Exodus

As you may have noticed from my dutiful workaday Songblague postings, I haven't had much of a summer vacation. It's OK. Work sets you free. Oh wait, that came out real wrong. Anyway, I'm not really looking at a ramp-up in leisure time. But the Dees are heading out on the road for a 2-show tour culminating in a minor league baseball stadium gig in Lexington, Kentucky (the other gig being a retirement home, and it won't be our first trip there).

So this is my excuse to take a week or so off. I'm gonna be inexact because I'm not planning that far ahead. But I'll probably be antsy to post again by midweek, so check back next Wednesday or so. Meanwhile, here's a totally dynamite nugget of late-model Judaica that is totally incongruous with spending a few days in Red America. L'chaim!

Masada - Meholalot

Sweet music is your best friend but will always leave you

I've realized something about myself. The sweeter the song, the catchier the hook, the worse my mood after listening. Enjoying that immediacy puts a spring in my step alright. Maybe I jump around. But make me have a conversation or put up with the slightest annoyance right after, and it's Mr. Hyde time.

It goes to my new theory that music is the absolute best thing ever, but only when it's happening. From the sublime, unfolding shapes of Cecil Taylor's improvs to the mental sugar rush you get with ace power pop, it all fizzles to a terrible letdown when life resumes. For me, there is no spillover. The noise of talking, doubt, fear, and regret don't get newly painted over. You don't wake up singing from the blissful dream. You wake up and get ready for work.

Here's a tune that made me happy for hours the other day inside the bubble of repeat. However unfortunately named, these midwestern kids exude the incomparable joy of spraying the air with tunefulness. And then it's over.

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Sink/Let It Sway

Francofilthia

I like to think that I'm not a particularly sleazy person. Most people who know me would say I generally live on the clean side, even if my mind immediately goes to the most tasteless joke that any situation suggests. Which makes me a bit disgusted with myself for the things that force themselves into my mind when this song comes on.

What's going on here? A teenage Jodie Foster coquettishly singing a greasy, mid-temp disco number about how "life is cool when you have a crush...surrounded by meadow flowers and violence" etc. Apparently, it's from this movie that she also starred in about an American schoolgirl getting deflowered in Paris. I haven't seen it, but the song suggests a drugging and brainwashing subplot. Maybe it's the album cover—Jodie all awkward and toothy kid-faced—but the whole vibe just seems wrong. Of course, musically speaking, it's so right. Cheers to whoever did that synth bit! It sounds like an evil ghost hand holding something forbidden in front of your eyes and then pulling away as you try to grab it. Or whatever.

Songs like this won't do anything to dispel any stereotypes about French depravity. I don't think Serge Gainsbourg had anything to do with this, but his spirit is all over it. Let's hope that's the only part of him that got all over it. Alright, I'm going to go take a shower now.

Jodie Foster - La Vie C'est Chouette

Sweet Africa

The Ethiopiques compilations—featuring Ethiopian pop from the '60 and '70s—have offered an embarrassment of musical riches over the last decade. Not only as an archival exercise, but also a valuable corrective to Western pop conventions, especially with singers. Notwithstanding the Joanna Newsoms of the pop map, it's really amazing how narrow our ears are in terms of vocals. We're awfully conservative in what we consider tonally pleasing. And we're even less tolerant of melodies that color outside the bar lines. A lot of Ethiopian stars would be considered novelty acts in America.

Here's a track from more recent times, involving Ethiopian and European musicians together—a little smoother and whole lot clearer than the older jams. I like it because the singers are doing pretty things that unsettle at the same time—a piercing lead melody that charts like a sine wave and a response that trills and grunts. It takes a minute to sound natural, but when it does, it's a breeze of new and friendly air, as lilting as the music behind it. Oh and also I appreciate any soprano saxophone that doesn't make me want to set myself on fire.

Yèshimèbèt - Medo Hane

Room to breathe

You know what's hard? Not making sound. Especially when you've got instruments right in front of your face. Like today's song. I'm constantly amazed not just at Harold Budd's melodic restraint, but also how he resists the temptation to resolve his ideas. Maybe it's a genetic predisposition to give direction to movement, but very few people have the instinct to make music that drifts, hangs, or lingers without coming to a comfortable rest. It's what separates the good ambient work of people like Budd and Eno from pony-tailed New Age baloney.

This piece feels like an un-hurried reach, an unfolding that reveals nothing. But with a slight sense of disturbance that keeps a small but necessary part of your brain at rapt attention.

Harold Budd - The Room of Ancillary Dreams

Double exposure

OK, here's one that's so nice, I'm gonna give it to you twice. Sorta. So Gabriel and Fripp played on each other's solo albums around the same time and decided to each take a turn at this song. If you can really call it a song. It's more like a riff and an attitude. Or an attempt at attitude. Which is maybe why I like it so much—2 overeducated English prog vets trying to be all 1978 New York dance-gritty. It's an awkward fit and its success and failure are equally endearing.

Of course, there's also the dork appeal. All the instruments are playing in different times. Hear it? Drums in straight 4/4, bass in a slinky 5/4, rhythm guitar in 3/4 but with self-effacement worthy of James Brown. And how about that bass. Tony Levin sounds like he's trying to rip the strings clean off. And of course, those heavenly Frippertronics fluttering around.

I like Gabriel's decision to make it lumber, with the bass all big and a slight delay in the snare as it whaps across the stereo field. And it's cool to hear him all out of his comfort zone with the speak-singing. Then he builds up to a shrieking that captures a depravity he's rarely equaled.

Peter Gabriel - Exposure

Interesting to hear how Fripp plays it. In a sense it's none too surprising—an academic exercise in letting Eno speak slowly while his guru gets some prime audio real estate with a sentiment that seems way less profound than it was meant to. Luckily, he's got that howling lady to steal the spotlight. With the rhythm section set deeper back, the tension rises. You get the sense of a bunch of elements that don't really fit together and seem to anxiously co-inhabit space. Maybe this was the 1978 feel they were looking for.

Robert Fripp - Exposure

Quiet is still the new loud

I never understood why such deliberate and sensitive-minded folks like these would give themselves such a terrible band name. Kings of Convenience? It sounds like a discount furniture store in Bay Ridge. Matters aren't helped by having a song title that awkwardly calls this to mind. Well, any clutch hitter will tell you that a two-strike count is the best launching pad for magic. Not that this tune is exactly magic. More like a quiet home run under a microscope.

Kings of Convenience - Me In You

Clear as a belle

I've never been good at having easy Sundays. I have a hard time letting time ebb and flow. It either needs to carry cargo or justify its accumulation in any one place. There's probably some correlation between playing drums and tending to keep your own time measured within bar lines. I'm working on it. Meanwhile, here's a song that has those long exhalations I'm trying to master. And also Neko Case's voice, always a beautiful bell.

Neko Case - Star Witness

If a man's gonna eat fried chicken, he's gotta get greasy

Staying on the topic of licentiousness, it's interesting to consider the geographical/cultural variations on how it's shaped into art. Let's take Kenny Rogers. In contrast to Leon Ware's domesticated, slightly over-the-top chivalrous approach to seduction, Kenny's tale of bonged-out redneck sexplay invokes the rambling drifter archetype who isn't too concerned about controlling his environment or even himself. And it's served it up in a swampy twang funk that smells a little suspicious. It's sort of hideous to imagine Kenny himself doing any of this stuff, but I bow to the tastes of his demographic, at least the one from those pre-cudddly-Kenny days.

Kenny Rogers & The First Edition - Tulsa Turnaround

Our ESP is so complete

So the thing about booty music is that you can almost never enjoy it in terms of its original intent. I'm a big fan of resisting the temptation toward irony, but if you put this kind of stuff on when you bring your date home, well, you're just leading with your chin. That said, I am so into Leon Ware right now. You probably haven't heard much about him, but he's the one who did the music for Marvin Gaye's I Want You—one of the least subtle records you will encounter. Apparently, he was persuaded to give away a completed album of his own to be the backing music for those songs of depravity. But Leon's got too much talent to be a behind-the-scenes guy. This track comes from his own masterpiece, Musical Massage. And that's pretty much what it is.

Leon Ware - Instant Love

They're playing our song

Whether you love or hate David Sylvian's voice, you've got to hand it to Japan. It ain't easy to be all dark romance, late Cold War continental rainy day music with a fretless bass slinking through it all. There are times when I think songs like this represent the peak of refinement. Or at least set a bar that the 1980s mostly failed to vault over.

Japan - My New Career

They'll only miss you when you leave

Some people get nostalgic about band reunion tours (see: recent Guided By Voices news).  I, on the other hand, get excited about compilations from a band most famous for being pre-Band of Horses for some of its members but given too little credit for being more interesting and more soulful than anything by Band of Horses.

In light of this and the inevitable mid-July sluggish weird feeling that creeps up.  This song creeps up on you too, but in more of a cozy blanket of heartbreak kind of way.

Carissa's Wierd - Die

Digital love/like

I'm no vinyl snob, but it just seems right to enjoy bands like Shalamar on turntables every bit as much as crackly Bix Beiderbecke records. Of course, with the former, you really shouldn't have to shell out more than the price of a hot dog for the pleasure. To that end, I was pleased as pie to find Shalamar's Friends album in a flea market dollar bin a while back. It lives happily in my living room alongside similarly beat-up—but now much-loved—musical orphans. But I'm a modern guy and I recognize the importance of having a healthy breadth of strut soundtracking options when you're out and about. Pops and crackles or no, I'll take the tradeoff. Give this hot little number a listen, and I trust you will agree.

Shalamar - Don't Try To Change Me

Memory doppelgänger

In some alternate version of my adolescence, I would come home, head straight to my bedroom, slam the door in a vague angsty fury, and crank Siouxie and the Banshees records. (In reality, it was usually a Smiths record and I was actually very polite with my door closing.) As a variation within a variation, let's say Siouxie was replaced by these English synth rockers. And let's say my name was Simon, and I grew up in a generically suburban place where modifiers like 'shore' and 'beach' weren't used in the names of the local strip mall shops.

These days, hearing music that sounds like other music from years back makes me think less of those sources and more about all the little differences that accumulate enough so that the alternate history seems so tantalizingly untouchable. And yet, part of me keeps trying to claim ownership of those other lives. Hmm...

All that aside, this song wins big points not just for its icy, yet full-throated catchiness, but also for rocking it out in waltz time. Thanks to the always excellent Mutant Sounds for posting their debut EP.

Indians In Moscow - Big Wheel

Haze on the highway

I rarely feel hemmed in by the city. There always enough spots to feel like you're someplace else. Or no place at all. But sometimes I do get the urge to hop in my imaginary car and hit the road. This is a strong contender for the song I'd put on as the key slides into the ignition. If John Lennon were from Detroit, he might've come up with this one. Clearly, it's not just Swedes who can conjure these classic sounds.

Tame Impala - Lucidity

People out there turning music into gold

All heat waves need their theme songs, and this one fell in front of my face just in time to take its rightful place. This John Stewart (who looks less like Jon Stewart than Garry Shandling) was a '70s folkie who found some minor acclaim after linking up with Stevie and Lindsey of Fleetwood Mac. You can hear her adding some extra fuel to this slow burner. Listening to it, I picture ominous scenes in the kind of fading evening light that does nothing to relieve the heat. I only wish I'd gotten my hands on it before putting together a barbecue soundtrack. The whole album is great, by the way. Worth laying hands on.

John Stewart - Gold

OK alright OK

In the past, Songblague has taken issue with the insistent lyrical canard about how everything's gonna be alright. We have much more love for songs that evoke the feeling itself, offering an existential lift which, in its disarming breeziness, inherently suggests an aftermath from something traumatic and maybe best not looked back on. The ones that are free of new age mumbo jumbo are especially sweet. And that's what we've got here—a wide open sky of a song, charmingly dorky, like the face you make when you acknowledge a fondness that's less than love but equally magnetic.

As a side note, I keep imagining that this is what the Weekend At Bernie's soundtrack would've been like if David Byrne had scored it. Maybe this would've appeared during the end credits. Meanwhile, Happy Fourth to everyone. Back at you next Wednesday.

David Van Tieghem - Flying Hearts

Soul reflections

I realize summertime is all about things turning outward, but let's take a moment to put that impulse in reverse. Even in the hours of stretched sunshine and heat that eclipses subtle impressions, there are moments of piercing introspection. If there's a music for taking a microscope to the soul, it's this. I love the mysterious, spare interplay at the beginning, but it's the haunting voices in the middle that kill me, like sirens pushing at every contour of your fear, dread, and bewilderment. And then suddenly, piano and guitar again—less mysterious now—shedding a redemptive light on the way out. I feel like I need to spend about a month alone with this piece out in the woods.

Luciano Cilio - Primo Quadro da Della Conoscenza