M'lumbo and Page Hamilton, Fairytale Aliens

A new M'lumbo album to me is an event, since their wall-of-sound Futurist Psychedelia is not quite like anything else out there, truly. Now we have a latest one, teaming up with Helmet guitarist Page Hamilton. Fairytale Aliens (Ropeadope) brings together Page on guitar with core M'lumbo men Robert Jordan Ray Flatow on keyboards, "suitcase symphonetta," "ectoplasmic radio," bass, electronic and acoustic percussion, voice, harmonica, and production-producer; then there is Paul-Alexandre Meurens on tenor sax, electronic and acoustic percussion, "cytoplasmic cheese synthesizer," assistant producer, flute, bass clarinet, bass, voice and shoes. They are joined at times by other friends but in the main it is the threesome who are responsible for the sprawling organic-electronic sympho-voltage.

I was surprised as I listened, absorbed, to recognize all-at-once that the M'lumbo sound is the Futurist progeny of John Cage's Variations IV, the late-'50s collage of Cage and Tudor mixing together long playing albums as an eclectic melange of musical styles, sound effects and adding live gallery sounds of visitors talking, etc. It was an innovative go of things and the M'lumbo density we hear in a most exemplary way on Fairytale Aliens is a highly original extension of the all-over sound. Not that M'lumbo deliberately sets out to "do Cage," just that the history of the future includes such things as subsets of themselves, in interesting ways.

The content though is entirely another matter. It is M'lumbo, Page and friends playing their special arrangements of some classic rock--"You Really Got Me," "Strawberry Fields" and "Sleep Walk" along with original music and special sound tapestries, etc. The mix peppers the band's large sound with samples that contextualize and thicken things, not only of the band itself playing against itself, but recorded excerpts of speeches, cartoon voices, etc that serve to encapsulate it all in a Futuristic time warp.

So the original "King of the Moon" juxtaposes segmented samples of JFK space-age speeches, cartoon snippets, into the thick musical collage for a kind of total immersion in sound.

Happily it all works resoundingly well, with Hamilton's guitar a key element on "Sleepwalk," "Strawberry" and "You Really Got Me" as typically excellent examples.  The totality of it all gives us a kind of psychedelic epic, a vintage dream of the future looked back upon and made most poetic.

And so it is certainly one of M'lumbo's best outings, moving and making total sonic sense for a kind of post-Sgt Pepper, post-Cagean, post-'60s Avant Rock studio presence into a future and so realizing the promise of the past. One must meet the music half-way because it is a complex sonic thing. If you do I think you will find it as enthralling as I do. Do not let this one slip by. Do not miss it.

Carla Diratz, Pascal Vaucel, pRéCis.AiMaNt

Vocalist Carla Diratz and electric guitarist Pascal Vaucel hold forth beautifully well on the new album pRéCis.AiMaNt (Pochette vinyl 33T). It is a series of originals with bass and drums (those latter sounds programmed by Pascal and also drum sounds compiled from field recordings) that conjures without imitating the sort of art you expected from the Tony Williams Lifetime in its first very heady days with John McLaulghlin, Larry Young and, eventually, Jack Bruce. Or also think about the quirky music-in-a-message-in-a-bottle of early Soft Machine with Robert Wyatt? That. The lyrics are poetic-personal, the vocals artfully individual, the guitar openly prog-fuze-neo-psychedelic in excellent ways, the rhythm team simply loose and jazz-rock-ful as befits a primarily accompaniment role.

Every track has its own individual sensibility, every minute has definite immediacy. Carla's vocals are absolutely tabla rasa, original, very herself, sultry-smart, musically bending and twisting over the sound skies we behold gladly. Pascal is a whirlwind in a thoughtful genie's magic lamp.

It is music that one cannot ignore, advanced and avant, very human, very hard edged yet sensitive in sensibility. In the horizon of music today pRéCis.AiMaNt is the Morning Star, a light bearing signal that comes out of the past yet signals a future daybreak maybe? Yes.

Excellent in all ways is this. Guitarists and psychedelicatessan owners take note, vocal aficionados and new electric music fans hearken! The pasture is the future-ful foddering grounds and we can hear it now! I am glad to talk about this one and I fully suggest you listen a bunch of times! Oh, yes.

Robert Zott, Baroque Blues, Vol. 1

There are DIY recordings out there in the multitudes. What it means in the positive sense is that some worthy artists get to put together some music for us that we might not otherwise have the chance to hear.

Robert Zott, guitarist, songwriter, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist gives us something of that sort on his EP Baroque Blues, Vol 1 (self-released). This is underground music that has a quirkiness that takes a listen or two to get acclimated.

It is musically quite competent but not about virtuoso chop-licking. Rather it is an intimate alternative-out series of songs with sonic extras, electronics, solid fundamental rock and blues roots, but taken to different places.

The strength lies in the convincing songs and their presentation. It is a kind of chamber rock more so than a blow-up-the-amps hard attack. And that is cool once you adjust your expectations.

Normal it ain't. And in the end, I found myself saying, "yeah, not what I would expect but it works!" If you want a break from the usual and still believe in the rock song thing you will find something to appreciate here. Beefheart meets Pearls Before Swine? No. Not exactly. But that might give you a very rough approximation?

Body/Head, Coming Apart, Kim Gordon and Bill Nace

Now that Sonic Youth is no more (for now, anyway) we have the proliferation of albums by ex-Sonics that carry on. The latest is by Kim Gordon and her friend Bill Nace, a duo known as Body/Head. Their album Coming Apart (Matador) has just been released, and it's an adventure.

The Sonics sometimes had their weirder moments when Kim might go into outside vocalisms while guitars fed back and skronked out. Coming Apart is a full album extension of such things, Kim sounding like a cross between Patty Waters and a female Lou Reed at his more bizarre, only it's Kim Gordon and so instantly recognizable as such.

Bill and Kim man the guitars, Kim the vocals. It's like Sonics/Velvets at their weirdest, and carves out further that territory in its very own way. The guitar playing is psychedelic outness that has its definite charms, provided you open your ears and take in the out abstract-artiness of it all. And Kim is her irreducible self as the vocalist-performance artist. Not always on key, purposefully, but always artistically expressive.

I like it. You might hate it. But not if you like the outside realms of the Sonics in their heyday. It takes things from there. Don't expect to hear any of this on top-40 radio!

Giant Dwarf, Rabbitwood

You listen to enough music, day-after-day, sooner or later a number of CDs kick themselves out from the bottom of the pile and say to you, "this is different. I have some music for you that goes a ways away from everything else you've been hearing." And if you cast with a wide net and not limit too much what you'll consider, just goodness as a rule of thumb, it happens more often than perhaps you'd expect.

It happened to me with the group Giant Dwarf and their CD Rabbitwood (Engine 2013). It's 16 pretty short numbers by the duo of Martin Philadelphy on electric guitar and Jeremy Carlstadt on drums. This is avant psychedelic-skronk-shred-surf-jeazzzzz of a pretty special sort. Mr. Philadelphy has a nice post-Rypdalian tork to his metallic soaring and he goes both in and out with a musicality not geared for adenoidal sludgeheads, whoever they might be. Jeremy Carlstedt plays some busy and hot drums, free and open and driving and responsive.

So leave it to Engine Records to come up with stuff like this. They often slip out this sort of release in their unassuming fashion, and you put it on--BANG! Nothing knee-jerk about this music.

You like weirdsville avant metal?? Man, you will love these guys. I think.

Alec K. Redfearn and the Eyesores, Sister Death

When you join bluesiness, avant psychedelic rock, folk rock and some kind of Goth in the spooki-est morbid-macabre way, you have something like what Alec K. Redfearn and the Eyesores give you on their album Sister Death (Cuneiform). This is a band that is so much of a piece it doesn't help much to say "it's a little like this" and "it's a little like that" because they aren't.

Alec sings and there's a female singer, too. And that works well because they both can sing. There is a kind of universal folk strain going on here, from all over the place, often taking on a minor key. But I hear everything there from Ireland to the Balkins by way of Transylvania and beyond. There's accordion in good measure, often electrified and altered. And keys in general make for distinctive ambiance throughout.

What else? The arrangements are worth the visit alone. They are very quirky and original. The songs come together as songs, dark and foreboding at times, rocking oddly at others.

This is one-of-a-kind music. You will do well with this if you are suited toward the corners of the musical universe, which most of my readers tend to pre-select themselves for. And if you like that spooky thing like I do.

Bravo!

Thurston Moore & Loren Connors, The Only Way to Go Is Straight Through

Before I go into describing the music on the album at hand I should first say that this was/is an extremely limited edition release--a vinyl LP available only in physical record stores. From what I understand this was made available to select stores on Record Store Day last month. You may have difficulty finding a copy, in other words. . .

That having been said, what we are talking about is an electric guitar duet between Thurston Moore and Loren Connors. The album is entitled The Only Way to Go Is Straight Through (Northern Spy LP). Moore, most readers will know, was a key founder of Sonic Youth who has since gone on to new projects. Loren Connors is an avant blues and otherwise musician who has been involved in a number of associations and has assumed a kind of legendary status out there.

The two crank it up for two sides of feedback, droning bends, scratchings, etchings, melodic and anti-melodic expression, and general psychedelic mayhem. The two segments were recorded live, side one at The Stone in Manhattan, side two at Public Assembly in Brooklyn.

There is good pacing and variety to be had here, for those accustomed to the more noisy a-temporal sort of avant rock out there. It is a very good set of jams. Good luck finding it. Your favorite cool record store might have a copy left?

Iron Dog, Interactive Album Rock

Welcome to post number 1,000! I should feel tired after 1,000 of these but I don't. Thanks for reading.

I like Iron Dog. I liked their first album (reviewed here, do a search in the top left-hand box to find it) and I like this second one too, Interactive Album Rock (PFM 003).

They've added Andrew Drury on drums to make it a trio. If you know Andrew's drumming, you know that's a good thing. Otherwise it's still Sarah Bernstein on psychedelic electric violin and moody, memorable recitation, and Stuart Popejoy on singular electric bass and atmospheric synth.

Iron Dog make a music fully of today. It's dark, metallic, forward reaching, avant and spatially rooted, sprawling, psychedelic and free-based, electronic and earthy, poetic and blunt, all at once. Sarah is her own person on violin and ruthlessly personal/abstract (in a great way) in her poetry-prose.

Just get this one and you'll get this one. Don't expect "happy". It's way beyond happy.

Adrian Benavides, Same Time Next Life

The multi-instrumentalist Adrian Benavides makes his solo debut with a jump-out-of-your speakers disk: Same Time Next Life (Unsung 016). Touch guitarist mastermind Markus Reuter shared the co-writing and co-production duties with Adrian. King Crimson's Pat Mastelotto supplied the heated drumming.

It's heavy music, music with an edge, post-prog with an attitude, metal with a brain. The music comes at you hard and full, much of the time, with a few lyric interludes for contrast. There is a bit of industrial in the mix but never in a formulaic way.

It's in expanded song form with vocals by Adrian, weaving around the theme of shock and bereavement of a father on the death of his daughter. In fact it is a personal response by Benavides to the stillborn birth of his daughter Valentina.

This is avant rock of a high order. It's a great example of places art rock is going today.

Starring, ABCDEFG-HIJKLMNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ

Hey, WTF! That's my motto for the day. It fits perfectly with the band Starring and their Northern Spy release ABCDEFG-HIJKLMNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ. The record label wisely put a sticker over the cover design because it has psychedelic graphics that are 100% unreadable. Now that's cool I guess. Cutting-edge graphic design has gradually eschewed the word content over the years so that in many cases it is no longer to be read, nor can it be. It's a kind of punk thing I suppose. And what counts for me of course is the music.

So let's turn to that. This is a very cool psychedelic-punk-prog hybrid band that rehearsed like the devil no doubt to get this album to sound the way it does. It has some pyrotechnical brilliance in it from keys and rhythm. The vocals tend to be attractive slacker girl punk in various guises, and there's something of Reich's "Four Organs" somehow in there, if you have any idea what I am talking about.

The band is Brooklyn-based, and that fits too. Brooklyn block-for-block right now is probably the creative capital of the United States and there's a WTF do what we want ethos that fits the kind of innovation being spawned over there (as opposed to the Jersey side, where "get the f outta here!" tends to be what comes to the forefront most frequently).

Anyway this is very cool music. Starring is doing something new with some earlier things without sounding retro in any way. That's not easy. It's good, though, seriously. Now who the f designed the cover??

Markus Reuter, Kopfmensch

Something new from the innovative Markus Reuter. Well, not entirely new. It's an anthology of Reuter's work that he put together before embarking on last year's "Two of a Perfect Trio" tour of the US (a Crimsonite gathering featuring the Adrian Belew Power Trio and Tony Levin's Stickmen, the latter of which included Reuter).

The album is called, humorously, Kopfmensch (Unsung). It's not exactly a greatest hits compilation. Some of it is unreleased. It shows you hefty, exhilarating glimpses of the post-Crimson Reuter, the compositional post-prog Reuter, and, something I am less familiar with, the art-song Reuter.

There are 16 cuts, much music. All kinds of notables appear (go to www.markusreuter.com for a rundown of what and who). And the end result, after a suitable period for gestation, is remarkable. Landmark. A gem of avant rock and/or post-prog. It's what others may be trying to do, but don't always get quite right.

This is quite right.

Operation ID, Trapped

First, sorry for the long pause in posts here. I was feeling quite out of sorts. The good news is that I am (I hope) back for good.

Today a pretty remarkable post-prog composer-quality rock single by Operation ID: Trapped (Table and Chairs). It has a Zappaesque attention to part writing and avant elements interspersed with a highly evolved melodic rock approach.

It's a damned fine slab of music if you like the ultra-prog thing. This is a band with its own sound. There's an album that came out after this that will be up for discussion in a few days. Meanwhile this whistle-whetter is worth the couple of peanuts you shell out if you like avant rock.

See you tomorrow.

Extra Life, Dream Seeds

Judging from their new album, Dream Seeds (Northern Spy), Extra Life is a very quirky alt rock band with a somewhat disturbed vision of lyrical reality, a musical sensibility and song producing capability, and a peculiar lead vocal style thing brings them into a land unto their own, like a little island that via geographical isolation gets different things happening.

It's a concept album centered around dreams and children. Charlie Looker, the main songwriter, lead vocalist, synth, and acoustic guitarist for the band, apparently had a series of harrowing dreams involving children (he teaches elementary school). He took them as the raw material for the lyric content and devised an interconnected set of songs.

With Caley Monahon-Ward on electric guitar and Nick Podgurski, drums, the threesome crafted some very creative arrangements.

The songs are in an art mode--with twists and turns of all sorts musically, and lyrically a bizarre series of imagery/symbolism.

It's like nothing else around right now. That in itself is a recommendation. It should be heard by anyone concerned to experience what's going on in avant rock nowadays.

Haunted House, "Blue Ghost Blues," Memorable Post-Velvets' Scronk-Psych

Haunted House makes good use of frame drums, distorted skronk guitar blares and poetic beatnik type song-chant vocals to create a heavy drop cloth of sound--on Blue Ghost Blues (Northern Spy 012).

It's an album that could have been made during the heyday of the psychedelic underground, maybe 1967. Only it's not. It has rawness, power and a sizable chunk of outer space in its pocket.

It's something that either works or fails miserably. Haunted House works. This is good crazy-arsed music. Grab it and you'll grab a piece of the underground, 2012. A worthy piece.

USA Is A Monster's Last: RIP

We've just dealt with Colin L.'s first solo effort after the demise of USA is A Monster. Today we look at that band's last, RIP (Northern-Spy). I peeked at the press sheet accidentally and saw that somebody said "Banal? Sure, but..." something like banal-good. Banal-good? Yes. It in some ways, at least in the opening minutes, sort of takes Van Dyke Park-Brain Wilson's Americana lyrics from Smile and makes them snide. And musically there is some relation too. What the relation is would be something you might explore if you were to listen to the album a bunch of times.

Beyond that, there is an indefinable something about this music, much like Colin L.'s album only perhaps slightly less so, something that hits you like an out-of-control Frisbee you didn't expect somebody to throw at you, and neither did the dog. I hope that makes it perfectly clear what we have here.

It's musically intricate and rather thoroughly off kilter. Now I know some of you. like me, respond to this sort of thing. Thank you Northern-Spy for putting this kind of stuff out.

Many Arms: Power Trio on Steroids and Ten Pots of Espresso?

Many Arms? And some legs too. Many Arms uses six arms and at least two legs to create a blazing avant scronk super-progressive speed metal (without the exorcist element) that's powerful and intricate. It's the guitar-bass-drums power trio configuration laying down a 43 minute onslaught of thrash and energy avant on their CD Missing Time (Engine 2010).

Many Arms to be more specific is Nick Millevoi on guitars, John Deblase, bass, and Ricardo Lagomasino on drums. They start in a mode that suggests the psychedelic pre-Mahavishnu McLaughlin and take off from there on a series of noteful, synchronized, chromatic rug burns of speed, stop-start routines and bracingly expressive line twisting. It's music that generally gets set to high and stays there much of the time. Something fast, frenetic, expressionist and very electric is what to expect. Unlike some of their more staid and arena-heat-seeking brethren, they often imply a time or even go beyond time and dispense with the regimentation of rock beats, back beats or even machine-gun double bass drum tatoos. Nick's guitar work is chromatically charged metal that opens up to more advanced harmonic-melodic implications of metal chromaticism--and in that way early Rypdal comes to mind as (again) early McLaughlin. The sound is quite raw, overamped and jagged like broken glass. So there is identity there. Bass and drums do a great job working out the edgy routines and in-the-face pies of free energy.

Many Arms may not appeal to those who seek some "easy" music to hear. This isn't. It's exhilarating, outside and unrelentingly uncompromising. It does what it does (or rather THEY do) with confidence and conviction. At least that's what comes across to me. The late Captain Beefheart would have appreciated this, though they enter his particular realm only obliquely.

Gol damn, though, this is some hot shoot. Get it, turn it up, amaze your neighbors, get evicted. All with a smile on your face.

Uz Jsme Doma, Czech Alt Rockers Celebrate 26 Years and their 7th Album "Caves"

Uz Jsme Doma, the Czech rock outfit now working on their 26th year together, do not fit neatly into a ready-made pigeonhole. Their new, 7th N American-Western European album release Caves (Cuneiform Rune 312) shows that wildly eclectic does not always mean derivative. Not with Uz Jsme Doma at any rate. There is a strong flavor of Eastern European dance/folk forms, a punk directness, the intricacies of prog rock and a healthy, hefty infusion of avant rock.

Mirek Wanek, leader and principal composer for the group, crafts some very original music. Like Zappa before him, he does not stay in any one place for very long, and also like Zappa the rock song form manages to accommodate some seriously involved musical variations with some of the heft and substance of modern classical music.

I don't suppose it should come as a surprise that Czech culture should spawn a mastergroup of this sort. After all there has been a tradition of Czech excellence in music, literature and the arts for many centuries.

Guitarist Romek Hanzlik stands out as a very dynamic thrasher on these sides. The band as a whole is put through hairpin-turn gymnastics (to mix a metaphor) that tell beautifully what a long-time tenure can do for a band. They work and breathe as one on the musical plane. And the vocals are quite impressively brash and bravura.

It's an album that gives you faith in the regenerative power of creative musicianship. This is music for today and, I believe, music that will be appreciated long in the future. Highly recommended!

Bassist Jack Curtis Dubowsky and his Ensemble

The Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble plays an unusual, conceptually rigorous form of instrumental music. Their second album Jack Dubowski Ensemble II (De Stijl Music) has a unique style compounded from Dubowski’s electric bass, often playing recurring riff patterns, and his analog synthesizer manipulations; Fred Morgan’s drums, frequently setting up a back-beated groove; and Hall Goff who plays trombone as processed through an analog synthesizer with a vocal effects device.

Dubowski is a present-day composer in addition to his performances in the ensemble. The album has composed elements, presumably the product of Jack Dubowski’s musical imagination. Then there are improvised elements, partially resulting from the settings and note values assigned to the synthesizers, partially what Hall Gull is doing on the trombone, partially the overall group situation and those free-er moments that occur throughout the set. No one overplays and there is a kind of appealing spaciousness to what they do. It is not so much music that tries to go to endlessly different places as it is music that sets up shop in a certain place and creates musical meaning within the defined parameters of the pieces themselves.

It is a band that finds a niche and then presents eleven relatively short works to explore the ramifications of the conceptual idea. The sort of four-tiered sound of secular drum rhythms, bass motifs, an independent synthesizer line and Gott’s altered trombone sounds is the cornerstone of the set. After a few listens I felt that this kind of rigorous limitation of roles as assigned and musical universes explored was actually a positive element. The music goes its own way without any frenetic sense of urgency. It unwinds its various laid-back grooves and allows the electronics to generate the unpredictable.

This is not music that is easily classified. I suppose you should think of it as electro-acoustical music that draws on rock and jazz elements and resituates them into a highly singular new music matrix. This is slowly developing music that over time is quietly rewarding and without a doubt worth hearing.

Originally posted on May 24, 2010 at www.gapplegate.com/musicalblog.htm.

Out Jazz-Rock from David Winogrond: "In the Ether"

The intersection of rock and jazz has been with us ever since Larry Coryell plugged in with the Gary Burton group back in the mid-‘60s. Since then there have been successes and failures, the latter usually a product of pressures to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but also because of creative misfires or chemistry problems among the musicians involved.

Happily, today’s CD has none of those difficulties. Drummer David Winogrond’s In the Ether (Wondercap) comes at it from the rock end. Essentially these are rockers who have embraced the jazz spectrum. David has influences from both camps—Elvin Jones and Gene Krupa but also Keith Moon and Mitch Mitchell. He finds his own path through the dense underbrush of what has gone before and emerges as a distinctive self. He is joined by reedist Jack Chandler, who ably asserts his musical vision, and guitarist Michael Campagna, who nicely shreds and psychedelisizes himself throughout much of the disk. When these three go at it, the results remind one slightly of the music Ginger Baker, Sonny Sharrock and Peter Brotzmann made a number of years ago. And yet that is only in terms of the basic stance. Winogrond, Chandler and Campagna go their own way here. There are cameo appearances by other fellow travelers as well. All make fitting contributions to the musical whole.

In the Ether shows a flair for combining freedom and electricity. In the search for viable home-grown energy sources, Winogrond and company can supply a good chunk of it right now! A tip of our cap to Wondercap Records for coming out with good sounds when we most need it.

Originally posted on March 10, 2009 at www.gapplegate.com.

Lucas, Johnston & Fast 'N' Bulbous Do Beefheart

Gary Lucas, a guitarist's guitarist, whether adapting an unlikely tune to a Delta blues slide or in a full-tilt electric shred zone....Phillip Johnston, piquant alto saxist and another bold iconoclast, the founder of the acclaimed Microscopic Septet....Fast 'N' Bulbous, the band Gary and Phillip put together to do some new arrangements of the music of Captain Beefheart. This is a potent combo, not the least because Gary did an important stint in Beefheart's band, but also because Beefheart's considerable music lends itself to open-ended interpretations. And that's what you get. Freshly minted Beefheart, so to say.

The latest album, Waxed OOP (Cuneiform) is a lively, rocking, exciting blend of very hip Lucas, excellent mid-sized band arrangements and some gems of the Beefheart repertoire, and not just the well-known songs either.

Beefheart was and is a complex, multifaceted artist. He extended the blues into zones no one would have expected them to go, he was a prolifically bizarre wordsmith magician, and he wrote some amazing music for his various bands, stretching the envelop as to how a typical rock-blues aggregation (or not so typical, sometimes) could take on complex and unprecedented interactions. Listen to a little Trout Mask Replica, for example, and you'll hear guitars, bass and drums do things that nobody thought they were supposed to do back then. And we're not even beginning to talk about his vocals! That's for another time.

Waxed OOP gives you another look at Beefheart the composer, the forthright and worthy arrangements of Johnston and others, and some great Lucas guitar, unaccompanied here and there and in full-bloom in the ensemble.

"Well," originally a vocal solo, bursts into a flowering full-band sound. "Blabber'n' Smoke" reminds you how many great songs Beefheart could toss off almost casually in his peak years and how good they still sound, especially with some fresh arrangements. "Woe-is-uh-Me-Bop" is another gem, from the extraordinarily innovative album Lick My Decals Off Baby and it has new life in this rendition.

If you love Gary's playing, Johnston's concepts and arranging and/or Beefheart and his music, or you just wonder about any or all three, you cannot go wrong with Waxed OOP.