fm416 - Canada has Beats to Go

fm416 - toronto college radio hiphop

Golden era hip hop, old school gems, funky beats, breaks and grooves.

I think the above is self explanatory.

Now go there and listen.

DJ Qbert

http://www.devilducky.com/media/47798/

This is where I think turntablism (along with the less showy but deft skill exhibited by guys like DJ Logic) as both a sampler unit and a functional instrument collide.

Molly's Yes - Wonderworld

A shame this act never got off the ground on its major label debut at its time of release, as they would have beaten Hoobastank at its own formula (although in quick retrospect, that really is not a very high bar to clear) and probably deserved a sophomore try.

A kind of Maroon 5 pop sensibility with the anthemic bombast of a Big Country, this band has at least a trio of very listenable cuts: Frida Kahlo, Hypnotic and the centerpiece And She. There is also the very catchy and clearly geared for radio Fall Down, the moody but otherwise equally AOR 33 White Roses and the riff and chord romp of the title track.

While occasionally pretentious in a way clearly derived from the 80s influences they have in their pop-rock mix, lyrically they are slightly stronger, even when the production makes them too glossy for their own good. They had a above par vocalist in Ed Goggin and the band could clearly play well, but that production sterilizes some of the grit that the songs and the performances hint at (Pro-Tools is both a boon and a bane, no?).

This will still appeal to segments of the fanbases of U2, Foo Fighters, M5, Third Eye Blind, Goo Goo Dolls, Collective Soul and even Cheap Trick.

Harmless but fun.

Random Newsbits

Well, it would appear the Sony has asked for a gag order of sorts, and in the process gagged itself, by opening its mouth to switch feet. I can't say i have any sympathy for this kind of legal chicanery.

In concert photo news, there is a lovely batch of images from a recent James Blood Ulmer show (featuring Vernon Reid, and what looks like Reid's keyboard assassin, Leon Grunbaum).

Also, Avril Lavigne got married. No one cares. Her music is still insipid and her interviews show someone with an IQ that makes Sid Vicious seem like a neurosurgeon by comparison.

It looks like Killing Joke have pseudo imploded again, with longtime bassist Paul Raven booking to tour with Ministry, and questions about what on earth they are doing in the air. One can assume based on history that Coleman probably lost his marble (singular) once more in some apoplectic bender.

The Seedy Arkhestra - Puzzle

Fishbone changed my musical life in 1991. I was on Senior Trip in LA. We had gone to Balboa Beach and I picked up two albums in a hole in the wall music shop on the boardwalk; Sailing the Seas of Cheese by Primus, and The Reality of my Surroundings by Fishbone. The former got a few listens, the latter was on constant rotation for weeks and regularly returns to the deck to this day.

One of the magical parts of Fishbone was singer and multi-instrumentalist Charles Dowd, who was the sensitive soulster in a troupe of fusion/punk/thrash/phunck-junkee militants. He left after their Give a Monkey a Brain and he'll Swear He's the Center of the Universe, and I thought he dropped off the face of the earth. Instead, he released Puzzle under the Seedy Arkhestra moniker in 1997...and then dropped off the face of the earth.

After years of looking, I found that sole Seedy release, and it is a sweet release indeed. Dowd did not have the benefit of the stellar production team he had during his Fishbone days (everyone from David Khane to Terry Date were known to sit behind the boards) and there is some sense of "what if...?" in that regard, but this disc captures the roots of the guy largely responsible for tracks like Everyday Sunshine. It is his knack for songcraft and thematic shift-on-a-dimeyness (I am hereby deeming that a word) that works here.

Where can you get the classic Motown soul of Shing-a-Ling and later have a roots reggae informed Despite the Tears, co-written and with guitars and backing vocals by the late Jeff Buckley. And Jeff is not the only guest here worth noting, as appearances by vets and upstarts alike pepper the joint; Don Byron, Josh Roseman (JR Unit, Groove Collective) , N'Dea Davenport (Brand New Heavies), Amp Fiddler, and David Ryan Harris (John Mayer, Follow For Now) all make the rounds. There are jazzy passages, dub and roots, Motown and Stax, quirked out pop, and a feel that calls up Brooklyn and Trenchtown at a house party.

The only vestige of the cacophonic punk-funk sound of Fishbone is evident on the closer, Flog Your Dead Horse, which appears to be a parting epitaph for his former bandmates, and includes an absolutely caustic solo by Buckley (one of the few recorded instances of his guitar prowess at full bore). The rock-steady that permeates the album is what happens when you move up a step from No Doubt's forays into the genre (although Gwen is better looking than Chuck by any measure), and the tunes are what you step to when one gets tired of "singer songwriter" types that lack any self-deprecation or the faux soul of today's bump-grind-and-grab the cash R&B automatons.

This really deserved more attention than it received.

For Fishbone completists and seekers of goodness overall.

Cyndi Lauper - The Body Acoustic

Cyndi Lauper
The Body Acoustic

To her credit, Ms. Lauper has been one of the few remnants of the 1980s who have been able to maintain a scaled down, but legitimately musical career since her initial big success in the first half of that much maligned decade. Her voice had to outlive her haircut.

She always had a distinct voice, and on this release, she puts it in some interesting contexts; largely acoustic, but the purpose here is reworks of her older material with collaborations that take the music quite often far afield of its original recordings. Money Changes Everything is a backwoods alt-country track with Adam Lazzara of Taking Back Sunday, and the folky pop of All Through the Night features...Shaggy? While it isn't the best cut, for whatever reason, it does not totally fall on its face either.

While it will most likely appeal to the Santa Cruz coffeehouse set, her remake of Time After Time (one of two songs here with Sarah MacLachlan) is almost too conventional. It doesn't improve or really detract from the original; it just wasn't necessary. The same could be said of True Colours (although the use of real strings is a nice touch). Conversely, one of the few tunes that is all Cyndi is She Bop, which in its new arrangement goes from high speed anthemic pop-rock to a dark, almost Warren Zevon-esque elegy (although its closing ends kind of flat). Sisters of Avalon was a very solid improvemnet from its original, with layers of acoustic guitars and full harmonies between Lauper, Ani DiFranco and Vivian Green.

The real gems of this album is Above The Clouds, which has a repeating piano vamp and the flourishes courtesy of Jeff Beck, of which it is well established as impossible for him to not play tastefully and which Cyndi sings with grace. The other is the ska meets j-pop weirdness of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, a meeting of Ms. Lauper and the Japanese duo Puffy Ami Yumi. Yes, you heard that right.

Part of the reason I think this all works is that Lauper has always been actually mindful of how to sing a tune, and that she likes working with competant people. In this case she had the production services of William Whitman (whose credits include Cyndi's debut as well as the Fixx, Dexter Gordon, and Dar Williams), and session players like Mark Egan, Rob Hyman and Jamie West-Oram. The result is something quite coherent, given the span of guest spots and remaking of arrangements.

Good job, yo.

Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins

Jenny Lewis & he Watson twins

This was a curiosity I had to try at the local listening station and then pickd up. It is alt-country pop done extra alt and laden with all the irony that one would expect from someone trying to channel both Bob Dylan and Barbara Mandrell.

Sometimes it works musically, as is the case with The Changing Sky; a kind of a feminine take on what could have been a Traveling Wilbury's b-side (and let's face it, Jenny Lewis is a lot easier
on the eyes than anyone in that outfit...have you ever seen Jeff Lynne). Oddly enough, she covers a Traveling Wilbury;s tune (Handle With Care) and seems to do the reverse...she screws it up royally.

Big Guns too is musically a joy, but the lyrics are (as so often happens with too much worldly angst and suburban irony) a little leaden. You Are What You Love is terribly catchy. A kind of twisted shuffle, It fails really badly with Rise Up With Fists, It Wasn't Me and Happy, which either suffer from morose arrangements, or just kind of sluggish, phoned in performances.

The Watson Twins are a surprise joy, with their harmony vocals working sublimely.

Petracovich - We Are Wyoming

I have heard this referred to as "bedroom folktronica" and I suppose this is as useful a descriptive (and catchy for marketing purposes) term for what is laid out on 2005's We Are Wyoming. I am not sure if this is what the sound of Wyomingians are, but if it is, Wyoming sounds pretty chill and pleasant.*

Based on her RupertMurdochpage, they/she is Santa Rosa based, and seems to gig round the Pac Norwest, when she/they are not busy making folktronica in their bedroom.

The sound is quiet and has much of the lo-fi but clean elements in post-rock but otherwise played very much in the coffeehouse folkiness range. It uses the typical minimalist beat constructions with acoustic bits interlaced over it (piano, guitars, and a string or brass bit here and there; in this case cello and trumpet) and a few less typical things (wurlitzer, kalimba, harmonica). It is an easy sound to ignore in the sense that it can easily fade into the background, but it is also eay to enjoy if you are actually paying attention. Jessica Peters has a softness to her voice that does not come off as pretentiously airy, but naturally tends to float over the spacious but delicate layers underpinning her sound. The use of harmonized vocals in spots fills the proceedings up nicely, and some of this leans towards realms frequented by folks like post-'Til Tuesday Aimee Mann, debut period Imogen Heap, and Leslie Feist (particularly her solo material, not her work with Broken Social Scene).

This will grow on you I suspect.

There is a little DIY promo video for Petracovich right over here. Downloadable to boot.

* I have been to Wyoming. It's too bloody cold, but the people are nice.

TF's Buyers Guide Recommendations

...is not this.

While I like the idea of a standalone unit that does a closed-loop conversion of tapes and vinyl to cd, the design of the TEAC GF-350. While not connecting to a computer is a minor irritant (what if I want to fit several albums onto one disc?) the idea that I need special watermarked cd's that cost more and are difficult to find, and a price tag I find less than commensurate with what is offered (400 USD), and the showstopper is that it builds DRM into the cd's it creates.

That is flat out garbage, as after the Sony debacle and the general idiocy that such useless tripe can wreak on a machine (although I only know second hand, as I play my cd's mostly in a cd-stereo or on a linux box, as that is where my jukebox for the house is), I am not inclined to give that much control to an exogenous party for my money.

To add injury to insult, the sound quality transfer is apparently less than stellar.

No thanks.

KGC is a drug against bore(dom).

Given that the lineup includes 2 key members of KMFDM and the indestructible Dean Garcia of Curve, I have high hopes for KGC.

Richard Butler returns, and other similar stuff.

So I am back a little early and ready to return to rambling incessantly about music I like (and occasionally about music I don't).

Over the past months I had been hearing about the return of Richard Butler, most famous for his stint as the semi-androgynous, semi-arty and fully raspy-voiced frontman for the Psychedelic Furs, a band I generally liked throughout the 80s when I associated them with various Hughes movies with Molly Ringwald.

I had known that he fronted a second outfit in the 1990s, Love Spit Love, but had never really taken notice of them. However, recently I found both LVL's sophomore album and a promo copy of Butler's new solo debut in a bargain bin at Rasputin's in Fremont. So I picked them up on a nostalgic lark, as I had also been listening lately to the Furs again; you never can get enough Pretty In Pink or The Ghost in You.

So the short and the long of it is that LVL (at least the Trysome Eatone album) was a kind of update of the Furs sound, with a guitar attack closer to the very early post-punk that Butler and the Furs emerged from with some very polished production. I think this album would actually do better today then upon its initial release in 1997, as this is exactly the sound bands like The Bravery and Interpol are mining, with less grit and less mileage. This is especially apparent on songs like the crunchy Little Fist and the dark stomp of Sweet Thing. There is some really artsy dynamism and almost full metal heft to parts of More Than Money, and the catchy Believe. There are some dead spots, but all around this was a steal at the price, and any adolescent goober that drools over the latest Killers single needs to re-evaluate what the real deal is.

Now Richard Butler had been out of the spotlight for a decade and seems to have admitted in interviews to have gotten into painting and going through a divorce, the death of one of his parents, and otherwise building a series of human experiences to power this rather low-key debut solo album. The opener, Good Days Bad Days seems to be an introduction of sorts to the period that led to the making of this album. It is a delicate bit of arty pop arrangement (including rolling strings and a sustain-heavy guitar section). His voice still has the raspiness, but is tempered by a growing melodicism. This album is in some ways very much a throwback to his Furs days, at least in terms of the darker tones, but it is much more intimate and personal. There is an almost off-kilter Bowie-esque feel to Satellites, and a rather sweet beauty to Maybe Someday.

Much of the instrumentation reflects the background of collaborator Jon Carin, who has done work with the Furs as a session keyboardist, but has also had stints with Pink Floyd (Roger Waters-less) , the Dream Academy, Bryan Ferry, Live and Roger Waters (Pink Floyd-less). This means there are folk, art-rock, and electronic flourishes, which suits the melancholic core of this album very well.

If you want introspective and moody without the lightweight somber emo tendencies, then go for Mr. Butler's eponymous solo album, if you want some more kick go for Love Spit Love...or pick up one of the bazillion Psychedelic Fur's comps and get a little of both along with some mid 80s synth pop and new wave fun thrown in.

Less of More-issy.

I have never been able to stomach the obnoxious cro-emo whining of Morrisey. Even worse in most cases is his snivelling tunes, which instill the kind of social torpor as only a man who personifies drab pretentiousness.

In his latest bid to replace Elton John as the most pointless effette blowhard in the UK with a modicum of celebrity for past achievments that were never all that thrilling to start with -- he threatens people who engage in animal experiments. Ohhhhhhh, he and his fringe buddies will "get them". The big twit makes a threat.

What are you going to do. Sob and whinge them into submission? Headbutt them with your depressed Elvis anvil hair? Oh, I know, you'll sing to them. That is enough to make anyone comatose. Just ask your girlfriend.

Dolt.

video: Mondo Grosso - Life (live)