Uncle Tupelo - Anodyne

 #Uncle Tupelo #pre-Wilco #pre-Son Volt #alt-country #roots rock #country rock #alternative rock #folk rock #blues #cowpunk #1990s

Before Wilco and Son Volt, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar invented alt-country with the mercurial Uncle Tupelo. When Uncle Tupelo released their major-label debut, Anodyne in October 1993, it should have been the beginning of something big. In a way, it was. Led by Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy from tiny Belleville, Illinois, the alt-country movement’s promising breakout band was packing clubs in major cities across America and Europe, not just the college towns where they spent years building their fan base. They were following up their left-turn acoustic record, March 16-20, 1992, recorded with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, with their best record yet — one that amplified the band’s strongest assets, the marriage of Jay Farrar’s yearning heartland spirit with Jeff Tweedy’s punk-rock soul. Anodyne smoothed the jarring, start-stop rhythms of the band’s first two records, No Depression and Still Feel Gone, into a straight-ahead steamroll behind new drummer Ken Coomer. Farrar’s barbed guitar riffs sear on “Chickamauga,” where he compares a crumbling relationship to a Civil War bloodbath. Quieter moments such as the title track flex the strength of new multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston, who played dobro, banjo and fiddle, and former guitar tech John Stirratt, who held down bass when Tweedy switched to guitar. Despite the buzz, Uncle Tupelo never had a hit. Their closest brush with fame was playing Late Night with Conan O’Brien on national TV, and they didn’t break the Billboard Top 200 until the compilation 83/93: An Anthology peaked at Number 173 in 2002. But following the band’s final show, a mere six months after releasing Anodyne, the band’s influence grew as Farrar and Tweedy found success with Son Volt and Wilco, respectively.
Eventually, the friction between lifelong friends Farrar and Tweedy brought down the band at their biggest moment. Tweedy rushed the remaining members of Uncle Tupelo into the studio to record Wilco’s 1995 debut A.M., while Farrar took the long cut and found success with the hit single “Drown” on Son Volt’s Trace a year later. Farrar has continued to wrestle with obscure, early country and folk music and his textured guitar wranglings over eight solid albums. Wilco has evolved from a Tupelo-twin to an engine of reinvention, from the deconstructionist country-rock of 1996’s Being There to the shimmering heartbreak of 1999’s Summerteeth and 2001’s experimental Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Although the two have apparently reconciled since the band’s final show in 1994, Anodyne is where the fissures in their friendship, and Uncle Tupelo, grew into a fault and spawned two of Americana music’s biggest bands.  From: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/uncle-tupelos-anodyne-at-25-oral-history-wilco-733327/

Los Lobos - Kiko And The Lavender Moon

 #Los Lobos #roots rock #tex-mex #country rock #Americana #cowpunk #blues rock #folk rock #Mexican #1990s #music video

On their sixth album, 1992’s Kiko, Los Lobos alternately distilled and deconstructed their music by embracing studio experimentation. After two decades together, the East Los Angeles band’s multicultural influences remained audible, crossing state lines and national borders to draw from regional Mexican and American styles: mariachi, ranchera, and Norteño music, Chicano rock ’n’ roll and R&B, Tex-Mex and zydeco, electric blues and country percolated through their playing. New to the equation were raw sonic textures, layered overdubs and outboard studio effects that reflected their sound in funhouse mirrors. Mood and musical color brought wonder as well as menace to fables, dreams and visions evoking the magical realism of 20th century Latin-American literature with a hallucinatory glow.
Up to that point, their records had hewed to the scale of their live performances, documenting an ensemble honed since high school garage band adventures. For David Hidalgo and Louie Peréz, later to emerge as the band’s primary songwriters, the gateway into traditional Mexican folk styles came not from the neighborhood but from American and British folk-rock records by Ry Cooder, the Band, and Fairport Convention. Just as the Band had inspired Fairport to explore traditional British music, Hidalgo and Peréz immersed themselves in traditional regional styles and Mexican stringed instruments.
Together with guitarist Cesar Rosas, bassist Conrad Lozano, and mandolinist Frank Gonzaléz, multi-instrumentalist Hidalgo and percussionist Peréz launched Los Lobos del Este de Los Angeles in 1973, winning eastside audiences with their authentic mix of Mexican styles. Following Gonzaléz’s departure, the surviving quartet built a home turf audience before turning their sights to Los Angeles’ burgeoning punk and roots rock scene, culminating in their triumphant debut at the Whisky a Go Go in January 1982, opening for the Blasters, who quickly became crucial allies, sharing stages and lobbying their label, Slash Records, to sign Los Lobos.
Blasters saxophonist Steve Berlin then teamed with T Bone Burnett to co-produce the quartet’s label debut EP and the full-length that followed in 1984 before leaving the Blasters to join Los Lobos full-time. By 1987, the band seemed at a commercial tipping point, thanks to their faithful covers of Chicano rock ’n’ roll pioneer Ritchie Valens’ hits for the soundtrack to La Bamba, the Valens biopic that scored at the box office as well as on album charts where the soundtrack album reached #1.
By 1991, however, Los Lobos was grappling with frustration over disappointing album sales and an ambitious tour’s cost overruns. Refocusing their creative process, Hidalgo and Peréz rented an office for songwriting sessions, with the band demoing new songs at a small studio near downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row. When Lenny Waronker, president of Slash’s distributor, Warner Bros. Records, heard the new songs, he recommended they reunite with Mitchell Froom, who had produced their hit single of “La Bamba” as well as a standout
In Froom and engineer Tchad Blake the band found hands-on partners whose recent clients included Crowded House, Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello and Richard Thompson. The duo was at a turning point in using the studio to actively shape the music rather than merely document it. Waronker’s instinct that they would push the envelope was on target.
That the band and Froom were unlocking a new sonic palette was apparent from the opening track, “Dream in Blue.” Rattling percussion, terse bass pulses, handclaps and jangling guitar bob and weave beneath Hidalgo’s giddy vocal as he recounts a dream where “I flew around with shiny things, when I spoke I seemed to sing, high above, floating far away…” Steve Berlin overdubs octave choruses and single lines on multiple reeds while electric guitars respond to Hidalgo’s playful command to “sock it to me one time” with blasts of distortion. The track’s raw edges and hurtling momentum are part of a conscious design that Froom and Los Lobos, sharing production credit, devised to preserve the gritty, abstracted feel of their demos, five of which would be kept for the finished album. Leaning into studio manipulation, they elevated noise and distortion from sonic taboos to creative tools.
Thematically, dreams and visions generate moments of mood-altering surrealism. “Wake Up Dolores” is a brooding lament for travelers on a stony, endless trail, haunted by ancient Aztec images of “quetzal plums, of dying suns, and purple moons,” set to a nervous, syncopated arrangement in which guitars and voices answer the lead vocal like chanting supplicants as Hidalgo lapses into the pre-colonial Nahuatl tongue. (The album’s focus on percussion is bootstrapped by a strong cohort of guest percussionists to buttress an already full court press by all five members of the band.)
“Angels With Dirty Faces” slows to a methodical pace, suspending Hidalgo’s voice in a percussive clockwork haze as he bears witness to homelessness: As biographer Chris Morris would later report, the song was inspired by the band’s experiences during its demo sessions near Skid Row, translating to images of the “broken window smile, weeds for hair” of one lost soul and a brief elegy for a brother lost “to the howling wind.”
The atmospheric sound treatments and off-centered meter of these tracks give Kiko a mesmerizing impact without entirely eclipsing Los Lobos’ earlier instincts. Cesar Rosas animates an easy blues shuffle in “That Train Don’t Stop Here,” handily working a time-honored erotic metaphor in a lament for a lover who’s abandoned him for another, delivered with sly humor and a simmering arrangement warmed by soulful organ accents, darting rhythm guitar and Rosas’ taut, blues-drenched electric guitar. Rosas’ spry vocal and two lively instrumental breaks reinforce the suspicion that however heartbroken he is, he’s having a good time.
Mitchell Froom’s role in enabling Los Lobos to shift sonic shape isn’t confined to the control room and the toy box of technical effects at hand. He augments Steve Berlin and David Hidalgo’s keyboards and accordion with his own array of vintage keyboards, including Chamberlin and Optigon, both distant, pre-digital cousins of the Mellotron. Credit him with the distinctive “horn chorus” that serves the album’s most enchanted piece, “Kiko and the Lavender Moon,” a dream that creeps into view against a three-chord vamp that suggests an Ellingtonian riff on “Three Blind Mice,” easily mistaken for a cluster of Berlin sax overdubs—a Froom emulation on Chamberlin conjuring the retro glow of an old radio. In its title character, a dreaming child, the song achieves a bewitched, playful gleam cast by its fanciful imagery and a spare, circular conversation between “horns,” Hidalgo’s button accordion and a doubled guitar and piano phrase.
Los Lobos taps into traditional folk textures and a spirit realm tagged in Catholic imagery on “Saint Behind the Glass,” a rare solo vocal by Louie Peréz set against a lacy backdrop of guitarron, acoustic guitars and Veracruz harp that brings a religious relic to life, if only in the singer’s mind. Elsewhere among the set’s generous 16 songs, they echo early heroes: “Arizona Skies” is a lush acoustic border serenade on stringed instruments underpinned by rippling, treated percussion and slide guitar figures worthy of Ry Cooder, while “When the Circus Comes” is a rustic ballad that evokes the Band.
Kiko, released on May 26, 1992, was rightly acclaimed as the band’s studio pinnacle for its thematic breadth and sonic innovation, but commercially it fared no better than its predecessors. However discouraged they might have been, the five veterans in Los Lobos would persevere to survive intact as one of the longest-running American rock band sextant as of May 2022, touring constantly and releasing 18 more albums and compilations to date.  From: https://bestclassicbands.com/los-lobos-kiko-review-11-1-21/

DakhaBrakha - Little Hare/Mermaids

 #DakhaBrakha #folk #Ukrainian folk #world music #Eastern European folk #folk rock #music video

Until you hear the music, the most striking thing about funky Ukrainian folk band DakhaBrakha is the headgear. Made of coarse, black lamb’s wool, the group’s towering hats evoke a faraway world of Cossacks and shepherds, dramatically complementing the traditional lace wedding dresses, thickly draped beaded necklaces and embroidered tunics that make up their costumes. The band’s music is just as captivating. DakhaBrakha’s sound, which the group calls “ethno-chaos,” is an anarchistic reinterpretation of traditional Ukrainian folk songs blended with eclectic influences like Middle Eastern sounds and a touch of R&B. “There’s nothing like it out there,” says Bill Smith of Riot Artists, DakhaBrakha’s North American agent. (The group’s members speak very little English.)
The four musicians — Nina Garenetska, Olena Tsibulska, Iryna Kovalenko and Marko Halanevych — play a variety of instruments, including cello, piano, bass drums and darbuka, accordions, jew’s harp and the didgeridoo. Even more impressive are the vocals: harmonies layered with riotous birdcalls, eerie whistles and wails, and Halanevych’s falsetto, Smith says. The quartet came together in 2004 as the house band for Kiev’s experimental theater company DAKH, but has only recently made inroads on this side of the Atlantic. After its North American debut at Toronto’s Luminato Festival in 2013, the group gave rousing performances last year at New York’s globalFEST and at Bonnaroo, with Rolling Stone singling out the band as the Tennessee festival’s “best breakout.”
DakhaBrakha, which means “give/take” in Old Ukrainian, draws on a repertoire of songs that the band’s three female performers — all of whom trained in folklore and ethnomusicology — have spent years researching in rural Ukrainian villages. Yet DakhaBrakha’s thoroughly contemporary compositions represent such a departure from the original Eastern European melodies and styles that their sound can seem as unfamiliar (and intriguing) to native Ukrainians as it can for American listeners. “It’s difficult to describe what they do; you’ve got to see it,” Smith says. “And then people just get hooked. It’s mesmerizing.”  From: https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2015/04/02/get-to-know-funky-ukrainian-folk-band-dakhabrakha/

The Honey Pot - Light Splinters

 #The Honey Pot #psychedelic rock #classic rock #neo-psychedelia #psychedelic folk rock #retro-1960s

The Honey Pot are a psychedelic/pop 5-piece band, steeped in a musical fantasy time-warp where they groove among their most revered bands, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors and The Small Faces to name a few, but totally modern in every other way. Had they been around back then, they would be riding high with the rest. They are happy, though, to be playing to the crowd who 'were there' and those who groove anew whenever they can.
What is the connection between talented Theremin player and founder member of the Buggles Bruce Woolley and psychedelic pop band The Honey Pot? Well, in the autumn of 2008 Bruce kindly listened to Icarus Peel's newly-completed album "Tea At My Gaffe" and suggested that he should stay on the psychedelic journey. Soon after, Icarus met DJ Marrs Benfire of Bay FM, who featured the album on one of his "Smart Set" shows. The challenge from Marrs was for Icarus to write a "Revolver" style album with shorter songs, and thus "To The Edge" was composed and produced with Wayne Fraquet on drums and Jacqueline Bourne and Iain Crawford on vocals. The album was so well received that a performing band needed to be formed to play the songs live, at which point Tom Brown was welcomed in to play bass. Their first gig was a local festival in 2013. Since then they've played at many groovy festivals and venues with different line-ups, and are looking forward to many more live performances in the future.  From: https://www.thehoneypotcollective.com/newpage


 

 

Jack O' The Clock - How Are We Doing... And Who Will Tell Us

 #Jack O' The Clock #progressive rock #art rock #progressive folk #avant-garde #chamber folk #avant-prog #Americana #prog folk rock

Jack O' The Clock is fronted by Damon Waitkus who has been a progressive rock fan since the first wave, but also a fan of more melodic and poetic music of that time. Their sound is not your typical folk music, or typical music at all for that manner, being a surprisingly accessible blend of avant garde and Americana, and has been compared to Henry Cow, Gentle Giant, Sufjan Stevens, Frank Zappa and others. They have released 3 critically acclaimed albums as of 2013, with more in the works. A band that is hard to characterize, they have found a home in prog folk because of their inherently folk instrumentation and timbre, their profound take on storytelling, and, well, the tendency for folkies to be an inclusive lot anyway.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=8552

Jack O’ The Clock continues its exploration of the dark underside of the American psyche on The Warm, Dark Circus. Released 10 years after All My Friends solidified the group’s unique position as a twisted mirror to recent history as well as current events, this new effort is another immersive experience – like a fiction anthology that picks at reality with poignancy and disturbing insight.
Now a virtual band split between the East and West coasts, the lineup features familiar names and a number of new performers. Multi-instrumentalist Damon Waitkus is the ostensible leader and contributes vocals, guitars, hammer dulcimers, piano, and flutes. Emily Packard is on violin and viola, while Kate McLoughlin is on bassoon. The rhythm section is Jason Hoopes on bass and Jordan Glenn on drums (both from the Fred Frith Trio). A number of guests contribute vocals, guitars, sax, clarinets, piano, and cello.
Waitkus’ lyrics do not hold back. The subject of The Ladder Slipped is considering suicide to escape pain and medical debt… or is he actually considering murder? And then there is Dürer’s Rhinoceros – a haunting 13-minute semi-autobiographical slice of life about a human feeding data to computers. It is named after a famous woodcut of a rhinoceros made 500 years ago by Albrecht Dürer, who never saw the subject of his artwork. This is perhaps a fitting analog to how the models of our current AI revolution are able to generate mimicked images and text without truly understanding the content of what they create. Waitkus approaches these topics with empathy rather than judgment – a refreshing approach in our hyper-opinionated socio-political landscape.
Musically, Jack O’ The Clock has always been a treat, and The Warm, Dark Circus stands out as one of their best. An amalgam of folk, rock, experimental, and classical, their being lumped into “progressive rock” is a disservice. There is no other set of musicians with quite the same sound. It is as if they have captured the characteristics of the last 75 years of Western music and reprocessed them into a new genre.
Case in point, Dürer’s Rhinoceros has passages that combine unconventional percussion with a prominent bassoon line and pseudo-chanted vocals, gentle flute melodies, and sophisticated art rock. The piece is heavily composed and yet has a loose and very human feel. There are moments of finger-picked beauty tempered with storm clouds on the horizon.
How We Are Doing… includes aggressive – almost mechanical – drumming overlaid with an angular sax solo. The assertive rhythmic structure continues through a flute interlude, then violin and guitar solos. A short polyphonic excursion leads to the main melodic structure underlying singing. Waitkus’s voice seems to talk to us from a distance as a variety of instruments busily come together and move apart in accordance with unusual timing. Indeed, this is the track that most clearly evokes historical avant-rock, such as Henry Cow, in its complexity and mashup of styles. The lyrical content is obscure but rich in imagery. It seems to be building on a number of themes, including those of humanity’s coexistence with nature and the passage of time, while touching on notions of technology and spirituality.
The music of Jack O’ the Clock is like the weather in Chicago – if you don’t like it now, wait a couple of minutes and it will be very different. But all attempts at humor aside, The Warm, Dark Circus is a stellar release with abundant eclecticism that can be enjoyed on multiple levels. This is a group that explores the human condition through their sounds and words. While melancholic, their approach is also evocative in its honesty, illuminating our shadows with a nod toward what we project on the surface.  From: https://avantmusicnews.com/2023/10/17/amn-reviews-jack-o-the-clock-the-warm-dark-circus-2023-bandcamp/

Grant Lee Buffalo - Mockingbirds

 #Grant Lee Buffalo #Grant Lee Phillips #alternative rock #folk rock #Americana #psychedelic folk rock #1990s #music video

They were one of the hardest 90s bands to pin down to a specific genre. One reviewer would call them psychedelic and the next would call them rootsy. Perhaps it’s somehow fitting then that “Mockingbirds,” the song that can probably be considered the most memorable of Grant Lee Buffalo’s career, is a sui generis chamber-pop piece.
As Grant Lee Phillips, the band’s lead singer and songwriter, recently told American Songwriter, the song was a last-minute addition to the band’s second album, 1994’s Mighty Joe Moon. “By the time we got to the second album, we had been on the road almost every day the previous year,” Phillips explains. “We sort of looked at each other and said, ‘It feels like it’s time to make a record. What are you doing next week?’ And we dove into it. That being the case, there were songs that were still coming along, songs that I had written, some out on the road, some on the odd day off.”
“But ‘Mockingbirds’ wasn’t one of those songs. I began to introduce all the new material. And we had gotten through most of the recording process when a massive earthquake struck Los Angeles. This was the Northridge earthquake. And it was out of that that I wrote ‘Mockingbirds,’ when the record was almost basically done. I said, ‘Whoops, I got one more here that we might want to consider.’”
Phillips lost his home in the earthquake. “My wife and I lived up in the high desert, maybe a 15-minute drive from the epicenter of Northridge, so we felt it really strong,” he recalls. “We spent the next number of weeks at my parents’ house, then managed to fly back into LA and slept on a friend’s floor for several weeks as Grant Lee Buffalo worked on the final stages of the album. I didn’t have much with me. My wife and I had our cat, and I had my guitar and my banjo. I was sitting on the floor as the aftershocks rolled and I began to write ‘Mockingbirds’ on the banjo.”
If you’re looking for a play-by-play of Richter scale readings and people diving for cover, look elsewhere. Phillips took a metaphorical approach, which made the song feel universal, even as it stayed true to a very personal experience. “The sentiment of the lyrics is that I’ve done everything I can possibly do to stay on the straight and narrow,” Phillips explains. “I tried to toe the line and yet life has caught up to me anyhow. And I suppose that’s a feeling that all of us can relate to regardless. Pick the cataclysm of your choice. That’s where it’s coming from. Although, when you stop and consider lyrics like ‘Devastation, at last, finally we meet,’ that is indeed very much the feeling one had as they walked out into the rubble of what was their home.”
By personifying this disaster, Phillips created a mindful and vindictive force that harries the narrator throughout the song. He rendered the anguish unflinchingly: “Woke from a dream where I was in a terrible realm/All my sails were ablaze, I was chained to the helm/Now I’m overwhelmed.”
The music, which includes an ingenious downward key change into the final verse and somber cello played by Greg Adamson, adds to the mournful feel. So too does Phillips’ falsetto in the chorus, which makes the narrator seem even more vulnerable to terrible fortune. “I’m known to go into the falsetto when it comes naturally,” he says of the technique. “I think it’s a case of growing up in the 60s and 70s when all of the singers would launch into falsetto at some point.”
Phillips initially had to convince his bandmates of the song’s worth. “To tell you the truth, that song very nearly didn’t make the record,” he says. “I brought that song in and I was told, ‘We’ve already got 13 songs and a few of them aren’t going to make the record because it’s going to be too long. Do we really have to bother with recording one more?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, we do. I feel really strongly about this one.’ I had made a 4-track recording of it at that point in time. I pushed for it.”
Once they did lay down “Mockingbirds,” the entirety of the band loved the idea of releasing it as a single, even as it bucked the grungy musical trends of the times. “I think we recognized that it was unique,” Phillips remembers. “Even though this was only two records in, we had encountered so many situations where it seemed as though the most obvious song to us in terms of being artful and interesting would be relegated to the backburner in favor of something that was quote-unquote more up tempo, more catchy, more memorable. All of those hallmarks that robots can achieve at this point in time.”
“We were always up against that wall. How do we fit into this world that demands something instantaneous, a song that achieves its goal within the first minute, that hits the chorus, and all of that stuff that we were less interested in? I was less interested in that stuff as a writer. And we were just trying to make albums that excited us, stuff that was like the weird records that we grew up with.”
In this case, not following the obvious fads paid off in the timelessness of this particular song, even if that tendency kept Grant Lee Buffalo somewhat uncategorizable and may have damaged their commercial prospects in their relatively brief time together. Grant Lee Phillips has continued on from the dissolution of the band to become one of the most intriguing and affecting singer-songwriters on the scene; look for a new album from him later this year. Meanwhile, he continues to be humbled by the demand for “Mockingbirds.”
“It amazes me that I still get so many requests for it,” he says. “I would have thought that even among our fans, who are so loyal and wonderful, that they would have tired of it by now. But there are always a few more that haven’t heard it or long to hear it. And I must say it’s a satisfying song to play.”  From: https://americansongwriter.com/mockingbirds-by-grant-lee-buffalo-behind-the-song/

Maria McKee & The Jayhawks - Precious Time - Live 1993

 #Maria McKee #The Jayhawks #alternative rock #alt-country #folk rock #roots rock #singer-songwriter #1990s #ex-Lone Justice #music video

Maria McKee – You Gotta Sin To Get Saved Tour 1993
November 21st 1993 – Leicester University
I had no interest in the support band on this day. This gig had been a long time coming. I’m fairly sure I went on my own to this one, as I don’t recall anyone else being interested in the singer of “Show Me Heaven” from the Tom Cruise film “Days of Thunder”. That wasn’t why I was there, good job too, because in the true spirit of rebel rock and roll, she didn’t play it anyway - in fact, she very rarely plays it at live gigs as the audience is not demanding of it’s playing and doesn’t really fit with her music generally. No – we had unfinished business here. I was a big fan of her band, Lone Justice and had been so looking forward to seeing them supporting U2 back in 1987. Things didn’t go to plan that day, due to Wembley’s inability to open gates on time and get us into the stadium in time for the first band, which Lone Justice were. So we only caught a couple of tracks that day. Unfortunately, Lone Justice also split up later in 1987, so this would be a new band, but Maria was the leader, so this was still a very good thing. Much as I love a good male singer in a band, I do have a penchant for a brash, full on female singer, who mixes passion, anger and softness into their music and Maria Mckee is probably the greatest of these (Listen to the albums and live music before you try and debate this with me). Obviously a few years had passed since the brash 18 year gave us the superb country/rock and roll debut album “Lone Justice” and then later the classic album “Shelter”.
I was looking forward to seeing this loud, confident, talented, maybe arrogant LA Girl coming strutting on stage, but she just walked on with her band, waved and spoke really quietly and politely thanking us all for coming and hoped we enjoyed the show. Well, no need to worry, first song was the powerful Lone Justice song “East of Eden” so the quiet Maria immediately turned into the stage persona I’d been expecting - brilliant start! What you get with Maria McKee is a great voice, with a mix of anger, passion, melody and fun behind it. I hate comparing singers, so I will: Maria is a strong Dolly Parton type singer with that strong edge of the anger and passion coming through. A mix of Country, Blues, Rock and Gospel - a great mix! Reckon this could be called Country Punk (my own genre). I love small venue concerts and the Uni is the perfect venue for this sound. We get “Shelter” during the set, but sadly, no “I Found Love”. Things slowed down for “Panic Beach” and the start of cover of Patti Smith’s “Free Money” (I’d never heard this before), but the beat gets strong towards the end and a brilliant MC5 cover of “Sister Anne”
Fact: Maria McKee wrote the hit song “A Good Heart” when she was 18 which, became a hit single for Feargal Sharkey - true! The brilliantly titled “Soap, Soup and Salvation” off the first album is so full of energy you can’t help but dance! You need to hear that too! A mesmerising concert from a band of exceptionally talented musicians. The mix of country, blues, rock and roll was brilliant, maybe even a little bluegrass in there too. The stage energy from the whole band turned it into more of a dancehall than a gig. On my top ten gig list.  From: https://fanclubyears.home.blog/1993/11/21/maria-mckee-you-gotta-sin-to-get-saved-tour-1993/

Maria Muldaur - Don't You Make Me High (Don't You Feel My Leg)

 #Maria Muldaur #folk #blues #country #jazz #folk rock #Americana #pop rock #1960s #1970s

Blue Lu Barker was a New Orleans singer married to the guitarist Danny Barker. They wrote this very sensual song, with Blue Lu singing, "Don't you feel my leg 'cause if you feel my leg you're gonna feel my thigh, and if you feel my thigh, you're gonna go up high." This was pushing the limits in 1938. The song was produced by J. Mayo Williams, who was one of the biggest blues music producers of the '30s and '40s. For Barker, this was her first single after signing with the Vocalion label, and it became a national hit, leading to appearances with Cab Calloway and Jelly Roll Morton. The Barkers appeared at the New Orleans Jazz Festival in 1989, and in 1998, this appearance was released as the album Live at New Orleans Jazz Festival. Danny died in 1994 and Blue Lu in 1998.
Maria Muldaur brought new life to this song when she recorded it for her 1974 self-titled album, with the title altered to "Don't You Make Me High (Don't You Feel My Leg)." That same year, Muldaur had her big hit "Midnight At The Oasis," and when she rose to stardom, she stopped performing "Feel My Leg," as she didn't want to be known for her sexuality. In her interview with Rolling Stone that year, she explained: "It's a funky song, fun to do, but I had to stop doing it. That's my concession to avoid being typecast as a sexy singer, period. I dropped it after I saw a Marilyn Monroe TV special early this year. I saw her entertaining the troops in Korea, up there singing 'I Can't Give You Anything but Love' to acres and acres of horny GIs. Shelley Winters was on the show and she said something about how far Marilyn might have gone if she hadn't let herself get stuck with an image as a sex symbol who couldn't do anything else. That shook me. You can't rely on physical image alone. That's sure as shit gonna fade. The shape of your tits and butt ain't always going to be so good. I want to be a singer long after I'm not so hot to look at."  From: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/blue-lu-barker/dont-you-feel-my-leg


Gaate - Sjaa Attende

 #Gaate #folk rock #folk metal #progressive rock #electronica #progressive metal #Norwegian

Hailing from Trondheim, Norway, Gåte ("riddle" in Norwegian) blended traditional folk melodies from their native country with powerful, fuzzed-up hard rock and electronica. The band was formed in 1999 by two siblings with a strong musical training, singer Gunnhild Sundli and her brother Sveinung. Gunnhild's distinctive vocals, together with Sveinung's playing of the traditional Hardanger fiddle, successfully bridged the gap between Norwegian folk music and harder-edged rock sounds. Many of their songs were based on lyrics by contemporary poet Astrid Krog Halse and folk musician Knut Buen, while others were modern interpretations of traditional melodies. After their first, independent EP in 2000, Gåte were signed by Warner Music Norway, and in early 2002 released the commercially as well as critically successful "Gåte EP". By that time the two Sundli siblings had recruited the band's other members: Magnus Robot Bormark (guitars, synths), Martin Viktor Langlie (drums, percussion) and Gjermund Landro (bass, vocals). Their debut album, "Jygri", also released in 2002, reached platinum status in Norway, as well as winning Spellemanprisen, the local equivalent of a Grammy Award. Its follow-up, "Iselilja", came out in the autumn of 2004. After the release of "Iselilja", Langlie quit the band, and was replaced by Kenneth Kapstad. There were plans of launching the band in Europe, and they even played a few concerts in Germany in the summer of 2005, but by autumn the same year Gunnhild Sundli felt exhausted and needed a break, and the band went on an indefinite hiatus. In 2006 a live album, simply titled "Liva", and featuring some of the band's most representative songs, was released on CD and DVD. On October 24, 2009, the band made a comeback at the cultural festival UKA in Trondheim. What was supposed to be a one-off, led to a small summer tour (5 concerts) in 2010, culminating with a performance on the roof of the Oslo Opera House on August 20, which marked the end of the band. That end would prove to be only preliminary though, as the Sundli siblings suprisingly resurrected the band, with new members, and released a short EP, "Attersyn", in 2017, with more new music and touring to come in 2018.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=4263

Rilo Kiley - The Moneymaker

 

#Rilo Kiley #Jenny Lewis #indie rock #alt-pop #folk rock #alternative rock #music video

It's the prerogative and privilege of any pop act to change direction. It's one of the things that makes pop music so exciting. But change always carries a degree of risk, and in the case of Rilo Kiley's fourth album Under the Blacklight, it manifests a wonderful sense of irony: Under the Blacklight is Rilo Kiley's riskiest album because it's their album that takes the least risks. Finding the band's music polished to an almost blinding sheen, Blacklight is not a commercial album so much as Rilo Kiley's conception (or misconception) of what a commercial album is. It's their "Project Mersh", an alternate-universe sell-out move. But beneath that surface - and Under the Blacklight is at first listen almost overwhelmingly surface - Rilo Kiley must know they're full of shit. Either they're utterly serious about their flirtation with the mainstream or they're taking the piss with a wink. In both cases, the songs suffer a smothering slow death by context. At the same time, the fun - or maybe "fun" - disc stresses how humorless and full of shit Rilo Kiley's former indie brethren remain, scared stiff of the prospect of unabashed pop in the true please-the-masses sense. But it's still an audacious, fascinating exploration of banality, almost to a patronizing point. Perhaps it's no coincidence that the big, straight down the middle-sounding first single is called "The Moneymaker".
From note one, the album's musical allusions and the references come fast and furious, and are often strikingly specific. The mock swagger of "Moneymaker", for instance, sounds like Heart doing Foreigner's "Juke Box Hero", and the rest of the disc revels in similar oddball but specific collisions. The title track sounds like Aimee Mann writing a song for Mandy Moore. "Dejalo" is Rilo Kiley's take on Miami Sound Machine. "Dreamworld" is *Mirage-*era Fleetwood Mac. "Smoke Detector" is Blondie by way of the Beatles. "15" does blue-eyed soul like Dusty Springfield. And so on. The saving grace for something so shallow is, as usual, Jenny Lewis, a strikingly direct singer and an even better lyricist. Especially following the verbose More Adventurous, she's almost ruthlessly efficient with her words here, making the most of a few choice lines. "Smoke Detector" demonstrates nearly as many derivations and variations in meaning of the word "smoke" as there are of the word "fuck," including "to fuck." "I took a man back to my room," she coos. "I was smoking him in bed/ Yeah, I was smoking in bed." In "Close Call" Lewis wryly observes "funny thing about money for sex/ You might get rich but you'll die by it," while the title track features the withering pun of an aphorism "even dead men lie in their coffins." "15" tracks the seduction of a wounded and vulnerable young woman, ripe like a peach and "down for almost anything." Many of Lewis's other character-study lyrics plum the sexual, too, not like a cop-out coy pop princess (even though someone like, say, Hilary Duff could do a fine job with the obvious cell phone metaphor of "Breakin' Up") but in a grown up sort of way. Or at least a distorted, corrupted, grown-up-in-L.A. sort of way.
Ah, L.A., where there's a thrift shop on every corner, the breakfast spots bustle well into the night, the lines at clubland bathroom stalls snake to early 1980s lengths, acts get signed at karaoke bars, and the plastic surgeons know just the thing to do with all those rough edges. Forget that Rilo Kiley's songs namedrop Brighton, New York, and Laredo: Under the Blacklight adds up to the familiar headline "California Band Makes California Album." Were all the AOR indulgences at least tied together into a concept they might have been more easily forgiven. And were any of those lyrics a little more pointed and less generalized, like they were in the anomalously galvanizing anti-Bush protest "It's a Hit", they'd add up to more than just a 40-minute short story collection on tape (with incidental music). For the relative few who really, really care, debates may rage over whether Under the Blacklight marks some sort of progress, though what's just as likely is that Rilo Kiley's earlier output was artificially regressive in a bid for some sort of cred. But leave that stuff to the conspiracy theorists. To be fair, most everyone would be well served giving in and enjoying Rilo Kiley's pop for pop's sake, smart, dumb and especially smug in equal measure. Song by song it goes down awfully easy, but be warned. The band sure cleans up well, but there's a fair amount of guilty washing and hand-scrubbing to be done afterwards.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10555-under-the-blacklight/

Magick Brother & Mystic Sister - Echoes from the Clouds

 

#Magick Brother & Mystic Sister #psychedelic rock #space rock #psychedelic folk rock #progressive rock #retro-1960s #retro-1970s #Spanish

What’s the concept behind the formation of Magic Brother & Mystic Sister?

Xavier Sandoval: I feel we make music for a utopian lifestyle, perhaps the one we would like to have and although we try, reality and present is what it is. For this album we gathered four musicians with no other purpose than to improvise and play as freely as possible. Personally, I think music must contain something magical and evoke images, sensations, emotions. Trying to capture the atmospheres we imagine as best as possible and to tune in with that inspiration, is to use themes related to magic, or the world of dreams.

How would you describe your sound?

It’s a peculiar sound due to the type of formation we have; bass, keyboard, flute and drums, only with guitars recorded later. Our sound is based mostly on the use of the mellotron and flute, but also the patterns of bass and drums and the dreamy voices. Perhaps this combination creates our sonority? In some themes, the synthesizer, piano or guitar arrangements have shaped each song providing a more cosmic sound in some songs, and more jazz or folk in others.

Would you like to talk a bit about your background?

When I was a child my parents listened to flamenco, and on long car trips they always listened to cassettes of Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry et cetera. I knew them by heart and I loved them. I’m self-taught. I started playing in high school, where I liked Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and so I started playing bass with a band of pupils older than me, experimenting with psychedelic rock, playing cover-versions of Hendrix, Cream, Steppenwolf et cetera. Then like everyone else we went through various groups, whether they were garage, pop, rock or psychedelia, until the era of techno and electronic music arrived, and I dedicated myself to studying and experimenting with ambient, cosmic music, krautrock, et cetera. I then spent a long spell collaborating in a music project for yoga and meditation playing the sitar. In the end, we make music whenever possible for each moment in life has its soundtrack. Sometimes it depends on the circumstances and your environment, and in our case it’s always from the underground and against the current.

Are any of you involved in any other bands or do you have any active side-projects going on at this point?

Nowadays there are a lot of musicians who have several projects at the same time and perhaps it’s quite common, but in my case, I do not believe too much in that. Life goes very fast; I have little time and I must make it compatible with my work. For me right now, it is difficult to indulge in multiple projects, and I believe in this one, so Eva and I are focused on it. I really admire other groups that make very interesting music and it would be great to collaborate with them, but it is difficult, who knows maybe in the future. Although I believe that MB & MS could be an “open project” for musicians who want to collaborate, it is a matter of connecting, creativity and energy. The doors will always be open.

Can you share some further details how your latest album was recorded?

The album was conceived by taking music from suggestive images, like an imaginary soundtrack we wanted to convey a cinematic and mysterious atmosphere. Although it’s a long story, each song has its moment, its place and represents something. It was a long process and some songs were left off the record. The album was recorded in our home studio, Cosmik Lodge, but some aspects were recorded in Sol de Sants Studio where Marc was working – utilising a mix of new and vintage gear. Normally we record bass, drums and keyboards at the same time, then we add flute, more keyboards, guitars, percussions etc. The first song we recorded was ‘Les Vampires’ where I made a script from which we recorded the different parts. Some songs were recorded on an inspirational night, and in others there were false-starts and took months to complete. We had several bases on which we had worked for a while, and then we would compose the rest. I think the cover by Bruno Penabranca (which we love) conveys that idea of how other sensory perceptions appear from a main image that arise in a creative feminine way.

How do you usually approach music making?

It depends on the song or the epoch. For this album, some songs have been created from the bass lines that we have tested in rehearsals, finding ideas that appear. Luckily some were recorded and in other sessions they were lost in the smoke of experimentation and the ambience. In our case, improvisation has been very important not only to let ourselves go, but also to get to know each other musically and to see which territories were most favourable for the individual – which patterns did we feel comfortable to investigate, deepen, study etc. Some songs are 7/4, 11/4 beats in which we have become used to building melodies. We have been testing different scales. Although in many of the songs the improvisation or the “magic of the moment” has been the starting point, in others many of the important details are calculated and measured and we try to convey that all the sounds, every note has a reason to be there whilst maintaining a criterion and respecting some patterns, be it folk, progressive rock or the style we were approaching.

How pleased were you with the sound of the album?

I think we have achieved a good sound considering the means we have used, and for my part I would continue to change things and improve to infinity, but in the end, we have to say “enough”. The sensation of the listener matters and there comes a time when the musician himself stops being objective in terms of sound. From this aspect the views of many listeners have helped a lot - the comments have been positive in this regard.

What are some future plans?

The current situation has conditioned so much, since we have not been able to present the album as we would have liked, the situation with the live show, of the venues et cetera. So in some way the impulse of social networks has replaced the accepted style of promoting, and we greatly appreciate all the comments that have come to us from many parts of the world. The album sold very quickly, in the midst of this pandemic, so thanks again to those who have supported us and the positive reception that this album has had at such a difficult time. This month [December] the second edition of the album will be available. As it continues to be difficult to think about concerts, we have focused on continuing to compose, so during confinement Eva and I took up an old project that revolves around Tarot cards where we explore other dimensions – shorter songs but with our same psychedelic vision, to put it simply.

Let’s end this interview with some of your favourite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

Obviously, this is the most difficult question of the interview, haha. There would be countless bands and albums that I would list. I will say that obviously, we have a weakness for the music of the late 60s, Electronic music of the early 70’s, British Psychedelia, Canterbury sound groups, Soundtracks, Folk, Hard Rock, classical music, jazz… In each era I have had many transcendent albums that have marked the moment that I was living and among some that I can cite a group that really opened my mind many moons ago would be especially Popol Vuh, ‘Aguirre’ to choose one of their albums. Another album that marked me was ‘Zodiac’ by Mort Garson. Also Gong’s ‘Angel’s Egg’ and Ananda Shankar’s 1970 release. ‘S.F. Sorrow’ by The Pretty Things, as an initiatory album.

From: https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2021/02/magic-brother-mystic-sister-interview.html

Moby Grape - Hoochie

 

#Moby Grape #psychedelic rock #acid rock #folk rock #country rock #blues rock #West coast sound #1960s

In the wake of Skip Spence's mental and physical breakdown, 1969's "'69" was recorded as a quartet featuring singer/rhythm guitarist Peter Lewis, singer/lead guitarist Jerry Miller, drummer Don Stevenson and bassist Bob Mosley. Produced by David Rubinson, the album doesn't get much credit from critics or Grape fans, but to my ears it's quite good. It's even more impressive when you consider the turmoil surviving members found themselves surrounded by. Part of the criticism is understandable in that the set isn't particular cohesive, leaving you with the impression it was cobbled together from earlier sessions and catalog odds and ends. Others aren't going to agree, but I've always found the album's diversity is actually one of the characteristics that makes it so enjoyable. With all four members contributing material, the set bounces between different genres, including country & western, folk-rock, pop and conventional rock. It's done with a sense of professionalism and a laid back charm. There are plenty of highlights with Mosley acquitting himself with particular distinction - check out what may be his prettiest song 'It's a Beautiful Day Today' and the boogie rocker 'Hootchie'. Other standout tunes include 'Ain't That a Shame', the rocking ''Going Nowhere' and the typically bizarre (and disturbing) Spence leftover - 'Seeing'. In fact, the latter selection may be enough for some psych fans to buy this set. If I had to find something to criticize then it would probably have to do with Lewis' growing interest in country, but I have to admit I liked 'Ain't That a Shame' and 'I Am ot Willing'. On tracks like 'If You Can't Learn from My Mistakes' the band reminded me of something out of Mike Nesmith's solo career.  Was it the best Moby Grape studio album? Nah, it doesn't come close to the debut, but I'm proud to own a copy, having done my part to boost its sales to #113 n the Billboard album charts. And as you'd expected by a band seemingly cursed with bad luck, things turned even uglier for the band when Mosley unexpectedly quit the band in order to enlist in the Marines Corps. He last nine months before be given a dishonorable discharge for hitting an officer (not a career enhancing decision).  From: https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/moby-grape/moby-grape-69/

Disappear Fear - Priceless

#Disappear Fear #Sonia Rutstein #folk rock #folk pop #alternative folk #indie folk #power pop #worldbeat #singer-songwriter #1980s #1990s

Hi Sonia, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?


I was five years old when my Aunt Laura took me out of kindergarten to attend the Flower Mart near the Washington Monument on Charles Street in Baltimore. It was around noon and for the first time, I saw Louis Armstrong perform, Hello Dolly. I was quite short so looking up at him I was looking directly into the sun rays was like swords of light into my eyes around the black outline of a man playing the trumpet and singing.
It was the first time I saw the sound from a radio come alive. It was REAL. I believe at that moment I decided I wanted to make music that could be heard on the radio and to be real on stages around the world. It made me feel good and that’s what I wanted to do, make folks feel good. I started writing songs when I was 14 and playing downtown at the dingy and famous Peabody Bookstore. my mother would drive me to the gig and my sister and I were paid $50 for two 40 minute sets.
It was a whole lot better than the $1.40 an hour I was making pizza and sundaes at the Beef Inn. So making music was my dream and has become my destiny but that is a bit of how it started. How I got to where I am I am today… was practice practice practice a bit of luck, a lot of naivety, determination, and perseverance. A publishing company in London heard my first record and flew me and my sister (singer/business partner) over to England and we signed our first publishing deal. We continued to play and amass a nice following in the USA and now around the world.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?


The most important thing to me was/is to be true to myself. It is a high price to pay. But it is the only way I can sleep well at night. As a kid, I would see all this glitter and gold on TV Stevie Lawrence and the Las Vegas guys, and that sort of thing and it seemed so phony. I wanted REAL. So folk music with harmonies and guitars that didn’t need a bunch of electricity just authenticity seemed the way to go. My sister Cindy and I had already been singing together for 25 years so starting our own band, disappear fear was a logical step.
But female and out lesbian independent singer-songwriters were not at all present in the local national or international pop or rock or folk music scene. There were out gay performers in the gay market but we wanted to be 100% inclusive so we had to show the world and essentially audition at every club and radio station we stepped foot into and we did just that. Once the folks started coming out we had the upper hand we could call the shots and make the show really great. We did get ripped off financially. There was a club in downtown Baltimore we had a CD release concert and our contract said we got 80% of the door and the owner got 20% of the door and the whole bar tab. We had a counter at each door entrance that calculated our earnings to be $2600.
But at the end of the night, the dude gave us $500.00. we told him that he had shorted us and he said, “that’s enough money for two girls in one night”. The police station was right around the corner and we did file a report but nothing happened and we went back out on the road so no follow-up. Once also in Baltimore, we had a 2 monthly contract with a bar for every Wednesday night. The first night we packed the place and then someone yelled, “KiSS iN” and all these lesbians started kissing. and we got fired at the end of the night. The owner said he, “did not want THOSE kinds of people in his club”. We took the case to court and we met with The Council for Human Relations- they offered us in settlement $2000 to amend the $ we lost but they did not apologize for their homophobic and blatant prejudice.
We did not accept the settlement. At this time. I was still working for the Rape Crisis Center in Baltimore City. My dear friend. Lynnel said to me, “Sonia -show business is crazy and cutthroat. You can either spend your time chasing down the bad guys or move on”. We moved on. Touring in the southeast in the early 90s the sound guys wouldn’t even look you in the eye. They wanted a dude to talk to tell them what was needed for that night tech-wise. And it was not limited to the south it was prevalent across the country. And then on the other end of the career spectrum struggles - once you start making a little money the evil wanna-be’s wanna beat and take advantage of you. I find it is best, to be honest. In the celebrity-mania culture that we live in it is valuable to know the difference between dream and reality. You can’t really buy success - your heart and soul know the difference.

From: https://voyagebaltimore.com/interview/daily-inspiration-meet-sonia-disappear-fear-rutstein/

Toni Childs - Welcome To The World

 #Toni Childs #alternative rock #folk rock #world music #contemporary folk rock #art pop #singer-songwriter #1990s #music video

Toni Childs’ musical compass has taken her north, south, east and west. Seeking inspiration for her third album, the American singer decamped to Madras, India, with a 24-track digital recording unit. It wasn’t her first field trip though. Childs’ debut, Union (1988), had been partially recorded in Swaziland, where she incorporated African voices into her art pop. (Fun fact: Union also features Marillion’s Steve Hogarth on keyboards.) Working with Indian musicians, Childs demoed four brand new songs in November 1992.
Womb, lyrically about a baby that is apprehensive about leaving its amniotic nest to enter the unknown world, suggested a conceptual direction for the rest of the album.The Woman’s Boat starts with that song of birth and ends with Death. The intervening nine songs trace a lifecycle of womanhood with all its triumphs and tribulations. Heavy stuff. But then Childs had plenty of life experience to draw upon. At 15, she ran away from the religious home she was raised in. Her early music career in Los Angeles foundered when she was briefly imprisoned for smuggling cocaine. A move to London heralded a fresh start. It was there that Childs befriended Peter Gabriel’s guitarist, David Rhodes, who became a key player on her early albums.
The Woman’s Boat was recorded at Gabriel’s Real World studios, which accounts for the album’s credits reading like a WOMAD festival bill. It features players of non-western instruments such as tamboura, mridangam, moorsing and didgeridoo, plus Pakistani superstar Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Belgian/African group Zap Mama. Producer David Bottrill also enlisted Talk Talk drummer Paul Webb, Trey Gunn on stick and Robert Fripp on guitar. Oh, and Peter Gabriel himself duets with Childs on I Met A Man.
Toni Childs’ utterly distinctive voice — as earthy and celestial as that of a gospel singer — sits atop the album’s verdant textures. On I Just Want Affection, the sultry desire of her vocal breaks through the cool reserves of the ethereal, bowed notes of an Indian sarangi. Her voice darts between the sinister shadows of Fripp’s soundscapes on Predator, and she sings with force-10 gusto over the heavy artillery of programmed beats on Lay Down Your Pain.
Upon release, The Woman’s Boat sunk without a trace. It would be 15 years before Childs released another record. Now living in Australia, she has since released several excellent albums via her website but The Woman’s Boat remains the album in which her musical compass pointed true north.  From: https://www.loudersound.com/features/toni-childs-the-womans-boat-its-prog-jim-but-not-as-we-know-it

Żywiolak - Bóstwa

 #Zywiolak #Slavic folk music #folk rock #world music #folk punk #folk metal avant-folk #neo-pagan folk #Polish #music video

Żywiołak, initially formed in Warsaw in 2005, is a Polish folk rock band steeped in mythos. Its name references the Elemental, a magical being said to harness the power of nature in the form of air, fire, water, or earth. Their lyrics sing of epic battles (in Wojownik, or Warrior) and explore the traditions of the early peoples of Poland, including the Vandals, a Germanic tribe that originally lived in Southern Poland and whose conquests spanned throughout Europe (in Epopeja Wandalska, or Vandal Epic). Żywiołak revives the history of its native nation while also connecting to a larger global community.
Before the release of their debut album, Nowa Ex-tradycja (New World Tradition) in 2008, Żywiołak’s line-up was in flux. A percussion instrumentalist, Maciej Dymek, joined original members Robert Jaworski and Robert Wasilewski and was followed by two female vocalists named Anucha Piotrowska and Izabella Byra. From 2008-2011, singer Monika Sadkowska replaced Byra. Following her stint with Żywiołak, Sadkowska pursued climate activism and worked with the World Wildlife Fund.
Musically, Żywiołak blends classical folk instruments with rock and metal elements like distorted guitar and heavy bass. Many tracks feature the hurdy gurdy, a crank-operated instrument with similar range to a violin found across cultures in Medieval Europe. In addition, the female vocalists occasionally utilize diaphony, a dissonant vocal harmony found in traditional Slavic cultures, to create tension and contribute to the witchy feel of many of their tracks.
Despite Catholicism’s religious dominance in Poland, Żywiołak is unafraid to reference pagan magic, evil spirits, and witchcraft. Oko Dybuka (Eye of the Dybbuk), a track on their first album, references a malevolent ghost from Jewish folklore. Czarodzielnica (Witch’s Night) is a vivid incantation, a song that invites in a myriad of mythical mischief makers including Slavic folk icon Baba Yaga, who often appears as an old crone who lives in a house with legs.
The song Bóstwa (Deities), included on 2017 album Pieśni pół/nocy (Midnight Songs), mirrors Żywiołak’s place as an ambassador between Slavic folk tradition and modern, Western rock through its depiction of Kupala, a pagan holiday celebrated on the longest day of the year. Originally practiced as fertility rites and an homage to the Sun, Kupala became Ivan Kupala, and fused with the Christian John the Baptist in a process known as syncretism.
Istanbuł (Istanbul) begins with an acknowledgment of the social effects of Catholicism and embraces Europe’s religious diversity. This track is featured on Żywiołak’s concept album Globalna Wiocha (Global Village), where the band composed songs based on major cities in Europe, including Moscow, Berlin, and Oslo. Through this album, Żywiołak reveals its modern, pan-European stance without losing the pride of its original Polish source material.  From: https://popkult.org/zywiolak/

Country Joe & The Fish - She's A Bird

 #Country Joe & The Fish #psychedelic rock #folk rock #psychedelic folk rock #psychedelic blues rock #acid rock #singer-songwriter #1960s

Although Country Joe and the Fish were together only four short years, the band’s political stance and eclectic rock left an important legacy. “Largely forgotten as one of the giants of psychedelic rock,” wrote Joel Selvin of MusicHound Rock, “Country Joe and the Fish towered over their contemporaries….” The band’s 1967 debut, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, remains one of the definitive psychedelic albums of the era, while “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” inspired thousands to protest the Vietnam War. The band received equal billing with San Francisco groups like the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, and Jefferson Airplane in the late 1960s, headlining at the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium. Country Joe and the Fish received their greatest attention and are most remembered for their pivotal performance at Woodstock in 1969 and inclusion in the film, Woodstock. With songs that included references to politics and drugs, the band represented a perfect marriage between the radicals of Berkley and the hippies of San Francisco.
Joe McDonald’s parents were Communist workers who named their son after Russian Communist dictator Joseph Stalin. Born in 1942 in Washington, D.C., he grew up in the Los Angeles suburb of El Monte, California. McDonald learned to play the guitar and joined local folk groups, but later ran away from home and joined the Navy for three years. After his discharge, he moved to Berkley where he played guitar and harmonica in the Berkeley String Quartet and Instant Action Jug Band. “Country Joe and the Fish,” noted Bill Belmont on the Well website, “came about as part political device, part necessity, and part entertainment.”
At the end of 1965 McDonald gathered Barry Melton, Richard Saunders, and Carl Shrager from the Instant Action Jug Band, then added Bob Steele to form the first version of Country Joe and the Fish. This acoustic lineup cut two tracks, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag,” an anti-Vietnam song, and “Superbird,” a political satire. McDonald and Melton then played for a short time as a folk duo before putting together a second, electric version of the band with Paul Armstrong, Bruce Barthol, David Cohen, and John Francis Gunning. “Bass Strings,” from their “white EP,” received radio play, and the group’s manager, Ed Denson, secured a record deal with Vanguard at the end of 1966.
When Country Joe and the Fish released Electric Music for the Mind and Body in 1967, it quickly became one of the definitive psychedelic rock albums of the era. “The record documented perfectly their unique conglomeration of folk, blues, country and rock,” wrote Marianne Ebertowski in the Marshall Cavendish History of Popular Music. “It also gave evidence of their involvement with the San Francisco drug and hippie scene on the one hand and the radical political movement on the other.” “Bass Strings” and “Flying High” contained overt references to drug use, while the aforementioned “Superbird” included a barbed attack on President Lyndon Johnson. “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” was left off the album at the request of Vanguard’s Maynard Solomon. “An unusual move,” wrote Bill Belmont, “by the company that staged the Weavers’ reunion concert at Carnegie Hall during the height of the anti-left sentiment in the United States.”
Country Joe and the Fish played at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium throughout 1967. They performed at “The Human Be-In” at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, made an appearance at the Monterey Pop International Festival, and even visited the United Kingdom where they played at the Roundhouse in Camden Town. They released their second album, I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die, seven months after their debut. Many critics viewed the album as overindulgent, or as Richie Unterberger described it in All Music Guide, “the kind of San Francisco psychedelia that Frank Zappa skewered on his classic We’re Only in It for the Money.” Nonetheless, the title track was a keeper, noted Unterberger, “a classic antiwar satire that became one of the decade’s most famous protest songs, and the group’s most famous track.” While 1968’s Together received a warmer critical response, it would be the last album by the group’s classic lineup.  From: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/country-joe-and-fish

The Wild Reeds - Where I'm Going

 #The Wild Reeds #alt-country #folk #indie/alternative rock #contemporary folk #folk rock

Three women and a banjo? Any band fitting those specifications must be a carbon copy of the Dixie Chicks, right? That's just one of the eye-roll-inducing comparisons the Wild Reeds has had to contend with since releasing its folk-inspired full-length, "Blind and Brave," in 2014. Filled with Americana essentials like harmonium and fervent, shimmering harmonies from the trio of lead singers and songwriters — Kinsey Lee, Sharon Silva and Mackenzie Howe — the album bears only minor resemblance to country music's once-scorned Grammy winners. But, that doesn't stop others from inventing parallels between the two.
"People listen with their eyes," Silva, 26, reasons by telephone a half hour outside of Los Angeles. In the band's early days, around 2010, when live shows consisted of open mic nights, and before drummer Nick Jones, 26, and bassist Nick Phakpiseth, 28, solidified the lineup, Silva would get aligned with husky-voiced actress Zooey Deschanel, who also moonlights as a singer in the pop duo She & Him. "Is it 'cause I have bangs?" she asks, referring to the "New Girl" star's distinctive hairstyle.
Silva hopes the tendency to lump girl groups together as interchangeable entities cools now that a feminist movement, re-energized by the current political climate, emerges from coast to coast. "Even though it's been such a gnarly year for our country, it's been great because people are looking for female-fronted bands and they are looking to support bands with minorities," she says.
The Wild Reeds' vivid major-label debut, "The World We Built" (Dualtone), will also help set the band apart. Recorded in Connecticut with producer Peter Katis (The National, Local Natives), the album lasers in on the women's precise harmonies while expanding the sound palette to include spaced-out guitars, beefy drums and whimsical strings. Silva doesn't know what held her back from embracing the electric guitar, but "now it's kind of hard to prevent myself from buying another fuzz pedal."
She also eliminates any speculation that her vocal connection to Lee, 26, and Howe, 27, is intuitive or the result of some shared sixth sense. Credit the stunning melding of their voices to an intensive rehearsal schedule, fueled by Silva's nitpicking. "We really put in the time," she says. Although the album's 11 tracks were written before the election, many have taken on new meaning with Donald Trump in the White House. "We've got this song 'Capable,' and every night I have to resist saying, 'I'm so much more capable than the president gives me credit for,'" she says. "We were never a political band and I don't think that we aim to be, but as a woman, I feel very convicted to tell mostly other women — and other people — 'Hey, we've got each other's backs, we can do this.'"  From: https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-wild-reeds-ott-0505-20170502-story.html

Graham Nash - I Used To Be A King

 #Graham Nash #ex-CSNY #ex-The Hollies #folk rock #country rock #singer-songwriter #1970s

Songs for Beginners is Graham Nash's solo debut apart from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Released in 1971, it is a collection of songs that reflect change, transition, and starting over. The set was recorded in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, in the immediate aftermath of Nash's traumatic breakup with Joni Mitchell. Unlike the colorful dynamism of Stephen Stills' eponymous debut recording, or the acid-drenched cosmic cowboy spaciness of David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name, Nash's album is by contrast a much more humble and direct offering. It is a true, mostly introspective songwriter's album full of beautifully performed and wonderfully recorded songs that reflect transition, movement, the desire to look backward and forward simultaneously. Like the aforementioned offering, this one is star-studded in its choice of players and singers: Crosby, Chris Ethridge, Jerry Garcia, Rita Coolidge, Clydie King, Venetta Fields, Dave Mason, Neil Young (under the pseudonym "Joe Yankee"), David Lindley, Bobby Keys, Phil Lesh, Dallas Taylor, and drummer John Barbata reflect some of the personnel on this heady yet humble session. The album is bookended by two of Nash's best-known tunes, the anthemic "Military Madness" that remains timeless in the 21st century, and "Chicago," that doesn't. That said, they are among the weakest songs here -- which reveals what a solid collection it is. Unlike many recordings birthed from personal angst, Nash's engages in no self pity; instead, he focuses on the craft of songwriting itself. Despite its personal darkness, "Better Days," with its swirling piano and pronounced bassline, is also an actual paean to self-determination and perseverance, the logic being that there were better days in the past, so there must be better ones in the future as well. "I Used to Be a King," with Garcia on a gorgeous pedal steel and Lesh on bass, is a direct, mature response to "King Midas in Reverse," a song Nash wrote and recorded with the Hollies. "Simple Man," with its sparse melody and strings and a fine backing vocal from Coolidge, was written on the afternoon of the breakup with Mitchell. The violin-cello backdrop to Nash's piano is particularly effective and makes this one of his most memorable songs. The parlor room country waltz that commences "Man in the Mirror," features Garcia's steel, Young's piano, ex-Flying Burrito Brother Ethridge, and drummer Barbata; it shifts keys, tempo, and feel about a third of the way in with a very long bridge that transforms the song's sentiment as well. Ultimately, Songs for Beginners is the strongest of Nash's solo efforts (outside of his work with Crosby).  From: https://www.allmusic.com/album/songs-for-beginners-mw0000197377

Graham Nash & Joni Mitchell

Laura Love - Sessions at West 54th 1998 / Philadelphia Folk Festival 1997

Sessions at West 54th 1998 

Philadelphia Folk Festival 1997

 #Laura Love #folk #Afro-Celtic #Americana #Afro-Carribean #folk rock #funk #R&B #world music #singer-songwriter #live music video

Singer-songwriter Laura Love has seemed like music's Next Big Thing for years now, a Northwest favorite occasionally brushing with national acclaim for her "Afro-Celtic" mix of exuberance, social conscience and heart. At 44, with a decade of comfort-level success behind her, the West Seattle resident has published a memoir with an accompanying CD. But "You Ain't Got No Easter Clothes" has nothing to do with Love's career, her Carnegie Hall showstopper or her folky-bluesy-jazzy soulful sound. Instead, it's about a child's bewildered love for her mentally unstable mother and a childhood so harrowing it could be used to argue for leniency if she ever committed a crime. Consider this, for instance: The scene where Love slips a noose around her own neck on her mother's command -- after being ordered to kill the pet cat as part of a planned family suicide -- is only a crest in the book's hills and valleys of tragedy. The memoir could have been a horror show, but it's eased by wry humor and amazing grace. And for Love, whose music often has been more global than autobiographical, the publishing debut is "just gravy" after the cathartic process of writing down her life. She wrote without expecting anything to come of it, she said, and found a literary agent through an Internet search after the manuscript was complete.
"I just wanted it to be written down somehow, even if it was just for me.” said Love. "There are few experiences in adult life that loom as large in my head and are as close to the surface as those childhood memories." Love and her older sister, Lisa, were raised in Nebraska by their mother, a highly intelligent, gifted teacher who was fearsomely mentally ill. Their father, Preston Love, one-time sax player for Count Basie, they were told, had died in a car crash when the girls were young. With novel-worthy characters and plot twists, Love describes how she and her sister stumbled through youth in an orphanage, a series of foster homes and their unstable home. Their poverty reached the point where a burglar who kicked down the door told the frightened children who were home alone, "Damn, y'all got less than I do."
The breaking point came not with those life-and-death struggles, but when a neighbor girl mocked Love as she walked home from church with her family.
"You ain't got no Easter clothes!" the girl taunted, as if Love's mother walking right beside her could provide no protection. Love attacked the girl like an animal, with claws and teeth. It's a scene that's hard to square now, with her generous voice and laid-back grin. "I just fell from grace that day, so hard," she said. Love knows she could have tipped either way in life. She said she needed to decide in those years "whether I was going to be a thug or enrolled in society." She was saved, she thinks, by the safety net of social programs such as Head Start and WIC, and the loving example of good teachers and social workers. "To be kind has always felt more powerful to me than to be mean and cruel," Love said. That goodness more than balanced the harsh realities she saw, such as the landlords who tried to turn her away when she began supporting herself at age 16, saying "we've never rented to coloreds."
Love committed her own cruelties and mistakes on the way to adulthood and they're also recounted in the book as plainly as if she were speaking from the stage, telling the whole story beginning to end. Where she did end is with understanding and forgiveness for her mother -- and for an unexpected figure, her father. As a teenager, Love stumbled on an advertisement for a Preston Love concert, talked her way into the show despite being underage and saw, in a shocking flash, that her father wasn't dead after all. He had fathered Love and her sister while married to another woman and raising his own family, she wrote. He was pleasant enough to Love, but never a father figure who took responsibility for her and her sister or felt any blame for the catastrophes they suffered. In her youth, "I was very angry about that and bitter," she said. As an adult, she worked on finding her own forms of family instead of brooding on all that she had lacked. College helped give her a broader perspective. "I've always lived better than 90 percent of the world," she said.
Today, Love is focused on those big-picture wrongs, more inclined to be angry about political cuts to the social programs that helped her, for instance, than to brood about the individual wrongs she endured. "For the most part, I'm grateful for all those things that happened," she said. "All the bad things, too." There's a joy in not being a powerless child anymore, she said, in not being forced to wait for the car that will take you to another dreadful foster home or bleak room. "I exercise every modicum, every bit of choice that I have now," whether it means voting in elections or choosing to eat only humanely raised meat, Love said.
Love supports herself full time with her singing career. She said she's hugely fortunate that she can spend only short blocks of time touring and long periods at home with her family. She and her partner, Pam, along with her best friend/business manager and her older sister, share a West Seattle home. They're now building a solar-and wind-powered house in the Okanogan, "swinging hammers" together, hoping to raise their own food and reduce the amount of natural resources they use and even create a cat sanctuary to protect songbirds from Love's beloved strays.
After 16 years of not knowing if she was alive or dead, Love tracked down her mother in Colorado a few years back with the help of fans who read the request on the liner notes of Love's albums. "I just love her dearly and feel like her mind has been like a torture chamber for her," Love said. In a last unexpected twist, Love is now a mother herself, to an angelic blue-eyed toddler who came to her and Pam in 2002 as a 7-month-old foster child with eight broken bones. "It had to be that bad for me to think I could be a better parent than someone," Love said. She has found patience and enjoyment over the past two years that she couldn't have imagined in herself and a happiness in responding to her daughter the way she wishes her mother could have responded to her.
Love describes the genesis of her singing career in her book as a soaring talent show where "I understood that I would never do anything else for the rest of my life but sing." She loves playing shows and festivals and the applause her music brings. And yet she isn't consumed with thoughts of selling out arenas or signing with another major label (she was represented by Mercury records a few years back), or otherwise seeking fame. Music doesn't define her, she said, it's only one of her great loves. She's truly thankful that she can play bass guitar and sing. "But, really, it's thank God I'm alive."  From: https://www.seattlepi.com/entertainment/music/article/musician-laura-love-survived-a-miserable-1151077.php