[The Record Crate] What's in a Name?

I’m not sure whether it is a good or a bad thing that bands have freed themselves from simple names, opting to be more than The Somethings. For a while in alt-rock, it seemed like everyone had blue in their name; recently, “wolf” and “deer” names were all the rage. On one hand, it’s just a name, it doesn’t matter, but I like a band name to inspire confidence. I figure if you are putting in enough hours to make a band, don’t hobble it with a lackluster name. I gotta think the guys from Hoobastank feel me on this, now that they are on the D-list.

Case in point: Say Hi to Your Mom, not helped much by shortening it to Say Hi, is a charming as hell, emotional dream-pop band from Seattle that I’ve avoided just because the name seems foolish. I’m glad someone pulled me aside and set me straight, otherwise I might have foolishly missed them this Friday at Spanish Moon.

About a year ago, someone coaxed me into driving out on a Sunday evening to the Magnolia Café in St, Francisville (though really, it doesn’t take much coaxing, that place is a musical and culinary gem in a jewelry box of a town) to see The Mother Truckers, unprepared for the roots rock explosion, combining off-the rails backwoods guitar wizardry by Josh Zee (also of Protein) and the many sultry charms of singer Teal Collins. I have never been so thankful to be dragged to a show than that one. By reading this, consider yourself dragged to Chelsea’s on Thursday.

Trenton Van Plummer’s Circus of Strings, now there is a name with confidence behind it. The Indianapolis singer songwriter and ensuing carnival live up to the acoustic grandiosity they profess, and are at the North Gate on Wednesday. The Cinema for the Ears presentation by LSU’s experimental media labs is exactly that—a presentation of strange and often breathtaking compositions composed for the 27-channel ICAST sound system, a confluence of amps and speakers with enough precision and juice to make sound a tangible physical presence inhabiting the room with you. Don’t miss this illuminating presentation of the next phase in music on Wednesday evening at 8 p.m.

Monotonix, a badass name for a badass band, likely the loudest, most frenetic power trio from Tel Aviv that you will see this year, is at the Spanish Moon this Saturday.

Monotonix

Link to original with local events calendar

I tried to get them to put the water jug in front of my head

but it wasn't big enough to eclipse the giant meatball resting on my shoulders. This is a pic of the OA panel at the Book Festival is from the blog of Sara Roahen, author of the essential Southern food exploration Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table, seated in the middle. On the far left is Ada Liana Bidiuc, and on the right with his head cut off is Marc Smirnoff of the Oxford American.

A little soul mining of my own

A friend remarked on his status that he was listening to The The's Soul Mining for the first time in 15 years, and that sent me into a tailspin of brilliantly crafted British Pop, blue-eyed soul titrated through the sieve of New Wave, the fey trying to be tough, the tough being fey. "Appetite" by Prefab Sprout is one of the oddest pop songs ever - the lyrics bend at the wrong places around a melody you can't really pin down, the lyrics, well.... if you take, then put back good/if you steal, be Robin Hood. And yet, it is swooning perfection, a tempest of synthetic strings whirling up out of it.

And sweet baby Jesus once uttered, "They should do an acoustic version of Two Wheels Good" and butterflies in heaven heard this utterance and fluttered down to the tangled English garden in which Prefab Sprout often suns itself, and whispered the sweet baby Jesus' request in their ears and they complied, tacking them on the remastered CD.

No butterflies were involved in the crafting of The The's tortured Dusk, a record whose brilliance I never really grasped until I heard Prefab Sprout playing while at a neighbor's apartment ages ago, and I layed this album on him. His sad little tortured heart flipped for it, and through his exhuberance, I fell for it again. While I put Soul Mining up as the pinnacle of new wave soul, Dusk is tenderized, flayed open and smoldering, begging-to-be-feasted-upon love songs. Not sure who at epic thought Matt Johnson was such a cover boy that they had to replace the excellent cartoonish artwork and The The's iconic logo with magazine-ready fonts, making it look like a jazz record from the cut-out bin, but the hammer swings the same as it always did.

And despite Paul Weller sounding like he is trying to choke down his words on a couple numbers, I rather like The Style Council, maybe a little more than I do his previous band The Jam, in that I am tempted to play The Style Council more often than I am The Jam. Sacrilege, I know. Our Favorite Shop, known as Internationalists ironically only in the US, is my second favorite after Cafe Bleu, (winning out because it contains the frighteningly perfect "My Ever Changing Moods") but is jaunty, socphisitcated fun, pitting his socialist leanings in the yachty of sonic confines.

And maybe I love it so because it sounds a little like The (English) Beat's Special Beat Service which I will once again proclaim to be one of the great pop albums ever, even better than Soul Mining, which is saying a lot.

5 Things on Old Blues Records

From here, and also on the first page that came back
from a Google Image search for old blues records.

The discussion about modern blues records that I referred to in my previous post got me thinking about what I really mean when I say old blues records:

1. The common complaint with modern "slick" blues recordings is that the scratch and the lo-fiedlity of older recordings are part of the fetishization that goes along with the blues. The phrase blues records is often prefixed with old when evoking a positive description: Tom Waits style has the appeal of old blues records . When a contemporary rock artist gets a little too noodly for his (our) own good (taste), they are sometimes disparaged as haing made just a blues record.
   
2. And one should consider that the old blues record is a very conscious, mannered art form. In social practice, blues songs would go on forever, until the dancers left the floor, while the three minute-limit espoused by pop/rock conservatives was dictated by the limitation of what one could put on a side of a 78 (often songs were extended over to the second side when the session was cooking.)
3. Old blues records were very consciously recorded in studios, engineered to maximize their effects on the playback of the day, to maximize sales. I was listening Zia on KLSU today play (I think) a Sonny Boy Williamson side and the harmonica tore through the scratch and the hiss while the rest of the band existed as a burbling murmur that launched it. If you've ever listened to a blues 78 through the horn of a Victrola, you'll know why the harmonica is a weapon of choice; it rattles the whole machine and the room when it plays, much in the same way Enrico Caruso's voice did on his records. It's the same principle that makes Dr. Dre albums sound so good on a stereo with a heavy bass - it's a psychical exploit of the technology. Maybe if modern blues records were recorded with that sense of exploit in mind - see Duwayne Burnside or James "Blood" Ulmer (who might actually be meta-blues, but whatever) for examples of people who do - they might sound better to our ears.
   
4. Modern blues recordings are engineered usually to modern tech spec, where everything can be heard and it flies against what we (or I) think of as blues. Fat Possum and Bruce Dickinson have become legends replicating the lo-fidelity of old blues records in modern technology, Danger Mouse has revolutionized pop production by sounding old. The Daptone sound feels fresh because it is actually anything but.
5. And it could be that as a white guy listening to the blues, I have an unconscious desire for it (black music) to sound ramshackle, for there to be a noble savage aspect to it. A specific example of this: I was talking to Teddy at Teddy's Juke Joint about T-Model Ford, and brought him a CD hoping it would spur him to book Ford out there. Teddy, it must be said, is a masterful DJ, spinning records that weave a groove through the crowd as he narrates the evening into the mic. I've heard him go from Grover Washington Jr to Lil Boosie and it sounded not only inspired but organic. So I asked him to throw on "Cut You Loose" by Ford, a song where it sounds like his guitar is strung with barbed wire, and while I thought it was glorious coming out of his sound system, it fell completely flat on the largely black crowd who was thankful that T-Model Ford's old timey bullshit kept to three-minute limit. Teddy recognized this immediately and threw on seven minutes of velvet Pendergrass to clear the air. That old timey blues sounds like the ugly past, and it is understandable why any black listener today would want to distance themselves from that, and all too unfortunate that many white listeners embrace it. The real static, it seems, in my feelings about crackly, tinny old blues records, might not be between the needle and the groove, but between my ears.
   

Louisiana Book Festival Recap

The photos I took during the festival all bore a patina of ennui which is in direct contrast to the event - as action packed as a literary event should be. Both the discussion panels I served on were well-attended despite the fourteen other ones happening at the same time. Lots of great conversations with editors and writers and cards were exchanged and ideas were sprouted and opportunities revealed at a rate quicker than I could gather. I sold a couple books, enough to cover the ones I bought.

Really I want to write a new book every year if for no other reason that to weasel an invite to the authors party where, between stuffed mushrooms, I observed that William Joyce looks like a character from one of his own children's stories, heard a great story about being an exterminator and talked the relative merits of modern blues records with some new friends, all without dribbling gourmet gumbo on myself or the computers in the state library. I do plan on one day patenting my idea of an hors d'oeuvre plate with a pistol grip underneath and a notch to hold your wine glass, so none of you mf's to whom I told this idea better steal it.

Thanks to Jim Davis and Robert Wilson for organizing such a great event, my wife for supporting this writing habit, Marc and Carol Ann from Oxford American and the Fox-Smiths from Country Roads for making me feel like a big shot, Scott for doing the blogging panel with me, Ian for letting me lay the splendor of Teddy's Juke Joint on him, and Baton Rouge for being cool enough to maintain this thing.

If Claes Oldenberg made swingsets

If Claes Oldenberg made swingsets, originally uploaded by real_voodooboy.

www.oldenburgvanbruggen.com/

You've been blogged

You've been blogged, originally uploaded by real_voodooboy.

This is an example of liveblogging...