Tag Archives: Rock

Pat Green: Songs We Wished We’d Written II

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Second album of covers from devout Texas traveler

Texas is a big place. Big enough for musical stars to develop careers that barely touch the distant lands on the state’s borders. Pat Green was born in San Antonio, raised in Waco, attended Texas Tech, played the clubs of Lubbock, self-released four albums, found a mentor in fellow-Texan Willie Nelson, toured all over the Lone Star state and developed mainstream sponsors, all before signing with Universal in 2001.His albums have cracked the Top 20, and his singles the Top 40, but he’s never become a mainstream country star. And that’s generally been to his artistic advantage. Nashville doesn’t need someone whose maturity would resist molding, and given the size of his home state audience, Green doesn’t really need Nashville.

His latest album repeats the title and theme of 2001’s Songs We Wish We’d Written, though this time he leads his crack road band without the co-piloting of Cory Morrow. Green’s given a lot of thought to the songs that inspired him, and his choice of covers says as much about him as about the songwriters he reveres. Running down selections from Joe Ely, Jon Randall, Lyle Lovett, Shelby Lynne and Tom Petty, gives listeners a sense of what you’d hear on Green’s tour bus, and songs by lesser-known writers Aaron Tasjan and Waylon Payne, include suggestions from his friends, family and band members.

The album’s best known numbers – Lovett’s “If I Had a Boat” and Petty’s “Even the Losers” – quickly remind listeners this is an album of interpretations rather than rote covers. The former’s reverential arrangement echoes the song’s impact on Green’s formation as an artist, while the latter blends Green’s love of Tom Petty with an arrangement that grows from Springsteen-styled piano-and-voice to full-blown rock ‘n’ roll howl. The Springsteen influence is heard again in the lyrical tone of Shelby Lynne’s “Jesus on a Greyhound” and likewise on Ely’s “All Just to Get to You.” Green adds some country twists to his vocal, and his guitarist’s Allman-esque slide mates well to the E-Street vibe coming off the drums, bass and organ.

The Allman’s crop up again with “Soulshine” (from 1994’s Where it All Begins), and though the song’s become more closely associated with Gov’t Mule, Greene leans more on the bluesy treatment of the former than the jam-band flavor of the latter. Green is rightly proud of his road band, and the Celtic-tinged arrangement they provide on Aaron Tasjan’s wordy folk song “Streets of Galilee” is a nice addition. The album closes with Green and fellow Texan Jack Ingram rocking with confidence on Todd Snider and Will Kimbrough’s “I Am Too.” Green’s fans will enjoy this second helping of songs he’s wished he’d written, and fans of the originals may likewise be impressed by Green’s adulatory spins on their favorites. [©2012 hyperbolium dot com]

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Walt Wilkins: Plenty

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Texas hill country soul

Texas singer-songwriter Walt Wilkins gets deeper with every release. Having spent ten years as a Nashville songwriter, Wilkins returned to his native Texas. He reminisces about his time on Music Row in “Between Midnight and Day,” but doesn’t miss it, and it’s in his native hill country, physically and mentally between San Antonio and Austin, that his music has grown more earthen and multihued. The absence of songwriting appointments, clocked sessions and market-driven recording/touring cycles has provided Wilkins time to develop a stockpile of material and a community of like-minded musicians. He’s hung on to the country, rock and soul sounds of his earlier work, but there’s more of a folk-singer’s eye to his new lyrics, and the delivery has the cadence of deep thought, rather than rehearsal.

The album opens under a shade tree, sharing Wilkins love of the spot’s introspective possibilities; it’s one of several songs that find Wilkins connecting to natural surroundings. He’s contented dipping his toes in the river and professes his love for the hill country in “A Farm to Market Romance.” The assembled musicians all breathe the same Cottonwood-scented air, as their music echoes the vocalist’s unhurried delivery. Wilkins is an infectious optimist who believes life’s setbacks are no match for a strong soul and that love is nearly inexplicable in its ability to entice, captivate, excite and repair. He sees loneliness as an opportunity to seek connection, and the chilly night of “Rain All Night” is celebrated as for its drought-ending downpour. There’s country deep in Wilkins’ soul, and deep soul in his country music. [©2012 hyperbolium dot com]

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Miles Nielsen: Presents the Rusted Hearts

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Americana touched by soul, trad jazz and modern rock

Nielsen’s name may not be immediately familiar, but the Beatles influences in his music hint strongly at his family connection to Cheap Trick guitarist/songwriter Rick Nielsen. The younger Nielsen’s music is less pure-pop than his father’s, with his hoarse-voiced Americana touched by modern rock, soul and trad jazz. Still, his sensibility for melodies and hooks is no doubt informed by embryonic exposure to his dad’s power-pop. It’s been three years since Nielsen’s self-titled debut, with much of that time’s been spent on the road with his band, but having finally holed up in the studio, he’s produced a very thoughtful album. Several of his songs launch from autobiographical details, including juxtaposed images of his grandmother’s childhood in Germany, and the not-so-nice repercussions of his father’s fame. Nielsen sings with first-hand experience of fatality and rusted hearts (“like empty shopping carts”), opportunities, lies and apologies, and his band’s music is a bewitching combination of country, rock and folk, loaded with pop harmonies, and touches of New Orleans and Memphis. The latter makes its strongest appearance in the closing instrumental “Soul Bash,” which sounds favorably like a vintage Stax backing track. Neilsen’s an adventurous musician, with a deft pen and a rasp-edged voice that’s at home in a wide variety of styles. Whether or not you knew his lineage, his music would cause you to pause for a listen. [©2012 hyperbolium dot com]

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Shoes: Ignition

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Power pop legends in perfect form after eighteen year hiatus

First, Redd Kross returns after a fifteen year studio hiatus with the best album of their career (Researching the Blues), and a week later the pride of Zion, Illinois tops that by ending an eighteen-year drought with a new release that’s as compelling as anything they’ve ever recorded. With all three founding members (John Murphy, Jeff Murphy and Gary Klebe) joined by their longtime stage drummer John Richardson, the band has self-produced an album that measure up favorably to their 1970s classic, Black Vinyl Shoes. The new productions are more spacious than the crowded 4-tracks of the group’s early years, but the refinements only serve to amplify the best aspects of the band’s hook-laden power-pop. Their words have matured, but their voices remain youthful, their melodies uplifting and their harmonies effervescent.

Having originally foreshadowed the DIY movement by a couple of decades, it’s no surprise that the band’s kept pace with evolving technology. Recorded in Gary Klebe’s basement studio, the productions deftly layer guitars (including gorgeous runs of 12-string) and voices on top of sharp rhythm tracks, adding piano, keyboards and handclaps here and there. As the band’s sound has grown, they’ve also expanded their musical and lyrical reach. The Stones-y rock of “Hot Mess” is gutsier than the group’s more polite pop, and the usual teenage angst has matured with deeper issues of middle age. This isn’t to suggest that they can’t still conjure the pain of dashed romance, because they can and do with the eternal quandary of “Head vs. Heart,” wounded satisfaction of “The Joke’s on You,” and the sweet support of “Wrong Idea.”

But these are no longer lovesick 20-year-olds; they’re grownups with perspective brought into focus by departed friends (“Out of Round”) and infidelity at an age where comfort can trump truth. Many of the songs, including “Maybe Now,” “Sign of Life” and “Where Will it End” read as both revelation and wisdom, marking songwriters who’ve held onto the immediacy of adolescence as they’ve accumulated the pragmatism born of experience. There are nuances to the relationships that typically elude the wounded hearts of younger writers, and Gary Klebe’s “Nobody to Blame” drops the finger-pointing altogether. All three principals write and sing lead, and there isn’t a favorite between them – each contributes equally to an album that shows a band that’s fused the winsome musical passion of youth with the depth of adulthood. [©2012 hyperbolium dot com]

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The Electric Prunes: The Complete Reprise Singles

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Mono mixes of the Electric Prunes’ singles 1966-69

For those who weren’t there in ’66 and ’67, the oldies radio shorthand for the Electric Prunes has been their one big hit, “I Had to Much to Dream (Last Night),” as anthologized (as the lead off track, no less) on Lenny Kaye’s legendary Nuggets compilation. The few strokes of shading inclues their chart follow-up, “Get Me to the World on Time,” and an oft-anthologized ad for Vox Wah-Wah pedals. It’s an abbreviation that shortchanges the band’s recorded legacy. Reissues of their albums along with single- and double-disc compilations (including Birdman’s Lost Dreams and Rhino’s Too Much to Dream) expanded the group’s posthumous reputation, and are now joined by this collection of twenty-four mono single mixes. As a group whose tenure spanned across AM Top 40 and the birth of underground FM radio, their singles are just as interesting as the stereo album tracks.

Like several other groups of their era, including the Chocolate Watchband and Grass Roots, the Electric Prunes name was applied to several wholly different aggregations of musicians. The original lineup shifted subtly through the group’s first two albums (I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night) and Underground), but with their third, the David Axelrod-produced orchestral Mass in F Major, the original band essentially broke up. The album was completed with studio musicians, and its follow-up, Release of an Oath, was produced similarly by Axelrod. The final album released under the Electric Prunes name, Just Good Old Rock and Roll, was recorded by a newly recruited group of musicians, wholly unrelated to the original lineup.

The singles gathered here span all three eras of the Electric Prunes – variations of the original lineup on the first two albums (1-12, 15 and 24), the Axelrod years (13-17), and the “new and improved” lineup (18-23). Original members James Lowe and Mark Tulin appeared on two of Axelrod’s productions (“Sanctus” and “Credo”), but the compositions and productions are so far divorced from the group’s earlier garage psych as to be nearly unidentifiable as the same band. The new lineup held on to only hints of the original group’s roots, bringing hard rock, boogie, funk and soul sounds to the Electric Prunes name.

As latter-day prune Richard Whetstone notes, the group’s identity remains anchored to the garage psych of their hit single and first two albums; the follow-on material remains more curious footnotes than integral parts of the legend. The collection’s rarest find, the one-sided single “Shadows” (from the film The Name of the Game is Kill) turned up on Rhino’s earlier compilation (along with mono mixes of the band’s early A-sides), but here proves itself the last gasp of the original Electric Prunes sound. Getting the group’s entire legacy of mono singles (including the bleeped-for-airplay version of “You’ve Never Had it Better”) is a great find for collectors, but those new to the group’s catalog should start with the first two albums. [©2012 hyperbolium dot com]

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The dB’s: Falling Off the Sky

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An older, wiser dB’s return to canny pop action

Way back in the early 1980s, when only graduate students and industrial researchers had access to the Internet, information about bands spread much more slowly. And so the dB’s first two albums, originally released on the London-based Albion label and imported back to the group’s native U.S. shores, were difficult to learn about, harder to find, and even trickier to put into context. Bits and pieces of the group’s background eventually circulated, with Chris Stamey’s tenure as Alex Chilton’s bassist providing a tantalizingly obscure connection to the ultimate cult pop band, Big Star. Stamey, Gene Holder and Will Rigby’s earlier work as Sneakers also resurfaced, providing a link to Mitch Easter, and thus to REM, and eventually scenes in Georgia, North Carolina, New York and beyond.

A special edition of the group’s second album, Repercussions, was accompanied by a bonus cassette of their debut, but even this promotion couldn’t push the records from great reviews to great sales. Stamey left the band to pursue a solo career, and Peter Holsapple led the band on albums for Bearsville and IRS. College  radio managed to launch REM into the mainstream, but the dB’s (despite an opening tour slot for their Athens-based comrades) couldn’t convert cult popularity into commercial success. The group disbanded in 1988, spinning off solo careers, occasional collaborations (particularly between Stamey and Holsapple) and eventually a new edition of the band for 1994’s IRS-released Paris Avenue.

Thirty years Chris Stamey left the original quartet, they’ve rejoined for Falling off the Sky. Three decades on, their voices are still easily recognized and their musical ideas still combine easily, but the result is something different as fifty-somethings than it was as twenty-somethings. Their fans have aged as well, growing from college students into parents, witnessing the group members’ various pursuits, and seeing what was once considered alternative co-opted by the mainstream. So while the album doesn’t crackle with the reinvention of the group’s original debut, the musical affinities – the interlacing of vocals, the rhythm section’s play against the guitars – are still full of life, and connect strongly to the dB’s origins.

Peter Holsapple’s aptly-titled opener, “That Time is Gone,” suggests the group was acutely aware that a reunion could easily slide into limp nostalgia. With a rhythm guitar that touches on the Gun Club, a twist of Sir Douglas in the organ and a maddeningly insistent guitar figure, the lyric of middle-age awakening is like a weary postard from a well-traveled musician. Holsapple neither celebrates nor laments the passing of time, but notes it as an inexorable fact and moves on. Stamey deploys his nostalgia more abstractly, writing wistfully of lovers whose flame has flickered out, and matching Holsapple’s mood of disappointment without disillusion. The bitterness of the songwriters’ early years has mellowed appreciably, though Holsapple’s “World to Cry” offers some pointedly snarky recrimination.

The album closes with its title song, also the set’s most nostalgic, with vocal harmonies and counterpoints that twine around a lyric full of memories. The band’s off-kilter craft is as fine as ever, with Stamey’s love of psych-era Beatles threaded deeply into “The Adventures of Albatross and Doggerel,” drummer Will Rigby’s “Write Back” offering up his first song on a dB’s record, and Holsapple’s high, yearning vocal on “I Didn’t Mean to Say That” adding a particularly riveting performance. The foursome doesn’t imitate their earlier selves, as many reunions are wont to do, but their current-day selves prove sufficiently vital to carry the legacy, creating in an album that stands nicely alongside their first pair. [©2012 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | That Time is Gone
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Heart: Strange Euphoria

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Career-spanning 3-CD/1-DVD box set with many previously unreleased treats

There has been no shortage of hits packages for Heart, starting with 1980’s Heart’s Greatest Hits: Live, which at the time seemed to sum up a fading band’s run of commercial success. But with the release of 1985’s Heart, the Wilson sisters sparked a major comeback with their band, and by 1995, set off nearly annual production of anthologies and album reissues. In addition to single- and double-disc sets (including 1998’s Greatest Hits and 2002’s Essential), the band released a live run-through of their debut album on both CD and DVD. But as the band’s career stretched into the twenty-first century with Jupiters Darling and Red Velvet Car, and the Wilson sisters recorded solo and with their side-project, The Lovemongers, existing anthologies have fallen out of date.

Epic/Legacy cures this problem with a 3-CD, 1-DVD set that expands across Heart’s entire recorded legacy, including hits, album sides, live performances, demos and rarities. And rounding out the Wilsons’ legacy are solo selections and a pair by the Lovemongers. All together, twenty of the CDs’ fifty-one tracks are previously unreleased, and the DVD serves up a fifty-five minute live performance recorded in 1976 at Washington State University’s television station, KWSU. The opening instrumental of this vintage performance, as well as a scorching version of “Sing Child Sing,” shows the group’s progressive colors, but as they kick into “Heartless,” it’s clear that Heart was ready to rock. Hard. With the band’s debut album just released, they had the goods, but not yet the fame the album’s hits would bring. The video’s lighting, camera work and mono sound are good, and the picture (including some primitive special effects) holds up well for something no one probably thought would become historically important.

The CD set begins the Wilsons’ very first single, “Through Eyes and Glass” recorded as Ann Wilson & The Daybreaks in 1968, and released locally on the Topaz label. Key elements of Heart can be heard in the elder Wilson’s voice and flute, though the brooding mood is more connected to 1960s ballrooms than 1970s arenas. Skipping ahead to mid-70s demos, it feels as if the gauze of ‘60s acid culture has been lifted. Even in this early form, “Magic Man,” crackles with passion in both the rhythm and vocals. There’s a healthy dose of neo-psych in the guitar solo, but the song is undeniably powerful and anthemic. Other demos, such as “How Deep it Goes” and “Crazy on You,” are closer to final form, with Heart’s signature blend of electric and hard-strummed acoustic in place on the latter. Ann Wilson had yet to unleash her full vocal power in these demos, but you can hear how the songs will push her to great heights.

Though the box set covers songs from all thirteen Heart studio albums, they’re presented in a mix of studio, live and demo versions. The disputed Magazine album is represented by demos of “Here Song” and “Heartless,” the first of which actually sounds more polished than its album release, and a live version of “Devil Delight” that appears on the DVD. 1990’s Brigade offers up a demo of “Under the Sky” that is truly compelling in its lack of big studio gloss. Other demos, like the acoustic-guitar accompanied “Dog & Butterfly” show off the Wilsons’ songwriting, rather than Heart’s instrumental and production talents. Although the band’s commercial fortunes began to decline after 1980’s Bebe le Strange, they returned to commercial dominance in 1985 with five singles from Heart. Chief among the successes, and indicative of the band’s changes, was “These Dreams.” Written by Bernie Taupin and Martin Page, and sung by Nancy Wilson, the sound traded in the band’s guitar rock for synth-dominated modern pop, and navigated the commercial winds for the band’s first chart topper.

Heart remained commercially vital throughout the ‘80s, with Bad Animals and Brigade selling multi-platinum and spinning off multiple charting singles, but artistically, their demos, such as the terrific “Unconditional Love” and “Under the Sky” often showed more earthiness and soul than their heavily-produced albums. The first-half of the set’s third-disc is devoted to non-Heart material from the Lovemongers, solo performances, and live and demo tracks that were never remade in the studio. With the big hair ‘90s receding in the rear view mirror, the Wilsons returned to the more organic rock and blues roots with which they started the ‘70s, and the demos show that they still had ideas other people couldn’t fathom as Heart material. The disc closes out with songs from the band’s last three albums, plus “Little Problems, Little Lies,” from Ann Wilson’s solo release.

Curated by Ann and Nancy Wilson, with notes that detail how songs and performances came into being, this is an artist’s view of their career, and one that may not completely agree with a fan’s perspective. The demos and live tracks provide new angles on well-known songs, and the video gives latter-day fans a peek at what they missed seeing and hearing live in the mid-70s. Someone looking for a recitation of the biggest hits in their original form is better off with a single-disc collection or a couple of original albums; with nearly two-dozen charting singles (including a handful of Top 10s) missing from the track lineup, this box is more of a supplement to a Heart fan’s existing collection than a place to start one anew. At over an hour each, the CDs are well stocked, and the live video is an unparalleled treat. [©2012 hyperbolium dot com]

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Radio Moscow: 3 and 3 Quarters

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The embryonic Radio Moscow

Recorded in Parker Griggs’ basement in 2003, these twelve tracks prove to be parts that would be more smoothly assembled on the band’s official 2007 debut. The ‘60s punk vocals, blues riffs, fuzz guitars and psychedelic overlays are all here, but they feel disjointed – like ingredients that have yet to jell into a final dish. On the other hand, the ferocious first press of a musician’s discovery is something special, and even the lack of longer jams (nothing over 3’30) or actual band interplay (Griggs plays everything here, though quite convincingly) can’t take away from the burst of energy that is the raw capture of a small town punk-rock teenager’s world. This was released in very limited and local quantities in 2004, and finds its first national distribution with this reissue. Fans will enjoy this peek at the group’s embryonic start, but those looking for the heart of their catalog are recommended to Brain Cycles and later releases. [©2012 hyperbolium dot com]

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Durocs: Durocs

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Clever late-70s studio rock finally rescued from obscurity

The Durocs 1979 debut (and, as it turns out, album swansong) was a singular combination of collaborators and the times in which they collaborated. The two principals, Ron Nagle and Scott Mathews, had already been working together for a few years when they signed a deal with Capitol in the late ‘70s. Nagle had co-founded San Francisco’s Mystery Trend in 1965, playing key venues and releasing a single on Verve. He went on to record a Jack Nitzsche-produced solo album, Bad Rice, in 1970, but garnered his primary renown as a ceramicist and university art professor. Mathews was a songwriter and producer whose multi-instrumental talents made him something of a child prodigy. The pair wrote songs for other artists and produced audio for film soundtracks, leading them, via their connection to Nitasche, to Capitol.

Nagle and Mathews produced the album with Elliot Mazur, in their own San Franciscostudio, overdubbing most of the instruments and vocals, and adding selected guests, such as sax player Steve Douglas. Their thick production sound brings to mind Todd Rundgren (both as an artist and producer), the Tubes (for whom Nagle co-wrote the signature “Don’t Touch Me There”), and Phil Spector’s later work on the Ramones’ 1981 End of the Century. Nagle explains in the liner notes, “restraint just wasn’t our forte at the time,” which explains both their over-the-top production and the enthusiasms of their lyrics. They’re equally unbridled confessing the shame of a cuckold as they are reveling in the connections of a successful relationship. They excoriate the excesses of ‘70s self-empowerment as easily as they offer reassurance to a partner in need.

The album gained fans inEuropeand on college radio, but failed commercially, despite two inventive promotional videos. The Durocs slipped through Capitol during a brief moment of major label adventurousness, and the band’s inventiveness is finally rewarded by this reissue, thirty-three years after the fact. Real Gone adds eight bonus tracks that fit stylistically with the original album, highlighted by a cross of Mitch Ryder, Mink DeVille and a modern rock guitar on “No Big Deal,” the baritone-guitar country twang “Drinkin’ One Day at a Time,” and Ernie K-Doe’s bizarre autobiographical monolog on “Nawgahide.” The two-panel slip-sleeve has a microscopic reproduction of the lyrics, and an eight-page booklet includes liner notes by Gene Sculatti. [©2012 hyperbolium dot com]

Bikini Machine: Let’s Party with Bikini Machine

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60s-styled fuzz-guitar soundtrack-ready instrumentals

Bikini Machine seems to have been teleported into the present from the soundtrack of a mid-60s American International Pictures film. Drawing their name (as well as a vocal drop used in their title song) from the 1965 film Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, there’s a healthy dose of Davie Allan and the Arrows in their beat-heavy instrumental go-go rock. Given that the film was originally slated to be a musical (you can hear some of the vocal tunes cut from the film in the Shindig television special The Weird Wild World of Dr. Goldfoot [1 2 3]), it’s only fitting that a band would eventually find retro inspiration here. The fuzz guitars, primitive keyboards and wordless vocals give the tunes a space-age bachelor pad dimension that suggests the great UK production library music, cinema soundtracks (including ample hints of blacksploitation soul) and instrumental knock-offs of the mid-to-late ‘60s, all driven by really snappy drumming. [©2012 hyperbolium dot com]

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