Take Five: (G)old soundz abound
Sorry for the Pavement bait and switch, just a post with some older songs and a couple of newer things that made me think of older things.
“Take Five” is posted each Friday, and offers five things I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested in checking out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other times.
1. William Tyler and Yasmin Williams
Let’s start with something sweet and soothing. With a hat tip to the “Doom and Gloom from the Tomb” Tumblr from Aquarium Drunkard’s Tyler Wilcox, I kept this great, brief live session from William Tyler and Yasmin Williams on repeat during the work day for much of the week. These are two of my favorite acoustic guitarists, so hearing them perform together was a great. There is just something about two acoustic guitars playing together. In this case, they each played one of their songs, with the other adding shading and texture, and then seemed to collaborate on a third. This session is a few years old, and I’m surprised it didn’t lead to a deeper collaboration. Here is hoping it will someday.
2. Beach Boys’ induction into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame
I picked up a second podcast that spent considerable time with the Beach Boys this month, as I finally decided to check out the "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" podcast with its latest entry, "Never Learn Not to Love" by the Beach Boys. That was four episodes totaling 7½ hours (I drove to Topeka and back, and then Ames and back and needed the distraction). Podcaster Andrew Hickey, in an exhaustive look at the song that was more like a history of the band, mentioned their cringe-worthy induction into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, so I headed to YouTube for a look and was not disappointed. After a lovely speech from the tortured genius Brian Wilson, singer Mike Love took the mic for a self-aggrandizing tirade where he took swipes at the Beatles and Rolling Stones for not touring as much as the Boys did. Hard for the former (who he called "the Mop Tops") to do so nearly two decades after breaking up, and the Rolling Stones were certainly on the road at that time. Fast forward 37 years, and while The Beatles' Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones continue to embark on massive stadium tours, Love's anemic version of the Beach Boys is playing a lot of theaters and casinos. Kudos to all of them for continuing to rock into their 80s, I suppose, but Love has always been best when sticking to singing about cars and surfing.1
3. My Morning Jacket — ‘Off the Record’
Reviews of My Morning Jacket's new album, is, have called it the band's best since 2005's Z. given that Z is the point after which I lost interest, I was intrigued. Those road trips afforded the opportunity to listen, but I started by going back to hear Z for the first time in many years. According to a list on my old blog, Things I'd Rather Be Doing2, it was my favorite of that year. At the time I wrote," Wow. What a progression, from folky country to full-on boogie jam to... whatever one would call this. Few bands have been able to grow this much this fast while maintaining a semblance of what first made them so appealing. Out of the silo3 and into the stratosphere." It was a trip to listen again, and it is the rare album I have revisited after so long a layoff that actually holds up. As my younger self opined, it was a rapid yet logical evolution of the band's sound. Unfortunately, it was the last point where the band struck the right balance of all of those elements. I finally got around to listening to some of the new album, and so far I'll at least agree with the "best thing since Z" praise, though that is faint given what fell in between. I'll continue to give it a chance, but it will be difficult to compete with my rekindled interest in Z.
4. Neil Young — ‘It Might Have Been’
One last item sparked by my recent road trips. It was difficult to keep up with Neil Young before he started to empty the vaults, and now that he is issuing live recordings and archival projects in addition to studio records, it can be a bit much. But his latest release was just the thing for cruising across the gently rolling hills of central Iowa (OK, very gently rolling). Oceanside Countryside is one of many albums Young recorded, considered for release, and then shelved only to cannibalize most of the tracks over the years. Recorded in 1977, it included songs that would eventually turn up on Rust Never Sleeps, Hawks and Doves, and Comes A Time. This is all quiet, country-inflected work, mostly solo acoustic toward the front, more fleshed out toward the end, but it all sounded good on this drive. It was the first time in a long time that a new Young release — be it something actually new or simply rescued from his filing cabinet — was so satisfying front to back. Listening later, it was difficult to recapture that feeling, though these songs cohere in a way that is surprising given how familiar some of them are from their subsequent contexts. The only “new” song here is “It Might Have Been,” a lilting, fiddle-driven tune that sounds more ’47 than ’77.
5. Tortoise — ‘Organesson’
Rounding out this week as a purely musical dive is the first new music from Tortoise in nine years. The quintet debuted more than 30 years ago with its blend of angular guitar-based, polyrhythmic, jazz-rock instrumentals, and over seven albums, a handful of EPs and a boxed set, has evolved a sound that has influence vast swaths of what has come to be called post-rock. This new track is subtle, focused more on the rhythms and Jeff Parker’s guitar, and as the first taste of what promises to be a new album, it doesn’t give much indication of where the band is headed. Still, it’s good to have new music from this creative bunch, and I look forward to what comes next.
The line of the night came from fellow 1988 inductee Bob Dylan. Amid his thank yous he singled out Love, saying “Thank you to Mike Love for not mentioning me.”
I wish I could just link to that piece, but a snafu several years ago — partly of my own doing, partly due to lousy customer service by GoDaddy — led to the blog’s demise. Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, I have at least been able to salvage a lot of the content.
For those unfamiliar with the band, their signature sound in their early days was a massive reverb on Jim James’ vocals that were the result of recording in a grain silo in their native Kentucky.