Extra width / Winter weight. Country gospel soul. Est. 1975.
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Sidecar: Transmission / 11 . . .
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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.
Martin Nunez, L.A.'s Sir Psych, sits in during the second hour of today's show sharing rare vintage nuggets from his personal collection. Find his work, here and twitter,
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Comprised of now-iconic tracks like “Cod'ine,” "The Universal Soldier,” and “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone”, Buffy Sainte-Marie's 1964 debut, It’s My Way!, first and foremost introduced the artist to the world as a songwriter. Her topical folk albums on Vanguard Records proved she was one of the more original folk revivalists as well an important Native American voice.
Sainte-Marie’s 1965 follow-up, Many a Mile, featured the original recording of “Until It’s Time for You to . . .
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Even if you've never heard of Chris Darrow, you've probably heard him. The guy has a resume a mile long, having lent his stringed instrument skills to recordings by Leonard Cohen, Linda Ronstadt, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, James Taylor and John Fahey, among many others. He was also a founding member of the obscure-but-excellent psych group Kaleidoscope, a collective that made two adventurous, West Coast-Meets-Middle-East LPs in the late 1960s. But by the time he recorded his solo debut, become a member or log in.
Oliver Wang's Soul Sides hipped me to this record 5 or 6 years back, and its rarely left the sweet-soul stacks since. Released in '68, courtesy of Boo Records, I recently re-encountered the track in a different context via a series of compilations documenting East L.A.'s affection for 50s and 60s soul and R&B.
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Lots of inquiries per the Band Not Band compilation I mentioned earlier this month, re: Clover's "Mr. Moon". The original CD-R has since been lost to the sands of various moves, road trips, etc., though I still recall much of the track selection, and will be posting it, piecemeal, over the next few months. Following Clover, track two was become a member or log in.
No one will accuse Foxygen's We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic of being a concept album. It’s as stylistically diverse, maddening and confident as the Take The Kids Off Broadway EP, yet feels ready to enter the primetime -- a band confident that their set of skills will be accepted, or at least tolerated. This is in part thanks to the deft production of Richard Swift, whose hand truly feels like a contribution rather than a contraption. Sonically, the music is still confounding, still prone to fits of vibing followed by un-fettered freakouts. And with Foxygen there always seems to be a nod and a wink with every riff and turn. Sam France's manic vocal delivery, something like a man alternating between 103 degree fever dreams and a case of the chills, meanders mercurially throughout the record, with multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Rado accentuating his most fanciful moments. And it's this, Rado's own ability to genre-hop moment-to-moment, that remains one of the bands hallmarks and is as defining as France’s howls of poetry.
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While my perception of "winter" has wholly changed since moving to California 11 years ago, Bunyan's haunting 1966 rendering of "Winter Is Blue" continues to inhabit the season existentially. Culled from an unreleased acetate, later tacked on the reissue of Just Another Diamond Day, the track cuts right through sunny and 75 L.A. in January. Call it achingly beautiful aural sleet and snow.
MP3: Vashti Bunyan . . .
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This Friday, direct from Sweden, Aquarium Drunkard presents The Amazing with Woodsman at Mercury Lounge, NYC. If you missed our 2012 Year In Review, we likened the record to a "textured glide through the past four decades of coast & canyon folk, pop and rock coupled with the pastoral side of Pink Floyd and the live fury of Crazy Horse." If that's your . . .
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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.
Download the Aquarium Drunkard session with Melody's Echo Chamber, HERE. The latest Sidecar podcast . . .
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Harlem River Drive were a short-lived but righteous group of musicians brought together in 1970-71 by Puerto Rican pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri. Veritable king of the Latin dance floors, by the end of the 1960s Palmieri was restless, out to top himself, and looking to push beyond the boundaries of the music he had been performing over the past decade. So that's what he did. He got down and pushed further out.
A street-tough blend of Latin rhythms, 70s funk, fusion, soul grooves and social poetry . . .
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Astral blues. More freeform interstitial airwave debris transmitting somewhere off the coast of Los Angeles. Green swamp fuzz from the 1970s.
Direct download, below. Subscribe to future transmissions via iTunes and/or through the RSS, here. The first nine transmissions can be found and downloaded, here.
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Yeah, the party line on the Velvet Underground is that the band was almost completely ignored during the 1960s, their flowers of darkness vibes passed over in favor of flower power. But as it turns out, plenty of people were listening -- including this one guitarist you may have heard of, a guy called Jimmy Page. Of course, Page had a direct connection to the Velvets, having played 12-string on
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Wrapping one's head around the music of Wooden Wand, the ongoing project of idiosyncratic singer/songwriter James Jackson Toth takes some effort. With over 100 releases to his name, from spiraling freak-out ragas and avant-garde experimentation to classic Asylum Records-style folk pop — Toth skips through styles like a zealous host swapping out LPs on the turntable at a party.
2011’s Briarwood was a smoky slab of country funk, one of the strongest entries in Toth’s extensive catalog, but his brand new Blood Oath of the New Blues finds him indulging more esoteric impulses, exploring looping crime story like “Southern Colorado Song,” lonesome folk with “No Debts,” and droning expanses with “Dungeon of Irons.” The melodic elements of Briarwood are still there; only they’re pulled and expanded, stretched across the new record’s meditative ballads.
Toth — who moonlights as a writer at Aquarium Drunkard — describes the record as "Sunday morning's wake and bake" after "Briarwood's’ Saturday night revelry.” Amen.
AD: This marks the first successive Wooden Wand record to be recorded with the same group as the previous, correct?
James Jackson Toth: More or less. Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice had a pretty stable lineup, but since I’ve been doing solo stuff, I’ve definitely favored the revolving door approach. But we did [Blood Oath of the New Blues] in the same studio with the same people as [Briarwood]. It just works. I’m definitely going to record with them again. It’s good, as long as they can tolerate me, and I don’t alienate anybody [laughs].
AD: Briarwood and Blood Oath of the New Blues sound very interesting back-to-back. I imagine there are fans yours that favor one “thing,” or one Wooden Wand style more than another.
James Jackson Toth: Oh yeah.
AD: This record feels like it unites a lot of your sounds. I imagine it wasn’t intentional, but when you listen to it, do you get a sense that it ties together some of the disparate styles you’ve explored?
James Jackson Toth: Yeah, I think it does. Like you said, it wasn’t really intentional, but it does feel like a culmination at this point. There’s a lot of Wooden Wand material out there, and often you’re posed the question, “What one record would you tell someone to buy to get a sense of what you do?” I didn’t really have a good answer to that question. Like you said, I move around quite a bit and try different things. It’s a really good distillation of the many hats we’ve worn over the years.
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In a lengthy, revealing interview with Pitchfork, Christopher Owens mentioned that he thought the songs he’d written for Girls’ 2011 album Father, Son, Holy Ghost were capable of winning Grammys. If he only meant that those songs were among the best of the year--or even of the era--then he certainly would have been correct. But if Owens, whose heartfelt honesty has made his interviews nearly as captivating as his songwriting, truly believed that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences might recognize that achievement as such, then it’s further proof that the Bay Area songwriter is only partially of this world. What I mean is that, for all of his personal eccentricities, Christopher Owens occupies a space that many of us left behind years ago, a place where recognition from awards shows and the Billboard charts are actual barometers of success. He’s long heralded the work of Ariel Pink, but he doesn’t seem to get the joke--or, what’s more likely, he doesn’t particularly care that it’s a joke. It wouldn’t be right to call him post-irony, if only because he doesn’t seem to have ever gone through irony’s throes.
That’s not really a fair reading--you don’t escape from what Owens has escaped from without growing a little world-weary--but the tenderness that characterizes Lysandre, his first post-Girls album, is beyond reproach. The album largely concerns Girls’ first tour through Europe, and Owens’ relationship with a French woman whose name gives the album its title. Owens and Lysandre’s relationship dissolved, just as the Girls project dissolved, and while Lysandre is not without its devastating moments, it’s a far cry from the existential horror that powered some of Father, Son, Holy Ghost’s most moving songs. Where that record, and Album before it, tried to rally its singer and subjects out of defeat, Lysandre finds Owens comfortably removed; he’s telling his story, not recreating it.
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