WILD HAIR GUY AND MORE 2016 VINYL

This guy looks back from the page with a strong vibe.  I spilled coffee on one of the floating space eyeballs and blurred it in retouching.

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I'll continue to review the best albums of 2016, aka ANY RECORD I BOUGHT.

Guided By Voices: Please Be Honest

This Guided By Voices record goes all the way back to Vampires on Titus approach, just Robert Pollard recording everything under the GBV name.  It sounds fresh to me, it has some killer artwork and killer tunes on it, what's not to like?  Along with the poet William Stafford, Pollard shows that steady process works, relaxed standards keep the flow going, and gems emerge.   These two are unlikely allies but they're kind of on my personal creative board of directors.  I found this on a spree at Josey Records with Dave Snider.

  
Sun Ra: Angels and Demons At Play

Also a crazy prolific artist with a bent point of view, Sun Ra has a lot of music to explore.  His Twitter feed, from beyond the grave, on the other side of Saturn, is always a refreshing aside of mysticism and affirmation.  This record seems transitional to me, between the more traditional sounds of the late 50's and 60's, and the noiser electric jams of the late 60's and 70's.  This was a Half Price Books find, on one of their bad-ass coupon days.  


"My music comes from outer regions, from other beings I communicate with. I've been to Jupiter, and I've seen a lot of things." (Sun Ra) 

 The Bevis Frond: Miasma

I guess this continues the theme of out-there, independent artists like Pollard--this is a home-recordist classic, reissued on groovy blue vinyl for 2016 Record Store Day, also a Josey Records find.  In the early days of college rock I would hear about Bevis Frond but I never went down the rabbithole.  The sturdier sounds of Screaming Trees was more my thing.  You seldom hear outright Hendrix-ism in indie rock--this has the psychedelic guitar god thing going on, miniaturized and privatized in the arena of backyard imagination, which is kind of where I like it best.  And with great pop songs (oft-covered) that is a sweet deal.

Charles Bradley: Changes

Of all the records I've checked out this year, this one has the feel of an instant, note-perfect classic.  The retro soul movement is one of the best things we have going in this icecap-melting age, but it can at times begin to sound by-the-numbers.  This is, top-to-bottom, a perfect batch of songs, recorded vintage, and very moving.  Also a Josie Records find.

SLOVENLY MP3 FREAKOUT + TOTAL BERRY CROP BONANZA

A friend hooked me up with the the digital Slovenly discography and this Facebook page: I Bet I Can Find, Like, Ten People Who Think Slovenly Was An Awesome Band.  The Ipod and ears are refreshed.  My vinyl versions are scritchy at this point, and hard to listen to at work.

The strawberry crop has been mighty fine this month.  Really the first time our patch has blown up this way.  It had to do with weeding, composting, watering, and otherwise baby-talkin' the plants.

BOOKS AND RECORDS

Record Store Day was a blast yesterday. I found some fun stuff, including this Rough Guide comp of Ethiopian music to go with the amazing book I'm reading, set in Ethiopia, Cutting For Stone.   These comps are great--they come with downloads and tons of digital bonus material.  On the turntable in your living room, they make you want to dance.

 

NEW TO MY IPOD

marnie stern "the chronicles of marnia"

shocking, shaking days: indonesian funk

Vinicius Cantu'aria & Bill Frisell: Lagrimas Mexicanas

A BAND THAT CAME TO OUR TOWN

DJ Thor invited me to this show the other night--bought this 7" by Cascadia, a BC band, and enjoy it quite alot.  The way sludgy/indie/dreamy pop meets extreme metalisms (mainly in the tag of this number) is pretty fresh, not something I've ever heard before.  I haven't tracked down anything by their tour mates, Weed, but they were fun too.

Dave and I were likely the oldest members of the crowd, and since I am older than he, that made me the very oldest.  Luckily the Lindale Medical van met us at the venue to deliver Grampers, oxygen, new canes, hearing aids, denture glue, and hernia trusses.  Dave's Ride The Lightning walker decals are neat, and my Bad Brains orthopedic toilet seat lifter makes me feel edgy and alternative.
  
Oddly enough, the only medical incident involved someone in his early twenties, but I had my all-in-one Leatherman and was able to help a youngster who stumbled and fell from: Excessively Pegged Skinny Jeans Syndrome.  The constriction of blood flow around the calves and ankles create a wooden, sleepy feeling in the feet, causing the sufferer to fall and hit whatever is in his/her path.  A small rip in the seam of the skinny jeans, just below the knee down to the cuff, releases the blood flow and the sufferer is able to stand and enjoy amazingly intense music while maintaining a studied lack of affect.  Jeans styled in this improvised way are called "no wave gaters". 

 

SNOW DAY

Taking a snow day today to catch up with life, which means slowing down and putting on a record and making a list and maybe doing nothing at all.

Vacation Music

It's our last half day of vacation, back in Kansas City after the train ride back from Jefferson City last night, and a quick outing to Westport Cafe, our new favorite place.  We got to see the replay of the Royals 1-0 ten-inning win, and Hosmer's scrappy bloop single that won it.  It's going to be pretty hot today, in the low 90's, and I'm sitting out on Steve and Cheryl's deck with a pile of CD's to rip.  My official trip souvenir is the new Redd Kross record, picked up at Vinyl Renaissance on 39th.  But typically our trips to KC involve Steve turning me on to new stuff, in his car.

We drove around last week listening to the new Swans double, and that really blew me away.  The downtown NY art punk feel is elegantly embedded in music that has something in common with Balinese Gamelan, Steve Reich percussion pieces, and very remote, smoky, country and western.  I don't think there's a genre for it--just musicians totally in control of what they are doing in a unique do-not-change-one-syllable-or-cymbal-hit-of-this way.  Everything corny or standard stripped away and apparently built out of pure chi. (Do bands like this eat veggie burritos and drink Pepsi while they are in the studio?) Another record that hits me the same way is Richard Hawley's Truelove's Gutter, even though it is an unabashed popular music record.

The other record we discovered (in my brother's rig) was Mark Twain: Words and Music, a narrative song cycle with Clint Eastwood, Garrison Keillor, and Jimmy Buffet providing the story between folk, country and bluegrass songs.  It was really cool, and it is a benefit for Twain's boyhood home and museum.  The sad parts had us crying while we drove to visit my folks in Columbia.  I'm ready to revisit Twain's writing in a big way.

So, after a walk down to a cafe on The Plaza for coffee and a walk back Ward Parkway in the glorious sun and heat, I am unwilling to admit this vacation is almost over.  Kansas City is pretty well hopping in new ways (restaurants, especially) and it is hard to leave.  The only thing that is going to make me feel better is to rip all six disks of The Stooges Heavy Liquid box set and envision myself running around Margaret Bailes Johnson track in Eugene, sweating out a full week of pork: pork sausage, pulled pork, baby back ribs, crispy pancetta.  Bacon Fest is coming up and Dave Snider had better get himself an Amtrak ticket.  This may be the city of his dreams.