Reviews
Friday, May 18, 2012
Reviews Umbrella Tree, To the Memory of a Once Great Man [Review]
Posted by Jewly Hight on Fri, May 18, 2012 at 11:29 AM
To the Memory of a Once Great Man
Cephalopod
A few days ago, I was reading along in an online magazine and came across a link to a feature on dictators who had extraordinarily close relationships with their moms. Which is a far more interesting topic than, say, the good ol’ mama’s boys of country music. Here in the West, we’re fascinated by figures who seem to wield virtually unchecked and entirely undemocratic power.
Umbrella Tree has never been the sort of band to tackle pedestrian pop subject matter, and for their fourth proper album, they’ve taken Napoleon Bonaparte as their muse. He was an emperor, rather than a modern dictator, but I think the parallel works nonetheless; we’re still talking about heavy-handed rule taken to the extreme.
In keeping with their artfully oblique approach to songwriting, this is by no means a straightforward retelling of a ruler’s bio. The cover art of To the Memory of a Once Great Man offers a clue about what the band is up to. Front and center is an image of a kid sporting Wayfarers, beneath the iconic silhouette of a Napoleonic bicorne hat twice as wide as his head. The image effectively brings Napoleon down to our level; makes him the boy next door.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Reviews Bonnie Raitt at The Ryman, 5/12/12
Posted by Jewly Hight on Mon, May 14, 2012 at 1:16 PM
Raitt kept it loose, her interactions with band, her stage crew and the sold-out crowd spontaneous, the set list subject to tweaks and re-tweaks on the fly, her phrasing venturesome. When she flubbed lyrics, which happened more than twice, she laughed about it. Altogether, it made for a warm, unscripted performance.
Friday, April 6, 2012
Reviews / Music Brian Siskind, Live at the Rothko Chapel
Posted by Edd Hurt on Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 4:01 PM
As you’ve probably figured out by now, Nashville is a words-and-music town whose devoted practitioners of song can stint on the music. Whether that is an unfortunate aesthetic miscalculation or simple common sense — many folks like a well-turned aperçu and down-home metaphor — it’s always a relief to encounter a Nashville musician who dispenses with most of that words-and-music linkage. Brian Siskind first made waves in Music City a decade ago with the kind of ego-less, ambient music that doesn’t boil down to such simple concepts as “commercial” or “avant-garde,” and he’s once again a Nashvillian. After living in New York for four years, Siskind made his way back to town last fall, and he’s released a fascinating new full-length, Live at the Rothko Chapel, which finds him exploring just the kind of site-specific, contemplative and non-verbal art such pioneers as Morton Feldman and Brian Eno have made a part of the global musical landscape.
Siskind, who recorded in the last decade under the name of Fognode, is releasing Live at the Rothko Chapel under his own name, and he captured the July 2011 performance at the famed Houston, Texas, building — which features 14 paintings by American artist Mark Rothko — as a way of immortalizing a unique event.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Reviews / Music Mad King Edmund's Happening: A Movement in 12 Acts Is 'Inspired by Occupy, but Not About Occupy'
Posted by Edd Hurt on Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 11:31 AM
Making effective political art can be tricky — an artist confronted by the larger issues of economics and class is likely to lose his touch, and the result can be well-intentioned but boring. Nashville producer and songwriter Ed Pettersen has delved into what you could call political music on his 2007 three-CD set Song of America, a sequence of songs selected to illustrate American history. Released under his avant-garde nom de plume, Mad King Edmund, Pettersen's new Happening: A Movement in 12 Acts is a politicized — if not overtly political — operetta that references the free jazz movement of the 1960s, complete with throbbing saxophone, dissonant piano and drums that imply the beat rather than state it. The relative difficulty of Happening is in keeping with its subject: the Occupy protests that have been in the news across North America. With contributions by the likes of Music City soul singer Charles Walker and all-purpose vocalists Mary Gauthier and Suzy Bogguss, it's a remarkable example of genre-busting — its intentions are noble, and it's certainly not boring.
Happening came about from a recording Pettersen was trying to make with free-jazz saxophonist Giuseppi Logan, who made a name for himself in the 1960s working with such figures as Patty Waters, Don Pullen and Milford Graves. After making a couple of well-regarded records in the '60s, Logan disappeared for decades — an apparent casualty of drug abuse and mental instability. Pettersen tracked Logan down a couple of years ago in New York, where the rehabilitated saxophonist had begun to play.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Reviews / Moving Pictures Charlie Louvin: Still Rattlin' the Devil's Cage Documentary Now out on DVD [Review]
Posted by Randy Fox on Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 12:11 PM
Charlie Louvin may have passed away a little over a year ago, but the revival of interest in The Louvin Brothers and Charlie’s music and life continues on like a country evangelist extending the altar call for yet another verse. Just in the last few months, deluxe vinyl reissues of the classic Louvin Brothers LPs Satan Is Real and Tragic Songs of Life have filled the racks of hipster record stores, Charlie’s plain-spoken and rough-as-an-Alabama-corncob memoir, Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers, has hit the bookstores, and now we see the release of the excellent documentary Charlie Louvin: Still Rattlin' the Devil’s Cage on DVD.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Reviews A Tour of Diana Ross' Wardrobe, 3/2/12 at The Ryman
Posted by Cayla Mackey on Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 4:59 PM
Diana Ross strode onstage to the song “I’m Coming Out.” This is it. This is the song that branded her album Diana. It’s her declaration of freedom from Motown’s disempowering business dealings — dealings that left her without ownership of her work. For the debutante, now is her time just as it was when this song first came out. She dresses the part.
Ross’ performance was a tour of her career, with each period of her life accompanied by a different gown. All five of Ross’ marvelous dresses dripped glitter and sequins. Her costuming alone was well worth the pricey ticket. But, as Edd Hurt says, “Don’t let the glamorous sheen of Diana Ross’ career prevent you from looking a bit deeper.”
For Ross, glamour and aesthetics are equally as important as her music. She defines and is defined by glamour. In a larger sense, she’s a poor girl from the ghetto who has risen to affluence and renown. Like Aretha Franklin, who performed at The Ryman last year, she embodies black female empowerment.
Ross began in a floor-length, slouchy red gown as the lead singer of the Motown trio The Supremes, performing “Stop in the Name of Love.” The eight-piece backup band sewed numbers seamlessly together as the sound shifted from Latin funk to smooth jazz to disco. From her entrance onto the stage, there was not a moment in the 90-minute set during which the entire audience was seated. She had them, and she had them on their feet.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Reviews Worker, Neurology [Review]
Posted by Ryan Burleson on Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 3:56 PM
Neurology
Self-Released
December 13, 2011
Twice a day, Monday through Friday, I wind my way through rush-hour traffic from East Nashville to my office on West End and back again. Little changes on these voyages — bar the weather and the sounds that accompany my drive. I even see the same drivers some days, often stone-faced for the very reasons I myself am stone-faced, which change depending on the day.
The best part of this drive is by far the moment I pass through the ever-changing corridor of shops and bars between 17th and 18th avenues on Church Street. I feel no attachment to the current tenants, but I once did. One in particular, the DIY venue Indienet, played host to more music-related memories than I can count. I moved to Nashville in 2000 and instantly found my tribe within its dark, dingy walls — punk rock and hardcore obsessives who wore their hearts on their sleeves and, for the most part, genuinely cared about each other despite wide disparities in belief system, fashion sense and so forth. For a time it felt like our own little Dischord-esque utopia, the friendships refined through debate and harmless antics, the music not yet tainted by starry-eyed hair rockers and powerful corporate interests.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Reviews Million Sellers' Music City USA and Other Ghost Stories [Review]
Posted by Edd Hurt on Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 7:45 AM
It's a very strange record, and that's what takes Music City USA to another level of expression entirely. Singer, songwriter and guitarist Kels Koch has come up with one of the great semi-decipherable rock 'n' roll statements in recent memory, and Koch's efficient little trio plays their rockabilly frantically, as if they have something to prove and three minutes in which to do it. The opening track, "Music City USA," finds Koch singing about living in hell — that's Nashville, if you haven't guessed by now — and wondering about his place in the musical firmament. He's just another idiot who came to town trying to play the music he once believed in. As he sings, "Please don't let me be just another hack in Music City, USA." But it's too late — he already is.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Reviews Glen Campbell at The Ryman, 1/3/12
Posted by Edd Hurt on Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 12:55 PM
Whether this hobbled his career, I have no idea, just as I have no real idea of what his stardom may have meant to him, or his disappearance from the charts after the mid-'70s. Of course, he could be labeled a transitional '60s-'70s artist in somewhat the same way you’d look at Harry Nilsson, a similarly deceptive middle-of-the-road pop singer Campbell covered in the late '60s. (You could draw a line from the string arrangements of Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” and “Galveston” to Nilsson’s version of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” and get a good picture of that weird American playground I mentioned earlier. But that’s for another time, maybe.)
Friday, November 4, 2011
National Skyline / Reviews M.T. Richards' Moogfest Coverage [Active Child, Tim Hecker, St. Vincent and More]
Posted by M.T. Richards on Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 11:14 AM
Having already guzzled an uncountable number of beers by this point, I was ready to mosh with the collegiate hipsters who had flooded the Civic Center entrance — many of them dressed in oh-so-clever Halloween get-ups. Turns out that Grossi has precious little patience for moshing. He plays dreamy, erotic, plaintive, goth-infused industrial R&B. New album You Are All I See is “headphone” music in the most concrete sense of the term — every track springs forth with opulent, velvety nuances that aren’t immediately hearable unless you’re listening on low-impendance headphones. Credit Grossi for pulling that aesthetic off live. Dressed dapperly and seated behind his signature harp, his glumly lit set included the titanic “Ancient Eye” and shattering operatic ballad “Hanging On.”
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Re: Embarrassing Retro-'90s Package Tour Ambitiously Headed for Bridgestone Arena Aug. 6
Is each band going to play one song?
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Re: Embarrassing Retro-'90s Package Tour Ambitiously Headed for Bridgestone Arena Aug. 6
@K "... you probably wouldn't recognize rock if it hit you in the face." If…
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Re: Embarrassing Retro-'90s Package Tour Ambitiously Headed for Bridgestone Arena Aug. 6
Solid pun, though — "rock" as in music and "rock" as in a stone.
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Re: Embarrassing Retro-'90s Package Tour Ambitiously Headed for Bridgestone Arena Aug. 6
K, U mad.
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Re: Embarrassing Retro-'90s Package Tour Ambitiously Headed for Bridgestone Arena Aug. 6
What kind of self-righteous asshole writes crap like this? Not everyone reduces music to social…
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