Here I am saying The Slip is the best Nine Inch Nails album since the first one when I haven't really listened to any of them since Broken.  So I've been trying to catch up, going from recent to older; Year Zero and With Teeth are actually better than I thought, but neither are reach-out-and-grabby like The Slip, and both suffer from album bloat.  I am especially impressed with the opener from With Teeth, "All the Love in the World," which starts with a dub beat before morphing into a piano ballad (with falsetto, even!) and then finally an arena rocker:

Trent is relentless with his morbidly dour lyrics, though; it becomes overbearing after a while.  I think I can place them all into three categories:

1. I have low self-esteem.
2. We live in a dystopia.
3. Living in a dystopia has given me low self-esteem.

Did I miss anything?  What would Nine Inch Nails sound like if fronted by, say, Tom Waits and his morbidly gleeful lyrics?  Like this, I bet:

A1 Too Hot

Peter Hope and David Harrow

This song contains one of my all-time favorite weird couplets:

Turn the dust out, oh clear a way
When the injury swells up, it will not be contained

Yeah!  What the hell does that mean?  I don't know, but it sure is catchy!  Peter Hope first emerged in 1983 as the lead singer for The Box, a Sheffield band made up of former ClockDVA members.  Mick Fish give some details in his book about Cabaret Voltaire, Industrial Evolution:

The Box tried a number of singers, one who sort of whooped like a Red Indian chief but couldn't sing in tune. They even played two gigs with Mal [Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire] on vocals -- a marriage of styles that was quite successful in its own way.... The Box eventually advertised for a singer. By far the best response came from Pete Hope from Hertford. Vocally somewhere between Tom Waits and Howlin' Wolf, he moved up to Sheffield with his young family.

Hope's inventive lyrics and unbridled singing style perfectly complemented The Box's no-wave skronk.  Although they released several records, The Box never broke out, and they disbanded in 1985.  Peter Hope then embarked on a series of one-off collaborations: this EP with synth whiz David Harrow (now known as James Hardway), an album with Cabaret Voltaire's Richard H. Kirk, an album with Jonathan S. Podmore (now known as Jono Podmore a.k.a. Kumo), and a 12" single with studio engineer Mark Estdale as Chain:

Chain - Chains(1)

Chain

I just adore that gothic-industrial-funk sound; if only that had caught on in the way Nine Inch Nails did.  Maybe it'll come back... Peter Hope, where are you?

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I've been spending a lot of my listening time lately back in the 80s and neglecting the funk, so I sought to remedy that today.  I started listening to Brownout, the Latin funk band from Austin, and as soon as I heard "African Battle" I was hooked.  Deep funk beat, extra percussion, horns, and trombone solos?  Yes, please!

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I've liked Medeski Martin and Wood ever since I first heard them on the Get Shorty soundtrack (one of the grooviest soundtracks to a mainstream movie since the 70s), but I only ever got a couple of their albums.  One that I bought was their first album with guitarist John Scofield, issued under Scofield's name alone as A Go Go.  That came out in 1998, and MMW dropped off my radar after that.  Last week I decided to do some catching up, and got their second collaboration with Scofield, Out Louder from 2006, credited to all four of them this time.  I skipped forward to "Miles Behind," which I gathered was a play on Miles Davis's Miles Ahead and may be a tribute of sorts.  And it is a tribute: not to the late-50s-era Miles of Miles Ahead, but to my absolute favorite stretch of his career, the wildly creative funk-rock-jazz fusion of the early 70s, Bitches Brew through Get Up With It, so despised by jazz purists but beloved by many who, like me, approach music with rock as their baseline.  I first heard Miles's 1975 live album, Agharta, at the Tower Records (remember those?) in Rockville in 1991, and I bought it even though I was broke, because it was exactly the music I needed at the time.  "Miles Behind" nails the Electric Miles sound (albeit without a trumpet); it distills that entire oeuvre into less than three minutes, and reliving the rush of my initial Agharta revelation actually gave me goosebumps.

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The Doors were accused of a lot of things, but being funky wasn't one of them.  So I am naturally surprised when I hear Doors influences in contemporary funk; who'd'a thunk it?  Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators (she's from Brooklyn, they're from Finland) play deep funk, but they stretch out into more soul and R&B styles than most other deep funk bands.  Listening to their Keep Reachin' Up album on my way to work the other day, I started hearing the Doors all of a sudden: halfway through "A Perfect Kind of Love" there's an instrumental break with a bassline right out of "Light My Fire," and then Antti Maattanen lays down a Ray Manzarek-like organ solo over it.  It's what the Doors would have sounded like if they'd had some rebop!

06 - A Perfect Kind of Love

Nicole Willis and The Soul Inv

So then I thought back to another Doors-influenced song that I liked last year, which I always meant to post here but never got around to; isn't this the perfect time for it?  The Doors influence in "The Witch" by The Broken Keys is in the Morrison-esque vocal (he even rhymes fire with pyre, just like Jim did), but for the life of me I can't figure out who is actually singing it.  The Broken Keys are two English dudes named Nostalgia 77 and Natural Self (whose real name, apparently, is Keno-1); on their own they each make richly-layered hip-hip-flavored jazz with no male vocals (in what I've heard), so it could be either one of them singing here, or someone else altogether.  This, too, is what the Doors would have sounded like if they'd had any funk:

05. The Witch

The Broken Keys

That is heavy; with those horns it could almost be an Ides of March song.  I can hear a Black Sabbath version in my head, too, and the lyrics are right up their alley.

Maybe I'm too hard on the Doors.  They did get almost funky once, with "Peace Frog"--

That's a pretty good beat; it would turn up again in Echo and the Bunnymen's "Bedbugs and Ballyhoo" (can't find it right now), and the Charlatans' "The Only One I Know"--

The Charlatans are streaming from Donnaslut.com: a single page with about 300 eclectic mp3's, including many of my obscure favorites, such as Allez Allez, Jerry Harrison, Nico + the Faction, SSQ, and lots, lots more.  Check it out!  Make sure you have playTagger installed first, so you can stream them from the main page instead of loading each one in a new page.

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To the elite group of musicians who have mastered the art of retro-disco-cop-show-funk-o-lounge-a-phonics (i.e. Skeewiff and Shawn Lee) add Frenchman Chris Joss, who since 1999 has built up an impressive catalog of recordings in that vein.  His latest album, Teraphonic Overdubs, is out now on ESL Music.  Now that I can embed a MySpace player I don't have to try to pick out one or two songs to share, I can simply present what he's sharing already.  If you listen to just one track, scroll down to "Luna Rides Back" and listen to that one:

Amazon link:

Teraphonic Overdubs

Chris Joss

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Starting with the premise that it's not healthy to live in the past all the time, I scan the zip blogs once in a while to get a taste of what's new, to hear if anyone is making good music today.  Answer: for the most part, no.  Same as always.  But it's the ones that cut through the noise, that shine through the murk of mediocrity like a halogen laser, that reward the hunt.  "Little Bit of Feel Good" from German soulster Jamie Lidell is one of those, and it's jazzed me up enough to further derail my whole trumpet theme.  Oh well, it has trumpets in it too.  And hey, I just found a tool that lets me embed a MySpace player right here on the blog, so here is Jamie Lidell's:

Wouldn't it be awesome to see a Jamie Lidell and Dap Kings double bill?

(Here is the MySpace Music Player Embed Tool.)

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I've been laid low by illness for the last few days, too sick to blog, but I did manage to listen to some music and find a nice trifecta of funky guitar instrumentals from the 70s.  The grandaddy of them all is Dennis Coffey's "Scorpio" from 1971.  As one of Motown's in-house Funk Brothers band, Coffey, with his wah-wah guitar, was one of the architects of the "psychedelic soul" sound that would later become the de facto soundtrack music for the entire blaxplotation movie genre.  (Template: poverty and discrimination force ghetto residents into moral compromises.)  In "Scorpio" Coffey's guitar sounds like an electric knife cutting through a steel rod (that's good, BTW), which I assumed to be the work of an effects pedal or three.  I was wrong, though, it's simply nine overdubs (thanks to Oliver Wang for doing the research on the occasion of "Scorpio" being NPR's Song of the Day on January 18, 2007).  Wang also gives the details on one of the funkiest, most generous (and therefore sampleable) percussion breaks ever, which involved four percussionists.  Get down!

09-Scorpio

Dennis Coffey

"Scorpio" must have spawned a galaxy of imitations (Coffey did some himself, such as "Taurus" and "Son of Scorpio"), since I found two this weekend without even trying.  First up is Donald Austin's "Side Saddle" from his sole solo LP, Crazy Legs (1973):

09 - side saddle -1974

Donald Austin

Then there's "Dr. Abraham" by Janne Schaffer of Sweden (and ABBA), from his 1974 album Andra:

A1 Dr Abraham

Janne Schaffer

Coming soon, some new vinyl rips of 80s obscurities I just received from Platters That Matter Records!

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I could sit and post songs and videos to this blog all day every day, but the prospect of picking out one or two from the universe of things I want to post sometimes paralyzes me into inaction.  So in the interest of catching up, here's a follow-up to my first James Blood Ulmer post, which contains all of the relevant information, so I won't repeat it here.  That post featured the standout track from Ulmer's second Columbia album, Black Rock (1982); here I back up to 1981 and his first album for Columbia, Free Lancing, for "Pleasure Control"--

02 Pleasure Control

James Blood Ulmer

Demand James Blood Ulmer in your city!  Hmm, one person demanding him in Ithaca, I wonder who that is?  (Hint: it's me.)

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The Spiderman theme is fine as a jingle, but I've never thought of it as an actual cop-show theme.  Until today, that is, when I found Norwegian electro duo Ugress's groovy remake:

Ugress-SpiderEyes(Spider-ManTheme)

Ugress

That's definitive; I doubt you'll ever hear a better version of that song.  Who are Ugress and what are they all about?  Rather than trying to paraphrase I'll just paste in the statement from their MySpace page:

Ugress is mad sound professor Gisle Martens Meyer and his groovetight percussive assistant, The Igor.

With a sexy crew of guest vocalists and instrumentalists, Ugress bloom with references to the last decades of pop, film and cult culture.

Symptoms of exposure include subtle drift towards the dancefloor, uncontrollable rhythmical movements, hightened auditive pleasure and a out-of-reality experience reported as "being part of an epic film".

On stage an überhybrid mash-feist of mad professorizing, cloned musicians, steampunk instruments and multiple synchronized video projections keep your eyes, ears and consciousness glued to an escapist reality of multiple dimensions.

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Upon discovering, just last year (fashionably late again) that A Primary Industry had morphed into Ultramarine in 1990, I got Ultramarine's first album, Folk.  It's a nice extension of the softer side of API, with lots of layered reeds (from both woodwinds and accordions) loping, dubby basslines.  The bassline for "Bullprong" sounded familiar...

Ultramarine - Bullprong

Ultramarine

... because it's lifted straight out of 23 Skidoo's "Language"--

23 Skidoo - Language

23 Skidoo

Granted, it's only the bassline for part of the song, and Ultramarine builds a different musical environment on top of it, and it's no more blatant than a lot of sampling that goes on, and both bands came out of England's 80s "industrial" scene, so I guess it's okay.  Now that I've called out API for copying Pigbag, and Ultramarine for copying 23 Skidoo, I'm going to make an effort to find a strikingly original Ultramarine song to post here.  And I've got more to say about 23 Skidoo, but it's a bit of a jumble at the moment so that will have to wait, too.  Enjoy these two tracks in the meantime.

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