Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings / I Learned The Hard Way

back.

LP Back.
I’ll admit it beforehand: I’m prepared to unconditionally like each new Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings release, BUT…since the powers of RETRO don’t free you from the need of being able to write a good tune, I’ll always go with their 1995 release ‘Naturally’, simply because, out of the four Longplayers that comprise their Discography (only partly true: There also are countless Singles), it still has the best righteous-groove-to-good-songwriting-ratio. This, of course, doesn’t mean that there aren’t enough good tunes on their remaining offerings. Actually, and herewith finally homing-in on the subject of today’s discussion, here’s ‘Better Things’, my current favorite off their latest:

(It might slowly dawn on you, that the only reason I started this post was to make one of those ultra-nerdy YouTube-Videos of a tuntable turning and playing a song, which are strangely useless and all over that place. At least now I’m once again unpleasantly reminded of the fact that my room lacks adequate damping.)

The execution’s flawless throughout, but as hinted at before, while the decision to play in a ‘classic style’ (i.e. in this case 60s/70s, Funk, Soul, Motown, Stax, &c.), opens up the opportunity of effectively summarizing that style’s essence (if you have a vague notion of what that essence, beyond its most obvious markers, which simply are quotes, is) moving beyond that job of rearrangement might be good advice. Meanwhile, i’m guessing that these tunes will probably be absolutely delightful in concert, an environment in which, as your humble reporter was blessed to witness, this group totally fucking excels.

Btw: Daptone Records always uses those nice and sturdy cardboard jackets for their Longplayers. Always a selling point. As y’all probably might have realized in the meantime, I love thick cardboard.

Recommended further listening:

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings/’Naturally’
Otis Redding/’The Dock Of The Bay’
Frederick Knight/’I've Been Lonely For So Long’
(Mainly because it a) simply isn’t mentioned enough and b) its cover features the most bizarre patchwork-jacket I’ve ever seen.)

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Gonjasufi / A Sufi And A Killer

So I skipped reading the reviews, gave it an MP3 test drive on shitty sound-equipment and decided it was interesting enough to buy it and give it another spin under more decent conditions. Additionally, good artwork on a big piece of cardboard always draws me towards a purchase. So here we have it:

Gonjasufi Vortex.

Front.

Gonjasufi Complete.

The whole hypnotic Shebang.

Gonjasufi Inside.

The Dark (in)Side.

This, as usual from Warp, is pretty nicely done, with the entire jacket printed on matt cardboard (pretty standard grammage, glossy black inside) with several stages of cell division (or at least some similar process, showing different stages of complexity) depicted on the labels to guide you from side one to four.
The previously described before (i.e. MP3) -after (i.e. the vinyl) listening experience made the difference for me:
Maybe I’m just a deluded fool, aimlessly fallen for the old ‘Vinyl sounds Best!’-Mantra, but MAN DOES THAT THING SHINE IN ANALOG!
So, having skipped the reviews I know next to nothing about that guy. Taking the title into consideration, I’m inclined to believe that he’s neither a Sufi, nor a Killer. (Clearly disregarding the concept of metaphor, just for fun. And yes, I know that Lee Perry ain’t no Super Ape.)
Anyways, this album’s a really glorious romp through the gutter of some really warped subconscious. Yet, despite early expectations of sth. much akin to Hip Hop, I was rather reminded of Ween‘s more low-fiish, claustrophobic moments on epic works like ‘The Pod’ being boosted into dripping Technicolor (e.g. ‘SuzieQ’. ‘Stardustin’). Additionally the incorporation of exotic/eastern/oriental (and do I hate myself for such superficial categorization?) works much more seamless than on, say, Mos Def‘s latest offering, which while being a pretty solid album, was imho mostly dubbed a ‘return to form’ because his two previous albums were among the biggest-piles-of-shit-from-an-artist-I-deeply respect that I have had the pleasure to listen to in recent years.
And just as some sort of random association w/r/t the Sufi’s vocal-stylings: Had Devendra Banhart looked into the possibility of doing stuff like this (e.g. ‘She Gone’), the world would have had one less mediocre album to deal with.

So, uhm, digression’s complete again: Give it a spin!

Recommended further listening:

Ween/’The Pod’
The Congos/’Heart Of The Congos’
(My prediction w/r/t The Congos: Never, in any genre, will anyone surpass the deep boggy blackness of this goddamn masterpiece.)

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Joanna Newsom / Have One On Me (Prelude)

Have.

Side 2 of either LP One, Two or Three. I'd have to check.

Don’t believe the hype, they say. But with y’all being critical consumers, you aren’t gonna be misleaded by all the cover-stories, Best-New-Music’s or anything, are you? I guess in the end it’s totally up to you…but this being the blog and all, I’ll ask myself:

Dear Guy, what do you think about the new Joanna Newsom-album?

I’ll answer truthfully: I have no idea, because each time i have listened to it (Three times up until now, i.e. six hours of my life, which I could have spent listening to D’Angelo‘s ‘Voodoo’ five times! And I know that every round would have been a hoot.) my mind went totally blank, i.e. I have no recollection of picking up any musical markers at all. Speaking of it now, I can hardly remember anything about this album, (except maybe for that odd image make-over transported by the artwork, which I’ll probably rant about later).
S’that what they call ambient-folk?

So, unless I’ll soon find out that my antenna for the contemporary Kunstlied is completely buried under Cars- and Queen-records (or sumthin’), I’ll settle for a wholehearted ‘Kinda Boring’, not entirely ruling out the possibility of later changes of heart and/or mind. Maybe I’ll even prepare a few arguments…once I’ll be able to remember anything about these songs.

Part 2 coming up, because the packaging’s kinda halfwayishly delicious.

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The Pavement Vinyl Reissues

Crooked.

Crooked Rain Crooked Rain. Side 1.

Nostalgia has struck again. Last year I was pretty amused by the lyrics to that National song ‘So Far Around the Bend’ from the Dark Was The Night-compilation (‘You’ve been humming and I think it’s forever / Praying for pavement to get back together.’), because I’d pray for the exact opposite.
So now it’s happened and we have videos. They are back together.

Don’t get me wrong, back when I was a little boy (sixteenish) I was as rabid about Pavement as the next indie-kid. (That was only a short while before that damn Donald Fagen stepped into my life and showed me that there were additional options. ‘Additional’ not ‘other’, mind you!)
I still like ‘em that much, that I dearly hope this reunion won’t turn into a full-on Pixies-style nostalgia show. (I mean, if you’ve been touring off and on for the last couple of years without producing any new music, there’s gotta be something wrong.)
The problem is that that’s pretty much all I get from watching those videos of Pavement‘s first show in over ten years: Some weird nostalgia. It’s nice and all, yet utterly unnecessary.

The upside is that Matador has decided to use the occasion for re-releasing the entire Pavement catalogue on pretty low-priced vinyl. (8-12 $ a piece, minus ‘Westing (By Musket and Sextant)’, which was released on Drag City, has stayed in print all the way, and is much better than its reputation, judging from my joyful sobbing upon recent relistening; plus some ‘Best Of…’ compilation which seems utterly useless to me and which I will therefore completely ignore.)

And here they are:

Front.

(Due to a shipping error, 'Slanted and Enchanted' is still missing, while I now own 'Terror Twilight' twice.)
Back.
ditto.

Facts first:

These reissues are pretty barebones, which means: Regular cardboard jackets, 120g vinyl, no gatefolds or additional lyric/info sheets, just plain white sleeves. (Which also means: No ‘Dick Sucking Fool at Pussy Licking School’-caption on the inside of ‘Wowee Zowee’ and, *gasp*, less freaky collages.) But I won’t complain.
On the contrary: They’re a real bargain and since vinyl had pretty much slipped off my radar back in the 90s when CDs reigned supreme, I was very much hoping to get the entire bunch one day, without spending a fortune on Ebay. So now I finally know that ‘Wowee Zowee’ is a three-sided ‘double album’
Do they sound good? They always did, they still do! ‘Slanted’, ‘Crooked Rain’ and ‘Wowee Zowee’ are still awe-inspiringly marvelous albums, ‘Brighten the Corners’ is still pretty top-notch, and ‘Terror Twilight’ is still the half-baked borefest it always was.
So why do we need that reunion again?

(One more question: Why ‘Watery Domestic’ and not ‘Pacific Trim/Give it a Day’?)

Further recommended listening:

Pavement/’Pacific Trim’
‘The Purdie Shuffle’

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The Society Islands / Last Hero of the Western World

While this doesn’t really fit the plans for this here blog, it deserves to be mentioned. Even if it’s just for the fact that I had the honor to do the artwork (and/or the consecutive urge towards self-promotion).

My dear friend Mr. Rogowski recorded this great album in a month, post-produced a couple more (months, that is), I spilled some espresso on cardboard and then we shipped it all to some pressing plant. Et voilĂ :

Hero.

Strange Dude.

All those that interested in more info and a big bunch listening opportunities, please go this way.

Further recommended listening (…ehm):

The Society Islands/’Kiss & Tell’ (listen to it here),
Stationary Hund/’Stationary Hund’ (listen to that here).

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Gil Scott-Heron / I’m New Here

The first post on this site is a perfect example for some of the reasons why I started this thing:

If your local shop doesn’t carry a specific album (or if you’re simply too lazy/occupied/&c. to go there) you’re usually bound to browse the internet for your object of (relative) desire. In some cases you come upon remarks like ‘Deluxe Edition’ tagged to the end of an album title and start wondering what exactly’s so DELUXE about it. The starting point for excessive googling which sometimes doesn’t end up that satisfying, especially when you’re talking about vinyl.

Thus I’m inclined to occasionally provide some information about the records I drag into my humble abode (plus of course those that I have sent there).

Here’s the first one:

I'm New Here

I'm New Here...in all my abundant glory.
Words.
A couple of warm words.

The general facts about Gil Scott-Heron’s first album in a long time…are known: It’s kinda short (28 minutes), Pitchfork loves it, it’s a pastiche of spoken-word pieces and (mostly) cover-songs and it’s set to sometimes rather alienating beats that might have been called ‘industrial’ back in the 90s, back when every sound generated by a computer in non-techno context merited that tag. Plus, it kinda grew on me, too.

The vinyl version of this album is pure haptic bliss. It features two 180g-records in an extremely rigid and heavy-duty cardboard jacket, solid sleeves, and two beautiful prints. LP versions of the Bible couldn’t look any more righteous. Physically, it’s the kind of packaging you could beat somebody up with (like that latest Sonic Youth or M. Ward albums por ejemplo).
The first record features the original album, while the second compensates for the relatively short, though imho perfect, playing time of its bigger brother/sister, by adding some pretty strong bonus material with Scott-Heron accompanying himself on the piano and dropping science. To me, it’s the rare case in which the bonus stuff actually makes the album itself stronger. It all seems very relaxed and, well, intimate.

Heavy.

Told you it was heavy.

These are the tracks:

LP #1:

1. On Coming From A Broken Home (Part 1)
2. Me And The Devil
3. I’m New Here
4. Your Soul And Mine
5. Parents (Interlude)
6. I’ll Take Care Of You
7. Being Blessed (Interlude)
8. Where Did The Night Go
9. I Was Guided (Interlude)
10. New York Is Killing Me
11. Certain Things (Interlude)
12. Running
13. The Crutch
14. I’ve Been Me (Interlude)
15. On Coming From A Broken Home (Part 2)

LP #2:

1. Piano Player (Intro)
2. Home Is Where The Hatred Is
3. Winter In America
4. Jazz (Interlude)
5. Is That Jazz
6. A Place To Go (Interlude)
7. My Cloud

Print.

This print alone is worth my 'investment'.
So here you go. This was my first. I promise that the photos are gonna get better. Plus, once I get some kind of stand, I’m gonna make some of those great nerdy videos of turntables spinning. Youtube is full of those.

Further recommended listening:

Gil Scott-Heron/’Pieces of a Man’,
Gil Scott-Heron/’Winter in America’.

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