Monthly Archives: April 2015

Just how dumb can you be and still make it big in the rock biz? To find the answer you need look to either Foreigner or Bad Company, and I lack the intestinal fortitude it would require to examine the former. Both bands achieved fame and fortune via songs with IQs (providing songs could have IQs) lower than that of your average ape, so there’s your answer right there. You can be dumb as a stump, and still make enough moolah to drive your Jaguar on a whim into your swimming pool, even though Jaguars don’t know how to swim.

But is dumb necessarily a bad thing? I love Bachman Turner Overdrive and they’d probably be the first three pupils eliminated in a second grade spelling bee. (Actually Slade would precede them, and I love Slade too.) There are rockers much smarter than any of the bands listed above, and their intelligence—take Rush or Bad Religion for example—just gets in their way. They’re just smart enough to be pretentious, which in turn should tip you off to exactly how stupid they really are.

So maybe dumb doesn’t necessarily translate as insufferable, as Bad Company proved during its career spent producing crudely simplistic hard rock songs that could have been performed by troglodytes playing rocks. It mattered not a whit that they were dumb, as in dumb as a thumb. Why, lead singer Paul Rodgers concedes in “Runnin’ With the Pack” that his girlfriend wants to keep him in a cage, presumably to prevent him from inadvertently doing harm to himself or others.

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“I’m really big into records—I have a lot of records—I like to listen to an album as a whole piece. That may be an old fashioned idea, but there’s definitely a cult of people that really still listen to music that way,” Sean Rowe told us in 2012.

“When I listen to music, I’m always hit by the sound of it first and then I think it’s great because if there’s real substance there, on the fifth listen, you start to dig a little bit deeper. A lot of my favorite music is like that—there’s so much depth to it, however you want to drag yourself into it a million different ways. I love music like that.”

Fast forward to 2015 and Rowe’s returned with Her Songs—his wholly unique and evocative take on 6 tracks from some of his favorite musicians who just happen to be female—including Neko Case, Lucinda Williams, Sade, Cat Power, and Regina Spektor. We’re delighted to unveil the official video for Rowe’s cover of Feist’s “Let It Die,” a thoughtful rumination on turning the proverbial page. And digging a bit deeper.

Her Songs arrives in stores on April 28 via ANTI- Records.

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PHOTO: ANTHONY ST. JAMES

Based in Brooklyn, RVNG Intl. specializes in progressive-minded sound creation frequently of an electronic nature. Featuring a diverse yet unified roster, the imprint’s FRKWYS series, a group of records documenting simpatico collaborations between younger and older artists, deserves special citation; FRKWYS Vol. 12: We Know Each Other Somehow details the meeting of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, ex-90 Day Men and of solo project Lichens, with saxophonist and avant-gardist Ariel Kalma. The resulting explorations are available on 2LP/CD/digital, and AV-lovers rejoice, for the physical formats are accompanied by a DVD containing a “feature-length exploratory documentary.”

The FRKWYS shebang began back in ’09 with Vol. 2, a 12-inch holding remixes of NYC outfit Excepter from Throbbing Gristle’s Chris & Cosey, JG Thirlwell of Foetus, and on a digital bonus Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto. Indeed, much of the early FRKWYS action was devoted to remixes, the tide later swinging to original collabs a la Vol. 6’s team-up of Julianna Barwick and Ikue Mori.

The series’ name is a play upon Folkways, the label started by Moses Asch in the late-‘40s, and if that reads as odd, lending an ear to a few FRKWYS volumes reveals a likeminded seriousness of intent extending to the RVNG discography overall; in fifty years it’s safe to predict listeners will look upon Vol. 9: Icon Give Thank by Sun Araw, M. Geddes Gengras and The Congos with a reverence similar to that paid to Folkways ’54 LP Jamaican Cult Music.

Succinctly, sound and its historical context is of the upmost importance; We Know Each Other Somehow is just the second FRKWYS set to offer an enhancing DVD, but it probably won’t be the last. And likewise, sonic creativity appears paramount to Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, not only as Lichens and as a former member of Midwestern math rockers 90 Day Men, but as an associate to doom metal titans Om and that fount of u-ground experimentation Nurse with Wound.

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What is there left to say about Jim Morrison? Most people have long since pigeon-holed him as either the Dionysian poet/seer in tight leather pants or the poetaster who got fat and died, his perfect male beauty ruined by alcoholic bloat and a beard that would have looked right at home on the faces of any one of my old pig farmer drug buddies. In short, folks tend to be either for or agin’ him, unless, like me, you’re one of those people who think he was all of the above, and more.

Morrison is a strange case, but those were strange days, and I admire his homicidal psychodramas and weird scenes inside the gold mine because they captured what it was like to live in a sunny LA paradise in whose shadows lurked dark predators and very scary cults, one of which happened to be the Manson Family. Morrison was a flower child only in the sense that his taste in florists ran to the French poet Charles “The Flowers of Evil” Baudelaire; as he famously said, “I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos–especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom.” Then again, he’s the same guy who said, “Some of the worst mistakes of my life have been haircuts.”

There are those who argue that the early Morrison got by on his model good looks, but the guy was a far better poet than, say, Patti Smith, and like Smith he was a mesmerizing performer, falling into captivating trances and flinging himself about like a man possessed, at least until demon alcohol really got its claws into him. At which point he fell into booze-soaked rambling, or face first on the stage floor, and got arrested for exposing himself in Florida, where the only thing you’re allowed to expose is the fact that you were dumb enough to move to Florida in the first place. And despite his wisecracks—“Actually I don’t remember being born,” he said, “it must have happened during one of my blackouts”—things weren’t funny any more.

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