Old-timey voice sings original alt.country laments and murder ballads
John Meeks lived the itinerant life of a troubadour before he was even old enough to drive or strum a guitar. Toted along to gigs by his musician father, and driven around the Southwest by his mother, Meeks racked up a lot of miles at a very young age. After a brief stab at college he settled in San Diego and tried out the indie-rock scene, but it wasn’t until he hooked up with the city’s roots musicians (including Pall Jenkins, Jimmy LaValle and Matt Resovich) that the sounds his father made came back to call. Meeks sings with a ghostly lonesomeness that’s partly Roy Acuff, partly Neil Young and partly a bluegrass yodel. It’s a voice from a much earlier era. His studied tempos provide time to hold onto notes in an expressive drone, bending and trilling here and there for George Jones-styled emotional emphasis.
Meeks’ downtrodden lyrics are written from the gut, rather than the mind, and they’re fit to melodies that feel like a natural wander rather than composed map. Taken together, they make songs that feel lived in, musical expressions of emotions that aren’t so much wondrous discoveries as they are worn resignations. It’s the unlikeliest of music to be made in a city renowned for its temperate weather and beautiful beaches. Of course, Tijuana is just a stone’s throw away (neatly echoed in the moody trumpet of “Been Down By Loveâ€), and Los Angeles is only a few hours up the highway, but Meeks’ murder ballads and laments of lost and crossed love remain surprisingly dark. Even at mid-tempo his keening melodies and the drifting backgrounds of guitar, bass, drums and fiddle are often laid out as a wail of defeat.
On their third album, modern country duo Sugarland (Jennifer Nettles-vocals, Kristian Bush-guitar/vocals) makes a bold bid for cross-over success. How well their effort succeeds depends on where you sit as a listener in the country-pop spectrum. Fans of modern country music may feel this forsakes the few threads of country roots that remain in Nashville’s productions. Ironically though, fans of earlier, twangier country music may be willing to take Sugarland’s arena-ready rock productions as just that – something fully divorced from Nashville’s faint echoes of roots music. Taken on this latter axis, Bryan Gallimore’s outsized productions – enormous drum sounds, slashing electric guitars, heavy echoes and the ubiquitous “programming†– make a good impression.
The duo’s original songs are catchy and Jennifer Nettles’ voice cuts through the rock backings like a fog cutter in a thick bank. When the productions occasionally lighten, as on the lead single “Stuck Like Glue,†the music turns into modern day bubblegum, with riffy lyrics, cute singing and a toasting bridge that suggests Gwen Stefani in Music City. One might argue about whether Sugarland’s previous albums had already moved far away from traditional country sounds, but The Incredible Machine puts the conversation to bed as the duo openly bids for modern rock success with power-ballads like “Tonight†and a heavy dose of studio effects. The closest the album comes to even modern Nashville’s notion of country is “Little Miss,†but even here the song grows from acoustic guitars into a heavily wrought production.
The Archies’ Ron Dante sings sweet bubblegum pop as the Cuff Links
Vocalist Ron Dante is the American version of British studio singer Tony Burrows. Though he didn’t duplicate Burrows’ feat of charting hit singles as the lead singer of four different groups in a single year (Edison Lighthouse, White Plains, Pipkins, Brotherhood of Man, all in 1970), Dante’s singing was nearly as ubiquitous. His first brush with fame came with the novelty single “Leader of the Laundromat,†by the Detergents, and he was widely heard singing the famous “you deserve a break today†jingle for McDonald’s. But his biggest score was as the lead singer of the Archies, minting the single-of-the-year (and the national anthem of the bubblegum world), “Sugar, Sugar.†In parallel with the Archies’ ride on the charts, Dante re-teamed with Detergents’ songwriter-producers Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss and cooked up this album under the Cuff Links banner.
The Cuff Links were, like Tony Burrows’ “bands,†a studio concoction rather than a working group. Dante provided both lead and brilliantly arranged backing voices, and as on the Archies’ records, went uncredited. Though he recorded a solo album in 1970, his first real claim to named fame came a few years later as the producer of many Barry Manilow hit records, and later as an award-winning Broadway producer. His anonymous work with the Detergents, Archies and Cuff Links has been sporadically anthologized and reissued over the years, focusing mostly on the hit singles; this CD release reintroduces the Cuff Links first album back to the market, adding a handful of singles drawn from the group’s still-unissued second album, and several more bonuses.
The album is a by-product of the effervescent single “Tracy,†which became a hit just as the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar†started to fade on the charts. The album was recorded quickly to capitalize on the single’s success, but with songs drawn from Vance and Pockriss’ catalog of co-writes, plus a pair of well selected covers, it’s a great deal more solid than the short time in the studio would suggest. Rupert Holmes (who would later hit with “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)â€) was brought in to arrange the strings, and his simple lines perfectly complement Dante’s overlaid vocals. The bubbly tone of the title track is balanced by wistful tunes, including the moving antiwar sentiments of “All the Young Women,†the Left Banke-styled nostalgia of “I Remember,†and the autumnal lost-love B-side “Where Do You Go?â€
The two cover songs are given nice twists, with a catchy organ riff and memorable call-and-response vocals on “Put a Little Love in Your Heart,†and an effective Burt Bacharach-styled treatment of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.†The songs run deeper than comparable bubblegum tunes written expressly for the pre-teen crowd, but their melodies remain hummable, and the lyrics catchy. Like the music that came out of Don Kirshner’s world, the craft here is superb – just listen how the album’s second single, “When Julie Comes Around,†builds masterfully from a tense organ and drum opening into a perfect mix of electric and acoustic guitars and then builds into a joyous melody in parallel with the lyrics turn from loneliness to happiness; the transitions back and forth between desperation and elation are handled just as perfectly as the song finally plays itself out with a smile.
No doubt some will take to these reconstructions of famous Elvis Presley songs, while others will feel they’re bastardizations on par with Ted Turner’s colorization of movies. The truth lies somewhere in between. Presley’s iconic vocals have been lifted and recontextualized in modern arrangements augmented with new instrumental performances. The results are a great deal more radical than George and Giles Martin’s mashups of the Beatles catalog for Love. At times the rhythms will remind you of the monotonous dance floor beats of the Stars on 45 medleys, and Brendan O’Brien’s overbearing remake of “That’s Alright†borrows its dominant riff from Katrina and the Wave’s “Walking on Sunshine.â€
Unlike Love, this feels less like a celebration than a tortured attempt to make Elvis relevant to twenty-first century ears. The shame of it is that Elvis’ original recordings still hold the magic laid into them fifty years ago, and much of what makes them special is lost in these translations. The contrast of hillbilly guitars and burning vocals is buried under mounds of modern studio sounds that compete with rather than amplify Elvis’ preternatural ferocity. Casting “Heartbreak Hotel†into a delta blues might be an interesting trick if the producer (O’Brien again) trusted listeners to stay entertained without adding sizzling Vegas horns. But he can’t help himself, or perhaps he can’t escape the live show’s demands. Serban Ghenea’s hyperbolic reworking of “Blue Suede Shoes†suffers the same fate, overwhelming both Elvis and the listener with studio pyrotechnics that are distracting rather than energizing.
The acoustic arrangement given “Love Me Tender†momentarily drops the album’s bombast, but Dea Norberg’s duet vocal doesn’t stand up to Elvis’ original. It’s not impossible to overlay an inspiring duet on Elvis – Celine Dion did so in a video performance of “If I Can Dream,†for example – but this is the wrong song and the arrangement is too sedate. Shelly St.-Germain fares better on “Can’t Help Falling in Love,†though the arrangement’s percussion distracts with its busyness. If you’ve been asking yourself “what would Elvis sound like if he were recording with a modern chart act,†perhaps these reworkings will help you imagine the answer. But even those few tracks that retain some of the originals’ joyousness, such as “Bossa Nova Baby,†fall to the disc’s hyperkinetic overdrive.
The Heats may be the best power pop band that most power pop fans have never heard. They peaked between the 1970s wave of AM radio pop and its 1980s underground echo, playing Seattle clubs and gaining regional college radio attention. Their lone LP, 1980’s Have an Idea, was produced by Heart’s Howard Leese and released on their managers’ Albatross label to local fanfare but no national attention. It sold 15,000 copies and failed to garner the band a major label deal. The thirteen original songs, including a remake of the catchy single “I Don’t Like Your Face,†are filled with the influences of the Beatles, Big Star, Tom Petty, and Dwight Twilley, and the singing of guitarists Steve Pearson and Don Short borrows some fine harmonies from the Everly Brothers.
This Japanese reissue of the original album was produced from sources that are inferior to the original vinyl pressing (and thus to the original master tapes). The high end is missing, shaving off the keening edges of the voices, guitars, drums, and cymbals, and sounding as if this was played through a radio. Much of this material was reissued in better fidelity on 1998’s Smoke, but this is the first CD to include the original album track “Questions Questions†and the correct album takes/edits of “Ordinary Girls,†“I Don’t Like Your Face†and “She Don’t Mind.†The four bonus songs, “Let’s All Smoke,†“Rivals,†“Count on Me,†and “In Your Town,†are great additions to the original album tracks.
Long lost 1979 power-pop gem
