Swervedriver: Part 2

Click here for Part 1.

After the crushing bad luck of getting dropped by their label the week of their record release, more misfortune followed. American major Geffen Records scooped them up at the tail end of the '90s indie rock bubble, which saw major labels impulsively signing everything from Urge Overkill to Shudder to Think to Jesus Lizard. Initially this was a boon, and Swervedriver pocketed a big enough advance to build their own studio, at which they began recording a new album with Moulder, 99th Dream (they gave up on trying to do anything proper with Ejector Seat). But as the bubble burst, well-meaning A&R people, like the lady that brought Swervedriver to Geffen, got sacked. And when she did Swervedriver were left label-less again. Fortunately Geffen weren't assholes about it and let Swervedriver reaquire the master tapes to their new record without too much pain. But by the time they found somebody to put 99th Dream out - New York indie Zero Hour - it was stale material, since almost two years had passed since its creation. It gets worse. Zero Hour released 99th Dream in the Spring of '98 and within the year, while the band were still touring to promote it, the label folded.

At this point the band must have felt like the fates had a personal vendetta against them. Somewhere in the middle of their Australian tour for 99th Dream, Franklin says they felt lost and ran out of steam. What makes it so depressing is that they were at their creative peak, but too many unhappy coincidences just beat them into submission. The band slipped into a coma.

99th Dream is astounding in places. It has some of the most accomplished guitar interplay of anything they ever did (when I try to think of an example of Swervedriver at their most Television-glorious, I think of "Up From the Sea" or "In My Time," both from 99th Dream) and Franklin had almost completely given himself over to writing pop songs, rather than instrumentals that happened to have vocals. Single "These Times" could have been on Oasis' What's the Story, Morning Glory. I bought 99th Dream the day it came out - a now-dead tradition - and when I got back to my room and put it on, the opening title track was so goddamn beautiful I had to sit down. I mean, just read these lyrics:

One day we'll work the world without these stimulants/ And as thought bubbles form above you/ You know that I have always loved you/ I love your ways/ I love your little ways/ I love your ways

Somewhere up in the sky the Hindenburg still flies/ You're still flying from the night before, last night the big score/ As we lie half in traction and in stereo start to dream/ Architecture, nature, alcohol, space travel, rock n roll

Shop windows at night and endless possibilities/ The mannequin's blank face reflecting how you feel/ So glamorous and surreal/ It's a thin veneer and something's got to give out here/ I'm dreaming number 99/ Get me to the world on time

Swervedriver - "99th Dream" [From 99th Dream]

Swervedriver - "Wrong Treats" [From 99th Dream]

As a Swervedriver aficianado, their demise was a relatively painless one for me since Franklin plowed ahead releasing solo material - first under the alias Toshack Highway and later under his own name - that conjured the same images in my head, only scaled down and more portably intimate. I'm going to do a post soon on just this material as well as Franklin's new project with Interpol's Sam Fogarino, Magnetic Morning.

A few years ago I did something a little unconventional, but also obvious and pure. Feeling that there was relatively little material available on the Web or otherwise about the making of these Swervedriver albums that I had spent so much love on ingesting in detail, I decided to just ask Franklin everything I wanted to know. So I set up an interview for the recording magazine Tape Op. (Our interview will be published in next month's issue.) Over the course of two evenings and over six hours of phone conversation, I pumped Franklin for stories. It was one of the most inspiring experiences of my life, not because it was like winning the geek-out lottery, but because Franklin was all about the music. He was gracious and charming and happy to talk about anything I wanted. He wasn't living in the past, and we spent a lot of time covering the then forthcoming Bolts of Melody, but he had tons of affection for the music that Swervedriver made and, in some ways, seemed like their biggest fan. It's hard to explain that last part, but it was as if he didn't have the luxury of distancing himself from the greatness he had achieved, because that music hadn't been validated by the superficial watermarks of record sales or even a gushing and pushy critical ubiquity. If someone like Thom Yorke or Kevin Sheilds wanted to talk dismissively about their earlier work, they could afford to: in Yorke's case that work is paying for his house and still being poured over in the present by thousands of new fans every year; and in Sheilds', the early material, while merely still an underground phenomenon, has been cast in bronze by now and formed in statuesque rock legend. I felt that Franklin doesn't have either security to fall back on, and so he holds a balanced, forgiving and proud view of a decade's worth of blared passion.

If you want to start somewhere, you can't go wrong with Juggernaut Rides, Castle Music's 2005 2-CD Swervedriver anthology. As someone with starched opinions about this band, who's devotedly collected their singles and 7-inches over the years, I couldn't believe how right they got it. The remastering engineer nailed making a warm coherence out of sometimes wildly different-bodied recordings - no easy feat considering that the decade the band was active was also the age of the Loud Race, where the competition to have the most compressed mix drove the industry standard into increasing harshness. Juggernaut Rides has all the key cuts from the four proper albums - I couldn't have picked them better myself - as well as just about every b-side worth owning. Which is not to say that moving on to the records themselves would be redundant. It wouldn't, and if you do, start with Mezcal Head and Ejector Seat, which have aged amazingly and were without filler.

Swervedriver reunited this year to hit the summer tour circuit. Nobody's saying if there will be new music made - it's all about the shows for now. It was a beautiful feeling to read the reviews of their Coachella performance, and see them getting the reverential treatment they deserve. They're still touring.

Jimmy Cliff Screen Grabs

So, I'm kind of obsessed with this video now.

Jimmy Cliff in the Best Video Ever?

I prefer to imagine that the images in this Jimmy Cliff video are not from a movie but are directed - in random, stream-of-consciousness perfection. The way Cliff moves while singing, holding his cigarette in the middle of his fingers the whole time... the rastas flying the kite on the beach... the rolling of a baseball-bat-sized spliff... the graffetti message: "I WAS HERE BUT I DISAPEAR"... the couple having sex in the ocean...

And when's the last time you saw a music video that wasn't lip synced?

Jimmy Cliff "The Harder They Come"

Swervedriver: Part 1

I found a copy of Swervedriver's first album, Raise (1991), in a Springfield, Missouri pawn shop. This was spring of '95, during my freshman year in college. It was lying dusty in a cardboard box alongside a few other beat-up CDs and I probably paid a dollar for it. At the time I was hungry for anything soaking in massive guitar blast - Catherine Wheel, Smashing Pumpkins, Slowdive, stuff like that - and my craving had given me an eagle eye for spotting album art that would deliver those results. Raise's cover was a pixilated screen grab of a nuclear bomb detonation framed in cinematic widescreen. It looked noisy and huge, I thought.

Obsession followed. It's not an exaggeration to say I probably logged close to a thousand listens of the track "Deep Seat" alone. The lyrics were ambiguous and desolate: You close my eyes without blinking/ You read my thoughts without thinking/ I swallow salt when you're kneeling/ We lie and stare at the ceiling. And I did exactly that, flat on my back on my dorm bed, staring at the ceiling in my headphone womb and reliving my relationship "tragedies" on loop, my finger inches away from the Discman's repeat button. (Yeah, I was pretty dramatic back then, but that was nothing compared to when I discovered Jeff Buckley.)

Though it was a great fit for me, in most ways "Deep Seat" was not a typical Swervedriver song. For one, it was depressing and built around a slurred, galloping beat, whereas their songs of the period tended to speed ahead straight and fast and sound like Hunter S. Thompson pill-popping through the desert in his convertible, in the opening scene of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Additionally, though Adam Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge's nimble, unconventional guitar work was and is a main attraction of the band, there were few solos in early Swervedriver music, only layers - a thousand tongues of texture lapping in and out of the mix. But "Deep Seat" climaxed in a guitar solo. Two actually, the second of which is a heart breaker - a howling wah-wah pedal wail that sounds verbal and has all the qualities of human suffering.

Swervedriver - "Deep Seat" [From Raise]

I've never had such a strong sense of aesthetic overlap as the one I got listening to Swervedriver. Their music began to get grouped with all kinds of things in my mind. Deserts, road movies, drug shamanism, Hemingway, jean jackets, poetry, muscle cars, Kerouac, booze, sex, mysticism, Mediterranean breezes, snake rattles, love letters, Fitzgerald... It was coolly savage and smart, like all my favorite authors. If the sun hit the sidewalk bright enough, I thought of a Spanish adobe bricked roof and Hemingway in Spain and that felt like Swervedriver. Like Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, it had a foreigner's mythic perspective of the American Southwest, only imagine those films scored by the Stooges rather than Morricone and you've got a better idea. Swervedriver were the sound of everything wide or sad or unhinged inside me. It was epic but contained, the sonic sprawl of the band held in check by songwriter Adam Franklin's English reserve and rock lyrics-as-literature.

It wasn't long before I invested in a copy of Mezcal Head (1993), their breakthrough follow-up for Creation. Mezcal Head made good on everything Raise promised. They worked for the first time with producer Alan Moulder (My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails, Blonde Redhead), who would handle every record after, and his ability to make mixes sound smothered yet destinct gave Swervedriver's power the articulation it needed.

Swervedriver - "Duel" [From Mezcal Head]

Swervedriver - "Blowin' Cool" [From Mezcal Head]

I'm not really sure why Swervedriver got tagged as a shoegazer band - other than the predominance of guitars in the mix and a heavy abuse of effects pedals - but Mezcal Head should have sunk the use of that term for them. Sure, there was something vaguely exotic about Franklin's mannered Oxford accent poking through the heavy space rock, but unlike Chapterhouse or My Bloody Valentine, they didn't sound shy or rely on the contrast of mopey dirges played at deafening levels for dramatic effect. They were quick, energetic and jarring. Rather than being washed out, their guitar tones were often prickly or glistening and the interplay between Franklin and Hartridge was as complimentary and angular as Television's Tom Verlain and Richard Lloyd. There was a sludginess to their sound, but it wasn't the effete, twee sludge of Ride or Lush's patently English approach. It was an American mud, more Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth.

Although Franklin's gift for melody and songcraft was only beginning to expand, he's never written better lyrics than the ones on Mezcal Head, like this from "Girl on a Motorbike": Followed the girl on a motorbike/ Saw her enter a bar/ It's dark inside with candles' burn and/ To liberate her scars/ She Spanish-dance on the table/ With butterflies that burn/ It's like an incessant fox-hunt/ Too many lessons learned. There are few works of art, in any medium, that I liked 15 years ago and can stand by today. But those lyrics still work for me.

In 1995, coming off high-profile U.S. tours with Soundgarden and Smashing Pumpkins, they released Ejector Seat Reservation, the product of their largest budget yet. It's now considered by many fans to be Swervedriver's finest hour, but it was also the beginning of a vicious string of bad luck for the band: the week the record hit stores, their label dropped them. Some said it was so Creation could focus on Oasis, others that they were still struggling from the release of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, which was rumored to have cost £250,000 and to have nearly bankrupted the label. But Franklin says it may have had more to do with the fact that, just when they turned the finished record in, owner Alan McGee was returning to London from LA where he had partied too hard and, as a result, had a "bad trip" on the flight back. When McGee received Ejector Seat Reservation he freaked, considering the name and the title track's lyrics about planes crashing and "psychotics tripping in the aisles" to be a bad omen.

All of this happened in the pre-internet days for me, and so I was ignorant. It wasn't until the Spring of '96 that I discovered the web and its abundant fountain of knowledge on the low-profile import acts I had been following for years. I ordered a copy of Ejector Seat Reservation from the band and waited, ripe with anticipation after over-absorbing their previous releases.

I wasn't prepared for Ejector Seat's loose sound and classic rock influences. I dug that drummer Jez Hindmarsh and bassist Steve George were coming into their own as a big-bottomed rhythm section on par with The Verve or Primal Scream, but the progression was shocking. It was tonally darker and rawer than Mezcal Head and even playful in places. To be honest, I was a little disappointed. It was their pop record, and referenced a whole bunch of music from The Kinks to The Who that I didn't yet know anything about. I didn't totally get it, but the band had earned the benefit of the doubt with me and so I kept at it for nearly a year before I realized that it was, in fact, actually genius.

Swervedriver - "The Other Jesus" [From Ejector Seat Reservation]

Swervedriver - "Plan 7 Star Satellite 10"

[Bonus track from Ejector Seat Reservation]

Pinch of Jamaican Soul: Essentials Mix

I've never done a mix before on this blog, but I know that my attempts at spreading the Jamaican Soul bug have gotten some of you ill by now, and I figure it's time to finally wipe you out with the sickness.

Here are 11 tracks that I consider essential, tracks I never get sick of and which epitomize all the things that draw me to this music: deep pockets, majestic singing, rainbow smears of harmony stacks and eccentric, warm productions. Some of these are fairly well known to fans of the genre, but others may have been overlooked in the reggae cannon and deserve a better death.

I left off anything by Delroy Wilson and early Bob Marley and the Wailers because I've got big plans for those mp3s in the near future. But this is still the cream of the crop. Enjoy the fever.

1. Matumbi - "Brother Louie"
2. Dennis Brown - "Man Next Door"
3. The Slickers - "Johnny Too Bad"
4. Myrna Hague - "Touch Me Baby"
5. Lee "Scratch" Perry - "Set Me Free"
6. Cornell Campbell - "Ten To One"
7. Keith & Tex - "Stop That Train"
8. Jimmy Cliff - "The Harder They Come"
9. Pat Kelly - "Somebody's Baby"
10. The Tartans - "Coming On Strong"
11. Twin Roots - "Know Love"

Keri Hilson in Pop Futures

If pop were traded on the stock market the best tip I could give you right now would be to bet it all on Keri Hilson. Not just because she's stunning to look at, or because Timbaland hand picked her as his personal grooming project and used her more than any other guest vocalist on his cameo-heavy Shock Value. Bet on her for the reasons I am. Because not only did she sing on Shock Value's best tracks ("Scream," "Way I Are," "Miscommunication"), managing to class up beautifully inventive songs soiled with the obnoxious thug posturing and inane raps of Timbaland and his friends, she co-wrote those same tunes. Which would make her the only mainstream diva figure that I know of who's authoring her own material.

This is the kind of story that's fun to tell, and she's going to get famous off people telling it. But I don't think it makes her a gimmick, and in my experience the hook is more than just pro-rating her singing and writing skills based on her good looks. Because I came to her the other way around: first falling in love with those handful of tracks on Shock Value and their female vocals, then noticing that they all featured someone named Keri Hilson, then learning that Hilson was a co-writer, then learning that Hilson has been writing hits for years for people like Britney Spears, Chris Brown, Mary J. Blige, Ludacris, Usher, and Ciara, and then finally seeing a picture of her.

I know that there's no such thing as overnight success, and that even being just a pretty face or just a pretty voice takes a ton of focus and hard work and disappointment before you can get to a point where you make it look easy. But there's something about Hilson's trajectory as a writer-first that is extra charming to me, and I really fall for the stories about her being all business and makeup-less concentration in the Atlanta studios where she came up producing.

In a minute she's going to put out her debut album, In A Perfect World, that will naturally feature production by Timbaland, as well as other Timbaland disciples like Danja, Xzibit and Polow da Don. The first single "Energy" is a bit rich for my tastes, with its glistening high hat programming and super-bright mix, but I've got affection for the way the bass doesn't drop in until the ending tag of the chorus. And that toasted synth that blasts in on the bridge is so goddamn pleasing I've forgiven the song's sins of perfection.

And that, in general, sums up my conflicted love for Keri Hilson. She's moving in some pretty slick waters and I can only hope she manages to keep letting her soulfulness peak through the airbrush treatment. So far, so good.

Keri Hilson - "Energy" [From In A Perfect World]

Timbaland - "Scream (Feat. Keri Hilson and Nicole Scherzinger)" [From Shock Value]

Timbaland - "Hello edit (Feat. Keri Hilson and Attitude)" [From Shock Value bonus disc]

Keri Hilson - "Where Did He Go"

Shining a New Light on Wolf Parade

I've been wanting to do a post about Adam Franklin and the band Swervedriver that he fronted in the '90s (they've just reconvened for some touring after an almost 10-year break), but it's almost beyond me. Swervedriver had a greater influence on my own music than any other artist. There was something about the tone, both sonically and compositionally, that seemed to mirror my own sensibilities most closely: Despite a large, heavy sound, with souped-up mixes and a beautiful, distorted blur, there was a detached cool to it that I appreciated. It was like an overreaction and a regretful calm in one. It made me think of Kerouac and Hunter Thompson as much as Dinosaur Jr. or Sonic Youth. It was the most romantic, noisiest thing I could find to listen to and also the most sophisticated. When the band slipped into a coma, and Franklin started putting stuff out alone, first as Toshack Highway, and then under his own name, there was never a slack moment. The scope might have narrowed a bit, but that tone was still there.

There's so much high-quality material to write about, material that I want to do some justice to, that I've let myself get overwhelmed with my own expectations. And so instead I've written nothing at all.

I will try to do something about that soon with a post about Swervedriver and Adam's other projects (besides releasing Bolts of Melody earlier this year, he just started a collaboration with Interpol's Sam Fogarino called Magnetic Morning). But since he just released the "Shine a Light" single, a Wolf Parade cover, and Wolf Parade themselves have an astounding new record out, this seems like the appropriate thing to share.

I love Franklin's take on "Shine a Light," so much so that it encouraged me to give Wolf Parade a second chance. I had them pegged as another kind of band, more fashion than passion. But At Mount Zoomer has all of the energy of groups like Animal Collective and Deerhoof who are trying to tear their way out of the wet sack of convention through sheer energy alone, but with a tighter focus and better production value than those groups. I'm still discovering Wolf Parade and this record and really shouldn't try to say any more than that, except that I'm in that beautiful, unfolding stage of half-understanding with them that is one of the best things about coming to new music.

Adam Franklin "Shine A Light" (Wolf Parade cover) [From Shine A Light single]

Adam Franklin "Birdsong (Moonshiner Version)" [From Bolts of Melody]

Adam Franklin "Sundown" [From Bolts of Melody]

Wolf Parade "Soldier's Grin" [From At Mount Zoomer]

Wolf Parade "Fine Young Cannibals" [From At Mount Zoomer]

Ken Boothe

Ken Boothe was a hit-making machine from the start, first as Clement "Coxsone" Dodd's protogee and, later, on his own and with Conscious Minds, the group he formed with B.B. Seaton. Of all his Rocksteady successes, he's probably best remembered for "Everything I Own," the hit he made with producer Lloyd Charmers. But Boothe, like Delroy Wilson and Alton Ellis, is one of the masters and you only have to dig a little into his prolific output to find some of the finest treasures of Jamaican soul.

Boothe has a couple of secret weapons - the way he plays with going flat and then pulls it back on pitch at that last second of acceptability, and a move where he shreds his own throat to make the note bleed. But I think what I love most about him is the way he pronounces words, a little snarl that makes his low-key crooning sound kind of antagonistic at the same time.

Ken Boothe "Just Another Girl"

Ken Boothe - "Set Me Free"

Ken Boothe - "Old Fashioned Way"

Ken Boothe - "Say You"

Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship Emerging

Keep in mind, this is all tentative. There's nothing final about this artwork, or about these mixes, but at some point soon Trevor Naud (of Detroit's Zoos of Berlin) will unleash a record of brutal, surreal and bite-sized epics under the name Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship. Most of the tracks clock in at just over 2 minutes and are like the corpses of pop songs that were torn in all directions on a medieval rack. The sounds are slurred and distorted and Trevor's baritone is more ominous than usual. It makes me think of the stories I've read about David Bowie wigging out when he was deep into his occult and cocaine phase.

I rarely get to spill the beans on a work in progress on this site, but because Trevor is my friend I'm privy to all sorts of classified state secrets (which I'm willing to sell if the price is right).

Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "A Head For Gabriel Dove"


Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "The Game As A Hunter"




There's no release date yet for the Hidden Ghost album. But you can get the Zoos of Berlin EP for $2 right now through their myspace page. I saw Zoos open for The National last Saturday and it was an impressive show. As usual, they played their asses off, but finally with a sound system that could do their level of detail justice. I guess they're working on their full-length at this very moment in a large industrial space they rented for the month. Okay, I feel like the Perez Hilton of indie rock and I'm going to stop now.

Zoos of Berlin "On Large Amusements."

Sigur Rós - Downsized Hymns

The work of Sigur Rós rarely seems to fit my world. It's one of those cliche-but-true observations that they make music as glacial and wide-open as the landscape of their native Iceland. And though my life can sometimes feel like it's moving as slow as an iceburg, it hardly ever warrants a soundtrack as closing-credits epic as the slow-building, major chord bombast of your average Sigur Ros opus.

About four years ago though, I did have one brief, meaningful experience with their album ( ). On Christmas I came down with the nastiest flu I've ever caught. It was malaria-grade. I had the week off work and spent it shivering in my bedroom alone, mostly in the dark (I was single at the time, and my roommate was out of town). I hallucinated. More importantly, and I don't know how to really explain this, all of my memories came back. Smell was a big part of it. I could remember every beach, every blade of grass, every perfume... By the morning of New Year's day the fever had broken and, as the sun came up, I put on ( ) and drank a cup of coffee, knowing that my memories had started to fade back away, and that I was going to lose them for good all over again.

In that instance, with my life dimming before my eyes and the dawning of a new year literally happening outside my window, the scope of Sigur Rós seemed appropriate. But those kinds of moments are an exception, and most of the time I'm looking for a smaller beauty. With this new release, Með suð í eyrum við spilum, the band seems to be trying to downsize a little bit. To, say, maybe the dimensions of a mere cathedral, rather than a Scandinavian fjord. To that end, I admire the perky percussion and ADD Animal Collective-isms of album openers "Gobbledigook" and "Inní mer syngur vitleysigur" and their attempt at a major stylistic change. It's a short-lived shift though, and by the third track they're back to their old hymn-like ways and much of what remains is Sigur Rós as usual, impossibly wide and sweeping.

Sigur Ros - "Gobbledigook"

Sigur Rós - "Su› I' Eyrum"

Jamie Lidell - Live Photos - Bowery Ballroom, New York

Photos by Nicolle Medina.

Click here for the hotness.

Tangerine Dream - Beginings of the Synth Collapse

Tangerine Dream was always an art project more than a band. Founder Edgar Froese had come to Berlin to study at the feet of Salvador Dali after all, and surrealist rot was sure to cave in any traditional rock notions the group might have had at the outset. But damn. People were shocked when Radiohead traded in its guitar-symphonic band tricks for the hollowed-out deconstructions of Kid A, but that transformation had nothing on what Tangerine Dream did to itself in the short span of their first three albums. They literally melted away all traces of acid rock and abandoned their native instruments to make sound collages with boxes and wires.

Sophomore album Alpha Centauri (1971) is a snapshot of the Dream collapsing under the weight of first-generation synthesizers; a burial so swift that by '73's Atem all traces of actual guitars and drums had been obliterated, with only the smoke of Moog squiggles and mellotron drones left hanging in the air. Which is kind of a shame, if only for the loss of Chris Franke's astounding drumming (Franke had just joined), best captured on Centauri track "Fly and Collision of Comas Sola."

This is an edit. I chopped off a good five minutes of obtuse space-phaser noodling - it just hasn't aged well - and faded in on the storm-in-progress of unresolved organ chords and Astral Weeks flute riffing. This goes on for a good five minutes, but trust me when I tell you that the wait is worth it to appreciate Franke's drum lighting finally bursting the rain clouds. Best. Drum. Tones. Ever.

Tangerine Dream - "Fly and Collision of Comas Sola" (edit)

Jim Noir is for Summers

With summer's thick swelter fully upon us (it passed 90 effing degrees today in Detroit), records like Jim Noir's Jim Noir become seasonal necessities, like flip flops and beach towels. There's a quote on his homepage from The Independent that calls this album "nothing less than the laptop Pet Sounds." I don't really have much to add to that. Besides recalling The Beach Boys, its filter of lovingly worked out electronics puts it in league with artists like Caribou and Pas/Cal who've found a modern home for the Beach Boys' sun-dappled sound.

To be honest, I'm not even a fan of the Beach Boys. I find them kind of annoying. But I'm now a fan of Jim Noir. I had a near-transcendent experience last night driving home to "On A Different Shelf," which I love for its beautiful synth fugues and a vocal round at the end that out-Spiritualizes Spiritualized.


Jim Noir - On A Different Shelf

Jamie Lidell's Jim was supposed to be my soundtrack of the summer. But I do believe one Jim has trumped another. Jim Noir is no joke and, though I'm slightly uncomfortable hocking another man's wares so blatantly, I have to say: get it immediately.

Jim Noir - Happy Day Today

Jim Noir - Same Place Holiday



Okay. I like one Beach Boys song. This is a demo, I think.

Beach Boys - All I Wanna Do (demo)

The Cavedweller is a Heartbreaker

Danny Scales is a heartbreaker, and I predict it won't be long before the rest of the world knows it. He records as The Reflecting Skin and it's audio heroin - a stream of extra-color that'll make your head go back, your cells open up and your body fill with worship. Sure there are other ways to get that emotional high but precious few works of electronic music, or any music for that matter, are cut at this potent of a grade.

Till recently, there have only been a few tracks to prove it as Scales has yet to release an actual album, just the odd song on a compilation. And for now at least, he's given us one more. "Cavedweller (Instrumental Version)," was just released on iTunes, off The Synchronicity Suite, another typically excellent compilation from Moodgadget Records.

How to even describe "Cavedweller" without making a gushing fool of myself? I can't. It begins quitely, fading in on a thump and bass line already in progress, while small synth howls sprout from underneath. Tonally it promises nothing, and has only the reverberations of something sad and already finished. Then there is a bit you could dance to before Scales grabs the flight controls and plunges the thing into a nose dive of catastrophic synth chords and beautifully brutal distortion. By the gorgeous last third you feel like you're sitting beneath the bombing of Dresden, with the heavy ordinance of digitally pulverized sounds diving around you. In what is becoming characteristic of The Reflecting Skin, it sounds like romantic impulses turning into destructive urges.

Fans of M83, My Bloody Valentine, Clark and any other music that manages to be epic, pretty and damaged at the same time are going to flip for The Reflecting Skin. Whenever Scales decides to finally come out of his cave.

Listen



Buy it on iTunes

Al Green: Nexus of Soul

Old Soul and New Soul have converged - or rather collided - in the reedy, joyful nexus of Al Green's voice. Al Green, one man, two sides of the same soul coin: a swirl of carnal smiles and yearning spiritualism.

After wandering in the wilderness of religious sentiment for years now, Green has emerged with the Good News and cut an album of love songs. He hired the Roots' Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson and James Poyser to produce. He also invited neo soul stars like Anthony Hamilton and John Legend to come make good on the free soul schooling they received at the feet of his now-legendary records.

None of the Roots' next-level production perspective is present on Lay It Down, just the sound of classic era Al Green. But that's okay, because classic era Al Green is more dangerous than people realize. For one, the snare was illegally deep; halfway between a kick drum and cannon fire (when I first heard Green as an adult I looked at my friends in shock, like, "am I the only person who hears that snare?"). And for another, Green is a bizarre singer. Sure, his is a voice like lotion - an aural aphrodisiac of candles and roses. But for Green the act of Feeling It is a holy thing, revealed in performances that stir screeching, shouting and lullaby mumbles in the liquid of his croon.

Al Green - "All I Need" [From Lay It Down]

Al Green - "What More Do You Want From Me" [From Lay It Down]

Al Green - "Simply Beautiful" [From I'm Still In Love With You]

Al Green - "I Gotta Be More" [From Al Green Is Love]


Adendum:

Neo soul is better now than ever, as some of the following cuts by Green's recent collaborators can attest. But if you're the praying type, pray for the return of D'Angelo. Voodoo is a record the music world has yet to come to terms with. It's more than just a sex-you-up suite. For musicians looking for a higher education, it's a PHD in pocket. It is, in a word, advanced. May his return cometh nigh.



Anthony Hamilton - "Do You Feel Me"

John Legend - "Lets Get Lifted Again" [From Get Lifted]

The Roots - "Baby (Feat. John-John & Malik B.)" [From Game Theory]

The Roots - "Rising Down" - [From Rising Down]

Start of my Heart

In a post last year I wanted to gush about Joan As Policewoman's song "The Ride." I wanted to tell the story of the mysterious concert bootleg cassette that arrived in my mailbox about 10 years ago featuring a performance by Black Beetle, the band Joan Wasser formed with Jeff Buckley's ex bandmates, which was recorded at the first Buckley birthday memorial. I wanted to explain my surprise then at how good and deep Black Beetle were, how Wasser's low croon reminded me of a cross between Chrissy Hynde and Billie Holiday, how stunned I was to hear those songs and that voice coming from the woman I had previously only known as Jeff Buckley's girlfriend and the violinist from The Dambuilders. I wanted to explain my relief, after Black Beetle fizzled without releasing a studio record, to find Wasser fronting a band again under the name Joan as Policewoman and releasing the exquisitely realized Real Life.

I wanted to say all of those things and more. But all I could manage was: this song is more Sade than Sade. And now, as she prepares to release new album To Survive, I still don't have anything to add. Just listen.

I mean... the woman can purr.

Joan As Policewoman - "Start of My Heart" [From To Survive] mp3

Joan As Policewoman - "Eternal Flame" [From Real Life] mp3