Iso-listens briefly chronicles the albums getting us through lockdown
Leon Bridges debut, Coming Home was obviously a delight for a soul fan, but it located itself entirely in about 1965-68; modeling Otis Redding, Sam Cooke and James Carr and a million others. Like a lot of neo-Soul which veers a little too close an exact replica of the aesthetics of it antecedents, it has a tendency to drift into the background. It’s a perfectly lovely listen but — the acoustic gospel of River aside — when Otis is already out there, it’s doesn’t offer you a sustained reason to do so.
Over the course of 2018’s Good Thing, he skips through the next three decades or so of black American pop music; the melted Philly-soul confection of the Bet ain’t worth the hand, thru jazzy disco of Bad Bad News even the sparkling Pharrel stomp of If It Feels Good and many other pleasures besides as he heads for the present day.
It’s still nostalgic (these are nostalgic times) but importantly, he’s broadened out the palette he uses, so songs like Shy and Forgive You doesn’t make you think of anyone other Leon himself.
There’s something about posthumous releases. I didn’t watch Amazing Grace— though it physically pained me — and something in me can’t quite relax into Prince‘s work on Spotify.
In both cases the artist had work that was theirs, which they didn’t want presented and profited from in a certain way. And the people who decide these things waited until they were dead and, and almost immediately did it anyway.
Few of us are afforded the dignity of true autonomy over our labour — but if Prince and Aretha Franklin hadn’t earned that right, then maybe none of us will.
All of which is a long way of saying Mac Miller‘s Circleswas working against a certain amount of inbuilt suspicion.
But — to the extent that any art completed and released after the holder of the byline is dead can — Circles addresses those suspicions. It is neither a cynical cash-in, nor is it ghoulish and exploitative, the aural equivalent glance at a depressed man’s last diary entries.
It starts with that voice. One of the most consistent difficulties of writing about depression is putting across how dispiritingly mundane it can become. As such, Miller’s drowsy melodicism communicates something words on their own rarely do.
Which is not to say the lyrics on Circles are artless. By pitching his experience in the everyday/conversational/matter-of-fact, he keeps the desperation quiet (Running out of gas, hardly anything left, hope I make it home from work), the resignation rueful (Some people say they want to live forever, that’s way too long, I’ll just get through the day) and the abyss forever only just off screen (That’s what it look like, right before you fall).
Across the length of Circles depression is a drag, a hassle, a source of exhaustion. Which after long enough — in one experience — is what it gets to be. The most actively sad Miller sounds is on his cover of Love front man Arthur Lee’s Everybody’s Gotta Live (just Everybodyhere) — the bounce, the “whattayagonnado?” shrug of the original is gone, and replaced by something anxious, insistent piano and Miller’s voice shifted into a frail upper register.
The most convincing, palpable reference to a life beyond the endurance of the present is left to the album’s one guest, Melbourne’s own Baro Sura, crooning about turning jeans into hand-me-downs. Contrasted with Miller who, here and elsewhere, seems to view intimacy as just series of occasions to apologise, it may be the album’s sad, lovely peak.
Circles is as much a soul album as it is a hip hop record. In the hands of the peerless Jon Brion, the aesthetic is velvety and sedate at the bottom and at the top (though it’s a few listens before you hear them) there are glistening bells, bright, gently pulsing synths, faint and weary and diffuse like street lights fighting through fog.
It’s not quite a perfect record — there’s no bad tracks, but the persistently somnambulant tone means the beauty of later tracks like Surf feels buried in the mix — but it’s close; a cohesive, joined up vision that never once betrays the fractured circumstances of its creation.
You already know what a deft writer she is, and how her phrasing and sense of rhythm serves that writing, so it won’t surprise you to hear how hard she hits with lines like:
And I’ve always been too smart for that But you know what? My heart was not I took it like a kid, you see The cool kids voted to get rid of me I’m ashamed of what it did to me What I let get done It stole my fun, it stole my fun
Or how she dances across each syllable of
I would beg to disagreebut begging disagrees with me
But that doesn’t communicate just how volatile, how funny, how alive — and at times how devastating — Fetch the Bolt Cutters is.
Musically it stomps and thumps and claps and ricochets about like an irregular heart beat. Lyrically it’s intimate — and sometimes uncomfortably so — like the wild and amused eye contact she makes from the album cover.
By turns it makes you laugh, wince and punches the breath from your stomach. It’s the first time in a very, very long time I’ve had any interest in finding out the real life story behind anyone’s lyrics (this Vulture interview is useful, if you have the same reaction).
The words, rhythms and limpid piano arpeggios tumble downhill, and yet there’s never any sense proceedings are outside Apple’s control. Just listen to those gonzo harmonies — on Relay, on Newspaper, on On I Go. — the voices clinging to one another while the song shakes itself to rubble all around. She apparently used the walls and surfaces of her house as a makeshift percussion section, and by the end you feel you could map it.
Fetch the Bolt Cutters achieves the rarest combo of seeming organic and unaffected, while never sounding quite like anything else. It’s chaotic and cohesive, raw and deliberate. It’s a great album in the truest sense.
Maybe it’s just because I was 16 when I first heard them, but –much like The Smiths did for a previous generation, for different reasons — I felt The Strokes were a perfect outlet for an age group needing to deal with a sudden eruption of emotions they were neither ready for nor wanted.
Their melodies were so delicate, but so detached. The songs sounded exhausted by their drama and bored by their beauty. It was vulnerable, but that vulnerability was deniable.
Much of that came down to Casablancas’ sleepy lower register, and the most obvious point of difference between this and, say, Room on Fire (the previous Strokes record it most resembles) is that Casablancas sounds so present, so full throated — the falsetto on the opener The Adults are Talking doesn’t hit as ironic, nor does the concern of a line like “why’d you let them judge your body?” on Selfless.
This sincerity doesn’t sustain for every song, and the record relies on it for life. You notice it particularly when Casablancas reverts to type, on songs like the single Bad Decisions and stretches of Why Are Sundays So Depressing which feel like off-cuts from a previous album, dreary in its familiarity.
But when his voice is there, when it’s present and sincere and even playful, The New Abnormal is — if you forgive the choice of word at a time like this — liberating.
Ah, The Weeknd. I don’t know what it is that has me hooked about this guy. It’s party music about never having fun at parties, and music about sex by a guy who sounds like he bursts into tears after he comes. Still, he’s got something, you know? On In Your Eyes, he locks into that 80s sax solo, and I’m his.
Pablo Casals was a cellist and composer who exiled from his Catalonia home by the Spanish Civil war. After leaving in 1939, he would begin each of his concerts by playing his composition Song of the Birds. I have to slightly fight my love of grim classical at times like this, but some days, it just sounds like all this feels.
Childish Gambino does what he wants, and has for a while. And obviously what he wants to do at the moment is listen to Prince. So releasing an album with no cover art, named for the date it came out, with tracks mostly named for how long the album has been playing is to be expected. 24.19 is my favourite — flipping that descending melody line from Redbone into a major key and drenching it in all manner of pitch-shifting and reverb, and somehow ending up feeling lazy and organic.
Rather nice to have Something for Kate back, isn’t it? I was never a major fan, beyond a handful of tracks. But it’s nice to know that the place carved into my heart by Paul Dempsey’s committed roar (and the lyrics he wrote to do it justice) is still there.
Frank Ocean‘s melodies sound almost accidental, tumbling airily and from chordal handle to another. Dear April continues his drift away from the expansive synths of Channel Orange, taking up the frail, whispered intimacy that started on Blonde.
JBlack is a beat maker I happened upon on Instagram. Even if sharing it doesn’t reveal me to be clairvoyant about his future superstardom, Hold it Down is as lovely a song as I’ve heard all year.
Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield & Stephen Stills extended, hip-swinging take on Season of the Witch is for everyone who was able to get ahold of some weed before the lockdown — but has its share of pleasures for the rest of us too.
Dua Lipa‘s Love Again is great fun in its own right, but it stuck with me because of that wailing horn line, a reminder that — beyond the dull, the generic, or the cynical — pop is inexhaustible because it’s inexhaustibly strange. And you can trace the DNA of dreamy disco pop in 2020, through the gender flipped work of a straight edge Marxist who had no business being anywhere near the summit of the pop charts in 1997, all the wayback to 1932. The album’s called Future Nostalgia, after all.
And finally, one last thank you for John Prine. I just called to say I love you is the go-to song for High Fidelity‘s rock snobs to use as evidence that Stevie Wonder is irredeemable post about 1976. And they’re more or less right. And yet there’s that voice — nothing, nothing on Wonder‘s — you can hear the half smile, the slight embarrassment at the sincerity. Like he always did, he makes the everyday feel profound. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he reminds you what a miracle the everyday can be.
Unlike other soul men of the era, Bill Withers — who died on Friday of complication from a heart condition — sounds grounded.
His voice was steady, untheatrical and true. He never reached for longing falsetto like Marvin Gaye or Al Green, nor growled and groaned like Isaac Hayes, Teddy Pendergrass or Barry White.
And while many other artists of the era perched on expansive string-lead soundscapes, Withers’ sound emanated from his acoustic guitar, from which he wrung a remarkable amount of funk.
Particularly on his first album, produced by Booker T. Jones, all other considerations — all those elegant, nimble strings, organ flourishes and bass lines — are secondary to the man, his voice and his guitar.
Apart from giving his music a richness and subtle depth, it gave Withers — again, almost alone among his contemporaries, perhaps excluding Curtis Mayfield — a closeness, a sense that he was looking his audience directly in the eye, with all the intimacy that implies.
Listen to the spine tingling Live at Carnegie Hall from 1973. Aside from flawless performances, hear how much power it derives from the silence of that audience. Listen to them listen.
All this talk of modesty and decency invites the thought that Withers was middlebrow, conservative, easy listening — and sometimes did succumb to that impulse, particularly in the second half of the 70s — that quiet, palpable decency gives the music its punch.
Whether its the cold sweat of Who is he (and what is he to you) or Ain’t No Sunshine or the other kind of sweat (Moanin’ and groanin’, Use me, countless others) it was vivid, potent, because Withers gave the impression of having lived (and continuing to live) a real life.*
And decency is the fuel for his anthem, Lean on me, a song you knew all the words to the first time you heard it.
In the wrong hands, it could be utter dreck, cynical syrup of the order of That’s what friends are for. But its precisely his modesty, his restraint which gives Lean on Me an exultant, secular grace.
It’s an effect only available to those few singers who can make you feel that you, personally, are being spoken to.
Vale Bill Withers. 1938 – 2020.
*And of course he had — he’d spent nearly a decade in the navy and didn’t get big until he was 33.
And I always will remember these words my daddy said He said, ‘Buddy, when you’re dead, you’re a dead pecker-head’.
I hope to prove him wrong.
John Prine When I get to Heaven
There was something nastily appropriate about it.
The day after my worried observation that in the age of coronavirus, Bob Dylan and his cohorts were statistically likely to be one substandard hand washing from very serious trouble, it was revealed that John Prine — one of the best of that cohort, and certainly the most blackly funny — almost certainly had it, and was in critical condition. A sick cosmic punchline.
So hemmed and hawed about whether to do this now, or wait, and decided with things being as they are, someone still being alive is the worst possible reason to delay saying something nice about them.
***
His self titled debut hit smack bang in that 1968 – 72ish period, where nothing was just country, or just soul, just folk, or just rock & roll, but some lovely combination of it all, of something more.
Typical of the era, Prine’s music — country instruments, earthy loose-limbed rhythms, a dust of blues accents over everything — is driving and expansive, tinged with possibility even at its saddest.
Take the lazy stomp of Angel of Montogomery (“If dreams were lightning, thunder was desire/ This old house would have burnt down a long time ago”) or the suddenly chilly sunset of Far From Me (“Well, ya know, she still laughs with me, but she waits just a second too long”).
The quality of the music was that of a road stretching off to who knows where, and was melancholy and hopeful in the same way. The effect is doubled now that the world is shrinking into our living rooms, the bars are all closed and police are monitoring any travel beyond the local shops.
His voice arrived set in amber, neither young nor particularly old. It was broad and charismatic, and never much more than adequately melodic. As Robert Christgau put it, Prine’s voice never went, “because it was already gone when it got here”.
Thus his range didn’t narrow so much as shift, and his wry phrasing remained as graceful as ever.
Sometimes his jokes are bawdy (In Spite of Ourselves, with his great collaborator Iris Dement), sometimes caustic (That’s the way that the world goes ’round) sometimes surreal (Living in the future). But they’re almost always funny because they are warm, and humane, and about something true to life.
Take his late career cover — again with Dement — of Let’s invite them over again. The story of a couple with in love with their best friends — not one another — is a tiresome melodrama in its original form. Because Prine and Dement have a lot less pity and a lot more affection for their characters, in their hands it’s a sweet, sad little comedy of manners.
And then there’s his “return from Vietnam” ballad Sam Stone — an aural imprint of 1971 America, so completely of its time that it’s timeless.
It’s been broken up into its base elements by cover after cover, across soul and country and rock. It accrues, with Didionesque cool distance, a litany of detail, of Stone’s return ” after serving in the conflict overseas”:
And the time that he served, Had shattered all his nerves, And left a little shrapnel in his knees.
All leading to the shattering refrain:
“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm, where all the money goes. Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose”.
No one can break your heart like a great comic.
At the top of the piece, I quoted When I get to Heaven from 2018’s The Forgiveness Tree. I suspect that album’s cover image — that beautiful old face staring in repose at the camera — will be one you see quite a lot of in coming days.
He’s almost unrecognisable — though he’s one of those people who seems to look different in every photo — already weathered by lung cancer, and throat cancer and god knows what else in his 71 years.
He’s not smiling, exactly, but by now that curl of amusement at the corner of his mouth is a permanent feature.
Bob Dylan‘s Murder Most Foul — his first original song for eight years — is rambling, self indulgent, and very beautiful. It forces you to ask, as every Dylan song over ten minutes that isn’t Desolation Row does, is this a masterpiece or utter tosh*?
Murder‘s 17 minutes are crammed from start to finish with baby boomer cultural touchstones, the assassination of JFK followed by a procession including Marilyn Monroe, Etta James, The Beatles and a million others, iconic and obscure.
Baby boomers love doing this, of course. Every generation has it’s defining moments, but anyone who came of age post the irony poisoning of the early 90s would be far too embarrassed to simply rattle off celebrities and events, We Didn’t Start The Fire style, like it was an achievement just to be alive at the same time.
But Murder Most Foul is not We Didn’t Start The Fire, nor is it American Pie.
Dylan — excluding those revolutionary “Thin, Wild Mercury Sound” years in the mid 60s — has always been something of a historian, cataloging early 20th century music, plucking sounds and phrases from deep blues, folk and country as surely as he did from Shakespeare and Rimbaud.
Murder Most Foul is in keeping with that. The elegiac tone and the plethora of references do not give the impression of nostalgia for the sake of it, and maybe not of nostalgia at all.
It catalogs the wounding of a certain idea of America (an idea which has for good and for ill influenced every other country in the world), an idea that slowly bled out over the next 50 years.
But these reflections feel as bitter as they do mournful, as much about the revelation of a lie as the loss of something real.
Along with reference to the “Blood-Stained Banner” and the slow decay of a nation’s soul, the line that struck me most is “You got unpaid debts, we’ve come to collect”.
In that light, The Beatles, It Happened One Night,Wolfman Jack, Fleetwood Mac and Thelonius Monk are just salves that make living with this debt bearable.
As James Baldwin — who wrote as beautifully as anyone about the collective delusions and revelations that could be contained in mass culture — put it, “people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them”.
Harry Nilsson‘s A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night is, as far as I can see, the first of the albums entirely dedicated to great American song book standards by contemporary artist**, which now has enough entries from Michael Buble alone to qualify as its own sub-genre.
It came out in 1973, the same year as American Graffiti. The generation that wrote the rules of mass popular culture — rules that have sputtered out as consumption and thus cultural thought becomes increasingly fractured, individual and atomised — was looking longingly over its shoulder more or less from the start.
That way of thinking is dying on another front: it is literally dying. Its icons, the reasons people thought like this in first place, are dying, one by one, something brought into even sharper relief by coronavirus.
Indeed, part of the poignancy of the song is knowing that its author, and all his cohorts nearing 80, are particularly at risk of being one thoughtless eye rub away from joining JFK, and Marilyn, and John and Leonard, Aretha, Prince …
And what came after is a culture more fragmented and thus less sentimental, for worse and better. So we mourn the heroes of a postwar mass culture, but in doing so we also mourn mourning, because it will not be done this way soon.
I don’t view boomer nostalgia with anything like the disdain many people my age and younger understandably do. In fact, I’ve always been abnormally inclined that way myself, always acutely aware of the passage of things that could never return, always missing some cultural or aesthetic moment that pre-dates my own, and in all likelihood never existed***.
I’ve always dimly suspected that September 11 — which happened 9 days before I turned 16 — accelerated that trait, and added a certain infantile escapism into the mix that expresses itself by the rush of well being I feel when I hear, say, the theme music from Batman Returns.
Given that BuzzFeed initially built its empire with “You Know You’re a 90s Kid When …” articles that were just photos of Johnathon Taylor Thomas, I don’t think I’m the only one.
The question follows, what will the effect of the current crisis be on the the art of the generation shaped by it, and on how they think about that art? A generation whose entire adult lives will be sandwiched between this global trauma and those that hit around 2050 is unlikely to have any illusions about golden years.
So if it means anything all to you, enjoy Murder Most Foul. Enjoy its rambling, unfocused beauty, its ambition and its staggering, almost unbelievable vanity and self-importance. Because soon, very soon, there will be nothing more where that came from.
***
*It’s neither.
**Apart from that dubious distinction Schmillsonearns its place in history by containing the best version of Lazy Moon I know of.
***I should note that I do understand that this feeling is a offshoot of a very privileged place in the world, thatdreaming of the heady atmosphere of 1965, however abstract, is only fun for a certain section of society.
I started this back in January, before a couple of personal traumas — motes of dust compared the coming sandstorm, as it turned out — delayed proceedings. Now it’s March, and just look at us.
No commentary on this one. Takes are the one supply chain completely uninterrupted by the virus, you don’t need any more.
There is a wonderful book to be written about the life of Jerry Lordan. He was an RAF radar operator, a stand up, he was in advertising, and eventually wrote a handful of songs that would become hits on the early 1960s UK pop charts.
One, Apache — one of those wonderful surf-spaghetti western instrumentals that were popular in the early 1960s — was initially sold to Burt Weedon, though Lordan hated his version. Indeed, compared to what followed, it seems hopeless plodding and pesdetrian.
The Shadows were the first to make it a hit, and their version is much closer to what Lordan wanted — it’s subtle but driving, and plays with the dynamics of the composition, raising and lowering the intensity as befits the cinema of the piece (Apache was inspired by Robert Aldrich‘s whitewashed 1953 film of the same name).
In the years following The Shadows UK chart-topper, the song became something of a guitar group standard, with The Ventures and Jorgen Ingmann putting out successful versions.
As writer and critic Michaelangelo Matos points out, Apache relies on layers upon layers of inauthenticity — an English ad man writing a theme tune inspired by a Western that has Burt Lancaster playing a Native American. Matos describes Ingmann’s version as taking “something that was already sourced in the ersatz” and adding “a sonic patina of ‘exotica’, turning a simulacrum of a simulacrum into a Moebius loop of third-hand representation”.
There is no reason such hokey, faintly problematic kitsch should survive the decade that spawned it.
And yet, Apache has two lives, and both are the product of a certain post-war optimism and opportunism. Just as Lordan was a hustler who tried his hand at various money-making schemes before turning to show biz, Michael Viner was no artist.
Viner had been a political operator during the 1960s, before joining MGM. He specialised in cheap novelty records — The Best of Macrel Marceau, 19 minutes of silence bookended by applause being the most transparently useless and the funniest.
In 1972, with the intention of recording a soundtrack for scifi B-movie The Thing with Two Heads, Viner threw together The Incredible Bongo Band.
A project more than a band, it was cobbled together during MGM recording facilities down-time, using whichever studio musicians happened to be around — allegedly including uncredited stars like John Lennon and Glen Campbell. They ended up putting two albums out.
It’s worth listening to their 1973 version of Apache — never released as a single — with fresh ears. Those thunderous echoing drums, that storm cloud of horns, that bright metallic guitar, that fizzing organ. It still thumps you in the stomach, to this day.
The Incredible Bongo Band had a couple of minor hits, presumably made their money back, and would now be long forgotten were it not for a Jamaican American funk fan called Clive Campbell.
At street parties and break-dancing competitions in the mid-to-late 1970s — by which point Lordan was acting in British comedy-porn films — in the Bronx, Campbell was performing as DJ Kool Herc, perfecting a technique that would eventually become the fundamental building block of hip hop.
Herc pioneered “the merry go round”, in which he would extend the percussive soloing in a song — the break — by playing two copies of the same record, syncing them so their breaks would flow into one another and cutting between the two seamlessly.
There was (and still is) no snobbery in this bricolage. A record could be by a funk legend like James Brown, or a quickie cash-in like The Incredible Bongo Band, an obscure English rock group like Babe Ruth, or even a misbehaving proto-boy band like The Turtles; if it had a stretch of unaccompanied drums that sounded good, it was welcome at the party.
Pioneers like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaata both adored Herc. They took the merry go round, augmented it with 808s and synths, and created the first masterpieces of recorded hip hop.
From there, the fixation on breaks was woven into hip hop’s DNA.
The Sugarhill Gang, has-beens two years after Rapper’s Delight gave them rap’s first hit single, put out Apache (Jump On It). A hit in Europe that, like most of their work, makes up for lack of substance with an abundance of fun.
The same year it featured in the party masterpiece The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel.
And from then on, it resurfaces, repurposed and fresh as ever in every generation of rap — Nas, The Roots, Logic and literally hundreds more.
Of course, the question right now is — what the actual fuck is the point of any of this? In the teeth of a global pandemic, and the countless other ways in which humanity feels at a frontier from which it can never return, what good does music writing do anyone?
I’m not sure I know. The best I can do is say music pins together layer upon layer of human experience — personal, political, historical — like a toothpick through a sandwich.
It’s why I’m slightly obsessed with samples and sampling. I love the acknowledgement it implies; that even the cheapest trash might possess a quality that, due to a combination of factors, is utterly arresting, completely unrepeatable.
I love that, far from vulgar theft, there’s a generosity in a lot of sampling, a need for the audience to hear the same thrill, the same beauty the sampler hears. And it places the song in a historical setting, explicitly the product of years of evolution and innovation from other artists.
Eight seconds of unaccompanied drums in 1973 can at once take you back to the second world war, and shoot you forward 50 years, several generations into a genre that was years from being born.
Or maybe (to self plagiarise a little) through it’s unrepeatable quality, its odd kismet — like the peculiar crackle of your particular copy of a record, a voice inadvertently cracking, the gentle wheeze of fingers running along guitar strings — it just barrels directly from your ears to the hairs on your arm.
And the artists and grifters and jobbing session hacks who unknowingly take their place in chains of events that alter what’s possible in music give me hope.
As Australia’s already poorly supported arts sector struggles with event after event being cancelled — not to mention the affect this has Australia’s largely ignored critical community — it seems all the more important to focus on what this stuff means.
When we come out on the other side of the storm — however long it last, whatever damage it does — we will need it.
Dancing to Architecture 