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Lyrics Born, Everywhere at Once.

Friday, May 9, 2008 § Matt Cibula

lb

I love Lyrics Born. He’s not the most fashionable hip-hop artist these days, but that doesn’t mean I can’t love him anyway, with his hyperliterate flow and self-deprecation-crossed-with-absurd-backpackadoccio and his lefty humanist inspirational politics. I know, I know, we shouldn’t like records based on whether or not their creators seem like nice people…but what can I say, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

Which is not to say that I sit around listening to him over and over or anything; Tom Shimura’s albums for me are always pretty good but not amazing, hella fun without ever being hella consistent. This is not to be a slam, but the best thing he ever did was the original Solesides/Quannum version of “I Changed My Mind,” an angry sad transcendent piece of funk wisdom.

If he’s never touched those heights again, maybe it’s because his life is going a lot better now than it did then. And LB has been quite diligent about making fun of the trivialities and b.s. that bring him down — remember “Stop Complaining” off the last record? Maybe it’s the dreaded curse of John Barth’s famous dictum in re: Hamlet: TOO MUCH SELF-KNOWLEDGE IS ALWAYS BAD NEWS. But I still hope against hope, and I was there with $10.54 in cash the first day this hit the Exclusive Co. shelves.

I think there’s no question that Everywhere at Once is Lyrics Born’s best album, maybe by a healthy margin. The only question, perhaps, is why. Maybe it’s because this record has a metric ton of funk for every spoonful of hip-hop signifiers, which is a refreshing development; maybe because it is the first time when he’s not really trying to prove how good he is at rapping; maybe it’s because the rest of the genre is stuck in a shame spiral. Not sure.

But this record really seems to me to be a new exciting development for LB as an artist, without really being very radically different from anything else he’s done. The thing just hums right along, uptempo and blippy and bleepy and electro-gutbucket the whole way. It’s all done by his live band, but it’s mixed together the way it would be in a club, so you really get no chance to hold your breath. Which is good.

For the first time ever, the feature tracks actually might have a chance at serious radio play. “Differences” makes a whole meal out of its whole “why can’t we end this crazy battle of the sexes” thing, with all of the good shots and conciliatory gestures on the part of the [very sensitive] guy, but the chorus is still pretty adorable, with Joyo Velarde singing her heart out, and I could see this being a good summer jamm. In contrast, “I Like It, I Love It” actually has a big bass bottom on it, and recaptures some of the old-school LB breathless line-spinning tension-packed delivery, which is glorious.

The real triumph of Everywhere at Once might be the way the second half of the record just keeps to steppin’ away from any kind of hip-hop template. “Rules Were Made to Be Broken” isn’t rap at all; among all the hipster jazz touches, Lyrics Born just kind of sounds like Falco and/or Rockwell. “Do U Buy It” is ramped-up new wave/electropunk pop, rendering it super-fun, and “I Can’t Decide” manages to combine ATL-rap vocal stylings with a Houston slowdown funk chorus (love them Jazz Mafia Horns!) and some big-time wave-o synth washes, all in service of a song about how LB wants to do everything in the world. Um, dude? Like, you’re already doing that?

Which is not to say that this is all surface-level stuff. “Whispers” is a heartbreaking song about the funeral of Benjamin “Mack B-Dog” Davis an “OG Quannum” homey who taught Shimura everything he knows about the game, but from whom he was estranged for a few years. It kinda rips your heart out, whether or not you’ve ever been in this situation, makes you want to call all your old friends and squash every beef you ever had with anyone.

Less successful: the glacial dub joint called “Is It the Skin I’m In,” which is just too slow to live, and its reggaetón predecessor “Top Shelf,” which doesn’t really work as much as I’d like it to but at least has some life to it. I’m still undecided also about “The World Is Calling,” which might be kind of dope but might also be one inspirational deal too many.

But the real triumph of this disc is the fact that a song called “Hott 2 Deff” can actually sound good in 2008. Who saw that coming, for Christ’s sake? It even features Chali 2na — what the hell year is it? But it bounces, it’s fun, it has a great Velarde hook, and it makes my car speakers and windows act funny. What do I need out of music? Just that, baby, just that.

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Play Time (Jacques Tati, dir.)

Thursday, May 8, 2008 § Matt Cibula

playtime

Step One: find a way to see this film. I suggest the two-disc Criterion Collection DVD; I got mine from the library. It is an absolutely necessity, an unparalleled achievement that was hosed by fate and haters in its own time (1967), a devastating critique of modern life that also ends up being humanistic, touching, life-affirming, and very funny.

Step Two, After Your Mind Has Been Completely Blown: read this piece.

Quick backstory, just to whet your appetite — Jacques Tati, fresh off his massive successes with Les Vacances des Monsieur Hulot and Mon Oncle, conceived a film about modern life in Paris, and how small humans are in the environment they have constructed for themselves. His vision was big — so big, actually, that he had to build an entire town for it, with its own power plant and facades and streets. They called it “Tativille,” and the haters started sharpening their knives. Disc two of the Criterion set details the epic building of this set: 100 workers, destruction by storm, rebuilding, running over budget, the interference of the French government, foreclosure…I won’t spoil things too much here, but suffice it to say that Jacques Tati was a crazy dreamer who sacrificed everything to make his vision come true. And I mean EVERYTHING, pretty much: his money, his family’s money, the rights to his movies, all of it.

And then it bombed. Critics were kind of “meh” about it, the American distributor didn’t come through — it wasn’t shown in the U.S. until five years later — and Tati was plunged, understandably, into bitterness. He gambled big, he lost big…unless you count the actual quality of the film, which is high high high. How people could not see this in 1967 (or how they refused to see it because they were too busy hatin’) is way beyond me.

Here’s the thing about the actual movie, though. (Continued)

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Flight of the Conchords - Flight of the Conchords

Wednesday, May 7, 2008 § Justin Cober-Lake

Flight of the Conchords

Flight of the Conchords would be a funny show, I imagine, without any music, but it’s hard to imagine it would have taken off (accidental pun, I promise) like it did without the insanely hilarious songs. And I guess the show wouldn’t be so good if it was about a band and they had no music, so I don’t know, really. At any rate, the songs from the series are incredible, but that doesn’t mean they’ll translate well to CD. At least that was my biggest fear before listening to the show’s identically titled band’s self-titled CD. My biggest fear related to the album anyway.

Since most of the songs fit into the narratives of their given episodes, there’s a reasonable chance that they won’t work removed from context. Of course, it’s hard to judge if you know the context when you listen to the CD, but it isn’t entirely impossible to get a feel for it. Maybe somewhat surprisingly, most of these songs are still very effective, minus a few jokes. (Of note is that “The Prince of Parties” still isn’t funny, although I like to think of it straightforwardly rocking neo-hippie communes).

“Mutha’uckas” was my favorite cut from the show, and the only one to put me into life-threatening need-to-take-a-breath hysterics. As much as anything, the song parodies radio edit cuts, but the second verse is explicitly about an odd fruit-stand racial conflict (if that intrigues you, go rent the series; if not, never bother). Even so, the complete breakdown of that version into edits and indecipherable bits of words aside from names of fruits doesn’t require too much context — just enough that it could become more puzzling than funny.

Not that this record’s going to sell too many copies to non-viewers anyway, so the more pressing question is what makes this record work in a way different from, say, Weird Al, and what makes me think this one will age better? Well, the second part is that the topics aren’t topical. Just as the music parodies styles from the last 40 years of pop, the themes are dependent on current events, contemporary context, etc.

What the songs seem to be most dependent on is the removal of any sort of romanticism from their content. Where the music sounds like [insert genre, obligatory Marvin Gaye reference], the lyrics are unlike anything in pop or art. Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement have stripped their songs of any transcendental expression. There are no metaphysical pleas for love or peace, no higher thought, no deep exploration.

That in itself isn’t that novel, but the ability to avoid making the songs a simple postmodern play of surfaces — of making it all a big signing game — is both impressive and important. The superficial nature of the songs creates pricks of aesthetic conscience, reminders of the ridiculousness we allow (and maybe need) our pop songs to contain. Where pop is supposed to be an escape, a catharsis, or whatever, these tracks are just reminders of what life is like.

No song displays this aspect of the music as well as “The Most Beautiful Girl (In the Room)”. The song sounds like a seduction song, but there’s neither rock romanticism or Donnean employment of technique to get sex here. The narrator hits on the woman because she is what the title said she is, but this amounts to “You’re so beautiful you could be a waitress … an air hostess in the ’60s” and, the ultimate clincher, “a part-time model.” There’s no gamesmanship here, nothing clever by the character saying the words. In fact, it’s ridiculously honest, something that neither pop nor seduction usually explicitly is. Admit it, even those songs that are omg totally the soundtrack to your life are at a higher pitch than you normally live it.

The final verse nails the stylistic humor of the songs: “You’re so beautiful, you could be a part-time model / … / spending part of your time modeling / and part of your tiiiiime next to me. / And the rest of the time doing your normal job.” In the middle of that stretch, the speaker starts to overturn the mundanity of the scene by saying something romantic (”next to me”). That moment gives “part-time model” a new, and very sweet, meaning. Then the reminder of real life hits us with the mention of the real job.

That type of humor (based on the avoidance of transcendant or romantic language) runs throughout the album, usually heightened by the nature of the delivery. “Business Time” takes an old sitcom cliche (the married couple only having quick, dispassionate sex at their appointed hours) but delivers it with such fervor and bluntness that it’s hilarious for the first time since well before Al Bundy. “Mutha’uckas” contains radio-unfriendly levels of vitriol leveled against ATM transaction fees and a fruit vendor. “Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros (feat. Rhymenoceros and the Hiphopopotamus)” explains its own lack of hypermasculine posturing with lines like “If you rap like me, you don’t get paid, and if you roll like me, you don’t get laid” and asks feuding rappers who diss them to “be more constructive with your feedback, please.” The songs carry the elevated intensity of pop music, but with all of the usual content exchanged for the mundane.

Like much humor, it’s the unexpected nature of the comments (even if it’s the same system throughout the album) that makes us laugh, in this case, the unexpected appearance of such unidealized ideas in a pop format. On a smaller scale, the use of language itself adds plenty to the comedy. The wordplay throughout the record is often top-notch, sometimes deliberately bad (the “changes” joke from “Bowie”) and sometimes it’s simply ridiculous (all of “Foux du Fafa”). The duo juxtaposes these two kinds of jokes with more traditionally skilled play so that we don’t even know what sort of humor is coming. “Hiphopopotamus” contains the line “My beats are phat and the birds are on my back and I’m horny,” which uses three puns of varying styles (the one on “birds” being the classiest, at least in its way) and requiring different amounts of rhinoceral knowledge. It’s that kind of persistent wordplay that keeps the album so funny throughout.

And the songs are catchy, too.

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Steven Bernstein, Diaspora Suite.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008 § Matt Cibula

diaspora

12:56 a.m., I should be sleeping, gotta get up and go to work tomorrow, make that cheddar, grease the wheels, bring home the vegetarian bacon. Instead I was up with my chronic insomnia, watching a fascinating film on DVD (check tomorrow’s entry), and thinking about home.

Home for me is here, now, good old Madison Wisconsin with its bike paths and cultural festivals and general sense of goodwill. But I have another home: the great weird wonderful maddening state of Oregon. It is on my mind lately for a couple of reasons, the biggest of which being that I haven’t been there for a long time and I miss my family and friends. But I carry a lot of Oregonisme with me, and I have been getting back in touch with some high school friends lately which feels good, and I will get out there sometime and drink lots of yummy dark beers in every McMenamin’s in the Five Oh Thrizzle.

I still feel connected to Portland and to Canby, even though I am a lot of miles away. I also feel connected to San Francisco, city of my birth and site of my mother’s whole family tree; to Chicago, an onion-like city named for wild onions, but still a city I got to know and understand on every single one of its layers; to New York because it is New York; and to Boston because I lived in the environs for the better part of a decade. I also count Addis Ababa, because I cannot wait to get back, and because it is the most completely WOW place I have ever been in my life.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about Judaism lately. II’m not Jewish (many years as an unmolested Catholic altar boy but I’m pretty much straightup Buddhist these days), but my wife’s family is, and so are my own children, one of whom is preparing for a bat mitzvah this fall. But even my vague misunderstandings about Judaism aside, I have always resonated with the idea of the diaspora, the tapestry, a life made up of crazy quilts and unmatched socks and family photos that look like diversity posters, the whole “Glory be to God for dappled things” thing.

Why does this occur to me? Because of a couple of things having to do with this record. Trumpeter Steven Bernstein has been putting out a series of discs on Tzadik marked with the word “diaspora,” because he is examining Jewish music from a number of different perspectives. This one, however, is the first one where he really lets his own compositions take center stage — kind of a ballsy move, but probably overdue at the same time, if you know what I mean.

And it is a glorious thing, people, a truly diverse and funky blend of world music, straight-up rock and jazz-rock and post-rock, and the full beautiful range of Jewish music. None of these styles is really allowed to dominate, which is good; the ambient primordial soup of “Reuben” seems to segue perfectly into the bluesy stomp of “Simeon (Yis May Chu),” and when “Zebulon” metamorphoses from post-bop nugget to Electric-Miles funk it sounds organic and natural. There are common elements to a lot of these pieces — minor-scale klezmer clarinet lines from Ben Goldberg, the squalling electric guitars of Nels Cline and John Schott and Will Bernard — but each has its own momentum and internal logic, or carefully planned lack thereof.

Hard to pick anything out as emblematic of a disc so wonderfully and purposely muddled, but there are hundreds of individual moments here where one gasps at how boldly the band is willing to jump off the same cliff together. The ringing Sibelius chords near the start of “Joseph”! The entrance of the sludgy doom-jazz horns on “Gad”! The completely OUT guitar figures ringing through “Levi,” and how they end up merging seamlessly with the unison horns, and then how the horns start to get all manic and the guitars drop down to provide stability, and then how everything just starts to decay from there!

See, this is the kind of jazz I like best — the kind without any kind of mental boundaries, but still constructed, or de-constructed, or something. Bernstein holds everything together in a couple of canny ways: the doubled-up drumming of Josh Jones and Scott Amandola, the intertwining of his own trumpeting with Jeff Cressman’s trombone and Peter Apfelbaum’s saxophone and Goldberg’s clarinet, Devin Hoff’s pulsing bass work. Sure, things get kinda mushy at times, but that just allows something to break through, and usually more than one something, and usually those three or so new melodic lines end up finding each other and mutating and oy, I’m kvelling.

But there are a couple more things here of interest. One is a photo in the inner booklet showing Bernstein, Apfelbaum, and Cressman playing jazz together…at a 1973 playground opening in Oakland. They are all longhaired adolescents, blowing their heads off in some high school band, and kids are watching. These guys have been making music together just about all their lives. No wonder they can give and go, run and gun, slide in and out of each other’s thought processes. The diaspora is a personal thing. The soul selects its own society, but it doesn’t have to shut the door.

The other thing has to do with Judaism, with Israel, with Palestine, with acceptance and mutuality and respect and the FACT that a diaspora is by definition a shape-shifting sort of thing with a fully permeable membrane, that osmosis is one of nature’s greatest tricks, and a whole bunch of other things. But I’m not really qualified to talk about any of it, so I won’t say anything else.

Except that this is one hell of an album and pretty much puts everything else out there to shame.

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La Roue (Abel Gance, dir.)

Monday, May 5, 2008 § Matt Cibula

roue

Let me begin by saying that I did not watch all 4 1/2 hours of this film, which I DVRed from Turner Classic Movies a couple of weeks ago. My life does not allow for such things as the careful study of a 270 minute movie. I watched the first oh maybe third of it or so, then forwarded through some of the rest of it, pausing for significant passages.

That having been said: WOW. I have previously seen only part of Napoleon, so I am just getting to know Abel Gance’s work. (Sadly, and stupidly, I DVRed J’Accuse but deleted it before I had the chance to actually watch it.) Briefly, though, he was an illegitimate working-class guy whose family was part Jewish, pretty much three strikes you’re out in France at that time, and forced his way into the theater and then films. According to the TCM host, La Roue was inspired by Gance’s trip to the U.S. and all he learned from D.W. Griffith about editing, but I call bullshit on that because I never believe anything the TCM or AMC hosts say.

The basic set-up of La Roue is this: Sisif, the most dedicated French railroad worker in history — he suspends a brawl just as he is about to win because he knows his antagonist has a train to run in a few minutes! — finds an orphaned little girl after a brutal wreck, and takes her in. Said wreck, by the way, is rendered about as chaotically as one can imagine, all a hell of cross cuts and multiple exposures, people crying and screaming and running around, very unsettling and pretty amazing for the early 1920s.

roue2

So Sisif is now raising the baby, Norma, alongside his own son, Elie. Forward several years to get to the good stuff.

(Continued)

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An Annoying Defense of Mariah Carey’s E=MC².

Friday, May 2, 2008 § Matt Cibula

mc2

There has been a lot of hoo-hah all up in the place about the fact that Mariah Carey has now had more #1 hits than Elvis Presley, and is knocking on the Beatles’ door. Since I’m not really into counting stats, I don’t really care about the actual controversy, or even the “OMG Music Sucks Now Elvis/Beatles/Doors were REAL MUSICK” boomer argument. The important part here is this:

We better start taking Mariah Carey seriously.

Okay, it’s kind of hard to do that, for a couple of reasons. Number One should be that some of her big hit songs are not so hot, but let’s be fair, that’s an argument that can be used against Elvis and the Beatles too. Anyone who tries to argue that all of her 18 chart-topping singles are crap is, flatly, wrong and dumb and rockist. Okay, so some of them sound alike, but having a formula is how you have a lot of #1 songs, duh. And while she’s not exactly my fave rave of all time, her body of work is pretty strong, people. “Hero” is actually an inspiring song; “Honey” is sexy and light; “Emotion” and “Dreamlover” and “Heartbreaker” and “We Belong Together” show a range of tone, scope, mood, and musical interest…hell, even “Vision of Love” still stands up tall. So no go on that one.

Number Two, which is usually presented as #1, is that Mariah Carey is crazy and/or weird and/or somehow unlikable, to which I can only respond in two ways: “What?” and “Huh?” Read one non-fawning biography of Elvis or John Lennon (but eschew the Albert Goldman stuff, that was an evil dude for sure) and get back to me about how horrible Mariah is. There’s a lot of sexism in this charge, methinks, because no one cares if guy musicians are crazy weirdos. And you know me, I naturally see racism here too, but I might just be wrong about that. Not sure. But using that argument against MC is pretty sketchy. Yes, she acted weird on MTV a couple of times — to me, that’s a big plus in her favor. And was Glitter really worse than Flaming Star or Spinout?

Number Three, “she owes her whole career to random producers/Tommy Mottola/outside help,” is ridiculopolis. She has written an alarming number of her own songs, blazing a huge trail for female r&b artists, end of story.

So now let’s stop talking about the past and start talking about now. E=MC² is not quite as ambitious as The Emancipation of Mimi, perhaps, but that is no reason it shouldn’t be taken just as seriously as anything else over which blog-ink is being virtually spilled these days. Let’s start with “Touch My Body,” the great pop song of 2008 so far. (Continued)

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Miscellanea Ephemera Etcetera: Items!

Thursday, May 1, 2008 § Zeth Lundy

Item! I had every intention of documenting at-bat music for every player while at the Sox game a few weeks back (let’s talk psych-out/psych-up tunes!), but like all good intentions brought into the teeming social experiment that is Fenway Park, was bested by the two-handed demands of peanuts, $7.25 Bud Lights, and enthusiastic clapping for Manny. I was able to make a few mental notes: lil’ Dustin Pedroia walks to the batter’s box to the oversized sounds of a bangin’ nouveau R&B joint that I kinda recognize from my day job (is it irony, or a good ol’ American tauntfest?), while Veritek still uses that dumbass 3 Doors Down song. Damn, Tek, you’re my captain my captain, but I refuse to call you “Superman” until you’re hitting over .300, at least.

The park’s organist did toss out a few left-field bones before the game, as usual – the smooth instrumental sounds of a song like “Pictures of Matchstick Men” or “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” does actually help to numb the oncoming ubiquity of “Sweet Caroline,” even if it’s just a small mercy. Sitting in certain areas of the grandstand, you also get the added sensory intrusion of the park’s P.A. system, which means between-inning snippets of gaudy Nashvegas and nü-emo are an unfortunate reality. Give me “Dirty Water” or give me death, I say. It’s only a matter of time before Fall Out Boy records a cover of John Fogerty’s “Centerfield,” isn’t it?

Item! Eddie Izzard at the Orpheum Theatre this past Tuesday. Absurdity + history = comedy gold. A few of my favorite bits involved Scrabble games before the invention of language and giraffes hiding from tigers by pretending to be the Eiffel Tower, but hands-down the best moment was when he topped a ridiculous run-on about badgers, crème brûlée, and creationism with an awesomely horrendous pun (”Badgers can’t be choosers”), which caused the entire audience to groan, at which he lashed back, “Fuck off! Like you’ve ever heard a joke about badgers, crème brûlée, and creationism before!” We fought the comedian and the comedian won.

Item! Me likey the new album by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, though I fail to understand why everyone thinks it’s better than Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, which it clearly isn’t. Still: a rockin’ good time, even if it’s a somewhat stream-of-consciousness kinda time, and even if the recording is far too tinny fer my ears. That one song, “Midnight Man,” especially the part near the end where that fuzzed-out electric guitar sounds like it’s being violently born atop the rhythm section, is totally Shaft. 

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Four Excellent Ways to Listen to Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak.

Thursday, May 1, 2008 § Matt Cibula

thin lizzy

1. 1978, I’m in 7th grade, hanging with Sam S. in his room up in the attic, it’s steamingly hot up there and KGON plays all day except when we put on records like Double Live Gonzo or The Wall or Paranoid (I was kind of afraid of Sabbath but I don’t let him know that) or London Calling or Dream Police, lots of my musical tastes were forged in that room. We would read The Uncanny X-Men and Alpha Flight and the original Wolverine miniseries, Chris Claremont was killing it back then, we would talk about girls and sex — Sam was a whole lot more experienced than I was, he was already six feet tall and had a partial beard — and life and fights and teachers, we would laugh and get mad at each other and have epic slap fights and then Sam’s mom Denna would pound with a broom and that meant it was time for dinner and we would chow down on pizza or hamburgers and then right back upstairs to listen to more music and read more comic books and drink epic quantities of Mountain Dew and call girls on the phone.Anyway, if you weren’t there it might kind of sound stupid or unconsciously gay or whatever. But I’m telling you that nothing ever sounded better in that attic room than “Jailbreak” or “The Boys Are Back in Town” popping up on KGON and me and Sam going into full-on junior high school music geek mode and doing the most incredible air band moves. I don’t think either one of us ever actually owned the album Jailbreak — it wasn’t in stock at either of the pharmacies in town, which were the only places you could actually buy albums, although I remember that Gary’s Rexall Drug usually had Johnny the Fox which I’m surprised I never actually bought — but believe me, we knew every single note, every single word of both songs. I played the air guitar and sang “Jailbreak,” Sam played air bass and got to sing on “Boys.”

A year or two later, Sam was starting to smoke a lot of pot with some of his other friends and I wasn’t into that, instead choosing to spend my time wallowing in early-stage depression, academic pressure, and jock life. We drifted apart for a couple of years but we ended up friends again by senior year.

2. 1988, I’ve just graduated from college and my girlfriend Liza and I are living with five other people in a three-bedroom summer sublet apartment in Cambridge Massachusetts. This arrangement was highly illegal and had to be hidden from our Mr. Roper-like landlord, especially after two other dudes got kicked out of where they were living and moved into our living room floor. I temped to stay alive, we drank a lot of beer and had parties where we watched the same dumb movies over and over and laughed our highly-educated asses off. That was also the summer that the Red Sox went on some crazy insane win streak, and the summer I turned everyone else on to It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back — actually, they all liked He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper better — and the summer where I could actually see my future stretching in front of me like a country road painted on a stage backdrop.

So one day Liza and I are down on campus and the Coop was having a cassette sale and there was Jailbreak for two bucks and how could I not. Polydor tapes all had that stupid-looking tan case, remember that? So I get the tape and a few more and bring it back to the apartment and Liza has to go off and do something for her upcoming thesis research about Elvis Presley so I’m there all alone, middle of the day, 95 degrees outside and of course no air conditioning in the room. So I grab a beer, go back into the bedroom, turn the fan up full blast, lie there in my underwear, and play Jailbreak about five times in a row. Back then everything seemed resonant, full of possibilities, overloaded with meaning — lol that’s what four years of college can do to a person — so I laid there trying to parse all the different logical strands of the songs. That’s when I realized that Thin Lizzy lyrics attained a kind of Celtic grandeur through their embrace and occasional rejection of cliché.

Actually, that was probably just the beer talking.

3. So Liza eventually agrees to marry me, foolish girl, and suddenly it’s 2002 and we have two kids and they happen to listen to a lot of Thin Lizzy as we drive together to preschool or soccer practice or off into the Wisconsin night to try to get them to go to sleep. They absolutely LOVE “Jailbreak” (not so hot on the other big song, not sure why), and we often play it multiple times because it so awesome.

I call up WORT, our local community-access radio station, and apply for one of the open spots on a Monday evening. We get 45 minutes to do whatever we want. Most people are hippie liberals who come on to complain about Republican outrage; we are just three weirdos, one guy two kids and a sackful of CDs and notes. I led with my favorite song of all time (guess what it is in teh comment space below) and threw in some Curtis Mayfield, each of the kids got to pick a song or two, it’s fun, you should try it sometime.

Anyway, last song is “Jailbreak.” When the chorus kicks in, we turn on the microphone and we all sing right along with Phil Lynott as he chronicles the desperate act of several brave fugitives from the future. I have the tape of this somewhere — we are all horribly off-key but we sound spazzy and glorious and passionate. Doing this is still one of my most treasured parenting moments.

4. Earlier this year, I finally break down and purchase the CDs of Jailbreak, Bad Reputation, and Johnny the Fox. Now I drive all around town cranking up all those octave-leap guitar figures, crying along with “Romeo and the Lonely Girl” (which doesn’t even make sense, that song, if Romeo was so good at his job he never would have lost her in the first place, and she hardly seems to live up to her nickname, she ends up with another dude like that) and hammering out the martial double-guitar codas on the steering wheel and trying to figure out just exactly what the hell is going on in the accompanying fake sci-fi liner narrative, something about a place called DIMENSION FIVE and outlaws and stuff.

Okay so Thin Lizzy was kind of a dirtbag 70’s rock band with a drug-addicted black Irish guy as its main singer-songwriter, and okay so their lyrics were kind of ass in many cases and they kept going to the same well over and over and Phil was a self-aggrandizing little snot with major woman and God problems. But to me, everything they ever did is an amazing monument to their own dogged belief in the majesty of rock, the mystery of roll, and I won’t hear a word against them. Actually, haters, go ahead and talk crap about Thin Lizzy if you want — I won’t hear you because I am busy singing “The Cowboy Song” in my car at top volume.

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Fieldwork, Door.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 § Matt Cibula

door

Okay so take three really smart and talented musicians and make them form a band called Fieldwork. Do it now. Vijay Iyer is a good start on piano, he has serious cred, good call; Steve Lehman is a very forward-thinking saxophonist who can go both light and heavy, so you can use him; also better add Tyshawn Sorey, he is an exceptional composer who just happens to be able to play a mean set of drums. Got ‘em all together? Make each one write some songs, give ‘em three years to cook up an album on notoriously avant-jazz Pi Recordings, and have ‘em call it Door.

So this record you have concocted…how does it sound? You probably won’t be surprised when you realize that it is not overly concerned with melody; there are long stretches that seem atonal (Lehman’s “After Meaning”) or three-way semi-nova simultaneous soloing. These three guys are in search of the holy mistake, the wrong-that-works-out-right, the form built from not imposing form. In this world of overly-simplified unambitiousness, you will be pleased to hear such sweet chaos as the burnout sections of “Balanced” and “Rai.” I may not have said it before but I’ll say it again — without the cutting edge, there is no center, no middle, no median, and we all go insane at the same time.

But that is not, by a long shot, to say that there is no melody here. In fact, that is the problem and the glory of Door: there are too many ideas, an overstuffed glut of creativity, on virtually every track. On Sorey’s delicate “Bend,” for example, piano and drums hover around each other like drunks fighting in a back alley while Lehman makes noises on his saxophone that range from guttural murmurs to actual blues-inflected yowls. Listened to once, this passage sounds random. On further review, however, the modal structure emerges in even the poorest ear. Several other tracks — “Cycle I,” “Of,” “Pivot Point Redux” — begin with brief helpful statements of purpose before pretending that there is no purpose at all.

All of which would be just neat conjuring tricks if the musicians themselves weren’t so damned on-point and empathetic. Sorey and Iyer seem to have memorized the entire Post-b0p Techniques Catalog; the safety net they weave for Lehman (who usually lays things out in disguise) is strong, like the hemp George Washington grew. And when a song falls apart in the middle (the effusive “Ghost Time,” the pizzicato section of “Less”), the collapse/defenestration seems well-planned, calculated without being all fussy about it.

This is not jazz that waits patiently in the corner for its audience. This is the real stuff, barefootedly seeking new paths through the world. Sure, sometimes it’s rough going. That’s why they brought the machete.

P.S. Listen to some of it here.

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Matana Roberts, The Chicago Project.

Thursday, April 24, 2008 § Matt Cibula

Let us now praise (not-so) famous (wo) men:

matana

Matana Roberts is a saxophone player of great skill and ambition, and some of the jazz sites have had minor buzzes about her new CD, The Chicago Project. But buzz dies down, especially for jazz in this world where every minor site goes goo-goo and gaga for Zooey Deschanel’s duo and the gossip about which Stroke has the herpes.

As for me, I have been trying to write about Matana Roberts, but I have been intimidated trying to understand this record. It’s huge in what she is trying to accomplish, and I always want more time to “get” a disc than life affords me. How do you really talk about her skill on the saxophone without resorting to comparison/contrast (a mug’s game in jazz, as everywhere else)? How to talk about her easy symbiosis with her band — Josh Abrams, Jeff Parker, Frank Rosaly — or the three duets with sax player Fred Anderson where they just pretty much tear the walls down, without saying things like “where they just pretty much tear the walls down”? How to make you understand that this is as vital and as crazy and as beautiful as anything else being made this year????

Well, in a desperate bid for attention, I’m going to do a kind of track-by-track, haiku-style. You want details? Go hit up this AllAboutJazz.com review. You want impressionism, pretention, poetry? You came to the right place. Here goes something….

1. “Exchange”: The journey is all / all the ways you get there are / what you really get

2. “Thrills”: Find your inner light / Hover there, understand it: / Method of the moth

3. “Birdhouse 1″: Skip a little stone; / The ripples will continue / even when you’re dead

4. “Nomra”: Quarter past seven / Time to fall in love again / Perfect ritual

5. “Love Call”: Roll the window down / Shout out all your pretty pain / Wake the people up

6. “Birdhouse 2″: Sent you a message / You never deciphered it / Kissed me anyway

7. “South by West”: Take your vitamins / Sneezing is not an option / Here on the high wire

8. “For Razi”: All night long you danced / the Dance of the Dreamers, now / dance the Dance of Days

9. “Birdhouse 3″: Outside in the rain / is the shining gleaming truth / Rise up, GO FIND IT

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