It’s good to hear a band make something worthwhile out of the scrapheap of Yamaha DX-7 synths and Linn drum machines that was the ’80s. Whether sounding like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark on human growth hormone on “Halfway Home” or INXS with the shades pulled back and a window opened on “Crying”, human hands firmly guide the mouse. Unlike Gnarls Barkley, another practitioner of Silicon Soul, there’s a muscular sexuality at the core of TV’s productions. Like mid-period Roxy Music, you can take this band to a fancy restaurant but you suspect all sense of decorum is out the door once back at your place. Guitarist/producer David Sitek deserves a lot of credit for the success of this album. An affectless, wheezy, 4-note bass synth pattern underpins the Prince-worthy party of “Golden Age”. It’s a subtle triumph of minimalism that ties back to Brian Eno and David Byrne’s subversive commercial highwater marks. The album closes with “Lover’s Day”, with a martial snare beat and an orchestral coda worthy of the Portsmouth Sinfonia.
Along with Dionne Warwick, the late-60s hits by Glen Campbell represent, in my memory, the best of the failed aspirations of middle-class America. I still see those albums sitting in front of the huge, wooden stereo consoles in our neighborhood, resting on plush, burnt-orange carpeting. Some elongated sculpture of a conquistador on a horse decorates one end of the console. A reproduction of some painting by one of the Dutch Masters is centered over the stereo; it matches the colors of the heavy velour drapes and couch. “Gavleston”, “Witcheta Lineman”, and “By the Time I Get to Pheonix” made vaguely country music safe for those of us on the more urban coasts–East Coast city dwellers and California dreamers alike. Campbell was pretty cool and sophisticated for a guy playing twangy guitar tunes. As some of us grew into rock nerds, leaving behind the fractured dreams of middle America circa 1968, there were unexpected depths of Campbell to plunder, such as his work as a session man for The Beach Boys and his role as mouthpiece to the surprising cult of Jimmy Webb, Songwriter. It was these after-the-fact revelations that kept the increasingly irrelevant Campbell on the right side of “cool,” despite the cheesy career apex of “Rhinestone Cowboy”, the rough-and-tumble Tanya Tucker years, the coke slide, and the more-recent Jesus-friendly infomercials. When I first heard of this album – a good 24 hours before it showed up in my mailbox – I thought, “Oh man, another Rick Rubin reclamation project! What’s he going to do next, produce a ‘cool’ comeback album for Vicki Lawrence?” (Turns out it’s not a Rick Rubin production, but the brainchild of Julian Raymond, who’s produced Roseanne Cash and The Wallflowers, among others.) After a few minutes I thought, this is Glen Campbell, we have a history together. So I pushed Play and got down to the business of sharing my thoughts, feelings, and other observations.
Adding new meaning to “lineman.”
“Sing”: Campbell’s tenor rises above the alt-adult contemporary fare of this modern-day wall of sound, complete with a skipping drum beat, orchestration, and the insistent plucking of a banjo. Turns out this is a song by Travis, a band I’ve heard of but have never passed judgement on. Do they do, like, iPod ads or something?
“Walls”: I know this song. Is it by someone I don’t typically like? Campbell’s delivery has a way of making me drop my defenses. His performances carry no baggage, have no agenda. He expresses nothing but love and joy for his material, and it’s contagious. OK, I peeked: this is a Tom Petty song. I haven’t been “duped” into digging, like, an REO Speedwagon song.
“Angel Dream”: Here’s another loping Tom Petty cover. This is what we call a nice cover: nothing earth-shattering but completely professional, befitting the studio cat that a young Campbell once was. If this is where this album’s heading, it’s a dignified comeback album we’ve got cooking.
“Times Like These”: Man, this song’s familiar and well constructed! There was always something refreshingly straightforward and good natured in the delivery of Campbell’s classic hits, which mixed the pride of country music with the optimism and hope of Southern California pop. This song has that combination in spades. Whaddaya know? It’s a Foo Fighters song! A lot of older dudes have been telling me there’s something to Grohl’s songs. It’s funny, this is the most like what I would have expected in an album presenting some producer’s version of a comebacking Campbell, as if Elvis Costello had been commissioned to write a song in the Jimmy Webb style. There may have been more to the singer than the song than revisionist hipsters would like to believe.
“These Days”: This song’s off to a lovely start. I’m afraid I’m falling in love with a song by an artist I’ve never much liked…Oh man, I’ve got to take a minute to let some tears flow. This is beautiful…I KNOW THIS SONG: it’s friggin’ Jackson Browne! Truth be told, this is one of the only songs by that guy that ever made the slightest impression on me, but hearing this preternaturally wise song through the voice of a guy who’s royally screwed up his life and lived to tell about it makes it really moving. I’m taken back to that huge, wooden stereo console; the burnt-orange carpet; and the aspirations represented by those conquistadore sculptures.
“Sadly Beautiful”: A Replacements cover. Much better, to my ears, than hearing it on a flagging Replacements album. Like the first few tracks, a “professional” cover.
Pleased to meet you, too.
“All I Want Is You”: Is this a U2 song or that horrible Rod Stewart song, “Forever Young”? It’s U2. As is often the case when I can get past the band’s stock digitally mystical production I’m impressed by how simple and direct the band’s music can be. I MUCH prefer hearing this song in Campbell’s plaintive voice than through the emotive Christ-worthy self-love of Bono.
On “Hang On”, from Dr. Dog’s latest album, Fate, everyone’s favorite floppy-eared psychedelphians swing Tarzan-like from bearded, cut-out bin Beach Boys to cokehead-era Band, before doing a canonball in the Beatlesque bongwater. Come on in, the water’s lovely! The Dog always seem to front load their albums with these kind of multi-faceted tracks — part homage, part theft — which is right up my alley, and even though the singer’s reedy voice has more in common with Steve Forbert than Danko, I’m always excited to hear more.
A bit like The Byrds in their post-Gene Clark Everyone-Must-Grow-A-Beard Period, this charmingly rickety band is strong on backing vocals despite the lack of a distinctive lead vocalist. Guitarist Scott McMicken and bassist Toby Leaman share lead vocals, but frequently, as on the “The Breeze” and “From”, it’s the pillowy Abbey Road-cum-Surf’s Up backing vocals that take the lead, cueing the dynamic shifts of the arrangements. Neat trick!
This Dog knows lots of old tricks. “The Old Days”, for instance, hangs on a cool ostinato, building to a solo that would sound at home on Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. No small feat, that. However, the band’s preponderance of laid-back beats leaves me wanting that elusive “more.” On songs such as “The Ark” and the circular sing-along “Army of Ancients”, I’m waiting for that “goosebumps” moment, the point in the song where a vocal or lyric cuts to the core. Considering that Dr. Dog freely uses arrangement devices of The Band, for instance, I feel justified in seeking a couplet worthy of “This hill’s too steep to climb/And the days that remain ain’t worth a dime” in “Rockin’ Chair.” When Richard Manuel gets to that couplet, I know it’s coming, I know how it’s going to make me feel, yet it still seems as if that emotional wave has taken me by surprise. With Dr. Dog, when the tricks begin to wear thin (and tricks ALWAYS wear thin after a while, even with the best of magicians) I can just sit back and savor that peaceful easy feeling you get from the gentle, rustic psychedelia of “Uncovering The Old.” And yes, a fat piece of smoke helps.
Fate ends with the anthemic “My Friend”, featuring a kitchen-sink’s worth of swirling orchestration: sunbeam harmonies; kaleidoscopic gee-tars; and stomping, extended, oom-pah rhythms. The band take it right back to my “Doubleback Alley,” ending on a Rutles-worthy high note.
I’m used to Sam Phillips albums being challenging on initial spins. A friend tried to turn me onto her in 1994, playing me Martinis & Bikinis, which he’d just bought. As he suspected, I dug hearing XTC’s Colin Moulding on bass, but the first time I heard it the album was too cluttered and claustrophobic for even my clutter-craving ears. About 2 years later, another friend who’d been trying to turn me onto Phillips and, for years before that, her husband/producer at the time, T-Bone Burnett, came to our house and left my wife and I with copies of both Martinis & Bikinis and a previous album, The Indescribable Wow. “Here,” he said, as he slapped the CDs onto our kitchen table, “it’s time you guys love these albums!” Continue reading »
The new Mudcrutch album is not the album they would have made in the early ’70s if they had not broken up, but it’s fun to think about it as if it were. Despite its appearance in the celebration of California Day, I’d like to think of it more as a Florida Day kind of album, with a distinct period vibe.
All that makes this album unique is disguised by the choice of the first single off the album, “Scare Easy”. Probably chosen so as not to scare off any of Tom Petty’s fans, this track sounds like it could have been on any of his albums from the last 30 years. As Ed mentioned, it has the “won’t back down” stance, and a very familiar chugging rhythm. It’s not a bad track at all. Au contraire, as they say in Florida. It’s just that it’s not representative of the album as a whole.
Petty’s Byrds influence was apparent from the very first, and it’s there on this album as well. But here we have the Gram Parsons and Clarence White versions of the band to thank, rather than the Feel a Whole Lot Better Byrds. Mudcrutch even covers “Lover of the Bayou” here, a McGuinn/Jacques Levy song from the Byrds’ Untitled album. And with Mike Campbell and Tom Leadon on guitars here, there’s a hell of a lot of guitar picking going on, and the sound often invokes Clarence White’s Telecaster.
However much we think of the Byrds as a California band, most of its members were not from the area. Only Crosby and Hillman were natives. McGuinn was from Chicago, and Gene Clark was from Missouri. And you know where Gram Parsons was from? Florida. He may have felt that Joshua Tree was his spiritual home, but he grew up in Winter Haven, Florida (and also Waycross Georgia). Parsons is definitely a presence on this album, and there are some his quasi-shitkicker style songs here. They also cover the trucker anthem “Six Days on the Road”, which the Burritos also covered.
Lots of people played that one back in the day. I think I first heard it from Taj Mahal. And this album opens with “Shady Grove”, one of those folk songs that was knocked around by lots of bands. It’s on one of those Garcia/Grisman collaborations, but the version here is probably most influenced by the one that was done by the edition of Quicksilver Messenger Service that featured Nicky Hopkins. Very ’70s. I read in an interview that Mudcrutch actually used to play this one way back when.
This album also reminds me that, when Mudcrutch first went out west, they were signed to Denny Cordell’s Shelter Records, and if I remember correctly Petty and the Heartbreakers did some time in Shelter’s Oklahoma studio. Here and there – mostly “This Is a Good Street” and “The Wrong Thing to Do” – this reminds me strongly of another Shelter artist, Dwight Twilley. The same mixture of twang and British beat, but with strikingly different idiosyncratic lead singers.
Another thing that might surprise you if you were expecting a Heartbreakers album instead of a period piece is the jamminess. As I said before there’s a lot of guitar playing, and on the 9:28 long “Crystal River” there’s a LOT of guitar playing – solos with space echo, wah-wah pedal, even phasing. It’s one of those dreamy extended workouts like “Mountain Dew” or “Mountain Jam”. Remember that in the world of the original Mudcrutch, the Allmans would have been a major presence, and there’s even a nod to them on this album’s “Bootleg Flyer”, a dual-guitar lead passage that’s so obvious it will make you smile.
In general the playing here is great. I’m sure Petty is glad he gave up the bass for the rhythm guitar/frontman role, but I bet he’s having a blast playing bass like he used to. Benmont Tench does his thing of never calling attention to himself, but when you do pay attention to what he’s doing you realize how great he is. If you were worried about whether drummer Randall Marsh, who doesn’t have much on his resume besides Code Blue (an L.A. band he was in with former Motel Dean Chamberlain and Gary Tibbs of the Vibrators/Roxy Music), don’t. He sounds fine. Sometimes you recognize Mike Campbell’s licks, but in general you can’t tell if he’s playing or if Tom Leadon is.
The reason Mudcrutch headed to L.A. in the first place was that Tom’s big brother Bernie was doing so well with the Eagles, perhaps the stereotypical L.A. band, none of whose members were actually from L.A. Beside Leadon, Meisner was from Nebraska, Henley Texas, and Frey Michigan, but I guess that’s one of the truisms about L.A., that no one is from there. (And here’s a bit of trivia I found when fact checking that last bit: according to Wikipedia, Frey, in his pre-alpha douche days, played on RTH icon Bob Seger’s “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man”.)
So I’m not saying anyone will mistake the Mudcrutch album for a Marshall Tucker Band album, and I’m not even saying that Petty is exploring his southern roots on this album. But maybe the sounds here crystallize the southern basis of Petty’s music that was there all along.
You may recall The Great 48’s initial impressions on Elvis Costello and the Imposters’ recently released, fetishist-marketed, vinyl-only (until May 1, 2008), unnecessarily gatefold-sleeve-packaged album Momofuku. The vinyl/gatefold fetishist in me was intrigued. Although it’s very rare that I even get a chill listening to a new release by one of my favorite artists of all time, no matter how many lousy and mediocre albums he’s released since first parting ways with The Attractions, and bassist Bruce Thomas in particular, I’m still willing to listen to most of his new releases. The packaging of this one had me as stoked as I’ve been since the release of anything by Costello since his collaboration with Burt Bacharach, Painted from Memory (which, by the way, includes the last chill-inducing song I’ve heard by EC, “Toledo”). In fact, I was stoked enough to run out and by the record.
Like The Great 48 said, the vinyl is heavy – at least 178 grams – and it being vinyl, a physical medium, can develop character-building pops and scratches soon after it’s been played. You may be able to hear the surface noise on my copy of the album’s kick-off track, “No Hiding Place”. I love it! And the song has a nice drive to it, complete with so many of Elvis’ beloved vocal and melodic mannerisms. My only beef is that the wildcard provided by Bruce Thomas’ bass is not in evidence. Imposter bassist, Davey Faragher, locks into the right launching notes, has the right intentions, but he never really frees his mind or ass and cuts loose. With Steve Nieve tamed down a bit on a song like this, the song could use an unexpected jolt of energy. Costello’s guitar playing is rarely that exciting when heard (his best guitar work is typically those parts you can barely discern on albums like Get Happy!! and Trust). As a result of Faragher’s more conservative approach, drummer extraordinaire Pete Thomas is more prone to stick to basic “engineer’s dream” drum parts, that is, straightforward snare-and-kick patterns without many surprises.
It’s songs like “Pardon Me, Madam, My Name Is Eve” that make me wish I more frequently cared what it was Elvis was singing about. With the exception of the of Imperial Bedroom and half of the songs on Get Happy!! and Trust, it’s rare that I get a lyrical kick out of all but a song or two on most of the man’s albums. Witty, angry couplets that are fun to sing along with? Certainly! But an entire set of lyrics that I would care to read or think about? Rarely. Nevertheless, the stately formalisms of this song are worth spinning, and I highly appreciate not hearing the too-clever pinging snare that would have spoiled this song on one of those Mitchell Froom-related productions. Elvis seems to have finally moved away from his Tom Waits fixation. Thank god! (And that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with Tom Waits; it just didn’t fit Costello.)
Here’s another song that, 10 to 15 years ago, during the What Would Waits Do era, would have surely had its humble charms overtaken by marimbas, junkyard drums, and a proudly credited chamberlain. Instead Costello and the Imposters play “Drum & Bone” like an early run-through demo. The light, Mellow Mafia backing vocals are just right. Wish I was getting something out of the lyrics, though.
You know what’s the only thing that SUCKS about Momofuku (beside the album title)? The record cover! They’ve taken the time and care to release this thing on 180-gram vinyl, yet the gatefold cover is as flimsy as a manilla envelope. Any utilitarian notion of the gatefold is down the tubes, and I doubt this cover will outlast the May 1st date of the digital release of these tracks. I may have to cut up the crappy graphics of this cover and paste the panels to a real gatefold sleeve from the ’70s, one made of 180-gram cardboard. Other than that, I’m satisfied with my purchase of Momofuku.
Circumstances of purchase: Having decided it was too hot to cook dinner, we went out to a dairy bar in Watertown that has the best hamburgers in the greater Boston metro area and some damn fine vanilla soft-serve. Afterwards, we went to the nearby Newbury Comics at Fresh Pond, where I purchased the LP and Charity got the two-disc deluxe edition of Forever Changes. (Suck it, Mod.)
Mood at time of first listen: Still full of excellent burger and soft-serve, and pleased that that screechy Irish girl was finally voted off American Idol. Somewhat tired, but with a fair amount of work to do before I can go to sleep in good conscience.
Place of first listen: In the office, sitting at my desk. Charity’s at her desk behind me, filing an invoice and looking at her nightly blogs.
While taking off the shrinkwrap: Cool, a gatefold. Can’t even remember the last time I saw a gatefold LP cover — even back in the ’80s, they started just shoving both discs in a single sleeve.
On opening the package: Oh, it’s like PiL‘s Metal Box. Two discs, three songs per side. I would have preferred a single disc, but that’s just the purist in me.
Best line in liner notes: “This album has no connection with the restaurants of the same name, but Elvis Costello does recommend their cooking.” There was a profile of the chef who owns Momofuku, David Chang, in the New Yorker a few weeks ago. Honestly, even by chef standards, he came off like a major-league dick. I do hear the restaurants are good, though.
On taking out the first disc: There’s a cardboard stencil. I am so doing this. There’s stenciled graffiti all over my neighborhood, and I suspect this is just going to confuse people.
On placing the disc on the turntable: Good heavy vinyl. 180-gram at least.
