……questo album recensito anche da rollingstone.com pare sia davvero bellissimo.
Qualcuno di voi ha notizie di “primo orecchio”?
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Ryan Adams
Cardinology
Ryan Adams’ drug problems and public tantrums have often overshadowed his music. But Cardinology may put an end to that. His first release in a year — notable for a guy who put out three (albeit spotty) full-lengths in 2005 — it’s the record he has spent the past few years promising but never quite delivering. Drunk on melody, high on musical history, but all his own, the record throbs with great playing and singing, and thrums with hope without pimping easy platitudes. It’s one of the best things he’s ever done.
Cardinology is a classic-rock record to the bone, nodding to influences that Adams has conjured before but never so well: the country rock of the Grateful Dead and Gram Parsons, the arena anthems of U2. It begins with four killers in a row: “Born Into a Light” prays for faith amid troubles over a Tex-Mex melody, weepy pedal steel and gospel-tinged vocals; “Go Easy” is a breathless love pledge with heartland-rock hooks; “Fix It” is a plea for psychic repair that meshes a slithery R&B groove with a soaring Bono-style chorus; and “Magick” is pure mindless garage-rock pleasure, notwithstanding the geopolitical apocalypse lurking in its lyrics (“You’re like a missile strike/Government goes underground/Warhead on legs/What goes around comes around”). Then things settle down a bit — but despite overcooked nautical metaphors on “Sink Ships,” they never slack. Cardinology’s riveting finale is “Stop,” a fragile piano ballad sung in a shaky voice that slowly gains strength and takes flight. It’s clearly about rehab, and while rehab rock may be a bit of an oxymoron, Adams — who has reportedly cleaned up — defines a genre here. If it helps undermine some of the bogus junkie myths about hard drugs and creativity, all the better.
WILL HERMES
rollingstone.com
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cellò…ascolticchiato una volta, non mi ha particolarmente impressionato. Devo anche dire che in questo periodo, la proposta musicale di Ryan Adams, non è propriamente il sound che prediligo ascoltare.
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Per dire, uno a caso, Vic Chesnutt, cantautore che tra l’altro è paraplegico, ha dato alle stampe unitamente a Elf Power e The Amorphous Strums, un cd di livello molto, ma molto superiore a quello di Ryan Adams; il titolo è Dark Developments, Orange Twin, l’etichetta.
Se poi si volesse andare indietro di un anno, ascoltatevi, sempre di Chesnutt, il suo: North Star Deserter
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Vic Chesnutt, Elf Power and The Amorphous Strums: Dark Developments – (Orange Twin, 2008)
Because of Chesnutt’s idiosyncratic appeal, there is usually something to love on every album. He’s an amazing influencer and sponge for whatever group of individuals he collaborates with and on any particular recording session.” — Tiny Mix Tapes A tuneful collision of Athens institutions finds fruition this fall when Orange Twin releases Vic Chesnutt’s collaboration with Elephant 6 originals Elf Power. As intriguing as this combination may seem for hardcore fans of either act, the final sonic results reveal a daunting sum much greater than even the involvement of such esteemed parts would imply. The Elves’ lived-in dexterity as a live band goads Chesnutt’s vocal delivery to a menacing new muscularity, imbuing this batch of songs with a sinister vibe not dissimilar to John Cale’s black classic Fear, the harsh & articulate sleaze of Lou Reed’s Street Hassle, or the defeated low-key soul music of Nick Lowe’s last few records. Chesnutt’s songwriting retains its trademark literary bent–central songs carry the narrative weight, sturdy construction, and lexical mystery of a long lost Raymond Carver story. And as he woos you with his squelched, beautiful melodies, his sonic turns-in-the road take an even stranger tack with the aid of psych-pop veterans Elf Power. Recorded over the course of a winter by Vic Chesnutt and Derek Almstead in Chesnutt’s own attic studio, Dark Developments revels in the intimate, home-recorded atmosphere you’d expect from an Athenian union like this. Elf Power’s tripped-out pop smarts provide the contradictory musical notions that never allow the album to sway too far in one bleak direction or another: it’s that friction extant between Chesnutt’s shadowy worldview and the inventive bounce and bray of the band’s joyful chemistry that buoys the album, provides freshness, and makes for highly rewarding repeated listening. Dark Developments stands as a classic addition to the legendary local pantheon.
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Vic Chesnutt Biography by John Bush
Though Michael Stipe had been a fan of Vic Chesnutt since the late ’80s, producing his first two full-lengths, it took the Sweet Relief Two tribute album to make a star of him in mid-1996. The album featured artists such as Madonna, Hootie & the Blowfish, Smashing Pumpkins and R.E.M. covering the songs of Chesnutt, a paraplegic who was injured in a car accident when he was 18. The singer/songwriter began playing contemporary acoustic folk around Athens, GA soon after his injury. A show at the 40 Watt Club brought him to the attention of Stipe, who helped with production on 1990’s Little and 1991’s West of Rome, both on Texas Hotel Records. A documentary video of Chesnutt’s life called Speed Racer was produced and directed by Peter Sillen in 1991, and has aired on PBS. Chesnutt’s third album Drunk followed in late 1993, but the release of his fourth album was delayed by Chesnutt’s membership in Brute, a project with members of Widespread Panic including David A. Schools, Michael Houser, Todd Nance, John Hermann, Johnny Hickman, David Lowery and John Keane. After Sweet Relief Two was released in July 1996, Capitol signed Chesnutt and released About to Choke, his major-label debut, in the fall of that year. The Salesman and Bernadette followed in 1998 on Capricorn and featured Lambchop as his backing band. The record’s poor sales led him to be dropped by that label, but Chesnutt continued to record, cutting an album with Kelly and Nikki Keneipp called Roses for the Butt of All Our Merriment that was issued in 2000. That same year, he teamed up with longtime friend and admirer Kristin Hersh for a series of U.S. tour dates. The following year, Chesnutt issued Left to His Own Devices, a collection of rarities, outtakes, and demos. In 2003, Chesnutt struck a deal with the roots rock-oriented New West label, who released his album Silver Lake in 2003. Ghetto Bells, which features contributions from jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and multi-instrumentalist Van Dyke Parks, followed in 2005. The following year, Chesnutt recorded North Star Deserter in Montreal. It was released on Constellation Records in 2007.
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Uh! Questa la devo raccontare, oggi mi sono rimesso ad ascoltare un bootleg, registrato il 7 agosto 2004 da Robyn Hitchcock e i suoi Heavy Friends, è doppio e s’intitola: White Album Tribute…la registrazione inizia con Robyn Hitchcock, che si mette davanti al microfono e fà: “buona sera gente, oggi vi suoneremo tutto il White Album dei Beatles” e attaccano a suonare. Cioè, questo (Robyn Hitchcock), se tralasciamo le registrazioni effettuate con i Soft Boys, a suo nome, ha prodotto qualcosa come 23 o 24 album da solista, avrebbe potuto fare un concerto pescando nel suo vasto repertorio e intascando, di ritorno i suoi bei diritti d’autore; invece che fa? Suona l’intero White Album e come, lui e i suoi accompagnatori, lo suonano!
Power Pop sublime. Un genio assoluto, provate ad ascoltare il suo Olé! Tarantula del 2006 e poi mi direte.
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Tanto per inquadrare meglio, l’uomo e il suo disco:
Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3: Olé! Tarantula (Yep Roc Rec. 2006)
Review by James Christopher Monger
In 2004, Robyn Hitchcock’s loose and folky Spooked saw the insect- and crustacean-loving eccentric enlisting the unlikely help of NPR darlings David Rawlings and Gillian Welch. This time around he’s backed by “3/4s of the Minus 5 and half of R.E.M.” (Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, and Bill Rieflin) as well as ex-Soft Boys Kimberley Rew and Morris Windsor, Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan, Harvey Danger’s Sean Nelson, and ex-President of the United States of America Chris Ballew. A small army indeed, but a tasteful one. Olé! Tarantula sounds like a trip back to the iconic singer/songwriter’s early A&M days. Long, Byrds-inspired harmonies, jangly electric guitars, and random bursts of piano, harmonica, and saxophone pepper the collection in fits, seasoning Hitchcock’s already delicious wordplay with exactly the right amount of spice. Opener “Adventure Rocket Ship” sounds like a lost track from Underwater Moonlight, the kind of confident psychedelic rocker that used to spill from the anti-bard’s leafy pen like battery acid in the early to mid-’80s. That confidence coupled with the tight, road-ready band vibe permeates Tarantula’s swollen belly, allowing only one or two forays into the esoteric balladry that has become the norm for the artist’s post-Egyptians catalog. With the jaunty “‘Cause It’s Love (Saint Parallelogram),” co-written by XTC’s Andy Partridge, the creepy and dissonant “Red Locust Frenzy,” and the impossibly ridiculous title cut, the former “Man with the Light Bulb Head” has distilled the best of each of his eras into one big shambling creature. Lyrically, he’s still obsessed with crabs, eggs, tomatoes, and things that are fleshy, furry, and spindly, but his greatest strength has always been his ability to toss a clear nugget of profundity into his most surrealist rants. In the warm, weird, and nostalgic “Belltown Ramble,” he manages to rope an Uzbek warlord, email and R.E.M. into a motor-mouthed stroll through town and time that’s bolstered by the wisdom that “It’s an independent life/And you want to see your eyes/Reflected in the world” and the notion that “The burning train is back in your hometown.” It’s that perfect balance of sadness, vitriol, and absurdity that makes Hitchcock (when he’s on) such a legendary social commentator. He’s the jester, the king, the convict, and the executioner all wrapped up into one.
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Un ultimo disco, seppur non recentissimo che, ho ascoltato molto questa estate è datato 2005, io lo trovo stupendo, va sotto il nome di Arizona Amp and Alternator (il titolo è identico) edito da Thrill Jockey e in pratica, è un disco di Howe Gelb & friends.
Review by Johnny Loftus
Howe Gelb’s 2005 effort with Arizona Amp and Alternator ambles out of his mind like usual, kicking dust from its denim verses and finding side doors into moments that open into spacious desert ballrooms. The drums drop in late on opener “Velvet and Pearl,” and tick along like a rusty generator; Gelb’s vocal is on top of the microphone, blowing into it, but his “Little late to find out you meant all the world” lyric is perfectly, haphazardly heartbreaking. The atmosphere grows with “Where the Wind Turns the Skin to Leather,” while their cover of the Traffic gem “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” (with Grandaddy in support) plays it only sort of straight — like a desert motel that only cleans the top sheet, there’s dirt and cynicism in its hollows. Of course these are the places Gelb has always inhabited, whether in his own material or the expanses of Giant Sand, so Arizona Amp and Alternator’s brushed acoustic guitars, stretches of squelch, and shuffled vocals will sound familiar to his devotees. Yeah, familiar like the worn brass rail of a tavern. Gelb has so many songs and stories stuck in his brain, Arizona Amp is just the latest crumpled brilliant letter from Americana’s unofficial poet laureate. His All Over the Map collaborator Henriette Sennenvaldt returns on the eerie “Man on a String” — over the song’s rickety piano, her flat phrasing and mournful keen actually suggest Will Oldham — and Marie Lorette Friis appears for the duet “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” where Gelb smacks his lips like a lecherous Tom Waits and changes the mercury of the original (but not the title) to match the Southwest’s heat. Like so much of Gelb’s work, there’s the sense with Arizona Amp that you’re seeing every five scenes of a film. “Vows” is full of hope — “Let’s fill the nest with an egg or two” — but “Can Do Girl” boils in reverb and claustrophobic memory while the Neil Young-ish elegy “Bottom of the Barrel” (again with Grandaddy) is a cosmic mystery spot that isn’t on any map. Arizona Amp and Alternator also features four versions of its title track, each tweaking the lyrics and arrangement to shift the meaning from touching autobiography, to rambling honky tonk duet, to tall tales told around the popping embers of a blue campfire.
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Howe Gelb bio:
It took singer/songwriter Howe Gelb nearly 20 years to receive the type of attention upstart indie rockers routinely obtain by their second album. During those two decades, Gelb released an abundance of material at the helm of his group, Giant Sand, presenting a highly original take on Southwestern roots and garage rock. Gelb rarely stepped off his wayward musical course and onto even ground for any length of time. Combining this with inadequate promotion and distribution from a number of independent labels, and Gelb was ensured regrettable obscurity. By the late ’90s, however, people finally began to take notice of a group of musicians gathering in Tucson, AZ. Gelb and Giant Sand had spawned a number of side projects including OP8 (Giant Sand plus Lisa Germano), Calexico, and the Friends of Dean Martinez. Gelb received the biggest critical and commercial success of his career with his Chore of Enchantment album in 2000.
Howe Gelb formed the first incarnation of Giant Sand (then, the Giant Sandworms) in 1980 with longtime friend Rainer Ptacek. Like most of the early lineups, however, the group didn’t last long, undergoing the first of many personnel changes. In 1985, Gelb took a new quartet (which included future Friends of Dean Martinez drummer Tom Larkin) into the studio to record Valley of Rain (the official debut as Giant Sand) for $400. More members came and went until 1988, when Gelb had settled briefly on a trio of bassist Paula Brown (his first wife who had joined in 1987) and drummer John Convertino. While Gelb and Brown would part ways in 1989, Convertino would eventually make up one third of Giant Sand’s most consistent lineup. The final ingredient came in 1991 with the addition of Joey Burns. This core group recorded Ramp (1991), Center of the Universe (1992), Purge & Slouch (1993), and Glum (1994), albums that alternated pulsating rock with dusty acoustic etchings.
In the years that followed, the story of Giant Sand’s extended family grew increasingly complex. Convertino and Burns launched their duo project Calexico and co-founded the Friends of Dean Martinez. Gelb laid relatively low, releasing live and outtake material on Goods and Services, Backyard Barbecue Broadcast, and Volume 1: Official Bootleg Series (all 1995). He lent piano and organ to the Friends’ debut (The Shadow of Your Smile, 1995) and joined an exceptional cast for contributions to Richard Buckner’s stunning Devotion + Doubt album (1997). In 1998, V2 released Gelb’s formal solo debut, the ethereal, lo-fi home studio project Hisser.
In 1997, Gelb lost his close friend Ptacek to cancer, months before he was preparing to record the next Giant Sand album. The event threw him into an emotional tailspin. Initial Tucson sessions (at the same studio where he had worked with Ptacek just weeks previously) were largely unsuccessful. Three producers (John Parish, Jim Dickinson, and Kevin Salem) later, Gelb emerged with Chore of Enchantment, only to have the album rejected by V2. Chicago’s Thrill Jockey ended up releasing what, against all odds, was one of Gelb’s most cohesive collections. Chore drew from the broadest palette yet. Gelb stretched from the laid-back grooves of “X-tra Wide” to the escalating rock of “Satellite” with ease. He seemed less reliant on Giant Sand as an outlet than ever before. Near the end of the ’90s, he launched his own Ow Om label. The Internet/mail-order imprint released discs from Gelb’s Official Bootleg Series.
Gelb spent a great deal of 2000 touring, orchestrating an increasingly spontaneous live show. A set list-free performance, a walkman playing snippets of previous shows, and a looping device (with 82 percent accuracy) were all used to supplement his extensive catalog of songs. More and more, both his live and studio performances began incorporating chance elements like these. At the start of the new millennium, the singer seemed busier than ever, working on a series of releases including a collection of solo piano instrumentals and a new album for Thrill Jockey. The latter project, designed as the follow-up to the intimate Hisser, was issued in early 2001 under the title Confluence, and displayed a sound closer to Giant Sand than any of Gelb’s previous solo outings. Lull, a collection of piano pieces, appeared that same year. Gelb returned in 2003 with the similarly muted Listener album, and released Arizona Amp and Alternator in 2005. The latter included collaborations from M. Ward and Scout Niblett. Sno Angel Like You arrived in March 2006.
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Caro Alien non ci abbandonare mai con queste tue vere iniezioni di entusiasmo e passione.
Una vera ricchezza per tutti noi dal valore inestimabile.
Benedetto il giorno che ti ho/abbiamo incontrato.
Grazie,spero di essere all’altezza.
Un abbraccio a te e a tutti.
Buona domenica
Buzz
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Ciao, solo per un saluto a te e al mitico Alien!!! Buona Domenica gente!
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solo un saluto? Ma vieniiiiiiiiii mitico Spacemax ,rocker e caro amico.
Benvenuto a te nella “casa delle musica ” di tutti,proprio tutti.
Saluti cari a te e a tutti gli amici blogger;qui la porta è sempre aperta al pentagramma e al sorriso:-)))
Ciao e buona domenica a te.
buzz
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