Collective.

Nowadays, a huge number of largely unknown bands are building in exciting ways on the best of classic rock, folk, soul and ’60s pop. I’ve decided to write one post each week that sheds new light on a recent album by comparing it to what I see as its parent, of sorts, from years ago. (The posts will normally come out on Tuesdays.) This week, I’ll line up Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, released on vinyl Jan. 6 and CD last week, with 1966's Pet Sounds, an album that many critics consider history’s greatest.

“I really want to do, just what my body wants to,” Animal Collective member Panda Bear sings on the swelling and exploding “Guys Eyes.” Panda’s vocals here immediately recall those of Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson: He takes one strong melodic phrase, belted in stretched-out vowel sounds, and builds above and around it with harmonies and background vocals centered on counterpoint.

“You Still Believe in Me” is Pet Sounds’ closest analog to “Guys Eyes,” musically and lyrically. Wilson sings a repetitious melody that climbs up then dips down, and the Boys cap it with a chorus harmony so rich it’s hard to find an overarching melody.

The orchestral sounds of “Believe” (and of other Pet Sounds gems like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “God Only Knows”) are distinctly baroque. Harpsichords and chimes and horns swim around each other in a goopy warmth. “Guys Eyes” and the rest of Merriweather also give the feeling of an immense ensemble, but this is a wilder one. Continuing to move away from their earlier work as freak folkies, Animal Collective have essentially made an electro-pop album, with high and hooky vocals backed by synthetic bass drums, whirly organs and indescribable sounds (how’s that one for a music writer’s cop-out?).

On "Believe" and "Guys Eyes," respectively, Wilson and Panda demonstrate knacks for refreshing self-critique as they beat themselves up over questions of fidelity. Wilson sings, “I try hard to be strong, but sometimes I fail myself.” Panda goes deeper inside his own head: “I want to do just what my body needs to / If I could just hold all the thoughts in my head and just keep them for you / I want to show to my girl that I need her / If I could just purge all the urges that I have and keep them for you."

Some friends who have no patience for Animal Collective tell me that the group’s music sounds like a broken record. There’s some merit to their complaint. For an entire minute on “Brothersport,” Merriweather’s magnificent closer, we hear an overwhelming repetition of what sounds like an out-of-whack organ; a distant synthesizer; and a police siren, brought to life and pissed off. But why not have some fun? Play Brian Wilson for a day and seize on these relentless phrases to add your own harmony to the mix. Now you’re instantaneously a part of the Collective, and you understand how beautifully the line can be blurred between observing art and participating.

• Click here to see Merriweather's first music video, a trippy, goopy clip for "My Girls." A higher-quality version is streaming from their Web site, myanimalhome.net, but that may change soon. Sure sounds like the Beach Boys. Looks . . . totally different.
  

A version of this piece first appeared as a column in the Jan. 26 issue of the Tufts Daily.