October Music Roundup

-->

Here's a potpourri of stuff that came through my physical and virtual mailboxes. I call them "Hits" and "Misses."

HITS

Boston-born Tracy Bonham has been around since the mid-90s–long enough to garner a few Grammy and MTV nominations and secure a middling hit with her 1996 single "Mother Mother." She's sometimes called a "post-grunge rocker," probably because she's wowed audiences with a stripped down cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Fire." I certainly would not apply that description for her new CD Wax & Gold. Most of its tunes fall into a cross-genre seam contains pop sensibilities, the vocal stylings of alt.country, and the melodic structure of folk. Speaking of the latter, listen to "Love, Love, Love," which has the feel of a mid-60s folk song. Then listen to Donovan's "Catch the Wind" and you'll find the melody of Bonham's verses echo it. I have no idea if that was intentional and the rest of the song is quite different, but my point is that there's decidedly a folk vibe at play were. And a country vibe as well. There's quite a bit of twang in her voice and when she climbs into the upper ranges—which she does to great effect on "Black Tears"–in which she warbles on the edge of a yodel. There's also plenty of country giddyup to the title track and Kevin Salem's jangly guitar. One of the more intriguing songs is "Luck," another one of those in-the-seam songs. It's a lullaby filtered through darkness courtesy of some grungy bass from Mike DuClos, some down-and-dirty swing from Salem's electric guitar, and Bonham's own hints-of-danger vocals. Those who've heard previous Bonham releases will find Wax & Gold stripped down by comparison. It suits.

Sam Gleaves is both talented and a man with courage of heart and convictions. America has changed a lot in the past few decades, but it's fair to say that there are still a lot of places where being gay is harder than others. Gleaves' Ain't We Brothers takes the LGBTQ agenda into the heart of the Southern Appalachians. His music is rooted in old-time and bluegrass music, so here's hoping that singing the region's language produces the tolerance for which he pleas. When he sings a song such as "My Dixie Darling," he's not singing about a calico-clad lass waiting on the front porch. I'll admit that it's jarring to hear him sing an unbridled love song to another man—not because I disapprove, but because I'm used to hearing country and bluegrass singers croon nostrums about "traditional values," whatever the hell they are. Gleaves also wears his blue-collar roots on his sleeve. "Working Shoes" is a backwoods paean to a poor miner, his grandfather, with all of life's hardships worn into the leathery cracks.  And what if that miner is gay, a question he raises on the title track: First things first, I'm a blue collar man/Scrapes on my knuckles and dust on my hands/Probably wouldn't have known/ I've got a man waiting on me at home. Later on he sings, I was born here just the same as you/ Another time, another day/I'm sure the good Lord took his time/ Making each of us just this way/I walked beside you step by step/ And it never crossed my mind/That I would grow up one of the different kind. Then the plea: "But ain't we brothers?"  Most of the songs on the album are, in some form or other, about different kinds of love: same-sex love, love of the South, love of humanity…. Can Sam Gleaves melt the hearts of self-styled good ole' boys? Why not? This dude has serious talent: a nice mountain voice and wizardry on banjo, flattop guitar, fiddle, autoharp, and dulcimer. Who cares if the calico lass is a jeans-clad working man?

The Texas-based country rock band Green River Ordinance has been kicking around long enough to have a few hit singles such as "Come On" (2009) and "On Your Own" (2010). Its most recent album, Chasing Down the Wind, is a good reason to check them out if you're not familiar. Josh Jenkins is a classic country rock vocalist–he has the chops of an arena rock singer, but leavened with Fort Worth twang and the ability to be smooth and gentle when needs arise. "She's In the Air" is simply a really great love song and finds the right seam between power, passion, and yearning. It's also different than the band's usual (and winning) formula of beginning songs quietly then using Geoff Ice's bass and Denton Hunter's drum to produce a thumping pulse to segue into more robust arrangements. You'll probably also appreciate how GRO eschew enigma. "It Ain't Love" is immediately decoded with the line "If it can't break your heart;" just as "Ain't Afraid of Dying" explains why: "Because I've truly lived." There's much to be said for hooks that work and theirs do.

MISSES

I loved November, the 2013 release by Grace & Tony, but am not a fan of their latest, Phantasmagoric. Tony White is an admitted refugee of the punk rock scene, so I expect his projects to wander into some dark places. Phantasmagoric, however, is relentlessly macabre and lacks the sunny interludes of November. It is also odd–and not in a good way. Tony & Grace indulge their love of creepy masters such as H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, and Stephen King, but they do so on an album that's a Southern Gothic version of rock opera meets Sweeney Todd. In fact, "Sweeney Todd" directly inspired the song "Invitation to an Autopsy". While I'd much rather hear Grace sing than Helena Bonham Carter, the material echoes too closely the histrionic style of stage productions. Most of the rest of the album mines from spooky pits as well: "Lullaby of Red Death" parallels the Ebola crisis, "Adam of Labour" takes the point of view of Frankenstein's monster, and both "The Marsh Prologue" and "A Lot Dies Today" draw upon Stephen King. You know you're in for a bumpy ride when an instrumental titled "A Fever on the Cthula Queen" is among the more upbeat selections—its mix of genteel and macabre is as ambiguous as Lovecraft's imagined terrors. Monsters, murderers, plagues, and suicides don't make for fuzzy feelings. I've no problem with grim material, but the project feels like music written for a stage show for which actors, costumes, scenery, and script have yet to be chosen. One must also wonder about the choice of making what is, in essence, a concept album in the age of single-song downloads.

When I was a teen, I was involved with a Christian youth group. We sang religious songs, but we also had a songbook filled with current and recent pop, folk, and rock tunes deemed angelic enough for our ears. It may have been the last time in which I heard religious music that was remotely contemporary. I will give some credit to Strahan; his Feel the Night is only a few decades out of date. The New Zealand-based Strahan calls himself a "modern psalmist" and his songs "folk theology," but neither is entirely accurate. His music is heavy on Meatloaf/Michael Bolton-like power ballads. That would make them "pop/rock theology" in my book. And it's straight out of the 1980s.

Rob Weir

Jenna Moynihan's Woven a Subtle Piece of Fine Cloth

-->

JENNA MOYNIHAN

Woven

www.jennamoynihan.com

I once asked Kevin Burke what kind of fiddlers impressed him. He replied that just about anyone with a moderate amount of talent can play fast; he pays attention when they can play slowly. Burke would probably love Jenna Moynihan's aptly named debut solo album Woven. Think the warp and weft threads of emerging patterns, not the clackety-clack of a loom. Moynihan is the latest Celtic music-inspired wunderkind from Boston's Berklee College of Music and like other recent grads, she's a treasure. She is capable of blistering the paint from the walls, as she demonstrates on breakneck pieces such as "Dolina MacKay," but for the most part she plays with a lighter touch and unhurried pace. On the impressive opening track "Haven," she uses one- and two-note repeats on her fiddle (and Della Mae's Courtney Hartman's guitar) to echo like a penny whistle whilst spinning finer threads around them. Like many of the Scottish fiddlers who inspire her, Moynihan likes to transpose pipe tunes for strings, but again she emphasizes subtle and introspective aspects. Among the artists she admires is Scotland's Blazin' Fiddles, a lineup known for its high-octane playing. Leave it to Moynihan to find something from its softer side, a lovely tune titled "The Eagle's Whistle." Lovelier still are pieces that also feature her sometime touring partner, Skye clarsach player Mairi Chaimbeul. Of particular note is Chaimbeul's own "Kendall Tavern," which invokes Catriona MacKay in the way it manages to be simultaneously edgy and frangible. It opens with Chaimbeul's harp taking center stage while Moynihan's fiddle adds resonant bottom, then midway through the roles reverse. The tune gathers speed, but it's more the pace of a spirited trot than a sweaty gallop, and then it decelerates to a slow fade.

Throughout this tight ten-track release Ms. Moynihan impresses with her flexibility and deep understanding of what each tune commands. There is, for instance, a superb collaboration with Darol Anger: "The Chill on the Montebello."  It is exactly the sort of freeform jam you'd expect from Anger–explorative and improvisational, yet controlled. "O'Sullivan's March" is an equally thoughtful arrangement. Moynihan's dreamy touch on this one feels more like a brook side pause for reflection than a measured slog down the road. She does take us out on a double-time note with the ironically named "Rise Ye Lazy Fellow" set. Call it the flash of eye-catching red that brings everything together on a muted musical tapestry.

Rob Weir

Charlie Parr: Badass Blues for Honest People

-->

CHARLIE PARR

Stumpjumper

Red House Records RHR-282

* * * *

Is there such a thing as composite reincarnation? Charlie Parr is what you get if Dave Van Ronk, Mississippi John Hurt, and the Rev. Gary Davis came back as one person. Parr's latest, Stumpjumpin' is timeless, badass, and hot. You know you're in for a trip down the bumpy alleys of life on a song like "Evil Companion" and lyrics such as: "You don't love me/It's nobody's fault but mine/You want me to go 100 mph/But my car only goes 99." And if you think that's love without a future, check out "On Marrying a Woman with an Uncontrollable Temper" with its backwoodsy feel leavened with attitude and lyrics worthy of John Prine at his puckish best.

Parr's blues are protean in the way that blue-collar life has to be adaptable. And, make no mistake–his take on life is fashioned by the school of hard knocks as experienced by rural free spirits and workaday stiffs. Check out the title track, a dynamo of energy, bad times, attitude, blistering resonator slides, and lyrics like these:  "We are stumpjumpers/We are cross-tie walkers/We are grown up kids of the working class/And I work when I can/And I ain't got no money/And I may look rough/But I'm an honest man." It's a song filled with such authenticity that you almost feel uplifted by its end. Or, at least, your heart's racing a few beats faster. Parr can really trump his resonator in the service of Delta blues. One hears Mississippi John Hurt influences all over "Falcon," which is filled with nibble acoustic runs, cool filling electric tones from Phil Cook, and lyrics that equate its antihero with his namesake sharp-clawed raptor. Parr also plays a wicked fretless banjo that brings his blues to the place where the Delta meets Appalachia. And what better way to end such an album than with a take on the classic murder ballad "Delia." (Parr's version is informed more by Bob Dylan's take than by Johnny Cash's more famous rendition.) This is, simply, a wonderful record, though it needs a slight name change; call it Stumpjumpin' and Footstompin.'

Rob Weir 

Charley Parr will appear at the Parlor Room in Northampton, MA on November 6. Check his Website f or other shows. You can also sample his music on that site or on the Red HouseRecords site, where you can also order his music.

The Electric Michelangelo: Find this Older Book!

-->

THE ELECTRIC MICHELANGELO (2008)

Sarah Hall

Harper, 368 pp.

* * * *

Yes, this is an older book–one that that would have escaped my attention had I not gone to the wonderful Hartford Wadsworth Museum show  on Coney Island last winter, where it showed up on a list of memorable books about Coney Island. As it so happened, I had already been reading Alice Hoffman's wonderful The Museum of ExtraordinaryThings, and through the years have wended my way through fine works such as Dreamland (Kevin Baker), Requiem for a Dream (Hubert Selby, Jr.), and John Kasson's Amusing the Million, a non-fiction work I routinely assign to my classes. I also reckon just about everyone my age has read Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poetic collection A Coney Island of the Mind, or laughed at Alvy Singer growing up under the Thunderbolt in Annie Hall. Oddly, though, I had never heard of Sarah Hall, though The Electric Michelangelo was nominated for a Man Booker Prize back in 2004. The fact that it didn't make it to the U.S. until four years later might be why.

If you too missed out on Hall's book, let me encourage you to seek it through your local library, bookshop, used bookstore, or Web search. (I bought my copy from Half.com for 75 cents.) Though parts of it are on the gruesome side, it's an eccentric pleaser. Hall gives us Cyril Parks, who grows up in the English seaside destination of Morecambe on the eve of World War One. Although parts of Morecambe are fashionable, that isn't the case for Cy, whose mother runs a hotel for consumptives. Among Cy's boyhood duties is to empty the vile fluids deposited by guests in their bedpans and spittoons. Small wonder that Cy finds himself attracted to a misanthropic "scraper," Eliot Riley, who agrees to take on Cy as his apprentice. Riley has loads of dark secrets, but he schools Cy in the art of tattooing and teaches him quite a lot about the fine arts in the process.

Move the clock forward. After losing both his mentor and his mother, Cy shows up in Coney Island, where he establishes himself at The Electric Michelangelo—often to the envy and occasional ire of competitors. No one seems to know much about this upstart, but it's clear that he's an artist, not just a mere scraper. Cy stays to himself mostly–until he encounters Grace, a daredevil bareback rider. She's among the scores of sideshow performers, freaks, and hustlers that populated Coney Island between the two world wars, but she is like Cy in that she harbors secrets and unexorcised demons from her past. Cy falls in love with her before he even knows her. How will he honor her macabre request: to be tattooed over her entire body with a repeating motif of a black-framed green eye? Will her skin be Cy's greatest canvass, or will his needles puncture his final chance for hope and happiness?

An odd book? Yes indeed. It's also a heartbreaking one. The skin we inhabit is the body's largest organ, so what better setting to explore themes of art and desire, or flesh and pain? Is tattooing an art, a science, or a trade? One might naturally think it's all three, but don't be so sure. Another question Hall probes is whether we revel in the things that disgust. She does not turn her back on cruelty, nor does she glamorize pain. Many of Hall's descriptions are vivid and lurid, but they are never gratuitous or sensationalized. If I might, she pricks holes into quite a few assumptions, especially notions of why we choose to endure unpleasant things. She even dares suggest that self-chosen pain has less to do with compulsion or fashion, and quite a lot to do with psychological compensation.  Hipsters beware!

Rob Weir

Blue-Collar Labor: Stop, Hey, What's That Sound?

-->

It stopped me in my tracks. What was that sound? Then it dawned: it was the sound of my youth. No, it wasn't some crystal-induced metaphysical past-life regression. I heard was the sound of work: of the blue-collar variety.

Remember this?

It happened on a day when I needed to be in my faculty office early, so I drove to work instead of taking the Five College bus. My parking spot is literally ¾ of a mile from my office, a journey I was happy to undertake on an unseasonably warm October morn. Bird songs greeted me as I left my car, but their chirps quickly gave way to the rat-a-tat-tat of rivet guns, the clang of hammers upon cold steel, the chug-chug of 'mud' (cement) being mixed, and the shrill commands, warnings, and "all clears" from construction workers shouting above the cacophony.

While it's not unusual to hear construction sounds on a college campus, I was taken aback by the realization that's about the only place I hear this sort of racket these days. Oh sure—earth gets moved, land gets scaped, buildings rise, and roads get patched (though the latter not so much any more), but the scale of what I witnessed is as rare in modern America as a kind Christian. The average road crew simply can't raise a big ruckus with a workforce that generally consists of a supervisor, an engineer, two traffic signalers, a cop asleep in a cruiser, and a handful of workers leaning on shovels waiting for the one person who operates all the heavy machinery to complete the job of the moment. On campus I saw a veritable army of workers: dozens upon dozens, sleeves rolled up, and attention turned to a common task.  Seriously—when was the last time you saw a hundred people working on a public project?

You'll get no romantic discursion into the nobility of toil from me. I'm not nostalgic for the days I worked on the factory floor, or the sticky summer days I baled hay on my grandfather's farm. The crews on campus were involved in hard, dirty labor—the kind that involves brawn, sinew, and muscle, not thinking, musing, and clicks upon a keyboard. But let's face it; the American economy needs more than retail workers, programmers, and professors.

What I miss are the days when things got built in America—the days before tax cutters, bean counters, and naysayers ran the Ship of State aground on the shoals of negativity. I yearn for the time when if something was broken, a crew went out and fixed it. The days when Americans said, "Can do," not, "It's too expensive," or, "It's an intractable problem."

If you're under 50, you probably don't recall when the United States bragged about its achievements and its productivity was the envy of the globe. You probably don't remember when we built new bridges instead of patching decaying ones with recycled steel and prayers. You didn't go to a school where the textbooks were replaced every two or three years and any town without a new school or one on the drawing board held its collective head in shame. You surely don't remember seeing "Made in the USA" stamped upon 90% of all that you owned, or hearing folks proudly call themselves members of the working class and labor unions. Those folks would have laughed at minimum wage Wal-Mart workers foolish enough to imagine themselves "middle class," or stupid enough to castigate unions.  

The rich would have you believe that blue-collar workers and labor unions bankrupted America. Nonsense! Bankers, grifters, and greedy investors stole America and fed the sheeple a rope of bologna they chewed and swallowed. The Devil's greatest trick was to get workers to blame themselves for paucity, poverty, and parsimony and to look upon robber barons as saviors. How's that working out?

I stopped in my tracks that fine October day because I heard the sound of prosperity and had forgotten its song. T'is a brash, strident, clamorous, clattering song, but it was sweeter than the warble of birds. As the songs of hope always are.

Rob Weir