CD Review: Copesetic – The Keys EP
Utterly impossible to pigeonhole artsy, tuneful rockers Copesetic – they’re nothing if not original and that’s a good thing. With plenty of hooks, harmonies and a groove that lends itself to sprawling out, they’d go over big on the jam band circuit. The opening track for some reason is called The Pickle Ditty, slide guitar over sparse acoustic with almost operatic vocals, then it gets funky, morphs into a big stomp and then into bouncy, cheery almost Penny Lane pop. Anytime also kicks off funky, blending late-period Beatlesque pop with a big grandiose 6/8 classic rock ballad feel, layers of jangly and crunchy guitar with sweeping organ behind them. The next cut, Veritas is another big but brief 6/8 anthem with the frontman howling through a bullhorn effect: imagine a straight Freddie Mercury.
Keys, which seems to be a title track of sorts builds from a thoughtful acoustic funk/jazz vibe with a latin beat, crunchy guitars finally kicking in with a gleeful “yeah!” Last cut on the cd is Be Here Now, yet another one in 6/8, which is actually pretty cool, starting out pensive and pastoral with a slightly jazzy tinge in the spirit of early 70s British art-rock bands like Nektar, building to a wildly beautiful, guitar-stoked crescendo.
If there anything to criticize here, it’s the vocals which are sometimes completely over the top, staggering from grungy slur to lazy Allmans drawl in places. Nothing wrong with New Jersey, dudes: you guys went for Obama last time out. This is a fun, summery record: Copesetic sound like they could be even more fun live. They’re at the Boro 6 Music Festival in Montclair, NJ on June 21.
CD Review: Federico Aubele – Amatoria
Buenos Aires-born songwriter/guitarist Federico Aubele’s going for a rico suave thing here, sort of like a downtempo Gipsy Kings. At a distance this may sound like generic latin lounge music – it’s kind of formulaic, but it’s a formula that works. This cd offers layers of acoustic and electric guitars with hushed lounge lizard vocals (in Spanish) over a trip-hop beat. Aubele could use a lyricist, and there are places where the drum machine becomes completely claustrophobia-inducing (the album is just out on the well-intentioned but sonically numbing Thievery Corporation’s label). Now for some good things about the cd. Aubele is an excellent, terse guitarist: there aren’t any wasted notes here. And the songs are pretty, most of them in moody minor keys. Plus, he’s dubwise. His reggae touches typically linger and reverberate in the background, lithe guitar accents cleverly and judiciously kicking in at unexpected moments.
Suena Mi Guitarra sways and bounces, trip-hop meets tango with a jangly reggae guitar feel. Te Quiero a Ti is upbeat and evocative of Mexican groups like the Reggae Cowboys. Del Ayer layers phased backward-masked guitars in the background; there’s also a duet with the unlikely choice of Miho Hatori from Cibo Matto, who quite surprisingly acquits herself so well that she really ought to have been given a turn out front. The most bizarre cut here – tropicalia is just full of them, isn’t it? – is the samba-inflected El Sabor with its layers of artificial, bubbling synth, early 80s ELO goes to Brazil. The cd ends with an acoustic guitar instrumental that offers more than a hint of a more stark, purist sensibility lurking here. Piazzolla it’s not, but it’s something you can put on at a party and nobody will complain – in fact, you’ll probably have people asking you who this is – and it’s a good late-night sleepytime cd.
CD Review: McGinty & White Sing Selections from the McGinty & White Songbook
A marriage made in heaven. Songwriter Ward White’s decision to hook up with keyboard polymath Joe McGinty is a smashing success, an update on the classic late 60s psychedelic chamber pop sound mined by Burt Bacharach, Jimmy Webb and others. And lest you take the first few words here, or the deadpan cd cover photo, a “Great American Songbook” style parody of the artist and his young protege, on face value, McGinty & White are neither an item nor are they gay. The chemistry here is strictly musical, but it’s strong: White’s purist, richly historically aware, ferociously literate songwriting is a perfect match for former Psychedelic Fur McGinty’s seemingly limitless yet equally purist imagination. As a song stylist, this is White’s finest hour, exhibiting the kind of subtle inflection that Elvis Costello was going for circa All This Useless Beauty but never could nail. “You can’t outrun me, I’ll beat you home,” he almost whispers on the cd’s opening track, Everything Is Fine, the tension so thick you need a knife to cut through – and the unnamed antagonist won’t admit to herself that there possibly could be any trouble brewing. Then on McGinty’s Big Baby, a sort of Jimmy Webb homage, White gives the allusive seduction scene a steamy, downright sensual feel. And his exhausted, bled-white interpretation of I’m So Tired (a McGinty/White co-write) is equally visceral.
But the rest of the album is a snarling contrast, and that’s where it really takes off. One of the most adventurously literary lyricists out there, White smashes through the fourth wall and goes meta-ballistic with Rewrite, ruthlessly contemplating the shards of a relationship smashed completely to hell:
You can talk all you want,
I’ll just busy myself with revisions
God these things used to write themselves
You’re not wise to the wisdom of piss-poor decisions
The kiss that precedes the tell
We had it all worked out
Now it sounds so formulaic
What man would want it now
The menacingly organ-driven Knees is just as savage, perhaps the only song to ever memorialize CB’s Gallery as White snidely recalls an encounter with a younger woman:
Oddly nostalgic for a place I always hated…
When Blondie came over the box
First time I heard it in ’78 it was this record
That was before I was born she said…
You take it all you don’t negotiate
You take it all by inches and degrees
You can keep my heart, you bitch
Just give me back my knees
The Roxy Music quote at the end of the song is priceless and spot-on.
Break a Rule, a McGinty composition welds an odd and eerie early 80s synth feel to a haunting, George Harrisonesque ballad complete with watery, period-perfect Leslie speaker guitar. Stay In Love, by White gently and methodically uses the West Coast trip from (or to) hell as a metaphor for disollution over an unabashedly beautiful, sad Claudia Chopek string arrangement. The cd closes with a cover of Wichita Lineman, just White on vocals and McGinty on celeste, a characteristically out-of-the-box way to wrap up one of the smartest, most memorable albums of the past several months: look for this high on the list of the year’s best here in December. McGinty & White play the cd release for this one at Bowery Electric (the old Remote Lounge space) on May 21 at 11 PM.
CD Review: Love Camp 7 – Union Garage
A strong follow-up to Love Camp 7’s classic 2007 cd Sometimes Always Never, this is aguably their most melodic and straightforward album – a direction from which the band once seemed completely alienated. That was a long time ago. Here the rhythms are as close to four on the floor as Dave Campbell – the closest thing to Elvin Jones that rock has ever seen – has ever done in this unit (he also lends his tropical, soulful beats to Erica Smith & the 99 Cent Dreams). Bassist Bruce Hathaway (also a noted contemporary classical and film composer) is his typical tuneful, melodic self, and it looks as if Steve Antonakos AKA Homeboy Steve, lead guitarist in a million other excellent projects has become a full-fledged member of the band. Frontman/guitarist Dann Baker (also of Erica Smith’s band) plays with characteristic wit and incisiveness, alternating between innumerable tasty shades of jangle and clang. Most of the songs here – including a mini-suite with a Civil War theme – are imbued with historical references in the same vein as the band’s previous cd.
The album opens with a 20-year old song, the Killers, slightly off-kilter film noir-inspired janglerock wherein the victim forgives his murderers since they’re just doing a day’s work. Crazy Bet Van Law kicks off the Civil War section, the tongue-in-cheek tale of an unlikely Union spy, its bridge morphing into a tidy little march. Crazy Bet’s funeral scene is the pretty, sad, harmony-driven Nobody Here but Us African-Americans – it seems she only wanted ex-slaves and servants there. Letting the Brass Band Speak For You is Beatlesque with a slightly Penny Lane feel, a snidely metaphorical slap at conformity and its consequences.
No Negro Shall Smoke is serpentine in the vein of the band’s earlier work, an actual segregationist proclamation from Richmond, Virginia set to herky-jerky, XTC-ish inflections. The way the band just jumps on the word “smoke” and repeats it over and over again rivals the “stone, stone, stone” on Pigs by Pink Floyd. The version of the slightly Arthur Lee-ish Start from Nothing that Baker and Campbell recorded on Erica Smith’s most recent album beats the one here. Arguably the best song here is (Beware of the) Angry Driver (Yeah), a spot-on, deliciously jangly chronicle of road rage, one sadistic city bus driver after another careening through the narrow Brooklyn streets in Williamsburg and Greepoint.
Another highlight is Johnny’s Got a Little Bag of Tricks, a frankly hilarious send-up of masturbatory guitarists everywhere: “He plays a hundred notes where one would do/And if it fits the song that’s ok too.”
Antonakos, who can satirize pretty much anything, gets a couple of bars to show off the kind of chops he never shows off anywhere else (well, maybe in Van Hayride). Bobbing and weaving, Lady Ottoline Morrell is a vividly clanging tribute to a Bloomsbury-era patron of the arts. You’ll see this cd on our Best Albums of 2009 list in December. Love Camp 7 play Southpaw on May 20 at around 8:30.
Song of the Day 5/19/09
Every day, our top 666 songs of alltime countdown gets one step closer to #1. Tuesday’s song is #435:
LJ Murphy – Geneva Conventional
Like Clampdown by the Clash, ultimately this is about selling out. Over a stark E minor blues, the great New York noir rocker reveals what happens when you trade your conscience for whatever it is you think you need more of: “Kiss the ground, cry your tears, see what’s come of your best years.” From the classic Mad Within Reason cd, 2005. In a fortuitous stroke of fate, he’s at Banjo Jim’s tonight at 8:30.
Lucid Culture 