A Man Lost In Time: Bowie Returns With New Single, Album

By Cait Brennan

It came like a bolt of lightning in the dead of night: news of a new David Bowie album, his first in a decade, announced with no advance notice in the wee hours of his 66th birthday. The Next Day, Bowie’s 30th studio album, produced by Tony Visconti (!), will be released March 8 in Australia, March 11 in most of the rest of the world and March 12th in the US, with a new single, “Where Are We Now?” available on iTunes now.

Watch the full video on Vimeo.

After health issues sidelined Bowie in 2004, fans have been hoping against hope that the singular rock and roll icon would one day return to music, but there was scant evidence it would ever happen. His suitably theatrical return sent social media into a frenzy, putting him atop Twitter’s trending topics within minutes. Radio stations around the world scrambled to play the track first, with BBC 6Music earning honors as the World Premiere play, edging BBC Radio 2 by a few short minutes.

“Where Are We Now?” is a meditative ballad of “a man lost in time, walking the dead,” recalling in both lyrical geography and atmosphere his Berlin trilogy, coupled with a sound reminiscent of his most recent albums Reality and Heathen. The track is accompanied by a hearteningly weird video filled with expressionist imagery and the Thin White Duke himself transformed into a tiny malformed creature with two heads, one of which is a girl.

Henceforth, Christmas is officially moved to January 8.

The album is available for pre-order via iTunes in both standard and deluxe editions (the latter featuring three bonus tracks). Visit davidbowie.com/the-next-day for the latest.

Free Single: The Explorers Club, “No Good To Cry”

By Cait Brennan

Charleston, South Carolina’s classic pop new traditionalists The Explorers Club are young men with old souls who have graced us with some of the finest pop music of the last ten years. Their output includes two critically lauded albums and a series of fun EPs featuring their fine originals alongside well-chosen covers of golden-age pop gems by Burt Bacharach, Vanity Fare, and Dennis Yost’s Classics IV.

The band is back with a one-off single, “No Good To Cry,” a dynamite tune guaranteed to blast the transistors out of your AM radio, and if there’s any justice, one that should garner the group some well-deserved attention.

“No Good To Cry” was a regional smash from the summer of ’67 by The Wildweeds. The band was fronted by 19-year old guitarist Al Anderson, and while The Wildweeds never quite broke through on a national level, Big Al went on to front the hugely influential NRBQ before going on to yet more success as a Nashville songwriter. “No Good To Cry” was just the third song he ever wrote, and it’s a gem that by all rights should have been a national hit instead of merely a huge regional number one record.

The Explorers Club version captures the raw energy and irresistible hook of the original scorcher and adds Matt Goldman’s lush, sophisticated production and the peerless musicianship that has been a trademark of the band’s fine albums Freedom Wind and Grand Hotel. Paul Runyon contributes a 50,000 watt soul vocal that transforms “No Good To Cry” from a mere cover into one of this very accomplished band’s finest moments yet. The song is free via the Explorers Club Noisetrade site, but “tips” are welcome and will help support the band as it works on its third long-player. Don’t miss this one.

Music Review: Bert Jansch, Heartbreak

By Cait Brennan

Trying to name the greatest guitarist of all time is a fool’s errand. One, because it would be impossible to choose a single player from a slate of candidates as diverse as Django Reinhardt, Andres Segovia, Jimmy Page, Lindsey Buckingham, Prince, Richard Thompson, Mick Ronson, George Harrison, Ron Asheton, Don Rich, Brian May, Frank Zappa, etc, ad infinitum. And two, because the answer is Bert Jansch.

Fine, reasonable souls may disagree, but from his stunning masterpiece of a debut in 1965, Jansch blazed a staggeringly original trail through an eclectic mix of folk, jazz, blues, rock, and even African, medieval, renaissance, and baroque music. Whether solo or with his band Pentangle, his highly distinctive playing and his warm, earthy vocals made him a major influence on everybody from Jimmy Page, Neil Young, Nick Drake, Donovan and Mike Oldfield to Paul Simon, Johnny Marr, Graham Coxon, Bernard Butler, and so many more. Bert died in 2011, doing what he did best till the very end.

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Music Review: The Edie Adams Christmas Album

By Cait Brennan

Ernie Kovacs is rightly regarded as television’s first genius. Dynamic, irreverent and uncompromising, Kovacs pushed TV technology to its limits in the service of his anarchic comic brilliance. More than that, Kovacs was larger than life. His personal motto was “Nothing In Moderation,” and he lived up to that billing until the day he died.

Few mere mortals could hope to keep up with his madness. But he met his match the day he met Edie Adams. Smart, sexy, sultry and with a voice like butter, Adams was everything Ernie needed: merry co-conspirator, brilliant comic foil, and a tremendously versatile actress and vocalist that brought elegance and heart to the proceedings. Kovacs’s life, and for that matter his untimely death, cast a big shadow, and Edie’s talents have often been unfairly overlooked.

Thankfully, the lady’s finally getting her due. From the formidable Kovacs/Adams archive and the good folks at Omnivore Recordings comes The Edie Adams Christmas Album, featuring Ernie Kovacs, a warm, charming, and nostalgic record featuring 15 never-before-heard holiday classics. It’s the perfect antidote to contemporary holiday angst and a testament to Adams’s vocal gifts.

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Music Review: David Cassidy, Romance Reissue

By Cait Brennan

Like a lot of artists who were huge in the early ‘70s, David Cassidy didn’t get much respect. The magnetic and charming breakout star of The Partridge Family topped the charts with his TV band and made waves as a solo artist as well. Modern audiences weaned on prefab TV pop stars may find it difficult to understand the extent of Cassidy’s fame at its peak. On one weekend in 1973, Cassidy sold out six consecutive shows at Wembley Stadium (capacity 82,000) and had similar sellout audiences at arenas around the world. Far more complex than the million-dollar teenybopper albatross they hung around his neck, Cassidy tried offroading it with Broadway plays, a TV series, and tons of other media appearances. In the UK and Europe, his later ‘70s albums continued to do well, but in his home country, David Cassidy was a man that was a little too undercover.

It’s a shame, then, that American audiences never got to hear Romance, Cassidy’s 1985 album for Arista Records. His only studio album of that decade, Romance is a bold re-invention that became a Top 20 hit in the UK and launched a couple of memorable hit singles that should’ve been hits at home, too.

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Subscribe To Marshall Crenshaw: New Single Out On November 23

By Cait Brennan

It’s hard to believe that Marshall Crenshaw’s tuneful, songs have been with us for three decades, but amazingly, 2012 marks the 30th anniversary of his acclaimed, self-titled 1982 debut. Three decades, five presidents, and thirteen albums later, he’s still going strong, not only with his own music, but his radio show, a book, film music, and vital compilation work as well. (It’s not an overstatement to say that the Crenshaw-helmed Hillbilly Music . . . Thank God!, a 24-track compilation of rockabilly and country sides by artists from Buck Owens to Rose Maddox to Hank Thompson to the Louvin Brothers, saved my soul and the souls of every living, breathing human being who heard it. It’s not too late for you, brother, get yourself a copy.)

Writing and performing new music is still where his heart’s at, though, and like so many artists in the still-evolving, post-record-industry-Armageddon landscape, Crenshaw turned to Kickstarter to fund a new way of getting his songs to his fans. After blowing past his goal with a cool $33,000, Crenshaw is launching a subscription EP series, enabling him to get new music to his fans in a cool way. Over the next two years, Crenshaw will release six exclusive three-song 10-inch, 45-rpm vinyl EPs, along with a download card for digital versions of the tracks.

The opener, which debuts November 23, features the brand-new Crenshaw tune “I Don’t See You Laughing Now,” combining Crenshaw’s relentless knack for melody with a withering character portrait of somebody who clearly had it coming. “It must be hell to realize you fell for your own lies,” sings Crenshaw, dismantling his subject line by line and rubbing it in with some gorgeous harmonies and the fine playing of Andy York on guitar and the brilliant Graham Maby on bass.

Track two features Crenshaw and alt-country sensations the Bottle Rockets on a live alted-up version of the Crenshaw gem “There She Goes Again,” originally on Crenshaw’s 1982 album.

A weird and wonderful cover of The Move’s post-apocalyptic 1971 classic “No Time” rounds out the set. Recorded with Glen Burtnik (who starred as Paul McCartney in Beatlemania opposite Crenshaw’s John Lennon), “No Time” is worth the price of admission all on its own, with its rich layered harmonies, gorgeous psych-pop production, and fine mastering by engineer Greg Calbi.

“I’ve always put a great deal of care into the albums I’ve made,” Crenshaw said in a press release. “But as a listener, I’ve always been a singles guy and an individual-tracks guy. I’m looking forward to creating a steady output of music in small batches, rather than being stuck in a cave for months and stockpiling a whole bunch of music and dumping it out all at once. Now, when I finish something, I get to put it out, instead of having to wait until I’ve got 12 more.”

“I Don’t See You Laughing Now” is available November 23 from marshallcrenshaw.com. Please note: the website has been down due to issues resulting from Hurricane Sandy, so keep checking back.

Graveyard Smash: John Zacherle, Monster Mash/Scary Tales

By Cait Brennan

Ever since the creeping dawn of that undead-zombification machine known as television, monster movies and horror hosts have been joined at the hip, like a mad scientist and his freakishly deformed sidekick, like Jan and her pan, like Rosie Grier and Ray Milland’s racist head. From Vampira and Ghoulardi to Dr. San Guinary and Morgus the Magnificent, horror hosts were an indelible part of pop culture in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.

But nowhere is there a horror host whose career—and life—has lasted as long as John Zacherle. The rockingest of horror icons, Zach got his start as Roland (pronounced “Roland“) on Philadelphia’s WCAU before pulling up stakes to New York and becoming “Zacherley” (same ghoul, different name). Now 94, the eternal Cool Ghoul is almost certainly the last survivor of the golden age of horror hosts, and he still looks as good . . . he still looks as . . . he still looks like Zacherle, and he’s still out there making convention appearances and delighting generations of horror fans.

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Music Review: Elton Duck

By Cait Brennan

In the modern history of popular music, the “great lost album” is a mythology that looms large. Whether it was the brilliant lost fourth Verve/MGM Velvet Underground record (pieces of which surfaced in the mid ’80s on VU and Another VU), the Beach Boys’ Smile, Prince’s Black Album, Eno’s My Squelchy Life, or even Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, pop music is littered with tantalizing projects that were abandoned, lost, or suppressed by hostile label execs.

But all those artists, at least, got to release something, sometime. Sadly, one of the finest “lost” albums came from a band whose promising career, like their self-titled debut, got stopped in its tracks. Now, an extremely limited pressing of Elton Duck‘s long-thought-lost debut album has finally made its way through the wilderness, and it more than lives up to the legend. If you like power pop you need to own this record, period.

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Coal Porters, Find The One

By Cait Brennan

Sid Griffin is one of the great, unheralded musicians of the last 30 years.

How unheralded? Wikipedia, that self-styled arbiter of “notability,” doesn’t even have a page for him. If it did, it would do well to start by calling him one of the most important founding fathers of alternative country.

In the early ’80s, Griffin’s outfit the Long Ryders was a good decade ahead of the alt-country movement. Combining Gram Parsons-style Cosmic American Music with hard-edged, punk-influenced rock, Griffin, with guitarist Stephen McCarthy, drummer Greg Sowders, and a succession of bass players (notably Tom Stevens) brought a much-needed boot-kick in the pants to L.A.’s Paisley Underground scene, and influenced a generation of bands that followed.

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20/20, 20/20 and Look Out! Reissues

By Cait Brennan

Before Pete Townshend even coined the term, power pop has been competing for oxygen—airplay, respect, dollars, a place in history—with bloaty classic rock. Virtually every interminable flatulent hour of every ponderous wanking jam-band guitar solo on every tiresome, self-indulgent, derivative, larcenous, mystic-hokum junkie 1960s blues-rock “gods” album has been catalogued, compiled, reissued, remixed, remastered, etched into 180 gram virgin vinyl, and shoved into soul-deadening collectible box sets like the rigor mortis museum pieces they are. Meanwhile, some of the most vital music of the rock era, made by great power pop, New Wave and American hard-pop bands, sits forgotten in zombie record label vaults, as the iron oxide tape slowly peels away to dust.

Thankfully, there are still some boutique record labels, run by actual music lovers instead of actuaries, willing to raid those vaults and bring forth musical treasure. So it is with Real Gone Music’s lovingly assembled reissue of 20/20’s acclaimed Portrait albums, 20/20 and Look Out!, two records that helped redefine American rock music at the turn of the 1980s. And they sound as vital as ever.

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