Lagniappe (la ·gniappe) noun ‘lan-ˌyap,’ — 1. An extra or unexpected gift or benefit. 2. Something given or obtained as a gratuity or bonus.
Diane Coffee (née Shaun Felming) returned to the fray earlier this year with his second full-length, Everybody's A Good Dog, following up his 2013 self-recorded solo debut. Like pals and bandmates Foxygen, Coffee's brand of psych-pop deftly mines the past, usually with a knowing nod and wink. Here, Coffee re-imagines become a member or log in.
With its pedal steel leads, Gram-and-Emmylou-style harmonies, and social realist imagery, Mark Jones’ Snowblind Traveler hitchhikes down some of the same highways as the LA burnout LPs of the early 1970s and Bruce Springsteen’s first three albums. Salem, VA-based singer-songwriter-producer Jones might not have been able to afford top LA session talent. Nor did he enjoy the backing of music industry machers like Mike Appel, Jon Landau, or Clive Davis. Yet he nevertheless succeeded in creating an appealingly ragged collection of songs that sounds as if they could have been recorded 9 years earlier and 2,460 miles further west, perhaps during one of Springsteen’s pre-Columbian trips to the west coast.
Jones’ stripped-down arrangements have more frayed edges than a thrashed Levis Type III. Still, not one of Snowblind Traveler’s eleven compositions would have seemed out of place on an early ‘70s Elektra or Asylum release. Jones’ lyrics, however, offered a blunt rebuttal to canyon rock’s pastoral yearnings. At the turn of that decade LA burnouts like John Philips and Gene Clark had temporarily traded habits for horses and groupies for domestic bliss, heading back to the land or out to the country in pursuit of solitude, authenticity, and redemption. The music that emerged from these rural retreats narrated their escapes from the sinful city and extolled the simple virtues of their new lives in their bespoke timber cabins or make-believe ranches.
Nearly a decade after the rural rock exodus Jones appropriated its sonic palette to present a series of stark, documentary-style portraits of the sorts of places that the LA refugees had dreamed of retiring to. This wasn’t the American south that Delaney Bramlett had once reminisced about. Indeed, there is not a cotton field, ray of early morning sunshine, or sprinkle-faced lady to be found on Jones’ album. It was a landscape whose defining features were the scars left behind by the economic and environmental catastrophes of the mid-1970s. Like Springsteen, Jones confronted his listeners with arresting snapshots of abandoned storefronts, soul-snuffing factories, and working-class zeroes plotting their escapes from dying small towns. In doing so he affirmed the dignity of these places and people, replacing small-town caricatures with three-dimensional renderings of life in flyover America.
Snowblind Traveler is a collection of self-contained yet thematically-linked first-person accounts of small-town decay, confinement, longing, escape, failure, and survival. Its nameless characters describe their hometowns as “lion traps” and their jobs as “bad dreams.” In “What You Get” a blue-collar worker with a few in him explains the perks of his gig at the local lumber yard to the anempethetic accompaniment of Mike Calaway’s peppy pedal steel licks: “Though the hours are tough to take, the work’s too hard.” He goes on to recount a friend’s barstool confession: “Said I need to spread these wings and fly, leave this world behind.” Other characters likewise share half-baked fantasies of one-way tickets that will take them as far away as possible. Save for passing allusions to “southwest cities where the sun is guaranteed” or “the highlands,” destinations are rarely mentioned. The insinuation is that literally anywhere would be better than Virginia or the power plant or Harrisburg, where, according to the song of that title, “things that can’t be seen control you.”
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Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can be heard twice every Friday — Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST.
SIRIUS 408: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ The Beach Boys — Surf’s Up (solo piano) ++ Bedlam’s Offspring — I’ll Be There ++ The Emperors — I Want My Woman ++ The Blue Rondos — Baby I Go For You ++ The Graham Bond Organisation — Early In The Morning ++ Bo Diddley — Bo Diddley ++ Cat — Do The . . .
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Here in the west, it’s finally starting to feel like autumn. As the sunset comes earlier each evening, it’s been hard to get Joan Shelley’s beautiful Over and Even off the turntable. Deep hued and haunted, it’s built on simple blocks that add up impeccably: Shelley sings and plays guitar with accompaniment by guitarist/Alan Lomax Archive curator Nathan Salsburg (who recently released a phenomenal duo recording with James Elkington). Recorded live in Kentucky by engineer Daniel Martin Moore, there are lilting touches — Will Oldham adds his voice, Rachel Grimes adds piano — but nothing ever gets in the way of Shelley’s clear, impossibly warm voice.
Shelley spoke with Aquarium Drunkard on the phone to discuss roots music, songwriting challenges, and note taking.
Aquarium Drunkard: You wrote much of Over And Even in Greece? Did you draw specific inspiration from your surroundings?
Joan Shelley: I wrote almost all the songs while kind of stranded for a month in Greece. It was ahead of a tour in Ireland and the U.K. The most influential part [while writing] was that I was going to try this theory of writing one song every day — which I had previously been super suspicious of. I knew that if you wrote a song every day, they can’t all be good, or maybe I’d run out — that was a fear. So, I was just going to practice writing one a day that month there, which actually seemed to work. As far as the influences of the surroundings…because mostly everyone spoke English as a second language there, I wanted to communicate. I feel like that’s what influenced the songs the most: just wanting to feel human relationships I wasn’t having.
AD: You recorded this mostly live in Kentucky. What’s the story there?
Joan Shelley: It was this very nice, spacious house in Kentucky. It was a ‘70s, kind of freaky experimental architect’s house that my friend was renting. It’s in the woods near where I grew up just outside of Louisville. Daniel Martin Moore set up his mics and a few things and Nathan and I just went and banged it out.
AD: I feel like sometimes people call your songs “sad,” and I certainly can hear that in them, but not only sadness. I hear beauty, resignation, contentment, and melancholy. Do you ever feel sad playing them?
Joan Shelley: I don’t feel sad, no. There is a great lecture of Garcia Lorca called “On Lullabies.” There are lullabies in Spain he was noticing that were really dark and morbid: a mother telling a child, “You’re going to get lost in this scary world and a monster is going to eat you”; or, “You’ll fall from the tree and break the cradle.” He got to the point of saying that music is this soft bed we make to explore some of our darkest fears, because that’s where you make a safe space. I think that resonated with me in that what I’m trying to do is make that soft bed. I’m not trying to make anybody sad, but there are things we're all thinking about anyway, so what not show them the light?
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Amid a now decades-long glut of roots music reissues, reappraisals, and deep cuts, one would think the keg would eventually kick. But that sure as shit isn’t the case with Legends of Old-Time Music: Fifty Years of County Records–there’s so much going on in this 4-CD box set that it’s difficult to know where to begin. Co-produced by Grammy-winning music historian Christopher King, an impossible amount of research went into this collection, both in the music and the meticulous liner . . .
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Will Toledo, the 23-year-old songwriter behind Car Seat Headrest, is not sweating the release of Teens of Style, his Matador Records debut.
He’s excited, sure, but these songs – culled from his massive discography on Bandcamp, where he’s uploaded songs since 2010 – are well broken-in for Toledo. The album will introduce his fuzzed pop to a wide audience, but he’s already started thinking about the next record as his proper “debut.”
“It’s intended to be sort of a compilation,” Toledo says from Seattle, belying the cohesive sound of the new record, for which he re-recorded older compositions with his band. “If definitely takes the edge off the debut when it’s not anywhere near the actual debut,” Toledo says. Fittingly, Teens of Style reads like a greatest hits record. Songs like “Sunburned Shirts,” “The Drum,” and “Los Borrachos” bristle with energy, like prime Pavement or Guided By Voices, with traces of the Beach Boys’ sunny pop and Animal Collective’s endlessly looped melodies. Toledo’s songs are often compared to those of the Strokes, and while they share spiky elements with that band, Toledo’s freewheeling narratives are more akin to those of Courtney Barnett – hilarious, sharp, and whip smart.
Car Seat Headrest :: Something Soon
Toledo began fooling around with GarageBand in high school, inspired by records by Deerhunter, Panda Bear, and Leonard Cohen. The band’s name serves as an origin story: Too embarrassed to record vocals at home, he’d take his laptop to parking lots and record in his parent’s car. These nascent recordings are still available at BandCamp. Rather than scrap them, he figures they might as well be there for anyone who wants them.
“I remember spending a lot of time with the Nirvana boxset,” Toledo says, of the rarities and B-sides collection. “For me, there’s no reason to hide that away until you’ve got a legacy. You might as well leave the story open to whoever wants to check it out.”
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Via Strut Records, Souljazz Orchestra returned last month with Resistance. Compared to previous albums, this one has a very strong French / Caribbean influence, placing it in some of the same territory as label's Sofrito and Haiti Direct releases. To mark the occasion the band put together a mix of vintage French, Caribbean and African material that influenced the record's sound. Notes on the mix, and sonic provenance, via Souljazz's Pierre Chrétien, below.
Souljazz Orchestra is based in Ottawa, Ontario, and Gatineau, Québec, twin cities on each side of the Ontario/Québec border, and a very bilingual area of Canada. Coincidentally, our band is also half Francophone and half Anglophone, and this duality does come out especially on this album. We’ve always had songs influenced by la Francophonie, it’s really a part of who we are as a group (“Secousse Soukous” on Freedom No Go Die, “Tanbou Lou” on Solidarity, “Sommet En Sommet” on Inner Fire, etc.)
Some people, especially those unfamiliar with Canada, don’t get how we got into this stuff. I guess I never really thought about it before, but I'll try to explain...
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Happenstance. Last week while in New York I caught a short ride with a West African cab driver in Brooklyn. Upon entry there was music. "What is this?" I asked. "It's African - Bembeya Jazz National. 1970's. West coast." And while the name was familiar, via a compilation, the sounds were not.
Originally from the Ivory Coast, the driver had been in the states two years, and in his thick patois began to recommend artist after artist, album after . . .
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"[Tom Carter] is tearing a giant hole in the sky right now at @3lobed Hopscotch Fest day show," Yo La Tengo's James McNew tweeted back in September of 2013. And anyone who was there or listening via WXDU's live stream (or heard the NYC Taper recording of the performance after the fact) had to agree. The ex-Charalambides guitarist was making scary-beautiful sounds.
Two years later, we can all finally . . .
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Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can now be heard twice, every Friday — Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST.
SIRIUS 408: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ Alain Goraguer - La Femme ++ Carsten Meinert Kvartet - One For Alice ++ Mad A - Aouh Aouh (AD edit) ++ Larry Ellis & The Black Hammer - Funky Thing, Pt I ++ Los Holy’s - Psicodelico Desconocido (Cissy Strut) ++ Bo Diddley - Another Sugar Daddy ++ Harare - Give ++ Jingo - Keep Holding . . .
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Dig into an assortment of choice live recordings from Neil Young's peak 70s period -- the period that will presumably be covered by the next volume of the songwriter's Archives series ... whenever that comes out. Drawn mostly from vintage audience tapes, the focus here is on unreleased tunes (of which this is just a small sampling) and interesting re-arranged versions of classics, such as a solo acoustic "LA" from 1973, or Crazy Horse's raggedly glorious version of "Helpless" in 1976. A master at work... words / become a member or log in.
Promised Land Sound's 2013 debut was a fun romp, getting by on garage-y energy and pleasing country rock choogle. The energy and the choogle remain firmly in place on the Nashville-based band's sophomore effort, but For Use and Delight is a quantum leap forward in terms of songwriting, interplay and general righteousness.
The immediate standout is "She Takes Me There," a woozy heartbreaker that suggests a mid-70s collabo between Neil Young and Chris Bell. But the rest of the . . .
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Leading up to the release of Deerhunter’s seventh long player, Fading Frontier, Bradford Cox revealed a “concept map,” drawing together some influences on the group’s latest work. Amongst the musical clues are influences as disparate as Laurie Spiegel, Pharoah Sanders, Caetano Veloso, REM, Al Green and Tom Petty. He also lists the Weeping Blue Atlas Cedar plant (a gothic and evocative creature), the Bergamot essential oil (noted for its uplifting and relaxing effects), Chrome Yellow (with its color akin to the sun), and volatile organic compounds (more specifically that found within that universally recognized new car smell). He twice links, under different codenames, a link to eight hours of peaceful synth pads and rainforest ambience.
And he lists the devastating and impactful accident late last year - in which he was hit by a car - an event that looms largely over this new work. He lists his rescue dog Faulkner, a new friend and companion who seems to bring Cox both cheer and hope, a theme that also illuminates the record. And he lists Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, an artist whose prose, vision and literary notion of Creationism (an idea that a poem be created for the sake of itself — that is, not to praise another thing, not to please the reader, not even to be understood by its own author) seem to influence Cox profoundly.
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In 1962, a young left-handed guitarist from Texas named Barbara Lynn Ozen penned a song called “You’ll Lose a Good Thing.” More than 50 years later, the song continues to resonate with audiences: It was a chart topping hit when released and was featured in John Waters’ camp ‘80s flick Hairspray, extending its influence beyond the cult of soul aficionados who’d long treasured it. It’s impossible not to be drawn in by Lynn’s plaintive, bared soul intensity, which she developed on two albums for Jaime and one for Atlantic: 1968’s
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The album opens with Charles Mingus sputtering a percussive motif with one hand while the other riffs out an arabesque fantasia. There’s a duality present here, a tension of opposites. A fixed pitch struggles with an ecstatic melody and the battleground is rhythm. This gives way to rich, rolling chords, which develop into a strange waltz that hums along in Mingus’ “leaky faucet” time. The piece unfolds like a dreamlike tremor, a sort of musical fingerprint of the artist’s unconscious, and is aptly titled “Myself When I Am Real.” In the liner notes, Mingus tells Nat Hentoff, perhaps the only jazz critic he could ever stand, “I go into a kind of trance when I’m playing this kind of number. I remember that when we were recording this one, I noticed suddenly I didn’t seem to be breathing.”
Aside from its breath-taking beauty, Mingus Plays Piano is a remarkable document in that it is Charles Mingus’ only solo record and he doesn’t even play the bass. He tables his virtuoso upright skills entirely for the instrument on which he composed. The album is an intimate portrait that reveals Mingus’ process and practice–not only his command of musical ideas but also his deep fluency and broad imagination. The material is rich and style expansive, however there’s playfulness to this LP, an understated, casual mood, like he’s jamming in your kitchen. Recorded in a single session on July 30, 1963, it’s an odd and often overlooked piece in the Mingus catalogue that contrasts and compliments his intricately orchestrated and technically challenging works of that time. Long out of print, SF archival label Superior Viaduct remastered and reissued this subtle masterpiece earlier this year.
Mingus Plays Piano originally was released on the heels of The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady, a brilliantly orchestrated, album length composition performed by an eleven piece band of frequent Mingus collaborators. The Black Saint was a career highlight, but the year leading up to that success was a tumultuous one. In 1962, Mingus toured heavily, and for his band’s residencies in NYC, he experimented with hiring a bassist and playing piano himself. He agreed to record a live album with a big band iteration of his Jazz Workshop for United Artists. Rushed preparations for this maximalist composition resulted in an incident where he punched his longtime trombonist Jimmy Knepper in the mouth. The 31-piece band’s one night stand at Town Hall was sloppy, and Mingus raged as concertgoers walked out and demanded a refund. After that disastrous performance, Mingus was exhausted, had gained a lot of weight, and suffered from painful ulcers. His wife Judy had just delivered a stillborn baby girl. The couple retreated to the Bay Area where Farwell Taylor, Mingus’ old beatnik-guru friend, straightened him out with a weeklong juice cleanse.
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