Today is the second anniversary of me being part of this music blogging adventure, so: thanks, y’all, once again, for joining us, whether it’s once or all the time. Have some pretty spring flowers as an expression of my appreciation:
I’m also declaring today Lurker Amnesty Day. Drop me a comment or an an email and say hi, y’all. Share a song or a video, ask a question, or just wave shyly, it’s all good.
Photo credit: Todd Wolfson
1. Who is Ray Wylie Hubbard? He’s Gandalf, if The Lord of The Rings had been written as a team effort by Warren Ellis and Charles Portis.
2. Once, very long ago, when I had only just begun to wander, I fetched up in a church in the center of London. There was music playing when I walked through the door, organ music, swelling and rolling and bouncing between the marble floors and pillars and filling up the soaring arches.
I drifted around, muddled by jet-lag, enjoying the music and only vaguely paying attention to the people who were with me. Eventually the music stopped, and a small, gray-haired man emerged from behind the organ, and I realized a) he had been playing the whole time and b) I had been walking quietly so I didn’t disturb the angels that I had thought were there and c) it had not seemed the tiniest bit irregular to me, that an off-duty angel should have stopped in to a random church in central London to keep the organ in good tune.
(I was really jet-lagged. About two hours later I would fall upon the only 7-11 in town like a hungry, homesick locust and eat the hot dogs of the lonesome and far from home.)
Dirty rock clubs are not (usually) churches, and Ray Wylie Hubbard is not an angel. But as the organ music contained within it the solemn peace and worn but still stately grandeur of that church, his music contains stages scratched by amps and dented by stomping boots and upright basses, mysterious unsavory puddles of liquor left by drinks gone astray, the shimmer-shine of rodeo buckles and lucite heels bathed in multi-colored neon lights, the rumble of truck engines out in the parking lot, and the sweet bite of whiskey against the back of your throat and smoke in your lungs in cold night air.
3. This is the video for Coricidin Bottle, from Grifter’s Hymnal, his most recent record:
6. Other songs I’m fond of on Grifter’s Hymnal include: Lazarus, Henhouse, New Year’s Eve at the Gates of Hell and Mother Blues. They are, collectively and variously, bluesy and stompy and rambly and thoroughly delightful. Though really that describes the whole record.
7. Delightful and educational: Ray Wylie Hubbard’s Twitter feed. Young musicians, take note, there’s solid advice in there among the shenanigans.
Good morning, NTSIBbers. Some of you may recognize today’s band from their recent appearance at Couch by CouchWest, but for those of you that don’t, please meet The Big Nowhere, from Glasgow, Scotland.
Their line-up is still evolving, but the music I’m bring you today is the work of Simon Sinclair (Vocals, Guitar, Slide Guitar, Organ, Percussion, Melodica, Saxophone), Billy Crowe (Guitar, Bass, Vocals, Harmonica, Banjolin, Lap Steel), Joe Keegan (Piano, Organ) and Peter Morgan (Drums).
Together they make music that sounds like it belongs somewhere (or some-when) a little bit wilder than now; some place and time where people are just starting to build dance-halls on the frontier.
The song that hooked my attention was, as it happened, the first song on the record: Some Kind of Sickness. Something about the tune was familiar, but I couldn’t quite work out what it was – something about the melody, maybe. I found myself humming it at odd moments, trying to figure it out. The penny finally dropped one afternoon when I was listening to it on the uptown 4 train, and both humming along and playing the drums on my knee.
See if you can work it out:
(The answer is: It’s built on the frame of an old Appalachian ballad called On Top Of Old Smok(e)y, the first recording of which is lost in the mists of time; the one the link uses the arrangement created by Pete Seegar in 1951. Burl Ives and Bing Crosby sang a duet version, and Hank Williams Sr. covered it as well. And that’s not even getting into the many parodies, starting with On Top Of Spaghetti, recorded by Tom Glazer in 1963.)
Also fun to sing along to is (Why Won’t You) Make My Telephone Ring:
and my personal favorite, Untitled Song Regarding the Dangers Of Making Faustian Pacts (short form: Untitled Satan Song):
Also worthy of note is the three-part super-creepy murder-ballad song series called “Hansen’s Trailer Park Suite”: Johnny Walker Red, My Name is Bob Willis and Song for Suzannah. This is one of the few times I will say this, but, be sure to listen to them all together and in order, or else the story doesn’t quite make sense. There’s a full explanation here, which I encourage you to read; meanwhile, I’ll start you off with the first one:
And now, on a somewhat lighter note, I give you two videos. The first one for a song called Junk Band, and is from their Christmas in the Gutter EP. I love it because it approximately what would happen if someone had made Twin Peaks as a silent movie.
It has many of my favorite things, for example: a moody black and white color scheme! title cards! a man in a bowler hat! Magic tricks! Shadow dinosaurs! I could say more but that is my allotment of exclamation points for this post!
In their eponymous album Dead Queen and the River, international men of mystery with roots in Virginia, combine American folk music with a Serbian brass band – the Dejan Lazarevic Orkestar – to magnificent effect.
It’s bluegrass, but it’s bluegrass where fast-picking dances a fascinating, complex and delicate ballet with, among other things, the cheerful oompah-oompah of a tuba.
The following are some of my favorites from the record:
And then some video, so you can see them rocking out live:
Dear 17,
Hey, girl.
I know you’re super busy right now, with school and swimming and whatever it is your doing there at the dining room table – you’ve just informed your mother you don’t have room in your schedule for a birthday this week, can it happen next Tuesday? – but there’s some things you should know.
1) You’re right to be worried about Kurt Cobain.
2) You’re also right to have faith in Axl Rose. He’ll put that record out. It will require a double dog dare from Dr. Pepper and it won’t be great, but it won’t be terrible, either.
3) You will get to see Whitesnake one day. It’ll be in a tiny club and it will be amazing.
4) And Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe, too. More than once! Not in tiny clubs, but the shows will still be pretty great.
5) You’ll love other bands. That first one you will fall for inexplicably – the first time you see them, they’ll be playing Beatles-y music, wearing a lot of beige and will have four tattoos between them, which is (still) SO not your thing – but somehow, you cannot resist.
6) By the way, that photography class you sulked through last semester? That really comes in handy later. You could maybe have done another semester of that, rather than taking weightlifting.
7) You are about to have tremendous adventures. Some good, some bad, several involving trains. But twenty years down the line, the regrets you have will not be for the path that you chose.
8) This song will resonate, too:
Love,
Thirty-Seven
The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem: Because their records were the ones I neatly extracted from my parents’ collection and played as often as I could.
The Clancys came from Tipperary, Tommy Makem from Armagh, and they started creating a Irish traditional music sensation in America in the 1960s. I was lucky enough to see an incarnation of the band – there were several line-up changes over the years – in the late ’80s in DC, and I brought one of my carefully hoarded records for them to sign. (Which they did, with great ceremony, and perhaps some amusement, but definitely with courtly kindness towards a gawky not-quite teenager.) And as I remember, their voices were as sweet and true as ever.
Time has taken its toll, and as of 2009, they have all passed on. But they are still my favorite, for ever and always.
To add the Clancys and/or Mr. Makem to your own record collection, you can go Amazon and also to eMusic . The latter has Hearty & Hellish! which was the record that I probably listened to the most.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these videos.
http://youtu.be/jpjWCSL-utI
http://youtu.be/ONAuo51pTHY
The first time I saw the The Saw Doctors is a little bit lost in the mists of time. It was probably around 1996; I have the feeling they were at Glasgow’s annual Celtic Connections festival that year and when I said “The Saw who?” my friends made outraged noises and took steps to address my ignorance.
What I do remember is combing the racks in Tower Records to find their CD – under rock, not “traditional” or “world”, because they were and are a rock band – and the second time I saw them, a wild evening a a club in DC called the Black Cat, which for me ended in leaving while the pit was still jumping in order to make a mad dash down 14th street and get on the train before the Metro shut for the evening.
This past Saturday night at Irving Plaza, though, I was able to stay until the joyful end.
I don’t really have any complicated thoughts here. Iridesense (sic) were the openers; in my estimation they got all the way to “not a terrible way to spend half an hour”, but did not really turn my crank.
When they were finished, The Saw Doctors came out and rocked it, and the room sang along at the top of their (our) lungs. They played pretty much all of my favorites – to the point that typing them all out would basically be recreating the set list – but special highlights were a sweeping, soaring Clare Island, a fancy doo-wop version of Red Cortina, and a raucous Hay Wrap.
That last one was especially sweet, partially because they seamlessly meshed a verse or two of Blitzkreig Bop into the middle, and partially because they did a short Monkees walk towards the end.
Without further waffle, here are some pictures from the show:
Davy Carton (left) putting the “K” in Tommy K, with Leo Moran (right).
Davy Carton again, with Kevin Duffy on keys in the background.
Leo Moran, this time without a mic in his face!
Leo Moran getting ready to start Clare Island.
Y’all, Clare Island is just such a beautiful song. I really do listen to it practically every day. If I could persuade you to buy just one Saw Doctors song, it would be that one. If I could talk you into two, or maybe three, I’d add N17 and Useta Love Her, or, if you have need of an anniversary song, Still the Only One.
Though really I think you should just get a-hold of as many of their records as you can, because all of their songs are good.
Anyway. Back to the pictures!
And also to Clare Island, with a shot of Anthony Thistlethwaite’s saxophone solo.
The whole band during the doo-wop Red Cortina.
Rickie O’Neill their (new!) drummer and Anthony Thistlethwaite during Red Cortina.
And in conclusion, Kevin Duffy when he came out to play guitar during Hay Wrap.
Shelf-reading has two purposes: one, to make sure everything is in its right place; and two, to discover works you would not necessarily have though to look for, left to your own researching devices.
I decided to take purpose #2 and apply it to Bandcamp’s tagging system, generally, and the Irish music section, specifically. I then decided to use the counties of Ireland (North and South), arranged alphabetically, as a framing device for the experiment.
I begin today with County Antrim, which contains Belfast, which has large, thriving scene, so this time my selections do skew dramatically towards one geographic location.
I’ve also noticed that, as one would expect, artists from further out in the countryside have drifted Belfast-ward, which muddies the waters a bit. With one exception (David C. Clements) I’ve tried to confine myself strictly to artists who have tagged their work “County Antrim.”
Without further waffle, here is what I found that I liked, drawing both from Belfast as well as the county at large:
I last wrote about Mr. Clements back in January. Since then he has added five songs, one of which I haven’t yet extracted from Bandcamp’s clutches (a cover of Devil Town) and the other four which, together with the first two that I wrote about, I listen to on endless repeat for thirty minute stretches at least once a day.
Update Nov. 2013: He’s removed some tunes and moved others, and The Longest Day in History is now a four song ep. Here is my favorite tune:
Next up: Paulie J Fox, who describes his genre as “country experimental surf.” To me it sounds a bit Twin Peaks-y, and I mean that in the best possible way.
Less experimental and more indie-folk is Ram’s Pocket Radio, aka Peter McCauley, who is from Lisburn, just outside of Belfast.
This is his contribution to a compilation called, of all things, Small Town America (Public Service Broadcast 10), which features a totally European cast of characters, all of whom look worthy of further investigation:
This one is from Trajectories, a three EP box set of only his work:
Jumping up the coast a little bit, there’s static white sound, from Ballymoney. They’re heavier and darker, and to my ear draw from the shoegaze tradition but incorporate some of the spirit of Metal Machine Music, in the sense that you can hear them noodling and experimenting and exploring some intriguing musical thoughts.
Also they get an A++ for page design, by virtue of featuring a picture of a cat who has clearly been interrupted in the act of investigating someones pedals.
And then, finally, last but absolutely not least, there is Roysta (also here), aka Lee James. The Facebook blurb for one interview described him as a “Belfast’s mutated version of John Waters, Charles Bukowski, GG Allin and Ice-T.”
The formal name for the result is “dirtcore”; obviously I had to find out what that might sound like. Below are two tracks from Hurrmaster (translated from the broad Belfast accent: Whoremaster). As you would expect, his language is salty and his imagery can be, uh, startling, but he’s got some good beats:
If you’d like to hear more, he’s helpfully uploaded his entire back catalogue (!) to bandcamp.
Or you can explore the County Antrim tag on your own time!
Balisong (She Told Me So) is a teaser from Alex Greenwald’s as-yet-untitled (and unreleased) solo record, which – and I say this with bemused affection – I have been referring to as “Nessie”, since I do sometimes feel like I’m sitting on the edge of a dark Highland loch with a toy radio, waiting for static-filled fin sightings.
And, too, when (if?) I do ever get to write about it, there will be a certain amount of myth and legend (i.e. out-of-date Wikipedia notes) to untangle.
But until such time as it glides to the surface, there is this song, which is a love song for a knife, and is made of many dark, shimmery layers:
It won’t let me embed, but go and watch it anyway. This particular video for Daydream Believer showcases both Davy Jones’ voice and the daffy fun that was The Monkees TV show, which I know I watched as a small child, either in re-runs or in syndication.
If Whitney Houston made me want to dance with someone, this song made me hope I might get to be the homecoming queen for a daydream believer. That sounded like a good time. I was sure there were frilly princess dresses involved, maybe even a crown.
Last Train To Clarksville was another one of my favorites:
http://youtu.be/RUZeZ1e441A
And finally I’m A Believer:
http://youtu.be/XfuBREMXxts
Rest in peace, Mr. Jones. We shall miss you very much.
