CD Review: Redhooker – Vespers

In terms of lush nocturnal beauty, this album tops the charts for 2010, end of story. Beguiling instrumental ensemble Redhooker defy categorization, incorporating elements of chamber music, ambient soundscapes, psychedelic rock and avant genres like minimalism and horizontal music, but whichever label you slap them with the result is the same, hypnotic and dreamlike. Where Brian Eno did ambient music for airports, this is ambient music for empty rooms in abandoned buildings, intimate yet impenetrably mysterious. There’s an almost magical symmetry to the compositions here, yet constantly an element of surprise. Essentially, this is a theme and variations interrupted by two long jams – which perhaps not ironically are the most captivating parts of the album. Guitarist/composer Stephen Griesgraber alternates between atmospheric washes of sound, simple but effective lead lines and gently insistent fingerpicking while the violins of Andie Springer and Maxim Moston trade harmonies and textures, with Peter Hess’ bass clarinet often carrying the lead counterintuitively in the lowest registers.

The opening track, Standing Still establishes a circular theme that weaves among the instruments like a lazy dragonfly in the bulrushes. The line goes straight back to Haydn if you follow it through the clouds. The aptly titled Bedside is a swaying minimalist lullaby with distant baroque echoes, a study in textural contrasts, guitar or bass clarinet playing stately melody versus the sweep of the violins. The first improvisation, Presence and Reflection begins ghostly, gently ominous with whispering waves of guitar noise, a draft-through-the-door atmosphere with distant echoes of (but not by) Pink Floyd. And then it’s a lullaby again, going out on a gentle, late afternoon tide.

Things get as lively as they’re going to here on the next cut, Friction, interwoven with subtly colliding textures and building to a tricky dance that wouldn’t be out of place in the Turtle Island String Quartet oeuvre. And then night falls again with the second jam, like Pink Floyd’s On the Run but quarterspeed – you could call it On the Crawl. In over fifteen minutes, starkly glimmering, Gilmouresque guitar rings out in the distance over dense waves of noise, the violins and then the bass clarinet eventually making a welcome, deftly terse return to paint in pieces of melody that slowly make shape out of shadow . The album ends with a rondo, each instrument working a judiciously studied piece of the original theme, ending with bass clarinet looming in from behind the strings like a sleepy caretaker who’s gotten to know the ghosts in this place by now. It takes a special kind of album to be this quiet and still keep the listener captivated, not to mention awake. This is that album.

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CD Review: Mickey Wynne – Running on Empty

We’re late in reviewing this one, but Mickey Wynne’s guitar playing and songwriting defy the ravages of time: the Liverpool-born rock vet delivers vivid, smartly played, smartly written Americana rock. As befits a guy with an Electric Ladyland/Abbey Road Studios pedigree, the song are superbly produced, blending rustic acoustic textures with a savage, electric, early 70s psychedelic bent, guitars swirling, bending, phasing in and out. Perfectly illustrative song: the lush ballad Against All Odds I’ll Do It, with its layers of acoustic guitar and mandolin that build to a big, sweeping crescendo before coming back down again with a majestic grace.

The tour de force here is the fiery, insistent Bush era parable All Quiet on the Eastern Frontier, funky acoustic guitar giving way to macabre, reverb surf guitar on the chorus and an equally nightmarish outro. It could have been an A-list Dire Straits album cut from 1982 or so. The title track is a shapeshifting John Lee Hooker-style blues with sparse, incisive slide guitar accents that morphs into pounding Led Zep style riff-rock; the hallucinatory, reverb-drenched French Blooze evokes recent work by Spottiswoode or Marty Willson-Piper. Wynne plays the usual UK roots music haunts: the 12 Bar, et al.; the live tracks up on Wynne’s site confirm his reputation as a dynamic, intense live performer.

The Church Spring 2010 US Tour Dates

Iconic Australian art-rockers the Church will be on acoustic tour, a sort of thirtieth anniversary celebration, with a New York show at City Winery on April 23. Can you imagine? It’s been thirty years since Unguarded Moment! This time around, the band has announced they’ll do one song from each of their [one assumes original, rather than greatest-hits] album releases, playing them in reverse chronological order. In other words, they’ll start with something from their latest, Untitled #23 (which ranked high on our Best Albums of 2009 list) and then work backwards. It promises to be interesting, to say the least. To further entice Church fans out, all ticketholders will receive a free copy of the Deadman’s Hand ep, including the title track (a killer cut from Untitled #23) along with unreleased tracks from the band’s “secret vault.”

APRIL

2 – San Juan Capistrano, CA – Coach House

4 – San Diego, CA – Anthology

5 – Los Angeles, CA – The Roxy (sponsored by KCRW)

6 – San Francisco, CA – Great American Music Hall

8 – Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios

9 – Seattle, WA – The Showbox

13 – Minneapolis, MN – Fine Line Music Café

14 – Madison, WI – Majestic Theatre

15 – Chicago, IL – Park West

17 – Cleveland, OH – The Winchester Tavern and Music Hall

18 – Ferndale, MI – The Magic Bag Theatre

19 – Pittsburgh, PA – Club Café

21 – Somerville, MA (Boston) – Arts At The Armory

22 – NYC, NY – City Winery

23 – Bay Shore, NY (Long Island) – Boulton Center for the Performing Arts

24 – Sellersville, PA – Sellersville Theatre

25 – Falls Church, VA (DC) – State Theatre

27 – Annapolis, MD – Rams Head On Stage

28 – Norfolk, VA – The Norva Theatre

29 – Raleigh, NC – Lincoln Theatre

30 – Charlotte, NC – TBA

MAY

1 – Atlanta, GA – Center Stage

More dates to be added, bookmark this space if you’re a fan like us!

Album Review: Smoothe Moose Mixtape #3 – We Love Video Game Music

While you were hunched over the xbox, the mysterious Smoothe Moose crew were busy in their smoky Brooklyn lab concocting a soundtrack for your alternate-universe adventures that’s as cool as it is funny. What they’ve done is taken four video game themes, actually all of them from classics that were either arcade or Nintendo games back in the 80s, and recorded dub versions of them. What hits you right away is how good that music was, even if it was coming out of a tiny, cheesy mono gameboy speaker. Click the link above and get a free download.

A Boy and His Blob, by Smoothe Moose’s Cosmo D and Dr. Thunder, gets the avant garde treatment, with a cello. It goes all spacey when they bring in the phaser, then it’s all blips and bleeps again. Ghouls and Ghosts, by Big Words gets a funky guitar treatment with shuffling triphop drums. This is actually a great song – it would make great surf music. No surprise, considering it’s a Japanese game from 1988. Castlevania is the one here everybody knows: the version by Cosmo D’s Sauce is a sick cyborg gypsy dance with a bop jazz sax solo. The Metroid theme that wraps up the mixtape is just plain good jazz, transformed into what could be an echoey dub version of an early 70s Herbie Hancock theme from one of those 4 AM local channel movies. Amidst all the sonic mayhem, there are good solos from cello, sax and especially the guitar. It’s really funny listening to how ornate this is in contrast to the original game’s lo-fi graphics. As the crew states on the download page, “We love video game music. We hope you’ll listen and be transported back to a different time when the drinks were lemonade and the food was Dunkaroos. Enjoy!”

We’ve been late on picking up on these guys’ mixtapes in the past: we reviewed their first  just when they were getting ready to release their second one (also a free download), and by the time that one was out we were halfway into the hibernation mode that lasted until last month here. The one we missed is some serious, far-out dub, an ambitious, high-energy joint featuring the MK Groove Orchestra’s horn section plus the lush vocals of jazz chanteuse and Bjorkestra frontwoman Becca Stevens. There’s a pretty straight-up version of the Junior Byles classic Curly Locks, which is especially cool considering how crazy the guy is; a sultry Billie Holiday-dub version of We Three by Wayne “The Train” Hancock; a sort of Uptown Top Ranking version of the 80s Chaka Khan cheeseball Ain’t Nobody, and deep space dubs of a Don Carlos and a Thom Yorke song. Stoner heaven.

CD Review: Dadi – Bem Aqui

Who’s your Dadi? If you’re Brazilian, it’s probably Eduardo Magalhaes de Carvalho. Over the course of a long and eclectic career as a sideman, he’s worked with everybody from Marisa Monte to Caetano Veloso to Mick Jagger. This new album, his second as a bandleader is recently out on Sunnyside, and unlike what you might expect from that label it’s not a jazz release but instead a tersely arranged, irrepressibly sunny, indelibly Beatlesque collection of sixties-flavored three-minute pop songs. For those who were smitten by Os Mutantes, whether the first time around or later, this is considerably more direct yet equally cheery and captivating. Carvalho sings in Portuguese with a casual, thoughtful understatement.

The album kicks off with a Stax/Volt style shuffle transported to even balmier surroundings, followed by a fetching duet with Monte over swaying, vintage 70s style janglepop  driven by tasteful electric guitar and organ. The title track is sparse nocturnal bossa-pop with acoustic guitar, piano and cello; likewise, Passando echoes hypnotically with distant piano in a Jenifer Jackson vein. Nao Tente Comprender (You Don’t Get It) nicks the chords from the Beatles’ You Won’t See Me; the strikingly minimalist, swaying 6/8 rock ballad Quando Voce Me Abraca (When You Embrace Me) blends tropicalia with deliciously glimmering layers of guitars and piano.

There’s also an ominously swinging, 6/8 Os Mutantes-inflected psychedelic number capped by fat blues guitar solo; another Beatlesque tune that could have been a Brazilian version of a top 40 hit from Let It Be, right down to the watery, George Harrison-esque chorus box guitar; and another Harrison-inflected song, the gorgeous, slowly crescendoing  jazz-pop anthem Por Que Nao (Why Not). The album ends on a surprisingly dark note with a fiery, bluesy, early Santana-esque one-chord rock jam, hinting that this guy may rock harder than he lets on here. If Dadi’s lyrics were in English, he’d be huge with the American indie pop crowd, the Shins et al. As it is, it’s a breezy, fun album, the kind you find yourself humming and wonder what that tune could have come from.

Song of the Day 2/24/10

The best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues every day, all the way to #1. Wednesday’s song is #155:

Richard Thompson – Mascara Tears

Big vicious rock anthem from the iconic British guitar god’s 1992 Mirror Blue cd, one of his best:

Mascara tears, bitter and black
Spent bullet through a hole in my back
Salt for the memories, black for the years
Black as forever, mascara tears