Author Archives: Joseph Neff

The first full-length LP from hardcore punk survival unit OFF! delivers more of the brief, scorching sound initiated on their four highly-regarded EPs. It’s a dandy listen, and it places Keith Morris and cohorts at an interesting place. Just where will they go from here?

When it first came to my attention that Keith Morris was going to be fronting a new band, my immediate impression was a mixture of sincere happiness for the guy and a complete disinterest in actually hearing the music. We’ll get to the happy part a few paragraphs down, but the apathetic aspect has been hashed out by quite a few others already; it has to do with both the age of Morris and his band members and the actual contemporary relevance of the whole hardcore punk shebang.

Methinks that hardcore is a perfectly fine genre to tackle in the here and now, but it is a form best served up by a band of fresh-faced upstarts like Trash Talk rather than promulgated by a bunch of certified oldsters. Unlike blues, jazz, and country & western, punk rock and hardcore in particular doesn’t ripen with age; it’s very much a young person’s game. Of course, plenty of old punks are still making high quality music. It’s just that very few are still working from within the confines of the style that originally spawned them.

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With Urban Turban, Cornershop continue with their welcome and unexpectedly prolific return to the record racks. Collecting the fruitful results of a batch of collaborative singles, this album should easily satisfy old fans, while its playfulness, intelligence, and range will help recruit new ones.

From a distance, Cornershop’s career trajectory doesn’t seem all that unusual, being one of many early-‘90s indie bands to jump onto a larger stage (in this case through the Luaka Bop label) and deliver a hit song that basically defines their existence for most casual listeners. After a hiatus and a label switch they released a follow up before disappearing again, only to pop back into public consciousness with renewed purpose via their own label Ample Play.

But up close it’s rather impressive just how smoothly Cornershop picked back up right where they left off, and after some consideration the reason seems to stem from the very nature of Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayers sound. Unlike many acts that had brief affairs with the ‘90’s pop charts, there is really nothing in the group’s music that defines them as a product of that decade. Indeed, in my estimation if “Brimful of Asha” had been released last week instead of a decade and a half back, it would register as freshly up-to-date with nary a trace of the throwback.

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With the Love American Style EP, The Beastie Boys gave the public a small taste of their new and improved direction. Some ears were ready and many were not, but this twelve-inch contained a tidy morsel of a true hip-hop classic.

In retrospect, Licensed to Ill came on like a ton of bricks. Out of the blue the group just seemed to suddenly be everywhere; on stereos and television naturally, but also in magazines, in car tape decks, as the soundtrack to parties, in the parking lot at school. This level of saturation wasn’t all that unusual, for the same sort of situation happened with Purple Rain, Thriller, Madonna’s debut and Born in the USA. Unless you were a hermit, it was ultimately all music the ears couldn’t escape, particularly in a suburban existence. What made Licensed to Ill feel like such a haymaker was its heightened sense of immaturity and its use (some said hijacking) of a musical form that many observers were still coming to terms with.

The Beastie Boys were generation gap music in its purest form. As expected, parents were indignant; Who raised these ingrates, What has happened to the youth of America, Where are the values, When I was your age we thought Pat Boone was risqué, Why I oughta lock you in your room without your stereo for playing that noise in the house, and in front of your sweet, impressionable little sister at that. How does it feel to feel old?

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If Lee Hazlewood lingers in the contemporary cultural memory, it’s easily due to his work with Nancy Sinatra. On The LHI Years: Nudes, Singles and Backsides (1968-1971), the Light in the Attic label collects a bunch of his post-Nancy collaborations and a welcome helping of his solo shots, and the results are highly recommended not just for Hazlewood’s fans but for anyone with an inclination for well-crafted oddball pop.

Though his music never wavered from its thoroughly commercial designs, Lee Hazelwood was still a truly strange duck. And the undeniable datedness of his work can really add to the overall weirdness factor, though that’s in no way a bad thing; if often possessing production values and orchestrations that are accurately assessed as “middle of the road” (not the same as “mainstream”), his songs almost always avoid falling into simple kitsch.

But Hazlewood was more than just a bizarro/sophisto cowboy that blended Vegas-inclined pop with a country-inflected folksiness both on his own and in a collaboration with Sinatra that still comes off like a Swingin’ ‘60’s reaction to Dolly and Porter. Indeed, while loads of folks are familiar with the string of late-‘50s hits that he produced and co-wrote with Duane Eddy, it’s also true that most of those listeners aren’t cognizant of Hazlewood’s actual involvement with those songs, a short flowering of creativity that stands amongst the finest instrumental rock music ever recorded.

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Led as always by Anton Newcombe, The Brian Jonestown Massacre has returned with its twelfth studio album, Aufheben. While not a complete washout, in the end it does little to displace the notion that the man’s best artistic days are far behind him.

Back in the ‘80s is when I first heard The Chesterfield Kings, a garage band with a definite ‘60s bent. Taking the genre’s limitations in mind, they were rather good. They also had a pronounced love of The Rolling Stones. One interesting thing about the Kings; while they certainly had a strong fan base and were bolder in conception than most other ‘80s garage acts, they were still somewhat hindered by the nagging viewpoint of many who considered their music to be decidedly retrograde.

Spacemen 3 and Flaming Lips were just two examples of late-‘80s bands with a detectable ‘60s focus that managed to dodge the retro tag, with both bands at different stages of their existence considered to be groundbreakers. The Kings on the other hand were dogged with the retro stigma, often by those who liked them even. If they made a very good record, it was ultimately very good from within the confines of a limited context, a bit like setting a home-run mark for a single-A farm club; it’s an admirable achievement, sure, but it still pales next to the more grandly scaled activity of the big boys.

I think of The Chesterfield Kings and The Brian Jonestown Massacre together for a couple of reasons. First is their rather obvious shared love of the Stones. The other concerns the differences in reception these bands received for doing something roughly comparable. Yes, BJM first made their mark with a spin on the sound of shoegaze, but they quickly shifted into the role of a retro-inclined band that wore their Stonesian inspiration proudly and defiantly.

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While he’s remembered foremost as a key contributor to the bands of jazz titan Charles Mingus, tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin also recorded a slew of outstanding albums as a leader, none of them better than his 1963 outing The Freedom Book. If the accumulated weight of post-bop’s golden era can sometimes feel like an unfathomable musical avalanche, this casually faultless quartet outing is unquestionably one for the hearing.

If Booker Ervin had somehow managed to appear on only one specific LP in his career as a horn man, his historical significance would still be solidly in the pocket. That record is Mingus Ah Um, the 1959 classic from bassist Charles Mingus, an album that’s rightfully considered as a core document of the whole jazz experience. But Ervin not only thrived as the go-to tenor guy for Mingus’ most creatively fertile period, he also cemented his reputation through a wealth of sessions as both a crucial sideman and as a leader, debuting under his own name in 1960 with the superb The Book Cooks for the Bethlehem label and following it up with Cookin’ on Savoy later that same year.

If 1961’s That’s It found him bouncing around the label scene as a leader (this third record was issued by Candid) he kept busy not only with Mingus but also through appearances on vital dates by pianist Mal Waldron (The Quest), vibist Teddy Charles (Metronome Presents Jazz in the Garden at the Museum of Modern Art), drummer Roy Haynes (Cracklin’), and fellow tenor man Bill Barron (Hot Line). His fourth LP Exultation! hit racks in ’63 and with its release Ervin found a sturdy home through the Prestige imprint. His next four albums were all completed through the backing of that legendary company and they form a thematic quartet of releases that stand for many listeners as the collected highpoint of Ervin’s career as a bandleader.

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As its trippy cover image indicates, the collaborative effort of Ty Segall and White Fence’s Tim Presley conjures up a natty batch of tough-minded psychedelia. While not a life-altering affair, Hair confidently succeeds in its ambitions and stands as far more than just a one-off curiosity.

While Ty Segall is still most accurately identified as a garage-rock guy, it’s also true that he’s been showing some significant growth spurts of late. His record of last year Goodbye Bread made great strides in both the level of his songwriting and the scope of his presentation, all while remaining true to Segall’s organic, non-flash aesthetic. And while he was never really a stone-faced garage purist, his development remains worthy of commendation; ‘tis true that no one will ever fill the gap left by the far too soon departure of Jay Reatard, but Segall probably comes closest through the prolific and unfussy nature of his progressions.

Tim Presley is the man behind White Fence, a quietly impressive bedroom psyche solo project that also happens to flaunt a high level of productivity; four albums, a live cassette, and a 7-inch in a two year period, all released while remaining a member of the bands Darker My Love and The Strange Boys. If his approach in White Fence looks backward to such fine antecedents as Syd Barrett, Love, The Move, Donovan and the anemic glory of toy-town psyche, hearing just a small portion of his solo output makes it plain that he’s very much an artist of the moment. Presley’s not deliberately up-to-date, but his work still feels contemporary in its overall thrust.

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With The Money Store, Sacramento, CA trio Death Grips cross-pollinates hip-hop with the tactics of noise and drenches it all in a seething, apocalyptic outlook. Certainly not for everyone, it is however a surprisingly successful document, displaying high standards of variation throughout its onslaught of vitriolic ferocity.

To begin with The Money Store, there’s the major label aspect. This is frankly the most unlikely release to get corporate backing in quite a long time, but it’s important to remember that this sort of thing happens in cycles, and the way some people are reacting, you’d think Epic signed Borbetomagus or Masonna to a contract. The Money Store is indeed a crazy and uncompromising release, but it’s not completely off the map; as abstract and scorching as the record gets it retains a close enough relationship to previous models (mostly through the employment of rhythm) that its integration into the Sony Music Entertainment empire doesn’t so much inspire head scratching but instead feels like the latest example of a company feeling secure enough in its bottom line to attempt stepping out as the coolest bunch of executives on the block.

If that’s cynical, so be it. Epic may very well believe very strongly in what Death Grips offer on this quite impressive if undeniably divisive record, but that remains to be seen. Just because the musical landscape is different now than in any time since people realized a nice profit could be made by mass producing records doesn’t mean that the behavior of big money is somehow in need of reappraisal. The ‘90s major label feeding frenzy of indie and u-ground acts also resulted in some hard to rationalize signings, e.g. Boredoms’ Pop Tatari. The main difference here is the lack of an overflowing floodgate of sudden (and temporarily) hot properties ready for the pickings; digital avenues have greatly leveled the playing field against big label tomfoolery and anybody with internet access and speakers can discover new bands and test drive the records they want to buy (this directly led to an indie band winning a Grammy for Album of the Year). Yes Death Grips stick out like bloody appendages on the Epic Records roster, but in the end that’s not really anything new under the sun.

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It’s not often that a compilation of thirty-year old music is almost as representative of the time of its issue as it is of the artist that originally made it, but that’s the case with Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music from the always suave and ever distinctive musician known to many as simply Esquivel. If the ‘90s fad for lounge and exotica sounds is often perceived as an unfortunate occurrence, it did hold a few pleasant twists and turns. This is one of them.

When Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music, a quite unexpected compilation of material by one-of-a-kind Mexican band leader/composer Juan García Esquivel first hit the racks back in 1994 via Bar/None Records, it was a welcome curveball of smooth lounge/exotica strangeness and a dish unspoiled by the potential taint of contemporary approximation. For outside of Combustible Edison I consider the ‘90s retro-lounge field to be a rather dismal bunch of pikers, and while I do enjoy them in doses I’m not even all that bonkers over Edison (though I am rather taken with Edison members Michael Cudahy and Elizabeth Cox’s non-retro inclined previous group Christmas). For the record I consider the excellent Chicago band Coctails to fall outside the genre.

The only sticky thing about Esquivel’s unlikely rise from obscurity was pondering if people were sincerely digging him (or fellow exotica specialists Martin Denny or Les Baxter); it was always possible they were just being infuriatingly ironic. This situation was sorta similar to the ebbing and flowing penchant of folks attaching themselves to Z-grade movies, but different in that nobody would actually fess up to believing it was “so bad its good.” However, spending too much time wondering about the ultimately innocuous motives of others is a surefire way to end up in a straightjacket. And whenever I would listen to Esquivel’s stuff my concern just evaporated anyway, for it’s a truly inspired and loony trip.

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