Music That Matters, Pt 24

242) Dengue Fever, Sni Bong, Lost in Laos, Ethanopium: Two California brothers infatuated with '70s Cambodian rock, scour clubs in Long Beach's Little Phnem Penh for a vocalist to sing the music in its native Khmer. Serendipity brings them to the recently immigrated (and coincidently gorgeous) Chhom Nimoi.

Further down the road, the band would expand its sound and include English language originals into the mix but I prefer their take on the Khmer. Their sound is constructed from a spy movie small combo owing more to John Barry than Southeast Asia. While there are heavy dollops of surf guitar, sci-fi keyboards, and lounge-y saxophone, the sound is much more than cocktails and retrophilia. Listen to Sni Bong below and note how the sum can be much more than mere fawning tribute (though, they can do that too) and unsubtle irony – a characteristic that handicapped much of the '90s Lounge fad. They succeed because they approach their source material with the sincerity of dedicated musicologists rather than with the fatuousness of winking hipsters or cultural tourists: Global Lounge Music for the post-ironic.

243) Black Orpheus OST: Released in 1959 during the height of a global Bossa Nova craze, this soundtrack included what would become three iconic standards of the form. Whether you're familiar with the album or movie, you no doubt know the melodies. Once, I was smitten with a girl who had this album. She was an adorable little thing with a cool record collection, dark wavy hair, and a hot temper. She left her CD copy at my apartment after a visit and then broke up with me. I always thought I'd hear from her again, bleating plaintively over how much she missed me, but – alas, when she called it was only to get her disc back. She told me I could mail it to her. "Get yo' mama to mail it to you" was what I should of said. I thought of sending it to her with the disk broken in half. But, I didn't. In the end, even though my brain knew we could never work, my heart was left in the magician's blade box and forgot to duck. Needless to say, the music oozes memories for me. But you, you're fortunate: You can listen to it ooze-free.

 244) Tim Buckley, Starsailor: Buckley's recording career spanned nine studio albums. Recording his first album when he was 19, he offered a noir-ish take on modern folk, serviceable but unexceptional: By the time he reached six albums in, Buckley had become another creature entirely. Eschewing the generic folk for an avant jazziness, singing with more passion and improvisation, his songs taking flight over exotic meters, dissonant chords, and lycanthropic vocal sounds all set between stabs of eery beauty. But this Starsailor persona, which had evolved slowly through his previous albums, was all but abandoned by its follow-up. From there, his later albums would sound like he was more focused on chasing commercial prospects. Like a parabolic peak, Starsailor stands as his culmination and masterpiece. Other erstwhile folkies of the time also spawned their experiments with jazziness – Ellen McIlwaine, Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, and Van Morrison. But none of them took to their voice to the places that Buckley did: going hard bop and treating his voice like Ornette Coleman or Eric Dolphy would treat a saxophone, pitching wildly and going feral. Recorded in 1970, Starsailor still stands as a grand experiment and a unwithering classic.

245) Vivabeat, Working for William: A synth band with guitar and drums like the way they used to do ca. '79. Man from China was their moment of glory but I prefer Working for William for its more oblique and melancholy vibe. The band had Roxy Music, Bowie, and early Sparks running in its veins and Peter Gabriel at their back (he helped to get them signed) but it was their ability to hammer out deep hooks that have abided so well. The Caribbean accents were a nice touch.

246) Cream, Dance the Night Away, As You Said, Doing that Scrapyard Thing: It's said The Yardbirds weren't blues enough for Clapton and that may explain the short and illustrious life of Cream as well. While Cream owned a few blues covers, and produced an album's worth of great singles, the further the band got away from the blues is where the true radiance of their genius lived. Jack Bruce stands today as a woefully underrated composer and at least part of that success goes to his lyricist, poet Peter Brown. As these songs show, Cream was startlingly versatile, eclectic, and literate. Even with all of their legend and platinum sales its hard to overemphasize their golden "it"-ness. In Cream's aftermath, Jack Bruce would follow up with a couple of laudable solo albums but nothing that compared to his work here. I imagine the combined torsion of their three uneasy personalities had something to do with it. (Apparently, Ginger and Jack didn't get along so well.) Like lovers capable of great sex who only make each other unhappy, there was art in their dysfunction. Shame they couldn't find more tolerance for the tension once the boots were pulled back on. As You Said still amazes me every time.



 247) The Decemberists, The Wanting Comes in Waves – Repaid: The band claims influences from Siouxsie and the Banshees, Morrissey, and the 60s British folk revival. No mere nostalgists, The Decembrists bring some new meat to the musical abattoir. The arrangement adds blues riffery, punk noise, and spunky energy with generous vocal assistance from Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond). Altogether it adds up to a sweet and jagged slice of pie.



248) Trilogue, Trilogue: Albert Mangelsdorff was a German trombonist who blew chords. And not just chords, but a polyphonic sound that churns like a church organ. In 1976 he recorded an album with the rhythm section from Hell in the persons of Alphonse Mouzon and Jaco Pastorious. The tunes are all Mangelsdorff's and the even though the rhythm makers are there for support, they can't help themselves: Mouzon's sticks strut like fairy flamenco dancers on nitromethane while "World's Greatest Bass Player" Pastorious inflicts calisthenic squiggling, bending and sliding sounds through treacherous angles, all held earthbound by his bass's lead-dense chords and tar-like harmonics. Like a pimp that just got paid, Pastorious's bass lines don't walk, they swag. Elsewhere, the trombone and bass bounce off of each other like choruses of brontosaurian farting, weaving grooves together with Celtic knots of intricacy. These cats can rage, taking Carl Stalling interludes and mewing like elephants and whales. Trilogue is a swinging kind of cosmic funk that sweeps jazz into new and transcendent triangulations.




249) Shirley Bassey, Goldfinger: The early Bond films were nearly as much about the theme song as they were the Ian Fleming's plots. The James Bond vamp is probably one of the best things to ever happen to pop music. In this iteration, a quintessential John Barry melody props up a classic Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse lyric, brassed up with those amazing horn blasts, and all given the proper cinematic push with the considerable capacity of Welsh-born Shirley Bassey's voice. With lungs like a leaf blower, Dame Bassey seems to sing only in 72-point exclamation points. Match this with the ecstatic pneumatics of a vibrato with the horsepower of four Judy Garlands in a paint shaker. A voice that provides the ultimate foil for a Bond villain squeezed here into the ultimate Bond theme song.

250) Wire, Pink Flag: For me, punk was a brilliant flash. Before it's value quickly disintegrated into a spewing sea of mediocrity, there were but a handful of towering classics: Never Mind the Bollocks, Ramones, Funhouse, New York Dolls and maybe a couple of others that escape me now. Add this one to the heap: Since its release in 1977, Pink Flag album has enjoyed drooling gallons of hyperbolic praise. Its sound is characterized by extraordinary confidence and an aesthetic so minimalist that it pushes toward asceticism. Pink Flag uses many of the sonics and tools of the first Ramones album yet adds much more color, tension, and subtlety. If there was such a thing as punk evangelism then the Ramones were its street corner preachers and Wire its temple monks. Much of the music of the '80s that followed would attempt to defy this type of taut minimalism and that may explain why so much of it is so hard to listen to now.

251) Flamin' Groovies, Shake Some Action: You'd have thought their sound came up from along the gray waters of the Mersey – just in case you missed it, they advertise their Anglophilia on the album cover – but no: they were from San Francisco. A critics darling band whose albums too quickly ended up in the cut-out bins (remember those?). I picked all of mine up for next to nothing. Didn't listen to them much as I remember. But then this: Shake Some Action. A beautifully sculpted monster.

252) Anthony Newley, The Man Who Makes You Laugh: Cabaret singer extraordinaire and seminal influence on young David Bowie and Bryan Ferry, Anthony Newley was the epitome of the "song stylist." Not one to simply gesticulate and mug for emphasis, Anthony Newley staged every beat of his performances and wrung every nuance out of a song from glee to pathos and back again. You have to credit those fuzzy bustling hedgerows of his eyebrows for doing half the work. But the real magic is when he does that thing with his voice where he mouth gapes open wide, his pitch defenestrates like a greased bandit making an escape, and his vibrato breaks into storm-sized swells. Besides being a major pop singer in England in the late 50s and early 60s, Newley is the cowriter (mostly lyrics) of many a classic including What Kind of Fool Am I, Goldfinger, The Joker, the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory soundtrack as well as writing a couple of successful musicals with partner Leslie Bricusse. While all of that is impressive enough, it's his genius as a stylist of his own songs that gives him immortality. The Man Who Makes You Laugh is the perfect Newley storm and a song that only he could sing.

Give the Drummer Some

This is the legendary drummer Clyde Stubblefield (even his name sounds like a drum pattern) trying to explain whatever the magic he does on those iconic James Brown records. Stubblefield is the architect of the most famous and oversampled 20 seconds of skin flapping ever: Funky Drummer. Stubblefield breaks it down but like any true illusionist, he reveals none of the magic. That sorcery will remain as ineffable and uncanny as ever – improvised off rhythms, syncopations, and ghost notes are the words he gives it. Electricity, devilry, and sleight of hands and feet is what it is.

Humbly, he says "it's just a simple beat" but there's a lot of shit going on there.

Hear for yourself:

Dylan Testifies

Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else. Songs like "Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain" or "I Saw the Light"—that's my religion. I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I've learned more from the songs than I've learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs. 
Taken from the Wiki page.

Destiny is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you're about will come true. It's a kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it's a fragile feeling, and you put it out there, then someone will kill it. It's best to keep that all inside.  
The Bob Dylan Scrapbook: 1956-1966

A poem is a naked person...

He May Not Be So Rotten After All

While on the subject of Sex Pistols alumni (see below):

The once hard stool of the former Mr. Rotten's reputation gets a serious softening in this recent BBC interview. Given for the occasion of promoting his new autobiography, Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored, the former Sex Pistol even manages a little dew to the eyes.

And just in case you missed the intended message of his music, he puts it thusly:

Really my message from my music is really learn to love each other properly, because you only get one go at it.

                                                  

Did Sid Do It?

It's long been assumed that Sid Vicious (nee John Ritchie) killed girlfriend Nancy Spungeon, if accidentally (as suggested in the Alex Cox movie).

England's The Mail claims "explosive" new evidence indicates that someone else may've been involved. A new documentary by Brit Alan G. Parker, who's been researching the project for 24 years, attempts to make Sid's case.

If you're interested, the movie is called Who Killed Nancy?

This just in: You can now see it on YouTube here.

"Guitar Riff Song of the Ages"

And that riff would be the one belonging to Train Kept a Rollin'.

In its original fingerpoppin' incarnation, the riffing was all piano and scat ba-doo-days. The groove is undergirded with a lyrical bouquet of postwar hipsterisms. This Train also offers up what is probably the greatest double entendre chorus ever written: The train kept a rollin' all night long and I still wouldn't let her go.

The song owes some debt to Cow-Cow Boogie.


Composer Tiny Bradshaw shuffles it along in 1951:



Johnny Burnette recognizes the song's carnal potential and sculpts it with a minor key slink in 1956. The result is a scorching, jungly vibe:

The Yardbirds bring the monumental riff of all rock guitar riffs in 1965. Behind the proto-metal figures, this version returns some residual swing and strips it of Burnette's jungly ambience. Keith Relf's double overlayed vocals are like a brain wrestling with good and evil:



The band rerecorded Train for the movie Blow Up. The producers couldn't get licensing clearance for the original so they changed the lyrics to Stroll On and electrocuted the riff, the fuzz-toned duel leads blowing from Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Many have argued that this is the moment where metal began. Whatever: it's friggin' hot.



Lemmy sludges it up and takes it back to the garage:



Jimmy Page brings it to early Led Zeppelin, 1969:



For most people, the reason they know of the song at all is for Aerosmith. The band released it as a single in 1974. It failed to chart at the time:



Live on television from 1974 on what may be the world's smallest stage:



Imelda May and "good ol' rockabilly":



While I was composing this piece I ran across a post for the Hard Rock Cafe's blog that had the same idea.

Babe I'm Gonna Leave You, Again

So, Miley Cyrus covers Led Zeppelin's version of Babe I'm Gonna Leave You and it's a joke, right?

Well, no, actually.

You've got to hear it to believe it.