Unh ah ahh! Not so fast, my pretties! Just when you thought you were safely ensconced in '07, the king of the run on sentence returns to drag you kicking and screaming back to '06 with yet another highly opinionated version of what allegedly took place, musically speaking
Something tells me you'll be seeing my comrades and I sooner than later, so I look forward to arguing some of the "finer points" in person!
Cheers, big ears!
Your faithful scribe remains
Bindi Boy
2006 Round Up
Top 10 Albums 2006
1. Bright Black Morning Light: Bright Black Morning Light
Not so much a collection of songs as an unfolding series of slow-motion hallucinations, this sultry drug dream seemed to materialize out of nowhere, easily taking 1st place in the "best make-out record of the year" sweepstakes. Cymbals quietly explode like color negative sun flares and filtered voices chant barely decipherable hoodoo mantras while this arcane Northern California collective drifts by on a prism'd cloud of beggars banquet slide guitars and opiated electric piano, all with the intent of lulling you into some kind of waking occult trance. I don't know whether these enigmatic folks recede back into the ether before they make another record or not, but the crystals were all aligned for this one, to be sure...
2. Peaches: Impeach My Bush
Taboo smashing klub grrrrl hits hard and fast with a true electro-porn stunner! Opening volley "I'd rather FUCK who I want than KILL who I am told to!" pretty much sets the scene for the ensuing onslaught of relentlessly slamming beats and exhibitionist rants of female dominance and control in the sexual arena. Fabulous post-Kraftwerk robo-grooves abound while our not so humble narrator flips roles at the drop of a pack of Trojans, making "a woman a man and a man can can", or claiming the enormous tent in your pants makes it "hurt so good" she's got a "soregasm". Elsewhere the question is posed, "fist fuck cock suck what's the diff?" but really, she had me at "Hello..."
Shockingly explicit, violently unapologetic and yes, most definitely RAWKING!!
3. Kelley Stoltz: Below The Branches
Like some weird postcard from the Bronze Age, parlour eccentric Stoltz has fashioned a "gate fold sleeve" classic the likes of which we ain't seen round these parts in a few decades (seemingly from the privacy of his front sitting room?). You'll detect vibrating trace elements of psychedelic Beach Boys, agrarian hunky dory'd Bowie, and even residue of his beloved Echo and the Bunnymen (the nut's been systematically covering Bunnymen albums in their entirety!?), but the man's singular (and flagrantly fun-loving!) vision wins out.
People have been talking this loopy San Franciscan up to me for years, but not until Motherhips drummer and sometime Stoltz sideman John Hofer forced a copy of this sideways masterpiece into my hand did I bother to take a peek. Immediately taken in (and aback) by the skewed and bejeweled contents found within, next thing I knew, everything looked fish-eyed, a month had passed and ‘twas all I'd been listening to?!
Premium home brewed psyche-pop of the highest order!
4. Ali Farke Toure: Savane
Mali's finest son tragically left this mortal coil last year, but not before graciously putting the finishing touches on this final and excellent statement of hypnotic blue worship. My friends at World Circuit diligently saw the package through to completion, insuring that the spell continues to be woven, even from beyond the grave...
I could say he saved the best for last, but let's face it, the guy never made a bad record. He shall be missed.
5. Tom Verlaine: Songs And Other Things/Around
The reluctant art/punk icon simultaneously releases 2 astounding albums after a loooong hibernation (14 years, to be exact?!), his otherworldly talents still fiercely in evidence and showing no signs of diminishing returns. "Songs..." showcases the distinctive alien logic of this unrepentant modern bohemian's well-touted song craft (Bowie's tapped him, among others...), inimitably fusing naked city noir with spunky garage nugget and tossing the subtle dazzle with a spectacular handful of elegiac future rock hymns. I had a seriously hard time pulling it out of my CD player once I'd been infected...
Even more captivating, the entirely instrumental "Around", with it's daybreak guitar miniatures and "journey to the center of your mind" mystery meditations, confirms once again to anyone who's been paying attention just why the man's regarded in some esteemed circles as one of our greatest living parallel universe guitar heroes.
He's a top ranker in my book, without a doubt!
6. Ornette Coleman: Sound Grammar
That this living legend and undeniable American treasure release ANYTHING at his "advanced" age of 76 years old (!?) is cause enough to sit up and take notice. That it's THIS fresh sounding, forward thinking and above all, simply BEAUTIFUL, calls yet again for a serious jaw drop, a tip of the hat in wonder and a sense of national pride that a country as screwy as ours could manage to produce such a fantastic and inspiring individual. Coleman long ago secured his status as one of the great visionaries of the 20th century; by dropping this album in the "double oughts", notice is being served that they're going to have a hard time topping him in the 21st...
7. New York Dolls: One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This
Bless my platform pumps, the "girls" just can't help it! Scornfully referred to by non-believers as the "Two York Dolls", survivors David Johansen (the thinnest man in rock! Dude looks like an ipod mini?!) and Sylvain Sylvain raise the lipstick smudged flag once again after a 30-year hiatus and amazingly emerge triumphant with help from like-minded degenerate cohorts and an irresistibly rocking album that does their notorious history proud. Essential bowery humor intact and sounding like nothing less than a night tearing it up til dawn in the lower east side, The Dolls turn the trick and appear to erase the ravages time. I've said it before: "Rock and Roll, it's the fountain of youth!"
Still gloriously trashy after all these years...thank gawd!
8. Thom Yorke: The Eraser
The undeniable pathos of his always amazing voice, along with his bewildering supernatural gift for melody, kept this computer driven glitch pop from slipping into the clichéd inhuman frost it could've been in lesser hands. Instead, he melds cyborg-like with his cut and paste function and elevates the whole affair to something all together "other". Pretty good for a kid with a laptop!
9. The Black Keys: Magic Potion/Chulahoma
Yes, maybe it's their "worst" recorded album to date; sounds like they whipped this one up in a matter of days, but it ain't no matter - these guys CRUSH! (I wish more bands still had the guts to deal ‘em down and dirty like this!)... They also without question played the best show I saw all year, lighting the record bins on fire as well as everyone in attendance for their 1/2-hour fuse-busting in-store at L.A.'s fabulous Amoeba Music.
The excellent EP "Chulahoma" finds the rough and randy duo lovingly paying sludgy lecherous tribute to the late great Junior Kimbrough, whose own hopped up slowed down blues grind indelibly informs the heart and soul of the noize of the boize from Ohio...
Treat yerself right and check ‘em both out.
10. Trio Beyond: Suadades
Originally formed on a lark to celebrate the long overlooked work of seminal fusion outfit "Tony Williams' Lifetime" ("Wha?", say ye), these three titans (premier guitarist John Scofield, legendary drummer Jack DeJohnette [both Miles alumni] and interstellar organist Larry Goldings) soon broke free of the intended framework and began seamlessly blending their own astonishing compositions and improvisations with the iconoclastic Lifetime material (please scorch your stereo immediately with Lifetime's 1969 debut "Emergency!"). Caught here in a live set from London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, these colossal players reward the curious with a "close encounter of the 3rd kind", displaying martian levels of psychic interaction and an utterly mind bending songbook... Trust me people, this thing smokes!
11. Jarvis Cocker: Jarvis
Pulp mainman and Britain's favorite improbable superstar, Cocker strides breathlessly through his 1st solo outing, wryly commenting from his class obsessed sidelines on everything from the usual neurotic bedroom antics to haunting murderous fat children and the fall of western civilization as we're living it. Typically hilarious and brainy, and with a brilliant big pop production serving him well, the posh prep-school sex symbol delivers in spades! Honestly, no one compares... (look deep to find hidden bonus track [and insta-classic!] "Cunts Are Still Running The World", which certainly gets my vote for song of the year...)
12. Sonic Youth: Rather Ripped
The self-proclaimed godparents of the so-called "alternative nation" have been discreetly making records of varying brilliance under the radar for years now, generally resting on their indie-cred laurels; but here, after losing key multitasking secret weapon Jim O'Rourke, they strip back to their original 4 piece line up, rise to the challenge and turn in their tightest collection since the glory dayze of "Evol" and "Daydream Nation"...
Check "Do You Believe In Rapture?" for signs of transcendent genius before you get throttled to the floor by the flat out Stooge rock of "Sleepin Around", then give thanx for a CD brimming with ideas that refuses to let up til the final buzz of bizarre and superb matter-of-fact coda "Or". Tight but reckless, and with no turn left unstoned, the veteran band seems to have legs yet...
(extra points for naming the album after the long gone Berkeley record store which claimed my mis-spent youth!)
Fave Reissues
1. Tiny Tim: God Bless Tiny Tim - The Complete Reprise Recordings
Ahhh, the old adage: "with hindsight comes 20/20 vision"...
Obscured by the distracting tabloid image that could only have materialized from the fallout of a bad Mad Magazine acid trip - a fey long haired 6-foot goon of questionable sexual orientation (if any?) singing "Tiptoe Thru The Tulips" in a helium falsetto with a ukulele barely the size of his ample proboscis - lay the fact that these albums made during the peak of his "freak of the week" heyday are state of the art encyclopedic kaleidoscopic psychedelic pop super productions!
His Warhol 15 minutes lasted about 2 years, famously culminating with his "live on The Johnny Carson Show" marriage to Miss Vicki. The union wiped out years later, and our hero spent the latter half of his life scuffling in relative obscurity (strange but true, Camper Van Beethoven once "backed him up" early in their career?!), but the records remain brilliant reinventions of the 20s and 30s popular song stylings he loved so much, cinematically updated for the late 60s dream hungry masses, a testament to the man being ohhh so much more than the laughable novelty act he seemed to be at the time. What a trip he really was...
2. Joe Cocker: Mad Dogs And Englishmen - Complete Fillmore East
Not even the annoying grandstanding of hippy opportunist Leon Russell can tarnish the enduring wallop of this once in a lifetime 20-piece traveling rock and roll carnival. Everyone and their brother (read Jim Keltner, the Stones' horn section, Derek's Dominoes etc., etc.) wanted to jump on this tour for one last hurrah before the 70s swallowed the 60s (Woodstock, Altamont, Manson family still in the news, Watergate soon to come). With more than a little help from his friends, an exceedingly road burned Cocker performs career cementing hari kari and pours it on like a man on fire, throwing alcoholic epileptic shapes and pulling definitive versions of Traffic's "Feelin' Alright", Russell's "Delta Lady", The Box Tops' "The Letter"...the list goes on and on. One of THE classic live records of all time, and as it happens, Leon does know what the hell he's doing when it comes to arranging a once in a lifetime 20-piece traveling rock and roll carnival.
Nobody dares do this kind of thing anymore! Go crazy, and get the expanded 6 CD version (oh gawd!?) to find out how great they could be over a 4-show run. (The movie's a good read as well...)
3. David Byrne/Brian Eno: My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts
This thing never sounded better than it did cranked over the PA system between bands at the Chris Spedding gig I attended the week it came out, shaking the nightclub walls and cutting through the cigarette fog like an unearthly invasion broadcast from another planet. With it's prophetic short wave radio samples and bible belt exorcists, laid rampant across trail blazing inverted mutant funk, it continues to hit like a futuristic witches brew, still way ahead of it's time...
4. Betty LaVette: Child Of The 70s
While we're gearing up to subpoena Karl Rove and a host of other evil-doers treading the corridors of power, lets get an inquest going on over at what remains of Atlantic Records to find out what FOOL let this stone soul gem incomprehensibly sit on ice for nearly 35 years!? Spitfire LaVette's barely contained "cat in heat" vocals, set crisply in some superior "dynamic beyond the call of duty" arrangements (care of the ubiquitous Muscle Shoals crew), would've sounded tailor made for the dashboard AM radio in your '73 Mustang convertible, and this riveting album should've been Ms. LaVette's ticket to RnB crossover superstardom (is that her trumping Bowie on Ziggy's "It Ain't Easy"?!).
We can rejoice in the wisdom and taste of Rhino Handmade, who finally got it right and let this undeniable KILLER see the light of day (with a staggering array of related singles and rarities). Even after languishing in the vaults for so long, it truly takes to task what passes for "soul music" in the current arid times...
5. Steeleye Span: Please To See The King
I've been taking in the endless charms of this PERFECT record for ages, and it just continues to improve like a fine wine. They're a tad more precious and scholarly than their more revered drunkard cousins Fairport Convention, but this masterpiece of time travel remains THE pinnacle of the late 60s/early 70s British folk rock scene. The mesmerizing songs collected here seem to ethereally hang in the air, the drum-less ensemble nevertheless maintaining an impossible inner gyroscopic propulsion while the singers emerge apparently conversant with some long lost druid alchemy.
Don't forget to breath as astral vocalist Maddy Prior stops time and claims her stake as the foremost interpreter of traditional song with her ultra mystic (and definitive) take on olde English fave "The Blacksmith", and genius new comer Peter Knight invokes the muses, weaving a Celtic knot through the fabric of the album with his phenomenal mandolin (maybe my favorite player!) and fiddle. The rare chance to hear the perennial folky Martin Carthy let his hair down and majestically ply his trade on electric guitar is a surprising added bonus, but it's just one of many allurements found on this multi-facetted landmark.
The well-appointed reissue is generously bolstered with an extra CD and a half of super rare live BBC sessions - yet even without the welcome whistles and bells, the unembellished album makes my top 10 of ANY year.
6. Big Youth: Screaming Target
He wasn't the first DJ to ever rap over a record, but he definitely elevated the practice to high art with this evergreen slab of insanity. The definitive sound of the Jamaican street circa 1972 shines as bright in 2006 as it did the day it came out! Part maniacal court jester/part John The Baptist, the gold toothed DJ with the contagious joie de vivre steps through the looking glass and insinuates himself with spliff-heavy eyelids directly onto the 12-inch lacquers he'd no doubt already been spinning and toasting over in the dancehalls for quite a while. The sterling selection of reggae standards (including hits by Horace Andy, Gregory Isaacs, and Dawn Penn), assembled, secured and mutated by his teenage producer Gussie Clarke, are claimed as his own by the Yout' as he liberally sprinkles on the Rastafarianism, makes film recommendations (?), spars with the stars, or just issues forth everyday observations from the Kingston ghetto. No matter what, he never fails to keep the party rolling!
Grainy, stoney, seminal...
7. Tony Joe White: Swamp Music
Untamed bayou dude sweating moonshine tries his fortune in tinsel town Nashville, accidentally steps on a new fangled wah wah pedal and comes up with a steady flow of untamed whomping bayou stank. "Muzak City" didn't quite know how to handle the genre jumping race-blind funky rebel, but Dylan was amazed and Elvis definitely got off - so will you.
8. P. J. Harvey: John Peel Sessions
The stürmm and draang of this torchy banshee's gut rock takes well to the requisite austerity of the hit and run Peel session. She's visceral, she's enthralling, she's uber-sexy and, lest we forget, my god, WHAT a singer! (The hair-raising version of Howling Wolf classic "Wang Dang Doodle" is worth the price of admission alone)
... Please darling, a new album soon!?
9. Free: Live At The BBC
It's one thing for a Dylan or an Ornette to improbably produce outstanding work late in their careers, but please tell me how it's at all conceivable that some of the members of this beyond precocious burner of a band had just scarcely hit the tender age of 21 having already given birth to 7 platters of blistering molten soul rock, hit the stratosphere with the timeless "All Right Now" and broken up (for the 2nd and final time!?) in a landslide of drug addiction and betrayal? I know things moved a whole lot faster back then, but jeezus, not nearly enough time to cram in enough living to justify the knowing worldliness found in the Stax on steroid grooves!...Way too young to explain the caged fire and seasoned telekinetic timing between them!? They were just kids, ferchrissakes!!
Yet another fruitful troll through the BBC archives finds them in their element, raw and simmering on the spot. The Free legacy is revealed as an undying lesson in the power of willful economy and fearless youthful passion, and it's high time they're given their rightful place in the RnR firmament. Despite often being reduced to a footnote in the tale of singer Paul Rodgers' far more successful Bad Company, for my money Free stand as simply one of the greatest bands ever...
(The DVD "Free Forever" is a must-see as well. Watch doomed guitar hero Paul Kossoff lean back against his Marshall stack like he's facing a firing squad and squeeze another corker out of his Les Paul as if his life hung in the balance. Frankly, I've never seen anything like it.)
10. Peter Hammill: The Future Now
I really don't even know where to tell you to start with this guy; I've been mulling over his perplexing body of work ever since the singer for The Ophelias. dosed me decades ago (apparently Van Der Graff Generator was required reading), and I remain endlessly infatuated/ entertained/ befuddled. Ya ain't gonna romance a lovely in your lair with this stuff, but you might catch a glimpse of the neurotic/psychotic inner machinations of the everyman intellectual meandering through the not quite dystopian futuropolis of NOW (dig that, Allen Ginsberg?...William Gibson?...Mark E. Smith?...anybody still reading!?).
What I Was Really Listening To
1. Paul Stanley: "People, Let Me Get This Off My Chest!"
Who needs actual music when you've got a rock n roll MC of this caliber?! A crony slipped me this highly entertaining bootleg - a solid hour's worth of nothing but histrionic between song banter from KISS' star-eyed mouthpiece, covering the '95 reunion tour thru the 2005 "KISS farewell tour" (yeah, right). What can I say? The raw demagoguery just floats my boat - I mean really, when Stanley fervently addresses an entire city mid-show as if it were a single individual, a la "You know what's really cool, Richmond {VA}? We are JUST... GETTING... STAAAAAAARTED!!!!", you're bound to be swept up in his highly contagious gusto and gargantuan self belief, and be well primed to accept any nonsense he's about to ram down your throat...
Needless to say I was henceforth inspired to undertake a brain-damaging chronological re-examination of the entire "original line up" oeuvre, getting in touch with my, ahem, "roots" (that's right train spotters, look closely to see an impressionable adolescent "yours truly" get splattered with Gene Simmons' fake blood from the 3rd row of the ‘75 Winterland show, caught for posterity on the hysterical "Kissology" DVD!). Was it The Roman Catholic Church that said, "Give me the child and I'll give you the man"? Ehhhh, once a "Kisstian", always a "Kisstian"!
2. Donovan: Sunshine Superman
Man, this thing really holds up! Mr. Mellow Yellow kept my flower power going in the hotel rooms all summer long. I also went round the bend checking out svengali Mickie Most's other myriad productions (Herman's Hermits anyone? Waaay better than you'd think!)
3. Killing Joke: what's THIS for...!
Electric tribal black magick from the dole line - isn't this what the 80's REALLY sounded like anyway?
4. The Blues Project: Projections
Corny, yes, but I really do have a soft spot for this kinda sheee-ite. On the cusp of Dylan going electric, pre-hippies prove that blue men CAN play the whites, even if only from the relative safe haven of a barely turned-on Greenwich Village.
Dated? Uh Huh... Earthshaking? Doubtful... Frenetic, hysterical and thoroughly dynamite?? Oh Yeah!
5. The Animals: Live 1965 -1968
Best of luck locating this private press triple set bootleg mostly chronicling the underrated live adventures of the late period "Sky Pilot" incarnation of this utterly savage band, when Eric Burden had taken the reins and reinvented himself as an acid gobbling pied piper of the Aquarian revolution. Highlights (among many!) include an utterly demented self imploding version of Donovan's "Hey Gyp" at the Monterey Pop Festival, and an hilariously self righteous Burden chastising a rowdy heckler at The Marquee for giving off an "ugly vibration, maahnn"!? Good stuff...
6. The Minutemen: The Politics Of Time
Where's D. Boon when we need him?! An early spontaneous combustion from San Pedro's finest!
7. The Meters: Hey Looka Py Py
This one always stays within arms' reach. In a word, the GOODS...
8. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Sessions
8 Cds spread over 2 deluxe bootleg box sets, entirely comprised of the vocal-less backing tracks to "Their Satanic Majesties Request", the universally scorned drug-bust answer to "Sgt. Pepper's..."? SIGN ME UP!!!
9. Pharoah Sanders: Karma
All creatures great and small present and accounted for, blown wildly from the tip of this flame keeper's heliocentric reed.
"The Creator Has A Master Plan"...mmm hmmm...
10. The Steve Miller Band: King Biscuit Flower Hour Presents
Another guilty pleasure perhaps, but hey, ya can't deny the good singing, nor the good playing and the man's always got the top-notch band in tow. Live and burnin', before the mega-success kicked in...
Alright, fellow music lovers, that's all for now...2007's already piling up!
David "bindis do it better" Immerglück
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