Following up 2012's Darkness Hides ep, LA's Geronimo Getty returns in April with Greyhound Blues. After the jump, check out the first taste off the lp - the Bryan Kramer directed "Devil's Theft".
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Lagniappe (la ·gniappe) noun ‘lan-ˌyap,’ — 1. An extra or unexpected gift or benefit. 2. Something given or obtained as a gratuity or bonus.
Kevin Morby's week-long tour of the west coast with Jessica Pratt begins today, followed by an east coast tour in early March. Before he hit the road, Morby recorded three covers for the Lagniappe Sessions at his home in Mount Washington: Dylan, Silver Jews and a re-imagining / taming of . . .
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Ben Hall isn’t Australia’s most notorious outlaw bushranger (those honors belongs to Ned Kelly), and the song Hall inspired, "Streets of Forbes", isn’t the country’s most famous folk narrative (cue "Waltzing Matilda").
"Streets of Forbes", however, is the best, firmly in the tradition of outlaw ballads such as "The Ballad of Jesse James and Pretty Boy Floyd". The song details the 1865 death of Ben Hall as he attempted to make his dreamed escape to America, ambushed by police on the New South Wales high plains in a Bonnie and Clyde-style death scene . . .
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The late Vivian Jackson, better known as Yabby You, was cut from a different cloth. Though rightly considered one of the pioneers of “roots reggae,” hailed alongside Bob Marley, Culture, Dennis Brown, Burning Spear, and other Jamaican artists speaking to matters of social justice and fighting oppression, Yabby You was an outsider. He shared his Rastafarian brothers’ visions of righteousness, but found himself on another path, focused on the divinity of Jesus Christ as a professing Christian.
But Yabby You’s faith . . .
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A week from today, February 25th, Aquarium Drunkard Presents: An Evening With Leon Bridges in Los Angeles. Gratis entry / invite only. Limited space available. RSVP at leonaqd at gmail.com. Confirmation replies with additional information will be sent to selected entrants . . .
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A decade ago I saw Phosphorescent play to a small crowd at an intimate art gallery in downtown Phoenix. It was a chilly November night in 2005, and Matthew Houck played most of his new Phosphorescent’s Aw Come, Aw Wry completely solo that evening, wrangling his voice and guitar into strange shapes through a string of loop pedals on the plywood stage. He sounded like a coyote in a sleeveless black t-shirt, singing songs like “Joe Tex, These Taming Blues” and “South (Of America)” from behind his curly beard.
These days, Modified Arts is surrounded by trendy businesses and dwarfed by high-rise apartments. In the years since, developers have moved on to the downtown street, which seemed so charmingly seedy back then. The gallery hasn’t hosted live shows for years, but I found myself thinking about that night and that place listening to Live at the Music Hall, the new live album by Phosphorescent. Documenting a four-night stint in December 2013 at Music Hall Of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, the record finds Houck backed by six (sometimes eight) players. The songs sound more like the Stones, the Heartbreakers, or Waylon Jennings than they did in downtown Phoenix that night, but he still sounds like a desert wolf - his howling voice, a line that’s carried through on the records he’s made since: Pride, Here’s to Taking It Easy, Muchacho,. It’s a thrilling live document: the band sounds unhinged on rockers like “Ride On/Right On,” bruised on “Tell Me Baby (Have You Had Enough)” and hallowed on “Song For Zulu.”
I caught up with Houck and asked him about the record, finding good boots, and creating a “ceremony” with a rock & roll show.
Aquarium Drunkard: What was the impetus to put out a live album? Why now?
Matthew Houck: I don’t really think of it as a “live record,” you know? I really think of it as a record. For me, I just think it’s a good record. Because it holds up on its own like that, it made sense to put it out. Also, I thought it was really important to document this band, because I think they’re really astonishing. Such a good band. It wasn’t recorded with the intention of putting it out; it was recorded just to see, to see what’s there. I really quickly I realized it held its own.
AD: In terms of live albums though, did you have reference points? Live albums you find yourself pulling out and digging when you’re just hanging out?
Matthew Houck: I think that I mentioned [Bob Dylan’s] Hard Rain early on in the press, so it kind got blown out of proportion, and it made it into the one-sheet that I was inspired to put out a live record by Hard Rain, which isn’t quite correct. Somehow, that’s not at all what it feels like to me. But I do love that record, and I guess what I meant is that what that record does for me, I hope this record does for other people. It’s a specific picture of two or three nights, and it’s not cherry picking from across a decade of performances. It’s one performance basically. It’s one room…it’s a set, it’s a show. On that record, what I get out of that record is just hearing how different the songs are. They’re all songs you know, but they’re so drastically different than the versions you’ve heard before.
I feel like this record is kind of the same. I don’t know if they recorded it with the intention of releasing it or not, but it sounds loose enough that I can’t imagine they were thinking, “This is for an album,” you know? [With Live at the Music Hall] no one was thinking, “Okay, we’re making a live record, so let’s play our A game.” It's really loose, but it was our A game just by the nature of that. Something different happens when you’re making a live record as opposed to really sinking into a live show and just playing.
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Word came creeping out of Western Mass early this year that Rangda -- the mighty psych rock trio consisting of Sir Richard Bishop, Ben Chasny and Chris Corsano -- was hunkered down in Black Dirt Studio recording a third LP. Good news. But until that third LP materializes, we've got two downright fantastic new works from Bishop and Chasny's Six Organs of Admittance to dig into. Even better news.
The entrancing Hexadic from Six Organs of Admittance sounds unlike anything Chasny has done before -- an impressive feat, considering his prolific nature. The album was created using a system of . . .
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Northern Spy is set to release Shilpa Ray's next full-length, Last Year's Savage, in May. In the meantime you can pick up the covers cassette, Make Up, both on tour and online. Ray covers Dinah Washington's "What A Difference A Day Makes" and "Make Up" - track one off side two of Lou Reed's Transformer. Ray, on the inspiration behind the Reed cover, below...
I had an epiphany about this song . . .
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From the very start there was something a little haphazard about Tull. In their initial incarnation they were a British Blues band who happened to be named after an 18th century agriculturalist (although this didn’t stop their first single from being misattributed to somebody named ‘Jethro Toe.’) Frontman Ian Anderson would show up at gigs–bird’s nest hair, dirty beard, dirtier coat–looking like a leftover Fagin from the previous night’s performance of Oliver!. It was a gimmick they kept up for years; where most bands would appear on stage like the rockstars they were, Tull would just stand around, doing not much of anything, before walloping everyone with a bombast worthy of Blue Cheer or Soft Machine. Anderson would stamp his foot and growl–a-one-to-three-two-two-three, the actual time signature didn’t matter–and in those seconds he would go from misbegotten tramp (chomping on a cigarette, mumbling to himself) to feral madman. And if the shock of it hadn’t quite carried to the back row, you had that silvery phallic symbol that was his flute: spluttering and snarling and occasionally beautiful.
It was all so incongruous. Their first album This Was weirdly presented them in the past tense, with the band members dressed as old men on the cover, posed in front of fake woodland backdrop and surrounded by dogs. Listening to the album now, you hear the British Blues rubric being accosted. There’s such a punky, anti-purist disorderliness to the attack. In other words, This Was…not John Mayall. This wasn’t Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. This was not even Led Zeppelin. It was far too ramshackle, far too impish, far too everything-and-the-kitchen-sink. Take ‘Beggar’s Farm’–built around a demonic little riff, it gradually whips its languorous jazz-blues into a nightmarish gypsy stew. Three minutes into the song, the wheels come loose and we enter a zone halfway between Ornette Coleman and Freakbeat. Another great example is the first Tull single proper: ‘A Song For Jeffery.’ The song opens like a cocktail jazz band consisting entirely of angry drunks: an owl screech of flute, an a-rhythmic throb of electric bass. Intro complete, Clive Bunker’s drums begin to crash and thump in a way that isn’t so much rock and roll as Salvation Army band. If the harmonica and slide guitar do give the impression of anxious Anglo-Blues, then Anderson’s singing wants to push things even farther back, into the murk of Depression-era hotel room recordings, gin, and faulty microphones.
Jethro Tull :: Song For Jeffrey
The regretful image of Jethro Tull that persists to this day is one of prog-rock excess, of album-length song cycles, FM hard rock staples, of beards, of a crazy-eyed front man who wore a cod-piece and played flute one leg. Not even cool enough to make the Dazed and Confused soundtrack, the band is easy to dismiss as a joke, much as onetime fan Lester Bangs did when he caught them touring an album of continuous music with cerebral lyrics reputedly written by an 8-year-old-boy.
However, early Tull is something else entirely.
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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 377: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ Arthur Russell - Love Is Overtaking Me ++ Amen Dunes - Spirits Are Parted ++ Loudon Wainwright III - Kick In The Head ++ Thin Lizzy - Running Back ++ Ian Matthews - Do I Still Figure In Your Life ++ Wings - Love Is Strange ++ Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Straight Into Darkness ++ Graham . . .
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In August of 2012, six months following the release of his last studio album Where It Hits You, Jim White was emailed by yours truly. I was reaching out to him to ask if he would be willing to participate in Aquarium Drunkard's ongoing Lagniappe Sessions series. "I'm just throwing this your way because we'd love to have you do the series and I know the results would be amazing," I said in the email, meaning every word.
Our love for Jim White . . .
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“...the entire album is basically about him meeting his wife,” my buddy says about I Love You, Honeybear, the new album by Father John Misty.
I think back to April 2013, when I spoke with Josh Tillman, Misty himself, at Coachella. He was doing a record signing, greeting sun-baked fans, posing for photos, and being a smart ass. His shirt was open, his pants white. His ladyfriend Emma Garr was with him, and she nursed a beer, occasionally wincing at Tillman . . .
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As the years march on, it's only inevitable that we lose the musical heroes of days gone by at a steady and sad rate. Our most recent loss is the great Don Covay at the age of 76. While Covay's name was not well known outside of soul aficionados, the songs he had a hand in penning are stamped indelibly into music history. See: "Mercy, Mercy", "Sookie, Sookie" and "Chain of Fools" -- tracks that will forever be etched into the souls of music lovers everywhere.
Covay was a South Carolina native whose church upbringing (his father was a preacher) is obvious in his powerhouse vocal delivery. Beyond that, I've long been struck by the poetic simplicity and directness of Covay's lyrics which make his writing and recordings so appealing. Don's career began when he was just out of his teenage years, as he began working as Little Richard's chauffeur and occasional opening act. As an artist, Covay struggled as a performer and songwriter for six years until "Mercy, Mercy" became his first R&B hit in 1964. Not only did the track become a soul standard, but it is also notable for the appearance of young Jimi Hendrix on guitar in one of his first forays as a session man.
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The third installment of an ongoing series with Pickathon, showcasing footage from the Galaxy Barn located at Pendarvis Farm in Oregon: Ural Thomas & The Pain's "I'm A Whole New Thing".
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In December we caught up with Gruff Rhys, during his last pass through LA, in support of 2014's American Interior - the Welshman's fourth solo release, beginning with 2005's Yr Atal Genhedlaeth. Recorded at Red Rockets Glare in Rancho Park, an unaccompanied Rhys laid down several tracks culled from his latest full-length. The session debuts Friday on the SIRIUS show - AD reader taste, below.
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