Greater Hits: The Impressions

Curtis Mayfield is best remembered for his fly-collared Superfly sound: a funky mix of his fat lady falsetto, black power jive talk and chik-a-wah-wah electric guitar.



And The Impressions, the Chicago soul group he fronted from 1962-70, get identified with their gentle post-do wop hits like "People Get Ready," "Gypsy Woman" and "It's All Right." But to me the real hot sauce was the two-year streak from 1967-69 that produced The Fabulous Impressions, We're A Winner, This Is My Country and The Young Mod's Forgotten Story.



The Impressions were a vocal group and, beyond Mayfield's nimble guitar and the husky harmonies of Sam Gooden and Fred Cash, it would take a lot of digging to find out who laid down the glorious, soul-explosive session work (although Mayfield was a multi-instrumentalist and could be responsible for some or much of it). Mayfield is acknowledged as a guitar great, but he's still underrated. His sound is based on an open tuning he created when, as a boy, he mistakenly tuned his guitar to the black keys of his piano (a foreshadowing of black pride). It's a tangy, sparse tone that peaks through with honey-sunned joy in even his saddest songs.

Speaking of sad, "I Can't Stay Away From You" is crushing. Like Jeff Buckley sad. Whereas "Fool For You" and "We're Rolling On" have strut and a giddy cool. "My Deceiving Heart" and "Soulful Love" are somewhere in the middle, like Mayfield was starting to find that mixing the two was the way - that an optimistic melancholy was the true Mayfield reality.


The Impressions - Fool For You [From This Is My Country]

The Impressions - I Can't Stay Away From You [From The Fabulous Impressions]

The Impressions - We're Rolling On [From We're A Winner]

The Impressions - My Deceiving Heart [From The Young Mod's Forgotten Story]

The Impressions - Soulful Love [From The Young Mod's Forgotten Story]

Four Tet - New Retro Coordinates.

I've always preferred Kieran Hebdan at his most pastoral. Tracks like "Hands" (Rounds) and "And Then Patterns" (Everything Estatic) have a really subtle elegance that I don't think will ever go out of style.

The new Ringer EP is a major stylistic change for Four Tet. Hebden has always mined the past for ores of futurism in his cut and paste collages, successfully recreating the crushing cymbal cacophony of free jazz drummers and a general stoned tone - like an acid flashback bursting from the spine of an old hippie. And on Ringer he's still looking backwards, only now it's at early electronic composers like Terry Riley and Brian Eno. Ringer is all analog minimalism, sequenced arpeggiators and grainy loops. The twang and scrape of Rounds' acoustic folk-tronica textures have been replaced by the furry sounds of first-generation synthesizers. And Hebden handles the form with characteristic restraint, pacing himself well in tracks that approach and exceed the ten-minute mark.

Four Tet - "Ribbons" [From Ringer]


Four Tet - "Hands" [From Rounds]


Four Tet - "And Then Patterns" [From Everything Ecstatic]

Jamie Winehouse

I'm disappointed in Jamie Lidell. But it's disappointment graded on a curve. There's no denying his jaw-dropping genius - Lidell's got the rare mix of talent and new ideas to tweak the mainstream, the way Bjork or Timbaland used to. He should be the next level, the cyber-funk soul shaman of my dreams, scatting and grunting with those licorice pipes over madness jams tricked out to within an inch of their lives. Instead he's gone off on this retro soul tangent. He's Jamie Winehouse. I want Jamie Lidell back.

All bitching aside, I'm not immune to his silly charisma or the joy fueling his jive-muppet theatrics. And I'm almost positive that Jim is going to get a lot of play come the warm months. It's just that I wish his Motown was a little bit more neon. A little bit Glo-Town.

Jamie Lidell - "Where D'You Go" [From Jim]

In the hallowed past, Lidell was one half of Super_Collider, which was like glitched-out D'Angelo, as cold and rigid as a headmaster's paddle and just as ass-slapping fierce. It was a pairing made in the heavens of perversion, with Lidell being matched pound for inventive pound by His Mad-jesty Cristian Vogel.



Vogel's bio is cooler than a bio should be. He's a refuge: his family left Chile in the '80s to escape the soul-fucking General Pinochet; a scholar - he studied electronic composition, getting his degree in 20th-century music from the University of Sussex; and all-around madman - he was a kid hacker, and that mindset still informs the deconstructionist dimentia in his productions. When he hooked up with Lidell and they started making records in their Berlin studio, there was no cure for the sickness that would come.

Super_Collider - "Cut The Phone" [From Head On]

Before they broke up, they broke the mold; twice, with Head On (1999) and Raw Digits (2002). But in between those Lidell signed to Warp and made his first solo record, Muddlin Gear (2000), which I described in an old post as unlistenable in the best way and like free jazz by R2-D2 freebasing cleaning products. But buried in the heap of droid parts was "Daddy's Car," this cold, crushed R-n-B single that I ended up putting on pretty much every mix tape I made for the next five years.

Jamie Lidell - "Daddy's Car"

Vogel, left to his own devices, did what he had been doing since '94 and kept up with releases under his own name, all with a similar twisted take on techno. But he also became a name brand for hotshit remix work and, when the tracks he did for Radiohead, Maximo Park and Thom Yorke were stood side by side with artists like Four Tet and Modeselektor, Vogel's always sounded the most moth-eaten.

Thom Yorke - "Black Swan (Cristian Vogel Spare Parts Remix)"

Cristian Vogel - "Neon Underground"

Lidell, on the other hand stopped stealing dirty cabbage from the avante garden and became Little Richard with a sampler on 2005's Multiply. And suddenly a Lidell track was in every fifth commercial. I'm not even saying he sold out. He's obviously earnest as hell about the classic mood he's been achieving on record, and maybe futurism doesn't get it up for him anymore. Still, I wish he'd bend the rules a little bit; I wish new Lidell albums sounded a little more destroyed, a little less safe. A little bit more like:

In Search of "Champ"

The things I'm about to tell you are incriminating. Multiple laws were broken to bring you this mp3 and I'll have to break a few more just to tell you the story of how I found it. I'm talking unauthorized captured screen grabs, illicit insinuations and flagrant violations of copyright laws. But such is my love for you. That I would go all Indiana Jones to rescue this pearl from the vine-covered tomb of anonymity.

I can hardly believe it, but here is the story.

In the summer of 2006 I borrowed the Season 1 boxset of the HBO series Entourage from my girlfriend, who had gotten it as a present from her macho boss. To my surprise, I got hooked. I say surprise because it's sort of a show for meatheads. It follows a posse of mid-twenties dudes living out their fratish fantasies in Hollywood, all childhood friends and all riding the coattails of Vince, the next big movie star. Every episode is a parable without a moral, about excess; of pleasure, testosterone and douchebaggery of every kind.



But that's a surface description because Entourage is smarter than that. And underneath all the weed, whiskey and women is a steady theme of Daoist resignation in the form of the lead character. Vince just takes things as they come, he never strives. He's completely in the gush of the universal stream, his lack of effort the very secret to his success.

It works for Vince anyway, but for the rest of us sometimes a little striving is in order, which brings me back to the subject of my hallowed mp3. In episode 10, "My Mazerati Does 185," all of the entourage bros show up to a slamming LA party - something which happens every fifth scene on the show - and the most phenomenal slice of bump is playing on the loudspeaker; this hoarse croon spouting a clipped lyric over distorted claps and clangy percussion. Half relaxed, half relentless. Most beautifulist thing in the world is how sweet your girl is. Few songs have ever delivered their hook so quickly.

I'm sold and so, being a good consumer, I find the Entourage page on the HBO website and click the link to the list of that episode's music selections.



Simple enough. The song is "Champ" by Mewzic Monsterz. Armed with a title and artist, I figured I was about 8 seconds away from a download. The simplest and most ethical option was iTunes, so that's where I stopped first. But no song matching those coordinates came up; nothing for the artist Mewzic Monsterz; nothing on the album Entourage: Music From and Inspired by the Hit HBO Original Series.

Having been failed by the iTunes juggernaut, I turned to another: Google. The first hit led me to a message board where I read the following post from Boozoo:

July 24, 2006 08:59 PM
Mewzic Monsterz's song "The Champ" ...Can't find the CD or MP3 of this song!! Help This song came on HBO's "Entourage" ep. 10...but I can't find it anywhere! Has anyone found it? Someone, anyone, pleeeease help me find it!

There had been no replies for a week until:

sweetlikeharmony
Aug 2, 2006 02:30 PM
i work in a record store and i checked the band in our database and the cd isn't even avalible, and i tried to find it to download but thats also impossible, i might suggest looking at http://www.mewzicmonsterz.com and contacting them about it.


Boozoo
Aug 3, 2006 06:53 PM
thanks for looking! it's funny, i found that site during my search a few weeks ago, called them and it's always busy. then i emailed, and it bounced back! i even found mewzic monsterz on myspace but it wasn't the same people! looks like this may be the most elusive song in the history of music.

Nothing against Boozoo and Sweetlikeharmony, but I decided not to take their word for it and contact the artist myself. Which led me to the ominous and vague mewzicmonsterz.com. Shrouded in black with a logo in some kind of ninja Klingon font, it looked like a homepage for a video game company, or a drum'n'bass artist. Not whatever next-level soul stirrers had written and performed "Champ."



A loop of far-East techno played while I scanned the various links: discography, television/film, profile. So far so good. Art gallery? Hmmm. I tried picturing the next Pharrell or Al Green having an art gallery. It didn't seem right. When I clicked on any of these links, they took me to a page that said "Coming soon..." (Now two years later, all of these sections are still "coming soon.") I found the contact link and fired off an email to you@mewzicmonsterz.com. It got bounced back, just as sweetlikeharmony had warned.

Having now been shunned by two thirds of the holy trinity of internet culture, I finally took my prayers to MySpace. Sure enough, Mewzic Monsterz had a page, but only one track on their music player - "A MoNsTer" - a kind of half dancehall, half dirty south hip hop. The artist listed next to the song's name was RokstrZ. I started to wonder. What was Mewzic Monsterz, anyway? A production house? A licensing or publishing company?

Totally confused now, but more determined, I sent them a MySace message:

Hi. I love the song "Champ" that was on Entourage. I've been trying to buy it online but haven't had any luck. Is this your song?

About a week letter, I got a three-word reply:

Yep. That's us.

Wow. Talk about cultivating an air of mystery. These guys must really be committed to building a buzz. I sent back:

Oh, great. So how can I buy the song?

I never heard back from Mewzic Monsterz.

At this point I had completely bombed at snagging "Champ" legitimately, and getting my hands dirty with illegal alternatives wasn't even an option. I found this almost impossible to believe. I mean, a series like Entourage must be raking in millions of viewers and music placement on the show is a huge part of its energy and style. They use music that makes the guys and their California nightlife look good. But in turn, those same scenes give the songs an entirely flattering context. As an artist, you couldn't ask for a better commercial for your tunes. How could anybody trying to crack into the business NOT be ready and waiting to capitalize on an opportunity like that? It was unthinkable.

I did some more googling. More frantic message board posts by people looking for the track and getting nothing in the way of information. So I forgot about it.

Flash forward a year and I'm cleaning out my MySpace inbox. I come across my pitiful little exchange with the enigmatic Mewzic Monsterz. I click the link to their page and, lit like God's holy dove, the song "Champ" is up, credited to Jay. I hit play and it's every bit as good as I remembered. The only problem, I do the same searches as a year before - iTunes, the band's dot com - and come up just as empty. I try messaging the group again via MySpace. A week passes. I can see the message has been read, but there's no reply.

This is when I said "Fuck it." Without a tinge of remorse, I used a program I bought called Audio Hijack to rip my own audio file from the MySpace stream of the song. I've been loving on it ever since.

It's been over two years now and Mewzic Monsterz have taken no further steps to make their amazing, high-profile piece of music available for purchase. I don't know whether to scorn or admire them for their Vince-like nonchalance. Either way, the song is a must-have. My version's got a few seconds of silence at the top because of the way I ripped it. And the quality's not going to be the best because it was going through the hideous compression of MySpace's music jukebox. But it'll do for now until the artist, or the show's producers, finally get around to releasing a legit copy. It'll have to.

Mewzic Monsterz/Jay - "Champ"

Spooky Soul

I like my Jamaican soul tracks smothered in spooky. The background singers have to moan like they're holding a candlelight seance. Lead vocalists should sound distracted, seized in the grip of mad flu. And I need a rhythm section that drags in unholy ways - like an evil code slurred backwards in a hidden message.

Here are a few cuts to that effect.


The Heptones - "Our Day Will Come"

I used to listen to this one in the mornings of my band's broke-ass tour, as we were pulling out of town, all tattered inside. This was included on the Trojan Records Lovers box set, but it's the un-romantic. The production and vocal sound completely beaten down. Our day will come, but in the next life.

The Heptones - "Our Day Will Come"


Cornel Campbell - "Devil in Bed"

Some guy singing about his lover, but recorded in a falsetto whisper like he's doing the take standing over her sleeping body - trying not to wake her cause he fears her and her menacing sex appeal. She's got the face of an angel, and the heart of a Jezebel.

Cornel Campbell - "Devil in Bed"


The Abyssinians - "Declaration of Rights"

More world weariness. Abyssinian is another name for Ethiopian, one who lives in the Rasta promised land. But these guys sound like they're residents of the Abyss. Get up and fight for your right, sung in defiance, but feebily, at half-power. This is the dredges of soul.

The Abyssinians - "Declaration of Rights"

The Funk Makes You Crazy: Brown, Jackson, Prince

Posting youtube videos is not really my style here, but sometimes you've just got to make exceptions.

A friend of mine has this brilliant, irrefutable theory: the funk makes you crazy. Think about it, he'll say. Prince? Funky. Crazy. Michael Jackson? Also funky. Also crazy. Jamariquoi? A little crazy, maybe. But only a little funky. Bootsy? George Clinton? JAMES BROWN?? All of them funky as all funking funk, and completely batshit, too.

Here is a rare, beautiful example of three of these funk greats on stage at the same time, made possible by some kind of freak-chance cosmic star collision (somebody in the audience was probably accidentally teleported through time to the middle ages as a result of this perversion of the natural law). It's an early glimpse of their genius, when the funk had already started to nibble away at their sanity.

Thanks to Megan at The Realest for the heads up.

Alton Ellis

Alton Ellis is, along with Delroy Wilson and Ken Boothe, one of the Jamaican soul singers who I've come to think of as a master.



The thing about falling in love with this music and these singers is that there is almost no information about them on the Web. That might not be a good thing for their legacies but, as a listener, it keeps them at a distance and the focus on what matters: the music itself.

Of the three singers I've mentioned, Ellis is the spookiest. There is some kind of blue mysticism in his voice, a twinge of backslidden gospel. On "When I'm Down," from a record of duets with his sister Hortense (who deserves her own post), he sings, When I'm down I just pray to the Lord, but rather than deliver a soothing, hymn-like embrace it comes across totally unsettling. It's partly because the chords are requiem-dark and partly because Ellis doesn't sound like he believes a word of what he's saying - like somebody roped him into recording this religious tune and he's going to make the best of it and undercut the lyric's empty promises by injecting some of his own sad perspective.

Ellis also has a bit of the madness in his delivery. There's no better example of this than "I'll Be Waiting," and its last third where Ellis has had enough of crooning and resorts to an ugly, broken falsetto wail. "It's a Shame" is just Ellis at his most relaxed and perfect.

Alton Ellis - "When I'm Down"

Alton Ellis - "I'll Be Waiting"

Alton Ellis - "It's A Shame"