Monthly Archives: November 2015

Raging Fire: Everything is Roses – 1985-1989

RagingFire_EverythingIsRosesMid-80s post-punk from the heart of country music

From a vantage point on the West Coast, Jason and the Nashville Scorchers seemed to be an anomaly – a rock band from Nashville – and when they dropped “Nashville” from their name, the connection between Music City and native-born rock music grew even more tenuous. But the Scorchers turn out to be both the nationally known emblem of and an inspiration for a lively Nashville rock scene that was broader than the mating of country and punk. A less widely known darling of that scene was Raging Fire, whose mid-to-late ‘80s catalog is sampled for this 22-track anthology.

Fronted by vocalist Melora Zaner, Raging Fire could pull back and give hints of their Nashville origins, but the band’s dynamic rock ‘n’ roll rage was more in line with the barking poetry of Patti Smith, post-punk of X and new wave studio sounds of the 80s, than southern rock or country twang. Even the band’s acoustic numbers, such as “After Loving One Man From East Texas,” have some bite. Had they been in San Francisco or Los Angeles, or five years later in Olympia, things might have been different; but as it played out, they attracted attention from record labels, but never closed a deal.

The group toured the midwest and south, and gained college radio play for their EP A Family Thing and album Faith Love Was Made Of. The former is included here in its entirety, the latter sampled alongside demos and tracks drawn from compilation albums. Without a label deal, the band’s momentum stalled, the members’ lives moved in different directions, and the group drifted and broke apart. With this first-ever reissue, it’s still hard to imagine this music coming out of Nashville, but even harder to imagine there wasn’t one label who could get this band signed. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Raging Fire’s Home Page

The Royal Hangmen: Hell Yeah! An 80s Garage Tribute

RoyalHangmen_HellYeahReviving the garage rock revivalists

Garage rock has turned out to be a gift that keeps on giving. The original mid-60s singles movement was recognized in the writings of Lester Bangs and Greg Shaw, and memorialized in 1972 on Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets. The sounds continued to echo ever more scratchily in the follow-on avalanche of Pebbles, Boulders, Back From the Grave, Girls in the Garage and their myriad peers, and the ethos took root among the DIY punk movement of the late-70s. By the early 1980s, a full-blown revival was underway, and over the succeeding decades, the sound has morphed and been reborn around the world.

Enter Zurich’s Royal Hangmen, who released their first demos in 2006, the single “Mary Jane” in 2009 and their self-titled debut LP in 2012. Their latest 4-song EP salutes the first wave of garage revivalists, including covers of the Chesterfield Kings (“She Told Me Lies”), Wylde Mammoths (“Help That Girl”), Miracle Workers (“I’ll Walk Away”) and Cynics (“Yeah!”). Just as the first-wave revivalists stocked their sets with covers of obscure singles from the 1960s, the Hangmen have selected their material with a connoisseur’s ear for the revivalists’ originals, and recreated the same sort of sweaty reverence these sides deserve. There are some great memories here, given a fresh shot of fuzz by the Royal Hangmen. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

The Royal Hangmen’s Home Page

Plainsong: Reinventing Richard РThe Songs of Richard Fari̱a

Plainsong_ReinventingRichardRichard Fariña’s songs reimagined for the new millennium

Richard Fariña’s untimely 1966 death silenced one of the folk movement’s rapidly blossoming voices. The albums he recorded with his spouse Mimi have survived in reissue [1 2 3] and anthology, but for many listeners, Fariña’s voice doesn’t come to mind until their ears are rung by the dulcimer of “Pack Up Your Sorrows” or stung by the protest of “House Un-American Blues Activities Dream.” His songs continue to find their way into the setlists and records of other artists, but for the most faithful, they’ve served as on-going guideposts. Two of those loyalists, Iain Matthews and Andy Roberts, co-founders of Plainsong, have been performing Fariña’s works on stage and in studio for more than forty years, and now come back together to pay a more consolidated tribute.

The trio, including Mark Griffiths, offers fifteen of Fariña’s songs, including the previously unrecorded “Sombre Winds.” They focus on the songs, rather than the Fariñas’ original performances, imagining how they might sound if written and recorded today. Well, that’s not entirely true, given the bluesy doo-wop treatment of “One Way Ticket.” Perhaps it’s fairer to say that this is the sound of artists who have so deeply absorbed these songs, they can turn them back out to the world in any number of interesting forms, converting the “Sell-Out Agitated Waltz” into soulful straight time, taming the agitated ask of “Pack Up Your Sorrows” into a placid invitation and turning “Hard Loving Loser” into a summery country tune. These broader interpretations show off both the material’s innate strengths and the the interpreter’s imagination.

Other titles, including “Another Country” and “Lemonade Lady,” are given to more subtle changes, adding flecks of the interpreter’s wares while keeping closer to the original mood. The musicianship is superb throughout, and the vocals, though sung in close harmony similar to the Fariñas, are comprised of of male voices whose timbres align more closely than the Fariñas’ high-low pairing. The difference in the vocal pattern is a blessing, as it gives each interpretation an original top line, even when the songs aren’t radically reworked. It may be hard for listeners to hear past the Fariñas’ original recordings (and, in particular, surrender Richard’s driving dulcimer), but doing so lets you hear these songs anew. And in the hands of artists who’ve had a lifelong love affair with the material, the results are fresh and fascinating. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Various Artist: Cold and Bitter Tears – The Songs of Ted Hawkins

Various_ColdAndBitterTearsRemembering the songs of Ted Hawkins

Ted Hawkins was the perfect college radio artist: articulate, soulful, emotionally powerful and most importantly, an outsider. His hardscrabble life simultaneously limited the commercial growth of his career and defined the authenticity upon which his art rested. What made him a particularly interesting fit for college radio was that his music wasn’t outwardly challenging. It wasn’t discordant noise or expletive-filled speedcore; it was soulful folk music, made with guitars and keyboards, and sung in a style that threaded easily with more commercially popular blues and soul. But that was just the musical surface, and beneath the performance were songs unlike those written in Memphis or Detroit or New York, or even Hawkins’ adopted home of Los Angeles.

With his passing in 1995, his singing voice was silenced, but in the tradition of folk music, the songs he left behind continue to speak his truth. This first ever tribute to Hawkins gathers fifteen performers to sing Hawkins originals, and adds a bonus demo of Hawkins singing an a cappella demo of the otherwise unrecorded “Great New Year.” The performers include many well-known names, including James McMurtry, Kacey Chambers and Mary Gauthier, and like all tribute albums, the magic is in selecting the material, matching it to the right performers and finding interpretations that honor the original while adding the covering artist’s stamp. Co-producers Kevin “Shinyribs” Russell, Jenni Finlay and Brian T. Atkinson have done an admirable job on all three counts.

The collection’s most well-known title, “Sorry You’re Sick,” found a sympathetic voice in Gauthier, whose own battle with addiction conjures a first-hand understanding of the song’s protagonists. Kasey and Bill Chambers give the title track a Hank Williams-sized helpings of anguish and loneliness, and McMurtry’s leadoff “Big Things” is more resolute in its melancholy than Hawkins’ original. The latter includes the lyric “Now I’ve got a song here to write, I stay up most every night, creating with hope they’ll live on forever,” a dream that comes true exactly as McMurtry sings it. While Hawkins’ original performances hinted at twang, his lyrics of longing and loneliness are easily fit to full-blown country arrangements, such as the two-stepping barroom infidelity of Sunny Sweeney’s “Happy Hour.”

Hawkins’ songs were surprisingly hopeful and good humored in the face of loss and unfulfilled desire. Tim Easton chases an end to loneliness in “One Hundred Miles,” Evan Felker seeks “Peace and Happiness,” and facing the greatest loss imaginable, Shinyribs remains funky fresh as he asks “Who Got My Natural Comb?” Hawkins’ widow, Elizabeth, and daughter Tina-Marie reach back to the songwriter’s earliest commercial release for a soulful rendition of the 1966 single “Baby,” expanding the musical essay to a time before Hawkins was “discovered” busking at Venice Beach. As with all tribute albums, these covers don’t substitute for Hawkins’ originals, but highlight his songwriter’s pen, and weave his memory into the folk tradition. [©2015 Hyperbolium]