Music Review: Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, RiPELY PINE

By Chelsea Spear

Over the past few years, singer/songwriter Aly Spaltro has beguiled New England audiences with her project Lady Lamb the Beekeeper. Her fractious, off-kilter songwriting is well-matched by a voice that seems to explode out of her. After releasing a series of demos, Lady Lamb the Beekeeper is poised to take over the indie world with her first studio album, RiPELY PINE.

While the sparely produced, independent Lady Lamb releases foregrounded Spaltro’s considerable talents, RiPELY PINE finds her experimenting with a more commercial sound. The clean production, with its new-found focus on the slow-burn dynamics of Spaltro’s songwriting, comes off like the aural equivalent of a leather-bound book with gilt-edged pages and four-color illustrations. Her minimal guitar riffs bristle with closely held emotion, as though she were denying herself a catharsis. The driving percussion and echoing violin that drive “Bird Balloons” emphasize the song’s theme of anger borne from love. The waltz-time instrumental break in “Mezzanine” pits a staccato prog-rock guitar solo against a mellifluous clarinet chart that, combined with the lyrics about ghosts and haunted houses, could break your heart. Spaltro’s dense arrangements and frequent use of odd time signatures, combined with Nadim Issa’s straightforward and pleasingly mid-range production, suggests the influence of Throwing Muses. Like Lady Lamb, songwriters Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donnelly negotiated a mid-point between their knotted, intuitive personal mythologies and the rewards of finding a wider audience, and as with Spaltro’s work, their albums had an appealing tension between these poles.

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Miercoles con Víctor Jara: Una Introduccion

By Chelsea Spear

Time stopped when I first heard Víctor Jara sing. One of my favorite podcasts, Alt.Latino, had included Jara’s music in an episode that looked at protest music from across Central and South America. Jasmine Garsd, the podcast’s co-host, had preceded his song with a description of his importance in his native Chile and his brutal murder at the start of the Pinochet regime. As disturbing and poignant as this biography was, nothing prepared me for the beauty of his music.

The needle dropped on “Un Derecho de Vivir en Paz,” Jara’s song in protest of the Vietnam war. Over a bed of harpsichord and arpeggiated guitar, Jara sang in a disarmingly straightforward voice. His tenor had a reedy tone and a substantial quality that anchored the melody. Like many of its North American counterparts, the song had a memorable melody that could invite singalongs. Where many songwriters north of the border tended towards straightforward production however, Jara’s song featured a psychedelic instrumental break in which a ragged guitar freakout alternated with a bobbling analog synth part. The song ended with what sounded like a spontaneous choir of “la la la”s, which reinforced the spirit of community for which Jara’s time was known. As understated as Jara sounded, a current of sadness and hope ran through his voice, and that emotion made me want to listen to it again and again.

After hearing about his grotesque death, I found myself wanting to see Jara as he was alive. Some excerpts from a live concert he performed for Chilean television came up on YouTube. Seeing and hearing this man, with his steady, weathered voice and his everyman appearance, made him more real for me but also made the tragedy of his death that much more palpable. I was drawn to the honesty of his voice and the lyrics I could understand, but the experimentation in his music beguiled me as well.

In time, I was able to get a boxed set of Jara’s albums through inter-library loan, as well as a copy of An Unfinished Song, the biography his wife Joan wrote about him. I also have been attempting to read The Shock Doctrine to better understand the Allende administration and how Pinochet came to power. Through my interest in Jara I learned that two bands I quite like have paid tribute to him in song—Joe Strummer name-checked him on Sandinista! and Calexico recorded a song called “Víctor Jara’s Hands.”

In spite of these tributes and the praises of other big-name fans, Jara is not well known in the States. To that end, I will be working through his discography and writing reviews for Popshifter when time permits. Víctor Jara created music that both spoke to the people of its day and is still prescient in this day and age. His work deserves a larger audience and I’d like to do what I can to encourage readers to track down his music.

Music Review: Richard Thompson, Electric

By Chelsea Spear

At this point in Richard Thompson‘s life, his legacy is assured. As one of the members of British folk band Fairport Convention, he played a role in bringing together traditional Celtic music, folk rock, and psychedelia, and his albums with former wife Linda are some of the most melancholic and offhandedly cathartic albums of their time. As a songwriter, Thompson has a mordant wit and a great sense of melancholy. His guitar work brings together several different styles and approaches, but unlike his contemporary Eric Clapton, his real skill is in the notes he doesn’t play. In short, one could forgive him for coasting.

To some extent, Electric picks up where Thompson’s previous album Dream Attic left off (review). While he doesn’t appear to be playing these songs before a live studio audience, this latest album at least sounds as though it was recorded live, with all the members of the band in the same room. While the stripped-down arrangements, with their focus on Thompson’s electric guitar solos, find him in his comfort zone, the lyrical content seems a bit angrier and more immediate than much of his previous work.

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Music Review: Erin McKeown, Manifestra

By Chelsea Spear

In 2012, musician/activist Erin McKeown made headlines for crowdfunding the production of her latest album, Manifestra. Unlike many artists whose crowd-sourced work becomes a three-ring circus, McKeown has strong musical bona fides. For almost two decades, the singer/songwriter has released a compelling body of work and dabbled in jazz, electronica, and folk. The spine of her work has always been her great skill at songwriting, which blends the tunefulness of Tin Pan Alley songwriters with her own irreverent charm, and her confident, minimalist guitar playing.

Manifestra extends the democratizing concerns of crowdfunding to some of her most explicitly political material to date. While I find many protest songs challenging—mostly because of the need to simplify complex issues into a three-minute time range and force them into a difficult format—McKeown escapes this trap by finding the human scale within the societal problems she describes.

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Band Profile: The Grownup Noise

By Chelsea Spear

Over the past few years, the Boston music scene has been host to a reinvention of the folk music scene. Bands like Crooked Still, Golden Bloom, and the Michael J. Epstein Memorial Library have adapted aspects of traditional music to a more rock- and indie-inspired sound. Most recently, The Grownup Noise has blended verbose, catchy singalong verses and choruses to ornately orchestrated pop songs and substantial rock rhythms.

The opening riff for “Strawmen,” the opening song for the band’s 2011 release This Time, With Feeling, sounds like the musical equivalent of a Dagwood sandwich. Rolling, savory percussion wells up amidst tangy cello and a schmear of shimmering keyboard. This combination of aural flavors shouldn’t work as well together as they do. Call it love at first taste.

Throughout the album, canny arrangements contrast the band’s musical lineup in a manner that keeps the listeners in a kind of musical suspense. On a production level, This Time, With Feeling has a clean, mid-range sound that sometimes emphasizes the band’s idiosyncratic, retro qualities, with some fun stereophonic sound effects.

Paul Hansen’s songwriting skills and endearingly imperfect vocals anchor The Grownup Noise’s musical cornucopia. Hansen writes lushly melodic songs and pairs his abbreviated verses with long, detailed lyrical stretches. Listening to him fit all the words into his verses sounds like watching someone try to write a long, detailed message on the back of a beautiful postcard. Hansen sings in a nasally tenor that suggests James Taylor or Van Dyke Parks. The contrast of his breathy, sometimes pinched-sounding vocals against the movable feast of The Grownup Noise’s baroque pop makes for an engaging listen.

Fans of The Grownup Noise’s impeccable records won’t have long to wait for the next one. The quintet recorded a new album this past fall that should be available soon. In the meantime, they will be engaging in a brief East Coast tour this February. Fans of unusual pop music should check them out. You can listen to tracks on the band’s website or Facebook page.

Tour Dates:
February 21: The Middle East (upstairs), Cambridge MA/8:30 p.m.
February 22: The Rock Shop, Brooklyn NY/9 p.m.
February 23: The Basement, Northampton MA/8 p.m.

Best Of 2012: Chelsea Spear

Say you’re a rock critic and the calendar has dwindled to a single page. You’re expected to write a year-in-review column, but your artistic heroes have disappointed you and none of the year’s new releases have galvanized you the way you’d hoped. What do you do? You reach into your back pages to look at some forgotten favorites and things that got away from you the first time around. In writing about these forgotten favorites, maybe you can introduce your readers to something new as well.

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The Vince Guaraldi Trio, A Charlie Brown Christmas

By Chelsea Spear

The tinkling piano lines, rolling brushed drums, and sprightly tempos of Vince Guaraldi’s soundtrack to the classic TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas are a welcome sign of the holiday season. Guaraldi’s keyboard treatments of classic Christmas songs like “Greensleeves,” “O Tannenbaum,” and the classic children’s choral arrangement of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” give these classics a new sound. Some of his originals, such as “Christmas Time is Here,” portray the loneliness and melancholy of the holiday season though a few minor chords and a contemplative melody. Other new songs, like the bright, upbeat “Linus and Lucy,” sound like the rush of energy you sometimes felt as a kid around the holiday.

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New Video: Big Dipper, “Robert Pollard”

By Chelsea Spear

There’s no one way to age gracefully while simultaneously rocking out. Just ask Big Dipper.

The perennially underrated purveyors of jangly pop returned to the limelight with Big Dipper Crashes on the Platinum Planet, an album of richly melodic and wryly funny pop songs. How do they balance their lives as rock stars with maintaining desk jobs, parental duties, and other attendant responsibilities of middle age?

In the video for “Robert Pollard,” Bill, Gary, Jeff, and Tom show you how they find their happy medium.

Music Review: Big Dipper, Crashes On The Platinum Planet

By Chelsea Spear

Of all the bands from the Boston Rock Class of 1990, Big Dipper weren’t the first candidates for the “Most Likely to Succeed” superlative. They wrote songs with undeniably catchy melodies and witty lyrics, and their shows at mid-sized East Coast clubs never failed to attract an audience.

Unfortunately, they had signed to Homestead Records, whose history of poor distribution and corrupt business practices restricted their reach to all but their most diehard fans. Though they jumped ship to Epic at the close of the decade, a series of shakeups at their label left them with little support. By the middle of the ’90s, “Dippah” (as their local fans called them) had joined fellow Beantown heavy-hitters Tribe and O Positive in the great cutout bin in the sky.

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Music Review: Sophie Auster, Red Weather EP

By Chelsea Spear

From the first notes of her debut EP Red Weather, Sophie Auster creates a compelling mise e scene. The angular piano riff and cacophonous arrangement that propel the first song, “Run Run Run,” invest the song with a palpable sense of urgency. Auster sketches out a minimal narrative that deepens this mood, and you feel her voice in the pit of your stomach as surely as you hear it.

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