Consumer GuideQuantity-wise, I came up a little short this month--only seven A-list records, and often not the ones I'd figured from the release schedule. But the two full A's are wonderful surprises, one from the Congo in its prime, one by a country artist just hitting hers. African Pearls: Congo: Pont Sur le Congo (Syllart) From the early '70s, before the plunderers went bonkers, the music on this extraordinarily sweet and gentle double-CD flows and glows where later soukous accelerates and coruscates. There are features for Franco, Rochereau, Zaiko Langa Langa. But it achieves its steady-state bliss by showcasing second-level artists rarely heard in the States: Franco's brother Bavon Marie Marie, dead in an automobile accident at 26; outspoken Congo-Brazzaville progressive Franklin Boukaka, executed after a leftwing coup at 31; Franco's adaptable guitarist mentor Dewayon; sax man as big man Verckys; silken guitarist Docteur Nico; and many others who won't let you down. Amid plenty of rhythm workout and enough rough stuff, the purpose is beauty rather than passion or ecstasy. And the effect is to make you feel how deep this musical culture ran. A Elizabeth Cook: Welder (31 Tigers) First you tell me the fourth album by a thick-drawling Opry regular from rural Florida assembles 13 pieces of harmonically received verse-chorus-verse, and then I'll tell you they pack more aesthetic power and sophistication than any college-educated art damagee has scared up in a while. Although it helps that she's a college-educated art damagee herself, it helps even more that her bootlegger-turned-welder dad was in a band with her mom. Cook has been perfecting her craft long enough to recognize that her mama's funeral and her heroin addict sister are the stuff of art--those are both exact titles, but capitals and quotation marks would reduce them to mere songs rather than experiences the non-irony-damaged can share. And she's been living her life long enough that she won't let her suffering, to call it by its rightful name, dampen her appetite for good times. Inspirational Verse: "And if I wake up married I'll have to annul it/Right now my hands are in his mullet." A Hole: Nobody's Daughter (Mercury) Most people don't like her, and actually, I don't either. So I can't claim you owe it to yourself to enjoy Courtney Love's much-delayed first-album-since-2004. Nor even that these songs cast a revealing light of her scabrous persona--beyond "Pacific Coast Highway" ("I'm overwhelmed and undersexed") and "Never Go Hungry" ("I don't care what I have to pretend"), they're typical wails of punk-schooled rage from "Skinny Little Bitch" to "Letter to God." Thing is, I can use some new punk rage in my life, and unless you're a fan of Goldman Sachs and BP Petroleum, so can you. What's more, better it come from a 45-year-old woman who knows how to throw her weight around than from the zitty newbies and tattooed road dogs who churn most of it out these days. I know--for her, BP Petroleum is just something else to pretend about. But the emotion fueling her pretense is cathartic nevertheless. A MINUS Nas & Damian "JR. Gong" Marley: Distant Relatives (Def Jam) The most political mainstream rapper and the most talented Tuff Gong scion make this a true collaboration except for one thing--beyond two Stephen Marley tracks, it's all produced or co-produced by Damian. One reason JR. Gong gets hip-hop better than his brothers is that he has the sense to subsume it in what he knows. The result is an exceptionally melodic reggae album that's intensified by rapping devoid of dancehall patois and a hard edge unknown to roots revivalism. The result is also an exceptionally political hip-hop album that's most convincing when it doesn't multiply Afrocentric distortion by Rastafarian reasoning. Go after bankers and raise the poor up, fellas. But simmer down with the ancient wisdom. The First Amendment you consider so lame or self-evident or whatever is a product of the European Enlightenment, and you are very much its beneficiaries. Back in ancient times you might be chiefs. But more likely you'd repeating some other chief's every word. A MINUS Ouaga Affair: Hard Won Sound of the Upper Volta 1974-78 (Savannahphone) Upper Volta became Burkina Faso in 1984, when Thomas Sankara reformed the corrupt government of this landlocked, not quite sub-Saharan backwater and simultaneously undermined a fan base consisting, as so often in Africa, of bureaucrats and businessmen with other people's money to burn. Not that the infrastructure amounted to much--a few venues and fewer labels, the largest of which supplied these 15 tracks. Recording quality varies from primitive to clear, but the music is remarkable for an impoverished nation of six million, no matter the input of educated immigrants from Europe and Francophone Africa. Singer and trade unionist Sandwidi Pierre contributes three indictments of urban decadence that include the instantly captivating lead cut. Manding guitarist Mangue Konde raises up a Latin-styled track before moving to Abidjan to join Super Mande. Harmonie Voltaique debate whether to save your mother or your wife from a raging river and make you feel their pain. Sahara and sub-Sahara mix and mingle. B PLUS Tin Huey: Before Obscurity: The Bushflow Tapes (Smog Veil) In a misguided attempt to correct for personal affection, I underrated these Akron prog-jokers' 1979 Contents Dislodged During Shipment, their only major-label and non-retrospective album. So I'm not about to make the same mistake with this one just because my wife and I wrote the liner notes (for free, speaking of personal affection). It's a hodgepodge of course, including several unusually useful live or otherwise alternate versions. But after putting it aside for a while, I find that it rarely lets down as it herks and jerks between free jazz and tight postpunk and theoretical Zombies and the usual array of key changes and tempo shifts in pursuit of what I once dubbed "the eternal secret of the whoopee cushion." The official album's better, and I am a fan as well as a friend. But why shouldn't I be? One reason I like these guys is that they're not the kind of narcissists who'll waste their own time or ours on obscurities or redundancies. B PLUS Titus Andronicus: The Monitor (XL) Their debut was one of those inexplicable accidents in which some dysfunction-channeling young malcontent recaptures the halcyon days when every punk band had something to say by simple virtue of existing. Usually these malcontents run out of jokes or tunes pretty quick. Seldom if ever do they then channel their dysfunction into, for instance, a concept album that squooshes an interstate breakup saga into a bunch of Civil War references. That's New Jersey returnee Patrick Stickles's project, only channeling is for punks and he's some indigenous emo-Springsteen hybrid--for an hour of rant and roll whose nine tracks range up to 14 minutes, it's more like sloshing or spewing, as intermittent love lookbacks evoke a social despair also contextualized by fabulous spoken epigraphs from Walt Whitman, Jefferson Davis, William Lloyd Garrison, and Young Abe Lincoln. In their spirit Stickles bellows, "None of us shall be saved, every man will be a slave," "After ten thousand years it's still us against them," "The enemy is everywhere." You could complain that these cris de coeur are a loser feeling sorry for himself, and I could admit he's overstating. But at least he's stating. He may be a loser and he may not. Either way, he's not about to quit. A MINUS Honorable Mentions
Choice Cuts
Dud of the MonthJulian Marley: Awake (Universal Republic) It's the curse of audibly inherited talent. Whatever your own limitations, which are often considerable, invidious comparisons shadow your every move as you negotiate between the arrogance of the privileged and the confidence of the born performer--and as your fans try not to wish you were someone else. This album has its moments--the well-worked title cut, a little homily called "All I Know," the "in a good way" aside after "everyone's going crazy" (on the dancefloor, he wishes). But for the most part it's as heavy-handed as Julian's close-but-no-spliff variation on his fathers timbre and phrasing. Granted, tracks eight and nine do give one hope--until one realizes that the agents of hope are Mr. Cheeks and brother Damian, respectively. B More Duds
MSN Music, June 2010
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