Category Archives: Free Stream

Elana James: Black Beauty

ElanaJames_BlackBeautyA fiddler’s longing and guilty pleasures

James has made a name writing, singing and playing a unique combination of hot jazz and Western Swing with Austin’s Hot Club of Cowtown. Though known primarily for her virtuosity as a fiddler, her voice, much like fellow instrumental prodigy Alison Krauss, has always held special qualities. Her self-titled 2007 solo album combined the same talents she’d leveraged in Hot Club – fiddle, voice and songwriting – but in a wider context that glimpsed her influences through the selection of cover songs. Eight years later, her second album expands on the same premise, weaving together originals, instrumentals (“Eva’s Dance” and “Waltz of the Animals”), and a selection of covers that spans jazz (“All I Need is You”), folk (“Hobo’s Lullaby”), counterculture classics (“I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” and “Ripple”), ‘70s novelty (“Telephone Man”) and even ‘80s synthpop (“Only You”).

Impressively, James brings this wide range of material under one tent. Her plucked violin opens the album in place of Vince Clark’s synthesizer for Yazoo’s “Only You,” with a double-tracked vocal that’s lighter than Alison Moyet’s original. The song’s mood of longing is a fitting introduction to James’ originals, which include the unbreakable hold of “High Upon the Mountains” and the second-thoughts of “Reunion (Livin’ Your Dream).” The latter might have been the album’s most poignant moment, had James not turned a letter from a U.S. soldier into the eulogy “Hey Beautiful: Last Letter from Iraq.” Setting the words of Staff Sgt. Juan Campos to music, James evinces a longing for home that’s beyond homesickness, and in it’s true-to-life source, beyond the craft of lyric writing. It’s a touching complement to James’ original songs and the revelations she offers through her selection of covers. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Elana James’ Home Page

Jesse Winchester: A Reasonable Amount of Trouble

JesseWinchester_AReasonableAmountOfTroubleAn endearing epitaph from a legend

Much like Warren Zevon’s The Wind, Jesse Winchester’s A Reasonable Amount of Trouble turned out to be his own epitaph. Unlike Zevon’s album, recorded in the shadow of a terminal diagnosis, Winchester recorded this final studio work while in remission, with hope still on the horizon. But even with his cancer at bay, mortality had clearly become a presence that was impossible to ignore. And so Winchester engaged it directly with songs that ponder life, and indirectly with songs – particularly cover songs – that held onto his abiding faith in music.

Reaching back to the Clovers’ “Devil or Angel,” the Del-Vikings’ “Whispering Bells” (complete with yakety sax), and the Cascades’ “Rhythm of the Rain,” Winchester found comfort in songs that had first stoked his love of music. Given his own prowess as a writer, it’s telling that he spent a quarter of the album on songs whose soulful resonance still gripped him fifty years later. His new material has a clear sense of nostalgia, but also a thankfulness for the here and now. He recalibrates his perspective, remembering to always value and enjoy life’s pleasures, and extols the virtues of people and places he’s loved and those that have loved him.

Winchester’s draft-induced emigration to Canada is captured in both the album cover, a parting gift to his mother in 1969, and the song “Ghost.” The latter reaches back to Winchester’s late teens, and alongside “A Little Louisiana” and “Never Forget to Boogie,” tells the story of his musical birthright. The album finally draws itself up to the inevitability of Winchester’s situation with the touching “Every Day I Get the Blues” and the contemplative closer, “Just So Much.” Winchester lived a songwriter’s life to the very end, allowing his questions and worries to wash over him, facing down fate and holding on firmly to sentiment without ever becoming maudlin. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Jesse Winchester’s Home Page

James McMurtry: Complicated Game

JamesMcMurtry_ComplicatedGameA welcome return of McMurtry’s experience and imagination

It’s been seven years since singer-songwriter James McMurtry offered up an album of new material. His last release, 2009’s Live in Europe, recontextualized McMurtry’s societal observations in front of a European audience, and though the songs took on new shades in front of a foreign audience, the CD was still more of a tour memento than a new statement. Which leaves 2008’s Just Us Kids as his last full thesis. At the time, McMurtry’s observation fell upon broad social issues of political disorder, social isolation, economic disruption and ecological destruction. Seven years later, his concerns haven’t abated, but his songs narrow their focus to witness these larger issues at human scale.

The album’s opening track, “Copper Canteen,” finds its aging protagonists struggling to hang on to their small town life. The big box stores on the bypass loom over them, reframing broad questions about mass-scale marketing to personal issues of an individual town’s demise. Their fears find salve in nostalgic thoughts and the hope that they can hold on to retirement, as they remain fatalistic rather than desperate or bitter. Nostalgia threads through many of McMurtry’s new songs, with wanderers looking back to see where they lost the trail and community totems memorialized by those who remember. The portraits of hard-working fishermen, hard-luck ranchers and unemployed veterans are both inspiring and heartbreaking, and blend easily into songs of depression and escape.

Peeking through the darker scenes, there are a few glimmers of sunshine. The everyday details of “How’m I Gonna Find You Now” are rattled off in a monologue whose agitation reveals the narrator’s unspoken feelings, and the portraiture of “Things I’ve Come to Know” stems from the sort of intimacy that is born of time and devotion. On its surface, the album feels less overtly political than Just Us Kids, but the incisiveness of the lyrics turns these individuals’ stories into social commentary. McMurtry labels himself a writer of fiction, but the details he captures in songs like “Carlisle’s Haul” are too visceral to have been read in a book. He may fictionalize, but the people, places and language are as much experience as they are imagination.

Co-produced by CC Adcock (Lafayette Maquise, Lil’ Band O’ Gold) and engineer Mike Napoutiano, the guitar-bass-and-drums are augmented by well-placed touches of banjo and violin, and given added dimension from Hammond B3 (courtesy of Benmont Tench), moog bass (courtesy of Ivan Neville), Uilleann pipes, and various electric guitar sounds. The longer songs give the band a chance to play into the grooves, but the productions never lose sight of the vocals. McMurtry is a singer who tells stories, and a storyteller who sings melodies. At times he sounds like a more-melodic Lou Reed, with a half-spoken, half-sung style whose medium and message are inseparable. Seven years is a long time to wait for a new album, but in addition to McMurtry’s busy road schedule, songs this finely observed spring from experience rather than demand. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

James McMurtry’s Home Page

Anne McCue: Blue Sky Thinkin’

AnneMcCue_BlueSkyThinkinAnne McCue swings

Anne McCue is better known for standing in front of guitars and drums than clarinets and brass. Her previous albums reached back to the gutsy sound of 1970s rock vocalists, as well as contemporaries like Sam Phillips and Lucinda Williams; her latest reaches back several more decades, to the sounds of the 1930s. There’s always been a bluesy edge to her singing, and here those notes consort with the roots of swing and gypsy jazz. McCue dials down the ferocity of her vocals to an era-appropriate slyness, picks terrific figures on her guitar, and perhaps most impressively of all, writes songs that bid to fill some blank pages in the great American songbook.

Drummer Dave Raven nails the era’s blood-pumping excitement with Krupa-styled tom-toms on the opening “Dig Two Graves,” Deanie Richardson’s fiddle provides a superb foil for McCue’s six string swing, and Jim Hoke’s clarinet and horn chart fills in the period detail. The song’s bouncy tempo camouflages lyrics of noirish revenge, with San Francisco fog cloaking fatalistic fortunes. McCue turns to folk-blues with the finger-picked renewal of “Spring Cleaning in the Wintertime” and the old-timey “Cowgirl Blues.” She turns into a charming, coquettish chanteuse for “Long Tall Story,” and gets slinky, ala Peggy Lee, on the double bass and finger-snapping “Save a Life.”

Within the realm of swinging beats, McCue’s songs are quite diverse, ranging from the rockabilly “Little White Cat” to the fiery tango “Uncanny Moon.” There’s a nostalgic jazz core to the album, but it’s embroidered with elements of New Orleans funk, New York sophistication, big band rhythms, sinuous blues, stage flair and lyric craft. Dave Alvin guests as vocalist on the Cab Calloway-styled “Devil in the Middle,” and the album’s lone-cover, Regis McNichols Jr.’s contemporary “Knock on Wood,” fits perfectly with the standards vibe. McCue’s virtuosity is no surprise, but the ease with which she’s absorbed and restated the beating heart of swing music is impressive and thrilling. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Anne McCue’s Home Page

Gurf Morlix: Eatin’ at Me

GurfMorlix_EatinAtMeCircumstance, disappointment and nostalgia yield unexpected insights

Two years ago, Gurf Morlix’s Finds the Present Tense, found the singer-songwriter contending with noir-like inevitability and consequences. His protagonists were hung-up in the here-and-now, at intersections whose resolutions were one-way streets to the future. His new collection shifts the timeframe, looking back at a gritty childhood whose future was surprisingly open-ended. Unlike the fixed destinies of his fictional protagonists, Morlix’s own future was not set in stone by earlier events. The disappointments of “50 Years” yields surprises, and the smoke-filled air of “Born in Lackawana” didn’t obscure the choice between life in the steel mill and roads that led out of town. Morlix’s nostalgia is colored by the melancholy of time, and the distortions of his rear-view mirror leaves the temptations of “Dirty Old Buffalo” barely visible beneath the city’s newly polished exterior.

Morlix’s gruff tone and deliberate tempos are a piece with his songs of despondency, loneliness and exhaustion. But these emotional crucibles also produce resolve, such as that underpinning “Grab the Wheel,” and lifelines that remain visible in even the darkest of places. Redemption isn’t always at hand, however, and self-awareness isn’t necessarily a saving grace; some setbacks can only be moderated, and invitations, such as the bar in “Elephant’s Graveyard,” can turn out to be a trap. Morlix picks at the details of missed opportunities as if they’re a scab protecting healing flesh; but at the same time he’s searching for kernels of truth, such as found in a canine’s view of “A Dog’s Life,” or penetrating human insights, as essayed in the closing “Blue Smoke.” The search may be eatin’ at him, but it’s a fulfilling emotional and intellectual meal. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Gurf Morlix’s Home Page

Paul Kelly: The Merri Soul Sessions

PaulKelly_TheMerriSoulSessionsPaul Kelly’s extraordinary soul revue

Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly’s turned his solo-act-with-band into an old school soul revue. Touring with multiple vocalists in his band, Kelly found his songs gaining a new life. Recorded a-song-a-day over two weeks, the tracks feature punchy arrangements and the soul stirring voices of Clairy Browne, Vika and Linda Bull, Dan Sultan and Kira Puru. Each takes their turn in the spotlight to deliver unrelenting, knock-out performances, building on Kelly’s new material and burning down the house with Vika Bull’s cover of the catalog chestnut “Sweet Guy.” Kelly sings a few tracks (“Righteous Woman,” “Thank You” and “Hasn’t It Rained”), but it’s his generosity as a songwriter and his ears as a producer that make this album so exceptional. Originally released as a set of four 7” singles, the original eight tracks are augmented with three bonuses for this digital release, including the superb gospel closer “Hasn’t It Rained.” Kelly’s currently touring Australia with the Merri Soul Sessions; here’s hoping the group’s tour bus has pontoons that will get it off the continent. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Paul Kelly’s Home Page

Lee Gallagher and the Hallelujah: Lee Gallagher and the Hallelujah

LeeGallagherAndTheHallelujah_LeeGallagherAndTheHallelujahSoulful rock with the fire and brimstone of the ’70s

Gallagher’s press pitches his band as psych-tinged Americana, but this album’s rock hearkens back more to the ‘70s than the ‘60s, and the roots more to soul than country. Gallagher sings in a high, keening voice that reaches with extra conviction in the most emotional moments, drawing the listener’s ear to regret and sorrow of his laments. The guitar, bass, drums and piano suggest the hearty guitar rock music you would have heard on a mid-70s bill at San Francisco’s Winterland. There’s an echo of the Black Crowes, Lee Michaels and others, but with more boogie and less blues.

Psychedelic touches are found in Jacob Landry’s guitar playing and Gallagher’s impressionistic lyrics. The latter occasionally come into sharp focus with memorable lines such as “… faith and fame / one will keep you honest / the other is just a game.” Even in his most poetic moments, Gallagher sings with the fervor of a preacher, exhorting the listener to break through self-imposed limitations and to create one’s own rock ‘n’ roll gospel. Gallagher’s high voice and enthusiastic delivery might suggest Blind Melon’s Shannon Hoon or even Slade’s Noddy Holder, but backed by a band on a mission, the effect is more like Rod Stewart on Jeff Beck’s Truth, or Jeff Bebe in the fictional Stillwater.

Gallagher adds harmonica to the fire-and-brimstone “Shallow Grave” as the rhythm session bashes it out alongside Kirby Hammel’s organ and piano, and the combination of vocal harmonies and hard-edged guitar soloing in “Feel Like Going Home” brings to mind CSN&Y’s Déjà Vu. Landry gets ample time to solo without the songs wandering into jam-band territory, and really lets loose for the closing “1935.” Written and rehearsed in only a few weeks, the album is surprisingly cohesive, doubly so when you realize the band’s only been together a year. Chemistry is key, and Lee Gallagher and the Hallelujah have started out with a winning formula. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Lee Gallagher’s Home Page

The Jeanies: The Jeanies

Jeanies_JeaniesGarage-bred power pop time-warped from 1978

This is music that could only have arrived through a tear in the space-time continuum. The Jeanies have somehow managed to create mid-70s DIY power pop forty years after the fact. The mid-fi production and endless hooks are so genuine as to rise above mere homage. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear this is a reissue of a long-lost Bomp release. Actually, and even more impressively, it sounds like an anthology of indie singles whose B’s were as heartfelt as the top-sides. Each track has you humming along almost immediately and invites you to listen again – if only to keep you from arriving too quickly at the end of your new favorite record.

If you collected singles by the Nerves, Neighborhoods, Zippers, Stars in the Sky and Shoes, you’ll remember how uplifting it felt to find music this good. You had to hunt for it; you had to make friends with record store clerks in small independent shops and hope they’d stash a copy for you behind the counter. And when you found albums by the Beat, Real Kids, Dwight Twilley, Flamin’ Groovies and Raspberries, you couldn’t believe your good fortune in finding something to expand your love of the Beatles, Beach Boys and Byrds. That’s how you’ll feel when you unwrap this one. And as good as it sounds in digital form, it’s going to sound even better when you play the limited edition cassette in your Chevy Vega. It’s a shame they didn’t issue this as five singles.

Songwriter and lead vocalist Joey Farber evinces just the right sense of angsty, adolescent longing as he recounts the breathless anticipation and unrequited moments of first sightings, second thoughts and postmortems. The guitars (courtesy of Farber and Jon Mann) strike a balance between sweet and tough, with succinct, melodic leads that verge winningly into garage-psych for “I’ll Warm You” and “Her Flesh.” There’s bubblegum-glam in “The Girl’s Gonna Go,” and the Who gets a nod with “The Kids Are No Good.” Fans of the Heats, Plimsouls, Posies (another band that debuted on cassette!) and Flying Color will dig this album from the downbeat. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

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The Rimshots: 7-6-5-4-3-2-1 Blow Your Whistle

Rimshots_7654321BlowYourWhistleHot ’70s soul (train) and disco from Sylvia Robinson’s house band

The Rimshots were the house band for Joe and Sylvia Robinson’s All Platinum label and its subsidiary, Stang. Sylvia Robinson had previously found success as a performer, teaming with Mickey Baker for “Love is Strange” and charting solo with “Pillow Talk,” but it was as producers and label executives that the husband-and-wife duo made their longest-lasting impact. In addition to All Platinum, the Robinson’s founded Sugar Hill and launched rap music into popular consciousness. But before that, in the early ’70s, the Robinson’s were producing funk and soul records, and various incarnations of the Rimshots got a chance to step into the spotlight.

The band’s most widely heard U.S. side was their reworking of King Curtis’ “Hot Potato (Piping Hot),” which had been used as the original theme song for TV’s Soul Train. The Rimshots recording was released on the subsidary A-I label as “Soultrain Part 1” b/w “Soultrain Part 2.” The group’s 1972 debut album, titled after the single, was a masterpiece of two- and three-minute ’70s soul jams, with hot percussion, funky rhythm and lead guitar, deep bass and a variety of keyboard sounds. In the UK, the group became best known for their hit cover of Gary Toms Empire’s, “7-6-5-4-3-2-1 (Blow Your Whistle),” which itself was a reworking of Blue Mink’s “Get Up.” The 1976 album released under this later single’s title shows the band to have moved towards a glitzier disco sound.

Sequel’s twenty-one track compilation collects both of the band’s albums, and augments the lineup with four non-album tracks, including the popular 1974 instrumental “Who’s Got the Monster.” Though the latter single still has a punchy beat and fuzz guitar, you can hear the group’s sound turning towards disco – a trend upon which the band doubled down for 1976’s “Super Disco,” it’s flip side, “Groove Bus,” and the post-LP single “We’ve Got You Singing.” Those looking for early ’70s soul might want to bail out halfway through the disc, but even the group’s disco manages to dig some worthy grooves. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Malo: Malo

Malo_Malo1972 debut of a Latin rock and soul powerhouse

Coming in the wake of Santana’s 1969 breakthrough debut, and led by Carlos Santana’s guitar-slinging brother, Jorge, there’s no getting away from comparing this group to their Latin-soul brethren. Malo trawled a similar groove of rock, soul, funk and Latin jams, though with a larger aggregation of musicians, a heftier dose of percussion and a tight horn section. This 1972 debut, the only album recorded by the group’s early lineup, includes their lone chart hit, “Suavecito” (presented here in its original six-minute album mix and its three-minute single edit). This is a hard-driving album that’s a great deal more energetic than the summertime vibe of the single. The album has been available part of Rhino Handmade’s limited edition Celebracion box set; fans can now get Malo’s debut as a standalone with a four-panel booklet that includes liner notes by A. Scott Galloway. [©2015 Hyperbolium]