This is the best/worst time of the year for me. I love year-end lists but I hate compiling them. It is a masochist thing for me: I stress on it, torture myself, then as soon as it is done, I want to change it. I’m never satisfied. For the record, all included here may or not be from 2013. My list contains things I’ve re-discovered throughout the year. It happens. Enough of the bullshit: here it is in no particular order (with exceptions for favorites).
The Meat Puppets are not only icons of the alternative/punk/underground music scenes; they are like fine wines: The band and their music just keep getting better with age. The latest from the Kirkwood Brothers, Rat Farm, is perhaps their finest, the band’s most playful and diverse offering since releasing Up On The Sun in 1985.
Hi, my name’s Danny and I’m a vinyl junkie. Not the vinyl slapped on the front seat of a 1973 Chevy Malibu. No, I’m talking records man, RECORDS! From my earliest memories, I have loved the dark wonder of the LP. I would sit surrounded by my mother’s collection, everything from The Faces to Supertramp, Everly Brothers to The Bellamy Brothers. I recall listening to records for hours on end, ignoring Sesame Street, often wearing a pair of those 1970’s “earmuff” headphones, tightened to the last notch to accommodate my five-year-old head, pressing them tight with my hands so that not a note could escape.
My editor at this fine publication has informed me that I need not stick to 2012 releases for my “Best Of” list. With that in mind, I have made a list of new releases & “classics” that I have gone back to in the last year or so.
As a fan of rock ‘n roll and music in general, many recording studios are deserving of the documentary treatment: Electric Lady (NYC), The Quonset Hut (Nashville) Abbey Road (London), Sun Records (Memphis), Ardent Studios (Memphis), Electric Audio (Chicago), and Motown (Detroit). Now, for those of us that love history and happen to be music nuts, Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana, a thousand other projects) has made his directorial debut with film on a studio that has a storied history of its own: Sound City.
The Los Angeles recording studio has borne witness to some of the greatest albums in the history of music. The roster of talent that has walked through its doors and blew up the soundboard is staggering: Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, Rage Against The Machine, Bad Religion, Evel Kneivel, Nine Inch Nails, Neil Young, Cheap Trick, Carl Perkins, Elvis Costello, Johnny Cash, Joe Cocker, The Breeders, the list could go on for days.
Sound City is Grohl’s love letter to a place that means so much to him and to anyone that has ever dropped the needle in a vinyl groove or obsessed over a CD. Sound City is one film I cannot wait to experience.
Sound City will debut at Sundance 2013 in January, but you can pre-order a copy in advance of the film’s February 1 premiere on HD digital download and stream at the movie’s official website. Sound City will open theatrically via Variance Films on February 1. Like the film’s Facebook page and stay tuned for cities and dates to be posted in the near future.
On paper, 360 looks like a good idea; much as I am sure, The Bay of Pigs Invasion looked like an ideal, foolproof military action. Well, neither one of these endeavors worked out very well.
All the pieces are there for a potentially great film. The writer of Frost/Nixon (Peter Morgan), decent director (Fernando Meirelles) and a cast that boasts great actors like Sir Anthony Hopkins, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, and the too-often-overlooked Ben Foster.
360 is a film that tries to show how seemingly unconnected things are, in fact, related. Everything is related in one way or another despite geography, sex, or belief. It is a gallant effort but falls short. Anthony Hopkins is a driven, possessed father looking for a missing daughter; Jude Law is dying in a marriage-gone-cold with Rachel Weisz playing the part of the distant, closed off wife. There is also a dentist with a romantic side; these are four characters and screenwriter Morgan is just getting started.
In the opening line of Alec Palao’s liner notes for the new three-disc set Ultimate Creedence Clearwater Revival, he makes the following statement: “If any one act could legitimately stake a claim to be America’s Beatles, then that would be Creedence Clearwater Revival.”
It shines like a signal flare in the midnight sky for me when hipsters and “tastemakers” love an artist. I do not know why. Maybe it’s my lifelong need to be difficult, to go against the flow. It’s kind of like my urge to see a movie that Siskel and Ebert panned; it’s going against the grain. Moreover, my feelings for Gary Clark Jr.‘s long awaited debut Blak and Blu are no different.
First I must state: I love the blues. From Skip James to Little Walter, on down to Hendrix, The White Stripes, and The Black Keys, I like that sense of longing, the feeling of loss, of desperation, coupled with a mastery of their instruments that seems, forgive me, supernatural. While Clark Jr. is an exceptional player that is a borderline virtuoso, his debut feels a bit flat to me. Blak and Blu is a record with only slightly more balls than John Mayer at his most ballsy; there are good moments of brilliance and wonder, and I will discuss them next, but for the most part, this debut is a typical major label debut cloaked in pseudo-Hendrix flamethrower work.
Country music—as a genre—has been a crapshoot for the last decade or so. For every Wayne Hancock or Justin Townes Earle that wade into the deep end of true country song craft, there’s a Kenny Chesney, Carrie Underwood, or Sugarland that claim the country mantle but are merely pop acts with lap steel.
That’s why I find a group like Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs to be such a kick in the pants; they embrace instrumentation as if they were recording with the Carter Family, and give bear hugs to tradition. Holly, an Englishwoman by birth, delivers more twang than Loretta Lynn. Two songs in, you’d swear she just walked down from The Blue Ridge Mountains with her flour sack dress on, well-worn Bible tightly in her hand. It is a respite from the everyday, manufactured “country” backwash.
Sunday Run Me Over is the perfect companion to last year’s fantastic (and my #2 album of the year behind Foo Fighters’ Wasting Light) No Help Coming (reviewed here).
I feel as though I should begin this review with a disclaimer: I believe Bob Mould to be a true master of his craft. From his days with the groundbreaking group Husker Du to his time piloting the power pop band Sugar, Mould has made few musical missteps (I choose to forget the mess that was his electronic music phase). His latest album, Silver Age, is an ode to the genre he helped create, a flawless mix of Husker Du noise/aggression and Sugar’s bouncy goodness.
Some of the music literati have said that Silver Age is the return of Mould to the world of musical relevance. I say it is just an excellent album that proves that he’s never gone away or gotten rusty with age. Listen to several bands over the years, most notably Foo Fighters, and you will hear Bob’s omnipresence. For the past thirty years he has blended aggression with melody, volume with deep thought and beautiful songwriting. Silver Age is certainly no exception.
