Twenty - Robert Cray

The 2005 release from Cray was special primarily for two reasons. There are 3 flawless gems that, frankly, make the album a keeper.

The first is the opening track "Poor Johnny", a Cray original that is one of the most memorable blues songs that I have heard in years. I first heard it - part of it - watching a chunk of a Clapton special in 2005 that cray was guesting on. He played one song and it soared. Not knowing the name of the actual song, it took some time to track it down, but track it down I did. The studio version on Twenty and a live version from Across the Pond are both fantastic. Tales of a rare degree sung perfectly by a man with an exceptional voice - is that too over the top, maybe, but its one of my favorite numbers from the last few years.

The second song are the title track, which is "pictured" on the front cover of the album. Not a happy song, by any means, but a worthy timepiece at a time when few solid artists took the time to write about the world they are living in today.

The final standout is a cover of Booker T's "I Forgot To Be Your Lover". Hard to argue with the treatment on this. Crays voice and guitar dexterity and tone are among the best in the blues world right now.

A solid album beyond these three songs and good edition to the Cray catelogue.

Before And After Science by Brian Eno

Art and experimental rock to a very weird and strangely accessible degree. To give an idea of what you in for with this one, note that the title of the album is actually aan anagram of the original title of the album: Arcane Benefits of Creed.

Its a trip, man. Released in 1977 and arguably the biggest bird that could be given to the punk, funk or disco that was rapidly beginning to dominate everything.


Its worth noting who plays on this wild ride of an album:
Brian Eno – voices, synthesizers (Minimoog, EMS Synthi AKS, Yamaha CS-80), guitars, synthesized percussion, pianos, brass, vibes, metallics, bell
Paul Rudolph – basses, rhythm guitar
Phil Collins – drums
Percy Jones – fretless bass, analogue delay bass
Rhett Davies – agong-gong, stick
Jaki Liebezeit – drums
Dave Mattacks – drums
Shirley Williams – brush timbales
Kurt Schwitters – voice
Fred Frith – guitars
Andy Fraser – drums
Phil Manzanera – guitars
Robert Fripp - guitar
Hans-Joachim Roedelius – piano
Dieter Moebius – bass, piano
Bill MacCormick – bass
Brian Turrington – bass


The first side begins energetically enough with No One Receiving. The song is like a funk song gone completely haywire. Imagine Earth Wind And Fire meets Pink Floyd and you have an idea of what's going on here.


Backwater keeps up the pace and replaces the funk with a Beatles-esq piano backing. The Floyd vocal stylings have been replaced with something that comes across far more like the Talking Head's (with whom Eno is closely associated) than anything. Tons of synth eventually replace the piano almost completely. Its just gets weirded and weirded... but tis very listenable and enjoyable - kind od liek Uncle Albert does. "Do what you do in a tiny canoe" kind of sums it all up, eh.


Kurt's Rejoinder begins in territory more often inhabbitted by Jaco Pastorius. A bass-line rhythm bounces along with a handful of nonsensical vocals and an ever elaborate amount electronic details. As usual the main riff gives way to synth and the song fades intot he distance.


Energy Fools The Magician slows everything down but keeps the goofy instrumentation coming. That's all it really is. A short instrumental track that is quite beautiful.


King's Lead Hat - an anagram Talking Heads and also a single in 1978 - sounds like a Talking Heads song. Punkish in that"80s" sounding way, but this is 1977, so its significantly cooler than all of the nonsense that tried to mimic it throughout the early 80s. A really fun tune.

Side two begins the pastoral and mellow stuff (yeah, I stole the pastoral line from Wikipedia, but its apt).

Here He Comes is gorgeous guitar rock with exactly the right amount of synth mixes in. Great vocals cap off a stunning song. This is the type of song that you always want your favorite band to cover, not just because its a somewhat obscure tune, but because its just such a satisfying listen and it'd be great to hear other versions of it. A perfect song.


Julie With ... delves into the mellower trend, but brings in a semi-psychadelic bent (lots of backward stuff!). This sounds like it walked out of a Pink Floyd session in 1971. Wow. Another perfect song. The song features stunning guitar soloing - indescribable. Its a sad and terrible song in the most wonderful way.


By This River continues the sad and terrible feeling, but with Piano. The opening words -"Here we are, stuck by this riven, you and I underneath this sky that's ever falling down, down down." - leave the listener stunned. A third perfect song. Vocal hamronies so sublime end the song far too soon.


Through Hollow Lands (For Harold Budd) somehow manages to find an even more depressing tenor. Its an instrumental that would fit any aweful moment in any movie. Picture the scene when Kong dies in the original BW King Kong, this fits. Picture when Vader dies and Luke burns him up... this fits. Picture when Homer ate the Fugu and spent the night listening to Larry King narrate the Good Book... this fits.


Spider and I is the song that, buying the album you wanted to hear most and it doesn't displease. The album closer is the arguably the best song on a fantastic album. It takes elements of the entire second side and sort of sums them up in an way that makes you feel like you are rising out of deep, dark water, one inch at a time.


Spider and I
Sit watching the sky
On our world without sound.
We knit a web
To catch one tiny fly
For our world without sound.
We sleep in the mornings,
We dream of a ship that sails away,
A thousand miles away.


Conlcusion: Over 100 (!!!!) songs were recorded for this album... 8 made it out of the box and onto wax. Beach Boys, eat your heart out. How many other perfect mellow & pastoral songs that are both sad and terrible never saw the lgiht of day? I totally recommend buying this album and playing it from start to finish as soon as possible. Obviously if you have never heard this, you ought to seek it out. It will open a whole new world of music to you.

Black Eyed Man by The Cowboy Junkies

Two albums removed from the ultra-chic, hip, spare and successful Trinity Sessions, Black Eyed Man sees the (Canadian born and bread) Junkies trying successfully to settle into themselves after the struggle to maintain impossible popularity. The vacuumlike arrangements of their previous work (recall their covers of Sweet Jane, Blue Moon, and Powder Finger) is suddenly abandoned for a fuller, richer and significantly more upbeat sound.

The album opens with some straightup rock and roll with Southern Rain and far more instrumentation than previous Junkie records. A very slowly escalating guitar riff peppered with fills and solos by guitarist and primary songwriter Michael Timmons serves as a platform for Margo Timmons ethereal voice. The song smokes.

The album dips significantly more hippy country with Oregon Hills. The evidence of a vastly different direction in production is everywhere. A great deal of musical instruments leave little room for the space so prevelant on previous releases by this band.

This Street, That Man, This Life offers a distinct return to form. Though beautiful and ethereal and very simple, the song sounds almost out of place at first on an album that clearly wants to go in a different direction. Is the band regressing? Though its a "beautiful song" my thoughts drift to what might come next. Will the new territory covered be explored more or not?

The heart of the album begins with A Horse In The Country, a strong country rocker that cantors along gracefully. The descending bridge is one of the more beautiful moments on any Junkies record. This is a great example of a band effort: the song speaks for itself without any excessive instrumentation or vocal stylings. And then it suddenly ends.

This band has always done covers well and their take on If I Were The Woman And You Were The Man with guest and friend John Prine is fantastic. A clarinet (?!?!) solo in the middle of the song fits perfectly. In fact, the sparity of past Junkie songs is clearly reminscent here, but the energy and mild experimentation seen on most of this album is evident. A (but not the) standout on the album.

Murder, Tonight, In The Trailer Park is easily the best song on the album. A stuttering skipper with dancing slide backs a dark tale of murder and darkness. Margo's voice draws the listener in only to be really kind of creeped out by what she's saying. Its at this point that you notice how fantastic the drumwork and guitars on the album have been. This family can play. The fills are fantastic.

The title track, Black Eyed Man, is an odd letdown after the last three songs - why is it that title tracks often do that. It is arguably the most country feeling tune on the record and its one of the few that lets the band members play around a bit - too much guitar and harmonica - too much "I'm riding a horse in a movie" feeling behind this song. At the end of the day, it doesn't really go anywhere.

Winter's Song seems to suffer from the same pointlessness at first: Margo's obvious domination of the song and far too much harmonica at the start allows for the "home on the range" feeling to fester a bit too long. However, a fiddle actually saves the song dramatically and it totally changes gear into a darker and far more effective tune.

The Last Spike features an almost inaudible banjo plucking beside an oppressive electric guitar riff which keeps the first-time-listener interested during the song, if for no other reason than to hear if the banjo is going to do anything interesting. Halfway through its evident that drums are not going to join in and the banjo isn't going to take on a greater role. A bit of tamborines added demonstrate that the song has peaked. This is the classic example of trying and failing to put a new twist on their classic spare sound. It doesn't work and its boring.

Cowboy Junkies Lament , written by Townes Van Zant for the band, brings the album somewhat back to life. This also suffers from stiffling production. The oppressive guitar remains is thankfully assisted by drums, but it like a loud version of the last song without a banjo. After the three previous songs, however, its not enough to save what appears be a not-so-wonderful second half of the album.

The penultimate song is Towne's Blues, a tribute to friend Townes Van Zant in thanks for his gift of the last song. The country swagger heard at the start of the album in back, thankfully. However, it is evident that the best songs were all piled high at the beginning of the album.

The album closes with To Live Is To Fly. This song works in every way. The opening sounds like a beautiful voice and a single guitar playing alone in a dark cavern. The band then kicks in steps into a mellow groove. This groove is bumped up to double time for the heart of the of the song, cappped by a fine fiddle solo. Suddenly, though not unexpectedly, the song drops back into the quite slow mood of the intro, only to jump again into the doubletime groove, featuring not only the fiddle but the banjo as well. A great closer which does a fine job summing up the album. A peice of pointless horn music is tacked on 20 seconds later for no reason whatsoever.

Conclusion: A very solid album is almost spoiled by three or four clunkers, beginning with the title track, in a row right in the middle of the album. There are definately some skippable songs on this record, but the good songs are borderline great. Perhaps the whole I-Tunes thing has its uses afterall.

Modern Classics: Gary Louris' Vagabonds

Gary Louris – Vagabonds
(Rykodisk)

In conventional rock & roll wisdom (if there can be such a thing), most prominent members of prominent rock bands find that they have a hard time finding their voice as solo artists. Even in the case of iconoclasts such as Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney, solo albums have alternately befuddled and alienated fans that came to love a certain artist as a principal contributor of a popular band. So it came as somewhat of a shock to learn that former Jayhawks frontman Gary Louris was cutting a solo album. Even more shocking was the news that the album would be produced by Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson, who himself had problems winning over his band’s audience to his own solo work.

In retrospect, though, it all makes perfect sense. Who better than Robinson, no doubt tempered by his own experiences as a solo artist, to help Louris wade through all of the expectations and baggage that come with being a band leader and cut to the essence of what the artist has to say? That is exactly what happened on Louris’ excellent Vagabonds, the type of singer/songwriter album that unfortunately seems only to get made a few times each decade, at least since the era of MTV.

Not that Vagabonds ignores the aspects of Gary Louris’ songwriting that made the Jayhawks one of the most influential bands of the 90s (Uncle Tupelo and Wilco didn’t just appear out of thin air). If anything, it outright embraces them. But gone are most of the fuzzy guitars and affected vocals that were so prominent in his work with the Jayhawks, and in their place are a more earthy assortment of instruments like pedal steel, Hammond organ, and harmonica, helping to reveal that Louris is still one of the most honest and imaginative songwriters in all of rock music.

But perhaps the most prominent instrument of all is the “Laurel Canyon Family Choir”, a collection of top-notch sit-ins assembled by producer Robinson via connections made from his infamous regular jam sessions said canyon with guitarist/songwriter Jonathan Wilson (who plays bass on the album). The chorus includes not only Robinson and Wilson, but also Jonathan Rice, Rilo Kiley singer Jenny Lewis and former Bangles frontwoman Susannah Hoffs.

It’s not that the Choir makes the songs that they appear on better. It’s that they make them beautiful in such a way that they will haunt your every waking moment – a brilliant juxtaposition of the oft-frail and vulnerable voice that is Louris’ trademark and the thick, angelic texture of the choir. When Louris sings on the title track “carry on, you vagabonds”, and the Choir joins him in delivering the line “everyone’s gone away”, the result hits you like a ton of the marijuana that Louris sings about being grown underneath the bridge during the song’s second verse.

The brilliance is that with the Choir present, Louris is under no pressure to oversing his way through the album’s bigger choruses. With Louris alone delivering the punch line, songs like “We’ll Get By” and “She Only Calls Me On Sundays” would either be simple-yet-charming life lessons about love and loss, or he might be tempted to oversing. With the Choir behind him – as well as stunning Hammond lines delivered by Adam McDougall (it’s really no wonder that he was later hired by the Black Crowes) – they carry the weight of sermons delivered by the Almighty him/her/itself. Even if you don’t believe in that sort of thing, after the Choir is done with you, you may be apt to reconsider.

This is not to say that the Choir dominates the album – far from it. The star of the show remains Louris’ ability to relate an earnest story without it feeling like he’s just making shit up to fill the space between choruses. The songs such as “To Die A Happy Man”, “D.C. Blues” and the aptly-titled “Meandering”, which feature the Choir either minimally or not at all, penetrate the deepest into the listener’s psyche, even though they might take the a few more listens to truly absorb.

So “conventional rock and roll wisdom”, be damned. After years of relative obscurity – contributing new material only to the alt-country “supergroup” Golden Smog – Gary Louris has emerged with what might well prove to be the best album released in 2008.