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While never really ranking in my lists of all-time favorite bands or albums, Sebadoh remain a critically important band in my musical development. I discovered Bakesale during a critical juncture where i was first starting to comprehend exactly what this “indie rock” stuff was all about (lo-fi recording? What? But i thought all good rock albums were produced by Bob Rock and Mutt Lange!). Later on, i discovered a few of the Original Recipe Sebadoh releases, including the collected Freed Weed and Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock, but with the exception of “Brand New Love,” a song that redefined for me the possibilities of making noise beautiful (and ultimately is probably my #2 Favorite Song of All Time, right behind Superchunk’s cover of the Magnetic Fields’ “100,000 Fireflies”), i have been admittedly remiss in familiarizing myself with the work of the Gaffney/Barlow/Lowenstein lineup, choosing instead to be disappointed by most of Harmacy and more-or-less pleased by most of The Sebadoh (”Flame?” Amazing).
So when i heard late last year that Sebadoh Classic was reuniting and coming to Milwaukee on March 20th, i was thrilled, but also expecting to hear precious little i was familiar with (but holding out hope for “Brand New Love”).
The show was held at Shank Hall, a venue most of my Milwaukee compatriots and i look upon with an attitude somewhere in the vicinity of “oh, for fuck’s sake, there? Well, at least it’s not the shitty Rave.” Where most of the preferred venues in town (OK, the Cactus Club) put off the “loveable dive bar” vibe, Shank Hall is one of those “professional” rock venues with a security staff, a taste for the more middle-of-the-road local “rock” bands, and bartenders in Metallica baseball jerseys serving my precious Miller High Life in a plastic cup for $3.75. $3.75? OK, i realize that in Chicago or Brooklyn, that’s a steal, but this is Milwaukee, where the faucets have three settings: “hot,” “cold,” and “Blatz.” Shank Hall needs a visit from the High Life Delivery Guy. “Y’all must be crazy,” indeed. Read more »
Rarely do you find an album with such an apt title. Joe Pat Hennen’s “Little Bit Easy†is just that. “A Little Bit Easy†was recorded at Third Coast Studio in Port Aransas, TX, a perfect setting for a songwriter who has actually been able to quit his day job.
In Joe Pat’s latest release you will find the steady and consistent acoustic guitar work of Barney Venables, the subtle harmonies of Susie Hennen, and the bare-bones lyrical workings of Joe Pat that work the same simplistic magic of the terse Ernest Hemingway.
The album was produced by Texas guitar legend John Inmon (The Lost Gonzo Band), who the late Stevie Ray Vaughan listed as an influence. Inmon’s electric lead guitar soars throughout the album, adding a perfect complement to Venables’ tooling on the acoustic and slide guitar.
Those who have followed Pat may say that it is a departure from his true form, but that is not the case. Pat has been playing a quite a few of these songs for a number of years in his live sets.
This album is definitely not your typical Joe Pat Hennen album. His previous two releases, “Brand New Day†and “There is a Riverâ€, portrayed Joe Pat as a cap rock-crooner and a master of the flat land boogie. But Joe Pat shows that not only does his musical talent stretch from “San Antonio†(which Gary P. Nunn made famous) to “Leaving Amarillo†(a terrible cover by Houston Marchman of a great Joe Pat song) but from “Soho to Tupeloâ€, a Knoppfler-esque trans-Atlantic journey that crowns his latest album.
Inmon said, “Hennen’s songwriting skills match those of Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark and it’s just a matter of time before listeners and the music world discover the same.â€
It’s sad that I heard that this album for the first time in the middle of winter, because the soothing melodies and red dirt blues that Joe Pat pulls off in this album are best served with a cold beer and both feet in the water.
I think i’m in the minority on this, judging by conversations i’ve had about Modest Mouse in the last couple years, but i think signing to a major label and going commercial was the best thing to ever happen to this band. Prease for me to exprain:
I was introduced to MM via The Lonesome Crowded West, a sprawling soundscape of indie-folk desperation fueled by a sparse instrumentation of guitar, bass, and drums, fueled by a frankensteined blend of Pixies- and Built to Spill-inspired guitar work that built Isaac Brock into something not far removed from an indie-rock guitar hero. The bent notes and sea chanty-inspired rhythms and melodies won me over instantly. But i’ve always had a problem with TLCW that my close friends have heard me drone on about for years–it’s too goddamn long. 15 tracks, two of which are over six minutes, one seven, and one nearly eleven? The album suffers from a lack of streamlining and a propensity for hippified jamming that serves to remind me why i hate bullshit patchouli bands like Phish. And seriously, folks–as soon as anyone compares a facet of your music to Phish, you’re in trouble.
The Moon and Antarctica, Modest Mouse’s first release for Epic, didn’t exactly thrill me, save for a few songs here and there (”Tiny Cities Made of Ashes” = tha dope jam, y’all), but in the wake of what came after, i’m willing to write it off as a transitional piece, a bridge between the complete artistic freedom of the independent record label and the artistic constraint that is the nature of the “big leagues.”
Because, Good News For People Who Love Bad News? It grew on me like a chronic case of athlete’s foot–sure, the itch is annoying at first, but eventually scratching it feels so damn good that you find yourself looking forward to the itch coming back and you stop using the cream you bought at Jewel Osco (or is that just me? Ladies, i’m single). See, i’m picturing an approach to Good News that envisioned harnessing the stark originality of MM’s infinitely charming and engaging musicianship and lyrics, and shoehorning it into the framework of three-minute radio-ready Billboard singles. The result, if you ask me, was a case study in the way a major label album should sound–instead of steamrolling over the artist’s creativity for the sake of the lowest common denominator, the Powers That Be chose instead to force a guiding hand that reigned in the noodling and focused the band’s brilliance into tightly compressed chunks of laser-accurate precision. The result? “Hold On” became the soundtrack for the most bizarre collision of galaxies since NGC 6745. Take it from me, folks: when a band that your friends’ old band opened for in front of 20 people in Green Bay almost 10 years ago is being used as between-inning bumper music at Miller Park during a Brewers game, walls are collapsing and worlds are redshifting. (Let’s not even discuss the Modest Mouse ringtone i downloaded from T-Mobile for my cell phone, ok? That right there was an entire Negative Zone of whatthefuck.) Read more »
Putting out a fantastically innovative album — or worse, a couple of them — is a tricky proposition. If each album a band released existed in a vaccum, there would be less of a problem; unfortunately, this is not the case, and expectations begin to creep in after a certain level of ingenuity and craftsmanship is established.
Sky Blue Sky falls victim to this phenomenon, making Wilco, in a sense, a victim of its own success. While the band forged new ground with the fantastic Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and then followed it up with the not-quite-as-fresh-but-still-pretty-damn-fresh A Ghost Is Born, they seem content to rest on their laurels a bit on this album, in some instances detrimentally so. That’s not to say there’s not plenty here to love for both newcomers and seasoned fans alike, but those who follow the band closely may be a little let down, and those who have heard the various accolades about prior albums may occasionally wonder, on certain tracks, what all the fuss was really about.
It has been said that the manner in which Sky Blue Sky was recorded 
represents a departure for Wilco; while previous albums had songs crafted and fleshed out prior to studio time, the band reportedly developed most of the ideas this time around right in the studio. Whether this is true or not, there’s no denying that some tracks give off this very vibe, as if the band thought, “Hey, this is kind of neat! Hit the button and let’s see where it takes us!”
Fortunately, the group has more than enough talent to carry them admirably through these songs, which include tracks like “Shake It Off” and “Walken”, particularly with the addition of guitarist Neils Cline to the band, who joined shortly after A Ghost Is Born and thus experiences his first time on a studio recording from the band here. Still, Wilco is not the sort of band one listens to for a well-done jam session–the band has made deft composition and clever lyricism a staple of its sound with past recordings, and so unfocused efforts come off as disappointing.
All of that being said, there are some cuts here that stand completely toe-to-toe with the band’s best work. “Impossibly Germany” captures the band doing music the way it does best, with a deceptively simple and laid-back chord progression leading to complex interweaving guitar lines that do as much to stimulate the ear as the backing rhythm does to relax it. Tracks like “Side With The Seeds” proves that the band’s can absolutely still produce top-notch lyricism, as well, with Jeff Tweedy’s lamenting hope working in perfect stride with the alternately laid-back and crescendoing melody. “No one wins but the thieves / so why side with anything?” he asks. It’s a sneaking moment of relevance that can catch you by surprise with how astute it manages to be without being intrusive.
When songs like this are followed up tracks like the repetitive and not-as-coherent “Shake It Off”, however, you can’t help but feel what’s missing here. Sky Blue Sky is a fine album that’s brilliant at times, but it’s not brilliant all the time. For a band like Wilco, this is something worth mentioning.
Release date: May 15, 2007
Label: Nonesuch
Rating: 8/10
Photos courtesy of Newberry Photography and Crayola.
There’s a sense in which even trying to review this album is an exercise in futility. Drums and Guns is a Low record. Do you really need me to write anything else?
You probably don’t, actually. Drums and Guns is constructed from the same sonic palette as the rest of the band’s output, full of endlessly feedbacking guitars, tinkling pianos with the sustain pedal all the way down, droning organs with blown-speaker buzz, several metric tons of industrial-strength echo, and the trademark twin vocals of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker. It perhaps has a few more electronic-sounding noises in the percussion than many of Low’s previous releases, but not enough to really throw you off.
Essentially, Low created a very specific sound, perfected it on either The Curtain Hits the Cast or Things We Lost in the Fire, depending on your point of view, and demonstrated on their subsequent releases that they’re not really interested in working outside of that template. Which is fine — speaking purely for myself, I’m not interested in hearing Low try to add Detroit House or mallpunk or Nigerian drumming into their mix. They do what they do, and they do it well, and maybe that’s enough. Nobody else really can — the sarcastic lyric of “I’ve heard your records, and they sound a lot like mine” on the throwaway-sounding “Hatchet” only serves to underscore the point.
And on that note…well, Drums and Guns skews toward the less- rather than more-catatonic sounding part of Low’s sound — a few of the songs, such as “Breaker,” and the aforementioned “Hatchet” have what in more plebian hands would probably be called a “nice beat.” It doesn’t have any of the epic-length songs that filled up “Trust”; nothing on the album even reaches the four and a half-minute mark. Despite the fact that the opening cut is the affected death-blues of “Pretty People” (”And all the little babies / they’re all gonna die…”), it’s often a contemplative album, but rarely an overly dark one. The vocals are pretty loud in the mix, actually. That’s about all of the distinguishing marks or scars, right there.
Low are consummate professionals, and though it perhaps loses a couple points for its insularity, the execution of this album is near-perfect. That said, it’s almost impossible to picture Drums and Guns being the album to sway someone on the fence about the band. Although actually, come to think about it, it’s difficult to picture someone on the fence about Low to begin with.
Release date: March 20, 2007
Label: Sub Pop
Rating: 8/10
There’s a couple schools of thought on this:
1) Good for her. Don’t let Hollywood or women’s magazines distort your definition of what beauty is.
2) A naked woman is like pizza: Even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.
3) You really need the body to wear something like that and she just ain’t got it.
Behold Beth Ditto of The Gossip… this is what going to see a band playing crappy throwback disco will get you:
photo by Andy Willsher, nicked from NME.com
