Monthly Archives: November 2016

Back in the ‘90s, if a listener desired to hear some uncut soul, they almost certainly turned to recordings at least two decades old. But as Daptone Records’ fresh compilation of The Poets of Rhythm makes clear, it didn’t have to be that way. Anthology 1992-2003 corrals eighteen tracks of raw Soul/R&B/Funk exuberance of Clinton-era vintage and intriguingly Germanic origin, and as it plays it’s frequently outstanding. That it also serves as the impetus for this music’s contemporary resurgence brings the record sizeable historical élan.

Unsurprisingly, this set’s excellent liner notes open with a succinct background study into The Poets of Rhythm that also stands as a testimonial on their behalf, and what’s immediately notable is how this combination of info and enthusiasm offers a perspective of substantial worth. Therein, the writer opens by relating his first exposure to the band in 1995 and a few lines later sums up this discovery as providing him with the evidence that soul music “wasn’t dead.” But it’s really the name at the bottom of text that drives its importance home; it’s signed by none other than Bosco Mann.

Many will recognize that nom de guerre as belonging to one Gabriel Roth, for as the Grammy winning producer for Booker T. Jones and Amy Winehouse, bassist/bandleader for Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, and just as notably, as co-founder of Daptone Records, Mr. Roth has been at the forefront of Soul/R&B/Funk’s renaissance as a thriving, “living” music for the 21st century. And quite striking is how a figure so instrumental in the revitalization of this aesthetic once considered the source of his passion to be located completely in the grooves of decade’s old records.

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“I am the youngest of three children. My sister is 10 years my senior and gave me my first mix tape (yep, those actually existed) when I was 7 or 8 years old.”

“It had everything from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to Pearl Jam’s “Alive” and even LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out.” This small piece of plastic with 21 songs opened up the world to me. It was rebellious, it was lyrical, it was emotional, and it was raw. The artists didn’t all sing with pretty voices. They just sang with what they had. The imperfection in the artists did not matter and, if anything, were reasons for celebration.

I found this break from the norm glaringly obvious in Dave Matthews Band’s CD, Under the Table and Dreaming. Go ahead, laugh. Shake your head in disagreement. But to a ten-year old kid in 1994 when this album was released, it was revolutionary on the Pop/Acoustic Rock scene.

His guitar playing and song writing broke away from the 4/4 time signature, broke away from the four chord songs I was used to hearing, and created space for improvisation with unconventional instruments instead of your typical guitar solo. This influenced my desire to study jazz in college as a bassist. This influenced the instruments that I wanted in my band. It also influenced my song writing to pull out some of the darker emotions I felt and to write about my inner demons.

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The Vinyl Guide is a weekly podcast for fans and collectors of vinyl records. Each week is an audio-documentary on your favourite records, often including interviews with band members and people who were part of the project.

It’s hosted by Nate Goyer, a self-described vinyl maniac who enjoys listening to records and sharing the stories behind them. Despite his Yankee accent, Nate lives in Sydney, Australia with his wife, 2 kids, and about 1,500 records. (But only about 1,000 of them his wife knows about.)

The Vinyl Guide takes records one by one, telling the tale of how they came to be, why the work is important, and then shares how collectors can tell one pressing from another. Learn more at the TheVinylGuide.com or simply subscribe via iTunes or RSS feed.

This week, we have Chris Robinson formerly of The Black Crowes and now with the Chris Robinson Brotherhood and we’re talking about his history, his music, and of course his massive record collection. Chris is quite the vinyl collector and can’t seem to stay out of record stores while on tour. Check out the new LP If You Lived Here, You Would Be Home By Now available here, as well as the tour dates for the Chris Robinson Brotherhood.

And this week we also plunder through the new Record Store Day Black Friday release list. Lots of stuff there—mark your calendars for Friday November 25!

For a significant portion of his career, Lee Fields was known only by the heaviest of funk and soul lovers. However, beginning in the late ’90s his profile began to rise in direct proportion to the fledgling neo-soul movement, and together with crack band the Expressions he’s grown from an artist primarily descended from the innovations of James Brown to one offering a broader and very rich early ’70s template with an inclination for slow romantic burners; his latest is Special Night, and it continues his evolution with assurance and verve. It’s out now on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through Big Crown.

Had Lee Fields quit the biz after the 1979 release of Let’s Talk It Over, he’d still be remembered for the bright rays of funky sunshine his self-produced and funded LP (on his own Angie 3 imprint) provided to heavy-duty aficionados of soulful groove. Reissued first in ’97 and again in an expanded edition by Truth & Soul in 2013, even with its maker securely ensconced in hypothetical retirement mode it’s basically a cinch the LP would’ve returned to store racks.

This observation mainly comes down to an abundance of vigor and sturdy execution, though if certainly influenced by James and the J.B.’s, it’s also clear that Fields, who began his recording career in 1969 with the “Bewildered” b/w “Tell Her I Love Her” 45 for the Bedford label, was no mere clone. Vocally, there is an undeniable similarity to Brown, but even in the walloping motion of “Funky Screw” there are subtleties of approach as the album’s title track points the way to Fields’ latest effort.

Obviously, the man didn’t retire, though the ’80s didn’t produce much, but at the point of his hookup with the Desco label in ’97, he’d been busy playing shows and releasing CDs and cassettes throughout the ’90s. Reading that he was on the roster of Ace, the storied Mississippi-based and initially New Orleans-centric label in the days prior to its sale to UK reissue entrepreneurs might seem enticing, but in fact this material, which reportedly suffers from weak production and a reliance on synths, remains out of print and mainly discussed in relation to his Desco debut.

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Sure, TVD’s Record Store Locator App with its GPS functionality directs you to where we think you’d probably like to be physically. TVD’s Radar is to inform those other sensibilities—the smart stuff that’s hit our in-box.

“Crowded House are delighted to announce they will be streaming LIVE an upcoming rehearsal at their private studio in Auckland ahead of their Induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame and the bands four SOLD-OUT Encore shows at Sydney’s Opera House via the band’s Facebook page. The Facebook Live stream facebook.com/crowdedhouse will commence at 10:30pm Pacific on November 15/1:30am Eastern on November 16 and will include the band’s rehearsal plus a fan-led Q&A. Fans wanting to submit questions can call in phone numbers to be announced via the band’s socials early next week.

Crowded House frontman Neil Finn said,”On the cusp of our special Encore performances on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, we’re excited to have an opportunity to play and engage with our friends and supporters around the world live streaming for an hour from the heart of rehearsals, unscripted and intimate as hell. It will be a joyous occasion that can be shared by one and all.”

Viewers of the stream will be able to catch a sneak peek into the band’s imminent Sydney performances, which are set to occur nearly 20 years on from the band’s Farewell to the World 1996 tour and the set-list which will be drawn from the bands six studio albums, Crowded House, Temple Of Low Men, Woodface, Together Alone, Time on Earth, Intriguer which along with the 1999’s rarities album Afterglow, have all recently been released as deluxe editions.”

“Nothing beats listening to my favorite albums on wax. I’ve always been an album guy, and vinyl records, for me, facilitate the necessary conditions for proper enjoyment of an album. The couch, the stereo system, the atmosphere, the lighting; everything bends to the will of the record once the needle drops.”

“Growing up in the ’90s, I experienced firsthand the minimizing and accessorization of the art and packaging (and ultimately the vibe) that was the unintended result of music going entirely digital by the early 2000s, and after going from cassettes, to CDs, to minidisks, back to CDs, onto to mp3s, and now streaming, it became clear that so much of the original context of people’s work gets lost in the details.

When all people have is a little track on their phone at the end of the day, something is missing. Records, to me, are the best way of retaining all of the integrity of an album and delivering the emotive experience to the listener as originally intended.

My record collection, while nothing to write home about, has become my little greatest hits of all my favorite bands. If I fall in love with an album, I feel compelled to add it to the shelf. Right now I’m really excited about my recent pick up of an original UK mono edition of Rubber Soul, and Nick is lending me a live Can record from France, circa ’75, which has some pretty insane stuff on it too. I also tend to keep Stereolab’s Mars Audiac Quintet next to the player as my go-to record these days for general life-living.

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Are you ready to hear some blaspheming? Good. Here goes. I never much liked the Clash. I know. I might as well be saying I never cared much for the Beatles, which is also true. I always thought the Clash’s revolutionary shtick was a total shuck—so much posturing—and much preferred the wild-eyed nihilism of the Sex Pistols, which may have been posturing as well but was far more amusing. Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, and Company simply left me cold, because they talked the talk but talk is cheap, so cheap that any huckster can engage in it all day long.

But I love Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros, and especially 2002’s Global A Go-Go, the last Mescaleros LP released during Strummer’s lifetime (2003’s Streetcore was released posthumously). Global A Go-Go was a brilliant exercise in genre bending, with explorations grafting various types of world music with good old rock and folk. There’s a lot of exotic percussion and great violin, to say nothing of some gnarly fuzz guitar and all manner of cool beats from here, there, everywhere. Why even Roger Daltrey makes a guest appearance on the title cut, and how cool is that?

Global A Go-Go is great from beginning (the sublimely lovely “Johnny Appleseed,” which features one of the best choruses I’ve ever heard) to end (“Minstrel Boy,” the almost 18-minute take on the Irish folk traditional). Strummer was a sponge, absorbing all the music he heard coming out of the wild mélange of exotic stores and restaurants on the streets he walked down in what he called his “humble neighborhood.” This is especially noteworthy on “Bhindi Bhagee,” a cold dead brilliant shuffle dominated by one wonderful flute and an equally great violin. He’s walking down the road and runs into a third-world stranger looking for mushy beans, and Strummer says he may not be able to find mushy beans but goes into a wonderful and rushed description of the whole universe of foods available in the immigrant-crowded neighborhood he calls home. Meanwhile the percussion makes you want to dance, Strummer welcomes the stranger to his new home, and a very fierce guitar joins in, leaving you both euphoric and spent.

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Press Play is our Monday recap of the new and FREE tracks received last week to inform the next trip to your local indie record store.

Red Pill – Fuck Your Ambition (Instrumental)
Adam & Elvis – Hanging Tree
Honey Lung – Real Reason
Spelling Reform – For Clair Patterson
Black International – Shining Swords
Lampshades – Thrills
High Violet – All I Want
Litche – Will You (feat. Loui Abell)

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
Little Barrie – Love or Love

The Gods Themselves – Tech Boys
The Chainsmokers – All We Know (Fareoh Remix)
K V A S I R – First Throws
STEL★LEO – Opal
Tony Moxberg feat. Fabolous – Wutcha Wana Do?!! (Remix)
Fabian Mazur – Make it Bounce
AutoErotique – Slew Dem
Kamixlo – Angélico

It’s not exactly a state secret, but plenty of people don’t know (and need to know) the horrifying truth; before he turned into the pop superstar who gave us such classics as “Piano Man” and “Uptown Girl,” Billy Joel was in a heavy metal duo called Attila. They released one LP, 1970’s self-titled Attila, and you will frequently find it on lists of the worst albums ever recorded. And small wonder. Attila kinda sound like a retarded Deep Purple. Lots of organ noodling by Joel, you know? And the cover! Billy looks like a New Jersey medieval knight, with hair way down to here and a mustache that is frankly offensive. Oh, and he’s surrounded by dead meat hanging from hooks. I don’t even have to listen to the album when I want a laugh; I just look at the cover.

We all make youthful mistakes, but this one is a doozy. Attila featured Joel on organ and Jon Small on drums, and Joel himself has written it off as “psychedelic bullshit.” But that’s nothing compared to the review written by one AllMusic critic, who opined, “Attila is undoubtedly is the worst album released in the history of rock’n’roll—hell, the history of recorded music itself.” No one, he adds, has ever matched “the colossal stupidity of Attila.” Me, I don’t think it’s that much stupider than most of the works of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and it’s a tad less pretentious, so I’m inclined to give Attila a break. But make no mistake about it. This is an album so dumb it transcends dumb and almost becomes genius, that is if you look upon it as satire, which unfortunately Joel and Small didn’t. They were serious as a heart attack-ack-ack-ack, which seems impossible when you listen to songs like “Brain Invasion.”

As for Joel, he wisely skedaddled with Small’s wife after the LP’s release, ending the collaboration, and went on to disprove F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adage that there are no second acts in American life. And good thing, too, because if Joel had stuck with Attila, he’d undoubtedly be working in the meat-packing plant where the cover shot was taken. Instead he became a balladeer and sometimes rock’n’roller, and is worth approximately $83 billion dollars. As for Small, he forgave Joel and went on to produce some of Joel’s LPs, as well as the greatest hits of Run-DMC and a concert film by the sad remnants of Lynyrd Skynyrd. The world can be a surprisingly lenient place.

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