Gavin B.

Jesca Hoop: A Leap Off the Musical Grid


Jesca Hoop- The New Weird American

Jesca Hoop was brought to the attention of the prestigious jazz & folk label by no less than Tom Waits, who became a career mentor for Ms. Hoop after hearing her rather unconventional musical approach when she was a nanny for his children. AMG lauded Jesca Hoop's off the grid approach calling her one of the "New Weird Americans" along with other musical iconoclasts like Devendra Banhart, Faun Fables & Joanna Newsom.

In a world where the Katie Perrys & the Lady Ga Gas work overtime to cultivate the image of weirdness, Jesca Hoop is the picture of authentic weirdness that isn't defined by haute couture fashion or shameless posturing for the paparazzi.

Jesca Hoop's first major label release Hunting My Dress was released late last month and copy fell into my hands a couple weeks ago & I've been playing it non-stop every since. On the song The Kingdom you can hear how she's thrown together her own musical operandi from scratch with nods to artists like Björk, Kate Bush, PJ Harvey & Tom Waits.



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Big Fish is from an 2007 indie release Kismet. At the time Jesca was still the Waits family nanny & Tom Waits offspring & their playmates are featured in the video. There's a definite Waits/New Orleans 2nd line jazz musical influence in this song.



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My final selection is a radio performance of Seed of Wonder also from the 2007 Kismet album. Notice how she effortlessly navigates the ever changing themes, key changes & tempos of this dark serpentine song.



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Hunting My Dress, Jesca Hoop's latest album was released on July 27, 2010 & it gets a 8.5 rating on a scale of 10.

Jesca Hoop- A Complete Discography
Silverscreen Demos (2204)
Kismet (2007)
Hunting My Dress (2010)

Gavin B.

2010 Summer Reading Notes & Book List

I've had a couple of weeks off work & I'm caught up with all my short term writing projects which has given me time to pursue my two favorite leisure activities, reading & listening to music. Today I'm going to cover a few of the books I've read over the summer & my next post will contain some of my favorite music from the summer of 2010.

Review of the Kindle E-Reader

I recently bought a Kindle reader & I'm hooked on it. The biggest benefit of the Kindle is you don't have to lug around any more heavy tomes or wrestle around in bed with 800 page book that weighs 12 pounds. The book prices are okay. At Amazon a book with a $30 list price can be downloaded for between $9.99 & $11.99 but there's a lot of grumbling about the pricing practices of the publishing houses here in the USA. Now that people are starting to use E-readers the list price of book downloads are steadily ticking upward. The price of the Kindle, however, is ticking downwards. Two weeks after I purchased a Kindle for $249, Amazon cut the price of the same model of Kindle to $189. Since then Amazon has developed a non-wireless version of the Kindle that you can synch directly from your computer processor for $139.

Another advantage of an E-Reader is that nearly every book written prior to 1930 is pubic domain and therefore available as a free download. There are a couple of non-profit literacy projects that are putting all the great books of the world into the digital format so people can access those books for free. As a result I've gotten free downloads of books by some of my favorite authors like Poe, Dostoevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dumas, Victor Hugo, Keats, Shelly, Joseph Conrad, Ambrose Bierce & Mark Twain. Now for the book reviews:
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Gavin B's Book Notes for the Summer 2010



Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes- Matterhorn is written by an ex-Vietnam vet who spent almost 40 years putting together the great American novel about the Vietnam War. It's probably the best anti-war epic since Tolstoy's War & Peace. This novel isn't escapist fare & Marlantes' lucid storytelling is so vivid that reading the novel is an exhausting & harrowing experience but it's never dull. This book will make you feel you've done your own tour of duty in Nam by the time you get to the last page.
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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
The recently deceased Swedish author Larsson's "The Girl Who" suspense/thriller trilogy have become the biggest sellers in the publishing world since the Harry Potter books. I read all three books of the trilogy early in the summer. They're great mysteries with an alluring & mysterious female computer hacker as the central character. At times Larsson will give you more information that you ever wanted to learn about Swedish politics but it all fits into overarching storyline of the three books.
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FDR by Jean Edward Smith- Every American high school graduate is aware of the historical significance of Franklin Roosevelt's 4 term presidency but can probably tell you little more than he was president during the Great Depression & World War II. Since our current worldwide economic situation has been compared to the Great Depression as of late, I decided to learn more about Roosevelt, his life & times. There are 3 or 4 first rate biographies of Roosevelt in print & after agonizing over the choices, I selected the Jean Edward Smith bio because it profiles Roosevelt from a psychosocial perspective & attempts to explain why a man from such a privileged blue blood family would end up become a traitor to his class and become a hero of the downtrodden & oppressed classes. It had a lot to do with Roosevelt's battle with polio which left him immobilized & in a wheelchair for his adult life. The are many parallels to Barack Obama & our current lean economic times. Roosevelt was also the target of hate mongering by the extreme right & the corporate titans who attempted to obstruct the New Deal & economic recovery in the same manner currently being used to deadlock Barack Obama.
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The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin- This 600+ page book is the first authoritatively written history of Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, and the epic cast of characters that were responsible for the hippie, LSD counterculture. It's the best history of the Sixties revolution I've ever read.
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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test- by Thomas Wolfe- Since I've been researching the origins of the psychedelic culture over the summer, I decided to reread the book that started it all. Wolfe's 1968 novel is about renegade author Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, LSD chemist Stanley Owsley & Jerry Garcia & the Grateful Dead's role in pscydelicizing most of the state of California in 1965 & 1966 with their public acid test events. It's supposedly fiction but Wolfe doesn't even bother to change the names of any of the books central characters. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test a classic relic of those bygone days when LSD was legal & live rock & roll was free to the public.
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The Passage: A Novel by Justin Cronin- The Passage is an epic horror/apocalypse novel that has been compared by many to Steven King's epic apocalypse novel The Stand. I'm a sucker for apocalypse novels & this one also has vampire themes. Cronin was a young and well regarded rising star among the highbrow literati, so his decision to dabble in the pulp fiction horror genre made his book the most anticipated book event of the early summer. He reportedly got a 1 million dollar advance from Ballantine Books to write the book & Cronin had optioned the film rights to the book to Hollywood überproducer Ridley Scott for another cool million before The Passage was even published. Paying out that much money for film rights to an unpublished book is unheard of in the film industry. I didn't like the book nearly as much as a lot of others did. Cronin took nearly 800 pages to tell a story that could have been told in 400 pages. It was an enjoyable read and I probably would have liked it better if it were written by Stephen King an author with less of a literary reputation than Cronin, but after reading The Passage, I'm wondering if King isn't the better writer of the two.
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Tomorrow or maybe the next day, I'll post my music notes for the summer of 2010.

Gavin B.

Summer Music Picks 2010

Here's my list of 28 songs that have gotten frequent rotation on my radio show & in my Zune player over the Summer of 2010. All of the songs are available for free download at my Media Fire page. See the end of my post for details on downloading songs.

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I'll Keep It With Mine- Dean & Britta Great cover of a Bob Dylan song most identified with Nico who performed it on her classic Chelsea Girls debut album. It appears on Dean & Britta's latest album 13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol's Screen Tests.

Round & Round- Ariel Pink's Haunted Pink Graffiti- Even if Ariel Pink has crafted a more accessible sound & widened there audience with the release of Round & Round, the band remains stubbornly quirky & unconventional. This band is worthy of the lavish praise by music opinion makers.

Boyfriend- Best Coast- The Best Coast is an unapologetic primitive garage band that will win your heart with their ragged low tech soundmix & their earnest simplicity.

Praire Mussettle- Black Prairie Black Prairie is a neo-traditionalist folk group founded by three members of the Decemberists. They play an odd mix of swing, French cafe music, bluegrass, pop, and blues. Most of the album is instrumentals but their fresh approach to the folkways is joy to behold.

Dancing With the Mentally Ill- Club 8 A dark & mysterious offering from The People's Record by Club 8, everybody's favorite Swedish indie pop of the moment.

Memories- David Guetta & Kid Cudi Memories is from David Guetta's latest, One Love a sublime set of dance oriented electronica from the Parisian club deejay.

Go Back To School- Get Back Guinozzi! Carpet Madness by the French/British rock electronica project is one of my favorites of the year.

Rayuela- Gotan Project Ruyuela is from the Argentinian electronica/tango fusion group's third album Gotan Project 3.0.

Balloon Girl- Hungry Lucy Hungry Lucy is darkside electonica group that has made several sublimely beautiful albums that have gone unnoticed. Balloon Girl is from Hungry Lucy's latest & best album Pulse of the Earth.

Feast of the Heart- Jesca Hoop Ms. Hoop's latest album the idiosyncratic Hunting My Dress is my favorite of the year so far. She has an experimental approach & she reminds be of an English language version of the brilliant Argentinian singer/songwriter Juana Molina.

Golden Virginia- Jj The oddly named Jj offers off kilter pop on their latest album Jj No3. This band requires a learning curve to appreciate & one can only fully appreciate their deconstructed after several listening sessions.

Madame Van Damme- Lightspeed Champion Lightspeed is a black musician who's hard to place in a single category because he's equally comfortable singing & playing R&B, rock & roll, folk music & even cabaret & Broadway show tunes. He does a version of Flesh Failures from the Broadway show Hair that's a revelation. Madame Van Damme almost sounds like a 70s glam rock song.

White Heron- Mountain Man Mountain Man is another neo-traditionalist folk group that has three female vocalists with haunting otherworldly voices. Despite the low tech, 4 track sound Mountain Man's Made In the Harbor is a mesmerizing musical statement.

Dog With A Rope- Quantic Presenta Flowering Inferno Dog with A Rope is title song from the new album from QPFI the versatile Caribbean music ensemble that plays everything from dub reggae, to mambo, to Trinidad style socca. Most of their music is bathed in crashing waves of dubwise echo effects.

I Am a Child- Red House Red Horse it part neo traditional folk, Americana & indie rock. This beautiful cover of the classic Neil Young song is from their self titled debut album.

Funk De Umbigada- Saravah Soul Saravah Soul is a muscular Afrobeat jazz ensemble that recalls the blazing riddims of Fela & King Sunny best moments. Their new album Cultura Impura is one of the best of 2010.

Hold Tight Jamaica- Ska Cubano Ska Cubana is versatile Cuban band that is equally at home playing ska, Afro-Cuban styles, mambo & South American cumbia dance music. Their album Mambo Ska is essential to fans of ska or Latin dance music.

King of Spain - Tallest Man on Earth Tallest Man on Earth is Swedish folk singer Kristian Matsson who writes music & sings music that sounds like a lot like Bob Dylan circa 1963. His latest album The Wild Hunt has gotten critical nods and expanded his cult of followers. I think Matsson is on the tipping point of a big career break.

Struck Dumb- The Futureheads Originally produced by the Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill the Futurehead still retain much of their revolutionary fervor & post punk edge on their latest album The Chaos released 6 years beyond their stunning 2004 debut album.

The Queen of Lower Chelsea- The Gaslight Anthem This band reminds me of a UK version of Springsteen's E-Street Band in 1973. A lot of the song themes & music are similar.

Narcissus in a Red Dress- The Like An all girls garage band that often sounds like one of the early Phil Specter girl groups.

The Video Department- The Radio Department Elegant electronic fused pop from another promising Swedish band.

Black Smoke- Tindersticks Tindersticks are the old soldiers of early 90's chamber rock movement. What amazes me about Falling Down a Mountain, Tindersticks' latest album is bands rarely make 10th albums that are this good. This album is way too good for a band that's been at it for 20 years & I hope they reach a wider audience with this stunning album.

Causers of This Thing- Toro y Moi Causers of This Thing is the title song from the latest effort by Chaz Bundrick a South Carolina bedroom studio musician who plays dreamy electronica pop. He's been compared to other electronic rockers like Cut/Copy, Neon Indian, & Washed Out. I know very little about Mr. Bundrick except that I really like his stubbornly individualistic musical vision.

Single's Bar- Tracey Thorn Tracey Thorn vocalist for the popular electronica pop group Everything But the Girl has spent most of the decade raising children and has said she doesn't intend to go on the road with her latest solo release Love & It's Opposite. It's too bad because her latest set of songs rival those of Elvis Costello for keen eyed observations & bittersweet commentary on the nature of contemporary adult romantic relationships. Tracey is proof that rock music is still a continuing career option at age 48.

Live In Dreams- Wild Nothing Yet another Swedish indie pop group but their album Gemini is my favorite of the half-dozen or so Swedish albums I've reviewed for the Summer of 2010.

You can listen to and download all of the songs I've reviewed for the Summer of 2010 at my Media Fire web space at Gavin B @ Media Fire There are 28 songs on two pages & I did few test downloads & got a quick and effortless download of each file in under a minute. If you're having problems accessing the page or downloading the songs, let me know on this thread & I'll help you out.

Gavin B.

Blonde Redhead's Penny Sparkles on New Album


Blonde Redhead's newest album Penny Sparkle completes a trilogy of groundbreaking rock/electronica albums on the 4AD label.

When the downtown New York City band, Blonde Redhead began gigging 17 years ago their high volume dissonant guitars, alternate tunings, and stilted lyric content drew inevitable comparisons to Sonic Youth. Sonic Youth's drummer, Steve Shelley even produced Blonde Redhead's debut album & released it on his own label. Between 1997 & 2000 Blonde Redhead released four well received albums on the Touch & Go label.


Blonde Redhead vocalist & guitarist Kuzu Makino

In 2004 Blonde Redhead resurfaced on a new label, 4 AD & during their four year hiatus from the recording studio, the band had retooled it's sound so radically that the Sonic Youth comparisons were gone forever. Blonde Redhead's new sound moved away from their dissonant punk noise rock origins into the territory of experimental rock/electronica. The smoother edges in Blonde Redhead's sound weren't a sellout to the mainstream. They were still to the left of the Cocteau Twins, perhaps the most adventurous electronic band of the first generation. The Blonde Redhead on 4AD sounds like a completely different band from the Blonde Redhead on Touch & Go.

This week the much anticipated Penny Sparkle was release & it completes a trilogy of near perfect albums by Blonde Redhead for the 4 AD label. Those albums are Misery Is A Butterfly (2004), 23 (2007) and Penny Sparkle (2010). The biggest challenge for Blonde Redhead was to top the sublime perfection of 23, their last album which is their career masterwork & one of the great albums of 4th Generation rock. Penny Sparkle is neither better or worse than 23, it's just different. This album is sparser & more minimalist than any other Blonde Redhead recording & like 23 it will take a few months of repeated listening session for the haunting beauty of Penny Sparkle to completely settle in. It's an artistic triumph for a band that deserves to be heard by more people. Blonde Redhead is a great band because it's members aren't afraid of change & have made a musical career out of refusing to do the obvious.

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The opening cut, Here Sometimes sets the tone for the album:



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The second cut, Not Getting There is a hypnotic & moody song well suited to Kazu Makino's languorous vocal.



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My favorite cut is the mysterious Oslo which features a prominent synthesizer & a ska riddim.



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duga

I had a huge Blonde Redhead obsession for a while when Misery is a Butterfly came out. I was quite surprised how different their early material was from that album. I can't wait to listen to Penny Sparkle...23 was pure genius. I didn't even know they had a new album coming out this year! MusicBanter comes through again...

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Confusion will be my epitaph...

James

I was also really impressed with Blonde Redhead's latest.

Gavin B.

I'm glad to see so many admirers of Blonde Redhead at Music Banter. My blog has gotten quite a few hits since I posted my review early yesterday. Onward & upward to today's topic:

A Brief History of the Neo-Traditionalist Music Movement



Has the troubadour returned? Do we really want him back?

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PART I: The Music Industry Coopts the 60s Folk Revival by Promoting A Bunch of Braying Neurotic Singer/Songwriters in the 70s

Sometimes I get nostalgic for the innocence of the early 70s. It was a time when urban troubadours like Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jackson Brown, Joni Mitchell & Paul Simon inspired tens of thousands of tone deaf people to pick up a guitar; only to find themselves getting booed off the stage by hostile crowds of caffeine addicts at open mike night. By 1976, everyone was sick of hearing everyone else's version of Where Have All the Flowers Gone on hootenanny night. All of those earnest amateur performances of Puff the Magic Dragon were causing entire audiences of coffeehouse patrons to go postal. Aspiring folk singers soon learned that even the most supportive of folk music fans had a breaking point. You've crossed a line when you sing yet another folk diddie written by Burl Ives before an audience that's been slamming down four gallons of Italian dark roast coffee a day

The shelf life of the early 60s urban folk music revival had finally expired, about a decade too late. There was a glut of discarded Yamaha guitars in pawn shops all over America & by the end of the 70s, Peter, Paul & Mary albums were selling for 23 cents a ton in used record shops. But everyone held on to those old Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie & Blind Willie McTell albums to remind themselves what real folk music was all about, before the music industry transformed the singer/songwriter genre into a group of pathetic middle-of-the-road, bourgeoisie neurotics insipidly braying about their tortured love lives.

Lots of songs were sung & lots of coffee was drank. We all ended up with jangled nerves & in search of a new kind of music that expressed the zeitgeist of our times. By 1979 we were so busy slam dancing to Totally Wired by the Fall we hardly noticed the ignominious fall of folk music. The 80s urban punk existentialist wardrobe of all black outfits with Doc Martin work boots, soon replaced of the 70s urban existential folkie's wardrobe of plaid flannel shirts & Redwing work boots. Arlo Guthrie & Officer Obie seemed like a characters from a big goofy dream that everybody shared a long time ago. I stopped playing my harmonica in a neck harness while I mowed the yard. The dream was over.

PART II: The Neo-Traditionalists Restore Authenticity to Singer/Songwriter Genre

For the past decade a number of roots oriented musicians have been laboring to restore some dignity & authenticity to the much maligned singer/songwriter genre & by doing so they've become the vanguard of a neo traditionalist revival that's reshaping the the direction of independent music.


Black Prairie's music is a provocative blend of swing, French cafe music, bluegrass, pop, and blues.

This year one can't help but notice the tsunami of fresh singer/songwriters like Lisse, the Tallest Man on Earth, Laura Cantrell, Marissa Nadler, Josie Holland, Brandi Carlille, Miranda Lee Richards & Phillip Selway who have all released notable albums & played the summer roots/Americana festival circuit to wildly enthusiastic crowds.

We've also noticed a growing audience for roots & ethnic fusion bands like Espers, Hem, Gogol Bordello, Calexico, Devotchka, Iron & Wine & the Carolina & the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

PART III: The 80s & 90s Roots of the Current Neo-Traditional Movement

In reality the 60's folk revival never really went away, rather it mutated & reinvented itself within the indie rock music movement of the late 80s & early 90s. My own epiphany was listening to The Trinity Sessions by the Cowboy Junkies back in 1989. The Cowboy Junkies were an alternative band that played low fi renditions of music by Hank Williams, Patsy Cline mixed with an acoustic rendition of the Velvet Underground song Sweet Jane at a slow but sensuous dirge tempo. This sort of post-punk/country music crossover by the Cowboy Junkies was a revelation for me.

The current crop of post millennium neo-traditionalist bands owe a debt to earlier roots oriented performers like Gillian Welch, Wilco, Cheri Knight, the Cowboy Junkies, Lucinda Williams the Handsome Family, Los Lobos, Steve Earle, the Pernice Brothers, Chris Whitley, Chris Thomas King & the ever present John Hartford who collectively invented the Americana genre back in the 80s & early 90s when roots music & the folkways tradition had largely fallen out of fashion with mainstream music audiences.

Joel & Ethan Cohen's 2000 film Oh Brother Where Art Thou? a musically driven story line set in the Depression era America became a cinematic manifesto for the No Depression movement has profoundly influenced the musical direction of the current generation of indie music artists. You can bet than nearly every contemporary indie musician from Jack White to Ira Kaplan has their own cherished copy of the Oh Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack in their music collections.


The ironically named Mountain Man is a trio female singers from Bennington Vermont.

1st generation poetic folk troubadours like John Prine, Leonard Cohen, David Bromberg, Loudon Wainwright II, Rory Block, Iris DeMent & John Hiatt are playing to SRO audiences all over the world & most of the fans are people under the age of 30. It's too bad that 1st Generation roots revivalists like John Hartford, Gram Parsons & John Fahey aren't around to benefit from the renewed public interest in the roots music they devote their considerable musical talents to promoting.

Even Robert Plant is getting in on the act. Plant assisted by co-producer & roots music superstar Buddy Miller has formed a neo-traditionalist fusion band, Band of Joy. The recently released Plant album, Band of Joy is highlighted by harmonist Patty Griffin. With the Band of Joy vehicle, Plant finds fiercely original music within other people’s songs, nabbing two songs from slow-core stalwarts Low & cherry-picking relative obscurities from Richard & Linda Thompson and Los Lobos. Band of Joy extends a lot of Plant's earliest ideas about dark, psychedelic country/folk music that predate his tenure as singer for Led Zeppelin. Robert Plant has always had an astute ear for innovative new bands & the latest musical trends. I remember checking out the debut releases of band like Massive Attack, Portishead & Saint Etienne in the 90s because Robert Plant chatted up those pioneering electronica bands in interviews.

Should we all get our old Yamaha 12 strings out of hock & relearn the chords to Kumbaya all over again? No... it's better to leave sleeping dogs to lay, but it wouldn't hurt to explore some of the great neo-traditionalist groups that are emerging from the current crop.

Here's three of my favorite neo-traditionalist artists who have all recently released debut albums.

Prairie Musette by Black Prarie Black Prairie combines French musette cafe music with traditional Americana on "A Prairie Musette" from their 2010 album, "Feast of the Hunters' Moon." Black Prairie hails from Portland Oregon & three members of Black Prairie are also members of the pop/rock band the Decemberists.



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I Am A Child by Red Horse Red Horse is a roots Americana folk trio formed by three veteran performers of the folk scene, Eliza Gilkyson, Lucy Kaplansky & John Gorky. Their sublime rendition of the Neil Young song, "I Am A Child" appears on their self titled 2010 album release.



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White Heron by Mountain Man Mountain Man is an ironically named all female trio of neo-traditionalist & Americana musicians from Bennington Vermont. Molly Erin Sarle, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, and Amelia Randall met while they were students at Bennington college. "White Heron" is a song from Mountain Man's debut album, "Made the Harbor" was released in 2010. It's one of the most original first albums I've heard in quite some time. The complex & elegant vocal arrangements, minimalist instrumental arrangements & low fidelity recording quality make it hard to place a date on the album. It almost sounds like a Library of Congress field recording made in Appalachia in the 1930s which is why the music of Mountain Man has such an alluring charm.

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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Flower Child

If only we really had this kind of music on the prairie.

Thank you.

Gavin B.

Five Good Reasons To Love Brit Bands

Say what you will about the never ending revolving door of new Brit bands, every decade or so a new wave of innovative UK bands come along to awaken the world to the infinite artistic possibilities of rock & roll music.

Be it the Kinks, the Beatles or the Stones in the 60s; Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols or the Clash in the 70s; Gang of Four, Public Image Ltd. or XTC in the 80s; Blur, Oasis or Stone Roses in the 90s; or Radiohead, the National, the Coral, the Futureheads or the Libertines in the 00s; every new generation of UK rock bands manages to challenge our expectations & subvert the conventional notion that rock and roll is subject to arbitrary rules or creative limits.

Below are five songs which will do a better job of waking you up in the morning than three double espressos & 40 milligram dose of Adderal. The songs are also five good reasons to love Brit bands.

#1. Struck Dumb by the Futureheads



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#2. Natural's Not In It (Rakes Remix) by Gang of Four



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#3. Song #2 by Blur



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#4. I'm Not Down by the Clash



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#5. Totally Wired by the Fall



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__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Queen Boo

I don't think anybody is unintellegent enough to shrug off many of the most influential and popular bands in rock music because they're from Britain but you posted some damn good songs, especially Blur.