The Body & Dis Fig - Coils of Kaa

US duo The Body, who have long operated in the post-apocalyptic remains of metal and noise, team up here with Dis Fig, AKA Berlin-based DJ, producer and vocalist Felicia Chen, known for her brilliantly unsettling 2019 album Purge and a subsequent full-length collab with the Bug. Here, there are times when the dub-wise feel is rather like Kevin Martin’s insectile alias at his most jaded and speaker-destroying, but even he might hold back from the hellish moods on show here. If current news events and the general state of the world are making chirpy pop or earnest heartbroken balladry seem trite, this explosively heavy album might resonate better.
Fans of the Body will be familiar with Chip King hollering in startled adrenal shock – still one of contemporary music’s best sounds – while the guitars, bass and drum programming again get pushed through the red and into the black, shaking with distortion. But Chen deepens the duo’s emotion and expands their tone. Her vocals are sometimes choral, chafing against the tracks in a beauty v beast dynamic, but she also frequently disrupts that, letting accusation seep in to crack her voice with anger.
The Body’s programmer Lee Buford has always flirted with techno, minimal wave and industrial, but Chen’s grounding in club culture seems to enhance all that, as when an analogue signal searches the wreckage of Dissent, Shame, or when Coils of Kaa settles into an almighty groove as Chen chants and taunts. Whether it’s a sludge-metal lope or a near-techno pulse, this truly awesome album’s sense of rhythm is perhaps its note of hope, suggesting a centre that just might hold even as things fall apart.  From: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/23/the-body-and-dis-fig-orchards-of-a-futile-heaven-review-awe-inspiring-music-for-heavy-times

The Youngbloods - Sham

My first-ever concert at the Fillmore East in New York City was on November 23, 1968. The headliner was Iron Butterfly, Canned Heat was the middle act and the Youngbloods opened the show. I was so excited, 16 years old and everything about the concert experience was shiny and new. Everything was great. I hadn't gotten to the point where something “sucked.” No. It was all exciting and fresh. I liked Iron Butterfly and already bought the mega-hit album In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. According to Atlantic Records executives I spoke with at one time, it was the first RIAA Gold-certified rock album. That album was given Gold record status in 1968, and eventually went double-platinum. Anyway, having taken LSD for the first time in April 1968, I will surmise that I was high on acid at this concert. What an occasion!
The opening band was the Youngbloods and I was blown away. They were riding high off their super-hippie anthem “Get Together,” which had been an FM staple for the past year. They played a song called “Darkness, Darkness” that wasn't released yet and I remember that it was haunting and beautiful. That's about all I remember except that I also loved Canned Heat and Iron Butterfly. The night was memorable because it was my introduction to the whole new world of live shows. Over the next 12 months I was able to see dozens of the world's most famous artists like the Stones. Hendrix, Blind Faith, Free, Spooky Tooth, Procol Harum, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, B.B. King, Johnny Winter, Terry Reid, Ten Years After, the Jeff Beck Group, Eric Clapton, Delaney and Bonnie, Mountain, Traffic, Led Zeppelin, the Woody Herman Orchestra, Chicago (when they were still called the Chicago Transit Authority/CTA), Pacific Gas & Electric, Lee Michaels, Janis Joplin, the Nice, Family, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Joe Cocker, NRBQ, Jethro Tull, Blues Image, Man, and the Who. The point of listing all these artists and shows is because I feel it's important to give atmospheric context to this review.
My memory was that the three bands at my first Fillmore East concert, the Youngbloods, Canned Heat, and Butterfly, were important to me at the time. My memory of this moment is such that I wanted to go back to a time. I bought the Youngbloods album Elephant Mountain when it was first released in 1969, and when I saw that it had just been re-released in an audiophile 180-gram vinyl version, I had to find out where this album stood in my emotional memory bank. I went into my record collection and found my original 1968 copy of Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and my original 1968 copy of Canned Heat’s Boogie with Canned Heat. Back in those days, if you didn't have the latest release of a band you had just seen, you bought it the next day. What did not survive my many moves between girlfriends and band relocation was Elephant Mountain. The original Elephant Mountain album came out a good six months after I saw that first show, and I couldn't wait for the re-release copy to arrive from Acoustic Sounds. I hadn't thought about the Youngbloods for many years. I could have downloaded or streamed the album but I wanted to create the entire experience again (if that was possible).
The new vinyl package came with a great six-page insert with photos and lots of historical information. First off, I learned that Charlie Daniels – yes, that Charlie Daniels – was the producer known as Charles E. Daniels at that time. Then I learned the album's seemingly free-form style was due to the band's insistence (and subsequent acquiescence by their record label RCA) that music should be a wondrous spontaneous creation full of experimental instruments and sounds never (or rarely) heard before. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was used as the example to the record label that the band should be left to record whatever they felt was right. I read all of this before I played the album. Elephant Mountain refers to the geographical area where the band was situated – Marin County. This is important to know as the band was surrounded by the newly-explosive effect of the Grateful Dead, the Airplane and all the San Francisco jam bands of the era. In the liner notes, the one band member quoted the most extensively, known as Banana (how ’60s) said that this kind of meandering jam style had no effect on the band. In fact, he went on to say that the band was part of and an extension of bands like the Lovin’ Spoonful, Buffalo Springfield, and the folk-rock scene.
OK, I finally put the album on and the opening track “Darkness, Darkness” immediately took me back to 1968 and 1969. On the plus side, lead vocalist Jesse Colin Young has a voice that sounds of the times – in the best sense. Like listening to Bob Lind’s voice on the song “Elusive Butterfly” or Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair).” Trust me, if you lived through those times the vocal vibes from these voices have a lot of meaning. Jesse’s vocals, at certain times, actually recall Janis Joplin’s at her most sincere and non-histrionic. After that opener, the band plays it all soft, however, and the recording, while very clean, lies fairly flat. For a band that says they were not part of that San Francisco jam scene, there seems to be plenty of that on this album. The liner notes tell a story that the band wrote the songs prior to recording, but as the album progresses what they may call rehearsed songs sound to me like they don't know when to stop. It is very strange that an album can contain some tightly-written material and then veer off where jamming fills a lot of space. It makes for nice background music, but I'm trying to remember if I used to play the entire album or just a track or two.
To put this in perspective, I played all the Buffalo Springfield albums in their entirety over and over, as I did with the Dead, Airplane, Love, Iron Butterfly, Canned Heat, the Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd, The Doors, etc. Bands like the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Turtles, and The Mamas & the Papas had many huge radio hits, so the albums they released were not that important to me, but all those bands had a very tight focus The Youngbloods’ Elephant Mountain, however, came at a time where you were supposed to sit around stoned out of your mind and you were supposed to groove on it. Apparently I did but got bored with it. Now, listening to it is an interesting exercise in memory retention and musical context.
The legendary Kevin Gray did the pure analog LP transfer and the sonics, given the times, are what you would expect, meaning the more you like the songs the more you will like this album. The vinyl transfer is dead quiet, but then again, so is the music, so there are not a lot of dynamics going on. My consumption of LSD, beginning in 1968 and peaking into 1970, however, made many marginal things extremely acceptable. It is in this contact that I will say that the next time I want to hear “Darkness, Darkness,” I probably will stream that song, as there is little in the musical noodling here on the rest of the album to hold my interest. Some musicians may really like the quasi-jazz leanings, as it seems that the band is trying to make a point. I'm not enough of a musician, however, to care about this as a “cool” factor. Our editor, Frank Doris, though, tells me he thinks “Ride the Wind,” which he first heard about 15 years ago, is one of the most marvelous songs he’s ever listened to. Yes, listening to the entire Youngbloods Elephant Mountain was a fun snapshot in time and fairly enjoyable, but only proves the old cliché: You can't go home again.  From: https://www.psaudio.com/blogs/copper/revisiting-the-youngbloods-em-elephant-mountain-em

Valravn - Kelling

Before I tell you about the superlative new CD by Valravn, I have to tell you what I like, and dislike, about ice storms. I'm wary of their destructive power. Trees come down, and electrical power can be disrupted. On the other hand, ice storms have a cruel beauty. The morning after a proper ice storm, the earth is crusted, and the tree branches make a strange clacking sound in the wind. The trees themselves look alien: you can see the branches, bark, and leaves through the layers of ice. And yes, this has everything to do with Koder på snor.
Valravn hail from Denmark and the Faroe Islands. The band's first, self-titled album featured electronica versions of traditional Nordic (Denmark, Faroe Islands, Iceland, Sweden) folksongs, enhanced by acoustic instruments. While interesting, and certainly danceable, Valravn had not yet fully settled into their own identity. But how the band has matured on Koder på snor. One would have to go back to Sorten Muld's landmark Mark II (1997) for the precedent of electronic treatments of Danish folk song. Further, the listener can easily be forgiven for noting parallels between lead Faroese singer Anna Katrin Egilstraoð's singing and the occasional Bjork-like whisper-to-a-scream vocalisms. Everything about Koder på snor (or "codes on a string," a tribute to the theoretical physics of string theory) is so fresh and inspired that Valravn may have released one of the more significant albums to successfully combine traditional folk elements with electronic ambiance.
String theory has evolved into an explanation that tries to show that the forces and materials of the universe are all interconnected, and it doesn't take much imagination to see that this idea is also rooted in many religions and 'alternative' lifestyles which stress the relationships between people, the earth, and all living things. Further, if you're brewing up a musical sound that is rooted in the organic and the electronic, then not treating the two soundworlds as disparate forces can result in a seamless mix. Valravn take this approach and their songs go widescreen; cinematic; elegiac; and yes, funky. The electronics envelop traditional acoustic instruments such as the hammered dulcimer, the hurdy gurdy, flutes, viola, mandola, but the beauty of the structure is still visible, like an ice-encased tree.
The band has chosen to focus on their own compositions on Koder på snor, and Valravn give themselves the time to explore their fusion. The title track goes over the seven-minute mark; beginning gently with hammered dulcimer, Anna Katrin Egilstroð's voice enters like a singsong wave. In between verses, she explores the joy of making sound, using onomatopoeia: "tip tap," "bum plum," "wish wush," "pling plang." The result is mesmerizing. Around three minutes in, we get the thudding bass of electronica, and Valravn ramp the tune up before returning to the comparative innocence of the dulcimer. This is dance music, but weightless; you forget your body, and just follow the stream.
The traditional Faroese tune "Kelling" starts with "Hag lies on the doorstep, dead/Cannot eat nor butter nor bread" and quickly turns into a storming dance tune, with viola gliding over relentless percussion, both electronic and live. Giddy and infectious, the vocals drop out, returning over a skittering beat, stuttering and with the call "Statt upp og dansa! (Stand up and dance)," Valravn hit their crescendo. That hag might be dead, but this tune is totally alive! There's a very traditional feel to the band's own "Seersken," recalling Hedningarna in their glorious frenzied electronic experiments; it is difficult to resist the interplay of the flute, groaning beat, and tribal percussion that animates this composition. And finally, the Valravn again throw caution to the wind on their epic "Farin uttan at verða vekk," complete with a choir that sails over deep cello sounds, dulcimer, and sparkling electronic landscape.  From: https://www.rootsworld.com/reviews/valravn09.shtml  

Joe Jackson - Another World

Joe Jackson's detour into the '40s sounds of Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway on 1981's Jumpin' Jive should have made clear that he was more than just another of the new wave's "angry young men." If not, then Night and Day was here to help. Jackson's fifth album set the scene in June 1982 with a stylish art deco cover and a Cole Porter-inspired title. He was making grown-up music now, mixing sophisticated pop, a dash of salsa, chamber music, Eastern modes and splashes of jazz. Still, Jackson shied away from the idea that any of it was meant to be backward-looking.
"I'm not a nostalgist," Jackson told The New York Times back then. "Since I wasn't born until 1954, how could I be nostalgic for a time I never lived in? The music I make is for the moment – for 1982." He'd adopted New York City as a home base when not on tour, and Night and Day pulsed with its energy and rhythms, its passions and its sins. The LP lacked the nervy musical attitude of 1979's Top 20 U.S. hit Look Sharp!, but that didn't mean it was without edges. There was just more to Jackson's musical vision.
"Rock 'n' roll is too narrow and limiting. That's why I've been trying to make connections with earlier traditions," Jackson told the Times. "There's so much about rock 'n' roll tradition that I hate. The idea of 'hope I die before I get old,' for instance. For me, whatever golden age there was in rock is definitely long gone. People have weird ideas about the history of rock. They think it came suddenly out of nowhere, and they're absolutely wrong. That's what Jumpin' Jive was about. Louis Jordan's jump-blues was a huge influence on Chuck Berry and Bill Haley."
At first, it seemed as if Jackson had lost his audience with this latest musical turn. He impishly released the complex and moving "Real Men" – a song that takes a cutting look at gender roles – as the LP's first single, then watched it fail to break the Top 90 in his native U.K. "Real Men" didn't even chart in the U.S. But then came "Steppin' Out," with its twinkling piano flourishes, stirring mechanical rhythms and soul-lifting lyrics. The single promptly went to No. 6, helping Night and Day become Jackson's only Top 5 smash in both the U.S. and U.K.
The momentum carried Jackson's impossibly sad ballad "Breaking Us in Two" into the Billboard Top 20, while "Steppin' Out" garnered Grammy nominations for Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance. Jackson suddenly found himself on a much bigger stage, figuratively and literally. "The pinnacle of it was Madison Square Garden in 1984," Jackson told the Times Colonist in 2016, "which pulled about 8,000 people." But this iconoclast's iconoclast wasn't celebrating the achievement. "A lot of people were congratulating me, saying, 'You've made it,'" Jackson added, "and I was thinking: 'Get me out of here.' I hated it."
He proceeded to dive deeper still into this LP's jazzier elements on the subsequent Body and Soul, bringing in bright brass and even deeper subject matter, and then placing it all behind a smoky album cover that deftly played off 1957's Sonny Rollins, Vol. 2. In keeping, his commercial momentum began to dissipate. Still, in Jackson's mind, all of this made thematic sense.
"I think that the thread going through it is just me," he told Alan Sculley in 2001. "It's my personality and my voice and putting different elements together. I think you just see different sides of it on different albums." Unfortunately, there were still those who pined for the lean post-punk joys of Look Sharp! and 1979's I'm the Man. Those days, however, were long past – and, for Jackson, happily so. "Believe it or not, I'm still getting reviews where people call me the angry young man of British new wave," he told the Times in 1982. "People latch on to one image so they don't have to think, and that kind of laziness has come to characterize the whole music scene these days."  From: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/joe-jackson-night-and-day/

Ethel Cain - God's Country (feat. Wicca Phase Springs Eternal)

A few weeks ago, Hayden Anhedönia fainted mid-show. The 25-year-old songwriter and musician, who in the past year and a half has found sudden fame under the stage name Ethel Cain, was performing at the Sydney Opera House. Halfway through the fan-favourite A House in Nebraska, she realised something was wrong. “Every time I belted, I felt a little bit dizzier,” she recalls. “Right as I was going into the second chorus, I was like: ‘Here we go.’” And then: lights out.
The Pittsburgh-based Anhedönia stresses that the incident was “nothing serious … I’m used to being alone in a quiet, isolated environment – I’m kind of a low-energy, low-vibration, low-stamina person to begin with – so let’s just say I’m very out of shape,” she says. But the incident sent a ripple through her huge fanbase, who had begun tweeting and posting footage shortly after it happened. “I kind of just sat in a room for six years making music, and then suddenly I was on the road all the time,” she says. “Usually I’m able to, like, grip the mic stand and kind of push through, but Sydney night two, it was like, ‘Nope, you flew too close to the sun with that one.’”
Passing out at the Opera House was a capstone on 12 months that have served as a kind of crash course in alternative pop stardom for Anhedönia – even if she never really wanted to be a pop star to begin with. Raised in a Southern Baptist family in small-town Florida, she was homeschooled and raised listening to Christian music. As a teenager, she discovered pop, and became enamoured of the music of Florence + the Machine; she became active on Twitter and Tumblr, and started making friends online. She moved out of home at 18 and, at 20, came out as a trans woman. Shortly after, she began releasing music as Ethel Cain, a character inspired by southern gothic, horror films, and the religious trauma of Anhedönia’s own upbringing.
After building up a small, dedicated fanbase with a series of EPs released in 2019 and 2021, Anhedönia truly broke through into the alternative mainstream with 76-minute epic Preacher’s Daughter. Released last May, it tells the story of the Ethel Cain character, a gnarly tale of abuse and cannibalism that, somehow, became one of the year’s biggest pop breakouts, and a mainstay in critics’ end of year lists. Touching on hazy ambient music, gothic country and doom metal, many of its songs stretch out to the 10-minute mark, with no choruses or discernible hooks. Its calling-card single, American Teenager, is a heartland rock anthem that feels indebted to Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen, but most other songs, like the pulverising Gibson Girl or the glacially paced Thoroughfare, seem to exist at the intersection of Lana Del Rey, the ambient folk artist Grouper, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor at their most grinding.
And yet, the album struck a chord, winning Anhedönia a colossal, adoring fanbase, despite the relative density of the actual music. At the time of the album’s release, Anhedönia told the New York Times that she was happy to “play Miss Alt-Pop Star and … parade myself around” if it meant that she would be able to build a sustainable career. A year later, she seems less sure. Zooming from her bedroom in Pittsburgh, perched on a desk chair in a forest green hoodie, in front of a window that’s been blacked-out with a blanket, she says that she “would really love to have a much smaller fanbase, and kind of go back to where I was aiming for ahead of time” instead of the intense scrutiny – positive and negative – she faces now.
Part of Anhedönia’s popularity – she has nearly 300,000 Instagram followers, and was the face of recent Givenchy, Miu Miu and Marc Jacobs campaigns – can be attributed to the fact that she is extremely internet literate, and became known online for a sharp Twitter feed on which she participated in jokes and memes about her public image. It soon began to feel as if she was “a dancing monkey in a circus. It’s very like, ‘Oh, she’s so funny on Twitter, she’s so relatable’ and then it becomes this big weird joke cycle,” she says. Although she stresses that she loves the support and adoration of her fans, she says it can become demoralising to not have her art met on the level she’d like it to be: “Don’t get me wrong, laughter and memes and jokes are always really fun. But when you want to post something to be consumed seriously, people are still joking – and then you get like, thousands of comments that are like, ‘silly goose’. All of a sudden, you start to feel like you can’t turn off the memeable internet personality thing.”
Live, Anhedönia is a captivating, remarkable performer: during a show at the London club Omeara last year, you could hear a pin drop as she shepherded an audience of thrilled young fans through her largely hushed setlist. But at concerts, Anhedönia will sometimes be trying to perform her quietest, most intimate songs, only to have people yell jokes at her, breaking the spell. “I had a show recently where I was singing the really quiet intro to Sun Bleached Flies,” she recalls. “I went to hold a fan’s hand and they began sort of screaming, ‘I didn’t even know who you were two weeks ago, I found you through a meme on TikTok.’ It’s almost like heckling. I don’t think any of them are mean spirited, but it’s a little jarring.”
Earlier this month, she deleted her Twitter, leaving fans aghast. “I always kind of conflated openness with honesty and I thought that if I was completely transparent and bared every aspect of my soul that people would think I was relatable and kinda cool,” she says. “Then I was like, I don’t want to know you. I don’t want to be friends with you. I don’t want to have all of my personal business and every innermost thought just out there on the internet for the world to see.”
Another part of the reason Anhedönia pulled back from social media was the way that her fans began to demand access not just to her, but to her friends and family. “I really had no idea the full nature of my success until I had those closest to me kind of half-joking, half actually kind of complaining, being like: ‘People are DMing me and asking me questions about you and trying to become my friend only to find out months later that they’re really just trying to get to you through me,’” she says. “I always thought that success would exist in a vacuum for me but it did start to affect my family. And my closest friends and even just acquaintances of mine. I’m not Britney Spears, but it was noticeable for them and it created a really weird dynamic between us for a while.”
Part of the problem, Anhedönia thinks, is the fact that she is often classed as a pop artist, and therefore becomes part of the stan economy, wherein teens treat female artists “like fantasy football teams”, arguing “about streams and stats and followers and almost using them as like Pokémon to fight each other.”
Right now, aside from an impending tour, Anhedönia is living the quiet life in Pittsburgh – “I just sit in my cave all day and write or embroider, watch a movie, play a game. My friends and I will go to the woods or a river, anywhere there’s not a lot of people” – and working on the follow-up to Preacher’s Daughter. “I’m trying to push my own envelope a bit. I’m trying to be super intentional about it and careful and dedicated and meticulous. Some of the songs I’m proudest of are on this project.”
Still, she is conscious of where her music goes, and says “no to most opportunities … I’ve been asked to share some stages with some artists, I’ve been asked to sing on some songs with some big artists, and I just had to say no, because I don’t want to be up there with them, I really don’t,” she says. “ I really do want to reiterate how grateful I am for everyone who’s ever said a nice word about my music. But I really think there can be too much of a good thing – there’s just some levels of success that I really don’t want for myself.”  From: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jul/07/ethel-cain-preachers-daughter-interview

Imperial Jade - The Call

If you’re a fan of classic rock from the 60s and 70s I think Imperial Jade needs no further introduction. Meanwhile, due to a relatively short career of the band, here follows a short intro to this ambitious Spanish band. Imperial Jade is a bluesy classic hard rock quintet formed in Barcelona in 2012. In November 2015 their first record Please Welcome Imperial Jade saw the daylight, being a bombastic entrance to the scene of hard rock. The new 2019 album On The Rise shows the band honing their sound in an almost cinematic quality adding further contrasts to their aforementioned style. On The Rise consists of 10 ordinary and 2 bonus tracks, all recorded by using modern technologies and tools while keeping the rehersal effects and this bluesy feeling like in the good old days. It feels organic yet defined and charming at the same time. It is somehow based on the melodies that are easy to be understood and assimilated, sober instrumental parts and good commanding vocals.
This bluesy and soulful feeling is best exemplified on the songs like a guitar driven “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” and due to the accessible melodies of “Dance”. The opening track “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” is high energy and soul packed track while the band successfully blends elements of a solid Country Rock on the song titled “Sad For No Reason”. “Glory Train” and “Heat Wave” both continues this characteristic upbeat, feel good tempo and vibe. “The Call’ is yet another completely different track which starts very psychedelic, but further on develops. In other words, it is a varied release but still within classic and heavy blues rock waters. On The Rise is a very successfully evolved and non derivative record that will please all fans of the band and the genre in general. Esp. recommended for those into Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Deep Purple, Airbourne, Alice Cooper etc.  From: https://www.metal-revolution.com/reviews/imperial-jade-on-the-rise

Lone Justice - Live at The Palace, Los Angeles, CA 1984 / Live at The Ritz 1985 / Live on German TV 1987

 Lone Justice - Live at The Palace, Los Angeles, CA 1984

 

Lone Justice - Live at The Ritz 1985 - Part 1

Lone Justice - Live at The Ritz 1985 - Part 2

Lone Justice - Live on German TV 1987

Back in 1985 ‘The Elite’ to me was anyone with access to MTV or a video cassette recorder, or both. Exploring new music was not easy, you could read about new bands in the weekly inkies, but getting to hear them was another matter. So thank heavens for Whistle Test. By ’85 it had dropped the ‘Old Grey’ and my memories are of Hepworth and Ellen and that young buck Andy Kershaw. REM were getting some airplay and they had impressed me so much that my attention was pricked by any mention of Athens, Georgia or ‘the Paisley Underground’. And a mid-evening Whistle Test appearance of a band in plaid pretty assured their guitar and my heartstrings were beating a similar rhythm. And so I marvelled at the Long Ryders and was bowled over by Rain Parade. Soon I was searching for the records by the likes of Beat Farmers, Dream Syndicate, Green on Red, and Let’s Active.
And so it was one evening I first saw Lone Justice. Big things, it seems, were anticipated for this band. They had been signed to Geffen, had Jimmy Iovine produce their debut album and had been raved about by Linda Ronstadt. Not only that but, we were told, lead singer Maria McKee was the half-sister of Brian MacLean from Love! To be honest, at the time, I had no idea what that meant, but it was said in such a way that this seemed like a CV-deal-clincher. They performed, the ‘big two’ – ‘Sweet, Sweet Baby (I’m Falling)’ and ‘Ways To Be Wicked’ songs from their upcoming debut release. The latter had been written by Tom Petty and Mike Campbell. They were a couple of tunes that showed that in McKee the band were fronted by someone with a perfectly suited country rock voice; all power and inflection. And she looked the part too, tossed strawberry blond curls, floaty dresses, motorcycle boots and a worn telecaster. What was there not to love? I did, and as I always did in those days, I rushed to HMV in my lunch hour the next day and bought the album.
And here is the thing – at the time it did not feel great. The rock songs were mixed with some rushed country – ‘East of Eden’, ‘After the Flood’, ‘Working Late’. The singing was great, the playing was great but it felt odd. Maybe this was because, at the time, I had no idea I was into Americana. I knew I liked some things (see list of bands above) but I had little notion of the boundaries or possibilities of the genre. To be frank, I didn’t know it was a genre. Neither, it seems did many others. The common agreement is that the band were over-hyped and could not possibly live up to expectations. I saw them play a mid-afternoon slot at Wembley Stadium on U2’s ‘Joshua Tree’ tour where a weak sound system and lights lost in the afternoon sun did them no favours. The band fractured with McKee and guitarist Ryan Hedgecock recruiting two new members and recording a new album – ‘Shelter’. This time Iovine was joined in production duties by another big name in Steve Van Zandt who also wrote some of the material. It was more mainstream than the debut but again bombed. This time I saw them at the Leeds Warehouse where they put on a fabulous energy packed show. The band broke soon after, the final track of ‘Shelter’, the McKee written ‘Dixie Storms’ was an indicator of the more epic solo material she would produce next and she is perhaps best known for her UK Number one hit ‘Show Me Heaven’.
So why, after a tale of woe are they my choice for the A-Z? Looking back now it seems that Lone Justice were a band (no pun) out of time. We were not ready for them; the geography of Americana was too new – just like fusion food, we provincials were a little too used to our tastes. What was perceived as a weakness then – that they satisfied neither rock nor country audiences is no longer a millstone. Indeed, it has become the USP of Blackberry Smoke whose ‘Too Country for Rock, Too Rock for Country’ T-shirts are a defiant shout against pigeonholing – you will see them at Luke Combs concerts as easily as at Monster Trucks (and this year at the Download festival).
Lone Justice deserve a reappraisal, had they been around now I have little doubt that a night headlining the Roundhouse would come as no surprise to anyone.  From: https://americana-uk.com/americana-to-z-lone-justice

The Smiths - Girlfriend In A Coma

At the tail end of 1987, the kings of indie-pop released their fourth and final studio album Strangeways, Here We Come a little over a year after their masterpiece The Queen is Dead. We at Melophobe certainly did not hold back with our praises with that record being one of the five albums to receive a perfect 10/10 score from us. Between the two final studio albums, two unique compilation albums were also released showcasing a handful of unreleased tracks rather akin to the style of The Queen is Dead with Panic and Ask at the forefront. In the Smiths final go at it, they seemingly tried to separate themselves from the jangle-pop sound which at this point, went hand in hand with the perception of The Smiths sound as a whole. To their credit, this album definitely exhibits a stylistic evolution, and has a sound more so in the alternative rock family (although it’s still an oceans width away from the alternative rock sound of R.E.M or The Pixies) than the indie pop family, at least in the context of the Smiths sound. All in all though, Strangeways, Here We Come was a great and largely under-appreciated record at a time when the alternative rock world was very malleable.
The room filling keyboards and microphone effects which kick off the album on A Rush and Push and the Land Is Ours set the stage for a stylistically different sound than the previous studio album; in fact, there are no guitars at all in this song. The Smiths with no guitars!? And the best part is, they nailed it. Although Johnny Marr is not wielding his 6 string on this song, Andy Rourke still lays down a great bassline raising the question, why do all The Smiths basslines go so hard? Following the guitar free opening track, fear not, Marr bluntly comes back in with a more classic sounding guitar forward song with I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish.
The star child track from the final studio album (at least to the masses) was the lead off single Girlfriend In a Coma. Short, sweet, and very concise, this song just shows what the Smiths do well - jangly, indie pop. No matter how hard they may have tried to separate themselves from that tag, they are just so iconic and good with that sound. The lead-off single finds itself with nostalgic, almost medieval sounding English folk melodies played so gracefully by Johnny Marr on his acoustic guitar. Although it may not be well noticed, and it certainly has not been talked about much, the bright indie folk sounds of this song were decades ahead of its time with the indie folk scene not popping off until the early 2000’s. For me though, it's the musically interesting third track on the album Death of a Disco Dancer that steals the show with its massive outro and interesting guitar work almost akin to what you might expect from a band like Radiohead. The Smiths had never released a song quite like Death of a Disco Dancer and although they made the sound their own in their unique Smiths fashion, that was a seemingly experimental and out of left field fantastic track.
The impact The Smiths had on indie and alternative music really cannot be overstated. They made it sexy, they made it accessible but most importantly, they were really good musicians. No one is saying Strangeways is The Queen is Dead, but it is great in its own right and allowed The Smiths to branch out a tad more before they vanished into the sunset. The legacy of The Smiths lives on today in the indie world, and is not going anywhere anytime soon. Just as most of what The Smiths have released, the songs hold up today as strong as ever.  From: https://www.melophobemusic.com/post/the-smiths-strangeaways-here-we-come-retrospective-review

Solstice - Bulbul Tarang - Live at Grand Chapel Studios

Thankfully, I chose to listen to (for the first time) Light Up in the morning. I wrote the review from that wonderful listening perspective. I did it because this wonderful album sounds like a bright, morning wake-up call. A soft, simple awakening to a summer or spring day (even though it’s winter, as I write this review). Light Up will be released January 13th, 2023 and it follows in the footsteps of Solstice’s very successful release, Sia, from 2020. Solstice is not a new band. They have been around since founder Andy Glass, who plays lead guitar, assembled the band in 1980 with violinist Marc Elton. But the band has a new sound and a relatively new voice, that of Jess Holland on lead vocals (she joined in 2020). Jess recently was voted amongst the top Female Vocalist of 2022 from Prog Magazine’s Reader’s Poll. Jenny Newman plays a mean fiddle and violin, Peter Hemsley plays explosive drums, Steven McDaniel plays amazing keyboards and Robin Phillips plays bass.
Light Up is a wonderful album to review as a first album of 2023. It will be a great year if more of the releases that I expect this year will fulfill expectations as well as Solstice have with Light Up. This band begins with one of the best voices from across the Atlantic. Jess sings in the title track,“Light Up”: “Let the morning in and the day begin. Wash the night away. There’s a place in here. She will keep you near. Don’t look the other way. Let the new light in. And begin again. Find another way. Here’s a place to start. Listen to your heart. See a brighter day. Give your heart away”. What a wonderful way to start a new year, eh? I think so. Love this song - already one of my favourites for the early new year.
Solstice was also voted one of the top progressive bands of 2022 by that same Prog Magazine Reader’s Poll. And it is no wonder. They are a dynamic band of musicians which provide a jazzier, Canterbury style of prog which is simply amazing. Andy Glass looks and at times sounds like one of my favourite guitarists, Steve Howe of Yes, and Jenny Newman on fiddle and violin make this band one to be reckoned with for the future of progressive rock music. And, even though this is an EP, the tracks are long enough and full of enough beautiful music to make this compilation fit well within the composition of most of the classic and modern progressive albums that you may already know, own and love.
“Wongle No. 9”, is no “Bungle in the Jungle”. Instead, it’s what might happen if Yes was to play alongside Steely Dan live. Truly inspirational in every way. Absolutely powerful jazz prog. You can dance to it. When was the last time you could say that about prog? I can definitely hear in this music how this band was so successful on the festival circuit this past summer with songs like this one. Andy’s cutting electric guitar soloing, Jenny Newman’s ripping violin solo, Jess Holland’s clear vocals, Peter Hemsley’s perfect drum beat, and Steven McDaniel’s radiant keyboards keep this musical train running at top speed. Speaking of Yes, Robin Phillips brings back memories of Chris Squire on bass. Such a great follow up to the title track and EP opener.
Then they hit you with Jenny Newman coming at you full speed with fiddle, the likes of which you probably haven’t heard since Charlie Daniels’ “Devil Went Down to Georgia” which lit up the amps and speakers back in the 1970s. “Mount Ephraim” also has some fantastic bass fun from Robin Phillips who keeps good pace with Newman and Hemsley’s solid drum beat. McDaniel’s adds some soft keys along with Glass’ guitar soloing. Jess sings around midway through this instrumental extravaganza. She takes the song higher and adds words to this wonderful fiddle symphony. A beautiful symphony of sound that just takes you over.
“Run” is absolutely not what you were expecting from that title. After all this cool, relaxing music, I don’t think anyone wants to run. But that is not what Jess and the band are talking about here. In fact, it is a confident, calm statement that, if you call, Jess will come running home. A beautiful keyboard and solo guitar statement, with Newman’s violin and soft drumming. Beautiful, and so wonderfully calming. Keep this one near, with a glass of wine and soft light, at the end of the evening. After all the work, or the things that you do during the day, sit back, relax and enjoy this song. “Home” is another wonderful instrumental journey for the band with Jess’ soft vocals adding to the sound. Home is where everyone’s heart is, and the band knows it to be true. This song encompasses everything we all appreciate about where we love to live, wherever that is. We all wish we were going home. Another wonderful Glass and Newman soloing experience. Just sit back and let them dazzle you again!
“Bulbul Tarang” is a string instrument from Punjab, which evolved from the Japanese taishōgoto, which likely arrived in South Asia in the 1930s. Andy Glass uses it to full extent on this exquisite piece of music to close the album. The harp-like sounds at the opening immediately remind you of some of the wonderful music off one of your favourite Yes albums. But this innovation is Glass’ and Solstice at their best. However, the comparisons are fair. This song sounds like something that Jon Anderson, Steve Howe and Chris Squire may have thought of and that is meant only as a compliment. However, Newman’s violin adds an Eddie Jobson-like feel to the atmospheric sound. Jess, at times, sounds like Jon Anderson on, say, “Onward”, or something off Tormato, Jon’s solo albums, or the ones with Vangelis. What a beautiful way to close this album. Steven McDaniel, finally gets front stage, with a beautiful, soft, piano solo. I wish it was longer, but as Pete Townshend sings, sometimes “a little is enough”.
Light Up is already one of my early year, favorite prog albums. There is a lot more to come this year, but Solstice has grabbed my ears early. This should definitely make my top 10 Prog albums of the year. Everything you could want and imagine out of a progressive rock album. Blistering, Hackett/Howe-like guitar solos, keyboards that melt your heart, great bass and drums, and a wonderful voice, as well as something more. Something that you didn’t expect. Violin to make you want to come back for more. Not Kansas-like violin. A unique and music enhancing violin sound.  From: https://www.solsticeprog.uk/reviews/light-up

The Flying Burrito Brothers - Christine's Tune

The Flying Burrito Brothers were a country rock band which formed in 1968 in Los Angeles, California. The band’s original lineup consisted of Chris Hillman (vocals, guitar), Gram Parsons (vocals, guitar), Chris Ethridge (piano, bass) and Sneaky Pete Kleinow (pedal steel guitar). Later members of from the band’s initial existence included Eddie Hoh (drums), Jon Corneal (drums), Bernie Leadon (guitar, vocals), Michael Clarke (drums) and Rick Roberts (vocals, guitar). The group originally disbanded in 1972 following Hillman’s departure. Kleinow and Ethridge instigated a reformation of the band in 1975 which continued through 1984. The band was reformed once again in 1985 and were disbanded for a final time in 2001.
The band best known as the “Flying Burrito Brothers” actually ‘borrowed’ their name from the original “Flying Burrito Brothers”, composed of bassist Ian Dunlop and drummer Mickey Gauvin, bandmates of Parsons from the Boston-based International Submarine Band, plus any of a loose coalition of musicians, including Parsons himself from time to time. In a deliberate choice of focusing on just creating and playing music without the distractions of the music industry, in 1968 the original Brothers moved from Los Angeles to New York City. From this base they continued to tour the Northeast playing their eclectic traditional/rockabilly/blues/R&B-oriented version of rock, using the name “The Flying Burrito Brothers East” after Parsons’ group became famous.
Meanwhile, on the West Coast, Parsons and guitarist/mandolinist/bassist/vocalist Chris Hillman thought this same moniker would be perfectly suited to the band they had been dreaming of since early 1968, when, as members of Roger McGuinn’s band The Byrds, they created one of the first country-oriented rock albums, Sweetheart of the Rodeo. They immersed themselves in their vision in their house in the San Fernando Valley, dubbed “Burrito Manor”, even replacing their wardrobe with a set of custom country-Western suits from tailor to the C&W stars, Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors (Parsons’s had marijuana leaf embroidery) and began a period of intensely fruitful creativity. At this juncture, the band also included pianist/bassist Chris Ethridge and pedal steel guitarist “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow.
Their first album The Gilded Palace of Sin (1969) did not sell terribly well, being a radical departure from anything most of the record-buying public (either rock or country) had ever seen, but the group had a cult following which included several famous musicians, such as Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones. Parsons soon became friends with Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones and left the group after 1970’s Burrito Deluxe, which also saw the departure of Ethridge and addition of guitarist/dobro player/vocalist Bernie Leadon and drummer Michael Clarke (of The Byrds). Rick Roberts replaced Parsons and released a self-titled album with the group in 1971. Kleinow then left to become a session musician and Leadon joined The Eagles. Al Perkins and Roger Bush replaced them, and Kenny Wertz and Byron Berline joined as well, releasing The Last of the Red Hot Burritos (1972), a live album. The band fell apart. Hillman and Perkins joined Manassas, while Berline, Bush and Wertz formed Country Gazette. Roberts reassembled a new group for a 1973 European tour, and then began a solo career before forming Firefall with Michael Clarke.
As Gram Parsons’s influence and fame grew, so did interest in the Flying Burrito Brothers, leading to the release of Honky Tonks (1974), a double album, and the recreation of the band by Kleinow and Ethridge in 1975. Floyd “Gib” Gilbeau, Joel Scott Hill and Gene Parsons (no relation to Gram) also joined, and the band released Flying Again that year. Ethridge was then replaced by Skip Battin for Airborne (1976), followed by an album of unreleased early material, Sleepless Nights. For the next few decades, the group released albums and toured and had a country hit with “White Line Fever” (1980, a cover by Merle Haggard) and then became the Burrito Brothers. Headed by prolific songwriter and ace guitarist John Beland and Gib Guilbeau, and normally featuring Sneaky Pete, this incarnation scored moderately well on the Country charts in the early 1980s. Through numerous incarnations (including Brian Cadd for a time), the band released albums and toured throughout the 1980s up till 2001 when John Beland “officially” ended FBB. While the bands work during the 1980-1999 period was exceptional, after 1984 none of the many releases had any chart impact. Sneaky created a Burritos spinoff in his new band Burrito Deluxe, which featured Carlton Moody on lead vocals and Garth Hudson from The Band on keyboards. While a good band, there has never been any real continuity with the true Burritos and this group can not be considered anything more than a spinoff. Pete however, left the band due to illness in 2005, leaving no direct lineage to the original masters.  From: https://thevogue.com/artists/the-flying-burrito-brothers/

L'Rain - Two Face

On her piercing self-titled 2017 debut as L’Rain, Brooklyn artist Taja Cheek sifted through the aftermath of her mother’s death with roaming sensitivity. Intimate field recordings, tape loops, and fragmented harmonies resembled loose sketches, yet L’Rain’s scattered structure framed an astounding, up-close document of grief. Fatigue, Cheek’s second album, once again looks inward, but this time allows more light into the corners. It’s a graceful record whose wearied landscapes of synth, air horn, strings, and saxophone distill a suite of low moods—depression, regret, and fear—into resilience and hope.
“What have you done to change?” demands Buffalo alt-rock artist Quinton Brock on Fatigue’s blaring opener, “Fly, Die,” a question that weighed heavily as Cheek put this music together. The album’s nonlinear framework replicates the elliptical way the mind works through intense emotions, twisting in different formations until it fractures into a breakthrough. Some of these diffuse songs evolved out of voice memos Cheek made for herself or in collaboration with others, but while her music can be intentionally illegible, it’s never unapproachable. Fatigue’s swirling blend of orchestral groans and human whispers evoke a state of subconscious drift where self-growth is nurtured in real time. It’s a way of taking stock of the bruises of life.
Cheek and co-producer Andrew Lappin’s work is painterly and methodical, daubing vocal loops over clattering percussion, sweeping strings, and resonant synths to create a shapeshifting strain of experimental pop. On the shattering standout “Blame Me,” she sings in a nimble voice over fingerpicked guitar: “You were wasting away, my god/I’m making my way down south.” Jon Bap and Anna Wise’s background vocals form an armature of strength as Cheek’s words grow more woeful: “Fought my demons until you were old—maybe ’cause you love me/Thinking ’bout it lately: future poison-blooded little babies.” Wherever Cheek goes on Fatigue, the ghosts of regret and trauma follow closely behind, an emotional state that colors the album in foreboding shades even as she creates space to recover and improve.
Like L’Rain, Fatigue is marbled with personal recordings: Dishes being washed in the sink beneath a piano melody on “Need Be,” a voicemail from her mother buried in “Blame Me.” The clips imbue the music with fleeting traces of closeness and familiarity. Cheek approaches them from a distance, recontextualizing some of the most heartfelt or difficult moments of her life in song. The mercurial, six-minute highlight “Find It” begins downcast, with a metronomic synth loop and the repeated mantra, “Make a way out of no way.” Screams echo through the sluggish beat as coming through a wall; the dust settles on an organist and singer performing the gospel song “I Won’t Complain,” recorded at the funeral of a family friend. Cheek intones over it until the song crests in a rapturous, overwhelming finale, with no less than 13 musicians contributing to the commotion. It’s easily the most poignant song she has ever made, a deeply felt, Biblically minded portrait of forging a path out of darkness. Yet the journey has room for lightness and humor, too, like the “oops” that slips into the end of “Walk Through” or the wacky vocal affect of a former roommate on “Love Her.” On the brief “Black Clap” and the rhythmic, low-lit “Suck Teeth,” Cheek incorporates the percussive sounds of a handclap game she made up with multi-instrumentalist Ben Chapoteau-Katz, a way to pay tribute to the joyful sound of childhood hand games played by Black girls.
Cheek upends expectations in more direct pop and dance traditions, too. On “Two Face,” a roving piano line and stuttering samples melt into a soulful, psychedelic throb as she ruminates on a failed friendship. “I can’t build no new nothing no new life no new nothing for me,” she trills in a singsong cadence, the words bouncing over oscillated coos. The lyrics on the tense “Kill Self” are even more unforgiving: “Did you see me chew myself out?” she asks, voice rippling in a cascade over shuffling percussion. “Hear the gnawing?” At once the album’s darkest and most propulsive moment, “Kill Self” eventually assumes a seething dancefloor pulse, bending skillfully toward structure without abandoning Cheek’s wandering impulses.
Fatigue ends with the beatific “Take Two,” a spare reconfiguration of “Bat” from L’Rain. She repurposes the song in a similar way to her field recordings, as raw material to mold into an unfamiliar shape. Stripped bare of percussion and transformed into an airy, droning spiritual, Cheek’s voice unfurls in billowy, Auto-Tuned tones as she repeats the words, “I am not prepared for what is going to happen to me.” In her skyward voice, the sentiment is more life-affirming than terrifying, suggestive of infinite possibilities. There is no fixed road toward healing, Fatigue reassures us; there is only the way forward.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lrain-fatigue/

Psychedelic Porn Crumpets - Mr. Prism

Perhaps more than in any other country – although there is fierce competition – Australia’s music culture is linked to the outdoors and festivals. A place of vast expanses and desirable weather will do that. Considering the enormity of the country too, a national tour can feel like a world tour, certainly in the sense of exhaustive travelling. Bands from the country – Spacey Jane, Ocean Alley, Skeggs, or DMA’s for example – thrive in the live setting, their years defined by festival slots and incessant gigs. Australian music is also indelibly linked to psychedelic rock, from psych revival bands in inner Melbourne to the idyllic revivalists from the coastal towns. Tame Impala and King Gizzard may have taken it to the world, but Australia’s psych-rock tradition thrives supremely on its own. Psychedelic Porn Crumpets adhere to both of these things: they are ferocious performers and festival favourites, and they also bang out psych-rock hits at an alarming rate. It’s fortunate, then, that their country’s superior handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that the Crumpets’ hazy tunes can be enjoyed outside as touring slowly but surely returns to Australia, for their songs are designed to be heard from within a messy moshpit or under the sun.
New album SHYGA! The Sunlight Mound opens with “Big Dijon”, a soothing swirl of contemplative rhythm, its lyrics inane psychedelic nonsense about a curious aardvark. Once that’s out of the way, the unceasing energy begins. The Perth band can appear ridiculous to an outsider – just consider their band name – but behind the whimsy and the folly is genuine technical ability. Harbouring their love of The Beatles and Black Sabbath, they spin it into relentless turbo-charged guitar riffs and earnest melodies. That love of the Fab Four shines during the shimmer melody of “Mango Terrarium” or the Sgt. Pepper’s-lite “Glitter Bug” and “More Glitter”. Before those, “Hats Off To The Green Bins” is a delightful ode to hastily cleaning a decrepit share house before a landlord arrives to inspect. The first half of SHYGA! contains most of the sharper hits, while the guitars on the second half are allowed to roam looser and longer. Apart from a few tracks like the interlude “Round The Corner”, the guitar riffs dominate. They thrash and fizz and never let up; it can have a bit of an enervating effect after so much – death by guitar.
It’s the lyrics that betray a band at a crossroad. “Tally-Ho” is a quintessential Crumpets track, featuring a wonderful metaphor for cocaine (“One more line of avalanche-winterland-handicap / Bleeding from the nostril”). Such a song is why they are, above all, a band for the fans. A review of their music can only go so far, for Psychedelic Porn Crumpets exist for the people like them: the festival-goers, the people that they used to be; as they now occupy the stage, they want to give back to their fans some anthems that they can relate to. This is who they’ve always been. It’s emphasised by main songwriter Jack McEwan’s description of one of SHYGA!‘s tracks, “The Terrors” (a term for the anxiety and despondency of the days following a big weekend of partying): “I wanted to write a track that paid homage to where Porn Crumpets began, back in our drug-ridden cave of a share house at Hector Street. There was a solid group of us on Centrelink, either studying or pretending to work, waiting for our pay-check to arrive so we could pickle the membrane and substitute reality for a while, very much in the name of science. The classic Australian coming of age saga.”
The crossroad arrives when they show signs that they’re considering their lifestyle. The raw punk energy of “Sawtooth Monkfish” belies thoughtful reflection on the effects of their hedonism; after listing all the different types of alcohol that they’ve consumed on “Tripolasaur”, McEwan sighs “I guess I’ll never know the reason why I feel so vacant.” “Mr. Prism” is about McEwan being informed by a doctor that he should probably quit smoking (“No more lungs, doctor says I’m done”); it’ll inevitably be bellowed back at them by teenagers smoking rollies as at a Mac DeMarco when “Ode to Viceroy” comes on. On the disgustingly-named “Pukebox”, McEwan says “One more day alive / I must be the luckiest boy around / Drinking moonshine my old man made,” before pondering if he’s truly lucky. “Mundungus” is the greatest reckoning with it on the album; “They said at my intervention / You should give drinking a rest,” McEwan begins, and after listing three days of truly awful effects of withdrawal he screams “I ain’t being sober no more.”
The Crumpets end the album with “The Tally of Gurney Gridman”, an illusion after all the noise from before. Beginning like a skidding and heaving rock song that recalls Sabbath or Led Zeppelin, it dissolves into a twinkling and meandering psychedelic closer. The song also sees a juxtaposition in its lyrics; “Life is dull without meaning / But drinking all day makes the future warm,” McEwan sings at the start, and as the contemplative tone arrives he ponders life and its meaning: “There’s no finish line, ticket sign or button to start it all again / Every old man tells me the same / Live while you’re young / Enjoy each day.”
This is Psychedelic Porn Crumpets of today: standing on the edge of two existences. Much of their music, their style, has often valorised excess and hedonism. Here, four albums in, McEwan and his fellow Crumpets acknowledge the less glamorous after-effects that are a considerably larger part of their lives now. Yet, for all of this, they still sound like a band content to party on. Ending the album with the lines “Live while you’re young / Enjoy each day” feels like a message of defiance as much as a moment of introspection.  From: https://beatsperminute.com/album-review-psychedelic-porn-crumpets-shyga-the-sunlight-mound/

Dengue Fever - Sni Bong

Dengue Fever’s psychedelic take on the Cambodian pop sounds of the ’60s makes them one of rock ’n’ roll’s most unique success stories. They draw enthusiastic crowds from L.A. to the UK, from Maui to Moscow, and leave critics rummaging through their thesauruses looking for new superlatives to describe their sound. Their appearance at WOMEX, the world’s largest international music conference, cemented their position as a global phenomenon. Amazon.com named their album Escape From Dragon House the No. 1 international release for 2005. Venus On Earth (2008, M80 Records) is the third chapter in the band’s continuing journey to create a unique fusion of Cambodian and American pop.
Brothers Ethan (keyboards) and Zac (guitar) Holtzman started Dengue Fever in 2001 when they discovered they shared a love for the Cambodian pop music of the ’60s. After adding sax man David Ralicke (Beck/Brazzaville), drummer Paul Smith, and bassist Senon Williams, they went looking for a Cambodian singer. Enter Chhom Nimol, who performed regularly for the King and Queen of Cambodia. Her powerful singing, marked by a luminous vibrato that adds exotic ornamentations to her vocal lines, and hypnotic stage moves based on traditional dances, complemented the band’s driving Cambodian/American sound.
The Cambodian pop music of the 1960s seems an unlikely template for an American band, but that sound captivated Ethan Holtzman during a trip to Cambodia in 1997. Before he flew back to L.A., he picked up every cassette of Cambodian pop from the ’60s he could find. Back home, Zac Holtzman had just returned to L.A. after living in San Francisco for 10 years. He’d been listening to a compilation of Cambodian pop and when the brothers reconnected, they decided to play their version of Cambodian rock. They hung out in the Long Beach Cambodian community to find a singer.
“We saw Chhom Nimol at The Dragon House,” Zac Holtzman recalls. “She was already a star in Cambodia and made a living singing traditional music at Cambodian weddings and funerals.” Chhom wasn’t sure she wanted to sing with Americans, but Dengue’s dedication to the sounds of Cambodia won her over. Dengue Fever was an immediate hit, both in the Cambodian clubs of Long Beach and regular L.A. rock venues. They won LA Weekly’s Best New Artist Award in 2002, and actor/director Matt Dillon asked them to supply a Cambodian version of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” for his Cambodian-based thriller City of Ghosts.
The band’s eponymous debut was mostly covers of Cambodian classics, a tribute to the singers and songwriters who were killed by the Khmer Rouge. Their second album, Escape From Dragon House, written almost entirely by the band, was more psychedelic, freer, looser, and more experimental than the debut. The album featured “Ethanopium,” a cover of a tune by Ethiopian singer Malatu Astatke that was used by Jim Jarmusch in his film Broken Flowers. “One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula” was later featured on the soundtrack as well as on the Showtime series Weeds.
In 2005, the band toured Cambodia. It was the first time any band, much less an American one, performed Khmer rock in Cambodia since Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1975. The country gave Chhom a lot of respect for “Cambodianizing” the Americans. The band met and played with Cambodian master musicians that survived the Khmer Rouge years and recorded those sessions. They hope to use that music on future albums. A documentary feature film of this trip, Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, has received an enthusiastic reception at international film festivals, as well as the Tucson Film Festival, the Silverlake Film Festival in L.A., and the Hawaii International Film Festival, and it had its New York premiere on opening night at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York.  From: https://www.laphil.com/musicdb/artists/1444/dengue-fever

The Everly Brothers - Cathy's Clown

The Everly Brothers were one of the most important acts in all of American music. There is a reason they were first ballot inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and are in the Country Music Hall of Fame as well. Though some consider their music mostly within the rock realm, the home base for their career was Nashville, and country songwriting duo (and fellow Country Hall of Famers) Felice and Boudleaux Bryant wrote most of their big hits like “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” and “All I Have To Do Is Dream.” But all great things must come to an end, and that’s what happened 50 years ago today, July 14th, 1973 in a rather spectacularly catastrophic fashion. It was the culmination of years of turmoil and conflict between brothers Don and Phil Everly, as well as conflict with the country music industry.
Unlike many of their contemporaries, the career of The Everly Brothers seemed to hit a brick wall in the early 1960s, and they never really rekindled their popular magic later in life. The country music industry was to blame, and it led to a deeper conflict between the two siblings. The well-known guitar player, producer, and country music executive Chet Atkins was a close friend of the Everly family dating back to before the brothers were a duo and were known more as a family band with their father Ike. Chet brokered the brothers’ first record deal with Columbia in early 1956, and also introduced the brothers to Wesley Rose, son of Fred Rose, who was the well-known songwriter and founder of Music Row publishing house Acuff-Rose. Wesley Rose also became The Everly Brothers manager.
In 1961, the brothers had a falling out with Wesley Rose. At the behest of Rose, they only used Acuff-Rose writers, including Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. But as time went on, The Everly Brothers wanted to record other songs. Wesley Rose adamantly refused, so the brothers dropped Rose as their manager. At the time, Acuff-Rose had a virtual monopoly on all the best songs and songwriters in the music business for the type of music The Everly Brothers played. The duo’s falling out with Wesley Rose meant they no longer had access to ‘A’ list song material. Both Don and Phil Everly were songwriters as well, and wrote many of their own songs. However, in a strange twist of fate only fit for Music Row, because the brothers were still signed to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, the falling out with Wesley Rose meant that the brothers lost access to their own material as well, and any material they may write in the future. So The Everly Brothers began recording cover songs, and started writing under a collective pseudonym of “Jimmy Howard.” However, when Acuff-Rose sniffed out what was happening, the publishing house brought legal action against the brothers and obtained the rights to those songs as well. Between 1961 and 1964, one of American music’s most brilliant and popular bands was resigned to singing cover material, and their popularity plummeted.
In 1964, the conflict finally abated with Acuff-Rose, and The Everly Brothers began to record their own material again, along with resuming work with Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. But not only had popular music in America mostly passed them by, due in part to the turmoil, both brothers were now addicted to amphetamines. Don Everly was also taking Ritalin, and eventually suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized due to his addiction issues. By the late 1960s and the release of their album Roots, The Everly Brothers were beginning to turn things around, and remained popular in England and Canada. They were also announced as replacement hosts for The Johnny Cash Show for a stint. But behind the scenes, things were beginning to fray between the brothers. Don released a solo album in 1970, but it was mostly unsuccessful. So they began recording together again for RCA, but the entire time, Don was ready to break away from his brother to be a solo artist.
All of this led up to what was announced as the final performances before a two-year break for The Everly Brothers set to take place at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California on July 13th and 14th, 1973. It was supposed to be a joyous occasion for the brothers who knew some space would do them good, and wanted to keep things amicable. But that’s not exactly what happened. The July 13th performances went fine, but by the time Don Everly was set to take the stage on July 14th, he was clearly drunk. He was slurring words and forgetting some of the lyrics to the songs—something unheard of for Don Everly even in his worst state. Warren Zevon happened to be playing keyboards for them at the time, and recalls of the evening, “I’d seen Don perform with the flu and a temperature of 103. I’d never heard him hit a sour note or be anything short of professional in front of an audience. But, this night, he walked onstage dead drunk. He was stumbling and off key and I remember Phil trying to restart songs several times. It was embarrassing.” As the crowd started jeering, Don Everly lashed out at the them, and at Phil. Embarrassed and frustrated, Phil slammed his guitar down on the stage, smashing it. As he walked off the stage, he said to the promoter, “I’m really sorry, Bill, I have to go. I can’t go back on stage with that man again.” Surprisingly, Don tried to continue the show, telling the crowd famously, “The Everly Brothers died 10 years ago.”
Don Everly later recalled to Rolling Stone,  “I was half in the bag that evening—the only time I’ve ever been drunk onstage in my life. I knew it was the last night, and on the way out I drank some tequila, drank some champagne—started celebrating the demise. It was really a funeral. People thought that night was just some brouhaha between Phil and me. They didn’t realize we had been working our buns off for years. We had never been anywhere without working; had never known any freedom. We were strapped together like a team of horses. It’s funny, the press hadn’t paid any attention to us in ten years, but they jumped on that. It was one of the saddest days of my life.”
Though the hiatus was supposed to only last a couple of years, it would take another 10 for the brothers to reunite on stage at at the Royal Albert Hall in London on September 23, 1983 in a concert that was recorded for an album and a cable special. Meanwhile, their infamous breakup on stage would go on to define the spectacular destruction of a band in public. The Everly Brothers would continue on and off for the rest of their lives. Phil Everly died in 2014, and Don Everly passed away in 2021. Despite the turmoil the brother duo experienced, they left a legacy that crossed genres and generations, and is still lasting today. There’s nothing like the blood harmonies of The Everly Brothers, no matter the bad blood that came between the brothers at times during their legendary career.  From: https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/50-years-ago-everly-brothers-tumultuously-break-up-on-stage/  

Martin & Eliza Carthy - Blackwell Merry Night

It’s always a treat to see either of these two, although this is the first time I’ve seen the pair of them perform together (aside from with The Imagined Village). Martin and Norma Waterson, yes; Martin and Dave Swarbrick, yes; Eliza and her band, yes; just dad and daughter, not previously. And the dynamic was a lot of fun, two dry wits together expressing their love for the slightly absurd nature of the music they play, whilst also conveying the genuine emotion that they find in the folk songs — and more recent compositions — that they perform. Not to mention the fact that they are incredibly accomplished musicians, one of whom played the version of ‘Scarborough Fair’ that provided the inspiration for Dylan’s ‘Girl from the North Country’ and Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme’. And he’s still one of the humblest and most genuine people you’ll ever encounter.
The set-list was largely made up of tracks recorded on their joint album, The Moral of the Elephant (2014), though Martin also played a recent acquisition — the name escapes me, and it doesn’t seem to have made it onto the setlist.fm page — that had apparently dogged him for some time before he’d managed to pin down the melody that he was so full of praise for.  The fact that, at 76, he’s still collecting and adapting material made this song the perfect example of his mantra that folk music is not about heritage but about life, a mantra reinforced by Eliza’s solo take on ‘Nelly Was a Lady’. The latter is a song written by Stephen Foster and taught to her by a colourful Canadian family friend, described as a great source of ‘hideographs’ (if I remember correctly). The tale of young Foster and his tragic, accidental death is as poignant and vaguely absurd as any you’d find in a broadside ballad (he tripped in his tiny New York apartment and hit his head on the sink as he fell, as there was no space to fall anywhere else); though like many ballads it needs to be read within its historical context. Eliza is a great defender of pop music and the songwriters who are able to write reams of hit songs, whether for broadside ballads, Motown or any other genre. She places the music that she and Martin perform within an ongoing tradition, the two of them noting common reference points and the underlying universality of emotions in these songs: people still love a good lock-in at the pub (Blackwell Merry Night), mothers still suffer the agony of losing their sons to war (Monkey Hair) and six individuals will still struggle to reach a common solution if they don’t work together (The Elephant).
Most of these songs aren’t the anonymous, centuries old pieces of tradition that I suppose many people associate folk music with. The three just mentioned also have named composers, and even the tracks they played with a more mysterious transmission history have been moulded and edited by different singers, performers and composers. An individual who has left their mark on a song is as worthy of discussing as the song itself at this kind of gig. When there’s not a composer or someone to credit the ‘trad. arr’ to, Eliza memorably described the great old ballads as icebergs or glaciers: something that starts off vast, but shears off pieces here and there as it travels the world. It’s perhaps a theory that skims bit close to Russian formalism for my taste, but I can’t deny that folk music does tend to gravitate towards particular types of story. Two grand narratives they put together in their own way were the ‘girl has to be quiet with her lover because her mum’s upstairs and has a vast collection of weaponry for dealing with just such lads’ (I paraphrase, but Eliza described it along these lines!) and ‘died of love’. Examples of the former that may be familiar are Silver Dagger and Kate Rusby’s ‘The Cobbler’s Daughter’, whilst the latter tends to crop up all over the place, often tacked onto the end of a narrative that’s about one sort of ill-fated relationship or another (many of Jim Moray’s preferred traditional songs seem to end like this…). The idea of the mother wanting to save her daughter from an unhappy future relationship, and the intensity of heartache (whether it’s after a break-up or a death) are at the core of these songs, and it’s not hard to see why they endure.
Another thing I’ve always admired about Martin and Eliza’s views on the music they play is their willingness to use it against modern narratives of purity and nationalism. Supporters of Folk Against Fascism, they were involved in setting up The Imagined Village as a multiracial, multicultural folk band that could create a sound that did justice to modern Britain — and historical Britain’s — reliance on immigration and the labour of its colonies. Just go and have a listen to Benjamin Zephaniah helping them re-work Tam Lyn. At this gig it was hard not to hear an anti-Brexit, anti-isolationist streak in the mischievous glee with which Eliza pointed out that, once upon a time, the popular English view was that Napoleon was their saviour, not Wellington… ‘The Grand Conversation on Napoleon’ comes across as a sibling to ‘Bonaparte’s Lament’, which Eliza recorded with her mother, Norma Waterson, on Gift (2010), providing a nice link between the two albums.
Musically, the two of them have a very particular dynamic; they’ve been playing together since Eliza was born, so there’s no attempt to make her into a substitute Swarb. And though she’s got her mother’s lungs, she’s a different generation of musician, and her voice and violin loop elegantly over and around Martin’s solid, syncopated guitar. Occasionally, as on the encore rendition of John Barleycorn, her enthusiasm doesn’t leave much space for Martin’s voice, but on the whole it’s a good balance, and even when they mess-up their intro they seem to be on the same wave-length.
An evening with a Carthy or a Waterson will always come with good stories as well as fantastic music. This was no different, with Eliza tending to provide the longer, meandering shaggy-dog stories behind the songs, and Martin occasionally expressing his enthusiasm for one melody or another, or muttering fond complaints at his guitar, which was prone to misbehave in the heat of the venue. It was a delight: consummate showmanship, peerless musicians and great storytelling. And, if you’ve any memories of seeing any Watersons or Carthys perform over the last decades, Eliza would really really love to know about it, so she can reconstruct her own family’s iceberg.  From: https://ienthuse.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/review-martin-carthy-and-eliza-carthy-cambridge-junction/