Craw, 1993-1997

The world of avant rock sometimes seems like a party, or maybe a movie, that I had to leave in the middle of and came back a while later and...well OK, where has it gone while I was away?

The band Craw is maybe a good example. I have been listening to the three-CD compilation of their music 1993-1997 (Northern Spy NS070). It is a guitars-bass-drums-vocals band that I have not had the pleasure to hear much of until now. Wiki tells me "they belonged to the harder-edged branch of the math rock or post-hardcore movement." From Cleveland. Broke up around 2002?

OK, the categories mean nothing much to me. But hearing this three-CD set, which appears to be their first three albums, tells me they are on terrain I recognize. It is elaborate hard-core post-punk/post-metal. They start as a band that sound very manic and hyper, but somewhat familiar. By the third album they are completely onto something their own.

The "math rock" element, I get it, has to do with the complex coordinated segmentation of time they mastered. Much of it has an incredibly driving block-power sound that is strikingly asymmetrical.

You can hear the progression clearly. By the time of the third CD (Map, Monitor, Surge 1997) they have become an avant powerhouse wholly their own. The first two disk-albums give us the process and in themselves are fascinating to hear and livelier than some may wish--very edgy, extreme hard aggression, in other words. By the third album they are still edgy in the extreme, but have a tightness and total mastery on the domain they rightly claim as their own.

This music is not for the faint at heart, to say the very least. But it is fascinating, moving, hard-hitting and I would say an essential listen for anyone serious about the avant extremes of art rock and its development. Whew!

Thinking Plague, In This Life

There are some bands so different and original that I find myself pausing. What to say? To start, we have today a reissue of the 1988-89 art-rocking album In This Life (Cuneiform Rune 407) by Thinking Plague, remastered and reissued on its 25th anniversary.

The band grabbed some underground attention with the album at the time. It was released in 1989 on Henry Cow's/Chris Cutler's Recommended Records as the band's third, part of the art-prog-post-rock-in-opposition movement. I missed it then, but hearing it today it gives you a timeless artfulness that most definitely sounds as fresh as ever.

The Denver-based outfit features for this disk Mike Johnson's wiry and very unusual compositions and the vocal tang and lyrics of Susanne Lewis for a standout set that sounds like nothing before or since, truly. Fred Frith makes a guest appearance on guitar but otherwise this is has electric and acoustic instrumentation and orchestration that does not classify so easily because it is so original.

It is song-form oriented with some very elaborate instrumental parts. I cannot say what it sounds like, because it sounds like nothing else. There are reed-guitar-key combinations that are uncanny, there are some ethnic-minimalist percussion and electronics, there is so much not easily described that I am afraid the hearing cannot be readily replaced by words--and that is pretty much one of the highest compliments one can give. When words fail, you KNOW something good is up. Or the very opposite. Here it is a matter of innovative excellence.

They are apparently working on a new album for Cuneiform. That will be something I'll look forward to. In the interim we have In This Life! Get it! Wow!

Dave Anderson's Blue Innuendo

To get to it straight off, this is NOT a guitarist's album. So why am I posting it on this blog? Because it is a very together organ band headed by a very together tenor man, and as that it is a model for such things today, the guitarist's role being played to perfection, as is the role of the organist, the drummer, and...of course the tenor.

Dave Anderson is the tenor (and soprano) man in question. He leads the band through a set of hiply swinging originals on Blue Innuendo (Label 1 2003-2). This is music rooted in the toughness of hard bop, yet fully modern in its tang of the beyond. It is no accident that Dave dedicates one of the numbers to Joe Henderson, for there is some of that sophisticated, hard-driving facility going on here, plus Dave himself showing his own way through nicely.

Dave Anderson sounds great, with plenty to say on both horns and a way of saying it that channels sax soulfulness and a true sense of what matters, yesterday and today.

Pat Bianchi on organ is a model for the extensions of organ bop-soul into now. He makes me smile as he always seems to. Tom Guarna, the guitarist, has a perfect presence in the ensemble and solos with authority. He also in his own way channels bop-and-after giants yet sounds original and contemporary.

Matt Wilson on drums comes through as he ever does as the swinging giant so necessary for the success of this kind of thing.

It's a model for how the organ-band roots can be enacted but with the modern complexities brought to the fore at the same time. A blazer, a hip disk is this! Hear it.

Permanent Clear Light, Corneville Skyline

Permanent Clear Light I have posted on at length on these pages. It is no fluke as I consider the Finnish band the best neo-psychedelic song-oriented unit out there, the best thing since the XTC came at us in the guise of the Dukes of Stratosphear.

Permanent Clear Light is getting ready to release its new album this year. As a taste of that last December they came out with a single, "Corneville Skyline." It was released on a 7" vinyl slab named Friend of the Fish (Fruits de Mer), backed with Ex Norwegian's "It's A Game." Only 50 copies were pressed, so I guess there is no way of getting that--but I believe you can still find "Corneville" one way or another if you do a little Googling around.

I have not heard the Ex Norwegian tune but "Corneville" is everything you would expect from Permanent Clear Light. It is a song that of course could have come out back in 1967 or 1968. The psychedelic Beatles, early Floyd and any manner of other folks come to mind, yet this is NEW music. The arrangement has that spacy voluminousness of the classic era, a blend of what sounds like cello, guitar and the band at large, really just right, totally authentic but totally right now as well.

It's a great song and it only makes me look forward to the new album. Oh, I just realized, you can hear both cuts via a You Tune link. Copy and past this into your browser window https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brxVUvJh0RM

It presages much good to come in the album. It is in itself a gas!!

Terrence McManus and John Hebert, Saints & Sinners

It is a treat to hear Terrence McManus on electric guitar and John Hebert on bass for a full album of duets. The album, Saints and Sinners (Rowhouse Music ROW01), captures a free-wheeling session of the two dating from 2010 but just recently released.

It gives you plenty of space to hear the freely creative twosome in a very inventive light. John Hebert is well-known out there as a bassist of power and imagination. We don't get a lot of him in such an exposed playing environment, and that is even more true of Terrence McManus.

It turns out that they were fully primed to get rolling on that recording date. The open-form possibilities are very nicely unveiled for this set. A tumbling, percussive/legato freedom comes into play and prevails throughout.

McManus reveals his considerably evolved outside lining, chording and sound-color sculpting prowess against a consistently invigorating backdrop of Hebert giving out with asymmetrical phrases that tumble forward to create a melodic-harmonic context advanced, swinging and well-thought out in the most spontaneous ways.

The two together let their creative intuitions flow for a full set. It is a refreshing result, two accomplished free improvisers getting maximum torque from the chemistry of the interactions.

We perhaps know Hebert's formidable capabilities, but then McManus comes through here as well to establish his own far-ranging imagination and an electric sound burnished yet cutting as needed.

This is high-powered invention, a duet that never flags and goes to a variety of interesting musical spaces.

A nice one!

Gary Lucas' Fleischerei, Music from Max Fleischer Cartoons, Featuring Sarah Stiles

Like the irrepressibly creative guitarmaster-bandleader-conceptualist Gary Lucas, my most vivid early television memories involve the daily afternoon program devoted to the old Popeye cartoons. They spoke to me without fail, though having nothing very much to compare them with at the time I did not appreciate the inimitable pacing and surrealism they embodied. Around the same time I watched Betty Boop cartoons with glee, on another station, I believe the old Metromedia Channel 5, but who can be sure? In the end, much later, I came to understand how special these Max Fleischer cartoons were from an artistic point of view. But the immediacy and peculiarly hyper quality of them still hits me directly when I watch again so many years later.

Gary Lucas has been at the forefront of creating music that references and interacts with film, as anyone who follows his career knows. So when I heard that he had the idea of devoting a tribute album to the music on the Fleischer cartoons I was not surprised but also filled with anticipation.

The album is just out, Gary Lucas' Fleischerei and Music from Max Fleischer Cartoons (Cuneiform). Its birth was a somewhat complex affair, involving a convergence of Gary working out guitar arrangements on his old Gibson acoustic and Joe Fiedler working out through-arranged complements for the ensemble of himself on trombone, Jeff Lederer on winds, Michael Bates on bass, and Rob Garcia on drums. The key component to it all, the lynchpin, is provided by Sarah Stiles in her uncanny vocal personifications of Betty Boop and Olive Oyl.

There are twelve musical numbers represented on the album, including the complete music and dialog from the Popeye cartoon "Beware of Barnacle Bill."

The liners describe the madcap fusion of jungle jazz, broadway ditties, klezmer and Yiddish theater elements that went into the music from those cartoons, a microcosm of New York in the '30s but put together in incredibly zany and eccentric ways. It was a formative influence on my ears and I remember virtually all of the originals. I was just one of millions of kids (and adults) who entered this world and came away permanently changed. So what better than a Gary Lucas take on the music?

Like all projects of this sort the outcome could go either way. There was such a special quality about the originals. Could they be recreated? The answer is yes, emphatically, and in the doing the album is a furthering. Gary's guitar arrangements are stunning (listen to "Little Pal") in ways that only Gary can pull off, the band arrangements get to the hot jazz-Yiddish nexus with gusto and verve, and I'll be d'd if Sarah Stiles does not get to the essence of classic Boop and Oyl and somehow does it with real style and verve.

My partner, who grew up just like me (only halfway across the world) watching these cartoons, reacted just as I did from the first listen. "Now this is my kind of music," to quote her. I feel the same way. It is a heartfelt tribute, yes, yet it stands on its own as re-creative whole! A hoot! Beautiful!

OK, so you want to hear a sample? Here's a cut from the album courtesy of the label: https://soundcloud.com/cuneiformrecords/gary-lucas-fleischerei-the-broken-record-from-music-from-max-fleischers-cartoons My live link feature is on the fritz again so you will need to copy the link and paste it in your browser. Also check out a cool live video at https://vimeo.com/155776682

The Allman Brothers Band: After the Crash, DVD

I covered the DVD documentary Song of the South: Duane Allman and the Rise of the Allman Brothers Band on these pages some time ago (type title into search box for that review). Now we have the sequel, The Allman Brothers Band: After the Crash (Sexy Intellectual DVD 585), which covers the band and its ups and downs after the tragic death of Duane.

Around 1971-2 many musicians I knew who were into an electric improvisational thing revered the Miles Davis electric bands then leading the way along with Mwandishi and a few select others firmly in the "jazz" camp. But many also revered the Dead, the Mothers and the Allman Brothers Band as parallel innovators in the rock world. Time passed and ultimately on the rock side the Dead and the Allmans managed to survive and resurge as part of what later became known as "jamband." But it was not at all clear then that they would last. On a good night either band could further the music and draw a large concert following, but it wasn't always that way, especially in the Allman's case.

This documentary DVD gives us a very decent, enlightened chronology of what happened to the band over those years. The almost miraculous recovery of the band with Dickie Best and Greg Allman presiding with strong songs and vibrant solo work is documented on the DVD with live footage, interviews and narrative.

There was a gradual decline in the band on an artistic level and waning popularity as Greg became estranged from his bandmates via a long relationship with Cher, a pronounced addiction problem and a controversial legal situation that involved Greg providing evidence against his personal assistant in return for immunity. Plus by the eighties, as the documentary makes clear, the guitar solo-oriented rock-jam sound hit an absolute nadir. Nobody wanted a "jamband" to fill their ears, blues had gone out of style, fusion and electricity were passe, etc.

The DVD does a fine job documenting those low points. They then cover in some depth the resurgence of the band, the discovery of young Maestro Trucks as guitarist following in Duane's footsteps and their subsequent rediscovery by a new generation.

Perhaps even more time could have been devoted to their latest period but there is enough the complete the narrative, surely. And their place in the jamband resurgence might have been made more detailed.

Nonetheless in all we have a fine two-hour documentary that will be manna for Allman fans and also enlightening for rock history buffs of a more general sort. It certainly kept my attention and gave me the big picture of developments that I never had the full scope on until seeing this. Well done!