Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

Trumpet time: Nils Petter Molvaer

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:45:26 -0800

Last week I remembered I like Steve Tibbetts, so I added a Steve Tibbetts station to my Pandora account. I was listening to it yesterday when I heard an unfamiliar Jon Hassell song. Or so I thought--it turned out to be by Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer, a former Tibbetts labelmate at ECM. I bought Molvaer's ECM album Khmer a few years ago, but I never took to it. The backing tracks sound like rudimentary techno and hip-hop loops, dooming the album to the fate of so many hybrids, i.e. not being as good as any of the individual genres that it combines. On the other hand, I did like his playing on one of Bill Laswell's Sacred System albums. But the song I heard on Pandora is from Er, Molvaer's 2005 album, and it's his best work yet. On several tracks he's obviously going for a Jon Hassell group sound, but his own tone and modalities are different than Hassell's. Then there's the song I can't stop playing, "Only These Things Count"--

04 - Only These things Count

Nils Petter Molvaer

That's Sidsel Edresen singing, with a voice like a cross between... Nico and Dewey Bunnell (of America)? And it's beautiful! (Now I'm tracking down her own albums.) The song feels like a thick down comforter with a golden brown velvet cover, draped over a sofa and just inviting you to plunge in, wrap it around yourself and luxuriate in the softness and texture. That's what I get from it, anyway. It also feels like a David Sylvian song, one of the ones with Mark Isham playing trumpet. The song it reminds me of the most is "Thalheim" from Dead Bees on a Cake:

04 - Thalheim

David Sylvian

Okay, that's not Mark Isham playing the trumpet, it's Kenny Wheeler playing the fluegelhorn. Not only that, Kenny Wheeler has been recording with David Sylvian just as long as Mark Isham has: both played on his first solo album, 1984's Brilliant Trees. That album initially disappointed me: I was so enamored with the electronic sounds of Japan that I had trouble accepting the mostly-acoustic instrumentation of Trees, and I didn't buy a copy for over ten years. I always liked "The Ink in the Well," though, and it features... Kenny Wheeler on fluegelhorn!

David Sylvian - The Ink In The Well

Coming up: equal time for Mark Isham.

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Blues backwards: On the Road Again

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:39:31 -0800

Of course everyone knows that "On the Road Again" is a blues standard made famous by Canned Heat in 1968:

But I didn't know that in the 80s; my first encounter with it was on synth band (or what in retrospect is referred to as "minimal wave") Schleimer K's debut album from 1981:

A5 - on the road again

Schleimer K

I love the stuttering kick drum in this version, you won't hear that beat anywhere else. Probably. The organ noodling by Dominique Brethes is also nice. What does it say about me that my favorite song on this album turned out to be an old blues cover? Obviously my musical tastes were not as esoteric as I once thought they were. I'm fine with that now, but it was a rather embarrassing bit of self-discovery when I finally heard the Canned Heat song for the first time. (And even that is a cover of sorts, based on a much older song by Floyd Jones, which in turn is based on an even older song. I lack the fortitude to track down the whole provenance.) This Schleimer K album is one of the many I sold during the 90s, thinking I would never listen to it again, so why keep it? Ten years later my life is completely different, and I do want to revisit the music I used to like, and thanks to Mutant Sounds and Phoenix Hairpins I can. And I still like it!

Finally, since every song reminds me of another song, I'll mention that Schleimer K singer Michael Wolfen's offhand, half-spoken vocal style was used extensively by Nik Fiend on Alien Sex Fiend's second (and best) album, Acid Bath. The atmospheric quality and midtempo beat of "Breakdown And Cry (Lay Down and Die...Goodbye) make it a good pairing with "On the Road Again"--

06 - Breakdown and cry (Lay down and lie - goodbye)

Alien Sex Fiend

Some other time I'll relate how Alien Sex Fiend almost played in Adelphi, Maryland.

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Naúx redux

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:04:33 -0800

I'll interrupt my Mars Volta jag to announce that I have found Naúx! On my first post about him, I wondered whatever happened to him after his excellent 1983 album Light, Traps and Exploding Wires. Thanks to Frank Eaton I've learned that he is now John "Crawlin' Snake" Mac, "The Next Dead Blues Guy." And he's still got the same skewed funky style that made Light, Traps... so great. Here's the video for "God Is Dead" from his newest album, Satan In Heaven:

Music Video of John "Crawlin' Snake" Mac's God Is Dead

Extra percussion makes everything better! Here he is performing another original, "When I'm Wrong," at one of his weekly gigs in Providence, in drag (F-word alert!):

Jon Crawlin' Snake Mac Live at MoJos

John "Crawlin' Snake" Mac has two MySpace pages, here and here (this one has all his drag photos), with a total of seven songs to listen to. w00t w00t! (as I believe you're supposed to type on the web to indicate excitement)

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Holding pattern: The Mars Volta

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:55:14 -0800

The new Mars Volta album (The Bedlam in Goliath) has me listening to all the old ones again, so I'm not ready to move on from them yet. Here's a video of a highly-abbreviated "L'Via L'Viaquez," one of my two favorite songs from my still-favorite Mars Volta album, Frances the Mute:

Mars Volta - L'Via L'Viaquez

The Mighty Boosh's Rudi and Spider are not based on The Mars Volta, as far as I know, but they definitely share a common ancestry. Big-haired dudes playing funky prog-rock are just part of the zeitgeist, I suppose, the New Sound for the 21st Century:

The Mighty Boosh: The Priest and The Beast

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The Mars Volta reminds everyone of King Crimson

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:21:28 -0800

I'm not the first one to notice that "Goliath" from the new Mars Volta album sounds like King Crimson's 1969 prog-rock classic, "21st Century Schizoid Man," but I did arrive at that conclusion independently. At just after the 4-minute mark they abandon all pretense that they're doing an original song (compare to "Schizoid" at 2:08):

The Mars Volta - Goliath

King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man

Okay, so Cedric's lyrics and vocal melodies are different. Still, I think "21st Century Schizoid Dude" would have been a better song title.

As happens so often, King Crimson's original song was another I learned about in reverse. In ninth grade I was completely taken by Canadian AOR band April Wine. "Roller" was one of my radio favorites, especially the part in the instrumental break where the three guitarists trade off the descending six-note motif. That was on the First Glance album, their first after adding third guitarist Brian Greenway. I rushed out to buy the next album, Harder...Faster (a little double entendre there, get it?), when it came out in 1979, and played it over and over and over. The last song on the album is "21st Century Schizoid Man," sung by Greenway (instead of bandleader Myles Goodwyn); the jamming and stop-start unison playing on it is far beyond anything else they ever attempted. It took about a year for me to connect the song to King Crimson, which then opened up a whole new world of music to me. Here, then, is April Wine's version:

April Wine - 21st Century Schizoid Man

April Wine

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Prog backwards: Memories

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:08:59 -0800

Cranking up The Mars Volta's Frances the Mute album the first time was revelatory, and it had me jumping around for days. I caught up with their other albums afterwards, but none of them quite did it for me the way Frances did. And now they have a new one out, as you may have heard, The Bedlam in Goliath. They have also released five cover songs as bonus tracks. One of them is "Memories"--

The Mars Volta Memories (cover)

Listening to that the first time I recognized the tune; it took me a minute but I placed it as a song from Material's 1982 album, One Down. It's a nice breather from the electronic funk of the rest of the album, and significant for being sung by a pre-solo-career Whitney Houston:

07 - Memories (Voc. Whitney Houston)

Material with Whitney Houston

I had always assumed this "Memories" was either original to Material or an obscure R&B cover, but The Mars Volta listed it as a Soft Machine cover. And sure enough, the first version of The Soft Machine--Robert Wyatt, Daevid Allen, Kevin Ayers, and Mike Ratledge--recorded it in 1967 with producer Giorgio Gomelsky. It never got beyond the demo stage, but has been released several times on "Soft Machine early years" albums:

06 Memories

Soft Machine

But wait, there's more! It wasn't actually a Soft Machine song originally, but a song written by bassist Hugh Hopper in the pre-Soft Machine band The Wilde Flowers. The Wilde Flowers first recorded it as an instrumental, then added lyrics for a 1966 recording, with Robert Wyatt singing but not drumming:

03 Memories (Hugh Hopper)

The Wilde Flowers

Hugh Hopper joined The Soft Machine after their first (demo) recording of "Memories," and in 1969 the new SM lineup --Hopper, Wyatt, and Mike Ratledge--recorded "Memories" once again... but as The Wilde Flowers!

22 Memories (Hugh Hopper)

The Wilde Flowers

And that's only a part of the rather amazing history of this little song. Luna Kafé has the definitive article on "Memories," the Dutch Progressive Rock Page has a complete Wilde Flowers chronology, and Richie Unterberger gets some interesting tidbits from Daevid Allen himself about the early Soft Machine. I obviously still have a lot to learn about the swiftly-shifting alliances of those nascent prog rock years.

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The Divine Comedy

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:09:48 -0800

Since Salty Miss Jill brought up Neil Hannon in the Music Lovers post, here is Neil himself singing his song with "Jill" in the lyrics:

04 If...

The Divine Comedy

Neil Hannon is the true inheritor of Scott Walker's mantle, though he has a lighter touch: his humor is more sardonic than morbid. (Walker himself now inhabits a different musical planet altogether.) The best Divine Comedy album so far is Casanova, from 1996, which spawned the delightfully wicked single, "The Frog Princess"--

The Divine Comedy - The Frog Princess

What a cheeky little man! Incidentally, I owe my Divine Comedy fandom to Duncan Sheik, who linked to the DC website from his. Co-incidentally, I heard Duncan's "She Runs Away" at the gas station yet again last week. That song must really make people spend!

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The Music Lovers

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:07:24 -0800

I first fell in love with The Music Lovers in 2003, when I was browsing on Darla.com looking for some new music. I listened to the two-minute sample of "This World vs. The Next World" and I was instantly hooked:

Music Lovers - This World

The Music Lovers

I bought that first CD EP, Cheap Songs Tell the Truth, immediately, as I have rushed out (figuratively) and bought the two full-length CDs since. Bandleader Matthew "Teddy" Edwards is a British expatriate, and The Music Lovers make their home in San Francisco. They have yet to play on this side of the Continental Divide, though I remain hopeful. I bring them up now because they have another album coming out soon, with a prerelease video directed by Margaret Cho:

Masculin Feminin

Teddy's rich croon, dark lyrics delivered with a sunny melody, and 60s pop sensibilities put The Music Lovers squarely in Scott Walker territory. ("Classic" Scott Walker, that is, not latter-day "difficult" Scott Walker.) But there was another connection to be made that I just couldn't put my finger on until, by chance, I listened to the 1986 album The Wrong People by Furniture. And thereon was a song I had forgotten about for two decades, but it all came flooding back immediately: "Love Your Shoes"--

02 - Love Your Shoes

Furniture

"We're going to have the best time, the time of our worthless lives!" How can you not love a lyric like that? Jim Irwin was Furniture's singer; their first releases were on Survival Records, one of my favorite labels. Survival was known primarily for minimal synthbeat music, and Furniture's cabaret style was a new direction for them. However, after one album with Survival (The Lovemongers, with the original "Love Your Shoes"), the band jumped over to Stiff Records, rerecorded "Shoes" for their Stiff album (The Wrong People), and then got lost in the shuffle when Stiff was acquired by ZTT. Most of that I learned on Wikipedia just now; I have some more Furniture music to track down, I'll report back if I turn up anything good. In the meantime, if you liked Furniture, you will like The Music Lovers as well, and vice versa.

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GOB Bluth and the Continents

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 23:14:33 -0800

Mrs. Veneer and I have never been able to watch a television show regularly, at least not until we got a DVR and found a show worth watching regularly (Ugly Betty). Then along comes the writers' strike, and kablooey. But the strike gave us time to catch up on a show we missed the first time around, Arrested Development. That's got t o be the funniest American TV show of this century (that's an easy claim to bandy about, with the century being just eight years old, but still), and it leaves Seinfeld in the dust. In only a month or so we managed to watch the entire three seasons, and now that we're done we quote it all the time. But what comes back more than anything is the "majestic" keyboard line from Europe's "The Final Countdown," which hapless magician GOB ("jobe") Bluth (Will Arnett) used as the backing music to every one of his doomed magic acts. Will Arnett is a masterful character actor, as long as the character he is playing is venal, conceited, insensitive, cowardly, self-pitying, blustering, immature, mean, or just plain evil. So in honor of Will Arnett and GOB Bluth, here's the song:

Europe - The Final Countdown

EUROPE

What a ridiculous song; perfect for GOB's ridiculous tricks! And it sounds suspiciously like an earlier song (1982 vs. 1986) by another band named after a continent, Asia's "Only Time Will Tell"--

Asia - Only Time Will Tell

"But where did the lighter fluid come from?" -- GOB Bluth

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Pretty Poison: in the beginning

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:31:48 -0800

Staying with the 80s theme of the last post but traveling a couple hours up I-95 to Phildelphia, here's Pretty Poison from their 1983 4-song EP Laced:

B2 Tempest Nightmare

Pretty Poison

More electronic toms, yeah! In the fall of 1982 I was a freshman in college, and somehow I quickly got "in" with the campus radio rock DJs and scored my own radio show (3-6 AM!). One weekend, at the last minute, the program director invited me to go to the 9:30 Club with him to see a band. I had never been to a nightclub before--I had just turned 17--so I jumped at the chance. The band was Pretty Poison, the PD was on the guest list and got me in free as well, he turned out to know the band from previous shows, he took me backstage to meet them, the singer was a beautiful little creature with teased hair and fishnets named Jade, and she kissed me! "Oh, what a night!", as the song goes. I remember thinking the show was spectacular, though I don't remember any details 25 years later. I became a fan, I bought their EP when it came out, played it on my radio show several times, saw one more show of theirs, and never heard of them again until the late 80s and the infamous "Catch Me, I'm Falling". The seeds of that fluffy synthpop are there in Laced, but so are the seeds of a darker sound, as heard here. They were on a cusp and could have gone either way: in a gothic, Clan of Xymox direction, or the direction they ultimately took. I would have preferred the former, but you can't have everything.

Jade Starling is now based in Las Vegas; she continues to be thin and wear skimpy clothes, and makes what can best be described as "aerobics pop." She has a MySpace page where you can hear some of it. Her bio begins:

This award winning singer/ songwriter is best known for the ..1 platinum hit "Catch Me I'm Falling" on Virgin Records. Along with co-founder, musician/producer/ arranger Whey Cooler, they are the driving force of Pretty Poison. This ground breaking late 80's pop band helped pave the way for crossover acts such as Britney Spears, Christina Agulera and Pink.

And all those years I'd been thinking it was Madonna who paved that way! Okay, she did say "helped." Still, that's a dubious honor, I don't think I'd trumpet that about. As I've said before about other bands: oh, what might have been. Here's a little reminder of how it actually turned out, from that fine Jon Cryer film Hiding Out:

Pretty Poison - Catch Me (I'm Falling)

Hey, that's not bad for what it is! I confess to tapping my toes while watching it.

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