Headless Heroes Of The Apocalypse - Eugene McDaniels

Well, ladies and gents, I'm sorry to say that I'm going to be taking a break from Solid Gold Easy Action for a while... I've just got too much goddamned shit to do and not nearly enough time to do it. I'll still try and post an album a week or so, and hopefully come back in full force once I get some more free time in my schedule. Anyway, here's an album that oughtta tide you over for a while: Eugene McDaniels's monolithic soul/jazz/funk/folk masterpiece, Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse. From the plunking bass notes and hi-hat clatter that starts the album, it's clear that this a rare-groove long-player to cherish. But the grooviest thing about Headless Heroes isn't its funkiness (it's not exactly a dance album), but its weirdness. Sounding like a collision between the spacey soul-jazz of Herbie Hancock, the folky soul of Terry Callier, and the ornate blaxploitation funk of Isaac Hayes, Headless Heroes is literate and poetic in the way that so few classic R&B albums are. McDaniels sings and emotes with all the improvisational unpredictability of an experienced jazz vocalist (which McDaniels had been for nearly a decade), but his lyrics owe more to America's folk tradition of the 60's than to jazz lyricism. Still, there's some fiery Afrofuturism informing these tight grooves, and manifesto-like tracks like "Freedom Death Dance" are almost psychedelic in their verbal intensity. This album is rightly vaunted as a cratediggers' classic, and it's not hard to see why: every song crackles with righteous energy and soulful pomp. It's not surprising that Headless Heroes was recorded and produced by legendarily ahead-of-his-time jazz maestro Joel Dorn. Even if it's not quite jazz, it's still as groundbreaking and far-reaching as any of Dorn's work with Yusef Lateef or Rahsaan Roland Kirk. I implore to give this album a listen - it is, without a doubt, one of the greatest and most inspiring lost classics of the 70's. The nasty Hendrixian funk of "The Lord is Back" deserves to become part of R&B's canon of classics, while "Supermarket Blues" is a criticism of race relations as witty and sharp as any of the Harlem Renaissance's finest moments.

The Lord is black, his mood is in the rain.

Porcella - The Deadly Snakes

Looking back, the whole “garage rock revival” of the early 2000’s was one of my favorite parts of growing up. Having already been exposed to classic rock, the discovery that an entire rock’n’roll culture had been gestating in my own backyard (Detroit) inspired me to delve into the world of garage rock with the kind of wild-eyed intensity that only 14-year-old boys learning about rock’n’roll for the first time ever get. Back then, I would gush about the raw power and hot guitar riffs of just about any group of shaggy-haired dudes with a “the” at the beginning of their band’s name. Then, gradually, I grew up and realized that 90% of garage rock sounds exactly the same, and now I only listen to the best of the bunch. I didn’t know it back then, but one of the very best garage bands of the last decade was a band that I rejected because they weren’t loud enough: The Deadly Snakes. While I was listening to legions of mediocre “mod” or “blues” bands, The Deadly Snakes were a couple hundred miles north, in Toronto, expanding and experimenting with their garage-y sound, adding elements of old-timey folk, carnivalesque blues, and admirably unique psychedelia. In 2003, the Snakes released Ode To Joy, an album stuffed to the gills with white-hot blues-punk. It wasn’t quite as loud or aggressive as The Dirtbombs or, say, Guitar Wolf, so I ignored it. Then, in 2005, they brought Porcella to the table. Let’s just get this out of the way right now then: Porcella isn’t garage rock by any stretch. It sounds like some awesome combination of the Oblivians and the Decemberists: soul-inflected gutter rock meets literary sophistication. The entire album pretty much sums up what I was trying to get at earlier in this review: garage rock is boring without embellishment. The Deadly Snakes embellish the style in the form of strings, horns, various oddly-tuned keyboards, and rather bizarre lyrics about sinking ships, shooting game birds, and other such pursuits. It’s a real trip, and for those of you who still haven’t forgiven garage rock for the travesties of Jet and their ilk, here might be a good place to fall in love all over again.

On the edge of a knife is a calm simplicity.

Night Life - Ray Price

This is the second day in a row that we’ve had an album from someone named Price, and if yesterday’s Alan Price LP offered an interesting glimpse into the concerns of the British everyman in the early 70’s, this country gem from Ray Price gives us an equally revealing view of the end of the honky tonk era in America in the early 60’s. This is a profoundly intimate country album, and it almost seems to take on a life of its own as it wistfully evokes the end of the era brought about by Hank Williams, with whom Price briefly shared a room in the early 50’s. But it seems pointless to bemoan the death of honky tonk when Night Life foreshadows so much incredible music to come. Night Life is one of country’s first concept albums, and even if Marty Robbins made a more fully-realized concept album a few years earlier with Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, Price’s set of odes to loneliness, lost love, and, sure ‘nuff, the night life itself, is a much more timeless set of tunes. The title track alone is, pardon my excessive enthusiasm, one of the all-time greatest American songs ever written, period. At the juncture of country and jazz (which would be further explored throughout the 60’s and eventually turned into the crystalline twangy pop of the Nashville “countrypolitan” sound), “Night Life” is a beauteous tribute to those shadowy characters that inhabited the musical underworld of the pre-outlaw generation South. Featuring some of the most heartbreaking pedal steel ever put to wax (courtesy of the god-like Buddy Emmons), it was written by Willie Nelson years before his pot-smokin’ hillbilly image would make him a superstar. The rest of the album is almost as stellar, as Price’s semi-legendary backing group, the Cherokee Cowboys, pretty much invent the “Nashville sound” that would characterize country music in the 60’s. This album was not a success for Price upon its initial release. Yet time has been kind to it, and it’s now rightly viewed as one of country music’s greatest moments. Price would go on to become a superstar in his own right with some schlockier, strings-laden material later in the decade, but Night Life is his finest moment. (For some reason, the reissue of this album that I’m working with only includes “Night Life” with a rather tedious spoken introduction, so I’ve included the Columbia single release as well.)

The night life ain’t no good life, but it’s my life.

O Lucky Man! - Alan Price

Alan Price’s soundtrack for Lindsay Anderson’s bizarre 1973 allegorical dark comedy, O Lucky Man!, is a marvelous example of a film that could not exist without its pop music soundtrack. O Lucky Man!’s protagonist, Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell reprising his role from Anderson’s 1968 culture-shocker If…), finds himself in a series of increasingly odd Candide-esque situations that, in supremely dry British fashion, lead the viewer to question one’s place in society like few other movies. Yet it’s Price’s soundtrack that cements the film’s status as a cult classic, and it’s plain to see that Anderson’s eccentric film would not have nearly the impact it does without Price’s contribution. Although Price got his start as organist in the original Animals lineup, there’s not much Eric Burdon-style R&B grit to be heard here. No, the best way I can describe this album is as the greatest album The Kinks never made. “My Home Town” is the best song that wasn’t on The Village Green Preservation Society, and “If knowledge hangs around your neck like pearls instead of chains, you are a lucky man,” is the best line Ray Davies didn’t write. These songs are bound in classic English tradition – music hall pop and skiffle sound as vital as rock ‘n’ roll here, and this is 1973. When The Kinks were reminiscing about the good old days in 1967, the hippies and acid-eaters ignored them. And while Alan Price’s pop ditties in O Lucky Man! didn’t exactly change the way Brits saw society, it certainly sounds in step with the paranoia and uncertainty of the early 70’s. The title track itself is a pop masterpiece, combining ace classic rock and the sharpest, most insightful lyrics this side of Noël Coward. “Poor People” is almost Randy Newman-ish, with its flighty piano and tongue-in-cheek attitude, and “Look Over Your Shoulder” sounds like the kind of heartfelt advice one only gets from one’s elders after a few dark beers. This album has slipped somewhat under the radar as of late(it does sound a bit dated), but Price’s keenness and sophistication sounds just as sharp today as it did three and a half decades ago.

If you’ve found a reason to live on and not to die, you are a lucky man.

Chum Onah: Bx7 Celebrates The Music Of Michael Jackson - Various Artists

Michael Jackson’s death back in June has, for some reason or another, made an impression on basically every single human being alive. I’d rather not mention my thoughts on the entire media circus surrounding the former King of Pop’s demise, but let me just say: if you thought that even the most cynical, chillwave-loving hipsters were immune to the news of MJ’s death, you’d be dead wrong. As proof, I offer Chum Onah: Bx7 Celebrates the Music of Michael Jackson. And sure enough, there’s a fresh-faced young Michael sporting a ridiculous psychedelic afro on the deliberately cheap-looking cover of this bizarre tribute album. Here’s the gist of it: somebody (Butterface, whoever that is) brought together ten buzzy indie/lo-fi/______wave groups to record a set of Michael Jackson covers in their own trendy recorded-in-the-bedroom style. So far this review is making it sound like I don’t dig this album, but that’s not true. I wish I didn’t dig this album, because, frankly, it seems more like a cheap attempt at pointless irony than a legitimate tribute. But the songs themselves are mostly pretty fab, particularly Toro Y Moi’s spacey version of “Human Nature”, which fizzes and crackles with the same groundbreaking energy that made MJ’s original such a revelation (I’ve already professed my love for Toro Y Moi a few days ago… he doesn’t seem to be capable of putting out a bad track). And despite the fact that Hungry, Hungry Ghost describe themselves as the world’s only “post-indie transcendentalist punk band” (gag me), their rendition of “Earth Song” is downright inspiring: it’s melodramatic, corny, and beautiful in all the right ways. Dem Hunger’s bizarre sound collage take on “A Brain Inna River” (is that even a Michael Jackson song?) sounds about as indebted to “Billie Jean” or “Thriller” as does Napalm Death, but it’s a cool track nonetheless. Unfortunately, it’s not all good vibes: Phil & The Osophers’ two tracks are lo-fi to the point of idiocy (you might as well listen to radio static), and Julian Lynch’s two chances to shine are squandered on a couple of hokey “I ♥ the 80’s” jokes. But even with its occasional missteps, Chum Onah is a pretty interesting and, for the most part, entertaining tribute album, and at the very least, it’s something different from the glut of bland MJ tributes that we’ve been enduring for months now.

If they say why, why? Tell ‘em that is human nature.

Album Para La Juventud, Vol. 1 - Juan Ravioli

The fabulously named Juan Ravioli is a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist from Buenos Aires, and, judging from the strength of Album Para La Juventud, Vol. 1, his first album, he's learned from the greats. After the delightful surprise of hearing some non-tango music from Argentina wears off, immerse yourself in the hearteningly accessible sound of Señor Ravioli's supremely well-realized imagination. I don't usually find myself impressed by bands that blatantly rip off classic rock (I'll take The Beatles over any of their millions of imitators, thanks), but Juventud stops just short of outright plagiarism. At times it sounds like the aforementioned Fab Four, at times like Pink Floyd, Tim Buckley, Neil Young, Radiohead (who are basically classic rock already), or, on the magnificent "La Diversidad De Los Rumbos", like Nick Drake gone jazz fusion. It's all en Español, of course, which does a lot in the way of distancing Ravioli from his monolithic influences, but the sweet 'n' sour acoustic laments and pop hooks are pretty darn universal. It's not likely to be the most groundbreaking album you've ever heard (unless your musical tastes are pretty much limited to Oasis), but it's a warm and familiar-sounding album that only the most jaded snob could dislike. Yes, the acoustic guitar melodies all start to blend together after a while, and Ravioli's not the most dynamic vocalist in South America, but when he tosses in a curveball like the previously mentioned and satisfyingly melodramatic "La Diversidad De Los Rumbos", it becomes obvious that there's more to our man in Buenos Aires than simple idol worship. Muy bueno.

Youth has no age.

Candylion - Gruff Rhys

Gruff Rhys might not be a household name (even in indie households, if there exist such things), but as a behind-the-scenes sort of eccentric, his skill for crafting psychedelic pop songs is rivaled only by Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips. As frontman for Wales’s finest band, Super Furry Animals (as well as earlier cult group Ffa Coffi Pawb), Rhys has spent the last two decades making music that can only truly be described as Gruff Rhys music. Combining psychedelia, folk, ambient, trip-hop, soul, and free jazz, Rhys is a bona fide renaissance man of indie music. With a knack for writing snappy pop tunes and a pleasantly husky, heavily Welsh-accented croon for a voice, I can’t imagine anyone hearing Rhys’s music and not enjoying it. Candylion, Rhys’s second solo album, is not so different from Super Furry Animals’ more recent material, except maybe being a little more laid-back. Featuring songs in English, Welsh, and Spanish, Candylion is a cutesy, quaint album that recalls Syd Barrett at his most delightfully whimsical. “Painting People Blue” is a wistful, waltz-like ballad that could sound just as fitting for a picnic in the sunshine or a walk through the snow. The track that best showcases Rhys’s diverse talents, however, is definitely the fourteen-minute prog-rock opus “Skylon!”. Layers of rollicking piano, pastoral folk flute, atonal strings and synthesizers, and fuzzy spoken-word samples build upon an insistent drum pattern that’s almost motorik-like in its consistency. It calls to mind the best British prog of the early 70’s, suggesting that Barclay James Harvest and the Strawbs might be cooler than you thought.

Now we’re in this shit together, let’s let each other live.

The Malcolm X Memorial: A Tribute In Music - Philip Cohran & The Artistic Heritage Ensemble

One of the best things about the late 60’s and early 70’s was the wealth of bizarre concept albums that never really took off. For every Tommy there was a God Bless Tiny Tim, and, in terms of jazz, for every universally applauded masterpiece (like Pharoah Sanders’s Karma or Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda) there was some sort of interesting, odd, and woefully anti-commercial project like The Malcolm X Memorial: A Tribute in Music. Philip Cohran made his name as a trumpeter with Sun Ra’s Arkestra (Sun Ra, of course, being the Egyptian god of bizarre concept albums), so it’s almost surprising that the music on Malcolm X is as coherent as it is. The album consists of four tracks, each representing a different stage of the former Malcolm Little’s life. The first track, “Malcolm Little” is a slow-burning blues with some nifty jazz flute, emulating Malcolm’s coming of age as his family moved throughout the Midwest. It’s groovy mood music, though it’s not particularly incendiary, especially in light of the innovation to be heard later in the album. The next track, “Detroit Red”, is a brassy big-band number, reminiscent of Sun Ra’s early Sound of Joy-era material. “Detroit Red” is ace old-school bop, the perfect evocation of Malcolm’s time as a conk-haired Harlem hustler, and, at ten minutes, it’s easy to get lost in the ballsy groove and forget just what this album’s all about. Oddly, the track titled “Malcolm X” is the shortest on the album, but it’s a slab of valiant soul-jazz that draws on the dignity of the Malcolm X legend itself. The final track, “El Hajj Malik El Shabazz”, is the only track here that sounds like an elegy for the late civil rights leader, and, with its layers of syncopation, it’s the song that most closely spiritually approaches Malcolm’s controversial doctrine. All in all, this is a well-done concept album, even if it is a bit dated and uneven in spots. For what it’s worth, however, I feel it to be a fitting tribute to one of the civil rights era’s greatest Americans.

Always talkin’ brotherhood, white man, you just ain’t no good.

You Don't Know: Ninja Cuts - Various Artists

There was a time in the mid/late 90’s when London’s Ninja Tune records virtually ruled the digital underground, with practically everything they released becoming an instant trip-hop/chillout/nu-jazz/ambient/drum & bass classic. Ninja Tune’s greatest achievement was legitimizing “weird” electronic music and introducing it to the dancefloor, and even the radio – it’s easy to forget that 90’s hipsters were dancing to something other than rave and big beat. You Don’t Know is the fifth in the label’s Ninja Cuts compilation series. While Ninja Tune might not command the underground respect it once did, it’s still one of the freshest labels in existence. Far from relying upon its old, outmoded standby genres, label founder Coldcut assembles here an all-star cast of mysterious dancefloor gods for this three-disc voyage through the oceans of “indie” club music. Though everything found here could tangentially be considered “dance” music, the variety of material is simply stellar: Ghislain Poirier, Bonobo, Daedalus, Mike Ladd, King Geedorah, and others bring the abstract hip-hop sound in which Ninja Tune has recently been specializing, The Cinematic Orchestra, The Herbaliser, and Yppah peddle homegrown acid jazz/funk, Roots Manuva and Ty rock over bottomless dub rhythms, and Amon Tobin, Mr. Scruff, and Coldcut himself update the classic Ninja Tune sound for a new generation of listeners. It’s all quality, but the most unusual tracks here are those that warrant repeated listens: Pop Levi’s buzzy electro-glam “Dita Dimoné”, RJD2’s barnstorming percussion-heavy “True Confessions”, and TTC’s over-the-top Francophone hip-hoppy “Travailler” are all marvelous dancefloor fillers, proving that Ninja Tune is even more relevant and impressive now than it was in its heyday over a decade ago.

Une

Deux

Trois

Meets A.S. Dragon - Bertrand Burgalat

Bertrand Burgalat's got style, and lots of it. As a singer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, record label head, and impeccably sharp dresser, he, along with other upstarts like Benjamin Biolay and Vincent Delerm, has been keeping the swinging spirit of 1960's Paris alive since the mid-90's, both musically and sartorially. But unlike Biolay and Delerm, who sound like little more than aurally pleasing Gainsbourg/Dutronc/Polnareff clones, Burgalat does his own thing, blending spacey Stereolab-style electronics, "French touch" dance beats, groovy 60's-derived rock'n'roll, and Radiohead-esque pomposity. This, a live album from 2001, finds Burgalat fronting A.S. Dragon, an ace space rock group assembled to perform as the house band for Burgalat's own Tricatel record label (inspired by Booker T & The MGs' keenly-felt presence at Stax Records, I might add). To be quite honest, A.S. Dragon steal the show with their spectacular brand of mod rock, and it's hard to wonder if this album might not be even better had it been recorded with the group's regular frontwoman, Natacha, an androgynous-looking fashion plate with a penchant for performing au naturel. But let's not bash our man in Paris, Burgalat himself, as his louche crooning proves to be perfectly satisfactory, as he whispers across cosmic numbers like "Follow Me" in an impenetrable Gallic accent. Further cuts like "Gris Metal" and "OK Skorpios" strut with the sophistication of Roxy Music and the raw soul energy of The Small Faces. But the show-stopping highlight has gotta be the last number, a groovy, vintage keyboard-heavy rendition of Smokey Robinson's "Tears Of A Clown". A.S. Dragon stretches a Motown classic into a spectral psychedelic jam that constantly grows in intensity across seven minutes, making this a rare post-millennial live album that manages to sound more urgent and thrilling than a batch of well-considered studio cuts.

Just like Pagliacci did, I try to keep my surface hid.