Containing, among other things, my humble effort to bring my fellow sixty(ish) year olds up to date on some current, and frankly, not so current, pop music.
For instance, the following record is the best folk/country album I've heard in years. Better this year than Hooray for the Riff Raff(!) (by a bit) and Waxahatchee (by a bit more) and Jesse Winchester (a bit more than that). And nearly as good as Robbie Fulks. Too bad it's 25 years old.
How is this even possible? I was on my last pop legs for a bit there. (This isn't pop, but you get the point.) No jazz chords either.
The songs have the most basic of melodies, made fresh via the kind of genius John Prine possessed, and Neil Young occasionally still does. It makes me want to play guitar again.
Brett Sparks' rich baritone is nearly as commanding as Johnny Cash's. He sounds ancient, yet I'm sure I'm twenty years older. I assumed the lyrics are profound. Or did the melodies and the voice make them so? Who knows? Who cares?
But upon closer listen, I find most of them dark and kind of twisted - more than one involving family murder. It's probably the only off-putting element in the whole project. But I'm still listening anyway, especially since there are also a few with lyrics so open-hearted as to bring you to tears.
I'd have preferred to include another album here for comparison or contrast, but that would have just complicated things. This short, modest record is nearly as good as the sprawling Diamond Jubilee.
When I think of songwriting genius, names like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and John Prine come to mind first. And I use the word genius especially because they have managed to create brilliant music and lyrics over a sustained period of time, from a pretty limited set of chords/melodies/vocabulary/instrumentation.
When I think of powerful rock n roll, names like Neil Young, the Stones, the Clash are near the top.
As you can see, one name appears in both groups, so as you might imagine I find myself looking for newer artists who emulate artists like Neil Young, who, using a limited palette, somehow infuse their music with both great power and beauty nonetheless.
During the early 70s everyone was looking for the "New Dylan". Now we may be looking for a New Neil Young without even knowing it. We should have started a while ago, but here we are.
The following three artists have gotten me thinking of them as possible new Neil Youngs. Here are my thoughts on their latest albums:
I'd run into this guy a couple of years ago as part of Wednesday, which, if anything, sounds more like Neil Young than he does alone. And while their guitars delivered an overwhelming intensity, the melodies were less forthcoming. Neil wouldn't make that mistake.
MJ himself has put out five solo records, and this is his latest. He's more laconic and more country than Wednesday. His singing style makes Neil seem like one of the Three Tenors. The lyrics pretend to be about nothing much, which makes them interesting. He almost dares you to not like him.
He plays a rudimentary style of lead guitar, much like Young, but doesn't make it a central part of his performance. The songs aren't as immediately catchy as Young's, either, but they do grow on you.
Overall, less assaultive and more tuneful than Wednesday. Instead of a bunch of drunks in a bar fight, there's just one drunk minding his business. But he is still drunk.
With both a male and female vocalist, Wussy covers Neil Young's vocal range. Their first album, Funeral Dress, was ragged, with electric guitars up front, interspersed with beautiful songs, and one of the best albums of the aughts. I thought of it as the Neil Young comeback album he never quite got around to making.
My next Wussy album was Attica! It was a bit more polished while simultaneously leaning even more heavily into droning guitar noise. Like Funeral Dress, it contained at least two or three masterpieces, but here they stand apart from the noise.
This time, the tone is hushed, in keeping with the sudden death of guitar player John Ernhart in 2020. Atmospheric and reverential, with vocals that no longer snarl, it captures the loss of a comrade in all its shock and confusion, and unlike certain other people they don't use it as an excuse to drown themselves in drugs and alcohol doing it, even if a better album came out of it.
Wussy now appears to have chosen a different path and is, thus,, less likely to be compared to Neil Young. And that's okay. Ultimately, it's about quality, and Wussy provides that in spades.
Meanwhile, this "band" (really just Kate Crutchfield and whoever she's playing with at the moment) doesn't have such aspirations or obvious similarities to Young. However, where she matches him most closely is her knack for tunes. I held off a while on getting this one, thinking, because I'd already loved Out in the Storm and liked the later St. Cloud, her songwriting might not keep up the pace she set for herself, especially since she's also done other records in addition to her solo stuff.
But that's not the case at all. I was pleasantly surprised that this one is a melodic rebound from St Cloud. The vocals are stronger, too, as is the production.
She did rock n' roll proud on Out in The Storm, and did the same for folk/country on St. Cloud. Now, with Tiger's Blood, which occupies a middle ground between those two records, she may have outdone herself. God only knows what I've missed on her other albums.
In songwriting, hooks, singing, simplicity, and most of all, consistency, she comes closest to Neil Young in spirit if not actual sound.
At first, I thought 2021's edge over 2020 was slim, and only because of not having a fascist in the White House. (Don't worry, there are still plenty in Congress.)
But in fact, it was a year of musical richness.
Yes, I did my usual "disappointment" post, but when I look back on how much enjoyable pop music I heard even while doing deep dives on LVB, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Bill Evans, I'm a bit stunned.
Best Humans:
Stephen Colbert
Bernie Sanders
And way too many others to mention.
Worst Humans:
Pretty Much Everyone at Fox News, although Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, and Jesse Watters all deserve special mention.
Kristen Manchin
Apologies for not bothering to mention all the new dictators who are actively making the world a worse place.
Best Books:
A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. Easily the best popular science book I've ever read.
Connections, by James Burke. A companion to the 1980s series, Jimmy actually knows of which he speaks.
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. And yet another book about how we humans think. Bu the best one, and really, the one all the others are based on.
Best Movies:
I didn't really see many for obvious reasons, so I don't really give a shit. Or is that vice versa? But here are the ones I did see.
Don't Look Up: What is the issue everyone is having with this movie? It's funny, bleak, entertaining.
Spiderman: No Way Home: I'm not a huge superhero movie person (I used to be a big comics person, though.) but this one got me all choked up.
Get Back: A lot less depressing than Let It Be. But so so sad given what would ultimately happen.
Best TV:
What We Do in the Shadows
Derry Girls
Music Awards:
Most Work (But Worth it):
Thelonious Monk (8 album set!),
John Coltrane (8 album set!)
Bill Evans (12(!) album set (leftover from last year.)
Time to slow down, Jaybee?
Most Work (And Possibly Not Worth It):
Weyes Blood Titanic RisingStately, serious, perfectly good, quite playable for company, but no intensity.
Most Surprising (and Not Necessarily in a Good Way):
Township Jazz and Jive: But in this case in a great way.
5. Etran de L'Air: No. 1 - It's amazing what energy and momentum you can generate with just a couple of guitars, a set of drums, and an enthusiastic audience.
8. Waxahatchee: St. Cloud - Kate Crutchfield made an almost perfect rock and roll record a few years ago with Out in the Storm. This time she nearly matches that feat, this time with country music.
9. Humperdink: Hansel and Gretel - Not being familiar with German, for all I know the lyrics consist entirely of variations on the phrase shove that old bitch in the oven! And yet it's lovely and sometimes sublime.
10. Rachid Taha: Bon Jour - High-quality rock music that just happens to be made in Africa.
Just another morning in the Jaybee household where I'm listening to an opera while checking out a video on who invented Heavy Metal music. Who said multitasking was dead?
It’s probably too late to explain to people that I’ve not become a classical music snob. It’s just that there are some mountains – and LVB is one - worth climbing.
But I assure you I am still a pop music snob/t, meaning that I sort of stand by a remark I’ve made a few times that I love music, and I hate people who merely like it. They’re the ones who buy all the bland crap cluttering up the record bins and record charts, thus discouraging the recording of the weirder/ deeper stuff I prefer. But things are much better these days: a random glance at the Billboard top whatever is likely to elicit curiosity from me rather than vomit.
Which is to say that I have been listening to pop(pish) music while climbing the LVB mountain. It resulted in a Jazz avalanche that I'll have to dig out of at some point but whatever.
With her slightly gravelly voice, these simple tunes occasionally risk sounding repetitive. (Rock and roll covered that shit up good.) But the tunes, voice, and passion win out.
They’re from Africa and have electric guitars. When they crank out are long, primitive but hypnotic call and response grooves. Guaranteed to drive anyone who insists on melody or pretty voices absolutely nuts. I like those things, too but I consider this to be my vacation from it.
It amounts to a so so quality live recording. Two guitars, rudimentary drums. I don't even hear a bass. And yet it does what rock and roll was always supposed to do: get people up and dancing. You can hear the audience doing just that, even though they never heard the band before. You can tell because at the end one of the band members has to tell them their name.
This one is just the opposite. Slow and ornate, it's just the kind of long, arty opus with overwrought vocals that should rightly sink most other records of the type. But this one damn near soars. Every time he starts to get precious he backs it up with a good melody or arrangement.
I hear dance, rock, electronic, and chamber music. And I've not yet gotten to the bottom of it.
To call this vocal music "classical" might be misleading. The only reason I do is that its best track showed up on a Most Relaxing Classical Musiccollection (which by the way is really good). The other tracks are not quite at that level, but the overall weirdness itself draws me in.
Another serious, arty record that doesn't make me bust out laughing at all the wrong times. Quite an accomplishment.
So when I come back from that vacation from melody and pretty vocals this is where I want to go. Her voice is usually a whisper, so she sounds fragile but then she'll come out with a line about starting a garden after a skinhead neighbor goes missing, or I won't forgive you, but don't hold me to it.
So the songwriting is sturdy, and the arrangements bring out the best in them, especially "Graceland Too". The title of which - along with her smashing her guitar of SNL - shows she has a healthy (dis)respect of her predecessors. David Crosby tweeted that her SNL stunt was "pathetic". She replied "little bitch".
You might notice that three of these records came out last year. Old LVB muscled out a lot of 2020. Somebody had to.
But I'm back, at least in the Jaybee sense of being at least a year behind current music, getting distracted by jazz, opera, and heavy metal. In other words, I'm all over the place.
Well, the old bell curve was bit flatter this year.
During 2017, I heard a lot of very good records but just a few that were great. 2018 had more great stuff but also more disappointments. (How can I be such a pessimist and still manage to get disappointed by things?)
But before getting into the music, let’s see how I did with my 2018 resolutions, broken down by category:
General Classiness:
Cutting down on saying “Awesome”: A-, but
I still say “Let's get on the same page” way too much. B-
Health:
10,000 steps in a day: C+ (It’s more like 7500.)
1,000 words per day. D (It’s more like 75, unless you count talking.)
More Exercise: B- (Hey, I like to walk but anything else requires too much...exercise.)
More Vegetables: B- (Do eggplant parmigiana heroes count?)
Fewer Sweets: B+
Less Drinking: B+ (Yeah, I'm just a barrel of laughs now.)
Music:
Fewer CDs, and more mp3s: A- (It’s going great, but I miss CDs! Vinyl, too.)
Getting current year music: C (Not so good, but then current year music wasn’t so good, either.)
Guitar: A I got a guitar! And I practice, too! (C- for that, though.)
Drive-By Truckers: Brighter Than Creation’s Dark(2008): So modest you could ignore it, so generous it just chips away at your resistance. They combine the sound of the Stones with genuine country, and excellent songwriting.
So if you think I missed out on 2018 music-wise, wait until you get a load of this, thanks mostly to the World History Project:
Hamilton by Ron Chernow: An amazing book. An amazing guy. He makes the biggest workaholic you know sound like a slacker. He should have written a book on productivity.
Burr by Gore Vidal: A delight, as always, and in the context of the WHP, Vidal clearly worked his ass off.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen: It’s been a long time since I read a “good old novel” that kept me involved all the way through to the end. Brainy, but more importantly, lots of heart.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon: Dark, and yet funny as hell.
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar: Eloquent, beautifully written
Washington: Ron Chernow: Great history.
The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendahl:Funny, cynical, kind of nuts. Very refreshing.
Thomas Jefferson by Christopher Hitchens: Okay, Tom, Vidal and Chernow - not to mention Hamilton and Washington - think you’re an asshole. So who but Christopher Hitchens could rise to your defense?
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob Zoet by David Mitchell: History and love.
The Life of Johnson by Boswell: Even the smartest guys have their blind spots.
Observations:
Like I said, 2018 itself - at least what I heard of it, was less than great. But I’ll be working on the stuff I missed, because I suspect it was a much better year than my ears heard.
The one single thing I like about this time of year is, if the music is good I can stay indoors, pretend the weather isn't there and JUST LISTEN!
My batting average hasn’t been great the last few years but things are different this time around. Perhaps it has something to do with my almost utter failure to stick to this decade, which was one of my New Year resolutions.
Plus, I did some mental traveling. I barely do the physical kind, so it’s a start.
And where did I (fake) go?
The Congo:
Not the place that comes to mind in January (then again…), but then there is Black Panther, so...
I wanted to get something by these guys for a while and when it came time to choose I ended up going with their 2004 debut. Doh!
I love the idea of this record. A bunch of guys make their own instruments and amps by pulling parts from junked cars and other crap, and then plug them in and play. A real garage band.
So you get a weird mix of the rhythms you’d expect, but with a raw distortion. And not like electric guitar distortion, unless it’s in your friend’s basement, and the amp’s been dropped a few times. Not slick at all, so you feel like you’re there.
It’s evocative, but over the course of an hour, a bit repetitive. Probably good for dance parties, though.
How could I go wrong with a “band” that brightened my 1997 with their first album - a mix of hip-hop and melody (And why hadn’t anyone thought of that by then?) - making both better?
Their love for the Beatles - only alluded to on their first record - just comes bursting out here with their cover of “Norwegian Wood”, which doesn’t top the original (how could it?) but is both faithful to it and all PMD anyway.
But it doesn’t quite measure up to the first record. When you do the same thing a second time round, it’s got to be much better to really knock you on your ass. If I heard this one first, no doubt I’d love it but I didn’t.
Just a guy strumming his acoustic, singing very simple, direct songs about the untimely death of his wife.
Although history proves otherwise, he believes death - or at least this particular one - is not something to make art about. And he tries to stick to this by making the songs so unadorned and matter of fact that you simply can’t escape the subject matter by focusing on the music.
And not melodramatic. Just troubling and uncomfortable - as he describes in one of the songs - when you’re having a dinner party and someone just starts talking about their spouse’s recent death. Because, like he says, death is real.
No grade, because I don’t know what to make of it yet.
Quiet, haunting, devastating.
And in its way, perfect for the cold grey days of February.
Ireland:
Mom interrupted all of this with the one year anniversary of her death.
At the time I made a playlist for her, and found myself listening to it several times during the week of the anniversary. It’s fucking long - 95 songs - but I got through it three or four times, and in an odd way, it provided a break from my explorations by focusing on the very familiar.
Ever fearful of pointless nostalgia, I typically avoid doing this. But this time it really helped.
Browsing amazon.com is the new record store trip for me. It's where I trip across stuff I've had my eye on for a while, but then because I see it now, it seems like the right time to try it.
So here’s this jazz guitar guy I’d always wanted to hear. But since, aside from Charlie Christian, I never warmed to jazz guitar since I’d only hear muted chords when I want ringing leads, I’d held off for quite a while.
And WM isn’t much different from what I expected/feared, but at least he had Miles Davis’s old rhythm section (circa Kind of Blue) backing him up, how bad could it be?
At first, it was a bit flat, but that rhythm section is so tight it keeps you listening. And eventually, you come to like his tone, his leads, and yes, his fast, smooth chord changes.
Good for mornings and nights. Play Charlie Christian during the day, though.
These guys came out of the early nineties amongst the grunge acts and never got quite the level of attention that Nirvana or Pearl Jame got.
I was so impressed with this on first listen! Right out of the gate, it’s fast, loud and tuneful. But each subsequent listen struggled to keep up. I think it's one of those records where your mood has to match it; otherwise, it’s just clatter. But when they do match, it’s the best record of the year so far.
And while all of this is happening while I do a deep dive into the Nick Cave oeuvre via this three-disc retrospective, none of which I’ve heard before. Ah but that's what winter is for! Unless it sucked, in which case, it could have gotten ugly.
The first disc is all arty poetics and gothic pseudo-Americana like only a pretentious Englishman can concoct. Not terrible, but it didn’t exactly encourage me to move on to discs two and three, which are an improvement.
Disc two leans toward ballads. Since mediocre poetry/gothic Americana can devolve into really awful and embarrassing soul-bearing. I was relieved to find that Nick actually has a bit of a heart. The melodies don’t hurt either.
In my year-end wrap-up I described disc three as Dylanesque, but I was mistaken. It’s really Springsteenian (ish? ist?). Again, a risky move, but Nick pulls it off with surprising grace.
I’m still finding my way through this extravagant (haven’t watched the DVD yet) box set (thanks, kids!), but for now, I don’t regret the plunge I've taken.
