Led Zeppelin - Black Country Woman

When Led Zeppelin entered the studio in January 1974 to record what would become Physical Graffiti, they wound up with just over three sides of material for a four-sided double LP. They reached back into their archives for previously recorded but unreleased material. This is one of the main reasons why, even though Physical Graffiti has some serious moments of brilliance, as an album it is kind of disjointed.
One of the tracks they decided to use was Black Country Woman, which was originally recorded with a mobile unit in 1972 in the garden at Mick Jagger’s estate, Stargroves. The song was intended for Houses of the Holy and was originally titled Never Ending Doubting Woman Blues. Although never acknowledged by the band, one of the reasons the track was likely left off Houses of the Holy was the unfortunately timed flyby of a private airplane.  From: https://us.kef.com/blogs/news/did-you-hear-that-led-zeppelin-black-country-woman?srsltid=AfmBOooxNUYq98XVLQj_v-yUkBsSJbTwTbXw29bMBQdxxUiN6dc-KxV5

Lais - After the Goldrush (Neil Young cover)

Having seen Laïs live at the Tilburg International Folk Festival in January, I was in a way impressed: a group of three pretty girls with gorgeous voices, bringing with them in concert a folk rock band, but presenting themselves in a very professional and attractive way, comparable to rock/pop bands - a high potential for stardom. Still they find the time to start the whole set with a capella folk singing in front of big audiences. Maybe the music style they do is not really new but their appeal definitely: young, charming, yet the right appeal to attract the masses. Just the right stars to lead the folk music to new audiences and new grounds... 
So how did the Laïs success story start - and why with folk singing? All three of them had no background in traditional singing - "traditional singing does not exist in Belgium", as Jorunn says. Yet she has a family background in folk music, with her father playing the accordeon. Laïs started five years ago, in a small village near Brussels called Gooik, being famous for its folk music courses. "I have come to these courses since I was a little child. So I brought on Annelies once, in 1996. On the last evening, everyone started singing with each other; and we started singing and everyone was quiet and listening. That was the start. Among the listeners were some members of Kadril, and they said we had to go on and rehearse." 
The core of Laïs' repertoire are traditional Flemish songs; so if there is no traditional singing these days in Belgium, where are these songs from? "The texts are from old books. The melodies and the arrangements we make ourselves." It is not too difficult to find those books and songs; they have bought quite a few books in second hand bookshops: "There are a lot of texts that nobody ever used, so we have plenty of texts. These songs are usually not sung in Belgium these days." 
Laïs only sing a part of their songs in Flemish; they add to their repertoire French chansons from Brel, English pop songs by Sinead O'Connor, trad songs from Italy and Sweden. As Marc Bekaert of the Flemish Magazine T'Bourdonske puts it, "they seem to fit in a Pan European influenced movement. This generation grew up with lots of compact discs from all different styles and regions. There are only some vague Flemish roots, and the fact that the performers are Flemish people. But their international success did draw the attention to the growing Flemish scene."  From: http://www.folkworld.eu/14/e/lais.html 

Mu - Make A Joyful Noise

If you’re feeling lost, depressed or brought down by life’s humdrum reality, a good cure is to give Mu a listen. Much of the music on these pages carries a certain amount of — weight. Which is fine if you want to get out there on the perimeter. What Mu does, though, is like a warm gentle breeze blowing through your soul, a spiritual spring clean.
All the members of Mu had been in LA pop bands at some time during the early 60s, oriented towards surf with Beatles and Byrds influences. Fapardokly was an album collection of these early efforts released only in LA and copies used to change hands for up to $2000 among collectors, such was the aura surrounding it. Fankhauser was in the Surfaris, and I think it is his voice that can be heard laughing maniacally at the beginning of Wipeout. Cotton landed a gig in Beefheart’s Magic Band, playing on Strictly Personal and Trout Mask Replica. Many chapters have been written about the influence of this latter album on rock, one of the most surreal, jagged episodes ever in music, and Cotton was a key part of the creation process. 
So … surf meets Beefheart. They recorded a promising first album in LA, then decamped to Hawaii where they embraced a blissed-out lifestyle of vegetarianism, flying saucer watching, study of the lost Pacific continent of Mu and creating gentle, organic music. The CD reissue on Sundazed contains the first album, the second, only released locally at the time, plus singles.  From: https://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/reviews/mu-end-of-an-era

Joan Osborne – Dracula Moon

 

Joan Osborne is a crazy chick. At least, this seems to be the consensual view in the more retro and retarded areas of rock culture, as in the latest issue of Q magazine, where she's listed in that category alongside musicians such as Alanis Morissette and Sheryl Crow. When she released her debut single earlier this year, One Of Us, "kooky" was the word applied to its lyric lines, "What if God was one of us/Just a slob like one of us?" Crazy? Kooky? That sure seems to be the way rock'n'roll now seeks to define, deny, reduce and potentially limit the latest breed of female singer songwriters, as happened roughly three years ago when a similar label was slapped on that other magnificent triumvirate Tori Amos, PJ Harvey and Bjork. But it ain't gonna work, boys.
Crazy? I might be slowly approaching that state, but I wasn't when we recorded that song!" Joan responds, speaking on the phone from Nevada. "But that kind of stuff has probably been, historically, a way to marginalise somebody who has a view that may be a little bit threatening. Yet I don't let it bother me too much. I don't think most people think I'm crazy."
Or if they do, clearly Joan Osborne is not alone. The mere fact that One of Us has spent the last three months in the Irish Top 30 would suggest that there are many people in this country who are tuning into her God/slob question at some intrinsic level, as though it tapped right into the core of some religious zeitgeist. That definitely seems to be the case in America, where this 33 year old "lapsed Catholic" has discovered that women, in particular, seem to cheer deliriously when she sings that line in concert, from a song she describes as "relatively light hearted" but "asking some pretty fundamental questions about what you believe in terms of God and the universe and all that".
Equally, Osborne's glorious, Grammy nominated album, Relish, reflects her own current obsession with what she calls the "concept of falling from grace" and even more sinfully, perhaps, relishing that descent, as in the song Dracula Moon where she sings "I'm naked in a hotel room/making out with my one true love/You say, come back home/I say I'm just falling from grace/I said, I like falling from grace.
"It's not that I'm subscribing to falling from grace as necessarily a way to self discovery it just seems that in religious fundamentalist culture there is this picture of a spiritual person as being something of a child, a sheep following orders and that this is the only way to get into heaven," she elaborates. "I rejected that a limited perspective. I believe you can be a really spiritual person and still be in touch with your own intellect, sexuality and free will all the things that make you a human being."  From: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/not-quite-saint-joan-1.58361

Country Joe & The Fish - Silver and Gold

How Country Joe & the Fish got their name: As their original guitarist/organist David Bennet Cohen tells it:
“Joe McDonald and E.D. [Eugene Denson, the band’s friend/manager] were sitting around E.D.’s cottage in Berkeley trying to think up a name for the group. As they both had revolutionary tendencies, they wanted a name reflecting their political position. Leafing through Chairman Mao Tse Tung’s ‘Little Red Book’ when E.D. found the phrase, ‘The revolutionary is a fish that swims in the sea of the people.’ From that came ‘Country Mao and the Fish.’ But Joe said it might cause confusion as America didn’t recognize Red China. So, E.D. suggested ‘Country Joe and the Fish, with ‘Joe’ being Josef Stalin.”
“Joe’s approach was…profoundly cerebral. His concept was basically to get a few people around and make something happen,” lead guitarist Barry “The Fish” Melton explains.
“None of us were professional musicians, except maybe for David, who came from New York. [Drummer Gary] Chicken Hirsh was somewhat professional, but only because he was a few years older than the rest of us.”
“When I got to California in 1965 I had been playing guitar, mostly folk songs,” Cohen said.
“I didn’t decide to buy an electric guitar until after seeing the Beatles’ movies. They finally got me to accept rock ‘n’ roll. I had been really opposed to it before that. I started hanging around the guitar shops and a few small local clubs called the Jabberwock and the Questing Beast, where we’d perform for $5 and food. The Jabberwock had an old beat-up piano and Barry went nuts over my boogie-woogie playing on songs like ‘St. Louis Blues.’ Country Joe wanted an organ player in the group after Highway 61 came out and Barry told him that I played.”
“Church organs were really big intimidating instruments, with all those pedals. I’d never played organ before, but I wanted the gig,” Cohen said with a laugh. “So, the band got me a Farfisa organ. I had no idea what I was doing. None of us did! We were just making up this music, creating a sound and then it became real. Later the reviews said I had ‘a unique style.’ But I was just copying my own guitar riffs!”
“We’d been a jug band but we didn’t play in a conventional way,” Melton said. “We were doing something new. We deliberately walked a different path. It wasn’t like we discussed it. We bridged folk and jazz with bluegrass, country and blues. It was an improvisational folk music, like what the Grateful Dead exploited commercially. When you’re creating something new you can’t be held to any standard of criticism.”
Just six weeks after the band formed they decided to record an EP comprised of three songs, and released it on the obscure Rag Baby label, as no record companies were pounding on their door…yet. The disc included three tracks that would soon appear on their debut album: “Section 43,” “Bass Strings,” and “Love.”
“We weren’t even sure we were going to remain a band for very long, but we wanted to make a record,” Cohen said. “The EP came out surprisingly good.” Soon after the band signed with Vanguard Records.  From: https://observer.com/2017/05/country-joe-the-fish-electric-music-for-the-mind-and-body-anniversary-review/

Aretha Franklin - Swing In - Germany 1968

It's frustrating how little well recorded live soul music there is from the 1960s and 1970s. Even for big names like Aretha Franklin, you're lucky if you get an official live album or two, usually short and flawed, and quality bootlegs are extremely rare. But this is one of those nice rare instances. Franklin became a big star in 1967, and arguably had an even bigger year in 1968. A lot of Europeans discovered American soul music in the late 1960s. When soul stars toured Europe then, they usually were surprised by the size and passion of the fans there. Franklin was so big in 1968 that she was given her own entire episode of a German TV show called "Swing In."
This show has its plusses and minuses. A minus is that there was a very talkative MC who spoke in German a lot. He also did a short interview with Franklin right in the middle of the show (with everything being painstakingly translated in German and English in real time). One other minus is that Franklin pretty much never says a word between songs. I'm guessing this is because she surmised the German audience wouldn't understand her, as well as the fact that she only had an hour for the concert and couldn't afford to waste any time.  
One minus is also a plus in the sense that the German audience was unusually polite and subdued for a soul music audience at the time. They were even subdued compared to other European audiences, because one can see video on YouTube of a much more lively Aretha Franklin concert in Amsterdam in 1968. But this is a plus because one can clearly hear the music instead of lots of screaming and cheering. Also, it's a big plus that the recording exists at all, since this sort of soul bootleg from the time is so rare.  From: http://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2020/04/aretha-franklin-swing-in-wdr-studio-l.html

Sweet Pill - Starchild EP (full album)

Philadelphia emo rockers Sweet Pill have readied their most recent EP, Starchild. Their debut for Hopeless Records will drop on March 15, 2024. The band's new four-track EP is a poignant and introspective exploration of battling anxieties, your inner voice, navigating life's transitions, and battling against a world that always seems to be against you. The band, consisting of vocalist Zayna Youssef, guitarists Jayce Williams and Sean McCall, bassist Ryan Cullen, and drummer Chris Kearney, delivers their most masterful and vulnerable work yet on Starchild.
The title track, "Starchild," opens up the effort and is a standout moment, serving as an ode to undervaluing oneself and the pressures of people-pleasing. Youssef's introspective lyrics and emotive delivery make this song a powerful and relatable anthem for anyone grappling with self-worth.
"Chewed Up," following "Starchild," takes a slightly more aggressive musical approach, mirroring the intrusive thoughts that plague the mind at night. It's a plea for assertiveness and self-advocacy, a call to break free from personal downfall and speak up for oneself. Whereas "Eternal" is a slower number showing the band's dynamic side. The music is slow and melodic, but every word Youssef sings cuts like a hot knife.
Throughout Starchild, Sweet Pill's musicianship shines, with dynamic instrumentals that perfectly complement Youssef's raw and emotive vocals that help her vocals soar. The EP's production is crisp, allowing each instrument to stand out while maintaining a cohesive sound from the start of "Starchild" all the way to the end of the closing number "Sympathy."
Overall, Starchild is a testament to Sweet Pill's growth and maturity as a band. It's a must-listen for fans, both old and new, showcasing the band's evolution and cementing their status as one of the most promising alternative acts of the moment.  From: https://www.crucialrhythm.com/sweet-pill-starchild-review