Monthly Archives: October 2015

PHOTOS: RICHIE DOWNS | As we noted earlier this month with our review of his latest release, “In guitar pop circles Tommy Keene is an utter fount of reliability. On the radar since the late ‘70s, he grew from underground beginnings and briefly landed on a major before transitioning into an unimpeachable elder of melodic rock, and one still active over three decades hence.

Make that active and undiminished, for Laugh in the Dark finds Keene in excellent form. Featuring typically sturdy songwriting and the bold production values associated with musicians who came of age when rock radio truly mattered, and it’s out now on LP/CD/digital via Second Motion Records.

Choosing Keene’s strongest record is no easy task…but Laugh in the Dark is a major development in a career of rare longevity and worth; if it’s not Tommy Keene’s best, it doesn’t miss the mark by much.”

In person, Tommy is warm, candid, funny, and seemingly has been and played just about everywhere—making an afternoon perusing the record bins an absolute delight. So, c’mon—we’re record shopping with Tommy Keene at Washington, DC’s Som Records.

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What do you do when the E Street band members go back to their day jobs? Forge on with deliberate pace, as Robert Allen, who records under the name DownTown Mystic, does on his new EP, “Soul’d Out.”

The new single on his Sha-La Music, receiving its premiere here on The Vinyl District is like a lot of DownTown Mystic’s earlier work, forging a link between familiar-sounding classic rock with an urgency of now.

Allen co wrote and produced “Soul’d Out” with lyrics from Martin Samuel, whose words are a kind of throwback as well, with a chorus that begins “How could something so right have to turn out so wrong?”

Although Garry Tallent and Max Weinberg aren’t providing the rhythm section, as they did on the last full length album, DownTown Mystic on E Street, “Soul’d Out” does have Steve Brown of Trixter on acoustic 12-string guitar as well as PJ Farley on bass.

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Hieroglyphic Being is one of the numerous recording monikers employed by the extremely prolific Chicago-based DJ and electronic artist Jamal Moss. Profoundly impacted by his city’s techno/house music scene, he’s by no means confined by structural rules; adventurous and even restless, his latest effort brings him into contact with such heavyweights as saxophone giant Marshall Allen and Downtown vocal titan Shelley Hirsch as members of the J.I.T.U. Ahn-Sahm-Buhl. We Are Not the First blends spiritual jazz, kosmische, electronica, and spoken word to surprisingly productive effect. It’s out October 30 on 2LP/CD through RVNG Intl.

Jamal Moss’s life was permanently altered by Chicago house music as experienced in clubs like the Hummingbird, Reactor & Medusa’s and as perfected by DJs such as Boo Williams, DJ Rush, Ron Hardy, and Ron Trent. The transformation is evident in the man’s undeniably massive outpouring of product, Discogs currently listing 33 releases by Hieroglyphic Being alone.

That’s Moss’s most used moniker by a wide margin, with much of Hieroglyphic Being’s material self-released through the Mathematics Recordings CDr project Music from Mathematics. So much material makes it assuredly difficult to draw a conclusion, which is surely part of the plan; a sampling of Moss’s output highlights a progressive approach to house-electronic matters, Hieroglyphic Being having appeared on Soul Jazz Records’ compilation of Afrofuturistic producers Sounds of the Universe: Art + Sound 2012-15 Vol.1 and the Crème Organization’s A Tribute to Robert Moog.

Moss’s interests reach beyond electronic affairs, however; J.I.T.U. stands for Journey Into The Unexpected, and We Are Not the First offers deep engagement with jazz precedent and contemporary sonic boundary stretching, the results deeply informed by history and thrusting directly toward the future.

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“Vinyl has been around me for as long as I can remember, and I do mean ‘around me’ literally. My dad had a small room in our family’s first house where he kept all his vinyl and musical equipment. The records were stacked all the way to the ceiling (at least that’s what it seemed like to me) in wooden fruit crates. They felt simultaneously comforting and imposing, which I suppose is a decent metaphor for a life spent trying to create music that holds up to those first impressions.”

“I never owned a turntable of my own until I was 19 or 20. Our family friend Bill McGurn gave me his old Marantz direct-drive table when we were visiting one Christmas, and I hooked it up to my dad’s amp and speakers that he purchased with his first paycheck from the local record store. That’s still my setup to this day.

I’m sure the first thing I played on that table was one of my dad’s old records—Led Zeppelin II or CCR Live in Europe—but the first brand-new LP that I purchased for myself was Mike Viola’s Just Before Dark. I have very vivid memories of peeling away the shrink-wrap and dropping the needle on that record for the first time in my parents’ basement on a snowy December night. It’s a beautiful, intimate album, recorded live at Largo in Los Angeles, and something about the experience of listening to it on vinyl is so intoxicating. I must’ve listened to it 10 times that night, and it’s still a favorite to this day.

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Contemporary composer JooWan Kim’s 10-piece chamber orchestra channels early Wu-Tang and Snoop Dogg.

The modern mashup may have found its live counterpart in Ensemble Mik Nawooj. The Oakland-based orchestra is putting its classical chops to work on the golden age of hip hop, re-imaging essential cuts like “C.R.E.A.M.” through the lens of Bach. Kim creates with the firmly held belief “This is the future of hip-hop, America’s newest great indigenous music.”

“C.R.E.A.M.” and four other reworks appear on their Golden Fetus Records release, Ensemble Mik Nawooj: A Hip-Hop Orchestra. The group will make their Los Angeles debut on October 29th at The Mint; an evening that promises a fleshed out, forward thinking approach to hip hop in an intimate setting.

Folks desiring to fortify their shelves with the work of producer, musician and label impresario Adrian Sherwood are currently in luck, for the flow of related items has been steadily increasing during 2015; combining well-known selections with rarities and a handful of unreleased bits, the 27-tracks deep Trevor Jackson Presents: Science Fiction Dancehall Classics is the latest compilation essaying Sherwood’s essentiality to the sonic architecture of the 1980s. It’s out now on 2CD/3LP through On-U Sound.

Earlier this year Sherwood at the Controls Volume 1: 1979-1984 correlated extensive evidence of its titular production wizard’s skills, the 2LP/CD’s contents derived both from the roster of On-U Sound, an enterprise founded by Sherwood as the ‘70s drew to a close, and beyond via material by Maximum Joy, Shriekback, Vivien Goldman, and The Fall. Science Fiction Dancehall Classics broadens this narrative substantially while remaining largely focused upon the On-U Sound discography.

Jump forward to the end of the ‘80s and Sherwood’s technique had developed from dub-centric beginnings to an important component in the rapidly mutating Industrial Dance scene, territory too-often synopsized in relation to Chicago’s Wax Trax! Records. The two Metal Dance volumes on the Strut label do a terrific job of deepening this milieu, the first one rounding-up Sherwood’s remix of Einstürzende Neubauten’s “Yü-Gung” as the second offers his production talents on Ministry’s “Over the Shoulder.”

The Metal Dance collections were compiled by Trevor Jackson, a DJ and audio-visual artist having collaborated with LCD Soundsystem and Four Tet on his label Output Recordings and most recently noted through Format, a 3LP/CD of his own stuff released by the Vinyl Factory. Underlining Sherwood’s influence upon Jackson is the latter’s project Playgroup, a collaborative affair sharing a name with one of the former’s numerous collectives from the early ‘80s.

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Austin, TX houses a renowned musical landscape—from kickstarting the career of SRV in the ’70s to hosting SXSW today, the Live Music Capital of the World certainly has room to brag. Austin’s Greyhounds is no exception. A product of the late ’90s, the band has established a distinct following through their spirited live shows.

Quite frankly, the duo’s draw lies in their passion for high quality tunes. They stand on the doorstep of the blues, occasionally stepping off into a field of raffish rock ‘n’roll. Their vocals have a weathered finish, a perfect touch for their soul soaked style. “What’s on Your Mind,” a track from their 2014 album Accumulator, is a warm groove the bleeds honesty.

Guitarist Andrew Trube begins with a slow haunting guitar lick, and singer/keyboardist Anthony Farrell quickly fleshes out the full song with deep lyrics. Occasionally he reaches for the falsetto, creating a unique tension of highs and lows. It’s an emotional interrogation with traces of funk and R&B lingering in the background.

The song ponders the shaky ways we talk to each other, hinting at the inherent flaws of communication. No need to say more—the song’s better at it anyway.

Greyhounds’ new live LP, Heaven on Earth is in stores now.

Yar! During my years as a pirate on the high seas, sailing beneath the Jolly Roger and switching my eye patch from one eye to another as the mood struck me, my mates and I had one album we listened to all the time. I’m talking about Procol Harum’s 1969 release A Salty Dog, which made for the perfect soundtrack to those quiet nights when we drank rum until we were stone blind, too blind certainly to find the other LP we had on board, The Instrumental Pirate Songs of Burt Bacharach, which no one wanted to listen to anyway.

A Salty Dog came highly recommended. The famed rock critic Robert Christgau, who served his seven years beneath the mast as our pegboy, gave it a rare A+, and even our finicky parrot, who liked nothing but techno, kept his mouth shut when it was playing. And why not? If the title cut isn’t the best sailor’s tune this side of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” what is? True, A Salty Dog doesn’t have “A Whiter Shade of Pale” on it, a fact that irked us because although we had the single, our 45 rpm adapter got blown overboard during a typhoon. It even piqued our techno-loving parrot, who liked to demonstrate his displeasure by crowing “House on Pooh Corner” at the top of his lungs. Why we never threw that goddamn bird overboard I’ll never understand.

As for Procol Harum, they’ve gone down in history as a proto-prog band, a fact that horrifies me because I despise progressive rock the way Blackbeard despised whiny plank-walkers. No, to me they’re just a rock band that happened to borrow occasionally from the classics without sounding beholden to them, a trick they pulled off better than any other prog band in history. Gary Brooker handled the bulk of the lead vocals, although guitar savant Robin Trower and keyboardist Matthew Fisher also took their turns. The rhythm section was composed of Dave Knights (who like Fisher would leave shortly after the completion of the album) on bass and B.J. Wilson on percussion. Oh, and the band had its own Bernie Taupin in the form of Keith Reid, who wrote the band’s lyrics.

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Press Play is our Monday recap of the new and FREE tracks received last week to inform the next trip to your local indie record store.

Chris Dupont – Forgiveness
Tall Tales and the Silver Lining – Burning Out
Tree Machines – Summer Night
Poppy Seed and The Love Explosion – Look At You
The Royal Oui – Brilliant Disguise (Bruce Springsteen cover)
We/Or/Me – The Dusty Roads
Annabelle’s Curse Shares – Lovedrunk Desperados
The Foreign Resort – Under The Bright Neon Stars
The Harrow – Love Like Shadows

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
Vanessa Carlton – Operator

The Black Ships – Dead Empires
Coromandelles – New Ordain
Dearist – Geneocide
Mother Leads – When Time Will Slow Down
Slow Death Lights – Broken Spirit Desert Nightmare
The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing – Not Your Typical Victorian
Warning Light – Past The Haro Straight
Big Bear – Three Season
DOSVEC – Do My Face (The Weeknd vs Rockefeller) (Lucas & Steve Mix)