PlexNex

Threefer

by mutt r.

No, that's not the name of a band I'm gonna write about. Not a bad one at that though, now that I mention it. If I may say so. And since I'm writing this article, who else is gonna say so? And if I may say so myself (did I already say that?) there's alotta good stuff jamming up the airwaves these days. That said, I'll say this not to myself but to you, dear readers....there's enough to warrant inclusion here of three very special bands floating my boat these days. And maybe yours too. If you have one, that is. If not, maybe get one. And sail away listening to the following. In no particular order, if I may say so myself.

Stereolab has been making music it seems as long as I've been listening to it. But that doesn't make their new stuff any less compelling, just me a lot older. But wiser too since I'm still all over anything they do. Including, getting up close and personal with 'em last week at their Town Hall show here in Gotham City. No, I didn't interview them....I don't speak French. But I was second row just left o' center....right smack in front of the young hipster on bass who was cool despite the t-shirt with the stencilled-on-tuxedo motif he should have been told not to wear. Kinda lame. But he wasn't and they weren't.

Stereolab are leftist-synth-drone-agit-rockers playing space-age lounge music for the now people masses. I can't name one song they played, nor one word lead singer Laetitia Sadier said, but know enough to know a good thing when I see one. And this was good. No, brilliant. She dances like a swivel chair on a Jetsons set....spazzy but cool. A beguiling chanteuse prone to spouting polemics against a backdrop of dada rear screens. Oh, and she sports a trombone. And plays it, too. Their new one's called FAB FOUR SUTURE and it's more of the same 'wow & flutter' they've come to be known for.....lots of retro keyboards like moogs & farfisas, and more melodic non-sequitirs than you can shake a flugelhorn at. Stereolab is at times like Modern Lovers with a better looking lead singer. At others, they're Kraftwerk with a soul. A Marxist soul.

The High Violets. Now that's a cool name. You better be pretty good to be usin' that name as your calling card. Or pretty high. The High Violets are the former for sure, and may be the latter. Dunno.....you'd have to ask them. But if you ask me, they are the very best of that whole Portland, Ore. thing going on right now. What thing, you ask? No idea, I say. (I'm just filling space here actually, biding time till I reach my word quota.) But they gotta be today's best combo outta Portland. Oregon OR Maine. And the whole Pacific Northwest, for that matter. Oh hell...they're the greatest band in the world! Ever!

THV wouldn't argue that point actually. They themselves call the follow up to the stunning debut 44 DOWN their masterpiece....but what are they gonna say: "this is our new album and it's pretty good"? Masterpiece? I'm not so sure. I prefer my masterpieces on canvas. But, TO WHERE YOU ARE proves THV are no Strokes and as such, not prone to laying a sophomoric egg the second time out of the gate. Just listen to "Sun Baby" a few times and you'll swear you saw god and she was black. They paint dreamy landscapes against hazy hooks and big, crunchy beats. Think My Bloody Valentine meets Lush at a Galaxie 500 boxed set release party and shares with them several martinis and you're halfway home. The rest is up to you.

And speaking of cool names for bands, it was on the basis of theirs that I looked into the catalog of the following....Trespassers William. Now what the hell is that? And just what the hell is it supposed to mean? Tell ya what, right after you get through asking The High Violets how high they are, go ask Trespassers William who William is and where he can be found. And whether or not he's trespassing on somebody's hallowed turf. Or if he himself is being trespassed upon. Me, I don't care. All I know is if Mazzy Star were fronted by Aimee Mann, they'd sound like this. So-Cal psychedelia via Seattle, Washington. Trippy, breezy melancholia anchored in forlorn folkrock, desire and despair...it's all over their new one, HAVING. Man, I'd sure hate to hear what NOT HAVING might sound like. For my money though, they hit their singular, signature peak one album earlier....no matter what, get thee self down with "Lie In The Sound" from DIFFERENT STARS for a full frontal, TW style.

Three great bands, all fronted by cool chicks. Gee, where's my head at? Forget the neuter card though.....men, women and the occasional barnyard animal would all do well to listen up to Stereolab, The High Violets and Trespassers William. Why? Because I said so.

Cat Power Outage

By mutt r.

Face it folks, the person formerly known as Chan Marshall (and the band she fronts now known as Cat Power) is a train wreck waiting to happen. In fact, maybe it already did happen......witness her 2006 American tour getting scrapped. By her own hand, mind you. What's up with that? I had really good seats for the show earlier this month at Town Hall here in NYC, so I'm naturally pissed.

Not the first time the not-so-divine-Miss-M has stood me up, either. A few years back, she bolted the stage I was so snugly bellied-up to after a song and a half.....didn't come back either. Not even to say "thanks for playing, drive home safely". Call it angst, stage fright, a small bladder......whatever. She's been known to hightail her way out of many a tight jam before. I call it a pain in the ass. My ass. Maybe yours, too.

That's why her latest THE GREATEST is the much welcomed masterpiece we've been waiting for. All is forgiven, Chan. Or would that be Cat? Maybe Ms. Power? Whatever. Who cares. "Where is My Love?" she asks on Muhammad Ali....I mean, THE GREATEST. I'm right here, baby. Right where I've always been.......firmly in your corner.

Much has been made of Marshall's deep-stir-fried southern roots. And like a true damsel in distress from a Flannery O'Connor novel, she plays that goth queen thing to the hilt. Sometimes. Just like the redneck trucker's hat she got her band's name from, it's all just too goddamned much sometimes. "It" being life, and hers is diesel-fueled. Say this for her: she is passionate. Everything's to the "nth" degree.

When you're lunatic enough to cover a Moby Grape song (as she did on 1998's MOON PIX), cancelling a single show simply won't cut it anymore. Blowin' off the whole bleedin' '06 tour.....now that's more like it. You go cat-girl!!!! I'm sure the kind folks at Matador were just thrilled that this colossal hissy fit coincided with the rollout for THE GREATEST.

And speaking of which, it is. Her greatest work to date. Easily her most accessible, too. Is that a coincidence? Dunno. Again, who cares? The title track, "Willie", "Love & Communication" and the aforementioned "Where Is My Love" (mutt's personal pick for top o' this week's pops with a screaming bullet, mind you) are all sublime. And beautiful. And sad. And brilliant. All of the above, all at the same time. And for that, she should be forgiven. So what if you won't be able to catch her live anytime soon....better to worship at the cat altar in the privacy of your own home, anyway.

So grab THE GREATEST and give it a whirl. You'll be hard-pressed to play anything else for weeks to come. And just to make your night complete and as close to a riveting concert experience as posssible, put the new Braden King "Great Waves" video featuring Chan Marshall & the Dirty Three on a loop in the background. Cat Power may not be coming to a theater near you anytime soon. But that shouldn't stop you from enjoying the show.

This review appeared previously somewhere on the Web in 2006.

Conspiracy Theory

by mutt r.

Ya know what's keeping me up at nite? In the wake of Johnny Cash's demise, who's gonna carry the American folk gothic torch? I mean seriously, who is truly capable of blazing that trail.... again? I offer up as a possible "Exhibit A" a little sumpin' sumpin' called Willard Grant Conspiracy, a half-baked traveling troupe of ennui espousers half-baked up by the inimitable Robert Fisher, he himself fully-baked by the same Cali desert scene that hatched the original hallucin-o-genie himself, Captain Beefheart.

Somebody far wiser than me agrees, too. On Jackie Leven's recent tribute album to the man in black, ELEGY FOR JOHNNY CASH, the lead Conspirator nails a little gem I'd never even heard before....."Law of Tide". Talk about brilliant. And while a Depeche Mode cover might not be in order for Fisher, serious consideration as a worthy Cash protégée just might be.

Now, on the eve of the release of WGC's new opus, LET IT ROLL, I thought it prudent to wax non-poetic (I’ll leave the rhymes and clever witticisms to masters like Fisher) on the band's output to date.  Or at least the highlights thereof. A WGC Primer, if you will. Granted, Fisher & Co. might not be able to carry JC's jockstrap even on their best day, but what the hell....somebody's gotta at least try, right?

With subject matter that rivals any of Red House Painters' oeuvre in terms of its morbidity, and sung by a man whose delivery is paralleled only by Mark Lanegan in its outright "lowness", the overall style of WGC is kinda close to Mark Eitzel's late great soul-searching engine, American Music Club. And with as many as 30 part-time touring members, you never quite know what you're gonna get when you buy a ticket to one of their shows...could be a full up combo complete with a Tijuana brass section, string quartet and a 9-man bongo squad; but you're just as likely to find Robert Fisher sitting on a stool accompanied only by a one-eyed albino on upright lute.

Of the five albums they've released, WGC fully reaches its stride on only two.....EVERYTHING'S FINE (one spin and you'll realize "oh no it's not") & REGARD THE END (which may be as near as the next gun pointed at your head.) Their most poignant work can be found here and the most gripping is comprised of the songs therein. For me, the ideal WGC set would go something like this....no, make that exactly like this:

In "Ghost of the Girl in the Well", Fisher assumes the identity of a 14-year-old girl whose long dead body remains unnoticed going on twelve years; "Massachusetts" is a sinister ode to simplicity, silence, sobriety and quiet neighbors; "The Suffering Song" mournfully wonders aloud the inevitability of heartbreak amidst a dysfunctional family that's "about to explode"; at this rate you'll need a break but won't get much of one in "The Beautiful Song" despite what the title might suggest; in "Fare Thee Well" you'll revel in an almost exact clone of Tindersticks' "Traveling Light", right down to the duet motif....female vocals here are handled by the oft-forgotten and brilliant Throwing Muses' oft-forgotten and brilliant Kristin Hersh; and just for kicks in the form of a make-believe encore, go to the band's unofficial website (http://wgc.hinah.com/news/) and punch in the second of the two "How to Get to Heaven" live tracks offered in the 'sound' section.....as the song goes, "you've got six shots to make one."

Guns are everywhere in the dark world painted by Willard Grant Conspiracy....both literally and metaphorically. But life's a loaded gun, isn't it? Just ask Johnny Cash.

This review -- by mutt r. -- has appeared previously somewhere on the web.

Rip THIS

(from the Mutt R.-chives)

It's the end of the year as we knew it. Or, so I'm told by my sage editor. Who's now asking yours truly for my "Best of 2005". Makes sense, I suppose. It being the end of the year and all. But wait. Maybe to her it is. But not by my clock. How can I stick my neck way out there on the line and share with you--oh dear readers--my tip o' the lid to this year's best when it simply ain't over yet? When there's even the slimmest chance that some genius clown will slip in under the wire in the next 3 weeks or so with sumpin' sumpin' so sick that it blows the rest of '05 away? It could happen. But i doubt it.

I got me an i-pod, see. Ok, so it's a mini. 1000 song capacity. lemme tell ya, there ain't half that many good songs. Ever. And i'm like OCD to the max. I open the refrigerator door at least 8 times whenever I go out, to make sure the cat isn't in there. And I don't have a cat. All is not right in my world unless the i-tunes display has all i's dotted...right down to the "my rating" part. Which I sometimes fill in even before hearing a song I've downloaded, I confess. Remember the Ziggy Stardust album cover? White Duke boy could have sounded like Leo Sayer for all I cared. So figuring out who did it best in '05 would be easy for me....simply scan the 1 to 5 "star" column in my i-tunes library, sort out to whom I doled out the most stars, anoint a winner, and hand out a cheap tiara.

And ain't life grand when all goes according to plan? When you think it's gonna be easy and it really is? It was. Even if the year in music didn't suck and there was a load of great noise to get excited about, there is a band outta London that would still have wasted no time in dusting off any and all pretenders. As it is (or would that be 'was'?) the year was devoid of greatness except for The Duke Spirit. Which simplifies things a good deal. There are maybe 10 or 11 songs (who's counting?) on their stunning debut "cuts across the land". And not a bum rush to be found. High fives all around. You do the math...multiply five stars by however many songs there are on the damn disc, and their 55 or so final tally lapped the field. Thrice. (for those of you still with me and keeping score, the Stuart Staples solo was a distant second with maybe 9.)

But this is not a record review. I'm not about writing song-by-song critiques. Nor do I analyze lyrics I can't quite make out anyway. Having a lyric sheet in front of me only makes it worse. I won't bore you to tears with a jerry-rigged lester bangs polemic about how this band may or may not call into question the hegelian dialectic in light of recent enron indictments. I only know the smack I got upside the head the first time I heard the title track. Got hit harder by a little ditty called 'Lion Rip'. A real gut check. Kinda like hearing "Raw Power" (or getting laid, for that matter) for the first time....no idea what in the hell is going on, only that it feels good. And craving more. If there remain any doubters as to the validity of what constitutes powerful public foreplay, just click on the “rip” film set and hit the most throbbing size that your personal bandwidth can handle over on www.dukespirit.com and savor the video-sonic sexual jihad of a lead- chanteuse-to-die-for wailing “You can have it” like it's a promise she won't keep. And you will die.

Ian Curtis answers Kim Gordon's "Atonal lute player wanted" ad whilst sharing absinthe with a band that would be king but better known as the Jesus & Mary & Nico Chain. That's my take on it. Forget about all the PJ Harvey comparisons....she sucks. Liela Moss doesn't. All they share is a producer named flood. Commendable nonetheless is the fact that he is on board minding the boards behind "cuts across". Sharing, mind you, those enviable chores with ex-Cocteau Twin Simon Raymond. These savvy pros---I tell thee, reader---cannot both be wrong. Christ, what's next: a Jamie Thraves video?

Despite the lofty heights to which they may be growing increasingly accustomed, my biggest kick to date was to find TDS still grounded enough to answer my emails. Ya know, fan mail...."You guys are really cool, how can i get a t-shirt, when are you going to play in Tulsa".....the whole bit. The very next day, Liela writes back. Then luke. ok, so Luke did convey in no uncertain words that the band was in fact called "The Duke Spirit", not "Liela Moss & The Dukes of Wayne" And to forget about that interview Ms. Moss promised me. But how cool is it to have her name (Luke's too, I guess, but she's better looking) amongst all the other worthless tripe making a muddle of what you call your "in-box"? very, I would humbly surmise.

I’ve not had the pleasure of seeing the group live. (Was in transit to a Toronto show last month when canadian mounted police found wallet size Liela Moss photos in my secret zipper belt and thought it best to detain me well beyond showtime...the belt is still at large) So I can't explain who does what on stage to make which sound. Or how close this guy Luke comes to resembling an atonal god on fuzzbox #9. And to what extent they duplicate the sound that makes "cuts across the land" the darkly brilliant thing that it is. And down. Did I mention down?

Yeah, that's the ticket. The down bit. It's way down. Haunting. As in depressing, lugubrious, all angst & ennui all the time. But beautiful. Pretty as the saddest This Mortal Coil song you've ever heard with a gun to your head.

As this is my first "column" for Beluria, I've established no identity yet. I've offered no yardstick by which to compare things. My aesthetic is perhaps being called into question by those of you who've gotten this far in my rant. But know this much, dear reader: If you like things that are down, you're half-way home. If you'd like a damn near masterpiece to get you there.... it's a done deal. This one's for you.

This review originally appeared somewhere on the Web in December, 2005.