Music: New Releases, October 2011 Volume 3

My Brightest Diamond

All Things Will Unwind

Hot on the heels of the new Bjork album, here’s another collection of anti-rock artsong from a woman whose striking vocal abilities help carry the music over the occasional melodic or thematic rough patch. Reuniting with the classical ensemble yMusic (who have also worked with Bon Iver and Antony and the Johnsons), Shara Worden shapes stunning sonic landscapes from her perspective as a new mother: she’s sodden with love for her new son, and wary, to the point of anger, of the world she’s brought him into.

Opener “We Added It Up” (“Confusion makes the world go round“) sets the tone, with her playful vocals bouncing along to Sondheim-like woodwinds counterpointing jazzy guitar chording. Worden continues to find new things to do with her classically-trained voice; there’s little belting here, with flights on beyond falsetto taken in muted tones. “Reaching Through To The Other Side” opens with ominous, echoing drumbeats as winds and strings seem to debate behind Worden’s recollection of the revelation of her son’s birth: “Oh, how gorgeous / Oh, how gorgeous,” while acknowledging that both mother and son had to struggle to achieve it. “In the Beginning” is a creation story set against gentle pizzicato strings and warbling trumpet: “There was no time / All of life suspended / And when you spoke / One heart jumped into action.” Central to the album, though, are several tracks that feel like Worden’s nod to the protest politics of Woody Guthrie, opened to new melodic possibilities and brought up to date, including “High Low Middle,” the closest thing to a conventional rock arrangement on the album (“When you’re privileged / You don’t even know you’re privileged / When you’re not / You know“), and the chirpy polemic-masquerading-as-children’s-song, “There’s A Rat” (“Bankers, lawyers, thieves / Governors, mayors, police / I ain’t gonna let you keep on takin’ and takin’“). Her son’s new world, she tells us, is in desperate need of remaking.

… stunning sonic landscapes from a new mother: she’s sodden with love for her new son, and wary, to the point of anger, of the world she’s brought him into.

In the end, we get a beginning: on “I Have Never Loved Someone,” Worden’s pump organ pedals simulate a noisy cradle while delivering her most heartbreakingly lovely vocal of the album. Though it opens like a traditional lullaby ( “I have never loved someone the way I love you / I have never seen a smile like yours / And if you grow up to be king or clown or pauper / I will say you are my favorite one in town“), it takes a sober turn, acknowledging reality: “And when I grow to be a poppy in the graveyard / I will send you all my love upon the breeze,” before gliding to its glorious close: “And if the breeze won’t blow your way / And if the rain won’t wash away / All your aches and pains / I will find some other way / To tell you, you’re OK,” fading away on a chorus of murmured “You’re OK”‘s. Worden doesn’t dodge sentimentality here, she embraces it, which is an appropriately conventional way to end an entirely unconventional pop album.

Jane’s Addiction

The Great Escape Artist

The fact that Lollapalooza developed out of JA’s first “farewell” tour places these guys in important historical perspective: its success (and that of Pearl Jam’s original “Fuck You!” to Ticketron at Coachella two years later) might have done more to shape the modern music scene than any other single event. For decades, the conventional wisdom was that you toured to promote record sales; in the wake of the Wall Street crash of the late 80?s, and the emergence of digital downloads, Lollapalooza helped demonstrate a way to start turning that equation on its head, and multi-artist, multi-day music festivals continue to proliferate. Which is sort of a long way of saying that the fact that Farrell and company still seem to be running a twenty-year-old playbook may not be exactly pioneering, but they do have some laurels worth resting on.

Not a bad album, really, just one that feels a couple of decades late.

And I doubt that’s what they originally set out to do. They recruited TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek to sit in on bass (along with Chris Chaney), and coaxed some songwriting out of him. A lot of the press leading up to the album’s release talked about “new directions” – but, then, that’s what everyone always says, isn’t it? “Underground” opens the proceedings with appropriately large, imposing sound, with Navarro snaking guitar lines in and around the echoplexed choruses… which, one has to admit, would betray some uncomfortably musty hair-metal overtones without the FX. A nice monster riff slams “End of the Lies” home, but lines like “You never really change like they say / You only become more like yourself” feel like rather mild medicine for the amount of energy being expended on their delivery. Throughout the album, as promised, there’s more keys and synth from Navarro than guitar, and I like the occasional change-up like the funky kick-drum propelling “Curiosity Kills” and the mysterioso intro of “Twisted Tales.” You certainly can’t fault the production itself: it’s always huge and booming, helping to swallow the recycled riffing and harmonies and spit them back out into a massive sonic attack. But the aural imagination seems to falter a bit as we round the home stretch, with the thudding “Ultimate Reason,” the strained metaphor of “Splash a Little Water On It” (“You’ve got to treat her like a flower / Women need time to recover“), and the cluttered arrangement that weighs down “Broken People.” Things seem to have reached the point of insufferability with the spoken intro to “Words Right Out Of My Mouth,” but the song recovers once the band kicks in, sending the album out on a peak of energy, if not craft. Not a bad album, really, just one that feels a couple of decades late.

Original 7

Condensate

There was an awful lot of cute-to-interesting-to-good music on the Purple Periphery back in those heady Paisley Park days, and in the space of just four albums, Morris Day and The Time managed to run that entire gamut. On the evidence here, they haven’t re-formed under their new name just to push 80’s nostalgia at us, which is all to the good… but what they are pushing is somewhat less tasty than, say, an Ice Cream Castle.

 … there’s an excess of polish, a sheen that has you straining to figure out where the hell the bassline went.

Granted, the cartoon voices and general air of wackiness that are mostly missing here used to get a little tiresome back in the day, but they were at least a signifier that set The Time apart from the dozens of Prince imitators that lacked their specific access to the little guy. Too often on the sixteen tracks here (more than twice as many as most of their previous albums had), the onetime bad boys feel as though someone asked them to start acting like grownups, which they seem to think means “conventional.” The title track, about how Morris is still too slick to sweat, is introduced by a “Press Conference” where a young female reporter asks him if he’s no longer “cool.” It’s not particularly funny, but it’s a promising conceptual direction that quickly gets dropped in favor of perfectly passable smoove-groove numbers like “If I Was Yo Man” and “Lifestyle” that are going to slip right past the tween radio audience, though it wouldn’t be hard to imagine an evening of them on American Idol. Songs like “Sick” and “Role Play” make a reach for the old funk, but there’s an excess of polish, a sheen that has you straining to figure out where the hell the bassline went. I have no idea if these guys are planning to tour, but I’d lay money that stuff like “One Step” and “Cadillac” will play a lot rougher and looser out of the studio confines. Too often, Day and company bear down on something like “Hey Yo,” that, for all the sweat (excuse me, “condensation”) the band puts into it, play a bit like your thinks-he’s-hip-at-the-wedding-reception uncle. The high points, like “Toast To The Party Girl” and “Strawberry Lake,” are strong, listenable toe-tappers, but like too much of the album, they’re rather lacking in personality, which is something these guys used to have coming out their ears.

Chris Isaak

Beyond The Sun

It’s a shame that The Chris Isaak Show will likely never turn up on DVD (the frequent musical guests would create a licensing nightmare). It was a TV anomaly: an hour-long program that derived comedy not from snappy sitcom one-liners and putdowns, but from strong characterization (from the band members – particularly wonderfully droll drummer Kenny Johnson – and the supporting cast, including Dexter‘s Kristin Dattilo), writing that felt lived-in, and a Seinfeld-like ability to mine small details for large payoff (one episode had Isaak’s manager buy him a new GPS for his car, only to have the voice turn out be an ex-girlfriend, putting Chris through a weird, funny, introspective form of therapy). The whole thing was solidly anchored by Isaak as the perfect post-modern straight man: equally frustrated and bemused by the absurdities around him, his comic timing perfection, and with his status as a marginally successful pop star allowing him to claim Everyman status without fudging too terribly. He brings that same sense of perspective to this set of covers of the music that inspired him: Isaak knows he’s nothing like the wild men that cut these sides back in the early days of rock and roll; in fact, he understands that the impulses of that generation would feel alien and out of place today. But he’s astute enough not to simply embalm the originals: he casts a wry eyebrow here and there, never slides his tongue too far into his cheek, while keeping the arrangements tight and the pace brisk.

… his offhandedly dirty delivery of lines like“Kiss me, baby” and “It sure is fun” restore the… sinful marriage of gospel and carnality.

The single-disk version kicks off with “Ring of Fire,” and Isaak gleefully embraces the cheese of the original, with wobbly Tex-Mex brass soundings, and a vocal that sounds less like a man trapped in a circle of hell, than of an acolyte marveling that Carter and Kilgore came up with that metaphor in the first place. “Trying To Get To You” and “I Forgot To Remember To Forget” are rough-and-ready Sun-era Elvis classics that Isaak delivers with a vocal lightness that reminds us how much The King’s voice, and worldview, darkened and deepened over the course of his career. “Great Balls Of Fire” reads like an odd choice for the generally laid-back Isaak, but that’s largely because there’s a mistaken image of Jerry Lee Lewis is as a shrieking white version of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. In fact, Lewis was a sly, canny vocalist who never pushed when he could insinuate, and Isaak nails that: his offhandedly dirty delivery of lines like“Kiss me, baby” and “It sure is fun” restore the original disquiet of the song’s sinful marriage of gospel and carnality. And for every too-obvious choice (we probably didn’t need both “Ring of Fire” AND “I Walk The Line”) there’s a “Miss Pearl” or “Dixie Fried” (or the sole Isaak original, “Live It Up”) to liven the party. The conclusion goes right back to the heart of the Sun experience, with a sweetly sentimental “My Happiness,” the first song that Elvis recorded, as a birthday gift for his mother (and no matter how much reality may diverge from legend, in Elvis’ case, nothing could be closer to The Truth than that gesture). Though the band mostly plays it straight, it’s worth noting that the rhythm section of Kenny Johnson and Roland Salley have this music in their blood, and that guitarist Herschel Yanovitz is one of the most versatile guys in the business, with a Frisell-like ability to get to the heart of virtually any genre.

While one disk of this is probably as much as anyone but the committed fan needs, it’s worth mentioning that some of the best stuff comes on the second disk of the 2-CD version, including the rollicking “Everybody’s In The Mood,” Isaak’s ballsy take on the untouchable “Oh, Pretty Woman” (fuck you, Diamond Dave) and two of Elvis’ oughtta-be-better-known classics, “Love Me” and “Doncha Think It’s Time.”