Though they didn’t go over too well with the mudslingers at Woodstock, The Incredible String Band were some of the biggest thrill-seekers in late-1960s psychedelic folk. Judging from the group photo on the cover of their third album, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, their lives were just as full of fairy-tale images as their music. In 1968, when The Beatles donned white kaftans and absconded to India to study transcendental meditation, Robin Williamson had already returned from Morocco carrying an oud, a gimbri, a sitar, a water harp, and a bag full of melismatic vocal licks. Though former bandmate Clive Palmer seemed lost to India and Afghanistan forever, Williamson reunited with rock guitarist Mike Heron and set up house in Pembrokeshire, Wales, where the Scottish duo experimented with communal living, ran around wearing Renaissance costumes, and mastered enough non-occidental string instruments to justify their towering moniker.
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
The Incredible String Band, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, 1968
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009Grains, Cranes, Centre of Wood
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
To judge solely from his MySpace page, ex-Ubzub guitarist Rob Williams seems to have already condemned himself–along with his new solo project, Grains– to a life of obscurity, underappreciation, and generalized sadsackism. It’s hard not to feel sorry for a man who describes himself as “some depressed guy playing repetitive riffs on an acoustic guitar,” and who cites “depression, sadness, heartache, misfortune, despair, failure, rejection, alienation, [and] repetition,” among other downward spirals, as his chief musical influences — though these freely-given histrionics don’t exactly draw us in either. And they might even be unforgivable if “Cranes,” his new full-length CDR, didn’t somehow manage to sublimate all this melancholy into something that is ultimately so uplifting and invigorating.
Behavior, Good Behavior 7 inch, Whip Records
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
Jonathan Kane, Jet Ear Party, Radium/Table of the Elements
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
Mining the vein opened by his first solo album, February (2005), and later by his very successful EP, I Looked at the Sun (2006), Jonathan Kane continues down the shores of “progressive blues” with Jet Ear Party. Kane winds and unwinds catchy loops, purging the genre of all incidentals, keeping only the essential: the telltale chiseled riff, repeated ad infinitum. A pursuit that began with his collaborations with some of New York’s most prominent minimalists, Kane’s quest travels backwards in time to the blues, the genre from which he draws his main inspiration: “Listen to Mississippi Fred McDowell, Son House, John Lee Hooker. These artists will often play pieces consisting of one droning chord and a hypnotic, repetitive riff!”
The Hunter Gracchus, Sacred Object of the Yiye People, Chironex Records
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009
Sacred Object of the Yiye People, the debut LP from England’s The Hunter Gracchus, is a cacophony of improvisation, acoustic noise, and obscure literary and cultural references. The odd charm of the album emerges through an interplay between unconventional rhythm and hypnotic melody. Sacred Object’s Bedouin influences stand out in a number of the tracks and make it traveling, richly textured, and entirely enthralling.
Hi Red Center, Assemble, Joyful Noise, 2009
Monday, April 27th, 2009
Following Architectural Failures (2003), their first effort, Hi Red Center has lead us to the other side of the mirror. With Assemble, recently released on Joyful Noise, these four New York stooges propel the listener into a sumptuous and colorful wonderland where everything is falsely welcoming. Taking cues, perhaps, from the likes of Lewis Caroll and his foul-mouthed flowers, Hi Red Center conjures scenes of toothless imps and giants that aren’t so giant at all. A play with off-kilter syncopation on the opening track sets the tone for what is to come: everything here may topple without warning. From song to song, logic is joyfully pushed and pulled, and common sense turned on its head; these boys cannot introduce a riff or catchy backbeat without exploding them like fireworks just a few seconds later.
Spirogyra, Bells, Boots and Shambles, 1973
Monday, April 20th, 2009
Easily confused with the American smooth jazz nightmare by the same name (or almost: Spyro Gyra), Spirogyra were everything that their popular 1970’s alter egos were not: long-haired, musically conscientious, fiercely independent, and politically engaged. Perhaps musical celebrity is more than just a competition between analogous Google search terms, but information about the Canterbury acid folk outfit — like physical copies of their records, reissued or otherwise — is notoriously hard to track down. What we know about the group is limited to a few vital stats: founded by singer and guitarist Martin Cockerham at the University of Kent in Southeast England and featuring a revolving cast of like-minded earthmuffins (vocalist Barbara Gaskin, bassist Steve Borrill, violinist Julian Cusack, and future Fairport Convention drummer Dave Mattacks), Spirogyra produced three stunning records between 1971 and 1973, then vanished off the face of this space-time continuum.
Andrew Paine, Five Perspectives (On The Same Event), Apollolaan Recordings, 2008
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” While it would be naïve to peg Glasgow’s Andrew Paine as a direct descendant of the father of experimental minimalism—ignoring everything that has happened in music in between– John Cage’s maxim on repetition goes a long way in capturing our experience of Five Perspectives (On The Same Event), released on Apollolaan Recordings last year.
La Otracina, Woven Wanderers, Colour Sounds, 2009
Monday, April 13th, 2009
La Otracina is drug music—more specifically, marijuana music. Not surprisingly, their MySpace page declares that their sound is of “cocaine riffs, mushroom freakouts, hashish metal, and fuzz-drunk jazz-rock.” Personally, only a couple of those drugs come to my mind while listening to their CD, Woven Wanderers, released on drummer and vocalist Adam Kriney’s Colour Sounds imprint. And I really think that listening to this CD is best complemented by smoking a good amount of Mary Jane.
Mostly Other People Do The Killing, This Is Our Moosic, Hot Cup, 2008
Sunday, April 12th, 2009
“Standing on the shoulders of giants makes it easier to kick them in the teeth.” This expression, worthy of Monty Python, neatly sums up the code of Mostly Other People Do The Killing, a New York combo led by contrabassist Moppa Elliott. Indeed, Mostly Other People Do The Killing show that they have grasped (and so, can gut) jazz history to the bone: while they reveal a sturdy formal reverence with every studied lick, MOPDTK never demonstrate their knowledge better than when they mock it. And This Is Our Moosic, their third studio album, does just that.
