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our brief reviews of new releases
8 December 2006
The younger brother of Curtis Stigers can certainly hold his own when it comes to making great pop rock. The seven-track album gets off to a good, rocking start with “Ride With You” that has all the Southern-fried strut and swagger of the Black Crowes or the Stones. Just as appealing is the moody, mid-tempo and hook-riddled “End of the World”, which seems to have a great deal of roots oomph coming off of it. But the singer-songwriter can also tone it down for a finer, acoustic effort such as “She’s a Woman” that glides along without a care in the world. A cover of John Hiatt’s “Riding With the King” is a bit of a stretch, much like it was for Eric Clapton and his attempt at the same song with B.B. King. But things get back on track with the quirky but effective tale of being at home with family during “House of Your Own”. A soulful “Slow Time” also seems to work quite nicely.
[Amazon ]
—Jason MacNeil 12:00 am
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7 December 2006
Fresh Maggots, Fresh Maggots . . . Hatched (Sunbeam)In any other year, Fresh Maggots… Hatched would easily have claimed the title of best maggot-themed album of the year. Released in 1971, it will instead always take the backseat to a certain Funkadelic jam. No shame in that, though; what’s here is certainly strong enough to stand on its own. Teenage duo Mick Burgoyne and Leigh Dolphin play acid folk as if they thought a tab was a form of musical notation and not something to trip with, which is to say that their clear-headed playing avoids the main pitfall of the genre: its frequent descents into self-indulgence. With brevity as an organizing principle (the “epic” here is six minutes, and nothing else tops four), the Maggots do indeed stay fresh; rather than meandering aimlessly, electric guitarist Burgoyne’s ferocious fuzzgasms grow out of the compositions organically, and the band never lets its head float too far into the clouds to lose sight of its roots in classic folk, as demonstrated on the absolutely gorgeous, lightly orchestrated “Rosemary Hill”. Only when the band attempts to get philosophical lyrically on “Who’s to Die?” does it reveal its adolescence, but that faltering moment aside, Hatched is a remarkably assured debut—and finale, alas, though Sunbeam’s loving restoration recaptures the jaunty, Bolanesque non-album single “Car Song”, along with a live radio session.
[Amazon]
—Whitney Strub 12:03 am
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7 December 2006
Hamilton de Holanda plays a 10-string mandolin. He plays it really really well. He plays it fast when he wants to, which is quite often ("01 Byte 10 Cordas"), and slow and pretty when that’s what he’s in the mood for ("For You to Stay"), and everything in between. His hot little quartet is right with him every step of the way; this is basically Daniel Santiago’s trio plus de Holanda and Gabriel Grossi on harmonica, so there is a little more latitude for the band, which stretches out a few more times than when it’s just Santiago’s band. De Holanda is a true musical searcher—his record this year with Mike Marshall is a real mandolin hoedown—and tracks like “Small Country Train” and “Hermeto Is Playing” will capture your heart by messing with your head. Top marks for this cunning and fun record.
[Amazon]
—Matt Cibula 12:02 am
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7 December 2006
 The Tongue is a young Sydney MC recently signed to Elefant Traks, one of the two premier hip-hop labels in Australia. He got signed on his freestyle talent, apparently, but you can’t really tell what an MC’s freestyle talent is like on record. Well, not on Bad Education, the artist’s debut EP, at any rate. It’s a result of the limited Aussie hip-hop community that an unknown like the Tongue can pull in guests as high profile as Urthboy (and indie songstress Bertie Blackman) and a range of top-shelf (for A-hop, at least) producers. The downside of this is that each producer brings their own style, swallowing most of the Tongue’s individuality in the process. From the heavy electro backing of “Bad Education” and “Counterfeit Cheques Remix” to the ‘70s happy-jam of “The Punch”, the music careens this way and that. The Tongue’s Aussie-accented delivery isn’t the speediest, but it’s heartfelt, and he’s inherited some of the Herd’s political outrage: “Don’t think when you vote? Then you’re not like me”. The Sex Pistols rip is a little blatant, but let’s chalk it up to inexperience. Take this young talent into the fold, Elefant Traks, and one day he may find the spark to ignite a larger audience.
[Amazon]
—Dan Raper 12:01 am
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7 December 2006
AG, Get Dirty Radio (Look)As a member of the legendary uptown crew Diggin in the Crates, Andre the Giant knows how to pick his beats. For Get Dirty Radio, his first solo album in seven years, Andre wisely chose to record in California, allowing him easier access to the top-shelf underground production from the likes of Madlib, Jake One, and DJ Design. AG hasn’t updated his style much in the last decade, but he still sounds sharp on tracks like “Gigantic” and “Say Yeah”. He also avoids the hip-hop proselytizing and endless references to back in the day that drag down most rappers past their salad days; AG sounds like he still likes rap, and isn’t just recording out of nostalgia.
[Amazon]
—A. L. Friedman 12:00 am
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6 December 2006
 She may have played a bigger country star in Nashville than she ever became in the actual music industry, but Ronee Blakley’s largely forgotten musical output of the 1970s easily merits reconsideration. On her second album, 1975’s Welcome, Blakley operates at the intersection of country and confessional singer-songwriter methods, to generally potent effect. From the disarming nostalgia of “Idaho Home”, to the understated melodicism of “If I Saw You in the Morning”, and then to the stark piano of the closing title track, whose arrangement complements the lonely desperation of its lyrics, Blakley manages to survey a wide swath of sonic terrain within a fundamentally boilerplate format. Credit producer Jerry Wexler for some of that, but blame him, too, for somehow turning several Muscle Shoals sessions into what sound like dimestore-bought country schmaltz; the intrusive, out-of-place saxophone that sabotages the otherwise powerful “Need a New Sun Rising” offers particular cause for chagrin. Blakley herself isn’t immune from occasional oversinging; “She Lays It on the Line” descends into overwrought bombast with its cries of “I believe in you”. Fortunately, such flaws fail to detract from the album’s main strength, Blakley’s sharp songwriting. Informed by the women’s liberation movement’s demands for personal autonomy, tracks like “Nobody’s Bride” and “Young Man” take assertive, progressive feminist stances; on the latter, Blakley insists a younger lover “understand you’re not the only man I know” before claiming her right to nonetheless “want you in my bed”. Damn right: self-definition, with a nice melody to boot.
[Amazon]
—Whitney Strub 12:03 am
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6 December 2006
ActionReaction, 3 Is the Magic Number (Hope Division/Equal Vision)Emocore has lost another soul to the allure of indie rock. Jason Gleason, ex-frontman for Further Seems Forever, has joined forces with old friends, Bella (keyboards) and Salvatore Ciaravino (bass) from New Jersey’s Element 101, and delivered a debut album of meditative, jangly-guitar and swirling-moog driven melancholia. 3 Is the Magic Number may be lighter fare than the dark side of post-hardcore but a moody sense of gloom still prevails on the majority of the cuts here. Those songs which work best, particularly the opener “Sinner’s Algebra” and “Can You Hear the Sun”, relinquish some of this tortured reflection in favour of catchy guitar hooks, funky bass line and ‘60s style keyboards reminiscent of the alternative-rock bands coming out of Australia and New Zealand in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, these all too brief moments of rock clarity are not enough to save the rest of the album from a plodding repetitiveness. With similar structure and tempo, plus highly-polished, precision production replacing the edginess apparent in live recordings of their shows, one song begins to bleed into the other until ultimately your attention starts to wander in the direction of happier, sunnier times.
[Amazon]
—Alan Brown 12:02 am
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6 December 2006
 Scott Solter is the go-to engineer and producer at San Francisco’s Tiny Telephone Studioes, as well as an experimental composer and soundscapist. This year’s One River, by Solter, was a work of piercing clarity and slow-moving beauty, almost devoid of conventional music forms like beat, key and melody. With this CD, Solter turns his considerable skills onto the work of Pattern Is Movement, a post-punk, post-melodic, post-modernist quarter out of Philadelphia. Solter recorded the band’s Stowaway in July 2005, then added copious amounts of—his words—machines, grease, razor and tape to the results. The album at hand gives us three of his reconfigured compositions, alongside their original Pattern Is Movement versions. “Witkin Dub” is a buzzing, distorted remake of “Two Voices for Two Sections.” “You! Glasstone” a mystic-aura’d alternative to the ethereal avant-pop of PIM’s “Talk Back to Me”. And “Blanched and Threshed Beats” strips the off-kilter harmonies of “Maple” down to rhythmic elements, with only occasional vocal flourishes. In all cases, Solter seems ready to squeeze any remaining pop easiness out of PIM’s already austere compositions, splicing dissonance and industrial abrasiveness into the floating harmonic structures. On headphones, the distortion approaches assault, fracturing sleek sounds into alienated buzz and hiss—you may even find yourself checking your speaker wires! Still, there’s an intellectual questing, a search for beauty beyond the conventional that makes Solter’s half work, even if it does make the fairly challenging PIM originals sound like radio-friendly pop.
[Amazon]
—Jennifer Kelly 12:01 am
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"End of the World" Streaming
