Laura Love - I Am Wondering

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

Laura Love's restless, musically adventurous spirit has carried her in a remarkable array of directions. A bass player with a unique vocal style, Love has performed everything from grunge to jazz to bluegrass. She has covered songs as diverse as Hank Williams' I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Jackie DeShannon's Put a Little Love in Your Heart, and Kurt Cobain's Come As You Are. Most remarkably, she has melded her own funky, folky genre from African and Caribbean rhythms, Irish melodies, and R&B. She calls it Afro/Celtic. "Love has a powerful raspy voice not unlike Toni Childs, and she uses it to full advantage — howling , crooning, and even yodeling," Lahri Bond wrote in Dirty Linen magazine. "These tunes usually have spiritual underpinnings that give Love's lyrics a simplicity with a lot of depth. Love often strings together 'nonsense' words that serve as rhythmic connecting devices similar to scatting or African chant."
With self-deprecating wit, the singer described her sound to Billboard as "more like confusion than fusion. I don't really devour a lot of music, but I hear snippets here and there at festivals without meaning to. Some of it just sinks in — the really emotionally grabbing stuff — and sticks with me. But I've always loved Appalachian — the high lonesome, bluegrassy, mournful, minor-key white soul music — and I love black soul music. Time magazine music critic Christopher Farley has described Love as more traditionally folky than musically exotic, believing that Love could be a descendent of Joni Mitchell, and her songs address typical coffeehouse subject matter. "Love has a voice rich with dark shadings and rural twang," Farley wrote. "She calls her music Afro/Celtic, but it's mostly front-porch folk with a few twists."
Love made her jazz-singing debut for a "captive audience" at a penitentiary in her home state of Nebraska in the early 1980s. She was 16 years old. Later, she developed a following in the Seattle music scene, where she played grunge rock in the early years of her career. Eventually, Love found — or, more accurately, created — her own niche. "The Afro-Celtic label doesn't communicate the full flavor of Love's songs," Nelson George wrote in Playboy. "Her songs have bright, lilting melodies that contrast nicely with lyrics that focus on poverty and pain. But Love isn't as heavy-voiced or didactic as Tracy Chapman. Her vocals are lighter, higher-pitched, and less guarded than those of her fellow pop-folkie. As pained and bitter as the songs are, Love suggests there's room for optimism."  From:https://musicianguide.com/biographies/1608000914/Laura-Love.html

 

Richard & Linda Thompson - A Heart Needs A Home

 #Richard & Linda Thompson #folk rock #British folk rock #contemporary folk #singer-songwriter #ex-Fairport Convention #1970s #music video #The Old Grey Whistle Test

Richard Thompson left Fairport Convention after 1970’s Full House, his reputation secured as an excellent songwriter and guitarist. He released a spectacularly unsuccessful solo album, Henry the Human Fly, in 1972. He then married Linda Peters and they released six albums between 1974 and 1982; their relationship broke down before an ill-fated North American tour in 1982. The duo’s music is often melancholic, and it’s a common trick of Richard Thompson to pair upbeat music with depressing lyrics. They often play acoustic folk-rock, especially on their early albums, but 1978’s First Light uses an L.A. rhythm section and 1982’s Shoot Out The Lights has few vestiges of folk remaining. Linda and Richard share the vocal duties – while Richard’s gruff voice is limited, Linda’s pristine voice is able to capture a range of moods, from joy on ‘I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight’ to resignation on ‘Walking on a Wire’. The pair’s first album, 1974’s I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight and their 1982 swan song Shoot Out The Lights are generally considered as their strongest. In between they spent time in a Sufi Muslim commune, taking three years away from music. Richard has stated that he considers their late 1970s albums as weak, as he didn’t have his mind on the job.  From: https://albumreviews.blog/reviews/1970s-album-reviews/richard-and-linda-thompson/

Linda Thompson's experience with Sufism was, by her own reckoning, not such a good one. She moved to a commune in Maida Vale with Richard, then her husband, after making "Hokey Pokey," and she describes her experience there as grim and self-punishing. For awhile, Richard's mullah told him not to play the guitar, so he didn't play the guitar. Richard & Linda Thompson, British folk-rock royalty, disappeared for a few years in the mid-'70s. Before they did, they sent this epistle. "A Heart Needs A Home" pointed straight toward the "Pour Down Like Silver" LP, Thompson's most explicit bout of Sufi songwriting. "Home" caps "Hokey Pokey," a collection of songs that describe the world as a cold, forbidding, sin-soaked place. Richard Thompson turns to Allah in emptiness, and finds fulfillment there. Odd, then, that he didn't sing it. He gave the song to Linda. Perhaps he identified with her so strongly back then that he felt no separation between his perspective and hers. Or maybe he was trying to convince her of something. Since leaving the commune (and the marriage), she's occasionally suggested that her heart was never really in it; that she followed Richard to Maida Vale because she loved him, and she wore the headscarf because that's what was expected of her. Do we believe her? She certainly does not look uncomfortable singing "A Heart Needs A Home." On the contrary: Linda Thompson is completely possessed, her eyes on the great beyond. Maybe she's singing about Richard, maybe she's singing about Allah. Maybe it doesn't matter. The Sufis have a concept called wahdat-al-wujud: God is the only reality, and all that we perceive is a decipherable pattern emanating from Allah. Nothing exists that isn't a piece of the divine. Linda might have got it better than the mullah did. She might have got it better than Richard did.  From: https://www.nj.com/entertainment/music/2010/08/song_of_the_day_a_heart_needs.html

The Neptune Power Federation - Watch Our Masters Bleed

 #The Neptune Power Federation #hard rock #stoner rock #occult rock #stoner metal #Australian #music video

Like all great threats to decency, the church of The Neptune Power Federation was born far from the tired gaze of the masses. Operating out of dive bars and biker clubhouses, playing to troubled souls with dirty hair and crude intentions, their high volume psychedelic gospel spreads like a glorious subterranean infection.  From: https://theneptunepowerfederation.bandcamp.com/community

10 Megatons of neanderthal rock fuelled by satan and space hallucinogens. Without doubt the Neptune Power Federation are the best live band playing in Sydney at the moment. A band comprised of musicians with the hard won skill earned through a lifetime of rocking deals out a feast for both the ears and eyes. Riffs that we all thought were forbidden are wielded with joy and crunching power whilst the Imperial Priestess Screaming Loz Sutch aka The Rat Queen presides above it all; mocking the heavens, defying hell and laying waste to any mere mortals foolish enough to stand in her path.  From: https://www.bandsintown.com/a/2387664-the-neptune-power-federation
 
I have always loved storytelling. As a child I rapidly ran out of interesting books to devour in the library, and nowadays I get my fill with online free-form role playing. This extends to music as well; a cool concept can really elevate an otherwise unremarkable album. What a good story needs first and foremost is interesting characters though, and The Neptune Power Federation get that. Their vocalist, Imperial Priestess Screaming Loz Sutch, assumes the mantle of a time-travelling space witch for their fourth album, Memoirs of a Rat Queen. 70s space rock that mixes Heart with Hawkwind and AC/DC, a sexy vengeful bombshell on the mic, and a story scattered from the French revolution to boning in a parking lot; what could possibly go wrong here?
I guess we won’t find out, because not much does. That largely comes down to the Imperial Priestess. Like an Oscar-worthy actress, she completely falls into the role. Her character is straight out of a Neil Gaiman novel, a demi-goddess of lust and wrath, of regal rage and justified arrogance, and you believe her every syllable whether she sneers about the deaths of her enemies (“Rat Queen”: ‘Their last words as they fell / were damn that bitch to hell!’) or seduces a mere mortal with her eons of experience (“I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” not even close to a Disney cover!). It certainly helps that her technical skills are off the charts. Her voice is razor-sharp. Some might consider her too shrill, but she conveys supreme passion and power, and with a few momentary exceptions, she is always in complete control of her vocal chords and her role alike.
All that would go nowhere without solid songwriting, and boy, are there some fucking jams on this platter. “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” is both incredibly seductive and a fantastic fist-pumper, reminiscent of the very best glam ever had to offer. “Rat Queen” has more hooks than an angling store and more girl power than a female bodybuilder competition, while single “Watch Our Masters Bleed” goes from reflective reverence to rousing revolution. Every track has a different vibe, thanks to the distinct hooks as well as selective use of classic instrumentation, like the cowbell in “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” and the Hammond organ blasting throughout “Pagan Inclinations.” Traces of soul are plentiful, thanks to the frequent female choir piping in, giving a gospel atmosphere to the electrifying boogie space rock anthems.  From: https://www.angrymetalguy.com/the-neptune-power-federation-memoirs-of-a-rat-queen-review/

 

Nurse With Wound - The Bottom Feeder

 #Nurse With Wound #Steven Stapleton #experimental #industrial #avant-garde #noise #dark ambient #drone #sound collage #plunderphonics #animated music video #stop-motion

A challenging, amorphous entity that has revolved around Steve Stapleton for almost forty years, Nurse With Wound has operated at the vanguard of industrial, drone and ambient music with fearless clarity. Steve Stapleton’s Nurse With Wound project is regularly positioned in the same universe as Current 93 and Coil on the basis of shared roots, ongoing social connections and a vague genre definition. What really unifies NWW with the other two, however, is the sheer uniqueness of the musical vision at play - each band has defined a sound world that echoes known genres, while belonging to any and all they might wish. In the case of Stapleton, his work has rarely featured a front-man or a conventional vocal presence, meaning the focus has always been on his abilities to reinvent and reimagine sounds in new contexts and new situations via his skill as a sound collagist. His focus on the moods and emotions evoked by what he creates has ensured a truly expansive set of alternative visions within his long discography.  From: https://thevinylfactory.com/features/an-introduction-to-nurse-with-wound-in-10-records/

As a testament to the random disorder and beauty of life, London’s Nurse With Wound (Steven Stapleton) functioned outside the normal musical channels for a decade, experimenting with tape collages of disjointed phrases, improvised music, electronics and found sounds on a series of intriguing, provocative, humorous and frequently entertaining self-released records. Between 1978 and 1988, Stapleton collaborated with such likeminded sonic adventurers as David Tibet of Current 93 and Tony Wakeford of Sol Invictus to produce a prodigious body of work that embraces surrealism in both content and graphics.

NWW’s debut, Chance Meeting of a Sweing Machine and an Umbrella on a Dessecting Table, welds introverted, spacey guitar to converging hemispheres of intergalactic blips. Then, like much of the band’s music, it veers into sketchy doodles: between intermittent lulls of humming and buzzing, there are bursts of frenzied screeching, torture chamber screams, piano scales, women speaking French, etc.

To the Quiet Men From a Tiny Girl resembles a nest of vibrating insects, with clinking chains, someone practicing saxophone, an operatic soprano and other voices. “Ostranenie” suggests a house of a hundred rooms — with a different noise in each.

Merzbild Schwet is as challenging as a Buñuel film, with repeated lines (like “We have fallen silent - lost the power of speech - our heads are empty”) as women laugh and sing. Other ingredients: clanking, ripping velcro, angry voices and something like a sick elephant honking.

Those first three albums were later reissued in a CD boxed set (Psilotripitaka), which also includes Ladies Home Tickler, another bizarre cut-up collage: snippets of sappy tunes, electrical noises and taunting laughter. Present the Sisters of Pataphysics compiles passages from the first three LPs.

The avant drippings on Sylvie and Babs — the most guest-laden NWW effort, with dozens of contributors as opposed to the usual one or two — include more laughter and repetition of the word “pardon.” The two Automating albums collect material from the many compilations to which Nurse With Wound has contributed. Slices of show tunes, repetitive background beats and advice like “Never eat anything bigger than your head” are sprinkled throughout. Volume II addresses the hierarchy of biological existence; one segment could be the soundtrack for a science fiction feature about giant rampaging tarantulas.

A pair of 12-inch EPs paired as an album, Gyllensköld bristles the coarsest of hairs with scratching and horror dungeon screams while Brained adds the demonic voice of Clint Ruin yet contains a movement that could accompany an underwater Cousteau documentary.

A Sucked Orange offers 20 experimental vignettes, many of which justify their titles: the scraping murmur of “Flea Bite,” the repetitive clank of utensils beneath a spoken loop of “It ain’t necessarily so” on “It Just Ain’t So,” the catchy ditty plinked out on “This Piano Can’t Think.”

Soliloquy for Lilith is Stapleton’s surprising chef d’oeuvre, a three-album box of contemplative, atmospheric experiments employing treatments of a stringed instrument of his own invention.

Over time, however, the group’s usual organized chaos gained a certain predictability. At the end of 1988, Stapleton moved to a farm in Ireland.

More accessible than much of Stapleton’s ’80s work, Rock ‘n Roll Station is rhythmic almost to the point of being dancefloor-friendly. The combination of rhythms, noise and ambience is in line with work done in the mid-to-late-’90s by artists on the Warp label. The title track begins with a clipped rhythm aided by random vocal samples; “The Self Sufficient Sexual Shoe” repeats the idea with male vocals replaced by female whispers. “Two Golden Microphones” is a multifaceted 17-minute sonic beast that throws together fragments of pop songs, surf instrumentals and tribal rhythms. “A Silhouette and Thumbtack (A Dance in Hyperspace)” slides from spooky ambience to a beat interrupted by random samples/noise. “R+B Through Collis Browne” works together female screams and guitar samples. The disc ends with three minutes of “Finsbury Park, May 8th, 1.35 pm (I’ll See You In Another World),” ambient-drone accented by a thumping beat.

From: https://trouserpress.com/reviews/nurse-with-wound/

 

 

Steven Stapleton

First Aid Kit - War Pigs

 #First Aid Kit #indie folk #Americana #country folk #folk rock #folk pop #singer-songwriter #Swedish #Black Sabbath cover #music video

You wouldn’t imagine that the mellow folky tones of First Aid Kit would pair well with the frenzied howling maelstrom of Black Sabbath. Sometimes defying convention is a thrill and music proves that time and time again. In fact, defying convention is something that First Aid Kit have had to do in their own usual field anyway. "We had a lot to prove, especially being in a genre that’s dominated by a certain type of man – you know, nerdy, bearded men listening to folk,” Klara Söderberg told The Telegraph. “We felt we had to prove we were serious about music and we weren’t just doing this because we thought it was trendy.” Her sister Johanna adds: “I felt there was a lot of sexism in that as well.” Thankfully, they persevered and have been offering up blissful music ever since, not least last year’s cracking album Palomino. Throughout their musical journey so far, they have remained defiant enough to venture into a range of genres and let their individualism and undoubted talent shine through.
That’s just as well when it comes to covering Black Sabbath because very few songs have the raw, mystic power that the anti-war juggernaut of ‘War Pigs’ contains. It is, in essence, an outcry. “Britain was on the verge of being brought into the Vietnam War,” Geezer Butler recalls, “there was protests in the street, all kinds of anti-Vietnam things going on. War is the real Satanism. Politicians are the real Satanists. That’s what I was trying to say.” The anthem remains one of the great opening tracks, blasting Paranoid off like the gunshot at the start of a race. Everything about the band was rough, tumble, and raw. Even their debut album was pieced together in a day, as Tony Iommi recalls, “We thought we have two days to do it and one of the days is mixing. So we played live. Ozzy was singing at the same time, we just put him in a separate booth and off we went. We never had a second run of most of the stuff.” While Ozzy Osbourne’s thunderous screech is hard to match, the duo bring their own sense of power to it. As Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys once correctly identified, there is just something special about siblings harmonizing.  From: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/first-aid-kits-cover-black-sabbath-war-pigs/

Saddhu Brand - Whole Earth Rhythm

 #Saddhu Brand #psychedelic folk rock #acid folk #world music #Indian classical #1970s 

This is what happens when you get four hippies back in San Francisco after a four year layover in India. Sounding strangely burnt out yet happy, the songsters of Saddhu Brand stick exclusively to traditional Indian instruments and vocals. The vocals come in two varieties: the strangely unemotional sounding female chorale vocals and the voice of one addled guru sort of fellow by the name of Peter Van Gelder (from Great Society).
In many ways, this disc makes me think of a weird transmutation of the British freak-folk scene. There's a kind of Incredible String Band vibe here, although this band has a different set of acoustic instruments and they're nowhere near as talented as the ISB. The whole affair reeks of patchouli (or let's say Nag Champa, I hate patchouli), but what we have here is for the most part a typical San Fran band thrown through a Hindu blender. "People Brittle" would easily translate to a later period Jefferson Airplane song with electric Western instruments, and "I Give You Johnee The Truth" is only one step removed from sounding like West Coast "cowboy" music like New Riders Of The Purple Sage. Just get a different singer and ditch the flute and sitar. Of course the charm of this albums is that it does have the aforementioned flute and sitar.
On the longer tracks "Babu Shoda" and "Dabi Das' Song" the band tries their hand at more authentic Indian style compositions. It's not going to stand in my way if I'm reaching for a Ravi Shankar record, but it's enjoyable enough. While they do whip up a wild dervish sort of sound on the later track, it's far muddier and less precise than something similar that the Indian masters would concoct. Whole Earth Rhythm threatens to confirm more than one cliche concerning the late 60's. If you can stomach that and enjoy Indian instrumentation, you'll probably find something to enjoy.  From: http://psychedelicobscurities.blogspot.com/2007/09/saddhu-brand-1970-whole-earth-rhythm.html

Nickel Creek - When in Rome

 #Nickel Creek #bluegrass #folk #contemporary bluegrass #progressive acoustic #Americana

Today, the music community broadly known as Americana has too many stars, scenes and subcategories to count. Beloved artists like Jason Isbell and Kacey Musgraves, who in another era might have been all but ignored by country gatekeepers, have found a welcoming community and something in the neighborhood of household-name status. The Americana Music Festival, held annually in Nashville, grows larger each year. And in 2014, the Grammys gave the first awards in the newly created "American roots" categories, which encompass bluegrass, blues, folk, gospel and anything too left-of-center for the country mainstream. But the music under this umbrella wasn't always the stuff of major festivals and glitzy awards shows, or of such broad interest to the youth market whose tastes drive the industry. At the turn of the 21st century, progressive-minded artists in this world were likely to be scattered across granular labels like contemporary folk or the then-popular "alt-country," with smaller audiences and fewer entry points for a casual listener. As it still does today, country radio leaned heavily commercial (though it did, at least, play music by women back then): In 2000, the songs that dominated genre playlists before finding crossover success were pop smashes like Faith Hill's "Breathe" and Lee Ann Womack's "I Hope You Dance." Traditionalists, meanwhile, carried on in the passionate but niche scenes they had occupied for years.
Then, 20 years ago this month, an album arrived that seemed to speak all these languages at once: unafraid to push the boundaries of its primary genre, and packing the musical chops to bring such an eclectic vision to life. Behind it were three musicians just barely old enough to vote. When Nickel Creek released its breakthrough album on March 21, 2000, the players comprising the California-born bluegrass trio were anything but newcomers: Chris Thile and siblings Sara Watkins and Sean Watkins had been playing together since 1989, when Thile and Sara were just 8 and Sean 12. The young talents had already released two studio albums as well as a handful of solo projects, and were regulars on the bluegrass festival circuit, a tenure that had refined their sound to a level typically reserved for older players with bigger discographies. Still, despite arriving with a pages-long resumé, Nickel Creek is still popularly thought of as the trio's debut — perhaps because, in retrospect, everything about it seems to signal a new beginning.
Both to mainstream ears and those steeped in string music, what Nickel Creek was doing sounded fresh. The three musicians, then aged 18 to 23, found creative and playful ways to infuse bluegrass music with ideas from jazz, classical, pop and rock. They put traditional songs next to original material about characters from The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps most impressively, they did so in a way that felt cohesive, as though the new approach they had forged for themselves had roots as deep as bluegrass itself. Working in a genre known to spark arguments over what counts as "authentic," the trio seemed far more concerned with realizing its own vision than hewing to hardline conventions — like sticking to a repertoire of mostly folk songs and standards, using common chord progressions or relegating the guitarist to the rhythm section. (And how fortunate that Nickel Creek didn't, as Sean Watkins' masterful guitar solos are always album highlights.)
There was some precedent for this kind of deviation, of course. Veteran genre agnostic Béla Fleck, who made his studio debut in 1979, had racked up accolades for his singular take on banjo playing, which often treads closer to jam and world music than to traditional American bluegrass. Alison Krauss, who would be integral in bringing Nickel Creek to a wider audience, toyed with pop and rock tropes alongside her band Union Station, and is often considered a primary influence on the "newgrass" movement. In 1998, Lucinda Williams released her landmark album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which won the Grammy for best contemporary folk album. The same year, Wilco released its first Mermaid Avenue team-up with Billy Bragg, which featured new songs built around previously unheard lyrics by Woody Guthrie. The album was a critical and commercial success. While nonconformists had found room in the conversation before, there was still something novel and uniquely compelling about the sight of three musicians, two in their teens and one in his early 20s, who revered Bach and Bill Monroe in equal measure. Krauss agreed, bringing the trio to Sugar Hill Records and producing Nickel Creek herself. Already a multi-Grammy winner upon meeting the group, Krauss had found great success both in bluegrass and adult contemporary, making her uniquely qualified to shepherd such an unconventional young act.
From: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/814739478/nickel-creek-self-titled-20-years-americana-roots-folk-country

Candelilla - 17

 #Candelilla #indie rock #post-punk #noise rock #experimental rock #dark cabaret #German 

Candelilla - "little light" - somehow doesn't want to go with the loud, angry and urgent songs of the band from Munich. However, Mira Mann (vocals, bass) and Lina Seybold (vocals, guitar) bring the name with them from their school days, where they met through music in 2001. Things really got going in 2007, when the two found their perfect partners in crime in Rita Argauer (vocals, keyboards) and Sandra Hilpold (drums). Mann, Seybold and Argauer had already recorded three EPs with changing members and distributed them themselves, rehearsed in the Munich area and as the opening act for Slut.
"Don't Rely On What Others Say" is the name of the first 6-track EP after the rebirth; message and self-admonition in one. Punk rock meets sweet pop moments, quite playful at times, almost a little well-behaved. But Candelilla are already "addicted to hoarseness", as they cry out in the song "4". The songs have to do without names from now on, numbering is king.
In an all-girl band that doesn't play folky fairy songs, but rocks properly, of course everyone comes with the feminist club and the riot grrrl drawer, with Bikini Kill and Hole. But you shouldn't come to Candelilla with the "woman thing" (Argauer). Of course they are feminists, but they want to be seen as a band and not as a "women's band". "You also have to know that Candelilla's all-female cast was more of a coincidence, the girls used to play with boys before I joined, and I've also been in other bands," Hilpold reveals to the blog Mapambulo.
In 2009 the first official studio album was released on the local label Red Can Records. The quartet is still testing how much can be packed into a song without it completely falling apart. The sweet pop melodies have to make way for more noise, grunge and hardcore. The microphone wanders wildly around the band, they sing in English and in German, preferably in the same sentence.
Candelilla records the follow-up album with producer legend Steve Albini (including Pixies, PJ Harvey, Nirvana and his own band Shellac). And that appears after the band made a name for themselves in Germany, France, Spain and the UK on Zick Zack. After all, the original Hamburg independent label has always been a haven for the more interesting and smarter German pop music.
"Heart Mutter" will be released in 2013 and comes at a time when a few more German-speaking bands with anger in their stomachs and brains in their heads are making a name for themselves: Ecke Schönhauser, Messer, 1000 Robota, 206, Better Times and a few more. But Candelilla don't really want to fit into this 2010 new edition of the Hamburger Schule. They are a bit too noisy and grungy, too erratic and too multi-layered for that. Because the band's first motto is still to take it apart and put it back together again. So the numbering continues to make sense, as Candelilla tell Zündfunk: "Because the three of us write texts and like to chop things up, put them back together, rearrange them and let them run against each other, it is of course very important again in terms of content or meaning fitting to let number stand as a total abstraction."  Poorly translated from: https://www.laut.de/Candelilla 

Emerson, Lake & Palmer - The Endless Enigma

 #Emerson, Lake & Palmer #Kieth Emerson #Greg Lake #Carl Palmer #progressive rock #symphonic prog #art rock #hard rock #jazz rock #blues rock #electronic #modern classical #1970s 

The first thing you'll ever learn about Emerson, Lake & Palmer is that they were the first 'supergroup' of the progosphere. The second thing is that they made their living on hyper-fast semi-classical excursions on anything equipped with ivories, preferably connected to sci-fi modulators (courtesy of Keith Emerson), hyper-fast machine gun drumming on anything equipped with a skin (courtesy of Carl Palmer) and suspiciously mellow folk balladry about anything equipped with a vagina (courtesy of Greg Lake). Every now and then though, they got together around lengthy pieces aspiring to one-up just about any modern classical composer in existence and in the process came up with some of the finest prog epics known to man. You see, this is one band where prog initiation is all but obligatory for anyone to have a decent chance to get into them, and I don't really think that anyone with much more humble taste would have that much need for Lake's ballads alone. Not that they are bad or anything, quite the opposite, but we'll get to that in due time.
Anyhoo, they got together as a result of Keith Emerson's, freshly out of The Nice, ambition to expand the boundaries of three-piece bands in 1970. He teamed up with bass player/guitarist/singer Greg Lake, who was right in the midst of recording "In the wake of Poseidon" with King Crimson but decided ELP was a better shot, and drum ace Carl Palmer who was to be found in Atomic Rooster (which you by the way really should check out; Art metal began here) as well as being an Arthur Brown graduate. And I'm gonna take the opportunity to debunk a widespread myth here; Hendrix was not considered as a fourth member (which would have yielded the abbreviation "HELP") since Emerson was keen on preserving the trio format from the very beginning, and I've got at least one fairly recent in-depth interview with Carl Palmer in a magazine to back it up. From the very beginning they pulled out all the stops on their live performances with Emerson straddling his Hammond organ the same way that Hendrix straddled his guitar, making it scream and moan with feedback and all kinds of unholy noises, occasionally crowning it all with daggers between the keys. Trust me, you gotta see it if you haven't already! What he should be revered for though, is his classically tinged finger-flashing over the whole thing. He could pull out just about anything from his sleeve, from rag-time barroom piano to Bach fugues at the speed of light. Of course, he had already made a name for himself in The Nice, but it was in ELP that he rose to the sky really. And don't forget his toying with all those Moog synthesizers which he actually helped develop with Bob Moog himself at the time.
Obviously, Emerson was the center of attention, but do not forget that he was backed up by one of the finest rhythm sections in prog as well. Carl Palmer may not be the fastest drummer in the world, but he sure is the fastest drummer I know of that simultaneously could swing and deliver something more than just robotic noise. After all, he took his inspiration from such giants as Buddy Rich, didn't he? And then Greg Lake, a great bass player in his own rights who on occasion had to switch to guitar to fill in the gaps, and on top of that crowned the songs with one of the best voices in rock; bombastic but yet humane and delicate. Listen to what he does on tracks like "The great gates of Kiev" and compare it with "The sage" or "Living sin". Talk about versatility! And he was also responsible for the more melodic and accessible elements of ELP's output and all of their albums sport at least one stripped-down acoustic ballad courtesy of him.
So there, the scene is set. Now what? Full frontal prog that managed to write itself into the history books as one of the most bloated, self-indulgent, excessive and pretentious acts of the whole movement. That's what the critics will tell you whether they like it or not, but that's not the whole picture. They were never strangers to silly little send-ups (or the aforementioned acoustic stuff) either, to spice up the flow on their albums and those who claim that progsters took themselves much too seriously have obviously missed out on songs like "Benny the bouncer". Of course, none of the occasional detours would overshadow their main schtick which was the grandiose epics and Emerson's lengthy keyboard excesses. But that's alright with me, because they are among the greatest epics and keyboard excesses ever captured on magnetic tape. I just don't want you to forget they were much more multi-faceted than they normally get credit for.
From: https://www.musicbanter.com/album-reviews/54650-endless-enigma-emerson-lake-palmer-reviewed.html#ixzz7vud1uMYp

Betty Wright - Clean Up Woman

 #Betty Wright #R&B #soul #Southern soul #funk pop #1970s

Betty Wright was a soul and R&B singer with deep gospel roots. She influenced a generation of female singer-songwriters and the world of hip hop, who sample some of her more famous material. Born singing gospel with the family group, the Echoes of Joy, Wright began experimenting with R&B music in 1965 when she was only 11. In 1968, she released her first album, My First Time Around, at the age of 14, and scored her first national hit, "Girls Can't Do What Guys Can Do". But it was not until the end of 1971 that Wright's most successful phase of her career began to take place. The song, "Clean Up Woman", became a Top 5 pop and #2 R&B hit, and would later influence a remix of Mary J. Blige's "Real Love" single with the sample of its guitar riffs; R&B girl group trio SWV's "I'm So Into You" also featured a sample from "Clean Up Woman," as did Afrika Bambaataa's song "Zulu War Chant", and Sublime's "Get Out!" remix. In 1974, Wright scored big with the songs "Tonight is the Night" (about a real-life love affair that happened with Wright when she was a teenager) and "Where is the Love". After experiencing the Alston label’s apparent dissolution in late '79, she rebounded founding her own record label, Ms. B Records in 1985. In 1988, Wright made music history by being the first woman to have a gold record on her own label, (self written, arranged, produced, and published). With the release of Mother Wit, which featured two of her biggest hits in years, "No Pain No Gain" and "After The Pain." On both songs, Wright displays her powerful upper register capabilities and seven-octave range.  From: https://www.umusicpub.com/us/Artists/B/Betty-Wright.aspx

Birdeatsbaby - Tenterhooks

 #Birdeatsbaby #alternative rock #progressive rock #alternative metal #dark cabaret #gothic pop #music video

Birdeatsbaby is a genre indefinable quartet formed in 2008 and based in Brighton. The dark and twisted quality of their music videos has gained them some degree of fame. Just like that other dark cabaret band, The Dresden Dolls, they present a lot of piano-led pop tunes, supplemented with drums, guitar, and violin. Singer and pianist Mishkin Fitzgerald has also released a solo album, and works in electro-math-rock band Cat Fire Radio.

This band contains examples of:
Cover Version: Birdeatsbaby has released covers of songs by Muse, Tool, Marilyn Manson, Korn, Hole, and PJ Harvey to name a few.
Genre Shift: The bombastic cabaret theme of the early videos has been somewhat withdrawn from their latest videos, giving place to more desaturated colors à la Nolan, and more melancholic songs.
Genre Throwback: The "Feast of Hammers" music video evokes Hammer Horror movies.
Gothic Horror: "The Bullet Within" borrows from this genre, particularly the song "Hands of Orlac" which is named after a gothic horror film.
Harsh Vocals: Mishkin alternates between this and more gentle vocalizations.
Haunted Heroine: The subject of "Ghosts".
Murder Ballad: "Love Will Bring You Nothing."
Obligatory Bondage Song: A variation: "Miserable" is about a woman who is into BDSM, but the narrator of the song seems to disapprove of her lifestyle.
Riot Grrrl: The movement seems to have at least influenced the band, though it is unknown if Birdeatsbaby identifies itself as a part of it.
Pintsized Powerhouse: Mishkin trains in kickboxing in real life. She is shown training and fighting in the "Present Company" video from her first solo single.
Sanity Slippage Song: "Incitatus"
Take That!: "Gone", "Jim", and "The Replacement". All quite vicious and open. "Part of Me" may be the band's most scathing song to date.
Teenage Death Songs: "Seventeen".
Uncommon Time: The verses of "Tenterhooks" are effectively in 22/8 time, and sections of "The Bullet" are in phrases of 5.
Vomit Indiscretion Shot: In "Feast of Hammers", when Mishkin sees the masked men in action.
Whole-Plot Reference: The entire "I Always Hang Myself With The Same Rope" video is one to Alfred Hitchcock movies.
Word Salad Lyrics: Most of the album "Here She Comes-a-Tumblin'" was the result of a teenage Mishkin's insomnia-induced hallucinations and nightmares, resulting in some particularly strange and terrifying imagery on more than one occasion.

From: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Music/Birdeatsbaby

Birdeatsbaby is a Brighton, UK chamber rock/prog-punk/dark cabaret four-piece, of Mishkin Fitzgerald (lead vocals, piano), Hana Maria (violin, vocals), Garry Mitchell (bass, guitar) and Anna Mylee (drums). The band was formed in November 2007, followed by début album Here She Comes-a-Tumblin' (2009, self-released). Their albums include Feast Of Hammers (2012), The Bullet Within (2014), Tanta Furia (2016) and The World Conspires (2019). Not fitting current musical trends, Birdeatsbaby's sound is fast-paced with complex drums, and piano/bass/violin generally combined for dramatic/catchy choruses. Like a more hyper-active Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds meets a slightly depressed Freddie Mercury. Descriptions of the band have included: 'an unhinged burlesque brand of freak-pop' and 'Twin Peaks on snuff.'  From: https://www.last.fm/music/Birdeatsbaby/+wiki

Donovan - Season of the Witch

 #Donovan #folk rock #psychedelic folk #singer-songwriter #1960s #music video #Häxan

One of the first songs to fit the "psychedelic" genre, Donovan recorded it in May 1966, shortly before his highly publicized arrest for possession of marijuana. The genesis of this song goes back to an evening at folk music notable Bert Jansch's house in north London, when fellow acoustic master John Renbourn showed Donovan a D ninth chord. From that Donovan built up a riff that, according to the memories of those present, he then played solidly for the next seven hours. "There was a feeling, even then, that all was not perfect in the Garden of Eden," he said of the song in an interview with Mojo magazine June 2011. "Dealers were moving into bohemia and hard drugs were on the fringes. The song was also prophetic. It was about the bust, although of course I couldn't know that then."
This song is ideal for long jams. The two main chords (A and D) are played during the verses, and during the chorus there are three chords (A, D and E). In Mojo magazine, January 2005, Donovan said: "Season of the Witch' continues to be a perennial influence because it allows a jam – not a 12-bar or Latin groove, but a very modern jam. Led Zeppelin used to warm up every day to it on the road during the soundcheck. It makes me very proud that I've created certain forms that other bands can get off on, to explore, be experimental, or just break the rules."
In the same Mojo interview, Donovan said: "I remember the bass line going down and Mickie saying, 'We've got a problem. The engineers are saying that they can't turn the bass up.' I said, Why? They said, 'Well, it's going into the red.' And so he said to the engineers, 'Look, you go into the red, I'm giving you permission. Go in the red! That's the bass sound I want. Very, very loud.' And they said, 'Well, we'll have to have a meeting.' So they went upstairs and had a meeting about whether the bass should go into the red. And they came down, they said, 'No, I'm sorry, the equipment can't stand it.' So Mickie Most said, 'Look, I've just made a record deal with your boss Clive Davis for $5 million and seven bands. And he's given me $1 million right now. So do you think if I phone him up, you'd give me a little bit more bass?' And they looked at each other, and immediately realized that their jobs were on the line. They said, 'OK, you've got more bass.' We got more bass the needle went into the red, the equipment didn't blow up. I guess next time they made that needle, they did that thing by just moving the red bit a bit farther to the right, like in Spinal Tap: 'My amp goes up to 11!'"
This song was covered by Al Kooper (Blood Sweat & Tears, The Blues Project) and Stephen Stills (Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills Nash & Young) on the historically significant 1968 album Super Session. That gives us an excuse to tell a fun story: Stills was brought in midway through recording the album to replace Mike Bloomfield (Butterfield Band, Electric Flag). Now, Kooper was originally enthusiastic to play with Bloomfield, but Bloomfield had a habit of ditching at the worst possible time. So when he showed up at Al Kooper's house, Bloomfield complained of an infected toe, then proceeded to use the most expensive crystal bowl in the house to soak his toe in. A photo of this (the toe) ended up on the back cover of the Super Session album. Then Mike Bloomfield simply disappeared in the morning, leaving only a note saying that he'd had insomnia. It wouldn't even be the last time he stood up Al Kooper! In his memoir Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards, Al Kooper mentions that he's been moved to cover this song after a trip to London, when he'd heard Donovan's "Season of the Witch" coming out of every shop on King's Road.  From: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/donovan/season-of-the-witch

Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen’s legendary silent film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages and early modern era suffered from the same ills as psychiatric patients diagnosed with hysteria in the film's own time. Far from a dry dissertation on the topic, the film itself is a witches’ brew of the scary, the gross, and the darkly humorous. Christensen’s mix-and-match approach to genre anticipates gothic horror, documentary re-creation, and the essay film, making for an experience unlike anything else in the history of cinema.  From: https://www.criterion.com/films/352-hxan

Tardigrade Inferno - Hypnotherapy For Beginners (Hypnosis)

 #Tardigrade Inferno #avant-garde metal #alternative metal #dark cabaret #Russian #music video

Tardigrade Inferno’s Mastermind is one odd duck. Put one way, this album is literally my personality written into a metal record. Put another way, it’s a circus-tent nightmare from clown hell, and Frontierer happened to play there once and left their chunky guitar tone there by accident. What sets Tardigrade Inferno apart from the only other act on the planet that I know of who sounds remotely like these Ruskies — Stolen Babies — is that their concoction of dark cabaret and metal is more straightforward and therefore way more fun. Cheesy? Hell-fucking-yeah. Yet, every microsecond of Mastermind claws deeper and deeper into my brain with every single riff or chorus or synth lead, of which there are multitudes.
Take the opening track, “All Tardigrades Go to Hell,” as the template for the album as a whole. Darya Pavlovich hosts The Greatest Show Under a Microscope with her sometimes sneering, sometimes quasi-operatic ringmastery. Maxim Belekhov and Alexander Pavlovich follow right behind with an elephantine riff that will stomp your skull flat. Keyboardist Viktor Posokhin further ensnares my imagination with eerie calliopes and buzzing synths, and drummer Andrew “Drew” [lat name redacted] provides a dynamic, albeit not at all technical, rhythmic backbone to support this colorful cannon of confetti and carnage.
Things get silly very quickly after that. “Hypnosis,” “Dreadful Song,” and “Alabama Song” maximize on Witchyworld-ready whimsy, but once again the riffs use the upbeat instrumentation as leverage to smash your face in with a Fist-in-a-Box. Instrumental “Precourse” comes next, smartly bisecting Tardigrade Inferno’s debut into two segments. In this second half, songs like “Church Asylum,” “All Pigs are the Same,” and Song o’ the Year Finalist “Mastermind” feel more story-driven and tinged with villainy, but in a playful way. Plus, you get not one but two fantastic covers: System of a Down’s “Marmalade” and “We Are Number One” from Lazy Town. Both of them are as faithful as they are absolutely ridonkulous.
Mastermind is certainly not perfect. As consistently insane as it is, it’s definitely also an acquired taste for many. At the same time, Tardigrade Inferno offer something truly rarefied in my world. I normally hate cabaret music, with very few exceptions (almost all of them found in videogames). And yet, here I am, spewing nonsense about a cabaret metal album that everyone else here will probably hate, but which I love with the burning passion of a million firecrackers. What a time to be alive!  From: https://www.angrymetalguy.com/tardigrade-inferno-mastermind-things-you-might-have-missed-2019/

Avey Tare - Uncle Donut

 #Avey Tare #Animal Collective #psychedelic folk #experimental #psychedelic pop #neo-psychedelia #electronic #freak folk #music video

The EP Conference of Birds/Birds in Disguise recreates five songs Avey Tare (aka Dave Portner) wrote and played live during his Eucalyptus and Cows on Hourglass Pond tours. Like the two solo discs—and indeed, like the recent work of Animal Collective — the songs alternate between tone-washed mystical auras and bouncy, dance-y raves. This bird-themed recording breaks down into two distinct sides. Conference of Birds — encompassing “Midnight Special,” “Red Light Water Show” and “Disc One”—has a euphoric air, whether in the dopplering guitar and distant voiced soundscapes of the opener (“Midnight Special”) or the gentle undulations of “Disc One,” the catchiest, most melodic song on the EP. “Red Light Water Show” splits the difference between hook and atmosphere with oscillating keyboard riffs that split the time in twos and fours and high chanting vocals that crest over a burble of noise and glitch.
The Birds in Disguise side runs incrementally more abrasively. Its exuberance is sweatier, more physical and less celebratory than the opening’s cerebral whoosh and hum. A wheezing buzz marks out dystopian time in “Enjoy the Change,” sounding a bit like the siren-y riff in ESG’s “UFO,” then eighth-banging percussion bumps up the tension. There’s a claustrophobic tautness in this cut very much at odds with “Disc One”’s dayglo colored joys. “Uncle Donut” dials up the rhythm further, with a syncopated cadence in percussion and chant; it is very much in line with the rave-y, drum-heavy experience of a live Animal Collective show.
Fans of Avey Tare, and of Animal Collective in general, will find much to like in this brief recording. If nothing else it’s more of what they do, which lots and lots of people like very much. Does it break down the barriers, explore new territory, redefine how you think of Avey Tare (assuming that you do think of him)? It does not. But it shimmers and envelops and bops in a satisfying way, and will perhaps, hold you until the next full length from Portner solo or his more famous band.  From: https://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/post/190124837243/avey-tare-conference-of-birdsbirds-in-disguise

The Dixie Chicks - Truth No. 2

 #The Dixie Chicks #country #bluegrass #country pop #contemporary country #country rock #Patty Griffin cover

As the summer of 2001 drew to a close, Natalie Maines invited her bandmates—the sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer—to play some bluegrass in her living room in Austin, Texas. They’d been off the road for a few years, and their plan was to hang out, catch up, and remember how good it feels to hear their voices blend in harmony, for no audience but each other. Earlier that year, they’d sued their label for withholding royalties from their first two blockbuster albums. In the years after, they’d find themselves in a righteous battle against the industry, leaving their future as a band uncertain. But for now, they were enjoying the most relaxed, unburdened creative experience of their lives.
It was Maguire on fiddle, Strayer on banjo and dobro, and Maines with a voice like a gut-punch. No amplifiers. No drums. One song Maines suggested they try was Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” a classic rock staple that Stevie Nicks wrote at the age of 27. Maines, who had just turned 27 herself, found new resonance in its words after the birth of her first child and she thought she could hear her bandmates’ voices in its bittersweet sunshower of a melody. Also on the setlist were two songs written by the folk artist Patty Griffin. One was about speaking your mind in the face of public dissent; the other was about winding up on your deathbed with a long list of regrets.
They weren’t planning on making an album. And even if they were, because of the lawsuit, they figured they couldn’t release it anyway. As the music started coming together and Maines enlisted her father, behind-the-scenes steel guitar legend Lloyd Maines, to produce the sessions, they brainstormed a couple of strategies. After the surprise success of the bluegrass soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, they thought maybe these songs would be served best in a film. They contemplated going indie. They considered breaking the mold and sharing the music directly on their website for free, a way to thank the loyal audience they’d amassed as a major breakthrough act in the late ’90s.
The two songs written by Patty Griffin, one of the band’s formative influences, serve as the heart of the album. In “Truth No. 2,” Maines belts in her powerful soprano how “you don’t like the sound of the truth coming from my mouth.” Without the direct narrative of their previous anthems, they meditate instead on the moral of these stories. Maines would become well-known for making enemies by speaking her mind; “Truth No. 2” would become the centerpiece of their songbook. The other Griffin composition, “Top of the World,” finds Maines narrating from a haze between life and death, lamenting “a whole lot of singing that’s never gonna be heard.” The arrangement is the album’s most elaborate. Its orchestral swell is punctuated with dramatic pauses that stretch it out past the six-minute mark, as if the song itself is fading in and out of consciousness. It threatens a long, eerie quiet, an afterlife to be avoided at all costs.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dixie-chicks-home/

Jon Anderson - Solid Space

 #Jon Anderson #Yes #progressive rock #progressive folk rock #symphonic prog #1970s

“I’d been thinking about Olias Of Sunhillow for a long while before I actually wrote it,” says Anderson today, speaking from his current home in San Luis Obispo, California. “When [sleeve artist] Roger Dean started creating artwork for Yes, I saw the ship he’d drawn sailing around the planet for Fragile [in 1971], and thought it was a very interesting concept.” Anderson then spent “a period of a year” composing a story about a magician/hero who rescues his people from their dying planet in a galleon-style Noah’s Ark-cum-spaceship.
In the meantime, though, his day job meant he was still busy conquering his own planet. Yes’ imperial phase began with Fragile and continued, unbroken, until 1974’s Relayer. Each of the five albums they released during this period, including the live Yessongs, went Top 10 in Britain and Top 20 in the US, with Tales From Topographic Oceans reaching No.1 at home. These figures make sense of the commercial and musical landscape in which Jon Anderson created his brain-boggling concept album. Yes were a huge hit group, so if Yes wanted time off to each make a solo album – even the drummer – their label, Atlantic Records, indulged them.
After the Yes tour, Anderson returned to the seven-bedroom country house he shared with his first wife Jenny and their children, in the Chiltern Hills, some 25 miles from London – and stayed there. “Seer Green, Buckinghamshire, was in the country, so I didn’t have to bother with the city any more,” he says. “I was surrounded by trees, birds and bees, and started living a hermit‑like existence.” Anderson went into the garage and began creating. Roger Dean’s artwork for Fragile was one inspiration; another came from the painter and mystic Vera Stanley Alder’s books, The Finding Of The Third Eye and The Initiation Of The World. Both had been published in the 1930s, but had found a new readership among the spiritually inclined pop generation – even Elvis was a fan.
“Vera Stanley Alder talked about the connection we have with the third eye,” Anderson explains, referring to the ‘invisible’ inner eye through which some believe humans can access a higher state of consciousness. Anderson, a devotee of meditation since the early 70s, regarded the third eye as “a beacon – like a radio satellite connection – to all that is divine”. Meanwhile, in The Initiation Of The World, Alder posited the theory that there had once been four “nature tribes” on the planet. “There was Negro, Asian, Oriental and Nordic,” says Anderson. “And that’s where the four tribes in Olias Of Sunhillow came from. But my four tribes were not physical tribes, but music consciousness tribes.” Anderson’s tribes – Nagranium, Asatranius, Oractaniom and Nordranious – existed, he said, “through music, rhythms and tempos”. Their planet, Sunhillow, was on the verge of collapse after a volcanic disaster. The titular hero builds a ship, the Moorglade Mover, to transport his people to a new planet. He’s helped in his endeavours by fellow magicians Ranyart, the ship’s navigator, and Qoquac, the four tribes’ appointed spokesperson.
Anderson now describes the time he spent making Olias Of Sunhillow as “going to music school”. Yes’ studio technician and live engineer Mike Dunne worked the desk, while Anderson took care of vocals, percussion, guitar, harp, Moog, sitar, flute and a Turkish lute-style instrument known as a saz. “What I learned was that you can play instruments and it works, even if you don’t play them incredibly well,” Anderson says. “You don’t have to be that good, but you can merge a guitar with a harp or a sitar or a flute and create new sounds.”
Anderson’s greatest instrument, though, was his voice, something none of his bandmates could match. Above all, Olias Of Sunhillow is a vehicle for some extraordinary vocals and lyrics. When confronted by their singer’s abstract words, Anderson’s bandmates often wondered what astral plane he was living on. But in the garage at Seer Green, he could sing what he liked, unchallenged. So much so that Anderson even created a new language for one track, Sound Out The Galleon. The lyrics, ‘Do ga riytan, sha too Raytan, gan matta sha pa, mutto matto mutto’ have always fascinated long-time Anderson watchers – especially the permanently stoned ones. “Those words were a solo for my voice,” he explains. “I couldn’t play a solo on an instrument so I used my voice instead.”
From: https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-story-behind-jon-anderson-s-debut-solo-album-olias-of-sunhillow

The Shangri-Las - Remember (Walkin' In The Sand)

 #The Shangri-Las #girl group #rock & roll #Brill Building pop #pop rock #1960s

The wild and crazy life of The Shangri-Las
While girl-group pop might stand out in that sentence like a sore cock at an orgy, there are many incarnations of the genre that disavow the commercial teeny-bopper fodder that often springs to mind when we hear that phrase. Of all the female four-pieces that sat outside of the usual status quo and spawned a revolution by doing so, the main protagonists in punks prelude were the 1960s phenoms, The Shangri-Las.
When Mary and Betty Weiss teamed up with Marge and Mary Ann Ganser, they might have dominated the commercial radio waves, but they did so on their own terms, signified in part by the fact that Marge Ganser retained her less than poppy-sounding name. This strident individualism was a central tenet that would help them on their way to stardom. One of the second key ingredients was that they had natural talent, and as Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys once said: “There is just something special about siblings harmonising.” The Shangri-Las had that in abundance, but they also worked hard at it, as Mary Weiss explains: “We rehearsed constantly until the harmonies were perfected. I think our voices blended so well because we were two sets of sisters. In a brief period of time, we had a manager, and we started doing small gigs.” Soon enough they were thrust from small shows into the headlights, a time when their youngest member, Mary, was just 15-years-old. As fate would have it, one of their first recordings was produced by George Morton, who would later produce the New York Dolls records that the singing sisters had helped inspire in the first place.
The Shangri-Las then became such an instant sensation that they were still in school when taking to the stage with the likes of James Brown and the Rolling Stones. Another act that the Shangri-Las rubbed shoulders with was the shirtless inventor of punk himself: Iggy Pop. The future incendiary frontman of the rollicking Stooges recalled: “My cover band had a professional engagement the summer that we graduated high school at a teen club called The Ponytail in northern Michigan. They served Cokes. And a lot of big acts came through. I got to play drums behind the Shangri-Las, the Crystals, the Four Tops. Learned a lot.” He then comically adds, regarding the beehive hairdo’s that group’s spiritual leader sported: “Mary, the lead singer of the Shangri-Las, had a really beautiful head of hair…and I just remember being very happy in the back you know playing ‘ts, ts, ts,’ while she was going, ‘remember, walking in the sand.'”
With iconoclastic lunatics like the young Iggy Pop tapping the drums behind them, their music had to be befittingly dark. They traversed subject matters that no typical girl group would go near, tackling motorcycle beheadings, heart failure of the spiritual bent and all the darkest pages of a teen’s diary. However, it was darkness tempered with the light touch of pop sensibilities. In short, punk followed a similar principle of finding fun in darkness, being brattish and proud, and swimming against the current of expectations. Mary Weiss will tell you herself: “The Shangri-Las were punk before punk existed. People thought we were tough.”  From: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-life-of-the-shangri-las/

Grant Lee Buffalo - Seconds

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

The first three Grant Lee Buffalo albums were insular affairs. Together, singer/guitarist Grant Lee Phillips, drummer/percussionist Joey Peters and bassist/keyboardist/producer Paul Kimble fashioned a self-sufficient musical workshop as impervious to pop fashion as a sharecropper is to the vicissitudes of life in the big city.
On Fuzzy (1993) and Mighty Joe Moon (1994), the trio rummaged through the antique art-junk of America’s attic, dressing up their garage-folk with vintage instruments and rediscovering the ancient wisdom of The Band, the Byrds, Big Star and R.E.M. along the way. It all worked to wondrous effect. But by Copperopolis (1996) — a gorgeous but unrelentingly somber song cycle — GLB sounded as if those attic walls, once valued for their windowless integrity, were beginning to close in on them. Kimble was dismissed from the band shortly thereafter.
On Jubilee, Phillips and Peters treat Kimble’s absence as a license to cut loose. The maelstrom of crunchy guitars and brisk tempos that comprise “APB”, “Change Your Tune” and “My, My, My” indicate a newfound will to rock out with raucous abandon. (Previously, rock was something GLB’s music implied more than manifested.) Even those tunes emitting the dusky pastoralism of early GLB — “SuperSloMotion”, “8 Mile Road”, “The Shallow End” — show a bit more tooth. Producer Paul Fox sometimes equates tooth with splashy, pumped-up choruses (“APB”, Truly, Truly”), and after three critically acclaimed but commercially ignored albums, the band seems bent on casting a wider net. But Fox deserves credit for bathing the band in prismatic light, thereby revealing a heretofore obscured aspect of the band. (Indeed, Fox’s production is luminous precisely where Kimble’s was tenebrous.) And, for their part, Grant Lee Buffalo never sound compromised, even when enlisting the services of such outside guests as Michael Stipe, Robyn Hitchcock and the Wallflowers’ Rami Jaffee. No, they just sound like they’re finally okay with windows — open windows — in their attic walls.  From: https://www.nodepression.com/album-reviews/grant-lee-buffalo-jubilee/

Stick In The Wheel - Roving Blade

 #Stick In The Wheel #folk #British folk #contemporary folk #folktronica #world music #indie folk

London’s Stick in the Wheel live up to their name: For the past few years they’ve been jabbing at the spokes of the English folk scene in their attempt to upend the system. With their 2015 full-length debut, From Here, they conceived of English folk music as something rooted in the past but not in the pastoral; the songs were urban instead of rural, social realist, often abrasive, and defiantly outside the folk mainstream. On traditional tunes dating back centuries as well as originals about the London riots and contemporary land-rights laws, Nicola Kearey sings in a voice that has more in common with Joe Strummer than with Shirley Collins. Co-founder Ian Carter eschews the jazzy improvisations that have defined UK folk guitar since the days of Davey Graham and Bert Jansch. Instead, he plays intricate looped rhythms that sound like he’s mimicking the beats he once created with the XL Recordings-signed electronic group Various Production. They followed up From Here with a 7” single based on 17th-century ballads, a split with the Irish band Lynched, and a collection of mostly a cappella performances recorded in the living rooms and kitchens of some of the country’s biggest folk artists. With their second album, Follow Them True, Stick in the Wheel continue their attack. About half of the album refines the acoustic folk sound of their debut, with lyrics emphasizing the pride of craftsmen and laborers as well as the desperation driving the poor. As Stick in the Wheel dig through the vast catalog of British folk music, they gravitate toward tales from the fringes of society: the destitute, the hopeless, the wronged, and the forgotten.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stick-in-the-wheel-follow-them-true/

Vartra - Sena

 #Vartra #world music #Balkan folk #Slavic folk #ethnic fusion #dark folk #tribal drum #shamanic #music video

Vartra is a collective of musicians, dancers and craftsmen based in Belgrade, Serbia, gathered around a common goal of bringing magic and mystery to the stage through a unique blend of their skills, interests and experiences. Our music is influenced by various genres, from traditional Balkan music characterized by the merging of Slavic and oriental cultures, through a variety of traditional music styles of indigenous cultures across the world, to a more harsh, industrial and dark atmospheric sound, common for genres such as doom metal. Most of our lyrics stem from old folk incantations and mantras from the Balkan area, that are sung in Serbian and Vlach languages. Our performances are enriched by utilizing handmade drums and rattles crafted by main instrumentalist and vocalist Siniša Gavrić. These instruments are made from animal skins and foraged materials from the rivers and mountains of Serbia.

The album Basma is inspired by the remnants of the South Slavic healing practices and folklore in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The lyrics in the majority of our songs are based on folklore from these areas, leaning predominantly on fragments of the spells used for healing purposes. These spells, named basma in the said areas, are the most archaic aspect of folk medicine and their power to heal illnesses, remove curses or cast away evil spirits lies in suggestive rhythmic repetition.This album was composed and recorded in the home studio of Siniša Gavrić and Ivana Stošić.

From: https://vartra.bandcamp.com/album/basma

Initially formed by Siniša Gavrić and sisters Ivana and Aleksandra Stošić, the band has extended into more of a community, brought together by an interest in world fusion music, Slavic paganism, shamanistic drumming and spirituality in general. Beside band members, integral part of the Vartra tribe are dance performers and friends dedicated to crafting costumes, accessories and stage requisites for live shows. The first debut album “Luna Nouà” was recorded at home based studio in Belgrade in 2018 and officially released on CD Baby online store in January, 2020. The band performed on multimedia arts festival Dev9t (Serbia), Exit festival (Serbia), Javorwood festival (Bosnia and Hercegovina), Elysium festival (Serbia), Lovestock festival (Croatia) and Nishville Jazz Festival (Serbia). The second album “Basma” was released in 2022 by a German publisher CPL music. “Luna nouà” was heavily focused on Vlach incantations (Eastern Serbia) while “Basma” focuses on the lyrical heritage from Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Montenegro. Their live shows are a cathartic experience, evocative of healing ceremonies and often combined with dance. Dark in a way that draws darkness out away from the spectator, Vartra’s primordial sound speaks directly to our internal rhythms and the lost ancestral wisdom that exists within all of us.  From: https://vartramusic.com/about-vartra/