My Little Corner Of The World – Volume 62

by Vinh on June 22nd, 2010

The Rolling Stones – Exile On Main St. (1972)
I’ll admit it, I’m still not convinced by this band but that doesn’t mean I have given up on understanding exactly why The Rolling Stones are regarded as one of the greatest bands ever. Every now and then, I feel the need to get into The Stones but it doesn’t always work out for me. I may get burned for it but my last foray into this great enigma was when I drunkenly purchased Let It Bleed a while back on the strength of ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. With the exception of a couple of other tunes, I was left scratching my head as to why that album was considered one of the greats. The recent reissue of Exile On Main St. provided another good opportunity to take another look. Obviously, this album has always had an aura about it. The name of the record is synonymous with rock ‘n’ roll history, it’s just I’d never actually listened to it before. But before you start thinking that the point of this piece is to announce some kind of great musical awakening for myself, let me just say I am still not convinced. As I went through the 18 tracks here, there were obviously some tunes that I did really enjoy. ‘Rocks Off’ is fantastic and the same can be said for ‘Shine A Light’ and ‘Let It Loose’. As a fan of much of the British music of the 1990s, I understand that many acts like The Verve, Primal Scream, The Charlatans, and many others drew inspiration from the music of The Stones and this album. Personally, I see it as a bit of an inconsistent and over indulgent piece of rock ‘n’ roll. I know I could make myself a mix cd of various Rolling Stones tunes and it would be one of my favourite CDs but I’m still searching for that special album from them that makes me sit and up and accept these guys as the legends so many others take them for. Initial reviews for Exile On Main St. were not exactly favourable and I find myself leaning toward that opinion too. Believe me, I’ve tried but in my world, The Rolling Stones remain a decent rock band and nothing more. If we’re talking legends from this era of rock history, I’ll take The Beatles, Dylan, and The Kinks every time. So where do I go from here? Word has it that Sticky Fingers is a bit of a classic…. – Matthew James

Monahans – Low Pining (2007)
Last night, I leave a concert in Austin shortly after midnight and point my car into the darkness of west Texas. On my GPS, I have a truck stop dialed up and I make it there in time to catch a three-hour nap in a cramped backseat. Way too soon, sunrise calls me back to the highway. As I pass an exit for Monahans, TX, I cue up the debut album by the band from Austin. When Low Pining came out, I was hooked by the band’s use of space to paint sonic landscapes that stretched to distant horizons. I imagined what Sigur Ros might sound like if Iceland was actually an outpost town somewhere west of Fort Stockton floating on a remote stretch of I-10. As I drive the highway, the music and the world beyond my windshield fuse together with no visible seam. On ‘Undiscovered’, Greg Vanderpool sings “Undiscovered, commonplace, quiet, tranquil and alive/rolling lands laid out like a linen/no transgressions under the mud/see it all so concise and vivid” as the scenery creates a natural video that no director could recreate. The music moves slowly with the occasional burst of noise, not unlike a ride across Texas where each city is surrounded by an ocean of silent wasteland laid out in every direction until the next steel oasis breaks the horizon. ‘Traveling Song’ builds momentum like an 18-wheeler working its way through the gears until it crests a rock-strewn pass and careens down to the desert floor. As an acoustic guitar lightly moves over a simple bass and snare pattern, ‘When You’re Down’ weeps through the speakers as a slide guitar brushes strokes of despair across a lonely night. Combining Americana sensibilities with indie textures, Monahans provide one of the more interesting albums in recent years. – Jason Lent

Justin Adams & Juldeh Camara – Soul Science (2007)
British guitarist Justin Adams has been a primary exponent of the largely overlooked African music crossover for a decade — beginning with 2000’s entrancing Desert Road — and his first collaboration with Gambian artist Juldeh Camara bears perhaps the venture’s sweetest fruits. One can rightfully be wary of projects of this ilk in which figures from disparate circles join forces; there’s always that risk of diluting the heart of their craft for fear of overstepping. Soul Science isn’t a case of watered down essences, it’s tradition cannonballing into a vast sea of possibility — two worlds of blues colliding. While Adams rips and roars on his axe and Camara tears it up on his one-string riti, bassist Billy Fuller and percussionist Salah Dawson Miller furnish the duo with a fierce band to flesh out these fizzy ditties. On ‘Naafigi’, the interplay between Adams and Camara is stunning as the two engage in a sportive call-and-answer whereby a gritty guitar riff is met with that fantastic fiddle. Neither budges, vying for the requisite zeal to emerge victorious. It’s an arresting stalemate, torrid and propulsive — the enduring image of good friends desperately attempting to one-up each other. Opener ‘Yerro Mama’ — a title which, as it were, sounds like another crude exchange pals might engage in — partakes in this spirit of competition as well, Camara grunting and hollering, puckishly taunting Adams in hopes of taking his counterpart’s eye off the ball. Soul Science sees two of the globe’s foremost contemporary bluesmen heading back to the playground and refusing to concede an inch, this stubbornness in turn weaving a motley tapestry either party would proudly claim as its own. – Vinh Cao

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Some Loud Thunder (2007)
Perhaps the definitive issue of the music industry during the last decade was how to produce, distribute, and sell music when new technological advancements made it increasingly easy for the listener to bypass the traditional and legitimate methods of obtaining music. Most recently, some artists with similar stability have followed Radiohead’s example of letting fans pay what they want for an album and countless others now offer up their entire albums to be streamed instantly and for free, whether on Myspace, NPR, or someplace else. Before this, though, Brooklyn’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah made an equally astounding breakthrough by releasing their 2005 self-titled debut without record or distribution deals. They managed to sell more than 125,000 copies, a relatively staggering number, and became indie Internet darlings due to their infectious melodies, bouncy danceable beats, and Alec Ounsworth’s indecipherable wail. For their follow-up Some Loud Thunder, though, they turned it all on its head. They signed a distribution deal in the UK and, with the help of the legendary Dave Fridmann, reappeared with a dark, challenging sound that initially alienated many fans. For starters, I thought something was wrong with my speakers when I popped the CD in for the first time; the fuzz on the opening title track was so thick I could barely hear whatever else was going on. Admittedly, I shelved the album for a couple of months until their name popped up on festival lineups and I decided to give it another shot. As it turns out, not only does the band manage this shift into new territory incredibly well, it was a logical step from the sugar-coated ecstasy of the debut. Rather than repeat themselves, or attempt to gain more mainstream accessibility, they added an edge. That opener is brilliant, and ‘Mama, Won’t You Keep Those Castles In The Air And Burning?’ has enough of that pop mastery to keep fans of the debut satisfied. But the masterpiece and best example is ‘Satan Said Dance’, a seemingly never-ending trip through hell, if hell is an awful dance club, which I’m inclined to think it might be. You don’t want to move your feet anymore, and the sounds continue to verge on unlistenable, but there is something absolutely evil in there that you just can’t resist, and really you don’t want to. – Paul Bulow

Major Lazer – Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do (2009)
It’s so goddamn hot that I can’t even think. I haven’t been running the air conditioner this summer because I can’t afford it, so for the past month I’ve been exercising various home remedies for not going insane from the heat. I’ve had a box fan on me everywhere I go in my apartment, I’ve been putting my shoes in the freezer overnight, I’ve eaten more Fla-Vor-Ices than any reasonable adult should, and I’ve been on a steady diet of easygoing beach music along the lines of Real Estate, Julian Lynch, jj, and Ducktails. But today, right now, the line has been crossed. Fooling myself isn’t working anymore, and now I’ll just have to become one with the sweaty, sticky, disgusting position I’ve been placed, and there’s no better soundtrack to this feeling than Major Lazer’s Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do. While most club music would do okay in the same position, none strive to the extent Major Lazer does to collect musical trends from every sweltering, humid corner of the globe. The album opens with a heat-stroked guitar riff that sounds like it was lifted from a John Wayne movie and then switches to pulsing surf rock strumming on ‘Hold The Line’, and doesn’t let up much from there. ‘Can’t Stop Now’ is derived from Jamaican dancehall tunes, ‘Lazer Theme’ is built from a jangly punk rock guitar riff and a dub style drum beat, ‘Cash Flow’ is a steady reggae jam, ‘Jump Up’ is based on reggaeton and Latin hip hop variations, and ‘Mary Jane’ has heavy weed talk buttressed on both sides by a thick horn section and throbbing back end 4/4 beat. But the best parts of Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do are when Diplo and Switch take to straight up club numbers, a skill few are better at. ‘Keep It Goin’ Louder’ might just be the funnest song to have been released last year, with Ricky Blaze offering the most tasteful use of autotune I have yet to hear, Nina Sky crafting the instantly singable chorus “I’ve got the girls in the truck bout six chicks deep/and you know what we rollin with is straight sexy”, a jittery backing beat setting the tone and frosty synths moving the track along. Meanwhile, ‘When You Hear The Bassline’, ‘Bruk Out’, and ‘Pon De Floor’ are coated liberally in the muggy feeling of the club, the first molten and boiling like lava, the second containing marching percussion and fidgeting synth lines, and, well, you should probably just watch the music video for the third to get the sense it is conveying. It’s still hot as hell, and while I may still not exactly be comfortable, at the very least I feel like my situation is being understood with Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do. – Brian Riewer

Jorge Ben – Africa Brasil (1976)
Riding too high can be awfully perilous. Brazilian pop maven Jorge Ben was grazing the sun by the early 70s, heralded as his country’s brightest star while concomitantly striving for what would become his artistic apex. Now, he wasn’t as outspoken as many of his tropicalia cohorts nor did his songs foster caustic political discourse. Ben relied on little other than the enchantingly doe-eyed allure of his compositions to earn his place among South America’s legends, displaying a cagey grace and facility with the rubrics he would conflate. This knack was also the one knock on his work. What came effortlessly verged on cutesy at times, as his mingle-mangles amplified the airiness of his stylistic base, lifting it to altitudes beyond our plain of sight. Forca Bruta and A Tabua De Esmeralda, two of his most celebrated full-lengths, don’t always feel present — grounded. He had to get down. And down he went, introducing earthy rhythms to his patented samba-rock. ‘Meus Filhos, Meu Teusoro’ flaunts this exhilarating marriage of Latin and African flair, as Ben’s ludic voice is braced by a frothy groove transporting his catalog from the dainty clouds to the dingy club. There’s an air of danger to the juddering bomb, a sensuality and malice in the irresistibly blithe harmonies elevating Ben well above the throes of callow pop. In a sense, Africa Brasil feels like a rite of passage: festive, fundamental, and endlessly funky. Forget wax wings, this one’s all about the chicken wing. – Vinh Cao