jesse poe.is writing

“It’s all about the sexy” (written for and release on Dusted magazine April 2006)

When we were in-studio recording Tanakh – Ardent Fevers and the yet to be released Tanakh – Poulos record, the deciding factor of which track to use, which guitar, which vocal, etc. was never one of the best executed or most perfect, it was always about “the sexy”. Our saxophonist Darius Jones, who is a monster of a player in every style he plays be it jazz, noise, or Tanakh, just mantraed day in day out “it’s all about the sexy”, till it became a buzz word in the studio, this one’s sexy and that one’s not, and so on. We would make a decision on a track, a tone, a twist, never based on intellect but just the feel. Everyone would nod in accordance, yeah that’s the one, that one feels good, it might be wrong, but it feels right, it feels “sexy”. It seems a bit silly in retrospect, but it is the truth, “it’s all about the sexy”. Not in drippy lips on mic or druggy strip-tease beats, but in its ability to move your head, for you to feel it on your skin. Take a look at the deference between Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotto Love” and Ike and Tina’s version. Same song, both are amazing, who could cast a stone at Zeppelin, but Ike and Tina just made it sexy.

From drunken midnight Marvin Gaye covers to endless mix tapes made and remade with every unearthing of another soul gem, I have had a growing obsession with soul music. Isaac Hayes, the Dramatics, Sly and the family Stone, the Jackson 5, Otis, Al Green, Ike and Tina, Prince, Booker T, The Temptations, Freda Payne, Bill Withers, Charles Wright, Etta James, Funkadelic, King Floyd, War, Marvin Gaye, The Meters, Sam Cooke, Shuggie Otis, Solomon Burke, The Spinners, Stevie, Wilson Picket, Curtis Mayfield, Smokey, etc. I wish I could explain it in some erudite way and then exegesis some sort of reason why I just loose it over this kind of music day in day out. But I guess it just comes down to “the sexy”, “it’s all about the sexy”.

These songs are great examples of people who knew exactly what I mean:

1. Ike and Tina – “Whole Lotta Love ike and Tina Turner” – Acid Queen
Maybe it was learning music on the piano that gave Mr. Izear Luster Turner his unmistakable gift for such rhythmic playing but what ever it was he could kick it and (too often hit it), but it helped shape rock and soul into what they has become. Both he and Anna Mae tip–top Tina slayed the charts with, what is to me, the embodiment of rock and soul, which in my opinion should be just one term altogether, it is in that mix I find myself most obsessed, head swaying back and forth like it is too heavy for your poor neck to support. They were so much more than great legs and abuse; they were the groove and the power of expression. Man, Jon Bonham and company must have shit themselves with glee tinged jealousy when they heard “Whole Lotta Love” grooving out of their hi-fi thicker than mud and badder than backstreet beat downs. What they stole from Wille Dixon, Ike and Tina had stolen back, and in this tug of war; the song arrives at its own place, that is just transcendental. What kills me over and over in this song is of course Tina’s amazing delivery and strength and the rhythm, but even more the arrangement, so confident and powerful, be it the influence of Phil Spector or just that as so often when you take something across a genre or even from one songwriter to another it goes through this alchemistical transformation where the song becomes what it was meant to be. However it doesn’t matter the formula, the product is what it is: amazing. And this song is just what it always wanted to be in the hands of Ike and Tina, slow, sexy, groovy, powerful and when she says “every inch of my love” you know she means every sweet inch.

2. The Isley Brothers – “Summer Breeze” – 3+3
Besides being some of the best dressed men of soul, these guys cranked out quality year after year from “It’s Your Thing” to “That Lady” to even their new record with the humorous but amazing executed “Busted” over a period of fifty years which isn’t too easy to do, just look at the Stones. Man, first of all, the main rhythm is on a banjo (or at least a keyboard banjo sound) that is enough to get you hooked, then the amazing harmonies, followed by the jaw dropping work of Ernie Isley who had just joined the band starting with this record. Imagine needing a guitarist and just getting your kid brother to play and your brother being Ernie Isley; if only. Ernie’s playing on this track is the kind of awe inspiring guitar work that is so often over looked in soul when people talk of guitar gods, sure Hendrix and the lot were great but what about Ernie?!?!?! And Eddie Hazel’s mind warpingly beautiful work on Maggot Brain’s Maggot Brain, or even Prince for that matter, shit Prince can play guitar better than most “guitar gods” you see appearing and reappearing on the pages of guitar mags.

3. Al Green – “Belle” – The Belle Album
What Al Green song isn’t great? It’s like you don’t even want to mention him or Otis, or Marvin, or Solomon, because then you have to split hairs over which tracks not to include, but not only is Belle one of my favorite songs, I think it is a testament to the power of the man’s music and deep rooted soul. This was a cross over record, a type of record that is almost impossible to make, almost as hard as “past their prime” records, but yet there is always someone there to thankfully prove you wrong, like Smokey Robinson’s Quiet Storm record. So a straight up religious record, nothing against religion, I find religion in all it’s forms terribly interesting (and sometimes just terrible when you look at the result of its misuse), but it is the sort of trial by fire that makes good song writers go bad (look at Cat Stevens. Mark Farner, or even Dylan’s saved period is a bit questionable). Of course it is a bit hard to completely take religion out of soul, it is in great part founded on it, but this was a straight up I love god kind of record and “Belle” is still one of the sexiest love songs ever made. Think of it as a three-way, him, her and the great other.

4. Ann Peebles – “I Can’t Stand the Rain” – I Can’t Stand the Rain
A guitar riff that is so distinct and ahead of it’s time that you could trick first time listeners into believing it was added by Aphex Twin last year. Then Ann hits you with the sexiest pronunciation of “rain” in the history of man, add the beat and sweet sweet punctuation of the B-3 and a horn section that takes flight on the wings of her voice. This has been in obsessive high rotation at my house for the last two years or so and I still die every time I hear it.

5. Garnet Mimms – “Cry Baby” – Cry Baby
Sure this song has been cover by some of the best around, but no one, I mean no one, holds a tear stained candle to Mimms proto-soul gospel tinged 1963 version, of course he wrote it and by most formulas somebody else should have come along and done it better, but how could you? It is so hot and wholly heart breaking, there is no fooling around in his voice and of course you just have to fall for the lyrics cause they’re so honest and strong in what today in our over analyzed therapy drenched world we would deem weak, self-depreciating, and dependant. Man I love it, people are gonna do what people are gonna do, whether the doctor says its good for you or not, like Antony and The Johnsons “Fistful of Love”, which I can never get enough of, it is just down right honest and beautiful and the way love really is, the dirty wet side that has worms clinging to it when you pick it up kind of love. “So go on and cry baby” its so pretty when you do.

6. Shuggie Otis – “Sweet Thang” – Inspiration Information
The amazing talented son of band leader Johnny Otis who, as I once heard, took Shuggie to Quincy Jones to learn how to write songs and Quincy sent him back saying the boy knew everything you could need to know before he even got there, whether the story is true or not, he certainly knew how to make some of the sweetest soul and amazingly played all the instruments on this record with a virtuosity and cohesiveness you don’t find in most virtuosos or songs built by overdubbing. All of the tracks are great laid back lazy ol’sun kind of soul that you don’t hear enough of and unfortunately there was never enough of Shuggie committed to tape, but thanks to David Byrne and his own blue-eyed soul (although I think he has brown eyes if I remember right) we have this record available on cd and with its success the others quickly followed. If only there was more.

7. Marlena Shaw – “California Soul” – Spice of Life
Speaking of the west coast and its own sun bleached version of soul, Marlena Shaw is another overlooked wonder, with a voice that is sweeter than taffy and just as sticky the way it bends and melts around every note. Complete with a full string symphony, horn section, and an infectious beat, this song knows no bounds and is impossible to not make the sun burn brighter through the windows of even the dankest of flats.

8. Tim Buckley – “Look at the Fool” – Look at the Fool
Getting back to brown-eyed masters of Blue-eyed soul, there is Tim (even Jeff blessed us with one kick-ass soul track “everybody here wants you”). After his amazing, yet at-the-time misunderstood opus Starsailor which brought about his musical hiatus and landed him earning his keep as a taxi driver and chauffeur before contractual pressure brought him back to playing/recording; he was just like, “you want a record?” blam! Here is a funk-soul-rock record (Greetings From L.A.) or blam! Here is a soul record (Look at the Fool) and the amazing thing is that they were every bit as good as anything else going and in most cases much much better. Look at the Fool has one of the coolest chord structures and amazing use of the male voice in soul music, and is every bit as good as an Al Green track but all Tim’s own style.

9. Joe Cocker – “Woman to Woman” – Say Something
Losing yourself giving your all be it for one or a stadium of 100,000 is what music is all about for me, and it is almost shameful to stand before this song, and at the same time when you hear it all you want to do is start a big ol’ soul band and just let it all go as hard as you can. Joe Cocker didn’t care that he didn’t have a “beautiful” voice, that he wasn’t black, that John Belushi made fun of him every Saturday night, that he covered more songs than he wrote, or even that he did some bad songs now and then, he just did it, and did as hard as he could and that is why he is the motherfucker and this song is the unyielding testament to it. This song is so mind-numbingly rhythmic and his vocals just rip through like gravel on your palms when you fall off your bike skid down the dirty pavement. Man it is so good it stings!

10. Rotary Connection – “Sunshine of Your Love” – Songs
Songs is a great collection of spacious groves, which were undoubtedly as soul as soul can be, but with huge lilting strings and a 70’s rock approach (“Respect” being another great track). Just to mention that Minnie Riperton was the “back-up” singer is a bit hard to imagine. This cover is hands down my favorite track they did, it is the song Cream only wished they had recorded, not that their version wasn’t great but the smooth slow groove, the flute, the strings, the druggy velvet voice of Sidney Barnes, you just have to say yeah this is what this song was meant to be and then…. oh my god then…there is Minnie, with her five octave range squealing the most angelic reverb to Sidney’s “love”. It is the sort of thing you interrupt a conversation to point out, an eyes-rolled back sound of purest beauty, it IS the turn around; there is no need for music, just Minnie. And did I mention the guitar? Beautiful all the way around, someone send me 100 more songs like this and I’ll never buy a record again, it is really to bad they turned down their slot for Woodstock, because the world would be a better place now if they had gained the success and influence other Woodstock bands garnished after the festival.

11. King Crimson – “Earthbound” – Earthbound
I remember in the 9th grade my dad turned me on to “In the Court of the Crimson King” claiming that “21st Century Schizoid Man” was the coolest songs ever, but I was one of those weepy kids and only really dug “I talk to the wind” (which we later recorded as a b-side to Dieu Deuil), but more than the record I loved the record cover, I drew that nostril flared face on all my note books, painted it for art class hung, it in my locker, it was all over everything, if I had only heard “Earthbound” instead, my life would have been so different, but unfortunately only a few ever heard this till it was re-released in 2002, but man it is soul soul soul, and you know it as soon Wallace kicks that first beat you just have to say, “ah shit here comes the soul” then Boz Burrell’s bass and scratchy scatting, Mel Collins punctuated sax, and Fripp is just Fripp as always. One blistering funk-rock-soul jam start to finish. Maybe if my dad had turned me onto this Crimson record I would have been picking out a Paik style fro for my senior pictures, instead of some stupid skater swoop.

12. Detroit Emeralds – “Baby Let me Take You (in my Arms)” – You Want It, You Got It
These guys had a smattering of low on the radar hits but this one is just sexy, there’s not much to say, it’s just sexy, and like I said “it’s all about the sexy”. Just put it on for the quiet storm, put it on for the evening drive, or just for your own singing into the spatula Saturday solo gig live from your kitchen, and follow it up with Syl Johnson’s “Is It Because I’m Black” whether your pasty, Polynesian, or dark red, let it all go and sing your soul cause like Syl says, everybody wants to be somebody it doesn’t matter if you’re white, yellow, or brown, we’re all Black, there trying to hold us, but we just can’t stop trying. Bring the sexy.

There are some 4000 four-letter words in the English language, and yet not even half of them are BAD. Yet, I remember being a kid in school and the teachers breaking our balls over using four-letter words, “Boys watch the four letter words!” being a cunning linguist little shit head, since I liked books better than the tube, I used to always get the eyebrow with smart ass retorts like, “like love, or like, or like math!” I have grown up a bit since then, just turned 30 in fact, and as if a nice happy 30^th Andy Vote drops this amazing collection of obscure folk, this is not your mom’s apron string back door folk obscurities but dope beat oriented folk that has a groove and soul and yet all the laid back acoustic warmth of what we love in folk. Funny how most of our over used (even by myself) cuss words are four letters; made me stop and think, you know some of my favorite words are only four letters even my favorite English collocation consists of a pair of four letter words “FISH TACO”, but four letter words are great like: Afro, Aloe (especially when you got a sun burn), babe, ACDC (earlier period only), beer, boob, cake, cope, come, cure, cusp, Dune, dusk, ears, Eros, fawn, foxy, gala, gale, gift, gigs (never enough good ones), gone (for a pint), hook, howl, hugs, Iris, Juju, Kali, Leos (like me), lips, luck, milk, moan, mojo, naps, racy, raga, rock (especially the over the top kind or the really druggy kind), sale, sexy, shag, taco, tits, toke, tush, twat, vibe, vows, warm, wine (preferably red), wink, yawn, Yoda (and his lovely syntactically broken sack of rehashed Joseph Campbell lectures), yoga, and zeal.

It is from a lexical set like this that Twisted Nerve’s Andy Vote, who refers to this collection as “a flock of unsung songbirds”, picked these sixteen songs from relative obscurity. They are obsessively and lovingly curated along with enthusiastic and illuminating liner notes. But what really matters here are the songs, which are just stellar! I mean he must have had at least a couple four letters stuck in his head when he picked these songs cause beat, weed, deep cuts and damn good would suffice to describe the kind and quality of this folk collection.

This is the kind of folk I remember my folks playing when I was a kid, the Pentangle kind of folk, but not just that, more like those great cuts from non-folk bands that just happened to play some sort of hybrid folk song on one of their records, like Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan” or Cactus “Song for Aries” or Amon Duul II “Sandoz In The Rain (Improvisation)” or the instrumental on Les Sinners “Sinners” record, that kind of stuff. The kind of song you’d buy a whole record just to get, and here is a whole album of just these kind of folky jam gems. Words to remove from your head would be Grateful Dead, sorry if I conjured that with folky jam, I mean Anthem of the Sun and a hand full of their songs are fantastic, and I might go to the mat for them, but it is not that kind of thing, this is even better. This is like a mix tape made by your older brother’s cool girlfriend made circa 1970 after her year abroad, stuff you wish you had always known about. Other words to remove in the four letter vein in regards to this record (and in general) would be: Abba, ACDC (latter period), acne, army, cats (only cause I’m allergic to them), cold, doom, dues, envy, fuss, frat, gawk, gnat, gone, guns, nuke, pain, pimp, runs, snot, ugly, woes, yack, zero, zoos, just to name a few.  (Jesse Poe)

(CD on Merge Records, www.mergerecords.com )

There was a wonderful four-year period of my life where I lived in a huge warehouse in a predominantly African-American sector of the dilapidated gateway to the south known as Richmond, Virginia. That sector, Church Hill, was a mythic southern place if ever there was one, families sitting on their porches in sweltering summer evenings, abandoned tunnels, tree infested theatres, Barbershops, Usher-like churches that wheezed the soul of old organs for hours on end four nights a week and marathon Sundays, and, of course, someone on every other corner who could sell you a little trip to heaven.

From it’s elevated vantage over the city the warehouse should have received the best reception in the city, pointing it’s antennae up like a finger touching god, but in fact it was blessed by an AM dictatorship that allowed only one station to come through the radios of these sweaty porches and junkie kitchens. AM 1380 From Sinatra to Streisand, THE MUSIC OF YOUR LIFE. You could smell the lipstick caked menthols wafting out of the speakers from kitchen to kitchen throughout the whole neighborhood. Even though by that time in my life I had hoarded enough records to dam the Nile, AM 1380 somehow wedged it way into my home during the wee hours of the night and early morning; I mean come on there is only so many times you can lever yourself out of your chair to flip records before you sub come to the allure of a crackly voice that assures you this is your music, the music of your life, the music you want to hear, song after song, night after night, and furthermore the seduction of community, a community which you so often feel alienated from in America, a seduction which was fostered by the fact that when you stumbled out of your flat, bottle of wine in hand, to the house of another, you’d hear the end of the same song you had heard begin within the walls of your own. 1380 ballistered that neighborhood like an external skeleton that your flesh somehow grew around. The beauty of hearing an entire symphony and the velvet voice of one crooning soul recorded in the grandeur of a full studio into the welcoming arms of Neumans, the warm belly of a Nieve board, and then lovingly committed to history on 2-inch tape, a sound so full and lush that it makes tears well and underwear melt, forced into the constricting compression of the AM bandwidth, a suffrage that even the highest-end stereo couldn’t dismount, was beyond explanation. And even through my own hodgepodge audiophile system it still sounded like a transistor radio in a free-calendar garage or sea-green kitchen, but much much louder. And it fulfilled it’s own proclamation, as it truly became the music of your life.

Being born fifty years to late and simultaneously fifty years to soon, I had a special love affair with AM 1380, and felt that it was truly the music of my life. However, as much as I was a card carrying member of AM1380’s ranks, boots polished to perfection and shining in the beauty of its broken antiquated glory, those songs by O.C. Smith and Floyd Crammer were never interspersed with Roy Montgomery or The third Ear Band like when I was the one putting the needle down myself. I felt like a Jekyll and Hyde hipster switching from the raunch of Louis Prima’s AM innuendos and trumpet blasts to the Verve’s riff-lifting lilts, living some sort of double life that was dubiously balanced between whore and virgin and equally enraptured in both, and it wasn’t until one night in the living room of my karnatic vocal teacher’s house, far from the squalor of my own neighborhood, that I really started to understand my own integrated duplicity.

As a student of my teacher, I was honoured to be the guest of a secret society of music that is near-impenetrable in America today, that of classical Indian Music Malifs, which are the concerts of world famous Indian performers in the living rooms of America’s displaced purveyors of an ancient tradition of underground music. Living room concerts where only family and friends, those with enough money to buy their way in, and music aficionados who could swindle their way into one all night swoon of music and food, fit only for ancient kings and courtiers, would take place right under the sentinel watch of florescent humming west-end street lights. On one of these many precious nights that I was so thankful to be apart of, I happened to wake from my vertiginous swirl of audile’s rapture to see the guy next to me recording/watching the same big bang experience that I was in front of through the pixilated screen of a mini-recorder. And there he was watching this heavy weight player through a 2×2 Sony screen. My first reaction was of indignation and disgust, man I could reach out my hand and fucking touch the guy who was pounding away on the santour and this guy was placing technology between himself and nirvana. WHY!?!? It was only later that I realized that my overly-self-indulgent experience was perhaps a bit anachronistic as I swayed to the tambura’s drone, one where I had beautiful almond-eyed beauties dropping figs into my mouth satiated beyond human capacity and that this guy next to me was actually (ok maybe) realizing the moment more than me because he was looking/listening to the same thing as me but in the present through the electric eye of our own pixilated present brain-fuck of a culture. That particular night I found myself disgustingly entranced by the small focused vista he held in his hand and wanted to take it into my own hands to zoom in on the pulsing forearms of the tabla player, the black folds of the hair of the teenaged Indian girl in the corner, the dilated pupils of the master’s eyes as he led the whole room through a dark sequestered night in a wealthy neighborhood flanked by health food T.V. dinners altered in front of Entertainment Tonight and Sex and the City, and our present dysfunctional theatre of life. And as I gazed through this 20th century crystal ball I realized the idolatry of my own ways, that AM 1380 wasn’t the music of my life but of a life that I wished I could live, not in reality, because there would be no Sonic Youth or Tim Buckley, but a time I romanticized as totemic to the things that were innate to me, beauty, reserve, and yet all out abandon to a sound that only existed during that time, ‘The sound of the right speaker in the right speaker and the sound of the Left … this is the hi-fi sounds of…. when I was twenty-five.’.

When I purchased M.Ward’s newest record Transistor Radio, these memories came back in deluge. From the first sounds to the last this record immediately sings of your life today and a time you can’t touch but feel a part of regardless. Slowly pulling you in with a low-fi instrumental. It sets the tone and quality of the record that will come to surround you for the next 43 minutes and invariably forever as you find yourself playing it time and time again. I am not saying it is the best record ever, some sort of Astral Weeks, or even that it has the power to change your life, but it has a staying power that is incomprehensible, like a love affair that you think would be good for a short period, a summer fling or something, and then you find yourself spoused, fathered, and unashamedly happy and content. It creeps up on you like a latent desire that you are not aware of and you realize, only after sometime, that you have played it over and over like you only own a record or two.

What is it about this record that makes it have this kind staying power? God I wish I knew, I’d make a dozen myself. It’s low-fi, but not in the foolish too cool for a studio style, or too apathetic to believe in it’s own merits to financially commit to a studio budget, nor is in a pretentious make it sound low-fi cause it’s cool Elliot Smith (god-rest his amazing singer-song writer soul) way. No quite the opposite, it is more like those gorgeous full-studio recordings of old forced through the limiting parameter of a transistor radio. You know I could and still have never been able to get into Steely Dan. But you love engineering and the sound of music and sound itself, how could you not love it? Cause who really has the kind of stereo to really appreciate records like that? And even if you do does it really sound any better than Zeppelin or Jon Spencer? I mean it takes the magical orifice of hearing a hot second to adjust, acclimate and appreciate what your hearing for exactly what it is… music. Two sides of a 78 and you no longer hear the scratch and hiss of history only the songs embedded within. And to be honest as much I love the recent works of the Flaming Lips or little Buckley’s Grace, there is something so comfortable about a record that lets you hear every little thing without occupying the sonic spectrum so completely that you are deaf to the very things Cage and the like admonished us not to block out, things like the neighbors fighting and the buzzing of mosquitoes and the hum of your own fridge.  This record is recorded in full force and then squeezed into comforting range of an uninvasive parameter of a guy singing in the street or a flat-mate practicing Al Stewart songs late at night in the other room. Stir this up with profoundly simple and exquisitely crafted songs and it begins to take a colossal form.

M.Ward’s lyrics for one must be mentioned here. Lyrics are such a difficult and wonderful polemic. They must be specific and personal enough to be distinct and recognizable between artists and have something to say in a new and fresh way, yet at the same time they must be general and all encompassing enough to touch each and every person the same across the board. Think about it, what is your favorite song lyrically, your song, a song that tells your story or at least the story of a particular slice of your life, the song of your love story. Got it in your head? Now couldn’t you objectively say that those words might be perfect not only for you but also for another person, and for many? Alex Chilton’s Kangaroo, for example, ‘I first saw you, you had on blue jeans..’ and you immediately conjure the memory of when you first saw her. Yeah me too, and it’s the same for everyone else who might still be reading this exhaustive review.

M. Ward, that motherfucker, has this very gift, to spin a yarn, which is so much his very own, and yet you feel that it is your very own. And he does it with such finesse and newness and attention to history. Like in Lullaby +Exile ,‘Then a lullaby on Broadway could sound like an exile out on Main, but when that curtain closes you’ll be back in your seat again. And the band starts the ball when the chandler starts glowing with or without you knowing who the partner what the dance. Oh a trance is a spell with a thrill wrapped up inside it and try as you might to fight it, love will get you in the end.’ Or in Radio Campaign, which speaks to me so personally I can’t even commit it to the page in good conscious or self-respect.

And on the record spins, spelling out my own love and loss. The content of the record handles no profound messages of enlightenment; in fact it is quite the same as for example its contemporarily released Magnolia Electric Co. ‘What Comes After The Blues’, dealing with themes of the inability to fully realize and act upon love when it is kind enough to present itself to us, the inevitability of coming to our own predisposition to make piss-poor decisions, touring and insomnia, yet instead of the screaming brittle siren of Jason Molina (whom I love), M.Ward is the comfortable gent in the corner with the sleepy-eyed smile telling us, ‘How I wish it wasn’t true I ain’t gonna stand up here and lie to you, I believe you all deserve more than that, and if there is one thing that I’ve learned, brother you gonna get burned if you don’t know where your love is at.’

This record doesn’t preach a life changing gospel or turn phrases in the way you wish you had, but it simply raises a knowing brow and lays a gentle hand upon you shoulder, and it is through this very human touch that you find the words revealed within yourself. As if it is not so much the word transmuted but the purposed word or idea that is almost apprehended right before your own eyes that gives you a leg up just enough that you grasp those words on your own for your own and then, man, they are your own and this record becomes your own, circling your brain like you have found some sort of port hole to understanding in the simple revolutions of it’s own circumference.

With my own unabashed adoration of M.Ward’s previous record ‘The Transfiguration Of Vincent’ I was apprehensive that he could reproduce something quite as great; not that I lack faith in his curly locks, but I found it hard to believe that there would be another record by the same man quite as great. I was greatly relieved to find not only was I wrong but ashamedly shortsighted. ‘Transistor Radio’ not only matches ‘The Transfiguration Of Vincent’ but in some ways supersedes it. It has the rambunctiousness of the previous, the gentle seemingly timeless soft ballads, and yet a progression and growth that must exist within an artist, lest they strangulate themselves in the lengths of their own laurels.

After the seemingly unnatural thousandth time I have listened to this record in the last few months, I have found a paradigm for the community I was looking for a record which is both old and comfortable, yet contemporary and aware of what came before it, a record which is truly my own and quite obviously everyone else’s who takes it into their own life. A record which is truly the Music of Your Life.

(Jesse W Poe)

With “Landed” period Can drumming, Montreal influenced repeative guitar lines,            “Para Dieswarts Duul” Amon Duul harmonies arising from the distance, early “Floyd/Crimson” Farfisa, and a decent helping of relaxed acid-y guitar leads, this Providence based trio delievers a larger sound than would be expected, based on an instrument list. A wonderful follow up to their successful debut “Garden of Bones” well-balanced and enjoyable to listen to, lulling and rocking at the same time. The title cut on this 36 minute sophomore release breaks from the self-set pattern of the record with a more developed sound and a more front-man styled vocal sounding like a less aggrandized Getty Lee or perhaps a lost track from Amon Duul’s “Yeti”, where the vocals were turned down some in the mix. The unmistakably lasting impression from this record is the fantastically realized and wonderfully recorded drums. They control the over all sound of the record making you nod your head without wincing from over playing or from being too loud, quite the opposite, they grab your ear without taking away a single note from the other equal parts Urdog. Wonderful and chill, well worth having for any psych-prog-drone fan and even those who are not.

Some years ago I came upon a record that upon seeing it immediately captured my imagination and the touch of this record in that dusty bin seemed to burn my hand. It had nothing but a drawing of a distorted face and  EXUMA scrawled across it in red like the last word scratched from a dieing hand. My mind raced with expectation as I hurried home to put this enigmatic disc on the plate, yet nothing could have prepared me for the raw intensity and power contained in those dust filled grooves. With the first sound of the howling wolves I was only further intrigued and sucked in by this mysterious record. And as it coiled in upon itself the music that filled me was like a possession, chills swept my body on top of each other like a city built upon a razed city built upon a razed city built upon yet another razed city. I had found a precious and wonderful thing, a record that made all my other records seem intentless and without meaning and I became very afraid of this record. I was afraid to over play it, to learn it’s cryptic lyrics, to wear out its sacred grooves. I was afraid to play it at times in which I might be interrupted from my listening. I was afraid most of all of listening to it too much and becoming too familiar with it and in some way diminishing the effect it had on me, I was afraid that I might some day hear it and not shutter and cower at its intensity, afraid that I might not dance my head and body along with it’s primitive rhythms. I began to covet this record of mine like Golumn and his ring, only playing this beautiful record for the closest of friends and only at the loudest volumes possible. “Don’t stay unless you can listen with respect, if you want to talk we can put on another record, if you don’t want to take a chance on transcendence then just tell me now and we’ll listen to something else, but if you want to hear this record, you have to be wholly here (hear) and no where else, until this record takes you somewhere else and then tell me what you see when you reach that other place.” Now that I am actually committing this words and ideas in type, it sounds Hokey, but man when I had this record in my hands these sorts of things came out of my mouth.

I remember playing it for a good friend of mine before we went on tour and telling him that if we could achieve this sort of intensity in the music we played together that for me we would have done something wonderful and powerful and worthwhile. I remember how the tears streamed down his face in the darkness as we listened to this record at deafening decibels.

A while later this same friend reported back to me from a very reputable source, the story of EXUMA which is not detailed in the liner notes and may not even be true but it is hard to deny it’s possibility when you listen to the desperate intensity of EXUMA’s voice.

The story went as such, that the man or the musical entity know as EXUMA was a folk musician in New York in the 60’s doing the occasional studio musician gig etc. and came home one day from playing to find his entire family slaughtered in their NY apartment. On that day he left New York and then blossoming folk scene to return to his home in the Caribbean. And that out of that unfortunate blood and necessary relocation was birthed EXUMA.

It is hard for me divorce this story from my mind because in my mind this sort of experience is one of the few things that could produce music of such intensity, music so devoid of pretext yet so richly rooted in the folklore of the past, so deeply intertwined with the sacred and the profane. So holy and yet so licked by the fires of hell.                        EXUMA is a music that is without parallel. You could only begin to place it in a parallel universe to the field recordings of Lomax and Livingston, and the studio voodoo of Dr. John’s Gris Gris Man. It has integrity of a music that is unaware that it is being recorded like a field recording of a voodoo ritual or burial sacrifice, and the same sort of eeriness to boot. And at the same time it has all the rhythm and production of a great R&B record like Ike and Tina records, the sort from which  Dr. John was born from. In this EXUMA record was born a mirror to Dr. John’s “Gris Gris Man”, a mirror that reflected back his grizzly beard and dread-bead mane and in the condensation that gathered on this looking glass from the Gris Gris Man’s conjuring you could find the finger-sketched directions to a music as real and a earth-drenched and you could ever find.

I remember that night when I played it for my friend and the tears streamed down his face, he told me that his dream was make a record and bury ever copy of this record in different places all over the world, and when you bought the record you would not obtain the actual physical record but a map to where the record was buried. What that record would contain I can only imagine, but in my mind the music contained on such a record, could only be of the quality contained on the EXUMA records a quality and intensity of music that can repel and embrace the elements and be fished from the fecund soil telling not only of it’s inception in the recording studio but also it interment in the dark ground. This is the sort of feeling related in music of Exuma, a music born from out of the ground and out of the body at the same time.

It is with great pleasure that I review these beautiful records, that for so long have been buried in the neglected soil of obscurity. The time of interment that they have suffered has not harmed them in the least, they sing as true and real as they did when I heard them years ago and as they did, I’m sure, in 1970 when they were recorded and released. I feel that these records were not ignored as much as they were hidden, because they are overwhelming and destroying. It is hard to listen to them and not consider your own life with out conviction, to listen to your own frail voice and not ask where is my true voice, where is my voice that calls the dead from their graves and the stars down from their watery skies, where is my true voice that causes the skin of others to blister and bubble when they hear it, where is my true EXUMA voice. The voice and the song with which EXUMA sang was not so much a song as it was a blood sacrifice. It is here at this point that I most highly recommend these records, because it is impossible to not sing along to these records as if the incantations are meant to loose your own tongue and it is here as you begin to sing along that you realize/release your EXUMA voice to dance around, to cry, to sing, to howl at the moon, and of course to run back to the stereo to play it again.

Alien8recordings

“I will Survive, I will Survive, Just turn……” the cracked track of Gloria Gayner crunches out of a small rental PA in a small bar in Roccalumera, a small fishing village on the northern oriental coast of Sicily. It is late fall and all of the last scraggles of tourists have scrapped their way back home, leaving no one here except the few dedicated denizens of Roccalumera and one very large drag queen lipping classic diva koans to these men of weather hands and corded backs and their lovely Sicilian wives.

Outside the sun is now finished setting and the tide is lapping against the abandoned wharf. Inside the tense air is finally ripped down the middle by Barbie-que and her/his drag show press-on fingernails, when one red-faced fisherman finally offers a hard earned Lira. My roommate, Umberto, continued to smoke this first-hand tale across our kitchen table, describing the beauty to be found in the tension of a man proudly publishing his own femininity. A femininity that in all of his/her glitter, gloss, feathered boa’s and precocious flaunting flirting and feline antics surpasses the all the femininity to be found in this small fishing village. And these men who are, each and everyone, a Man’s man, find themselves taken by the flip and flaunt of a lip-synced stage show. And there in this sticky-floored fisherman’s bar the most precious moment is precariously balanced on the achievement of the first embaressment and the subsequent wining of that first Lira.

Every time I hear Who Will Cut Our Hair When We are Gone, this story of Roccalumera’s first drag show is rubbed from my brain like a genii from his lamp erhhh…umm her lamp. The Unicorns make-up the face of modern music in such a way that you can’t help but crease you hard earned money and slip it into their hair surrounded garters. So seductive and sweet yet utterly destroyed and tragic in it’s bleeding Beefheart beauty.

Who Will Cut Our Hair When We are Gone, pedals a purely unique disco-punk portfolio, of low-fi vocals, folio sound melodies, and lush arrangements cross-cut with insanity, all under the upturned umbrella of pop-dementia. This sort of stew could so easily become a mess or a sad knock off of bands that should never be repeated, however the Unicorns pull it off with a surreal Picasso purity that makes sense even if the nose and the eyes are out of place. It’s so good and yet so all wrong like a Tim Burton Easter Special.

And yet over and over, as I listen to this crazy record, I am further attracted to it, unlike the diminishing returns of many bands that try to swim in the Unicorn’s waters but smack only of kitsch. And that is the strength of this record that after the drag show at five in the morning in the wood-paneled diners of the mid-west countryside there is an aging man under all of that make-up and his life is interesting and real for all of its theatrics, as he sits there with his coffee, waffle, and his five (a.m.) o’clock shadow. His half-spent stories, his weird hoarse syntax, his life, a life so his own, that you can’t help listening and wondering.

Imagine yourself on a merry-go round and there with you on the reciprocating horses and unicorns is Daniel Johnston, Fuck, Themselves, Jonathan Richman, Weezer, Ween, Cibo Mato, and Vinicio Capossela their faces all caked with cotton candy and high as kites, then you will begin to know the analogue androgyny of the Unicorns’ Who Will Cut Our Hair When We are Gone.

Smells Like Records

Plays and Sings…. is an aptly titled debut record for the man truly sings, which beyond its beauty is quite a feat and we applaud him above the hushed and whispery vocaled artists that abound. Don’t get me wrong I love a hushed whispery vocal where appropiate, but it is truly wonderful to hear a man step up to the mic and let it out.

Temptation will arise a first note to name Chris Lee a Jeff Buckley knock-off but that is just because he is one of the few folk who take the chance on letting their voice be heard, and it is well worth hearing the voice on this man. Full of meaning and soul and masculinity that graces his tone his onward towards the upper registers of vocal range with ease. Beyond the pleasant voice is an adventursome and creative desire to use his voice as an instrument beyond simple dynamics. Lee doubles, triples, quadruples his voice making it sound full and rich like most artists do, but just when you think that a vocal is just doubling the first it begins to race around the first and the third vocal cuts across the second and in this sort of serpentine double-helix way Chris Lee wraps you up in his voice. It is this approach to singing that sets this record apart as worthy of your hard earned dollar, for there is so much for your ear to drift away upon at each listen. You can follow one voice where it goes on one listen and another on another, it is like a “choose-your-own-adventure-book” for your ears.

Of course there is more to the record than the man’s voice. The songs that Lee sings are interesting and easy to understand, immediately catchy and familiar, in a sort of old fashion sort of way like Joni Mitchel or Carol King for example. Brillent in simplicity and exectution. Slight use of horns and guitar, bass and drums. Nothing flashy or fancy just good music leaving room for the beauty of the voice and the story it carries.

This is great record of home spun originals to drive the evening sun into the horizon and your gin bottle to the bottom, plus one extremely well chosen cover from my favorite Neil Young record. Chris Lee covers On the Beach from the saddly unavailable On the Beach record and he does it in a vary reverent style that elevates the original by the wonderful timber of Lee’s voice and leaves the cover on the shelf next to a handful of covers that sound as good if not better than the original, ie. Pearls Before Swine-Bird on a Wire, Flying Burrito Brothers-I Shall Be Released, Nick Cave-Helpless, and Six Organs of Admittance-I’m on Fire.

Alice in Wonder Records Dijon, France

The Manchester makings of Last Harour (piano, violin, acoustic/electric guitar, deep male vocals, bright female vocals, and a distant yet approaching thunder of drums) is the raw gut of Last Harbour’s debut full-length, the alchemy however is in how they guide this combination from the dis-mantleing furrows of forerunners Simon Bonny’s Crime and the City Solution, and Nick Cave, (especially the duo and Anita Lane period).

Both of the aforementioned greats, I am sure, will be mistakenly referenced in reviews of this record. However, The Host of Wild Creatures is void of Boney’s wonderful theatrical mellow-drama and Cave’s American South obessions, it also steers clear of the chaos guitar and affect of those artists, as well as the often over production. It could be said that The Host of Wild Creatures lacks the poetic slick-ness of their elegant Godfathers, Bonney and Cave, but that slick-ness is replaced with a more contemporary directness, that seems appropiately poetic in it’s modernity. In fact, the true beauty of the lyrics might be lost to some, at first listening, beneath directional lyrics like “clap your hands” and extestiential musing of “is it wrong to love you” (a song that has the hip-shot sincerity of Leonard Cohen in place of others’ tendencies to sugar coat and obscure any true content to lyrics.)

However this only takes us to the conclusion of the fourth song, with the first meloncholic piano note of the fifth song, From the Sea, Last Harbour steps from the wet leave grave of comparisons and citation and fully embraces the fact that although all parts could equal Crime or Cave, they in actuality only equal Last Harbour, as they boldly step forward proving that  Austrailians are not the only ones able to stamp the art they export with darkness, beauty, and intensity. They continue to push forward with direct narratives, which become more and more poetic as they stack upon themselves. Their seemingly plain diction looks beautiful in succession like Warhol or a room of Rothkoe.

The later half of the album finishes before you are ready for it to end and you find yourself (or at least I did) understanding the first half of the record all the more. The instrumentation on this record is wonderful in it’s simplicity and beautiful execution. The drums and violin provoke a particular space of mental landscape where you might find other dark rovers such as the Telestar Ponies in their wandering wagons. And the remaining instruments and vocals adeptly guide you in your journey through those lands. If you have to compare a record to other records put this one next to the incredible beauty of Keenan’s Telestarponies, and far from the much imitated uh… “aforementioned”.

I guess you could say that my love for Canadian music is the North Pole to the South Pole of Mats’ love for the music coming out of Texas; equal and really the same material, just separated by a huge mass of geography The majority of music making its way out of Canada is wonderful, bleak and beautiful, with a melancholy that has merit, based on something loved and then lost, not manufactured melancholia made for effect. Set Fire to Flames Sings Reign Rebuilder is to date my favorite of the records blown in on the cool winds of Canada. It redesigns the paradigm for the over used soundtrack/ soundscape metaphor. Not
since Eno’s Music for airports, etc. has “soundtrack” been more apt a description, but this is not a “soundtrack” for some film you’]l never see, rather this record evokes the movie in your mind. It is not music that could present a score or back drop for a film it actually presents the movie to you, if you just take the time to shut your eyes. It is true sensistasia. It is misty ontological movie making that takes
all the things that you love and all the things you fear and puts them in a room, sets them to life and builds a fire outside the window It is musical cinematics with the lush Zen-chromatics of Kurosawa, the fragile vulgar beauty and crusty old-worldness of the Brothers Quay, the biographical unfolding
and idiosyncrasies of Jaramusch or Errol Morris, and the collage genius of Altman or even Rauschenberg.
The musicians that make up Set Fire to Flames come from the same collective of musicians that have given us A Silver Mt. Zion, Exhaust, Fly Pan Am, 1-Speed Bike and Godspeed You Black Emperor. There
are many similarities with this record and other records that this collective has put out under different configurations and different names, but these reoccurring threads seem to find a more appropriate and integrated home on Sing; Reign Rebuilder than any of the other magnificent records from this collective as if the stars were all aligned just right as they hit record and all this beautiful bleakness and present hope went to tape. And although I didn’t think it could be done the packaging is the most attractive and engaging in the Godspeed cannon. It comes in gate-fold vinyl and gate-fold CD with blurry dream like photos and private writings, diagrams and velum, everything you could hope for in a record but there are two distinct images in the packaging that describe best the beauty of this record. One is the sentence you find on the First page that simply says “I will be true…” which mirrors the integrity that you feel behind the
recording and the second is a well marked prayer request form from a church pew that has almost all of the boxes checked except a few the “prayer needs” found in the middle of this record say more about the
atmosphere of this record and more about the sound than any review ever could:

I am fearful for various reasons;

my heart has been broken;

I am sad too much of the time;

I do not feel good about myself;

I suffer from anxiety;

I am often unhappy but do not know why;

I sometimes let my temper get out of control;

I am angry too much of the time;

it is difficult for me to forgive;

it is difficult for me to trust others;

I love people but have a difficult time showing it;

I am overly sensitive to small things;

I cry too much;

I sometimes have difficulty controlling my thoughts;

pray for a friend or a loved one to be saved;

I “get down” on myself too much;

what others think about me bothers me too much;

I feel as if I have lost control of my life;

I am easily confused.

SIXTEEN HORSEPOWER | Low Estate
A&M Records
Sixteen Horsepower’s new album LOW ESTATE rocksl Irs dark. dark. dark, and oh, so good, blurring the distinctions between the sacred and the profane in the tradition of the true great blues men of the rural twenties and thirties. Mixing a drink of women, guns and God. each with equal parts and respect like
some sort of ransom mute LOW ESTATE rocks like a Black Sabbath, twangs like a Blue Mountain, and raises your hackle like a BLACK RIDER. with banjos, hurdy-gurdies, heavy electric guitar riffs, fiddles, and far away waver-of-tenor that parbuckles itself from a sweet gospel into a chasm of distortion and prim.
Aesthetics, integrity and talent and effect are perfectly balanced by the sure hand of Mr. JohnParish (PJ Harvey’s main creative cohort), more like a painting than an album; even the lyrics on the  page look more like a bourbon
label than a lyric sheet.

This record marches boldly and somewhat bent into your house dressed in smartly pressed Salvation Army Minster’s jacket and heavy pointed black boots  caked with mud and blood, to lay hands on your five senses for the
fifty minutes it plays and fortunately for the next fifty minutes it isnt playing). It waves its arms and wheezes vignettes like “My Narrow Mind”’s “wicked, wicked /from the mouth I spout/O Lord Don’t let these thoughts come out.” Looking like an old barnyard lit by torch-light on a bleak December Louisiana night; smelling like horses and saloons where women sell sex and men sell death; tasting like salvation in a bottle, a Cure-all sold off the back of a travelling-show wagon; feeling like a stage coach ride through hell, driven by Hazel Motes; and the way it sounds… sweet, dark, beautiful, dusty… like the best record I’ve heard this year
and maybe last year too.