Monthly Archives: December 2013

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MARCH 21, 2013 | Could you dismiss Pegi Young as having a charmed musical life? I suppose so.

But Young’s third LP, Bracing For Impact, is an album from a woman who’s long past her first tentative steps out into the musical world. Her music is as confident as it is introspective, and Young’s skillful songwriting makes the listener wonder which songs are really tongue-in-cheek, because they all reach deeper. The transitions are seamless, and even the three songs not penned by Pegi Young (including one by her husband, Neil) fit in perfectly with the theme of survival with a smile.

Ghosts abound—from the beautiful pedal steel of the late Ben Keith, to a sad song of Danny Whitten’s, to the playful spirit of her departed dog, Carl. And still Impact is unflagging in its storytelling, embracing the tragedy and the unintentional comedy alike. It’s just life, after all. However charmed it might seem for some, there’s always another shoe waiting to drop. But we move on, we create, we laugh through the anguish and stress. Pegi Young puts it all into perspective beautifully with Bracing for Impact.

Pegi and her band of legendary musicians, The Survivors, embark on a tour today (March 21) that will include dates with Willie Nelson and an appearance on Late Show with David Letterman. As I quickly discovered in our conversation, Pegi Young is herself the archetypal musician: she loves touring, loves collaborating, and loves her vinyl.

Bracing For Impact has lots of different musical elements—rock, Dixieland stuff—and maybe more blues and R&B than your previous records. Are these some of your favorite genres, or did the songs just work out the way they did?

I mean, kind of “yes” to all the above. When we brought in Kelvin Holly as lead guitar player in the band after Anthony Crawford left, he had fifteen years of experience playing with Little Richard, so y’know, he’s a solidly R&B guy. And, of course, with Spooner Oldham in the band, we also got the great Muscle Shoals sound. So, the songs ended up kind of lending themselves to that sound.

I think the Dixieland band sound you’re referring to was on “Trouble in a Bottle” and that was our drummer Phil Jones’ idea. We were recording in LA and he had a horn section down there that he knew… we just sort of heard that. And that was an older song, but we re-worked it a little bit, gave it a different tempo. We recorded it a different way back with the other band before Ben Keith passed away and Anthony Crawford left the band, so we kind of perked it up and then it sort of lent itself to the Dixieland band sound. A lot of it was kind of a collaborative effort when we were in there recording, just thinking, “What would sound cool here?”

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I used to know this rather dim garbage head who gobbled a handful of pills he thought were opiates but weren’t, and he swore—on a stack of ludes!—they didn’t do anything but make his waist-length hair stand straight up in the air and vibrate. I’m pretty sure his story was bullshit. That said, if you’re looking for an album that will do the same thing, you could do much worse than check out The Osmond’s Crazy Horses.

You heard me right: The Osmonds. Because despite what you may have heard about Ogden, Utah’s finest, they weren’t a do-goodie, whiter-shade-of-pale tweenie-pop imitation of the Jackson Five but substance-abusing (they sometimes took as many as three aspirin at once!) Mormon mofos who took their Tang straight yet still managed to stand up on their hind legs and bray.

And the culmination of their badassness was Crazy Horses, one of the greatest hard rock albums your ears will ever hear. And that’s not just me talking: in Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums, rock crit Chuck Eddy puts Crazy Horses at No. 66—which is too low in my opinion, but then everybody underestimates the Mormon Motörhead.

The brothers began their career as a barbershop quartet, The Osmond 5 (math is not taught in the schools of the Church of Latter Day Saints) before becoming worldwide superstars thanks to little brother Donny and the bubblegum classic “One Bad Apple.” Meanwhile, though, Donny’s older siblings were chomping at the bit. They wanted to write their own songs and play their own instruments and smoke fake cigarettes and change their name to The Gentile Killers. So they staged a coup of sorts, relieving Donny of lead singer duties to toughen up their sound while honing their protopunk chops by playing along to Hollies’ records until they were the five maddest, baddest, LDS-taking apples in the whole bunch, girl.

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Press Play is our Monday morning recap of the new tracks received last week—provided here to inform your vinyl purchasing power. Click, preview, download.

Shivery Shakes – Sidewalk Talk​
Potpourri Of Pearls – Island
Sidney York – Hearts
Macedo – Your Skin Brims
HUNDREDS – Beehive (Prelude)
Gramatik – Obviously (Feat. Cherub & Exmag)
Yahtzel – Jungle Feels
Leif Vollebekk – When The Subway Comes Above The Ground
Love Echo – The Scientist (Coldplay cover)
The Slowdown – Digital Gold

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
KRONO ft. VanJess – Redlight

Imagine Dragons – Demons (La’Reda Remix)
Kid Felix – I Am The River
Ducky – Two Over Ten
Simone Felice – Molly-O!
Orchestra of Spheres – 2000000 Years
Trails and Ways – Taj Mahal (Jorge Ben Cover)
Soul Glimpse – In the Dawn of the Day
Marika Hackman ft. Sivu – Skin
The New Royales – Fell In Love With A Girl
Shy Hunters – Echoes

25 more FREE TRACKS after the jump!

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Greetings from Laurel Canyon!

Normally I “cut” the Idelic Hour late Thursday nights, often after dinner or taking in a show in Hollywood. This week’s Idelic episode is different. After all, not only is it Friday the 13th but it’s a special Friday at that. Today is my birthday!

I hesitate to use an exclamation point at my age, but with all the shit that goes down year after year, I’m just grateful to be at “the party” with family, friends…and yeah, with my ever growing record collection!

So every now and then I get to have my birthday on Friday the 13th! Pretty fucking cool.

In celebration I came up with with an inspiring muse for this week’s show. What first came to mind sprung from a recent fascination with early Stones albums in mono. Of course, none other than Keith Richards is one of December’s children and will be 70 next week! If you happen to be a Sagittarius, you might have noticed that we born in December tend to get along and rock the fuck out!

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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 17, 2013 | To say that Ken Stringfellow is intense is an understatement. The co-founder of The Posies is relentlessly honest, self-critical, and he’s released one of the finest under-the-radar albums of the previous year, Danzig in the Moonlight. He says it’s his best work, and it’s hard to disagree with him. The album’s great strength lies in its diversity, which is a virtue the multifaceted Stringfellow takes to heart. Danzig is a masterful collection of songs, from power pop to the blues to soul to country, woven together by Stringfellow’s sage storytelling and set to his distinctive, otherworldly vocals.

Despite an eight-year break between solo albums, the music never stopped for Ken. He has been in constant collaboration with artists worldwide, from Norwegian garage rockers to Dutch film stars to R.E.M. to a re-formed Big Star. Currently residing in France, Stringfellow is Stateside through early spring on tour–first with The Posies at the Todos Santos Music Festival, then with The Maldives as his backing band before crossing the country solo. When TVD spoke with him, we got a glimpse into the thoughts of an artist who is ambitious, unapologetic, and one of the most unique singer/songwriters of the last three decades. 

I am wondering how I escaped 2012 without listening to Danzig in the Moonlight. You’ve said it’s your creative apex and that you want it to be heard by “everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.” I get that, but I’d love to hear why you feel it’s so important to you.

Well, I think because of the amount of information that’s out there in the world, people have a lot to sort through. Often, and this has been true even before the information age, people sometimes go with what’s easy. They go with preconceived notions or they go with hearsay; few people ever have the time or the access to information to get really in-depth into something. Any musician, and this is true even for the biggest at the top, there might be someone out there who doesn’t know what they’re doing.

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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 9, 2013 | If you’re like me, perhaps you take to Facebook a wee too often some evenings sharing music. And perhaps this shared music strikes a chord with a friend who is equally as effusive with the “like button.” And perhaps the invitation arises that affords an opportunity to put said friend—Chad Clark of Washington, DC band Beauty Pill—in contact with the musician inspiring the evening’s muse, Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile, whose brand new US release, Mid Air is in stores now. 

Well, perhaps you’re reading that conversation at present.
—Ed.

Chad Clark: One of the things that attracted me (and many others, I’m sure) to The Blue Nile was the band’s daring and imaginative use of sonic texture. There was always a delicate, elegant, painterly quality to the records that seemed deeply felt, deeply considered. Some of the early sounds were almost non-musical: the sound of bicycles wheels spinning and such. Always at the center of it was your voice and your imagistic words.

This is something that influenced me greatly as a musician to experiment and explore textures in the studio. This “texturalism” (for lack of a better word) leads me to a few different questions. It seems to me that The Blue Nile was sort of is its own impossible-to name genre. Would you agree?

Paul Buchanan: I suppose we pursued our own shared imagination. What was important was the sense of the song, so recognisable licks were out. We tried to create the world in which the person in the song belonged.

I can’t really think of “peers” who worked in a similar terrain. Did you regard yourselves as having peers or did you feel like you were working in a field of your own? If so, was that lonely? Or did you enjoy the feeling of making your own world?

Yes, we were in our own world, and just doing the best we could to capture the idea. We had no money, no phone.

The Blue Nile’s sonic adventurousness proved to be subtly groundbreaking. Did you have conscious ambitions to break ground, to innovate? Or, were you just following your instincts? Did you just innocently happen upon those ideas or was there a sense of deliberate design to the path you chose?

Circumstance and limitations shape what you do as much as your imagination, don’t they? Marrying the two is a step forward. You’re right—we stumbled on ideas and followed our instincts. We played the way we could play.

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“I always appreciated the experience of vinyl for as long as I can remember, but it wasn’t until I listened to vinyl through headphones that I really experienced that level of auditory euphoria. It was then that I knew it was a far superior listening experience.”

“I think it was an old copy of Smiley Smile by the Beach Boys. The hair on my arms sprung up and I felt a chill all over. Soon after that I learned that there were countless records released on vinyl that never made it to CD, so my collection quickly expanded.

I think at the time there were only 2 Andrew Hill records available on CD, and a record store near my apartment in Boston, MA that specialized in old jazz records carried 2 additional Andrew Hill records that blew my mind.

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If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a mystery. Did D.B. Cooper survive his jump from Northwest Orient Airlines’ Flight 305 into a 200-mph wind on the rainy, pitch-black night of November 24, 1971? Why does Wile. E. Coyote continue to use ACME products, when they’re obviously subpar and don’t meet even the most minimal consumer safety standards? Why, on Bewitched, did Darren insist that Samantha not use her powers? When any sane man would have said, “I’d like a million dollars in small unmarked bills, the guest room filled to my Adam’s apple with high-grade pharmaceutical cocaine, and a bigger dick. A much, much bigger dick.”

This is the reason Clem Snide’s Birthing Pains drove me so wild. It was released this year, but I wasn’t able to find out zilch about it. It’s not mentioned on Clem Snide’s web site or listed on Wikipedia, and good luck discovering a review of it online. You can buy the damn thing, but just try finding anything out about it. You’d have an easier time finding D.B. Cooper.

To be honest, I wouldn’t have cared if Birthing Pains sounded even remotely like the Clem Snide I know, which copped its name from a William Burroughs character and produces a highly intelligent and frequently melancholy hybrid of country, folk, pop, and restrained rock’n’roll. But it doesn’t. I listened to it once, twice, and a third time and was still convinced some type of mistake had been made, and that the music on Birthing Pains had been made by somebody else, this despite the fact that the words “Clem Snide” were right there on the album cover.

Because the cold hard fact is that amidst Clem Snide’s amazingly consistent body of work since 1998 (which includes at least 12 LPs and 4 EPs including 2002’s brilliant Moment in the Sun, 1999’s lovely Your Favorite Music, and 2011’s wonderful “Clem Snide Journey” EP, which consists solely of breathtakingly original covers of Journey songs), Birthing Pains sticks out like a Hell’s Angel at a Mormon wedding.

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In 1973, “Why Can’t We Live Together” b/w “Funky Me” was a massive hit, and it remains the best known achievement of its creator Timmy Thomas. Steeped in socially relevant Soul, it also possesses a beautiful, distinct simplicity that has perhaps interfered a bit with its status as a truly classic single. If not forgotten, it’s a 45 that deserves to be even better remembered.

Not all hit singles enjoy the same fate after they exit the charts. Plenty of big sellers from the ‘60s and ‘70s have landed in heavy rotation on oldies radio of course, the songs adapting to a second life as a representative of the popular whims of a bygone era. But other tracks get passed over by this process, often because they don’t fit the accessible nature of the oldies template. In other situations however, it seems that certain songs are excluded mainly due to the very uniqueness that led to their commercial success in the first place.

Timmy Thomas scored an early-‘70s smash with “Why Can’t We Live Together,” hitting the #1 spot on the R&B chart and making it to #3 Pop with further inroads internationally (#12 in the UK). And yet I’ve never heard it over the airwaves even once, a circumstance that might just be chalked up to the nature of regional playlists or even to the happenstance of not being in the right place at the right time.

However, a little snooping around the internet does reveal some discourse over the song’s lack of retrospective recognition. The reason behind this situation seems to come down not to a lack of accessibility, but rather to the warmly unusual feel of Thomas’s creation. To be frank, it stands considerably apart from the norms of nostalgia.

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“I knew that there was a lot you could do with the song “Soothing Me So” and I was excited to hear some fresh takes on the song. The original version is a raw, fuzz-heavy, song that encompassed my feelings of lust and desire.

Luckily house/dance producers ENSO were able to take those feelings and make them even more palpable. They knew that there was a dance song hidden beneath the fog and they started an entire dance party in my head the first 10 times I heard it.

The original album version of this song is available on limited-edition clear blue vinyl via “Victory Is Music” (Reserva Records).”
—Robert Fleming

Victory’s “Soothing Me So” EP was released on December 3rd.
Victory Official | Facebook | Twitter

San Francisco’s The Avengers were one of the USA’s great punk bands. They not only rocked with intensity and imagination, but through the talents of vocalist Penelope Houston made it clear the California wing of the punk gestalt wasn’t just a boy’s club. And that’s the achievement for which she is most celebrated, but Houston has also worked outside the punk rock paradigm in a solo context. Birdboys, her 1988 debut under her own name is a fine record that’s deserving of far wider appreciation.

The Avengers made some great racket in their original incarnation from ’77-’79. While extant they were responsible for one of the finest of the Dangerhouse singles in the “We Are the One” 3-song EP, but the rest of their fine initial discography appeared post-breakup, a circumstance that helped to keep them fresh on the minds of those attuned to punkish affairs for a good long while after their too brief creative spurt.

Well, that and the band’s rep as openers for the Sex Pistols’ legendary last gig at San Fran’s Winterland. Toss in a production credit by the Pistols’ Steve Jones and the esteem of worthy punk theorist Greil Marcus, and The Avengers shape up as one of the enduring pillars upon which the pre-hardcore American punk experience sits, registering not as a group that was destined for a short existence due to youth, snot, and barely being able to hold it all together, but instead as a fully formed and confident expression of the music’s vast potential. And so much of their sturdiness came right down to Houston’s impressiveness as front-woman.

This is why the band’s reformation in the ‘90s was no great surprise. That decade found Houston and original guitarist Greg Ingraham touring and recording new material with replacement members to a solid response, an activity that’s continued right up to the very present. And while it’s surely cool that Ingraham is a member of the reformed lineup, it’s basically a plain fact that without Houston there would be no reason for The Avengers to exist in the here and now.

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