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Arthur Alexander :: Anna (Go To Him)

Just wrapped a music consulting gig downtown and included this bit; a favorite early soul ballad culled from an old soul an old r&b mixtape I put together years ago of tracks the Beatles covered. One of the great voices of his time, Alexander's honey vocals and delivery are perfectly matched by the track's drums and ivory run. While I love the Fabs rendition, it comes off somewhat tepid in comparison.

MP3: Arthur Alexander :: Anna (Go To Him)
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Stephin Merritt’s Obscurities: Forever And A Day

Merge Records just announced they will be releasing a collection of hard to find and previously unreleased tracks by the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt. Entitled Obscurities, the set will feature songs during the bands run on the label from 1994-99. Look for it August 23rd. Here is the first taste, "Forever And A Da

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Monster Rally :: Surf Erie

If you keep up with our Mondo Boys stuff (pt. 3 of our Weird Summer mixtape series is on the horizon) than you're familiar with the stylings of Monster Rally. Like a self-contained surf & sand b-movie from the sixties, "Surf Erie" (premiered via IGIF last week) is a surreal instrumental slice of bedroom . . .

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AD Presents :: White Denim @ The Echo, May 25

Wednesday night, May 25th, Aquarium Drunkard welcomes back White Denim to Los Angeles at The Echo. I've said as much numerous times on these pages in the past, but if you've yet to see this band live than you're truly missing out on one of the best shows going today. Also, the band is sure to debut a bunch of material from their forthcoming LP, D . . .

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Big Sambo & The House Wreckers :: The Rains Came

Spun this joint today on the radio show. You may be familiar with Doug Sahm and his band's cover, but this, the original, is seriously where it's at. Fronted by vocalist/saxman James Young, Big Sambo & The House Wreckers hailed from the gulf coast of Texas, laying down "The Rains Came" for Eric Records in 1961. I'm sure if you're diligent you could track the 45 down somewhere, but I was personally hipped to the track several years back via the . . .

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SIRIUS/XMU :: Aquarium Drunkard Show

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 194: Jean Michel Bernard - Generique Stephane ++ Howard Nishioka - Carnivourous Dogaramus ++ Michael Kiwanuka - Tell Me A Tale ++ Big Sambo & The House Wreckers - The Rains Came ++ Bill Withers - Better Off Dead ++ Amanaz - Khala My Friend ++ Wendell Stuart & The Downbeaters - Hey Jude ++ Santa Nguessan :: Manny Nia ++ Os Mutantes - A Minha Menina ++ Henri . . .

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Timber Timbre :: Woman

Keeping with this Tom Waits/Morphine "low rock" noir vibe for a minute, check out Timber Timbre's "Woman," both the track and the accompanying video culled from the Creep On Creepin . . .

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Tom Waits :: Clap Hands (The Big Time Theatrical Concert)

I enjoy a good magic trick, a bit of slight of hand. I enjoy an entertainer--a changeling, a shapeshifter, a master of ceremonies. While there are fewer and fewer artists tapping into the primordial, the supernatural, we thankfully still have the self-made myth that is Tom Waits.

Captured in 1987 during the the tour for Frank's Wild Years, you could do much worse than spend a night nipping on your favorite bottle of whatever and this tourfilm . . .

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Mount Moriah :: Only Way Out

You wouldn't be wrong to categorize North Carolina's Mount Moriah as "Country Rock," but might I suggest the term "Southern" be used instead. While the songs are often set in motion by electric guitars that lead down country roads, Mount Moriah garnishes their sound with a faithful declaration of spirit. Be it Heather McEntire's sorrowful psalms, the haunting organ on "Lament" or the weeping violin on "Old Gowns," theirs is a requiem with a palpable sense of place. It's the sound of a . . .

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Cure For Pain: The Mark Sandman Story (The AD Interview)

Compared to his contemporaries, Morphine's Mark Sandman came off like more of an out-of-place beat poet than the zeitgeist's 'slacker' guitar sound of the day. With a presence tapped in to the lineage of Tom Waits and Bukowski, Morphine worked the noir and worked it hard. They dubbed their sound "low rock." No one else sounded anything like them at the time...no one else sounds anything like them today.

Below is my conversation with the filmmakers behind the new Morphine documentary, Cure For Pain: The Mark Sandman Story.   Jeff Broadway, Dave Ferino and Rob Bralver discuss the documentary, the process behind it and the case for Morphine in 2011.

Aquarium Drunkard: Why Morphine, why now?

Jeff Broadway: When I was maybe 10 or 11, I was introduced to Mark’s music by my mom and her sisters because Mark was a second cousin of theirs. I thought it was awesome that I had some rockstar of an extended cousin and started listening to a lot of Morphine as a teenager. As I got older and more into Mark’s music and the idea of family, I began considering how a film, most likely a doc, could be developed from his life story. When we started really getting serious about the project in 2008, it was like, okay, so OG Morphine fans are in their 30s and 40s and have seen a decade of music go by without hearing a sound quite like Morphine’s. They miss it. We wanted to remind them of that nostalgia and introduce the music to a new generation of listeners.

AD: Now a decade-plus since Sandman's death, the music feels as timeless and out of step as ever. Your film feels like what could be the beginning of getting the Morphine conversation started again.

Jeff Broadway: I agree. I think enough time has gone by since he passed that people will see the film and immediately reconnect with the music — above all. They’ll go download it. Talk with friends about it. Introduce friends to it. And Morphine will become appropriately relevant again. But beyond the film re-catalyzing the Morphine conversation, I think people will walk away from the film with a deeper appreciation of the evolution and breadth of an artist who left too soon.

AD: What's the temperature like out there? Are young people beginning to discover the band's music?

Jeff Broadway: I think so, but I also think it’s a bit early to say definitively. The film’s been seen by maybe a couple thousand people and needs more time in circulation before we can determine what sort of bump in sales the Morphine catalog might receive as a result of our film. I am confident, though, that the doc will only increase the appreciation of Mark’s and Morphine’s global cult stardom.

AD: Tell me a bit about accruing the doc's footage. Had Mark died in 2009, instead of 1999, I imagine there would have been near-infinite droves of media to delve through due to the advent of camera phones, etc.

Rob Bralver: There was definitely a limited amount of material to work with, and we just had to make do with what we could. The movie is a pretty big grab bag of footage - basically anything we could get our hands on. As you say, Mark was popular before the days of entire audiences filming shows in HD on their phones, so what we had to work with was mostly dusty, distorted VHS tapes we found in the basement of Mark's old studio, Hi-N-Dry, combined with 8mm family footage, plus our own present day interviews. Most of the archival stuff in the movie was shot on analog cameras ten to thirty years ago and then digitized, so while it was limiting in terms of what we were able to use to tell our story, it also gives the movie some of that period feel.

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Wendell Stuart & The Downbeaters

Nick at Ghost Capital must have read my mind as he just shared Wendell Stuart & The Downbeaters, a Bahamian soul LP I've been searching for the past two months having caught a track on the recent Trans Air Records West Indies Funk compilation. Below is their obligatory, yet excellent, take on the Beatles, plus a cover of . . .

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Amédé Ardoin :: Mama, I’ll Be Long Gone: The Complete Recordings, 1929-1934

Certain strands of rockist kids grow up saying that their favorite music is “anything but rap or country.” For the teenager of the 1990s in Southern Louisiana, the silent addendum to that addendum was “or Cajun or zydeco”. The nasal-honked whine and chank-a-chank rhythms of our cultural forebears was anathema to us, as was anyone who cried “ay-ee!” in exultation, comme les cadiens. Acadiana Open Channel, the local access station for the region surrounding Lafayette, regularly broadcast fais do-dos live from Randol’s restaurant. Even a passing glimpse of the oldsters two-stepping in their starched Wranglers, filtered through the cheap fuzz of a tax-funded lens, was enough to bring out from us sinking and embarrassed feelings of recognition, an emotion that blew from the screen with enough force to pin back our ears. As we struggled to find the remote, at the forefront of our minds was the unacknowledged fact that these were our people–or, that we teenagers were the people of these people. The only hope was in finding the channel changer, and thus in being able to clap our eyes gratefully on Ren and Stimpy or Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; anything that had syndication.

But something has happened. Blame it on the internet, or on Katrina or the BP spill, or even the Saints winning the Super Bowl. Blame it on the nostalgic zeitgeist, or the actual process of easing into adulthood. Whatever the cause, something has happened. All the embarrassed teens are playing the accordion. While the local music scene in Lafayette has always been oversaturated with pick-up Cajun and zydeco groups looking for modest regional success, the past few years have seen a definite shift in the cultural landscape. The local sound is what’s in. Local noise-popsters (and Park the Van signees) Brass Bed are on the verge of releasing a split EP with Cajun group Feufollet, whose sound has been hailed by none less than kingmaker Elvis Costello. When they’re not off playing outdoor festivals in Quebec or Minnesota, local heroes Cedric Watson and Bijou Creole play to overflow crowds at the Blue Moon Saloon just off of Lafayette’s main drag. Young Cajuns, weaned on punk and garage, have made enough noise with their fiddles and accordions to perk the ears of NPR’s Geoffery Himes, who, having caught a Pine Leaf Boys show at New Orleans’ Jazz Fest, wondered aloud whether Cajun string bands might break out and become the next big thing, î  la Mumford and Sons.

So it’s appropriate that, as a new generation begins to push Cajun music out of the provinces and onto the national stage, Tompkins Square has released this set from Amédé Ardoin, the Depression-era accordion player considered by most to be the godfather of both the Cajun and zydeco genres. Mama, I’ll Be Long Gone, which collects for the first time each of the thirty-four tracks recorded by Ardoin, ought to play the same role for young Cajun musicians that Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music did for Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Like many of the songs captured by Smith, Ardoin’s songs have entered what we might call the social domain; songs like “Two-Step de Eunice” and “Les Blues de Prison” have been passed around and reinterpreted for generations, and are genre standards.

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The Rolling Stones :: We Love You (Dandelion A-side)

Around this time last year I took on my first full assignment as music supervisor for filmmaker Robbie Pickering's Natural Selection. The film nabbed both the Grand Jury and Audience awards at SXSW Film in March. It also won best music. More on that later, as right now I want to share a song I've long had grouped in a folder of tunes I'd like to see placed in the context of a film; the Rolling Stones "We Love You."

The A . . .

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Jacqueline Taieb :: 7 Heures du Matin

Cut in 1967, "7 Heures du Matin" follows Jacqueline Taieb's morning as she fantasizes about Paul McCartney (though it's The Who's "My Generation" she riffs on) and spins Elvis records. While readily found on many a sixties Parisian girl-group and yé-yé compilations, might I recommend checking out Taieb's own become a member or log in.